Indentured Labour in South Africa

Abstract

This essay traces the historiography of Indian indenture in South Africa, paying particular attention to shifts in approaches and interpretation and the evolution of the extant archive. Studies of Indian indenture in the 1970s focused on how the system originated and operated, the conditions under which migrants laboured, and their contribution to the colonial economy. Digitizing immigrants’ registers and quantitative studies followed in the 1980s and 1990s and laid the basis for (colonial) archival-based studies that focused on the agency of migrants, their resistance and resilience. The years since 2010, when Indian South Africans commemorated 150 years since the arrival of the first indentured migrants to the country, have witnessed an explosion of family histories and works of fiction. These publications have expanded the archive of indenture and enriched our knowledge and understanding of the system. Studies of indenture have been criticized for framing the system within a neo-slavery paradigm and suggest that works of fiction can best capture the stories of indenture. This essay demonstrates that historiographical developments since 2010 underscore the importance of personal contact, determination and imagination to take us beyond what is recorded in the official colonial archives, facilitating conversation across the oceans and bringing the individual and collective agency of indentured migrants centre-stage. It shows the richness of the work on indenture resulting from the expansion of the archives, the constantly changing view of the past, and different ways of communicating the story. This study contends that the Natal colonial archive remains relevant while acknowledging that writers of historical fiction and family histories are asking new questions about the past and broadening the lens through which we approach the story of indenture.

Keywords:

• Biography
• colonial archive
• critical fabulation
• faction
• fiction
• indentured labour

Introduction

The year 2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hugh Tinker’s influential study, A New System of Slavery, which arguably ushered in a critical academic study of Indian indenture. Indenture as a system of labour was established after the abolition of slavery by the British parliament in 1833, and the practice continued in the empire until 1920.

Tinker was an activist academic who fought with the Indian army during the Second World War, subsequently completed a doctorate at Cambridge University and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Lancaster, where he was Emeritus Professor of Politics. He was at one time Director of the Institute of Race Relations in Britain and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. Tinker’s study of indenture was celebrated in the 1970s because it not only provided the statistics of colonial exploitation but also marshalled evidence of the human cost involved as tens of thousands were uprooted from India and transported across the oceans, which gave new impetus to scholarly and popular discussions of indenture.

A New System of Slavery has been described as a “foundational moment” in the historiography of indentured Indians (Bhardwaj and Misrahi-Barak 2021, 4) and as “providing momentum to students of the history of indenture” (Kumar 2017, 6). According to Doug Munro, “as historical monographs go, the ‘Tinker thesis’ has been durable; it was a point of reference for many decades” (Munro 2021, 373). As the title suggests, Tinker’s thesis is that the transition from slave to indentured labour had several continuities and that conditions were, in many respects, comparable. He outlines the horrors and abuses of indenture and argues that the regulation of indenture by governments in India and the colonies cannot mask the fact that conditions were highly repressive in practice, and that indentured labour was essentially unfree.

This essay reviews the representation of Indian indentured labour in South Africa in the historiography and the evolution of the extant archive on indenture since the 1970s. Natal was proclaimed a British colony in 1843. White settlement resulted in the establishment of plantation agriculture, with sugar flourishing along the coast. Planters were frustrated by the absence of cheap and malleable labour as the Zulu had access to land and were only prepared to work on their own terms in order to “minimise disruption of the household economy” (Freund 1995, 4). With indentured workers from India proving successful in Mauritius and several Caribbean countries, the authorities in Natal sanctioned the importation of indentured labour from India. Around 1.3 million Indian indentured workers went to various sugar-producing colonies, with Natal importing 152,641 indentured migrants between 1860 and 1911.

Nafisa Essop Sheik (2022) has argued that academic histories of indenture in South Africa have failed to “embrace its [indenture’s] ocean passages” and have therefore not captured the “fluidity” of indenture and the transformations it brought about in the lives of migrants. She describes the historiography of indenture as “plantation literature” and advocates for studies that free indentured migrants from “the genre of labour or carcerality”, and are “more revealing of the human stories subsumed by existing narratives” (Sheik 2022, 395). Sheik maintains that the roots of this “polemical foundation of a land-based canon” are found in Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery (1974), which portrayed indenture “as a form of slavery, or a mere continuation of a broadly exploitative capitalist and imperial labour system” (2022, 391–92).

