Bengal textiles were so renowned in the 17th and 18th centuries that the region attracted European traders for not only the product, but also the producers. Bengali textile workers were forced into slavery and transported to distant lands, where their textile skills were employed in domestic and commercial means, developing a diaspora of Bengali migrant weavers in the transoceanic world.
Bengali textile workers were not enslaved as ancillary to men or as commodities of pleasure alone. They were enslaved and migrated primarily because of their repertoire of skills highly demanded in textile industries in Mexico, and for specific domestic needs in Manila, the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia. This chapter shows how a diaspora of enslaved Bengali textile labourers was developed in Batavia and Cape Town on the one hand, and Manila and Mexico on the other, with a shared skill repertoire which can be traced in the cultural imprints of these slave societies.
The slave raiding and trading were conducted as an organised enterprise driven by a specific demand for slaves, particularly for textile workers from Bengal, and the different zones of control of the European actors who interacted in the trade of these slaves and their engagement in the slave societies. The cultural imprints of these assimilations are seen through the textile crafts produced by these slaves and their visual and technical affinities with the crafts of the region from where they were procured.
Bengal: a slave catchment zone
The Bengal Delta was fragmented by the fluvial shifts of the 16th–18th centuries, from west to east, leaving the agrarian base of the delta depleted. The fluvial shift left the western delta moribund and made the eastern delta more agriculturally productive. Hence, resettlements and relocations in both structural and demographic dimensions manifested in further fragmentations of the Bengal Delta.
The fluvial shifts created creeks and inlets, and in the monsoons, these were filled up, creating a labyrinth of waterscapes that facilitated the swift movement of the canoes and dinghies of the Magh raiders. The Midnapore–Orissa coast being infested by Portuguese harmads (a colloquial Bengali word for Portuguese pirates, originating from the Portuguese–Spanish naval fleet, Armada), was termed feringhi desh (foreign land). The southeastern delta with bigger rivers going far inland, had more creeks and inlets to offer predators. Streynsham Master wrote that the river that goes to Chittagong and Dhaka was called the “River of Rogues” and Shihabuddin Talish recorded Magh raids as far inland as Dhaka.
Enslaved women
In the historical discourse of maritime predation, the Magh predators perceived women as “subjects” instead of “objects”. The Portuguese–Arakanese Maghs raided and captured women slaves from the local littorals of the Bengal Delta as far inland as Dhaka in the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries. The skilled women slaves were traded to the Transatlantic slave markets of Batavia and Cape Town. The unskilled women were sold as Brahmin brides in the deltaic littorals of Bikrampur, Dhaka, Pipli and Hooghly, to cater to the increasing dearth of brides in the Stotra Brahmin communities. The Magh predators acted as brokers and hired local Brahmins to facilitate these marriages. The kulapanjikas (caste genealogies) that record these marriages and local testimonies suggest that this system of bride brokerage continued into the early 19th century.
These sold brides were called bharar meye (women on boats). Since they were blemished by the Maghs (moger dosh, in Bengali), they were socially excluded from religious ceremonies, and the natal families were excommunicated. These families were later accommodated in society as sub-castes including Mageha Brahmins, Mageha Kayasthas etc.; these prefixes reflect the enduring memory of predation.
Women skilled in needlework and men skilled in weaving had a specific demand in the slave market for their textile repertoire. Otto Mentzel, a well-known German visitor to the Cape and named “the Herodotus of the early Cape” by Robert Shell, reported that Indians, especially Bengali female slaves, were preferred for their skill in needlework.
Slaves were racially profiled based on their procurement area: Black slaves from Africa were robust and used only for manual labour, whereas male slaves from India were deemed industrious and serviceable, and women slaves were employed as seamstresses, knitters and engravers in the textile mills and domestic households.
The networks of slave trade and raid
The Portuguese allied with the Arakanese to raid along the coasts of the Bengal rivers, and capture thousands of slaves. These depredations led to the gradual depopulation of the littorals of Bengal, particularly those of Bakla and Backergunge (Bakerganj), designated by James Rennell as “ravaged by the Maghs.”
