IN the first week of May, Guyana commemorates two important anniversaries – Labour Day, which celebrates the working people of the world and is an internationally celebrated anniversary; and May 5, Indian Arrival Day, which commemorates the arrival of the first Indian indentured immigrants to Guyana.

Since Labour Day is an international celebration and would accordingly have attracted greater media coverage than Indian Arrival Day which is a strictly Guyanese event, our offering today would therefore focus on Indian Arrival Day.

From the 17th century, the economy of Guyana and the West Indies rested on sugar production, which was done by the plantation system, which necessitated a large labour force.  That labour force was supplied by slaves mostly from West Africa.  By the beginning of the 1830s, the sugar planters knew that the emancipation of the slaves was in the offing and they had to find a new labour force.  They frantically began searching for such a labour force and after trying Malta, Madeira, the West Indian islands, and China, they settled in India.

Between 1838 and 1917, approximately 240,000 Indian indentured immigrants were transported to Guyana from the Bhojpuri-speaking belt of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and from Madras, now known as Tamil Nadu.  The Madrasis were very much smaller in number.  Immigration was discontinued in 1917 because the Nationalist Movement in India was able to pressure the British Government to end it.  The death rate among the immigrants was very high, even by Victorian standards, and over one-third of them died in the colony without being able to see their homeland again.  Approximately one-third of them managed to return to India, and the other one-third remained in the colony. A good portion of those who remained were broken in health and unable to travel or continue working. They were decanted from the estates and found themselves among the homeless in downtown Georgetown and New Amsterdam where they ate a meal by doing odd jobs, mostly “fetching loads”.  These homeless, hungry, and sick people were known as “jobber men”.

The life of an indentured worker was one of oppression and poverty and very little different from the slaves whom they replaced.  They occupied the same logies with their mud floors which the slaves had once occupied, and their water supply was from canals in which pit latrines emptied.  Their wages were very low and were often denied on one excuse or another and they laboured from dawn to dusk.  Their wages were able to barely buy them basic food;  indeed, the slaves were comparatively better fed.  If they fell ill, they were placed in the same “hospital” which accommodated slaves, which was more like a prison and where the main medication was rum in various quantities.  Only about 10 percent to 20 percent of the indentures were women, so there was little opportunity of establishing families.  Further, the culture and religions of the indentures were despised and ignored, which compelled them to do their religious and cultural activities in the evenings and on Sundays.

When conditions became overbearing, there tended to be protests involving labour disputes, but these were termed “riots” that permitted the police to use firearms.  During the period of indentureship, there were seven such big “riots” in which workers were shot and killed by the police. The last of such”riots” occurred at Enmore Estate in 1947, where seven workers were shot in their backs;  these are remembered today as the “Enmore Martyrs”.

In the 1870s, DeVoux, a former magistrate in the colony, wrote an explosive report on the conditions of the indentured workers exposing the oppressions and injustices they suffered which compelled the Imperial Government to intercede.  Reforms were gradually made and the conditions of the workers gradually improved.  There was some relief in wage disputes;  conditions in the hospitals improved; mosques and temples were permitted to be built and some Hindu and Muslim priests were allowed to practice;  and one-third of the indentures had to be women which allowed for the establishment of families.

For the next four decades, the indentures and their offspring began to create a more normal life and to positively be involved in the process of nation-building.
Marriages became more frequent and the family structure
grew;  indentures and their offspring entered the rice, coconut, and dairy industries; some even ventured into shopkeeping, opening businesses in Georgetown and New Amsterdam.  Several families migrated to the African villages, occupying the unoccupied front areas since such areas were subject to flooding.  Some migrated to Georgetown and New Amsterdam.  In both the villages and the towns, there were schools to which their children could attend since primary education was controlled by the churches which never built any schools in the sugar estate areas where the immigrants lived.  By the 1920s, however,  there emerged several Indian doctors and lawyers, teachers, land surveyors, tradesmen of various kinds, and even a few trade unionists and politicians.  In this process, the social and economic life of the country expanded and life became more comfortable.

In the 1940s and 1950s there occurred a revolution in secondary education.  Several educationists, chief among whom were J.C.Luck, R.B.O.Hart, R.E.Cheeks, O. Allen, and J.I.Ramphal opened schools and campaigned among parents to send their children for secondary education, most of whom would not have normally done so.  These schools offered the Junior and Senior Cambridge examinations and the London Matriculation, which qualified students to enter the public service, the officer class in the police, and the teaching profession.  Many more could now do correspondence courses for London University degrees and even felt they could enter politics.  The descendants of the indentured workers all became literate in English, and with the Secondary Education Revolution, an even stronger professional class emerged among them to help in all areas of economic and social development of the nation.

Guyanese celebrate Indian Arrival Day as commemorating a moment in the nation’s history that began the unleashing of growing strength and creativity.