Indian Indentured Labour

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30for more details.

1:00you shop in-store or online for easy pickup or delivery. Restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions. During Memorial Day at Lowe's, shop household must-haves for less. Save$80 on a Char-Broil Performance Series 4-Burner Grill to chef up something special. Plus, get up to 45 % off select major appliances to keep things fresh. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Lowe's. We help. You save. Valid through 527. While supplies last, selection varies by location. Visit your nearby Lowe's on South Loop 288 in Denton.

1:38This 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 programme. 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.

2:23and 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 more nuanced. Well, with me to discuss this period of Indian indentured labour are Purba Hussein, 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.

3:09In 1833, give us a sense of how entwined slavery, sugar and the British Empire were. 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.

4:09So what happened to the former enslaved people? What did they do? 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 labour was still accessible to the planters. But in places like Trinidad and British Guyana 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.

5:13And 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 emancipation. It is to those places where that vacuum was left, were Indian indentured laborers. In fact, other forms of indentured laborers, including Madeira and Portuguese indentured labor and Chinese indentured labor. So tell us a little bit about the compensation. Who was compensated for the abolition of slavery? But certainly not the enslaved or the freed people.

5:56The compensation, ironically, was referred to those who owned the 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. And it was huge sums of money, as I understand. Well, it was over 20 million pounds, certainly for Caribbean planters and that was a vast amount of money in its time. So, Neha Hui, tell us a little bit about this man John Gladstone and what problem he perceived he had once slavery was abolished. John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant, member of parliament, and the father of future Prime Minister William Gladstone.

6:44He 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.

7:28He wanted access to a reliable labour force. Just if I can butt in there, how much were the former enslaved workers being paid during these apprenticeships? So during the apprenticeships, they were required to provide unpaid labour for up to 45 hours a week. And yes, so it's not quite the abolition of slavery that we thought it was. No, no, definitely, at least not in the initial years. So, yes. So going back to Gladstone. So Gladstone was very keen to continue having the supply of reliable labour. And so he knew that Mauritius had already started getting a supply of Indian workers from 1834. And he started lobbying the parliament.

8:17Yes. So what arguments was he making and who did he need to persuade in order to introduce this system of indentured labour? There were a couple of things, a couple of concerns that the plantation 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 labour in the Parliament. That was the Sugar Equalisation Act, Sugar Equalisation 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.

8:59The 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. So, Portima Hussain, 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?

9:42So 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 a 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.

10:32The idea is that the margin 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. So what were the voyages like? What were the conditions that the indentured workers were kept in? 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.

11:16It does change quite a bit. And presumably it's a lot quicker once you've got steel. 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 the system of having an overseer, becoming one labourer amongst many, and following very particular kind of almost the synchronised system of waking up at a particular time, being allowed on deck at a particular time, living with other indentured migrants.

12:11Most of the indentured men, women and children were living under the decks, they were allowed up on 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. 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? There's some gradation here in terms of the treatment of indentured labourers. It's not a uniform thing.

12:47And 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 Guyana with the first two ships that arrived there in 1838 that the system was suspended for a number of years.

13:40And it wasn't restarted again in the Caribbean. But suspended because the conditions were so awful. Because the conditions were so awful. And there was a high mortality rate among the first batch of indentured labours. 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.

14:37And 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 labourers were able to undercut the bargaining position of the freed people. Yeah, of course, the Indian indentured labour was not the only indentured labour system that emerged in the 19th century.

15:20We 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 labour, how does that fit into this? So liberal thinkers of that time saw Indian indentured labour as an uneasy compromise between slavery and free labour. 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.

16:08There were other things that made indentured workers 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 labour. Adam Smith, who of course predated indentured labour, was unambiguously opposed to unfreedom.

16:49So 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 labour was inefficient because workers just did not have the incentive to work more. J.S. Mill also opposed unfree labour 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. Well, talking about those contracts which they were signing, back in India, who was doing the recruiting and how much did the indentured workers know what they were signing up for?

17:30Labour 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, especially for people who were already quite used to agriculture and labour.

18:15That 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. Their contracts lasted for about five years, is that right? Five years, yes. Five years was the standard contract. And were they generally, after five years, free to choose what to do next? 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.

18:53Various 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 move to colonies where it would be easier to kind of settle down a bit.

19:33But 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 are expecting really a river journey to somewhere in or near India.

20:12We all can agree that housing is expensive. Rent, mortgage, it doesn't matter which one you're paying, it stings every month. But BILT can make you feel a little better. Let me explain. BILT started out rewarding members on their rent. Now, as of 2026, Built Members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use toward flights with top travel partners like United & Hyatt, Lyft Rides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. And here's what you might not expect. Built Members can also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while being rewarded at more than 45 ,000 merchant partners.

20:55It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home is better with Bilt. Join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash podcasts. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash podcasts. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Here's golf legend John Daly. Hell yeah, these wins are piling up faster than my divorces. I only spent on Moto, America's Social Casino. You know, I've won a couple of majors. And on Moto, I've won majors, grands, and epic jackpots on their classic Vegas slots with huge, huge bonus rounds. Moto Casino adds new games and awards players free coins every single day.

21:31Grip it and spend it on Moto Casino. Download the Moto Casino app today. Moto Casino is a social casino. What we're prohibited, no purchase necessary. Visit Moto.us for more details. Moto Casino. America's social casino. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Jewel Osco. For you, save days are here now through June 23rd. Find hot deals throughout the store and earn four times a point. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Keebler, General Mills, Lactaid, Jack Links, Cheez-It, and Gatorade. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more.

22:06Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in-store or online for easy pickup or delivery. Restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions. 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. Did that result in ever any coming together of the two communities or were they at daggers drawn, as it were, over the years? 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.

23:04So after 1870 in particular, because conditions started to improve, there were reforms. The system that Parva is discussing from the 1830s and the 1840s had undergone some reforms from the 1870s to 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.

23:59And what happened there was that many people, many endangered 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 caste, people like the Chamars and the Domes and the Dusads, 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 labourers.

24:47So the people who were taking most of the indentured laborers who were taking 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 there which had started with the inflow of indentured labourers, 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.

25:51Neha, Clem just mentioned there about the caste system and the fact that I presume most of the indentured labourers 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? 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. There were people who were from agricultural castes. 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.

26:37So 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.

27:20So people lived lives of physical segregation. Inter-dining was not allowed. Inter-marriage was not 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.

28:07Sex 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 troubled. Less able to stand up for their rights and less confident. Clem, you wanted to go in there. 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.

28:48But 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 Bhojpur area, Bhojpur speaking area, that Bhojpur culture, the agricultural castes like the Kurmis and the Ahirs and the Khoris and so on. These people were among the best agriculturalists in 19th century, late 19th century Eastern U.P. 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 the here is that these people, although they were the best agriculturalists, they owned very little of the land.

29:39So 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 returned. I think in Trinidad it was less. They stayed on after their contracts. They stayed on because they were recreating a world.