The slave marts of Pipli, Dianga and Balasore were used to hoard these slaves and profile them based on their skills and categories, to meet a specific demand or requirement of the market. As Richard Allen argues, the Portuguese brought slaves to Manila in exchange for American silver, which they needed for trade. Portuguese acquired slaves either by direct raids or by purchasing them from compatriots to be traded elsewhere. There was a sharp distinction, as the Dutch rarely indulged in slave raiding. They traded the slaves driven by the demand for labour in Batavia and the company’s other possessions in the Indonesian archipelago. Alexander Hamilton (1723/27) points out that the Dutch used to traffick women from Barnagul to Batavia.
The Dutch traded the slaves from Mrauk U to Batavia, and then to the Cape of Good Hope. Slaves were brought by Indian and Dutch trading vessels carrying rice, saltpetre and silk to Batavia, from the Bay of Bengal. Many Cape Town Indian slaves were likely to have been transferred from Batavia and owned there, before being taken to the Cape on the numerous vessels of the return fleet. In 1771, the Governing Council at the Cape officially asked the VOC authorities in Bengal to send a total of one hundred half-grown (i.e. young) slaves for its use. Cape household inventory records suggest that the highest numbers of female slaves were procured from Bengal, peaking in 1750–94. The VOC slaves brought to Cape Town were primarily housed in the Slave Lodge. They were christened and listed in the inventories under the names of their owners. One such register of Simon Van Der Stell (1685–1716) listed 15 slaves with their homeland in Bengal. The Iziko Slave Lodge Museum in Cape Town displays a piece of lace and a baby cap knitted by Melati, a female Bengali slave. The accompanying note by Jeffcoat says: “Knitted by a slave of my grandmothers’ and worn by me in 1838.”
The slaves had opportunities to engage in leisure activities beyond their work in the farms or households in Cape Town. Women like Melati continued their Bengali tradition of knitting in their leisure, even as slaves in Cape Town. These laces and baby caps are the material links of their lost homeland.
Spanish colonists engaged with the slave trade for their own labour needs in Mexico. The Portuguese were licensed to trade slaves to Mexico during the Iberian Union of 1580–1630. Portuguese ships transported several hundred slaves each year during the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, with Melaka frequently serving as the collection point from where these labourers were funnelled to Manila. From the late 1560s through the early 1700s, individual traders brought slaves from Manila to Mexico aboard the ships of the Manila Galleon. The Manila Galleon, Spain’s link to Asia, was sometimes referred to as the Eastern Islands Run. Its ships carried bales of Chinese silk and Indian cotton, and slaves on them were referred to as “Mogos” (Magh; Sir A. Phayre in his History of Burma, derives it from “Maga”, referencing the early kings of Arakan), “Chinos” (a blanket term used to denote Asian slaves), “Chingala” (slaves from Ceylon) etc., based on their origin.
The Spanish and Manila archives record the coming of slaves from Bengal to Manila and then being taken into Mexico. One Portuguese soldier tried to make a profit by bringing a slave from Bengal named Miguel to sell in Manila, but Miguel ran away soon after arriving in the Philippines. In 1652, Francisco, a “Chino negro” from Bengal, was purchased from Juan Galban, a Portuguese, in Makassar and then taken to Manila, where Francisco boarded the Galleon for Acapulco. Even after the Iberian Union ceased, slaves were smuggled by independent Portuguese shadow merchants (adventurers-cum-traders who were beyond the official control of Portuguese Goa). Manila archival records repeatedly complained that many slaves were brought in “off registry.” In 1635, Jacinto de Contreras, the appointed scribe of the ship San Luis, arranged to sell Baltasar, “de casta Bengala” (of Bengali caste), on behalf of Joseph de Acuña.
The prices of Bengali slaves in Mexico were much higher than their prices in Manila. The demand for these slaves increased due to their employability in the textile mills, owing to their repertoire of textile skills. Andrés de la Trinidad, a slave from Bengal, sold in Manila for 90 pesos and for 270 pesos in Acapulco just a few years later. A folio in the Mexican archives recounts the story of Cecilia in 1634, declaring that she was a free woman who had been subjected to bondage illegally since she was six years old, when Portuguese pirates captured her in her native Bengal. They sold her to a horrifying master, who kept her in chains and branded her on both cheeks to mark her as a slave. Around 1610, Catarina de San Juan was captured from his home in South Asia and taken to Pueblo in Mexico, later becoming a saint and enduring in popular memory, there. Ramos, one of her confessors, recounted that she was taken from the “thorny bushes and hidden jungles of Cambaya and Bengal.”
The experience of Chino slaves in textile factories points to the complexity of this important industry and its use of coerced and slave labour. The history of slave labour in the obrajes (textile mills) dates from the time of the conquest and the early association of Indians with textile production. Starting with the New Laws (1542), the Spanish government openly acknowledged the exploitation of Indian workers in these nascent factories and urged colonial officials to intervene. Charles V, for example, explicitly banned the practice of locking up indigenous women “to make them spin and weave cotton” in 1559.
Spaniards categorised the slaves brought from Manila. The 17th century Spanish historian, Pedro Chirino observes that women slaves from India, particularly Bengal, were employed in domestic services and in the craft trade. Apart from personal service, they were also employed in textile mills, where they were assigned specific tasks – cleaning the raw wool, carding the fibres, spinning the wool into thread, weaving the cloth and napping it, to make it smooth. A dearth of these slaves meant a decline in the Mexican economy. The government adopted protective measures to avoid over-exploitation.
The Bengali weavers could not have been taken to Lisbon because of the time needed to travel and the costs incurred in the loss of lives during that travel. As the Inquisition records at the Panaji Archives at Goa show Bengali names in the registers, it is probable that they were employed in Goa to complete or finish the embroidered textiles, like those of the Satgaon quilts headed to the market at Lisbon. Only some of the Bengali slaves were taken to Lisbon and employed in elite households as domestic help.
Cultural imprints
Although, technically different, textiles produced in Mexico have an apparent visual affinity with those from Bengal. Although it is difficult to establish such a material exchange, the motifs and visual language of the textiles prompt one to speculate. Mexican rebozos – long, rectangular multipurpose shawls with silk embroidery on cotton – began as backstrap-loom woven, warp-faced shawls featuring long, fringed or elaborately knotted ends. As the textiles evolved in competition with Spanish imports, ikat, or yarn-dyed patterns developed and became part of the rebozos’ design features. Specialisms evolved; the weaver who created the main shawl length was a different person from the knotter who intricately fringed the ends. The shawl became an integral part of china poblana, a traditional Mexican woman’s dress. The quilts of Satgaon have a similar visual language.
The 18th-century embroidered rebozo has a clear affinity with embroidery techniques of cross stitch used extensively by the women textile embroiders of kantha (a spread or a wall hanging in Bengal). The 17th-century Peruvian embroidered bedcovers made for export with European motifs and designs employed a distinct visual language than that encountered in Peru and Mexico in the 16th century. The Indo-Portuguese embroideries found in Satgaon, Bengal required a similar skill repertoire and exuded a similar visual-material language.
The zig-zag running patterns with interlocking geometric elements employed in the Mexican sarape (shawl/ blanket worn as a cloak) and the Bengal Bostani kantha from Jessore (one of the most Magh-ravaged areas of Bengal) are technically and visually similar with interconnecting knots at the intersections. These crafts and their tangible heritage endure the long history of the Bengal–Mexico connection drawn by the network of Bengali slaves.
I therefore argue that the Bengali textile workers, particularly needlewomen, were procured based on their textile skills, so that they could be employed as domestic help or textile workers in Cape Town, Batavia, Manila and more significantly, Mexico. Their assimilation into the culture through intermarriage created a hybrid cultural milieu with a diasporic presence of Bengali textile workers. The judicial cases, inquisition records and church disputes and marriages record their identification as Bengali as a leverage point, a bargaining counter, to promote themselves as free workers in Mexican society. Beyond the archival traces of the slave raids and forced migrations of skills, visual traces of this historical process can be identified through the textile objects produced in two distant land masses, connected by a shared skill repertoire and heritage. The hybridisation of culture and the resettlement of the migrated Bengali textile workers maintained an embedded Bengali cultural and social identity through their diasporic presence, one connected by the transoceanic networks of slavery.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Forced Migration of Skills’ by Subham China in Textiles from Bengal: A Shared Legacy, edited by Sonia Ashmore, Tirthankar Roy, and Niaz Zaman, Mapin Publishing.
