Anniversary Of Indian Immigration
by Eddi Rodney, MP
A week ago Guyanese commemorated the 161st Anniversary of Indian Immigration to 19th century British Guiana. The event coincided with the 164th Anniversary of Portuguese migrants to the colony. It is by now common knowledge that these migrants, recruited first from Madeira and thereafter from the Calcutta ‘hinterland,’ and ‘depots’ in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta itself, were brought to Demerara and elsewhere in the West Indies, to replace African slaves. What is not often recognized is that apart from the original ‘traffic in bonded collie labour’ from Chota Nagpur (which reached a total of more than 250,000 before it was exhausted), the vast majority of Indian ‘indentured servants’ - as the Immigration Office described them (S. Panchanan, 1970) had no intimate, close links with arduous agricultural task work. British rule in India marked but one stage in the history of European intervention and exploitation in that political demography of Asia. The inauguration of mercantilist expansion which as a process coincided with and was sustained by what Marx called "an insatiable appetite for tropical products and surplus value derived from exotic commodities," also stimulated an extraordinary demand for human as well as (draught animal - mainly oxen and buffalo) labour. In India this meant that the historically entrenched caste system as well as the structures that served the supply ‘centers’ for the recruitment of conscripts into the Indian army, would be subject both to the wider political economy and to the demand for ‘coolies’ as substitutes for African plantation slaves. The fact that the Indian experiment was viewed favourably even by those monopolists with direct interests in the fortunes of the Indian Trade, notably the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, further reinforced the fierce class struggle waged by the European bourgeoisie to expand capitalist property. Professor Hugh Tinker in his seminar work A New System of Slavery describes the scenario posed in the ‘recruitment depots.’ "The agencies" he writes, "often took the people who were already available in the ports of embarkation - Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. These were the flotsam of humanity, drawn to the big city by the prospect of employment which had vanished and left them stranded. Some were domestic servants, who had accompanied a European master to the city, and had been discharged when he was transferred elsewhere or went home to Europe on leave or retirement. They included cooks, footmen, washermen, grooms, and coachmen. Then there were entertainers (jugglers, "illusionists") who had fallen upon bad times - dancers, musicians, prostitutes. The great majority however were simple country folk who had been attracted to the big city in search of casual work as burden carriers - coolies in the basic sense." The lessons of Indian Immigration to British Guiana and elsewhere in the Caribbean are numerous. Perhaps the most important being that the period of ‘indenture,’ however harsh and cruel, was always regarded as a given and set period or term - 5 or, if so desired, 10 years. Indentured folks thus were placed in that social matrix dominated by the plantocracy but at the said time holding out distinct possibilities for ‘primitive’ and later ‘primary accumulation’ based on laissez faire. Additionally, whenever ‘acculturation’ and or ‘creolization’ did take place as a sociopolitical process, the role of the colonial state could be likened or compared to that of a ‘harbinger.’ The indigenous elite that exercised political and economic hegemony had no problems in co-opting the first generation of East Indian ‘evolves.’ Even after Constitutional reforms and the Moyne Commission, the colonial state maintained effective control over the Indian masses. All of this was to change abruptly when Cheddi Jagan began to forge the political development of British Guiana. It was Jagan who advanced the cause of national liberation, a process that created political and subjective conditions for large scale socialization.
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