The study of indentureship since its establishment in British Guiana in 1838 has two historical landmarks. The end of the process of immigration in 1917, and the time when all contracts were terminated, and the scheme was abolished in January 1920. While the year-long period of observation in 2020 actually marked the abolition, all that is involved in this commemoration is indivisible from the study as a whole.
This is significant because even 100 years later, the independent nation Guyana, as a plural society, has not outgrown the importance, the impact and influence of indentureship and immigration to the cultural and demographic life, the social, political, and economic development of the country.
Questions have been raised about whether Guyana paid sufficient attention, given its deep historical importance, to the marking of this centenary. There were events locally and internationally, but what was done in Guyana through its various agencies to mark the occasion? Was it enough? Questions were asked directly of the nation’s primary academic institution, the University of Guyana; did it step up to its responsibility?
There are institutions in and adjacent to Guyana with a history and record of attention paid to the study of indentureship and its aftermath. These include the Indian Arrival Committee, the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, the Arts Forum and the Arts Journal, and the Ameena Gafoor Institute of Indentureship Studies. They, among others, marked the centenary in various ways. But the critical gaze was focused on UG where many will look for a quality contribution and from where some role of leadership is expected. These seem to have been called into question.
But no institution surpassed UG in scholarly attention paid to indentureship, the immigration associated with it, and its role in Guyana’s history. There is no intention here to measure the work of other institutions; the evaluation is aimed entirely at UG and what the national university has done to advance knowledge, to instruct the world on the subject and understanding of indentureship.
The university has taken the lead in covering the entire period of study and has imparted knowledge and elucidation extensively. One of the ways in which this is done is through different levels of public service and national service which are enshrined in the contractual obligations of UG lecturers. Contributions have been made by UG academics and researchers to the work of some of the other institutions mentioned above. For example, Evan Persaud, a lecturer in Geology, but an avid researcher in indentureship immigration, worked as an executive member of the Indian Arrival Committee when he published “The Coolie Ships” on May 5, 2009. UG linguist and researcher in cultural studies Alim Hosein made substantial contributions to The Arts Journal and Arts Forum.
One of the current foremost UG scholars on immigration, Mark Tumbridge, a member of the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, is a member of the Board of the Ameena Gafoor Institute, and a contributor to The Arts Journal. (I am an Associate Fellow at Warwick, in the Yesu Persaud Centre, contributing to research there and was the keynote speaker delivering the Roy Heath Memorial Lecture at a conference on Indian immigration at Warwick in 2011.)
Guyana is a plural society with historical foundations in slavery, indentureship, immigration, and colonialism, as well as contemporary developments. UG has covered and analysed all through scholarship, research, publications, public lectures and other activities, in addition to its intra-mural academic programmes.
Historian James Rose, a former vice-chancellor, as a further example, has published “The Enmore Incident of 1948”. But he has also given several public lectures and has worked with the national government and other institutions in the commemoration of the anniversary of the rising that ended with the martyrdom of plantation workers at Enmore.
The university has made these continuing contributions through a number of institutions of its own. These include agencies of research and publications such as the journal Transition; the History Gazette, run during its lifetime by the History Society; the Guyana Historical Journal, published by the Department of History; and “History this Week”, a series formerly published in the Stabroek News. To this may be added the outstanding series of weekly broadcasts on radio “Living History”, which ran for 12 years.
Furthermore, the UG Library has within it the famous Caribbean Reference Library which holds the most substantial archive of scholarship on Guyanese indentureship assembled in the Caribbean. The main feeder to that was the flagship post-graduate programme, the Masters in Guyanese and West Indian History. Those UG institutions have been responsible for the greatest volume of research and publications on indentureship.
Several UG academics – Tota Mangar, Winston McGowan, Mary Noel Menezes, Rose, Basdeo Mangru, and Simon Mangru – have individually published important material while also playing leading roles in the institutions mentioned. Menezes’s Scenes From The Portuguese in Guyana is a seminal work on Portuguese indentureship, supported by such papers as “The Establishment of the Portuguese Business Community in British Guiana” by Khallel Mohamed. McGowan published “Evolution of Education in Guyana”, which included a number of the policies and practices that affected East Indians in the public education system under colonialism. That was also the subject of Simon Mangru’s “Anglican Efforts to Evangelise East Indians in British Guiana”. Another significant topic rarely treated is “Liberated Africans in British Guiana” which was examined by Anand James.
Mangar and McGowan worked indefatigably in the institutions run by History Department and History Society to which others such as David Granger and Cecilia McAlmont substantially contributed. But Mangar has been a prolific researcher and marks among his publications “The Hopetown Experiment: An Aspect of Chinese Immigration in C19th British Guiana” and “A Brief History of the Rice Industry in Guyana”. He also investigated colonial policies governing indentureship in “The Immigration Policy of Henry Irving 1882 – 1887”.
Basdeo Mangru was among the major indentureship scholars coming out of UG and counts among his many publications “Imperial Trusteeship and the East Indian Indentured Labour in British Guiana”. Several dozens of these papers were made available through the History Gazette and the Historical Journal, in addition to those on indentureship published in the Transition journal published by the Faculty of Social Sciences.
There has been no dearth of research, scholarship and publications from other departments of the university. Cultural Studies and Literature have been particularly productive. Individual scholars have worked, but of considerable importance was the Colloquium on Indentureship held on the UG Campus by the Department of Language and Cultural Studies in December 2017. This was the university’s main event to mark the centenary of the end of Indian indentureship.
There were significant presentations by Tumbridge, Creighton, and Hosein in addition to participants from outside of the university. It was an all-day affair of papers as well as cultural interventions and an exhibition of publications by the UG Library. This was the largest and most thorough investigation into the field that was held in Guyana during that significant year.
Of related interest is the analysis of the fiction of Guyanese novelist Jan Lowe Shinebourne by UG lecturer Abigail Persaud Cheddie. Shinebourne’s novels deal with Guyana’s post-indentureship realities. The Last English Plantation, in particular is a post-colonial study of the Rose Hall area in Berbice just around the time of Guyana’s independence. It treated a post-indentureship society in transition, still under influence from that era.
Of further interest are the research studies done by art lecturer Philbert Gajadhar, who studied cane cutters and estate workers to produce a series of paintings. This shows the diverse possibilities of scholarship on indentureship, and the way they can inform artwork.
Before the end of 2020, the year of the centenary of the abolition of indentureship, the University of Guyana will make a final mark in the calendar of events. There will be a “Forum to mark the Centenary of the Abolition of Indentureship” on Wednesday, December 23 at 5 pm. This is an international event and timed to be compatible with participants and audiences in the UK and Europe. It will be held online and beamed via Zoom to a world audience. There will be less than 2 hours of scholarly papers on the Indian and the Chinese with cultural presentations from both spheres. This is being done by the Department of Language and Cultural Studies and the Confucius Institute at UG.
