Indian Indenture

During this period aapproximately 42,800 women and girls arrived in Trinidad - about 29% of the entire labouring population. By the end of indentureship in 1920, only 25% per cent of the total number of female labourers was repatriated to their homeland. The majority settled in Trinidad. The indentureship experience was different forIndian women in many ways.

This newspaper column from 2003 examines how Indians in Trinidad and Tobago are misled, guided by so many fears, the encouragement of feelings of victimhood, and smallness of vision. There is an important contribution for Indians to make to the building of this New World civilisation, which is still in its infancy and only half-made. What is needed is a vision, mission and leadership not griping about “discrimination”, but looking fearlessly to the future.

As India adopted a ‘multi-pronged approach’ to mend the long-lost ties and engage with its diaspora during 1990s, the Indian diaspora emerged an important element in India’s economic, strategic and soft power pursuit. India’s enormous economic potential and its rising global stature also attracted the diaspora which has resulted in a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship between the two.  Nevertheless, Indian diaspora is an extremely diverse construct consisting of people who have migrated during the British colonialism to the present times. Regardless of all the concerted efforts New Delhi has taken, several sections and groups within the diverse rubrics of the Indian diaspora, such as, the Girmit/old diaspora continued to remain at the peripheries of the Indian diaspora policy. As India’s policy towards the diaspora is closely linked with its strategic interests and other policy priorities and the fact that these communities are law full citizens of the other countries, India is constrained from taking appropriate measures for the welfare of the Girmit/old diaspora.  Nevertheless, some strategic and out of the box thinking can help India in converging its interests with that of the Girmit diaspora and use their potential as an asset in a win-win gain for both. In this paper I seek to critically debate as to why India has not been able to create an asset out of its Girmit diaspora; what has been India’s prejudices and limitations in this regard; and what efforts India has made to bridge the gap over the years. The paper will also explore the prospects of engagement in the future that can result in win–win for both India and Girmit diaspora.

This article examines music’s role in decolonising processes in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on postcolonial national identity politics with reference to the country’s two largest ethnic groups: those descended from enslaved Africans and those from indentured labourers from India. First, the article traces the nationalisation of Creole culture – defined in terms of African- European syncretism – from the 1950s onwards, and it describes the state’s use of music competitions and educational programmes to institutionalise Carnival, calypso, and steel pan, all associated largely with African Trinidadian culture. This impacted on Indian Trinidadians by excluding them from inscriptions of national identity. The article concludes with a discussion of Indian Trinidadian cultural resurgence, tassa competitions, and the growth of public pedagogy from the 1970s that established tassa as an icon of Indianness; and all illustrating how music was used in a complex decolonisation process (relating to colonial rule and the Creole mainstream).

One of the long-held myths about Indian women immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago is that they migrated with their families under the power; authority and control of their male relatives and were docile and tractable. These views ignore the historical documentation on the 'Indian Women Problem' which confronted the colonial office as far back as 1845 when Indian indentureship to Trinidad began. Contemporary research in women's history
has revealed that a large proportion of Indian women did make a conscious decision to seek a new life elsewhere. They came as workers and not as dependents. However, the planters saw women as 'unproductive' labour and policies facilitated their exploitation as cheap labour In addition the hierarchical social structure of the Brahminic Sanskritic tradition brought about a conflation of interests between migrant Indian men and the colonial capital. Indian women in the colonies did not easily or willingly submit to these designs

This paper looks at gastronomic identity in the age of global labor migrations. Focusing on the nineteenth-century inden- tured labor voyages from northern India to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, it highlights the sea voyage as both a social setting and a mirror back onto colonial society. The space of the indentured labor ship serves as an innovative site for understanding the political, cultural, and economic dimensions of historical labor movements, through which colonial politics andgustemic identities were negotiated. An analysis of the food provisions and other culinary items that British colonial officials provided to in- dentured workers during their journeys situates the “taste” of laborers in colonial feedings.

Starting from a broad historical overview, and focusing on the main group in the Mauritian population (the Hindu descendants of indentured laborers), this paper goes through the many and changing narratives of indenture, as a ‘domesticating paradigm’ promoted in both literature and identity discourses. It deals with three connected questions, each helping us understand the relations between Mauritius and the Indian Ocean. First, is the issue of the links between so-called Indo-Mauritians and India, the territories their ancestors came from: have they been severed or enhanced? Second, comes the auto-representations and status of Mauritius: is it an ideal center-of-the-world, or a relegated island lost in the Indian Ocean? Third are the representations Indo-Mauritians have of their original migrations, through the crossing of the Indian Ocean. A final point notes the poor inclusion of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean compared with the powerful and exclusive link between India and Mauritius.

