Voices from Calcutta

This is the story of how Calcuttans challenged post-Abolition labour practices, shaping and reshaping the lives of 19th-century Indian indentured labourers.

At the intersection of histories of labour, migration, empire and South Asia, this book shows how spokesmen from Calcutta – the capital of British India – challenged colonial labour practices, shaping and reshaping the lives of 19th-century Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean plantations.Between 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured labourers migrated from India to sugar plantation colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Voices from Calcutta shows how spokesmen from Calcutta – the capital of British India – disrupted this trade and influenced the lives of these migrants. It follows Calcuttans in their journey of debating, investigating and defending indenture, unfolding a complex web of letters, petitions, interviews and investigative-reports. As the indenture debates influenced lived experience on ships and plantations, and shaped the negotiation of subjecthood and labour rights for the empire's peripatetic labourers, they became a means by which elite Calcuttans negotiated their own position within the empire. This book locates in Calcutta voices of protest that fundamentally defined the contours of post-slavery labouring across the British Empire. Instead of simply emanating from Britain, to be dutifully followed in the colonies, labour legislation was informed by voices from those very colonies.