Histories of Racial Capitalism

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Indian labor emerged as a vital commodity, as the British Empire adjusted to a new, “free,” global order after slavery was abolished in 1833. Racial discourses abounded as colonial agents constructed elaborate taxonomies of peoples, vociferously measuring and orientalizing in grand comparative projects of imperial knowledge production. Yet in order to fully grasp the multiple valences of the worlds of labor that emerged in this imperial moment, we must properly link these larger dynamics to the particularities of precapitalist social formations. In this chapter I shift focus inward to colonial India and argue that it is imperative to pay attention to a series of racial projects that occurred on multiple scales. The discursive ordering of races itself drew on contingent and possibly infinite manifestations of racialization as they unfolded in colonial contexts. Only by fully grasping the interlocking scales on which human distinctions were produced and capitalized on can we apprehend the forces that were required to bring bodies into the service of global commodity production in a capitalist world order.

This essay provides an account of racial capitalism that speaks not of racialization, but rather of racializations in the plural. By focusing on two separate figurations of the indebted Indian laborer in colonial India, I elucidate how both were produced by distinct forms of racial ordering. I argue here that abolition was a racial project—the left hand of global capitalism, if you will. Indians were a racialized category of labor not because of slavery, but because of processes set in motion by the particular constellation of labor demands called into being by British abolition. This project was global in its scope and ambition, clearly distinguishing, ordering, and assigning roles to populations based on the exigencies of imperial labor demands and cultural tropes reified into biological and scientific truth.

I follow a range of scholars who have asked various forms of the question: how were “new forms of bonded labor engendered by the vocabulary of freedom?”1 This perennial question has now emerged with a renewed sense of urgency. Analyzing the postabolition landscapes in Jamaica, East Africa, and Cuba, Cooper, Holt, and Scott shift attention from the legacies of slavery to the problems of freedom, noting that abolition “did not break the association between race and labor, but in some ways deepened the racialization of the labor question.”² Similarly, Eric Foner invites us to think about the “political economy of freedom,” and Saidya Hartman pays attention to the “burdened individualism” of the world that lay in wait for freed ex-slaves in the Reconstruction Era South.³ In this essay, I focus attention on one particular geographical location, tracing how multiple forms of debt bondage emerged directly from the deep interconnections between global abolition and racial capitalism in colonial India. Indeed, these connectivities and shared legacies were being pondered a century ago by W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw the effects of global capitalism, and the very definition of freedom itself, as a shared project for the “basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.”⁴

Colonial India provides a unique opportunity to examine the workings of racial capitalism in a context where labor formations were truly staggering in their variety, manifesting in intense and often violent forms. These included subjugated untouchable labor, low-status kinship groups with tenuous to nonexistent claims to land, complex household economies where servitude, slavery, and marriage were almost indistinguishable, and new forms of coolie labor working on European-owned plantations in India. Scholars have noted that all these regimes were shaped in some way by debt, but the particular form these took and how they relate to one another is rarely elaborated. How were different forms of indebted labor framed amid imperial discourses that positioned Britain as the global standard-bearer of free labor and antislavery? How were these discourses bound up in racial projects that circulated, rehashed, and reverberated back repertoires around the African slave, the white master, and the East—and South—Asian coolie? What was the relationship between different iterations of debt bondage and forms of racialization as seen from the vantage point of colonial India?

As Robinson asserts in the opening of Black Marxism, “feudal society is the key.”5 Following Robinson’s lead, Chhabria notes it is imperative to see the subcontinent’s own history as one “shot through with a fundamental antagonism between capital and unfree labor” and suggests it is the “distinction between peoples rather than distinction between places that gives capital its power, everywhere.”⁶ Scholars of racial capitalism have highlighted that the “production of capital occurred in tandem with the production of difference,” arguing that these processes were endemic to the spread of capitalism.⁷ In other words, at all moments, “capitalism is racial capitalism.”⁸ I draw attention here to the layers of racialization that undergirded how labor was produced for the global capitalist order. There were always multiple repertoires at play in ranking human activity and, ultimately, civilizational and moral worth. It is crucial, therefore, to pay attention to the scales upon which racial processes were occurring in tandem—fluctuating between a more expansive notion of pre-modern iterations of racialization, as insisted upon by Robinson, and the more particular, emergent forms of racialization forged in the crucible of Atlantic modernity.

India is a site where we can interrogate how racial capitalism operates in a context where “race” as a category fits uneasily with prevailing notions of difference and inferiority—a site where we can think about “diverse genres of human difference.”⁹ To remain coherent in this engagement with racial capitalism, I step back to subsume two such “genres” under the umbrella of “racialization.” Historians today debate tirelessly over labels and terminology, fearing the reification of modern concepts such as race in other times and places. Similarly area studies specialists insist on the contingent and unique ideologies of human difference in each of their contexts. Capitalism has no such concern for the vicissitudes of contemporary debates over biological-racial-religious-caste difference. It may be true that modern racial ideologies, best represented by the devaluing of black life before, during, and after the slave trade, were the most virulent and powerful drivers of modern capitalism. I argue, however, that capitalism has demonstrated remarkable flexibility historically, exploiting each new frontier’s unique logics of exclusion and exploitation, where and how it finds them.

