401 results in Cross-discipline history: general interest
Introduction
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Summary
The historiography on South Asian overseas migration in the colonial era has focused extensively on the history of indentured labour. This was a system of recruitment of workers on a fixed contract of three to five years with a single employer, at the end of which they could re-indenture, find other employment or have their passage paid home. These contracts were prominently used by private employers to hire plantation labour in sugar, rubber, tea and coffee plantations following the abolition of slavery and by rural Indians to escape from poverty and/ or discrimination. They were also used in government public works departments, in railway construction and in the military. Those who signed such an agreement (known as a girmit in north India) described themselves as girmitiyas. Although guaranteed food, shelter and employment, and subject to periodic inspections, those in the hands of private employers overseas could be exploited as they were often working in remote locations and were legally not free to leave until their contract had expired or they (or their family) had bought their way out of it. Although never allowed in Sri Lanka or Myanmar, and superseded by other forms of migration by the beginning of the twentieth century, more has been written about South Asian indentured labour than any other form of historical migration from India, partly because it was subject to government regulation and is therefore unusually well documented in colonial archives.
Within the literature on indentured labour, most of the writing has revolved around migration statistics and the debates between anti-slavery campaigners, planters, British imperial officials and, latterly, the complaints of Indian nationalist politicians, leading up to the effective abolition of indentured overseas labour contracts by 1920. The voices of the migrants themselves are not so often heard, nor those of the many other Indians who were not on contracts of indenture who migrated at the same time. A classic text, Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery, drew its inspiration from the early campaigns against indentured migration launched by the anti-slavery movement in Britain. However, in recent years, a new scholarship has been emerging, especially from within the diaspora – most prominently in South Africa – which sheds light on the highly varied social lives of migrants.
14 - Opposing the Group Areas Act and Resisting Forced Displacement in Durban, South Africa
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- By Brij Maharaj
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Summary
The implementation of apartheid in South Africa centred to a large extent on the control of residential location. One of the cornerstones of apartheid and one of the few areas in which the policy has been effective was in the provision of separate residential areas for the different race groups. This spatial segregation and segmentation of residential areas for whites, Coloureds, Indians and Africans expressed the impact of apartheid most acutely. The Group Areas Act (GAA), 1950, was one of the key instruments used to reinforce the ideology of apartheid and emphasised separate residential areas, educational services and other amenities for the different race groups.
The major impact of group area dislocations has been borne by black communities, particularly Coloureds and Indians. According to Johannes T. Schoombee, ‘the actual legislative model taken for group areas has been the string of legislative measures starting in the 1880s directed against “Asiatics” [particularly Indians] in the Transvaal and later, Natal’.
Indians represent the smallest proportion of the four population groups in South Africa, numbering about one million. Yet, proportionately, the impact of the GAA ‘has been borne most heavily by the Indians, with one in four of them having been resettled’. Indians ‘suffered the most from the implementation of the GAA, either through removals or the inadequate provision of living space’. This was especially so in the port city of Durban, situated on the east coast of South Africa, where indentured labourers from India first disembarked in 1860 and who were followed by traders (or passengers who paid their own way) in the mid-1870s.
This chapter is a continuation of my earlier historical research on the GAA in Durban. The focus of the chapter is on opposition to the GAA and resistance to forced displacement. The reasons for the failure of resistance is also analysed. The chapter is divided into three sections. The background and context are presented in the first section. Opposing the GAA is the theme of the second section. Resisting forced displacement is discussed in the third section, and the sub-themes include the approaches of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), the Natal Indian Organisation (NIO), the ‘All-in-Congress’, and the 1958 proclamations and mass action.
The data for this chapter were derived from a variety of primary documentary sources, ranging from official central and local government records and newspaper reports to memoranda prepared by political and civil society organisations.
