|
The
Politics of Representation in the Indian Labour
Diaspora:
West
Indies, 1880-1920
Prabhu
P. Mohapatra
(Prabhu
P. Mohaptra is Reader, Department of history, Delhi
University)
Preface
Contrary
to the trend of neglect towards labour history research,
which is true not only in the case of India but also in
the world over, the recent past has witnessed a revival in
Indian working class history. The turn of the present
century has seen some helpful spurts of resurgence of the
discipline with efforts to stimulate academic thinking and
substantive research into the changing profile of the
Indian working class. The establishment of Integrated
Labour History Research Programme (ILHRP) at the VV Giri
National Labour Institute, as a collaborative initiative
with the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH)
was in some sense is a part of this renewal and revival of
labour history. Apart from instituting an 'Archives of
Indian Labour', the programme initiated a 'Writing Labour
History Series' and specially commissioned essays by
leading labour historians in order to disseminate research
in labour history to a wider public. Prabhu Mohapatra's
essay, 'The Politics of Representation in the Indian
Diaspora' forms a part of this series.
In
the essay, the author brings together two important
histories of labouring experience, which have been seen
separated in the historiography. The first relates to the
history of Indian labour emigrants in the colonial period
to the overseas colonies of British empire, which the
author sees now as an integral part of the larger history
of Indian labour migration in the 19th and 20th centuries,
which as is well known, contributes the basis of the
formation of Indian working class. The second set of
issues that the author discusses is the history of country
formation on the one hand and the formation of class
identity on the other.
The
essay also examines the process of identity formation of
Indian emigrants in the West Indies by locating it firmly
in the context of the changing labour regime in the
plantations, where the migrants have been placed as
indentured labourers.
The
author argues against the emergence of a singular identity
in the Indian labour diaspora in the West Indies and
demonstrates that neither cultural persistence nor "assimilationist"
theories of identity formation can capture the multiple
possibilities that could and did coexist during the period
under study. The essay also successfully transcends the
dualities of culture and economy as well as class and
community, which have plagued the study of diasporic
formations, especially those that were formed through long
distance labour migration.
I
hope that the publication of this essay will add new
dimensions to the study of Indian labour diaspora and
hence will be a valuable addition to the written history
of Indian working class.
(Uday
Kumar Varma)
Director
On
25th of June 1887, a curious incident was reported in the
San Fernando Gazette of Trinidad. At the end of the month
of Ramadan that year, on the great festival day of Eid Ul
Fitr the Indian Muslims of Victoria village and of nearby
estates congregated for the mass prayer in the Little
Masjid. A fracas began unexpectedly when several Muslims
objected to facing east in the direction of Mecca for the
prayer- they argued instead that they should face west as
they were wont to do in India. Theological debates soon
gave way to free exchange of blows between the votaries of
Eastward and west ward prayer. Peace was restored after
considerable period but with appeals to eminent lawyers
Messers Wharton and Farfan to mediate in the dispute. Was
the dispute simply due to ignorance as to the true
direction of Mecca or was it a case of "following
Custom" the much maligned traits that the
Indian Muslims shared with their compatriots? [i]
This incident a small footnote in the longer history
of community formation is significant for another
reason - indicative as it was of the travails of travel.
Migration always meant transformation of lives and styles
and involved living with changes that one did not choose
or anticipate. Cultures had to be created ;they simply
could not be transplanted.
However,
what interests me in this description of the incident
is the ways in which one can find the reflection of two
competing and divergent theoretical formulations about the
larger question of community and ethnic identity formation
in the diaspora context . The first view is widely
known as one of cultural persistence which was popularised
largely though the work of the anthropologists in the
1950sand 1960s. Main features of this theory may be
summarised briefly. It argues that cultural identity is
central to the process of distinctive community and ethnic
formation in the diaspora- and that this cultural identity
is transmitted largely through deeply embedded cultural
symbols and value systems. In case of the Indian community
formation the centrality of religious, caste and family
patterns are stressed as institutional embodiments of
these value systems. More specifically in the case
of the diaspora in the Caribbean it was argued that
wherever Indian community was found in large numbers the
deeply embedded institutional patterns of caste, religion
and family values were carried (the so called cultural
baggage) by the migrants to their new home land. These
cultural values transplanted in the new surroundings
shaped the emergent forms of community identities. In this
view culture emerged as deeply resistant to change
unleashed by modernsing forces of the new society. The
classic ethnographic description of this process of
cultural continuity is to be found in the work of
Morton Klass and Arthur Niehoff on Trinidad
conducted in the 1950s.[ii] Persistence of cultural values
of the homeland in the disapora, it was argued, shaped the
distinct ethnic identity of the diasporic community and
prevented their assimilation into the prevailing cultural
norms of the new societies. This explanation of ethnic
distinctiveness was reinforced and transformed by
the emergence of the enormously influential theory
of plural society enunciated in the work of M.G
Smith in 1965 on the British West Indies. In this
study Smith characterised the multi racial societies of
West Indies as being composed of population segments
marked by distinct ethnic attributes that lived in a
state of “economic symbiosis and mutual
avoidance”.[iii] Following as it did on the work of J.S
Furnivall on the Colonial Dutch East Indies, Plural
society theorists emphasised the fact that each ethnic
group held on to its inherited cultural traits and
only interacted in the market place or due to the
overarching political compulsions of the State. The
influence of plural society theories was largely due to
the close fit it had with the emergence of racialised
politics of post independence West Indies. ( Despres 1967,
Singer 1967. Clarke 1986, Leys and Peach 1985, Ryan
) As is clear cultural retentionist arguments focused
strongly on reified cultural traits that had been
inherited from by the immigrant communities from their
homeland- very much like the votaries of Eastward prayer
in the example I have cited in the beginning of the essay.
