“What I want to say in this letter,” wrote the exasperated Viceroy of India in a telegram to the London-based Secretary of State for India, “is that the time for palliatives is past, . . . and that, if public opinion — and this won’t remain a purely Indian question — is to be satisfied, recruiting must stop.”1 Weeks later, on March 10, 1917, the British Empire caved to mass agitation and abolished the indenture trade more than eighty years after the first indentured Indians were recruited to work overseas.2
A century later, the trade casts a long shadow.3 Indenture was a system of contract labor under which individuals were recruited in their home countries to serve as migrant workers abroad, usually for a term of three to five years.4 Though these contracts often provided for return journeys after a decade of plantation labor, a significant proportion of those indentured never returned to their home countries.5 Between 1834, when the first thirty-nine Indians were brought to Mauritius, and 1917, when recruitment was halted, indenture resettled more than 1.3 million Indians, as well as hundreds of thousands of East Asians, Africans, and Pacific Islanders, on British colonies the world over.6 Most of these workers were bound to sugarcane plantations, where they were used at first as replacements for formerly enslaved Africans.7 Because of this relationship to enslaved labor, its deceptive recruitment practices, and its oppressive labor conditions, indentures was scandalized by British abolitionists as a veiled attempt to reintroduce slavery under a new legal form.8
Despite these early scandals, indenture carried on for decades before it was abolished. Past scholarship on this subject has therefore examined closely how the British Empire managed dissent, protest, and resistance in the knowledge regime of indenture. This literature has explored the role of inquiry commissions,9 which colonial officials organized to study charges of abuse, as well as shifts in public opinion, labor protests, and diasporic resistance.10 The picture that emerges is that indenture grew more and more legitimate until it was finally abolished.11
This Note makes two contributions to that scholarship. First, it adds the process of legislating to the catalog of tools used by the Empire to digest dissent and legitimize indenture. Second, this Note argues that when indenture ultimately ended, that abolition occurred in part because its critics directed their dissent not to the colonial bureaucracy, which could capture and use that dissent to further propagate indenture, but instead to the masses in India, creating in effect a counter-regime of knowledge about the institution.12
Both arguments take their root in the colony of Fiji, a small island in the South Pacific that played an outsized role in the system’s abolition. Fiji was a relative latecomer to Indian indenture. Enacted in 1878, Fiji’s Indian indenture law was, in the eyes of contemporary colonial officials and several historians, an uneventful improvement on laws enacted in other colonies.13 This Note offers an alternative account. In so doing, it revisits the letters exchanged between colonial officials to show that the imperial bureaucracy was producing important legislative changes late in the arc of indenture. This account demonstrates that the law was in fact more repressive.
Along the way, we will encounter a secret memo, Confederate veterans in Fiji, what may be the first foreign chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, experiments in human survival on famine rations, and early twentieth-century viral media. To start, Part I provides a brief primer on nineteenth-century indenture and the colony of Fiji. Part II then turns to Fiji’s Ordinance No. VI of 187814 as a case study in how colonial bureaucrats digested dissent to produce a repressive but politically legitimate law. Part III concludes by outlining how the movement to abolish indenture responded by directing its dissent not to empire, but to the masses.
I. From Abolition to Indenture
This Part begins with a primer on indenture, paying special attention to the relationship between enslaved African labor and indenture, as well as the important role played by inquiry commissions. Then, the focus turns to the conditions that paved the way for indenture in the Fiji Islands.
A. The Beginnings of Indenture
Nineteenth-century indenture had a rocky start. Alarmed by the Haitian Revolution, during which enslaved Africans emancipated themselves from French rule, the British Colonial Office in 1803 sent a secret memo from Trinidad to the East India Trading Company.15 The office worried that the colony’s own enslaved Africans would likewise revolt, so the memo proposed a solution: “[N]o measure would so effectually tend to provide a security against this danger, as that of introducing a free race of cultivators into our islands, who, from habits and feelings would be kept distinct from the Negroes, and who from interest would be inseparably attached to the European proprietors.”16 The office had in mind Chinese indentured laborers, almost 200 of whom were ultimately obtained from Macao, Malaya, and India in 1806.17 This scheme, however, largely failed when, within three years, all but twenty-two of the recruits had departed on British ships.18 The experiment in indentured labor would lie mostly dormant until 1834, but the seed was planted.
Just as emancipated Haitians troubled British Trinidad in 1803, so too did emancipation give planters in British Mauritius anxiety three decades later. They worried that following abolition, emancipated Africans would either stop working on their plantations or demand a higher wage.19 In addition to exploiting the apprenticeship system,20 planters in Mauritius arranged for thirty-nine indentured Indians to be delivered on August 1, 1834, or the day the British Slavery Abolition Act took effect.21 Within the next five years, the colony would go on to import over 20,000 indentured Indians.22 As with the Chinese workers in Trinidad, Indians were used as a racial buffer to lower wages and model docile employment.23 To support this experiment, the colony of Mauritius introduced to nineteenth-century indenture an innovation: state regulation.24 No longer would indenture be organized only by private contracts.25
With the ordinances, Mauritius introduced two kinds of indenture regulation. The first kind, justified in its preamble by an appeal to the “maintenance of good order” following the abolition of slavery, aimed to control workers in a variety of ways, including a vagrancy clause that penalized unemployment with forced labor or imprisonment, a clause that automatically renewed indenture contracts, and a clause that punished labor organizing with six months of hard labor.26 The second kind regulated the introduction of indentured labor, requiring the state to control recruitment in India, the allotment of laborers to plantations, and their labor conditions.27 The dual regulations likely represented a trade — the state would supervise the indenture trade to protect the Indian laborer so that the system wouldn’t devolve into slavery, and in return, the planters got labor regulations that tightly controlled the Indian laborer through state law enforcement.
