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Why Indian women did matter?

30 octobre 2015, 09:30

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lexpress.mu | Toute l'actualité de l'île Maurice en temps réel.

The huge gap in gender ratio between male and female could have derailed the indenture system in Mauritius. Reason why the British and Indian authorities took prompt action to correct this imbalance. 

 

The British sugar colonies were on the verge of collapse as the Apprenticeship system, designed as grace period to planters to scout for alternative labour after the abolition of slavery, was coming to an end in 1840. In the case of Mauritius, it was Indian labour that was tapped after an experiment with the “Hill coolies” in 1834 on the initiative of Hunter Arbuthnot & Co. Followed then the “Grand Experiment” with the importation on a large scale cheap labour bound by a contract under the indenture system which contained conditions so harsh including severe penal sanctions. Some British historians have even argued that indenture was slavery in disguised form to deflect British public opinion, in particular, the Anti-Slavery campaigners. But what mattered most was the survival of the plantation economy and the economic strength of the British Empire.

 

The low morale and concern that had gripped the planters during the transition period in the wake of the abolition of slavery now received a boost up as the correspondence dated 11 June 1839 from the Governor, Sir William Nicolay, to the Colonial office showed a sense of optimism that had crept in with the “universal joy spreading throughout the colony”. The planters heaved a sigh of relief with the introduction of the indenture system - “Nous sommes sauvés”, they said, as quoted by Governor Nicolay. The Mauritius “Grand Experiment” was to serve as a template to pull out the other colonial plantations reeling in the doldrums. The first to try the Mauritius experiment was John Gladstone – father of William Gladstone, the future British prime minister – who owned a sugar plantation in British Guyana and who in a letter dated 4 January 1836 made a request to the Calcutta office of Gillanders Arbuthnot & Co. to send him “one hundred Bengalis” in order to destroy the ex-slaves’ monopoly on labour. The emancipated slaves were demanding higher wages, instigated, it was said, by missionaries.

 

But in the feverish rush to import Indian labour, one element that was initially not kept in mind by both planters, agents and Colonial administrators was the sensitivities of Indian family life. A climate of uneasiness and discomfiture had settled in with frequent disorders and mayhems attributed largely, according to Governor Nicolay, to the acute shortage of Indian women. Indian women accompanying the menfolk to the colonies was something rare. To the planters, the coolie labour force gravitated around the deployment of male workers and production, making abstraction of social consideration or family life. Hugh Tinker called the indenture system a “lifeless system” where “human values meant little in the drive for production”.

 

In fact, the huge disproportion in gender ratio having a negative bearing on the social life of Indians offered, according to the historian S.B Mookherjee, a “disquieting spectacle” that could have had at some point derailed the indenture system.

 

Indeed, Governor Nicolay’s despatch to the Colonial office mentions that between 1834 and 1839, there were 25,456 men brought to the island as against 500 females who came as “wives”. Mauritius was the only sugar colony where Indian women were not given a contract to work on plantations. By being kept out of the indenture circuit, they became more vulnerable to exploitation.

 

In the Caribbean colony of British Guyana, for example, the worsening situation impacted on the mental health of the Indian males driving them even to suicide. In her book, Coolie woman – The Odyssey of Indenture, Gaiutra Bahadur puts the suicide rates in Guyana as having been “20 times greater than in India” because women were much-sought after. Female scarcity gave them a sexual leverage so that women being induced and changing partners became something familiar. It was also a fact that women bore the brunt of men’s jealousy because of infidelity to the point that “wife-murders” were rife –“90 times more frequent in Guyana than in India”.

 

With the existence of the indenture system at stake, the British and Indian authorities took prompt action to correct the gender ratio imbalance. Such a measure brought about an environment conducive to social stability and get the system back on track. But while encouraging Indian family life, that measure also indirectly induced contractual labour to become permanent, providing estates with skilled labour and eliminating costs incurred for return passages and payment to recruiting agencies. Planters thus saved much money.

 

The inclusion of a proportionate number of women to men – twelve women for every one hundred male indentured labourer with a gradual increase in the years ahead- in every immigrant ship sailing from Indian ports to the sugar colonies became a prerequisite. The Secretary of state’s firm instruction was that no ‘coolie ship’ could be released by the ports’ authorities from India “unless a due proportion of women was recruited”. In what concerned Guyana, the proportion of women, from 1868, was set to forty women for one hundred male labourers. Thus, when the temporary ban on emigration was lifted, a total of 36,339 men and 4530 women landed in Mauritius during the two year period of 1843 and 1844.

 

Government regulations now compelled the recruitment agencies to work hard to attract not only Indian men but also women to the overseas adventure. What seemed a more arduous task at the outset with getting women to buy in the promises of a brighter future in distant lands was soon rendered easier. According to Bahadur, seventy-five percent of the Indian female population who travelled to sugar colonies through the indenture system were unaccompanied, without a husband or a family member. That could possibly mean resistance, defiance or a protest of Indian women fleeing oppressive relatives and Indian society in general. According to Sir Georges Grierson, the supervising recruitment officer in the Indian northern provinces, the female immigrants consisted of four categories: the destitute widows rejected by in-laws; the prostitutes fed up with the traditional “kothas”; runaway women absconding from their husbands’ homes and the wives of the immigrant men.

 

To reach the required quota imposed by the government, recruiters employed all fair means and foul. Kidnapping of poor and ignorant girls and women and coercing them on the voyages to the unknown was a common occurrence so much so that the Government of Bengal protested against what it called the recruitment of “a low type of women”. The pilgrimage places like Vrindavan, Kashi, Varanasi and Mathura turned into a hunting ground for unscrupulous agents to ensnare desperate women in search of God to be relieved of their miseries only to find themselves landing somewhere in a remote place they had never ever imagined. Ostracized and spurned young widows tricked into the quest for salvation and dumped by their ruthless in-laws at these holy places ended up in the Coolie Depots of Calcutta from where they would be hustled into ships bound for the colonies.

 

Such were the ordeals of these women who suffered not only the oppression of the Indian society at home but also the harsh conditions of an indentured life overseas. But their role in the colonies was crucial in weaving family life and this had a stabilising effect on the overseas Indian society. That’s why the historian Marina Carter holds the view that the “Indian women migrants were primarily valued not for their labour power but for their role in fostering permanent settlement of Indian families in colonies”. By ricochet, the Indian family was instrumental in rescuing the sugar plantations of the British Empire from collapse as another famous historian, Hugh Tinker, makes the point in his book, A New System of Slavery.