The arguments that Sheik makes are significant, but in many respects, as this essay demonstrates, the writing on indenture is already producing the kind of changes she advocates, while there are strong political reasons for the retention of some perspectives that Sheik criticizes. Together with an analysis of Tinker’s impact, this essay on the evolution of historical writing about indenture in South Africa addresses the ongoing relevance of the Natal colonial archive for historians who seek to address the transformative role of the ocean crossing and the importance of human agency. This essay also investigates an emerging group of writers of historical fiction, faction and critical fabulation who examine the sources from new perspectives, in the process expanding the use of the archive and blurring the conventionally strict lines of academic research to provide new insights on indenture.

The tinker paradigm, and beyond

Early works on indenture in Natal paid particular attention to how the system operated, policy and legislation, and the contribution of indentured workers in developing the Natal economy (Choonoo 1967; Thomson 1952). These studies were important in facilitating subsequent scholarship on indenture. Swan (1985), Tayal (1977), Beall (1990) and Henning (1993) have chronicled the appalling conditions faced by indentured workers in Natal, including corporal punishment, denial of rations, withholding of wages and indebtedness. Swan, for example, argues that employers increased profitability by “denying workers their contract rights and by a concomitant reliance of labour-coercive techniques”. Overwork and poor housing led to high rates of malnutrition, disease and death. The system “offered little room for even basic human comforts as family life”. Swan concludes that “there is a solid weight of evidence in the Protector’s files to suggest that overwork, malnourishment, and squalid living conditions formed the pattern of daily life for most agricultural workers” (Swan 1985, 26). Beall (1990) underscores the double burden faced by women.

The 1990s saw a move towards quantification, pioneered by Fijian academic Brij V. Lal (1983), with Surendra Bhana (1991) and Joy Brain (2003) following suit in South Africa (see Waetjen and Vahed 2014). Quantification provided the demographics of the migrant population in terms of caste, language, age, religion and regional origins. Quantification laid the foundation for exploring other aspects of migrants’ lives. Social and cultural history and postmodernism changed the questions that historians asked. Brij V. Lal, who had pioneered quantification, led the way in producing scholarship that included rigorous, postcolonial and decolonial approaches. He turned to micro-biographies to provide a sense of how migrants negotiated indenture, including resistance, the position of women and a discussion of suicide among them. He also used micro-biographies to illustrate the agency and the desires of indentured migrants and their cultural, religious and leisure practices. Lal stated at a public address on Fiji Remembrance Day in 2014 that he did not seek to “celebrate struggles and sacrifices and sufferings. What I marvel at is how ordinary people did extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances” (Vahed 2016, 79).

Lal, who was instrumental in “modif[ying] scholars’ approach to indentureship and indentured labourers” (Bhardwaj and Misrahi-Barak 2021, 6), died suddenly on 25 December 2021, days before the hard copy of his edited book, Girmitiyas: The Making of Their Memory-Keepers from the Indian Indentured Diaspora, became available (Lal 2022). The works of what Lal called the second-generation scholars of indenture “provide tantalising glimpses into the beginnings of an autonomous history of Indian indentured and post-indenture communities, not simply illustrations of grand themes originating elsewhere” (Lal 2021, 5). In their works, “we thrill to the particularities of the human experience. The attractiveness of social history, history of people rather than of things, storytelling, using oral evidence and family histories all have their place in our scholarship” (Lal 2021, 11).

The transformative role of the ocean crossing was recognized in Mauritian-born poet Khal Torabully’s concept of “coolitude” (Cale d’étoiles: Coolitude, 1992). Torabully explained that he coined

‘coolitude’, very much as Aimé Césaire did for négritude (though I took my distances with any essentialist view from the outset). I carved it as the basis of a humanism of diversity born from the mosaic India migrating through indenture. (Torabully 2011)

Torabully made the sea crossing central to “avoid any essentialism” (Carter and Torabully 2002, 15). When Amitav Ghosh published his historical fiction novel Sea of Poppies, Torabully congratulated him for being “immersed in the ‘sea of memories’ of coolitude, an aesthetics so dear to me”. He wrote that he too “played with languages and archives, moved to silences of archives, sketched the centrality of the voyage of the coolie as a space of construction/deconstruction of identities, giving a primordial role to the ocean so as to move away from the ‘kala pani petrification’”. It was during the ocean crossing that “diversities meet, clash and emerge in new configurations of humanities” (Torabully 2011).

