Kunti’s cry: Responses in India to the cause of emigrant women,Fiji 1913–16

On 1 August 1913, Bharat Mitra, a Hindi daily published from Calcutta, carried a story titled ‘The wails of a woman’. The story was a personal account of an Indian indentured woman labourer in Fiji, by the name Kunti, who had been exposed to sexual exploitation and various other forms of injustice. In the story, Kunti speaking about her fate observed:

I, Kunti, daughter of Charan, by caste Chamar, am an inhabitant of village Lakhiapakar, P.O. Belghat, Thana Belghat in the district of Gorakhpur in Hindustan. With my husband, whose name is Jal, I came to Gorakhpur and one day happened to come across a coolly recruiter. From there he brought me with my husband and other registered people down to Calcutta, where he left us in the depot. For a few days only, we were in the Calcutta depot and faced many troubles. Then we were despatched to Fiji and packed like so many sheep on board the steamer Sungola No. 4. Neither the depot people in India nor the Arkatis ever told us anything about law or work or jail summons. When we arrived at the town of Suva in Fiji by the steamer, we were again thrust like so many sheep into a boat and made to disembark at the Nuklao Depot. My husband and I were despatched to the Waini Bokasi factory in the district of Rewa. The sardar and the overseer allotted me the work of grass cutting quite detached from the men and women, in the banana plantation of Saber Kara, and there the Sardar and overseer came to commit a beastly assault on me. On the overseer peremptorily ordering the Sardar, the latter wanted to seize me by the hand, and when I ran away and, at the risk of my life, jumped into the adjacent river. But a boy named Jagdeo in his boat nearby ferried me across the river.

I told my master, the kothiwalla, all that my oppressor did, but he said, ‘Go-away, I won’t hear anything about what takes place in the plantation’. Presently the overseer and the Sardar came and wanted me to work. I did not go to work for three days. From the 14 April, twenty jaribs (chains) of the plot of land called Nabada have been assigned to me for rooting out the grass …. My husband has been given work at a place just a mile off from where I am …. I prayed to the master for the preservation of my chastity in the presence of Sundar Singh, who is my witness, and requested that the agreement of myself and my husband be cancelled for which we offered to pay £8. The master of the factory agreed, but the overseer opposed and threatened to resign, whereupon neither I was discharged nor the agreement cancelled by the Manager.

Reader, I am twenty years old now and have two daughters, one of whom is aged three and the other only one year. Alone my husband is unable to face or stand in the way of the overseer or the Sardar. Now I am prepared to kill myself by drowning, giving up all love of the world, of my daughters and my husband, if my chastity is ever violated and I ask my Indian sisters never to commit the mistake of coming to this side or their condition too will be as miserable as mine. I pray also to the leaders of the country to put a stop to this bad system and earn the great merit of protecting helpless women from oppression by saving them from the miseries caused by the contract.

(Sd., I, Kunti, have given the impression of my right hand thumb). ¹

The story was also reproduced in many Hindi dailies and it also drew the attention of the colonial bureaucracy in India. The Government of India sought information in this regard from the Government of Fiji, and on the Government of India’s insistence, the Emigration Officer in Fiji met Kunti to ascertain whether there was any truth in the story published in her name in Bharat Mitra. Kunti claimed that whatever had appeared in the paper was a true account of what had been experienced by her. She said that she felt happy with his own personal presence in investigating the matter, but complained that twice before he had turned a deaf ear to her complaints. The Bharat Mitra too reported that despite her complaints on previous occasions, the authorities in Fiji had shown no interest in investigating the case. Despite the colonial bureaucracy’s attempt in Fiji to question Kunti’s allegations, the editors of Bharat Mitra strongly asserted that it was Kunti’s own genuine story and nobody had invented it. They also demanded that at a time when the condition of the Indian labourers in Fiji was being investigated by Messrs Macneill and Chamanlal, the colonial bureaucracy in Fiji should cooperate with them and explore the reality in which women like Kunti found themselves. In the end, the Bharat Mitra lavishly praised Kunti for her bravery and strong will. Yet she was still referred to as a ‘low class woman’ born in the cobbler caste. The Bharat Mitra in its appeal to the British government, also opened the larger issue, holding that ‘it would be impossible to get on without putting an end to the indenture system. Kunti’s case is but one of the few brought to light’. ²

