← In Our Time
In Our Time
Indian Indentured Labour
00:51:35
How slavery's abolition led to Indian workers being recruited to work in British colonies.
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- [00:00]
Johnny Diamond
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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- [00:37]
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- [01:42]
Clem Sicharan
Apro vechecha los ahoros de Memorial Day in los y compra los vasicos pare logar pormenos ahoro centadolares en la parria gas de cuatro que madores charbroil Performance series Ademasa hora sta cuarintaisinco porciento en electro domesticos elect.
- [02:13]
Misha Glennie
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description. Wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation owners turned to Indian indentured labour, taking more than a million people to colonies from Guyana to Mauritius to the Caribbean and beyond. Critics, Gandhi amongst them, later on, said this was little more than slavery in disguise and argued for abolition, which happened but not until 1917. And there could be deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. But since many, especially from disadvantaged castes, chose to stay rather than return to India when their contracts expired, then questions about the experience of different peoples in different Colonies became, became more nuanced. Well, with me to discuss this period of Indian indentured labor are Purba Hussain, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, Neha Hui, Associate professor in Economics at the University of Reading, and Clem Sicharan, Emeritus professor of History at London Metropolitan University. And Clem, it's to you I turn to first, in 1833, give us a sense of how entwined slavery, sugar and the British Empire were.
- [03:52]
Clem Sicharan
Well, there was a very long history of that and some scholars have referred to it as the sugar slave plantation complex. Certainly in the Caribbean, the sugar industry with slave labor was the dominant factor in the economic development of the Caribbean islands. So it was crucial. In fact, when you think of sugar in the Caribbean, you think of sugar and slavery. And very often the expression bitter sugar crops up, because I think it summarizes the experience under slavery as well as to an extent, certainly in the early stages of indentureship, which came after the enslavement of Africans.
- [04:44]
Misha Glennie
So what happened to the former enslaved people? What did they do?
- [04:50]
Clem Sicharan
It varied, Misha. In some islands, like Antigua for instance, where the possibility of acquiring land was virtually impossible. So very difficult indeed. You didn't even have the so called apprenticeship system which existed on other islands or in other colonies in the Caribbean, because the planters knew that the freed people, the former slaves, the former enslaved, had very few options, very few alternatives, so that their labor was still accessible to the planters. But in places like Trinidad and British Guiana and Suriname in the southern Caribbean, there was a considerable amount of unoccupied land, land that did not belong to the plantations or land that was not used by the plantations. And in those places, the freed people had options to acquire land, as they did in British Guyana as well as in Trinidad. And it was to those places where people had options and therefore were inclined to leave the plantations after emancip. It is to those places where that vacuum was left, where Indian indentured laborers, in fact other forms of indentured labourers, including Madeira and Portuguese indentured labour and Chinese indentured labor.
- [06:20]
Misha Glennie
So tell us a little bit about the compensation. Who was compensated for the abolition of
- [06:27]
Clem Sicharan
slavery, but certainly not the enslaved or the freed people. The compensation ironically was referred to those who owned they enslaved Africans and they were being compensated for their property. And enslaved people were not human beings. They were property in the same way the oxen and the mules.
- [06:50]
Misha Glennie
And it was huge sums of money,
- [06:51]
Clem Sicharan
as I understand well, it was over £20 million. It's certainly for Caribbean planters And that was a vast amount of money in its time.
- [07:00]
Misha Glennie
So, Neha Hui, tell us a little bit about this man, John Gladstone and what problem he perceived he had once slavery was abolished.
- [07:10]
Neha Hui
John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant, member of Parliament, and the father of future Prime Minister William Gladstone. He was also a slave owner. He had more than 2,500 slaves across nine plantations. And he was one of those people who got the compensation that you were talking about a minute ago. He got over £100,000 in compensation, which was close to £83 million in current money. So as was mentioned, as Clem mentioned, it isn't like plantation owners like Gladstone lost complete control. So right after slavery was abolished, a transitional period of apprenticeship was instated where former slaves were required to continue working for their slave owners for a period of up to eight years. However, Gladstone was looking beyond that. He wanted access to a reliable labor force.
- [08:07]
Misha Glennie
Just if I can butt in there, how much were the former enslaved workers being paid during these apprenticeships?
- [08:17]
Neha Hui
So during the apprenticeships they were required to provide unpaid labor for up to 45 hours a week. And. Yes, so.
- [08:26]
Misha Glennie
So it's not quite the abolition of slavery that we thought it was.
- [08:30]
Neha Hui
No, no, definitely. At least not in the initial years. So, yeah. So going back to Gladstone. So Gladstone was very keen to continue having the supply of reliable labor. And so he knew that Mauritius had already started getting a supply of Indian workers from 1834 and he started lobbying the Parliament.
