Social Aspects of Health, Medicine and Disease in the Colonial and Post-colonial Era

Henk Menke, Jane Buckingham, Farzana Gounder, Ashutosh Kumar, Maurits S. Hassankhan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000329971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

From the 1600s, enslaved people, and after abolition of slavery, indentured labourers were transported to work on plantations in distant European colonies. Inhuman conditions and new pathogens often resulted in disease and death. Central to this book is the encounter between introduced and local understanding of disease and the therapeutic responses in the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific contexts.

European response to diseases, focussed on protecting the white minority. Enslaved labourers from Africa and indentured labourers from India, China and Java provided interpretations and answers to health challenges based on their own cultures and medicinal understanding of the plants they had brought with them or which they found in the natural habitat of their new homes. Colonizers, enslaved and indentured labourers learned from each other and from the indigenous peoples who were marginalized by the expansion of plantations. This volume explores the medical, cultural and personal implications of these encounters, with the broad concept of medical pluralism linking the diversity of regional and cultural focus offered in each chapter.

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PART 1

CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS, PLURALISM AND HEALTH CARE

CHAPTER 1

‘Colonial Care’

Health and Healing for Indentured Migrants during the Journey from India to the Sugar Colonies 1830-1920*

Ashutosh Kumar

Introduction

India experienced a huge migration of peasants in the nineteenth century, who went under indentured contracts to work on the plantations of the Caribbean, Pacific and the Indian Ocean regions. This migration was the result of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which had created a paucity of workers on the farms of the capitalists in the various sugar colonies. The abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire resulted in an industrial depression. ‘Great distress undoubtedly prevails amongst all who are interested in the production of sugar in the British colonies’, a committee of 1842 declared (Rushbrook Williams 1924: 6). The cause of this distress, and the resulting diminished production of sugar was ‘the great difficulty which has been experienced by the planters in obtaining steady and continuous labour…’. It is no surprise, therefore, that these colonies should have tried to tap new sources of supply, or that India, with her teeming population, should have appealed to them as a suitable field for recruiting operations (Rushbrook Williams 1924: 7). From 1830 until 1920, the recruitment of Indians to work on the various plantations of the British, French and Dutch colonies was organized through what became known as ‘the indenture system’, originally used by South American planters to obtain Chinese labour from the Portuguese settlement of Macao. Under this system, labourers were recruited for the planters by their agents, and bound to work for a certain period (usually five years), during which time the employer was legally obliged to provide fixed wages, medical care and other amenities for the labourers. After the period had elapsed, the labourers could either renew their term of employment or return to their native land (Thomas 1985: 1). Throughout the period, it was the responsibility of the colonial government of India to curb malpractices within the system.

* Sections of this chapter are reproduced from the book written by the author (Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830-1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and reflect the contents of his paper presented at the international conference on ‘Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora and Identity Formation, in Historical and Contemporary Context’. The conference was held in Paramaribo, Suriname from 19 to 23 June 2018.

As soon as the indenture system started, strong opposition emerged from anti-slavery societies. High mortality rates among indentured labourers during their transportation and coercive conditions on the plantations provoked many humanitarians, historians and scholars to describe the system as nothing but a ‘new kind of slavery’. However, as the system developed, the colonial state implemented a range of regulations and reforms to manage the experience of the migrants. The voyage became the site of medical and dietary encounters. Many have described the food provisions and medical treatments received by the labourers as interventions into indigenous Indian practices. Was this so? Were provisions of food and medical treatment aboard ships carrying labourers simply a result of the efforts of the colonial powers to control its Indian subjects? Or did it reflect a degree of accommodation with and concern for migrants’ expectations? This article examines the attitudes of the colonial state towards Indian labourers, who chose to work on sugar plantations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the indenture contract.

Health in the Literature

Historians have looked into issues of health and healing practices in colonial India, presenting two different, but not opposing viewpoints. The first argues that the colonial regime in India came up with advanced and logical practices of medical science (Ramasubbam 1988). The second view is propounded by David Arnold and looks at the health and medical practices as a colonial intervention, an imposition of English medical norms at the expense of indigenous Indian practices. Moreover, these practices were a tool that the colonial state used to control their Indian subjects (Arnold 1993). Mark Harrison has focused on the internal conflict within the colonial regulation of health, which meant the British failed in the implementation of the colonial health project in India.

Issues relating to the health of indentured labourers travelling abroad to work on sugar plantations have been explored in the context of the nineteenth-century colonial intervention. Hugh Tinker (1974) has examined the mortality rates of indentured labourers during their sea journey and concluded that the health conditions of indentured labourers were no better than those of slaves. Disagreeing with Tinker, Piet C. Emmer (1997: 73-89) argued that the colonial authorities imposed strong regulations to reduce shipboard mortality and improve health, hence indentured Indians were in a much better condition than slaves during the voyage and on the plantations. David Northrup (1995) has also contended that the health conditions of indentured workers on board the ship was materially better than that of any previous kind of labour migrants. According to him, the improved size of decks, better equipment, effective ship regulations, and better medical facilities made indentured ship voyages comparatively comfortable and healthy.

Ralf Shlomowitz and John MacDonald (1990: 35-65) have provided a systematic and comprehensive study of mortality among indentured labourer on the ocean voyage and have argued that the mortality rates of indentured workers were much lower than that of slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. British sanitary reforms made better and healthy conditions for indentured labourers possible during their journey on the high sea, and as a result, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the mortality of indentured labourers on ships declined. Marina Carter (1995) has provided a different explanation of declining indentured worker mortality on their journeys, as well as on the plantations. She believes that the decline in the mortality rates from the second half of the nineteenth century was due to the change in the demographic composition of immigrant groups from India to include more people who were accommodative of a sea voyage.

Recently, Brown and Mahase (2009: 195-212) have examined the British policy of health and medical facilities for indentured labo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Cultural Encounters, Pluralism and Health Care
• Part 2: Pluralism and Ethno-Health Practices
• Part 3: Leprosy in Plural Contexts
• Note on Contributors
• Index