The Mauritius experiment and a privately organized copycat project in British Guiana led by John Gladstone soon came under scrutiny in London.28 In response, imperial officials temporarily halted indenture and ordered several inquiries, each intended to study indenture and recommend a corrective course of action.29 An India inquiry was called to study allegations of fraud and deceit in the recruitment of indentured workers; another set of inquiries in Mauritius and British Guiana began studying their labor conditions.30
Professor Radhika Mongia’s analysis of these inquiries calls for close attention to their form and substance. Understood this way, the inquiries fashioned not just a knowledge regime on indenture — that which was understood to be true at the time about this practice — but also a set of methods for producing that knowledge as impartial or objective, thus making inquiries and their recommendations all the more credible.31 So, when these and later inquiries inevitably found indenture to be fit to continue (with reforms), those conclusions were to be trusted.32
Inquiries demonstrated how colonial officials should arrive at those conclusions by determining what evidence should be used. For example, even though inquiries were organized to investigate abuses against Indians, those same Indians were not considered reliable informants because they were deemed ignorant, exaggerating, and deceitful.33 The exception was that colonial officials could trust indentured Indians who were asked about their labor conditions in the presence of their plantation overseers.34 In those instances, inquiry officials determined that indentured Indians were unlike the recently enslaved African apprentices, who might sugarcoat their accounts to please an oppressive employer.35 Crucial to this determination was the expertise that the inquiry officials claimed to bring to their survey subject.
Managing dissent was a core part of the inquiry practice. These early inquiries concluded, in one case, with an even split between three committee members wanting to continue indenture and three members calling for its end, and in another case, with a scathing critique by one of the members over the information-gathering practices of the committee.36 But rather than crippling these inquiries, this dissent was channeled back into the process to make its conclusions appear even more credible.37 So, these early inquiry commissions were not less credible because of their dissenting opinions, but instead more credible because they had considered those dissents, and because the dissenters largely shared the same assumptions as their majority counterparts.38 As a result, the exchange of claims and counterclaims allowed imperial bureaucrats to fashion what Mongia calls an “arithmetic median” of objective truth.39 Likewise, several other inquiries would be ordered and conducted in the following decades, and, in each case, the initial scandals and criticisms that gave rise to indenture would be incorporated into the bureaucratic process, considered, and ultimately regurgitated into a report that allowed indenture to continue, refreshed by an impartial and objective evaluation.40
Shortly after the Mauritius inquiry reported its findings, the Empire restarted indenture by executive order in 1842.41 By 1844, this permission extended to British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica.42 Over time, such authorizations would stretch across four continents and more than twenty colonies.43 Who ultimately left India for indenture turned on several factors, such as recruitment practices, intercontinental migration, colonial policy, economic hardship, and plantation prejudices.44 In general, approximately two-thirds of indenture recruits came from North India, while the majority of the remaining one-third came from South India.45
B. The Indenture Colony that Almost Wasn’t
Even as Fiji would play an outsized role in the abolition of indenture, it was not at first a likely candidate for extending indenture, nor was it even intended to be a British colony. As it turned out, the specter of slavery would justify both annexation and indenture. In this way, even as a late participant in indenture, Fiji marks a continuity in how colonial officials justified indenture by reference to racial management.
Fiji is an archipelago of 332 islands in the South Pacific, together totaling a square footage roughly the size of New Jersey.46 While archaeological evidence from the island group shows human settlement and the development of an indigenous population reaching back to around 1500 BC, it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that a British explorer, Captain James Cook, saw Fiji.47 Then, between the early and mid-1800s, European settlers began setting up missionary activities and trading posts.48
Though King Cakobau, whom outsiders had recognized as the indigenous ruler of Fiji, had attempted to cede his kingdom to Britain following American aggressions in 1858, it wasn’t until 1874 that Britain took up the offer.49 In those last years, Londoners read accounts of native South Sea islanders being kidnapped and enslaved for Anglo-American settlers’ cotton plantations, a practice known as blackbirding.50 In 1871, one planter recounted with fondness robbing and killing native Fijians.51 Two years later, the settler-run Fiji Times printed the following:
[Cakobau] feels the power of the white race, and must bow to it. Already the Anglo-Saxon has firmly planted his foot here, and so certainly must he remain. The whites can do without the natives, but Fiji can never again be free of the white man. Her destiny is sealed, and as sure as the American Indians, the New Zealanders, and Australians have had to give way to the superior race, so surely must the Fijian. . . . Fiji must now become the home of a white race, its original inhabitants are no doubt doomed.52
Indeed, many white settlers refused to be governed by Cakobau.53 Those settlers organized a mutual protection society that would intervene to protect white men threatened by arrest at the hands of the native government.54 One name given to the settlers’ mutual protection society was the Ku Klux Klan55––a group whose original chapter was founded just seven years prior, more than 7,000 miles away in Tennessee.56 In what might explain this choice of branding, one of the more notable members of the Fiji KKK was Confederate veteran James Toutant Proctor,57 nephew of the noted Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard.58
One reason why Proctor found a welcoming home in the planter community was that Confederate propaganda and American racial ideology had already taken hold on the island. The Fiji Times frequently ran stories on Reconstruction America to discredit native Fijians’ fitness for governance.59 In a thinly veiled analogy to the native Fijian government recognized by Britain, the paper decried the ascendance of Black Americans to Congress.60 One historian describes a Fiji Times report from 1873 –– a detailed story on a KKK attack in South Carolina –– “as if it were an instruction manual and/or device to bolster morale in the South Seas.”61 A British official in Fiji would later reflect on this context that he “had learnt by experience how many Europeans hold in practice to the principle announced in the celebrated Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that the coloured man ‘has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.’”62 With Fiji home to many like Proctor and the KKK, Britain’s leadership reluctantly came to see their choice as between annexation and permitting slavery or outright genocide.