Like Lal and Torabully, others have contributed to newer perspectives on indenture: Maurits Hassankhan in Suriname; Marina Carter, Satyendra Peerthum, Vijaya Teelok and Amit Mishra for Mauritius; Farzana Gounder in Fiji; Lomarsh Roopnaraine and Radica Mahase for the Caribbean. Ashutosh Kumar’s (2017) global overview of indenture and Ambe Pande’s (2020) volume on women all go beyond Tinker’s “neo-slave” perspective to portray migrants as active players in this colonial drama. Crispin Bates is editing a multivolume Cambridge University Press Global South Asian series that examines migrants’ “motivations, understandings and personal stories”, in short, subaltern agency. The series aims to “move away from well-worn dichotomies of ‘slavery’ and ‘free labour’ and re-centre the role of human agency and creativity, even in the face of structural opposition” (Bates 2017, 7).

South African scholarship on indentured labour has lagged behind other countries, with Fiji and the Caribbean countries leading the way. This is due to the focus of academic works on Indian South Africans on their political struggles against white minority rule, the extent to which Gandhi’s South African years have dominated the narrative, and the white dominance of South African universities and academic work. Real growth in works of indenture came only after the introduction of a democratic dispensation in South Africa and the 2010 commemoration of the 150th anniversary of indentured labour in South Africa.

Desai and Vahed’s Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914, first published in 2007 and republished in 2010, embraced the attempt to “re-centre the role of human agency”. They suggested that the ship was an embryonic new society that challenged old social relations. A British official described it as the Temple of Jagganath, in reference to the temple in Puri, Orissa, where there were no caste restrictions (2010, 23). Inside Indian Indenture emphasizes the affective impact of the ocean and is filled with human interest stories, including chain migration, workers insisting on returning to India because work conditions did not meet the contract, marriage, gender, class formation, wealth accumulation, resistance, religion, culture, leisure-time activities, music and sexuality. When Joanne Joseph, author of the fictional Children of Sugarcane (2021), was asked how she researched this historical novel on the indentured experience in South Africa, she replied that “a wonderfully collated historical work on indenture … played a pivotal role in painting the human face of indenture for me” (Marec 2022).

The ship’s list that was meticulously prepared and digitized by Brain (2003) was absolutely key in assisting Desai and Vahed to compile the micro-biographies of individual migrants, which are central to the book. They used the lists to identify individual migrants, make linkages with family members and trace the movements of indentees. They augmented that with archival research through a perusal of court records, estates of the dead, and records of the Colonial States Office. The indentured number facilitated this research since the spelling of migrants’ names varies from document to document.

Inside Indian Indenture moved the narrative well beyond the plantation, which is the focus of only two of the book’s twenty-one chapters. As Desai and Vahed point out:

If the indentured system tried to turn people into numbers, then this book seeks to turn numbers into people, empirical detail into a foundation for a deeper understanding of the life of indenture, and of ‘our’ past into a basis for reflection on the challenges of the present. You see, journeys like Shiva’s dance, are unending. (2010, 27)

They accept that “indenture was not slavery” (2010, 32) and that “migration was a liberating experience for some who may have sought an escape from India” (2010, 32). Transformation had limits, of course. Inside Indian Indenture has a chapter titled “Caste on an African Stage”, which points to ways in which first-generation migrants re-established aspects of caste in Natal. These ideas were consolidated at a theoretical level in “Indian Indenture: Speaking Across the Oceans” (Vahed and Desai 2012).

The profusion of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies and family histories over the past decade and a half provides a rich new source for studying indentured migration in South Africa. These are written by professional historians, fictional writers and laypersons interested in family history and inspired to search for their roots or moved by the human dimension of indenture.

Fact, fiction and fabulation

Sheik hypothesizes that archival-based histories have failed indenture and that the legitimate questioning of the formal archive opens new possibilities for reconstructing the story of indenture. In Sheik’s view, Aziz Hassim’s fictional Revenge of Kali, “to which pluviality and its cultural histories are central” (Sheik 2022, 389), succeeds where historians have failed. She argues that the novel, covering three generations of indentured migrants and their descendants, restores “the humanity buried by large-scale narratives that demand insertion into even larger frames of reference” (Sheik 2022, 395). Hassim “re-humanises” the migrant experience through “the telling of stories, the deeply held desire for them, the faith in the discovery, evaluation, retelling and redemption of selfhood and the understanding of one’s place in the world through memories” (Sheik 2022, 395). Hassim complicates the story by introducing those who came outside of indenture and are known as passenger Indians in the literature. Indenture was not hermetically sealed from passenger migration and the focus on indenture to the exclusion of passenger Indians presents a distorted picture for one cannot then explain the emergence of “Indianness” except through imposition from above, whereas it had impulses from below.

