The commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the abolition Indian indentureship kicked off last Thursday with a dinner hosted by the High Commissioner of India and a gala event at the National Culture Centre the following evening. As the vaunted “land of six peoples”, Guyana should consider itself fortunate by its diversity but at the same time, it has to continuously engage in self-reflection to ensure the peoples see themselves as part of one Guyanese mosaic. The Indian indentureship abolition event provides one such opportunity.
Modern Guyana was built on the fateful decision of European colonisers not to exploit the labour of the native Indigenous peoples to provide labour on their plantations which provided their home countries with tropical produce. African slaves were introduced from the beginning in the early seventeenth century by the Dutch and in 1834 when slavery was abolished by the British, which then “owned” British Guiana, over 80,000 slaves were liberated.
The English abolitionists had supported the suggestion by Adam Smith that “free labour” would be more efficient that slave labour on the plantations. The planters, however, were convinced the freed Africans would not be as reliable as was demanded by the exigencies of sugar production. Compounding their claim was their knowledge that with the imminent removal of preferential sugar tariffs in Britain, their profits would plummet and wages would have to shrink, which would be unacceptable to the freed slaves.
The planters turned instead to indentured labour, which ironically, had been the first choice of European colonists when they brought their own poor to the other islands in the 17th century. Under indentured labour contracts, the passage of the labourer was paid for by the employer but he had to work for a specified period under stipulated conditions. These were very harsh and had criminal sanctions. At the end of the period he was now free and given a sum of money, or more frequently, a plot of land that formed the foundation of his independent livelihood.
After introducing Portuguese and a smattering of other Europeans indentures, India provided the bulk of the indentured labourers, with substantial numbers of freed Africans introduced from other Caribbean Islands and Africa. During indentureship, the Portuguese and Chinese immediately moved off the plantations, which were then serviced by skilled Africans in the factories and Indians in the fields. To augment their increasingly meagre wages, the Indians exchanged their contracted right of return passage to India for small plots of land on which they planted rice and cash crops. They also reared cattle which then offered livelihoods off the plantation.
The end of Indian indentureship was resisted by the planters who wanted continued supplies to undercut the bargaining power of the contract-expired Indians. Their lobby in the British Parliament was counter-manned by English officials in the Government of India, a much more lucrative colony, which wanted to placate Indian nationalists. The latter, from the Indian National Congress, were informed about the abysmal conditions of indentured labourers by Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer in Natal South Africa. While the periodic strikes by indentures on the plantations – here and in other colonies – to protest the violations of their contractual conditions were controlled by the planters via their proxy state Police did not have local impact, their reports in India stimulated the Indian nationalists in India. Especially in 1913 when 13 workers were shot and killed at Plantation Rose Hall.
The end of Indian indentureship then precipitated the struggle by Indians for equity, justice and full civil rights after all indentured contracts were commuted on January 1, 1920, and they became full citizens. Even though a labour union to represent urban workers was launched in 1919, fourteen protesting sugar workers were shot and killed in 1924. Finally, in 1939, after four more were killed at Leonora and five in 1948 at Enmore, their own labour union picked up their struggle, which unfortunately, continues into the present.
