Onboard the first ship, the SS Whitbywhich landed at Highbury on the Berbice River on May 5, 1838, there were 166 men and six women; one a Muslim named Sheebah, aged 18, who was accompanied by her husband Beejo. There were also five girls among the infants and children who disembarked.
From the first, there was a marked lack of female recruits and academics have forwarded various reasons for this including the idea that the arkatis were tasked by the colonial planters with recruiting able-bodied labourers. This could have led to a natural de-selection of women.
While the female to male ratio of recruitment went up from 11 to every 100 in 1851 to 40 to every 100 in 1914, the disproportionate number of women labourers became critical to the plantations and an 1855 dispatch to the colonies even suggested that Indian emigration could be stopped unless more women were recruited.
By then, there had been a high number of wife murders on the estates which was blamed on the insufficiency of women rather than on the violence of the men. At the same time, the planters wanted to encourage Indian men sign on for longer periods of bonded labour.
If the men stayed on this would save them the return passages to India and they turned to the strategy of recruiting more female labourers which would also help to create stabilising family structures and a self-reproducing labour force. It was hard-nosed economic considerations rather than societal ones that led to more women being recruited.
Some boarded the ships because they were actively resisting caste and gender oppression in India and, like the men, were also dealing with the drought and famine, the loss of land rights, and the debt and poverty that resulted from British colonial rule.
That the women who came were actively resisting injustices at home dispels any notion that they were purely docile and submissive.
A third of those who emigrated were married but the majority were single. They were widowed, separated, or abandoned wives and some academics like to further the idea that many of them were of loose moral character.
Undoubtedly, some of the single women had fallen on hard times and survived by whatever means necessary. However, our history bears out the fact that women stood with the men in the over 100 revolts, strikes and disturbances on the plantations. Three of them – Gobindei, Sumintra, and Kowsilla – lost their lives in that struggle.
To stand and fight against injustice demands courage and strength of character and is hardly the mark of looseness or weakness. And the fact that the jahajins fought against their sexual exploitation by the planters and overseers hardly substantiate the argument that they were of immoral character.
They also stood with their male counterparts in the struggle for better wages and living conditions and, during their indentureship, they worked alongside the men in the fields under the same harsh conditions and were subjected to the same punishments.
They could not demand higher wages, refuse any assigned work, or live or work off the plantation to which they were bound. If they infringed any part of their contract, they could be prosecuted as a criminal and jailed.
Women’s work was seen as supplementary to the men’s and it, therefore, paid less. Whereas in 1872, men were paid a fixed daily rate of 25 cents, women earned between 48 and 60 cents per week. They were paid less even when they performed the same tasks as the men.
Our jahajins also kept the homes, raised families, and ensured the survival of the religious rituals and the cultural etiquette and values that are still present in Indian Guyanese communities 100 years after the abolition of the indentureship programme.
It was only here in Guyana that the women labourers perfected a fashion statement out of the Madras kerchief or rumal. They tied it in a particular way. It was a mark of their modesty and self-respect; our jahajins were not to be meddled with.
The women martyrs along with the hundreds of women who participated in the strikes and revolts on the plantations were seeking fair wages, better terms of employment, and were also fighting against their sexual exploitation.
They were along with the female slaves before them who rebelled, among the world’s earliest feminists and the fight against gender discrimination continues today even with the very same issues on the table.
Next Wednesday, when we mark International Women’s Day, we must honour the legacy of courage and sacrifice that our jahajins have bequeathed to us.
