A bonded labourer under contract to work for an employer tor a specific period of rime, to pay off a passage a new country or home. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands o: Indian and Chinese labourers went to work on plantations, in mines and ill roads and railway construction projects around the world. In India, indentured labourers were hired under contracts which promised the return travel to India after they had worked five years on their employer’s plantation.