I focus on two interrelated processes. First, this essay takes global “racial” discourse as its empirical object, examining how it emerged over the course of imperial discussions around labor before and after abolition. Important scholarship has highlighted the global scale on which “races” were discursively constructed in broad strokes—the emergence of Asian-ness, Indian-ness, African-ness and White-ness, each of these categories as fictitious as the biological truths that were imputed to them.¹⁰ I show that the global construction of “Indian labor” took place in a context of ideological comparisons with African slave labor. As Lowe reminds us, “the placement of peoples at various distances from liberal humanity—“Indian,” “Black,” “Negro,” “Chinese,” “coolie,” and so forth—are integral parts of the genealogy of modern liberalism.”¹¹ Constructing Indian labor as “free” was not only a crucial abolitionist strategy in the first instance, but became laden with meaning for a variety of actors thereafter.

The most pernicious aspect of the construction of Indian labor as free was the fiction that it conjured about relations between Indian subjects. These broad processes of demarcating and categorizing “races” embedded within them a simultaneous muting of internal forms of subordination from view, even as they continued to operate, quietly assigning unequal value to groups as capitalism expanded. This could be an epistemic assault on many levels, representing sets of truths about Indians, Chinese, or Africans in one-dimensional terms. In this case, I am interested in representations of Indian hierarchy and subordination. In India, relations of subordination were at all times mediated by caste or kinship, even if they were not always reducible to these categories. The particular role that Indian labor was called on to play in the new, expanding global economy was reserved, therefore, for particular Indians already embedded in internal feudal, caste, and service relations that were governed by their own sets of differentiating logics. All laboring bodies were forced to join the world of “free” wage labor, a scaffolding erected by colonial powers and the structures of global capitalism—but this process was enabled in the first place by dispossessions that started much closer to home.

Through the Indian coolie, we examine how a particular form of debt bondage emerged from the global political vocabularies of free-market individualism and the ascendance of contractual forms of labor control.12 The “entrapments” of liberal discourses of freedom have long been a subject of interest and debate among South Asian historians.¹³ However, in this essay, I embed this constellation of policies in a particular set of racial assumptions that we can trace to Indian labor’s role in empire—free enough to enter contracts, yet devoid of the industrial spirit that made them willing workers without the aid of coercive legal mechanisms.¹⁴ I focus on the coolie trade within India, particularly labor imported to tea plantations in Assam, but given the close connections with the overseas indenture trade, the logics and discourses around both were closely intertwined.

Then, shifting focus away from plantations, I turn to the rural countryside where debt operated in an entirely different way and was not always visible as a form of labor control. I show how indebtedness was constantly kept alive as a specific problem to be addressed, but that reform efforts were redirected to conversations around concern for “peasant” debt—a category that privileged landowning agricultural classes rather than landless, low-status groups. Capital and credit were already channeled into the hands of groups that had benefited from preexisting forms of domination. Through this discussion around debt I demonstrate how these discourses were justified as natural and tied to the value of labor and moral worth of different subjects. This not only created the very conditions that made labor desperate enough to have to work on distant plantations but also strengthened forms of labor control that agrarian capitalistic projects rested on in the global countryside, increasingly integrated into global commodity markets. These racializing discourses were the foundations upon which groups were seen as landed in the first place, deemed creditworthy thereafter, and finally considered worthy of being rescued from the evils of indebtedness. Through an exploration of this second kind of debt regime, focusing on one particular case in the Bombay Presidency—relations between sharecroppers and landowning peasants in Sindh—I highlight the more nuanced and less visible workings of racial capitalism.

The abolition of slavery in India took place in a broader imperial context, as Great Britain assumed the lofty responsibility of carrying the torch of freedom when it became the first nation to abolish the slave trade in 1807.¹⁵ Soon after, with the passage of the Slavery Emancipation Act of 1833, the British Parliament officially abolished slavery in British colonies. In a single day, almost a million slaves in the British Empire were called from “social death” to “life”¹⁶—with little concern for the caveats and limits that would burden this new mode of living. The triumph of the moment was attenuated, however, when the British public turned their gaze eastward and discovered to their horror the sheer number of slaves in British India. India, still officially under the East India Company (EIC) rather than the empire proper, had been excluded from the 1833 imperial decree. According to numbers circulating around abolitionist circles, there were more slaves in British India than had been emancipated in the entire British Caribbean.¹⁷ While the existence of slavery in India was a shock to the British public, it was certainly no secret to members of the EIC, who been enforcing legislation and regulations around the slave trade in India for decades.¹⁸

