Migration history is a research field that is being analyzed rather thoroughly, and migration in colonial contexts is a much studied topic too. Worth noting in these histories is that colonial migrants mostly did not have free choice in their movement; the majority of these were enslaved people who were transported throughout the world.⁶ In the post-colonial period, however, migrants did have more freedom in their movement, of which the migration stream from Suriname to the Netherlands from around 1975 (the year of Surinamese independence) onward is a good example.⁷ In the case of Hindustani indentureship in Suriname, as a part of the greater migration flows from India⁸, it is disputed among historians whether kantráki did have some form of free choice in their personal lives. The research conducted by Maurits Hassankhan and others suggests that, although Hindustanis migrated into a hierarchical system of labour, these indentured labourers in fact had agency and that, although living in an oppressive society, it was possible for indentured labourers to improve their social status and living conditions in Suriname; there were downsides as well as advantages for the Hindustani indentured migrants regarding emancipation, integration, and social mobility in their host or new country.⁹

Indentureship, which can be defined as a migration and labour system where workers temporarily move from their hometown to another place to work for a certain amount of time, dominated the labour market in British, French, Danish, and Dutch colonies like Mauritius, South Africa, and Barbados beginning with the abolition of slavery during the 1830s and lasting until the 1930s. The majority of the indentured labourers in that period came from the former colony of British India, but indentured migration flows also originated elsewhere as, for example, in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies.¹⁰

The historiography on indentureship is mainly focused on the process of recruitment, migration, and on life on the plantations. However, not much research has been devoted to the post-indenture life, especially as concerns whether the kantráki returned to their country of origin or settled permanently in their new country. The same can be stated for the Hindustani case in Suriname: this specific scholarly debate on that choice after the ending of the contract period is rather fragmentary and superficial. However, there are research projects focussing on the reconstruction of the indentured populations of different countries – and their post-indenture life courses if they stayed. Two examples are the International Indentured Labour Route Project and the Historical Database Suriname.¹¹

In this regard, the studies of Chan and Gharietje Choenni do, in fact, present an overview of criteria kantráki had to meet if they wanted to settle in Suriname, which could have limited kantráki’s freedom of movement. The stipulations on this list seem to be strict and to apply for the full period of indentureship, and some criteria have more than one possible interpretation. According to Choenni and Choenni, one was not permitted to sign a re-indenture contract or permanently settle after their contract period if one was in any way convicted or had anything to do with any illegal practices. This prerequisite is not subject to much interpretation – albeit that the trial and conviction themselves were handled from a European and mostly pro-planter perspective. On the other hand, Choenni and Choenni mention, for example, that if an ex-kantráki was considered to be debilitated or lazy, the Hindustani lost their right to stay in the colony. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to standardize the practice of exclusion of re-indenture or settlement for this particular group based on this particular list, since there are several examples found that seem to contradict these prerequisites.¹²

In all probability, despite this list of criteria, the majority of Hindustanis actually had a choice to settle or to repatriate after their contract ended. Regarding the motivation to stay or to return, Rosemarijn Hoefte states that ‘many factors influenced decisions about whether to return or to stay.’ She mentions some variables on which this choice could have been based, like the positive effect on settlement for the formation of family and other relations and the fact, for example, that women were financially dependent on men due to a significantly lower income for female indentured labourers. Together with a greater amount of oppression, this made women more vulnerable and, therefore, female kantráki had a lower chance of repatriation. However, she does not dig deeper into the relative importance of the mentioned factors.¹³

The historiography suggests that living and working conditions during and after indenture improved from 1873 onward. Not only the emergence and the expansion of Hindustani communities and relations, as mentioned by Choenni and Choenni, but also improving living and working conditions, as well as advances toward disease control and better nutrition, increased the attractiveness of settlement for ex-kantráki, especially from 1895 onward. In this year, the colonial government actively sought to reduce the repatriation rates by offering ex-kantráki land while guaranteeing their right to a free return. Those who declined to return received a premium of 100 florins – the equivalent of 34 working weeks for men and 58 for women. Additionally, this distribution of land boosted petty agriculture, which enabled small farmers to grow different crops, while it also contributed to the reduced importance of plantation agriculture.¹⁴