Sheik believes that fiction gives authors the freedom to challenge existing narratives and to provide, as Phillips states, a “closer affective engagement with the past” (Phillips 2013, 14). Or as E. L. Doctorow put it, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like” (Groves 2015). This dichotomy generally holds, but there are many histories that give you a sense of what it “feels” like and many works of fiction that do not. Nevertheless, the fictional works of Peter Abrahams, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Chinua Achebe affirm the value of fiction in African history. For India, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, particularly Sea of Poppies, which focuses on indenture, explores the perspective of subaltern peoples usually hidden from history. An edited volume by Dabydeen, Kaladeen, and Ramnarine (2018) to mark the centenary of the abolition of indenture explored the heritage of indenture through stories, essays and poems. This anthology of twenty-eight stories from writers across the Commonwealth makes the indentured past more accessible to readers.

The indentured experience in South Africa has been captured in fictional writing and theatre to great effect. Rajesh Gopie’s 2002 play Coolie Odyssey follows the life of an indentured migrant, Ramlal Kihari, who arrived in 1888, and his search for identity and salvation through a ruthless working regime and race-based political oppression. Yusuf Haffajee’s 2010 Bittersweet centres on the story of two brothers of the Dalit caste and their indentured and post-indenture lives in Natal. Haffajee sought permission from the authors of Inside Indian Indenture to draw inspiration for his script from the book. Rubendra Govender’s Sugar Cane Boy (2008), Girrmit Tales (2008) by Neelan Govender, Fiona Khan’s Reeds of Wrath (2009), Aziz Hassim’s Revenge of Kali (2009), Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane (2021) and Shevlyn Mottai’s Across the Kala Pani (2022a) are part of the growing number of works of fiction and historical fiction on indenture in South Africa. As literary critic Betty Govinden observed, “the history of indenture continues to shape the psyche of Indians in South Africa” (Govinden 2009, in Stiebel 2011, 88).

Internationally the Fijian historian Brij V. Lal turned to what he called “faction” to capture Indo-Fijian rural life in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, in Mr Tulsi’s Store (2001) and Turnings (2008): “How do you write about that past when you don’t have records and people’s memories are fading and many of them are dead?” he asked (Munro 2021, 287). Lal “tried to recall the past creatively, imaginatively, rendering factual, lived experience through the prism of semi-fiction”. It was always with “a historian’s mindset” as he was “on oath to tell the truth”: he tried “to capture the inner truth of that experience” (Munro 2021, 292).

Gaiutra Bahadur encountered similar problems when researching the life of her indentured great-grandmother and came against “the archive and its elisions and biases”:

How could I write about women whose very existence the official sources barely acknowledged? To enter their unknown and to some extent unknowable history … I looked for clues in visual traces and the oral tradition: folk songs, oral histories, photographs and colonial-era postcards, even a traditional tattoo on the forearms of elderly Indo-Caribbean women. Perhaps most daringly, I turned to the self and wrote about my own journeys: to India, to visit my great-grandmother’s native village in order to uncover why she left; and back to Guyana, where I was born. (Bahadur 2016)

Literary scholar Hershini Bhana Young (2017) and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman (2008a; 2008b) propose that we take the archive seriously, but go beyond it to “thicken” the historical reading. Bhana Young chose the title Illegible Will for her work on Black women at the Cape, such as Saartjie Bartman and Sila van der Kaap, who were caught up in networks of bondage and exploitation. Illegible Will conveys both the absence of their voices in the archives and the way in which historical documents can be used to invoke will through critical imaginings. Bhana Young asserts that “the illegibility of (Black) will within the historical archive requires performative critical engagement with absence”. Using performative theory, Bhana Young sought to overcome the absences in the archives by engaging with novels, photography and performances (2017, 23).

Hartman’s study of her grandmother is “a history written with and against the archive” (Hartman 2008b, 12). She coined the term “critical fabulation” as a method of creative semi-nonfiction in which the fragments of stories are used to exhume suppressed narratives. While we cannot “recover the lives of the enslaved”, she writes, we can “strain against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive” (Hartman 2008b, 11). There are things “that we cannot know and that will never be recovered” from the archives but the telling of these stories produces a “counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the historical” so that they eventually “install themselves as history” (Hartman 2008b, 13). Critical fabulation is Hartman’s way of filling the gaps in the archives, or “toppling the hierarchies that determine how we know things”, to imagine what the lives of the women in her study were like.

