Book Title: The Other Mohan
Author(s): Amrita Shah
Publisher: Fourth Estate India
Number of Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-9362139610
Date Published: Nov. 11, 2024
Price: INR 431
Book Excerpt
Chapter 10
Île Maurice
Pg. 111 – 114
Indians have been in Mauritius since the eighteenth century. They came with Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, a celebrated captain in the French East India Company who became the governor of Isle de France in 1734 and who is widely credited with initiating the development of the island. His name and likeness are everywhere in contemporary Mauritius, most prominently in Port Louis, where his statue stands at the quayside end of Place d’Armes, a broad forehead and pointed chin rising from wide, sloping shoulders, his tall stout figure in ruffles and a long open coat revealing a shapely extended leg, all gloriously framed by an avenue of Royal Palms.
To lure Frenchmen to the island, Mahé de La Bourdonnais offered inducements of land and slaves. The slaves were drawn mostly from Mozambique and Madagascar, but among them were also a number of Bengali women from India who were imported to serve as domestic workers and concubines, on account of their ‘gentleness, good manners and cleanliness but also for their hair and features, which were similar to those of Europeans, differing only in colour, ranging from a light tan to very dark’.5 The governor also brought lascars, rugged Muslim seafarers from coastal India, to build a shipyard and repair centre at a site on the northwest blessed with a friendly southeastern wind. In the cove overlooked by an arc of hills dominated by the thumb-like protuberance known as ‘Le Pouce’, a town named Port Louis after Louis XV emerged, dotted with thick-walled stone churches and public buildings constructed by Indian temple masons from French territories in South India.
By the time the British arrived, descendants of the original Indian migrants had made a place for themselves in alien surroundings. The lascars had established their own neighbourhood, known alternatively as Camp Malabar or Camp des Lascars in Port Louis, and led a riotous annual procession through the city for Muharram or ‘Yamse’ as they called it. Heirs of Bengali slaves and stone masons were spread out through the colony and some of them had climbed out of their servile status and become owners of estates. About forty traders who had moved from French enclaves in India, such as Pondicherry, had set up thriving businesses.
More Indians came to the island, known again as ‘Mauritius’ after the handover to the British. Some Indian soldiers who came to fight the French, for instance, chose to stay on and make a home there. Then there were convicts whose crime was political in nature, mostly sepoys guilty of military offences, who were brought to Mauritius by its new governor, Robert Farquhar, to build roads and fortifications in the new colony. Business entrepreneurs came from British colonies. The most prominent one was RatanjiBickaji, who came in 1810 or thereabouts. A Parsi from Bombay, Bickaji seems to have been an inordinately enterprising man with a finger in every pie. He was a representative of the imam of Muscat and various Bombay firms, which included ‘Frith & Co.’ (possibly Francis Frith, a grocer, printer and photographer in the Middle East) and ‘Jujabbey’ (most likely a misspelling of Jejeebhoy, the owner of Bombay’s Jubilee Textile Mill) and ‘Dadebhoy’ (Dadabhoy) & Sons. He paid bills of transaction, equipped bricks and schooners, lent money (there is a record of 500 piastres given to a Mr Collier in 18156) and arranged for the scavenging of Port Louis, for which he had a tender in 1835.
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Vellivahel Anassamy of the mercantile Chettiar Hindu community, who was probably from a French-occupied part of India since he could speak French and doubled as an interpreter, came to Mauritius as a storekeeper with the British navy and went on to buy the Bon Espoir estate, once owned by Mahé de La Bourdonnais. It was his son, Inonmondy, and their neighbour, a Britisher, E. Arbuthnot, who first hit upon the idea of importing Indians to labour for plantation owners and for Bickaji, who needed workers to meet his scavenging contract. Arbuthnot’s brother was an indigo planter in India and used workers from the hills as labour.
The need for a scheme of this or a similar nature arose in the context of abolition. The British had left the French administrative and judicial system intact in Mauritius and permitted the widespread everyday use of French Creole while English became the language of administration. But they discontinued commercial activities on the island, turning a thriving port and shipbuilding centre into a vast plantation: the area under sugarcane cultivation increased five-fold to over 20,000 hectares and sugar factories multiplied from a mere ten in 1798 to 157 in 1823. The Franco-Mauritian elite, facing no threat to their privileges, raised no objection to the new orientation, but the new 1833 British law abolishing slavery and threatening their own right to keep slaves, filled them with alarm.
Under Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the ratio of slave to master was ten to one and as many as 110,000 slaves, arriving between 1767 and 1810, made Mauritius the British Empire’s most productive sugar colony. Estate owners protested the abolition act and their consequent loss of a free labour force. A Franco-Mauritian lawyer, politician and slave-owner, Adrien d’Épinay made representations to the British government in London in 1831 and 1833 on behalf of sugar planters and negotiated a compensation for farmers for the loss of their slaves.
Following the enactment of the British Slave Compensation Act 1837, Adrien d’Épinay and his wife successfully lodged claims against the release of their 455 slaves and received £15,192.8 A total sum of £2.1 million was awarded as compensation. Plantation owners replaced their lost slaves with 25,000 bonded workers from India in 1834. In 1837, the colonial government of India passed an ordinance, setting in motion a formal system of indenture which, over the next hundred years or so, saw about 450,000 Indian indentured workers arrive in Mauritius.
Excerpted with permission from The Other Mohan by Amrita Shah, published by Fourth Estate India.
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