Prior to 1833 British abolitionists, too, had been invested in de-emphasizing the ills of Indian slavery. The “discovery” of slavery in India took place in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as debates raged over abolition in the British Carribbean.19Abolitionists and industrialists looked to India as the promised land of plentiful and free labor—the palatable alternative to slave labor. Ironically, it was George Saintsbury, an active member of the West Indian planter association, who first published the widely circulated pamphlet East Indian Slavery in 1829.²⁰ This was part of a concerted campaign to highlight not only Indian slavery but the downtrodden position of the Indian laboring poor in general. Highlighting both the abuses of the EIC and the inherently unfree nature of the Indian laborer was designed to thwart abolitionist arguments to promote Indian “free” labor as an alternative to African slave labor. Abolitionists had been arguing that Indian labor was not only cheaper but a more ethical option that would align with the British Empire’s emerging moral commitments. Focusing in particular on sugar, the commodity that William Fox famously compared to a “pound of human flesh,”²¹ abolitionists were intent on promoting India as the answer to the labor shortage crisis that plantation owners dreaded.²²

Plans to both invest in plantations in India, and ship labor out of India were floated periodically throughout the nineteenth century, to produce not only sugar but also cotton. India figured prominently as the solution to Britain’s ever-increasing need for raw cotton to supply its textile factories.23 In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists, keenly aware of the global monopoly enjoyed by the American South, pressured the British government to consider India as a free-labor alternative for cotton production. As Florio notes, the Indian poor were thus “supposed to do emancipatory work on behalf of America’s slaves”²⁴—not merely physically, but also ideologically.

British abolitionists, therefore, insisted on the benign nature of Indian slavery. The EIC was more than happy to go along with these assertions, keen to underplay their own complicity in Indian slave trading, and to promote capital investment in British India. This was an unlikely partnership, as the EIC was a symbol of British mercantilism and monopoly power, imperial policies that abolitionists had often railed against. Both found themselves on the same side of the table, arguing that slavery in India was governed by a uniquely paternalistic logic, particularly when it came to domestic regimes of slavery and servitude. What had already emerged by the time of abolition in India in 1843 was the peculiar idea of the “Indian contract” defined by a “warm feeling” toward the familiar attachments and domestic life of Indians.²⁵ Unlike the position of African slaves in the Caribbean, who were notoriously prone to uprisings and resistance and in need of brutal regimes of disciplining, Indian slavery, it was said, was a protectionist institution, the equivalent of an Indian poor law.

Once the 1833 Act was passed, however, British abolitionists soon began to see India as the new frontier for their antislavery fervor—even though they more or less held on to the notion that Indian slavery was qualitatively different from West Indian slavery. In light of mounting pressure and increased British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) advocacy, the British Parliament assembled a commission to investigate the full extent of Indian slavery. The Indian Law Commission was instructed to solicit evidence from magistrates and district-level officials, as well as Muslim qazis and Hindu pundits (religious legal authorities), about the prevalence of Indian slavery. In this sweeping review of the state of Indian slavery, it became clear that “slavery” took a bewildering variety of forms. These included children sold to wealthy families during times of famine, household slaves imported from outside British India, agricultural slave castes “attached” to the soil—bought and sold as appendages to landed property—and poor Indians who sold themselves into slavery.

Important for our purposes is the fact that agricultural laborers trapped in cycles of debt were frequently cited as “debt slaves,” or indebted bondsmen. For example, the halees in Gujarat were described thus: “a halee is a hereditary bondsman, almost the only description of slaves” in the region, “employed in agricultural labor … these bondsmen are compelled personally to work out their debt.”26 The state of being trapped in cycles of debt, with the debt transmitted hereditarily and the indebted reduced to having to serve in perpetuity, was the clearest example of a degraded state of slavery and unfreedom. Although these reports have been criticized as haphazard and unsystematic in their method, they are still critical documents.²⁷ These reports provide some of the most incisive accounts of forms of servitude and labor subordination in Indian society. As Dharma Kumar noted many decades ago, perhaps they tell us more about agricultural bondage than they do about the state of slavery per se.²⁸ In fact, she argued that what colonial officers were seeing was really caste-based servitude rather than “slavery.” Notwithstanding the murky terrain of defining slavery in India, what these reports demonstrate was a willingness to read debt as a key form of unfreedom among the Indian population prior to abolition.

Importantly, even while documenting these different forms of slavery and indebted labor, the report noted that, in general, “there is nothing more remarkable than the fact that most slavery in this country is voluntary in origin.”²⁹ Indian labor, it was argued, was governed by customary traditions of reciprocal exchange that included patronage and care in exchange for provision of service, honor, and of course, labor. This reading of Indian labor relations was thus a crucial part of constructing a discourse around Indian labor as free, laying the groundwork for new imperial labor regimes, such as the global indenture and contract labor systems, that would emerge after abolition.

In addition, this reading made it easier to legitimize the particular form that abolition took in India. In 1843, the EIC finally caught up to the rest of the British Empire and passed the Indian Slave Act—Act V. Unlike the dramatic Emancipation Act of 1833 Act, Act V merely delegalized slavery. This did not include any direct legal imperative to free slaves; rather, British courts were simply instructed to cease recognizing rights over slaves. This clearly relied on the problematic assumption that that the power relations within which Indian slavery operated relied on colonial legal institutions for their legitimacy. Indrani Chatterjee has famously, and aptly, described this move as abolition by denial, or by semantics.³⁰ Colonial courts would no longer use the word slavery to describe attached or traded peoples and, in fact, would reprimand official uses of the term.³¹ Act V thus erased the official comparison between debt bondage and slavery. The widespread regimes of debt, resulting in cycles of poverty and sometimes violence, which the Law Commission had been clear in labeling as slavery one moment, thus ceased to be read in these terms. To do so would fly in the face of the empire wide designations of Indian labor as “free,” clearly demarcated from black African labor as “slaves.”

