Palgrave MacMillan will publish the above book next month (July 2016). The idea of writing this book on Denmark’s solitary experiment with Indian indenture on St Croix from 1863 to 1873 emerged from a number of evolving interests.
The first interest occurred in the 1990s when I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation on Indian resistance and accommodation in the Caribbean at the Indian Record Office in the British Library, London.
There, I came across some unusual information on Denmark’s involvement with Indian indenture on St Croix. I was struck by what I found because I was unfamiliar with the fact that the British Government allowed the Danish planters on St Croix to import Indian indentured servants to substitute the loss of slave labour. I was also struck by what I found because the literature on Indian indenture in the Caribbean has not seriously addressed this labour experiment on St Croix.
The second interest occurred when I was asked to teach the history of the United States Virgin Islands and the Caribbean. Within my first year, I realised that even though Indians were brought to St Croix, the experience of these labourers was marginalised to footnotes in many major textbooks on the Caribbean. However, the work of the Indian researcher Kalyan Kumar Sircar should be recognised as the first person to write on Indian indenture on St Croix. Nonetheless, Sircar was writing from Europe and did not demonstrate a thorough understanding of the local realities of St Croix.
The third interest occurred when I presented a paper at the conference on the 150th anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery and Indenture in Suriname in 2013. On the programme, there were topics on every island in the Caribbean that experimented with Indian indenture except for St Croix. I was convinced that there is a need to put the St Croix experiment in a book form.
The final interest occurred in March 2014 when I presented a paper on 150th anniversary of the arrival of Indian indentured labourers on St Croix at the Landmarks Society of that island.
I was shocked and stunned at the size of the audience as well as at the interests of many who wanted to find their indentured roots. I left St Croix thinking that only a comprehensive book would solve this need.
Space does not allow me to provide full details of the book but two analyses will suffice. The first is that in other Caribbean islands, continuous importation of fresh emigrants from India brought with it the culture, customs and conversations about India that facilitated and reinforced bonds amongst the immigrants.
This inter-ethnic exchange amongst new arrivals and Caribbean-based indentured was not one way. Arriving immigrants generally received information about the pros and cons of indenture from the resident indentured that eventually helped them to adjust to an ever conflict habituated plantation world. None of this happened on St Croix.
Indentured Indians were not only isolated on the plantations but St Croix never received a second wave of indentured Indian immigrants which meant that the first batch of indentured Indians never saw people like themselves until their contracts of five years expired.
To people known for their home-loving character, the loss of and nostalgia for things about India certainly contributed to some social ills, including depression, on the plantations. Indians were left to imagine their homeland, although they wrote and received some letters from their spouses and relatives in India.
The second analysis is that there were many disappointments with Indian indenture on St Croix but one worth sharing here.
It is expected that nineteenth century indenture would not be free of problems but attempts to improve it once put in place was not a priority even with the well-minded plantation owners. The latter might have even been jeered at for their pains to ensure a decent indenture system.
For many Indians, the indenture system had the better of them as evidenced by flight to their homeland when their contracts expired. But what is more disappointing is that the indentured never had their day and we know this because they left no traces of themselves, no Hindu Temples, no Muslim Mosques, no architecture, no sculpture, no monument and no writing, as noticed elsewhere in the Caribbean where Indians were indentured.
This book is dedicated to indentured Indians on St Croix and my hope is that the Government of the United Virgin Islands will put in place a small monument to recognise the sacrifice and contributions these labourers made to the island. I am working on it.
