Lascars

South Asian seafarers, seamen and mariners, known as ‘lascars’, were first hired to work on ships by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. As the Company increased its control of territory in India and trade and merchant shipping expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Employed on so-called ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Lascar’ Articles, which determined their rates and condition of employment, lascars were a source of cheap labour for shipping companies, who paid them significantly less than their European counterparts.

The designation ‘lascar’ is derived from the Urdu word lashkar, which was initially used in military contexts to describe an army or camp. The Portuguese first used it in maritime contexts and via this route it entered the British lexicon. In British shipping contexts, ‘lascar’ was a reference not to ethnicity but to terms of employment, in ‘Lascar Articles’ where their workplace and related wages were codified. Men from diverse religious, regional and cultural backgrounds signed up as mariners mainly in the large port cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Initially recruited from the coastal regions of East Bengal, Gujarat and the Malabar coast in south-west India, as demand for their labour grew, workers from more rural areas of India, such as Assam, Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab also signed up.

The advent of steam-powered shipping and passenger liners to connect Britain’s growing empire and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further expanded lascar recruitment as well as generating new positions of work. Their hard labour in the engine rooms as firemen and trimmers, preparing coal and stoking the furnaces, was indispensable, and work unattractive to European seamen. While in the early 1890s some 24,037 lascars were employed, their number more than doubled by 1930 when some 51,616 lascars worked on British merchant ships. By the 1920s, South Asian seafarers began to organize themselves into trade unions to fight for better working conditions and wages.

Lascars were badly treated, faced racial prejudice and endured harsh conditions with low pay and inadequate food rations, leading some to jump ship. Major port cities like London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow saw small lascar populations grow, the earliest working-class communities from the subcontinent in Britain. Once settled, some sought to continue working as seamen but on European Articles with better pay; some were destitute and needed to beg to survive while others worked as crossing-sweepers, ran lodging-houses or set up cafes and restaurants.

South Asian seafarers were a familiar sight in British port cities. Often they had to wait several months before they could secure work on a return passage to India. Equipped with inadequate clothing and with shipping companies not held responsible for their upkeep and accommodation while they waited, in the early nineteenth century, many found themselves in distress on the streets.

In London, due to their proximity to the docks, many sailors frequented areas around Poplar, Shadwell, Shoreditch and Whitechapel. With their increasing number, the East India Company established a network of private lodging-houses responsible for providing accommodation, board and clothing. After the dissolution of the East India Company in 1857, the India Office stepped in. In order to help meet increasing demand and to ensure lascars were housed in adequate conditions and that their local interactions could be controlled, the Strangers Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders was built in West India Dock Road. Partially government-funded and run by the London City Mission, it remained the main provider of temporary accommodation for lascars until 1937 when it closed.

Lascar recruitment further accelerated during wartime, but with the economic downturn in the aftermath of the First World War which led to riots, the British Parliament passed legislation, including the 1920 Aliens Order and 1925 Coloured Alien Seamen Order, to limit their access to the labour market and to Britain. The order remained in force until the Second World War when lascars played a key role in keeping Britain’s supply lines open.

The work of lascars was of central importance to Britain’s imperial trading economy, ensuring the operation of its merchant shipping fleet and the flow of raw materials, goods and passengers.