401 results in Cross-discipline history: general interest
9 - Memory, Nostalgia and Reality: A Socio-Historical Perspective of Culture and Education in The Grey Street Complex
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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Summary
As the globe has experienced increasing population shifts from rural peripheries to towns and cities, urban expansion has become one of the most complex challenges. The fabric and form of every city is continually restructured to cater to the arrival of new entrants and aspirants. Whether urban communities have been favoured or disadvantaged by such modifications, they remain inherently associated with their unique urban identity and its place-relationship. This is because the identity of a city (with its urban morphology) becomes history once it is altered, and the placerelationship remains perpetual and preserved in the emotional memories of its urbanites. The mnemonic and emotional elements of a particular location have long played essential roles in understanding the history of socio-demographic dimensions of urban environments. The South African experience has been no different.
The socio-spatial systems of South African cities reflect the history of apartheid and its plethora of consequences for various disadvantaged groups. Thus South African urban history has been a vital aspect for understanding the contemporary shapes and forms of its cities. The changing form of the central business district (CBD) of Durban, one of South Africa's major urban nodes, for example, has captured the attention of scholars from various disciplines. It has become a focus for researchers due to its remarkably rich history and diverse culture.
The historic distinctive trait of the Durban city centre was that it contained two CBDs: a white one at the core and an adjacent Indian business sector. From the late nineteenth century, it was in this precinct (currently renamed after Yusuf Dadoo, an anti-apartheid activist) that many indentured and passenger Indians in Natal inexorably planted their footprints. Previously a legislated Indian Group Area, this precinct formed a fundamental economic and commercial component of the Indian CBD and served as an important contributor to the urban economy during the apartheid era. It also served as an incubator for numerous Indian entrepreneurs and business houses, many of which have still retained their operations there to this day. The presence of multifarious Indian businesses not only brought about a sense of belonging but also gave this complex a cultural vibrancy. Often called a ‘home away from home’ for the South African urban Indian population, the complex encapsulated a rich cultural ambience with great recreational and institutional significance.
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5 - Ageing Girmitiyas and The Story of Salt Behind The Sugar
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Old age and ageing are categories that can ground anthropological reflection on ways of living. Anthropological inquiries into old age have also contributed to ethnographic practice: participant observation, the use of biographies, individual trajectories and audio-visual narratives form part of the research legacy of anthropological literature on old age. Evolving forms of social and spiritual care for geriatric needs reflect complex and diverse transformations in any era. This chapter points out that the existing literature on plantationbased indentured Indians is yet to feature detailed studies on ageing and the factors that may have accelerated the process. Additionally, there is a dearth of studies on the social-care networks that came into being to provide for the elderly once the indenture system was abolished and/or free living outside of the plantations started. While striving to fill this gap, this chapter endeavours to open up themes for further research.
RETHINKING ‘AGEING’ AMONG THE GIRMITIYAS
In the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the indenture system was used to recruit Asian workers for employment elsewhere in the European colonies. Despite the end of slavery, the British Empire's quest to make sugar and keep it profitable continued. It was a major source of governmental revenue, and consumer demand increased as the masses developed a taste for this labourintensive commodity, using it to sweeten tea and coffee all over Europe. As a layered, divisive and discriminatory process, indenture steadily revealed the global division of labour as well as the scale of exploitation of the body that went along with it. The physical sweat and toil accompanied by regimes of bodily control not only became the salt behind the success story of sugar production, but, I argue, these factors also hold the key to understanding the problems of ageing among the indentured and ex-indentured population.
Ageing in an era when longevity (as we know it now) was yet to be established as a fairly probable norm, provides us with a compelling context. The colonial perception of ‘ageing’ under indenture was shaped by economic needs: in the plantation system, older workers were a burden or a liability. Able-bodied individuals likely to perform well under harsh tropical conditions were preferred. Thirty-five was considered too old to re-migrate. Many aspiring migrants were rejected on ‘account of old age or some bodily infirmity’.
Part I - Origins
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1 - ‘Coolie Catching’: The Recruitment of Indentured Women to Colonial Natal
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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labour migration led to the settlement of Indians throughout the British Empire. Fiji, Mauritius, British Guyana and South Africa became key labour procuring colonies. Thousands of men, women and children crossed the oceans to work on plantations and estates under contracts of indenture. Studies on indentured migration are well documented. Its gendered aspects have been the subject of research examining issues such as mobility, agency, resistance and citizenship. In most instances, the gendered experiences of indenture are discussed in the place of destination – that is, life on the plantations and estates. However, the narratives around recruitment practices concerning women immigrants have primarily been an untapped area of analysis.