Coolies of Capitalism tells the story of women, men and children being recruited and transported to work on the plantations of tea being set up in nineteenth century colonial India. The making of these workers into so called coolies was a broader global process of disciplining labour in the nineteenth century revealing deep lineages and linkages with slave labour and " free " wage labour. The process of producing coolies revealed deep and organic relationship between colonial state and private capital. The author particularly highlights the human dimension of this story by showing how the coolies themeselves were actively intervening and transforming the nature of plantation capitalism in a colonial world.

The term indentured labour refer to a system where the individual work under a restrictive contract of employment for a fixed period of time in exchange for payment of passage, accommodation, and food. Indentured labour started as early as 1806 in the Caribbean with the first shipment of Chinese workers. This was during the period of apprenticeship. Planters were anticipating a drastic decline in their labour force since they felt that the soon to be emancipated enslaved workers would become reluctant to return to the plantation. They feared that this would have disastrous consequences to the economy thus a collapse for the sugar cane industry. Their instinct was accurate for after the emancipation of slavery, most Africans and their descendents opted to move away from the plantation which for many of them, was viewed as the site of their servitude.

In the Anglophone Caribbean, nationalist discourses of sexual citizenship are inextricably linked to the afterlife of colonialism and its far-reaching and affective legacies, resonances, and continuities as it reinscribes alterity on the bodies of sexual and gendered "others." Focusing our optics on the Indo-Caribbean, I explore how archives of chutney music offer disruptive methods, strategies, and praxes of transgression that trouble discourses of "normative" Creole (Afro-Caribbean) and heteronormative nationalisms as "authentic" ideologies of Indo-Caribbean gendering-notably, masculinity. Drawing upon historical genealogies of sexual-sacred erotics found within the Hindu, women-exclusive, pre-wedding Indo-Caribbean tradition of matikor, I interrogate how men artists in chutney music spaces perform what I conceptualize as "qoolie subjectivities," or distinct embodied languages of self that operate through what I argue are long-standing entanglements of Indo-Caribbeanness and queerness that, when excavated via the body, cultivate critical forms of Indo-Caribbean knowing and living.

In this essay, I specifically focus on acts of remaking the pejorative term "coolie" from a grammar of harm to one of reclamation, and agentive potential. Such performances choreograph embodiments of erotic self-making, or "qoolieness," as methods of pursuing transgressive Indo-Caribbean means of doing nonnormative gender and sexuality, offering us important vocalities that speak through genealogies of (post)indentureship chutney feminisms. My analysis of Indo-Guyanese chutney artist Mystic's viral song and music video entitled "Coolie Bai" (2014) interrogates how such embodied articulations of qoolieness generate alternative forms of Indo-Caribbean citizenships, masculinities and strategies of remaking the self that move us beyond hegemonic ontological paradigms.

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genre-defying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.

This article examines the reconstruction and deconstruction of the concept of काला पानी or kālā pānā, meaning the ‘black waters’, which all Indians must cross when migrating overseas. From its origin as a Brahmanic text warning about the dangers of oceanic voyages, through its dissemination as a more generalised stricture against emigration and its use and abuse as a British colonial construction, to its recasting as a historical trope and a literary device, the ever-changing influence and meaning of kala pani is interrogated and assessed. Contextualising the kala pani trope against the setting of sepoy, convict and indentureship voyages, this study also evaluates its historical validity and importance in colonial and nationalist realities. Finally, the symbolic value of the kala pani and its reworking as a literary device are explored.

This paper explores the representation and misrepresentation of indentured Indian labour migration in the colonial archive and subsequent historiography, and offers some suggestions for alternate ways of viewing the origins of the South Asian labour diaspora. Drawing on ongoing research, it emphasises the need to move away from well-worn dichotomies of ‘slavery’ and ‘free labour’ and instead to re-centre the role of human agency and creativity, even in the face of structural opposition. By reflecting on the limitations of the colonial archive, and emphasising the role of pre- existing networks, returnees and recruiters in facilitating and informing patterns of migration, it suggests ways to move beyond the persistent popular misrepresentations of this process, and find alternative, subaltern perspectives on the indentured labour experience.

In Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

This chapter traces the cutlass, a plantation tool that Indian men sometimes used to harm their partners, across contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminist writing and arts. It thinks across black feminist and Indo-Caribbean feminist thought in order to offer a materialist history of “wife murders” in the post-emancipation period. In Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur reproduces the spectacular violence in the colonial archive by recounting “wife murders” in stark detail. In contrast, Andil Gosine’s metal brooch “Cutlass” revises the colonial narrative of “wife murders” as Gosine invokes his grandmother’s domestic work with the cutlass. Through these readings, this chapter poses a dougla feminist theory of representation, which understands Indian women’s desires and sex work in the context of African wage labor and Indian indentureship.

The centenary of indenture in Fiji was celebrated with public displays, speeches, parades, and publications. The momentum for critical and creative response grew in tandem with the wave of publications inspired by the end of colonial rule in many Pacific Island countries. This period of increased agency and autonomy was also a time of political uncertainty in Fiji, as questions of the nation's identity and direction were raised. For many Indo-Fijian writers rootedness in Fiji was voiced through the traumas of indenture, which they invested with mythic valence, and which can be understood as operating as an origin story for Indo-Fijians. Vijay Mishra considered indenture, or girmit, to be a foundational ideology for Indo-Fijian writers, but viewing girmit in terms of false consciousness leads him to read Indo-Fijian anxieties in terms of political blindness and cultural insularity. Building instead on Sudesh Mishra's elaboration of girmit as non-agreement, and Vijay Mishra's later revisions of girmit ideology as founded on memories of betrayal, this article argues that girmit can be productively understood through Marianne Hirsh's work on postmemory. Looking at writings of the centenary, and in particular Subramani's short stories, this article proposes that the traumas of girmit that haunt writings of the period do so as postmemories.

This paper explores the folklore of indentured Indians and endeavors to understand the elements of Indian folk culture in the sugar colonies in the age of the empires. While examining the content and context of the folklore, it finds that the indentured folktales were very much influenced by the Indian socio-cultural life, however, these folktales got transformed and modified due to the contact with host countries' languages, places and space. On the other hand, the content of the indentured folksongs not only depicted the culture and pain of separation from homeland and familial ties, but also became an instrument to resist against the plantation hardship.

The Gangadhaara Festival, the brainchild of Ravindranath Maharaj (Raviji), a Hindu activist in Trinidad, is the yearly celebration of Ganga Ma, the goddess associated with the Ganges River. Although Raviji's temple, the Hindu Prachar Kendra (Kendra), organizes the event, their name is absent from signage, emphasizing the collaborative aspect of the festival. This celebration is the joint effort of many local temples and is for the entire Indo-Trinidadian community, not just the Kendra's members. As such the festival works to unite the Hindu community and introduce a pilgrimage aspect to their established religious practices. Envisioned as a pilgrimage through the waters of the Marianne River, the Gangadhaara festival both sacralizes the landscape of Trinidad and connects participants to their ancestors who were indentured laborers. In the retelling of their own history, Indo-Trinidadians describe the journey to the island as one sanctioned by the gods. The resilience of the laborers and their ability to conquer the land further indicates the specialness of Trinidad. In this article, I argue that although the Gangadhaara festival outwardly focuses on environmental issues, it serves an additional purpose by  embodying the journey of the indentured laborers.  By enacting their ancestors’ journey across the Kala Pani, or black waters, the offerings at Gangadhaara become an  act of  remembrance  and  a  way  for  Indo-Trinidadian  Hindus  to  cope with the transgenerational trauma of indentureship.

In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19th century and early 20th century life of her Chinese great-grandfather in colonial British Guiana, and the economic, religious, racial, and gender circumstances of Chinese and Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean.

'To work with an axe is a pure pleasure for a Ranchi.' Marking a century of oppression, this local proverb vividly portrays the entangled history of contract labour migration and the colonization of space in the Andaman Islands from 1918 onwards. This chapter explores how the contracting of the Ranchis, Adivasi labourers from Ranchi (Chotanagpur), as successors to colonial convicts in the task of forest clearance and infrastructure development has conditioned their marginalised position in the Andaman society. Since the advent of their migration a century ago, racial stereotypes attached to their ‘aboriginality’ have accompanied the Ranchis to the islands. Having been continuously exploited and discriminated against as ‘tribals’ by decision-makers and members of the Andaman society, the Ranchis remained, as a result, alienated from the lines of social mobility. Going beyond a historical analysis of exploitation, however, the chapter proposes to view their migration as a process that unleashed various forms of subaltern resistance. I so doing it dwells on a subaltern perspective highlighting the Ranchis as silenced agents or "architects" of the Andamans, whose contributions to the development of the island infrastructure needs to be publicly acknowledged.
Keywords: Adivasis, Ranchis, Chotanagpur, Andaman Islands, Contract Labour, Aboriginality, Stereotypes, Race, Social Inequality, Agency, Voice