However,
very early on the arguments of cultural retention came
under scrutiny in historical and other anthropological
studies. Instead of cultural persistence, what was
emphasised now was the ways in which central features of a
putative ethnic culture had been adapted to and changed in
the diasporic context. This process of adaptation and
transformation was termed “creolisation”. In case of
the Indian diaspora it was argued for instance that the
institution of caste identities had been largely
attenuated through the experience of migration and in the
new society- where caste status bore no implications for
occupational and social mobility or resource
control.(Schwarz 1967,Smith 1955, 1962, Nevadomsky 1982).
Similarly changes in the language patterns had led to
extensive creolisation of original language(Hindi,
Bhojpuri) of the migrants and there was evidence of
distinct adaptation to the dominant creolised English.
Creolisation thesis, as is clear, emphasised radical
discontinuity and cultural transformation in diasporic
identity formation .(Rodney 1981, Vertovec 1992) In
recent years the creolisation thesis has received much
support from the Post modernist turn in social sciences
with celebration of hybridity ,migrancy and emphasis on
improvisation in the formation of identity. (Ulf
Hannerz). One might with some qualification think of the
upholders of the creolisation thesis as votaries of
Westward prayer in the example cited at the beginning.
My
aim in this essay is not to provide a substantial critique
of these two major views on identity formation that I have
telegraphically described above, what I intend doing
is to draw on the insights of both these formulations in
order to historically examine the process of
identity formation among the Indain immigrant labourers in
the West Indies ,specifically in British Guyana and
Trinidad focused mainly in the period during which Indian
labourers came in large numbers under the indenture system
to populate the plantation societies of the West
Indies.
At
the outset I might briefly set out the main points of
difference that I have with both the creolisation and
cultural retentionist arguments. The first relates to the
notion of community identity in the diaspora. Both the
theories, I believe are pitched at a general level
and are applicable without discriminating between the
different diasporic contexts-that is, it is assumed that
the concept of diaspora itself is unproblematic .[iv]In
the process what is lost sight of is the process by which
immigrant communities are formed through their insertion
into specific socio economic context. In case of the
Indian immigrants in the West Indies – the way in which
the immigrants were forced to relate to the wider
society through their position in the labour regime
on the plantations has been insufficiently
explored in the studies on community identity formation. I
intend to demonstrate in this paper the crucial role of
the changing labour regime in shaping the process of
community identity of Indian immigrants. However by
emphasizing the relationship which the labourers had with
the labour regime I do not mean in any way that the
community identity was in some sense directly
derived from the structure of the labour regime. It is
here that I wish to focus on the ways in which
identity is formed in the crucible of practices of
representation – it is through these practices of
representations that structures of labour regime impinged
on the process of identity formation. However it is also
my contention that there exists no pre formed cultural
identity that is then expressed through representations-
in cognitive terms there is no identity imaginable outside
representations (except perhaps as unconscious). This
allows one also to think of identities as historically
amenable to transformation and contest and also to imagine
the coexistence of multiple identities along
with different representations.
With
these preliminary excursus on the weighty question of
identity what I propose to do however is far more
modest – mainly by examining four different sets of
representations of community identity during the
period 1880-1920 i.e in the last phase of the career
of indentured labour regime in the West Indies. The first
of these is about collective representations of community
enacted and staged in the Muharram festival by the
Indian immigrants in West Indies. Then I take up three
different styles of representations of community identity
in public sphere activities by three individuals. Two of
these were irrepressible and prolific letter writers in
the colonial news papers while a third is the author
of one of the rare literary text produced by an |Indian
during the period of indenture in the West Indies. What I
will focus on of course is the different styles of
representations of the community identity in its relation
to the dominant labour regime and thereby hope to provide
some clues as to the contradictory and often contested
nature of the process by which community identity was
fashioned during the period of indenture.
I
Changing
Labour Regime
Before
I undertake the analysis it will be useful to mark
out the terrain of the labour regime on which these
acts of representations were staged. The labour
regime to which the immigrants came was marked by
transformations along two axes- that of the economic
cycles of growth and stagnation benchmarked on the
international sugar prices and the long term process by
which indentured labour was changed into permanent
settler.
Indentured
labour from India was imported to the Caribbean colonies
of British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica following the
abolition of slavery in 1838. Resistance of the ex slave
labourers to the unreconstructed plantation labour
regime forced on the planters the necessity of
sourcing " cheap and reliable labourers "from
India. Several private experiments beginning in 1838 gave
way to organised labour importation under colonial aegis.
Planters and the colonial state jointly bore the cost of
recruitment and disciplining of the immigrant labour,
effected now under a series of ordinances promulgated from
the 1840's onward collectively known as the Coolie
Ordinances (consolidated in the late 1890s as
Immigration Ordinances of British Guiana (1893) and
Trinidad 1899).
These
ordinances and the apparatus of enforcement and
`protection' that came into existence regulated
every aspect of the working and to large extent non
working lives of the immigrants (e.g marriages and
festivals, sickness ,housing and return to India). The
central feature of the labour system that came into being
was contractual servitude at fixed wages (25 cents or
1shilling per day) for a period of five years on a
plantation where the labourer was obliged to reside.