Kunti’s story ignited passions in India, and the Anti-Indenture Emigration League which had its headquarters in Calcutta took up the matter with the Government of Bengal and Government of India. A number of Indian notables, prominent among whom were men like Tej Bahadur Sapu, wrote strongly to the Government of the United Provinces to conduct an impartial enquiry into the allegations made by Kunti. On the other hand, two high-ranking members of the colonial bureaucracy stoutly dismissed Kunti’s story altogether. The Acting Agent General of Emigration, in his official correspondence with the Colonial Secretary, insinuated that the letter with the title ‘cry of an Indian woman’ was the handiwork of an Arya Samaj missionary by the name of S.M. Saraswati who had arrived in Fiji at the beginning of April 1912 and had thereafter been found to be inciting Indian indentured labourers against the colonial regime and the planters’ lobby. ³ The Inspector of Immigrants posted in Suva reported that Saraswati was referred to by the Indian coolies as Swaminath and alleged that he had drafted the letter for Kunti: in consultation with an Indian Indentured labourer, Totaram, working in a sugar plantation in Nausori. It was argued that the overseer against whom the charges of molestation had been made had always enjoyed a good reputation and the women coolies had never levelled any allegations against him. Moreover, the contention was that it was on her own insistence that the overseer granted permission to Kunti to work in a desolate place, owing to there being constant quarrels among the Indian women labourers. Cobercraft, the inspector, also reported that the trouble brewing over Kunti’s allegations had to be judged in terms of some recent developments, notably, the dismissal of a Sardar named Sundar Singh. Kunti and Sundar Singh were alleged to have been on friendly terms more so when her husband was in jail convicted of larceny. The overseer, on the evidence provided by an Indian coolie, Rehman Khan, was said to have dismissed Sundar Singh for improper conduct. The inspector dismissed the allegations that the sardar and Ramharak who was co-accused in the charges of attempted rape, had ever any intention of committing an assault on any women. The overseer had only displayed his anger at Kunti because she had shown little interest in completing the task assigned to her, and there was no attack on her modesty. He also dismissed the claim that Kunti jumped into a swirling river. The inspector also alleged that Sujni and his wife, the two people whom Kunti met after the trouble, had never talked of any assault on Kunti’s modesty. Such statements obviously influenced the Magistrate of Wainibokasi who dismissed the allegations against the overseer and the sardar, thereby leaving no room for Kunti to seek any legal redressal. ⁴

The Hindi press, however, continued to find fault with the statements issued by government officials. It was alleged that despite adhering to the hard task work schedule, both Indian men and women continued to live on starvation wages. The women faced more insult than the men and they were often the victims of rape and other forms of indecent conduct. Interestingly, it was through the Hindi press that several limerics about Fiji now circulated in India. ⁵

The reactions of the Hindi press tended to become far more strident once Kunti’s complaint gained publicity. Several columns started appearing in Hindi books and journals praising the conduct of brave Indian women like Kunti, but at the same time reviving the two interconnected ideas of patriarchy and family, the cornerstones of the Hindu way of life. This was revealed, for example, in this limeric:

When the forces of evil tried to

Shake the religion of chaste women

Kunti jumped into deep water,

With no banks in sight

Despite the injustices,

She did not detract from her own religion

Do we lose our Hinduness?

The brave Indians are no fools

Something has to be done to address this fall,

Let every Kunti’s life be successful,

In the absence of religion, how

Can prosperity and peace reign? ⁶

Historians like Brij Lal have interpreted the Kunti episode from the point of view of the broader working experience of the Indian Indentured women in the Fijian plantations. He holds that the commodification of labour and its linkages with a very coercive regime of labour management was responsible for producing all the problems connected with the indentured. ⁷ On the other hand, too often the colonial officials and the planter lobby would describe the Indian Indentured women as of ‘low caste and loose character’. This kind of stereotyped account of Indian women was even to be found in the writings of men like C.F. Andrews, who was an ardent supporter of Indian nationalism. After a fact finding-mission to Fiji he had observed:

The Hindu woman in this country is like a rudderless vessel with its mast broken drifting onto the rocks; or like a canoe being whirled down the rapids of a great river without any controlling hand. She passes from one man to another and has lost even the sense of shame in doing so. ⁸

