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Inside Indian

Indenture

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Inside Indian

A South African Story, 1860–1914

Indenture

Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed

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Published by HSRC Press

Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.hsrcpress.ac.za

First published 2010

ISBN (soft cover): 978-0-7969-2244-1

ISBN (pdf): 978-0-7969-2245-8

ISBN (ePub): 978-0-7969-2312-7

© 2010 Human Sciences Research Council

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the

views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the

Council endorses the views of the authors. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to

attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council.

Copyedited by Lee Smith

Designed and typeset by Jenny Young

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Contents

Preface vi

Map of indentured recruitment districts, sea routes

and settlement areas x

1 Shiva’s dance 1

2 The paglaa samundar (mad ocean) 19

3 From the Raj to Raju 39

4 ‘Master Coolie’ arrives 61

5 The interpreters of indenture 83

6 Inside the world of Uriah Heep and Jabez Balfour 103

7 Esperanza: a place of hope? 127

8 Bhen Choodh and the politics of ploys 149

9 Cast(e) on an African stage 173

10 Family matters 197

11 When the ‘coolies’ made Christmas 223

12 From heathens to Hindus 239

13 Coolies with Bibles 261

14 Bâdshâh Pîr meets Soofie Saheb 283

15 The many faces of leisure and pleasure: from China to ganja 301

16 The bodysnatchers (1899–1902) 323

17 The Virgin Mary and the three-pound cross 341

18 ‘Drawing blood from a stone’ 357

19 Resistance goes underground 371

20 The moral persuaders? 399

21 Africa calling 423

Glossary 439

Notes 442

References 463

Index 470

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Preface

He has nothing to lose, he tells himself and so he reaches for the stars. For where do

we go when it falls apart in our hands and we are left with less than we started with?

Begin again? And with what? Where are the dreams to fill the souls of wandering

exiles? JAMAL MAHJOUB1

The landscape of KwaZulu-Natal in the early decades of the twenty-first century still bears the

signs of indenture.

Travel up the north coast, look for the pointer that says Kwa Dukuza, turn left, head beyond

Mahatma Gandhi Street and you will end up at Kearsney. At the bottom of a hill you will come

across a Baptist church. It is in this church that indentured labourers listened with rapt

reverence to the sermons of John (the Baptist) Rangiah, who was especially brought from

Nellore, Madras, in 1903 to see to their spiritual needs.

Head down the south coast and you will see acres of land bristling with sugar cane and

carrying the names of enclaves that signal the sway of British colonisers: Margate, Ramsgate,

Port Edward. Before these vestiges of British imperialism, drive through Umzinto and you will

see a sign for Lynton Hall. Once the home of the Reynolds brothers, it is now a venue for

expensive cuisine and plush weddings. A visit is guaranteed to leave ‘a lingering memory of

culinary extravagance’.2 There are other memories of Lynton Hall too, clues of which linger

more than a century later and point to the setting of one of the most brutal and compelling

episodes of indenture.

We travelled these roads and were moved to tell the stories of indenture, to turn the

tombstones on the hill near Lynton Hall overlooking Esperanza,3 with their stark date lines of

‘when-born’ and ‘when-died’, into real living people, and to turn the empty pews of the church

in Kearsney into moments when they were filled with the faithful flipping through Bibles

marked in Telegu. The stories we uncovered are an incredible slice of history, the impact of

which resonates into the present.

We are not the first to traverse this territory. A steady stream of writing on indentured

labour has come our way over the past few decades. Much of this literature painstakingly

details the number of indentured who came, where they came from, the regional variations,

the caste designations, the system’s indignations, and so on.

Inside Indian Indenture builds on this strong body of information, but also seeks to go

beyond the numbers, trespassing directly into the lives of the indentured themselves. It

explores the terrain of the everyday by focusing on the development of religious and cultural

expressions, the leisure activities, the way power relations played themselves out on the

vi

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vii

plantations and beyond, inspecting weapons of resistance and forms of collaboration that were

developed in times of conflict with the colonial overlords.

It is a social history that extends beyond the boundaries of institutions, yet is situated in

the social web of indenture itself, especially the small intense world of the plantation. The

writing that follows seeks to move away from seeing indenture as some Benthamite

Panopticon in which the indentured were completely under the gaze and discipline of the

master. We show that they ‘were as much agents as they were victims and silent witnesses’.4

Indenture was a time in which old patterns of living could not simply be resurrected in a

‘foreign’ environment, while new patterns struggled to be born. We enter this world by

showing real people in all their ambiguities and complexities as they danced the uncertain

edge between improvisation and resignation.

While the system was presented by the colonists as a fait accompli and the indentured as

a tabula rasa on which the economic needs of late colonialism could simply be imposed, in

reality, indenture saw its contours being established, resisted and renegotiated as the inden￾tured and their white masters were constantly involved in a shared but uneven economic and

political dynamic.

In seeking the voices of the indentured, we faced an important methodological problem, as

these voices were ‘filtered through the pens of others’. The testimonies of the indentured ‘were

transcribed or recorded by official scribes. Most of the emigrants could not even read the

deposition they were asked to sign, marking an “X” instead. Next to direct evidence, however,

they come closest to revealing the voices of bonded labourers.’5

We have found this a fascinating story brimming with desire, skulduggery and tender mercies,

as much as with oppression and exploitation. None more so than the 1913 strike, studies of

which in the main have rendered the crowd largely anonymous as Gandhi, the master

puppeteer, took centre stage. Yet the indentured participated in their thousands, more often

than not outside the purview of Gandhi and the visible leaders of the strike, in some instances

fighting violent hand-to-hand battles with the authorities, throwing up their own leaders and

drawing on memories of previous struggles. In telling the story of the strike, we try to reveal

‘the faces in the crowd, their hopes, their fears and muddled aspirations’,6

and show how the

erstwhile puppets, the indentured, were in many cases pulling the strings of rebellion.

Reclamation can, of course, lead to cultural chauvinism. So we aim not just to tell a story

of the internal dynamics of indentured life, but to do so against the backdrop of white rule and

its oppressive relationship with the Zulu. Inscribed in this unfolding narrative is the brutal

and violent dispossession of the Zulu, and the callousness of the colonial onslaught that

destroyed their indigenous economy and turned once courageous warriors against imperialism

into ‘houseboys’ serving at the white man’s table or doing his laundry, and into dispossessed

migrants tunnelling underground in the mines while their families struggled to survive. We try

then to tell a broader history that does not, we trust, lend itself to reinforcing cultural and

racial bigotry.

But this is not done in a way that obscures the central narrative. In fact, it renders it more

revealing. Those who ‘agreed’ to indenture were often propelled by desperation as the British

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spread their tentacles throughout India. It is apposite in these contemporary times in which

the British Empire is dressed up (once again) as a benign, progressive, modernising force, as

cover for the ‘civilising mission’ in Iraq and elsewhere, to iterate, as Mike Davis has done in

Late Victorian Holocausts:

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this:

there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last

half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent...From

1872 to 1921 the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent…

‘Modernisation’ and commercialisation were accompanied by pauperisation.7

It was the very same British Empire that brought misery and subjugation and, ironically,

created an opportunity for ‘escape’ to places like Natal. Many were filled with hopes as high

as Mahjoub’s stars as they crossed the kala pani (the black water – the sea). Dreams of a better

life and the opportunity to save money and return to the village as ‘success stories’ were not

to be for many who returned ‘home’ with less than they had started out with, and who found that

home was not the same place. Neither were they the same people. Caste had been transgressed,

parents had died and spaces for reintegration closed as colonialism tightened its grip. Home

for these wandering exiles was no more.

A substantial number came to the realisation that the place of exile was the place of home.

Like Mahjoub, they wondered, ‘…where do we go when it falls apart in our hands and we are

left with less than we started with? Begin again? And with what?’ And so, many made the

return journey. To Africa. To begin anew.

This book tells a story about the many beginnings and multiple journeys that made up the

indentured experience. The research for this book took several years. We shuddered and

gasped as we found snippets of information tucked away on forgotten shelves and in boxes of

musty archives. We felt proud and terribly sad as we read letters penned a century ago and

more from distant ancestors, so dignified still in their anguish. And some of the photographs

that we have included are beyond description.

As authors we come from different academic backgrounds, one a sociologist (Ashwin) and

the other a historian (Goolam). There are other differences, too, that are not necessary to go

into, but which those who know both of us would find it easy to discern. They have no doubt

made many jokes about how such an incongruous twosome has managed to survive the long

period that has been the writing of this book. But this collaboration has been a wonderful

experience. This is not simply a professional relationship but one of abiding friendship.

Writing this story has been an emotional experience and an incredibly humbling one. The

people who are closest to us bore the brunt of the long hours and of a project that seemed to have

no end. To them we owe a deep gratitude and we hope that this story, when (if) they read it, will

explain our mood swings between sadness, anger even, when we came across the depth of the

humiliations and violence suffered by the indentured, and our smiles, joy and pride as we came

across the remarkable ability of the indentured to confront and resist the system. The indentured

viii INSIDE INDIAN INDENTURE A SOUTH AFRICAN STORY, 1860–1914

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Preface ix

refused to be disembodied ‘coolies’ defined by numbers and fought many battles to ensure that

they were recognised as people with rights, feelings and a permanent future in Africa.

Ashwin’s father died on 11 November 2006 without seeing the final product. He was a

history teacher and it is extremely sad that he will not pass judgement over this work. His

influence, though, lives through the pages of this book. Goolam’s wife, Taskeen, and children,

Naseem, Razia and Yasmeen, live many miles away, and they feel the separation intensely.

This book, which in essence is about painful separations and multiple journeys, helps suture

the wounds of long absences.

We believe that you will feel enriched by sharing these stories. If even a little of the

emotion and insight about being alive in South Africa today that came to us through

researching and narrating the stories of indenture is transmitted to you, then the many hours

of painstaking labour in producing this book will have been worthwhile.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank friends and colleagues who took time out of their busy schedules to

assist in different ways. Surendra Bhana, as always, gave liberally of his time. He has been a

great support throughout and especially in reading early drafts of the manuscript. Joy Brain

very kindly provided documents and photographs from her collection. Others whose help,

comments, questions and encouragement are appreciated include Brij V Lal, Isabel Hofmeyr,

Parvathi Raman, Paula Richman, Betty Govinden, Brij Maharaj, Sudesh Mishra, Mandy

Goedhals and Karin Willemse.

In the course of our research we relied on primary sources from many archives and

libraries, and have been fortunate to have had their generous support. We owe special thanks

to the staff of the South African Archives Repository in Durban, Maritzburg and Pretoria, as

well as the Killie Campbell Library, who often went beyond the call of duty to help. We would

like to mention Judith Hawley, R Singh, Mwelela Cele and Nellie Somers by name, though

others also helped in various ways. We also thank Mr K Chetty and Emmanuel Narie (Siya) of

the Gandhi–Luthuli Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal, for their assistance.

Finally, we thank the reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions. All errors that remain

are our own. As is the tradition when sociologists and historians work together, the theoretical

shortcomings are all Goolam’s and the factual errors are all Ashwin’s.

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x INSIDE INDIAN INDENTURE A SOUTH AFRICAN STORY, 1860–1914

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xi

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xii INSIDE INDIAN INDENTURE A SOUTH AFRICAN STORY, 1860–1914

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CHAPTER 1

Shiva’s dance

Middle-passaged

Passing

Beneath the colouring of desire

In the enemy’s eye

Scatter of worlds and broken wishes

In Shiva’s unending dance. ARNOLD ITWARU1

The maps that light up the journeys of the indentured migrants to Natal can be traced through

mighty social forces that linger as high as stars over the unfolding personal voyages below.

They can also be told through the windows of individual biographies and local dynamics. The

most illuminating are those that look upwards at the stars, the social forces that shape circum￾stances, without losing sight of the bodies that dance through time, making history as much as

they are made by it. This is a story, then, that in its telling attempts to deal with the challenges

of ‘biography, of history, and of their intersections within social structures’.2

October 1860. The Belvedere and the Truro crossing the Indian Ocean, heading for Port

Natal. The ship, ‘the medium of mercantile capitalism and of the [middle] passage of

indenture, [was] the first of the cultural units in which social relations were re-sited and

renegotiated’.3 Hierarchies ‘imagined’ into being over a long period; divisions based on age-old

customs; castes, religions, dialects, centuries in the making, unravelling. Space, place and time

compressed. Recent acquaintances beckoned possibilities of intimacy.4 Many of the inden￾tured will remain burdened by the past; others will embrace the new, relieved of the ‘personal’

and not so ‘personal’ forces of history.

But already we hurry Shiva’s dance.

Indenture. It is unclear whether the kind of life that they would come to live was immedi￾ately apparent to the indentured when they signed or thumb-printed the contract – that they

would be bound in a ‘legally authorised domination which denied them choice as to work,

residence or remuneration, and assumed that their labour lay in the ownership of some lord,

master, employer or custodian’.5

Sourcing material, especially searching for the voices of the subalterns, is made difficult

by the lack of ‘their’ perspective, and the overwhelming voice of the ruling classes. But we

follow Edward Said’s pointer of searching in the direction of ‘unconventional or neglected

sources’,6

of trawling the ‘official’ archives, while simultaneously ‘listening’ to the voices of

1

OPPOSITE: Although the system tried to turn people into nameless numbers, the indentured found all manner of ways to

resist this and assert their humanity. Shown here are Napaul Kaloo (7359), Neetye Peeroo (7360), Nathonee Sooraie

(7366) and Chand Kahn (7367).

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the indentured through letters, newspaper reports and anecdotes handed down through time,

matching them with stories of the indentured in different locations. Parvathi Raman lamented

that ‘the early narrative of (indentured) workers’ history remains largely unrecorded’; they are

depicted in the literature as defenceless victims of the political economy. ‘Hopefully,’ she

adds, ‘it is not completely lost to us.’7 This book takes up the challenge, seeking to recover the

narratives of indentured migrants, not just as subjects of history, but as active agents who

resisted and contested the attempts of employers and the state to control their lives.

Indentured life was trespassed with systemic violence from the outside, as well as within

its internal social life. It had its resisters and its collaborators, its class fighters and its caste

defenders. The indentured, as much as the system tried to control and confine them, carved a

number of different spaces in the new environment, prayed to a myriad gods and swayed to

the beat of many dances. Along the way we gather snapshots of the intricacies of their lives,

markers providing a clue to what life might have been like: the desperate but forlorn wish of

some to return to India; families separated, lost and mourned; acquiescence and resistance to

the bonds of indenture.

The colonists were determined to reduce the indentured to the catch-all ‘coolie’. Their

lives were lived in the context of a white ruling class that saw them through the lens of racist

stereotypes. Kuli, in Tamil, referred to payment for menial work for persons from the lowest

levels in the industrial labour market. In the ‘transformation of kuli to coolie, the distinct

humanity of individual Indians was appropriated and eliminated as the person collapsed into

the payment’.8

It is not surprising that the indentured appear in the official records mainly

when they were brought before the colonial authorities for infractions, for ‘criminality’, for

being ‘troublesome’. Hopefully, the ‘voices’ that fill this book go beyond, below and between

these records to allow the indentured to reclaim their personhood. We seek to recognise their

agency, and ‘track the silences, displacements, and transformations’ produced by indenture.9

Our challenge is to write a story that illustrates the encounter between a system that had

tangible effects and the way in which the indentured submitted, appropriated and resisted it.10

The myth of return

Walker there is no path

You make the path by going,

And on looking back,

You see steps you will never retrace,

Walker there is no path,

Only trails in the ocean. MACHADO ANTONIO11

There are many threads to string together in relating the experience of indentured migrants.

Some were defrauded into migrating, others chose to make a new start in Natal; some estab￾lished family, the attempts of others ended in failure or tragedy; some prospered while others

lived in abject poverty; many simply endured the hardship of indenture; some collaborated, a

few chose to fight; many, too many, took their lives; most made Natal home, others returned to

2 INSIDE INDIAN INDENTURE A SOUTH AFRICAN STORY, 1860–1914

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India; many others tried to go ‘home’, only to return. Maistry was among the latter. His story

was one of a handful of life histories of indentured migrants recovered by Hilda Kuper in the

late 1950s.12

Maistry was a Telegu of the Dhobi (washermen) caste, born in about 1870 in a small village

near Cuddapah in Andhra (Madras). His parents had six sons; he was the second youngest.

Maistry would have been expected to contribute to the family economically, even though he

had several older brothers. From Kuper’s interviews, Maistry emerges as a quiet man deter￾mined to build a life for himself and his family. As a young man, he was employed as a dhobi

by the Royal Battery in Andhra, and produced a reference to this effect on his arrival in

Durban.

Before long, the Royal Battery moved off. ‘Then,’ says Kuper, ‘there was nothing’ for

Maistry, who had a wife and baby to support. After discussing the situation with his wife and

parents, they agreed that he should indenture for five years. He was younger than 20 at the

time. Maistry and his friends, eight young waiters and three cooks from the same village, made

the voyage into indenture, embarking on a journey that changed their lives forever. It must

have been an incredible passage for these young men, unsure of what awaited them across the

kala pani (black water). Upon arrival in Durban, Maistry was immediately swept off to a local

hotel, where he took over washing duties, working diligently for five eventless years.

Whether it was the long separation from his loved ones, the loneliness of the new country

or a heart inflamed by passion, Maistry took a second wife, a young colonial-born woman, to

whom friends had introduced him. ‘Colonial-born’ referred to children born in Natal to inden￾tured or ex-indentured Indians. Did he still harbour thoughts of his wife and child in India?

Leaving India to earn a living for his family must have been difficult, and yet the memory of the

family he had pledged to support seemed to have faded, as Maistry registered his second

marriage with the Protector of Indian Immigrants. Maistry’s story is not unique. Many wives

and children were abandoned as the realities of separation in time and space took hold. One

cannot help but think of Maistry’s wife when reading this heart-rending cry of a wife

abandoned by her indentured husband:

All my friends have become mothers,

And I remain lonely and childless.

Again and again I pleaded with you not to go,

For there live women who will win your heart.

For twelve years you haven’t written a word:

How shall I spend the days of chait ? FOLKSONG13

Separation between husbands and wives, or migrants and their families, could last for months,

years, decades; sometimes they became permanent. This severance of contact affected the very

fabric of family life. Married migrants who left their wives and children in India probably

intended returning after five years; they may have been apprehensive about taking their

families to Natal, or worried about the financial cost of supporting wives and children who

would not receive equal pay and rations; or perhaps they were concerned about raising

Shiva’s dance 3

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