- [08:52]
Misha Glennie
Yes. So what arguments was he making and who did he need to persuade in order to introduce this system of indentured labour?
- [09:00]
Neha Hui
There were a couple of things, couple of concerns that the plantation owned owners felt would reduce their profitability. One was, of course, the Slavery Abolition Act. But then there was another act which was being debated around the same time as indentured labor in the Parliament. That was the Sugar Equalization act, which Sugar Equalization Bill, which became an act in 1846. That act would remove the preferential treatment that British Caribbean sugar had in Great Britain and they would face competition from slave produced sugar from Brazil and Cuba. The kind of argument that people like Gladstone was making was they were concerned that these newly freed former slaves would have increased bargaining power. And then they were also concerned, as Clem mentioned, because there was abundance of fertile land, these workers would be contained with bounties of nature was the term that was used. So he argued for a flow of workers from India.
- [09:59]
Misha Glennie
So the legislation goes through relatively swiftly. The indentured system is set up and it begins with the Atlas voyage going from Calcutta to Mauritius in 1834. Why does it begin in Calcutta?
- [10:17]
Purba Hussain
So Calcutta in 1833, if you take the year that the Slavery Abolition act is passed in the British Parliament, Calcutta is a very, very important city already in South Asia. It is a port city. It is a really quite massive port traffic connecting East Asia, China on the one hand, all the way up to Europe. In the 19th century, Calcutta is the capital under the East India Company, later under the British Crown. But also there are multiple important shipping companies and merchant companies based in Calcutta. And in fact, when Gladstone in 1836 writes to Calcutta based merchant company where his cousin works, to ask if Indian labour is a possible way of bringing labour into the Caribbean and a way of ensuring that sugar production is not stalled, they have this conversation that is very focused on what Calcutta can provide. The idea is that the merchant companies based in Calcutta can kind of run the operations at the port city side, but there would be labour recruiters going into different parts of eastern India, into villages and towns and cities, entice people in, in some cases, as we know now, kidnap people and bring them to the port.
- [11:26]
Misha Glennie
So what were the voyages like? What were the conditions that the indentured workers were kept in?
- [11:32]
Purba Hussain
So the voyages were actually an extremely important part of the indenture experience. And maybe I'll start with the caveat that this changes quite a lot. In the 1830s and 40s we see really long voyages with the coming of steel ships and much improved steamship engineering. In the 1880s and 90s, it does change quite a bit.
- [11:52]
Misha Glennie
And presumably it's a lot quicker once you've got steamship.
- [11:55]
Purba Hussain
It is a lot quicker once you get to the end of the 19th century. Yes, but surprisingly, people's understanding of the ships and the voyages does not change as a complete overhaul. For context, in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, if you go from Calcutta to Mauritius, it takes about one and a half months. If you go to Fiji, it takes about four months. If you go to Jamaica, it can take up to five months. It depends on the time of the year and all those other geographical concerns as well, that a large part of becoming an indentured migrant and becoming used to this system of having an overseer, becoming one labourer amongst many, and following very particular kind of almost the synchronized system of waking up at a particular time, being allowed on deck at a particular time, living with other indentured migrants. Most of the indentured men, women and children were living under the decks. They were allowed upon decks for certain times. There were real concerns with spread of disease because they were living very, very closely together. There were other issues, such as sexual harassment of women, that was really quite rampant on these ships.
- [13:03]
Misha Glennie
So, Clem, let's focus a bit on Guyana, which became one of the main destinations after Mauritius. What were conditions like for indentured labourers at first when they arrived in Guyana?
- [13:14]
Clem Sicharan
It's some gradation here in terms of the treatment of indentured laborers. It's not a uniform thing. And the first indentured laborers who were taken to British Guyana arrived there on the 5th of May, 1838, even before the final day of the formal end of slavery. So we're dealing here with a society that was still a slave society. And obviously the attitudes of planters, in spite of the fact that they were facing this potential loss of labor, the attitude of planters was still the attitude shaped by being slave masters. So I think the initial experience was quite awful. And it was primarily because of that experience in British Guiana with the first two ships that arrived there in 1838, that the system was suspended for a number of years. And it wasn't restarted again in the
- [14:17]
Misha Glennie
Caribbean, but suspended because the conditions were
- [14:20]
Clem Sicharan
so painful, because the conditions were so awful. And there was a high mortality rate among the first batch of indentured laborers. And it was restarted again in 1845. But what is interesting to note here, Misha, is that those freed people of African descent, the former slaves, they understood their bargaining position because British Guyana was not a developed slave society like Jamaica. Trinidad was not a developed slave society like Jamaica or Barbados. So there was considerable amount of land, and the freed people realized that they had a bargaining strength, a bargaining advantage because of their access to land. And they started to buy land and to acquire small villages and so on on the periphery of these plantations. But they were very conscious that they could bargain with the planters. In fact, they went on strike in 1842 in British Guyana, and they were able to get an increase in wages. But when those same freed African people went on strike in 1848, by then indentureship had started again. And therefore those Portuguese and Indian indentured laborers were able to undercut the bargaining position of the freed people.