South African journalist Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane relates the story of Shanti Manickam’s flight into indenture to escape a forced marriage. The book originated from Joseph’s quest to trace her matrilineal line and the story is about her maternal great-grandmother who arrived in Natal in the 1870s. The silences in the archives meant that she resorted to critical fabulation, as she explained:

Historical fiction is a difficult genre to write. I chose this genre to write as I couldn’t gather enough information about my great-grandmother. We only had a headshot of her and I did a lot of research on life in rural India and colonial Natal. I see her arrive in the archive, she is there on the Laurel Madras in 1884 with her youngest sibling and then she disappears for thirty years and reappears in a textbook in which she has accomplished a number of things. That meant there was a massive gap in her life that I just could not fill other than to fictionalise the story and to bring her story together with the stories of several other indentured women and make my protagonist kind of a receptacle for all those amazing stories. (Joseph 2022)

Joseph used information from the archives and oral history as building blocks to create a fuller and realistic portrait of her imagined great-grandmother:

I made peace with the fact that I would have to fill in the blanks …  There’s a fine line in telling a historically accurate story that at the same time weaves a narrative that is palatable to the reader. We get to walk with the characters to address our deficits in knowledge about life in indenture. (Watson 2022)

Joseph’s fictional account poignantly captures the joys, sorrows, ambitions, love, agency, failures and triumphs of the migrants. Violence, personal and systemic, is ever-present. A reviewer, Helen Johnson, wrote:

Shanti’s experience of indenture is brutal. So much so, that the author warns in a fore-note that readers may find some parts offensive. Unfortunately, the experiences – and attitudes – that Shanti suffers are those reported in the historical record …  This sad history is brought to life through the hard choices of characters who live and breathe, laugh and love, leading me to keep turning the pages …  Distressing events are treated in a poetic style that reaches the heart of the matter far better than any gruesome catalogue of injuries. (Johnson 2022)

Shevlyn Mottai’s Across the Kala Pani also embraces critical fabulation in writing the story of indenture and her central character Latchmee who arrived in Natal in 1909 with three other female shipmates. As Mottai reflected, “Nobody knows where she is buried or the circumstances of her life” (Mottai 2022b). Mottai found that push factors such as the land tax and drought made it difficult for many to eke out a living in British India and some chose to indenture. What inspired her ancestors’ decision? “Why did they leave knowing that they would break caste? What were their fears? The Arkatis did a brilliant job in duping the Indians though some came willingly”. She set out to “fill the gaps in the story” by combining her research with speculative narration and storytelling. Mottai recounted that she “had real stories” (based on her research) which she “melded in a way that was accessible to the reader. I wanted to create a contract with the reader to take a leap. It was difficult and required skill to make the story happen” (Mottai 2022b).

Capturing the voice of the marginalized was important to Mottai, as she explained:

Some things moved me to the very core. I felt a responsibility placed on me. For example, in one ship log a captain wrote about the ‘bad’ behaviour of a coolie woman whose baby had died and he wanted to throw the body in the furnace. The mother was distraught. She was clinging to her baby but he (the captain) wrapped the baby in a cloth and threw it overboard. They had to hold the mother back as she wanted to jump over. The captain’s account is unsympathetic, cold, distant. I felt, what about that woman? How did she feel to have to go through all this and still go to a new land and face new challenges. It was absolutely crucial that I try to give her perspective. I hope I have done the women justice and even if I have gone a small way to represent them and put them out there in the hands of readers so they get a sense of what that experience was like, I would have succeeded. (Mottai 2022b)

These fictional accounts, as Johnson above reflected, “reach the heart of the matter far better than any gruesome catalogue of injuries”, but they do not shun comparisons with slavery. Sheik (2022, 392) argues that a study of indenture “cannot include anything which might be coherently regarded as a ‘Middle Passage’”. Yet some fictional works do approach indenture through an “Atlantic register”. Hassim’s Revenge of Kali, praised by Sheik as a work that succeeds in ways that historians cannot, conveys the “experience of indenture through the ‘middle passage’ and ‘new world’ plantation slavery” (Samuelson 2010, 78). Hassim, in fact, stated that indenture

was essentially slavery disguised in a legalised document referred to by the lofty title of ‘indenture’. A document to which many innocently affixed their signatures. And that is not counting the thousands that were shanghaied (tricked) and forcibly loaded on to the ship. (Hassim 2009, in Stiebel 2016, 11)

The indentured journey across the ocean reads like a slave journey as migrants speak of being “packed together like fish in a net”, of “coughing and vomiting” incessantly, and of the unbearable stench on the ship. Samuelson suggests that Hassim’s description of the first indentured sea crossing in the Truro “is presented as a site of ubiquitous death, rather than hopeful beginnings …  transformation”, even though the Truro recorded few deaths. Hassim views resistance through an “Atlantic register”: “we walk out as free men – or die as free men …  We died on the day they brought us here. We are fighting to be alive again”. Hassim insists categorically that “India replaced Africa as the source of slave labour” (Samuelson 2010, 78).