9 - Intimate Lives on Rubber Plantations: The Textures of Indian Coolie Relations in British Malaya
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Summary
On 13 September 1935, Muthusamy, an Indian coolie from the Haron Estate, Klang, in British Malaya (henceforth Malaya), was charged with enticing away a married woman, Thavakka, who was a coolie and the wife of Rengasamy, another coolie at the same estate. During the trial, it was established that Rengasamy married Thavakka in India in 1927, just before they arrived in Malaya at the Haron Estate. In his statement, Rengasamy claimed that Muthusamy had begun taking his meals with the couple from August 1934, and in March 1935 the latter enticed Thavakka away from him. Muthusamy, on the contrary, claimed that during the previous year he had been depositing all his earnings with Rengasamy for safe keeping, and in March 1935, when he demanded the money back from Rengasamy, the latter offered his wife instead of the money. Furthermore, Muthusamy tried to establish that he had initially refused the offer, but upon the pleas and eagerness of Thavakka, he agreed, and they proceeded to an estate in Ipoh where they began to live as ‘husband and wife’. After hearing the case, the magistrate convicted Muthusamy and sentenced him to three years of rigorous imprisonment.
The investigation and verdict on the Muthusamy and Rengasamy case was covered in a number of local newspapers, as were most ‘enticement’ cases in Malaya. Such cases were not uncommon in transnational migrant labour communities in colonial plantation societies. Colonial administrators, while dealing with incidences of domestic trouble, kidnapping, crimes of passion and other misdemeanors often used stereotypical labels of ‘victim’ and ‘enticer’ to categorise colonised subjects, but stereotyping did not always prove helpful for either administrators or their subjects. The frequent recurrence of incidents involving acts of ‘wife enticement’3, sexual jealousy and partner or spouse desertion amongst immigrant Indian coolies in Malaya sparked intense debate amongst colonial administrators both in India and Malaya from 1900 to 1940. The discourses that arose in the wake of such incidents offer many clues about the nature of Indian coolie life in British Malaya, particularly the nature of intimate gender relations.
Due largely to the demographics of early Indian immigration, historical research on Indian coolies in Malaya has tended to focus on male immigrants and their work as coolies, kanganis and chettiars. This emphasis has resulted in complete silence regarding Indian coolie women or gender relations between coolie migrants within colonial plantation societies.
1 - Negotiating Power in Colonial Natal: Indentured Migrants in Natal, 1860–1911
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- By Goolam Vahed
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Summary
The Power of a Man is his present means to obtain some future apparent Good.
—Thomas HobbesWhere there is power, there is resistance and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
—Michel FoucaultMen make history, but they do not make it just as they please.
—Karl MarxThe British colony of Natal imported just over 152,000 indentured migrants between 1860 and 1911 to work on its railways, municipalities, coal mines and sugar plantations. The indigenous Zulu population had access to land at mission stations at reserves and through private companies, and resisted absorption into the racist capitalist economy for as long as they could. Therefore, despite the large indigenous Zulu population, white settlers turned to Indian labour. The indentured migrated for a variety of reasons. These ran the gamut from demographic and economic dislocation resulting from British colonialism to being a widow or outcast or perhaps simply possessing a desire to travel. Notwithstanding claims of duping and false representation, the many examples of return migration, (re)migration to different colonies and chain migration suggest that at least some of the indentured were consciously undertaking the journey and had a reasonable idea of what they were getting into.
Colonial societies and their plantations specifically were structured around power. Hobbes is cited in the epigraph because of his emphasis on the centrality of absolute power in human relations, while Marx’s domination–repression conception of power sees power as residing in the bourgeoisie and a process of constant struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The concept of power is highly contested in the social sciences. Broadly speaking, however, there is a difference between those who see power as an ‘exercise of power-over’ and those who define it as a ‘power-to-do’. Max Weber, for example, defines power as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. Foucault has a similar perspective: ‘if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others’. The power-to-do conception, as Hanna Pitkin explains, means that ‘power is a something’ – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability or wherewithal.