He or she was for bidden to be outside the plantation
without explicit permission of the planters since the
essence of indenture lay in prohibiting the labourer from
taking advantage of competition for scarce labour. The
contracts were enforced by criminal breach of contract
provisions of the ordinances which punished breaches
of contract by imprisonment and pecuniary levies. [v]It
was to this extremely restrictive and oppressive labour
regime that India immigrants were inserted to serve out
five to ten years of their working lives. After ten years
of industrial residence in the colonies the immigrant
could seek repatriation back to India. [vi]Thia last
provision was explicitly inserted in the contract in
order to distinguish indentured servitude from
slavery.
Who
were these Indian immigrants and how many of them came to
the Caribbean. Between 1838 and 1917, excepting for few
years in the early decades there was continuous annual
importation of labour from India- totaling 238,000 to
British Guiana, 145,000 to Trinidad, 50,000 to Jamaica and
40,000 to Surinam a Dutch Colony. Smaller numbers came to
St’ Lucia, Nevis and Grenada. The peak of
importation was reached in the 1870s and 1880s after which
the flow of immigration was relatively reduced.
While
Immigrants came from practically every province of India,
the overwhelming bulk - upto 80 percent were drawn
from the Gangetic plains of North India from the two
provinces of United Province and Bihar. Of these
again most were from the eastern UP and western Bihar
districts culturally and linguistically contiguous Bhojpur
and Awadh region. A small but significant percentage
of the immigrants were drawn from the southern India from
the hinterlands of Madras from which they had embarked for
the West Indies.
As
to the caste and religious composition of the immigrants,
the overwhelming bulk were drawn from several castes that
together were identified as Hindus constituting 85 percent
of the total immigrants. As with regions again practically
all religious of India were represented in the rest but
nearly all of them were Muslims (14.7%). Castewise the
emigrants were drawn from a medley of caste but with 12-13
percent Brahmins and other upper castes, 35 percent
agriculturist castes ( Koeri, Kurmi, Chasa etc),6 percent
artisans and 32 percent lowcastes (dalits and other menial
castes) they seemed to represent a perfect cross section
of the North Indian society from which they
emigrated.
If
there was a severe discrepancy between the `home' context
and the immigrants it was in gender and age composition of
the latter. Immigrants were predominantly single , male
and in the prime age group of 20-35. Family migration was
not the norm with only 15 percent married couples,
very few children and only 28 percent females(70 percent
of whom were single). All evidence points to recruitment
of immigrants individually rather than in groups, not
usually from their home villages most having already been
mobile and in search of employment before they were
recruited in major cities and railway and road junctions
of the region.[vii]
The
nature of recruitment reflected particular nature of
demand by the planters (of able bodied young fit for hard
labour) which was geared towards continuous importation
rather than local reproduction for its need of a servile
labour force. Colonial labour policy militated against
settlement of the labour force for the greater part of the
period when indenture was in place. Deaths outs tripped
births among Indian immigrants till the end of the 19th
century- not an unexpected result given the skewed gender
composition of the immigrants .
Community
formation on the plantations was thus beset with
structural problems. Yet in spite of these there emerged
an embryonic community centred round the estates. The
spearhead of this were the time expired labourers who had
finished their terms of indenture. According to the
indenture contract they could apply for a free return
passage to India after completing a further five years of
residence in the colonies. Thus there grew around the
estates small settlements or villages of ex indentured
labourers who worked on the estates as well took up
several other occupations. In the end after completion of
ten years , many immigrants either did not return or
delayed their return. On the whole of the total immigrants
who came to the colonies about 20 percent ever returned to
India. This process of villagisation accelerated in the
late 19th century with the sugar economy plunging headlong
into a long crisis .
A
slow but gradual mutation occurred in the plantation
labour regime that came around to a policy of settlement
of the immigrant labour-mainly by encouraging the ex
indentured labourers to become part time estate workers
and bear the cost of reproduction in small parcellised
holdings. Thus grew in Trinidad by the turn of the century
a cane farming small holders community and in British
Guiana rice farming and a paddy proletariat emerged among
the Indian immigrants. This process of villagisation
transformed the character of community formation among
Indians with slow emergence of differentiation within the
Indian community.
This
brief excursus was necessary to show the changing
nature of community formation among the Indians. I
have identified three phases in the process by which
Indian labourers were transformed from temporary
sojourners to permanent settlers in the colonies. The
first phase from 1838- 1880 was phase of growth of
the plantation economy with the centre of immigrant
community being strongly centred on the estates and around
it. Between 1880 till the end of indenture is the phase of
villagisation with increasing diversification of
occupation, the centre of gravity of community definitely
shifts away from the estates into the villages and
settlements.
The
third phase in the post indenture period is marked by
continuing decline in the social valence of the
plantations and the increasing occupational mobility,
differentiation among the Indian settlers and the move to
urban areas by professionals and educated. These are
necessarily broad phases -and there were overlaps between
the phases and the tendency towards settlement was
accelerated or retarded according to the pace of the
economic and political processes. Crisis in the sugar
economy accelerated diversification of occupation in
the late 19th century while the crisis in the 1930's led
to stagnation and strangulation of these processes.
Further there were difference between Guyana and
Trinidad which was very significant both in the nature and
character of settlements of the Indians as well as their
specific responses to periods of crisis and boom.
II
Muharram
in the Caribbean
A
bemused " sight seer" was once witness to the
celebration of Muharram or (Tadjha as it was called in
British Guyana) on a sugar plantation in Demerara in
British Guyana in 1897 and had exclaimed
....
there is something very striking in the in the thought
that this Muslim "Miracle play "should be
so firmly rooted in this single corner of the American
continent. If we count Trinidad as part of the British
Guiana then this must be the only spot in the whole of the
Western hemisphere where the martyrdom of Hassan and
Hossein is annually commemorated. It is as though Good
Friday were religiously observed in a single province in
the middle of China."
This
singular incongruity led him onto philosophical
speculation about the East in the West and he further
ejaculated:
The
Coolies bring their Tadjhas and Tom Toms and we give them
trousers and other advantages of civilisation. They come
here with their strange customs and superstitions and we
give them in return free schooling and Western standard of
living. What the result of this strange conjunction of the
Orient in the Occident will be, what sort of a social
cosmos it is going to produce I leave to others to
foretell.[viii]
He
may not have been right about Good Friday in China nor
about the advantages of trousers and civilisation but he
was not very far from truth in his observation about the
strange location of Moharram performances in the
heart of West- except that he should have included Jamaica
and Surinam as also the little island of Grenada
where too Muharram was celebrated.
In
fact wherever Indian labourers were sent as indentured
labourers be it the African continent or the
American from Mauritius to Natal, to Fiji and the
Caribbean colonies Moharram had emerged as the most
important and spectacular festival of the Indian Diaspora
in the 19th century. If the " sightseer" had
been more knowledgeable he would have been acquainted with
the Hosay massacre in Trinidad of 1884( as undoubtedly
many of the contemporary missionaries were) he would have
exclaimed greater surprise at the fact that Hindus and
sunnite muslim labourers had even laid down their lives in
order to assert their right to celebrate a minority
Shi sect festival.[ix]
On
October 30 1884 , 6000 Indian labourers residents of sugar
estates around the town of San Fernando took out
their processions of Tazias replica tombs of the grandsons
of the prophet and marched towards the town to
complete the process of immersion of these tabuts to end
the festival of Moharram like they had done for thirty
years. But that year the Government had banned the
procession from entering the town and imposed heavy
punishment for infringement of the ban- yet the
processionists marched on to the town to fulfill what they
said was their "religious obligation". A short
distance from the town troops and police mustered to stop
the processionists opened fire at two entrances to the
town - twenty two Indian labourers were shot dead and one
hundred more injured. They had not attacked the police nor
had they actually entered the town . When the dead were
counted and the injuries toted up- a strange statistics
emerged - 17 of the killed were Hindus and five Muslims,
76 of the injured were Hindus and nineteen Muslims and one
Christian.
The
Government had ostensibly banned the procession as it had
argued that Hindus and other non Muslim participation
indicated that the procession was not a religious one and
its banning did not amount to suppression of religion of
the immigrants. The enquiries followed and the governor of
Jamaica Sir Henry Norman exonerated the government from
allegations of interference with religion of the
immigrants. Yet a timid Hindu labourer when asked by the
Commissioner as to why he a Hindu had joined the
Muslim festival replied'" I did so because it is the
custom of all the coolies in Trinidad to join Hosay".
Strange indeed are the effects of traveling cultures-and
customs, more so because in that same year Moharram
processions in Agra in north west provinces had become the
site for a major riot between the Hindus and Muslims. In
the 1880's and 1890's more conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims over the Moharram procession in several cities of
North India and following them came the great round of
conflicts over cow killing during Bakrid. Why indeed did
Muslims and Hindus who fought and killed over Moharram in
India jointly laid down their lives in far off Trinidad
defending their right to celebrate it?
I
have elsewhere analysed the reasons for both the
unprecedented hostility of the colonial state and
planters to mass public manifestation of community
of Indians and also the obstinacy with which the
workers staked claim to public performance of community (
Mohapatra 2002). What I wish to note here is to trace the
historical career of this popular community festival in
the Caribbean.
If
our bemused sight seer had lived till the third decade of
the 20th century, he would have seen the passing of the
indenture labour system into history and with it also the
passing of the Moharram as the premier celebration of the
descendants of the Indian immigrants. In 1932 Tadjah
was banned in the British Guiana by the colonial state ,
but already some time before that date it was definitely
on the wane. ( Williams 1991) In Trinidad Hosay, as
Moharram was called had been pushed back into a corner of
the suburb of St James in Port of Spain and only survives
till date because of its exotic value as a tourist
attraction for the Caribbean island country. In Surinam
and as also in Fiji 1930's had seen the decline of
Moharram, being now a minor festival in certain rural
locations devoid both of its past grandeur and wide
participation (Kelly 1988). In all these locations several
other forms of religious festivals had already overtaken
Moharram e.g. Ramlila, Ramjag and Deepavali for the Hindus
and Eid Ul Fitr for the Muslims.
What
then accounts for the dazzling rise of Moharram in the
19th century in the Indian labour diaspora and its
subsequent fall from grace? I shall then in this section
try to explain some aspects of this puzzling phenomenon
associated with Moharram namely its immense popularity
with the predominantly Hindu and Sunni Muslim emigrants ,
the cultural meanings that they derived from its
performance and its unique place in the community
formation in the 19th Century as also the factors
leading to its decline in the post indenture period.
I shall do so with reference mainly to Moharram in British
Guiana and Trinidad the two most important
Indian labour importing colonies. I hope too that in
trying to answer some of these questions and by
tracing the course of performance of Moharram over
time it would be possible to get a handle on the
complex process of community formation in the
diaspora as well as in the context from which the
emigrants came.
