Poisoning occupies a special place in the history of crime. It requires a considerable degree of premeditation, and because it often produces very little incriminating evidence and until comparatively recently was virtually undetectable, it was an attractive and favoured method of killing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1880 and 1920, 18 high-profile cases of poisoning by Indian domestic servants in Natal were tried before the circuit, district and supreme courts. Due to the clandestine nature of poisoning, the difficulty of detection and the knowledge required for its successful execution, it is likely that this only represents a small proportion of the actual number of attempted poisonings – such is the predilection of historicity and nature of archival sources.

Under the Indian indenture system, approximately 152,184 indentureds voyaged to colonial Natal in the period between 1860 and 1911. Conventional and linear histories of these years have tended to present a static categorisation of Indians in Natal as those who toiled on the sugar plantations along the coastal belt of Natal and non-contracted traders commonly referred to as ‘passenger Indians’. For the most part, indentured Indians were considered by the state and employers to be dispensable components of a capitalist bonded labour system. On the periphery of this indenture–trader dichotomy, Indians also took up positions as railway workers, constables, court messengers, miners, fishermen, fruit and vegetable hawkers, tea pickers, teachers, interpreters and, in this case, domestic servants. The private and personal spaces of colonial society within which domestic servants lived and worked – the settler homes – bore witness to entangling relationships between master and servant that were at times both volatile and tender. This chapter focuses on the crime of ‘administering poison with intent to murder’ and argues that the very act of poisoning manifests as a mode of agency, revenge and resistance by domestic servants against their masters and mistresses. The crime of poisoning in a settler community is rather revealing of the deep levels of anxiety and paranoia that proliferated in Natal’s white community.