A Quest for Identity: The Story of Indian Indentured Labourers

In tribute to this extraordinary work, the author, Ambassador Bhaswati Mukherjee could deservedly add ‘Dr.’ or ‘Prof.’ to her diplomatic designation. Her labour of love would easily pass muster as a doctoral thesis at the best universities. Evidence of her scholarship is to be found in the 370 footnotes that adorn the 198 pages of her thesis.

They range from English to French sources, a language in which she is effortlessly fluent, and even Dutch (she was India’s Ambassador to The Hague) besides Hindi and Bhojpuri. They cover a wide swathe of research that reveal both her dedication to her subject as well as her diligence in winkling out facts and opinions from virtually all available sources.

The earliest of these sources date back to the 1812 report of a select committee of the House of Commons and a selection of papers from the records of the East India Company published by J.E.Cox in 1820, leading up to the 1871 Report of the Commissioners looking into the treatment of immigrants into British Guyana, in addition to John Fiske’s publication of his influential book, The Unseen World and other Essays, in 1876.

From then on, books and reports on the condition of indentured labour become prolific, notably Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1860s); Major D.G. Pilcher’s 1883 report on the system of recruiting labour for emigration; the 1894 report of the Protector of Emigrants on the excessively high death rates at the Calcutta depot; and the 1897 proceedings of a conference on indentured labour convened in London by the Secretary of State for the colonies.

By the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the question of indentured labour had become an acute source of concern, dissatisfaction and dissent for not only Indian nationalists of the standing of Gopalkrishna Gokhale and Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak but also the rising stars of the freedom movement from Gandhi to Jinnah.

This lead to one of the more humane and sensitive of British viceroys, Lord Hardinge, to recommend, in virtually his last report home from India in 1917, that the whole question of indentured labour be reviewed by the Imperial government. Although this was not followed up by his successor – the ‘cold’ Lord Chelmsford, as the author describes him – by 1924, the liberal opinion in the British parliament was sufficiently outraged to outlaw indenture even as they had outlawed slavery a century earlier – only to replace slavery by indenture! 

Now that indenture stands abolished since exactly a century, academic work of a high order has studied its origins and its similarity to slavery despite a contract (girmit) between the employer and the labour. However, an overwhelming majority of the indentured could neither read, understand or even sign the document – they only affixed their thumb print on it – resulting in gross violation, by the white employers, of the terms of the contract as well as ignoring its provisions for the welfare and repatriation of these allegedly ‘voluntary’ emigres – the ‘girmitiya’, as they termed themselves.

Put to backbreaking labour for up to 20 hours a day, supervised by brutal, whip-cracking overseers, the indentured were effectively deprived of all rights and, like the slaves earlier, tied forever to their masters. Women were hugely discriminated against, their honour repeatedly violated, their marital status left indeterminate, their wages a fraction of what the menfolk were paid. Living and sanitary conditions were terrible resulting in massive loss of life at a young age and among infants, as well as high maternal mortality. Ambassador Mukherjee describes all this pain and suffering with both passion and compassion. 

What lends dignity to this otherwise sordid tale is that notwithstanding their having left their homeland thousands of miles across the distant oceans, never to return, this reluctant diaspora, forced by poverty and despair out of their native milieu, struggled to preserve the collective community memory of their religious and cultural practices.

The author illustrates this with excellent translations from the original Bhojpuri of their songs and stories. Despite the odds, they held on to their identity. Of course, back home, several of these traditional rites and rituals, caste discrimination and religious beliefs were changing – which is perhaps why diaspora writers of high distinction, of whom V.S. Naipaul is the most famous, critique a distant memory of their home country without absorbing the profound transformations that have taken place since their ancestors of nearly 200 years ago exchanged poverty for degradation in the false expectation that they would be making a better life for themselves and their children.

It is this unending “quest for identity” that has made of the descendants of indentured labour, a diaspora spreading from the South Pacific right around the world through the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean, the most distinctive diaspora the world has ever known – “Indian” despite being deprived of India for years and years and years.

Ambassador Mukherjee draws on the vast literature spawned in recent times to study the trials and tribulations of the indentured until liberation came. Her two most quoted scholars are Hugh Tinker, who wrote A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas (1993), and Brij V. Lal, from his full range of writings in books and leaned journals. But her research is far from limited to these principal sources.

As can be seen from her meticulous footnotes and her impressive (but disappointingly incomplete) Bibliography, she delves deep and wide into available records and garnishes her tales with cameo portraits of those who went over the kalapani to work the sugar plantations – not “voluntarily” but driven by desperation, bewildered and mercilessly exploited.

Happily, their struggle for liberation in concert with their sympathisers in India and Great Britain came to final success in 1924 with the abolition of indentured labour by the British Parliament. It is a heroic and inspiring tale told with verve and profound empathy. 

Reassuringly, in many of the host countries – notably Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname – the descendants of the indentured rose to high political positions. The names of Sir Seewosaugur Ramgoolam of Mauritius and his family; of Bishnu Pandey and Ranjit Kumar of Trinidad; of Sridath Ramphal of Guyana; of Shankar and Rabin S. Baldewsingh of Suriname; and Reddy of Fiji readily come to mind. Perhaps it was in Reunion and other French colonies that the nexus between the immigrant and the home country was most effectively snapped. Elsewhere, it was, as the author says, a “relentless quest for identity”

The main cautionary tale for contemporary India that comes through is that where our diaspora integrated with local communities and culture without abandoning, indeed enhancing our grand civilisational tradition of “absorption, assimilation and synthesis”, as in Mauritius and parts of the Caribbean, the Indian diaspora thrived, but where it consciously distanced itself from the locals, as in Fiji, inter-community tensions persist. Apartheid, that is, “living apart”, does not work. So also, within our nation, it is not through uniformity that we will best achieve unity. It is only ‘unity in diversity’ that will ensure our emotional integration as a free people.