Lascar
A lascar (Lashkar, Laskar) (Persian: لشکر) and (Bengali) was a sailor or militiaman from the Indian Subcontinent or other countries east of the Cape of Good Hope, employed on European ships from the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century. The word comes from the Persian Lashkar, meaning military camp or army, and al-askar, the Arabic word for a guard or soldier. The Portuguese adapted this term to lascarim, meaning an Asian militiaman or seaman, especially those from the Indian Subcontinent. Lascars served on British ships under 'lascar' agreements. These agreements allowed shipowners more control than was the case in ordinary articles of agreement. The sailors could be transferred from one ship to another and retained in service for up to three years at one time. The name lascar was also used to refer to Indian servants, typically engaged by British military officers.[1]
History
Indian seamen had been employed on European ships since the first European made the sea voyage to India. Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea (in 1498), hired an Indian pilot at Malindi (a coastal settlement in what is now Kenya) to steer the Portuguese ship across the Indian Ocean to the Malabar Coast in southwestern India. Portuguese ships continued to employ lascars from the Subcontinent in large numbers throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, mainly from Goa and other Portuguese colonies in India.
The number of Indian seamen employed on British ships was so great that the British tried to restrict this by the Navigation Acts in force from 1660, which required that 75 percent of the crew of a British-registered ship importing goods from Asia had to be British. Initially, the need arose because of the high sickness and death rates of European sailors on India-bound ships, and their frequent desertions in India, which left ships short of crew for the return voyage. Another reason was war when conscription of British sailors by the Royal Navy was particularly heavy from Company ships in India.
In 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was originally set up thanks to concern over Lascars left in London. However, in a report made after one month of the Committee's existence, it was found that only 35 of the 250 recipients of aid were Lascars, while the remainining recipients were Africans and former slaves from the Americas.
The British East India Company recruited seamen from Bengal, Assam, Gujarat and Yemen. They were known by the British as ‘Lascars’, and a number of these created small settlements in port towns and cities in Britain. Most of these sailors settled down and took local white British wives, due to a lack of Asian women in Britain at the time.[2]: 111–9, 29–30, 40, 54–6, 60–8, 81 By 1813, there were more than 10,000 Indian Lascars living in Britain.[2]: 140, 54–6, 60–8, 72 By 1842, 3,000 lascars visited the UK every year, and by 1855, 12,000 lascars arrived annually to Britain. In 1872 and 1873, 3,271 Lascars arrived annually to Britain.[3]: 35 Throughout the early 19th century, lascars from the Indian Subcontinent arrived to Britain at a rate of 1,000 every year,[2]: 140, 54–6, 60–8, 72 which increased to a rate of 10,000 to 12,000 every year throughout the late 19th century.[4] In 1891, there were 24,037 Lascars employed on British merchant ships, and on the eve of World War I, there were 51,616 Lascars in Britain.[3]: 37
Lascars were also used by ships plying other routes. For example, the New South Wales government record of the ship Massilia en route from London to Sydney in 1891 lists more than half of its crew as being either Lascar or Indian.
The term Lascar is also used in Mauritius, Réunion and the Seychelles to refer to Muslims, by both Muslims and Non-Muslims. The preferred spelling in modern times is "Lashkar."
Interracial marriage was fairly common in Britain since the 17th century, when the British East India Company began bringing over thousands of Sylheti scholars, lascars and workers (mostly Bengali Muslim) to Britain, most of whom married and cohabited with local English women and girls, due to the lack of Indian women in Britain at the time.
This later became an issue, as a magistrate of the London Tower Hamlets area in 1817 expressed "disgust" at how the local English women and girls in the area were marrying and cohabiting almost exclusively with foreign Indian lascar seamen. Nevertheless, there were no legal restrictions against 'mixed' marriages in Britain.[2]: 106, 11–6, 9–20, 9–35, 40–2, 54–8, 60–8, 72, 81 [5][3]: 58 Families with Indian lascar fathers and English mothers established interracial communities in Britain's dock areas.[6]
This led to a growing number of "mixed race" children being born in the country, which challenged the British elite efforts to "define them using simple dichotomies of British versus Indian, ruler versus ruled."[7] The number of women of colour in Britain were often outnumbered by "half-caste Indian" daughters born from white mothers and Indian fathers.[8]
References
- ^ Butalia, Romesh C (1999), The evolution of the Artillery in India, Allied Publishers, p. 239, ISBN 81-7023-872-2
- ^ a b c d Fisher, Michael Herbert (2006), Counterflows to Colonialism, Orient Blackswan, ISBN 81-7824-154-4.
- ^ a b c Ansari, Humayun (2004), The Infidel Within: The History of Muslims in Britain, 1800 to the Present, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, ISBN 1-85065-685-1.
- ^ Diane Robinson-Dunn (February 2003). "Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England". Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges. Retrieved 2009-01-13.
- ^ Fisher, Michael Herbert (2006), "Working across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857", International Review of Social History, 51: 21–45, doi:10.1017/S0020859006002604
- ^ "Growing Up". Moving Here. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
- ^ Fisher, Michael H (2007), "Excluding and Including "Natives of India": Early-Nineteenth-Century British-Indian Race Relations in Britain", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27 (2): 303–14 [305], doi:10.1215/1089201x-2007-007
- ^ Laura Levine Frader, Sonya O. Rose (1996), Gender and Class in Modern Europe, Cornell University Press, p. 184, ISBN 0-8014-8146-5
See also
Lascar Shahida Rahman ISBN: 978-1907401718 Publisher: Indigo Dreams Publishing (4 June 2012.)
External links
