I must admit that when I first came across the literature on Devonshire Castle uprising in 1872 in Devonshire, Region Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam), Essequibo, while conducting research at the India Record Office in London some 30 years ago, I thought the word castle was a common colonial error similar to the careless registration of Indian names in route from India to the Caribbean plantations.

The word castle was too close to the word caste in spelling and that caste was central to the social structure of Indian immigrants. Caste is a form of social stratification in which individuals are born to specific stations of life with little or no opportunity for upward social mobility. Caste does not exist in Guyana.

The above error on my part has been long resolved but what I was told recently suggested that thirty years ago, I was probably on to something similar. I received a message from historian, Evan Radhay Persaud, saying that, and I paraphrase, please address the error associated with Devonshire massacre in your next column. I asked why. He stated that this year will be 150 years of the massacre, and that for “every year around September 29 various organisations including the regional administration and the Indian Arrival Committee remember the fallen heroes with a wreath laying ceremony” on the wrong day. The massacre happened on September 30, not 29, he espoused.

To wit, the British Government allowed the transportation of an estimated 239,000 Indians from mainly North and South India to work on Guianese coastal plantations on a contract system known as indenture for years. When their contracts expired, they had the option to settle or return home, resulting in about 75,000 returning to India while a third of them “chose” Guyana to be their home.

In short, the Guianese sugar plantation systems held all the trappings of a conflict habituated environment in which the indentured/plantation Indians occupied the lower end of the social, economic and political zone. In this man-made setting, problems were bound to surface, in Karl Marx’s analytic, from those who rule and those who were ruled not merely to upturn the power structure of the ruling plantocracy, but the ruled seeking some fair justification for serving their labour bondage.

There were actually three categories of Indian immigrants in relation to their approach to indenture: (a) those who were bossed and bowed to the labour regimen (b) those who were skeptical about it but preferred redressing grievances according to the law (c) and those who revolted outright against their overlords. The latter was the smallest in population size but the most determined to seek justice.

Within the latter context, the Devonshire uprising occurred seeking a fair relationship between wages and work. When this did not materialise, the aggrieved immigrant labourers revolted and five were subsequently killed by colonial authorities. The dead were Acukloo, Baldeo, Beccaroo, Kaulica, and Maxidally (ABBKM), pronounced as appKAM in keeping with the intention of bringing us close to the Hindu custom and language.

Many other indentured immigrants were injured, and although no women were killed, they also participated in the uprising, a role commonly untold in the subalternity of justice. In honour of the dead, a monument was built at Cabbage Dam in Region Two, the site of the uprising. However, the date of the monument is inscribed as September 29, 1872, which, according to Persaud, is inaccurate.

The role of accuracy that Mr. Persaud is referring to that September 30, 1872, was the correct uprising date is paramount. Persaud’s position is supported by an impressive dissertation written by Anne Marie Phillips titled Contracting Freedom: Governance and East Indian Indenture in the British Atlantic, 1838-1917 submitted to Duke University. Drawing upon a correspondence respecting a disturbance among the Indian Immigrants employed on Devonshire Castle Estate, a colonial report of 1873, Phillips mentioned that the uprising occurred on September 30, not the 29.

My position is that the date is now open for further discussion and further research to have such an important historical experience of Indian immigrants, our forefathers, in Guyana, correct since it is inscribed in stone. If we do not address the accuracy of the uprising date, we will add to the misinformation so associated with Indian indenture in Guyana. For instance, we are told that about 239,000 Indians were brought to British Guiana, but there isn’t one existing population study to justify this figure. I am backing historian Evan Radhay Persaud on this one. (lomarsh.roopnarine@jsums.edu)