International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Abolition: The memory of Indian indentured labourers

Ever since the first sails were lifted on Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria (Ships of Christopher Columbus) in the last decade of the 15th century, the political map of the world underwent significant changes. Conquistadors and explorers like Ferdinand Magellan, Bartolomeu Diaz, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama showed to their Portuguese and Spanish masters that the world was much more than the continent of Europe. 

Routes to the ‘Orient’ (Eastern) world were searched with the clarion call of ‘God, Gold and Glory’. Within the next century, European colonisers occupied and divided the landmasses of newly discovered America, Caribbeans, Africa and Spice islands in South Asia.

This period in the 15th century was called the Age of Discovery, and slavery was a direct result of the same. A huge number of native men and women in the colonised and ‘discovered’ land were employed to do the plantation job of the colonisers. Thousands of hectares of native lands of the American mainland and the Caribbean were used for the plantation of sugar, cotton and tobacco.

Slavery and the plantation economy

This needed cheap labour round the clock. The colonisers used brute force to enslave the native unsuspecting population of Africa to fuel this plantation economy thereby giving birth to transatlantic slave trade. According to the Heritage collections of the UK Parliament, roughly 12 million slaves were shipped between 1500-1800, with Britishers alone accounting for 3 million.

Any version of modern American history cannot be written without mentioning slavery and the subsequent struggle for the emancipation of slaves. It was the Haitian Revolution of 1791- 1804 that led to the first struggle of slaves against their colonisers. Haiti was colonised after its discovery by Columbus in 1492. He called it La Isla Española. The Spanish colonisers literally mined gold from the Caribbean Island and after exhaustion passed it onto the French. It was from here that French colonisers took the reins of Saint-Domingue and Port de Paix (new trading stations in Haiti). 

At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the population of Saint Domingue was 5,56,000 with 5,00,000 slaves of African origin, 32,000 European colonisers and 24,000 affranchis (people of mixed European and African descent). Revolt started during the night of August 22-23, 1791 in Saint Domingue which lasted till 1804. 

It was the joint revolution of affranchis and slaves working in the Haitian plantation economy that resulted in the birth of the first slavery free country in the world.

By 1804, the world had its first slavery-free country, i.e. Haiti (a native origin Arawak name) under Jean Jacques Dessalines, a former slave of African origin.

Therefore, August 23 is commemorated as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave trade and its Abolition.

Abolitionist movements

The saga of slave emancipation did not end here but next unfolded in the isles of British dominions. In the 1830s, the abolitionists started gaining weight in British politics. These were the group of politicians and merchants in Britain who wanted to end the slave-led plantation economy in the American and tropical British colonies. This was very unusual on the surface but if looked deeper within, had reasons in decolonisation politics. 

Ever since the birth of the USA in 1776, Britain lost a big colony and its slave led plantation economy. It was not on amicable terms with the independent US and hence wanted to end the monopoly of big plantation economies like the US. British politicians with their new age Victorian liberalism and protestant ethics started talking against forced labour and instead supported ‘Laissez Faire’ or free trade policy. 

This was coupled with abolition movements like ‘Baptist War’ in Jamaica in 1831 and anti-slavery movements in Upper Canada. All these led to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 by the British Parliament freeing roughly 8,00,000 slaves in Caribbean, South Africa and Canada. It received royal assent on August 1, 1834.

The American civil war

The biggest saga of slave emancipation was however starting to take shape in the courtroom of St Louis Circuit Court, Wisconsin in the US. A person named Dread Scott and his wife Harriet pleaded to the court to grant them freedom from bondage and servitude because they now lived in a ‘free state’ Wisconsin in 1846. Back then the US was divided in free and non-free states (slave state) as far as slave trade was concerned. Slavery was largely prevalent in the South American plantation economy. 

The Supreme Court finally in the judgement to Scott vs. Sandford in 1857, opined that slaves were not part of the citizenry of the US and hence could not get protection of civil liberty from the Federal Government. This led to deep anguish and fissures in the political and social circles of the US. Abolition question in the US also snowballed into a constitutional crisis. Slavery and plantation fuelled southern states under Jefferson Davis started talking about the right to secede from the Union. 

All these developments led to the American Civil War starting in 1861. The 13th and 14th Amendments to the US constitution argued for giving equal citizenship rights to all the men and women born on American soil thereby ending slavery and the overturning of the Scott judgement. President Abraham Lincoln emerged as the leader and biggest advocate of the abolition movement around the world. 