The accounts of female deviance in colonial Fiji are not by any means difficult to interpret. Women were always seen as rule breakers, castigated for their overt sexuality, for which there had to be regular colonial if not patriarchal efforts to regulate feminine behaviour. Margaret Mishra in her researches based on police records, court proceedings and news items preserved in the National Archives of Fiji, has shown how both indigenous Fijian women and indentured Indian women were seen as sources of all moral transgressions. Mishra has argued that the deviant blot that had been inflicted upon these women does raise some doubts whether the representation of these female subjects is at all be possible through normal historical scholarship or whether it could be the study of feminist history alone whose methodology would bring out the nuances that has hitherto lain hidden. ⁹ Mishra holds that this patriarchal imposition of feminine deviance can only be understood through the connectivity of feminine history, ethnography and anthropology, which could at last lead to the recovery of women’s lost voices. ¹⁰ Charu Gupta, on the other hand, has strongly argued that the way the image of the Indian subaltern women was constructed by nationalists and reformers, brings out both the sympathetic and yet contradictory ways which often suppressed the layers of meaning linked to the story of their migration. She argues that the moralising discourse of the Hindi writers essentially represented attempts on their part to envision an imagined Hindu social order, separated from which the Indian indentured women fell innocent victims to an alien environment. ¹¹

Some indentured workers, men and women, returned from Fiji to India and became public spokespersons, such as (among men) Totaram Sanadhya, Bhavanidayal Sanyasi and Baba Ramchandra. But even if the Indian indentured women were seen as a part of the Indian nation, they hardly had much opportunity of directly representing their own cause. For Kunti, it had been a prescribed ‘trial by water’ to prove her innocence, the drowning of women in water being seen as ‘penalty’ for their apparent transgression of gender behaviour. ¹² Nonetheless, the importance that was given to victimised women like Kunti afforded the reformers and nationalists a strong moral opportunity to condemn colonial rule. ¹³

Yet, the ‘immoral character’ of such women as expressed even in the writings of nationalists ¹⁴ lent a distantly traditional tone to the campaign against the system of indentured labour. Charu Gupta argues that the obscene behaviour and the lack of shame associated with the image of the emigrant women was a serious violation of the established moral mores of the middle-class, social reformers. Thus, it was in the fitness of things that her superior sisters should ‘speak on her behalf’ and make strong pleas that the indentured women be returned to their homeland from these alien territories where dangers loomed large for their womanhood. ¹⁵

In this entire story of nationalist protest, there has been little emphasis placed on the role of the Indian trading and mercantile groups. The debate on indenture in the early part of twentieth century is believed to be one where the participation was increasingly of the liberal English-speaking political elite in British India. However, this is only a partial side of the story of protest since this does not accord with the involvement of the Calcutta-based Marwaris in the matter of indentured labour abroad.

One needs to go beyond the nationalist versions as represented in the upper caste Hindi counter public narratives to understand the reasons behind the protest against the indenture system, especially in relation to Fiji. The Marwari reformist involvement with the abolition of indenture could hardly be seen as something which was linked to their own social concerns in early twentieth century Calcutta, for no Marwaris were involved in the migration. In fact, the Marwaris’ reformist zeal predated the campaign against indenture in Fiji in the mid-1910s. Research on the Calcutta-based mercantile groups has fairly well established that there was a difference of outlook between the rich conservative Hindi speaking orthodox Hindu Marwaris and those of the Indian western educated liberal groups, ¹⁶ particularly when it came to understanding the social and economic implications of colonialism. As revealed in the diatribes against the indenture system, the Marwari rhetoric was replete with inspiration drawn from Hindu Shastras and invocation of violence to Hindu moral code in Fiji. A discursive reading of Timburg also makes us aware that there were solid economic reasons behind the Marwari opposition to Indenture. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, their trading expertise had given them an opportunity to outwit other Indian trading groups and corner a large share of public work contracts. The involvement of Marwari businessmen in the jute market increased during the war years, and this made them the later-day barons of the jute industry. In their role as capitalists, they were also emerging as major opponents of local British capitalists, vying with them over matters related to labour recruitment. ¹⁷ There was also an implicit understanding on the part of the Marwaris that cheap labour increasingly drawn from the eastern Hindi speaking hinterland would give them a competitive edge in the world market. However, the Calcutta Marwaris, unlike the Indian industrialists from other parts of India, were reluctant to admit any immediate economic motives behind their spirited opposition to the indenture system. Omkar Goswami has argued that by the early years of the twentieth century the Marwaris who were traditionally involved in trade and money-lending now possessed the requisite funds for setting up units of industry, so that by the end of the war the Marwaris would start moving from trade to industry and would be establishing new jute mills and also running collieries. ¹⁸ As for their opposition to indentured labour, they based their arguments in terms of transgressions of the dharmic injunctions as laid down in the Hindu Shastras. This strategy resulted in an alliance between the Bhojpuri speaking ‘rustics’ of rural eastern and northern India and Marwaris who for long had oppressed them as moneylenders. Despite the differences on class lines, this alliance proved much stronger than the alliance between the villagers and the English-educated nationalists. ¹⁹

