South Asian Migrations in Global History

Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives

Neilesh Bose

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350197343
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350124691
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This collection explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography.

Including recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, this volume brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system.

Centering south Asian migrations as a site of analysis in global history, the contributors offer a lens into the ongoing regulation of labourers after the abolition of slavery that intersect with histories in the Global North and Global South. The use of historical biography showcases experiences from below, and showcases a world history outside empire and nation.

Part One

Impacts of Indentured Labour

1

Gokhale, Polak and the end of Indian indenture in South Africa, 1909–1911

Goolam Vahed

Indian indenture resulted from two distinct but converging factors: the labour shortage on plantations that followed the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1833 and a new phase of imperialism that resulted in the expansion of European settlers and capital into new parts of the world, such as Natal and Fiji, which had not known slavery. Around 1.2 million Indians emigrated as indentured workers, mainly to British colonies in a ‘massive, micro-managed state-controlled enterprise’¹ for purposes of ‘facilitation’ rather than ‘restriction’ of labour migration.² Despite several commissions across the Empire that exposed labour abuses,³ there was little pressure to end indenture within India itself until the early twentieth century. Sustained agitation only materialized in the period after 1910, when indentured emigration entered Indian nationalist discourse in a significant way as an attack on British imperial rule itself.⁴

Natal was the first colony where pressure was applied to end indenture and this chapter examines the complex set of factors that drove this process as well as the key figures involved. While the figure of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the future Mahatma, understandably dominates the historiography of Indians in South Africa during this period, the influence of two other individuals, the South African–based Jewish lawyer and Gandhi’s accomplice Henry Polak, and to a lesser extent Indian nationalist leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was key to ending indentured emigration to Natal. Until now, the involvement of Polak in particular in ending indenture has been overlooked and a key contribution of this chapter is to examine his critical role. This chapter also argues that those seeking to end indentured migration to Natal had different motives. Natal was set apart from other colonies/countries that received indentured labour in that its white minority government was itself looking to end its reliance on this labour supply and was actively seeking alternative sources. At the same time, anti-colonial leaders like Gandhi, Gokhale and Polak, though working towards the same end, had different motivations for wanting an end to indenture. This chapter provides a brief overview of indentured migration to Natal, then discusses anti-Indian legislation which rendered Indians as second-class citizens, and finally focuses on the sustained campaign in India to end indentured emigration to Natal.

The ‘Indian problem’

The annexation of Natal by the British in 1843 was followed by large-scale immigration of mainly British settlers who found success with sugar production, but whose enterprise was hampered by the shortage of a stable, low-cost labour force because the indigenous Zulu had access to land and were not willing to labour on sugar plantations.⁵ Colonists were aware of the success of Indian indenture in Mauritius and petitioned the British for Indian labour. Between 1860 and 1911, 152,641 indentured migrants arrived in Natal. Tayal,⁶ Desai and Vahed,⁷ and others have chronicled the appalling living and working conditions of the indentured as well as the lives they made in South Africa. From the mid-1870s, indentured workers were followed to Natal by free migrants from Gujarat on the west coast of India. As they and the ex-indentured population spread throughout the colony, white settlers saw them as constituting an economic and political threat and pressured for legislation to restrict Indian trade, residence and immigration rights.⁸

After Natal achieved self-government in 1893, the new government dealt with the perceived ‘Asiatic Menace’ by passing laws ‘to establish expensive registration taxes and pass systems, and to restrict commercial activities and property holding for postindenture Indians’.⁹ Formal Indian political leadership was provided by the merchant class who formed the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1894 under Gandhi’s leadership. The NIC’s strategy was primarily constitutional and included petitions to government officials and private persons in Britain, Natal and India, as well as letters to newspapers arguing for the rights of non-indentured Indians.¹⁰ This strategy failed to stem the tide of racist legislation.

As Indians made their way from Natal to the Cape, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, these governments also passed measures to restrict Indian trade and residence rights. The Free State adopted legislation in 1891 prohibiting Indian settlement in that colony; the 1906 Immigration Act introduced a literacy test that made migration to the Cape extremely difficult; and Law 3 of 1885 – amended in 1886 – restricted Indian trade and residence rights in the Transvaal. The British used the treatment of Indians in the Transvaal as part justification for going to war with the Boers in what would come to be known as the South African War (1899–1902). Lord Landsdowne told a meeting in Sheffield in 1899: ‘Among the many misdeeds of the South African Republic I do not know that any fills me with more indignation than its treatment of these Indians’.¹¹