Let
me anticipate here the main line of my exposition
though some of it is already evident in the presentation
of the problem itself. The coeval emergence and decline of
Moharram with the indentured labour system is an
important feature of the problem that I have set out. My
contention is that Moharram's unique features and
its wide popularity as the premier religious and
community festival bears an important relation with the
labour regime in which the emigrants were inserted. It
follows from another proposition that
community identity formation among the Indian emigrants
and their descendents was deeply shaped by their
relations, both involuntary and expressive ,with the
labour regime. The Colonial state played a constitutive
role in the labour regime on the plantations and the
changes it underwent over time and directly shaped
recruitment, organisation and disciplining of labour. To
the extent then that Moharram symbolically expressed
community aspirations of the emigrants it was necessarily
refracted through their experience within the labour
regime and with the colonial state. The relationship no
doubt is not a simple unilinear one, it was
multiplex (to borrow Craig Calhoun's
facile phrase)- yet what has marked several contemporary
as well as later anthropological accounts of the diasporic
community formation in general and Moharram or similar
cultural performances ( with perhaps few exceptions
as Kelly and Chandra Jayawardane) is a deliberate erasure
of the relationship these bore with the labour regime and
the colonial state .
I
believe and my research has convinced me that none of the
major questions regarding ethnic and community festivals
can be understood outside the labouring context in which
they were performed. Ethnicity or community identity is
not a historical entities and are part of the problem to
be explained rather than the explanation itself. The
origins of Moharram celebration in the Caribbean were
definitely in the early years of indenture. While in
Trinidad Moharram festival was traced to its first
celebration in 1855 in the Philippine estate in the
Naparima area -its origin in British Guiana is not
well accounted for. Yet by the late 1850s contemporary
news papers had taken notice of the celebration of this
" tumultuous festival" of the ' coolies in
Trinidad. They noted with wonder the parade of
" coolie castles" or " locomotive
temples" as the tabut replica tombs of the martyred
grandsons of the Prophet were termed, in the main cities
of the island. They also noted the high spirits of the '
noisy crowds of coolies exhibiting much earnest
gesticulation, making a great noise , dancing and
capering" and the vigorous fencing with sticks.
There was a certain amused tolerance of this "
false and foolish worship" of the heathen crowd.[x]
(The Trinidad Sentinel Aug 6 1857, Port of Spain Gazette (
hereafter POSG) July 13 1859)
These
early reports noted that the local black population
participated in these parades in great numbers as
onlookers in search of novelty while they scarcely
mentioned the religious denominations of the Indian
immigrants. It was and remained for along time a
festival of coolie religion which was broadly termed
idolatry. What was noticed consistently was the public
display of Moharram - which was by the late 1850's called
" Hosay" or " Hosein" in
Trinidad in imitation of the lamenting chant of " hai
hassan hi hosein" and simply Tadjah in Brtish Guyana.
(In Jamaica it was known as Hussay). The ignorance as to
the religious import of the festival was widespread and it
was left to the missionaries specially interested in
proselytising among the Indian immigrants in the 1870's to
decode it for the edification of the public and officials
alike. A bewildered Trinidadaian newspaper
wondered in 1871 if the Tabuts displayed were "
Gods" and if the god worshipped was the amorous
Krishna. John Morton the first Canadian Presbyterian
missionary in Trinidad had to dispel (He had
arrived in 1865 in Trinidad) these notions by
providing the basic information on the story of Kerbala
and its religious meanings for the Shhite sect of the
Muslims. However , the missionaries both in Guyana
and Trinidad were deeply hostile to the Muharram
celebrations- disliking the idolatrous aspects of the
Muharram celebration, unruly congregation as also the
attractions it held for the Christian lower class black
population. From the 1870's Christian missionary
opposition to Muharram's public festival aspect was
an important ingredient in the making of the colonial
state and planter's reaction to the festival.
In
spite of occasional forays by the missionaries,
contemporary accounts of the Muharram remained fixated on
its processional and public manifestation. It was
only in the 1882-84 in the prelude to the Hosay massacre
in San Fernando that somewhat more detailed accounts of
celebration of muharram can be found in the Official
correspondences, judicial reports and the major enquiry
report on the incident by Sir Henry Norman. The
first somewhat comprehensive anthropological account of
the Moharram was by Mary Beckwith a folklore specialist
who studied the festival in 1923 in Jamaica. It is
from these scattered sources that I have tried to
delineate some of the important features of Muharram in
the English speaking Caribbean in the 19th and early
twentieth century.
Hosay,
tadjah or Hussay was in the 19th century celebrated
on the first ten days of the first Islamic month
of Muharram or twelve new moons after the last
celebration( since Islamic calendar was lunar one with
alternating months of thirty and twenty nine days). The
festival commemorated the death of the Prophets' grandsons
Hassan and Hosein and especially the latter's death
in the battle of Kerbala at the hands of the Ummaid
enemies of the house of Ali. The festival consisted of
three parts: ritual construction of the replica Mausoleum
of the martyrs over the period of ten days at the sighting
of the new moon, taking out of Alams or Flags representing
the martyrs and their families and other memorabilia
associated with them e.g Horse shoe shaped Nal sahibs
representing the horse Dul Dul of Hosein and parading them
from the seventh night onwards accompanied by tassa drum
beatings and fencing with the sticks and finally climaxing
on the tenth day when the tabuts were taken out and
displayed in public, and a grand procession of tazias of
various estates were sent off to be immersed in the river
or sea in a grand procession accompanied by singing of
ritual lament or Mersiahs by women. For most part of the
19th century, the grand spectacle of the Muharram
procession found its culmination in the coastal cities of
the colony Georgetown, Port of Spain , San Fernando. It
was there that the elites of the colonies witnessed the
parade of tazias from their balconies and as the years
passed they witnessed with horror the growing size of the
processions and the " diabolical activities
accompanying it namely stick fighting and the incessant
chants of "hai hussain hai hassan". By 1880's
for instance the procession in San Fernando a cute little
planter town with population of 5000, was invaded annually
by the Hosay procession consisting of about 15 to 20000
Indian labourers.
