A Million Indians Signed a Contract They Called Girmit

On the waterfront at Port Louis, in Mauritius, a short flight of fourteen stone steps climbs up from the harbour and then simply stops.

Between 1834 and 1920, more than 462,000 people walked up those steps. Nearly all, 97.5 per cent, came from India.

Each carried a printed paper. The English on it said “agreement”. In the Bhojpuri of the villages most of them came from, “agreement” came out as girmit, and a person bound by one became a girmitiya, a person of the agreement.

That sheet of paper is why there are Hindu temples in Trinidad and Diwali lamps in Fiji. It is also why historians have spent fifty years arguing about whether it was slavery under another name.

Britain freed 800,000 people and immediately needed workers

The Slavery Abolition Act took effect on 1 August 1834, freeing over 800,000 people across most of the British Empire. Parliament paid £20 million in compensation, to the owners.

Sugar planters looked at their fields and did the arithmetic. Britain picked Mauritius to test a replacement and gave the test a name: the Great Experiment. The point was to prove that “free” contract labour could out-produce slave labour.

The contract was an indenture, a fixed-term work agreement: five years with one employer in one named colony, in return for passage, a wage and rations. On 2 November 1834 the ship Atlas landed the first indentured Indians at Port Louis.

A letter from a Liverpool merchant

In 1836 John Gladstone, who owned sugar plantations in British Guiana and was the father of a future prime minister, wrote to a Calcutta firm asking for 100 “young, active, able-bodied” labourers on long contracts.

The Hesperus and the Whitby sailed from Calcutta on 29 January 1838 and reached British Guiana on 5 May. Of the 414 people aboard, 18 died at sea. Nearly half were Adivasi people from the Chota Nagpur plateau, listed in the paperwork as “Hill Coolies”.

What happened on those estates was ugly enough that India banned shipments that year. The traffic reopened in 1842 and ran for another seventy-five years.

Where they all went

Mauritius took the largest share, those 462,000. British Guiana, now Guyana, took roughly 239,000. Natal, in what is now South Africa, took about 152,000 from 1860, Trinidad about 144,000 from 1845, Fiji around 61,000 from 1879, Jamaica about 36,000 and Suriname about 34,000.

Totals for the whole system run from more than a million to two million depending on who is counting. Nobody knows precisely: millions of other South Asians moved with no contract at all, and plenty signed a second one in a new colony rather than go home.

The man who came to the village

Recruitment ran on commission. The man who turned up in a village was an arkati, an agent paid per head for everyone he delivered to a port depot. Famine, flood, epidemic and debt did most of his persuading for him.

His standard trick was to be vague about geography. Recruits were told the job was in Calcutta or a town nearby, and many learned where they were really going only once they were inside the depot, signed up and far from anyone they knew. Almost none understood the criminal penalties in the contract.

Bhojpuri speakers from Bihar and eastern United Provinces, now eastern Uttar Pradesh, sailed from Calcutta; Tamil and Telugu speakers sailed from Madras. Fiji’s recruits came overwhelmingly from eastern UP; Natal’s were about two thirds south Indian.

Ten weeks at sea, sometimes twenty

The Leonidas took seventy-two days from Calcutta to Fiji in 1879. Of the 498 aboard, seventeen died of cholera and smallpox on the way, and 463 were released from quarantine that August.

On the Caribbean run in the bad season of 1856 to 1857, seventeen in every hundred died on the passage. Arrival ended nothing: yearly deaths among indentured workers ran near 12 per cent in Jamaica in 1870 and Mauritius in 1900.

Five years, and a criminal record for walking off

The term was five years. The rations were written into the contract: daily rice, dhal, ghee and salt. Wages in Natal ran from ten to twenty shillings a month, with women on half pay. In Trinidad it was around twenty-five cents a day for a man and sixteen for a woman.

The clause that mattered was not the wage. Breaking the contract was a criminal offence, not a civil one. Being absent, refusing a task or leaving the estate without a written pass could put you in front of a magistrate. Under the “double cut”, missing one day of work cost two days of pay.

