Purba Hossain
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 May
Purba Hossain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They were allowed up on decks for certain times.
There were real concerns with spread of disease because they were living very, very closely together.
There were other issues such as sexual harassment of women that was really quite rampant on these ships.
Labour recruiting was done by quite a wide range of people.
Back in India, the general idea was that plantation owners in different parts of the British Empire, including British Caribbean, would write to the merchants in Calcutta, some merchant companies, and say, we need this many people at this time.
The merchant companies would recruit local Indian men, mostly men, to go into the hinterlands of India.
We've talked about Calcutta, but that was not the only port.
There were two big ports in southern India as well, Madras and Bombay.
So the idea being labour recruiters go into villages and towns and cities in the hinterland and try to argue that indenture system is a really good alternative, especially for people who were already quite used to agricultural labour.
That is not actually how it happened.
There were people coming back from the Caribbean who had been an indentured migrant, and they would then have the job of trying to then entice other people to join the indentured migration.
Five years, yes.
Five years was the standard contract.
On paper, yes.
Actually, no.
Sometimes it really depended on whether they had been paid their wages up on time, on whether their wages had been cut because of being ill, for instance, where you couldn't work on certain days.
Various plantation colonies used the double cut in wages.
So if you miss one day, you get two days wages cut.
They were supposed to be paid for the voyage back to their port of origin.
Many weren't paid that.
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