Trinidad and Tobago experienced an influx of tens of thousands of
Indians during the nineteenth century. Some Indians came directly from
India but many are the descendants of indentured labourers from other
Caribbean islands. These originally worked on the sugar plantations and
then on the newer plantations which produced cacao, the basis for cocoa
and chocolate. The Indians of Trinidad and Tobago are mainly from the
Hindi belt in the central north of the country and are ethnically
Hindustanis.
‘A Virtual Round the World Voyage’
Many here might recall the Natalee Holloway case of a few years back involving a young US student who disappeared while on a class trip to the island of Aruba, and remember as well the primary suspects, a Dutch national and two brothers of Indian origin. Some of you at the time may also have wondered exactly how a population of Indian ancestry wound up living in this region of the Caribbean, where Aruba is located, on the other side of the world from India. Wonder no more.It is of course much the same story for many other peoples, whether they are called ‘coolies or ‘immigrants’, whether they be non-European or European. As a general rule they are peoples in a national state of weakness being preyed upon, ‘imported’ by diktat to live amongst other peoples, and having their labor systematically stolen from them, the essence of slavery, in what is euphamistically referred to as ‘cheap labor’.
For almost sixty years, the Nourse Line would primarily engage its oceanic fleet in the transport of cheap labor.
“The service operated by Nourse Line was a virtual round the world voyage, initially sailing from London for European ports where a general cargo was loaded before heading for Calcutta. After discharging its cargo, a cargo of rice would be back loaded, and her passengers of coolies would embark for the voyage out to the West Indies, Mauritius or Fiji.”
Indian “Coolie” Families
‘Having observed the carriage and possible profits to be gained from the carriage of “Coolies” James Nourse entered into negotiations with the Crown Agents for the Colonies, his proposed service was to be between India and Mauritius, the West Indies and Fiji. Once the contracts were secured James Nourse bought India, an iron barque of 912 tons from Cowie & Company of Liverpool and chartered from T.O. Harrison of London, the Adamant in 1865. By way of explanation, a Coolie was of Indian or Chinese nationality, indentured labourers, who were hired for work in foreign lands, the word Coolie is traceable to a tribe from the West of India known as the Koli. Sadly the term became synonymous with cheap labour and they did in fact replace the African slaves whose use was outlawed in British possessions in 1834. In the main James Nourse’s passengers came from north central and northeastern India though some came from the Tamil and Telugu speaking regions of the south. The terms of contract were that they agreed to work for a defined number of years, five, in one of the colonies and in return they earned return passage but were paid extremely low wages, but, perhaps more importantly, were fed and housed. The Chinese Coolies were employed under exactly the same terms and it should come as no surprise to anyone that this form of indentured labour explains why the Indians and Chinese populate virtually every country in the world.”
Indus
Built: 1866 by Denny and David Rankin, Dumbarton.
Launched 13th of July and completed a week later.
“Between 1866 to 1869 the company built four ships, all to James Nourse’s specifications and all with the carriage of Coolies taken into account, Indus by Denny & Rankin, Jumna & Syria by William Pile and Neva by J.G. Lawrie The carriage of Coolies dictated that for each one and a half registered tons equalled the carriage of one Coolie, later it was measured in covered deck space. The medical requirements of those travelling was monitored by a Surgeon Superintendent, they all had food and water allowances overseen by the ships Purser and both Officers were paid by a capitation grant for those successfully completing the voyage. Two further ships were acquired in 1872/3, Stockbridge, which was bought outright, and Jorawur that remained owned by J. Fleming, 42/64’s and D.K Mair 22/64’s.”
Forth
Built: 1894 by Charles Connell & Co, Glasgow.
Tonnage: 1829 grt, 1713 nt.
Yard No 212.
“The service operated by Nourse Line was a virtual round the world voyage initially sailing from London for European ports where a general cargo was loaded before heading for Calcutta. After discharging its cargo, a cargo of rice would be back loaded, and her passengers of coolies would embark for the voyage out to the West Indies, Mauritius or Fiji. The ships that voyaged to either Mauritius or Fiji would normally then travel to Australia to load coal. Those on the West Indian route after discharging their coolies and cargo would proceed up to the east coast of the United States to load grain or case oil for Europe. Prior to the carriage of case oil Kerosene had been transported aboard sailing ships in wooden casks, this proved not only wasteful of space but also dangerous because of leakage. Various American exporters improved the transport of their oil by packing their product into cases, each case contained two five-gallon tins making it infinitely easier for the recipients to handle and store. The next progressive stage was to fit the sailing ships with large storage tanks placed in their holds leading of course to the eventual building of ships for the sole transportation of oil.
Nourse Line in the eighteen eighties increased the size of its fleet by some fifteen vessels, Allanshaw, The Bruce, Hereford, British Peer and Rhone all of which were second hand, the remainder, new, and all but two being built at the Glasgow yard of Russell & Co.”
GANGES
Courtesy Alex Duncan
Built: 1906 by Charles Connell & Co., Ltd., of Glasgow.[center]Tonnage: 3,475 grt, 2,151 nt, 5,200 dwt.
Engine: Single screw, Triple expansion, 426 NHP, 11.5 knots by D. Rowan & Co. of Glasgow.Launched on the 9th of March 1906, completed in the May 1906, Yard No 303.
“By the early twenties the importance of the carriage of Coolies diminished to be replaced by that of cargoes such as rice and gunnies, gunny is a fabric made from strong course jute fibre more commonly known as sacking, however the company still maintained a return voyage facility for those, by now indentured labour, to return home on leave. The company’s Managing Director, Mr C. A. Hampton died in the November of 1922 and was succeeded by Mr C. Hampton. As with all shipping companies the twenties proved to be something of a retrenching period and it wasn’t until 1928 that Nourse Line commenced to replace its somewhat aging fleet. Three ships were completed between 1928/30, Saugor, Jumna and yet another Ganges”
The Burdens of Cooliedom
People always assume because I’m from India that my interest in the Caribbean must lie exclusively in the Indian components of the Caribbean. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I’ve been so little interested in matters pertaining to the Indian diaspora that it wasn’t until last month (after 25 years of being here), when I had to write a review essay of Gaiutra Bahadur’s superb Coolie Woman: An Odyssey of Indenture that I really started delving into the history of Indian indentured labour in the Caribbean.
And having done so I’m finding it difficult to avert my gaze. Like myself not many Indians seem familiar with this classic example of subaltern history that is slowly coming to light once again with books like Bahadur’s. Scholars have studied and written on the subject for many years but it takes a book like Coolie Woman to bring the troublesome subject of indenture to the forefront of what I think of as the popular sphere.
Between 1838 and 1917 around half a million Indians were brought to the Caribbean to serve as indentured laborers on three to five year contracts, replacing the loss of free labor after plantation slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Around 238,000 of these laborers were brought to British Guiana to perform the back-breaking work of cultivating sugarcane. For a description of the kind of people who made the journey let’s turn to Rahul Bhattacharya, the writer I mentioned in my last post, from his novel The Sly Company of People Who Care:
MEANWHILE ship upon ship of coolies from India kept coming – and kept coming steadily for almost another eighty years, by which time they outnumbered the Africans in Guyana. It is a forgotten journey; few, even in India, are now aware of it. The history was too minor compared to slavery and the Middle Passage, its damage not so epic. The ships sailed from Calcutta, and a few from Madras. The immigrants were drawn mainly from the peasant population in the Gangetic plains of the United Provinces–modern-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar–and a minority from the presidencies of Bengal and Madras. They were mostly young and middle-aged, mostly male (which led to the sensation of ‘wife murders’ arising from jealousy), mostly Hindu, and mostly taken from the agricultural castes, lower castes and outcastes. The largest caste groups were the chamars, the lowly leather workers, and the ahirs, the cowherds. What was common to them was the fate they were escaping: the famines and revolts, the poverty and destitution of British India. Making their way, that is, from the mess of one end of empire to another.In her book Mobilizing India Tejaswini Niranjana (citing Hugh Tinker) points out that the anti-indenture movement in the early part of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi’s first major political intervention in India during which he gave anti-indenture speeches all over the country. Anita Desai records how, ‘It was a shock to Gandhi to find that in South Africa he was considered a “coolie”—in India the word is reserved for a manual laborer, specifically one who carries loads on his head or back. In South Africa the majority of Indians was composed of Tamil, Telugu, and Bihari laborers who had come to Natal on an agreement to serve for five years on the railways, plantations, and coal mines. They were known collectively as “coolies,” and Gandhi was known as a “coolie barrister.”’ It was also the first such campaign fought entirely in India rather than metropolitan Britain. By 1915 it had become a central issue in Indian politics. As Bahadur notes:
Lured by local recruiting agents and their tales about the land of gold, they set out to cross the seas. Crossing the sea: kalapani: this was the great Hindu taboo. It came with a loss of caste, of one’s place in the social order – but also, for the wretched, a liberation. When victuals among the castes spilled and mixed on the stormy waters, when each person was treated by the white man with equal indignity, the curse of being judged by birth was lifted. From here on they could be anything.
The policy made indenture a cause for the nationalists, who saw it as an insult to their dignity and self-respect, an attempt to make Indians permanent coolies in the eyes of the world..indenture offended the pride of Indians by “brand[ing] their whole race in the eyes of the British colonial empire with the stigma of helotry. But this shame over reputations as slaves paled in comparison to their anger over the sullied reputations of their women.In the review essay I mentioned at the top of this post I dive in-depth into the politics of the struggle over the status and conduct of indentured Indian women, about how Indian nationalists were incensed by the “harlots of empire” even more than the danger of being branded the helots of empire. I had to look up what helot meant actually–an interesting word meaning serfs or slaves–with a history dating back to Spartan times and referring to a subjugated population group from Laconia and Messenia who became state-owned serfs whose job it was to cultivate land to feed and clothe the Spartans. Their status was in-between that of freed people and slaves.
For purposes of this post I want to stick to the other problem that worried Indian nationalists–that of being regarded as “permanent coolies” in the eyes of the world. It was one I found rearing its ugly head unexpectedly and perhaps by mistake when I first posted the link to Bahadur’s Coolie Woman on Facebook. “‘Indian woman’ not ‘Coolie woman’” a well-meaning African-Jamaican friend responded, a bald declaration that crept under my skin and niggled at it. After an inconclusive back and forth during which she firmly maintained that the word “Coolie” was too disrespectful a term to use while I rankled at her presumption in blithely determining the vocabulary a young descendant of indenture was permitted to employ, I snapped something to the effect that the word ‘coolie’ is a living word in India today and is by no means a synonym for its 2 billion strong population.