Carter, Lal, Hoefte and Reddock have alluded to some aspects in their studies of women indentured immigrants to Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean, examining colonial attitudes towards women as well as the role of women recruiters in labour mobilization to the colonies. In South African historiography, while several publications have explored varied aspects of female experiences in the migration process, no extensive study has been done on the recruitment practices surrounding women's migration to Natal. This gap is explored in this chapter. The unequal ratio between men and women labourers migrating to Natal created many problems for recruiting agents, colonial officials and employers. Securing the 40 per cent set quota for women immigrants was at times hampered by socio-economic conditions in India, depot medical examinations and colonial attitudes towards female labour. An analysis of these aspects of indenture will provide rich insights into recruitment practices and procedures concerning women immigrants to Natal and the factors that shaped their decision to migrate.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Indentured immigration to Natal began in 1860 at the request of sugar planters. In 1874, the Natal government agreed to indenture labourers from the southern and northern areas of India. They entered a contractual agreement for five years. Those who re-indentured were entitled to claim a return passage to India or a small piece of land for settlement after 10 years. Many immigrants took advantage of this concession, and by 1891 it is estimated that there were approximately 30,000 Free Indians in Natal. However, they, together with ‘passenger’ Indians, began to compete with the colonialists in trade and agriculture and soon generated widespread protests in the colony.
Index
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2 - Life on The Plantations: Indentured Indians in South Africa and Fiji, 1860–1917
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This chapter aims to reconstruct life for Indian labourers under the indenture system on the sugar plantations of South Africa and Fiji, examining their everyday experiences, ritual observances and social interactions. The introduction of the indenture system in India in 1834 swiftly followed the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Growing protests from antislavery society on humanitarian grounds had led the parliament to outlaw slavery, a victory that caused a severe shortage of cheap labour on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean where British capitalists had invested their capital. An industrial depression set in. Two parliamentary committees appointed in 1842 and 1848 reported that ‘great distress undoubtedly prevails amongst all who are interested in the production of sugar in the British colonies’. Both attributed the distress to the difficulty in obtaining labour. In the words of the first committee, ‘the principal cause of the diminished production [of sugar] and consequent distress is the great difficulty which has been experienced by the planters in obtaining steady and continuous labour …’. It is no matter of surprise, therefore, that these colonies should have sought out new sources of labour supply, and that India with her teeming population should have appealed to them as a suitable field for recruiting operations. Hence, an alternative labour contract system, officially known as the indenture system, was devised to recruit labourers from India to work on overseas sugar plantations.
Indenture originated in Europe; it was used by European planters in the United States to employ European and Chinese labour. South American planters also followed this practice to obtain Chinese labour from the Portuguese settlement of Macao in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Under this system, labour was recruited for the planters by agents to work for a certain period of time (usually five years), during which the employer was legally obliged to provide fixed wages, medical attention and other amenities for the labourers. After the designated period had elapsed, the labourer could either renew his term of employment or return to his native land.
The Indian indenture system commenced under the same terms and conditions. Details of work, hours and remuneration per day were included on the agreement form, as was a commitment to provide free accommodation, hospital and ration facilities for the workers.
7 - 100 Years After Indenture: The Present Generation of Indo-Trinidadians and Their Cultural Environments
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TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TODAY
Trinidad and Tobago is a twin-island republic located at the southern tip of the Caribbean archipelago. Approximately 10 kilometres from the northern coast of Venezuela, the islands are collectively comprised of around 2,000 square miles of land. Tobago is the smaller of the two with a wealth of natural scenic beauty. Trinidad is the agricultural, industrial and service hub of the nation. Both islands have separate and interesting histories. While Tobago has a predominantly homogeneous racial grouping, Trinidad reflects a mosaic of races and cultures, the result of its separate and distinct historical antecedents and heritages (built and natural). This multicultural mix is reflected in existing population statistics, in its philosophical, social, economic, religious and physical landscape and in its artistic expressions. It is manifested in its performative traditions: its fasts, feasts, rituals and festivals. Within this cultural dynamo the Indo-Trinidadian contribution is noteworthy, adding significantly to the rhythm of daily life. This chapter explores what has been, and what continues to be, the role of the Indo-Trinidadian in shaping this dynamic, syncretic culture.