In addition to these rather demographic prerequisites and characteristics, it is equally important to take Indian cultural values into account to improve our understanding of the position in which Hindustani immigrants were situated. These cultural values were important for both Hindus and Muslims, since they are mostly based on Vedic traditions. Sumit Guha and Choenni and Choenni argue that, culturally speaking, Muslims from Hindustan are more inspired by and tied to the Vedic traditions than Middle Eastern cultural customs, and it is therefore important to include non-Hindus in Indian history. In this research, especially one cultural aspect is important. Hindustanis believed that crossing the sea, or the kali pani (black waters), to other lands is a sin and that, therefore, one’s social position will be lost because of the detachment from the River Ganges. Following this detachment, the migrant will be severed from the cycle of reincarnation. Not only did this affect the process of consideration to emigrate, but it was also particularly important if one wanted to repatriate to Hindustan after indentureship. Without the rights of the caste they formerly belonged to, it was difficult to maintain a life in Hindustan, thus influencing the post-indenture decision between settlement or repatriation.¹⁵

The processes of recruitment, migration, and arrival of Hindustani kantráki have been extensively described. Mostly, they were recruited in the region or village where they lived. The majority of the recruited kantráki came from smaller towns and villages in the northern Indian provinces Uttar Pradesh (North West Province and Oudh, illustration 1), Bihar (part of Bengal, illustration 1), and Bengal.¹⁶ Kantráki were gathered in a central depot in Calcutta before embarking a ship to Suriname. During the voyage to Suriname, which could take six weeks to three months, kantráki faced harsh conditions for disease but, at the same time, were also able to get acquainted with those who shared the same destiny. When arriving in Suriname, the ship first stopped at Fort Nieuw-Amsterdam on the other side of the River Suriname from Paramaribo, where a medical examination took place. The healthy kantráki were sent to the Paramaribo depot, from where they were assigned to a plantation. The Hindustanis from ships that had sick kantráki could be quarantined in Fort Leyden, south of Fort Nieuw-Amsterdam.¹⁷

There were specific demands regarding age, sex ratio, and social status in the recruitment process. Arkatias (recruiters; literally: cunning seducers) were not to recruit men above the age of 35 and women above the age of 30 years. Additionally, only 10 percent of the recruited kantráki could be younger than ten years old. For every hundred men, about fifty women had to be recruited. In addition, the Surinamese planters preferred low-caste, agricultural Indians. Although some contemporaries argued that only the ‘scum of the earth’¹⁸ came to Suriname, not all contemporaries saw the immigrants as weak, poor servants. For example, Agent General for Immigration C. van Drimmelen wrote in 1910 that the Hindustanis were agriculturists with outstanding qualities. Radjinder Bhagwanbali and Choenni and Choenni, among others, have demonstrated that the kantráki represented Indian society relatively well in terms of religion and social position in the caste system.¹⁹

To properly answer the research question at hand, a combination of qualitative and quantitative sources is used. Although these sources have been used separately in many studies, this article will integrate these sources into one analysis, so as to reveal insights in indentureship that have been unprecedented until now. Supplementing the unique qualitative sources with biographical, governmental, and secondary sources makes it possible to understand different statistic relations in a more thorough, coherent, and personal way.

The autobiography Jeevan Prakash (Light of Life) by Rahman Khan gives a unique insight into the experiences of Hindustanis in Suriname, because this chronicle is the only known autobiography of a Hindustani kantráki in Suriname. Khan described his life vividly, ranging from his life as a youngster in Uttar Pradesh until he finished his book in 1943. Admittedly, the autobiography is not representative of all the Hindustani kantráki, because Khan held a rather strong position in Surinamese society. He could speak at least five languages and taught Hindus – despite being a Muslim himself – the meaning of holy texts. Considering that Khan was appointed sardar (overseer), it becomes even more obvious that Khan was not an average person. Therefore, it seems impossible to extract experiences from Khan’s life and superimpose these on other kantráki. However, Khan’s life story will be useful when criticizing and supplementing quantitative information and explaining given statistical outcomes and relations. It is, after all, difficult to reconstruct the lives of that many people based solely on databases.²⁰