In fact, the entire Kunti episode would not have gained currency in India had not there been a movement for social reform among the Marwaris in the early twentieth-century Calcutta. This was clearly revealed through the emergence of the Marwari Sahayak Samiti, in Calcutta, a society which from its very inception had shown interest in helping indigent Marwari families. But its involvement within the Marwari circles did not prevent it from endearing itself to the Hindi speaking people who escaped from the coolies’ depots and sought shelter in the ‘dharamshalas’ of Burrabazar. The deserters were usually very poor and had virtually no money to secure legal aid. The samiti was prompt in providing legal aid and also arranged tickets for their return to their upcountry homes.

This was clearly revealed in the story of Shankar Rao, by caste a Maratha Surja Vanshi and by occupation a naik havildar (earning remuneration Rs 16 per mensem) attached to the Third Imperial Service Infantry. In his statement before the Calcutta Police on 15 October 1912, he stated that one Romjan tried to convince him that he should migrate to Jamaica and work on a salary of twenty-one annas per day. Shankar Rao agreed and he was taken to coolie No. 61 at Metiaburj. Within a few days, he expressed his unwillingness to leave for Jamaica leading to repeated threats by Romjan. Left penniless, he went to Burrabazar and found there were about 200–300 men and women like him who were homeless because they had been brought to Calcutta on false promises of lucrative jobs. ²⁰ The Marwaris were thus already involved in relief activity of this kind when the Fiji scandal broke.

Indeed, Karen A. Ray has argued that by 1913, Marwaris had changed their policy from that of helpful assistance to escapees to active opposition directed against indentured emigration. Characteristically, stories from Hindu mythology were cited time and again to illustrate the darker sides of the indenture system. ²¹

Babu Rambehari Tandon, the Secretary of the Anti-Indentured Emigration League, occupying premises at 160, Harrison Road, Calcutta wrote a letter to the Undersecretary, Government of India, bringing out numerous instances of hapless women who had been waylaid by the Arkartis (native agents) through false promises to sign indenture contracts for work in British colonies. ²² One of the women who had this misfortune of being duped by the Arkarti was Krishna Devi, widowed wife of Sur Ram Tewari of Basti, who was enticed by an Arkati during a pilgrimage to Ayodhya and was later taken to Faizabad. In her deposition before the Alipore Court on 11 May 1914, she stated that from Faizabad she was taken to Calcutta, and there in the depot the babus took away the ornaments of many of her companions. It was in Calcutta that they found they had been deceived. Despite constant pressure from the Babus to deposit her personal belongings, she did not do so and preferred to keep them with her. Interestingly, Kishori Devi’s case was represented by a Bengali Vakil Purnachandra Mitra, who had been hired by one, Kishori Lal Gupta, resident of the Burrabazar area of Calcutta. Similar, stories of other women like Lakhiraji Brahmani and Ram Piyari Halwain were also recorded before the Calcutta police by Kishori Lal Gupta, in May 1914.

Many of these women, as in the writings of the Secretary of Anti-Indenture League, had been approached by the Marwaris for securing their release, but the Depot Babus and their accomplices in most cases had driven them away. One of the Babus was said to have derogatorily referred to the Marwaris as Goondas of Burrabazar, who would dishonour the ‘deserted women’ and keep them as slaves for ever. ²³ Despite such misrepresentations, many of the women like Lakhiraj Brahmani and Ram Piyari Halwain reposed their faith in the Marwaris and preferred to go with them. The Marwaris got their release by paying Rupees thirty for each.