Indenture followed a similar path. Because colonies in the Caribbean and Mauritius constituted the center of gravity for British indenture, Fiji was an unlikely choice for extending the indenture system.63 Indeed, private individuals and consular officials in Fiji were denied indentured Indians three times before the British Empire annexed the island in 1874.64 Although Fiji would not gain approval to import indentured Indians until 1878, its Governor General Arthur Gordon put into motion plans to solicit Indian labor at least as early as January 1875, when he used meetings in London with the India Office to test the waters for imperial sanction.65
Gordon was intimately familiar with the workings of Indian indenture. Prior to his station in Fiji, he served as the Governor General of two indenture colonies, Trinidad and Mauritius.66 While Gordon would observe that indenture in Mauritius was broken beyond reform, Fiji appealed to him as an opportunity to build a system from the ground up, a chance to make his mark.67 But Gordon could not immediately request Indian labor. Another system of labor, a quasi-indenture scheme transporting local Pacific Islanders to and from Fiji, predated his arrival.68 Within a few years, however, that indenture scheme fell apart due to colonial mismanagement by planters and Gordon’s government.69
By 1877, Gordon was asking if the colony could supplement its labor, perhaps even replace it wholesale, by introducing indentured laborers from the “superabundant population of India.”70 Knowing fully that London might object to another extension of Indian indenture, and the most distant such installation of it to date, he presented Indian indenture as the lesser of two evils. “I must confess,” Gordon wrote, that “it will be very difficult long to withstand the pressure . . . to consent to measures intended to coerce the native population of this Colony into an involuntary servitude, or at all events to wink at practices not consistent with fair dealing.”71 The message was clear: allow Indian indenture or risk slavery reemerging in Fiji under the watchful eye of the British Empire. So, even though the Empire had thrice denied such a request, this time it was asked to reckon, once more, with the chance of native enslavement or extinction. Gordon’s request was approved.72
II. Ordinance No. VI of 1878
When London gave Gordon the green light, the next step was for Fiji to secure approval from the government of India. This Part will first describe that approval process. Then, it will catalog the main points of negotiation between the governments of India and Fiji over Ordinance No. VI of 1878, the law that first authorized Indian indenture to Fiji. The final section of this Part explores the consequences of this law.
A. Section 24 Notification
Bringing indentured Indians to a new colony required navigating an interimperial bureaucracy of global proportions. To start, the Governor General of an interested British colony would send a request to the London-based Colonial Office, as Arthur Gordon did. At this point, the Colonial Office could veto the request and end the process there, as the Office did several times prior to Gordon’s bid. But if the Office approved the request, the colony would next have to negotiate with the government of India. In that negotiation, the colony would share its proposed indenture ordinance and seek input.
The prize for successfully negotiating with the government of India was receiving its section 24 notification. Codified in the Indian Emigration Act of 1871,73 which framed the subcontinent’s indenture policy, section 24 allowed the government of India to authorize indenture immigration to a new colony upon certification that the colony had “made such laws and other provisions . . . sufficient for the protection of Natives of India emigrating to such place.”74 In other words, if the government of India was satisfied with the colony’s proposed indenture ordinance and labor conditions, it would signal to the Colonial Office that indenture could proceed there.
The requirement for this sort of approval can be traced back to the earliest attempt at Indian indenture regulation in Mauritius. Before lifting the ban on indenture there in 1842, the government of India first required reforms to the colony’s indenture ordinances.75 The notification requirement appeared in legislation in an 1855 law passed by the government of India that provided for indenture immigration to St. Lucia and Grenada.76 Later, this language was incorporated into Act XIII of 1864, within which the government of India consolidated prior indenture laws and practices.77 When Act XIII of 1864 was updated in 1871, this clause was renumbered to section 24.78
That the government of India could even authorize migration to another colony was itself a legal innovation that predates the modern conception of immigration regulation. Where modern laws restrict free movement between nations, section 24 notification imposed conditions on what was otherwise free movement within the empire.79 To rebut charges that such regulations therefore lacked legal validity, indenture bureaucrats argued in the early nineteenth century that regulations were necessary to protect Indians from their own ignorance or deception by recruiters.80
But section 24 notification was not a total grant of power. The government of England and the Colonial Office still exercised authority over the government of India. Indeed, at several points in the arc of indenture, the British Empire preempted indenture or strongly encouraged the government of India to resume or allow indenture.81 And contrary to the language of section 24, the government of India did not in practice walk away from indenture negotiations if it was dissatisfied with the colony’s proposed law. Rather, the government of India consistently made concessions to the colonies.82
Where the section 24 process did not effectively operate to prevent or address indenture abuses, it did play an important role in maintaining the legitimacy of the indenture system in a liberal empire. In this way, the section 24 process resembled the inquiry commission. Several themes from that analysis reemerge here. First, the multistep approval of indenture in new colonies represented another arithmetic median of colonial bureaucracy. Indeed, section 24 was designed so that each government represented a different interest: India was to withhold approval unless it believed the indenture scheme would be sufficient for Indians;83 the colony usually advocated on behalf of planters; and the Colonial Office was supposed to balance the interests of the Empire. Section 24 approval also digested conflicting priorities, dissent, and disagreement so that the resulting decision would appear impartial and considered in the model of liberal governance. In addition, the process was filled with claims to expertise by colonial bureaucrats working to persuade one another. Each theme appeared in the negotiation between the colony of Fiji and the government of India.
