these are some plantations in British colonies that operated just 100 years ago some of these workers are enslaved Africans some are indentured servants from India can you tell the difference after slavery was abolished Britain replaced its enslaved workers with a cheap alternative indentured servants in this new system millions of people were coerced into signing away their rights for five to ten years at a time this system is not ancient history some of its survivors could still be alive these workers became bound to overseas employers where they endured harrowing abuse and exploitation for the duration of their contract I would call the system of indenture a hidden history and it is and has been deliberately obscured from our national narrative Maria caledine's great-grandfather was recruited from India through this exact system he ended up toiling at a sugar Plantation in British Guyana for years on end after seeing how her family's past had been buried Maria decided to specialize in the study of Indian indenture we know about it because the British kept the receipt they are there that all the receipts are there they're there for everyone to see British colonizers took portraits of these workers after taking them from India to work in overseas colonies most would never return [Music] its record of Indian immigrants these are the names of Indians who signed an indenture contract and boarded a ship from Kolkata on December 2nd 1903. there's an agreement between you and your employer that you will work for a particular number of years as soon as they sign that contract the indentured worker lost much of their freedom they were treated like human cargo shipped around the world and bound to their employer for the time period of their contract they were bought sold overworked and abused in ways far too similar to slavery here's how it all went down by the end of the 1800s the British Empire was growing to the biggest the world had ever seen and the natural resources of the colonies like sugar and cotton earned the colonizers a lot of money but labor costs started eating into Britain's massive profits after slavery was abolished and that's when the British brought in indentured Indians there were more than 3 million people like Maria's great-grandfather taken from their homes and placed on ships heading to British colonies the overall trade for these cheap laborers replaced nearly a quarter of the Atlantic slave trade what has taken place is um a retelling of the history of the 19th century that focuses on the abolition of the slave trade and Lords those involved in the abolition of the slave trade but does not draw attention in any way to the fact that the system of slavery was replaced by a system which was very brutal really cruel and lasted into the 20th century the vast majority of indentured workers were from India as a result of indenture and additional migration pockets of the Indian Community can now be found in nearly every corner of our globe over 32 million people of Indian origin live outside of India to day the world's largest diaspora India might actually be a kind of replacement for Africa think of this from the Planter's point of view they can't imagine a world that will deny them a source of Labor cheap malleable labor in 1838 the first Indian indentured laborers arrived in Guyana and that was really the beginning of the system of Indian indenture some laborers were forced or kidnapped but others signed on voluntarily especially during filming caused by British colonial rule but most didn't know what they were signing up for picture yourself as Maria as a great grandfather kaladine who was living in pipra India wages are at an all-time low the class system is not working in your favor famine plagues your village recruiters employed by the British boast about the opportunity of indenture guaranteeing High wages in return for a five-year labor contract they often frequently lied about what the terms of the indenture contract were the distance of the place that people would traveling to and the nature of the work that they would have to perform you can't read or write but they tell you the contract provides round-trip passage to Calcutta India where you put in light labor in exchange for great wealth to bring back to your family like more than 2 million other Indians you stamp your finger and take the deal in 1886 my great-grandfather was recruited in Gonda he was taken to pfizabad that from then he was taken to Calcutta as an indentured laborer what they didn't tell you is you're not really going to Calcutta you're transferred from Depots to shipyards perhaps told your final destination would be Sri Lanka but your ocean Voyage keeps going and going the ship itself is rancid and you are crowded alongside Parcels of rice wheat and hundreds of other laborers deep within the cargo deck your Voyage could have been one that was full with deaths from cholera for example typhoid dysentery it would have been quite traumatic for the um for the immigrants you are lucky to survive the diseases that kill roughly one in five of your fellow passengers your peers Bond over the shared trauma and call themselves The jahaji by or Brotherhood of the boat three months later you arrive in an unfamiliar land and someone tells you it is known as British Guyana a British colony thousands of miles away from home he left Calcutta for Guyana and he indentured for two periods of Five Years on two Estates in in demeraris this arrival story is way too familiar for the tens of millions of descendants of Indian indenture hundreds of thousands of people were taken from China Japan and Polynesia as well forming an extracted Community known as kulis a term that's now an offensive slur the laborers were shipped across 19 of Britain's colonies namely in the Caribbean and South Africa the Dutch and French also took advantage of the cheap labor for their own plantations indentured labor was used to cultivate sugar cotton and tea as well as endless train tracks as early as the 1840s British officials were calling this a new system of slavery the vast majority would never see India again and would end their lives working in cane fields on the other side of the world indentured workers endured back-breaking work and were whipped and abused by white authorities many of them were even housed in the same Barracks as formerly enslaved people endangered women were sexually abused by white overseers and sometimes assigned to an Indian man as his housemate and sexual partner there is a deliberate kind of denial of anything which does not meet the description of enslaved or free these binaries are not helpful to people who are trying to express or explain what the system of indenture was there are conditions of unfree labor that exist between these two states and we must look at them we must see them they're part of our history and what happened when their indenture contracts ended you could then choose to accept a return Voyage Home to India or you could again accept a further Bounty and stay in the colony and that's what the majority of people chose to do but why would anyone choose to remain indentured even after years of laboring some people didn't earn enough money to bring back home others feared they would be shunned when they got back to India accused of abandoning their family so from India people were taken to Mauritius to Trinidad to Guyana to Fiji to St Lucia Grenada South Africa Malaysia the system was huge so over 2 million people were part of it and and it has left obviously a huge diaspora because the majority of people didn't return in those places they are a remarkable people because the story of indenture is a story of Against All Odds survival and it is a story of great sacrifice the trauma lasted lifetimes in British Guyana it took Generations before descendants of the first indentured laborers were able to get off the plantation find work or own property of their own and British colonizers didn't stop there in Trinidad British Guyana and South Africa the British inflamed tensions between formerly enslaved Africans and Indians sewing divisions that continued to plague former colonies so we are still able to see the legacies of colonialism to that extent that they are part of the politics in those countries still today the indenture system didn't last forever Indians in British colonies resisted their colonial oppressors for several decades although they didn't realize it resistance efforts across the Indian diaspora culminated almost simultaneously in the early 1900s in South Africa individual workers rebelled on their plantations through desertion or suicide Mahatma Gandhi later joined the Indian South African resistance movement leading this major strike in 1913. in Fiji indentured workers had the highest rates of suicide using it as a form of resistance in British Guyana Collective organizing ranging from demonstrations to resistance literature shook the nation some indentured workers took to writing in Guyanese newspapers to protest their abuse I don't think that the British have have ever apologized there is a very violent way of erasing somebody's history without it seeming to be violent which is just not to talk about it just not to acknowledge it Britain finally out loud indentureship in 1917 but the system left behind a Monumental Legacy millions of South Asians were scattered across Far Corners of the world in a multi-generational Indian diaspora descendants of indenture in Suriname Mauritius British Guyana and Trinidad cultivated a thriving indo-caribbean Community Indian South Africans launched their own political parties and joined an anti-apartheid efforts alongside black South Africans the coastal city of Durban South Africa became home to the largest population of Indians outside of India and is acclaimed for its Indian culinary scene assimilation was bittersweet for Indian migrants they wanted to hold on to their cultural heritage but colonial policies made this harder in some places says it was punishable to speak Hindi in others Indians were not allowed to go to school or get jobs without first converting to Christianity I am sure that every indentured family has stories like mine and I wish that we could just have some sense of you know the tragedy of it and also the remarkable nature of the people who survived it today indentured servitude may be a forgotten or even buried history but many of the tens of millions of descendants want us to know their story [Music] foreign [Music]