Addressing this question requires a definition of the term ‘culture’. Culture in this sense is the sum total of one's norms of behaviour, one's values, attitudes to spiritual and religious development, to society, to family and to personal growth and development, to life in general. It is influenced by our heritage, traditions, legacies and our present circumstances. Culture is thus the vehicle and platform for maintaining historical linkages and for shaping one's environment. It guides and inspires a people, giving them a personality of their own. It influences the environment, provides historical continuity and opportunities and sets out a veritable road map for future development.
Over the years the various cultural streams in Trinidad have assimilated. These streams have included the cultures of the former European colonizers, of the various ‘mother’ countries as well as internal innovations within them. To them have been added both North and, to a lesser extent, South American ideas, values, behavioural patterns, traditions and aesthetics. Today, evidence reveals the existence of a unique, syncretic emerging culture in Trinidad and Tobago. Intertwined with this emergent culture are major identifiable elements of cultural persistence in the Indo-Trinidadian psyche, as is very apparent in their everyday lifestyles. There is a kind of ‘ethnic dualism’ as parallel cultural traits exist side by side.
3 - Stories of Girmitiyas: Folklore and The Sociocultural World of Indentured Indians in The Sugar Colonies
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The presence of Indian labour across the globe during the nineteenth century not only helped transform the capitalist global economy but also affected the cultural expression, including folklore, of migrant workers. More than 1.3 million Indians signed contracts of indentureship between 1834 and 1916 and shipped out to sugar plantations across the globe under the aegis of European empires. The first colony to bring in Indian indentured work was Mauritius in 1834. British Guyana imported indentured labour next in 1838, Trinidad and Jamaica in 1845, the smaller West Indian colonies of St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada in the 1850s, Natal in 1860, Suriname in 1873 and Fiji in 1879. Most indentured Indian labourers chose to stay in their new homes after the termination of their contracts and formed a distinct Indian diaspora in their respective host countries. Indentured Indians brought many sociocultural norms and expressions to the host countries which evolved over the succeeding generations. Folklore is one of these traditions.
Folklore is the traditional expression of a society or a particular group of people in which folk tales, songs, ballads, proverbs or jokes are transmitted from one generation to another. In the course of transmission, the folklore changes, depending on the place and cultural context. This is one of the reasons that different versions of the same folk tales exist. The origin and authors of folklore usually remain hidden as the stories and traditions are carried on and spread orally among often illiterate people.
INDENTURED FOLK TALES
When indentured migrants reached plantation colonies, they not only brought Indian religio-cultural norms but also folklore. Most of the folklore of the indentured Indians is in the Bhojpuri language as the majority of migrants were from the Bhojpuri-speaking areas of north India. However, over time, exposure to the languages, places and space of the host countries meant that indentured folklore in Mauritius can be found in both Creole and Bhojpuri. Other folklore in Mauritius is recorded in south Indian languages, such as Tamil, as a significant portion of the indentured there were from south India.
There are broadly five kinds of folk tales prevalent among Indian indentured societies across the globe. These are didactic tales, social stories, religious tales, love stories and entertainment stories. Moralistic tales endeavoured to encourage certain behaviours in children (and adults). A moral education was attempted through such accounts.
6 - Sanctions for Citizenship: Indians Overseas and Imperial Reciprocity
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- By Heena Mistry
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On 4 November 1944, the home department of the Government of India ordered a notice to be placed in the Gazette of India announcing the enforcement of the Indian Reciprocity Act against South Africa. Because persons of Indian origin in the Union of South Africa faced restrictions in entering, residing in, and trading, the central government directed that similar restrictions be imposed on South Africans of non-Indian origin in British India. In addition, the home department distributed an office memorandum explaining that the Government of India had decided to enforce the Indian Reciprocity Act and take retaliatory measures against the union government. The memorandum declared that the decision to finally implement the Indian Reciprocity Act against the Union of South Africa was a reaction to proposed legislation, such as proposed legislation that was colloquially known as the Pegging Bill. The proposed bill, which would later be passed as the Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction Act in 1943, was referred to as the ‘Pegging Act’ because it ‘pegged’ a racial pattern of land ownership in the Durban municipal area. Sir Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, the agent of the Government of India in South Africa at the time, had also recommended that the Government of India consider more drastic retaliatory measures towards the union government, advising that the bill be made immediately applicable. The floor of the legislature, Indian public opinion and the press were all insistent in demands for retaliatory measures against South Africa.
