Indian indentureship
Arts On Sunday
By Al Creighton
Stabroek News
November 5, 2006
Like the institution of slavery that it replaced, various aspects of the history and conditions of the system of Indian indentureship in the Caribbean have been fictionalized. The treatment has never been as frequent or extensive as in the case of slavery, but works about indentureship in British Guiana date back to the earliest period in the development of Guyanese literature, while artistic interest in the subject is still alive today. What is not very frequently found are works which attempt any substantial treatment of conditions at the other end of the story of indentureship the way David Dabydeen tackles it in one of the recent Guyanese novels, The Counting House.
Dabydeen goes back to the setting at the point of recruitment in India to identify the factors on both sides of the Indian Ocean responsible for the troubled state of the recruits on the Gladstone estates in Demerara. He showed the life of poverty in India that they dreamed to change and the rascality of mercenary recruiters who took advantage of this, using persuasion, the "El Dorado" myth, deceit and abduction to get them on the boat for a wretched journey across the dreaded kala paani. At the other end he explored their disappointment; their mental and physical dislocation in a plantation life little different from the miserable slavery that was supposed to have ended. It is precisely the same subject that is dealt with, in a more limited way, in the latest creative work on those themes, the feature film Guiana 1838 by Rohit Jagessar.
In 1836, John Gladstone, owner of Plantation Vreed en Hoop Vreedenstien in British Guiana, proposed a scheme to import labourers from India to serve the sugar plantations. Using the precedents of other places such as Mauritius and Sri Lanka, which showed how well such a scheme could work, Gladstone won the approval of the colonial authorities. What followed is well documented and quite well known. The Hesperus and the Whitby landed in 1838 and the planters lost little time in reneging on their solemn promises about fair and decent treatment, relapsing with relish into all their old habits. They dusted off the old whips and whipping posts, bringing back into service the instruments of torture and domination to which they had been accustomed under the previous disreputable system. Conditions under which sugar production continued were so bad that they once again attracted the interest of the British anti-slavery activists who caused the colonial authorities in London and India to close down indentureship by 1840. It resumed in 1845 until its final closure in the Caribbean in 1917.
That is very much the history of the bound coolies in Guyana and it is largely faithfully narrated by Jagessar in Guiana 1838. This most recent effort joins the growing list of feature films which represent the bold attempts to create a cinema industry in Guyana. Most of them were merely just filmed on location in the country and most of them have not proved to be worthy efforts in an industry still to take off into significant development. In a line of productions before Jagessar's that goes back to the 1960s, two deserve approval as genuine tries although none achieved excellence. Vivian Lee's comic adventure If Wishes Were Horses (1969) with Habeeb Khan and Mignon Lowe, is top of the list as one of these, while the second is Song of the Sugarcanes (c.1983) rather clumsily and inelegantly made from Sheik Sadiek's novel, but well deserving of sympathy and encouragement as a courageous amateur effort. Guiana 1838 can comfortably take its place as a third.
It is of interest that Sadiek's work is also set on the old colonial sugar estates, treating with oppression, exploitation, rebellion and violence, the same setting fictionalised by another novelist, Arnold Itwaru in Shanti (1989) and the same concerns revisited by Jagessar's film. Although similar in theme, however, this latest film is not to be compared in quality to the Sugarcanes since it is a far more competent and professional movie. It is a serious document, very neatly structured and designed to document the history very scrupulously, hardly departing from real facts of the case. None of its little inaccuracies are worth complaining about and, at any rate, it is, after all, a fictionalized account. The presentation is well packaged, framed by a voiced narration and carried by creditable photography. There is little ingenuity in the cinematography, however, except in some devices used partly to disguise the limitations of location and partly to create the desired atmosphere.
Scenes were shot in an obviously limited range of locations causing landscape and seascape to be slightly monotonous. Yet there is an attempt to disguise this by the use of night scenes and darkness, which effectively serve attempts to create the atmosphere of a nether world with dismal and dark experiences. Allied to this are the many attempts in the screenplay, plot and imagery to establish a close likeness between indentureship and slavery; the plight of the coolies and those of the slaves whose place in the sugar industry they so haltingly took and whose garments sat so uncomfortably upon them.
In this regard, the flaws of the movie are to be found on the other side of the same coin of its success. So faithful is it to a history that it endeavours so carefully to document, that it still lingers somewhere on the borders between a feature movie and a documentary. Even though it is never dull and never loses audience attention, it is not driven by the excitement of action and intrigue. This, along with the limitations in the shooting, leads to the suggestion of an illustrated historical narrative with characters who are representative of types rather than rounded out personalities. The two white planter types, for example, reappear unchanged in repetitive scenes on horseback or standing on a beach. Even the hero, the most courageous among the Indians played by Kumar Gaurav, and his new found friend, the former runaway slave played by Henry Rodney, are not given the opportunity to develop as individuals to put human personalities to the figures of defiance that they represent.
Gaurav, however, makes the best of his role, which, in spite of its containment, is the most explored in the film. He plays it well, balancing the fierce warrior front he is always expected to present with a sensitive understanding of the person the plot does not sufficiently allow him to explore. He is, in the end, credible and convincing. Rodney, on the other hand, is attended by a characteristic woodenness not helped in this film by the fixed context of his appearances, or by the fact that he often has some of the most clichéd lines in the script, which he chooses to deliver in a strange accent that belongs nowhere. Too prevalently, it also appears, he is stagy, not realizing that theatrics, unless they are a part of the plot, are best left to that medium and do not work when one is acting for the screen.
The acting is creditable in other areas such as in the performances of Aarti Bathija and Neville Williams whose circumscribed role waxes larger because of his command of it and the comfort with which he stands before the camera. The most interesting of the Englishmen is the government official who comes to investigate complaints and to deliver the doom of the colonial office. His appearance is brief but decisively well executed.
The sequence in which he appears, as well, contains some of the best of the film. It is dramatically linked to the reappearance, like a ghost, of the Indian hero who everyone thought was indeed dead. He materialises out of the canefield with the telltale iron shackles dangling from his hand like the spectre of horrific slavery which was supposed to have died, returning with the living evidence of their guilt to haunt the planters. Another successful dramatic technique is the use of the copy of Gladstone's letter. It appears at both the zenith and the nadir of the first venture into indentureship that the movie dramatizes. It is first lifted in triumph from the pocket of the boasting recruiter on the shores of India, then reappears, taken from his pocket again when the recruiter collapses in symbolic decrepitude, ending up as damning evidence in the hands of the government official.
Details like these lend some artistry to the movie to rescue it from remaining a historical documentary. Although limited in many ways, Jagessar's Guiana 1838 takes the line of previous efforts a step further and will claim a prominent place in the history of Guyana's struggling and still fledgling motion picture industry.