- [15:48]
Misha Glennie
Yeah, of course, the Indian indentured labor was not the only indentured labor system that emerged in the 19th century. We saw this particular with Chinese workers as well. Neha, you mentioned before about the lifting of the sugar monopoly in the 1840s. So we've got a tension between the colonialist planters and the free traders in Britain at The time, what role does the idea about free labor, how does that fit into this?
- [16:21]
Neha Hui
So liberal thinkers of that time saw Indian indentured labor as an uneasy compromise between slavery and free labor. So say, for example, the Indian indentured workers did have sort of macro freedom to travel from one part of British colony India to other parts. However, of course, mobility was restricted within the plantation. There were other things that made indentured worker superior, say, for example, a right to passage back home. Recruitment was at least theoretically free and people were signing a contract to get into the system. Of course, there was a lot of evidence of abuse and coercion there. Indentured workers were paid a wage. It was less than free wage, but they were paid a wage. So it was a bit of a compromise. The political economists of that time were uneasy about this, but they didn't explicitly talk about indentured labor. Adam Smith, who of course predated indentured labor, was unambiguously opposed to unfreedom. So in his work Theory of Moral Sentiment, he calls states that had slavery the vilest of all states. And then in wealth of Nation, he said that unfree labor was inefficient because workers just did not have the incentive to work more. JS Mill also opposed unfree labor on a very deep philosophical ground. In his work On Liberty, he argued that indentured labour, because it resulted in loss of freedom, actually made contracts meaningless.
- [17:51]
Misha Glennie
Well, talking about those contracts which they were signing, Purima, back in India, who was doing the recruiting and how much did the indentured workers know what they were signing up for?
- [18:05]
Purba Hussain
Labour recruiting was done by quite a wide range of people back in India. The general idea was that plantation owners in different parts of the British Empire, including British Caribbean, would write to the merchants in Calcutta, some merchant companies, and say, we need this many people at this time. The merchant companies would recruit local Indian men, mostly men, to go into the hinterlands of India. We've talked about Calcutta, but that was not the only port. There were two big ports in southern India as well, Madras and Bombay. So the idea being labour recruiters go into villages and towns and cities in the hinterland and try to argue that indenture system is a really good alternative for people who were already quite used to agricultural labor. That is not actually how it happened. There were people coming back from the Caribbean who had been an indentured migrant, and they would then have the job of trying to then entice other people to join the indentured migration.
- [19:02]
Misha Glennie
Their contracts lasted for about five Years, is that right?
- [19:06]
Purba Hussain
Five years? Yes. Five years was the standard contract.
- [19:09]
Misha Glennie
And were they generally after five years free to choose what to do next?
- [19:14]
Purba Hussain
On paper? Yes. Actually, no. Sometimes it really depended on whether they had been paid their wages up on time, on whether their wages had been cut because of being ill, for instance, where you couldn't work on certain days. Various plantation colonies used the double cut in wages. So if you miss one day, you get two days wages cut. They were supposed to be paid for the voyage back to their port of origin. Many weren't paid that generally. We do know of multiple indentured migrants who did after they have gone to the Caribbean, to Fiji, to Mauritius, who did take the opportunity of the end of the contract to try to get some of that agency back. We know of multiple people who put in applications to move to a different colony or to a different estate because they heard from other indentured migrants that that was slightly better for them or moved to colonies where it would be easier to kind of settle down a bit. But we know so many indentured migrants who had absolutely no idea what they were signing on for. We know of people in the 1830s who was told that they were going to be going on a five day journey. They ended up going on a two month journey, who were told they were going to be abroad for six months. They were abroad for, well, five years in the plantation and then the travel time as late as 1898. We know of people who thought that land would be visible throughout the journey. Many of these people from the hinterlands have never been on the oceans. So many of them, we know, were expecting really a river journey to somewhere in or near India.
- [20:47]
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- [22:21]
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- [23:09]
Misha Glennie
So Clem, back to Guyana. You've mentioned the fact that the agency of the freed enslaved population was initially considerable but then weakened by the introduction of indentured Indian labor. And did that result in ever any coming together of the two communities or were they daggers drawn as it were over the years?
- [23:35]
Clem Sicharan
Yes, primarily because the indentured laborers had access to a considerable amount of land on the Guyana coast because as I said earlier, it wasn't a mature slave society in the way Jamaica and Barbados were. Some of the islands in the Leeward Islands and the Windward islands. So after 1870, in particular, because conditions started to improve, there were reforms. The system that Purba is discussing from the 1830s and the 1840s had undergone some reforms from the 1870s, the 1880s. So increasingly people were able to or some people were able to move out of the plantations. So you had an interesting relationship where Indian villages were being created on the Guyana coast, on the periphery of the sugar plantations in the same way that African villages were created. But in many cases the Indian villages were substantially more successful because this is a place that's below sea level, tends to be very swampy during the heavy rains. And what happened there was that many people, many indentured laborers who came from agricultural castes or people who were forced into agriculture because of the penetration of the economies of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, where many of the caste professions had become defunct. So virtually everybody was thrown onto the land. So even the lowest of castes, peoples like the Chamars and the Domes and the Dosads, who today, I presume, consider Dalits, or at the time, were seen as untouchables. Even those people had considerable experience as cultivators, renting land, of course, not owning land, but also as agricultural laborers. So the people who were taken, most of the indentured laborers who were taken to British Guyana and Trinidad and Suriname and so on, had considerable agricultural experience, and they were able to maximize the advantages that were thrown up on the Guyana coast on these swampy lands, because these swampy lands were ideal for the wet rice culture, Whereas in many cases, that militated against the kind of crops that African villagers were cultivating. So there was already a conflict which had started with the inflow of indentured laborers. And that was magnified by the fact that Indian villages after the 1870s, the 1880s, were emerging all along the coast, to the point where, when some African villages or bits of land owned by Africans could not be profitably cultivated, some of these lands were bought over by Indians, which exacerbated that discordance that had already emerged.
- [26:43]
Misha Glennie
Neha Clem just mentioned there about the caste system and the fact that I presume most of the indentured laborers were Dalits, or Untouchables, as they're often referred to. Can you tell us a bit more about what happened to the caste system as people went away and who was signing up for this?
- [27:05]
Neha Hui
Just to clarify, it's not that most people were from Dalit backgrounds, but then a significant number were. I think about a third that came out from my research. There were people from other castes as well, people who were from agricultural caste. There were people from a high caste as well. Now, no matter where they were in the caste hierarchy in India, their lives would have been structured very much by gender and caste norms. So just to tell the listeners a little bit about what we mean by the caste system in India. When the indentured workers came, the system of caste hierarchy would be a very structured system that would deem some people or groups, Varnas, superior to others, and people who were at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, they would live really difficult lives of material deprivation, having no access to educational institutions, locked in really bad quality, unskilled labor. People of lower caste were considered so polluting that anyone who, if someone of the higher caste saw them, let alone touched them, they would be defiled. So people lived lives of physical segregation, inter dining was not allowed, Intermarriage was allowed. And the gender norms were particularly difficult for women of higher caste. But then for most people, the caste structure was very strong and prohibitive in the plantation colonies. Not that caste completely disappeared, but it didn't exist in the same way. All the workers were working similar jobs. The hierarchy based on occupation couldn't exist anymore. It's not that there was no hierarchy, but the hierarchy was more on racial lines rather than caste lines. Also, you know, coming together in the ships, living together in the sleeping quarters, eating together, meant that these prohibitions on inter dining or these physical segregation could not be continued. Sex ratio was skewed, which meant that intermarriage cohabitation was quite common. In fact, in some instances, people of lower caste were considered better options by plantation management because they were less trouble,
- [29:13]
Misha Glennie
less able to stand up for their. For their rights, less nice, confident. Clem, you wanted to go in there?
- [29:20]
Clem Sicharan
Yes. I just want to add to what Neha is saying there because I think that the whole process, as Neha was saying that it's not just people from the lowest caste. You had people from a broad cross section of castes, including some minority of Brahmins and Kshatriyas who were upper caste people. But you also had a significant amount of people from agricultural castes. If you go to eastern UP today or western Bihar, what is known as the Bhojpuri area, Bhojpuri speaking area, that Bhojpur culture, the agricultural castes like the Kurmis and the Aheers and the Koris and so on, these people were among the best agriculturalists in 19th century, late 19th century, eastern UP and western Bihar. And many contemporary writers spoke about the great agricultural skills of the men, even more so of the women. But what was interesting about here is that these people, although they were the best agriculturalists, they owned very little of the land. So when they went to a place like British Guyana or Trinidad or Suriname, and found that although they were from the lowest caste and they now had the means to acquire some land, even small parcels of land, that was magical for them. Because in spite of their agricultural skills, in many of these places there was absolutely no way they could acquire land. Acquiring land was magic. And that explains why, or to a great extent that explains why in, say, a place like British Guyana, only about 28, 29% of the people return. I think in Trinidad it was less.