Though these stories might have buttressed the Marwari opposition to the indenture system, the mobilisation against emigration from Calcutta gained a great deal of significance with the circulation of the story of a Marwari woman Lakshmi. She was reported to have been passing through utter despair in the coolie depot in Calcutta. A delegation of Marwari leaders visited the depots and found Lakshmi, her daughter and another woman who was identified by her as her servant. The Marwaris narrated a horrific picture of a coolie depot which was believed to have been packed with more than thousand recruits. The lawyer who had been recruited by the Marwaris to represent the case reported that he was accosted by more than a thousand recruits who on seeing him:

… began to cry and to entreat us to arrange for their release…. one woman said that she had been separated from her child, only six months old…. still another said she was a Brahmin woman and there she was falling from her religion by having to take her meals with low caste men like Chamars…. While all this was going on, some depot officers reprimanded the poor helpless women and forbade them to speak to us and threatened to turn us out of the depot if we spoke to the coolies. ²⁴

The Marwari intervention managed to free fourteen of these women. The women also testified that they had been robbed, beaten and forced to eat with ‘low caste’ men and compelled to take new ‘husbands’. In the court room depositions, Marwari involvement was visible, and in the end, the court verdicts went in their favour. Subsequently, the Marwaris with their own financial contributions arranged for the passage of these women back to their homes provided their family members were willing to take them. ²⁵

Subsequently, the Calcutta Marwaris, particularly those owing allegiance to the Marwari Sahayak Samiti, began a campaign against indenture with a great deal of fervour. They used their commercial contacts in the Garden Reach area to gain access to the few returned immigrants and interview them on the conditions prevailing in overseas colonies. The Anti-Indentured Emigration League which was formed by the members of Sahayaik Samiti of Calcutta had a large support base among the Hindi speaking Hindus of Calcutta and in places like Delhi and Allahabad where it opened its branches in 1914. The office-bearers of the Anti-Indentured Emigration League were able to convince returned emigrants like Tota Ram Sanadhiya, Buldeo Thakur and Jal Chamar to testify before the Calcutta police court in summer 1914 against the indenture system. ²⁶

The Calcutta-based Marwaris not only publicised these accounts of the returned emigrants, as given to the police and the law courts but also sent their representatives to parts of northern India for carrying out propaganda against the indenture system. These representatives often alleged that the contracts bound the people to work for five years, failing which they would receive jail sentences, though such conditions were not included in the contracts. However, the representatives were able to convince a substantial section of the rural population of northern India that the conditions of life in the colonies were likely to be very oppressive and the recruiters were very much like slave purchasers. ²⁷ Karen A. Ray has shown that these speaking tours were supplemented by pamphlet distribution. Marwari volunteers often camouflaged themselves as potential emigrants, and during their journey to Calcutta tried to convince the recruits not to emigrate. ²⁸ But more importantly, the issue of indenture offered the Marwaris as a social group to develop links with the mainstream of Indian public life. The publication of Kunti’s story and many other accounts in the Hindi press brought them closer to the nationalist leadership and a little later to Mahatma Gandhi. It was their connections with Gandhi that led to Andrews and Pearson’s investigative trip to Fiji, which brought out the horrors of the lives of women residing in the coolie lines. ²⁹

Much before C.F Andrews had painted the Hindu women in Fiji as a rudderless vessel, white overseers saw them as immoral beings willing to accept favours in exchange of sex. Walter Gill, an Australian overseer, who worked in Fiji during the last days of indenture, alleged that the Indian woman in Fiji was ‘as joyously amoral as a doe rabbit. She took her lovers as a ship takes rough seas; surging up to one who would smother her, then tossing him aside, thirsting for the next’. ³⁰ Brij Lal has argued that Indian Indentured men remained rather reticent if not oblivious to the degradations suffered by their own women and were perhaps ‘more charitable in their comments’. ³¹

The utter indifference towards the labouring women’s issue was clearly revealed in the proceedings of Kunti’s case in Fiji. Much was these made of a statement of a woman, Sujani who was cross-examined by R.M Booth, Agent Commissioner. Sujani claimed that she had seen ‘Kunta’ (Kunti), a woman working in the banana fields close to her house. She had only seen the overseer visiting the field once. The woman she recalled was sitting down and not working. ³² On such evidence, the Magistrate, as has been mentioned earlier, completely absolved the overseer John Barber and the sardar Ram Hark Singh of physical assault on Kunti, her plea being also dismissed on the ground that the allegations were made many months after the incident had allegedly taken place. ³³