The Indian indenture system spanned the globe, creating the legal scaffolding for circuits of labor from India to far-flung regions such as Reunion, Mauritius, Natal, East Africa, Fiji, South Africa, and Brazil.³³ The long voyages, threat of death, and starvation they faced could be waved off with the refrain that they had “freely” entered these contracts. At the same time, within India, particularly in Assam and Travencore, novel plantation complexes were springing up. Scholars such as Kris Manjapra connect these complexes with the rise and fall of plantations in the Caribbean, showing how capital generated on West Indian plantations in the Caribbean moved eastwards to India.³⁴ In exchange for their capital investments in India, the EIC guaranteed planters and entrepreneurs a docile and steady supply of labor. Others show how technologies of violence and discipline perfected on slave plantations were transported to India.³⁵ This was the new world of free labor that the death knell of African slavery had ushered in.

The shifting discourse around Indian labor, debt, and slavery began to recalibrate the contractual terrain in India almost immediately after abolition. For instance, in 1843 the district magistrate in Konkan in the Bombay Presidency wrote to the commissioner asking whether any special measures were to be taken in regard to debt contracts in light of the recent abolition legislation. After examining several exemplary cases of debt bonds, they concluded that “the Judges are of the opinion that the term slavery is altogether misapplied in these cases, they being merely contracts of service which are nowhere forbidden by Law … it being fair to assume that such would not be entered into except as a mutual convenience to the parties concerned.”³⁶ Indeed, this perspective became juridical common sense after 1843. This new contractual regime was signaled by the passage of key legislation from the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act, (Act XIII) in 1859, sections 491 and 492 of the Indian Penal Code (Act XLV) in 1860, the Indian Contract Act (Act IX) in 1872 and a series of provincial-level legislation to enforce labor contracts, particularly around plantation complexes.³⁷ The same moment that Indian slavery vanished, therefore, was the moment when the juridical conceit of Indian laborers being free enough to enter contracts was rendered sacrosanct.

The construction of the free Indian laboring subject only strengthened over the course of the nineteenth century. These ideas emerged in full force as both plantation owners and officials in London debated the merits and risks associated with using labor from different colonial populations. The emergence of strictly demarcated racial categories, each with assigned labor roles, took place in various settings where populations were migrating and mixing with each other—on plantations, on the high seas, and within colonies such as India and South Africa. Mawani shows how in British Columbia different racial populations were “constituted dialectically against one another in a shifting and unstable global order.”38 These global and local projects of racial governance served to reify and conjure “truths” regarding the “racial” distinctiveness of Indian labor, calling upon particular policy interventions and modes of disciplining. In the Caribbean, studies have shown how anxieties over racial mixing between different laboring categories reified divisions between groups, making it crucial to demarcate the boundaries between free Indians and African ex-slaves.³⁹ Planters hoped “industrial labourers from India would eventually uplift the ‘moral character’ of the local African-derived workers.”⁴⁰

While contingents of British navy vessels stopped, searched, and freed African slaves carried on ships on the Arabian Sea, others were quietly shipping “batches” of Indians to plantations in Suriname, Jamaica, Fiji, and Reunion.⁴¹ Sue Peabody traces how Indians and Africans faced distinct legal identities and possibilities for freedom as they wove their way through British and French legal regimes.⁴² Within India, African-origin groups were singled out as “self-evident” slaves and freed, unlike Indians, who were trafficked with impunity.⁴³ The conceit of the Indian laborer as free, therefore, was integral to both the initial drive for British abolition and the myth that allowed the engine of capitalist production to keep on churning out imperial global commodities.

The above scholarship demonstrates the discursive production of the Indian coolie across colonial sites. Turning inward to British India, this construction affected contractual and moral discourses around labor on the Subcontinent. Debt was a critical part of the apparatus set up to control and discipline the migrant Indian coolie within India. Cash advances were crucial modes for recruiting Indian laborers to work on plantations and the basis upon which contracts became enforceable. Indians were often reluctant to sign on to work on plantations; among themselves, they used the term phataks (meaning jail) to refer to the Assamese tea plantations. To overcome this problem, recruiters handed out advances in cash, one of the few sources of cash outside of the credit advanced by the local moneylender as I will discuss in more detail below.

Once this cash advance had been distributed, the labor contract became subject to the laws governing debt contracts, with even stricter rules for defaulting and absconding. This tactic was couched in rationalistic language that claimed to be based on shrewd economic logic.44 According to planters, they incurred heavy expenditures in importing immigrant labor, and the Act was devised to “in short, to give the employer the penal contract as security for his outlay, while it ensures to the labourer complete protection by the government.”⁴⁵ Such measures were therefore justified as being beneficial to both parties. This kind of strict interpretation established the “coolie” as a particular category of laborer under the law, subject to uniquely harsh penalties for violating debt contracts.

