Collective Memory, Identity and the Legacies of Slavery and Indenture

Farzana Gounder, Bridget Brereton, Jerome Egger, Hilde Neus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000595277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

The Caribbean history provides a rich study of the different forms of labour systems that have historically marked the politics of the coloniser and the colonised. It further provides the basis for an essential study for discourses on colonialism and capitalism. This interdisciplinary volume bridges the gap between historiography and the present-day diasporic communities, which emerged from the slave trade and indenture. Through case studies from the Caribbean context, the volume demonstrates how the region's historical labour mobility remains central to performances and negotiations of collective memory and identity.

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PART I THE LEGACIES OF INDENTURE AND MIGRATION

CHAPTER 1 The Legacy of Indian Indentureship in the Caribbean 1838-1920

PRIMNATH GOOPTAR

Globally, ethnicity continues to be a central feature in social foundation and commonplace collective action. This is particularly true of such post-colonial Indian indentured immigrant Caribbean societies in Guyana (238,909), Trinidad and Tobago (143,939), Suriname (34,304),¹ Jamaica (36,412), St Lucia (4,350), Grenada (3,200), St Kitts (337) and St Vincent (2,472), where between 1838 and 1917 over 5,00,000 Indian indentured immigrants were domiciled (Samaroo, 2011: 248).

¹ Unlike Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, which accessed Indian indentureship after the end of slavery, in Suriname, indentured immigrants were accessed just before the end of the apprenticeship from 1863-73. The importation of Indian indentured immigrants in Suriname was not in response to the labour shortage but intended to avoid the shortage of labour. The labour shortage was quite clearly envisioned to follow after the full freedom of the slaves in 1873. However, despite the fact that Indian indentured immigrants were imported to Suriname just before the end of the apprenticeship, they still faced the ire of the ex-slaves in a similar fashion to what occurred in Trinidad and Tobago.

The labourers originated from agricultural and labour sectors of the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar regions of north India, with a relatively lesser amount than from those conscripted from Bengal, south India and other areas (Brennan 1998, Lal 1998). Approximately 85 per cent were Hindus, while 14 per cent were Muslims.

The Indian indentured immigrants came to the Caribbean from the opposite side of the globe with very profound and divergent differences in language, social customs, religion, dress and music (Samaroo 1987). While they came from the same country, India, they held different perspectives on regional differences, where they were going and their tenure in their new country of residence in the Caribbean (Chatterjee 2001). The methods by which European planters executed the Indian indentured contractual requirements had an unfair outcome in influencing the communal attitudes between the ethnic groups in the colonies. For example, Indian indentured labourers were calculatedly kept away from the rest of the society (namely the ex-slaves and the Chinese and Portuguese) geographically, socially and culturally. The planters portrayed the ex-slaves stereotypically as poor workers, lethargic, reckless and frivolous. East Indians, on the other hand, were considered hard working, compliant, submissive and controllable. The East Indians soon espoused the planters’ negative views of the ex-slaves, who, in turn, saw the Indians as miserly, violent (domestic violence), taking bread from their mouths (preventing them from bargaining for higher wages) and heathens for not accepting Christianity and Western ways. The propagation of these stereotypes between the two major groups had the desired effect, as far as the white planters were concerned, of keeping the groups apart. That separation also helped to keep them from uniting with the ex-slaves and demanding higher wages from the planters. The coloured persons and ex-slave group consisted mainly of Africans. There were also Portuguese and Chinese immigrants, but the stereotyped ex-slave mentality was aimed mostly at the African ex-slaves (Haraksingh 1981) .

By analysing the historical relationship between the coloniser, the Indian indentured immigrants and the ex-slaves, one can trace the roots of the legacy of the Indians and the impact they had on the various Caribbean islands in which they were domiciled.

It is noteworthy that with the culpability of the plantation owners, the ex-indentured immigrant Indians were encouraged, whether passively or otherwise, to take up residence in plots ‘loaned’ to them or rented to them by the estates, or sometimes they were encouraged to continue living on the estates. In Trinidad and Guyana, the planters also used their influence with the governor to allow Indian settlers to occupy adjacent Crown lands free of charge. So, while the former-indentured workers were encouraged to live close to the estates and could pursue their own agenda, the planters were happy to have them close by as additional labour, especially as seasonal workers at crop time, when additional hands were needed on the estate (Laurence 1994). This reassurance to live close to the estates encouraged the development of small villages around the estate peripheries. As those grew, they became settlement communities, which were referred to by outsiders as ‘Indian settlement communities’. On the other hand, some adventurous ex-indentured Indian immigrants, not wishing to return to the estates, relocated further afield in forested and grassy or swampy areas. These individuals became coal burners, rice planters and gardeners and created their small settlement communities.

In those Indian settlements, the ex-indentured immigrants bonded together because of their shared values, ethics, cultural similarities, religion, dress and social life. These bonds, based on their commonalities, created strength and cohesiveness within their evolving society. In developing their ‘exclusive’ Indian settlements, they unwittingly formed a barrier between the white colonial planters and the freed ex-slaves who vented their ire on them. That fracturing, however, helped to structure and shape the lives and pathways of the Indian immigrants and their descendants on the islands, perpetuating the division between the two ethnic groups.

The indentured Indian immigrants held India as their cultural and spiritual home and that helped them to shape and keep their identity alive even on the sugar estates. At the end of their indentureship, at least 80 per cent of them made the Caribbean their home, yet they did not sever ties with India. In most cases, with the coming into being of their settlement communities, those ties were strengthened by the sheer cohesiveness of the new communities and their willingness to subsist in a hostile land. They were in survival mode in a country they had chosen to be their new home. Many of the push and pull factors forced them to look inwards, and, in doing so, revived the memories of their identity in India, which they transplanted to the new land (Gooptar 2012).

Indians, in the larger evolving communities, turned inwards for self-protection, preservation and to find meaning to their existence in those colonies. They recreated parallel communities based on units from their jahaji bundles (the real and the imagined jahaji bundles) with their systems of sustainability, economic activity, culture, language, food, flora and fauna.²They practised their culture from memory, and, over time, converted it into ‘Indian culture’ in the Caribbean that affirmed the historical memory they had brought with them. Many of their memorialised practices were informed, validated, influenced or reinforced by their local communal settings. This linkage to the homeland gave them the strength and courage to continue along the path they had consciously chosen, creating in that evolutionary process new cultural meanings from what they had brought from India in their jahaji bundles. That legacy, associated with their new environments, was passed onto future generations.

² Jahaji Bundle. A big bag or cloth tied at the top and containing one’s personal items. Jahaji is a Hindi word meaning shipmate, specifically, those indentured servants who travelled from India to the Caribbean on the same ship. Ajahaji bundle was the bundled possessions of those servants.

The free Indians were becoming a reckoning force. Nanlal Ramcharan, basing his interpretation upon stories he heard from his parents and on his observations, indicated that by 1920,

... from what I came to know of my own and what my parents and grandparents told us, their culture was of foremost importance to them. They did not want to give up their culture, their way of life, the way of living, their language and most of all their dress and so they kept more to themselves and only went into the town whenever they had to purchase supplies or attend to a legal matter. They developed their means of self-containment and survival, and there were very few things that they purchased in the town centres. Transportation was difficult to get from where we lived, and so they only went to Cunapo (Sangre Grande) for supplies such as oil, pitch oil, salt and flour. They grew most of what they ate: bodi, seime, carille, pumpkin, seasonings, corn, rice, dhal (urdhi, pigeon peas etc.) and cassava.³

³ Nanlal Ramcharan. Interview with Nanlal Ramcharan. Plum Road, Sangre Grande, Trinidad. 100 years old, 2009.

In this way, they avoided contact with Afro-Trinidadians and developed their parallel communities. The same could be extrapolated for Guyana, Suriname, and some of the other Caribbean countries.

Because of the rejection they faced from the outside world, the Indians sought to become self-sustaining, and, in the process, became a force to reckon with as they developed their parallel societies. Thus, they kept alive their collective memory of India among themselves through their songs, music, dances, religion and other aspects of life and living. The indentured immigrants had a long civilisational history that followed them around, and their memorialised history was responsible for the creation of their new homes in the new lands. In addition, that history helped East Indians to reconstitute aspects of the old homeland in the Caribbean. In the recreation of their new homeland, the new cultural environment and the natural landscape were contributing factors to the early identity that East Indians created in the Caribbean. Their isolation and their rural residency allowed them the chance to develop new cultural settings based on existing cultural and religious realities (Lowenthal 1972). They had dotted the landscape with jhandis, temples, mosques, and had kept alive their songs, music and dances.

From the perspective of non-Indians, the Indians were often seen as a closed community ‘doing their own thing’. They were, therefore, regarded not as part of the society, but as birds of passage, who would soon return to their original homeland. They were seen as not belonging and different because they spoke Hindi and all their practices were different from the ex-slaves.

However, from the Indians’ perspective, while they maintained a seperate and distinct identity, they considered themselves part of the country. They had chosen to make the new territory their homeland, and, as such, began to put down their roots. Those roots spread to other parts of the country outside of their parallel societies. Soon, identity markers emerged that helped to solidify the community against the onslaught from the ex-slaves and Westernised values.

IDENTITY

In the case of East Indians in the Caribbean, their identity formation was both a reaction to a hostile environment and a primordial fallback on their identity. Individual or group identity, it must be noted, is different to the idea of national identity, and with East Indians in Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname there was, by the 1920s, a wide schism between individual and group Indian identity, and the national ideal of identity. Despite the schism that seemed to exist at that time, significant groups within the Indian community and many Indians too held the view that East Indians could hold on to their ethnic identifications while being compatible with the national identity of the nation to which they belonged. The Indian ex-indentured immigrants preferred to build that identity around factors that related to their original homeland, and this did not, in any way, negate the fact that they were part of the new society, or imply that they were unpatriotic to the nation (Gooptar 2012).

Moving from the state of being indentured immigrants to free persons living in their settlement communities was an event of enormous proportions that took them from survival mode, through identity formation, and, by the beginning of the twe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: The Legacies of Indenture and Migration
• Part II: Identity Negotiations Through Music and Cuisine
• Part III: Collective Memories of Slavery and Indenture
• Contributors
• List of Illustrations and Table
• Index