Since its conceptual evolution some three decades ago, COOLITUDE, a neologism advanced by Mauritian cultural theorist Khaleel Torabully, has grown into an intellectual framework that led to the production of a number of studies on the global Indian indenture experience. It has paved the way for an increasing body of literature that captures the experience of Indian labourers who were taken across the kala pani from ancestral India in the 1800s to diasporic colonial plantations including Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, British Guiana and other Caribbean islands. Initially applied to the poetics of the indenture experience, Coolitude has been associated with multiple narrative forms depicting the Indian experience, including films, songs, visual arts, literature on ancestral root search and recordings of oral history.
Indentureship and the impact of Indian immigration on Guyana were addressed by Gaiutra Bahadur in her book, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). The Berbice-born author utilized archival documents located in Britain, Guyana and India, and her investigative journalistic skills to produce a comprehensive biography of her great grandmother, Sujaria, who migrated to British Guiana in July 1903. Aside from Bahadur, the poetry of Rajkumari Singh and Mahadai Das also reflect the Coolitude tradition. Both women were members of the Guyana Messenger Group which published a short-lived journal called Heritage, dedicated to the promotion of Indian art forms. Unfortunately, their work was given short shrift, particularly by Indians, due to their association with the Cultural Division of the Guyana National Service. Rajkumari’s collection of poems in Days of the Sahib Are Over (1971) speaks resolutely to what Jeremy Poynting referred to as “her commitment to restore the invisible Indo-Caribbean woman to the stage of history”. Her dedication to the preservation of Indian culture, as she revealed in her play The Sound of Her Bells (1974), was complemented by an equally aggressive opposition to “gender oppression”. Rajkumari s poem, dedicated to the first Indian immigrant woman who arrived in British Guiana, was expressed in “Per Ajie” (1971):
Per Ajie
Did bangled-ankles
Well thy sea-legs bear
While Sahib’s gaze
Thy exotic
Gazelle beauty
Of face and form
Mahadai Das’s poetry invoked images of the indenture Indian odyssey that captured the “historical,…emotional and symbolic elements of the collective transoceanic memory.” Unlike most historical narratives which centered around the girmitiya (indenture Indians) plantation experience, Das incorporated contemporary issues affecting descendants of girmitiyas in post-colonial Guyana into her poetry, such as human rights violations and racial discrimination under the Burnham dictatorship. An excerpt from her classic poem, They Came in Ships (1987), quite vividly captures the early history of Indians:
They came in ships
From across the seas, they came.
Britain, colonising India, transporting her chains
From Chota Nagpur and the Ganges Plain
Westwards came the Whitby,
The Hesperus,
The Island-bound Fatel Rozack.
Despite the rise of contemporary writers who have made a significant contribution to Indian historiography in the Caribbean, historical studies have relied extensively on what Professor Lomarsh Roopnarine refers to as “the records of the colonizers to write the history, narrative, and memory of colonized indentured.” Not surprisingly, early historical narratives on the Indian subalterns reflected an enduring European influence that shaped the image of Indians. The writings of “liberal” Europeans like John Edward Jenkins, HVP Bronkhurst (a “half-Indian” originally from Sri Lanka), Joseph Beaumont, and Charles Freer Andrews, were steeped in stereotypical views, often revealing profound contempt for Indians. For example, C.F. Andrews, Mahatma Gandhi’s confidante who visited Fiji thirteen years before coming to British Guiana in 1929 referred to Indian women as prostitutes who “passes from one man to another”. No less, Bronkhurst, the Wesleyan missionary in British Guiana, keen on aggressively converting the Hindu and Muslim “pagans” to Christianity, proposed “catting” (public whipping), and “decapitation” of the “Indian coolie” as a deterrent to criminality.
Indenture was a global economic and socio-political system controlled by a powerful European ruling class specializing in the accumulation and profiteering of generational wealth through the extraction of cheap labour. Not surprisingly, the period of indenture, from 1834-1917, was managed under strict penal and contractual obligations. The emancipation of slaves provided the catalyst for the rise of an energetic, dynamic, often rebellious peasantry that established residencies along the Guyana coastal region. A major contributor to the establishment of the Indian labour-intensive indenture scheme in British Guiana was the father of a future British Prime Minister, John Gladstone, an influential member of the British Parliament whose wealth was closely tied to the slave trade. Basdeo Mangru noted that Gladstone was “a wealthy Liverpool merchant/ship owner, absentee proprietor and owner of Plantations Vreed-en-Hoop and Vriedenstein [Vreed-en-Stein] on West Bank Demerara”. FM Gillanders (who brokered Gladstone’s plan) was a nephew of Gladstone’s wife. One of Gladstone’s close friend in the Colony, Andrew Colville, (who owned Plantation Belle Vue, on the East Bank of Demerara) was a relative of Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India from 1836 to 1842.
Historical records suggest that between 543,914 to 750,000 girmitiyas were brought to the Caribbean from 1838-1917. About 238,700 Indian immigrants (number varies depending on the source) were taken to Guyana, 143,900 to Trinidad & Tobago, 34,000 to Suriname and about 37,000 were taken to Jamaica. One-third of the Indian labourers who were taken to the Caribbean may have re-migrated to ancestral India instead of extending their labour contract for another five years or opted for land settlement in lieu of a return passage to ancestral India.
Coolitude literature posits that the transoceanic voyage (Indian and Atlantic oceans) was the initial step toward construction of an Indian identity characterized by physical separation from India, cultural isolation, social alienation and psychological distress. The late Arnold Itwaru described the kala pani crossing as Shiva’s unending dance in a culturally diverse society, implying that diasporic Indians found themselves in a liminal world and had to “construct new identities” in their adopted communities. Ancestral India, Coolitude contends, lacked an original monolithic unity, paving the way for the transformation of the cultural heterogeneity of Indians in their settled diasporic communities. The “new” Indian social and cultural identity is inextricably linked to interactions with native and creolized communities. However, as Mariam Pirbhai has observed, Indians have maintained a distinct cultural identity in spite of the processes of “colonization, assimilation, and creolization.” Lingering caste distinctions, a distinct culture, plantation segregation, marginal language retention and geographical separation have all combined to mitigate against the creolization of Indians and racial/ethnic integration in Guyana.
An important critique of Coolitude which cannot be overlooked is its derivative from the “coolie” neologism. The word invokes memories of manual plantation labourers, conjecturing up an image of the Indian as primitive, unsophisticated, filthy and disease-ridden. Henry G. Dalton, a medical doctor associated with the London Royal College of Surgeons in his book The History of British Guiana (1855), referred to “coolies” as “indolent, dirty, and vagrant in their habits, … the scavengers of society.” Recognizing the racial stereotypes invoked by its pejorative use, the Jamaican government, following concerns raised by Indians through the East India Progressive Society (EIPS), was encouraged to ban the use of the term. Like the “N-word” and its evolutionary pejorative reference to African-Americans, the use of the “C-word”, surprisingly, has not invoked similar widespread denunciation. Shanaaz Mohammed observed that, “…reframing of the term coolie is not devoid of its oversights and inherent contradictions. … It also does not take into consideration the colonial power dynamic at play in the emergence and sustained usage of this term.” Researchers who insist on using the term, a large number of whom are Indians affiliated with Western universities, have not seen it fit to initiate a movement against its use. Instead, their research actively seek to humanize the concept. Ironically, the origin of Coolitude can be traced to Négritude, an early 20th century literary and ideological movement which promoted pride in African culture, led primarily by French-speaking African and Caribbean writers.
Coolitude contends that Indian immigrants were culturally divorced from ancestral India after they crossed the kala pani, paving the way for a new cultural identity. Mahadai Das expressed this contradiction with the phrase “If I come to India …will I find myself?” However, the assumption that Indians were culturally “cut off” from India is problematic. For one, it is impossible to argue that the Indian identity that developed after the oceanic crossing was devoid of any sustained cultural influence dating back to ancestral India, or that a tabula rasa of cultural values and practices ensued once the girmitiyas crossed the kala pani. As Clem Seecharan observed, “…indentureship went on for over seventy years; new immigrants were constantly coming from India, bringing aspects of their culture, and renewing the cultural pool. There was no terminal break with the homeland” as the flow of immigrants continued from eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar.
Secondly, the hybrid identity that developed in Indian diasporic communities is not necessarily peculiar to the one that shaped the original girmityas, many of whom can be said to have developed an “otherness away from multiple India.” The dynamics in Guyana’s plural society, also worked towards reinforcing the notion of “oneness” by preserving whatever cultural values were retained by first generation and embraced by successive girmitiya generations. This reality has led Shanaaz Mohammed to conclude that Coolitude “romanticizes ancestral links and overplays the indentured laborers’ social and political authority in the system of indenture.” While Coolitude argues for a dynamic process that reshapes cultural identity in diasporic communities, it downplays the continuing dynamics of cultural recovery and identity transformations attributed to contemporary interactions between the diasporic communities and modern India.
Despite its controversial use, the narrative of Coolitude attributes great ontological significance to the lost history of the Indian labourer, which it seeks to recapture. A large body of literature has now contributed to the establishment of a legitimate Indian historiography in the Caribbean. For the academic researcher, there exists an ongoing challenge which necessitates navigating among contradictions that may exist between colonial interpretations and historical revisionism in order to capture the experience of the lost voices of indenture Indians.
A most depressing reality of indenture history in Guyana (first Caribbean country to receive Indians), is the obvious lack of an academic journal dedicated towards a study of the Indian indenture experience and its legacy. To date, no undergraduate degree is offered at the University of Guyana on Indian Indenture and its legacy. Neither has the university provided an endowment or fellowship dedicated to the study of the Indian experience in Guyana or the broader diaspora. Perhaps the recently formed Inclusivity, Diversity and Equity Unit at UG may address this matter. An even more depressing challenge confronted by researchers is the poor state in which archival documents are preserved in the Walter Rodney National Archive. There have been extensive lobbying efforts to encourage the Guyana government to digitize the historical records of the descendants of Indian indenture by adopting The Indenture Labour Route project as UNESCO has done for Mauritius. Neighbouring Suriname, with the help of the Dutch government has ensured that all of their Indian immigration records are electronically preserved and are available online. The existence of these shortcomings contribute to the silencing of the history of Indians in Guyana.
[Dr Ramharack teaches history and politics at Nassau Community College (New York). This piece is excerpted from a forthcoming publication on Alice Bhagwandai Singh, a Guyanese cultural activist].
