ABSTRACT
South Asian sailors had toiled on sailing ships of the English East India Company even before the nineteenth century, but it was the combined expansion of British imperialism and steam navigation in the Indian Ocean region that boosted employment figures. As early as in 1855, it was estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 ‘lascars’ or ‘native seamen’ were engaged in the British merchant marine on ships plying the seas of Africa and Asia and about 60 per cent of them originated from South Asia.1 The five decades between the opening of the Suez Canal and the end of the First World War were not only the age of ‘high imperialism’ but also a period when ‘lascar’ employment rose continuously. ‘[T]he lascar is a fairly good sailor, is cheaper in respect of both food and wages, requires less forecastle accommodation, is more alienable to discipline, and, as a matter of course, is gradually working his way against the British seamen’, noted the Calcutta Shipping Master in 1896.2 The last assertion is confirmed by maritime census figures that are available from 1886, when 16,673 or 8.2 per cent of 204,470 sailors on British merchant vessels were said to be lascars. In 1914, the British merchant marine’s total employment figures had risen to 295,652, of which 51,616 or 17.5 per cent were lascars.3 Thus, if total employment had increased by about 50 per cent, lascar employment had trebled. However, many more lascars were actually engaged in Indian ports than those mentioned in British maritime censuses: As early as in 1899, they were estimated at 45,000 in each of Bombay and Calcutta, the two major ports of recruitment.4 More reliable port statistics are available for the early 1920s, when about 33,000 and 44,000 Indian seamen were annually shipped from Bombay and Calcutta respectively.5 From about the turn of the century, the Indian Ocean labour market was also tapped by shipping companies of other European states. Most prominent was the German ‘Hansa Linie’ who reportedly engaged 4,000 lascars on average in the early 1900s, while official sources quoted a figure of approximately 3,000 South Asian seamen who had annually been recruited in Bombay alone by ‘foreign’ companies before the First World War.6 When a long-drawn crisis of British merchant
shipping, as well as technological changes, resulted in a drastic decline of maritime employment in the 1920s and 1930s, the figures for lascars remained more stable. Hence in 1938, 50,700 or 26.4 per cent of the 192,375 sailors employed on British merchant vessels were lascars.7 In 1960, more than a decade after the end of British rule in India, seamen ‘under Asian agreements’ still made up about a quarter of the British merchant fleet’s labour force.8 Yet India’s independence and partition in 1947, and the emergence of air passenger traffic and container shipping, transformed South Asia’s maritime labour scene fundamentally in the two decades after the Second World War.9 Thus, the ‘age of the lascar’ lasted from about the 1890s until the mid-twentieth century. This chapter focuses on employment of Indian Ocean seafarers on British merchant steamships in this period. Let us ask first what precisely was a ‘lascar’ and what rendered these
maritime workers so attractive to European shipping companies? In the eighteenth century, the Persian word ‘las(h)kar’ had been used by the British as a denomination of South Asian sailors as well as of non-fighting military personnel (such as ‘tent-pitchers’ or the ‘gun lascars’ who moved artillery equipment).10 By the nineteenth century, the phrase had entered the European maritime language as a generic term for sailors from colonies of the Indian Ocean region. In Indian languages, there are various words to designate a sailor, and in nineteenth-and twentieth-century sources it appears that South Asian seamen preferred to call themselves ‘jehazis/jehajis’ (ship people) or, more often, ‘khalasis’ (another word of Persian origin, literally meaning ‘freed person’ and referring to maritime labourers of a superior status).11 On steamers, however, these designations seem to have been used only for deckhands. In the engine rooms, workers appear to have referred to themselves not as seamen but rather as ‘ag-wallahs’ (Hindustani: agvala, a direct translation of the English ‘fireman’) in clear distinction to the ‘panivalas’ (‘water men’).12 The term ‘lascar’, on the other hand, being one of several categories for colonial, ‘native’ labour, carried connotations of a low, subordinated status and of inferiority to ‘white’ workers. If an ‘unskilled’ Asian labourer was not a worker but a ‘coolie’ and an Indian infantryman not a soldier but a ‘sepoy’, an Indian Ocean sailor was not a seaman but merely a ‘lascar’. This discriminating label stuck to Indian seamen even after the end of colonial rule when it was ordered, without much success, not to use it in official correspondence.13