The other set of textual primary sources consists of works produced by colonial institutions, for the most part the Surinaamsche Almanakken, which was an extensive yearly publication that included a detailed overview of the different plantations and their cultivation, covering most of the period for this research. This list has been used, for instance, to collect information on the cultivated crops on the plantations. Additionally, the Adresboek (Address Book) has been used to extract information on the number of cultivated crops for the year 1911. Moreover, the Surinamese newspaper De West mentions the production of several crops for two years. Additionally, the secondary work of Philip Dikland, in which he summarizes a vast amount of information on Surinamese plantations from their establishment to the present day, is used to determine the crops cultivated over several years. Furthermore, the 1914 report of James McNeill and Chimman Lal on the living and working conditions of kantráki in British colonies and in Suriname has been consulted to give extra contextualization. This report was the result of investigations by McNeill and Lal commissioned by the British-Indian government. Although this report was written from a colonial perspective, it still gives insight into the lives of the kantráki. Just like the work of Khan, the report is useful when contextualizing quantitative information and explaining statistical outputs.²¹

The quantitative source used for this research is the database Suriname: Hindoestaanse immigratieregisters²² (Suriname: Hindustani immigration registers, hereafter: the database), which enables us to capture the life courses of many individuals to gain a more general image of kantráki. The database is the result of merging the information from the immigration registers and a semi-alphabetical index. The registers were kept at the Immigration Department in Paramaribo, and the information in them was written down at the Paramaribo depot after arrival in Suriname, in part directly copied from the muster rolls. Those muster rolls were drawn up in Calcutta, as commissioned by the emigration agent.²³

All the variables from the immigration registers were standardized in the process of compiling the database, which was supervised by Maurits Hassankhan and Sandew Hira. However, more information was written down in the registers after the first registration upon arrival in Paramaribo, which has been collected in a non-standardized memo field in the database.²⁴ This information is, however, of utter importance for answering the research question of this article because, on the one hand, this information can determine the development of the life course of a Hindustani migrant and because, on the other hand, variables can be used to explain the developments. This information is, however, far from complete, partly due to the fact that memo fields were not added in the original folios and information was not always written down.

The richness of the database notwithstanding, it does not completely compensate for the colonial, top-bottom perspective used by the Dutch officials who recorded the information of the kantráki. It therefore must be kept in mind that although much information seems rather objective, it was still written down with the goals of legibility in mind. This concept of legibility means that the population of the colony was recorded in order for governments to administer and govern the colony and to be able to recognize and identify the immigrants. The latter becomes clear when considering that body height, identifying marks, and skin colour were mentioned in the registers. Additionally, the Surinamese colonial administration was obliged to report information to the British-Indian government.²⁵

The database has limitations regarding the resemblance of the registration to the real-life situation. For example, it is known that not only is information particularly on marriages incomplete, but also the concept and definition of marriage was itself an issue. The colonial officials only recognized marriages conducted according to European tradition and therefore traditional Hindustani marriages were hardly recognized – even after a modification of the marriage law in 1907. On the other hand, it also appears from the autobiography of Khan that in practice ‘marriage’ was a concept imposed upon migrants by the planters and therefore not recorded in the database. This becomes strikingly clear from the following episode when Khan arrived at the plantation named ‘Lust en Rust’:²⁶

This research used a sample that manually extracted the non-standardized information from the memo fields. This sample consists of every first person from every 25 persons mentioned in the database, resulting in a group of 1,151 kantráki. To properly determine the development of these kantráki, the demographic status of the Hindustanis ten years after the ending of their last contract was established in several ways. This period of ten years was selected due to possibility of temporal settlement in Suriname and because, in the words of McNeill and Lal, an ex-kantráki could choose to ‘make a round of estates and settlements before deciding what they will do in the future’.²⁸

