Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- The Coolie Odyssey: A Voyage In Time And Space
- Thrice Victimized: Casting The Coolie
- Surviving Indenture
- Reclaiming The ‘Other’: Diaspora Indians And The Coolie Heritage
- Some Theoretical Premises Of Coolitude
- Conclusion: Revoicing the Coolie
- Poetic And Critical Texts Of Coolitude
- Notes
- Bibliography
Surviving Indenture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- The Coolie Odyssey: A Voyage In Time And Space
- Thrice Victimized: Casting The Coolie
- Surviving Indenture
- Reclaiming The ‘Other’: Diaspora Indians And The Coolie Heritage
- Some Theoretical Premises Of Coolitude
- Conclusion: Revoicing the Coolie
- Poetic And Critical Texts Of Coolitude
- Notes
- Bibliography
Summary
Coolies ‘knew’ where they were going. They would think about their separation, devise a strategy for survival and settling down, and work out their place in the new existential structure that would take them in.
K Torabully, 1996, p. 14.Disembarking coolies usually passed through an immigration depot from where they would be registered and distributed to employers. The depot enclosure prefigured the confinement of the estate to which new arrivals would be indentured for up to five years. This chapter explores the serf-like conditions that prevailed on plantations in the ex-slave sugar colonies and the strategies adopted by Indians to circumvent and recast the inferior status imposed upon them.
The lengthy, cramped voyage was succeeded, for new immigrants, by the procedures of disembarkation and allocation to employers. In some cases indentured labourers were engaged to a specific plantation in India and would be sent directly, usually on foot or in carts, to the estate-owner who had requisitioned them. In other cases, new arrivals would be placed in an immigration depot, to be viewed and engaged by local planters. Women who arrived without a male partner were often also ‘looked over’ by prospective spouses. The new arrivals would be taken before a magistrate to sign indenture contracts, which varied in length between one and five years. As the nineteenth century progressed, the five-year indenture became the norm.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- CoolitudeAn Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora, pp. 88 - 116Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2002