Posted
on May 5, 2016
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Trinidad and Tobago and
several other nations in and around the Caribbean,
Guyana celebrates Indian
Arrival Day.
Does
it seem surprising to learn that Caribbean nations celebrate the
anniversary of people arriving as indentured laborers from India?
Perhaps
it is not so surprising when you learn that a large percentage of
these nations' populations are descended from the Indian laborers.
(And, remember, we are not talking about Amerindian – we are
talking about East Indians, from India.)
Amerindians
make up only about 9% of Guyana's population. Afro-Guyanese,
descendants of slaves from Africa, make up about 30%; Guyanese of
mixed heritage make up almost 17%. Indo-Guyanese – the descendants
of the laborers from India – make up the largest group, at almost
44%!
Why
were Indians brought to Guyana and other Caribbean nations? Slavery
was abolished in Guyana in 1834, and many former slaves left the
plantations where they had worked, eager to start their own
freeholdings. The sugar planters, who were by and large British,
began to recruit people from Africa, Portugal, and other places to
come work on the plantations, but they could not interest enough
people to work the plantations.
One
of the plantation owners asked if he could bring over Eastern Indians
for a 5-year period of indenture. (That means that the planter and
the laborer had a contract that the laborer had to work on the
plantation for five years.) Since Britain controlled India, it was
perhaps natural for the British planters to recruit from the populous
sub-continent.
On this date in 1838, the first small group of Indian laborers came to Guyana. Eventually, over the course of some eighty years, hundreds of thousands of laborers were imported from India. Of course, some of them returned to India with their earnings; many chose to (or had to) stay in Guyana.
 |
| Just as some Americans celebrate the Mayflower, the ship in which some early colonists traveled to the New World, some Indo-Guyanese people celebrate the Whitby, the first ship that brought Indians to Guyana. |
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| Indians in Guyana were allowed to keep and practice their culture, even back in the 1800s. Many modern Indo-Guyanese celebrate Hindu holidays and keep Indian traditions. |
I
bet you are wondering if the planters, who were used to having slave
labor at their disposal, treated the Indian workers well. As in
anything dealing with people, the answer is “some did, some
didn't.”
However, the Anti-Slavery Society visited Guyana to make
sure that a new kind of slavery was NOT being introduced.
On some
plantations they observed bad treatment of workers, including
flogging and imprisonment, and they also found that some workers were
being paid less than a third of what they were promised. After the
members of the Anti-Slavery Society investigated, they gave a report
to the Governor, who ordered the prosecution those guilty of
mistreating the Indians.
Guyana is on the northern coast of South America. To
learn more about Guyana, check out this earlier post.
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