Bhana Young writes that in Hassim’s Kali, “indentured servitude in Natal becomes transatlantic slavery by another name in another place” (2017, 150). Parts of the novel are “straight out of abolitionist literature” and “collapse the distinctions between indenture and Atlantic slavery”. A downpour “washes clean the blood-soaked earth as truth and reconciliation triumph over the retributive justice of the titular goddess Kali”. Black Africans and Indian Africans are united; this link, “no matter how politically strategic, rests on certain historical generalisations, oversights, and misperceptions” (Bhana Young 2017, 151).

Fictional works on indenture are full of imagination and empathy, and appeal to the wider reading public, but remain in part framed in the trope of indenture-as-slavery. The themes often bear similarity to historical works: the trickery of recruiters in India, the horrendous journey from India, terrible living conditions on the plantation, back-breaking work, oppressive sirdars, caste strictures, and the subsequent meritorious achievement of Indians through hard work, education and resilience (Stiebel 2011).

Mottai recollected that when her husband

read the book, he told her that her mind was ‘dark’ but added that he knew that it had to be so because those women ‘went through hell’. The story couldn’t be told in any other way. I know that everyone likes a happy ending but it couldn’t be for those women and what they endured. (Mottai 2022b)

The blurb for Mottai’s novel reads: “the brutal reality of life on the farms reveals the truth about the crossing: that it is usually a one-way journey, rife with misery, and that the hardship doesn’t end after the ship has dropped anchor in Durban harbour” (Mottai 2022a). Joseph related that hard labour and political and sexual violence were a pervasive feature of the lives of migrants who were “constantly striving against the odds …  Their biggest victory is that they survived …  The system and weight of colonialism did not crush them in the end” (Watson 2022).

This is not to detract from the value of fiction (novels, films, theatre, television) in deepening readers’ understanding of the past. The historical fiction of Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende, for example, makes our complex human pasts accessible in ways that historians may not. In the case of Natal, the increase in the number of women authors has resulted in more attention being paid to the experience of indentured women migrants.

The 150th anniversary of the arrival of indentured labourers in Natal was commemorated in 2010, and the period since has witnessed a profusion of family histories on indentured migrants and their descendants, such as Gokool (2009), Narrandes (2010), Mudly (2011), Bismilla (2016), Govinden (2019), Gubili (2018/2020), Bhagwan (2020) and Shah (2022), which trace the arrival of indentured migrants, reconstruct their indenture and post-indenture lives, and take the story once more across the oceans to Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom where many descendants of the indentured now live.

Part fiction and part nonfiction, Vicki Bismilla’s Indentured! A Labourer’s Journey (2016) recounts the journey into indenture of her grandparents:

We owe my grandfather so much. He gave us the roots of our lives and in his memory I want to acknowledge his struggles and those of his young wife and family whom he nurtured under such harsh conditions in the cane fields of Durban, South Africa. (Bismilla 2016, 245)

For Mudly (2011, 172), her family’s history is a narrative of “survival and triumph over adversity”:

Our forefathers worked their fingers to the bone to ensure that we, their descendants, live a far better life than theirs. They persevered against all the odds stacked against them. They scrimped and they saved, and they put up with the worst indignities with us in mind. (Stiebel 2016, 15)

The story of M. L. Sultan is fascinating. He arrived in Natal in 1890 as an indentured migrant and worked for the railways. Thereafter he worked as a waiter in Johannesburg, returned to Durban to take up farming, and donated a substantial portion of his wealth to establish a technikon (post-secondary institution for career-oriented technical education) for Black students shortly before his death in 1953, now the M. L. Sultan campus of the Durban University of Technology. The extended Sultan family has turned the family tree full circle by making the return trip to India. During a family reunion in 2015 younger members expressed a keenness to trace their relations in Kollam, Kerala, South India. A chance meeting between Dr A. H. Sultan, who already worked at an English hospital, and a doctor from Kollam who joined the staff, led to the hiring of a lawyer in Kollam to search for their family. Relatives were found after two months. The Kollam family had in their possession photographs and letters from Sultan, the earliest written from the Masonic Hotel in Johannesburg in 1897 in the Malayalam language. Members of the extended Sultan family from four continents visited Kollam in March 2017 and met 168 cousins. Several reunions have been held and a website has been established (https://www.mlsultan.com/mlsultanfamily.html).

