NCIC
By: Aneela Bhagwat
The history of indentured Indians is not
fully covered by the secondary school syllabus. A history, which is not being taught
in our schools, is not being thought
(about). This is history that belongs not
only to the descendants of indentured
labourers or to Indians, but to the nation,
the region and indeed, the world. The history of any of the peoples of Trinidad and
Tobago is a history that belongs to all of
us: it is a part of our collective history as a
nation and of the wider Caribbean region.
And history, we would like to note, is not
only about dry and dusty dates, complicated names and things that happened to
other people in other times. We are all
living history day by day, and what we experience is coloured and informed by our
Issue 1
collective pasts. As the saying goes, “You
can’t know where you’re going, unless you
know where you’ve come from.” If we
don’t wish to be passively pushed into the
future, but to truly shape our own destinies, we need to understand ourselves and
how we have come to be. Our histories
need to be taught/thought. A more apt
title for this article might therefore be
“Thinking Indian Indenture.” Here are
some of the things that you might have
thought you knew: but have to think again.
After slavery ended in 1838 British colonial
plantations were faced with a labour
shortage for the cultivation of crops and
they looked to India to meet this need. So
it was that the first batch of indentured
Indians arrived on the shores of Trinidad
on May 30th 1845. Yet Indians had already
been taken abroad as indentured
labour before being brought to
Trinidad: in 1829, over a decade
earlier, Indians had been indentured to estates in Mauritius. Antedating even this migration, however, was the long history of Indians
traveling overseas for labour. They
were taken as slaves to the French
territories of Reunion and Mauritius
in the 18th century and to Burma
by the East India Trading company
May 2012
to work on the ports from 1753. Indian
convicts were also sent to Mauritius, Sumatra and Singapore to perform manual
labour in 1815, 1818 and 1825 respectively. Later, Indian labourers were also
sent to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1827 and East
Africa to work on plantations there. It was
only in the 1830s, however, that the system of sending Indians as labourers overseas started to be regulated and controlled. In 1836, John Gladstone, an estate
owner in Guyana wrote to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies (no Independence
back then) and the President of the Board
of Control for India requesting permission
to ship Indian labourers to Guyana to work
on the sugar estates. In 1838 he was
granted permission and thus began the
trade of Indian labourers to the West Indies.
Continued on Page 8
Inside this issue:
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Celebrating 167 Years of Our
Arrival
Diabetes - Myths, Misconceptions and Good Advice
Local Classical Singing in
Trinidad and Tobago
Sufism: The Yoga of Islam
Upcoming Events
And much more!!