I - Agency and Resistance
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8 - On the Move: Remigration in the Indian Ocean, 1850–1906
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Summary
On 21 September 1909, the acting protector of immigrants in Mauritius wrote to the Inspector General of Police of the colony the following about Boodhun, who was now living in Seychelles:
I am informed by the bearer of the letter that an old immigrant named Boodhun who had left the colony [Mauritius] for Seychelles has returned & was on board the French Mail and that is considered as an undesirable & prevented from landing. It is to my knowledge that his son is a labourer in the service of the Beau Bassin & Rose Hill Board [in Mauritius] & he has asked me to interfere to get his father’s [repeal] … as he is willing to receive & to maintain him at his expense. In these circumstances, I hope you will issue orders accordingly.
The aforementioned story is an illustration of remigration – that is, mobility – between supposedly minor colonies without returning to India. Boodhun, an indentured worker from India, had completed his contract of five years, had probably spent many more years in Mauritius and had eventually become an ‘old immigrant’. Time and familiarity in Mauritius had shaped his information networks in such a way that he was aware of the populations in neighbouring colonies such as Seychelles. Colonial discourse emphasises how he was ‘undesirable’ in Mauritius, thus possibly rendering Seychelles a refuge for all unwanted immigrants. However, this could not be further from the truth since Seychelles had a significant population of 22,409 persons in 1909 and was a major exporter of vanilla and coconut oil.
The presence of Boodhun in Seychelles is not to reify the exotic undertones of islands as spaces of violence, disease or penalisation. Rather, his presence suggests the economic possibilities that remigrants pursued, despite the constraints of colonial administrations (here, those of Seychelles and Mauritius). This chapter uses passenger logs and colonial reports to examine Indian labour remigration within various nodes of the Indian Ocean between 1847 and 1906. Remigration, as pointed out earlier, refers to the process whereby labour migrants moved across colonies (and their dependencies) without returning to India or making the three main ports of embarkation (Calcutta, Madras and Bombay [present-day Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, respectively]) the points of departure. The chapter further queries the profiles of those who pursued remigration and their motivations.
Dedication
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Contents
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16 - New and Old Diasporas of South South Asia: Sri Lanka and Cyber-Nationalism in Malaysia
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Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in the translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.…
[W]e will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
—Salman RushdieIntroduced following the official abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1833, Indian indentured labour migration in turn came largely to an end by the end of First World War. By the time of its abolition, millions from the Indian subcontinent had shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the globe. Many were ‘free migrants’, or so-called passenger Indians, but others had signed an agreement to perform contract labour as indentured workers for three to five years in colonial plantations, on railways or roads, or in construction work. Whether in neighbouring Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and Malaya (present-day Malaysia) or further afield in Fiji, Africa or the Americas, from Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, to Surinam in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Mauritius, first-generation ‘coolies’ – the name given to bonded labour migrants and those recruited under the kangani system (where free migrants were recruited by Indian intermediaries) – courageously journeyed for the larger part of a century, first by sail and then by steamship, to live and labour in far-off lands.
Indentured and free labour migrants from India and their descendants, who worked in the lucrative sugar, rubber, cotton, coffee, cocoa and tea plantations in the tropics of the world, played an essential role in the development of the modern world and the functioning of global capitalism, as Crispin Bates, Adam Mckeown and Sunil Amrith have noted. Yet the oral history and literary record of generations of Indian indentured diasporic communities echo narratives of social suffering. They describe the struggle for agency against victimhood within the colonial plantation economies. Their literature and songs detail loss and longing for an increasingly ‘imaginary homeland’, similar to those portrayed in the writings of African American descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.
II - Remigration
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Index
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3 - Labour Resistance in Indenture Plantations in the Assam Valley
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Summary
The Growth of the Tea Industry
The tea industry was the earliest commercial enterprise established by private British capital in the Assam Valley in the 1840s. It grew spectacularly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued to expand in the first half of the twentieth century. Tea production increased from 6,000,000 pounds in 1872 to 75,000,000 pounds in 1900, and the area under tea cultivation expanded from 27,000 acres to 204,000 acres. From the mid-1860s, labour for the Assam Valley plantations was mobilised under the indenture system. Employment in the Assam Valley tea plantations increased from 107,847 employees in 1885 to 247,760 in 1900. At the end of colonial rule, the Assam Valley tea plantations employed nearly half a million labourers out of a total labour population of over three quarters of a million, more than 300,000 acres were under tea cultivation (with a million acres under the control of the tea companies) and 397 million pounds of tea were being produced. The important features of this plantation enterprise were the monopolitic control of private British capital, production for a global market and the employment of a migrant labour force recruited and transported under indenture contracts from different parts of British India.
