Indian Indentured Labourers in Mauritius

Abstract

Immigration of Indian indentured labourers to work on various overseas destinations began over the debris of slavery and this led to a never ending debate over the nature of indenture labour regime in terms of the freedom and unfreedom of the labour. This article attempts to argue that the problematic of this incessant debate lies in referring to ‘classic’ slavery as the closed model of reference for all forms of labour servitude. By studying the historical experiences of Indian in-dentured labourers in Mauritius, this article attempts to shift the core of this debate from institu-tional definitions to the decisive role of circumstantial necessities and perspectives culminating in multiple forms of labour servitude. This article examines the question of freedom and unfreedom in the indentured labour regime at two levels of ascendency—the physical and the moral—being exemplified through the regulation of vagrancy among the Indian indentured labourers, the language of command and the colonial lexicon while referring to the Indian labourers; and it concludes that the indenture labour regime was a form of servitude, though not essentially a new system of slavery, as the labour was denied of its economic freedom and occupational and ter-ritorial mobility in the indenture system.