I’m convinced my Facebook friend didn’t mean to conflate the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘coolie’–and surely if we don’t want to be branded by the word we should demolish the conditions that continue to give it currency in the 21st century, not abroad now but at home–but I realise that the C-word as Bahadur calls it in her book, has a Caribbean history reflected in the discomfort my friend showed when she tried to erase it. In places like Jamaica there were arguments in the local press about what ‘Coolie’ meant and to whom it could be applied which you can see reflected in the letters to the editor of the Jamaica Gleaner appended above and below.
Laxmi and Ajai Mansingh, colleagues from India who worked at the University of the West Indies, produced a book on the 150th anniversary of the arrival of indentured Indians in Jamaica in which they note:
In Jamaica, the term ‘coolie’ was legally banned in the 1950s because it was used in a derogatory sense for an ethnic minority. This process began when the founder-President of the East India Progressive Society (EJPS), Dr. J. L. Varma, was popularly (but not abusively) referred to as ‘coolie doctor’. The EJPS then moved the government to ban the use of the term.Now my Facebook friend’s squeamishness at the use of the term ‘Coolie’ becomes clearer. But although laudable I wonder whether banning words or proscribing them ever achieves the desired outcome. Should we be trying to sanitize history or recording it in all its ugliness for the benefit of future generations? Can we ever liberate the word ‘Coolie’ from the unbearable weight of its history if its contemporary namesakes continue to work under the backbreaking conditions they do? These are hard questions for hard times.
This article was first posted on my EPW blog (Economic and Political Weekly, India)
Sunday January 18, 2015
Images of Indentureship
The NCIC wishes to thank Mr. Angelo
Bissessarsingh and The Virtual Museum of Trinidad and Tobago for
providing us with the photographs and research for this page.
Below you will find some of the most captivating images of Indentureship and East Indian Ancestry in Trinidad and Tobago.
Child Brides, Trinidad 1915
Bal Vivaha, child marriages and betrothals
originated in the pre-Mughal era of Indian history as a means of
creating a tangible bond between two families. It was practiced in both
high and low castes as a means of social interaction. When Indian
indentured immigrants began arriving in Trinidad in 1845, this ancient
and odd (to Western Eyes) marriage custom was brought wholesale to the
island. Children as young as five were often engaged, but in Trinidad,
the average range of ages appears to have been 11-15 with a girl of 18
being a veritable old maid. My own great-grandmother, Sookhia Mahabir
was married at 14. Since there was a dearth of Indian women in Trinidad,
dowries (tilak) were rare. This would be a payment in compensation to
the family of the dulaha (groom) by the dulahin's (bride) family.
Instead, a bride-price (dahej) was often paid by the dulaha's people in a
complete role reversal. Sometimes the dahej and tilak were nominal and
comprised a set of lothar and tharia (brassware) or could be quite
lavish and include cattle, land, cash and even jewelry. In this
monumental photo, two prospective child-brides seem to wait with
trepidation, their fate as married women. In some cases, where the
families of the girls were poor and needed money, the dulaha could be
many years older, sometimes in his 30s, although this occurrence is
rare. Normally, daughters younger than 13 stayed with their parents a
year or two after marraige before moving in with their husband's family.
This foto also shows a complete set of lothar and tharia which could
have been part of the dowry. The dearth of extensive jewelry on the
young brides seems to suggest that they are of modest means, although
their clean and substantial muslin and calico saris do not imply dire
poverty. FOOTNOTE: Child brides were often extant among some pretty
important Euro-Trini families too. Two of those I know are: 1) Yldefonso
De Lima (1864-1927) who founded the Y. De Lima chain of stores in 1888,
married his 13 year old sister-in-law after his first wife's death
around 1914 or so. He was nearly 50 at the time. 2) Sir Ralph Woodford
(Governor of Trinidad 1813-28) was over 40 when he wooed and engaged
Soledad, the 15 year old daughter of his solicitor general, Antonio
Gomez. He presented her with an expensive silver cruet as a betrothal
gift, and planned to marry her the following year (1829) but
unfortunately, he took ill and died. I would imagine Soledad was
relieved since it was widely rumored in the colony that Woodford was an
avid homosexual and his predilection for the company of stalwart young
men and nubile lads was well known. His marriage to Soledad was supposed
to have been engineered to dispel this notion. As a matter of course,
Soledad married a handsome, glib and spendthrift French aristocrat,
Roget de Bellouget, who soon squandered his fortune and his wife's
inheritance from her wealthy father, died insolvent, and left his poor
widow to struggle in genteel poverty until her own death in 1907 at a
very great age.
Wealthy Indian Couple 1899
Although the majority of Indentured coolies were
poor, downtrodden masses trying to wrestle a living from the soil, some
individuals acquired considerable wealth, either through large scale
agriculture or commerce. In San Fernando especially, the Indian merchant
was an economic powerhouse as early as the 1880s, when people like
Albert Sammy and Janaki Maharaj were considered powerbrokers. This photo
shows a typical wealthy couple of the era. The man is taking a pull at a
clay hookah which most likely contains a mixture of local tobacco and
ganja, which was legally sold through licensed dealers much like a
liquor permit. The woman is bedecked with much heavy jewelry
particularly a nakphul (nose ring) heavy silver bracelets and a
gold-coin haikal, which was a necklace made by soldering gold sovereign
coins together. The haikals were primarily made by Y. De Lima and Co.
and were manufactured well into the 1930s. Three were known to exist,
one being stolen from the National Museum.
Water Buffalo, Central Trinidad 1924
The Asian Water Buffalo was imported into the
island in the 1870s as a beast of burden for the vast acreages of sugar
cane covering the plains from Caroni to the Naparimas. The animal was
also called the bison and hog cattle locally. These docile cattle were
immensely strong and unusually adapted to working in swampy conditions
where zebu bulls and even hardy mules would founder. Well into the 1970s
and 1980s, the occasional bison cart could still be seen lining up at
the scales during croptime, drawing a cart loaded with cut canes,
cutting a strange and primitive figure among the tractors and trucks.
Even today, bison carts still may be seen in places like Barrackpore
where a few of these animals survive. The water buffalo provided the
genetic stock for the buffalypso, which was a unique hybrid sub-species,
engineered by pioneering veterinarian, Dr. Steve Bennett.
Coolie Children
In 1879, an Englishman visiting an estate in
Central Trinidad (Felicity) wrote of the children of indentured
immigrants resident in the barracks; "The coolie is generally a creature
with little or no sense of personal hygiene, but his children are
positively filthy little urchins. They reek of excrement and urine, and
their oil-soaked locks are teeming with lice and ticks. Few bathe daily,
and they are left uneducated although there is a coolie school in the
town." While this description sounds harsh, it is not altogether biased.
While cleanliness is a big issue for higher castes, many of the Indians
who came to Trinidad (1845-1917) were of low, agrarian and sudra
(untouchable) castes, a fact which was hidden with name changes when
they registered at the immigrant depot on Nelson Island. The
barrack-rooms in which they were housed lacked even the most basic
sanitary facilities with the canepiece being a toilet and a barrel of
water being a bathroom for male and female alike. Children in particular
were neglected. Until the coming of the Canadian Mission to the Indians
in 1868 under Rev. John Morton, most did not go to school. Male
children were expected to begin work as early as five years old, earning
20 cents a day during the rainy season as part of 'grass gangs',
assigned tasks in weeding the cane. Girls were expected to stay at home,
launder, prepare meals and look after younger siblings. Left to their
own devices, the children ignored cleanliness. Lice were a major
problem, as most did not bathe with soap, and heads were doused in
coconut oil to prevent them 'cactham sick' This photo clearly shows
elder children looking after babies. At least two are wearing clothes
cut down from the garments of their elders.
Lunchtime 1920
This iconic foto shows a scene that was played out
countless times under merciless sun in the canefields of Trinidad during
the period of indentureship. Here, the labourers squat on a railway
line to take a meal. The looming clouds overhead obscure the light, but
this break may have been mid-morning, since cane-cutting often began at
4:00 a.m and earlier to avoid the brunt of the sun. They eat from tin
carriers which may have held a bit of roti and aloo, talkaree or maybe
dal-bhat (dhal and rice) or khora bhat (pumpkin and rice) there is no
shade in the stubbled canefield so the meal must be taken in the open
sun. There is a drainage canal in front of the lunching group, and it is
possible that after consuming the meal, they would have bathed their
brows and hands in the muddy trench and then returned to work.
East Indian Wrestlers circa 1915
Most WWF, WWE, NWA, and WCW fans would know that
Indian wrestlers have made significant contributions, namely Tiger Jeet
Singh, Tiger Ali Singh, and most recently, The Great Khali. Well in
Trinidad, wrestling was a popular entertainment, and was specially
marked by the number of Indians who competed. A popular arena was in St.
James (then known as Coolie Town) behind a rumshop on the corner of the
Western Main Road and Patna St. The matches were often quite intense
and sometimes appeared in reports in the POS Gazette. This rare photo
shows some rather sorry-looking specimens of gladiators and spectators
about to enter into a match. It is interesting to note that two Indian
wrestlers later became famous men. The first was Chandericker 'Chanka'
Maharaj, who moved in the 1930s from being a well-known grappler to a
seat on the City Council of POS. The other luminary was none other than
the formidable Bhadase Sagan Maharaj, who sucessfuly pinned the then
American Champion, John Gooch in the 1940s. Bhadase's height and good
physique put him at an advantage over the 5'9" Gooch.
