*All about Indians: A review of Trinidad During the 19th Century: The
Indian Experience*



*Trinidad Guardian*



*By Raymond Ramcharitar*

Published:

Thursday, May 30, 2013



Gerad Tikasingh’s book has the benefit of nearly 50 years of reflection on
subsequent developments and subsequent scholarship on the issue of Indian
arrival and indentureship.


Gerad Tikasingh’s 1976 PhD thesis (UWI, St Augustine) on Indians in
Trinidad in the 19th century is one of the most widely consulted documents
among historical researchers on the subject. It was the first locally
produced thesis to examine Indians in Trinidad, and it was and remains a
meticulously researched and formidably documented work. It was also a work
of which nearly everyone who read it asked the same question: why isn’t
this published?


Thirty-seven years later, it has been, as Trinidad During the 19th Century:
The Indian Experience. The book has the benefit of nearly half-century of
reflection on subsequent developments and subsequent scholarship on the
issue. And what is evident from the beginning of the book is that the issue
of epistemology is of premium importance. And from episteme come politics
and consequences.


The thesis was written in the aftermath of Black Power. This meant the
atmosphere in Trinidad was rife with much public expatiation of the African
experience, and the tropes of struggle and oppression with which the Black
Power cognoscenti, and their academic enablers, defined their experience.
As a thesis, Tikasingh’s work differed, in terms of how the Indian
experience would be defined. But in the public sphere over the next four
decades, thanks to other academics, the Indo historical experience was
conflated with the African experience.



Nearly a half-century after the thesis, The Indian Experience bristles and
bridles at the mésalliance. The book is a much more polemical work than the
thesis. This is evident from Tikasingh’s introduction, wherein *he
identifies “black bias” in historical scholarship, *from which his work
seeks to diverge, and takes grave issue with.







The bias (known these days as Afrocentrism), writes Tikasingh, manifests in
three epistemological axioms, which do not stand up to examination. These
were the assumptions that: Trinidad was a slave society; that Africans were
natives, and Indians were immigrants; and indentureship was somehow
analogous to slavery.



The first 138 pages of The Indian Experience are devoted to dismantling
these axioms by examining the society from Spanish rule till 1845. Trinidad
was not a slave society, Tikasingh argues. Slavery lasted only a
half-century (from 1807 to 1838), and the society never settled into the
institutional normativity of slavery.



For half Trinidad’s life as a slave colony (from 1807), the enslaved saw,
heard, and exploited the fact of their impending liberation. They became
difficult, and resisted their enslavers, behaviour that would be
unthinkable in a traditional slave society, like Barbados and Jamaica,
which societies had been designed around the institution.



*Tikasingh argues, convincingly, that since indentureship lasted 72 years,
and slavery 51, Trinidad might be more accurately defined as an
“indentureship” society. *

In this first section, Tikasingh traces the economic and demographic
development of pre-indenture Trinidad. He dismantles the claims that
Africans were natives, and the Indians were late immigrants by pointing to
the island’s several “population makeovers” from the Cedula of 1783 to the
introduction of Indians in 1845.

Many attempts were made to encourage black settlers from other islands, and
(by 1841) some 13,281 black immigrants had come, but the plantations were
dying for labour. Incidentally, he points out, intra-island immigration was
fully financially supported by the State, and Indian immigration was only
partially supported. And the black immigration from the other islands never
stopped throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

He gives an overview of Trinidadian economic history from the beginning of
the 19th century, and presents a plausible case that the economy was saved
by the steady stream of labour from India. This has been pooh-poohed by
mainstream historians, but the facts are there, if politics say otherwise.







And it is the politics, the social realities of Indian immigration
materialised in the contact of cultures, and the human and power-wielding
consequences which most interest Tikasingh. They are at the root of the
epistemological and social/political problems.



A good example of a touchy political issue is the regional aversion to the
sugar industry—when sugar continued to be cultivated elsewhere, like
Brazil. The reality illustrated by the data, he points out, was that the
Africans were unwilling to work on the estates, for obvious and
understandable reasons of their recent experience of enslavement. Indians,
because of their agrarian roots, had no such revulsion for the work, and
the immigrant experience, though rife with injustice, hardship, and
unfairness, was one the Indians chose gladly.



Tikasingh also discusses some of the much-bandied-about aspects of
indentureship, like the contention that Indians were deceived or railroaded
into emigrating. This might have happened in the early days of the scheme,
but the consolidation act of 1864 addressed these abuses, and thereafter,
Indian immigration “was one of the most regulated migrations that occurred
during the 19th century.” He examines various stereotypes Creole society
formulated about Indians: their litigiousness, their racial tendencies, and
their untrustworthiness.

The polemical irruptions occasionally become overbearing, as they are
repeated through the book. But in the main, Tikasingh’s argument is
well-articulated and evidence-driven, and there’s a lot of evidence, some
of which has not been seen before.



Most impressive is the documentation of the consistent institutional bias
against Indians from even before their arrival. This was visible in the
courts, the press and the immigration and education systems. The estates
manipulated the law against labourers with impunity. Even when 80 per cent
of the population was off the estates, any Indian could still be detained
for not having a pass. This galvanised an organisation of Indians to
petition the government—and catalysed the beginning of organised Indian
politics in 1897.



In his discussion of education, he reveals the crucial intervention of the
Canadian Mission in the person of the Rev John Morton in 1868. Before this,
Indians were left out of the education system. By the end of the 19th
century, the situation had changed radically. Education had transformed the
Indian community, and it was around this is the time Indian political
consciousness emerged, materialised in writing letters to the newspapers
and forming association to protest what would today be called institutional
racism.







What is also fascinating is that in the 19th century (as in the 20th and
21st centuries) *the press was consistently used by the coloured middle
classes against Indians. *Tikasingh describes a revealing, and familiar to
anyone who reads the papers these days, conflict during the San Fernando
borough election of 1890. Mayor Robert Guppy and the San Fernando Gazette
raged against one Albert Sammy, who, it was alleged, controlled a
significant block of new Indian burgesses. According to Tikasingh: “The
hysteria that was being whipped up against Indian burgesses in general and
Albert Sammy in particular, was incomprehensible.”



Outside the polemics, the book’s 576 pages details the minutiae and
overarching facts of Indo life. Tikasingh provides statistics on the number
of castes among immigrants, the methods and areas of recruitment,
education, the status of women, the geographic dispersion of Indian
settlements, daily life on the estates, and the Jahagee relationships.

Despite this most impressive marshalling of material, there are some
shortcomings. The author chose to self-publish. This is not necessarily a
bad thing, but The Indian Experience would have benefited from a strong
editor, and some pruning and compression.



There are two shortcomings with the structure of the book: first, the weak
story arc. The book is presented as a series of sections loosely bound
together rather than an unfolding story. The second major weakness is
discursive:* Tikasingh writes combatively, going mano a mano with
Afrocentrism. *He writes without the sense of security that critiques of
Afrocentric epistemology exist within the West Indian academe (hard as that
is to believe) and in the North American and western academe—as in the
Black Athena debate.

A good editor would have restrained Tikasingh’s too-sharp, and too-frequent
asperity (having made a point, he can’t leave it alone), levelled out the
prose, and shaped the story arc of the book.

Nonetheless, The Indian Experience is a well-argued, well-documented work.
Tikasingh has done justice to the material on Indians in the 19th century.
Obviously historians will differ, perhaps violently, as to his
interpretation and orchestration of the facts.

But the West Indian academe has for too long been complacent and guilty of
laziness and self-indulgence. *A work like this upsets those who need to be
upset.* This is one of the books every Trinidadian should read.

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