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Unfreedom and the Indenturing of Labour: A Few Conceptual Aspects
We intend to analyse in this paper aspects related to the large-scale movements of indentured labour from colonial India, between the years 1834 to 1920, to plantation islands owned by Britain. Labour deployed as above can be labelled as 'unfree', judged by the yardstick of the so-called 'freedom' that is supposed to be enjoyed by wage labour under capitalism. Unfreedom, as faced by those indentured labourers, concerns the denial, in terms of the contractual arrangements, of command over their own 'labour power'. The employers had full control over the labourers employed, and their labour power could be used, exchanged or even sold at will without need for acceptance or consent by the concerned labourers.1 In effect, thus, labour got 'alienated to the master'.2
We dwell on a distinction here between 'labour power' and 'labour'. This relates to the essential non -exchange nature of labour-capital relations in capitalist economies. As has been pointed out,
the commodity which the worker sells is not a fixed amount of labour embodied in a completed product but 'labour power'; i.e. the capacity to work. Thus the commodity (labour power) which is exchanged in the marketplace is not the same entity which enters into the production process (labour).
From this angle, the 'market models or notions of contract are inadequate conceptually to grasp the relations of subordination and domination governing the labour process'.3
As for slavery, which ended in British colonies by the 1830s, the plantation islands ruled by Britain started experiencing severe labour shortages, especially with the reluctance of former slaves to continue as wage labour at the rates that prevailed during slavery. With the planters failing to turn labour power fully into a commodity, they sought 'an alternative and politically acceptable form of unffee labour', which was to be found in the indentured population from British colonies like India.4
Changes such as above brought in a new category of labour, which was to face 'restrictions on freedom of movement, penalties for negligence, absence of work etc. as criminal offence'. From this point of view, such labour was 'in practice near bondage due to dispossession and fear of vagabonding which was punishable'.5
Going by the available literature, one can...