The first method used was to link the database to the census of 1921 based on the contract number. When an ex-kantráki was listed in the census ten years after the last contract, it is assumed he or she settled in Suriname. The second method was to determine the last known life event and compare that event with the end date of the last contract. One of the most useful events was the revision of the names of the Hindustanis from 1916 onwards, because the names were not always written down correctly in the immigration registers. Considering all last known life events, a set of sixteen possible final demographic statuses were extracted from the database (Figure 1), which were then categorized into five main divisions. These are: settlement, repatriation, decease (other), decease (during contract period), and unknown/other. The explanation of these divisions is given in Appendix 2.²⁹

This study will follow trends in colonial historiography, taking bottom-up and subaltern perspectives in order to investigate individual choices and the motivation behind these life-determining decisions. By researching the individual demographic aspects and the influence of the Surinamese context with a large-scale methodology, this article will align with the perspective of New Imperial History. This widely supported trend in colonial history aims at looking further than the institutional aspects of colonies and focussing on (information) networks as well as the ‘webbedness’ of colonialism – the intertwinement of multiple sorts of relations constituting colonial societies.³⁰

This article will follow the aforementioned statement of Hassankhan, assuming that people had agency and, therefore, the settlement and repatriation rates will be regarded as a result of personal motivation. Based on the historiography, the sources and the methodology, this article investigates five hypotheses. The first hypothesis, regarding the development over time, is that the relative share of Hindustanis settling themselves permanently in Suriname, compared to the share that repatriated, increased throughout the research period. This growth is believed to be explained by improving working and living conditions and by the establishment and expansions of Hindustani communities.

Secondly, following the discussion in the scholarly literature, it is expected that close relations with family members contribute to a higher chance of settling at the expense of the share of kantráki returning to India. Thirdly, and consequently, it is expected that women settled more often, because it is argued that they were more dependent on other people during and after the contract period than men were. Fourth, it is expected that religious differences did not affect the choice between staying or leaving, since Hindus and Muslims shared many cultural values with one another.

What stands out in the debate on the demographic development of Hindustanis is that Surinamese and plantation-specific circumstances are mostly not taken into account. It has, however, been shown in studies on slavery that different crop growth processes are not always comparable in the physical labour that was required by plantation directors and overseers. Therefore, following the same train of thought, the fifth hypothesis is that indentured labourers who worked on sugar plantations – where work is considered physically more exhausting – had a higher chance of repatriation to India.³¹

This article has tried to shed light on the development of Hindustanis’ lives in Suriname by focussing on the choice between returning to India and settling in Suriname. By conducting this analysis, this article enables scholars to understand indentureship and its consequences in a more macro and quantitative manner. The research question was: ‘How did individual characteristics and the Surinamese context influence the post-indenture choice of repatriation or settlement of Hindustani indentured migrants in Suriname between 1873 and 1940?’ In order to answer the question, then, the hypotheses will now be either accepted or rejected, after which the relative importance of the hypotheses is presented.

The first hypothesis stated that the share of Hindustanis repatriating compared to the ones who settled declined throughout the research period. This seems to be partly true, because the balance shifted from more repatriation to more settlement, although Hindustanis arriving after 1903 again tended to repatriate more often. This development has, however, not been fully explained. The role of a growing possibility to connect with like-minded people who migrated before seems to play at least a considerable role. The hypothesis can thus be partly accepted, yet has to be rejected for the last years of the research period.

Secondly, it seems that the presence of family members or close acquaintances had a positive effect on the number of Hindustanis settling in Suriname, especially when those relations were forged in Suriname. However, the sample used may have had a bias, since the database does not give all marriages made or children born in Suriname. However, the fact that the presence of family members upon arrival – which information is more complete – also had a positive effect on the share of repatriation, implies that connections did matter. Therefore, the second hypothesis can be accepted with quite a degree of certainty.

The third hypothesis stated that women settled more often than men, who were expected to have repatriated more often than women. This expectation also seems to be correct, which can be explained by the female need for dependency both during and after the contract period and by the assumption on the part of both the colonial planters and Hindustani women that female kantráki ought to have been accompanied by a man. However, in absolute numbers, more women as well as men present in the sample settled in Suriname than returned to Hindustan. Altogether, this hypothesis can be accepted as well.

