ON March 4, 2021, I delivered a virtual lecture on Indo-Caribbean migration, cultural change, and continuity and identity formation to the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It was an invited lecture, which lasted about ninety minutes. If interested, the lecture is posted on the department’s website (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMakL038Iss). The South Asian Center is one of a kind, focusing on the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora in the United States. To jump-start my lecture, I shared the thought on how the label of the descendants of the Caribbean indentured has evolved over time but, I did not delve deeper because of time constraints.  I argue here that we can now be called Atlantic Indians.

The first indentured Indians to British Guiana in 1838 were called “Hill Coolies” because they were recruited from the tribal region of Chota Nagpur, the present Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. To my knowledge, this was the only shipload of “Hill Coolies” that was brought to the Caribbean region mainly because they were abused on the Guianese plantation, and so, further efforts to recruit them to provide plantation labour were discouraged. The recruitment of indentured Indians shifted from tribal regions to the North-West Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), South India, and Punjab. What is so interesting about the only “Hill Coolies” shipload of Indians to the Caribbean was that all Indians thereafter transported to the Caribbean, and even in other indentured colonies, were labelled as “Coolie”, the Indian C-word. For this reason, I think Indians are still dragging the chains of indenture, which I call Coolieolgy.

By the 1850s, when some loopholes of the indentured system were “remedied”, the recruits from North and South India were labelled as East Indians alongside the “Coolie” label and was used interchangeably. The East Indian label made sense since the labourers were from the East, and they did not look like the Amerindians in British Guiana, also called Indians. This label avoided the confusion and the conflation of Caribbean ethnicity.

By the end of indenture in 1920, the now-settled indentured labourers, were called East Indian West Indian, or an East Indian living in the West Indies. Those who were returning after their contracts had expired were called “Tapu Walla,” meaning indentured Indians who were working in the Caribbean Islands. I should mention here that the indentured Indians conjured up their own labels to the places they were taken. British Guiana was called Damra, Damaralia, or Doomra for Demerara. Trinidad and Suriname were known as Chinidad and Sri-Ram, respectively. Mauritius was called Mirich or Mirich Desh, Fiji was called Pheegee, Natal was Naatal, and so on.
By the second World War, the East Indian West Indian label had outlived its usefulness. The indentured Indians have come to see the West Indies as their home, and so, the East was dropped from the East Indian and the West Indian label was rarely mentioned. They were called Indians. The recognition of the Caribbean as their new homeland does not mean, however, the negation or abandonment of India. In fact, the cultural ties were still strong, and when Guyana became independent, diplomatic connections were established, bringing India and the Caribbean regions where Indians were the majority population closer.

By the 1980s, the hyphenated label of Indo-Caribbean was introduced, although the Indian label was not dismissed. The hyphenated label was somewhat of a copycat from the wider movement in the West, namely, to connect identities of the Old and New World, and to distinguish and define identities according to individual or group experiences, for example, African American. By 2000, there was mass confusion regarding who was an Indian in the Caribbean. I wrote the following in Caribbean Quarterly in Vol. 52. No. 1. 2006 after attending and presenting at two conferences: “At the international Indian Diaspora Conference in Trinidad in May 2004, attendees were asked who really is an Indian with regard to how one defines an Indian or what makes someone an Indian. A year later at another conference, Caribbean Migrations: Negotiating Borders, at Ryerson University in Toronto, a similar question was asked, what does Indo-Caribbean mean? Did the term Indo-Caribbean issue from, and was it used only in, the Caribbean Diaspora? There were no definite answers to these questions, but they raised issues that are an integral part of the global trend. How do ethnic groups like Caribbean Indians see themselves in an ever-globalizing world? Have they become increasingly connected with other world cultures through forces and facets of globalization? Or have they resisted assimilation and instead show a quest for a separate identity, be racial, ethnic, or regional?”

Here I am some twenty years later addressing the same issue. I have argued elsewhere that Indian identity has been shaped by population size, migration, and geographical space based on a multipartite structural analysis grounded in physical and imaginative space. These once indentured people are no longer anchored on the plantations or in one specific Caribbean country. These transplanted people have created their own space in a transplanted world, revealing an interwoven web of connections and collaboration from the Caribbean to the United States to India, and further afield. They are found almost anywhere in the Western hemisphere as participatory citizens that qualify them to be Atlantic Indians rather Indo-Caribbean, Indians, or “Coolies” (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu).