The shortage of women on the plantations during and immediately after Indentureship, because the recruiters in India couldn’t secure even the one-third quota, had a great impact in reshaping social relations in the new community they would form in Guyana.
It played a major role in breaking down the caste and even religious distinctions that were so powerful in India. The low status given to widows or women with children there was also reversed as they were so in demand.
Coming from a rather patriarchal society, but who could now work independently, it forced a rethinking of the role of women since they now seized greater agency in choosing their companions or remaining with them.
I will illustrate these points with examples from my own family history. My paternal great-great grandfather Rambishun (b1869) left a wife and baby son in Ishmailpur, Bihar and arrived in British Guiana in 1888 where he “married” Sanichari (b1873), who already had a son, Rambharose. Not long after, Sanichari’s widowed mother married a Muslim man. Her oldest son, brought up as a Muslim, was younger than his nephew, my great grandfather. Interestingly, Sanichari separated from Bishun in his later years and raised her grandson from her firstborn, Rambharose, who had passed away.
Whether fact or fiction, the story is told in my family of one of Rambishun’s seven brothers arriving in Demerara to look for him, but upon discovering the latter had married a local woman outside his caste, returned to India without even seeing Rambishun.
If true, Rambishun and Sanichari would have been one of the few Hindus whose marriage was registered to have been checked in the immigration depot’s records. “Marriage” was a rather fluid relationship to the early indentureds, and even the ones performed by the Hindu or Muslim rites were not recognised by the authorities.
Remarkably, however, towards the end of Indentureship with an increase in the number of women from local births, the immigrants began to recreate the communities they had left behind in India. And to reintroduce in inevitably altered forms, some of the old social relationships.
The religions of Hinduism and Islam, which the immigrants had brought with them in their practices, provided the framework for this change, but it played out within the plantation environment. My paternal great grandfather Ramlagan (b1896) living at De Willem on the West Coast Demerara, for instance, was betrothed to a girl in Leguan at the age of eight in 1904. She was identified through “Jahaji” relations.
Ramlagan was expected to bring her to his home when he “became a man”, most likely between 14 and16 but never did. He had learnt to read Hindi, considered himself “modern” and was determined to select his own bride. As a young man, he was the driver (foreman) of a female weeding gang and there saw and courted his future bride, my great grandmother, Kaamoda (b1901) sometime around 1918. She boasted that while he had his way with “many girls” she withstood his charms until marriage!
However while she was famously very strong willed and independent, Kaamoda was typical of the women from that time onwards who allowed their husbands to strut on the stage as “the man” but behind the scenes was an equal when it came to running the house and making major family decisions. She worked from the age of six in the “backdam” and after marriage, also helped with the 3-acre “farm” Rambishun had acquired in exchange for his return passage to India.
It was on the site of the old factory at De Willem which has been abandoned and had to be laboriously cleared and levelled. She would also plant, cut and thresh paddy from the land she and Ramlagan rented.
All of Kaamoda first four children – sons – died young and it was not until 1929 that my grandmother Surujdai was born, followed by her sister in 1939. Kaamoda would have then been 38 years old – practically middle aged. She worked in the cane fields until she was sixty and then, along with Ramlagan, worked the farm and rice “bed” full time. They raised my father from the age of six.