Methods of recruiting labor to work on plantations, particularly in Assam and Travencore, were often highlighted for their particular cruelty. Professional native recruiters, known as arkattis, or sardars rounded up illiterate Indians or sometimes kidnapped and illicitly trafficked them to numerous depots across the country.⁴⁶ These middlemen were notorious for the potentially violent and duplicitous methods they used to obtain labor. Reports detailed what was known among recruiters as “coolie-raiding,” the widespread kidnapping of women, and the obscuring of contract terms and working conditions from illiterate and vulnerable villagers.⁴⁷ On arrival at designated depots, laborers would be made to sign a contract—with their consent taking the form of a mere thumb imprint. Both the overseas indenture system and the internal coolie trade to plantations drew on similar recruitment structures.⁴⁸

Indian labor was thus subject to a specific set of racial discourses in the minds of planters tallying profits and deliberating the merits of slave versus free labor, and by magistrates and colonial agents making decisions about the nature of contracts between Indians. These judgments were tied to the global exigencies of empire, bringing order to increasingly connected populations and sorting them in line with assigned roles. This particular form of debt bondage—a term rarely deployed by those involved—was bound up in a contractual regime that criminalized defaulting on loans by Indian coolies with particularly harsh penalties. This form of bonded labor thus emerged directly out of the vocabularies and discourses of freedom.

Scholars have emphasized the intimacies of continents—how plantation technologies traveled across the globe and how commodity production for the world market brought diverse geographies into the same temporal rhythms. However, the local skirmishes of feudal relations and the dusty, almost arcane, world of agrarian relations have somewhat fallen to the sidelines of these global histories writ large. Manjapra, among others, has noted that as the plantation complex traveled, this did not “flatten the customary land tenure systems of Asia, but rather it created new relationships between land, labor, capital, and international markets for commodities.”50 While acknowledging that the relationship between broader land regimes and the plantation is crucial, it is imperative to acknowledge that these causal processes also moved in the other direction—that underlying social relations with their own discrete logics continuously structured capitalist transformations.

Indeed, the very ability of capitalists and plantation owners to lure coolies away from their villages and communities was premised on Indian landless or land-poor peasants being trapped in webs of debt to the local shopkeeper, the moneylender, and of course the landlord. While many actors were involved in loaning, enforcing, forgiving, and accruing debt, “dependence on loans meant a structural subordination to … money capital in general.”⁵¹ At the same time that legislation trapped coolies into “free” debt contracts with plantation owners and industrialists, debt was already being wielded as a crucial mode of controlling agrarian labor outside the plantation. The manner in which landless groups were pushed into increasingly fragile sharecropping arrangements—exemplified by the haris, discussed below—was the product of a regime that produced its own kinds of racial assumptions about labor, status, and “natural” occupational hierarchies. These regimes, embedded in local myths and discourses around kin and caste, were reified by the colonial state in grand projects of knowledge production such as the census, and a truly voluminous arsenal of travel writings, and compendiums on caste and tribes.⁵²

Over the course of the nineteenth century, rural debt slowly became a dominating feature of the agrarian economy in India.⁵³ Peasants borrowed money against their land to help meet expenses for the year between crop cycles, to pay for weddings, funerals, implements needed to grow crops, and basic food and subsistence. In return, peasants pledged a certain percentage of their crop to their creditors, relying on the transferability of legal titles in property to guarantee their loans. Meanwhile, low-status landless laborers, who had no land to pledge, had to rely on patronage networks with elites to access credit. David Hardiman aptly describes the prism through which groups were deemed capable of paying back loans and safe to lend to as “hierarchies of honor.”⁵⁴ Debt bonds certifying shares in crops over money borrowed from the local storekeeper, moneylender, merchants, and landlord overwhelm the records of district and city courts.⁵⁵ Indeed, rising colonial taxation regimes and years of famine often increased the burden on agricultural laborers, who had to either borrow greater sums or enter new debt contracts to survive in an increasingly precarious rural economy.⁵⁶

Initially, the colonial administration saw the bania, or moneylender, as a crucial source of credit in the agrarian economy, providing the capital needed to encourage technological developments as well as cash crop production.57 However, after decades of peasants’ losing their land after defaulting on payments, colonial policy shifted to a more protectionist stance against the moneylender. The growing concern was that moneylenders did not make good agriculturalists, so that land alienated from a skilled peasantry would lie wasted and uncultivated. In the Deccan in the 1870s, there were riots over the problem of peasant indebtedness, indexing debt as a real social issue that could incite social unrest. Comparisons between debt and slavery became commonplace as the public outcry against strict enforcement of debt contracts became more virulent. One article in the Times of India noted: “the complaints of multitudes of debt-slaves for reform must be attended to … the existing law aims at the relief of insolvent debtors—first by releasing from prison all who give up the whole of their property … millions of wretched men have still to take their choice of binding themselves to be slaves to usurers, or of going to prison and leaving their families to starve.”⁵⁸ These concerns led to the passage of the Deccan Agriculturalists Relief Act of 1879 and later, in Punjab, the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1901. In Sindh, the Encumbered Estates Act, or Act XX, of 1896 was enacted to protect zamindars who were in debt and had mortgaged their land.⁵⁹

