The Labour Contractor
Image description: Dark green text reads "The Labour Contractor: Plantation Labour was anything but casual.”
“In the 1830s, famines and the rumour of jobs available in Calcutta drove groups of landless men out of their villages and on the roads. Most came from remote villages in the uplands of Chota Nagpur, where fertile soil and surface or subsoil water were scarce. Labour contractors called arkatis waited on their routes, and persuaded them to sign indentures to go to Mauritius or British Guiana. The abolitionist rhetoric then raging in Britain blurred the distinction between indenture and slavery for many, and made this traffic controversial. When the government in Bengal barred some of these contractors (but allowed the trade after a short-lived ban), arkatis, now tough and dangerous men from the small towns along the way with a smattering of Europeans among them, conducted the business secretly in the nights. Some individuals signed the contracts with a reasonable knowledge of what they were committing themselves to. Many signed without a clear knowledge or understanding.
The labour contractor almost always found an intermediary within the group to negotiate terms with. This figure, commonly called the sardar (leader), and in some contexts maistry or kangany, was entrusted with the accounts and eventually with some supervision tasks at destination. In some later reports, the sardar occasionally appeared as a collusive agent, one who mysteriously disappeared at the last minute when the ship set off. In most cases, however, the sardar continued on the journey, and reinvented himself as a foreman at destination. The sardar was sometimes discovered among these roving bands to be the village headman, and in some cases, headship was assigned by the negotiators.
We do not know to what degree the sardar among the early indentured workers was an innovative response to the needs of capital, or the carry-over of an older institution that made some rural communities particularly familiar with these specific forms of labour market transactions. What we do know is that throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a figure in part a foreman, in part a headman, and in part a recruiting contractor, formed an indispensable part of labour organization in mills, mines, ports and plantations in India, and in the tropical colonies where labourers from the subcontinent went for work.
The intermediary embodied a blend of different kinds of authorities, economic, cultural and political. The term 'labour-lord' seems to capture this variable blend rather better than any equivalent. Historians have explained the presence of such a figure by the needs of capital for intermediaries, or needs of labour for familiar relationships in an unfamiliar environment. The significance of the labour agent for economic history, however, seems to go beyond these specific needs.”
-Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History, Tirthankar Roy (2008)