- [31:13]
Misha Glennie
They stayed on after their continent.
- [31:14]
Clem Sicharan
They stayed on because they were recreating
- [31:17]
Misha Glennie
a world, but not just recreating a world. They actually had certain advantages which didn't exist in India, of course, and they
- [31:25]
Clem Sicharan
were able to exploit a variety of niches in the village environment on the periphery of these plantations. So you had a kind of symbiotic relationship between the villages where people were pursuing their particular skills and developing village communities. But at the same time, during the harvest season, because they'd recreated the Indian families as a kind of corporate economic unit, some members would be sent out to the plantations to earn cash during the harvest season on the plantations.
- [32:01]
Neha Hui
Neha, we've not spoken very much about the experience of women.
- [32:05]
Misha Glennie
Yes.
- [32:05]
Neha Hui
And that is actually quite interesting because on the one hand, yes, there was a lot of sexual harassment, coercion and so on right from the time of recruitment. However, there's also evidence that many of the women who went were women who were, you know, widowed, who were destitutes. Many of the recruitments were from pilgrimage areas where women and men were recruited from, often under false Britons. But then many of these women were in the pilgrimage sites because they were widowed and they were sent away by their families at the death of their husbands. And they lived under extreme conditions of austerity with very little financial support. So for some of them, this signing of contract was also an act of agency given the very limited and a real opportunity.
- [32:56]
Misha Glennie
Clem, come in on that.
- [32:58]
Clem Sicharan
Yes. Just to what Neha is saying here, my, my maternal great grandmother came from a low caste Parsi, which would be a Dalit caste, and she came from the district of Gonda, which is on the border with Nepal. And she was 20 years old when she was taken to British Guyana in 1909, unaccompanied by anybody. And from Brijal's study of Fiji, the late great professor Brij Lal, an Indo Fijian historian, we can extrapolate from that to say that the overwhelming majority of women who were taking on the indentureship certainly to Fiji and possibly to the Caribbean were not accompanied by anybody at all, which was a clear indication of what Neha has been talking about, that for some of these women, their husbands had probably died. There were many. They were married at 14. 90% of the girls in this area in eastern UP and western Bihar were married at the age of 14. So many of them would have been widows, some of them would have been deserted. But what we have to understand also is that there was a culture of migration which had been opened up in the context of the expansion of British colonialism.
- [34:29]
Misha Glennie
Let's pull out a bit now. Towards the end of the 19th century, we started seeing more and More voices arguing against the indentured system. And perhaps some of the most important voices came out of South Africa. Can you tell us about what happened in South Africa and why that was so important?
- [34:48]
Purba Hussain
South Africa was one of the parts of the British Empire that also saw the use of Indian indentured labour. I believe from the middle of the 19th century, Indian labourers were also moving as indentured migrants to South Africa, working not just on the field but in a variety of jobs. One of the reasons why South Africa becomes so important to the voices against indenture is because of Gandhi, who, you know, before he started becoming really involved in the Indian independence movement, was a lawyer, educated in London, for instance, and then based in South Africa, where he realized that there were multiple groups of Indian origin or Indians living in South Africa at the time. People like him who were professionals, people who were laborers and people who had specifically gone under the indentured system to work in the particular part of South Africa known as Natal. And Gandhi became very involved in the rights of Indians and in that case, the rights of Indians, of course included the rights of indentured migrants and the descendants of indentured migrants. The South African voice then really comes in as part of the discussion of indentured migrants as part of a wider Indian diaspora and thinking particularly about how prejudice against people of Indian origin in South Africa, as in many other colonies across the British Empire, prejudice against Indian indentured migrants became part of the prejudice against Indians as a whole. So when Gandhi is back in India in the beginning of the 20th century, very end of the 19th century, this entire discourse and this entire experience he had in South Africa became part of the wider discourse that was coming up out of India at this time, which was that the British imperial system that existed in India needed a complete overhaul, moving later to the asking for complete independence.
- [36:38]
Misha Glennie
So, Clem, if we look at what happens as the movement to abolish the indenture system develops, what happens to the communities afterwards? They are now really part of the local countries that they've moved to. How do they respond to the end of the system?
