In 1981, Dupha Mtshali in conversation with Mbulelo Jili in suburban Durban presented a version of Zulu historical memory of Indian indenture in Natal.Footnote 1 Mtshali’s account encapsulated features of Indian indentured migration, their gradual economic mobility, and labor relations between Africans and Indians. Mtshali argued that British settlers brought Indian indentees to Natal as “no one worked… among the Blacks of this country.” Jili agreed with Mtshali’s claim observing that Africans “had cattle, they lived a leisurely life (bezihlalele, in the Zulu language), they had cultivated fields and were comfortable.” In Mtshali’s view, white settlers used Indians as “slave labourers, indentured labourers (gilimithi).” Mtshali further characterized an indentured worker as a “slave labourer (oyesigqila ngomsebenzi)” who was “enslaved…under a certain master.” He also outlined a distinction between “isibhalo” and “Gilimithi” arguing that “Black contracts were not called ‘gilimithi.’ They were called ‘isibhalo.’” Mtshali differentiated between forced labor extracted from Africans as opposed to indentured contracts based on labor time demanded by white employers in an agrarian cycle. He emphasized that “Blacks worked for six months” while “Indians worked for twelve months and then they finished.” Mtshali argued that majority of the contract expired ex-indentees later stayed in Natal because they found South Africa “to be a rich country.” Highlighting economic mobility of Indians indentees over time, Mtshali observed: “Indians are now masters… Blacks are now living on their farms.”
However, a contemporary Indian South African scholar disagreed with Mtshali and Jili’s memory. Fatima Meer argued that Natal’s industrial agriculture did not face the problem of lack of labor but the lack of abundant cheap labor.Footnote 2 Meer observed that introduction of Indian indentees “weakened the bargaining power of Natal Africans,” “accelerated” African “alienation from their means of production,” and converted them into “a labour reserve.” On the other hand, writing from postapartheid South Africa, scholars have placed the history of Indian indenture in the context of global labor systems. Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai argued that “there was an umbilical link between indenture and slavery where… Indian indenture replaced slavery to address the problem of the so-called labour shortage in the colonies.”Footnote 3 Though the institution of slavery did not shape labor relations between settlers and Africans during early decades of colonization in Natal, Nafisa Essop Sheik argued that “colonial domination over local African and immigrant Indian subjects” should be studied “in terms of emerging nineteenth century post-emancipation context of labor and ‘consent’” as imperial and colonial needs for labor brought them into contact.Footnote 4 Sheik also explained gendered moral economies in Natal to highlight pressures created by independent forms of African production that led to settler calls for labor supply.Footnote 5 Sheik indirectly takes us back to Mtshali and Jili’s conversation encouraging a discussion of Indian indenture in southeastern Africa from an African vantage point.
However, Mtshali and Jili’s late twentieth-century rendition of Indian indenture was far from identical to late nineteenth-century African understandings of Indian working-class presence in Natal. Local histories of colonial Natal centered around political economy and identity politics explain conflicts and competition between Africans and Indians. Citing numerous examples between the 1870s and early 1900s, Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed explored the political economy of land dispossession, a domineering attitude of African police constables and overseers observed on sugar plantations, competition between Africans and Indians in small trade, and the racialized politics of economically affluent passenger Indians who migrated voluntarily to Natal. Bhana and Vahed observed that emergent forms of identity politics among Zulus and Indians since the 1890s reified differences between the two social groups. Discussing Mohandas K. Gandhi’s attempts to keep Indian political struggles separate from Africans, Bhana and Vahed argued that Indians appropriated “racist notions of the ‘kaffir’ other… to stress the difference between them and Africans.”Footnote 6 Complementing this analysis, Heather Hughes alluded to African land crises, attitudes of American missionaries towards Indians, settler policies of favoring Indians over Africans, and the outlook of kholwa (converted Christians) political figures such as John Dube to highlight antagonistic African responses to economically mobile Indian ex-indentees. Hughes argued that access to jobs and land created tensions between Africans and Indians which was not just “the result of familiar ‘divide and rule’ tactics from above” but social groups “down below also had a hand in its creation.”Footnote 7
These historiographical interventions not only problematize Mtshali and Jili’s linear account but also invite inquiries on the complex workings of capital, labor, and race in nineteenth-century Natal. This essay tracks the life processes of capital in Natal vis-à-vis the complex labor relations between African and Indian workers and their white employers to narrate a history of racial formations in the working-class lifeworld. However, instead of tracking an “umbilical link between indenture and slavery,” I explore how local histories of labor extraction in colonial Natal were simultaneously shaped by African indigenous moral economy, settler dependency on labor supply, anxieties over productivity, oceanic migration of Indian indentees, and the systemic violence of labor management. In doing so, I think with Sheik’s argument about the impact of African gendered moral economy on the origin of Indian indenture. However, without overemphasizing the postemancipation legal paradigm of “consent,” I focus on the relationship between settler anxieties over productivity in a weak colonial economy and the violence of managing plantation labor. Moreover, instead of treating the history of racial formations between Africans and Indians through singular moments of competition and conflict between subjugated colonial subjects, I examine social processes shaped by capitalist flows and its impact on the domestic sphere of working-class life. I argue that exploration of the intimate domestic sphere of the working-class lifeworld is useful to mobilize new analytical critiques of violence produced in the wake of cultural assimilation or lack of it.
