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" Investigates the relatively little studied but growing field of the experiences of East Indians in the Caribbean from their arrival in 1838 to the end of indentureship in 1920..." -- Cover.
Arising from Bondage is an epic story of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From the 1830's through World War I hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they labored on the sugar estates. Unlike the Africans their status was ambiguous--not actually enslaved yet not entirely free--they fought mightily to achieve power in their new home. Today in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. This study, based on official documents and archives, as well as previously unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, fills a major gap in the history of the Caribbean, India, Britain and European colonialism. It also contributes powerfully to the history of diaspora and migration.
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Denmark’s solitary experiment with Indian indentured labor on St. Croix during the second half of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on the recruitment, transportation, plantation labor, re-indenture, repatriation, remittances and abolition of Indian indentured experience on the island. In doing so, Roopnarine has produced a compelling narrative on Indian indenture. The laborers challenged and responded accordingly to their daily indentured existence using their cultural strengths to cohere and co-exist in a planter-dominated environment. Laborers had to create opportunities for themselves using their homeland customs without losing the focus that someday they would return home. Indentured Indians understood that the plantation system would not be flexible to them but rather they had to be flexible to plantation system. Roopnarine’s concise analysis has moved Indian indenture from the margin to mainstream not only in the historiography of the Danish West Indies, but also in the wider Caribbean where Indians were indentured.
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.
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.