Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-century Indian Ocean Indentured Labour Migration*

Labour intermediaries: theoretical perspectives

The jobbers who recruited labourers for migration from the peasant population in their home regions were known by various names: as mukadams in western India, sirdars or sardars in eastern India, duffadars or arkatis in migration to Assam and via Calcutta to the sugar colonies, and maistries or kanganis in southern India. Some of these groups were simply commercial recruiters who escorted would-be labourers to the employer or shipping agent; others travelled with their recruits and worked alongside them in factories or on plantations, often as their overseers. It is this latter group that concerns us in this article: the intermediaries who provided advances to their workers and acted as foremen upon arrival. Their role in rural-rural migration at harvest time was as important as their role in migration to urban centres. In rural Gujarat, Jan Breman has observed:

What at first sight appears to be a kind of tidal movement--a capricious pattern of wholesale influx, a haphazard swarming over the villages in the plain to be followed in time by a gradual dispersal--is in reality a movement of labour which is prestructured by highly personalized control mechanisms, that bridge the distance between home area and destination. A key figure in this is the jobber who, in providing the link between supply and demand, is on the one hand bound to the employer with whom he maintains regular contacts,. . . while on the other hand striving to secure labourers in numbers which match his current needs.¹

In the jute mills of colonial Calcutta, this phenomenon has been described by Dipesh Chakrabarty as pre-capitalist, and the discipline exercised by sirdars over their workers as brutal: 'In the jute worker's mind itself, the incipient awareness of belonging to a class remained a prisoner of his pre-capitalist culture; the class identity of the worker could never be distilled out of the pre-capitalist identities that arose from the relationships he had been born into.'²However, Subho Basu and Anthony J. Cox have argued for a broader conception of identity formation, there being, for example, 'no impermeable boundaries between class-based collective action of workers and their sense of belonging to a religious community'. In submitting to the leadership of sirdars, labourers were primarily...