It
is clear from the accounts of the 19th century from which
the above descriptions of the festival has been gathered,
that the Muharram was by far the most important community
festival of labourers. The question that needs
to be answered however is what cultural meanings were
sought to be represented in this festival and in what way
was community identity of the Indian immigrant labourers
expressed through this festival? By answering this it is
possible to explain the reasons for the marginalisation of
this festival in late indenture and post indenture period.
Community
identity can be best understood by examining its
concrete manifestation in public and collective
performances. Through collective performance
community was affirmed , powerfully inducing
feelings of solidarity and a sense of belonging. A
common sense of belonging is the result as well the pre
requisite of community performances.
Experience
of migration and the long sea voyage bound the Indian
immigrants together and their closeness was enhanced
further by the fact that most immigrants were recruited
from the same linguistic and cultural region in
India( nearly three quarters of Indian immigrants came
from the Bhojpur and contiguous Awadh region in the
Gangetic United Provinces and Bihar). Further the
Plantation labour regime provided an overarching
commonality of experience irrespective of inherited
differences of creed and caste to the Indian immigrants.
The primary identity of Indian immigrants in the
plantation setting remained that of "Coolie",
nominally meaning an unskilled wage labourer but in fact a
pejorative racial appellation for all Indians. Nothing
marked out the Indian immigrant as the member of the
lowest social group in Trinidad more than the
spatial and temporal immobilisation which was imposed by
the five year indenture. It was this attribute of
immobilsed labour implicit in the term "coolie"
which was extended to the whole community of Indian
immigrants and their descendants. Understandably,
community aspirations of Indians was asserted in
opposition to the "coolie" identity and the
physical and cultural immobilisation imposed by the
indentured labour regime.
The
structure of Hosay and the procession provided an adequate
frame for expression of community aspirations of the
Indian immigrants and their decedents. First of all given
the popularity of Muharram as an important public festival
in northern India, most of the immigrants were familiar
with the rituals and observances associated with it.
The festival and the procession incorporated a spectrum of
practices, which allowed for participation by all the
Indian immigrants irrespective of caste and religious
affiliations. These ranged from the strictly religious
observances of prayer, fasting and keeping of vows and
construction of the Taziyas by the devoted to ostensibly
secular ones of ritual stick play, singing of mersiahs(in
which women were most prominent) ,carrying banners and
other memoribilias , tassa drumming and as spectators.
Secondly, since the festivities centered round the
estates, the pooling of resources in the construction of
the tazias and participation in the procession as members
of the estate reinforced estate based solidarity of
all the immigrant labourers. Finally it was the procession
in which various estates came together that allowed for
congregation of all immigrants from various estates thus
physically representing the whole community of Indians.
The visual impact of the massed participants undoubtedly
provided a powerful stimulus to community feeling as did
the proud display of the magnificent structure of taziyas
as unique cultural symbols of the community.
It
was the processional aspect of Muharram , which was
perhaps the most important reason for its popularity among
the immigrants. The articulation of community identity in
a processional form was specially important in the context
of the spatial immobility of the community engendered by
the indentured labour system. Through the
Hosay procession, the community manipulated already
existing spaces and places but gave them a new
albeit temporary meaning. The Hosay procession
performed at least three functions which were crucial for
expression of community identity: an integrative ,a
transgressive and a reiterative one.
The
route of the procession integrated normally segregated
plantation communities and physically linked the bounded
space of the plantations with the city or town centre. It
was thus that the community was structured by the
procession and at the same time as it imprinted itself on
the existing space. In its' transgressive aspect, the
procession narrated a counter discourse to the
normal spatial immobility imposed on the immigrants. By
occupying the highway and marching through the centre of
the towns Indian immigrants laid claim to the public
spaces which were ordinarily denied to them. While
indentured immigrants were bound by law not to be outside
the plantations without explicit permission of the
managers even non indentured immigrants and
their descendants were required by law to possess with
them certificates of exemption from indenture and were
liable to be arrested as vagrants or deserters. Public
spaces, highways and towns were especially fraught places
for the Indians. By occupying spaces and places in the
procession, even though temporarily, Indian labourers
symbolically transcended both their
"coolie" status and the implicit bounded space
in which they were located. The Muharram procession then
literally mobilized an immobile community.
However,
the counter discourse of space was not formulated in
opposition to the established authority structure even
though the procession did not draw its legitimacy from any
explicit legal right to occupy spaces and places.
Rather, the transgressive and liminal aspects were
normalised through the reiterative function of the
procession. By repeating over the years ,fixed routes,
destinations and orders of estates in the procession, the
community arrogated to itself an implicit right to occupy,
and march through pubic spaces. It was custom rather
than any specific legal right which was invoked by
the participants in the Hosay procession of 1884 to
go to San Fernando. The heavy investment in customary
spatial rights was also at the root of conflicts over
orders of precedence in the procession. Custom also made
space sacred as was asserted by the Babajees about San
Fernando in 1883. By integrating, mobilising and investing
customary rights on public places and spaces , the
Muharram festival and the procession powerfully
articulated community aspirations and religious belief,
the sacred and the profane were not separated either in
the practices or in the minds of the participants.
A
final feature of the processional form of Muharram needs
to be noted here. While I have drawn attention to the
relation between the expressive forms of community and the
specific condition of labouring existence (Integration,
mobilisation,public representation) it must not be
inferred therefore that the procession was in some sense a
direct expression of the labouring identity of the
indentured immigrants workers. In fact in the Muharram and
the procession if any thing was visually absent was any
direct reference to the labouring condition on plantation.
