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‘During our slavery we was clothed, ration, and seported (supported) in all manner of respects,

Now we are free men (free indeed), we are to work for nothing

Then we might actually say actually say, we become slaves again’¹

A vast population that is living outside their ancestral homeland but shares a common cultural and regional background is referred to as the diaspora. Immigration and forced migration are the main causes leading to migration of people and creating diaspora communities. The Indian diaspora serves as a bridge for friendly international relations between India and the nations that have been embraced by them. The Indian diaspora community is among the world's biggest and most varied diasporas. They developed gradually during the 19th and 20th century when emigration  of indenture and contract labourers, traders, professionals, students took place to the British, French, Dutch, Dane and Portuguese colonies in Asia Africa, Caribbean and Far Eastern countries.² 

The history of the Indian Diaspora is closely linked to India’s trade links and  can be traced back to the era when the Indus Valley Civilization was in  trade relations  with ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Small merchant communities in these regions were the precursors of the modern Indian Diaspora. Modern Diaspora is said to be  26 million strong with roots in the colonial era of the 19th century when European powers consolidated their claims across Asia. The year 1879 was the historic year when the first Indians entered in Fiji as labourers, destined for work in the sugarcane plantations. Large scale cash-crop plantations in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago – much like Fiji – became profitable on the backs on indentured Indian labour.³

Under colonial rule, India provided the British Empire with a ready source of cheap and mobile labour force. Many  Indians agreed to become indentured labourers to escape the widespread poverty and famine in the 19th century. Some of these workers travelled alone while some moved out with their families to settle in the colonies they worked. For slavery, which ended in British colonies by the 1830s, the plantation islands ruled by Britain started experiencing severe labour shortages. The reluctance of former slaves to continue as wage labour at the rates that prevailed during slavery all the more stressed upon the need of labour from colonies. With the planters failing to turn labour power fully into a commodity, they sought 'an alternative and politically acceptable form of unfree labour', which was to be found in the indentured population from British colonies like India. Such labour was 'in practice near bondage due to dispossession and fear of vagabonding which was punishable'. ⁴

Indenture implied unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. Indians were taken from India to work on colonial plantations of sugar, rubber, tea and cocoa in the 19th and early 20th century. By the time indenture was abolished in 1917, the system had spread from Mauritius and the Caribbean to Fiji, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and many other countries.

Indentured labourers, amounting to over half a million, were brought to the British West Indies between the end of slavery in 1834 and the war. Thousands of African and Indian labourers were transported by ship during the nineteenth century, which seems to be an evidence of European racism. The entire nineteenth-century indenture system has been referred to by numerous academics as a "new system of slavery." Melbourne's government initiated the indenture of Africans in 1841. Peel's ministry extended the program to India, and Russell's government expanded the length of indenture and the scale of immigration from both places.⁵ The advent of this migration has been heavily criticised from historians who consider it a raging example of British hypocrisy, a proof that Britain's vaunted humanitarianism was easily derailed when confronted by powerful vested interests.⁶

"An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies" was passed by the British Parliament in 1833, which led to a  change in  the legal framework of certain social relations specially labour relations. That Parliament took the planters' concerns seriously and decided to minimize the social impact of the abolition act. In order to make the change gradual, and to ensure the continued dominance of the planters and dependence of the freed slaves. One element was compensation: In order to compensate the slaveowners for their loss of property, the act gave the treasury the authority to raise twenty million pounds. The other element was the provision introducing the system called "apprenticeship," under which all registered slaves over the age of six years were initially to become "apprenticed labourers" who would be compelled to work without pay for forty-five hours each week for the same masters as they had prior to abolition. Field laborers were supposed to serve as apprentices for six years, and other workers for four years, but in the end, everyone was set free in 1838. They  outlawed slavery in 1834, claiming that doing so would serve their own interests. However, until it was abolished on August 1, 1838, the apprenticeship system in the other British colonies gave planters a temporary way to manage their labor forces. The planters, feeling betrayed by their imperial law makers, then sought to devise new ways to control labour. The masters tried a variety of techniques of labour control after 1838 throughout the British West Indies. These included enactment of laws to restrict emigration and "vagrancy," various forms of taxation to pressure people into wage labour, and the development of systems of police, magistrates, and prisons to punish those who broke the new labour laws.⁷
Several of these techniques had already been tried in Antigua, and planters elsewhere in the British colonies frequently sought to benefit from the Antiguan experience. For example, one technique was the use of contracts to ensure regular and obedient supplies of labour. The Antiguan legislature passed an Act on 29^th  December 1834 to regulate and enforce labour contracts which were most of the time unwritten. On 18^th January 1826, the Government of the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion laid down terms for the introduction of Indian labourers to the colony. Each man was required to appear before a magistrate and declare that he was going voluntarily. This agreement is known as Girmit and it outlined a period of five years labour in the colonies with pay of 8 rupees per month (about $4 in 1826) and rations, provided labourers had been transported from Pondicherry and Karaikal.

