To reiterate, Indian indentured historiography has revealed elements of decay because of the predominant use of archival records, which has inadvertently produced colonial patterns and perspectives. These colonial records were determined more by authority rather by evidence. Of course, not every colonial record on indenture should be dismissed but its originality with regards to whom, where and how it was determined should at least be challenged.
I do not expect colonial writers to write a balanced history of the colonised, that will be myopic attacking the strawman but I do think that we should not repeat the missteps and the mistreatment of the history of the colonised. Unfortunately, Indian historiography has revealed the latter trend.
Over the past four decades, a substantial number of studies have been published on Indian Indentureship in the Caribbean. Two books, however, appear to have dominated the field. In fact, it is impossible to write about indentureship without using these books. The first is Hugh Tinker’s, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920, and the second is Keith Laurence’s A Question of Labor: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875–1917. Tinker tells a story of how indentured Indians were brought from India to the Caribbean under dubious circumstances to replace slave labour and subsequently experienced conditions similar to former African slaves. He argues that indentured Indians exchanged one poverty-striven and oppressed environment for another.
Specifically, Tinker takes the position that Indians were brutalised in the Caribbean sugar plantations during indenture and reaped marginal benefits from their contracts.
Laurence’s book examines the immigration and settlement of Indians from their homeland to the Caribbean. Laurence shows how indenture was organised through a three-way interaction among the British, Indian, and Caribbean government/planter class.
The questions that Tinker did not address are as follows: why would an estimated 30,000 ex-indentured Indians return to work on the sugar plantations for a second and even third time if the system was a new form of slavery? How come a majority of indentured Indians chose to stay in the Caribbean rather than return to their homeland? Of course, the planters induced Indians with small parcels of land in lieu of return passages. But Indians did remit savings to India and Indian settlers in the Caribbean did acquire land, among other things. Where Laurence’s study is concerned, he rarely used oral resources in his study of Indian Indentureship, which is really a missed opportunity, since he started his research in the 1960s when some ex-indentured servants were still around in British Guiana and Trinidad.
Laurence’s book would have provided a fuller understanding of the Indian experience with indenture in the Caribbean if he had utilised oral narratives of the survivors of indentureship.
Instead, both Tinker and Laurence used and relied on the archival records of the colonialists, Christian missionaries, as well as the occasional European individual traveller/writer to write the history of Indian indenture during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from both sides of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
The weakness of this approach is that the archival records were written by individuals from their own perspectives, reflecting anecdotal rather than analytical evidence. These individuals relied on authority rather than evidence to write on Indian indenture. The writings or documents can be described as a scholarship based on the oligarchy of strangers to the reality of indenture, at least from the point of view of the indentured.
Tinker and Laurence therefore might have magnified the narrow thinking of the creators of these original records. Both authors might have also continued a variety of errors (noted above) based on omission and commission.
Even when Indian indenture had received attention from independent-minded researchers who used empirical means to gather information and form generalisations, indentured Indian historiography still had inherent problems. They have approached and analysed indenture from the position of indentured Indians, drawing upon their own voices but these voices have been drawn from archival records that were overwhelmingly controlled by the organisers of indenture. By contrast, Prakash Vatuk’s article “Protest Songs of East Indians in British Guiana” is based on unfiltered Indian sources. The author conducted field research in British Guiana in the 1960s, a decade (1955) after the last shipment of Indians left that colony for India. He recorded over nine hundred protest songs from the descendants of indenture, but unfortunately only a few of these songs still exist.
The point should be stressed, however, that oral history and testimonies of indentured, if not used effectively, can produce weak and strong points much the same way with the use of archival records.
To be continued
