Indentured Labours Guyana

This paper looks at gastronomic identity in the age of global labor migrations. Focusing on the nineteenth-century inden- tured labor voyages from northern India to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, it highlights the sea voyage as both a social setting and a mirror back onto colonial society. The space of the indentured labor ship serves as an innovative site for understanding the political, cultural, and economic dimensions of historical labor movements, through which colonial politics andgustemic identities were negotiated. An analysis of the food provisions and other culinary items that British colonial officials provided to in- dentured workers during their journeys situates the “taste” of laborers in colonial feedings.

Hinduism in Guyana consists of various traditions and subgroups such as the Sanatan, Madras, and Arya Samaj traditions. Influenced by various historical conditions and the dominant Christian influence, members of the so-called Sanatan tradition have sought to establish their practices as the 'Great' or Sankritic Hindu tradition, for example through sanskritisation processes. In this context, specific practices such as possession rites and animal sacrifices were defined as inappropriate and excluded from mainstream Hinduism in Guyana, creating orthodoxy. These 'inappropriate' practices were consolidated in what is today known as the Madras tradition or Kali-Mai Puja, a shaktistic tradition which continues to be marginalised and stigmatised in contemporary society. Highlighting how members of the various Hindu traditions seek to establish and legitimise their traditions, this article demonstrates that these traditions are constructed in relation to each other and that they are based on socio-cultural othering processes within the heterogeneous 'Indian' ethnic group in Guyana. Based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews, this anthropological contribution discusses that the Madras tradition is an 'invented' yet 'authentic' tradition and elaborates how various socio-political conditions have led to phases of its revitalisation.

In the early nineteenth century, strong opposition of slavery resulted in its abolition around the world. But the imperial nature of the European colonies was in great need of manpower for their plantations going on in different parts of the globe. British colonial rule had already introduced the Permanent Land Settlement Act, 1 which worsened the condition of the common farmers of India. The industrial development of Europe and in particular Britain had hit hard the Indian handloom and weaving industry. These two historical developments during the early British rule had a murderous effect upon the common Indian man. This resulted in the common man trying to look for work abroad. The problem of indentured labour was thus the product of the colonial British rule which made the Bhojpurias suffer from culture shock and pathos. Although, the emergence of 'Bidesia' culture was a product of the crisis of indentured labour and migration in a large number during the British rule, its cultural resonance always existed in the society. The British rule had just pervaded the crisis that brought the issue at the forefront. The crisis of indentured labour was the construct of the British imperial rule and it had deepened the crisis in such a manner that it became the central thrust of the society and its cultural expression. As Badri Narayan Tiwari puts it: In the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, as the abolition of slavery progressed around the world, European colonies found themselves in great need of manpower for their plantations. India, meanwhile, was suffering from an economic depression, due to both the decline of the weaving industry caused by the Industrial Revolution in England, and the extreme population pressure on agriculture and cultivable lands. This pressure on the resources of the country, combined with the colonial masters' demand for cheap and abundant labour, led to migration of a large number of migrant labourers from the Bhojpuri region.

From "Area Impossible: Notes Toward an Introduction" (GLQ 22.2) by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel: "Temporality, the promise and peril of area studies, then might provide an epistemic demeanor for the impossible nexus of area with sexuality. Each of the three long essays in this special issue is somewhat configured through time, in [Ronaldo] Wilson’s words 'capturing the patterns,' a 'poetics of asking what happens through improvisation, or in the gesture of writing about the scene, the area/arena where the story is experienced within time that folds through multiple modes of the event.' The essays translate time through area, as it were, in possibly incommensurable directions...Aliyah Khan ferries in the historical legislative record alongside the labor of desire to translate shipboard intimacies between men and between women into kinship. The nominalizations jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin (ship brother and ship sister) provide her leverage into both the racialized landscape of the Anglophone Caribbean and the more contemporary lesbian fictional narrative with which she sites the 'voyager who is not, however, a permanent exile.' Home, then, through the crossed chronologies of desire, of sexuality, of traffic across water, loosens its vantage, dropping area in its wake."

The participation of Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugar estate strikes and in the interwar development of trade unionism has been underestimated by colonial authorities, indentured men and historians. This essay combines historiography and literary analysis to contend with gendered archival gaps. First, I chronicle elided instances of Indo-Caribbean women’s participation in labour organizing, with a focus on British Guiana. I then argue that the Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah’s novel A Silent Life (2015) is a jahaji bahin — “ship sister” — narrative that recovers the Indian ancestress as she was: not the Ramayanic Sita, wifely ideal adopted by Indo-Caribbean migrants, but a woman like the historical Sumintra, a martyred woman strike leader. I show that real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genre-defying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women.

