Overlapping Ideologies and Class Formation in Mauritius, 1937–38

Between 1830 and 1920, more than one million workers left India to labor on sugar plantations in the backwaters of the British Empire (British Guiana, Natal, Mauritius, Fiji). The indentured labor system that moved workers through various corners of the Empire rode on high international sugar prices. However, by the 1930s, global depression conjugated with the decline of the international sugar market, impacted local sugar industries. This was most apparent in a strike in August 1937 in a sugar estate of Mauritius, where four men were killed in a clash between estate managers and casual workers. The latter were discontent because of low wages and the labor recruitment process within sugar estates. This strike spread to other sugar estates throughout the island. The local colonial state scrambled to establish a Commission of Enquiry to investigate the causes of the unrest. In India, few were insensitive to the strikes. The Imperial Indian Citizenship Association in Bombay quickly contacted the Government of India to probe into the oppression of casual workers, most of whom were descendants of indentured workers.  Scholarship on South Asian labor diaspora has predominantly focused on how the indentured labor system was a new system of slavery. This move has anchored the field very firmly in the nineteenth century thus ignoring the social stratification processes that occurred amongst descendants of Indian indentured workers. In this paper, I examine how competing ideologies in diverse nodes of the Indian Ocean intersected to shape the social relations in Mauritius. While the indentured labor system was formally abolished in the 1920s, it had left larger ramifications. A new class of casual workers emerged from its debris. Out of this entanglement of ideologies, two aspects stand out: the control of social wealth and the formation and legitimation of new social and class relations.