The beginning of the indenture trade was a pivotal moment in the history of colonial labour servitude. With the abolition debates of the early nineteenth century, and the subsequent outlawing of slavery in the British Empire, the assessment of labour movements was based on a complete and immediate revocation of the slave trade. Naturally, the labour regime created to replace slave labour was evaluated along the rubric of the recently condemned slave trade. Discussions around Abolition had created a new dichotomy of acceptable and unacceptable (exploitative) forms of labour regimes. Thus, provisions that had been discarded as unacceptable within the slave labour regime – such as the use of coercive and deceptive practices in the procurement of labour, mistreatment of labourers during passage and on plantations and the detention of labourers against their will – also had to be discarded in the labour systems that followed. Calcutta took centre stage in these unfree labour debates. By playing a vocal role in negotiating the indenture trade, Calcuttans contributed significantly to the rhetoric that christened the indenture trade ‘a new system of slavery’.

The implementation of Act V of 1837 had created a new emigration policy applicable exclusively to the indenture trade, in the process defining the indenture trade as separate from other migratory labour regimes. One of the provisions of the act stated that it did not apply to ‘native seamen’ (such as lascars) or domestic servants, thus implying a newly emerged legal status for indentured plantation workers that separated them from other workers in the eyes of the colonial state.