However, the publication of Kunti’s story, which led to the investigative mission by Andrews and Pearson, altered the entire situation. Banarasi Chaturvedi, a Hindi journalist, who was close to Andrews, encouraged a Fiji returned ex-indentured labourer Totaram to narrate his experiences. Totaram’s testimony subsequently appeared in an autobiographical form titled Fiji Mein Mere 21 Varsh. Totaram first recounted his experiences before the Presidency Magistrate at the Calcutta Police Court on 13 July 1914 as has been alluded to earlier. He quoted one of the writings of an Australian Methodist missionary Hannah Dudley to underline the injustices and inhumanity extended to indentured men and women from India:

When in the depot these women are told that they cannot go till they pay for food that they have and had for the other expenses, they are unable to do so. They arrive in this country timid, fearful women not knowing where they are to be sent. They are allotted to plantations like so many dumb animals. If they do not perform satisfactorily the work given to them, they are punished by being struck or fined, or they are even sent to jail. The life on the plantations alters their demeanour and even their very faces. Some look crushed and broken-hearted, others sullen, others hard and evil, I shall never forget the first time I saw ‘indentured’ women. They were returning from their day’s work. The look on those women’s faces haunts me.

It is probably known to you that only about thirty-three women are bought out to Fiji to every 100 men, I cannot go into details concerning this system of legalised prostitution. To give you some idea of the result, it will be sufficient to say that every few months some Indian man murders for unfaithfulness the woman whom he regards as his wife. ³⁴

Fiji Mein Mere 21 Varsh, despite being an autobiographical account of Babu Totaram, was really authored by Banarsi Das Chaturvedi, one of the enlightened Hindi literati. Totaram was a Thakur by caste. The twenty-one years he spent in Fiji saw him in myriad roles, first as an indentured labourer in the cane fields, then as a priest and writer and later as an activist dedicated to the fight on behalf of the Indian population in Fiji. ³⁵ These manifold experiences accounted for the popularity of the book and the first edition ran into 15,000 copies and was distributed on the Kumbh Mela ground in Allahabad in early 1915. Totaram was well aware of Kunti’s tribulations in Fiji and this formed the major plank of discussion in the play Coolie Pratha which he published in 1916. In this particular play, there was much emphasis on Hindu–Muslim cooperation for the cause of abolishing indenture. There was also a somewhat hidden dictum that the indenture system could only be ended through popular protests. The anti-indenture propaganda of the Marwaris seemed to have initiated a radicalised movement that now unnerved even some of the British officials. ³⁶

In the end, Kunti’s story expressed some of these concerns of the indenture women who in their own ways were trying to seek some means eventually to force the planters to submit to scrutiny about the horrors of indenture system. But while Prem Misr eulogises this version of women as an agent who could successfully challenge plantocracy, it remained doubtful whether the Indian indentured women could have come up with such a victory on their own. The involvement of upper- and middle-class women in the anti-indenture groups added a new dimension to the entire issue of women’s agency. Consequently, protest and defiance of Kunti and other indentured women was gradually subsumed within the language of upper- and middle-class nationalist protest in India. Kasturba Gandhi, along with Lady Mehta (the widow of Sir Feroz Shah Mehta) and Ramabhai Ranade supported by Lady Tata, Lady Fazulbhoy, Mrs Currimbhoy, Lady Chandarvarkar and Lady Petit came together in a historic meeting in Bombay. This was the first time that Kunti’s case came to be defined by the English press in India as a political one. The developments in Bombay inspired Indian women of bourgeois background elsewhere also to protest against the continuation of indentured labour system which dishonoured womanhood. There were also moves on the part of a section of these women to join the Home Rule league to generate a protest that would ultimately force the Viceroy to issue orders of abolition of the indenture system. ³⁷ C.F Andrew’s description of the Fijian cooly lines also led to frantic appeals from the vernacular and Indian owned English press for ending the system. The ‘New India’ published from Madras declared that it was the British empire that was mainly responsible for the slavery of men and women and more so for dishonouring women because they were sent in far lesser numbers compared to men. ³⁸ Though the government officials did not fully agree with the demand for the abolition of the indenture system, it was clear by the early and mid-1910s that middle-class Western educated politicians had succeeded in mobilising Indian public opinion behind the demand for its abolition. In December 1914, G.A Natesan in his speech before the Indian National Congress session made a fervent plea against the degradation suffered through it by men and women of the labouring classes. ³⁹ But even if there might have been some other viable reasons behind the empire’s decision finally to abolish the indenture system (1916), many believed that it was the protest of the women against their exploitation that gave real momentum to the movement against indenture. Kunti had won at last.