The Indentured Labour Regime
Having failed to ‘persuade’ the indigenous communities of Assam to work in the plantations, the planters brought labour from other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Recruitment was arranged by British managing agencies based in Calcutta through a hierarchy of local intermediaries known, for example, as arkattis and sirdars. This mobilisation was described at the time as the ‘coolie trade’. Through a process of recruitment, transportation and employment, the colonial plantation regimes transformed Indian agrarian communities into labouring ‘coolies’. During the course of this transformation, their castes and their religious, regional, social and cultural diversities were homogenised under the disparaging term ‘coolie’, which was universally used by planters in plantations around the globe and the colonial bureaucracy. Individuality was subsumed within anonymous ‘gangs’ and ‘muster rolls’ and only survived in the plantation ‘coolie lines’ for the duration of their working lives. Labourers were converted into what James Duncan has described as ‘abstract bodies … that are made docile, useful, disciplined, rationalised, and controlled sexually’.
Another common and significant feature of plantation life under the indenture regime was the immobilisation of the labour force upon arrival.
III - Gender and Family
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IV - Legacies
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2 - Stewed Plums, Baked Porridge and Flavoured Tea: Poisoning by Indian Domestic Servants in Colonial Natal
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Summary
This teapot, whose rage is writ too large to be cooped
within one pygmy chanticleer, surveyed amazed
by gulls and gannets, trumpets his fractious challenged.
Tempting to dub the din thanksgiving; or more; life
triumphs even on no longer trusted planets.
—Douglas Livingstone, ‘Scourings at Station 19’ (1991)Poisoning occupies a special place in the history of crime. It requires a considerable degree of premeditation, and because it often produces very little incriminating evidence and until comparatively recently was virtually undetectable, it was an attractive and favoured method of killing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1880 and 1920, 18 high-profile cases of poisoning by Indian domestic servants in Natal were tried before the circuit, district and supreme courts. Due to the clandestine nature of poisoning, the difficulty of detection and the knowledge required for its successful execution, it is likely that this only represents a small proportion of the actual number of attempted poisonings – such is the predilection of historicity and nature of archival sources.
Under the Indian indenture system, approximately 152,184 indentureds voyaged to colonial Natal in the period between 1860 and 1911. Conventional and linear histories of these years have tended to present a static categorisation of Indians in Natal as those who toiled on the sugar plantations along the coastal belt of Natal and non-contracted traders commonly referred to as ‘passenger Indians’. For the most part, indentured Indians were considered by the state and employers to be dispensable components of a capitalist bonded labour system. On the periphery of this indenture–trader dichotomy, Indians also took up positions as railway workers, constables, court messengers, miners, fishermen, fruit and vegetable hawkers, tea pickers, teachers, interpreters and, in this case, domestic servants. The private and personal spaces of colonial society within which domestic servants lived and worked – the settler homes – bore witness to entangling relationships between master and servant that were at times both volatile and tender. This chapter focuses on the crime of ‘administering poison with intent to murder’ and argues that the very act of poisoning manifests as a mode of agency, revenge and resistance by domestic servants against their masters and mistresses. The crime of poisoning in a settler community is rather revealing of the deep levels of anxiety and paranoia that proliferated in Natal’s white community.
