Indenture and Exile: The Indo-Caribbean Experience

Raj S. Gandhi is a professor of sociology at the University of Calgary.

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.