It can assuredly be said that the Indo-Trinidad and Tobago Arrival Day celebrations have gone past the memory of an introduction of workers tied to the sugar estates, to one of a people of an ancestral culture who have become “Trini to the Bone”. Moreover, they have done so in their own inimitable way as citizens of T&T with ancestral links in India.
The representatives of the Indo-Trinidad political party at the Marlborough House negotiations in 1962 to win political independence for Trinidad and Tobago from Britain, played a significant role in the laying down of the terms and conditions for Independence agreed to between the opposition and government. It was a coming together of the two major segments of the country which ultimately led Britain to feel confident enough to grant political independence to allow for the rise of a nation.
Reaching back to the late 19th century, the ancestors of today’s Indo-Trinbagonians featured prominently in the creation of the peasant economy which assisted in the move beyond the plantation existence of the times.
Today, as co-citizens of Trinidad and Tobago with an interest and involvement in everything Trinbagonian, the generational descendants of India—Indo-Trinbagonians—have established themselves in business, law, medicine, agriculture and retail distribution, have raised families, and have contributed to the Trinbagonian culture in music, dance, the creation of the festivals such as Divali, Eid, Ramleela, Phagwa, Hosay and other activities shared amongst all in the nation.
Of great significance is the fact that notwithstanding the specificity of these and other festivals, Indo-Trinidad has been accommodating and encouraging all the other ethno-religious and cultural groups of the nation to be participants in what is peculiarly and ancestrally theirs.
If, however, elements of Indo-Trinidad, like those of Afro-Trinidad, have not completely crossed the tribal, political-electoral boundaries in the same way that they have done culturally, that can be attributed not to the whole but to self-seeking politicians wanting to corral a base of electoral support for themselves and their parties.
The effort must now be that while the cultural individual identity of groups of citizens is being developed, we created a Trinidad and Tobago in which we all work towards firmly establishing, not a perfect nation, but one in which we all aspire in law and constitutional rights and equality of opportunity for all to share in.
Specifically, the challenge for the generations of all our peoples must be to take the fact of Arrival further down the road, to an independent country made up of many cultures and religions, including the existence here of the often-forgotten First Peoples, who provided the bridge for all others to cross.
The reality is that a Trinidad and Tobago as constituted in the present, would not have been possible without Indo-Trinbago and its contributions to nation-building. Yes, the population is diverse in origin and aspects of ancestral cultures; but the continuous striving must be to sustain the inherited cultures while contributing to one that is wholly T&T.
The world of the 21st Century is largely hostile and in many ways unkind to small nations; it is even more so in the case of small divided countries unable to stand together.