When John Gladstone wrote to Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company about procuring Indian labourers, the latter suggested labourers from eastern India as ideal for Gladstone's West Indian plantations. Speaking of their previous experience of sending Indian labourers to Mauritius, Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company wrote:

Gladstone's stipulations for labourers to replace enslaved labour in his plantations were clear – they needed to be active, able-bodied, experienced in hard labour, easily manageable in a plantation context and willing to travel overseas for work. The response to his stipulations, however, betrayed an essentialised understanding of the Indian labouring class. Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company's choice of men ‘from the hills to the north of Calcutta’ drew upon a combination of assumptions about docility, lack of ties to the land, physical fitness and climatic compatibility. Essentially, the labourer's purported ignorance, docility and eagerness to travel abroad were not seen as individual circumstances but as racial characters – common to the entire community and determined by race.

Such assumptions were not restricted to merchants and planters but were, in fact, a ubiquitous feature of the Calcutta public sphere. Spokesmen in Calcutta employed a similar language of racialisation when referring to indentured Indians, particularly when arguing for the need for spokesmen to intervene in the indenture trade.