Indenture & exile

the long version

Some 150 years ago, the first jahajibhais (“ship brothers”) set off from India to work as indentured laborers in Caribbean plantations. Their descendants now make up numerical majorities in Guyana and Surinam and a significant presence in much of the Caribbean. Yet many flee the countries of their birth, seeking asylum in Britain, Canada, and the United States. This volume, which consists of selected papers from a York Indo-Caribbean Studies Conference, revolves around the Indo-Caribbean experience of its participants. This experience has many facets: the conditions of indenture; the development of urban bourgeoisie; labor movements; protest; political organization; race relations; community and religious organization; the conditions of women, sports, and education; and the emergence of fiction writers like Naipaul, Selvon, and Khan. In addition to the introduction, Birbalsingh also contributes a chapter on Jamaican Indians, and participates in panels on Indo-Caribbean literature and on Indo-Caribbean cricketers. Other outstanding participants include Cheddi Jagan, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, E. Moutoussamy, and Hugh Tinker. Such a volume not only reflects the kaleidoscopic experience of Indo-Caribbean exiles but also mirrors their courage, creativity, joys, sufferings, achievements, and persecution. Although most contributors are academics, a few—like Lamming, Sarusky, and Dabydeen—are professional writers. Three are politicians who may be classified as being on the left or far left of the political spectrum. Much of what they say about exploitation, resistance, ethnic alienation, and racial discrimination may indeed illuminate situations in other Third World countries, and perhaps in all places with a colonial inheritance. Although colonialism or colonial domination is considered to be a passing phase in world history, its objective consequences and the subjective experiences of colonial subjects should be time and again shared and expressed in conferences and in publications of this nature.