IN a few weeks, Guyanese will celebrate Arrival Day, notably, the arrival of Indians to Guyana following the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. In tandem with this historic episode, I will share four columns.
One interesting characteristic of Indian indenture was letter exchanges between India and British Guiana. This practice was developed by the colonial government to facilitate and maintain relationships between families in India and British Guiana which was uncommon in rural India, the origins of Indian immigrants. Communication in rural India was based on oral tradition and the written form of communication was not widespread. Actually, some never wrote a line in their life, simply because they did not know how to.
The lack of knowledge about writing played a pivotal role in determining the extent of letter exchanges as well as the growing distance between families in India and British Guiana. D. W. D Comins, a government official, reported that from indentured Indians in British Guiana in 1890 only 2,035 letters were sent from the Immigration Department and 1,705 letters were registered at the Post Office for transmission to India. Even fewer letters were received from India. If we take into consideration that at any given time during the period of discussion an estimated 75,000-100,000 Indians resided in British Guiana and an estimated 2,000-3,000 Indians were either arriving or leaving British Guiana on a yearly basis, particularly between 1860 and 1917, then the few thousand letters between British Guiana and India certainly represented a low level of communication. In 1927, seven years after indentured emancipation, of a total population of 127,017 Indians, 56,875 and 70,017 were living on and off the estates respectively. In that same year, only 1,123 letters were sent from British Guiana to India, a substantial decrease from three decades earlier.
The reason for the lack of communication was that many indentured Indians were not in a position to remit any savings after spending at least one to two years in British Guiana. They were locked in a low-wage plantation regime where they earned just enough to sustain themselves at least in the initial stages of indenture. Their own frustration to acquire savings as well as their inability to send back savings to relatives was a major embarrassment to indentured Indians in British Guiana. Some indentured Indians simply did not communicate with relatives in India until they had accumulated enough savings while others simply abandoned ties with their departed homeland.
The infrequent communication was partly due to the fact that Indians were also encouraged to settle in British Guiana through a government-sponsored land-in-lieu-of-return-passage policy. After the 1890s when the colonial government asked ex-indentured Indians to contribute to their return passage the letter exchanges decreased further resulting in a greater social distance between India and British Guiana.
Perhaps strange, Indians in India did not communicate frequently even when they received remittances. Robert Duff, a colonial official, declared that when the Indians left India, they were looked upon more or less as outcasts, and so when considerable amounts of remittances were sent from British Guiana to their friends and relatives in India, the latter did not take the trouble to even acknowledge them, although a stamped and addressed envelope was sent along with the letter. Because of this practice, colonial officials often stated that Indian remitters in British Guiana would contact them to receive information if their relatives did receive the remittances. A policy was subsequently developed whereby a small fee was charged to remitters in British Guiana for the official acknowledgment of payment in India. The Post Office subsequently sent a note to the remitters informing them that the money order was cashed in India.
Why payees in India did not acknowledge remittances from their relatives in British Guiana is open to speculation. Some Indians in India were perhaps unaware that their relatives were in British Guiana mainly because their relatives were lured, duped or kidnapped into indenture. This sudden departure might have explained why some Indians were despondent to their relatives in British Guiana. They were under the impression that British Guianese indentured Indians abandoned them. Moreover, those Indians who had crossed the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to get to British Guiana had, in minds of their families, violated communal caste customs. Nineteenth-century Indian caste customs discouraged out-migration, in particular, travelling over high seas. The crossing of kala pani (black water) meant a loss of caste which could only be remedied by religious ceremonial purification. Indentured Indians might have tried to conceal crossing the kala pani by discontinuing communication for fear of rejection and social ostracism on their return to India. In the eyes of their relatives in India, they had essentially abandoned Maha Bharat (Great India) for tapula (Caribbean Islands). Still, even if Indians in India had known that their relatives had signed contracts and had crossed the kala pani to work in British Guiana, continuous communication was not a normal expectation. Many Indians in India could not read or write (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu).