Sir Shridath Ramphal, Attorney General under Forbes Burnham and later Secretary General of the Commonwealth, passed away on Friday at the age of 96. The following is excerpted from his memoirs, “Glimpses of a Global Life”.
“On 1 January 1881, the sailing ship Ellora arrived in Georgetown from Calcutta after a voyage of nearly three months. Its human cargo was indentured labourers for the sugar plantations of British Guiana.
“Among them was a widowed mother, Doolnie, and her son of nine, Ramphul, bound for (Gladstone’s) estate of Vreed-en-Hoop. Her story was already remarkable, though not unique, for this journey across the kala pani was for her a third crossing.
In the early 1870s bubonic plague, which was to reach epidemic proportions at the turn of the century in India’s United Provinces, had left this woman widowed. She and her husband were high caste Brahmins, but poor. And as so often happened in their circumstances, all but one of their children had succumbed, leaving only one son alive. ‘Suttee’…was a sacrifice the widow was unwilling to make.
She took the only other option – return to her maternal home. But it was not a real option. She was treated as an outcast. To purify herself, she took her infant son to the sacred city of Benares for both to wash in the holy waters of the Ganges. Benares then, as Varanasi now, was a city to which the forlorn and despairing came, and there lurked the Arkathis – the touts employed by the agents recruiting labour for the sugar plantations.
“To the rejected widow, the promise of a new life must have seemed an answer to her prayers. But who knows with what stories she was lured, or how long she believed the journey or the labouring to be, or even where she was going? But to Calcutta with her son she duly went, and was recruited for the West Indies, arriving eventually in Suriname – Dutch Guiana. That traffic to Suriname in 1873 was disastrous; 18 per cent of the immigrants died in the first twelve months. But the widow and her son survived. Eventually, she worked out the five-year contract and, no longer bound, they took the long journey back to India.
“But the rules of caste were strict, and she found no welcome despite her absence of six years. In fact, in her penance, she had sinned still further by having crossed the ‘Black Waters’ and lived among unclean meat-eaters. “Once again, she went with her son to Benares to wash seven times in the Ganges in the hope of being favoured with better fortune. Her late husband’s family was of the priestly class – the Pandas – who it is thought administered the sacred Vishnupad Temple at Gaya in Bihar.
“For a while, as they lingered by the holy river, the boy was apprenticed to a priest, one of the Pandas of Benares, and began his training in the Hindu scriptures. But, once again, they encountered the silver-tongued Arkathis, perhaps this time with a tale of a better life than Suriname had offered. The British sugar planters were said to be less cruel than the Dutch.
“A second time they journeyed to Calcutta, and a second contract of indenture. This time, however, the widow had no thought of returning to the village and family that had cast her out so cruelly, not once, but twice. Harsh and uncertain as were the fortunes of indenture, she was leaving now for good: to give her young son, in particular, a better chance than he might ever have in a village and a family that did not want them.
“So it was that, in due season, on the ship Ellora, the widow and her son reached Georgetown, committed to labour on that same estate at Vreed-en-Hoop that the abolitionists had singled out for attack almost fifty years earlier, and with which, under the then ownership of Sir John Gladstone, the whole system of Indian indenture to the West Indies had begun. The widow fulfilled her contract of labour on the sugar plantations, her son…sharing her burden.”
(The son was Sridath Ramphal’s grandfather.”)
