On May 5 every year, Guyana celebrates Arrival Day which was ostensibly to commemorate the peopling of Guyana in the 19th century by indentured immigrants from various countries in the world. Guyana’s experience in this regard was not singular since there were other countries in the Americas which were going through a similar experience.
As examples of this movement of peoples we will mention three examples: The United States of America, where, after their Civil War, increasing numbers of Europeans emigrated there; Argentina, where mainly Italians, went there to make a new life; and Cuba where thousands of Spaniards settled the Island.
The one commonality these movements of people had was to supply labour. In the case of Argentina, it was to supply labour for their Agricultural Revolution which was taking place; in the case of America, it was for both their Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions: and in the case of Cuba, as it was in Guyana, it was to supply labour to their burgeoning sugar industry. In all these countries, as it was in Guyana, the labour imported suffered grave exploitation and the immigrants suffered discrimination.
Slavery was finally abolished in 1838 with the ending of the Apprenticeship System. The freedmen began leaving the estates to set themselves up in villages or went to the capital town to try to find employment. With this exodus of the workforce, the sugar estates were all on the verge of collapsing and their owners, the planter class, frantically began to search everywhere in the world to recruit labour. They tried the West Indian islands, Madeira (an island territory of Portugal), China and India.
The Indian indentures proved themselves better suited for the work that had to be done and from about 1860 only Indians were imported. Since Indians were the overwhelming majority of indentures and owing to the great contribution they made to the social and economic life of the country, Arrival Day came to be known as Indian Arrival Day and was celebrated on May 5, the date when the first Indian indentures disembarked in Guyana in 1838. Accordingly, special commemorative days are celebrated to mark the arrival of the first Chinese and Madeirans.
Indian indentured immigration was a new form of slavery. The indentures were exploited to the hilt Their wages were the lowest in the colony, barely enough to keep them alive; their freedom of movement was restricted as at the time of slavery; they had no educational facilities though from 1876 free and compulsory primary education was established by Law; there were no medical services; they were housed in ranges or logies where the earth was their floors and there was little privacy; the pit latrines they used contaminated the water used for washing and even drinking. Above all, their culture and religions were barely tolerated and held in contempt.
In such conditions, there were continual labour disputes and when conditions became unbearable there were spontaneous strikes which the colonial authorities designated “riots” and this allowed the Police and military to violently suppress them, often with loss of life. The last of these “riots”, in effect a labour dispute, occurred at Enmore Estate on the East Coast Demerara where the Police shot and killed seven workers. As a result of these “riots” and the rise of trade unionism in the sugar industry in the 1920s, conditions of life and work gradually began to improve but are still inferior to those of other established industries.
There are several inaccurate assumptions which have become attached to the story of Indian immigration but we shall mention only two here: Between 1838 and 1917, 239,000 Indian indentures came to Guyana and it is loosely assumed that they all settled in the colony. In fact, one-third were able to return to their homeland; about 40 percent died in the colony before they could return home and it was this high death rate which resulted in the continual immigration to replenish the workforce, and a maximum of 80,000 settled in the colony.
The other inaccurate assumption is that Indian immigration brought down the wages of African workers. This inaccuracy is perpetuated in the CXC Caribbean History textbooks. Until about 1860, Indian indentures were far outnumbered on the plantations by West Indians, Chinese and Portuguese and as such could not have brought down the wages of African workers. Indian indentures only became the most numerous group of indentures from about 1860 by which time the Africans had mostly left the estates to set up in villages (The Village Movement) or had migrated to the towns.
The relations between the various racial groups were friendly and between Africans and Indians particularly so. It is only some politicians and those aligned to them who speak of racial tensions and try to stimulate such tensions and this could be ascertained by newspaper research over the last 20 or 30 years.
The Indian contribution to the development and creation of modern Guyana has been of fundamental importance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Indian labour sustained the Sugar Industry on which the colony’s economic survival depended. They were also the founders or main players in other Agricultural Industries such as the Rice Industry, the Coconut Industry, the Fishing industry, the dairy and meat industry and in increasing the production of ground provisions, fruit and vegetables.
Schools were never established on the sugar estates since it was the assumption of the ruling classes that the role of Indians was to supply agricultural labour. It was only when they left the estates that they and their children were able to access secondary and tertiary education. The turn of the 20th century saw an increasing number of Indians entering commerce and industry and the learned professions such as Law, Medicine, Engineering and Accounting, adding another dimension to their contribution to national life.
The Indian cultural contribution to national life is of notable importance: They introduced new foods and recipes, new festivals, music and dance and above all, Hinduism and Islam as established religions. This has given Guyana the unique position of having the three greatest world religions established here side by side and existing in the greatest amity unlike other countries in the world.
Finally, the large settlement of Indian indentures in Essequibo meant there was an even larger British presence in the territory from 1838 and no Venezuelans whatsoever and ensured that Essequibo remained without question a part of the then British Guiana when the Arbitrators were working out their award.
