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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2025
On a warm September afternoon of 1838, prominent Scottish watchmaker and philanthropist David Hare was passing through the streets of north Calcutta when he came upon a group of men shouting for help. In a later statement, he recounted:
I have frequently passed along … Tuntunniah-street, and observed a number of men always on the top of one of the houses on that street … I believe it was about the 11th of September last I was passing, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a much larger number than I had seen before…. The people on the top of the house were crying out, ‘Dohye Sahib’ – ‘Dohye Company’. I asked what was the matter, and the people around my palanquin told me they were a parcel of Coolies confined there, who were to be sent to the Mauritius.1
On entering the building, he saw more than a hundred men confined behind bolted doors, guarded by police watchmen. The men had been kidnapped on their way to Calcutta and to nearby pilgrimage sites and were to be sent to Mauritius to work on sugar plantations. They complained of being held against their will, locked up, beaten and mistreated, and urged that they would sooner die than go to Mauritius. After a prolonged negotiation with the watchmen and the Calcutta police, Hare was able to help release the confined men. With detailed reports in newspapers, this incident – and the image of labourers being migrated overseas against their will – soon became the popular image of Calcutta's encounter with indenture migration.
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