B. The Negotiation
The negotiations over Ordinance No. VI largely took place between Charles Mitchell, Fiji’s Agent General for Immigration, and George Henry Maxwell Batten, the Officiating Secretary to the government of India. Each bureaucrat came to occupy positions of relative importance in the imperial civil service by way of patronage. Mitchell was picked to oversee reforms in Trinidad as a stipendiary magistrate in 1867, served on an inquiry commission in British Guiana in 1871, and, before arriving to Fiji, served as an unofficial member of the Mauritius inquiry commission.84 Each time, he was appointed or recommended by Arthur Gordon, who happened to be the Governor General under scrutiny in Trinidad and Mauritius.85 Likewise, Batten seemingly catapulted to Private Secretary to the Viceroy of India from his role as Secretary to the Department of Revenue and Agriculture.86
1. Illusory Improvements. — In an attempt to curry favor with Batten, Mitchell led with both his expertise in indenture and the claim that Fiji’s proposed law would be an improvement on the norm. These points came in response to Batten’s request that Fiji just “adopt generally the provisions of the British Guiana Immigration Ordinance of 1873.”87 That Caribbean colony had not only administered indenture for decades but also was the target of a recent inquiry commission.88 With the understanding that British Guiana had just recently scrutinized and reformed its indenture scheme, Batten asked Mitchell to copy what was likely considered to be the standard bearer of progressive indenture policy.89 Mitchell no doubt knew this — he was one of the three members of that very inquiry.90
So Mitchell recounted his seven years as an official in Trinidad and his more recent service on the British Guiana inquiry, adding, “on whose report the Immigration Ordinance of 1873 was based.”91 Where the law differed, Mitchell presented those departures as improvements on the West Indian model. He therefore proposed to depart from the livret policy used by British Guiana, a system where each worker maintained a personal record book accounting for wages accumulated during indenture.92 Mitchell critiqued the system as an impracticable method for preventing unfair extensions of the indenture term.93 Instead, the draft ordinance would require magistrates to approve extensions, like they did in Trinidad.94 Next, the government of Fiji would dispense with the vagrancy clauses abused in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Mauritius.95 It instead proposed that employers had to be sure of an immigrant’s identity before arresting her, and it would prohibit arrests by police who lacked a warrant.96 Last, Mitchell proposed to consider in the future a scheme by which immigrants could renounce their right to a free return passage in exchange for a land grant or cash bounty.97
But improvements these were not. The livret had not been used primarily to prevent unfair extensions of indenture but rather to prevent wage theft by planters.98 And contrary to Mitchell’s representation, both the draft ordinance and the final ordinance allowed police officers to arrest immigrants without a warrant — the law was in fact identical to the system abused in the West Indies.99 Last, the return passages promise could not offer land grants to Indian tenants, as the Fiji government by then had severely restricted the alienation of land held by native Fijians.100 Whether India spotted these inconsistencies is unclear. Regardless, India went along with Mitchell’s characterizations.101
2. Punishments. — Even if Batten declined to scrutinize carefully the draft’s illusory improvements, he did attempt to take Mitchell to task on the law’s austere disciplinary regime. Batten first singled out the draft’s system of double punishments. In the ordinance, an immigrant’s term of indenture could be extended not just for length of desertion, but also for the time spent in prison to punish that desertion.102 For example, if an Indian was convicted of deserting her plantation for two weeks, and for that violation was required to serve a two-week prison term, her indenture could be extended for four weeks. Compare this to British Guiana’s 1873 ordinance, under which indenture could be extended only for the period of time an immigrant deserted her plantation, or for the period she spent in prison as punishment for a crime that was not a violation of the indenture law.103 Using the same example, only a two-week extension would be allowed. Where British Guiana prior to 1873 permitted an extension scheme of the kind Mitchell proposed, Batten explained that the inquiry commissioners denounced that provision as excessive punishment.104
Realizing that Batten was again invoking the British Guiana inquiry to corner him, Mitchell wrote: “[I]t may appear strange that . . . I have not strictly adhered to the recommendation of the Commissioners.”105 He explained his change of heart — it would be unfair to planters to lose labor as their “incorrigible” laborer served time in prison.106 “Discipline must be maintained,” he continued, “and an example must now and again be made of some constant offender even on the best regulated plantations.”107 To tailor the law for these repeat offenders, Mitchell revised the draft by adding a provision granting the magistrate discretion to determine the punishment for desertion.108 So too did he alter the extension clause, cabining double-punishment extensions to only desertions109 and the catchall labor penalty, which allowed the planter to punish his laborer for failing “to show ordinary diligence” on the job.110 Batten persisted to argue that employers just as often abused the law as they turned to it for proper recourse,111 but he ultimately dropped the matter.112
In addition to the double-punishment system, Batten demonstrated that several of the proposed penalties and fines for labor violations far exceeded those used in British Guiana.113 One of these fines, the cost of replacing a certificate attesting that an immigrant had completed her term of indenture (without which she could not leave the plantation) was greater than what she could earn for forty days of work.114 In British Guiana, the equivalent fine charged one day’s wages.115 By effectively frustrating a post-indenture immigrant’s effort to move about the country, the government of India said, Fiji’s proposed fine “savours of the repressive legislation against so-called ‘vagrancy’ till recently in force in Mauritius.”116
Answering Batten’s disapproval, Mitchell first attempted to defer the matter, replying that the colony would have several years to set a policy on this issue, as it would operate only when the first batch of future laborers would complete their five-year term of indenture.117 Following up a few days later, Mitchell added that Fiji had already proposed to do away with vagrancy laws, so planters needed some kind of assurance that their investment in a system of bound labor would be secure.118 Batten again relented and allowed Fiji to keep the high charge for duplicate certificates, but only if Fiji included an exception in the case of immigrants who could offer bona fide proof that their certificates were without fault lost or destroyed, in which case the cost of replacement would be reduced to one shilling in conformity with British Guiana’s fine.119 Although Fiji promised to amend the law shortly after ratification, it would take the colony thirteen years to address the issue.120
Beyond the surcharge on duplicate certificates, Batten cited three other clauses containing comparatively harsh punishments for indentured laborers. The first punished indentured laborers for the nuisance of keeping an unseemly dwelling space; the second, for disorderly behavior in a hospital; and the third, for desertion.121 In general, Fiji’s draft and final ordinances imposed lower fines but higher prison sentences compared to those in the 1873 ordinance in British Guiana.122 And compared to the earlier Polynesian indenture ordinance in Fiji, both fines and prison sentences for Indians were far higher in these later ordinances, with the exception of the second desertion offense under the Polynesian ordinance.123 Of the higher prison sentences, Mitchell again explained that the penalties were designed “to leave a fair margin” to the magistrate setting punishments for repeat offenders, as some would require the full penalty.124 Of the lower fines, Mitchell said that the object was to “encourage the immigrant to pay the fine instead of going to prison.”125 And to repeat offenders in particular, the fine would not be too low, as this class represented “the least respectable or least industrious class of labourers, and will not, in general, be overburdened with their savings.”126 Batten did not protest the lower fines, and by the end of the exchange dropped his recommendations regarding the higher prison sentences.127
3. Plantation Rations. — The last major topic of discussion was a pair of disagreements over plantation rations. The first disagreement concerned ration indebtedness. By this point in the practice of indenture, plantations by law provided to their workers shelter and food, among other necessities, in exchange for a portion of their wages. In the draft ordinance that Mitchell sent to Batten, planters were permitted to issue rolling debts.128 This departed from the practice of British Guiana, where planters could deduct from their laborers’ weekly wages only the cost of rations supplied in that same week.129 By closing the ration account weekly, the immigrant was protected from falling into debt that carried over week to week. In contrast, and as Batten noted, a rolling debt system could quickly produce a “very serious” evil.130
Mitchell did not relent. To him, closing accounts weekly would serve only to harm the “industrious” immigrant.131 His skepticism, he explained, arose from his experience in Trinidad, which had no provision analogous to the one suggested by Batten.132 Batten responded by attacking this explanation as logically unsound and empirically false.133 He parried Mitchell’s description of Trinidad with his own description of the Caribbean island of Nevis, where the average laborer was in debt to the tune of many months’ wages due to the ration debt system Mitchell was proposing.134 While Mitchell would continue to defend his position on the ration debt scheme, he agreed to change the law in the final exchange, subject to the wishes of the Governor of Fiji.135 The Council never approved the amendment. In the end, the ration debt system that Mitchell proposed was final.
The second disagreement concerned the volume of rations provided. Compared to the draft ordinance Mitchell sent, Batten noticed that British Guiana’s ordinance provided more rations to immigrants.136 Mitchell did not want to increase the rice and dal (lentil) ration and offered two justifications for this disparity. First, again, his experience in Trinidad suggested that the lower ration was workable.137 The second rationale came from the government of India itself. Mitchell referenced published colonial correspondence from that year between two Indian bureaucrats, one explaining to the other that the Viceroy was “convinced” by a one-pound rice ration supplemented by dal and foodstuffs.138 Compared to this ration, which provided to Indians in Mysore one pound of rice, one ounce of dal, one-sixth ounce of tamarind, and one-sixth ounce of chili, plus foodstuffs and oil, Fiji would be somewhat more generous.139
This comparison was curious. The Indian ration Mitchell referenced was known as the “Temple wage,” named after Sir Richard Temple, who devised the ration to feed relief workers in famine-stricken Mysore in 1877.140 In Temple’s words, the famine rations were “subordinated . . . to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life.”141 To reach this goal, the rations provided 1,627 calories per day to those completing hard labor in the relief camps.142 Compare this amount to the 1,750 calories provided each day to Nazi concentration camp prisoners in Buchenwald in 1944, or the ration of 3,900 calories for hard labor recommended by modern standards.143 The consequence of the Temple ration was a ninety-four percent annual mortality rate in the Mysore relief camps.144 So bad were conditions there that famished Indians committed felonies for the purpose of being imprisoned, during which they would receive more food.145 By the final round of letters exchanged, Batten dropped the point, and Fiji moved forward with the Temple ration.146
C. The Aftermath
That Batten was unable to gain many meaningful concessions from Mitchell did not hamper Fiji’s chances of gaining section 24 approval. Indeed, even though Batten’s superiors were displeased with the government of Fiji’s stubbornness regarding ration debts and duplicate certificates, neither was so big a problem as to deny the colony indentured laborers. Besides, they reasoned that the colony could be persuaded to amend its laws to conform with India’s expectations.147 So, on August 30, 1878, about a year after Mitchell and Batten were first acquainted, the government of India “duly certified that the Government of Fiji has made such laws and other provisions as the Governor General in Council thinks sufficient for the protection of Natives of India emigrating to that Colony.”148 Fiji gained its section 24 notification.
Let’s pause to consider what changed. Batten asked Mitchell to eliminate double-punishment extensions, to substantially lessen prison sentences, to increase rations amounts, to revise a system of ration debt, and to reduce the cost of duplicate certificates for free Indians. Only one prison sentence was reduced, and it could be accompanied by double-punishment extensions — a system which, for all practical purposes, remained the same. Rations changed on the margins but largely remained at famine levels. And where the government of Fiji promised to consider amendments to its ration debt scheme and duplicate certificates, it would avoid that task for thirteen years. Recall too that several of the law’s positive features were illusions. The government of Fiji allowed police officers to make warrantless arrests, and no livret system would be in place to check wage theft.
With Fiji’s system of indenture now authorized, the British Empire moved forward with recruiting the Indians over whom this regime would govern. In total, the British Empire commissioned eighty-seven voyages trafficking 60,965 Indians to Fiji between 1879 and 1916.149 The geographic and caste makeup of this group is roughly similar to that of the broader indenture population, with South Indians accounting for 23.8% of indenture recruits.150 And as with the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Mauritius, a majority of Indians indentured in Fiji came from Uttar Pradesh.151 Moreover, data gathered from indentured North Indians’ emigration passes show that no one caste or social group accounted for more than 13.4% of the recruited population in Fiji.152 Overall, indentured immigrants from North India represented 265 castes and subcastes.153 Beyond indentured Hindus, 15.1% of Fiji’s North Indian recruits were Muslim, and 0.05%, Christian.154
The consequences of the section 24 negotiations were inscribed on the lives and livelihoods of the indentured Indians trafficked to Fiji. Planters and their overseers deployed these and other policies in Ordinance No. VI to control their workers and maximize their profits. For example, planters prosecuted workers who failed to complete their daily set of tasks, the content of which was left ambiguous in the law but for the requirement in section LXV that Indians complete five-and-a-half tasks weekly.155 Because tasks were measured at the rate of the most productive workers, the average worker struggled to meet the standard.156 Then, when indentured Indians failed to complete tasks, planters would bring actions against them under section LXVIII of the ordinance, which penalized indentured Indians who “fail[ed] to show ordinary diligence in the performance of any work assigned to [them]” with a fine amounting up to three days’ wages or seven days’ imprisonment.157
Using this and other laws,158 planters prosecuted more than seventy percent of indentured Indian men, and nearly thirty percent of indentured Indian women, between 1897 and 1907.159 On some parts of the island, like Labasa in 1895, planters charged ninety-six percent of indentured workers with labor violations.160 And where the conviction rate for such prosecutions hovered around forty percent in other colonies like British Guiana, in Fiji the rate started at nearly eighty percent between 1885–1890 and eventually reached ninety percent between 1906–1909.161 In short, the vast majority of indentured Indians could expect to be punished under the law.