7 - Not So Anchored: The Remigration of Indians within the Caribbean Region
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Summary
Caribbean migration studies have focused overwhelmingly on the forceful and semi-free movements of Africans and Asians during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as the extra-regional movement of Caribbean nationals to Europe and North America following the Second World War. These studies have done remarkably well in excavating the dynamics so associated with the aforesaid patterns of Caribbean migration, namely how migrants were uprooted from their homeland and transported across the Atlantic and Indian oceans to provide the oxygen of labour on the Caribbean plantations. Studies of migration from the Caribbean following the Second World War show how Caribbean nationals have been pushed out of the region and pulled to developed destinations. Moreover, these studies have provided the fundamental reasons for the leaving and settling of the migrants. They have revealed how the migrants have adapted, settled and even reconfigured the demographics, economics and cultures of the receiving enclaves. Howbeit, studies of migration within the Caribbean pale in comparison to the larger influx during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as out-migration following the Second World War. Still, even when studies are conducted on migration within the Caribbean, they are ethnically imbalanced, focusing largely on Africans and Hispanics. Yet when studies are conducted on Asians, the remigration of them within the Caribbean is largely absent.
The academic exclusionary treatment of Indians in the general Caribbean migration narrative is rather unfortunate since Indians have been on the move since the mid-nineteenth century from India to the Caribbean, within the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe and North America and back to the Caribbean. Crispin Bates and Marina Carter ask, ‘Why did such a large number of Indian labour migrants who had completed one term of service overseas return to India, and then remigrate, or move from one colonial territory to another?’ These scholars espouse that ‘the frequency of remigration, and of onward migration to other colonies suggests considerable enterprise and strategic thinking on the part of labour migrants seeking out opportunities within the interstices and constraints of the colonial labour economy’. Until we understand how wide and complex the remigration of Indians has been, one important aspect of their migratory experience will remain a puzzle and buried in the lower depths of Caribbean migration.
4 - A Forgotten Narrative of the Satyagraha Campaign: The Treatment of Prisoners between 1907 and 1914
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Summary
Under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian community staged the first non-violent mass movement in South Africa. This involved defiance of unjust laws, courting of imprisonment, boycotts, marches and strikes. In the Transvaal, then under British rule, 3,000 Indians, including more than one-third of adult males and even some children, went to prison and suffered privations between 1908 and 1911. Over a hundred were deported to Bombay and Colombo, often leaving their families behind without support. In 1913, the struggle extended beyond the Transvaal when nearly 40,000 workers, equivalent to over half of the adult Indian population of Natal, struck work. Almost 10,000 were imprisoned, some in mining compounds. Some workers were killed and many injured. Yet in the vast corpus of literature on the Satyagraha campaigns, the treatment of Indian prisoners, both men and women, has not been examined or documented fully.
Existing studies have focused mainly on the leadership of Gandhi and the socio-economic background of the Indian resistance in South Africa. Gendered aspects of the struggle have mainly been documented through a feminist lens seeking to debunk the myth of docile Indian women in the diaspora. Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt published poems written in Gujarati, English and Hindi during the movement and produced an interesting literary study of the struggle. In addition, numerous biographies of Gandhi deal with the Satyagraha campaigns, but they are focused on Gandhi, his leadership and spiritual development. However, none of the aforementioned studies has examined, in-depth, the prison conditions and treatment of satyagrahis.
Gandhi’s Collected Works and the Indian Opinion are perhaps the only first-hand insights on the prison conditions of both men and women incarcerated in Durban and Johannesburg during the Satyagraha campaigns between 1907 and 1914. This chapter documents the treatment and impact of prison conditions on satyagrahis between 1907 and 1914. For many resisters, the prison became a site of struggle; it did little to deter or diminish their resilient spirit. They became more defiant amidst the plethora of discriminatory laws and repeated imprisonment. In exploring the incarceration of Satyagraha prisoners, this chapter shifts the focus from the coloniser to the colonised, to the marginalised and subaltern groups, ‘viewing them as important historical actors in their own right’. Clare Anderson, in her study on the 1857–1858 Indian uprising, shares a similar trajectory revealing how prisons became ‘sites of Indian resistance’.
Acknowledgements
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13 - After the Long March: Colonial-Era ‘Relief’ for Burma Indian Evacuees in Visakhapatnam District, 1942–1948
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Summary
For diasporic Indian communities living in Burma (present-day Myanmar), the Second World War was a period of massive upheaval. As the Japanese military bombed the colonial capital of Rangoon (present-day Yangon) in December 1941 and conquered large swaths of Burma by the spring of 1942, many Burma Indians fled across the Bay of Bengal by steamship, aircraft or on foot. They, along with much smaller numbers of Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmese and Europeans, reached British India’s borders, numbering approximately 500,000 in total. Upon their arrival in India, these displaced people became the subject of large-scale relief projects developed by the government, which included limited efforts to employ ‘skilled’ workers, labour projects to absorb ‘unskilled’ evacuees and the issuance of repayable loans. The final stage of colonial relief for the Burma evacuees came after 1945, when the government cobbled together a repatriation programme to assist those who wished to return to Burma after the war. By providing an overview of these policies, this chapter will track the colonial administration’s changing responses to Burma Indian populations as they went from ‘migrants’ to ‘evacuees’ to ‘repatriates’ during the 1940s. Drawing on historical evidence from Visakhapatnam district, which received the largest number of Burma Indian evacuees of any district in India during the war, the chapter also provides a brief discussion of evacuees’ responses to government-run aid programmes.
In recent years, scholars have begun to reappraise the impact of the Second World War on South Asia. One of the outcomes of this new research has been to see the war years not only as the lead-up to national independence, but also as a period that caused massive disruption and social and political change throughout Asia. Within this broader literature, a growing number of authors are now examining the effects that the war had on migratory and diasporic Asian communities. Scholarship from the 1970s onward on Indian communities in Burma, for instance, has presented the regional onset of war and the evacuation of Burma as the start of a precipitous decline for people of Indian descent. For instance, Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, a Burma Indian Civil Service (ICS) member, wrote of the period from 1942 onwards as ‘the end of Indian interests in Burma’.
6 - The Remigration of Hindostanis from Surinam to India, 1878–1921
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Summary
The Dutch colony of Surinam (present-day Suriname), situated on the northern tip of South America, was one of the last colonies to introduce indentured labour from India. In 1870, after extensive negotiations, the Dutch and British governments signed a 26-article treaty, agreeing to the employment of indentured Indian labourers in Surinam. This Coolie Treaty (Koelietractaat) was not implemented for another three years, and it was only on 5 June 1873 that the ship Lalla Rookh arrived in Surinam with 410 emigrants, having left the port of Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) in February. Within one year (between June 1873 and April 1874), seven ships followed, bringing almost 4,000 Indian emigrants to Surinam. In total, 34,304 Indian emigrants were received across 64 ships between 1873 and 1916. It is important to note that these Indian emigrants remained British subjects in Surinam. Their descendants did not become Dutch subjects by law until 1927, and by that point the majority had been born in the colony. They designated themselves as Hindostanis (‘Hindostanen’ in the Dutch language) in reference to their land of origin – Hindustan being one of the original names for India. Due to their status as strangers in a foreign colony, special arrangements protected them. According to Article 9 of the Coolie Treaty, the Indian labourers indentured to Surinam had the right to a free return passage after five years. It also stated:
If he consents to contract a new engagement he will be entitled to a bounty and will retain his right to return-passage at the expiration of such second engagement. The right of the immigrant to a return-passage extends to his wife, and to his children who quitted India under the age of ten years, as well as to those born in the Colony.
More than a third (11,512) of the 34,304 Indian emigrants returned to British India at the expense of the Dutch government. Yet, significantly, in spite of the gratis opportunity to return, the majority of the emigrants settled permanently in Surinam. They received approximately 5 acres of fertile land free of rent for six years and 100 guilders (equivalent to the cost of the return passage). Furthermore, over a quarter (9,725) of them signed a second contract for an additional five years in Surinam and received an extra premium of 100 guilders. After settling, these Indians and their descendants became successful small farmers in due course.