Annihilation of Caste Is Not Annihilation of Hinduism: The Story of Indentured Indians in South Africa

In 834, following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1933, until the end of the World War I lasting roughly over a period of 90 years, 1,336,034 indentured Indians were transported to the British colonies in South Africa, the Caribbean Islands, and Fiji (Pool and Singh 1999: 2). Indian indentured labour replaced the slave labour that sustained the sugar plantations of the British Empire in these colonies before. Production and sale of sugar was an important economic enterprise of global nature. And for 90 years, sugar plantations of the empire were kept alive primarily by the indentured labour from India.