Freedom, Festivals and Caste in Trinidad After Slavery

About the Book

Dr. SookDeo´s book shows the relevance of the past to the present by using the case study of Trinidad that highlights the crippling disadvantages that accrue to any people experiencing segregation, no matter the era or system of government.  The study challenges notions of free labor, caste and free immigration, especially as it applied to the Caribbean region at the end of slavery and Emancipation (1838) in the British Empire.

  One thread of commonality with more radical studies of the past is that colonialism perpetuated a caste society similar to the one experienced under slavery.  In Trinidad, this was true not only in labor but in education and even when the authorities responded to mass festivals and other freedoms.  Such a study is prescient and relevant today, where opportunities for healthy race and economic relations within nations such as Trinidad were lost. This has been to the detriment of national growth and development in all aspects of Trinidad´s life. The irony for the East Indians arriving in nineteenth-century Trinidad was that if some of them had left the worst features of caste-ism behind, they were entering another rigidly caste-structured society in the New World.

The ostensibly free British citizens of India, coveted as substitutes for slaves after Emancipation, had the historical destiny to contribute to the free labor system in Trinidad, but they paid a heavy cost.  In general studies of the island nation, Indo-Trinidadian indenture is separated from labor history; this author sees a continuum of many labor regimes including slavery, peonage, indenture of many stripes, and free labor.  The US has unearthed evidence in the 1990s that new forms of indented immigration continue in our time. When East Indian history is written as part of Caribbean labor history, we see a story of courage, of pre-industrial people learning how to organize and demand human rights, to survive and make progress with the slowly increasingly opportunities of capitalism.

This work reveals much about transitions in society generally, and about the transition from slavery to free labor more specifically.  That transition is, for Trinidad, a summary of the daily struggles of laboring adults and children who succeeded as "immigrants" against unimaginable odds.  A largely illiterate, male population - ill-prepared for western, multi-racial societies -anonymous behind studies that focus on numerous regulations, platitudes, gross statistics and averages come to life in this study.  This study humanizes "caste" and "outcaste" groups who knew nothing of Trinidad and it shows what indenture contracts meant in the "East Indian´s" day to day life on Trinidad´s plantations.  Many Indians who did not succumb during the three-month voyage from British India to British Trinidad, died of poor health and diet on the plantations, or after expulsion from the estates when they could no longer work, some were found dying on the roads.

Individual deaths on ships, beatings and whipping of indented workers and leaders, medical and food inadequacies (on Walkinshaw´s Estate in 1846), abuse of indented laborers, their wives and children are connected with real people and names.  Especially damning of British-sponsored indenture was its relegating of Indians to pass-carrying prisoners of an anachronistic apartheid state; Indians became the largest sub-group of prisoners allegedly for violating rules that were unfair or hard to understand.

The untruths told Indians about high wages at nearby "farms" and outright abductions of men and women, and capricious extension of "contracts" are juxtaposed with other contemporaneous labor migrations. In other words, Portuguese, Chinese and free African indented migration to Trinidad occured at this very moment in time, yet Indians were probably the most abused single group.

SookDeo´s study connects this to the "spirit of the times" where colonial elites and pla

About the Author

Neil SookDeo has a twin passion for communicating and the Past. SookDeo left apartheid South Africa via a Fulbright Scholarship to Ohio University (1983). It was his chance to learn about hope. He believes that History matters and shapes our thinking in ways we do not always understand. Sookdeo's book is about slavery, free labor and racism; it is also about democracy. Chapter One looks at Trinidad at the beginning of the nineteenth century and contrasts Spanish rule there with British rule. Aspects of slavery, immigration and the demands of plantation economy are compared. Chapter Two examines the immigrant waves that landed after Emancipation and assesses why each came. Chapter Three sees "coolies" boarding steam ships in India for places unknown, where courts and jails replaced the whip as an incentive to assume labors that slaves rejected. Chapter Four examines education in a colonial context. Chapter 5 is about Carnival and the therapeutic role of street festivals. The response of the colonial elites in Trinidad was far from supportive. In 1884 hundreds of East Indians were shot at Muhurram. Neil has kept ties with developments in the Caribbean, Fiji and Africa. He worked briefly for Nelson Mandela's government.