Cooking the evening meal 1940
This Indian couple is preparing a simple meal. It
is a bit of an un-traditional photo since tey are using rather
un-traditional utensils, particularly the cast-iron coalpots in place of
earthen chulhas. The woman is preparing the ubiquitous sada roti while
the man is frying something...perhaps baigan , aloo or plantain. Shortly
after the influx of Indian Indentured Coolies as a source of cheap,
reliable labour, Trinidad’s Colonial Government under Lord Harris
(1846-53) realized that the new arrivals had by necessity, to be fed on
foods that they were accustomed to in India otherwise they would suffer
malnourishment . Thus, large quantities of Indian food began arriving in
the colony. Paddy rice ( Trinidad was already familiar with creole hill
rice or red rice thanks to the industry of the ex-American black
soldiers of the 1816 Company Villages) , split peas (dhall) , ghee,
curry spices, all originally imported exclusively for the Indians, began
to find their way into shops and soon formed a foundational part of the
national cuisine. For newly arrived indentureds, the estate
commissariat was supposed to supply them with food rations and clothing
for the first year of their five-year contract. This edict was often
ignored, and some unscrupulous planters even deducted the cost of the
rations from the pittance paid to the Indians. Strictly speaking, the
ration allowance was as followed: For every male over 18 years of age
per month: 45lbs. of rice, 9lbs. dhall, ¼ gallon ghee or coconut oil, 1 ½
lbs. salt, 6 lbs saltfish, 2lbs onions and chillies. Annual endowments:
1 small iron cooking pot, 2 cotton shirts, 2 dock trousers, 1 woolen
cap, 1 felt hat, 1 woolen cloth jacket, 2 woolen blankets. Women and
children received half the rations of men. A woman’s clothing allowance
was also allotted, comprising cotton slips, woolen skirts,
handkerchiefs, and blankets. Most estates allowed the Indians provision
grounds to supplement the rations, but the mighty Woodford Lodge did not
as they squeezed every stalk of cane from its lands. At the depot for
incoming Indians (up to 1917) at Nelson Island, provisions for the
transients ( who were detained several days for medical inspection
before assignment to estates) consisted of rice, pumpkin, live mutton
and chapattis.
Croptime 1899
In this photo from 1899, in an unnamed Trinidad
canefield, a timeless scene is depicted.....the white overseer astride
his horse, while the servile indentured Indian labourers stand
sheepishly off to one side…cut canes are being loaded on carts for
transit to the usine where they will be processed into sugar. In the
canefields of 19th century Trinidad, especially in the Naparimas, the
vast majority of overseers were Scottish with a smaller number of
Irishmen. They were largely young men of little or no formal education
who would normally have few prospects in the UK, and so were sent out to
the colonies to act as the intermediary between the labourers and the
owners of these estates who were largely absentee British landlords. The
overseers, particularly the Scots, were Protestant to a man. Many died
soon after arrival, the combination of tropical diseases and cheap booze
being too much for them. The English administrative elite and the
native French Creoles looked down on these hardy Highlanders as boorish
and crude. Indeed, the Indians felt the brunt of their tempers, for even
though corporal punishment of a labourer was punishable by law, many
overseers took delight in a few well placed bootings and clandestine
horsewhippings to keep the coolies in line.Many Scots overseers kept
mistresses, particulalry among the Indian women under their supervision.
In fact, an entire sub-ethnicity of fair-skinned, grey eyed Indians was
created from these unions which were the norm rather than the
exception. These bastard offspring stood out in the short, dark throngs
of their mothers' countrymen. One way for a cuckolded Indian husband to
explain how his wife had given birth to a white child was to say that
one had ancestry in Kashmir where the Indians are tall and light
skinned, and that the colour was just passing down having skipped
several generations. Indeed, Rev. Harvey Morton, son of pioneering CMI
missionary John Morton, was well known to have fathered many children
with the Indian women of his congregations. Some of these children are
still alive today, with one family in particular having three of the
seven children being fathered by Morton, who rewarded the tolerant
Indian 'father' with a high postion . St. Clement's Anglican Church
Cemetery and Paradise Cemetery in San Fernando are an invalauble record
of the Scottish presence in the island as there are many graves for
those who expired early. Indeed, there were many kind and charitable
overseers whose goodness was remembered long after their demise. One in
particluar was so fondly remembered by the Indians, that his grave near
Debe was (and still is) a site of pilgrimage, being known as Dumfries
Baba tomb. People go there to do obeah and to ask the spirit of Dumfries
Baba for help. Sometimes, overseers ran afoul of their Indians if they
dared be to brutal, as was the case of 1881 on Cedar Hill Estate near
Princes Town where the Indians rioted, burned canes, and nearly killed
the overseer.
Cremation at Mosquito Creek circa 1958
Even though Hinduism requires the cremation of the
dead, there was no such thing for Indo-Trinidadians until cremations
were legalized in 1953. Hitherto, each estate provided a patch of
wasteland where the bodies were hastily interred. On older estates such
as Canaan near San Fernando, these Indian cemeteries were those used by
slaves pre 1834. In 1892 there is the record of a clandestine cremation
being undertaken on the banks of the Caroni by some indentured labourers
for a colleague who died, an act of devotion for which they were duly
arrested and jailed. Mosquito Creek, at the mouth of the Godineau River,
along the South Trunk Road in La Romaine, was one of the first
cremation sites to be legalized. Intially, the site was not up on the
hill where it is now located. When this foto was taken (for those
familiar with the area) it was on the eastern bank of the river. A small
promontory jutted out into the sea. Today all that remains of it is a
pile of rocks which are only visible at low tide, the rest having been
eroded. Aside from erosion, one of the reasons the site was moved across
the river and up to the hill in the 1960s, was that sometimes, during a
cremation, the tide would come in, and mourners would have to beat a
hasty retreat. Sometimes the body would not have been entirely consumed.
Several persons who remember the area tell me of times when charred
flesh and fat would be seen floating on the water. One chap even told me
about the time he saw a skeleton among glowing embers, which had been
left to the tide. Today, the cremations are regulated by a public health
officer who ensures all remains are reduced to ash before being thrown
into the sea. Nevertheless, I was once fishing near the cliff (which is
white with human ash, and I saw a jawbone lying on the shore....I now
fish elsewhere. The cremation in this foto is a bit different from those
of today, where the corpse is placed inside a framework of wood,
instead of on top the pyre. One of the morbid incidents that would have
occured in a cremation of this sort, would be that if the tendons were
not cut while the body was being prepared for the funeral (a distinct
possibility since even in this era, most Hindus preferred to bathe and
dress their dead at home rather than have them sent to a funeral home) ,
the drying out of bodily fluids would cause the tendons to contract,
causing the body to sit up suddenly in the fire without warning....which
naturally would have scared the hell outta everybody.....if you stand
close enough to a pyre, you can hear a loud POP which is when the
cranium explodes.
Indian Vagrant in POS circa 1903
People erroneously assume that upon expiration of
their 5 year indentureship contracts, coolie labour from India
(1845-1917) was automatically handed five acres of land in lieu of a
return passage to India as an incentive to stay in the colony. This is
not true. The incentive only existed from 1860 and applied only to those
who served a full term of the contract. The Indian who saved from his
pittance and bought out his contract received nothing. He and those
before 1860, were left to survive on what little they had saved from
their wages ($2.50/month for an adult male, $1.75/month for a female,
$0.75 for children up to 12). . Neither did the incentive consist of
land. It was simply five pounds in cash with which the majority
purchased crown lands, which after 1870 were available for one pound per
acre. Naturally, there were those who for reasons of profligacy or
ill-luck ended up as vagrants on the streets of POS. In 1904, it was
estimated that as many 140 Indian vagrants slept in POS, most near
Columbus Square. From 1849, an official known as the Protector of the
Immigrants was appointed to oversee the general welfare of the
immigrants, ensuring that they were treated fairly. Often enough, these
bureaucrats were corrupt slackers, who took massive bribes from estate
owners to not 'rock the boat'. The only one who seems to have been a man
of energy and conscience, was Major P.W.D Comins (1895-1910) , an
honest soldier and owner of Glenside Estate in Tunapuna. Major Comins
travelled extensively across the estates, inspecting barracks, and the
dreadful living conditions of the Indians on the plantations. His
scathing report published in 1902, and revised in 1908 is an indictment
on a labour system that was little better than slavery. He was
particularly aggrieved over what he saw at Woodford Lodge Estate where
Indians were worked longer than stipulated hours, kept on the estate by
armed guards, left untreated at a filthy estate hospital. and fed on
scanty provisions . The last Protector of the Immigrants was Arnauld De
Boissiere in 1927...a playboy and dandy who only held the office for the
400 pounds a year it paid. POS Indian vagrants were a lost
people....they could not return to India, and even if they could, they
would not have been better off. In Trinidad, they were alien, many spoke
little or no English, and were considered less than human, both by the
middle and upper class of society, the barrackyard dwellers, and the
colonial authorities. Most Indian vagrants survived as porters at
sixpence a load. The main employers were marchandes (female vendors of
edibles), and laundresses who would engage porters to carry the bundles
of soiled clothing collected from the better homes in Woodbrook and St.
Clair , returning the freshly ironed and starched pieces , neatly folded
on a wooden tray, carried by an itinerant porter. Some fortunate
displaced Indians found accomodation at the Ariapita Asylum (known as
the Poor House) until that facility was closed in the 1940s. Largely,
most begged charity on the streets until death claimed them, their
bodies being consigned to the earth of the Pauper's cemetery in St.
James, opened in 1900.
Indian Porter in POS circa 1903
People erroneously assume that upon expiration of
their 5 year indentureship contracts, coolie labour from India
(1845-1917) was automatically handed five acres of land in lieu of a
return passage to India as an incentive to stay in the colony. This is
not true. The incentive only existed from 1860 and applied only to those
who served a full term of the contract. The Indian who saved from his
pittance and bought out his contract received nothing. He and those
before 1860, were left to survive on what little they had saved from
their wages ($2.50/month for an adult male, $1.75/month for a female,
$0.75 for children up to 12). . Neither did the incentive consist of
land. It was simply five pounds in cash with which the majority
purchased crown lands, which after 1870 were available for one pound per
acre. Naturally, there were those who for reasons of profligacy or
ill-luck ended up as vagrants on the streets of POS. In 1904, it was
estimated that as many 140 Indian vagrants slept in POS, most near
Columbus Square. From 1849, an official known as the Protector of the
Immigrants was appointed to oversee the general welfare of the
immigrants, ensuring that they were treated fairly. Often enough, these
bureaucrats were corrupt slackers , who took massive bribes from estate
owners to not 'rock the boat'. The only one who seems to have been a man
of energy and conscience, was Major P.W.D Comins (1895-1910), an honest
soldier and owner of Glenside Estate in Tunapuna. Major Comins
travelled extensively across the estates, inspecting barracks, and the
dreadful living conditions of the Indians on the plantations. His
scathing report published in 1902, and revised in 1908 is an indictment
on a labour system that was little better than slavery. He was
particularly aggrieved over what he saw at Woodford Lodge Estate where
Indians were worked longer than stipulated hours, kept on the estate by
armed guards, left untreated at a filthy estate hospital and fed on
scanty provisions. The last Protector of the Immigrants was Arnauld De
Boissiere in 1927...a playboy and dandy who only held the office for the
400 pounds a year it paid. POS Indian vagrants were a lost
people...they could not return to India, and even if they could, they
would not have been better off. In Trinidad, they were alien; many spoke
little or no English, and were considered less than human, both by the
middle and upper class of society, the barrackyard dwellers, and the
colonial authorities. Most Indian vagrants survived as porters at
sixpence a load. The main employers were marchandes (female vendors of
edibles), and laundresses who would engage porters to carry the bundles
of soiled clothing collected from the better homes in Woodbrook and St.