Moreover, mediating through the relationship between capitalist accumulation and colonial violence, this article presents a history of racial formation in Natal’s working-class lifeworld. Reflecting on everyday surveillance of factory workers, Slavoj Žižek argued that violence takes two forms: first is “symbolic violence embodied in language and its forms” and second is “‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.”Footnote 8 Existing historiography on labor-discipline in colonial Natal explains everyday form of subjective violence used by settlers to discipline African and Indian workers. Drawing on Marxist critiques of restructuring working habits in industrial capitalism, Keletso Atkins explained the racialized culture of disciplining Zulu workers that underscored the colonial difference.Footnote 9 Similarly, historians of Indian indenture highlighted routine use of corporal punishment by white employers since the beginning of the system.Footnote 10 On the other hand, writing on the biopolitical state, Stephen Peté and Annie Devenish analyzed the colonial prison system in Natal. They argued that settler obsession with flogging played a key role in formation of racial identities.Footnote 11 These contributions explain aspects of subjective violence in the wake of colonial biopolitics. But systemic violence of capital’s life processes in plantation economy remains underdiscussed. Ironically, the very systemic violence of capital’s life processes shaped economic mobility of Indian ex-indentees compared to Africans making it a complex process in a racialized labor market. Recognizing this process demands an engagement with the relationship between colonial violence and violent conflicts between Africans and Indians. Therefore, I argue that analytical critiques of violence in the working-class lifeworld of colonial Natal must move beyond writing the biopolitical state to unpack the discursive formations of race from below.
Productivity, Labor Time, and Colonial Labor Management
Framing a critique of the pre-emancipation and postemancipation divide in Indian indenture studies, Richard Allen demonstrated that experiments with Asian migrant labor began two and a half decades before abolition of slavery in the British Empire.Footnote 12 Allen thus dislodged the temporal dichotomy that prompted Hugh Tinker to frame Indian indenture as a “new system of slavery.”Footnote 13 Similarly, Jonathan Connolly bridged the gaps between “African colonial” and “imperial” historiographies to explain causal links between British antislavery rhetoric and the decision to introduce Indian indenture in Natal.Footnote 14 However, these historiographical strides in global labor history miss the significance of a resilient Zulu moral economy leading to the decision of introducing Indian indenture in Southeastern Africa. Therefore, this section of the essay will demonstrate that colonial efforts of labor management in Natal were simultaneously shaped by African moral economy, settler concerns over productivity, and the emergence of a biopolitical regime to insert Indian indentees into the machinery of production.
The report of the 1852–53 Native Affairs Commission in Natal was a testimony of settler frustration with African workers.Footnote 15 The commission argued that while the “want of coloured labour” was “very great,” it was “by no means regular.” Explaining its effects on industrial farming, the commission observed that, “[l]arge portions of crops” were “frequently lost and seriously damaged through want of the labour necessary to secure them.” In the early 1850s, Africans were content with working as servants of white employers for a month or two, but they showed little interest in long-term employment. Faced with shortages of labor, the commission argued that polygamy forced African women to work while it enabled men to “live in idleness.” Moreover, the commission observed that African locations in Natal were unduly large which “operated as a premium on idleness.” They also blamed African chiefs for creating the impression that “labour” was “disgraceful.”Footnote 16 In the 1850s, taxation also failed to force Africans to enter the workforce. Africans were interested in public work such as building roads in lieu of taxes. But officials acknowledged that imposing additional taxes would be counterproductive as the authorities were in no position to “enforce its orders.”Footnote 17 Explaining the situation, Michael Mahoney aptly observed that until the defeat of Cetshwayo’s army in 1879, the indigenous Zulu state was “too strong to love” while the “colonial state was too weak to hate.”Footnote 18
Local histories of colonial Natal explain settler frustrations with African workers in detail. Africans often returned to their kraals after a few months of employment, avoiding long stays in plantations. Atkins explained this in relation to indigenous understandings of time and conflicts that emerged in the shifting context from peasant time to industrial time. Africans calculated time following the lunar cycle of inyanga (the moon) while white employers calculated labor contracts following the Gregorian calendar. Highlighting confusions emerging from disparate notions of time, Atkins observed that “time was at the nexus of the ‘Kafir labor Problem.’”Footnote 19 Moreover, due to superstitions of being attacked by abathakathi (witches/evil doers), Africans avoided night labor hampering the processes of crushing sugarcanes, boiling, and treatment of juice in the mills. Simultaneously, settler demands of ten and a half hours of labor during the harvesting season from June to September was incompatible with Zulu peasants’ daily work cycle.Footnote 20 Industrial schools established in mission stations also did not fulfill the colonial desire for an African artisan class. Norman Etherington underscored three factors behind kholwa disinterest in skilled trades. Firstly, some trades required sitting indoors for long hours, which was contrary to African work habits. Secondly, wage differences between Black and white workers discouraged Africans. Thirdly, African artisans found it difficult “to move from salaried employment to ownership of their workshop.”Footnote 21 Since 1869, the colonial administration intervened in African customary practices of ukulobola (bride wealth) exchanged during marriage, hoping that such meddling with indigenous institutions would force African men to take up wage labor.Footnote 22 However, T. J. Tallie observed that, until the early 1880s, “continued stability of Africans as both a labor force and subject population” created fears in administrative circles of “social disturbances resulting from a hasty government action to quash polygamy or ilobolo.”Footnote 23
Discussions on Indian indenture in Natal emerged against this backdrop. Since the 1830s, Indian indenture was a key feature of British imperial labor policy for its overseas sugar plantations. Rapidly growing demand for sugar in Britain necessitated a steady supply of Indian indentees to Mauritius, Fiji, and the Caribbean.Footnote 24 Madhavi Kale argued that this category of labor was constituted for capitalist and imperial expansion after abolition of slavery in Britain’s plantation colonies.Footnote 25 In the 1850s, settlers in Natal were aware of Indian indentees being employed in Mauritius. In October 1851, a collective of settlers met in Durban to discuss the option of Indian indenture. However, the meeting turned out to be a heated debate. Alfred Evans argued that settlers could not rely on Africans for “permanent and effective” labor supply. Identifying Zulu polygamy as the primary problem, Evans suggested that wages of “coloured labor” from India would be cheaper.Footnote 26 However, Edmund Morewood disagreed. Based on his lived experience of thirteen years in Natal, Morewood claimed that he never encountered the difficulty of labor supply. Morewood advised his peers that, if Africans were treated well, they would offer their services. On the other hand, Marshall Campbell was worried that introduction of foreign labor whether white or Black would severely depress the wages which was undesirable for Natal’s poor economic health. However, Joseph Byrne advised his fellow settlers not to conflate “Malays” with Indian “coolies” as they were two different “races.” Byrne argued that settlers in Natal should not draw conclusions based on the experiences of Cape Malays whom the Dutch allowed to assimilate. Byrne then asked Morewood, if African labor was so reliable then where were his exports produced in the last thirteen years?Footnote 27 At the end of this heated debate, majority of them voted against the motion to introduce Indian indenture. For the next four years, settlers in Natal did not discuss the matter formally.
However, by 1855, the conditions of Natal’s sugar industry were gradually changing. With growing demands for labor, conversations on Indian indenture resurfaced. In April 1855, James Saunders wrote a letter to the editor in Natal Mercury reviewing the existing system of Indian and Chinese indentured migration to Mauritius.Footnote 28 Saunders had spent a few years in Mauritius before arriving in Natal and was familiar with the bureaucratic processes and economic liabilities involved in importing Indian indentees. Outlining a tentative plan, Saunders argued that Natal officials would have to convince officials in India to supply workers. He also reviewed the legal contracts in Mauritius and mentioned that they were usually for a term of three years. As renewal of contracts was not guaranteed, Saunders warned settlers that importing indentees might impose a substantial financial burden. Therefore, he advised to calculate costs before investing in Indian indentees. Saunders concluded his letter expressing his willingness to invest. The Natal Mercury lobbied behind Saunders with an editorial the following week.Footnote 29 The editorial appealed to the Natal Legislative Council to create legal provisions for importing Indian indentees.
Within weeks of the Natal Mercury’s advocacy for Indian indenture, planters in Natal organized a meeting. By then the collective opinion of planters had changed due to growing demands for labor. Planters made an assessment that Natal’s sugar estates needed at least 60,000 laborers working permanently to produce 100,000 tons of sugar annually. In their estimate, Africans could only constitute “30,000 capable male labourers.”Footnote 30 Moreover, planters felt that importing Indian indentees would guarantee a stable labor supply throughout the year. In May 1855, planters met once again in Durban to draft a petition to the Colonial Secretary George Grey whose visit to Natal was forthcoming. They also collected signatures from different sections of settler society to mobilize future legislative processes.Footnote 31 Grey responded positively, establishing communications with the Government of India and British officials in Mauritius.Footnote 32 Meanwhile, the Emigration Commission in London appointed an immigration agent in Natal. By October 1856, the Natal Legislative Council issued an ordinance authorizing importation of Indian indentees.Footnote 33 However, the East Indian Company regime in India and Emigration Commission in London found issues with the Natal administration’s proposal, as it did not specify wage rates and guarantee a free return passage to India after the completion of contracts. Changes in the structure of British administration in India following the Uprising of 1857 also delayed the process. After a series of consultations with the Emigration Commission and the colonial authorities in India, the Natal Legislative Council passed three laws in July 1859.
This legislation can be read as straightforward texts of colonial biopolitics. Settler concern over management of labor time was at the center of the laws. Clause 13 of Law No. 13 stated that indentees would be offered a registration ticket within forty-eight hours of their arrival at the immigration depot. Law 14 suggested that an “Immigration Agent” appointed by the lieutenant governor of Natal would maintain a register after the arrival of indentees. However, ambiguity characterized the definitions of “Immigration Agent” and “Protector of Immigrants.” Legal definition of “Protector of Immigrants” referred to “the Immigration Agent of the colony” or “the Clerk of the Peace of the country or division into which the immigrant” would be “introduced or located.”Footnote 34 Thus, a protector of immigrants/immigration agent was empowered to check the mobility of indentees at each point. Law 14 further laid out instructions on terms of labor contracts. Indentees could initially enter a contract for three years with a person or an estate but the authority to allocate workers would rest with the lieutenant governor. The resident magistrates in each district were assigned with the responsibility to enforce this clause and supervise the signing process of contracts. Upon the expiration of the first contract, indentees would enter another contract for a period between twelve months to two years. If any worker refused to enter the second term of contract after the completion of the first three years of industrial training, the immigration agent reserved the right to assign such workers to the same or another employer.Footnote 35
Moreover, the legal provisions guaranteed a discharge certificate after the completion of a five-year contract. The certificate would allow the immigrants to reside in the colony, change his or her residence, or change employers. But any failure to produce the discharge certificate on the request of an investigating officer would constitute a punishable crime. Additionally, clause 21 of Law No. 13 stated that the Master-Servant Ordinance of 1850 would be applicable to Indian indentees. This law guaranteed impunity to Natal’s white employers for flogging workers.Footnote 36 However, since indentured legislations in Natal were crafted under the shadow of similar legislations in Mauritius and the Caribbean, it guaranteed a free return passage to India after completing ten years of service.Footnote 37 While framing the laws, Natal Legislative Council ensured that Indian indentees would stay in the colony for at least a decade. This legal vision was a direct response to the labor crisis created by Zulu moral economy.
Commenting on the Indian indenture system, Mishal Khan argued that “Indians were a racialized category of labor not because of slavery, but because of the processes set in motion by the particular constellation of labor demands called into being by British abolition.”Footnote 38 Experiences of the first group of indentees who sailed for Natal illustrate this point. In September 1860, a ship named Truro brought 203 adult males, 87 adult females, 21 boys, 19 girls, and 10 infants to Natal. Before the workers boarded Truro, officials in Madras prepared a list of passengers. Officials in Natal also maintained a similar list when workers arrived at Durban port. The ship list carried every detail of indentees. Each migrant was assigned a specific number. The different categories of recorded data included name, surname, age, sex, caste, and the name of home village and district in India. Moreover, the Immigration Agent meticulously recorded the visible identification marks on the body of each migrant. If two or more workers belonged to the same family, their relationships were recorded as “Son of 73,” “Wife of 213,” “Wife 205 and Children of 205,” “Wife of 133 and Cousins of 133,” and so on and so forth.Footnote 39 In the official gaze, familial relationships of workers were mere statistics. Since the power of colonial authorities resided in the management of these laboring bodies, they ensured that all details were carefully recorded. Such management of indentees were indispensable for processes of capitalist accumulation. Natal’s sugar industry would not sustain “without the controlled insertion of these bodies into the machinery of production.”Footnote 40
Systemic Violence and Processes of Accumulation
Recent historiography on Indian indenture celebrates the triumph of liberal legal reforms. Exploring the question of international rights, Rachel Sturman argued that this labor system “occasioned new ideas, among both supporters and opponents, about what constituted a legitimate and humane labor system.”Footnote 41 Similarly, Ashutosh Kumar highlighted narratives of subaltern mobility and bargaining space for workers to explain reforms in Indian Emigration Act 1883.Footnote 42 However, South African plantation literature problematizes the liberal consensus. Following concerns raised by the Coolie Commission of 1872 about abuses of Indian indentees, the Natal Legislative Council passed Law 12 of 1872 creating provisions for the appointment of a protector of immigrants. Goolam Vahed demonstrates that Indian indentees successfully used the protector’s office to address grievances and resist abuses by employers. But Vahed also acknowledged that “vastness of the area under the Protector’s jurisdiction and the enormous power of planters made it difficult” for officials “to balance the needs of workers and employers.”Footnote 43 Similarly, Philip Warhurst and Duncan Du Bois showed that sustained official inquiries carried out by successive protectors against Reynold Brothers failed to produce meaningful outcomes amidst collusion of planters and Natal officials.Footnote 44 But, micro-histories of the protector’s office, despite explaining labor abuses and official efforts to address them, miss out the role of systemic violence in capital’s life processes. Considering this historiographical elision, this section alludes to two parallel processes: first, the link between subjective and systemic violence for smooth functioning of Natal’s plantation economy; second, the processes of accumulation among Indian indentees shaped by the violence of indenture system.
Maureen Swan observed that Indian indentees in Natal were hostages to a “material and ideological matrix.”Footnote 45 In the 1860s, use of physical violence against Indian indentees was significantly high. Writing about the meaning attached to everyday use of corporal punishment by settlers in Kenya, Brett Shadle argued that “performative aspects” of such violence reinforced “relations of dominance.”Footnote 46 Physical violence used against Indian indentees carried a similar meaning in Natal as it governed the relationship between employers and workers. Provisions of Master and Servants’ Ordinance of 1850 made use of physical violence against Indian indentees legally acceptable. Colonial authorities designed this coercive legislation to make Zulu workers submit to the authority of white employers. According to the ordinance, neglect of work, insolence, drunkenness, or other perceived misconduct could lead to imprisonment for a month with or without hard labor. Alternatively, workers could be subjected to twelve lashes of flogging inside prison or imposition of a fine up to five pounds.Footnote 47 Settlers in Natal took undue advantage of this ordinance. In 1872, Immigration Agent Henry Charles Shepstone observed that flogging became such a common practice that Indian indentees were scared to approach local magistrates due to fears of its consequences.Footnote 48 In 1871, Acting Resident Magistrate of Inanda District presided over twenty cases of flogging which were results of failure to produce certificate of residence after completing industrial training.Footnote 49 Testimonies of plantation managers were equally unambiguous about how they understood the function of physical violence. B. Beater, a plantation manager, stated: “I never preferred a complaint. One man complained against me—a groom refused to do his stable-work and I thrashed him. I was fined £1.”Footnote 50
Outright use of physical violence during the first decade of Indian indenture in Natal posed challenges to recruiting agents in India. Having collected testimonies from returnees, officials in Madras acknowledged the seriousness of charges against Natal’s white employers. But they argued that some of the testimonies were a bit exaggerated. However, these testimonies are useful to understand the “scenes of subjection” and the “diffusion of terror.”Footnote 51 Balakistna arrived in Natal as a government interpreter in 1861 and spent a decade working for multiple employers.Footnote 52 While working at William Lister’s estate, Balakistna witnessed harrowing experiences of Indian indentees. If a worker was absent for a day, Lister deducted wages for a couple of days. If workers committed any mistake, Lister and his sirdar (Indian overseer) flogged them and “put salt-water on their backs.” Balakistna remembered that Lister inflicted such violence against two indentees, Jacob and Moonesawmy, multiple times. When Jacob and Moonesawmy complained officially, the local resident magistrate made a visit. But Lister got away with verbal promises without ever facing a trial.Footnote 53 Moreover, Natal’s white authorities did not trust Indian indentees. The attorney general of Natal, M. H. Gallwey, argued that it was tough to judge any case filed by Indians as they were not at all trustworthy.Footnote 54
The culture of physical violence that characterized disciplining Indian indentees continued outside the plantations even after the appointment of labor protectors. The patronizing attitude of employers coupled with official justifications allowed violent practices of labor management to become a process over time. In 1884, the superintendent of the Indian and Native Labour Department severely whipped Mariappen with a sjambok.Footnote 55 Mariappen entered a contract with the railway department in August that year and later moved to the maintenance department. However, Mariappen was sent back to the labor depot as his supervisors considered him “useless.” Sirdars complained that Mariappen was a source of trouble. Apparently, Mariappen disappeared for hours with the pretext of using the toilet. According to the superintendent, on the day of the incident, Mariappen was drunk at work to the extent that he could be run over by a machine. Speaking to the members of the Wragg Commission that conducted an inquiry on Indians in the mid-1880s, the superintendent claimed that Mariappen’s punishment was “richly deserved.” Trivializing the violence he argued: “I did give him six cuts with a small sjambok over his posterior, over his clothes—there was no severity exercised more than I would have used to a child of my own.” The Wragg Commission observed that Mariappen was a “worthless servant” whose “continued misconduct” provoked “those placed in authority over him.”Footnote 56
While physical violence was the means to establish settler dominance over Indian indentees, its link to systemic violence of capital’s life processes demands an explanation. Žižek argued that systemic violence is “like notorious dark matter of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence.”Footnote 57 Therefore, to make sense of ““irrational” explosions of subjective violence,” he advised us to be attentive to systemic violence. Since subjecting indentees to physical violence organized the disciplinary regime of labor management, settler concerns over productivity and utilitarian management of labor time shaped the conditions of labor extraction. In some instances, unusually coercive contracts between planters and indentees set up harsh working conditions. In 1871, managers of Duiker Fontein and Springvale sugar estates, G. Jackson and T. Anderson violated constituted law.Footnote 58 Jackson and Anderson agreed to pay fourteen shillings per month for a term of one year. But the contracts included Sundays. Moreover, workers were asked to provide documentation if they fell sick. However, since there were no hospitals nearby, workers could not produce medical evidence. Jackson and Anderson deducted one shilling for each day’s absence. Some workers who worked under Jackson for the year of 1871 received only £4 and 18s. They received wages for only 213.5 days as they were marked absent for 151.5 days. Moreover, at the end of the year, Jackson refused to hand over the certificate of residence keeping the workers stranded in his plantation.
Moreover, extra-legal arrangements of employers with indentees underscore the link between systemic violence of capital’s life processes and visible forms of subjective violence. Indian indentees were severely overworked in Natal. The usual labor time in a week for the workers was more than what they were promised in Calcutta and Madras. The government of India’s notification stated that workers would work for five years, six days a week, and for nine hours between sunrise to sunset. It also mentioned that all Sundays and holidays would be excluded from the weekly schedule. Authorities in Natal later passed the Law No. 2 of 1870 to comply with the government of India’s notification by including Sundays, Good Friday, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.Footnote 59 However, settlers often complained about this legislation. Describing Indian indenture as a system of “Minimum wages, maximum work,” Desai and Vahed observed that indentees worked for fourteen to sixteen hours a day during the crushing season.Footnote 60 Moreover, in the 1870s, subjecting indentees to Sunday labor was a common practice in northern districts of Natal where white farmers possessed significant livestock. However, Louis Mason, the protector of immigrants observed that “no ordinary labor” was “exacted on Sundays” and “an extra allowance” was offered for “the care of domestic animals” and “other work necessary.”Footnote 61 Mason’s consent allowed employers in northern Natal to transform contract labor into patron-client relationships. The Wragg Commission recommended that indentees should not be subjected to perform “field labour” on Sundays but they should cater to the “immediate necessity… for the preservation of the property” of employers.Footnote 62
However, the violence of indenture simultaneously nurtured processes of gradual capital accumulation for indentees. Some indentees found economic mobility as colonial collaborators. Ramasamy arrived in Natal in 1861 as an indentee. Having worked for Mr. Noon’s estate for five years, Ramasamy acquired a discharge certificate. He then entered a contract with Mr. Crozier for two years as a sirdar. In the 1870s, Ramasamy owned a small store in Durban and could afford school education for his kids spending eighteen shillings per month.Footnote 63 Similarly, Seebaluck Panday, who arrived in Natal in 1864, acquired economic mobility by serving as a sirdar. When Panday died in Durban at the age of eighty-five, he left behind £1,163 in savings and possessed a licensed muzzle loader double barreled gun.Footnote 64 In the 1870s, ex-indentees in Durban also entered various occupations such as servants, traders, storekeepers, gardeners, and fisherman.Footnote 65
Some of the ex-indentees used skills acquired during indenture and their networks with plantation owners to start small-scale agricultural enterprises. The 1872 Coolie Commission argued that granting eight to ten acres of land per head of contract-expired indentees was less expensive to the colonial treasury than paying return passages to India. Some indentees took advantage of this scheme. The commission observed that ex-indentees near Waterloo estate held 120 acres of land at an annual rate of £1 per acre. These farmers supplied sugarcane to the nearby mill at Waterloo estate. In such instances, accumulated wages during the term of indenture provided the capital for small-scale financial investments. Moreover, following the legal provisions of indenture, employers supplied daily rations of food to indentees. As a result, instead of monthly payments, indentees could afford to collect wages after longer durations. Most indentees left plantations with small savings while some sent remittances to India. In 1872, the branch manager of Natal Bank in Durban noted that the total savings of Indian indentees was £5,918 10s.Footnote 66 In 1877, a group of former indentees came back to Natal from Madras with friends and relatives and entered contracts with the same employers. Some of them did not want to return as indentees and, thus, travelled via Pondicherry and Mauritius paying for their own passages.Footnote 67
Moreover, unlike for many Africans, Indian indentees were completely alienated from home and plantations became their homesteads. Homestead agricultural practices gradually opened another process of accumulation. In the early 1870s, Thomas Dawson, a plantation overseer, observed that indentees had gardens attached to their huts where they grew beans, eschalots, and other vegetables. Ex-indentees sold vegetables to indentees and peddlers.Footnote 68 Such agricultural practices gradually became a commercial enterprise. Since the 1880s, ex-indentees settled in Inanda District in large numbers and gained economic success by exploiting African labor. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Indians employed African workers at wages ranging from ten to twenty shillings per month. Indian farmers paid a nominal portion of wages in advance to secure regular supply of African labor.Footnote 69 These arrangements helped Indian market gardeners to maintain a steady production of maize and vegetables. Moreover, Indian hawkers, including women and children, carried heavy baskets on their heads and went door-to-door selling vegetables and fruits. In the mid-1880s, the Wragg Commission observed that Indian farmers ended the monopoly of white farmers in market gardening.Footnote 70
However, studies of the peasant economy in South Africa and Natal warn us against reading Indian working-class economic success as exceptional. Colin Bundy showed that, despite making significant economic progress, the decline of an African peasantry towards the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries was a result of land dispossession and state led policies of promoting African underdevelopment.Footnote 71 Similarly, Etherington showed that kholwa section of Zulus “established a flourishing peasant economy” and “embarked upon entrepreneurial capitalist ventures” before the Anglo-Zulu war. But Etherington argued that, after the 1880s, Natal’s colonial administration framed policies to undo this progress.Footnote 72 Extrapolating these arguments further, Hughes observed that Africans were charged rent per hut whereas Indians were charged per acre of land. Moreover, Hughes alluded to Indian Ocean flows of capital to argue that ex-indentees established credit networks with urban based passenger Indians who started populating Durban in the early 1870s.Footnote 73 In short, these arguments establish a linear relationship between capital and race.
But problematizing this linear reading of capital and race is useful for tracking flows of capital in Natal’s heterogenous social milieu. In the mid-1880s, the Wragg Commission observed that Indian shops were “almost exclusively supported” by “white merchants” who employed Indians to “dispose of their goods.”Footnote 74 During the 1880s, despite settler anxieties about the expanding trading networks of Indian Muslim merchants in Durban, the commission observed that, “even now…free Indians who still do this trade derive their main support from white firms and not from the Arabs.”Footnote 75 Similarly, some African chiefs did not follow the linear logic of capitalist flows and racial intimacy. In the 1890s, Indian ex-indentees rented land in Ndwedwe Location twenty kilometers north of Durban, negotiating with African chiefs. George Hulett observed that understandings of property among African chiefs had significantly transformed by then. Many African chiefs who earlier saw land as a communal property started exploiting all options for financial gain.Footnote 76 In this instance, capital’s life processes broke old loyalties of kinship and community. In the 1890s, the Natal Land and Colonization Company sold portions of its properties to ex-indentees for exorbitant prices which were earlier occupied by African tenants. Ex-indentees paid between £10 to £50 per acre.Footnote 77 By 1902, around 600 ex-indentees occupied approximately 4,000 acres of land in Stanger either as owners or tenants.Footnote 78 These transactions defy linear understandings of a direct co-relation between flows of capital and racial intimacy. Accumulated wages from indentured periods enabled ex-indentees to offer competitive prices. Thus, the systemic violence of indenture offered Indian ex-indentees economic advantages over Africans.
Racial Formations in the Working-Class Lifeworld
In 1905, speaking to bureaucrat James Stuart, Dinya ka Zokozwayo reflected on the conditions of African workers in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu region under settler colonial rule. Dinya identified himself as a Qwabe, a kinship based social group that migrated from Zululand to Natal during the early nineteenth-century period of political tumult and famine known as mfecane. Born during the reign of Shaka, Dinya’s lived experience was informed by colonial social formations. Dinya lived in Ifafa mission station. Unhappy about labor relations in Natal, Dinya argued: “We are crushed by this side; we are crushed by that – i.e. the various kinds of work natives are obliged to perform for Europeans… We are governed as if we are slaves.”Footnote 79 Interestingly, Dinya’s observation included a comment on economic mobility of Indian ex-indentees. He argued: “Indians can buy land, Indians can keep stores, but natives have no similar rights, and yet [the] former are newcomers.”Footnote 80 Similarly, testifying before the South African Native Affairs Commission, Mahashi Somanyala echoed Dinya’s sentiments: “The Coolies have rushed us Natives; they have taken up a large amount of land, and we have been pushed out into the poorer portions of the farms.Footnote 81 Makiyana Ndonga, who served the Natal Land and Colonization Company as a police constable, also observed that settlers allotted the best farmlands to “coolies,” pushing Africans aside.Footnote 82
These observations at the turn of the nineteenth century underscored the growing land crisis among Africans, including the emerging competition for land among Africans and Indians. Such complaints about Indian ex-indentees echoed debates in the Zulu-English newspaper Inkanyiso that appeared almost a decade prior. In the 1890s, Indian indenture became a reference point in kholwa intellectual discourse on African workers. Since settlers labelled Zulus as lazy and unproductive, the Christian African editorial collective of Inkanyiso further argued that Indian indentees were productive compared to Africans due to five-year contracts during indenture and permanent residency in plantations.Footnote 83 Kholwa debates thus reproduced the colonial logic of labor time and work-discipline. In 1903, Ilanga Lase Natal published an editorial, titled “The Indian Invasion.”Footnote 84 Targeting Indian market gardeners and hawkers, Ilanga’s editorial observed that Indians could sell goods anywhere while Africans had to secure passes before entering European areas. In the early 1900s, amidst ongoing debates among settlers on whether Indian indenture should be continued, Ilanga’s editorial collective tried to forge an alliance with opponents of the system. It concluded that Indians have become “an eye-sore and a terror to the whites and black alike.”
Kholwa critiques of colonial labor relations vis-à-vis the economic mobility of Indian ex-indentees reflected the discursive formations of race as it spread to the working-class lifeworld. Explaining competition for jobs among Africans and Indians, Atkins explained the rise of Indian dhobis or washerman at the expense of Zulu amawasha in Durban during last two decades of nineteenth century.Footnote 85 On the other hand, Hughes read African complaints about Indian economic mobility in terms of “cultures of production” which was “compounded by discriminatory practices and attitudes of… white landowners and officials.”Footnote 86 Moreover, reflecting on John Dube and M. K. Gandhi’s narrowly defined racial politics, Hughes argued that “it was a classic case of people with equally little purchase on Natal’s land and labour policies blaming each other.”Footnote 87 Similarly, Bhana and Vahed located these conflicts in relation to Gandhi’s conceptualization of “Indianness” and rejection of an alliance with Africans. They also observed that, “Africans responded to the colonial structures by developing identities in relation to Whiteness and Indianness.”Footnote 88 Atkins, Hughes, Bhana, and Vahed thus echoed African complaints about Indian ex-indentees. While translating the reactionary impulse of the archival sources, they collectively remained inattentive to certain social processes that generated the anti-Indian discourse. To further unpack the anti-Indian discourse, this section examines the dynamics of labor relations and moments of gendered violence in the wake of cultural assimilation or the lack of it. Therein I draw a connection between violence of indenture to that of intimate domestic space.
The Wragg Commission’s commentary problematized kholwa critiques of Indian indenture. Desai and Vahed observed that in the mid-1880s settlers preferred to employ Zulu workers instead of Indians as they were cheaper.Footnote 89 But concerns over continuous supply and durations of labor time encouraged employers to hire Indians. The Wragg Commission framed settler concerns in a comparative frame. The commission acknowledged the desire of individual employers to hire Africans. But they observed that “‘nostalgia’ or longing to return to their kraals” discouraged Africans from binding themselves to plantation labor for more than three to six months. Moreover, reiterating the proverbial trope of African laziness and calling African men as beneficiaries of lobola, the commission argued that older married men settled in kraals with four or five daughters were “absolutely independent” of seeking “bread abroad.”Footnote 90 Thus the official discourse on African labor did not shift much over three decades. Since the early decades of colonization, the Native Affairs Department that presided over the indirect rule of Zulus attempted to undermine customary practices of lobola. The Native Marriage Act of 1869 was a direct attack on the Zulu gerontocracy as it encouraged younger men to get married and added a consent clause of the would-be bride. Discussing its implications, Sheik argued that while such colonial “negotiations” shifted “authority from older to younger men by reworking relationships and processes of marriage” with the objective of “ensuring a robust labor supply,” it also produced profound changes in claims to “gendered authority.”Footnote 91 However, until the 1880s, such legal experiments initiated by Secretary of Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone did not produce its intended outcome. In 1882, George Christopher Cato, in a memorandum submitted to Native Affairs Commission, argued, “‘The Great Expectations,’ namely, to make Native labour plentiful, cheap, and permanent” was never fulfilled by the administration.Footnote 92
While labor contracts, land crisis, differential wages, and small stores run by ex-indentees were material signifiers of the anti-Indian discourse, a closer look at the domestic space of the working-class lifeworld is useful to further unpack these ideas. Labor histories of Natal suggest that an archival silence in official records and newspaper reports on the relationship between Zulu and Indian workers in the nineteenth century poses a challenge to craft a meaningful story of their everyday interactions. Desai and Vahed observed that during the initial decades of Indian indenture, interactions between Indian and Zulu workers were nominal. They further argued that any attempt to understand how Zulus and Indians related to one another “must be seen in the context of the fact that the indentured were restricted in the movements, large numbers of African were placed in reservations, and points of constructive interaction were limited.”Footnote 93 However, demographic pattern of workers in Natal’s plantations demands a reconsideration. In 1875, 5,292 Indian indentees labored in plantations alongside 7,457 Africans. Subsequently, the number of African workers in plantations dropped significantly while the number of Indians increased. By 1888, only 28 percent of workers employed in plantations were Africans. By 1908 this figure dropped to 18 percent.Footnote 94 Since these statistics indicate a shared workplace among Africans and Indians, historians must creatively read the scanty archival traces to craft a meaningful story of everyday relationships between Zulus and Indians.
Indian indenture system led to failed expectations of domesticity. The disproportionate sex ratio among indentees, made it difficult to find partners within the intimacy of their racial world. In the 1870s, Ralph Stott, a missionary in Durban observed that many indentees would not have returned to India if they could find women to marry in Natal.Footnote 95 Similarly, testifying before the 1872 Coolie Commission, ex-indentee-cum-storekeeper Rangasammy reflected on cultural alienation and the crisis of the domestic space. As a deeply religious person, Rangasammy complained about the lack of Hindu temples in Natal where he could worship. He suggested that the colonial government should allocate land for a separate Indian location and build a shrine there. However, Rangasammy’s central concern was the unstable nature of domestic partnership among indentees. He argued:
As to marriages, among the coolies we first imported, too many males were single, and the scarcity of females caused many debauches, and in many cases they committed suicide; therefore I consider, to stop this, when they agree to marry, the agreement should be drawn by the Coolie Agent, in the Coolie Office. After they agree to marry, if either party refuse to marry, the Coolie agent should punish the guilty person. If a woman commits adultery, she should be punished by cutting off her hair, and ten days’ imprisonment, and cautioned that if she goes to another man, she must pay to the first husband £10. The adulterer should be fined £5, and be imprisoned for twenty days, get twelve lashes. The wife should be imprisoned until she repaid the money, or went back to her husband.Footnote 96
The Coolie Commission endorsed Rangasammy’s views by arguing that new “legislation regarding Coolie marriages” was necessary for the “settlement of disputes arising out of seduction of married women.”Footnote 97 Sheik explains the crises in domestic space of Indian indentees in great detail, alluding to conflicts among workers due to the disproportionate sex ratio and the colonial state’s efforts to establish gendered authority. Sheik observed that Rangasammy’s testimony and the commission’s recommendations highlighted “the contradictory tension regarding the place of women in the social reproductive lives of Indians.”Footnote 98 Similarly, Tallie’s study of racialized and gendered sociality in nineteenth-century Natal demonstrates that violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans shaped conceptions of race and gender in a way that it bolstered each group’s claim to authority.Footnote 99
However, Rangasammy’s subjectivity and official endorsement of his views give historians access to the racialized social milieu of Natal. In his statement, Rangasammy simultaneously articulated the discursive formation of race and a lost sense of patriarchal authority during indenture. According to official records, suicide among indentees was significantly high.Footnote 100 However, exact causes of suicide were never apparent. By identifying failed expectations of domesticity as the prime cause of suicide among indentees, Rangasammy produced a tertiary discourse on Natal’s working-class lifeworld. Rangasammy’s outright rejection of Zulu women as potential partners for indentured Indian men was a candid admission of the intimacy of one’s racial world. It was also an articulation of the fear of miscegenation among Indians. Archival evidence suggests that, in certain sugar estates, male and female indentees worked alongside Africans.Footnote 101 Drawing such racial boundaries in domestic expectations, Rangasammy highlighted the racial exclusivity of Indians. Moreover, Rangasammy’s expectation of a stable heteronormative monogamous order primarily rested on the conduct of Indian women. Rangasammy’s suggestions for punishing adultery extrapolated his gendered expectations. Articulated in an acquired legal language, Rangasammy’s suggestions were a dangerous mixture of patriarchal authority, claims to racial purity, and gendered violence.