‘The Dhantal’s Irreverence: Off-Beat as the In-Between Time of Indenture’, in Maurits S. Hassankhan et al, ed., Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and its Diaspora: Past and Present (New Delhi: Manohar, 2015)

This is a speculative exploration of the ways in which the cultural production of indentured labour diasporas from British India can hold clues as to a shared, modern, experience of temporality. it touches on issues of play as resistance and the freeing of subaltern embodied experiences that was enabled by the movement of populations outside the territorial space of 'India'. I've uploaded the paper in proof form as I don't actually have access currently to the published version. it's also something I did a long time ago! (four years to be precise)

In this essay, Khan takes a historiographic and speculative fiction approach to examining the 19th century and early 20th century life of her Chinese great-grandfather in colonial British Guiana, and the economic, religious, racial, and gender circumstances of Chinese and Indian indentured labor in the Caribbean.

Indo-Guyanese Canadian writer and poet Cyril Dabydeen’s novel Dark Swirl (1988) imagines the settler-colonial cultural and environmental encounter among a rural Indo-Guyanese family, the indigenous reptilian water spirit the massacouraman, and a white British naturalist, illustrating that the Indo-Caribbean story of migration, indenture, and postcolonial citizenship includes negotiation not only with the Afro-Caribbean, but with the marginalized indigenous presence in the Caribbean. This essay considers, among other aspects of Dabydeen’s novel, the metaphor of water and the bridging of the relational gap between indigenous myth and Indo-Guyanese Hinduism through similar stories of reptilian spirits to argue that, like Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese are interpellated into the nation and accorded postcolonial sovereignty through the appropriation of indigenous myth and the syncretism of religious and folkloric belief. Following the Guyanese writer of magical realism Wilson Harris, Dabydeen’s unusual literary attention to the relationship between the indigenous Caribbean and creolized diasporic communities illustrates that postcolonial rulers invoke continuity with an effaced indigenous presence to establish legitimacy while simultaneously denying living indigenous inhabitants their land rights and identities.

Abstract: Despite being separated by over 6,339 miles, Kilmainham Gaol and Aapravsai Ghat are inextricably linked as artefacts documenting the legacy of the British Empire. This essay shall consider the geo-historical and socio-political dimensions of each by examining them under a lens for both form and function. Chronologically, it shall consider events across the long nineteenth century (1789-1914).1 Consequently, it shall enable an understanding of the role of these events’ contextual impact upon the British Empire by birthing the related, nascent independence movements; the shaping of its legacy; and recasting of its identity.2

This article deals with the issue of Indentured labour, which is one of the biggest man made disaster in 19th century India under British rule. It broke into a new culture and performing art form due to the lamenting and suffering of millions of people.

Karimah Rahman. (2021). Muslim Indo-Caribbean Marginalization: In Indo-Caribbean, Indentured Diasporic, Caribbean, West Indian, Indian, South Asian and Muslim Spaces. The Brown Girl Diary.

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The present article opens with a generic plea for the de-imperialization of Lusophone studies. A de-imperial turn should allow researchers to explore more thoroughly the experiences of diaspora and exile that an empire-centered history and its spin-offs have obfuscated; it should also help to de-essentialize depictions of Portuguese heritage and culture shaped by these narratives. Such a turn promises to address the multiple identifications, internal diversities, and racialized inequalities produced by the making and unmaking of empire. My contribution consists of a few ethnographic-historic case studies collected at the intersections of empire, post-empire, and diaspora. These include nineteenth-century diasporic movements that brought Portuguese subjects to competing empires; past and present celebrations of heritage in diasporic contexts; culture wars around representations; and current directions in post-imperial celebrations and reparations.

While capitalism has always relied on the segmentation of the labour process and labour markets, such processes were respatialized and intensified with the global reorganization of production beginning in the 1970s.  In single (and often the most profitable) global production chains, we find the most advanced and the most dramatically ‘backwards’ modes of surplus value combined, even to and including superexploitation and new forms of slavery.  In Brazil, technological, organizational and finance-related ‘innovations’ driving the most dynamic sectors have enhanced accumulation but also reintroduced these ‘backward’ forms, all the while swelling the reserve army, now peopled by those precariously cycled through formal employment and spat back out again.  Meanwhile, the instruments of struggle associated with the age of the nation-based mass worker (where s/he existed) have not caught up to this challenge.

This paper is intended to think through these issues by reflecting on the work of two activist-intellectuals from Caribbean and Latin American Marxism.  In their own contexts, Walter Rodney and Ruy Mauro Marini attempted to come to terms with the specific role of Southern labour in global accumulation strategies at a pivotal moment in the global re-organization of production, with the shift from unfree to free labour at the height of classical imperialism.  Rodney (1981) discussed the racialized division of labour instituted by the British planter class in Guyana which polarized classes of emancipated African slaves and Indian indentured workers, despite the parallel between each group’s experience of subjugation in and displacement from the labour process.  Marini (2005) provided the most rigorous discussion to date of the role of superexploited Southern labour in equally racialized global strategies of accumulation, looking at how the recourse to superexploitation in Brazil effectively subsidized the cost of foodstuffs and primary materials in Britain, enabling the shift from absolute to relative surplus labour in the mid-19th century.

Both authors insisted that such supposedly backward forms of surplus value were inherently ‘modern’ due to their centrality to global accumulation in imperialist times.  Both insisted on the need to reckon class relations within and across national borders, in keeping with the regime of accumulation shaped by imperialism.  And ultimately, both read the shape of struggle through these objective conditions, moving between the particular conditions of oppression and the necessity of unified national and international class struggle.  Rodney was at once a Pan-Africanist who insisted on the necessity for Afro-Caribbean revolutionaries to ‘ground’ their struggles in the history and oppression of one another; and a Marxist who rejected Guyana’s communal politics, which had "been used by the colonialists ... to split the progressive movement and prevent the people from securing their rightful shares" (Mohamed 2010).  Similarly, with the bankrupting of democratization at the hands of Brazil’s first neoliberal governments, Marini argued the only way forward was through the struggle for working class unity across national boundaries; what social movements today are calling the "integration of the peoples."  Such ideas are timely contributions to the effort to create an international working class response to the current crisis.

FOREWORD The annexation of native states across the Indian sub continent in 19 th century AD by the British colonialists lead to massive displacement of people. The changes in the land owning patterns, destruction of irrigation systems, changes in the traditional farming methods, introduction of mono-culture in crop-cultivation for exports, and collapse of the traditional industries lead to social destruction hitherto unheard and unseen in the area. People fled from their villages to escape from poverty and humiliation. The revenge of British transported hundreds of thousand of mutineers and poor land less famers and labourers across Kala Pani. The emancipation of African slaves in 1838 and their subsequent demand for better wage and living conditions lead to serious labour crisis in the plantation colonies owned by the British, Dutch and French planters. The freed Africans refused to work on the plantation when their legitimate demands were not met. To neutralize the demands of the freed Africans and to undermine their collective bargaining power the planters imported fleeing Indians from the trouble prone areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and coastal areas of Southeastern India to save their plantation economies. According to various estimates, nearly 30 million Indians were displaced during this colonial occupation either transported across as indentured labourers or to serve in the colonial rule. Though nearly 20 million of them returned to India at the end of colonial rule nearly 10 million Indians were left to live in these colonies forming one of the largest Indian Diaspora during colonial period. The system of indenturedship was only an euphemism for the slavery. The Indians were given the same loggies or barracks to live which were once occupied by the African slaves. The living and working conditions of these Indians on the plantations were abysmal and attracted wide spread criticism from Indian nationalist leaders which eventutaly lead to the abolition of the labour recruitment in 1917. The Indians who either opted or destined to live on these plantation colonies soon set up their villages and recreated an India from their memories. Ethnic beliefs, religious customs, rituals, practices associated with marriage, child birth and death soon found a new place in these plantation colonies. In Caribbean plantation country like British Guyana, this reaffirmation of cultural values by Indians also lead to a conflict with the cultural practices of Africans who by then absorbed into the Christian and Western religious and

Karimah Rahman. (2020). Muslim Indo-Caribbean Identity: Muslim Indentured Resistance to Colonization and Colonial Policies​. The Migration Institute

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The manifestations of ancient Indic civilization -- from meditation, to Ayurveda, to yoga, to Hindu (and Buddhist) philosophy, to Indian cuisine -- have become more and more a part of the daily life, consciousness and practice in the Americas. However, for Indic culture to be more sustainable in the Americas, it needs to be more organically rooted and enmeshed. For a number of reasons, this is not likely to happen in the United States, outside of peculiar, generally marginal localities.

Indic philosophy and practice in the Americas are arguably most firmly rooted and authentically manifested in the countries of the Southern Caribbean, particularly the island of Trinidad, from which Acharya Ramsamooj emerged, and after whom this annual lecture series in the United States is named. In order to grow Indic culture in the Americas more sustainably and organically, the Southern Caribbean region of the Americas – especially Trinidad – needs to have its vital role more explicitly acknowledged.