“Remember one-third quota/Coolie woman./ Was your blood spilled so that I might reject my history?”
– Mahadai Das, “They came in ships”
During last May, “Arrival Month”, I wrote some pieces about the contributions of women during the period of Indian Indentureship, which lasted between 1838 and 1917. With the 100th anniversary of the End of Indentureship coming up, I thought maybe I could share a few thoughts on the role women played to bring about that end.
In the line from Mahadai Das’ poem above, she’s referring to the quota stipulated as to the minimum number of women that had to be recruited for each shipment of “coolies” – as the Indian Indentureds were scornfully called. With those numbers, you can imagine what the competition for women did to social relations on first the ships and then the logees. Murders and choppings and desertions were rampant.
On the ship Allanshaw’s voyage to Guyana in 1885, along with my maternal great-great grandmother, was a woman Maharani who was raped by some sailors during the voyage and died. Her story is told as “Maharani’s Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean”, by Professor Verene Shepherd, one of the present champions of the Reparations Movement. It should be read by all persons in the Caribbean to get a glimpse of what it took to bring the half-a-million Indian Indentureds to the Caribbean. Seventeen persons died on that voyage and were thrown into the “Kala Pani” – the dreaded “Black Waters”.
To secure women for their “one third” quota from a 19th century India where women were completely sequestered, even the recruiters (“arkatis”) must have been challenged. Most of the female recruits were listed as “single” and there is much evidence that there was a high percentage of youthful widows. At that time, they could not remarry and would have lived a very miserable life of semi-servitude if their in-laws were willing to keep them, or more frequently, not a much different one in their home village.
Even in modern India, many widows have a liminal existence of “betwixt and between” the living and the dead and it is not surprising that many of them in the 19th century were persuaded to start a new life in a foreign land. Some of went into relationships in the depots while they waited for the ship’s complement of immigrants to be filled. They would be described as “married” before the final boarding. This behaviour – breaking of caste rules! – scandalised later commentators such as Gandhi, one can imagine their reaction to the reality on the plantations when women were in such demand that even older widows with children could remarry – between religions much less caste boundaries.
Additionally women were harassed by both white overseers and Indian drivers for sexual favours and it should not shock the sensibilities of anyone that several women would have voluntarily entered into “liaisons” with men in power. How much different is it in the modern world of the office world? Starting in the beginning of the 20th century, Indian Nationalists started to take up the cause of overseas Indentured Indians – mostly because their degradation gave lie to their claim to be “brown Englishmen”. The “cause” of “protecting Indian women abroad attracted the greatest interest and even attracted one of the top Indian Nationalist of the time – Sarojnie Naidu.
Women were also an integral element in the several episodes, beginning in 1872 in Devonshire Castle on the Essequibo Coast, when immigrants protested their working conditions – including abuse of women – and the Police were called in to open fire. In Rose Hall, Canje in 1913, 15 Indians were shot and killed – including one woman. News reached India as the matter was discussed in the Indian Legislature.
When a similar number of Immigrants were killed in Fiji in 1915, this served as a death knell to Indian Indentureship which was finally ended on March 12, 1917.