Clair , returning the freshly ironed and starched pieces , neatly folded
on a wooden tray, carried by an itinerant porter. Some fortunate
displaced Indians found accomodation at the Ariapita Asylum (known as
the Poor House) until that facility was closed in the 1940s. Largely,
most begged charity on the streets until death claimed them, their
bodies being consigned to the earth of the Pauper's cemetery in St.
James, opened in 1900.
Anise Pillai nee Matrizan (1885-1968) (photo dated circa 1900)
Of the hundreds of period photos of Indian girls,
this is the only one to which an identity has been ascribed. Anise was
born in Martinique in 1885. A large number of Tamils from Madras came to
work on the sugar estates of the Island. In typical Madrassi fashion,
they integrated speedily into the French society, adopting the language,
customs and dress. Anise's mother, Valiama, married into a French
Creole family named Matrizan. This was not an acceptable social
condition and the family made arrangements with the rich and influential
De Boissiere family in Trinidad to take in Valiama, Anise, Alice
(Valiama's sister) and Peroumal (Valiama's mother) in 1888. The family
settled in what is now Boissiere Village No. 1 as tenants of Madame
Poleska De Boissiere, the awesome grande dame who took over the running
of the Champs Elysees estate (the Trinidad Country Club is the old
estate house) in 1870 after the death of her benign husband, Dr. John
Valleton De Boissiere. Valiama made a decent living by keeping milch
cows (grazed in the Queen's Park Savannah), catering for parties (she
had skill in French culinary arts), and as a masseuse, being versed in
therapeutic treatment. Anise, while inheriting her mother's skill for
French cooking, did not become a masseuse, but made money on the side as
a model for photographers. From the late 19th century up to WWII, more
than 3,000 images of Indo-Trinidadians were produced, since they were
considered mysterious and exotic. Anise was unlike the other Madrassis
in Maraval, since she had delicate features and light skin because of
her mixed heritage. This shot was taken when she was about 18 years old,
showing her bedecked as a rich Indian wife , with the heavy silver
yoke, gold nakphul (nose ring) and silver bracelets. Another tenant of
Madame De Boissiere was Shiva Subromaniam Pillai, a sort of drainage
expert who was retained of Champs Elysees at the fantastic rate of $1
per day to dig drains for the cocoa trees. He had come to Trinidad in
1873, and his son, Tamby wished to make Anise his wife. Negotiations
were settled and a barber sent out to deliver invitations. Some elders
may remember how this was done. The barber would carry a brass tray on
which there was a piece of camphor, saffron rice and flowers. Upon being
received, he would speak a poetic invitation, light the camphor, and
give the guest a flower and some rice, for which the guest had then to
pay sixpence. Anise and Tamby had eight children and lived in Boissiere
No. 1. Tamby drank himself into an early grave around 1921, but Anise
and her mother managed to raise all the children. Sylvan, a son, became a
successful businessman and later built a holding company worth many
millions. Anise died in 1968, her mother in 1954. It is ironic that the
crown jewel of the Pillai empire, Royal Palm Plaza , sits atop the site
of the magnificent Bagshot House which Madame De Boissiere's son had
built in the 1880s. It is meet that the De Boissiere's are now a memory
while their former tenants flourish.
Weighing Cane 1912
This is a timeless scene which played itself out
countless times in the canefields of Central and South Trinidad well
into the 1950s. When contracted Indians were sent to estates, they were
paid according to task work. In croptime, the driver (usually an Indian
bully or Sirdar who could force work from his peers) would come out to
the fields and assign a portion of canes to be harvested for the day ,
for which a fixed rate would be paid (in 1910, it was about 20 cents per
task) . The Driver was beneath the white overseer and was the tangible
link between the owner/manager and the labour. In the rainy season, the
Driver would carry a long bamboo rod with which he measured out swathes
of cane which had to be weeded or manured. Sometimes, like in this
photo, tasks were paid for according to the weight of canes cut. It was
not a popular system with the coolies, since the Drivers were usually
thugs and thieves, appointed by the managers since they had the ability
to form mafias on the estates to keep the labourers in line. Drivers
would rape women, and receive bribes of eggs, fowls, rum and money.
During croptime on those estates which paid for task work according to
weight (Eg. Forres Park, Bronte, Woodford Lodge) a portable scale would
be placed in the field to be harvested (as seen here) and labourers
would bring canes to place on it by turns (also shown). The weight would
be graded by the ton and noted next to the labourer's name. The cut
canes would be loaded onto mule carts and taken to the estate railhead
(most of the larger conglomerate-owned estates had railways like Usine
Ste. Madeline, Woodford Lodge, Forres Park, Orange Grove and Reform) .
At the railhead, the canes would be loaded onto rail carts for transport
to the refinery. The Drivers were most often corrupt, and would steal
from labourers, in that they would assign the tons cut by one to another
whom they favoured (most often because they were sleeping with the
lucky man's wife). On Saturday, when labourers lined up at the pay
office for their wages, some persons would be in shock and some jubliant
when they learned about what their sweat during the week had earned. In
times when the price of sugar was high on the world market, bonuses
were awarded for high productivity. This system of weighing in the field
ended in the 1940s and 1950s when diesel powered Jones cranes,
outfitted with built-in scales were imported by the major factories so
that the canes could be weighed AND loaded at the railheads, thus
eliminating the corrupt drivers.
Cutting the grass in the Queen's Park Savannah 1904
The POS of yesteryear was a town where one could
stroll northwards for a few minutes and leave behind the traffic of
horse and buggy and encounter a very rural existence. Many people in
suburbs like Belmont and Woodbrook kept cattle to ensure a domestic milk
supply. In Maraval, Tamil Madrassi Indians who had settled in what is
now Boissiere Village, kept large herds and supplied fresh bottled milk
to the urban residents of POS. Even the colonial administration was in
on the act, maintaining a large stock farm on St. Clair lands from the
late 1870s. When St. Clair began to be broken into lots as prime
residential property around 1915, the stock farm was removed to Mt. Hope
where it is now known as the UWI Field Station, an experimental farm.
The Queen's Park Savannah, that great playground purchased in 1817 by
Sir Ralph Woodford, never needed grooming since dozens of cattle from
the government stock farm and the Indians of Boissiere Village were
grazed on the turf. In an 1850s painting done by the great artist Michel
Jean Cazabon (1813-88) cattle are seen placidly grazing in the
savannah. Opposite Whitehall in Queen's Park West, there used to be a
well and drinking trough for the livestock. Indian herders and milk
sellers from Coolie Town (St. James) also grazed their livestock here.
From the 1890s, the government charged a fee of $1 per person per month
for grazing rights in the savannah. Cattle were a problem for the
Savannah Tram (1895-1950) as they sometimes wandered onto the track in
front of the speeding tramcar.....the conductor frantically clanging his
bell. During WWII supplies of imported staples (rice, flour, salt meat
etc.) dwindled because the ships bringing them were often torpedoed by
German U-boats. In order to counteract a serious food security crisis,
the government embarked on a "Grow More Food" campaign and offered free
lots in the savannah for all those who would undertake to establish 'war
gardens'. It is not known if anyone took up the offer. One of the more
disconcerting experiences of the QPS of yesteryear was being chased by a
maddened bull. This was the sad lot of many a courting couple who had
to cut their amours short and scamper in the wake of a charging 1,200
lb. bull. By the 1950s, cattle on the savannah were a thing of the past
NB: THIS SAME LAWNMOWER IS STILL IN EXISTENCE AND IS RUSTING UNDER A
TREE AT THE UWI FIELD STATION IN MOUNT HOPE WHICH WAS FORMERLY THE
GOVERNMENT STOCK FARM IN VALSAYN.
Baba and Jhata 1910
This photo shows a Hindu pundit grinding rice into a
coarse flour. The mill is an ancient piece of the heritage of the
Indian Diaspora since its design has remained unchanged for over 5,000
years. The jhata is made of two round pieces of rough granite. They are
pierced with a piece of wood which acts as a pivot. The upper wheel is
also equipped with a wooden crank handle which turns independently.
Grain (mostly rice, but corn was also ground) is placed between the two
stones and the upper portion is turned, grinding the grain into meal.
This is one of the most primitive forms of milling and dates back to
very early eras of human history. The jhata was one of the many
implements brought to Trinidad by East Indian indentured immigrants who
were imported as cheap labour for the sugar industry between 1845 and
1917. Jhatas were fairly difficult to make and were passed down like
heirlooms from generation to generation. Some of the few which still
exist in Trinidad are well over 200 years old, being relics of family
lines in India. This particular one still exists. I saw it in a family
home in Scotts Road in Penal about 4 years ago. I recognized it
instantly from the chip in the lower portion, although the current
owners are not the original family who would have brought it to
Trinidad.
