By Prof S. Arasaratnam, University of New England, Australia
David Chanderbali. Indian Indenture in the Straits Settlements, 1872 – 1910 (Leeds : Peepal Tree Press, 2008.- 233 p.)
Indian Indenture in the Straits Settlements is a study of the immigration of Indian indentured labour to the Straits over a period during which this migration was legalized and an institutional structure erected to manage the various stages of the migration process. The subject is well chosen and tightly defined. The author is aware that he is entering a crowded field of colonial historiography. There have been a number of macro studies that have etched the broad outlines of the phenomenon of Indian migration and others that have looked at the entire process in a single country, tracing the changing methods and the consequences of migration and settlement over a long period of time.
The labour movement to British Malaya has thus been studied by works of both types.
The author is aware from the outset that if he is to make further advances in our knowledge he has to move to a micro study and ask searching questions of particular phenomena. He has done this by defining his subject in terms of space (Province Wellesley), time (1872-1910) and a particular form of the migration phenomenon (indenture). These features give the book a central theme and a cogent argument which the author develops in various chapters.
The author sets out the framework in his introductory chapter where he shows familiarity with the universality of the problems of Indian migration. His own previous work on British Guiana and his Guyanese background help him in this as the West Indian colonies give him a good referral point for raising questions on his Malayan material.
The study also provides the background information on the growth of a plantation crop in Penang and Province Wellesley. Here the author has had to do a good deal of the primary work himself as the early history of plantation agriculture in Malaya has not been properly studied. He has done this with competence, filling in the gaps with some research on primary sources. The discussion of the reasons why Malays did not come into the plantation labour force is cogent and convincing. He attempts this difficult subject and carries it off without relying on the usual clichés and stereotyped arguments that abound in discussions of this problem that recur in a number of similar situations – Fijians in Fiji, Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Burmese in Burma, Amerindians in South America.
The author comes to the meat of his subject when he discusses the supply of labour for a rising demand in Province Wellesley, first through unregulated recruitment and transshipment by private entrepreneurs. He traces the background factors and the developing situation which move the Indian government and the Straits Settlements government towards erecting legal and administrative machinery for a controlled implementation of a policy of migration of indentured labour from South India to the Straits Settlements. Here the author has presented much primary statistical data on the very first phase of controlled immigration to Malaya.
This section leads naturally on to the next two which discuss the operation of recruitment and the process of migration under this institutional framework. There is some good evidence of the recruitment process as it operated in the field and an attempt to look comparatively at the effectiveness of labour recruitment to the Straits Settlements, Ceylon and Burma. Likewise the comparison of indenture recruitment with the kangany recruitment is interesting. In the chapter on migration the author amasses the available evidence on the operation of the system and its abuses. Much of the evidence is episodic and impressionistic and it is important that the author recognize it as such. It must be said, however, that he has marshalled a lot of such evidence through a meticulous study of his primary sources. I am generally in agreement with the conclusions he has drawn on the abuses practised in the immigration depots and on the voyage.
In the last two chapters he shifts attention to the Malayan end of the migration process and looks at important questions on the condition of labour and the level of wages. It is here that the book makes a major contribution to our knowledge of Indian immigration in Malaya. He tells here a very cogent and convincing story of the gross ill-treatment and exploitation of labour through the system of indenture as opposed to non-indentured migrant labour that was operating in the neighbouring Malay states.
He has been able to amass such an array of facts that at times he tends overly towards a narrative of facts, a description of events, thus affecting the quality of the analysis and the conclusions he derives from them.
The chapter on wages is, in my opinion, the best chapter in the book where he has presented new data, and convincingly established the hypothesis that indentured labour was low-wage labour that distorted the market forces that governed the demand and supply of labour. His detailed calculation of wages in relation to the cost of living and transport establishes the real standard of living of indentured labour and once and for all disposes the myth of an improvement in the standard of living of the migrant labourer. It would have been good if he had done a calculation of the cost of living of a labourer family in the Madras Presidency to see whether he was not in real terms better off if he had stayed where he was.
The strength of the book lay not in any path-breaking new conclusions the author has put forward but in amassing much new data to underline and clarify general trends that were vaguely visible. In this respect, while I said at the outset that the tight definition of the subject enables him to magnify phenomena that were not clearly visible, it also has the disadvantage of looking at problems in isolation and not paying sufficient attention to their relation to cognate issues. For example, the question of indenture migration cannot be viewed in isolation from the migration of free labour to neighbouring states. The author is aware of this and notes the relative wage rates and the effect of this on attempted movement of labourers on indenture to these states. But this problem of the general versus the particular is inherent in any intensive and in-depth study.
The standard work on Indian Immigration to Malaya is that of KS Sandhu (Cambridge, 1969). Though Sandhu has taken a long period 1786-1957 for his study, his major statistical data relate to the period after 1890. He devotes eleven pages of the work to immigration under indenture. This phase of labour migration had to be looked at intensely. Dr Chanderbali has done so in this study and done it, I believe, successfully.
