CHARLES DARWIN AND COFFEE WORKER

Charles Darwin did not visit Ceylon but he was impressed with the Indians he saw in Port Louis, Mauritius. “Before seeing these people I had no idea that the inhabitants of India were such noble looking men; their skin is extremely dark and many of the older men had large moustachios and beard of snow white colour; this together with the fire of expressions gave to them an aspect quite imposing,” wrote Darwin. The Indians Darwin saw at Port Louis could well have being convicts and not indentured workers, as Indian convicts were transported to Mauritius at the time Darwin visited the island. Charles Kingsley, the Victorian novelist and social worker, was as impressed as Darwin he saw at Trinidad. “ one saw in a moment that one was in the midst of gentle men and ladies’…..every attitude, gesture, tone was full of grace; of ease, courtesy self-restraint, dignity…”he wrote. The views of Darwin and Kinsley and Anthony Trollope and the rev.H.W.Cave (seen in chapter11) were in direct contrast to those of the famous British missionary, the Rev.C.F.Andrews, who was provoked by the cold, bureaucratic prose of a British official, (Mc Neil) into declaring – “I have seen these wretched, frightened, quivering, cowering Indian coolies with the hunted look in their eyes. I have heard their own stories from their own lips; Mc Neil evidently has not If he had, his pages would burn with fire, and he would understand the horror of statistical tables about convictions, suicide rates, proportion of men to women etc”.

The subjective to the nature of comments on the physical appearance of Indian workers was also reflected in the comments on their qualities as workers and their general characteristics. Governor sir William Gregory (1872 to 1877) stated that no one who knew the estate workers could fail to like them despite their faults. “Their cheerfulness, their readiness to oblige, their attachment to a kind master covers a multitude of sins”, he wrote. Gregory‘s comments on the coffee workers was very similar to that of Stanley Elkins description of atypical “sambo” as “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy… his relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment”. yet another similar assessment was made of the coffee worker by governor sir Hercules Robinson (1865 to 1872) who wrote that “the Tamil coolye is perhaps the simplest, as he is certainly the most capricious, of all Orientals with whom we have to deal in Ceylon. He is like a child requiring the sense of the strong arm of power. He must know that he is subject to parental authority