Contra some recent comments, Indian-Guyanese were shipped out from a British India that had been pillaged and looted (not coincidentally a Hindi word), with its native cottage industries, especially in textiles, destroyed to create millions of peasants as “surplus labour” that sought a “vent”. Irrespective of particular origins, they were othered into “coolies”: persons at the bottom of the social ladder, to provide labour on plantations. After the abolition of slavery, in an era of supposed “progress”, they were subjected to an “agreement” specifying the conditions of their labour. It is this agreement, which they pronounced “Girmit”, that they defined themselves as “Girmitiyas – people of the agreement. This act of naming was their seminal act of signalling their appropriation of agency.
They knew it was a one-sided contract. But they “banded their belly” to fulfill their side of it, because it opened more opportunities than in British-ravaged India; to which most chose not to return, confident that after they had finished their indentureship, they had the ability “to produce two blades of grass where there was but one”.
They were labelled “docile” for “keeping their word”, but when the planters broke theirs, they rebelled. These are shown by the number of court cases filed against Girmitiyas, and the number of strikes they staged even in the face of the “leaden argument”.
Girmitiyas marked the transition from a world in which slave labour was abandoned, but the world of “free labour” had not yet been born. They were kept in that intermediate state of being neither slave but certainly not freedmen. The transition was not for humanitarian reasons, as the colonizers would have it, but for the more prosaic reason of greater profits for the empire. However, as immigrants escaping British-generated landlessness, joblessness, famines and debt, they were determined to work their way up and out, even when other groups balked. Their motto, as one scholar put it, became “laboro ergo sum” – “I am because I work”.
Girmitiya became the inaugural “Indian”, since in the colonies it didn’t matter from which region or rank one originated; they were all “coolies”. When a group is ostracized, it becomes more cohesive: solidity of the group is directly proportionate to the impressed pressures. But they became also less bogged down by the deadweight of caste etc. From the moment they stepped into the Depot in Calcutta and were handed those new clothes, they were liberated from the caste semiotics of clothes and how they were worn.
When Girmitiyas were shipped to the various Imperial colonies to work on the sugar plantations, in each case, they encountered groups already there. The constant were the ruling Europeans, who exercised total control through their laws; coercive forces; and hegemonic, discursive structures already deployed in India. It is now a sociological truism that groups placed in proximity with each other will engage in a “social comparison process”. While initially Girmitiyas were placed at the bottom of the social ladder, they inexorably elevated themselves because of the same derided culture that conferred the value of hard work. But it exacted its price in suicides, alcoholism and domestic violence.
However, as Girmitiyas became the progressive, upwardly mobile group, it created a negative sense of group worth in those displaced. In response, the latter claimed greater legitimacy to the national patrimony – through Christianity/Westernization, earlier arrival, or “greater suffering” etc. In the decolonisation, “democratizing” wave after WWII, these factors led to the present politics of entitlement” against the background of Girmitiya unprotectedness. While the British had ostentatiously arranged for a “Protector of Immigrants”, which, with some notable exceptions, took over from the “Protector of Slaves in the Amelioration Period”, these operated more in the breach than not. It left a lasting legacy of Girmitiyas not expecting much justice from “law and order”. But more insidious were the formation of armies and Police Forces staffed exclusively from non-Girmitiyas, which further exacerbated the tensions between these groups.
The state, however, is the property of all citizens, which include Girmitiyas, and must be manned by what Hegel called a “universal class” representing all. In plural societies, this demands that the groups be proportionally represented in them. If not, leaders from the dominant elements will always be tempted to seize power or demand partiality in political conflicts.
Girmitiyas cannot accept the principle of opponents, that: “what we have is ours and what you have is negotiable”.
