Humans or "Chattel"?
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Indian labourers in Britain between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were seen somewhere between being human and “chattel”, not always quite fitting into either category. On one hand, they were often dehumanized. Seddon mentions that Muslim Indian lascars were treated so brutally on ships that they would attempt to escape. In the 1850s, they would be crammed in lodging houses without bedding, chairs or tables. Some would die from hunger and the cold (Seddon 61) or even from being beaten by their white captain (75). Such severe mistreatment attests to how worthless these lascars were perceived to be.
Indians were also sometimes likened to animals, with engine stokers being called “donkey-men” (63), for instance. There was a lascar who, according to Joseph Salter’s record, was called “Monkey Abraham” who apparently assumed an “ape-like attitude” and wore “ridiculous ornaments” (81). Seddon describes him as using his ‘exoticness’ as a last resort to make money, but the language that Salter uses and the fact that this was an established image Abraham could exploit says enough. Visram also describes how a Bengali boy named Nabob was called a “little pet boy” by William Hickey (Visram 12). While he was not working for him as a servant, Hickey still clearly did not see him as an equal. I happened to do a small project last year where I looked at advertisements for runaway South Asian servants, and I would add that the concept of there being rewards for them was rather dehumanizing, as their existence was being given an exact value.
Despite this inhumane treatment, I would argue that Indian labourers were still not seen or treated entirely as “chattel”, as Visram refers to them in the title of her chapter. She explains that many labourers were abandoned after they were no longer needed, resigned to begging on the streets of London for money. Though this was a terrible fate, the fact itself shows that they were not legally property. Unlike enslaved individuals, their lives were not owned and their contracts had an eventual end. Some accounts of white Britons even express sympathy for their situation, as one did in the Public Advertiser in 1786 by calling for them to be taken back to India as an “act of humanity” (Visram 19). Sometimes, notions of dehumanization and sympathy were expressed at the same time. In 1789, Mrs. Lock describes the Indian servants she encountered as having “inhuman voices and barbarous chattering”, yet she felt sorry that they were “taken away from their own country” (12). The situation of Indian labourers in Britain during this period was arduous, but not to the extent that legal human “chattel” was.
(Just as a side note, if anyone is interested in looking at advertisements for African and South Asian runaways, I suggest this database, which has a pretty accessible and easy to navigate collection!)