In 1599, Gaspar Fernandes, a Japanese slave from Bungo, petitioned for his freedom in Mexico City. During the course of the trial, it was revealed that his master's claim to him rested on a limited-term servitude certificate issued by a Jesuit missionary in Nagasaki, a type of legal instrument that remains poorly understood by historians of slavery. This article discusses contemporary understandings of this controversial system with reference to a new source on slavery in Iberian Asia, Gomes Vaz's De mancipiis Indicis (c. 1610). While admitting that it was an usual arrangement and that the edicts of Dom Sebastião and Hideyoshi in combination with a decree of excommunication by the Bishop of Japan had since rendered all Japanese slavery unlawful, Vaz accepted the system in principle as compatable with Japanese law, the ius commune, Portuguese law, Castilian law and the wide-ranging thought of the School of Salamanca, sources that he cites as part of his larger comparative legal project. In the end, Vaz concludes that the schedulae issued in early modern Nagasaki were an entirely explicable, if at the time of writing no longer acceptable, legal instrument that also served the pragmatic function of lessening the burden of slavery in an important missionary context by regulating it bureaucratically and limiting it in time. He also saw it as a creating an intermediate condition between slavery and freedom that was analogous, but not quite identical to that of servants and indentured youths in the Iberian World.

The presentation gives a broad sweep of the Indo-Muslim community covering:
(a) Planting the seeds:  migration patterns of Muslims during the indenture
(b) Germination and growth:  establishment of structures
(c) Flowering:  expressions of identity.

Presentation to the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago.

The central idea of the poem is to reflect on the essential parameters which can make any nation-state on the face of the earth into, as Tagore calls it, ‘a heaven of freedom’. Throughout the poem, Tagore outlines this very idea of the ideal nation-state beautifully and succinctly. He begins by pointing out that...

This paper seeks to look the evangelical efforts of early Christian missionaries as well as the impact of Christianity on the Indentured Indian communities. The societal comparisons between missionaries who were white and converts who were of colour in early South Africa.

Accessible in OA: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/fe42f18a-925f-4a9c-a64d-93d8d9667103

Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki traces the self-positioning of Hindostani people in the face of British and Dutch colonial practices. Originally from India and shipped to the Dutch colony of Surinam after the abolition of slavery, the Hindustani served as contract labourers to keep the plantation system afloat from 1873. Central to the book is the perspective of the Hindostani’s themselves. We travel alongside the Hindostani’s from the moment they signed up for contract labour and their movement through the depots awaiting shipment, their travel experiences and encounters on ships en route to a new and unfamiliar land, their arrival in Suriname, relocation to plantations, and their dispersal following the end of their contracts, either as city workers, or farmers. All along, the book poses the question of identification: how did Hindostani make sense of themselves, their fellow Hindostani, and Surinamese society, both on the plantation as well as when they moved on to lives beyond contract labour when they took up jobs as small farmers and in the city? Beyond Being Koelies and Kantraki unhinges stereotyped characterisations of Hindostani lives, showing how various men and women, upper caste and lower caste, Hindus and Muslims, adults and children shaped their lives.

Michelle Mohabeer’s groundbreaking Indo-Caribbean queer film, Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994) remains one of the earliest works of queer Indo-Caribbean visual art. Mohabeer scripts the lesbian body cinematically through an iconography of indenture: coconut, cane, cutlass. This article returns to Coconut/Cane & Cutlass nearly three decades after its release to examine the radical ways in which Mohabeer’s visual aesthetics posits the canescape as a site of Indo-Caribbean lesbian subjectivity, reconfigures the cutlass from its status of violence to one of desire, and examines the poetics of fragmentation as a queer feminist genealogical approach. In my reading of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass as a visual text of rewriting diasporic subjectivity, Mohabeer produces a radical visual genealogy that narrates diasporic Indo-Caribbean identity through a primary site of queerness, upending historical approaches to gender and sexuality within traditional configurations of the indentured diasporas.