One of the most striking examples of the new family history genre is Krishna Gubili’s book Viriah (2018), an account of his persevering search for his roots in South Africa. Born in Hyderabad in 1970, throughout his boyhood Gubili heard tales of his great-grandfather Viriah’s indenture on sugar plantations in Natal, related by his father Gurumurthy. Krishna had never known his grandfather Nagoor, who died in 1947, nor his great-grandfather, as Viriah had died in 1952, bitterly mourning the loss of his son. Krishna’s interest in his ancestor’s journey became concrete in his late teens, when he found a letter with a South African postage stamp whilst cleaning the attic of the family home. The letter came from Daniel Naidoo, his third-generation cousin: Viriah had returned to India with his son Nagoor in 1932, whereas his daughter Chengamma and her family settled in the Natal town of Tongaat and Daniel was her grandson.

This discovery launched Krishna on his long quest. He wrote to the South African address but received no reply. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on 11 February 1990 prompted him to write again, and he continued to do so at regular intervals. Krishna emigrated to the United States in 1998. Much to his surprise, he received a response from Daniel in 2000, but Daniel was unable to shed much light on the family history. The death of Gubili’s grandmother Nancharamma, Nagoor’s wife, in 2013 at the age of 90, once again spurred his interest. In the social media age, he was able to trace his South African family through Facebook and was elated to meet them when he visited South Africa in December 2014. His visit to the archives on Christmas Eve, where the dedication of an archivist allowed him to find Viriah’s records, and the family history, is brilliantly related in the book. Viriah resonated with many readers and was translated into Telegu, while the author has given book readings across North America and India¹ and has spoken about indenture on Ted talks.²

These accounts combine archival traces of their ancestors’ lives with fiction and fabulation. They are unique, of great human interest, and an important new source of information for researchers as the intensive research is based on the ship’s lists, photographs, identity documents, the occasional diary, newspaper cuttings and letters.

Political importance of the slavery-as-indenture thesis

Persistence of the theme of oppression and suffering may in part be due to a concern with the present. Scholarship is not produced in a vacuum and the political struggles of the descendants of indentured migrants for citizenship rights remain a source of tension and anxiety in some former colonies. As Nathan Bracher writes, “we often concern ourselves so diligently and intensely with the past for reasons of the present” (Bracher 2017, 133). While academics may insist on unhinging indenture from slavery by creating new and fashionable concepts and areas of study, heirs of the indentured often identify a need to place the genealogical link to slavery at the forefront of discussion on indenture because of current circumstances.

Brij V. Lal suggested that the appeal of Tinker’s study was in part due to political considerations:

His book came out at a time when Indian communities all over the developing world were facing exclusion and discrimination, from the Black Power movement in Trinidad to Forbes Burnham’s racist socialism in Guyana to the assertions of the Creole plantocracy in Mauritius. South Africa’s apartheid regime was at its height and Fijian nationalists were agitating for the deportation of their Indian compatriots to India. At a time like this, a narrative emphasising suffering and servitude added strength to the call for equality and inclusion, that they had earned their right to full citizenship. (Lal 2021, 10)

A public meeting in Durban in 2009 to discuss the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the arrival of indentured workers rejected the phrase proposed by academics, “indenture was akin to slavery”, and insisted that indenture was “a new form of slavery”. There was fear amongst many in attendance that differentiating between indenture and slavery would dilute the harshness of indenture as a system of bonded labour (Vahed and Desai 2012, 201). The early arrival of the trader class in Natal and the economic success of many complicates the story of indenture. The quick crossover of ex-indentured into market gardening and free labour adds to this complexity. Gandhi is an example of this. He arrived to support a rich merchant, and was caught up in the struggles of this class for much of his stay in South Africa. It was only in the last few years before his departure in 1914 that the injustices of the indentured moved centre-stage.

A committee was formed in 2010 to build a monument as a tribute to the indentured. That monument has not yet been built despite funds being set aside by the government, partly as a result of heightened Afro-Indian tensions in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and an attack on Gandhi’s statue in Johannesburg in 2015. The anti-Indian Mazibuye African Forum (MAF) issued a statement that a statue would be a “monumental insult to (African) leaders …  who uncompromisingly defended the length and breadth of KZN”. Indian indentured labour, MAF insisted, “reduced African bargaining power with whites”. The MAF position was that Indians “continue to be racist towards Africans and an impediment to African economic progress” in the contemporary period and were therefore “undeserving of official acknowledgement” (see Vahed 2021, 263). It is in this context that framing indenture within the narrative of slavery and victimhood has purchase.

In Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia and elsewhere, many descendants of Indian indentured migrants feel that their place in the nation-state is threatened by the descendants of slaves or indigenous people and are keen to underscore the suffering of their ancestors and their role in the economic and political development of these former colonies. From about 2009, with the support of the Mauritian and Indian governments, conferences have been held in former colonies of indenture, in European countries where the descendants of indentured migrants are now settled, and in India, around the issues of slavery, indenture and the Indian diaspora. There is an increase in literature published on indenture, and a move to get the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to recognize the journeys of indentured migrants on the same lines as the 1994 Routes of Enslaved Peoples: Resistance, Liberty and Heritage project.

This move was given impetus by the government of Mauritius, which established an International Indentured Labour Route Project (ILRP) and submitted a proposal to UNESCO in early 2014 for recognition of a global indentured labour route. The Executive Board of UNESCO resolved to support the initiative at its 195th meeting in Paris in October 2014, but nothing came of this. In October 2017, the ILRP formed an International Scientific Committee (ISC) comprising scholars of indenture from across the world to pursue this project. The Committee has been meeting annually but has not yet succeeded in getting UNESCO recognition. In the Caribbean, descendants of indentured Indians expressed concern about being left out of the slave reparation movement. This, they say, is reflected in the lack of representation in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission (CRC). Guyanese Lomarsh Roopnaraine, a Professor of History at Jackson State University in the United States, noted that CARICOM’s ten-point plan for reparative justice did not even mention the word “indentureship” (Roopnaraine 2022). The concerns of Indo-Caribbeans were reinforced when CARICOM was declared the 6th Region of Africa at the second annual Africa-CARICOM Day held at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, on 7 September 2023.

While the writing on Indian indenture has moved beyond the Tinker paradigm, the link between slavery and indenture prevails as a strand in the historiography of Indian indenture for reasons that are clearly comprehensible.

Conclusion

The evolution of historical writing about indentured labour in Natal provides yet another case study of the truism that history is always in the process of being rewritten, as each generation of historians, in the words of W. K. Hancock, must “examine the sources more deeply and re-examine the concepts that serve to elucidate the sources” (in Munro 2021, 375). Early studies of indenture in South Africa were influenced by the Tinker paradigm. They concentrated on the technical aspects of indenture and foregrounded colonial injustices against migrants. Notwithstanding their shortcomings, they helped to address the silences of colonial and apartheid historiography.

Subsequent works, drawing on the official archives, focused on migrants’ agency, their reasons for emigrating, work and life, gender, culture, religion, and how the indentured established new lives in South Africa. Micro-biographies have proved effective in critiquing systemic histories, and getting sight of the ambiguities of the world left behind and the new lives being made. While agency and transformation are central to these studies, Parsons (2023, 112) provides a timely reminder of the limits of change in ocean crossings: “the indentured labor trade releases its subjects from the victimhood of their Indian existence [but] fluidity and movement come face-to-face with geopolitical power”.

The colonial archive of South African indenture contains a vast quantity of “human interest” stories yet to be tapped. Court records, immigration registers, the files of the Protector of Indian Immigrants, correspondence with India, and newspapers provide rich material for historians and for writers of historical fiction who wish to look afresh at the material in light of innovative approaches and theoretical perspectives to provide new interpretations of the indentured past. While the shortcomings of the archives are well documented, they should not be discarded since most historians are trained to mine archival materials judiciously, being aware, as Ann Stoler warned, that the archive is a site of contested knowledge, a “process” rather than a “thing”, and that they must look beyond the official documentation (2009, 20).

Antoinette Burton’s excellent Dwelling in the Archive (2003) asks that we ponder over who makes history and how, and that we move beyond what we traditionally understood to be legitimate historical sources. For example, Burton extensively uses memoirs as a historical source (2003, 26). The archive of indenture has broadened as a result of works of historical fiction, family histories, poetry, theatre, painting and art. Written by historians, often drawing on fictional techniques, and laypersons with no formal academic training, these works allow us to understand the indentured experience in non-essentialist ways and from different perspectives. Critical fabulation is often employed to produce narratives of what life might have been for their ancestors and to fill gaps in the archival record, which primarily reflects the perspectives of employers and officials. These works address silences in the official colonial archives as they reflect the viewpoint of the indentured migrants.

The colonial archive and the discipline of history remain key, but writing about South African indenture in the twenty-first century has expanded in creative and imaginative ways to produce new modes of historical writing and representation. The foundational fifty years from Tinker to the present have seen significant changes: as with Brij V. Lal, we can expect the story of indenture to continue to be told “in a variety of genres”, some yet unknown (2021, 13).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://viriah.com/index.php/book-readings.

2 https://www.ted.com/talks/krishna_gubili_sweets_smartphones_and_sweatshirts.