Mechanical Cane Harvesting 1965
Mechanization of the propagation and harvesting
phases of the suagr manufacturing process in Trinidad was slow to
develop technologically. Even so, as early as 1888, Spring estate in
Couva was employing a steam traction engine in tilling the fields. Aside
from requiring a great deal of specialized maintainance, labour costs
on the plantations were exceedingly low (approx. 5 cents/man hour) so
that for the price of a steam traction engine, one could employ the
equivalent of 120 indentured coolies for a period of 5-10 years. Thus,
it was not until the 1950s, that tractors began to replace mules and
cattle as motive power for sugar haulage, and mechanical harvesting was
experimented with by Woodford Lodge and Caroni Ltd. In the early 1960s,
Caroni imported some mechanical harvesters. These (like the one shown
here) were large stand-alone machines which clipped off the sugarcane
stalk, stripped the leaves and dumped it into a hopper drawn by another
tractor. Since the harvesters did not have a transmission or driver
controls, they had to be hitched to a wheel or crawler tractor, like the
1950s Massey Ferguson TE20 on the left of the foto. The mechanical
harvesters were a flop since they soon became troublesome from a lack or
routine servicing. They were also allegedly sabotaged by employees who
viewed mechanization as a threat to their security. Although they worked
well in the large, flat canefields, the harvesters were basically scrap
metal by the end of the 1960s. This foto shows one working near
Woodford Lodge. The tractor on the right is a 1946 Internationall
Farmall. Canes are being dumped into the hopper by the feeder chute from
the harvester. The International is sporting a tandem axle layout with
four rear tires to give it more traction for drawing the loaded hopper
in muddy fields. In 1995 Caroni again invested in three new
state-of-the-art Massey Ferguson combine harvesters which foundered for
similar reasons as their predecessors.
Ma Mayute's Mansion, Siparia , 1890-
WATERCOLOUR ON PAPER 24x18" BY RUDOLPH BISSESSARSINGH (2004) Mary
Bartlett (Ma Mayute) was born circa 1850.
She was a woman of Afro-Venezuelan descent who had
emigrated to Siparia in her teens, marrying a local chap of mulatto
blood. She became the de-facto manager of the Catholic church in the
village, which was built on the site of the old Capuchin mission founded
in 1758. Since at least 1808, the chapel (a rude structure of mud and
thatch) had been home to a small wooden statue known far and wide as La
Divina Pastora, the Divine Shepherdess. In those early days, the annual
feast of La Divina was attended by local Catholics, and Waro (Guarahoon)
Indians from the Orinoco Delta. After around 1870, East Indian
indentured immigrants began to make up the largest percentage of
devotees. They saw in the dark wooden image, a kindred deity which they
called Siparee Mai. Before the feast day, thousands of devotees would
flock to the little village of less than 150 persons, and pitch camp on
the savannah where the present public cemetery is sited. Naturally, the
worshippers made offerings of gold jewelry and money which Ma Mayute
managed for the church. The offerings were enough for an elaborate,
twin-spired presbytery to be erected opposite the church in 1872 and
even the chapel itself was neatly rebuilt of wood in 1890. Ma Mayute
also prospered. In 1885 she built the largest, most elegant residence in
Siparia, to the south of the church. It was two stories high, with a
spacious dwelling space on the upper floor. The lower story was divided
into four apartments which were let during the week of Siparia Fete, to
visitors. For a number of years, the most regular tenants of Ma Mayute
were itinerant Chinese traders who gambled and smoked opium in the
apartments. Many tenants, including one named Kong stayed in Siparia and
opened shops, Kong being the most successful. Ma Mayute had no
children. Her life was indelibly linked to the church. She was
predeceased by her husband in 1920. She herself lived to a great age,
dying in 1965 at 115 years of age. After her death, the mansion fell
into dereliction, and finally was demolished in 2001. A Jehovah's
Witnesses church now stands on the site. Of interest in this saga, is an
ancient burial vault which was only seen for the first time in decades
when the house was demolished. It apparently predated the construction
of the house in 1885, and was composed of large blocks of limestone,
with a small entrance door. The house had been built over it. When the
site was cleared, the tomb's door was sealed to prevent trespassing. It
has been preserved in the yard of the Jehovah's Witness church and may
be seen today. This painting depicts Ma Mayute astride a horse (she was
an excellent rider) in front of her place as it would have appeared in
its heyday.
Caroni Estate Saturday Market 1950s
In a time-honoured tradition which played itself
out for well over a century, the Saturday pay-yard market was a facet of
life on sugar estates across the country . Labour was paid by the task.
The majority were East Indian indentured immigrants, with a minority of
Afro-Trinidadians. These labourers were cutters, grass gangs (children)
and carters. Tasks for the week would be measured out by the overseer
with his long bamboo rod and noted. The tasks were for cutting or
weeding the cane according to the season, and ranged from 10 cents to 25
cents from 1865-1928. On Saturday, labourers formed a line in the
pay-yard to collect their wages. This was a sort of ritual which is
vividly described by Sir V.S Naipaul in “A House For Mr. Biswas”: Every
Saturday he lined up with the other labourers to collect his pay. The
overseer sat at a little table on which his khaki cork hat rested,
wasteful of space, but a symbol of wealth. On his left sat the Indian
clerk, stern, precise, with small neat hands that wrote small neat
figures in black ink and red ink in the tall ledger. As the clerk
entered figures and called out names and amounts in his high, precise
voice, the overseer selected coins from the columns of silver and the
heaps of copper in front of him and with greater deliberation, extracted
notes from the blue one dollar stacks, the smaller red two dollar
stacks, and the very shallow green five dollar stack. Few labourers
earned five dollars a week. The notes were there to pay those who were
collecting their wives’ or husbands’ wages as well as their own. Around
the overseer’s hat, and seeming to guard it, there were stiff blue paper
bags, neatly serrated at the top printed with large figures and
standing upright from the weight of coin inside them. “ After being
paid, the labourers had money to supply their needs for the next two
weeks. Naturally, there was a rumshop near the estate which would
consume part of the cash, and also a further claim for debts for staple
goods, taken on credit since the last payday. Near the pay-yard, a
market would spring up which would be the social equinox for estate life
on a weekend. Vendors would erect rude stalls or sometimes be allocated
a shed as in this photo from Caroni. A priceless description of the
Saturday market is given in the period novel, Tikasingh’s Wedding by
Wilfred D. Best. “Tika found the arrangement of the stalls (crudely
built trays on legs for easy movement) very orderly. There were sections
for ground provisions such as yams, dasheen, eddoes and Irish potatoes;
another for vegetables such as bhaji, patchoi, baigan and dasheen bush.
There was a section for soft drinks, mostly red kola and cream soda in
heavy bottles sealed with a marble which was kept in place by the force
of the gas. To open the bottles there was a wooden opener with a rounded
portion which fitted into the space between the top of the bottle and
the marble. The bottle was opened by a tap on the wooden opener strong
enough to dislodge the marble which fell on a ledge on the bottle about 3
inches from the top. If the contents of a soft drink bottle were
agitated by shaking, the liquid would squirt into the air through the
pressure of the gas, and many were the occasions when a bottle burst ,
sending bits of razor-like glass in all directions. Sometimes the person
opening the bottle and those standing nearby would receive nasty cuts
from the missiles, and the only ones who welcomed these breakages were
the little boys darting in search of the marble to add to their
collection for the next game of marbles. …they paused near a stall where
the vendor was selling ready-made khaki trousers and shirts…..the group
moved to another stall where two ladies , both Indians, were selling
metai and pastries. On one table was kurmah while on the other were
sponge cakes topped with pink, yellow and white icing, coconut and jam
tarts and heavy loaves. “ Also present in the market would be the
itinerant Syrian peddler with his box of piece goods (dress and pants
lengths, ribbons, bows and other haberdashery) either conducting cash
sales or collecting installments of a few shillings on cloth taken on
terms by the labourers, who could not at once afford this luxury. This
foto from the 1950s shows the Caroni market, with the chimneys of the
Usine in the background, and two small brick buildings which would have
been quarters for the overseers.
Perseverance Estate Pay Yard, Cedros, circa 1912
East Indian immigrants are in the majority, having
been settled in Cedros as early as 1850 on the sugar estates of the
district. Here is a timeless scene of indentureship, with the manager
(J.O Urich) sitting on the right in his topee (cork hat) and with what
looks like a watch chain looped across his shirt. On the left sits a
person who appears to be a constable from his pith helmet. On the table
is a bag, possibly containing the meagre wages of the labourers which
were doled out according to tasks. Perseverance estate was founded as a
sugar estate circa 1800 by Charles Rousseau, a Martiniquan immigrant in
conjunction with other French cedulants including Gardie, DeMontbrun,
Lequin and Bonasse. It originally extended over 800 or so acres, and
unlike other estates in the area, included a minimum of swampland and
extensive rolling hills as can be seen from this photo. Coconuts,
introduced by Francois Agostini of Constance Estate in 1860 gradually
replaced sugar, although as late as 1890, Perseverance was still a sugar
producer. The factory, seen here, was erected in 1885 and produced
crystal sugar, and rum. The estate also boasted a fine jetty with iron
piles for the loading of sugar ships. At this juncture, the estate was
owned by an Englishman, John Kemp Welch. By 1917 the equipment for the
sugar refinery was being sold off as the estate had gone over completely
to coconuts. The manager of many years, J.R Urich, incidentally died
the following year. Most of the machinery would have cost a fortune when
they were installed around 1875-80. The sugar works were converted for
the processing of coconut oil and copra. The factory and chimney can
still be seen today. The estate is now partially owned by the Bhola
family and was unsuccessfully diversified into peanuts and other crops.
Lots have now been developed for sale to homeowners. In a time-honoured
tradition which played itself out for well over a century, the Saturday
pay-yard market was a facet of life on sugar estates across the country.
Labour was paid by the task. The majority were East Indian indentured
immigrants, with a minority of Afro-Trinidadians. These labourers were
cutters, grass gangs (children) and carters. Tasks for the week would be
measured out by the overseer with his long bamboo rod and noted. The
tasks were for cutting or weeding the cane according to the season, and
ranged from 10 cents to 25 cents from 1865-1928. On Saturday, labourers
formed a line in the pay-yard to collect their wages. This was a sort of
ritual which is vividly described by Sir V.S Naipaul in “A House For
Mr. Biswas”: Every Saturday he lined up with the other labourers to
collect his pay. The overseer sat at a little table on which his khaki
cork hat rested, wasteful of space, but a symbol of wealth. On his left
sat the Indian clerk, stern, precise, with small neat hands that wrote
small neat figures in black ink and red ink in the tall ledger. As the
clerk entered figures and called out names and amounts in his high,
precise voice, the overseer selected coins from the columns of silver
and the heaps of copper in front of him and with greater deliberation,
extracted notes from the blue one dollar stacks, the smaller red two
dollar stacks, and the very shallow green five dollar stack. Few
labourers earned five dollars a week. The notes were there to pay those
who were collecting their wives’ or husbands’ wages as well as their
own. Around the overseer’s hat, and seeming to guard it, there were
stiff blue paper bags, neatly serrated at the top printed with large
figures and standing upright from the weight of coin inside them.
Indian Mud Hut circa 1920
Coolies who were indentured in Trinidad post 1860
were offered five pounds in lieu of a return passage to India as an
incentive to settle. The myth that they were given five acres was simply
that...a myth. Many Indians purchased five or more crown acres at a
pound per diem, often in swampy or forested areas. This mud hut with a
thatched roof is typical of the domiciles constructed on these
homesteads. These buildings had tapia walls , plastered by the process
of leepay (cow dung and clay) and were roofed with the leaves of timite
palms (carat) they were eco friendly, cheap to construct, cool and
renewable. Some examples may still be seen in St. Helena village,
Piarco, albeit with galvanized roofs.
Musicians 1893
This photo shows a chowtal group of olden days in
Trinidad. Music was one of the many social adhesives which bound the
immigrants together. Its evolution, chutney, is truly a tribute to
integration and hybridization of an exotic culture.
Roadside Vendors 1934
Trinidad is well and able to feed itself save for
the sad fact that we have shunned the land and now depend on imports for
sustenance whereas out forefathers made do with what their own sweat
could coax from the soil. This foto shows an impromptu roadside market
along the EMR in San Juan. Vendors, mostly Indo and Afro Trinidadian
women, would erect rude stalls or simply spread their produce on the
ground and wait for trade. This pic shows the rich variety of food that
they produced.
Cattle grazing in the Queen's Park Savannah near the Peschier Cemetery 1925
The POS of yesteryear was a town where one could
stroll northwards for a few minutes and leave behind the traffic of
horse and buggy and encounter a very rural existence. Many people in
suburbs like Belmont and Woodbrook kept cattle to ensure a domestic milk
supply. In Maraval, Tamil Madrassi Indians who had settled in what is
now Boissiere Village, kept large herds and supplied fresh bottled milk
to the urban residents of POS. Even the colonial administration was in
on the act, maintaining a large stock farm on St. Clair lands from the
late 1870s. When St. Clair began to be broken into lots as prime
residential property, the stock farm was removed to Mt. Hope where it is
now known as the UWI Field Station, an experimental farm. The Queen's
Park Savannah, that great playground purchased in 1817 by Sir Ralph
Woodford, never needed grooming since dozens of cattle from the
government stock farm and the Indians of Boissiere Village were grazed
on the turf. In a 1850s painting done by the great artist Michel Jean
Cazabon (1813-88) cattle are seen placidly grazing in the savannah.
Opposite Whitehall in Queen's Park West, there used to be a well and
drinking trough for the livestock. Indian herders and milk sellers from
Coolie Town (St. James) also grazed their livestock here. From the
1890s, the government charged a fee of $1 per person per month for
grazing rights in the savannah. Cattle were a problem for the Savannah
Tram (1895-1950) as they sometimes wandered onto the track in front of
the speeding tramcar.....the conductor frantically clanging his bell.
During WWII supplies of imported staples (rice, flour, salt meat etc.)
dwindled because the ships bringing them were often torpedoed by German
U-boats. In order to counteract a serious food security crisis, the
government embarked on a "Grow More Food" campaign and offered free lots
in the savannah for all those who would undertake to establish 'war
gardens'. It is not known if anyone took up the offer. One of the more
disconcerting experiences of the QPS of yesteryear was being chased by a
maddened bull. This was the sad lot of many a courting couple who had
to cut their amours short and scamper in the wake of a charging 1,200
lb. bull. By the 1950s, cattle on the savannah were a thing of the past.
NOTE: The QPS was originally part of St. Ann's sugar estate owned by
the Peschier family. When the estate was acquired in 1817 by Governor
Sir Ralph Woodford, the Peschiers retained the ancestral burial ground
in the center of the land. The oldest graves therein date back to the
1780s, but the oldest legible plaque is dedicated to the memory of
Celeste Rose Peschier, daughter of the Marquise de Beltegens who died in
1817.
Bath Time 1930
This is a timeless scene in which two children are
being given a bath in an old wooden washtub. The children are
light-skinned and fair-haired while the woman appears to be Indo
Trinidadian. This is possibly a nanny who has been engaged by a wealthy
family to take care of their offspring.
Related Links
23/08/2006
COOLIES : HOW BRITAIN REINVENTED SLAVERY
COOLIES : HOW BRITAIN REINVENTED SLAVERY
The slave trade was officially abolished throughout the British Empire in 1807.
This documentary reveals one of Britain's darkest secrets : a form of slavery that continued well into the 20th century - the story of Indian indentured labour.
Coolies : How Britain Reinvented Slavery - VIDEO
Indentured workers from North India.
ndian Arrival Day & Indentureship
A Ship used to transport indentures to Caribbean
Friday 30th May 1845Ship: Fatel RozackCargo: 225 Indentured labourers on a journey
of one hundred days from Calcutta, British India
3 fatalities -222 Arrived
3 fatalities -222 Arrived
Indenturers arrival on an island port near Trinidad
It
was the lucrative Slave Trade to the British Caribbean islands, (not
Chattel Slavery) which was abolished in 1834 by the English Parliament.
Though the plantocracy was compensated, Afrikan captives considered
property were required to serve five more years of service to their
"OWNERS" under an assumed "Apprenticeship" scheme. This period was
designed to enable them through a transition to CIVILDOM.
The
British East India Company imported Indentured Labourers from
Portugal,Syria, Lebanon, India, China, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and
Indonesia to replace the Afrikan captives.
This anniversary is celebrated with a Public Holiday in the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago.
1400s - 1600s
- (1498) Christopher Columbus sighted coast of Suriname
- (1593) Spanish explorers visited area, named it Suriname
- (1602) Dutch established settlements
- (1651) First permanent European settlement, established by British at Paramaribo by Lord Francis Willoughby
- (1667) British ceded their part of Suriname to The Netherlands in exchange for New Amsterdam (later called New York City)
- (1682) Coffee and sugar plantations established . worked by African slaves
- (1799-1802, 1804-1816) British rule re-imposed
- (1863) Slavery abolished; indentured labourers brought in from India, Java, China to worked on plantations
- (1916) Aluminum Company of America (Aloca) began mining bauxite- the principal ore of aluminum- which gradually became Suriname's main export
- (1954) Suriname given full autonomy, The Netherlands retained control over defense, foreign affairs
- (1975) Suriname became independent with Johan Ferrier as president, Henck Arron of the Surinam National Party (NPS) as prime minister; more than a third of population emigrated to The Netherlands
- (1980) Arron's government ousted in military coup, President Ferrier refused to recognize military regime, appointed Henk Chin-A-Sen of Nationalist Republic Party (PNR) to lead civilian administration; army replaced Ferrier with Chin-A-Sen
- (1982) Armed forces seized power in coup led by Lietenant-Colonel Desire (Desi) Bouterse, set up Revolutionary People's Front; 15 opposition leaders charged with plotting coup aexecuted; The Netherlands, US cut off economic aid
- (1985) Ban on political parties lifted
- (1986) Surinamese Liberation Army (SLA), composed mostly of escaped African slaves, began guerrilla war with aim of restoring constitutional order; principal bauxite mines. refineries forced to shut down
- (1987) 97% of electorate approved new civilian constitution
- (1988) Rameswak Shankar, former agriculture minister, elected president
- (1989) Bouterse rejected accord reached by President Shankar with SLA, pledged to continue fighting
- (1990) Shankar ousted in military coup masterminded by Bouterse
- (1991) Johan Kraag (NPS) became interim president; alliance of opposition parties- the New Front for Democracy and Development- won majority of seats in parliamentary elections; Ronald Venetiaan elected president
- (1992) Peace accord reached with SLA
1900s
- (1996) Jules Wijdenbosch, an ally of Bouterse, elected president
- (1997) Dutch government issued international arrest warrant for Bouterse, claimed he h smuggled more than two tons of cocaine into The Netherlands during 1989-97; Suriname refused to extradite him
- (1999) Dutch court convicted Bouterse in absentia for for drug smuggling
- (2000) Ronald Venetiaan became president, replaced Wijdenbosch, after winning early elections following protests against former government's handling of economy
- (2002) State owned banana company closed, financial woes compounded by low market prices; restructured smaller company opened in 2004
- (2004) Suriname dollar replaced guilder; government said move aimed to restore confidence in economy; UN set up tribunal to try to resolve long running maritime border between Suriname and Guyana
- (2005) President Venetiaan re-elected after months of deadlock
- (2006) Flooding, caused by torrential rain, left more than 20,000 people homeless
- (2007) UN tribunal ruled in Guyana-Suriname dispute over maritime territory, gave both a share of potentially oil-rich offshore basin
- (2008) Trial began of former dictator Desi Bouterse, 24 others accused of involvement in 1982 killings of opponents of military regime; dispute with government over development of new bauxite mine in the west; mining giant BHP Billiton announced cease of operations in Suriname by 2010
- (2009) Troops called in to suppress anti-Brazilian, anti-Chinese riots in gold-mining area in northeastern city of Albina
Typical Indian Peoples’ house
Picture called Typical East Indian Coolies house, Essequibo , from On Land and Sea – on Green and River, by Henry W Case, 1910. Indian people were used as indentured servants, who sold their labour for a set period of time on plantations such as this one in Essequibo (now called Guyana)in South America. |
Home
 Sense of Identity |
Sunday, 18 January 2015
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The labourers were bound in five and ten-year contracts to sugar estates (cocoa plantations to a lesser extent), and from 1866-1880, were offered an incentive to remain in the island and form a peasantry which would provide a seasonal workforce for the plantations.
Whilst bound to the estates, a few owners and managers of a more benign disposition would have introduced Christmas to the lives of the workers.