Planters who did not wish to bring legal action before a special magistrate could instead dock a laborer’s wages under a theory of contract breach. Even though the text of Ordinance No. VI did not at first permit this deprivation, a legal opinion issued by the Attorney General of Fiji soon ratified the planters’ practice.162 In the Attorney General’s view, the penalty could be harsh:
It may be stated as a general legal proposition that if a person engages to perform a given task or a piece of work for a given wage and fails to perform such a task he forfeits all claim to the wage: for the performance of the task is the condition precedent to the payment of the wage.163
Ultimately, the combination of wage fixing, overwork, and legal action deprived Indians of a large part of their pay. By 1897, nearly eighty percent of men earned eight pence, or one-third of the daily minimum wage, while more than sixty percent of women earned five pence.164 Those off the ration system found it difficult to afford the cost of food too, and, without proper nutrition, they were more likely to grow sick and take absences, which further limited their ability to earn a wage.165
The effects of this regime were apparent in public health outcomes, which far eclipsed conditions for indentured Indians elsewhere. The suicide rate, for example, reached 80 per 100,000 Indo-Fijians in the early 1900s.166 To compare, this figure was eight times higher than Indian suicides recorded in British Guiana, twice as high as those recorded in Trinidad and Jamaica, and sixteen times as high as those recorded in Madras and the United Provinces.167
These figures contrast sharply with the praise given to Ordinance No. VI by contemporary colonial officials, as well as later historians. When the Colonial Office reviewed the legislation for final approval, for example, it believed the law to be mostly the same as the ones in force in British Guiana and Trinidad; where Fiji departed, the Office believed Fiji to do so to the benefit of the worker.168 Decades later, an inquiry commission organized to study indenture conditions reported that because Fiji came relatively late to indenture, it could “profit by the experience of other colonies” and “avoid the abuses connected with the earlier attempts to introduce indentured labour from India.”169 A prominent history of indenture in Fiji recounted:
No objections were raised by the Government of India to the extension of the system of indentured labour to Fiji now that it had become a British Colony. Mitchell submitted a draft Ordinance which was modelled on those of Trinidad and British Guiana. The changes were generally in favour of the immigrant rather than the employer; the few outstanding differences of opinion concerned minor matters only.170
Later historians have repeated this conclusion.171
There are a few explanations for the apparent discrepancy. One is that neither colonial officials nor historians sufficiently scrutinized the claims being advanced by Fiji, and so let Mitchell’s puffery become the account of the law. This explanation would fit with some trends in the contemporary reception and historiography of indenture. Professor Madhavi Kale has demonstrated how both served as agents of empire by failing to question the fraudulent rationales offered by early proponents of indenture.172 Another explanation is that section 24 approval was easy to obtain, and indeed the government of India itself may not have believed that it had much leeway to withhold that approval from colonies already given permission from London.173
The explanation advanced by the foregoing analysis, though, is that the section 24 process, like inquiry commissions, served an important role in digesting dissent and disagreement into an impartial, considered, and, above all, legitimate law. In other words, even though Batten failed to win meaningful changes for the benefit of Indians, what mattered was that he participated in the approval process and that his concerns had been considered.
III. From Indenture to Abolition
With dissent so effectively managed, the movement to abolish indenture faced tall obstacles. This Part narrates that struggle. After first reviewing why traditional channels of dissent were often ineffective, the latter two sections describe how locally rooted resistance to indenture ignited a mass movement that bypassed the traditional channels for dissent.
A. The Limits of Traditional Dissent
Options were few for those struggling to abolish indenture between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. For the most part, dissent was either digested by well-worn processes like inquiries or legislation or rendered irrelevant by those in power. The knowledge regime of indenture held a monopoly on criticism.
The Sanderson Committee, an inquiry that Britain commissioned in 1910 to determine whether India should extend indenture to additional colonies,174 demonstrates that inquiries late in the arc of indenture successfully quashed indenture criticism. In determining that indenture should be extended to additional colonies,175 the Committee relied on interviews with eighty-three witnesses,176 only three of whom were non-European, and of whom none had ever been indentured.177 One of the non-European witnesses, Alfred Richards, the Afro-Caribbean head of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association, did actually object to the extension of Indian indenture because it depressed free market wages, cost colonies too much in outlays, and led to the abuse of indentured Indians on plantations.178 Upon hearing these critiques, the committee of interviewers harassed Richards for wasting their time and funds and dismissed his comments as inconsistent.179
Richards’s experience lends context to how the Sanderson Committee Report massaged its observations and reached its conclusions. Conceding that the rate of labor prosecutions in Fiji was “considerably higher than it should be,” the report nonetheless concluded that “persons prosecuted are as a rule unsatisfactory workmen, unaccustomed or disinclined to regular agricultural labour.”180 So, allowing for some “room for improvement,” the report found “no reason to doubt that the indentured labourers are, as a whole, fairly and justly treated in all material respects.”181 Even though the report itself was an inquiry into the colony’s indenture conditions, it called for yet another inquiry to grapple with the issue of prosecutions.182
Nor could those interested in reform or abolition place much hope in Britain’s antislavery societies. True, these societies helped champion the emancipation of enslaved Africans a century prior and raised alarm about indenture when it first began in the 1830s.183 Over time, though, groups like the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines’ Protection Society lost their hold over British public sentiment. While such groups continued to publish pamphlets railing against the horrors of indenture, by the mid-nineteenth century their advocacy went unheeded by the British public.184
Elite Indians also failed to be a powerful voice of dissent, at least on their own. Several prominent members of the Indian National Congress, for example, supported Indian indenture late into the nineteenth century, characterizing it as a path of economic advancement for Indians.185 It wasn’t until the Congress’s 1902 and 1903 sessions that indenture was condemned for the first time, and even then the focus of those meetings was on free Indians in indenture colonies.186 When the Congress in 1905 finally passed a resolution asking the government of India and the British Empire to end the indenture trade, its request fell on deaf ears.187 And while rising figures like Mahatma Gandhi would build their reputations on the issue of indenture, several historians have carefully documented that mass mobilizations to end indenture were not started by Gandhi but actually predated his campaigns.188
Among the problems dissenters faced in inquiries, legislative processes, British antislavery societies, and elite Indian political mobilizations was the fact that these channels were attempting to speak for oppressed third parties.189 In this sense, what was innovative about the turning point that led to indenture’s abolition was that it joined local resistance in the colonies to mass resistance among those still at risk of dispossession back in India. To reach that turning point, we return to Fiji.
