Dear Editor,
May 5 has arrived to offer us the opportunity to commemorate one of the most significant events in the constitution of our nation. We all are aware and acknowledge the contribution of the Indians and of all other immigrants.
The responses to the event will range from the correctly celebratory to the clamantly unhappy. There will be some to remember the contribution the Indians brought and the complexity of their circumstances that go beyond the comic book rendition of a group of yokels conned into taking the ship and discharged onto the shorelines of a hell where their descendants continue to live the inferno of exile.
The truth is that some had been indentured elsewhere before, some were to re-indenture themselves and those that came were earning ten times more than they could hope to gain in India, most refused the chance to go back to the spoilt paradise of Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. And we need to remember that so much is unknown about the arrivals, returns and living conditions apart from the slavery-coloured clichés retained by the historians and politicians of the past.
As one Trinidadian historian reminds us, Indentureship ended up being one of the most controlled and documented immigration schemes in the world, with the Indian government monitoring each phase, and with an Immigrant protection office in most colonies. It is interesting that the legends/stories of returning “Demerarians” from indentureship in Guiana to Madeira, is that of men having a chance to improve themselves and finding a form of success in moving out.
Things would have been different for Indians as they would have been for the indentured Africans who were to come, and like the Portuguese and other bound ethnics, did not find it necessary to construct a narrative of victimology to vindicate themselves and justify the scenario they had prepared for the world they would inhabit.
So while we remember the first arrivals, let us resist the low temptations to caricaturise them. Let us note that they arrived and that their descendants have also arrived. To seek to scrawl another portrait would be to perpetuate a falsehood.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
