Coolie — A baggage of Colonialism
Last year, the Ministry of Railways, India used the word ‘Coolie’ in one of their tweets to refer to the scarlet-clad porters at the railway stations. Unknown to the person handling the twitter account(or maybe their entire PR team), Suresh Prabhu, the then railway minister, had announced in the railway budget of 2016 that the porters will now be known as ‘sahayaks’ (helpers). Yet the same ministry used the term officially atleast till March 2020.
The following article is inspired from that unfortunate tweet by the Ministry of Railways, India.
The Indian Railways, a Govt. body, is taking pride in enabling women to work as ‘Coolie’ at railway stations in India. In many countries, it is considered offensive and a racial slur but not in India. I am here telling you the story of what the word means and what is its significance in history. It was supposed to be a short twitter thread but then I went on to write a bit more.
The word ‘Coolie’ has its origins in the colonial times when poor Indians and Chinese were shipped by the British overseas to work as labour during the 1800s. Slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1833, so to compensate the sugarcane plantation owners aka the slave-owners, the British Govt paid them one time compensation package for the loss of their slaves. The same money was used to get Indian indentured labourers to replace the slaves. It literally means someone doing very hard, back-breaking work, thanklessly.
European agents began recruiting young men from the hinterlands of India. Poor quality of life and multiple famines coupled with lies about the great opportunities abroad lured many. Most of these men came from the Indo-Gangetic plains (Bhojpuri speaking belt from UP and Bihar) and Tamil Nadu, regions with a history of sugarcane cultivation. Why Tamil Nadu? Because the French had already been shipping out Indians from as early as 1826 from its ports in the French colony of Pondicherry and Karaikal. They even signed an agreement with the British Govt to do so officially in 1860.
Indian labourers were hired on a 5-year contract after which they could choose to return home or stay back. A corruption word of this agreement led to these people being called ‘Girmitiyas’. Also referred to as ‘Jahaji’(shipborne).
Out of the ports of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, the latter became the major port for labour passage and by the 1850s, each colony used to maintain its own coolie depot in Calcutta. The men would be housed here and checked for being fit before embarkation. Just before embarkation on a ship, a Govt officer would require them to state that they knew where they were going and were willingly doing so. The novel ’Sea of Poppies’(2008) by Amitav Ghosh is set in 1840s on the ship ‘Ibis’ transporting Indian indentured labourers to the plantations in Mauritius.
They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites. Poor working conditions and a meagre pay meant that they could not afford to pay for their passage back and the majority of them had to stay back forever. Later on, a lot of women were also taken to colonies because having a family meant the labourer would not go back to India.
The working conditions were awful, the harsh tropical climate, lack of nutritious food and hygienic conditions led to high mortality rate among the Indian immigrants.
On 2nd Nov 1834, the first 36 Girmitiyas docked at the ‘Aapravasi Ghat’(The Immigration Depot) at Port Louis, Mauritius. It has also been called the ’Coolie Ghat’.
Over 1.5 million Indians were transported to the British, French and Dutch Colonies. Of these, 450K went to Mauritius alone. Today at least 51% of Mauritians are Hindus and 65% have Indian ancestry making Mauritius the only African country with a Hindu majority.
Public outrage over exploration of labourers halted the scheme in 1917 and the indenture system was finally cancelled in 1920. Most of them stayed back and are now a part of the huge Indian diaspora in South Africa and the island countries of Fiji, Suriname, Mauritius and the Caribbean.
In 2015, Sushma Swaraj, the then External Affairs Minister of India unveiled the ‘Suriname Memorial’ or ‘Mai-Baap Memorial’ at the Suriname Ghat along the banks of river Hooghly in Kolkata. The statue, of a plainly-dressed couple carrying a potli, honours the Indian indentured labour who migrated to the Ducth-controlled Suriname in South America between 1873 to 1917. This is a replica of the original ‘Baba and Mai’ monument in Parimaribo, capital of Suriname, which symbolises the first Indian man and woman to set foot in this Dutch-speaking nation.
Today, many of these countries like Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, etc celebrate ‘Indian Arrival Day’ on the date of arrival of the first ship with Indian indentured labour back in the 1800s. Indian Govt. also observes a grand ‘Pravasi Bharatiya Divas’ on 9th Jan with some other functions to recognise the contribution of Indian diaspora towards the development of India. The date was chosen because the greatest Indian to have come back, M K Gandhi, had returned to India from South Africa on 9th Jan 1915.
So next time, if you wonder how come V S in V S Naipaul’s name refers to Vidiadhar Surajprasad even though he’s a Trinidadian and Tobagonian British or about former West Indies cricket team captains Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, just think of over a million Indians who went to work overseas as slave replacements, as ‘Coolies’, and how we still have kept the word alive back home in India.
In India, it refers to someone who carries your baggage, but still using this word is a baggage of colonialism.