- [37:01]
Clem Sicharan
The British Guyana case is especially interesting because when indentureship was abolished, the last indentureds were cancelled. In April of 1920, some middle class Indians in British Guyana launched something called the Colonization Scheme. It was headed by two very distinguished Indians, a lawyer and a legislator, a man named J A Lock, who. And a man named Dr. William Hughley Wharton, who was actually Indian, who was the first Indian in the Caribbean to graduate in medicine. He studied at the University of Edinburgh. And they thought that the Indian population was stuck at something like 42 or 43%. Precisely the time when no more indentured laborers would be taken into the colony. And they felt that that left them very vulnerable. Because, unlike Mauritius, and they were citing the case of Mauritius, where the Indian population was already well over 60, maybe 70%. The Mauritian Indians had the instruments to begin to fight for greater political rights. But that in British Guyana, they didn't have that numerical strength to be able to fight in the same way.
- [38:22]
Misha Glennie
You mean to fight. To fight for them with the British
- [38:26]
Clem Sicharan
authorities or with the British authorities or
- [38:29]
Misha Glennie
the other peoples of British Guyana?
- [38:31]
Clem Sicharan
Well, with the British authorities. But that any kind of political battle of that nature Inevitably acquired an ethnic dimension. Because the Africans were not in favor of the continuation of Indian indentured laborers. In fact, they were trying to get more Africans to come in from West Indian islands and from West Africa because they thought the. That their position in the future, their political and economic position in the future would be gravely undermined if the Indian population was further increased. So that created a big battle there already between the two of them.
- [39:11]
Misha Glennie
So, Neha, you have these populations in places as far away as Fiji, British Guyana, Mauritius, South Africa. These Indian populations who remained there after the end of the system. How do they view India itself? I mean, do they feel detached from it? Or what is their relationship with India?
- [39:32]
Neha Hui
The Indian diaspora in the different colonies have a very distinct identity in themselves, which is, of course, influenced by India. But then it is distinct. Say, for example, in Trinidad and Suriname and British Guyana, There is a very strong Indo Caribbean identity. And in the. During the time of decolonization, these people of Indian background played extremely important roles in every sphere of life. In politics, in literature, and I'm sure Clem will tell you, in sports, it's a.
- [40:08]
Clem Sicharan
Of course, yes, of course.
- [40:11]
Neha Hui
It's a distinct identity did exist, but then it was influenced by their background in India. There are traces of Indianness in different aspects of their life. For example, maybe the caste system didn't continue to exist in the same way, but then festivals got transferred. So people of Indian origin in the Caribbean celebrate festivals like Pagwa, which is the spring festival of color, which is also known as Holi in India, as well as Diwali, which is the autumn festival of lights. Food has got a very rich influence from India, but then it is, you know, unique and their own. So, yes, the culture did come in, but it's a very distinct identity and purpose.
- [40:57]
Misha Glennie
How would you Sum up the legacy of the Indian indentured system.
- [41:02]
Purba Hussain
It kind of touches upon everything, economy, politics, culture. This is about eight decades of Indians moving to different parts of the world, as you say, Fiji in the South Pacific, all the way to Caribbean. One of the biggest legacies, of course, is the creation of these new identities that Neha just told us about, and these new aspects of the Indian diaspora that many of whom remain quite Indian in their culture, but as you say, also created their own distinct identity as Indo Mauritians, as Indo Caribbean. Neha has talked about the population and cultural legacies. To me, one of the bigger legacies, of course, as a historian thinking about what's happening in India at the time is considering how the abolition of indenture and the discussion and discourse that came out of that snowballed into a very important part of the Indian independence movement and the mass mobilization politics that we know about the Indian independence movement today. Many of it started with people like Gandhi, who were based in India, but also ex indentured migrants. A very important person being Totaram Sanadhya, who was an Indo Fijian man who came back to India this time, as many did, as part of the repatriation process, who would go on and giving lectures around different parts of the country in India to try to show his experience of the indenture trade and use that as a way to rile people up, to speak against the indenture system.
- [42:30]
Misha Glennie
And Clem, how about you? What do you think the primary legacies of this system are?
- [42:36]
Clem Sicharan
Well, I think, Misha, I've called it a social revolution. And in this respect, I think I was greatly influenced by Professor Bridge Lal, who had a great impact on me. One of the most important things here was that the caste notions of caste were largely incompatible with the capitalist rationale, the capitalist ethos of the sugar plantations. But the whole process, from the depots in Calcutta that Purba writes about in a very fine book, from there onto the ships, onto the plantations, into the logis, the barracks, there was no recognition of one's caste background. And therefore, people of necessity started to integrate and to create a new identity. In fact, those who travel on the same ship, whether they were Brahmins or Kshatriyas or kurmis or chamars, or people who were seen as being from a very low caste, they had to integrate, they had to work within this framework. And that is why I say the social revolution began there and it continued onto the plantations. In fact, men and women who traveled on the same ship saw themselves as jihadjis or jihadjins, ship brothers and ship sisters. And that relationship became so strong that it was almost forbidden for such people's family to intermarry. And I think that that process was magnified by the fact that people were able to retain Islam as well as Hinduism in the Caribbean, because Muslim people, Brahmins, lower caste people, all were in the same, literally in the same boat and on the same plantation.
- [44:29]
Neha Hui
Clem has mentioned a lot about what the pull factors, what kept workers back in British Guyana or other colonies. One thing that stopped many people from going back was the notion of kalapani. So Hinduism imposes caste expulsion on people who have crossed the sea in a process called kalapani, which translates to black water. And then that process can only be reversed through an expensive ceremony called shuddhi. And people of lower caste did not often have the means or the motive to go back.
- [45:04]
Misha Glennie
I was going to say, why would they.
- [45:05]
Neha Hui
Yes, people have confirmed the fact that
- [45:08]
Misha Glennie
they were a Dalit.
- [45:09]
Neha Hui
Exactly.
- [45:10]
Clem Sicharan
And just one final point, Misha. I do not know how orthodox Hinduism, for instance, which is still very strong there, Sanatan Dharma, how that could have been maintained if it hadn't been for the minority of Brahmins who were taken to the Caribbean, because they themselves were conscious participants in this process, because they started in order to counteract, to make a living, but also to counteract the Christian proselytizers who had come in because they had a whole set of heathens there as they saw them. But those Brahmins soon started not only to minister in the homes of people who were known to be a very low caste with whom they would never have associated with in India. Not only did they go to their homes to do the pujas and to do all the religious work and to recognize these people as human beings, but they also start to take cooked food from these people. And for me to take cooked food from you, if you're known as a dilator or an untouchable, that itself was a social revolution of great significance. And for me, that is what epitomizes this new identity that was being shaped.
- [46:29]
Misha Glennie
My thanks to Purba Hussain, Clem Sicharan and Neha Hui. Next week, the origins of Cybernetics. Thank you for listening.
- [46:39]
Purba Hussain
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [46:47]
Clem Sicharan
Are you taping this bit?
- [46:49]
Misha Glennie
Yeah, we keep this, but we keep this bit. So there are a couple of things that really struck me. First of all, we didn't talk about Uganda. We didn't talk about what the long term impact has been politically in places like Uganda and Fiji in particular, where there's been real tension in the past 50 years or so and how that emerged. And the other thing that strikes me is that this is so reminiscent of something else that I've done some work on, which is the effectively indentured labor of Bengalis and Nepalese in particular, but also Filipinos into the Gulf states. It seems to me to be very, a very similar system. I mean, when you signed up for the indentured labour, did you. Well, I mean, obviously you didn't have passports, but did you get any cash for it? Were there tangible benefits straight away for these people?
- [47:50]
Purba Hussain
On paper, every indentured migrant who signed up to join the trade got six months wage advance. Multiple people who came back and spoke to multiple investigative committees said that they never received that wage advance or they received it from the labour recruiters and then some of it was taken away as sort of fee.
- [48:11]
Misha Glennie
Some middleman.
- [48:13]
Purba Hussain
Yes, yeah, exactly. But there was the idea that you could just get cash in hand immediately.
- [48:18]
Misha Glennie
Right, so. And did any of them take the money and run?
- [48:22]
Purba Hussain
Most indentured migrants were under quite severe surveillance before they moved onto the ship. They were kept in these warehouse kind of spaces on the ports known as
- [48:33]
Misha Glennie
depots in Calcutta and in Mumbai and
- [48:36]
Purba Hussain
in Calcutta, Mumbai and Madras and all that.
- [48:40]
Misha Glennie
So. And how long would they stay in these warehouses?
- [48:43]
Purba Hussain
Five to six months, up to sometimes three months.
- [48:48]
Misha Glennie
So there's been quite a bit of debate amongst researchers and scholars and presumably also descendants of indentured laborers, about the balance here. You know, was this a replacement for slavery or was this actually something which facilitated opportunities for people? I mean, is that a live debate amongst scholars?
- [49:11]
Clem Sicharan
Well, I think a lot of people hold on to this idea that this was a new system of slavery. I think the early period and you discussed in your book, certainly, you know, there were slave like conditions and slave like practices on the plantations. But you can't extrapolate from that and paint the whole thing in that sense.
- [49:35]
Misha Glennie
Yes, because it lasted 100 years.
- [49:37]
Clem Sicharan
Yes, it lasted 75 to 80 years. And people were very enlightened. People understood people were returning. Some who would return went back to the Caribbean or went back to Fiji. Now we knew little about this. As a descendant of indentured laborers. I had no idea until I was probably in my 30s as to where what part of India these people came from. It was a closed book, as Vs. Naipaul said, apart from the fact, as he put it Memorably, that the poverty of these people. And if you go to India today, these still remain two of the most deprived parts of India. Their poverty was immemorial. It went back many, many centuries. And here you had people, many of whom, certainly in the later stages of indentureship, were making a conscious effort to find a new life. But this was never discovered in families anywhere in the Caribbean.
