Tony Fras­er

The ob­ser­va­tion to be made about the In­do-Trinidad com­mu­ni­ty/ pop­u­la­tion is the as­ton­ish­ing progress it has made dur­ing the 50 years of po­lit­i­cal In­de­pen­dence in eco­nom­ics/busi­ness, pol­i­tics, ed­u­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, so­cial and hu­man de­vel­op­ment. In the in­stance of sev­er­al vil­lages, In­do-Tri­nis have lit­er­al­ly grown bustling ur­ban towns, ex­plod­ing with en­ter­prise and hu­man busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty, out of sug­ar cane fields.

One of the sig­nif­i­cant el­e­ments of the ad­vance has been the rel­a­tive­ly short time-frame in which the trans­for­ma­tion has tak­en place: the end of in­den­ture­ship (1917) to the present, five years short of 100 years. In this con­tin­u­ing se­ries, which tracks the progress or lack of it, of the dif­fer­ent eth­nic and so­cial-class groups dur­ing the pe­ri­od of In­de­pen­dence, the fo­cus in this col­umn is on sketch­ing some­thing of the con­tours of how In­do-Tri­nis have ar­rived at where they are in the so­ci­ety of to­day.

The ef­fort at hu­man ad­vance of the in­den­tured East In­di­an work­er start­ed back in the last quar­ter of the 19th cen­tu­ry. First, the Cana­di­an Pres­by­ter­ian mis­sion­ary, the Rev John Mor­ton, demon­strat­ed an in­ter­est in bring­ing a "civil­is­ing" re­li­gious and ed­u­ca­tion­al eth­ic to the in­den­tured im­mi­grants.

The ac­qui­si­tion of land by the in­den­tured at the end of his con­tract, through the ex­change of the cost of be­ing re­turned to In­dia (by the colo­nial gov­ern­ment) for por­tions of land, was one means to land own­er­ship. An­oth­er was the pur­chase of lands by In­di­ans at the end of their con­tracts with sav­ings from wages earned. The his­to­ri­ans note that it was the start of what be­came an In­di­an peas­ant com­mu­ni­ty here.

Sug­ar cane and co­coa were the crops cul­ti­vat­ed. By the end of the in­den­tured pe­ri­od, those In­di­ans who did not stay in agri­cul­ture, in one form or the oth­er, drift­ed in­to towns and in­to the city and hired them­selves out in var­i­ous ca­pac­i­ties, tak­ing up jobs that the eman­ci­pat­ed African re­fused to even con­tem­plate. But many did not suc­cess­ful­ly make the trip from rur­al to ur­ban work­er/dweller, gain­ful­ly em­ployed.

Prison, al­co­holism and the ac­com­pa­ny­ing va­grancy ac­count­ed for many. The ef­fort by the Cana­di­an Mis­sion (CM,1868) marked the start of an ed­u­ca­tion for the chil­dren of the in­den­tured im­mi­grant. In ex­change for ed­u­ca­tion­al tu­tor­ing, Mor­ton and the Pres­by­ter­ian mis­sion spread the Chris­t­ian faith amongst the In­di­ans. The eth­nic com­po­si­tion of the Pres­by­ter­ian con­gre­ga­tion and that in the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools of the faith to­day are in­dica­tive of the Cana­di­an Mis­sion to the In­di­ans.

It has served the In­do-Tri­ni pop­u­la­tion well; we shall re­turn to the sub­ject when we seek to iden­ti­fy the rea­sons for the ad­vance of In­do Tri­nis as a group dur­ing the first 50 years of po­lit­i­cal In­de­pen­dence. But the Rev JT Har­richa­ran, in a small book­let, pro­vides ev­i­dence that the Ro­man Catholic and An­gli­can church­es al­so pro­vid­ed so­cial wel­fare and ed­u­ca­tion for East In­di­ans. He re­ports that by 1931 there were 8,649 In­di­ans who had be­come Catholics and 3,3,946 In­do-An­gli­cans com­pared to the 10, 335 In­di­ans who had con­vert­ed to the Pres­by­ter­ian faith.

It is of­ten mis­tak­en­ly thought that In­do-Tri­nis en­tered the po­lit­i­cal are­na in the 1950s with the Peo­ple's De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Bhadase Maraj. How­ev­er, ful­ly three decades be­fore, the East In­di­an Na­tion­al Con­gress and two oth­er groups demon­strat­ed a po­lit­i­cal aware­ness and ac­tivism be­fore the Wood Com­mis­sion; the EINC pro­ceed­ed to con­test the 1925 elec­tions based on a lim­it­ed fran­chise.

In the suc­ceed­ing pe­ri­od of in­ten­si­fied po­lit­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty, the likes of Tim­o­thy Roodal, Ran­jit Ku­mar, Stephen Ma­haraj and a num­ber of oth­er In­do-Tri­nis en­gaged in po­lit­i­cal mo­bil­i­sa­tion of the In­do-Trinidad com­mu­ni­ty. At the lev­el of the grass­roots, In­di­an work­ers on sug­ar es­tates in cen­tral and parts of east Trinidad were very much part of the labour up­ris­ing in the 1930s to change the old colo­nial or­der.

By the 1950s, Bhadase Maraj, then or­gan­is­er/leader of the Hin­du com­mu­ni­ty, not on­ly formed the Ma­ha Sab­ha, an at­tempt to bring sev­er­al Hin­du or­gan­i­sa­tions to­geth­er, but es­tab­lished the PDP as the po­lit­i­cal ve­hi­cle to give or­gan­i­sa­tion­al and emo­tion­al ex­pres­sion of the In­do-Trinidad com­mu­ni­ty for po­lit­i­cal pow­er. In the years there­after, the PDP gave birth to the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Labour Par­ty (in all of its for­ma­tions) and ul­ti­mate­ly the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress.

Over the decades those par­ties have sought to be the In­do-Trinidad re­sponse to the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment, the pre­dom­i­nant­ly Afro- Trinidad and To­ba­go par­ty formed by Dr Williams. So the be­gin­nings of the rise of the In­do-Tri­ni pop­u­la­tion were seed­ed in the pol­i­tics of the 1920s in­to the 1950s and be­yond, in the peas­ant so­ci­ety of the late 19th cen­tu­ry and in the ed­u­ca­tion/Chris­t­ian re­li­gious sys­tem as far back as the last quar­ter of the 19th cen­tu­ry by the Cana­di­an Mis­sion. In the next col­umn we shall take a clos­er look at how In­do-Tri­nis, and very im­por­tant­ly their in­sti­tu­tions, stim­u­lat­ed the de­vel­op­men­tal thrust in­to the pe­ri­od of In­de­pen­dence.