Saturday marked the 180th anniversary of the arrival of Indians to Guyana. The first batch of 396 who arrived in 1838 was just an “experiment” which, after a hiatus, resumed in 1845 and continued until 1917 when 239,000 had been offloaded to toil on sugar plantations. At “Emancipation”, 82,000 Africans had been freed and the planters, not surprisingly, were apprehensive about retaining their labour in the structured manner the cultivation and manufacture sugar from sugar cane demanded.
Cultivation of sugar cane on the Guyanese coast differed from that in the West Indies and necessitated the construction and maintenance of an elaborate network of conservancies, canals and sluices (kokers) to make the land cultivable. Only a mass enterprise like sugar would have persuaded the colonial power to expend the vast sums needed to keep this hydraulic system going.
Because the freed Guyanese slaves had the alternative of moving off the plantations by purchasing the ever-increasing number of abandoned plantations – unlike the case in the West Indies – they demanded higher wages. This, the planters could not afford, since the “preferential tariffs” in England had been removed. They turned desperately first to the smaller WI islands and then to Madeira to supply new, cheap labour. They proved insufficient, and it was the Indians, who not only saved the industry but soon tripled the production achieved during slavery. Guyana soon surpassed Jamaica as the largest British sugar-producing colony.
Three-quarters of the Indian immigrants remained in Guyana and they changed the society irretrievably. The very first batch had 94 Muslims and 302 Hindus, who brought and retained to a remarkable degree, their religious practices and in doing so, formed a multi-religious society. The European colonists had forbidden the Africans brought as slaves from practicing their religions – which included Islam and African practices dismissed as “animism” – and most had picked up Christian practices from their masters. At the abolition of slavery, the colonists and missionaries explicitly began to organise the freed slaves into the officially sponsored Christian Church and Church-controlled schools. While the missionaries also attempted to proselytise the Muslim and Hindu Indians, it was to prove an uphill task that is still ongoing.
Along with the official insistence on “one religion” – Christianity – Indians faced the pressure to practice one “Creole-White-bias” culture through official laws and practices. Hindus in India cremated their dead, but in Guyana cremation was forbidden and Hindus were forced to adopt the practice of burial and the ancillary practices of “keeping wakes”. Unlike Muslims who had retained their Friday congregational worship – “Juma” – Hindus had no set day of worship or congregational worship in India. With Sunday being their one “day” off, they adopted the Christian of “Sunday congregational service”, and the “sermon”.
Even after indentureship, the Indians were structured to remain on the sugar plantations. They were rented or allowed to purchase lands that were used to cultivate rice to supplement the miserable wages the ex-slaves refused, but ended up creating a new industry, while still yoked to the sugar plantations or its environs. Systematically denied entrance to the prestigious civil service or other jobs in the State sector, Indians followed the Portuguese immigrants who had preceded them into the retail trade and the professions of law and medicine.
Their agitation on the sugar plantations, at first was to insist the terms of their indentured contracts be observed. After indentureship, it was for better wages and working conditions during the depression, was in tandem with other disturbances in the WI and led finally to the colonial Government deploying a Royal Commission in 1938 to investigate. Improvement of conditions and finally the increase in the franchise were recommended.
This led to the conceptualisation of a mass-based political party by Cheddi Jagan and “the rest is history”. Unfortunately, under the People’s National Congress, this has become a revisionist history as exemplified by the firing of 5700 sugar workers and the refusal to properly commemorate Cheddi Jagan’s birth centenary as the “father of the nation”.
“Arrival” still means “exclusion”.