- [50:40]
Misha Glennie
So, Purba, how did people go about finding what their heritage was? What is the sort of record system? Is there an extant system of records of who was moving and why?
- [50:53]
Purba Hussain
Yes. So there are multiple times in the indentured system itself where people's names were recorded. So the first time is when people are brought to the port cities. There are government officials, colonial officials who take down things like name and where they come from, their village name or geographical specific space. For women, they often take down whether they're married or not. As Neha pointed out, there are multiple women who are actually traveling by herself, many pregnant, often giving birth on ships, often giving birth when they arrived. And as you say, many of them unaccompanied. So a lot of records were taken down or were supposed to be at least taken down at the port of origin. And then when you go to Mauritius, Guyana, they're supposed to also kind of check that those are the people who arrived because there were many deaths on passage as well.
- [51:43]
Misha Glennie
So, Clem, how did you track down your maternal grandmother?
- [51:47]
Clem Sicharan
Well, I tracked down most of my relatives because on their transport for the land that they owned in Guyana, their names would be listed, but it would say ex avon, 1884, which means that he came on the ship Avon in 1884. And if you go into the National Archives in Guyana in Georgetown, Guyana, Neha has been there. I think if you go there, you will see these volumes which state the name of the ship and the year, certainly from 1865, not the early stages, but from 1865 to 1970. So once I had that information from the land transport documents, I was able to go straight to the ship's registers which would state their names, the village from which they came, what district. Yes. Their caste background, whether they registered the
- [52:51]
Misha Glennie
caste background as well.
- [52:52]
Clem Sicharan
Yes, they did. They did. And it would state where they came from, it would state who they were accompanied by, and then it would be penciled in. Rose Hall, Port Morant, wherever they were centered, that would be penciled in.
- [53:08]
Neha Hui
Or whether they were re adventured, whether they went back, which they took.
- [53:13]
Misha Glennie
Right. So you could track their career. Pretty much. So there's Some advantage to that bureaucratization of the colonials.
- [53:24]
Clem Sicharan
It's there. I mean, I would never have known because this thing wasn't discussed, you see, for two reasons. One, the idea that you were all kidnapped, in a way handled this feeling of animosity that Africans had, that these people had come in to swamp us and as they used to put it, took the bread out of our mouths. When we were about to embark on our freedom, these people came in as cab labourers and we paid because one third of the funding of it came from colonial budgets. So they said we paid to bring these people in to undercut us. So if you were going there to indentured labour, you say, well, look, I didn't come to undercut you. I was kidnapped, I was tricked, I was fooled. So you sustained that.
- [54:13]
Misha Glennie
So that becomes the narrative that everyone was kidnapped.
- [54:18]
Clem Sicharan
One final point to that that within the family itself, we knew nothing. As Naipaul said, I didn't know my great great grandmother was pregnant on this boat and she came here alone to Trinidad. They weren't going to discuss that past. That past was an area of darkness. It was never discussed because there were too many things hidden in that past. Personal reasons for leaving, conditions within the family. And for women, two thirds of whom went on their own, and these were women large among to them, between 20 and 30, they would have been married, they would have had all kinds of family connections. But to revisit that was far too painful. So it was a cultivated area of darkness.
- [55:06]
Misha Glennie
Well, thank you very much. I think you've all deserved a cup of tea or coffee indeed, if that's what you want. And. And I think Simon is going to
- [55:13]
Clem Sicharan
be making his shot of Guyana rum.
- [55:16]
Misha Glennie
A shot of Guyana rum.
- [55:18]
Clem Sicharan
They make a very good rum.
- [55:20]
Misha Glennie
I'm sure they do, if you've got any hand.
- [55:23]
Clem Sicharan
They make a very good rum.
- [55:27]
Misha Glennie
I've got to go.
- [55:28]
Purba Hussain
Unfortunately, In Our Time With Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.
- [55:36]
Johnny Diamond
Hello, I'm Johnny diamond and I'm the presenter of the Radio 4 series how did We Get Israel and the Palestinian Opinions. We explore the complicated backstory of that Middle east conflict as the region endures another wider war. Through conversations with experts with a variety of perspectives, we travel back through the centuries to examine the history of the land that's now so contested between Arabs and Israelis. And we try and understand the past that's brought us to such a present. How did we get here? Here, Israel and the Palestinians. Listen on BBC Sounds
- [56:15]
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