Arkatis, Recruiters, Intermediaries: The People and Practices in Indentured Labour Recruitment in Nineteenth Century India

In the nineteenth century – especially from the 1830s – a set of people could be seen moving from village to village in India, recruiting indentured labourers. They were known as ‘arkatis,’ most commonly in the region covering the erstwhile Bengal Presidency and the North-Western Provinces. Their recruitment was sometimes targeted at the sugar plantations in foreign colonies – such as Mauritius, the Caribbean, Fiji, and South Africa – where Slavery had just been abolished; at other times, they supplied to the demands of the tea plantations of Assam, in Northeast India. They were important players in the sustenance of the British Empire, despite never quite featuring centrally in any of its histories.

This study is an inquiry on them and their practices: the evolution of their name; their initiation into the indentured labour trade; the perception around them in the nineteenth century press; their relationship with other intermediaries of their time; and their image in the eyes of the people they recruited.

In the first chapter, we draw an unprecedented trajectory of the recruiters’ name – the word ‘arkati’ – from eighteenth and nineteenth-century dictionaries. This trajectory seeks to look beyond conventional wisdom, that categorises ‘arkati’ as a Bhojpuri adaptation of the English word ‘recruiter.’ We trace the indenture-recruiter’s predecessor in a river-faring mariner, who served to be the leading transporter of humans before railways. We also provide a frame of vision to look at how the arkati got himself involved in indentured labour recruitment, at the first place. Overarchingly, we observe how words generally acquire new meanings when the people behind them assume new functions in emerging markets.

Our study on the arkati from eighteenth and nineteenth century dictionaries looks at the functionary from a non-State perspective. This perspective is carried on to the next chapter, where we take newspapers and periodicals as the main sources of enquiry. The sphere of print in South Asia expanded remarkably in the nineteenth century. Newspapers sprang up in numbers, and undertook investigations to uncover cases of deceitful and coercive recruitment of coolies. These reports played a major role in consolidating public opinion against indenture. Eventually, they also contributed towards the formation of a pan-Indian anti-indenture movement, and got the arkati out of work. This chapter examines how the picture of the arkati was painted in these newspapers and periodicals? It also brings to light the methods of some of their journalistic enquiries into indenture.

In the third chapter, we attempt a reconstruction of the experience of recruitment from the perspective of the labourers. We take their testimonies into account, and a few songs that they are considered to have composed. We try to locate the arkati in these texts; this helps us conceive recruitment – at least in cases where no explicit coercion was involved – as a dialogue between two minds: that of the recruiter and that of the potential recruit. It further allows us to think of the arkati as a human messenger of work; it also provides us with an intimate glimpse of how the arkati manipulated the desires of potential recruits, and exploited them with false promises of prosperity.

Recruitment happened through conversations on many occasions. But few sources reach the level of detailing, where they can tell us exactly what transpired between a recruiter and a potential recruit. Thus, we strive to find a frame of vision in this chapter, through which these exchanges could be perceived. We take an intermediary called the ‘setho’ – who conducted pilgrimages – and analyse his people-gathering strategies, to obtain a sense of how indenture recruitment could have happened. We also examine transportation – how migrations were conducted before the coming of railways – since the arkati had to guide his recruits to the port cities after recruiting them from the villages. Finally, we enquire how pilgrimage shrines had become hotspots for indenture recruitment in the nineteenth century? We also ask whether the setho had a part to play in that?