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 Although never allowed in Sri Lanka or Myanmar, and superseded by other forms of migration by the beginning of the twentieth century, more has been written about South Asian indentured labour than any other form of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.

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.

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.

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.

The 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.

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’.

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.

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:

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.

Introduced 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.

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.

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.

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.