LAST week, I addressed how the colonial state shifted the financial responsibility of sending Indians back to their homeland from them to the labourers, resulting in the latter contributing about US$213,000 to their return home. This was a violation of their signed contract, and an unnecessary financial burden on Indians, money that they could have used for personal, family, and communal development. Instead, the colonial state became the beneficiary of a flawed contractual system brought about by their own induced design. Paradoxically, when Indians violated their contracts, which they did, they were fined and jailed, but when the planters violated their contractual agreements with the indentures, they were awarded special privileges. Welcome to a world of a common double standard in a conflict-habituated plantation environment.

I will address, here, the policy of exchanging the right to a return passage for a small parcel of land in terms of financial value. By the early 1870s, it had dawned on the planter class that Indian indentured labour was the answer to the labour shortage following African emancipation. The once cyclical contract system of five years between India and British Guiana (BG) began to experience gradual change, based not on humanitarian sentiments but on the maximisation of profits for the planter class. Indians were given a bounty of US$50.00 to re-indenture for another five years, which was difficult to resist because it was worth about one year’s earnings. The bounty inducement was not only successful, but it provided the basis on which the planters worked out a plan for the exchange of return passage for a small parcel of land.

Allow me to pull from what I wrote, with some modification, in the Guyana Times some four years ago. Up to 1882, 49 residential lots and 69 cultivation lots were granted to Indians in British Guiana. Between 1897 and 1903, the period when more details are available, 2,711 Indians received allotments: 1,206 on Helena, 574 on Whim, 755 on Bush Lot, and 176 on Maria’s Pleasure settlements. The allotments were about five to 10 acres, which means that between 1882 and 1903, about 28,229 acres of land were given to Indians. In the process of receiving land, Indians gave up an estimated US$135,550 of their return passage, which means they were inadvertently paying for the land they received. Moreover, out of an Indian population of 90,000 during the period in which land was granted, only 2,711 of them received land, which is less than one per cent.

Now, let us do some calculations in terms of what Indians gave up for settling in BG following the end of indenture in 1920. In 1924, the total population in British Guiana was around 300,000, and the Indian population was 124,967.  Of this population, about 68,351 were living off the estates, which meant that they had bought land on their own terms, or they had exchanged their return passages for a piece of land to settle before 1903.
About 56, 616 Indians out of the total population of 124,967, however, were still residing on the estates. 17,331 were children. We can say that these individuals did not own any land. We know that these adults were either brought from India or born in BG before the land policy was abolished in 1903. What percentage out of the 40,000 (subtracting the children) in 1924 were waiting to use their return passage is not precisely known. More research is needed.

Of the 40,000, however, I would say about 50 per cent of them were waiting to return, while another 50 per cent were born in BG, therefore making the latter ineligible for a return passage. So, let us work with 20,000 waiting to use up their return passage, since some of these figures can be confirmed by examining the number of Indians who returned to their homeland every year after 1920.

The figures on the return ships from BG to India show about two-thirds of the returnees were men, while women and children constituted about a third of them. This means roughly 15,000 men and 5,000 women were waiting to use their return passage in 1924. To recall, men and women contributed differently to their passage; men one half (US$24) and women one third (US$16) out of the cost of US$48.00 per person to return from BG to India. Let us do the math. 15,000 X 24 = US$360,000 for men, while 5,000 x 16 = US$80,000 for women, making a total of US$440,000. This is the amount of money Indians would have spent if they were to return to India in 1924, but only about 300 went back each year until 1955, given that they were still living. I am working on how many Indians went back from 1920 to 1955, using the above reasoning to determine how much they contributed financially to their return passage. The above figures speak to the violation of the indentured contracts, and the shifting of the financial burden from the colonial state to indentured Indians. To be continued (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu).