Short Read: How British Abolition of Slavery led to India’s Indentured Labour System

In Holland, in the West Indies, in Fiji, in Malaysia and in Mauritius, we have met people of Indian descent whose ancestors left India around 150 years ago. Given that the rest of the world wasn’t exactly embracing Indian talent at that point of time, how did these Indians migrate such vast distances and build new lives in faraway continents. Rishabh Chauhan’s story gives you a window into this difficult phase in Indian history. He begins by highlighting the underlying cause of the Indian migration:

“It was in 1833 that the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act, marking a decisive step towards ending the long, dark legacy of the British Empire’s involvement in slavery. The Act received Royal Assent on August 28, 1833, and came into force on August 1, 1834.

The law initially applied only to the British colonies, freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, South Africa, and parts of Canada. While it was a significant move towards abolition, the Act also included provisions for a system of “apprenticeship,” which required former slaves to continue working for their former masters for up to six additional years, prolonging their subjugation until the system was fully abolished in 1838.”

With slavery being abolished in European, the colonial powers were now deprived of their supply of zero cost labour. Without labour, how could these colonial masters continue their mining and plantation franchises in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia. The answer they found was to bring in the Indians:

“Between 1830 and 1860, the British, French, and Portuguese prohibited slavery in their colonies…However, they introduced the system of indentured labour as a means to perpetuate forced labour under a different guise.

The abolition of slavery did little to alter the mentality of the plantation owners, who continued to think like slave owners….Indentured labour served as the new kind of slavery for the colonisers and big plantation owners. The unchanged mindset allowed this dark custom to persist, benefiting the profit-seekers among the colonisers.

Indentured servitude from India began in 1834 and continued until 1922, even though it was officially banned in 1917 by the Imperial Legislative Council of British India under pressure from freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi.

After ruining the agricultural business in India, the British colonisers exploited the mass unemployment that had hit small farmers the hardest. The worst affected regions were the modern-day states of Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh.

The British collected these unemployed migrants from India and employed them on a contractual basis, which turned into indentured labour.

This practice led to the growth of a large diaspora with Indo-Carribean, Indo-African and Indo-Malaysian heritage that continues to live in the Carribean, Fiji, Réunion, Natal, Mauritius, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka.”

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