These reforms were limited in scope, however, and meant to protect only specific categories of Indians. The social problems caused by indebtedness seemed visible only when they involved agricultural peasants losing their land. The commentator in the Times article above, like so many others, mourned that debt condemned landed peasants to the ranks of the landless—with little concern for those who were landless to begin with. It was landless groups who were confronting the ever increasing burdens of unremunerated labor in an increasingly cash based economy. In other words, these policies did not target the “debt bondsmen” that the Indian Law Commission had been so concerned about decades before. There were times when missionaries, rebel members of the judiciary, and district officers sporadically brought attention to the ill fate of the indebted “slave” caste laborer.⁶⁰ Yet these actors had to insist on these labels against discourses produced by the colonial state.

What options did an indebted landless laborer have? One possible way to procure a livelihood was to work as a coolie on a plantation or some other small-scale industrial or extractive site. When this option was not available, or when news of the terrible conditions on plantations reached their ears, they could but continue to work as sharecroppers for a landlord to try to pay off the debt. This “choice” was often made even when this relationship involved violence and the extraction of extra forms of unpaid labor. Meanwhile, debt not only rendered the indebted labor immobile but also meant quite immediately that he and his family would not have enough for subsistence after laboring an entire crop season.61

Therefore, by and large, the official conversation around rural indebtedness was driven by the feared pauperization of landed peasants. This was in line with a general policy of protecting customary agrarian relations—once again, an offshoot of discourses around benign Indian social relations.⁶² This was so, even though widespread transformations were taking place throughout British India—from factories opening up in cities to the increasing infusion of money into the countryside, large-scale public works projects, an increasingly sophisticated railway system to facilitate long-distance trade, and a growing orientation toward production for export to the global market.

In Sindh, as in much of British India, anxieties about debt were inextricably linked to the colonial state’s concerns about increasing revenues from the land and cultivating a class of flourishing “peasants proprietors.”⁶³ Indeed, the definition of peasant in this instance meant the zamindar, or landlord, rather than the people who actually cultivated the land. Zamindars held lands of varying sizes—some were petty cultivators, and others commanded large, unwieldy estates.⁶⁴ The colonial state viewed zamindars as key allies when it came to managing and modernizing the rural economy and relied on them to invest in capital-intensive methods of agrarian production. As one officer put it, “It is unnecessary to insist upon the retention and preservation of the zamindar. He has long been looked upon as an integral part of our administration. In times of flood and disaster, in times of crime and disorder, in times of need, we look to him to help, and he is never wanting to our call.”⁶⁵ Zamindars were solely responsible for paying taxes and were entitled to receive lapo—translated as manorial due—from those subsisting off his land.

In the 1840s and 1850s, the early days after Sindh was annexed by the EIC, colonial surveyors went to painstaking efforts to record the name of the official cultivator in settlement records. The colonial state thus introduced a specific, legally enforceable regime of property rights that bestowed privileges and coopted the authority of landowning groups. The vast majority of agricultural laborers, however—those who ploughed land, built roads, served touring colonial officers, fixed breaches in canals and in their “spare” time performed extra work for the landlord in return for his generosity—were not given the status of official tenants except in exceptional circumstances. The people who actually performed the labor in Sindh were known as haris—derived for the Sindhi word, to plow. Hari was the term used to describe a landless laborer, or sharecropper, who entered into agreements with the zamindar, sometimes on a yearly basis and sometimes generationally. Haris were mostly removed from direct interaction with the colonial state.

What does it mean to use “racialization” to describe the phenomenon encountered here? In most cases agents relied on “self-evident” logics upon which to demarcate the landed from the landless. When agents surveyed the Sindhi countryside to determine who the “real” landowners were, families who displayed status and wealth were recognized as entitled to the land and its produce. One way this was determined was through a group’s connections with the previous ruling dynasty, established through reputational networks and wealth. Such measures such as the size of a zamindar’s autak or guesthouse where he would meet and entertain guests and followers was often a measure of status.66 Landowning families were described more often than not as reputed simply for being great families, proclaiming myths of migration from Central Asia or Arabia, and particularly being connected to the bloodline of the Prophet.

However, while these external markers helped colonial agents distinguish categories of people, the status of the zamindar was inscribed most viscerally and immediately in behaviors and comportments—on his body and the bodies of those around him. State recognition of status was based not only on ostentatious displays of wealth but also on the strength, and the subservience, of laboring entourages and followers.⁶⁷ Haris knew all too well that the zamindar required the hari to publically and ostentatiously perform obedience and subservience. Therefore they “bowed” to the zamindar to demonstrate their allegiance to him, and his standing in the community. Indeed, as Abu Shaukat, an early twentieth century poet who supported the hari movement, lamented that all a hari had to do was fail to bow low enough, clasp his hands tight enough, or forget to call the zamindar “sain”—and he was beaten, jailed, or worse.⁶⁸ “Wealth in people,”⁶⁹ was correlated to entitlements to wealth in landed property.