To the consternation of Indians, however, the British pursued anti-Asiatic policies in the postwar period. Lord Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner and Governor of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, was an advocate of white supremacy. He told the Johannesburg Municipal Congress on 18 May 1903: ‘The white man must rule, because he is elevated by many, many steps above the black man; steps which it will take many centuries to climb, and it is quite possible that the vast bulk of the black population may never be able to climb at all’.¹² As Radhika Mongia has pointed out, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the transformation of ‘“Asiatics” into new kinds of nationality-bearing “Indians” and “Chinese”’, and ‘the category of “British subject” was also undergoing a thorough redefinition’ to exclude ‘racialised subjects’ from citizenship in ‘white-settler colonies of the British empire’.¹³ Racist controls resulted in the adjective ‘white’ being attached to ‘settler’ colonies.¹⁴

Anti-Asiatic legislation in the Transvaal climaxed with the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance of 1906, which Gandhi termed the ‘Black Act’ as it required Indians to register by providing fingerprints. Gandhi went to London in 1906 to canvas against the law. His delegation, led by London-based Sir Lepel Griffin, Chairman of the East India Association, met with John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, on 22 November 1906. Griffin urged Morley to stop indentured migration to Natal ‘until the status of their fellow-subjects in South Africa is altered’.¹⁵ The British acted duplicitously in vetoing the ‘Black Act’ in December 1906 but allowing the law to be passed when the Transvaal was given self-government under General Louis Botha on 1 January 1907. The British government approved the Transvaal Registration Act on 9 May 1907 and on 11 May Gandhi announced that Indians would embark on a passive resistance campaign against it. The Act came into effect on 1 July 1907.

Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign began in December 1907. He himself was arrested on 27 December and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. The matter was raised at the Surat conference of the Indian National Congress (INC) which was held a few days after his arrest; the INC’s discussion of the issue caused alarm among British rulers. The Register, an Adelaide-based newspaper, reported from London on 3 January 1908 that British officials feared that it could lead to

a spread of the boycott of British goods and a revival of sedition (Swadeshi Movement). It must have the effect of strengthening the agitation against British rule. Indignation is expressed towards the British government for not having vetoed a law which is denounced as insulting to Indian peoples. Ministers are characterized as either servile and weak in their attitude to the colonies, or hypocritical in their professed determination to defend the King’s Asiatic subject against injustice.¹⁶

As prisons began filling up in the Transvaal, General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Colonial Secretary and Education Secretary in General Botha’s government, met with Gandhi on 30 January 1908 and they reached a compromise, which Gandhi understood to mean that the Act would be repealed if Indians registered voluntarily.¹⁷ But Smuts did not repeal the Act and was accused by Gandhi of ‘foul play’. At a mass meeting at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg on 16 August 1908, around 2,000 Indian registration documents were burnt and the passive resistance movement recommenced. Gandhi was imprisoned between February and May 1909. In all, 3,000 people were arrested, and fifty-nine were deported to India in April 1910 and a further twenty-six in June 1910. In addition to registration, the Botha regime also passed an Immigration Act which virtually ended further Indian entry into the Transvaal.¹⁸

While the satyagraha movement was ongoing, the colonies of Natal, Transvaal, Orange Free State and the Cape began discussions about forming a Union of South Africa. Indians were concerned about their fate and two delegations went to London in 1909, one from the Transvaal headed by Gandhi and another from Natal under the auspices of the NIC, while Gandi sent Polak to India as a one-man delegation to publicize the grievances of Indians in South Africa. Nationalist fervour was gathering momentum in India and Indian nationalists took a keen interest in what was going on in the colonies. The treatment of Indians in South Africa in particular was a rallying point for many in the INC.

The Indian context

The INC, formed by Indian moderates in 1885, took a keen interest in the treatment of Indians in the Transvaal due, in part, to the close relationship between Gandhi and Gokhale, but also because they believed that Indians’ patriotism to the Empire was not rewarded with equal treatment. Moderates argued that Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 stipulated that Indians were subjects of the Crown entitled to ‘the equal and impartial protection of the Law’, and thus citizens of the British Empire, and it was within the framework of Empire that they were claiming their rights.¹⁹ In reality, however, there was a colour line in the Empire as India was not only treated unequally in comparison to self-governing dominions such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada – even though it contributed the most financially to the Empire – but within each of these ‘white’ states, Indians were discriminated against because of their race.²⁰

Gandhi’s associate Polak was an English Jew who had arrived in the Transvaal in 1903. He was sub-editor of a newspaper, Transvaal Critic, when he became acquainted with Gandhi through the latter’s work during the plague epidemic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: Archives, paper regimes and mobility
• Introduction
• Part One: Impacts of Indentured Labour
• Part Two: Law in Migration Histories
• Part Three: Historical Biography
• Epilogue: Ocean currents and wayward crossings
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Imprint