Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates that the first phase of Indian indenture immigra­tion, taking place in Mauritius from 1834 to 1840, cannot, despite its com­paratively short duration, be neglected as a side note in the overall indenture period.

The concept of post-emancipation apprenticeship betrays itself as extended slavery particularly if attention is paid to the level of corporal punishment appren­tices were liable to. An examination of the legal frameworks which governed early indentured labourers and apprentices reveals that while the conditions were

Informal indenture and apprenticeships 137 ostensibly more favourable for the former, in practice this was not automati­cally the case. A definite consensus on which group was earning more is lack­ing, though the majority of the commissioners of the Bengal Hill Coolie Report agreed that apprentices obtained higher wages. The concept of advance pay to Indian labourers was an insidious one. Planters made the payment in full to the agents, but only a fraction of it reached the labourers, who then had to work for the first few months after arrival without further wages, under conditions where the planters were seeking to recoup their recruitment expenses. In this context, it emerges that the gender imbalance among labourers was not solely the result of cultural inhibitions, but also a consequence of planter preference and recruitment policies which encouraged the emigration of unaccompanied men, much to the detriment of families left behind.

Deception and exploitation were rife, in an early system that preyed upon the vulnerabilities of certain segments of the Indian population. The issue of consent is thrown into relief when it becomes evident that the labourer in question was not clear what he or she was consenting to, given that both the nature of the work and even the destination was purposefully kept obscure. If place of origin was a key consideration in the decision to seek indentured labour from India, and hence “marked” the system of indenture with eth­nic overtones in its distinction from the African apprentices, preparing the Indian worker for the plantation context involved a forceful breaking down of customs and habits which saw the prospective labourer being shaped to the requirements of his future employer. Ethnicity thus appeared to be an impor­tant marker through which the two systems of labour would be effectively distinguished, but it was ultimately to be an instrumentalized category - one “imposed” upon the indentured labourer as opposed to being one that reflected the distinctiveness of their own cultures and traditions. The produc­tive encoding of the two labour systems by reference to the putative ethnic identity of the labourers themselves was to lead ultimately to the systematic merging of class and race within a tiered Mauritian society with the white, European, plantation aristocracy at the top, and the black, former slave popu­lation at the bottom.

Yet there is one further twist to the story. In Mauritius and elsewhere, it is clear that indentured labour from India had been sought, in part at least, to enable the plantation owners to achieve independence from the labour power of apprentices, whose compulsory term was coming to an end. As in Hegel's famous account of the master and slave dialectic,^[629] there was an incipient recognition that the master was not entirely “free” in the sense of being a self-determining and autonomous agent, but was yet dependent upon the labour power of the slave over whom authority was asserted. The formal emancipation of the slaves in Mauritius thus exposed the plantation owners to the very real possibility of a reversal in the

relationship of power, the danger of which could only be avoided by dint of the identification of an alternative supply of labour. As will be seen in the next chap­ter, the anxiety of the plantation owners on this score was evidently well-founded insofar as the former slaves showed no inclination to work as “free” people in the same setting as before. The ever-growing number of foreign workers arriving in Mauritius ultimately however proved to be to their significant detriment.

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