G. M. Syed, famous leftist leader of the hari movement, contrasted the “helpless, heavily indebted, overworked, overstrained malaria-stricken, famishing farmer (hari) who marched on the moods, fancies and caprices of his landlord” with the “wealthy, healthy, idle, scheming, sporting, polygamous, hospitable host of the touring district satrap.”70 Abu Shaukat points out that the haris lived in a state of wilderness, providing us insight into how haris were described and devalued in the vernacular. He describes them as drudging under the sun alongside their donkeys, drinking from the same dirty river—donkeys with their mouths and the haris with their hands. The haris “look like people but in reality they are animals.”⁷¹

The haris as a category made up the vast majority of the rural population in Sindh. Examining census notes that give us details of the kinship and caste groups subsumed under the label of the haris, we find a variegated and complex mix of populations. From migrating tribes, impoverished families with no ability to earn a livelihood without entering into an agreement with a zamindar, to attached families of laborers and servants, and others with no capital other than the “skin on their back”—their labor power. Haris were often made up of low-caste Hindus, ex-slaves, and other low-status kinship groups—Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. Attached to these groups were, and indeed still are, robust myths of impurity, associations with low-status occupations, and ex-slave stigmas. Some groups were subjugated based on doctrines of untouchability, but also on local myths about their eating habits, drug use, the impurity of their women, and the kinds of polluting occupations they performed.⁷²

For example, Sheikh Ansari’s glossary of tribes in Sindh lists the Bhils as a “menial” caste, known for eating “all kinds of wild animals. They are notorious for their habits of thieving.”⁷³ Even when groups converted to Islam or Christianity to escape the caste system, these discourses persisted, though sometimes in a different form. Other groups that showed up frequently among the haris were shidis, khakhelis, or makranis.⁷⁴ Colonial officer H.T. Lambrick describes the khaskhelis as “old servants of the Talpurs,” and Ansari explains they used to be African slaves now working as laborers or agriculturalists.⁷⁵

Assumptions about eating habits, drug consumption, and female morality were not merely communal myths but had real consequences for access to resources, most fundamentally land and credit. Caste and kinship status made claims to land suspect in some instances, and impossible in others. Thus the logics of the feudal social structure that the colonial state reified became the foundation for the social hierarchies that continued to intensify for duration of the nineteenth century. In addition, colonial decisions to frame indebtedness as a problem was motivated by racialized judgments about the character and nature of relations between different rural subjects. Even as the colonial state saw indebtedness as a universal problem, convoluted reasoning operated to contain reforms along caste and kinship lines. Therefore racialization produced access to land and credit in the first instance but also dictated notions of worthiness for debt reform thereafter.

For instance, the extravagances of the zamindars—included their spending on shikaar (hunting), lavish entertainment, and women—were forgiven because of default assumptions about their moral worth. These vices were seen as the fault not of the zamindar but of the natural demands of his position, or more to the point, the loose morality of lower caste and kinship women. One report notes about the mohanas, another group who were often haris: “The mohanas are very numerous in the Muncher tract and their females, at once attractive and profligate, are a perfect curse to the idle zemindars … considering how abounding the temptation is… it is not wonderful that they should fall into it.”76 Therefore if the zamindar was in debt and at risk of losing his land, this was not an issue with his morality, but rather the immorality of low status women.

From the perspective of the colonial state, protecting zamindars from losing their land was of paramount concern. In fact, it was the Hindu bania—moneylender—who emerged as the real oppressor in Sindh, a danger to hari and zamindar alike. One revenue collector warned that if the bania was allowed to continue harassing the zamindars, “their ruin would amount to social and agrarian revolution.”⁷⁷ Another frequently made argument was that the hari benefited from the labor-market shortage, putting him in a position to dictate terms to the zamindar. The haris, the argument ran, were gaining freedom from the zamindar. It was their choice to relocate or work for other zamindars if their situation became intolerable.

Colonial officials in Sindh sometimes recognized that the haris as a whole were a class of indebted landless tenants completely dependent on the zamindar.78 One such instance is in a 1901 Pamphlet on Relations Between Creditor and Debtor:

In order to live between harvests, the tenant (hari) has to borrow from the money-lender … the tenant is not able … to mortgage his right on the land and so the tenant who is established by immemorial custom as well as the tenant at will in order to feed themselves, can only borrow on their zamindar’s security. The zamindar is responsible for recovering from his haris at the time of the harvest all that the banya has advanced to them during the year: he is responsible also for the debts of those who die, or abscond, or refuse to pay.⁷⁹

The logic here is peculiar, yet typical. Even though hari indebtedness was clearly acknowledged by the colonial state, the zamindar emerged as the victim. The discourse around impoverished indebted Indians being akin to slaves from a century earlier was thus turned on its head. Indebtedness was dangerous and harmful, but some forms of indebtedness were more dangerous and harmful than others. Official reports heralded the zamindar as the defender, or an asset for the hari. While the zamindar, it was argued, was forced to pledge precious land in exchange for loans, the haris were fortunate enough to have their debts secured by the zamindar. A similar paternalistic argument is made in the Gazetteers. For example, E. H. Aitkin of the Bombay Salt Department noted in 1907 that, even though debt was common among the haris, “they were fortunate in being as a rule attached to a landlord who was debarred by his religion from taking any interest for the advances” given them by “well-to do Muslim landlords.”⁸⁰

