July 16th, 2001
Mauritius figures in Indian media today on account of its being a tax haven. All FFIs or Foreign Financial Institutions operating in India are registered in Mauritius to escape the liability of the Indian Capital Gains Tax.
India with Mauritius have been linked by considerations of money and trade since the end of the eighteenth century/beginning of the nineteenth century. This is the time when the British took the island over from the French because it lay on the sea route to India. The perceived danger was that Napoleon, who was in correspondence with Tipu (Tippou) Sultan of Mysore, might carry on eastwards from Egypt and dislodge the British from their most valuable possession, India.
From then on Mauritius was developed by Indian labour whether it was slave, transported convict or “indentured”.
In her doctoral thesis “Convicts in the Indian Ocean” ; Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius 1815-1853″ Clare Anderson of Leicester University U.K. provides a Glossary giving English equivalents of Indian words.
“Coolie” is translated as “casual or menial labourer, indentured Indian immigrant.
In the Urdu-Hindi Shabdakoash (Dictionary) of Muhammad Mustafa Khan “Muddah” published by the Uttar Pradesh Government in 1951 (and now out of print as is everything else of value worth and consequence in that benighted state) the correct spelling “Quli” is given along with its various meanings such as ” servant” “slave” “helper” and “the labourer who carries luggage at railway stations”. This word “Quli” or Coolie has been censored out by free India and is no longer in use.
Further on in the glossary we have the word “corah” which means whip or lash and the word “godna” or tattoo as the crime allegedly committed and the sentence passed were tattooed on the forehead of the convict in his dialect for all to read.
These three words “coolie” “corah” and “godna” provide the flavour of British Rule in India. After the Indians lost their independence to the British they became like dumb driven cattle. Indians labourers were made “coolies” and in this enslaved state exiled to wherever their British masters sent them. They were subjected to brutal flagellation ( corah) and if convicted their crime was tattooed on their foreheads.
It was not only labour that was subject to alien European exploitation. The land also suffered. The example of the island of Mauritius will provide an example.
This small island, measuring 58km x 47km lies 800 km due east from Madagascar. It was discovered in 1507 by the Portuguese. When the Dutch, following the Portuguese in the 16th Century developed land hunger they laid claim to it in 1598 and named it “Mauritius” after Prince Maurice. Fifty years later, in 1648 they tried to colonize it by settling people there. The settlement failed. By the time the Dutch quit in 1710 they had denuded the island of all its ebony trees and killed all the birds called “Dodo”.
In 1715 the French stepped into the vacuum created by the Dutch departure and renamed the island “Ile de France”.
The French tried to develop the island by growing cash crops such as vanilla, coffee and spices for export using slave labour from Africa Madagascar and India. Despite the slave numbers going up from 600 in 1753 to 37,915 in 1788 the economy did not take off.
The French Revolution [1789] triggered wars in Europe. In 1794 France overran Holland. To preempt the French from claiming and occupying Dutch possessions in the East the British occupied the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon. The French seized Java and the British acquired the islands of Rodrigues and Bourbon followed by Mauritius in 1810.
Terms of capitulation guaranteed French property language religion and the legal system as defined in the Code Napoleon. The British were satisfied as they had achieved their primary objective which was to secure the trade route to India.
Between 1814 and 1817 some 1500 Indian convicts including six women were shipped to Mauritius. After the abolition of slavery in 1834 four lakhs and fiftythree thousand Indians went to Mauritius as “indentured” labour.
It was Indian convicts put to labour on public works projects [ clearing land, quarrying, building roads and bridges] which made the sugar industry possible and put Mauritius at the centre of international trading networks.
As the word “convict” raises images of unsavoury countenances in the mind we reproduce what Charles Darwin had to say about Indian convicts he saw in Mauritius :-
“Before seeing these people I had no idea that the inhabitants of India were such noble looking men ; their skin is extremely dark, and many of the older men had large moustachios and beards of a snow white colour ; this, together with the fire of their expressions, gave to them an aspect quite imposing.”
Scholars have noted that most nineteenth century observers, although themselves European were sympathetic to Indian convicts in Mauritius and found the white convicts in Australia “a seething mass of professional thieves and prostitutes”.
The answer lies in what Auguste Billiard wrote in 1819 who described some of the “convicts” as ” part of a Sepoy Regiment who had been condemned to transportation and hard labour for life because their crime was to rebel against the English”.