The concept of "coolitude" provides a creative and discursive framework for remembering and comprehending the dislocation and transformation expressed in the literature, art, music, and other creative work of descendents of indentured workers enmeshed in a global scheme of contract labor. As explicated in the work of Mauritian poet Khal Torabully and elaborated by a range of scholars and artists in the decades since, coolitude discourse has come to inform an array of cultural and creative expression in former sites of indenture and their diasporas across the Global South. Beginning in the 1820s and continuing to 1920, the system of indenture transported millions of workers from South and East Asia-"coolies" in colonial jargon-to far-flung territories across the Global South. As a creative practice, coolitude draws on traumatic memories of the past to inform post-indenture identities, importantly referencing the centrality of creolization and cultural mixing in present-day notions of self and community. As an analytical perspective, a coolitudian approach moreover provides poetic context that informs histories of indenture and post-indenture along creolized trajectories in multicultural, postcolonial societies.

Hindu Mauritians are mainly descendants of indentured laborers who came in the 19th century to replace the slaves in sugar-cane plantations. The territories of Hinduism in Mauritius focus on the patterns of wandering and taking roots. Far from being limited to a lost and/or reconstructed Indian territory, the Mauritian Hindu territory is mainly built on undeniable local rooting processes, most of all the plantation structures.
My first part focuses on the original rupture from the Indian territory, often thought of as Hindu, through various narratives of the Ocean crossing. Between taboo « Black waters” (kalapani) and locus of identity regeneration, indenture connects wandering with promising a new territorial root. The main part of the paper is a detailed study of « estate shrines », kalimai, which have stood for the first access to the Mauritian land and the first rooting of Hinduism in Mauritius. Here, the creole plantation context strongly mediates the link with the ‘territory’. My last part concentrates on the ways the Mauritian national territory has become recently appropriated by Hinduism via various circulations and pilgrimages symbolizing an emancipation from the plantation territory.

Epistolary Conversation with Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and Sumayya Vally -  from Mauritius to Guyana from South Africa to Fiji - The Funambulist (Issue 43, 2022) https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/diasporas/living-the-legacy-of-indenture-from-mauritius-to-guyana-from-south-africa-to-fiji

the captive boy and the unwinged biped - poetry, Doek! May 2022 https://doeklitmag.com/the-captive-boy-and-the-unwinged-biped/
Reading - Oceans As Archives Conference, University of Amsterdam, July 4, 2022 https://www.oceansasarchives.org/portfolio-1/project-one-bj73p-xxb2a-9452p-kms74-47e9h-cgewc-nrex2

Kreoling Sisters: (un)intimate relationships, child marriages and women spirits - Literary non-fiction, Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies (2021) https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0114.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A54d651aee9272b1dd8decd2204070184
Interview: https://islandpieces.substack.com/p/ep-1-on-brownness-indenture-and-matrilineal?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F49538235-island-pieces&utm_medium=reader2#details

Mother wounds - Literary non-fiction, We Mark Your Memory, Writings on Indenture, Anthology, Commonwealth Writers/SAS Publication (2018) https://www.sas.ac.uk/publications/we-mark-your-memory-writings-descendants-indenture.
Interview: https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/06/12/british-imperial-indenture-system-a-sanitised-form-of-slavery/.
Readings: ICC Kuala Lumpur 2019, Migration Museum/Commonwealth People Forum London 2018

Poetry
. There is only sky - Silver Pinion 2020 https://silverpinion.blogspot.com/2020/05/there-is-only-sky-gitan-djeli.html?m=1
. For you, Vava - Parentheses Journal 2020 http://www.parenthesesjournal.com/issue-08/for-you-vava-gitan-djeli/
. Lalang twist - adda 2019 https://www.addastories.org/lalang-twist/
. Lava Spasm - Amberflora Issue 8 2019 https://www.amberflora.com/issues/issue-8/gitan-djeli-lava-spasm/
. The Lorde - Poetry Magazine July-August Issue 2019 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150282/the-lorde
. We are the drops, the lake, the tongues, the songs - Collaborative poetry with Kama La Mackerel and Athol Williams, Commonwealth Writers 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTILXhTd1Nk

Over 147,000 Indians were brought to Trinidad between 1845 and
1917. While there is consensus on the broad patterns of the demographic and social characteristics of these labourers, there is a limited focus on interrogating the same characteristics of various subpopulations. This paper extends the earlier work by Kassim and Polar
(2018) and seeks to rectify gaps specific to Muslims by mining the
Ship Registers/Emigration Passes for the period 1892-1901. Data are
presented for two five-year periods and the geographical and social
patterns are then considered; the periods are 1892-1896, and 1897-
1901. Findings suggest that the patterns for Muslims are generally
consistent with the findings in the literature for the overall Indian migrants.

The sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)—foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies—is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roy's thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars' multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the 'benign' role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora.