The Indian Caribbean

Migration and Identity in the Diaspora

Lomarsh Roopnarine

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496814395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.

Chapter One

THE MIGRATION OF INDENTURED INDIANS FROM INDIA TO THE CARIBBEAN

The previous section provided an introduction to Indian migration and identity. This chapter examines the movement of Indians from their homeland to various Caribbean colonies. The focus is on the circumstances that led to the arrival of Indians in the Caribbean as well as the factors that made them leave their homeland to work in a distant and unfamiliar environment. Particular attention will be paid to the entire organization of the indenture emigration system, recruitment of Indians in India, and their subsequent experience on the long sea voyage from India to the Caribbean. Statistics will be provided on the number, gender, caste, and religion of Indian emigrants to show the magnitude and diversity of the indenture emigration scheme.

QUESTIONS ON INDENTURED EMIGRATION

The majority of original correspondence or archival records on indenture tends to support the view of the planter class that indentured Indians left their homeland because of the push-pull model of migration; that is, people are pushed out of the sending environment because of deprivation and disadvantaged conditions and pulled to the receiving destination because of opportunities for a better livelihood. This explanation would imply that more Indians would have migrated to the Caribbean, since India was considered a poor colony where millions of Indians lived in hapless conditions. However, only five hundred thousand (0.16 percent) Indian citizens migrated to the Caribbean out of a population of over three hundred million. Why did a large proportion of India’s population not migrate? Was it because they did not want to? Or was it because their family ties, jobs, culture, and familiar environment made them feel at home? Or could it be that many more had wanted to migrate but were prevented from migrating because of their own poverty and cultural institutional barriers (caste) that isolated them? Were they simply unaware of indenture emigration? Or did the Caribbean plantations have inadequate accommodation to take in more indentured laborers? Did the planters operate simply on demand rather than on the need for a large surplus of labor? It is therefore crucial that the various aspects of Indian indentured emigration be sorted out before any analyses can be made.

First, Indians were involved in migration before they were brought to the Caribbean. Indian indenture emigration to the Caribbean was a form of migration that was in tandem with other world migration patterns in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other forms of world migration, Indian migration was built on historical instincts to move, although the specificities were different from other world movements. By the nineteenth century, satisfaction with the once settled, stable, and static way of life in a particular environment gave way to the urge to move. In this regard, Indian migration coincided with the age of migration; that is, people were essentially always on the move. Indians were migrating from rural to urban areas as well as to areas around India looking for seasonal and permanent employment. To be sure, only a small percentage of Indians were involved in indenture emigration. But how they have impacted their new environment is more significant than what would seem to be reflected by their small number. Second, indentured emigration was multifaceted, revealing patterns and practices of regular and irregular, temporary and permanent, and manipulative and voluntary trends. Third, indentured Indians were not from a common background. Sure enough, they were mostly peasants and shared a fundamental indentured status, but they were as diverse as India itself. Moreover, the migrants during the first two decades of indenture were remarkably different from those who left India from the 1870s onward. Fourth, no single theory is sufficient to explain any form of migration. Indenture emigration, however, can be explained by applying the historical-structural perspective, or world system model of migration, followed by the push-pull factors of migration. The world system model is a Marxist approach to migration and argues that migration is caused by uneven socioeconomic global capitalist development (Wallerstein 1974; Wood 1982). The theory is that the forces of capitalism penetrate into underdeveloped regions or colonies of the world and distort social and economic relations, which in turn pushes people in these regions to move. Migration is a natural outgrowth of disruptions and dislocations as well as the structure of the world market system in the process of capitalist accumulation and development. In other words, development in the core simply means underdevelopment in the periphery. The main thought in the historical-structural perspective is that when the capitalist economy grows outward from the core into peripheral regions, migration flows are inevitable because the forces of the capitalist economy provide job opportunities in the core, but they also interfere with material bases of survival (land, labor, wages, jobs, culture, etc.) in peripheral regions. However, internal push factors in the periphery are a consequence of the more powerful external capitalist development structure. Over time, the internal push factors will become so structurally embedded in the periphery that external factors may appear invisible. Nonetheless, and in the case of indenture migration, neither the Caribbean nor India was in the developed or underdeveloped world, respectively. Both places were colonies of the British Empire (except the Dutch and French West Indies) and were treated as such, although for different purposes. The British used the Caribbean mainly for the exploitation of sugar, while India was exploited for cotton. In the constant drive for capital accumulation within the British Empire, inadvertent outcomes emerged, such as the creation of a shortage of labor in one area (the Caribbean) because of slave emancipation and a labor surplus in another (India) because of the internal displacement of the peasantry. The colonial planter class believed that these unexpected outcomes could be beneficial to them if they were channeled wisely from one area of the world to another. For the capitalist class, indentured labor was mobile labor. It is within this context that indentured migration occurred (see Roopnarine 2003).

REASONS FOR INDENTURED MIGRATION: FROM THE CARIBBEAN

Indentured Indians were brought to the Caribbean precisely to supplement rather than substitute the lost slave labor on the sugar plantations. The question of whether or not their arrival was a necessary response to the mass exodus of former slaves from the plantations is an analysis for elsewhere. Long before emancipation, the planters had made up their minds to look for an alternative source of labor because they thought the newly freed slaves would reject or withdraw erratically from labor conditions or even revolt against the planters for injustices inflicted on them as slaves. The planters were also searching for a cheap source of labor that they could import with relative ease to use against and control the newly freed slaves’ bargaining power for better wages and other plantation amenities. The continuous influx of indentured Indians was also based on failed experiments with other early postemancipation emigration schemes from Africa, the United States, Europe, Madeira, China, and within the Caribbean islands. These emigration experiments failed in terms of steadily supplying labor to the plantations for reasons related to maladjustment, alcoholism, low wages, poor working conditions, tropical heat, and diseases. By contrast, indentured Indians proved to be reliable laborers.

The eventual reliance on indentured Indian laborers to supplement slave labor did not begin in the Caribbean but in Mauritius. The experiment with indentured Indians in this island in the Indian Ocean caught the attention of private sugar planters in the Caribbean, such as British Guianese planter John Gladstone. In a series of letters to the private recruitment firms Messrs Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Company, Gladstone requested and requisitioned for one hundred Indians from India to work on his plantations in British Guiana. He expressed preference for the Dhangers (the tribal hill people), the very type of indentured Indians who were contracted in Mauritius, to serve his plantation. After some negotiations, Gladstone’s request for indentured Indians was accepted (see British Parliamentary Papers 1837–38a, 1837–38b).

The first experiment with 396 indentured Indians in British Guiana was a disaster (see Scoble 1840). More than a third of them perished from abuse and poor working and living conditions. The British government suspended indenture emigration to British Guiana the same year it started (1838) and stated that emigration would resume only when the defects in the system were remedied. The government stopped the private importation of indentured laborers and instead placed all responsibilities under state control and under a series of strict regulations. The British crown and Indian governments emphasized a sound recruitment process, a safe and secure transportation system, and a nonabusive plantation experience. They also insisted that a British agent or a British consular as well as a protector should be stationed at the ports of departure in India and on the Caribbean plantation colonies. Finally, the British and Indian governments reserved the right to suspend and stop indenture emigration to the Caribbean colonies if so needed at any time (British Parliamentary Papers 1874, 29–32). The new state guidelines governing the entire indenture system meant the planters were required to negotiate directly with the British crown and Indian government mainly to avoid abuse and to ensure that indentured Indians would be fairly protected outside the crown’s jurisdiction.

In 1845, indenture emigration resumed, but it was suspended in 1848 due to financial difficulties. It resumed again in 1851 and was eventually abolished in 1917. From the 1860s, the British and Indian governments were comfortable with the movement of indentured Indians from India to the Caribbean. Colonial governments in St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica, and St. Kitts—all British Caribbean colonies—were permitted to import indentured laborers. This permission did not go unnoticed by other European governments. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments also saw indentured Indians as a possible solution to alleviate the acute labor shortage in their former slave colonies. During a number of independent conventions and negotiations among the French, Danish, and Dutch governments with the British government following 1860, the British government allowed for the importation of indentured Indians to foreign colonies. These foreign governments who wished to participate in the movement of indentured Indians from India had to comply with a series of regulations designed mainly to safeguard against the ill treatment of indentured Indians.

REASONS FOR INDENTURE MIGRATION: FROM INDIA

A majority of indentured Indians who were taken to the Caribbean did not choose to emigrate willingly, particularly during the first half of the indentureship period (1838–80). A number of them were duped into signing contracts while others felt obligated to go to the Caribbean because they had “eaten their recruiters’ salt,” meaning that their recruiters had invested in them through feeding, clothing, and housing (British Parliamentary Papers 1910b, 30). Stories abound whereby recruiters would supply the basic needs of intending indentured Indians, such as money, clothing, and food, with the intent of trapping them in debt peonage (see Tinker 1974, 123–26). Indentured Indians’ main objection to migration, however, was caste inhibition and obligations. To nineteenth-century Indians, including the peasantry, crossing the kala pani, or “black water,” was an act to avoid until death. The moment an Indian crossed the kala pani, his or her caste was gone and could be reinstated only through excruciating and expensive purification ceremonies. Given the strict caste structure of their close-knit villages, few Indians would have risked caste defilement and ostracism for the unknown Caribbean islands. George Grierson (1883), a colonial official, observed that the main objection of Indians to emigration from their villages was caste restrictions, superstition, and religious beliefs. Around the major recruiting centers in India, stories circulated that Indians were taken away to have mimiai ka tel (the oil extracted from a Coolie’s head by hanging him upside down). British historian Hugh Tinker (1974) espoused that intending indentured Indians were under the assumption that in the Caribbean they would be converted to Christianity, forced to eat beef and pork, and dispossessed of their holy threads. These Indians were also naturally reluctant to travel to the Caribbean. They would rather have worked in their own familiar environment than venture out to some unknown destination. Agricultural job opportunities existed in India itself, especially in tea gardens and in nearby Assam, Burma, and Mauritius. Grierson noticed that the Assam recruiter could easily outbid the Caribbean recruiter because there was no sea to cross, the distance was shorter, and the pay was better.

The af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Migration of Indentured Indians from India to the Caribbean
• Chapter Two: Indian Migration during the Indentured Period
• Chapter Three: Indian Migration from the Caribbean to India
• Chapter Four: Indian Migration within the Caribbean
• Chapter Five: Indian Migration from the Caribbean to Europe and North America
• Chapter Six: Nonindentured Indian Migration to the Caribbean since World War II
• Chapter Seven: Indian Identity in the Caribbean
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index