The Legacy of Indian Indenture

Historical and Contemporary Aspects of Migration and Diaspora

Maurits S. Hassankhan, Lomarsh Roopnarine, Hans Ramsoedh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138280526
• eBook ISBN: 9781351986830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

This book is the second publication originating from the conference Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour: Past, present and future, which was organised in June 2013, by the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research (IGSR), Anton de Kom University of Suriname.

The articles are grouped in four sections.

Section one concentrates on indenture in the Caribbean and the IndianOcean and includes four diverse, but inter-related chapters and contributions. These reveal some newly- emerging, impressive trends in the study of indenture, essentially departing from the over used neo-slave scholarship. Not only are new concepts explored and analysed, but this section also raises unavoidable questions on previously published studies on indenture.

Section two shows that there are many areas that need to be re-examined and explored in the study of indenture. The chapters in this section re-examine personal narratives of indentured labourers, the continuous connection between the Caribbean and India as well as education and Christianization of Indians in Trinidad. The result is impressive. The analysis of personal accounts or voices of indentured servants themselves certainly provides an alternative perception to archival information written mostly by the organizers of indenture.

Section three in this volume focuses on ethnicity and politics. In segmented societies like Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago institutional politics and political mobilization are mainly ethnically based. In Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana this has led to ethnic and political tensions. These themes are explored in these three articles.

Section four addresses health, medicine and spirituality – themes which, until recently, have received little attention. The first article examines the historical impact of colonialism through indentureship, on the health, health alternatives and health preferences of Indo-Trinidadians, from the period between 1845 to the present. The second examines the use of protective talismans by Indian indentured labourers and their descendants. Little or no psychological research has been done on the spiritual world of Indian immigrants, enslaved Africans and their respective descendants, with special reference to the use of talismans.

Part 1
Indenture in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean

1 Trans-Colonial Migration during East Indian Indentured Servitude in British Guiana and Trinidad

LOMARSH ROOPNARINE

Introduction

The common perception of East Indian (hereafter Indian) migration during indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of stringent limitations. Historians who write about indenture generally agree that the British imperial and the colonial Indian governments established rules and regulations to anchor indentured Indians to specific plantations as soon as they arrived in British Guiana and Trinidad (Laurence, 1994; Look Lai, 1993; Mangru, 1987; Tinker, 1974). The Indian government in particular assumed a paternalistic stance, insisting that it was in the best interest of Indian indentured labourers to remain on their assigned plantations until their contracts expired in order to safeguard them against mistreatment and abuses. Moreover, the Indian government insisted that time-expired Indians should return home and other unemployed Indians should take their place (Roopnarine, 2006; 2008: 208). While on the plantations, Indian labourers could technically leave for important reasons and with the permission of their employers through a pass system. However, the employers used all their power to discourage the free movement of labour, so that their investment (basic housing, fringe medical benefits, and low-wages) would not become a financial burden on them. If Indian labourers violated the measures that restricted free movement, they would be arrested, fined, and their right to return passages from British Guiana and Trinidad to India would even be forfeited (British Parliamentary Papers, hereafter BPP, 1904: 30). Time-expired Indian labourers who wished to travel had to apply for a passport at the government-run immigration office (India Immigration Proceeding, hereafter IIP, 1878: Appendix 20). Indian labourers who had completed their contracts and returned home and wished to return to another colony for a second term of indenture were carefully monitored by emigration agents in India, who would most likely reject them. Returnees were seen as experienced labourers who would resist working conditions and influence other arriving labourers to follow suit (BPP, 1910:181). Aspiring returnees were generally rejected, even when they argued strongly. By contrast, the colonial authorities also used the willingness of the returnees to re-migrate to justify that indenture was not slavery in disguise. Whatever might have been the case, the indenture system offered the planters a seemingly endless army of cheap, unorganized workers brought to the gates of their plantations by various emigration agencies. The indentured workers were a captive population with little recourse. Such was the legacy of migration during Indian indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad.

However, the non-migratory thesis represents only one valid aspect of Indian indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad. Other things were happening that had little to do with planter control over labour. Indian indentured labourers tried to find continuities with their departed homeland in their new environment. They simply did not abandon their pre-indenture ambitions—such as the desire to move for better opportunities—and accept the paternalistic structure of the plantation system. If these points are not recognized and addressed, then the migratory patterns of indentured Indians in British Guiana and Trinidad will be grossly misrepresented in Indian indenture historiography in the Caribbean. It would seem illogical to conclude that for over three-quarters of a century (1838-1920) indentured Indian migration was simply restricted between India and British Guiana and Trinidad as well as between plantations. Migration, restricted or free, is not so characteristically insular. This article proposes that migration during indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad was more active and wider than previously discussed. The argument is that while some segments of the Indian indentured population were subdued by the strict, restrictive migration policies, other Indians challenged these very policies and migrated for better life opportunities. It is also argued that Indians possessed a deeper understanding than previously thought of their new indentured communities and beyond. Over time, they used this knowledge effectively to achieve wider migratory goals. In many respects, migration during indenture relied on trans-colonial networks, which have been undetected and rarely analysed. This article divides the examination of trans-colonial migration during indenture in British Guiana and Trinidad into three sections. Section 1 provides a background of indenture in terms of migration between India and British Guiana and Trinidad to contextualize trans-colonial migration. Section 2 examines trans-colonial migration to and from British Guiana and Trinidad, that is, within the Caribbean. Section 3 analyses trans-colonial migration from other colonies (Natal, Mauritius, Fiji) to British Guiana and Trinidad as well as second-term migration of time-expired Indian indentured labourers from India who had indentured in British Guiana and Trinidad previously.

A Background of Indenture: A Migration Perspective

Some of the most established writers on indenture such as Brinsley Samaroo, Clem Seecharan, Ron Ramdin, Kusha Haraksingh, Bridget Brereton, Radica Mahase, Tota Mangar, Kumar Mahabir, Rosemarjn Hoefte, Maurits Hassankhan, Verene Shepherd and others have addressed the cyclical nature of Indian indentured migration between India and the Caribbean. These authors generally agree that the movement of indentured Indians from their homeland to British Guiana and Trinidad emanated primarily from planters' desperation to fill a labour vacuum precipitated by the gradual withdrawal of freed Africans from plantation labour. The British capitalist class believed that British India could satisfy labour needs for other British colonies in the Caribbean. They became more confident when they found out that planters in Mauritius successfully used indentured labourers from India to substitute the loss of slave labour. As soon as slavery was abolished in British Guiana and Trinidad, the planters in these colonies followed the example of Mauritius (BPP, 1839). They were encouraged by poor governmental regulations of indentured labour, the easy manipulation of the so-called hill coolies and the common British colonialism, which made the shipment of labourers between colonial destinations less complicated and cumbersome. However, the planters ensured that indentured labour was about submission and subservience to cultivating and harvesting sugar cane. They were not sympathetic to the nurturing of a migratory lifestyle. The planters simply did not want a labour force that would simultaneously negate and affirm, dismantle and construct, reject and reshape its purpose and place in the new environment. Instead, they wanted an able-bodied male labour force that would be subdued and anchored to the plantations (see Roopnarine, 2007).

In spite of the planters' expectations of a labour force on their plantations, a continuous supply of labourers was not always realized partly because of the stern ordinances embedded in the indentured contracts and partly because of unscrupulous recruiting methods in India (see Roopnarine, 2004). Nevertheless, a sizeable population of Indians was willing to indenture overseas. These individuals represented a cross-section of the Indian peasantry. Many were pushed to migrate because of socio-economic pressures and natural disasters that brought enormous hardships. Their main hope was to work to acquire sufficient money to return home to live a comfortable village lifestyle, preferably one that was free from the caste regulations and restrictions of the lowest echelon. They were simply looking for new forms of survival and a better life. The planters, on the other hand, were willing to flex their labour standards to meet the growing demands for labour on their plantations. Subsequently, the movement of Indians from their homeland to British Guiana and Trinidad was not governed by sound procedures and practices. Loopholes allowed for unexpected migration opportunities in the Indian indenture system.

Less discussed than gender, age, religion, and marital status is the strata of society from which Indians were taken to perform indentured labour in British Guiana and Trinidad. The analysis of this aspect of Indian indenture is important because it would have determined, to some degree, an Indian's migratory experience in the colonies. At the lowest strata of Indian society were those who were locked into their inflexible social caste structures in ways that relegated them to sub-human living arrangements and also those who were unsuitable to engage in plantation agriculture. Their desperation and dependence made them easy prey for unscrupulous recruiters. These Indians represented the tragic underside of indenture. They became the vagrants and paupers in their new environment either while in the depots, on the sea voyage, or on the British Guianese and Trinidadian plantations. Table 1.1 shows that of 379 Indians who had served indenture in British Guiana and returned to India in 1924, 83 of them were considered to be misfits, an estimated 22 per cent. This

TABLE 1.1: IMPACT OF INDENTURE IN BRITISH ON INDIAN MIGRANTS WHO RETURNED TO INDIA

Status of Returnees	Numbers
Free passage after ten years	39
Assisted passage after ten years	248
Passage paid in full	9
Paupers	83
Total	379

Source: 'British Guiana: Report of the Immigration Agent General foryear 1924', The Argosy, Georgetown, Demerara, Guyana, Guyana Nation Archives, 1925, p. 2.

year is selected randomly soon after indenture because it has been argued that the worst aspects of indenture were remedied precisely when the system was abolished in 1917.

In 1926, 1928, and 1936, 779, 654, and 865 Indians respectively left British Guiana for India, and of this total, 123, 99, and 257 respectively were paupers and lepers (Report of the Immigration Agent General, hereafter IAG, 1927: 2; 1928: 2; 1937: 3). From the statistics, an estimated one-third of the returnees were paupers and lepers. Other ships returning to India from British Guiana showed a similar pattern. Two observations can be gleaned from these statistics. The first observation is that the indenture system took an enormous toll on indentured Indians in their sojourn in British Guiana to the point where, at least in the above case, a third of them became victims of circumstances rather than marginal beneficiaries. The second observation is that the planters' desperation to supply their plantations with labour resulted in unsu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1: INDENTURE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN AND THE CARIBBEAN
• PART 2: RE-EXAMINING INDENTURE AND THE MIGRATION EXPERIENCE
• PART 3: ETHNICITY AND POLITICS
• PART 4: HEALTH, MEDICINE AND SPIRITUALITY
• List of Contributors
• Index