I would even suggest that Muharram procession allowed the
Indian immigrants to negate their overwhelming existence
as Coolie labour and represent themselves as full-fledged
moral and cultural community. Muharram drew its sharpest
meaning for the participants in the evident contrast with
their daily condition of labour- and this was the meaning
that was powerfully conveyed to the wider public through
the Procession. However despite this caveat, because of
the way in which the processional form of Muharram became
an expression of community assertion- it also emerged as
potentially powerful vehicle for representing collective
grievances. In my analysis of the 1884 Hosay Massacre I
have demonstrated the special conditions in which the
community assertion and class grievances were uniquely
combined in the Muharram procession in Trinidad.
(
Mohapatra 2002) The Muharram of 1884 in Trinidad came in
the wake of a unprecedented strike wave that swept through
the colony between 1882-1884 as planters tried to counter
the crisis of falling sugar prices by intensification of
work . The threat of insurrection appeared imminent to the
planters and the colonial state as they panicked in face
of massed display of Muharram procession. By banning the
procession and brutally enforcing the ban the colonial
state sought to unlink the class and community assertion
expressed in the Muharram.
Having
elaborated the cultural meanings that were sought to be
expressed through Muharram I need to explain its eventual
decline over time as the premier community festival of The
Indians in the diaspora. Muharram grew in size and
importance with the growth of the plantation economy and
its decline coincided with the severe crisis of plantation
economy in the late 19th century. But the most important
factor for its decline remained the unabashed hostility of
the colonial state to the Moharram procession. The first
attempts at controlling the procession had been initiated
in Guyana in 1869 when a special ordinance required
specially chosen headmen to be seek permission and be
responsible for order in the procession. This was followed
in Trinidad in promulgation of ordnances banning the
procession from public roads and towns and confining it to
the estates. Finally the large scale shooting down of the
workers in 1884 to enforce the ordinance broke the back of
this community festival. A new ordinance in 1885 In
Trinidad made the celebration of the festival a
Muslim affair with punishment for non Muslim celebration.
I have argued that community representation in public
spaces was the most powerful source of popularity of the
festival- denied this vital expressive quality and by
confining the festival to individual estates this festival
was starved of the oxygen of publicity. Allied to this was
the sustained hostility of missionaries and orthodox
sections Muslims to the pagan display in the festival. But
the factor that worked incessantly in the background was
the gradual move away from the plantation and the process
of villagisation that was initiated as a response to the
crisis of the late 19th century. As the locus of community
formation shifted away from the plantation and the estates
Muharram could no longer become the preferred mode of
community assertion. There was a definite shift from
public display of community to more inward and exclusive
forms of religious observances (such as ramayanjag, flag
worship for hindus and EID for muslims).This process of
retreat from Public display however was soon overtaken by
a new form of engagement in the emergent public sphere in
the colonies.
III
Voice
of the Settler Indian : A Son of India in Trinidad
In
the aftermath of the crisis of 1884 , a new mode of
public sphere activity emerged quite suddenly in the
Caribbean. This was in the form of writing letters
to the leading journals of the colonies. The first
letterwriter to emerge from the ranks of the |Indians
wrote under the nom de plume of A Son of
India in the San Fernando Gazette in 1888 a widely
circulated daily in Trinidad. This was the leading
Creole (Black) newspaper of the colony and championed the
cause of the educated Creoles who were demanding
greater share in the affairs of the colony. It is in
this newspaper that A son of India began writing a series
of letters and essays drawing attention to the
demands of the Indian community. Three factors seem
to have given rise to this public representation
form .First the emergence of a substantial number of
Indians, ex indentured labourers who had diversified out
from the Plantations and had formed the nucleus of
the Indian settler community. Second from within
this small but rapidly growing section there emerged a
miniscule group of Indians educated in English largely
through the proselytising effort of the Canadian
Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad which opened its first
school for Indian children in 1871 (By 1888 there were 52
Schools in several estates and villages with three
thousand children of the settler Indians and
10 educated Indian were employed as interpreters and shop
clerks in 1880) Third the institution of the Royal
Franchise Commission enquiring into the question of
electoral enfranchisement in the colony in 1888 gave a
fillip to public agitation for elected and
representative government largely led by progressive
Creole middle class .[xi]
It
is significant that the first letter of A son of India
in December 1888 was written as an address to the new
Governor William Robinson , articulated the demand of the
growing settler Indian community.[xii] The themes
set out in the letter seemed to have persisted through out
the career of this pioneer Indian letter writer. First
there was the demand that efforts should be made by
the government to retain the Indian labourers in the
colony rather then repatriate them. Secondly the most
important incentive for retention was for the
government to intervene actively to provide education to
the Indians taking into account their special needs
as the bulk of them were outside the purview of any
education effort at all. In it there was the demand to
provide for compulsory education to all Indian children.
