Indentureship abolition: Accurate history vital

However, there appears to be some confusion in the form of perspective which informed the organisers of these events, the Indian Diaspora Council and its local affiliate in TT . What we had was ideological confusion and the domination of an India historical experience and the total marginalisation of the Indian-Caribbean historical reality.

EH Carr in his What Is History defined it as “an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” He added that “history cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.” The mind of our Indian ancestors was not recognised and ignored.

And this is easy to verify.

The history of the end of Indian indenture came about largely as a result of a massive campaign in India against the export of Indian labour under a contract or indenture system to various parts of the world. The India campaign was led by EK Gokhale, Pandit Madan Mohn Malaviya and especially Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s ten-year residence in South Africa brought him in contact with indentured Indians whose grievances he began to champion.

His mind was made up on the question when he returned to India.

In his autobiography he recorded that he was about “to tour the country for an all-India agitation” when the system was ended.

Indians in the Caribbean were not supportive of the Gandhian campaign. Indian opinion wanted Indian immigration to continue, even if in a modified form. For example, in the Koh-i-Noor Gasette (1898), the first Indian newspaper, there is no campaign to end Indian labour immigration. In 1913, the first detailed analysis of the Indian presence in Trinidad, given by FEM Hosein, titled “East Indians in Trinidad A Sociological Analysis,” expected Indian labour immigration to Trinidad to continue indefinitely.

The opponents to Indian indentured labour migration were largely non-Indians, mainly blacks. Eric Williams in chapter 9 of his book History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1962) listed the names and quoted their position extensively: Sir Henry Alcazar, Lechmere Guppy, Dr de Boissiere and Prudhomme David.

Two working class black organisations were involved in this campaign: Working Men’s Reform Club and the Trinidad Working Men’s Association headed by Alfred Richards.

In Guyana this opposition began in 1868. Several black newspapers in Trinidad and Guyana were part of this campaign.

The positions against Indian indentureship were similar for different reasons. The Gandhian India nationalist position had to do with Indian pride and self-dignity and an affront to their nationalist feelings; here it was a black campaign of the black fear of the Indian spectre.

An accurate interpretation of this history should inform Indian opinion to properly guide action in the present.

Kamal Persad Carapichaima