Born to Work: An In-Depth Inquiry on the Commodification of Indian Labour – A Historical Analysis of the Indian Indentureship and Current Discourses of Migrant Labour Under the Kafala System

Abstract

This paper raises issues pertaining to prevalent claims of human trafficking and forced labour under the kafala migrant system, a migrant sponsorship system used by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries which includes the following: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The conceptualization of human trafficking and migrant labour fits into the conceptual mode of slavery and enslaved labour of racialised bodies. It can be best understood through an anti-racist and anti-colonial framework. This article explores racial disposability of brown bodies under systems of debt labour, as brown bodies have been historically constructed and conceptualized as mere labour commodities, and assigned to spaces of degenerous work. Drawing connections from the Black-White paradigm and the saliency of Black skin as racialised bodies, this article argues that the saliency of brown skin has been historically produced and intertwined with notions of bondage and enslaved labour, as a result of brown skins positionality in Black-White paradigm constitutes brown bodies as racialised. Anti-racist theorizing found in this paper led to the tracing of the inextricably linked narratives of human trafficking under the British’s Indian Indentureship system and the kafala system.