By the late nineteenth century agrarian debt had become a crucial policy challenge confronting the colonial state. Worried that their peasant allies would lose their land to usurious moneylenders, they created credit cooperatives, passed a proliferation of legislation to protect mortgaged land from being sold, and provided relief for landowning castes and kinship groups in times of financial struggle and deficit. However, these policies did not extend to groups who had no land to lose in the first place. Even though haris were usually beholden to both the moneylender and the landlord—sometimes the same person. The veritable swaths of men and women whose indebtedness left them with limited options for survival other than to plow the lands of wealthier zamindars were notably absent from the voluminous paperwork generated on the problem of rural debt. The term debt slave thus travelled from signifying the agricultural bondage of the dispossessed, to a critique of free contract when it involved “worthy” and “moral” subject such as zamindars.

In the early twentieth century, Sindh was experiencing the transformative effect of being designated as a site of large-scale cotton production for export by the Bombay Government. This system of production could not function without a disciplined and docile labor force. Debt was wielded as a crucial, yet discrete, tool for maintaining control over labor in Sindh, integral to the region’s integration into the global economy.

10.Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

15.As Brown demonstrates, the British state accrued moral capital through its antislavery activities. Richard Huzzey shows the role of antislavery in advancing imperialist goals on the African continent. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012).

18.Regulation X of 1811 formally prohibited the import or export of slaves into or out of EIC territory but not the purchase or sale of slaves within India, which was merely regulated, not prohibited. This was followed by Regulation XIV of the revised Bombay Code of 1827, of which chapter IV lists the “illegal import, export, and transfer of slaves” in addition to kidnapping, detention, and forced labor.

31.For example, a judge in Travencore was chastised for being theatrical and prone to dramatics when he released a judgment comparing the treatment of coolies to that of slaves. See Enclosure of the Judgment of the Sessions Judge, Kottayam Sessions Case, No. 6 of 1089, in “Cooly Crimping Case,” British Library, India Office Records (henceforth BL/IOR) R/3/882/108.

33.Scholars estimate the number of Indian indentured laborers transported to have been approximately 1.2 million initially to various colonial sites, initially to sugar plantations but increasingly to a wide variety of agricultural and industrial plantations. Outside of the formal system, numbers were exponentially higher; McKeown, for instance, estimates close to 29 million Indians were transported to other parts of Asia between 1850 and 1950. See Rachel Sturman, “Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1439–65 (1441); Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018); Mahdavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

46.Rana P. Behal and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “ ‘Tea and Money Versus Human Life’: The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840–1908,” in Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, ed. E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein, and Tom Brass (London: Frank Cass, 1992); Ulbe Bosma, “Slavery and Labour Contracts: Rethinking Their Nexus,” International Review of Social History 63 (2018): 503–20; Nitin Varma, Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenburg, 2016); Paul E. Baak, “About Enslaved Ex-Slaves, Uncaptured Contract Coolies and Unfreed Freedmen: Some Notes About ‘Free’ and ‘Unfree’ Labour in the Context of Plantation Development in Southwest India,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 121–57.

59.This law was designed to protect those who already paid more than 300 Rs a year in revenue—thus ending up as protection for the wealthiest and most prosperous zamindars. Two other pieces of legislation were passed for this purpose: the Agriculturalist and Land Improvements Act of 1884 and the Loans Act of 1884. See E. H. Aitken, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind (Karachi: Mercantile Steam Press, 1907), 338.

60.This was so in particular in the South Malabar region and in Bihar. See Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles Against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerela (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

61.In surveys finally conducted in the 1940s, Sir Roger Thomas listed twenty possible kinds of “legitimate” fees levied against the crop that the haris were expected to deduct from their share. These included lapo, cost of carrying the grain, storage of grain in mud cabins, wage for the measurer of the grain, for the watchman, and sometimes a “hak allah” and pir jo toya—a portion simply given in the name of god and given to the jagirdar, and another to be given to the shrine. “Report of the Special Officer Appointed to Examine the Relations Between Jagirdars and Zamindars and Their Tenants and Haris,” Personal Papers of Sir Roger Thomas, Agriculturalist, MSS Eur 235/470.

74.For a history of the makranis and connections to the ex-slaves freed in the Indian Ocean and deposited by colonial sea captains in Gwadar in modern-day Baluchistan, see Hafeez Ahmed Jamali, “A Harbor in the Tempest: Megaprojects, Identity, and the Politics of Place in Gwadar, Pakistan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2014); Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The Persian Gulf and Britain: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” in Abolitions as a Global Experience, ed. Hideaki Suzuki (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2016), 113–29.

78.One report carried out a sample survey of haris and found 85–90 percent of them were using their share of the crop to credit an account; “a number of cases have been reported where the whole of the crop has been taken by the sowcar at each picking and sold.” Report on an Investigation Into the Finance and Marketing of Cultivators Cotton, Report on Investigation Carried out in Sind. (Bombay: C. V. Thomas, 1926–1927), 11.