The year is 1840. Devi Singh, an erstwhile watchman from Calcutta, watches from the slit that passes as a window in the crowded underdeck of a ship, as the shores of his homeland quickly recedes from view.
But that’s alright; the taciturn agent who had recruited him had assured him that the land he was going to — Fiji — was a mere 700 miles away, and he would have to serve just five years, earn a lot of money and make his way home a rich man.
But Devi Singh would soon realise this was an abject lie. Fiji was in fact 7,000 miles away, he would be nearly whipped to death working in sugarcane plantations for his European masters, and he would never come back home.
Devi Singh was just one of 1.5 million Indian indentured labourers who were lured away to distant lands with promises of a better life, and one of hundreds of thousands who never made it back home.
The Start Of The Indentured Labour Trade In 1834, African slaves were liberated and the British empire abolished slavery. But the vast empire had been built on the blood, sweat and tears of slave labour, and the abrupt halt of the supply of dirt-cheap labour hurt the business interests of European businessmen deeply — especially plantation owners who required intensive labour capital.
So, they came up with a system of indentured servitude, in which the labourer would sign a nominal contract for a fixed period and get a pittance as wages. This was enough to circumvent the ban, and soon the business of indentured labour supply flourished across the Empire. The main victims were Indians and Chinese.
In 1793, Lord Cornwallis instituted the Permanent Settlement Act in Bengal, Odisha and Bihar. They instituted hereditary Zamindars who officially owned a specified amount of land and thus, the fortunes of all the people who resided in it. They were to collect a fixed amount of revenue from the peasants in the form of taxes and pay for protection from the British East India Company.
However, the revenue was sky-high, and in order to maintain their luxuries and privileges, the Zamindars taxed the peasants for everything they had. Often, they would cart away a peasant’s entire harvest in a bid to meet the revenue target. This caused preventable famines in the Indian hinterlands.
The people of these impoverished villages, ravaged by poverty and disease, were soft targets for the agents (called Arkatis) of businesses which supplied indentured labour worldwide.
The Arkatis targeted young men, and occasionally women, who were slaving away in farms in villages or working small jobs in the cities, and wove fanciful tales of a better life and gainful employment which would make them and their families rich if they just worked hard for five years.
Once these people were swayed or harassed into saying yes, they were told to sign an agreement. Most of the people, who were either illiterate or semi-literate, had trouble pronouncing the word “agreement” and resorted to calling it ‘Girmit”, which is where the term “Girmitiya” — which they used to refer to other indentured labourers — came from.
These Girmitiyas were taken to the far-flung outposts of the British Empire: Mauritius, British Guiana (Guyana), Natal (South Africa), Trinidad, Fiji, Jamaica, Suriname and Reunion Islands. A few men were even taken to Africa to work as labourers in the Kenya-Uganda railroad project.
Unlike the ones who worked in plantations, most railroad workers who survived the punishing conditions and man-eating lions went back to India.
Very few indentured labourers were accompanied by their families — most men had left their families behind. Single women were also recruited, and they were told that they would work in the households of plantation owners, and would be nannies to the Master’s children.
The indentured labourers’ identity cut across caste, region and religious classes. The destitution was so widespread that it did not spare even the high caste families — erstwhile rich Brahmin families were forced into labour and were transported as well. Thus, there are many Brahmin communities that exist in Mauritius and Fiji today.
Read More at https://swarajyamag.com/commentary/trials-and-triumph-of-the-early-pravasis-how-indian-indentured-labourers-survived-and-thrived-in-alien-lands
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