FOR over a month, in this space, I have been addressing some “unexplored” areas, namely, unclaimed remittances, of the Indian experience in British Guiana (BG). My reasons for doing this are twofold. It was in May and June that indentured Indians arrived in the European-owned post-Emancipation colonies across the globe. The sailing and later steamships left India in March to avoid the challenging weather around the Cape of Good Hope. It is, therefore, not unusual to see “Indian Arrival Day” being celebrated in the aforesaid colonies, from Fiji to the Caribbean, during this period. It is the first shared commonality of Indians in the diasporic indentured colonies. My writings are intended to coincide with this global movement of labour, and its consequences, as well as, since I have turned down five invitations to present papers at five different venues, because of personal family reasons.

My second reason is to continue to address the historical wrongs of indenture to bring about some form of justice. I will address one wrong briefly today and hope that the British and Indian High Commissioners in Guyana may respond since they might be aware of or be able to address our concerns, despite how limited.

One violation was that when the Indians officially signed or fingerprinted their contracts in India to labour in BG, it was understood that they would serve for five years, and, upon successful completion of their contracts, they would return home. The colonial state would pay their passage from India to BG and back. This was a crucial characteristic/clause of the contract, and if the right to a return passage paid by the colonial state was not in the contract, most and I repeat, most, would not have left India.  However, by the early 1890s, some five decades after indenture started in BG, the planter class changed the contents of the right to a “free” return passage without the consent of Indian indentured servants. Indians were required to contribute to their return passage. Men had to contribute one-half and women a third of their return passage.

The contextualisation and consequences of the shifting of this financial responsibility from the planters to indentured Indians are as follows. Indian men were earning 24 cents per day while women were earning 10 cents per day. The cost of sending back one Indian from BG to India was about £10. One pound at that time worth about US$4.80. The cost in dollars to send back one returnee was about US$48.00, equivalent to one year’s earning for men and three times for that of women.

Now stick with me since I am going to do some rough calculations on how much money Indian returnees contributed with the changing of their contact. To simplify the calculations, let us use the year 1890 when the right to a return passage had changed from “free” to Indian contribution. Indian indenture was officially abolished in 1920, but the return of Indians from BG continued until 1955. After that year, the door of indenture ceased. So, from 1890 to 1920 makes it thirty years, the period in which Indians had to contribute to their return passage. I will leave out the years from 1921 to 1955 for now to avoid confusion. I will have to conduct more research during this period to have a solid grounding. So, if we take the Indian male returnees, for example, one male would have contributed $US24.00 (half of the amount of the return passage of US$48.00). We know also at least about 325 (a conservative figure) Indians returned home every year from BG from the 1880s, and seventy-five per cent (243) of them were males. So, we multiplied 24 x 243 to find out how much money returnees contributed to their return passage for one year, which is US$5,832. So, for 30 years, we multiply 30 x US$5,832, and the amount is US$174,960.

Now let us do a calculation for women using the same conservative formula. Indian women contributed one-third of their return passage. I divided 48 by three which means that women contributed 16 dollars each to their return passage. Out of the 325 returnees, about 25 per cent were women, which meant then that 81 of them returned from BG to India each year during the period under discussion. For one year Indian women contributed 16 multiplied by 81, which gives us a total of US$1,296, and for 30 years we multiplied US$1,296 x 30 resulting in a total figure of US$38,880. The total amount of money Indian indentured contributed for the years between 1890 and 1920 would be US$174,960 + US$38,880 giving a total of US$213,840. To be continued (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu).