Indian Indentured Labour

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under five year contracts of indenture across the empire from Guyana to Trinidad to Mauritius and Fiji and colonies in between. These indentured labourers were to share vivid accounts of deception and abuse, especially in the early decades. From the outset there were critics and opposition gained pace with Gandhi and others in South Africa arguing the system was close to slavery and calling for the Indian government to stop the practice, which was to happen in 1917 with the last shipments of people in the 1920s. Meanwhile, rather than return after their contracts, a section of indentured labourers stayed where they were for their own reasons, negotiating their new identities alongside formerly enslaved people and the planter culture in a new Indian diaspora.

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Guests

• Purba Hossain No other episodes
  Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York
• Neha Hui No other episodes
  Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Reading
• Clem Seecharan No other episodes
  Emeritus Professor of History at London Metropolitan University

Reading list

• Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
  Gaiutra Bahadur (Hurst and Co., 2013) Google Books →
• Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834-1874
  Marina Carter (Oxford University Press, 1995) Google Books →
• Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora
  Marina Carter and Khal Torabully (Anthem Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation
  Jonathan Connolly (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Google Books →
• The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire
  Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (eds.) (Pluto Books, 2021) Google Books →
• Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers
  Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati (The Economic History Review, 2022)
• The political economy of Indian indentured labor in the nineteenth century
  Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati (Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2025)
• Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean
  Madhavi Kale (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
• Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920
  Ashutosh Kumar (Cambridge University Press, 2017) Google Books →
• Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians
  Brij V. Lal (Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, 2004) Google Books →
• Kunti's Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations
  Brij V. Lal (Indian Economic & Social History Review, 1985)
• "Hill Coolies": Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836-38
  Andrea Major (South Asian Studies, 2017)
• Indenture and Abolition: Sacrifice and Survival on the Guyanese Sugar Plantation
  Basdeo Mangru (TSAR, 1993) Google Books →
• Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67
  Kalathmika Natarajan (Oxford University Press, 2026) Google Books →
• 'Tiger in the Stars': The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana, 1919-29
  Clem Seecharan (Macmillan, 1997) Google Books →
• Finding Myself: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture
  Clem Seecharan (Peepal Tree Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Indentured labour from India in the age of empire
  S. Sen (Social Scientist, 2016)
• A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920
  Hugh Tinker (Oxford University Press, 1974) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002vc9m

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vc9m

Auto-category: 325.341 (Emigration and immigration)