Return or remain?

Last Friday, September 4, was the 71st anniversary of the MV Resurgent becoming the last “return” ship transporting time-expired Girmitiyas to India in 1955, and it prompted the question of why Rambishoon, my great-grandfather, had not taken that option. A return passage was a critical early clause in the indentured contract that was to kick in after the five years of indenture had been fully served – meaning that all periods of incarceration for labour violations were added on. To encourage the now fully seasoned worker to remain as a labourer, a $50 bounty – equivalent to the cost of the return passage – was offered in the 1850s if the worker re-indentured for an additional five years.
However, because of sugar planters’ influence on the legislature – both local and in London – this offer was not only removed in 1873, but in 1879, Law 12 required male returnees to pay one-fourth and females to pay one-sixth of their return passage. In 1899, the law was again changed to shift the burden onto the labourer when it was stipulated that males would now pay one-half and females one-third. Rambishoon, however, having arrived before August 1898, was exempt from this new burden.
The record is replete with accounts of the difficulties and challenges returnees faced in India, and these accounts would have filtered back into the Indian community on and off the sugar plantations by re-indentured. The returning Girmitiyas invariably discovered that their attitudes had changed significantly during their stay in Guiana, and they could not fit in with the India they had left or which some were discovering for the first time. They were fleeced from the moment they stepped off the return ship, and the expense of Hindus performing the ceremonies to be reinstated into their community after crossing the Kala Pani (Dark Waters of the ocean) was the final straw.
Many returned to the docks where they had arrived and tried desperately to raise the money to return to Guiana. A slum developed near the depots of Calcutta at Marienburg, where they scraped out a desperate existence.
The death rates on the return ships were frequently very high, and on the Sutlej, which left in December 1929 with 920 persons from Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana, 420 died because they were old, and the ship was overcrowded. In the previous year, the same ship had made the return journey with 37 deaths, which precipitated an inquiry that clearly had no effect. My wife’s great-grandmother – who had arrived on the Allanshaw in its notorious 1885 journey chronicled in “Maharani Miseries” – had returned on the 1929 Sutlej from De Willem and might have been known to Rambishoon, who passed in 1944.
These factors played a significant role in determining why only one in three Girmitiyas – 75,000 out of 239,000 – made the “return” decision. For Rambishoon, the Indian reaction was even more personal. Sometime around 1895, one of his older brothers arrived in the country in search of him. The family might have paid his passage, or more likely, he would have volunteered as a worker on the ship. Not long after his re-indenture in early 1894, Rambishoon had married a girl from the neighbouring logies of Zeeburg, and this was recorded in the immigration records at the Depot. Upon learning that the girl was not only Kurmi but also from a Bengali “lower” caste – and born in Demerara to boot – the brother returned to India without even visiting Rambishoon. A visiting sub-agent to De Willem conveyed his brother’s message that he was excommunicated from his family in Ishmailpur.
The other factor acting against Girmitiyas returning was the planters influencing the legislature not only to introduce sharing the return passage as a burden but also to offer to purchase land, which most immigrants craved, especially farmers like Rambishoon. In 1880, an estate in Essequibo, Huis’t Dierien, became a model for land settlements for time-expired Girmitiyas. Having stalled due to unfavourable farming conditions, new schemes were launched starting in 1898 with Helena, followed by Whim, Maria’s Pleasure, and then Bush Lot in 1902. Importantly, Indians who bought land did not surrender their return passage.
Crown lands in Canal #2 became available in 1898 at a lease price of fifteen cents per acre in plots of 25 acres, as opposed to the previous $5 per acre for 100 acres. Rambishoon leased a 25-acre plot in 1899 when his second contract was completed.