Despite such clearly drawn racial boundaries in domestic expectations, certain Zulu and Indian workers crossed those lines. Abdullah Kulla arrived in Natal in 1882 from Muradabad in northern India. After working for his employer Alice Dykes for two years, Abdullah requested Dykes provide a separate quarter where he might live with his kholwa partner. In this instance, Abdullah and his partner successfully crossed religious and racial boundaries.Footnote 102 Commenting on this case, Desai and Vahed observed that it is a rare archival trace on cohabitation between Zulu and Indian workers.Footnote 103 Elsewhere, Bhana and Vahed argued that although there were instances of “some casual sex and a few instances of marriage,” there was little assimilation of Indians into African society and vice-versa.Footnote 104
However, the lack of assimilation of Africans and Indians amidst racial and religious boundaries needs to be seen in relation to disparate embodied dispositions in the working-class lifeworld. Wasli, an ex-indentured worker, paid all his savings to a Zulu father with the hope of getting married to his daughter. Conforming to Zulu indigenous custom of lobola, Wasli considered it as his bride price. However, unknown to Wasli, the girl’s parents got her engaged to another man. Whenever Wasli met the parents, they kept on postponing the marriage. After living on Wasli’s money for a while, the parents of the girl asked her to express her unwillingness to marry Wasli. When she informed Wasli about her disapproval of the marriage, he became furious. Unable to accept the betrayal, Wasli murdered the girl. Wasli’s deeply gendered violence led to a death penalty.Footnote 105
Since mutual feelings of distrust governed social relationships between Zulus and Indians, cultural differences and racialized expectations of domesticity produced such gendered violence. Wasli tried to fulfill his expectations of domesticity by assimilating into the Zulu ways of being. However, navigating the uneven cultural habitus of Natal’s heterogeneous working-class lifeworld was not an easy task. It was a choice of a man in difficult circumstances who came from a culture where the custom of lobola did not exist. In fact, in the South Asian cultural practice of exchange during the time of marriage between two families, wealth primarily flowed the other way. Wasli’s failed attempt to cross racial boundaries while seeking domestic partnership culminated in gendered violence. It was a gendered violence produced through the encounter between two cosmologies of being in Natal’s working-class lifeworld, which was simultaneously informed by processes of racial formation from below.
Louis Mason, the protector of immigrants observed that, although Wasli’s case was exceptional, it became a common practice among some African parents to extract money from Indian ex-indentees with false promises of marriage. In such situations, Zulu patriarchs’ proprietorial view of their daughters found an economic expression. Subsequently, Wasli’s case created an anxiety in Natal’s colonial bureaucracy. However, colonial officials were clueless about how to create legal provisions to prevent such personal tragedies and social tensions while simultaneously pursing the project of a racially segregated settler colonial order. Mason was anxious because he believed that “such deceptive and fraudulent practices used against men belonging to a proverbially excitable race might lead to serious personal reprisals.”Footnote 106 In the absence of an acknowledgement of the reckless designs of colonial labor policies leading to such intimate forms of gendered violence, Mason articulated the proverbial fear of miscegenation. But it was the violence of indenture that manifested such gendered violence in the wake of cultural assimilation or the lack of it.
Conclusion
Commenting on South African plantation literature, Sheik recently argued that the “politics of group identity” both during and after apartheid “predetermines framing of indenture stories.”Footnote 107 Sheik further observed that it has “turned the Indian Ocean” side of “the indenture story” “into an interpretative Kala Pani (literally, “Black Water”)” possessed by “deep opacity of its vernacular descriptors” which is “unknowable to scholarly curiosity” as much as it is claimed for “indenture’s sailing subjects.” Sheik therefore turned her gaze to literary fiction as a “revelatory form,” searching for human stories of indenture. Elsewhere Sheik observed that separate legal regimes established by Natal’s colonial state with respect to Africans, Indians, and whites permeated into segregated historiographies of these communities.Footnote 108 In the past decade, writing from different vantage points, Tallie, Desai, and Vahed alongside Sheik have made efforts to desegregate social histories of Natal.Footnote 109 This essay is an attempt to advance that collective intellectual agenda through an exploration of southeastern Africa’s historical entanglements in the Indian Ocean.
Moreover, exploring histories of Indian indenture in Natal from an African vantage point opens new possibilities of writing race in South Africa moving beyond the black and white dichotomy. Such efforts to write racial formations in the working-class lifeworld of a subjugated population in colonial Natal must cross historiographical boundaries as well as navigate archival silences. The Wragg Commission’s report did not even mention the name of Wasli’s African victim. But I hope this essay explains the layered causes of her death as well as the conditions of Wasli’s disposable life. Thus, to avoid the deep opacity of Indian indenture’s vernacular descriptors, a postcolonial historiographical vision of subaltern pasts must attend to “double session of representations” rather than reintroducing “the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire.”Footnote 110
Acknowledgements
I presented a draft of this article in a workshop on “Commodity, Labor and Capital in Southern Africa in the Nineteenth Century” held at Stellenbosch University in April 2024. Comments from participants in the workshop were extremely helpful. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer-reviewers of The Journal of African History for directing me to relevant secondary literature.
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