Lister, though, swaggered to the stand and was unrepentant in his testimony. He told the Commission that Balakistna, Moonesawmy, and Jacob, the men who were beaten, "were very badly conducted men", continually encouraging "other coolies to do the same".

Balakistna spoke English and "used to cause every sort of mischief".

He grudgingly conceded to making Indians work two days for each day absent, and of sending one of his workers with a rope round his neck to the police station. The reason: "the man had committed a crime; and the police station was distant".

Lister’s defence revealed the casual brutality that lay at the heart of settler colonialism. The indentured, who spoke up were “clevers” who had to be put in their place. Their place was to be passive cogs in the white man’s machine.

The Commission, which issued its report in September 1872, found that magistrates failed to visit estates twice a year as required by the law because they felt powerless against influential planters. Employers were generally left unchecked to do what they willed; "few reports as prescribed by law appear to have been furnished".

The Indian Coolie agents (later Protector) Tatham and H, Shepstone were overworked and unable to see to the needs of workers.

The Coolie Commission was one of many inquiries, large and small, instituted in Natal. They included the Shire Commission (1862), the Coolie Commission (1872), the Wragg Commission (1885–1887), the Reynolds Commission (1906), the Indian Commission (1909), and the Solomon Commission (1914).

Radhika Mongia, in assessing indentured commissions, describes "the inquiry" as ‘one of the most mundane, routine, yet significant practices’ for colonial authorities. It was a key instrument to produce a "regime of truth" based on the "liberal" notion of “impartiality”. She defines truth not as "the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted", but "the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true".

Commissions controlled the process by defining what was to be probed, the questions to be investigated, and the hypotheses that should form the foundation of the inquiry.

Members of the Commission were deemed to have "expert knowledge".

Banastre Pryce-Lloyd had been a major general in the Bengal Staff Corps. As a result of his many years of living in India, he was fluent in Indian languages and had a deep knowledge of the "ways and customs" of Indians. Pryce-Lloyd was also a wealthy farmer, who owned an estate in Natal and clearly had a stake in "the system". Pryce-Lloyd’s "practical knowledge of the natives of India", and both his and Attorney-General Gallwey’s "unbiased minds", meant that their evaluation of the contradictory positions and their findings were beyond reproach.

This "expert knowledge" allowed the Commission to proffer that indentured Indians had to be judged against different standards: "for the most part the immigrants of Natal are drawn from the lowest classes of the population of India, and consequently loose and thriftless characters might be expected from the majority of them".

The idea of Indians as duplicitous has a long genealogy in British colonial history. This bigotry had an echo in Natal. For example, most employers simply refused to accept that the indentured were ill and forced them to work or deducted their wages. The commissioners supported these actions because Indians liked to "humbug illness".

Not surprisingly, the Commission concluded that Indian labourers were "not and have never been subject to any systematic ill-treatment or oppression by their employers". While highlighting instances of ill-treatment, inadequate housing, poor rations and medical facilities, made light of the abuses. A few changes were recommended, including the appointment of a "Protector", improved medical facilities, and a stop to floggings. Indenture was resumed and continued for almost four more decades.

Mongia sums up the role of commissions succinctly: "it appeared as if the system had been evaluated afresh each time and the best course of action pursued… Indenture thus continued not in spite of the numerous inquiries, but because of them. The inquiry as a mechanism for ‘impartial’ truth procurement continued to sustain a (system) wherein, the scandal (was) that there (was) no scandal."

The Commission made one important recommendation. It noted that witnesses told them that the word "coolie" "is regarded as a term of reproach in the nature of abuse" in India.

From their interaction with workers on estates, the commissioners concluded that the term is galling, and a source of annoyance. We would suggest that the term "Indian Immigrants" be substituted for that of Coolie in all official documents, and that the designation “Coolie Agent” be changed to that of “Protector of Indian Immigrants”.

The indentured saw themselves as people; the colonists saw them as numbers. In confronting the label "coolie", the indentured were confronting the way in which they wanted to be viewed. But the indentured would soon have to come to terms with the fact that, while in official documents they were no longer coolies, the system of indenture was geared to collapsing their person into payment, their histories into numbers.

But the indentured refused to simply accept their lot in life. Through acts like foot-dragging, supporting each other when times were tough, building rudimentary places of worship, learning to speak the language of the bosses, using the legal system to press their concerns, they were not just surviving but building a life on African soil.

In spending time poring over Commissions of Inquiries, trawling the archives, reading the diaries of white colonists, tracking down newspapers of the period, we sometimes ask ourselves why? A fool’s errand some might say.

The answer is that it affords the opportunity to write people like Rangaswammy into history. A man who arrived as an indentured labourer and went on to be an owner of a rudimentary hotel, and faced down intimidation to give testimony about a system he knew, first hand, through his calloused hands and broken back.

History is not just about the past. Are not the qualities that Rangaswammy displayed exactly the kind we need in these turbulent times? To not only think about how far we have come, but where we have come from? To consider not just looking upwards at how far we need to climb but to take a step down the ladder to lend a helping hand? Rangaswammy had escaped indenture and was getting on with life, but he used his position not to shrug his shoulders, but to enter a hostile terrain.

History allows us to honour him, for we are only able to write, because he dared to speak.

#indenture

“Coolies” became Indians