Today is the day the Whitby and the Hesperus – the first two ships bringing Indian indentured labourers to then British Guiana (BG) – serendipitously appeared off the coast of Port Georgetown on the same day, even though they had departed the port of Calcutta more than two weeks apart: May 5th, 1838. The receiving depot, which was at Barrack Street next to where the Marriott Hotel stands today, was not ready to process them. The Whitby was dispatched to Plantation Highbury, up the Berbice River, to disgorge some of its human cargo.
As such, the first Indians set foot on Guyana soil – and in fact in the entire Western Hemisphere – in Berbice. The arrival of Indians to British Guiana was a momentous occasion: one that would irremediably alter the trajectory of its social, economic, cultural and political development. Socially, the society was already “plural”, with the freed African ex-slaves and Portuguese (brought in since 1835) adding to the white planters, overseers and Government officials. There were also the Indigenous Peoples sequestered in the interior, and a “Coloured” strata issuing from the miscegenation between the white planters/overseers and African slave women. They formed a buffer zone between whites and blacks.
The Indians, however, with their vast numbers (238,000) shipped in over the next 79 years, qualitatively altered the nature of the society. But it was economically that the Indians had their greatest impact. Even before the abolition of slavery, the planters were petrified at the prospects of sugar’s survival in a post-slavery economy, in light of the vast tracts of land that were available for the freed slaves to occupy and make their own “living”. And it was this fear at the loss of a stable labour force, which sugar demanded, that drove them to introduce “indentured” labour into the industry. In many of the small West Indian islands, there was not even the transitional “apprenticeship” scheme for the freed slaves that we had here between 1834 and 1838: they had nowhere to go, but return to the cane fields.
But the planters also had to cater for the loss of their preferential British market because the tariffs imposed on sugar from countries producing the commodity cheaper, were to be removed. In addition to a stable work force, sugar production needed a cheap one; and this was where the Indians’ greatest economic impact was felt. While the Portuguese and the Chinese (who started arriving in 1853) quickly abandoned the sugar fields at the expiration of their indentureship, the Indians stayed on and facilitated more than a doubling of the production of sugar than in the heyday of slavery.
But how could the Indians survive on wages that the ex-slaves, Portuguese and Chinese balked at – 24 cents daily for men and 16 cents for women? They supplemented this miserable sum by cultivating rice on swampy lands leased or bought from the plantations, and by planting cash crops and rearing cattle to sell their milk during their free time. These endeavours in time, became substantial industries on their own, and lowered the cost of living for the entire colony – and formed the base for Indian economic advancement out of the sugar plantations.
Culturally, the Indians’ who were brought from North India (95%) and South India (5%), had different practices from the “Creole culture”, which had evolved between the African slaves and the white ruling class over hundreds of years they lived together during slavery. This served the interest of the planters, since it helped to nip any ties that might be formed by the Indians with the few freed Africans who remained on the plantations in “logies”. This cultural and social pluralism, along with economic competition helped foster differential ethnic political mobilization in modern times, which exacerbated our divisions. The PNC was formed in 1955 by Forbes Burnham explicitly to counter “Indian dominance”. And this has precipitated political violence against Indians since.
This year, all of the major Indian Arrival Day commemoration events have been cancelled because once again, the Opposition has fostered violence against Indians.
