The long shadow of indentured servitude

When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1834, it led to a surge in another form of exploitation: indentured servitude. In this arrangement, a contract outlined a worker’s debt to their employer, for costs such as transatlantic passage and room
and board. Labourers from India and China were recruited to work on plantations — at times using coercion and fraud — and sent to colonies in Africa, the Pacific and the Americas.

Toronto author and novelist Andrea Gunraj heard one such story of trickery in her own lineage: two distant relatives promised a better life, then sent on a one-way journey from India to Guyana (then British Guiana).

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In her new essay collection, Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present, Gunraj examines the reverberations of her own ancestors’ migration to the Caribbean and Latin America, part of the 1.6 million Indians who entered indentured servitude between 1834 and 1917. While she puts a critical lens on how this history has been told, or undertold, she focuses on the present-day echoes of this form of exploitative labour.

Gunraj spoke with Sadiya Ansari about the parallels between indentured servitude and contemporary immigration policies, and how writing this book changed her understanding of labour movements today.

SADIYA ANSARI: What led you to write this book?

ANDREA GUNRAJ: Over the last 20 years, I’ve been interested in the topic of racialized indentureship. I realized it’s not particularly known, though it has influenced the entire world. My ancestors’ migration was rooted in this form of labour.

It’s also something that is resurging in the forms of work we see more and more people facing now — there’s a lot of precarity. People feel that they are their labour, and they’re only valued for their labour.

SA: You write that you found it confronting to think about the agency of those who were indentured. Can you explain why?

AG: The unique thing about indentureship is that it was exploitative by nature, but it also had an element of choice. The choices could have been constrained. The histories, as thin as they might be, show that people were running away from things like starvation, or escaping abuses at home. But I also think there’s this element of wanting to find a better life, to gain freedoms they couldn’t have at home or a sense of new identity.

We often want to fit racialized indentureship into a neat box, and to say that people didn’t have a choice. Many have written about indentured people being tricked and becoming replacement slaves, but those stories do some of the choice element an injustice. They can flatten reality, flatten people’s agency. When you’re choiceless, it writes you as somebody who is desireless.

For us to sit with that discomfort of all these things being true forces us to see people more humanely.

SA: You draw a direct line from indentured labour to modern immigration policies. One of the connections you make is the medical test that is part of the immigration process. When did you start making those kinds of links?

AG: I happened upon an article about the extensive medical screening [for indentured labourers] ahead of putting people on boats. They didn’t want to have outbreaks on boats, for everybody to be sick and at risk of death. It fascinated me that these processes of getting checked for fitness still happen in immigration practices today. Officials want to see what medication you’re on or to know you’re not chronically ill.

I just felt, Oh, this has not changed at all. The way that we treat people and [assess] fitness for labour is absolutely the same.

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We think things are so much better than they were before, but it’s not necessarily better; it’s just different. The constant is that you are your labour, and if you can’t labour in a particular way that’s monetized and taxable, you lose your worth.

SA: How did writing this book change you?

AG: It made me more convinced that racialized indentureship means something — not just to my life, but to the world. It changed me to see myself and my unspoken histories as something important for us to understand, and the fact that we don’t understand it means we’re missing something key for the way that we deal with the future.

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Sadiya Ansari is a writer in Berlin.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It first appeared in Broadview’s July/August 2026 issue with the title “Precarious Work.”