Thirdly, the language of Imperial citizenship is
deployed by the author to seek governmental welfare
and stake a permanent claim on the colony.( “It is not
too much to ask from the Government these privileges ,for
we consider ourselves part and parcel of the great British
Empire and not aliens…) Finally there
is a conscious effort to refute the ascription of
low status to the Indian community on the ground of
their low caste origins, illiteracy and position as
bound labourers on estates. This is done in several
subsequent letters by drawing on the glorious past of the
Indians and by the fact that not all of the immigrants
were of low caste but contained a fair proportion of high
caste and middling castes. [xiii]
In
demanding special attention of the government for
the education of Indian community, A Son of India
irked several pro planter lobbies and also the
Creole middle class . The former thought it as
useless expenditure on a class whose
main occupation should be and would remain for labouring
on the estates as ‘Coolies”. Port of Spain Gazette ,
the pro planter newspaper of the colony reacted to this
novel form of public activity and demand for education by
asserting that most Indians will ‘enter the school
as a coolie and emerge from it the same coolie”. [xiv]The
emergent Creole middle class continued to castigate the
immigration and the immigrants as causes of demoralization
to the colony and a potent factor for depressing the
labour market.[xv] They saw in the demand for education
emanating from the settled Indian community another
instance of state pampering and special privilege.
Even John Morton the Canadian Presbyterian Missionary who
played a leading role in setting up schools for Indians
was irritated by the demand for non denominational
education for Indians demanded by A Son Of
India.[xvi] The author who himself was a
christian and trained in missionary school was
acutely aware of the reluctance of Indian s to enter
denominational schools for fear of losing their religion
. He sought to highlight the need for advancement of the
settler population through education rather than
conversion as a means of “amalgamating to Western
civilization”. [xvii] Apart from these A Son of
India through his letters commented on the major
legislations affecting the Indian community such as the
Immigration Ordinaces and ordinances for Indian
marriages. And on the Report of Sergeant Commins.(1893).[xviii]
In
what way was the Indian community identity expressed in
this new form of public activity by the letter
writers? The community that was imagined had as its
nucleus those who had made Trinidad their home- this
included the rapidly growing peasant proprietors involved
in cultivation of crownland and others who had
diversified in activities outside the plantation in
trading, huckstering and market gardening. The spearhead
of this group was the small educated Indians mainly of
Christian denomination . There was no attempt to exclude
the indentured immigrants but as was evident they were
seen as the source for recruitment into this rapidly
expanding nucleus. Thus the letter writers did not oppose
immigration as the Creole middle class did and were all
for its encouragement but it was imagined that they
could only become full members of the community by
graduating out of the estates . The emphasis on education
as a means of acquiring citizenship and permanence was
also indicative of the character of this putative
community. While the problems of indentured labourers were
sometimes raised in his letters, there was no attempt at
criticizing the indenture system directly nor any
substantial issue of wages, working conditions and terms
of contract taken up in these letters. The ascription of
low status of coolie identity to the whole Indian
community was contested but in some sense there was
also an implict acceptance of this condition.
By 1889, the term Coolie was thought to be too degrading
to be designated as the appellation for Indian as a whole-
the PRESBYTERIAN mission led the way under pressure
from its exclusively Indian members to change the name of
the mission from Coolie Mission to East Indian Mission. As
a new community began to be imagined around the settlers,
there were attempts to begin rudimentary organisation of
the Indian community at the end of the century in 1897
with the establishment of the East Indian Congress in
Trinidad .
While
the settler community of Indians came to chart out a
different path of involvement with Colonial Public Sphere
in the late 19th Century, what happened to the Indentured
Indian workers the century as a response to the crisis of
the Plantation economy? In the next two sections I take up
two different styles of representation of community
in the work of the Songwriter Lalbehari Sharma and that of
Bechu.
IV
Lalbehari
and the poetry of indenture
It
is widely assumed that Indian Immigrants were illiterate
and their education happened subsequent to
their entry into the plantation. This image neatly fits
into the idea of the plantation and indenture as a school
for development of the immigrants. However there is enough
evidence contrary to this popular image to suggest that
literacy was not entirely absent among the immigrants- a
fair number among them were literate in native languages
of India such as Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. In the first
place familiarity and reading of important religious texts
was fairly common among Indians- it is possible that
the upper caste Brahmins and Muslim clerics and ritual
specialists were perhaps over represented in this section.
Despite this it is also true that the Indian diaspora has
produced far few public texts for the posterity in forms
of memoirs, autobiographies and other literary texts.
It is in this context of near absence of any public text
authored by the immigrants that the rare work
of Lalbehari Sharma an indentured labourer in Guyana
published in 1916 quite at the end of indenture
period has some significance.[xix] The work entitled
“Damra Fag Bahar” (Holi songs of Demerara)written in
Nagri script and in a mixture of Bhojpuri and Avadhi
language was a collection of original songs meant for
recitation during Holi festival. The language of the text
and the construction of the poems followed the
16th Century textual forms of the epic Ramcharit Manas (
The Story of Rama) by Tulsidas with a mixture of
couplets(Doha )quatrains( Choupai), freeverse (Kabita),and
rhymes (Chautal,Ulara) which were well known in the main
recruiting ground of the immigrant population in Eastern
Uttar Pradesh and Western Bihar. It is evident from the
mixture of the forms utilised in the text that the author
expected familiarity from his readers and audience of not
just the themes but also the sequences and rhythm of the
text. The text is eminently recitable apart from being
readable too. The explicit audience of the text is a
collective of singers and listeners-or as he wrote in the
preface of the text gayanpriya rasik (connoisseurs of
songs). Yet it is evident in the structure of the
collection and in the references to the landscape
sprikkled with names of settlements and estates where
Indians resided , that the audience and readership is
explicitly the Indian community of Guyana.
While
ostensibly intended to entertain the community the text
was also confessional that is the poems were meant to
cleanse the inner world (antah karan pavitra) and provide
an outlet for anxieties and worries of the author. The
collection of songs are in three parts; the first
introduces the author to the audience and relates the
story of his present condition and daily life in Guyana,
the second part are collection of songs abo | 