The Natal courts show the result. Between 1903 and 1908, employers brought 15,611 complaints against indentured workers. Workers brought 374.

Forty women for every hundred men

From the late 1860s recruiters were under orders to ship forty women for every hundred men. The quota was routinely missed, and in some early years the ratio was as low as three per hundred.

About a third of the Indians who went to the Caribbean were women, and more than two thirds of them were single or widowed. Some were leaving widowhood, caste restriction or a bad marriage, and the ship was the only exit. That was a real choice and it should be counted as one.

The imbalance was also dangerous for them. Rations were withheld in exchange for sex. Single women were often not permitted to live alone and were assigned to a man. Court records across several colonies show a pattern of women murdered by Indian men.

The treatment of these women became the sharpest weapon the campaigners in India had.

Was it slavery? Fifty years, no verdict

In 1974 Hugh Tinker published A New System of Slavery. His case was that the paperwork changed in 1834 and the machinery did not: deceit at recruitment, penal law on the estate, protections that existed on paper and nowhere else. The phrase stuck, and much of the field has been arguing with it ever since.

K.L. Gillion, the historian of Fiji’s Indians, reviewed Tinker harshly in 1975, in an exchange still known as the Tinker-Gillion controversy. Both men agreed indenture was oppressive. They disagreed about whether “slavery” was the right word for it.

David Northrup, writing in 1995, read indenture as a form of free labour migration, closer to European labour movements of the same decades than to the slave trade. Marina Carter on Mauritius and Crispin Bates argue that the slavery label wipes out the migrants’ own decisions and family networks. Brij Lal read Fiji’s emigration passes one by one and found recruits who were not simply famine wreckage. Sugata Bose points to indenture systems older than abolition, to the people who went home, and to those who signed a second contract of their own accord.

Against them stand the people who were there. Henry Polak, who worked alongside Gandhi in South Africa, called Natal indenture “temporary slavery”. W.W. Pearson, sent to inspect Fiji, found the protective laws gave no adequate protection in principle or in practice.

Both camps accept a common floor. Recruitment involved routine deception, criminal sanctions made leaving impossible for five years, and the safeguards mostly failed. What they weigh differently is the contract, the wage, the return ticket and the people who chose to stay or go back. Whatever choice the migrants had was hemmed in by bad information, no power and a recruiter on commission. The National Archives, which holds much of the evidence, still calls it a live question rather than a settled one.

The book that helped end it

Totaram Sanadhya spent twenty-one years in Fiji, came home, and wrote it down. Fiji Dwip Mein Mere Ikkis Varsh appeared in 1914, the first book by a girmitiya. Fiji banned it. India read it. The next year the government sent C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson to Fiji to see for themselves.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale had already moved a resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council, on 4 March 1912, to prohibit indenture outright. It was defeated, but the viceroy promised early steps and an end to imprisonment for labour offences. Madan Mohan Malaviya tried again in March 1916 and lost too. Gandhi, whose own twenty-one years in South Africa had included a fight against Natal’s £3 tax on Indians who stayed after their contracts, made abolition a national demand.

The system was stopped in March 1917 under wartime ordinances, with a shipping shortage and army recruitment given as the official reasons. The last contracts were cancelled on 1 January 1920.

What the ships left behind

Descendants of the people who climbed those fourteen steps are more than 70 per cent of Mauritius today. Indians of indenture descent are 30 to 40 per cent of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Fiji, and about 27 per cent of Suriname.

They speak languages that exist nowhere else: Fiji Hindi, Sarnami Hindustani in Suriname, Mauritian Bhojpuri. In 2016 UNESCO added Geet-Gawai, the Bhojpuri pre-wedding song ceremony of Mauritius, to its list of the world’s living heritage. Those songs came over in the holds.

The surviving indenture registers of Fiji, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad sit on UNESCO’s Memory of the World list, because for most of these families they are the only record an ancestor left: a name, a village, a father’s name, a height, a scar.

Historians can go on arguing about what to call it. The people it made settled on a name long ago, and it is the one their great-grandparents mispronounced on the dock.