The Experiences/Struggles of Indian Indentured Women in Nineteenth-Century Mauritius

Abstract

The struggles and life stories of the Indian women who came to Mauritius in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century are inspirational. These women had migrated either as dependents, spouses or as single females and were labelled as timid, unskilled or as characterless females. They were often mentioned only as ‘accessories’ in population movements, leading to their conceptualisation as ‘unproductive individuals’. However, the nineteenth-century Indian contractual migration has been categorised as the ‘new form of slavery’ where women, although unequally, were fully integrated into the capitalist system of production and the plantation economy. The earlier perspectives on indentured women asserted that these women were largely tricked into going abroad, or were from a very marginal social class, ‘single, broken creatures’ which led to a demoralised and even a deprived life for them, overseas. In reality, the role of women in the indentured migration, whether as individuals or as part of family groups, has always been significant. Between 1835 and 1875, around 75,000 Indian women arrived in Mauritius. The purpose of this chapter is to reappraise the roles and experiences of the Indian indentured women, who eventually settled in Mauritius and played a pivotal role in its development.