The first attempt at importing Indian labour into Mauritius, in 1829, ended in failure, but by 1838, 25,000 Indian labourers had been shipped to Mauritius.

The Indian indenture system was put in place initially at the behest of sugar planters in colonial territories, who hoped the system would provide reliable cheap labour similar to the conditions under slavery. The new system was expected to demonstrate the superiority of "free" over slave labour in the production of tropical products for imperial markets.⁸
Many were commonly misled about where they were departing for and the wages they would receive. Through testimonies of the migrants it was discovered that many workers were recruited from rural India to work in cities like Calcutta, but once they were tricked or persuaded to sign the contract it took them to the emigration depot and to the plantations overseas.
In other cases, they were lied to about the length of the journey: “An Indian woman (who)… belonged to Lucknow, … met a man who told her that she would be able to get twenty-five rupees a month in a European family, by taking care of the baby of a lady who lived about 6 hours’ sea-journey from Calcutta; she went on board and, instead of taking her to the place proposed she was brought to Natal” (this extract taken from Indian Immigrants Commission Report, Natal, 1887, cited in Carter and Torabully, 2002, page 20).⁹
The conditions at work were harsh, with long working hours and low wages. Given the weak physical condition of the labourers after the long voyage, this took its toll. Available records indicate that the annual mortality rate for Jamaica in 1870 was 12%, and little changed over the years, as thirty years later the same figure was common for Mauritius. Children were expected to work alongside their parents from the time they were 5 years old. Hausildar, an ex-indentured worker remembered in an interview he gave to a newspaper ,Fiji Sun,: “We were whipped for small mistakes. If you woke up late, i.e. later than 3 am, you got whipped. No matter what happened, whether there was rain or thunder you had to work - we were here to work and work we had to do, otherwise we were abused and beaten up”  as reported in Fiji Sun, 1979, cited in Carter and Torabully, (2002). Between 1895 and 1902, several thousand Indian indentured labourers helped build the Kenya-Uganda Railway, and rail construction projects also brought Indian 'coolies' to  Kenya and to Natal (South Africa).An estimated seven percent of the indentured workers who built the Kenya-Uganda Railways died during their contract, according to historian Hugh Tinker (1993). These workers were also exposed to the wild animals like man eater lions who  attacked the  rail construction groups on several occasions.

Many workers tried to escape their harsh life but were recaptured, and imprisoned. Sometimes their initial five years contract was doubled to ten years for attempted desertion. At the end of the contract, while some workers chose to return, others decided to stay where they were, particularly women who had left home following a disagreement with their parents because they were unlikely to be accepted back into their family after several years away in a distant country. However,contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of those who worked on the Kenya-Uganda railways returned to India after the end of their contract.

Migrant workers did try to protest against  the abuses of the indentured labour system, but it was not easy. Some sent petitions to the agents of the colonial government who administered the indenture system. According to historical records, indentured workers carried out acts of sabotage and revenge against the plantation owners on numerous occasions, but this just resulted in increased repression.

To the voices of the indentured workers was added the dissenting voice of the growing Indian nationalist movement. Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian freedom movement, saw first hand the plight of Asian indentured labourers in South Africa and campaigned on this issue during the first decade of the 20th century. The system of indentured labour was officially abolished by British government in 1917.

Over the following century, the descendants of those who stayed back became significant parts of the population of a number of countries including like Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad, Jamaica, Malaysia and South Africa, and, to a lesser extent, in the East African countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Many of these Asian people later migrated to the UK in the 1950s and thereafter. They form a part of the Diaspora community and play an appreciable role towards the development of India from outside.

1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/178395?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents

2. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/diaspora/

3. https://www.gatewayhouse.in/indian-diaspora-new-chapter-indias-story-2/

4. Indentured Labour from India in the Age of Empire ,Sunanda Sen, Social Scientist, Vol. 44, No. 1/2 (January–February 2016), pp. 35-74 (40 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/24890231

5. Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality, William A. Green

Journal of British Studies ,Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 98-121 (24 pages),Published By: Cambridge University Press

6. Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality, William A. Green, Journal of British Studies,Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 98-121 (24 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/175675

7. Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838, O. Nigel Bolland Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1981), pp. 591-619 (29 pages)https://www.jstor.org/stable/178395
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_indenture_system
9.https://www.striking-women.org/module/map-major-south-asian-migration-flows/indentured-labour-south-asia-1834-1917