B. The Girmitiya & Local Resistance
Indentured Indians resisted their labor and living conditions almost as soon as they reached the island.190 A key part of this resistance was fashioning an identity. In the first decade of resisting indenture in Fiji, indentured Indians began calling themselves girmitiyas, a term vernacularized from the English word for the indenture contract; the “agreement” became the “girmit,” and its subject, the girmitiya.191 Thus, to call themselves girmitiyas was literally to say that they were people of the agreement, or people of the indenture contract.
In this way, the term helped indentured Indians fashion a counter-authority on the nature of indenture. Since the inquiry and its related bureaucratic forms, like the section 24 approval process, were powerful because they could speak authoritatively for the state of indenture, and indeed, on behalf of the indentured worker, it was no small feat that the girmitiya identity connected the indenture agreement directly to the lived experience of indentured workers.192 Prior to this innovation, that connection was more remote. In other words, it was the sum total of colonial bureaucracy, plantation management, and the large volume of official records and reports that constituted the meaning of indenture. In the colonial production of truth, then, the Indian’s experience was filtered through people and processes, digested much like dissent. To step into an identity directly connected to indenture forged a tighter connection between the laborer’s lived experience and their status in empire. The act of calling oneself a girmitiya was an effort to speak for oneself.
In addition to reasserting the authority to describe one’s own conditions under indenture, the girmitiya identity helped facilitate group consciousness, or solidarity.193 To be clear, the fact that indenture recruits all came from India was not, in itself, a reason to band together. Not only was India (as it is today) a site of rich diversity across religion, gender, language, custom, caste, geography, color, wealth, and more, but also planters attempted to alienate and dominate indentured Indians on the basis of these differences.194 A term that identified both a common struggle and a common enemy was thus strategically useful as a predicate to organizing collective resistance.
And organize resistance they did. After worker unrest in 1881, a strike in 1882, and an attack on a plantation overseer in 1885, tensions reached a flash point in 1886, by which point 8,853 labor indictments were brought against a population of 5,237 indentured immigrants.195 In protest of the overtasking that preceded these charges and the lack of sufficient rations to feed them, 300 girmitiyas on the Navuso and Koronivia plantations went on strike.196 In 1887 a group of 130 girmitiyas led a protest to the home of the colony’s Agent General for Immigration, the official charged with protecting immigrant workers.197 The Agent General, upon showing support to the girmitiyas, was swiftly relieved of his office.198 Smaller protests continued, eventually reaching Fiji’s other big island, Vanua Levu, where in 1895 forty girmitiyas armed with knives and hoes protested their task assignments.199
When the high conviction rate for indentured laborers resulted in heavy fines, girmitiyas organized a mutual aid fund, or a pool that workers paid into so that their fines would be covered when they were inevitably indicted by their employers.200 Girmitiyas who completed their five-year indenture term even organized a kind of underground railroad that harbored deserting indentured workers in Suva.201
The girmitiya identity also facilitated interreligious solidarity. First-person accounts of indentured Indians describe Muslims attending Hindu kathas, Hindus celebrating Eid with Muslim peers, Muslims at Diwali festivals, Hindus at Tazia, and so on.202 One reading of a combined Holi-Tazia festival suggests that Hindus and Muslims deployed religious symbolism to critique plantation abuse.203
Girmitiya women, who protested the same plantation abuses as men, also resisted additional forms of sexual violence and sex-based subordination.204 This resistance challenged their repression not just on the plantation from overseers, but also in their homes, where they often faced violence and bore a heavier burden of domestic labor.205 In several instances, women protected each other by intervening in gangs when a plantation overseer threatened to rape an indentured woman.206 By 1920, women would lead a major labor strike in Fiji, protesting that Indians could not obtain enough food to survive.207
While large-scale protests were not frequent, the history of Fiji between 1881 and 1920 was marked by an unrelenting series of agitations on and off plantations. When girmitiyas resorted to violence against their overseers, the attacks were often in broad daylight, and in a manner that maimed overseers to prevent them from inflicting further harm on the workers.208 More common were efforts to withhold labor through absenteeism and desertion.209 Some girmitiyas also sabotaged planters by trampling cane crop, throwing farming equipment into the river, setting fire to property, damaging plantation machinery, or dropping iron onto train tracks during the night.210
But building a girmit counternarrative and mounting local resistance were not enough to abolish indenture in Fiji, to say nothing of the global system. Even though indentured laborers in Fiji outnumbered their employers and the government, it was difficult for indentured laborers to build power because colonial officials in Fiji responded aggressively to resistance, using Ordinance No. VI to squelch organized protest.211 However, even if local resistance could not reasonably be expected to end indenture, it did play an important role in drawing attention to immediate problems. And it played a role in fueling a mass politics of abolition.
C. From Local Resistance to Mass Politics
A remarkable indicator of the power of the indenture abolition movement can be seen in the difference between two inquiry commissions: the Sanderson Committee Report of 1910 and the McNeill-Lal Report of 1915. Commissioned by the government of India in 1912, the latter task force traveled to several indenture colonies for the purpose of producing a report and a set of recommended reforms that would once again redeem Indian indenture from charges of abuse.212 Following past practices of designing inquiry commissions to embody an arithmetic median, the government of India sought an Englishman and an Indian to cochair the commission, though in private officials described the latter as an “Indian companion or junior.”213 The commission found its cochairs in the Irishman James McNeill and Lala Chimman Lal, the nephew of a wealthy Indian lobbyist.214
The task force followed the playbook of the Sanderson Committee and other inquiries. McNeill and Lal started by contacting each colonial government and its immigration department, gathering from them statistical data and arranging tours.215 Before McNeill and Lal arrived, the selected plantations received advance notice, which allowed them to prepare their overseers and workers for the commission’s interviews.216 Thus, where these reports did acknowledge worker abuse, it is likely that such observations were the sanitized version of true conditions. Ultimately, and, like the Sanderson Committee, which also reported damning statistics on suicide, the McNeill-Lal Report concluded that indenture’s “advantages have far outweighed its disadvantages.”217
Readers in India had none of it. Indian National Congress member Srinavasa Shastri characterized the McNeill-Lal findings this way in 1915: “[L]ike most reports it contains a certain proportion of facts . . . [and] some statistics but the greatest ingredient you will observe in its composition is that commodity known as ‘white-wash.’”218 He urged the Congress that it could not “believe in this report or in its conclusions.”219 The Anglo-Indian press likewise trashed the report, with one reader defying “anyone to read this report without a sense of bewilderment.”220 Its poor reception was soon translated into local newspapers, angering the masses and their local officials.221
The transformation from the Sanderson Committee Report and the McNeill-Lal Report was not overnight. The mass politics of anti-indenture leagues throughout India was carefully cultivated with what might be recognized today as viral media.222 Among the first of these was a sensationalized story from 1913 about an Indo-Fijian girmitiya woman named Kunti, who evaded rape by a European overseer by throwing herself off a cliff.223 Other stories were adapted into plays. For example, a northern India newspaper adapted accounts of indenture abuses from South African protests into two plays, one titled Death Not Dishonour, and the other, A Bleeding Heart.224 In fashioning descriptions of oppression into stories that could be transmuted through traveling performances, the plays were designed to draw the masses in villages into the anti-indenture movement.
