ABSTRACT

Among the many streams of labour migration from India to the other British colonies beginning in the nineteenth century, the Malayan pattern showed one distinctive feature. Whereas all the other colonies lay at a considerable distance from India, Indian emigrants to this territory were crossing the sea into their own geographical neighbourhood. In the hundred years from 1830-1930, Tanjore was one of the main districts supplying labour to the plantations of South India, Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, Mauritius and the West Indies. The establishment of a British port at Penang in 1786 was soon followed by the growth of an Indian colony. The period from the mid 1840s to 1910 is characterised by the indentured immigration of Indian labour recruited to work on Malayan plantations. The heavy mortality rate among immigrant Indian labourers and the high figures for desertions are two clear indices of their disillusionment.