FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page i Inside Indian Indenture Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page ii Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page iii Inside Indian Indenture A South African Story, 1860–1914 Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page iv 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 Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page v 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 Choodh and 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 18 ‘Drawing blood from a stone’ 357 19 Resistance goes underground 371 20 The moral persuaders? 399 21 Africa calling 423 Glossary 439 Notes 442 References 463 Index 470 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page vi 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,3 with their stark date lines of ‘when-born’ and ‘when-died’, into real living people, and to turn the empty pews of the church in Kearsney into moments when they were filled with the faithful flipping through Bibles marked in Telegu. The stories we uncovered are an incredible slice of history, the impact of which resonates into the present. We are not the first to traverse this territory. A steady stream of writing on indentured labour has come our way over the past few decades. Much of this literature painstakingly details the number of indentured who came, where they came from, the regional variations, the caste designations, the system’s indignations, and so on. Inside Indian Indenture builds on this strong body of information, but also seeks to go beyond the numbers, trespassing directly into the lives of the indentured themselves. It explores the terrain of the everyday by focusing on the development of religious and cultural Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download expressions, the leisure activities, the way power relations played themselves out on the vi FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page vii 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 accompli and the indentured as a tabula rasa on 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’,6 and show how the erstwhile puppets, the indentured, were in many cases pulling the strings of rebellion. Reclamation can, of course, lead to cultural chauvinism. So we aim not just to tell a story of the internal dynamics of indentured life, but to do so against the backdrop of white rule and its oppressive relationship with the Zulu. Inscribed in this unfolding narrative is the brutal and violent dispossession of the Zulu, and the callousness of the colonial onslaught that destroyed their indigenous economy and turned once courageous warriors against imperialism into ‘houseboys’ serving at the white man’s table or doing his laundry, and into dispossessed migrants tunnelling underground in the mines while their families struggled to survive. We try then to tell a broader history that does not, we trust, lend itself to reinforcing cultural and racial bigotry. But this is not done in a way that obscures the central narrative. In fact, it renders it more Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Free download revealing. Those who ‘agreed’ to indenture were often propelled by desperation as the British vii FA INDIAN BOOK 3/7/10 2:16 PM Page viii 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.