A Woman Alone: The Story of India's Forgotten 'Coolie' Women
Image courtesy of South Asian Literature Festival
Listen to the audio version of this story on KALW
When Gaiutra Bahadur came to India from the United States, the anxiety about women’s safety was at fever pitch. “Everyone freaked me out about Delhi,” recalls Bahadur. “They said Delhi is a particularly unsafe city for women. Don’t go out by yourself after 6 o’clock or after sunset.”
The advice was well-intentioned but ironic. When it comes to women going out by themselves, Bahadur comes from a family where the bar has been set quite high.
In 1903 Sujaria, her great-grandmother, a 27-year-old Brahmin woman boarded a ship from Calcutta bound for the sugar plantations of British Guiana. She was traveling alone. She was not headed to meet any family on the other end. And she was four months pregnant.
Bahadur never met her great-grandmother. All she had was the story her father told about his father being born on a ship. And her great-grandmother’s immigration pass which said how old she was and that she had a burn mark on her left leg and written above it in pencil the fact that she was pregnant.
But working backwards from that story, Bahadur uncovered an astonishing piece of history. “It started out as a story of identity but it didn’t take long for gender to become much more important,” says Bahadur. Her great-grandmother was not alone in making that journey. About a quarter of a million women did that as well – the first large scale migration of India women overseas. “About 75 percent of the women who migrated were traveling without a husband and that’s when I realised I had a book to write that wasn’t just about my great grandmother but about generations of women,” says Bahadur. That book is Coolie Woman – The Odyssey of Indenture.
The stereotypical image, positive or negative, of the migration story has usually been male – the Mexican man picking California strawberries, the Indian or Taiwanese engineer in Silicon Valley, the Bangladeshi immigrant coming across the border illegally who became a hot button issue in India’s recent election. Or it has been about family migration like the motel owners in a small town in the American South.
But women too are on the move around the world on their own. A 2007 World Bank report says women comprise almost half the world’s immigrants and that number is on the rise. “The share of women migrating for employment rather than family reasons has increased over time,” says Maurice Schiff, lead economist at the Development Research Group.
Women like Bahadur’s great-grandmother are the unacknowledged foremothers of that trend.
The reason why so many women went on their own from India to the sugar plantations of Guiana are complex. The plantations needed labour to replace the African slaves they had once used.
So they turned to the colonies. There was a huge gender imbalance on the plantations and there was a great demand for coolie women. No ship could sail unless there were at least forty women for every 100 men among the coolies it carried. But the 1883 Indian Emigration Act would not allow married women to emigrate without the permission of their husbands. And as Bahadur notes the 1891 census of the United Provinces reported that 90 percent of girls between ten and fourteen were already married. That meant recruiters were on the lookout for all kinds of women who were alone – for example widows, pilgrims, sex workers, women cast out by their families because of some scandal.
“It was an unsettling question to ask myself was my great-grandmother possibly a sex worker,” muses Bahadur. But she says from the little that is known about her history and the fact that she was picked up in Ayodhya, she has her own hypothesis. “I think she was probably a widow who was on the Vaishnavite pilgrims circuit and she might have ended up in a relationship or being exploited by a temple priest. My father, for instance was told his father’s father was a gosain (sadhu).” Her research shows many women were picked up from Mainpuri most likely, she reasons “siphoned from the pilgrims on their way to Vrindaban in search of food, shelter and god.”
The exact truth will never be known. Bahadur found a village in Bihar that was possibly the one her great-grandmother came from. She even found a family that claimed her as their own. But these stories can never be watertight.
What is clear however is that even life as a coolie woman in a sugar plantation was a sort of liberation for many of these women.
Or if not liberation, at least a new beginning. “There were so few of them they actually had a limited amount of leverage in choosing partners,” says Bahadur. Her great-grandmother got into a relationship with a man on the ship. Later she married a cow herder and set up a business selling milk, a business in which she was a partner. Some women married their white overseers who bought them out of indenture. Many shocked the missionaries trying to “civilize” them in Guiana. Bahadur quotes Sarah Morton hired to teach Indian girls to become proper wives asking a Brahmin widow if she had family in Guiana.
“No, Madame,” she replied. “Only myself and two children; when the last immigrant ship came I took a ‘papa’. I will keep him as long as he treats me well. If he does not treat me well, I shall send him off at once, that’s the right way, is it not?"
Of course, calling the plantations of Guiana a haven for women’s liberation would be sugarcoating reality. Women were exploited as well, many murdered or disfigured with the same cutlass used to chop down the sugarcane.
The story of the indentured workers of the Indo-Caribbean is something that’s little discussed in India. In Kolkata, Bahadur found that few knew where the old British Guiana immigration headquarters in Garden Reach were. But she says Calcutta holds a huge place in the imagination of the Indo-Caribbean because that was their ancestral point of departure from India. In India most people don’t know anything about this history which “is unfortunate because this was the first significant movement of Indians abroad,” says Bahadur. “It was a third the size of the British slave trade – more than a million people.”
Some of the amnesia is because the “brain drain” of doctors and engineers has always been the migration story India wanted to highlight rather than the “coolie” migration. That holds true even today. The Indians building stadiums in the Middle East were not the ones feted in the first Pravasi Indian Divas-es organised with such fanfare by the government.
Indenture became a burning issue in British India. Gandhi demanded the viceroy abolish indenture. Sarojini Naidu talked about the “the misery and shame of our sisters in the colonies.”
The missionary C F Andrews called indenture little more “than a legalised form of prostitution”. It was the first time women petitioned the viceroy about their rights. Bahadur writes India’s freedom fighters squared off against the British “in moral combat, over the bodies and honour of indentured women” and coolie contracts were cancelled in 1919. But when the indentured did come back, the returnees, especially women, were not welcomed back home after crossing the kala pani. Coolies deserted their wives from Guiana, often from a different caste because they had other wives in the home village. Many just camped out in the slums of Metiabruz in the docklands of Calcutta. When a ship with returnees docked in Calcutta, Nehru, with his hands already full with refugees from Pakistan, complained “Thetar log agaye (the stubborn people have come).”
Bahadur however bears that stubbornness as a sort of badge of pride. She says that looking back what she sees is just “how brave and exceptional these women were in leaving by themselves.” That history deserves to be remembered, especially in these times.
Listen to the audio version of this story on KALW
When Gaiutra Bahadur came to India from the United States, the anxiety about women’s safety was at fever pitch. “Everyone freaked me out about Delhi,” recalls Bahadur. “They said Delhi is a particularly unsafe city for women. Don’t go out by yourself after 6 o’clock or after sunset.”
The advice was well-intentioned but ironic. When it comes to women going out by themselves, Bahadur comes from a family where the bar has been set quite high.
In 1903 Sujaria, her great-grandmother, a 27-year-old Brahmin woman boarded a ship from Calcutta bound for the sugar plantations of British Guiana. She was traveling alone. She was not headed to meet any family on the other end. And she was four months pregnant.
Bahadur never met her great-grandmother. All she had was the story her father told about his father being born on a ship. And her great-grandmother’s immigration pass which said how old she was and that she had a burn mark on her left leg and written above it in pencil the fact that she was pregnant.
But working backwards from that story, Bahadur uncovered an astonishing piece of history. “It started out as a story of identity but it didn’t take long for gender to become much more important,” says Bahadur. Her great-grandmother was not alone in making that journey. About a quarter of a million women did that as well – the first large scale migration of India women overseas. “About 75 percent of the women who migrated were traveling without a husband and that’s when I realised I had a book to write that wasn’t just about my great grandmother but about generations of women,” says Bahadur. That book is Coolie Woman – The Odyssey of Indenture.
The stereotypical image, positive or negative, of the migration story has usually been male – the Mexican man picking California strawberries, the Indian or Taiwanese engineer in Silicon Valley, the Bangladeshi immigrant coming across the border illegally who became a hot button issue in India’s recent election. Or it has been about family migration like the motel owners in a small town in the American South.
But women too are on the move around the world on their own. A 2007 World Bank report says women comprise almost half the world’s immigrants and that number is on the rise. “The share of women migrating for employment rather than family reasons has increased over time,” says Maurice Schiff, lead economist at the Development Research Group.
Women like Bahadur’s great-grandmother are the unacknowledged foremothers of that trend.
The reason why so many women went on their own from India to the sugar plantations of Guiana are complex. The plantations needed labour to replace the African slaves they had once used.
So they turned to the colonies. There was a huge gender imbalance on the plantations and there was a great demand for coolie women. No ship could sail unless there were at least forty women for every 100 men among the coolies it carried. But the 1883 Indian Emigration Act would not allow married women to emigrate without the permission of their husbands. And as Bahadur notes the 1891 census of the United Provinces reported that 90 percent of girls between ten and fourteen were already married. That meant recruiters were on the lookout for all kinds of women who were alone – for example widows, pilgrims, sex workers, women cast out by their families because of some scandal.
“It was an unsettling question to ask myself was my great-grandmother possibly a sex worker,” muses Bahadur. But she says from the little that is known about her history and the fact that she was picked up in Ayodhya, she has her own hypothesis. “I think she was probably a widow who was on the Vaishnavite pilgrims circuit and she might have ended up in a relationship or being exploited by a temple priest. My father, for instance was told his father’s father was a gosain (sadhu).” Her research shows many women were picked up from Mainpuri most likely, she reasons “siphoned from the pilgrims on their way to Vrindaban in search of food, shelter and god.”
The exact truth will never be known. Bahadur found a village in Bihar that was possibly the one her great-grandmother came from. She even found a family that claimed her as their own. But these stories can never be watertight.
What is clear however is that even life as a coolie woman in a sugar plantation was a sort of liberation for many of these women.
Or if not liberation, at least a new beginning. “There were so few of them they actually had a limited amount of leverage in choosing partners,” says Bahadur. Her great-grandmother got into a relationship with a man on the ship. Later she married a cow herder and set up a business selling milk, a business in which she was a partner. Some women married their white overseers who bought them out of indenture. Many shocked the missionaries trying to “civilize” them in Guiana. Bahadur quotes Sarah Morton hired to teach Indian girls to become proper wives asking a Brahmin widow if she had family in Guiana.
“No, Madame,” she replied. “Only myself and two children; when the last immigrant ship came I took a ‘papa’. I will keep him as long as he treats me well. If he does not treat me well, I shall send him off at once, that’s the right way, is it not?"
