In the history and historiography of labour servitude, the ideology of modernity and progress looms large. Thus it was with bitter irony that a British officer described the miserable condition of a labourer in late nineteenth-century colonial India: “Steam, the great civilizer, has not done much for this man, although the railroad runs within a few hundred yards of his door.” The persistence of the miserably poor existence was bad enough, but truly appalling was the fact that the introduction of modern industry had not set the labourer free. The poor labourers, or kamias as they were called locally, had seen modernity whizz past them without carrying them along in its journey to progress and freedom.