In December 1865, slavery was abolished in the US. However, as the former slaves in the US and Caribbean began to breathe in free air, the air started choking for the cheap labour available in countries like India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. Abolition movements around the world led to sudden huge demand for labourers in plantation economies around the world. India and other south Asian colonies filled this gap by supplying a new version of ‘indentured labourers’ around the world. 

Indian ‘indentured labourers’

These labourers originating from mostly northern India, coastal Burma and South East Asia were made to sign an agreement by their employers. The agreement stipulated the wages for the period of employment, which ran into several years. The wage was not enough to secure a good earning, not the least for their return journey to their native land. The labourers who signed these agreements were new age slaves – bound by economic hardship in an alien land. Today as we see Indian origin diaspora in the Caribbeans or in Mauritius – they all bear an imprint of the indentured labour system.

Historian Brij Lal in his seminal book, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (2012), talks about his personal and community history of 60,000 Indians who travelled to Fiji during this time period. It is worth noting how these indentured labourers used to call themselves as ‘girmitiyas’ – the one who has signed the agreement or Girmit. The National Archives of India holds these agreements which sent Indians to places like Mauritius, British Guiana, Ceylon, Cape Colony, St Kitts, Windward Islands, Grenada, Kenya, Uganda, Trinidad and Jamaica – roughly accounting for 1.6 million labourers.

The National Archives summary notes that most of these labourers were mostly young, active, able-bodied people. They demanded agricultural jobs but were often ignorant of the places they agreed to go to or the challenges they were going to face. Before 1840, a large proportion of the labourers were so-called ‘Hill coolies’, aboriginal people from the plains of the Ganga. Later many others signed indentured labour contracts, including Hindus, Brahmins, high castes, agriculturists, artisans, Muslims, low castes (untouchables) and Christians.

Over 41,000 Bengali labourers were sent to Mauritius in 1834, but the Indian government banned ‘coolie’ shipments in 1838 because there were reports of repression and abuse. In 1842 the British Prime Minister Robert Peel directed the Indian government to re-open these lines of emigration under proper safeguards. A Protector of Emigrants was appointed to ensure that the labourers had adequate space, food, water and ventilation on the journey.

Emigration to Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad was legalised in 1844. Emigration to Grenada and St Lucia was legalised in 1856 and 1858 respectively. The last indentured labourers went to the West Indies in 1916. Repatriation continued for many years after the time limit. The last ship carrying returning emigrants left the West Indies for India in 1954. 

Breaking silence on the history of slavery

In 1994, the UNESCO “Routes of Enslaved Peoples: Resistance, Liberty and Heritage” Project contributed to the production of innovative knowledge, the development of high-level scientific networks and the support of memory initiatives on the theme of slavery, its abolition and the resistance it generated. At the international level, the project has thus played a major role in “breaking” the silence surrounding the history of slavery and placing this tragedy that has shaped the modern world in the universal memory.

But for India, the memory of indentured labourers and emigration pain came alive when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologised in Canadian Parliament for the Komagata Maru incident in May of 2016. Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship carrying Indian emigrants to Canada in April of 1913. The Canadian authorities denied entry of the ship in Canada, starving the passengers of food and water, involved them in litigations and ultimately forced the ship to return to India by Sept of 1914. 

This created a huge uproar in the Budge Budge port of Calcutta (Kolkata), leading to firing and death of 16 passengers. Incidents like these led to the Ghadar Movement in India against British imperialism. On the one hand, the Indian cheap labourers were sent to plantation colonies for rigorous work, on the other hand, educated Indians were never encouraged to travel to and work in other prosperous British dominions. Thus, the hypocrisy of British emancipation was long exposed and emigration became an important issue in Indian nationalism.

In recent years, memorials such as the Apravasi Ghat in Mauritius unveiled by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005, the Kolkata Memorial inaugurated in 2011 at the Kidderpore Depot and the Mai-Baap Memorial at the Suriname Ghat unveiled by former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in 2015 symbolise the tragedies of indentured slavery and the resilience of human spirit. They celebrate the momentous contributions of the diaspora originating from the indentured system in their adopted countries as well as the Indian spirit that these communities have kept alive all these years.

Post Read Question

Why is the International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition celebrated on August 23 every year?

Why were indentured labourers taken by the British from India to their colonies? Have they been able to preserve their cultural identity over there?

Discuss the role of Mahatma Gandhi in the abolition of Indentured servitude from India.

(Aakanksha Jha teaches at the Delhi University.)

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