Of course, calling the plantations of Guiana a haven for women’s liberation would be sugarcoating reality. Women were exploited as well, many murdered or disfigured with the same cutlass used to chop down the sugarcane.
The story of the indentured workers of the Indo-Caribbean is something that’s little discussed in India. In Kolkata, Bahadur found that few knew where the old British Guiana immigration headquarters in Garden Reach were. But she says Calcutta holds a huge place in the imagination of the Indo-Caribbean because that was their ancestral point of departure from India. In India most people don’t know anything about this history which “is unfortunate because this was the first significant movement of Indians abroad,” says Bahadur. “It was a third the size of the British slave trade – more than a million people.”
Some of the amnesia is because the “brain drain” of doctors and engineers has always been the migration story India wanted to highlight rather than the “coolie” migration. That holds true even today. The Indians building stadiums in the Middle East were not the ones feted in the first Pravasi Indian Divas-es organised with such fanfare by the government.
Indenture became a burning issue in British India. Gandhi demanded the viceroy abolish indenture. Sarojini Naidu talked about the “the misery and shame of our sisters in the colonies.”
The missionary C F Andrews called indenture little more “than a legalised form of prostitution”. It was the first time women petitioned the viceroy about their rights. Bahadur writes India’s freedom fighters squared off against the British “in moral combat, over the bodies and honour of indentured women” and coolie contracts were cancelled in 1919. But when the indentured did come back, the returnees, especially women, were not welcomed back home after crossing the kala pani. Coolies deserted their wives from Guiana, often from a different caste because they had other wives in the home village. Many just camped out in the slums of Metiabruz in the docklands of Calcutta. When a ship with returnees docked in Calcutta, Nehru, with his hands already full with refugees from Pakistan, complained “Thetar log agaye (the stubborn people have come).”
Bahadur however bears that stubbornness as a sort of badge of pride. She says that looking back what she sees is just “how brave and exceptional these women were in leaving by themselves.” That history deserves to be remembered, especially in these times.
- Share and Email |
- Print |
Sign in to comment, or comment anonymously.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ravi
Ji
|
|
Indian Labour in British Guiana | History Today
Indian Labour in British Guiana
Emancipation
in British Guiana brought an influx of indentured labourers from India,
whose working and living conditions were destructive of caste and
culture, and often as harsh as those of the slaves they replaced.
British Guiana, 1908On
May 5th 1838, the very year of final slave emancipation in the British
West Indies, a small batch of 396 Indian immigrants popularly known as
the 'Gladstone Coolies' landed in British Guiana (Guyana) from Calcutta.
This was the beginning of the indenture system which was to continue
for over three-quarters of a century and whose essential features were
very reminiscent of slavery. Within a decade Indian immigration was
largely responsible for changing the fortunes of the sugar industry, the
mainstay of the economy, from the predicted 'ruin' to prosperity.The importation of labour from the Indian sub-continent was part of a continuing search by Guianese planters for a labour force that was docile, reliable and amenable to discipline under harsh, tropical conditions. Emancipation had conferred on the Guianese labourers both physical and occupational mobility. They could withhold their labour temporarily or permanently and vacate the estates if living and working conditions did not satisfy them. In fact, a gradual exodus from the plantations began soon after emancipation. What the planters desired was an alternative and competitive labour force which would give them the same type of labour control they were accustomed to under slavery.
Only memory of the oppressed can defeat colonial ideology
Gopal Krishna
is an activist and associated with ToxicsWatch Alliance, Ban Asbestos
Network of India (BANI), IMOWatch, MediaVigil & WaterWatch Alliance.
He is also researching the corporate crimes in India after
Independence. He can be contacted at krishna2777[at]gmail.com.
Gopal Krishna
“The
division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and
others in losing.” Eduardo Galeano‘s book Open Veins of Latin America:
Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent sounds like it is the story
of the Indian sub-continent. The story of the indentured labourers and
coolies is the story India’s open veins and arteries.
As Girmit
Remembrance Day (14 May) is commemorated recollecting the departure of
Indian indentured labourers and coolies at least since 1879, 22 years
after 1857, can it be hoped that our ‘decolonized’ state will conserve,
restore and manage its natural resources and desist from imitating a
cannibalistic model of development that forces people to migrate and
become wage slaves? The illiterate workers transliterated the word
‘agreement’ in contract as ‘Girmit’ and ‘Girmitya’
.
The famines
of 1873 and 1896-7 took its toll because of excessive land-revenue
demands and export of foodgrains. They have been referred to as ‘Late
Victorian Holocausts’. The money needed to combat famine was diverted
towards British military effort in Afghanistan. After that the East
India Company of British royalty laid the foundation of its rule by
defeating the Indians by deceit and treachery at Plassey and Buxer as
lands came under company control, the “violent” land tax was raised
fivefold — from 10 per cent to up to 50 per cent of the value of the
agricultural produce. The hoarding of food grains was banned. The food
crops made way for opium poppy cultivation for export to countries like
China. The farmers were made to grow indigo instead of rice. This
reduced food availability. The company facilitated establishment of
monopolies in grain trading. This led to a catastrophic famine.
The control
of Indian affairs was complete by 1857, “India became a dependency” of
British King Emperor and “she passed under British guardianship” as per
British records. But India had become ‘dependent’ long before the formal
declaration. As a consequence British government’s market policies had a
field day resulting in famines. Advocating Macaulayism, British India
Viceroy Lord Chelmsford revealed the plot in his speech while
inaugurating the new Indian legislature, consisting of the council of
state and the legislative assembly at Delhi on February 9, 1921 after
‘the glorious imperial half century’. It was in these glorious years
that after the abolition of slavery by Britain that Indians left their
homeland as in answer to the need of many former slave-plantation
colonies for labour that was cheap and plentiful. From 1830 until 1920
the recruitment of Indians in India to work on the various plantations
was organised through what became known as the indenture system. It was
engineered through a licensed recruiter or “Kangani” who used lure
people away from their homes with promises of a bright future in the
colonies. The journeys were long, for example, that from Patna or
Benares to Calcutta took thirty to forty days. They were forced to march
till the Indian emigration depots under supervision of the licensed
recruiter.
In pre
census era estimates about the number of migrants from India remains
uncertain. A total of about 3,42,575 were sent from Calcutta during the
period 1830-70 with emigrants drawn from Bihar and other north Indian
states. These migrants went to Fiji, the West Indies, Mauritius, British
Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and other places. Before 1870 about 17
to 20 per cent of the labourers died before they reached their
destination. The whole indentured labour system and the Indian Diaspora
were indeed the consequences of British exploitation. Our ‘decolonized’
state is yet to realize that it cannot comprehend its identity without
situating itself in the historical context of indenture system at least
since early 18th century. The state needs a blueprint to ensure that
situations of famine, displacement, migration and humiliation do not
arise in future.
When Bihar
likes Trinidad & Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar, who
visited Bhelupur in the Buxar district of Bihar in January 2012, it
cannot forget that her great grandfather Ram Lakhan Mishra was compelled
to migrate as a Girmitiya labourer to Trinidad and Tobago, then a
British colony in the Caribbean islands in 1889. It cannot feign
ignorance or remain callous about the economic policies that lead to
such migrations. There has been internal migration as well and their
records in census data.
As “we the
people”, there is no alternative to learning from at least last 300
years of impoverishment and subjugation of Indians. The central and
state legislatures and governments ought to make a concerted effort to
reach out to those who left and are leaving for other countries in
unfortunate circumstances. The lessons they learnt on their voyage away
from their roots since then must be recorded for posterity.
It is quite
visible that in the last few centuries the plight of migrant workers
from places like Raxaul, Narkatiaganj, Betia, Sugauli, Motihari, Chakia,
Darbhanga, Madhubani, Jaynagar, Nirmali, Farbisganj, Munger, Purnea,
Saharsa, Begusarai, Araria, Sitamarhi, Vaishali, Chhapara, Gopalganj ,
Ara and Buxar in Bihar and Ballia, Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Basti, Banda,
Gorakhpur, Sultanpur, Gonda, and Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh remains
wedded to history of misery and exploitation. In colonial times they
took long ships and now they take long distance trains to work as
workers on contract “agreement” or even as casual labourer sans any
social security.
Within the
country the kind of racist assault migrant workers face in states like
Maharashtra and in other non-Hindi speaking parts of the country merits
sensitive engagement with political imagination. There appears to be a
political consensus in adoption of development fundamentalism as an
ideology which is creating an ideal situation for forced displacement
and migration in its myopia and after doing that indulges in victim
blaming with colonial cruelty.
“Get this
into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if
exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of
nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even
your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression,
your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of
the oppressors” observed Jean-Paul Sartre in The Wretched of the
Earth. It must be realized that those attempt to naturalize the
existing colonial system are on the side of the oppressors.
Indeed
all history is contemporary history. It cannot be forgotten that
indentured labour from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still being
sent to far off places both within the country and outside the country.
How can it be forgotten that words, gestures and looks we use and we
have inherited us so that they can express themselves through us. It is
deeply tragic commentary on sensitivity that those in Bihar and Uttar
Pradesh in particular who seem to have forgotten all about the
Girmityas. But those who were forced to adopt and live in foreign lands
carry the emotional pangs of separation. The memories of history of
one’s own community and family have been overwhelmed by manufactured
history of the dynasties of all ilk. This needs to retrieved for waging
the continued struggle of memory against forgetfulness before it is too
late.
There is
nothing to celebrate about indenture; it is an occasion to resolve to
reconstruct the untold history by back tracing the roots and struggling
to claim it and own it. The phenomena of Girmit system is a product of
colonization both by internal and external forces. Therefore, Girmit
Remembrance Day must not get reduced to a routine affair, it must face
those economic forces and ideologies that will have us believe that
colonial language, education, dress and culture that has been adopted is
a natural phenomena. This naturalization of cognitive and physical
exploitation can only be resisted if in the words of Howard Zinn the
author of A People’s History of the United States, historical memory is
seen as a weapon.
It cannot be
forgotten that decolonization struggle is not over as yet. It has to
continue till the time the existing imperial architecture of dialogues
with fellow beings across historical times is made rootless to ensure
that the disadvantaged and the aggrieved are not compelled to leave
their homeland ever again. The defeat of the oppressed is not final as
long as their memory is intact.
Comments