The Government of India decided to give effect to all measures of the Reciprocity Act. One of these measures was to refrain from employing any more South African nationals of non-Indian origin in the various services in India, as Indians in South Africa were not employed in any but the ‘most subordinate and menial posts’. Only approximately 200 white South Africans were employed in India. Specifically, the Home Department requested that South Africans of non-Indian origin not, in future, be appointed to posts in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police and other services at the provincial or federal levels. Despite putting these measures in place, the memorandum admitted that they were ‘not likely to be of any considerable magnitude’ because so far, no South African had been employed in the Secretary of States or Provincial Services and the number of those who held technical posts was negligible.
10 - Rooting History: Indian Indenture in South Africa and The Sultan of Many Journeys
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The death of Hajee M. L. Sultan removes from the Indian scene one of its most colourful personalities. His story is in the best American tradition of the poor American boy ‘who made good’. Farm hand, waiter, farmer, porter, small businessman, big businessman, he passed through all the phases of poverty and wealth, at one time losing all he had in a tobacco business, at another time risking more than he had in a commercial venture. Written up, the story would appeal to thousands as on a par with stories of the merchant princes of the Western world; rich in interest and a spur to everyone.… The story is touched too with the same human magnanimity that has brought a final lustre to the great names of the capitalist world.… Who knows but that in time to come another small boy provided with the advantages existing only as a result of Hajee M. L. Sultan's beneficence will not rise from poverty to wealth; and what is more important, from ignorance to knowledge; and become in the field of political leadership or literature or science or industry a great statesman leading the whole Indian community to new levels of attainment. For who can tell where the influence [of] a benefaction begins or of magnanimity ends. There is something more. A curious inspiration invests the memory of such a man as the late Hajee M. L. Sultan. It is the inspiration to emulate his example of munificence.
—The Graphic, 19 September 1953The contribution of the Indian indentured of South Africa to the colonial economy was massive. Despite undertaking back-breaking work, from labouring on sugar plantations to building railways, most of the just over 150,000 migrants chose to stay in South Africa rather than return to India. Their impact was incredible, yet their histories were largely invisible in the public domain and continue to be marginalized. The promise of a memorial for the indentured made by the government in 2010, as Indians commemorated the 150th year of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, failed to materialize even a decade later as the 160th anniversary was being marked. There is one indentured migrant, however, Sultan Pillai Kannu, whose name was emblazoned on a technical training college, and in postapartheid South Africa, a street bears his name.
About the Contributors
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4 - Traces of Female Bhojpuri Migrants in Suriname
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This chapter explores the portrayal of Bhojpuri indentured female migrants and their identity formation in Surinamese photographs. By examining several archival photographs, I connect visual traces to various contemporaneous cultural developments described by Tejaswini Niranjana, Roshini Kempadoo, Marina Carter, Anouk de Kooning and Patricia Mohammed. Analysing the photographs, considering the social circumstances that must have influenced identity formation, it is possible to reconstruct the social roles that were imposed on women migrants. As noted by Bhikhu Parekh, I attempt to understand the journey of these women and how they were transformed by diasporic experiences. Since Bhojpuri females belonged to villages characterized by diverse Indian traditions, how did the latter remain or change within this process leading to multiple identities? These photographs can be mined not just for their archival and historical value but also for what they aesthetically communicate and the way they have been staged. The photographs have been archived in various collections, including the National Archives, the Tropenmuseum and the Rijksmuseum collection in the Netherlands.
There is a lack of academic scholarship on female indentured labourers in archival photographs. The images selected from Suriname feature individuals from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian indentured labour communities that were shipped there and lived alongside the descendants of enslaved Africans. Women have been documented in the actual landscape of the places they lived in Suriname, becoming agents of reinvention and cultural innovation. This chapter seeks to address and discuss this, in particular the ethnic mixture and diverse cultural influences that are visually unavoidable in these images. I argue that by viewing the cultural and ethnic diversity apparent in these photos, we can analyse visual traces that may indicate the emancipation of female Bhojpuri migrants from gender norms based in the rural settings in India.
THE ARRIVAL OF BHOJPURI MIGRANTS
After the abolition of slavery by the Dutch government in 1863, indentured labourers were required in Suriname to maintain the plantation economy. Most of the recruited labourers came from the region covering the western part of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP). The present generation of diasporic Indians living in Suriname and the Netherlands have their migrant roots mostly in these Bhojpuri- and Awadhi-speaking regions.
