Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860-1914

504 Pages·2010·10.3 MB·English

by  Ashwin Desai

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Inside Indian
Indenture
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Inside Indian
Indenture
A South African Story, 1860–1914
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
Printed by Creda Communications
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s. Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver
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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 Choodhand 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
a 18 ‘Drawing blood from a stone’ 357
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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,3with their stark date lines of
‘when-born’ and ‘when-died’, into real living people, and to turn the empty pews of the church
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c.z in Kearsney into moments when they were filled with the faithful flipping through Bibles
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ss. marked in Telegu. The stories we uncovered are an incredible slice of history, the impact of
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expressions, the leisure activities, the way power relations played themselves out on the
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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 accompliand the indentured as
a tabula rasaon 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’,6and show how the
erstwhile puppets, the indentured, were in many cases pulling the strings of rebellion.
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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
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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.
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Preface ix
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x INSIDE INDIAN INDENTUREA SOUTH AFRICAN STORY, 1860–1914