I think by now readers realise that Indian indentured historiography is fraught with problems, or at least this is my position on the scholarship. I will just discuss two more problems before I move on and share some thoughts on how we can move this field of study forward.
The first problem is the deafening silence on unclaimed remittances, which I have addressed in this and other newspapers, particularly to the Indian and British High Commissioners in Guyana. Let me repeat briefly what I have said earlier and I will not stop until I hear something from these busy Commissioners. In the process, I ask that my call for unclaimed remittances should not be conflated with reparations.
Whatever might have been the problems so associated with not remitting savings from indentured servants in British Guiana to their families in India, the point remains that the unclaimed remittances belonged to the indentured servants not the colonial government. There is overwhelming evidence to make a case to reclaim these remittances. The records show that thousands and thousands of pounds of remittances from indentured servants went unclaimed. The current leaders of indentured scholarship should at least ask the question: Where are the unclaimed remittances now, or what happened to them? They can even push for the holders (if they can be found) of these unclaimed remittances to hand them over so that they can be given to the descendants of indentured Indians in the Caribbean, especially in the impoverished communities. However, no one has even brought up these ideas, and the challenge to reclaim the unclaimed remittances remains a closet secret.
The second problem, which I believe, is worse than the evils of indentureship because in some ways Indians are still dragging the chains of this demonic act. This act by the Indian government, which is practically absent from Indian historiography, is the shameful abandonment of indentured Indians during and after indentureship. Those Indians who chose to settle in the Indo-phone Caribbean lost their Indian citizenship.
There seems to be no concrete explanation as to why the Indian government chose to take such action. One suspects that the Indian government was powerless since it was essentially a colonised government subjected to the more powerful British Imperial government. Certainly, more research and published studies on the Indian government’s policy of non-inclusion will bring awareness to one of the multitudes of maladies during Indian indentureship.
Perhaps this question about the Indian government’s policy of non-inclusion should be posed to various Indian High Commission Offices in the Caribbean since it had dire consequences. The loss of citizenship made Indians feel “homeless” in the Caribbean. For example, in the 1960s in British Guiana when racial riots broke out between Africans and Indians, many Indians felt they had no government protection and no place to escape to, even to their former homeland.
The Indian government now grants citizenship to overseas Indians, but this move is probably too late since a majority of Indians in the Caribbean have lost connections with India. If the Indian government had not denied Indian citizenship rights to the resident Indians in the Caribbean, a more meaningful connection would have been forged, culturally and otherwise, between India and the Caribbean through migration.
Now, on the topic of what ought to be done. Well, the study of indentured Indian history in the Caribbean should follow a revisionist approach with the intention of not merely dismissing previous studies, but fostering a focus for enquiry to better understand and advance our knowledge of indentureship. The focus should be from the memory and narrative of indentured servants and less reliance on archival records, housed in former colonial mother countries and in the Caribbean. This approach will produce an alternative, if not an equally compelling, collective memory of indentureship. Put differently, there ought to be a better approach and a better, selective use of sources to deconstruct, in order to reconstruct historical narrative. This approach has the potential to produce a reconstruction different from the predominantly ongoing neo-slave scholarship.
To illustrate, the use of colonial records to write indenture so far has shown that there was one or two Indian heroines during indenture, for example, the leadership role played by an Indian indentured woman named Janey Tetary on plantation Zorg en Hoop in Suriname. She was eventually killed by colonial authorities.
Are we to believe that the movement of 500,000 Indians from their homeland to the Caribbean and eighty years of indentured experience produced only one outstanding female indentured servant? From the colonial perspective, this memory existed in limitation and marginalisation. However, the basic understanding to historical memory is that there are two sides, and while historical truths cannot be determined by what people tell us, both sides should certainly be examined to arrive at some degree of authenticity. ([email protected])