The most famous of these plays was the Kuli-Pratha, or The Practice of Recruiting Coolies, written by an Indian nationalist and later banned in 1917 under the 1910 Press Act.225 The play was based on the popular autobiography and speaking tour of Totaram Sanadhya, a girmitiya who returned to India after twenty-one years in Fiji.226 Influenced by the solidarity and collective resistance around him, Sanadhya makes frequent reference in the text of the book to the girmitiya identity.227 The book also reflected his social location. Sanadhya, himself a high-caste Hindu, exploited conservative Hindu politics to indict the indenture system as an indignity to the religious orthodoxy and heteropatriarchy of high-caste Hindus, and, in particular, the sexual purity of Hindu women.228
Kuli-Pratha begins with a prayer seeking the return of honor to Hindus by right of their religious heritage.229 In the next scene, the audience is introduced to the villain of the play, an Indian emigration agent named Brij Lal, who is shown to be a close associate of the British government.230 Recruiters then come onto the stage and describe to Lal their methods of deceiving villagers into signing indenture contracts.231 The protagonists of the play include two villagers tricked into indenture, a woman by the name of Kunti, and a man, Bhola.232 The symbolism is laid on thick, as the recruiters persuade Kunti and Bhola to immigrate to Fiji for the purpose of building a temple to the light-skinned god Gaurang.233 Then, in a nod to interreligious solidarity, one of the play’s other heroes is the Muslim Abbas, who, with Kunti and Bhola, braves a series of trials before Bhola is beaten to death and the child of Kunti and Bhola is killed by a planter’s dog.234 The play ends with Kunti and Abbas returning to India as friends.235
In addition to developing the laborer plotline, the play satirizes the government of India in a clear allusion to the McNeill-Lal Commission. The government is shown sending a commission to study the abuses of indenture, one member of which is an Indian who is frequently disrespected — in one scene the Indian commissioner must stand because a dog has taken his seat.236 While the commissioners (and the audience) observe on stage the many abuses of indenture, the Indian and British stand-ins for McNeill and Lal conclude that indenture is fair and just.237 Likewise criticized are moderate Indian politicians, who are seen as accomplices to the British abuses.238
Like the term girmitiya and the local resistance it facilitated, works like Sanadhya’s autobiography and Kuli-Pratha rebutted the colonial account of indenture and deflated the authority of colonial bureaucrats. In both cases, the audience was led, scene by scene, to understand how indenture purported to work as a system of free labor, the mechanics of its legal architecture in India and in the indenture colonies, and how it was propped up by colonial bureaucrats’ justifications. The moral of these stories was clear: audience members must take it upon themselves to end indenture.239
The works communicated this message by turning against itself the design of indenture, which rested on the contract law principle of mutual assent. Moved by these plays, Indians organized anti-indenture leagues and “cooly-protection societies,” which demanded that recruiting depots release those who had been signed to indenture contracts on the basis that they had been misinformed about the contract.240 Other agitators sought to get themselves recruited so that they could lead an uprising inside the depots with other recruits.241 They printed pamphlets to explain the conditions of indenture to those most likely to be recruited, so that they would be dissuaded before recruiters could induce them.242 One of these pamphlets, titled “ESCAPE FROM DECEIVERS,” made clear what conditions were like under the indenture contract: “It is not service. It is woe. Do not fall into their snare. They will ruin you. . . . [The indenture colonies] are not islands; they are Hell.”243 At every juncture, then, a mass movement combined with elite agitation to frustrate the machinery of indenture.244 By 1917, indenture recruitment was banned in India,245 and by 1920, no existing indenture contracts were valid.246 Indenture had been abolished.
In the span of a few years, Kunti’s narrative, Kuli-Pratha, and the actions of cooly-protection societies subordinated the dominant truth discourse of the imperial indenture bureaucracy. They did so by joining local resistance and stories of local resistance to the virality of the growing vernacular press in India, which printed news and media for the consumption of the masses. Thus, what changed between the Sanderson Committee Report and the McNeill-Lal Report was the audience and the way it consumed content about indenture. Where colonial officials and some exasperated British abolitionists made up the primary audience for indenture inquiry commissions prior to 1915, after this period the reports were scrutinized by Indian nationalists, Indians across the subcontinent, and indentured laborers themselves, who were at the same time producing and distributing en masse a counternarrative on the lived realities of indenture in places like Fiji. In short, a medium designed for an elite European audience ran headlong into a mass politics.
Conclusion
Writing of British Guiana in 1871, an Englishman observed that “the Coolie is nil; he has no voice, nor the shadow of a voice.”247 This characterization was apt — for most of the arc of indenture, the laborer’s (and her advocates’) options for effective dissent were slim to none. Whether it was one of the many inquiry commissions or section 24 approvals for introducing indentured workers, the colonial bureaucracy controlled the legitimacy of the system, transforming dissent and resistance into markers of impartial, objective policymaking. As a result, the abolition of this system might have seemed unthinkable throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Visioning the unthinkable, then, required agitating outside the formal channels of dissent. Rather than take a seat at the table where their protests might be digested into institutional credibility, indentured laborers and a mass movement left the proverbial room where it happens to write their own counternarrative on the realities of indenture. For a people that lacked a shadow of a voice, it made all the difference to speak for themselves, and for others to listen.