The fourth hypothesis can also be accepted. It can be concluded that there were no significant religious differences that influenced the post-indenture choice of staying or repatriating. This can be explained by the fact that crossing the kali pani was believed to erase religious and cultural status and positions, and also by the fact that Indian Muslims and Hindus shared many cultural values, as described in the literature. Additionally, the partly vanishing boundaries between Muslim and Hindu kantráki resulted in a decreased importance of their religious differences, which further confirms the idea that religion did not affect the settlement and repatriation rates significantly.

Regarding the role of the Surinamese context, it was expected in the fifth hypothesis that when kantráki served their first contract on estates that cultivated and processed sugar products, the living and working conditions were harsher and more difficult. However, there is no statistically significant evidence for higher repatriation rates and, therefore, this hypothesis must be rejected. Instead, there seems to be a positive relation between the number of different crops cultivated and the chances of settlement. Polyculture reduced the risk of total crop failure and therefore increased the kantráki’s chance of receiving full payment. This enabled Hindustanis to build up more savings, which enabled them to have a more financially stable life in Suriname. This seems to contradict the statement previously posited that money was needed to return to India, given that these savings were also necessary to build up a stable life in the new home country. Additionally, the district to where the kantráki were assigned to seems to have influenced the final demographic status. For four districts, statistical evidence was found that supports the idea that the assigned district influenced the choice between repatriation or settlement.

When comparing the statistical outcomes, some statements can be made about the relative influence of the variables. The formation of family relations in Suriname, especially in the form of marriage, had the strongest impact on the choice of settlement or repatriation. The Surinamese context, especially the cultivation of either monoculture or polyculture on plantations, had the second strongest influence in the kantráki’s decision. The sex and the presence of family members upon arrival did have some kind on role on the post-indenture life course, albeit rather small. Altogether, it seems that, as Hassankhan and others have already stated, Hindustanis indeed had agency and could to a great extent determine their own life course development after indenture.

Situating this research in the scholarly discussion, it appears that, although the literature stated there were some rules, requirements, and assumptions that influenced the development of the life course after the period of indentureship, these statements are not always correct. The overview given by Choenni and Choenni as to when someone was to leave Suriname does not seem to apply to all cases considered in this article. Therefore, it must be stated that the development of the life course in some cases evolved outside of the legal framework and was instead shaped by individual decisions.

It is evident that, although this research has explored the specific historical processes for the post-indenture choice of either repatriation or settlement, it has its limitations and therefore calls for future research. First of all, following the relatively large impact of family bonds in this choice, it is necessary to conduct more broad analyses on the formation of family relations; at the same time, it also suggests that forming these networks was a decisive factor in the development of the post-indenture life courses of Hindustanis. Therefore, it will be important to expand the information included in the sample. On the one hand, information on marriages and births has to be added to conduct a more precise analysis. This information is available in the Centraal Bureau voor Burgerzaken in Paramaribo. On the other hand, it would be similarly useful to expand the sample itself. In this way, more significant relations can be found as regards, for example, the role of the smaller districts, whereby it will be possible to better understand the role of the different variables analyzed in this article. In expanding the research on this subject, scholars will be enabled to better understand the processes of indenture in colonial spheres, especially concerning the developments after the contract periods, as well as forced labour and labour migration in general. Secondly, in combining the immigration registers, the information on marriages and children, and the 1921 census, it will be possible to (partly) reconstruct the Hindustani population of Suriname from 1873 onwards. This sort of research would contribute to the Historical Database of Suriname, so that the Surinamese population between 1830 and 1975 can be reconstructed as fully as possible. This enables a group of 400,000 descendants from these Hindustani kantráki to dive deep into their family history, giving them insight into how people, destined for Suriname, built their lives far from their origins.

Matthijs Kraijo (1997) is an affiliated researcher at the Radboud Group for Demographic and Family History at Radboud University. He specializes in Hindustani indentureship, late colonial history of Suriname and Curaçao, anthropometric history, and the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish-Dutch maritime and commercial relations. In his present capacity, he is involved in the research project Historical Database Suriname.

E-mail: matthijskraijo@gmail.com