It is not without a certain degree of irony that the first day of May – the month in which Indian indentured labourers were first brought to British Guiana (BG): in 1838 on May 5th – in modern times has been declared to be Labour Day. Labour, which along with land and capital, is defined as one of the three factors of production, is however rather peculiar when provided by humans. It raises questions about the implications of our humanity. The colonials had “resolved” questions on Africans’ humanity by defining them as not human but as “chattel”: property like animals who could be coerced by any means necessary to deliver their labour free as “slaves”. The Indians were brought as indentured to replace the freed Africans.
Indian Indentured labourers in a canefield
Indentureship was supposed to return humanity to the Indian labourers by offering them a contract (or agreement some pronounced “Girmit”) that specified the terms of their employment to which they “voluntarily” agreed: their agency was supposedly recognised. Those terms, however – five years’ work and then a return passage to India, a fixed rate of pay (1 shilling daily for males throughout the indentureship period) for specified “tasks”, housing and medical care – were interpreted by the same system that had extracted slave labour and was severely abused to extract the labour as cheaply as possible. The period of labour was extended to ten years, and the returning emigrant had to pay portions of their return passage. The daily tasks were invariably too arduous to be completed in the 9-hour workday; the housing was worse than the mule stables, and medical care was geared to return the worker to the fields. The system ensured that if the labourer was not in the fields, it was because he was in the hospital or in jail.
But in India, which had been devastated under British rule, famine became endemic, and, combined with direct taxation on crops, hundreds of millions were uprooted, and roamed the country seeking subsistence. Emigration was initiated from Bengal in 1834 to Mauritius and 1838 to BG against a background of their 1770 famine that had killed a third (10million) of their population. By the time indentureship was abolished in 1917, conservatively another 50 million had perished from famines. Combined with individual challenges such as child widows not permitted to remarry pressures in the extended joint family, the more enterprising migrated to other parts of India and to the foreign plantation economies.
Indians threshing paddy
Overall, there were some 1.5 million Indian indentured labourers sent to foreign climes, of which half a million ended up in the British, French and Dutch Caribbean, with 239,000 of them to BG. This labour force was critical to the survival of this country. At the end of slavery, sugar production was around 60,000 tonnes, but by 1848 had plummeted to 20,000 tonnes.
By the 1880s, with indentured labour (which included Portuguese, Chinese, West Indies and Africans from Africa) sugar production had grown to 120,000 tonnes. As noted historian William A Green pointed out: “Although the sugar industry survived (in British Guiana after the abolition of slavery) at very heavy social cost, there can be little doubt that the coastal lowlands inhabited by nearly the whole population of the colony would have been swallowed by the sea had the organising presence of the plantations been removed.” The “great social cost” was borne primarily by indentured labourers, of which Indian indentured labourers were the overwhelming majority.
The Indians who were brought to BG as indentured labourers were overwhelmingly from villages that were sustained by agriculture – especially wet rice cultivation. As one of the inducements for remaining in BG, the planters rented them small, marginal swampy plots on where they cultivated rice that served to keep them tied to the plantation while subsidising their food costs to the benefit of the planter. The first large-scale rice cultivation was done at Edinburg West Coast Demerara (WCD) when sixteen acres were rented to a number of Indentured labourers by the Plantation Overseer William Russell in 1865. After Crown Land costs were reduced towards the end of the century, large acreages were purchased to cultivate rice.
According to a contemporary report, “Between 1903 and 1919 the area under rice cultivation has extended from 17,000 to 61,000 acres; and whereas prior to 1893 the average annual import of rice …was 18,000 tonnes, this import ‘had by’ 1917 been converted into an export of 14,000 tonnes.”
The indentured Indians had launched an industry that remains their largest employer.