When the first ships with Indian indentured migrants from Calcutta arrived in Suriname in 1873, only a small proportion of the inhabitants were Dutch.
8 - Emigration Against Caste and The Globalization of Castelessness
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The understanding of caste or casteism and resistance against it beyond South Asia remains rudimentary. Popular subfields such as South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, Indian Ocean studies and Indian diaspora studies have been woefully deficient in engaging with caste as a foundational problem in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Likewise, such disciplines have not given much-needed focus to the caste-free (and anti-caste) culture, politics, economy and history of caste-oppressed communities in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. This has led to a lopsided understanding of, for instance, the re-establishment of caste through colonial apparatuses and how the privileged-caste groups, such as Brahmins, re-entrenched themselves to turn the British Raj into a British–Brahmin Raj. Significantly, however, we have now begun to learn about the multiple movements and discursive and non-discursive practices of the marginalized communities who challenged the domination of self-privileging-caste groups in colonial and postcolonial India. In this chapter, I examine how immigration, emigration and transmigration were part and parcel of the repertoire of resistance of caste-oppressed Indians, taking particular examples from the experiences of Indian migrants who settled in the Caribbean.
The institutionalized structures and violent practices of race, caste and gender have always been crucial push factors of migration in the modern period. Recent philosophical and interdisciplinary studies have engaged with how aspects of race, gender and nationality intersect with migration. However, thus far, theories of migration and philosophies of immigration have inadequately engaged with the emigration of caste-oppressed communities during European colonialism in South Asia or with the postcolonial transmigration of such communities between the Global South and the Global North. The hitherto unexamined interrelationship between colonial policies and the emigration of Indians against caste, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of a caste-free life overseas by oppressed Indians, on the other, provide critical philosophical, cultural, political, economic and historical dimensions to migration.
Colonial racial capitalism depended upon comprador privilegedcaste groups for its success (and stability). A large majority of Indians were, as a result, culturally othered, spatially segregated and economically underprivileged as lower castes and untouchables through the colonial state's legitimization of precolonial privileged-caste identities and practices. The Brahmins – who constituted not even 5 per cent of India's population, then and now – reaped maximum benefits through the propagation of their castepower and by utilizing British colonial apparatuses.
List of Figures and Tables
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Part II - Afterlives
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Introduction
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This book concerns what has been called the ‘first wave’ of Indians who travelled overseas to work on colonial plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a migration facilitated and supervised by the British colonial government of India under what became the indentured labour scheme. Under this scheme, workers would sign a contract, popularly known as a girmit, or agreement, which bound them to work for a single employer at a fixed wage for a fixed period of three–five years. Indentured migrants identified themselves with specific terms such as angaze in Mauritius, kontraki in Suriname and girmitiya in Fiji. However, the British commonly called them ‘coolies’ – a term already familiar to them from its usage in South India and China.
The indenture system was introduced to overcome the crisis that emerged from the banning of slavery in the British Empire by the British Parliament in 1833. The system attracted huge criticism and opposition from the very beginning; however, it continued until 1917 when it was finally abolished, under pressure from Indian nationalists and the greater importance of moving troops and supplies during the global conflict of World War I. Another reason was the crisis in the sugar industry as the production of sugar beet undermined the demand for plantation sugar cane in global markets.
This volume explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contract, but chose to stay in their respective host countries. These communities of South Asians abroad struggled to adapt to their new situations, standardizing the languages spoken and preserving some cultural and folk traditions, whilst discarding others (notably many of the distinctions of caste) – in short, forging for themselves entirely new identities as ‘diasporic Indians’.
Many books and essays concerning the history of Indian indentured migration in the colonial period begin with numbers. They attempt, with overused tropes, to generalize in a few lines the experience of labour migration across multiple destinations throughout the globe and a period of more than a century. However, the numbers themselves are uncertain. Many more millions of South Asians migrated without contracts of indenture as ‘free migrants’, otherwise known as ‘passenger Indians’. And many re-indentured, or re-migrated from colony to colony, without ever returning home (what Reshaad Durgahee has termed ‘subaltern careering’) – thus evading enumeration in official statistics.
List of Abbreviations
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Frontmatter
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Introduction
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- Beyond Indenture
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- 31 December 2023
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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.