© 2019 Dionna D. Richardson All Rights Reserved

DIONNA D. RICHARDSON

PURLOINED SUBJECTS:

RACE, GENDER, AND THE LEGACIES OF COLONIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE

BRITISH CARIBBEAN

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Dionna D. Richardson

August, 2019

PURLOINED SUBJECTS:

RACE, GENDER, AND THE LEGACIES OF COLONIAL SURVEILLANCE

IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN

Dionna D. Richardson

Dissertation

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Department Chair Dr. A. Martin Wainwright Dr. A. Martin Wainwright

______Committee Member Interim Dean of the College Dr. Martha Santos Dr. Linda Subich

______Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Stephen Harp Dr. Chand Midha

______Committee Member Date Dr. Timothy Scarnecchia

______Committee Member Dr. Maria A. Zanetta

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is an investigation of the imperial racialized and gendered origins of surveillance culture. It is primarily an interrogation of the British Empire’s methods and justifications for measures taken to maintain imperial control in the colonial

Caribbean. The main subjects of this study are women that migrated from India to the

Trinidad during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their story is told within the context of the larger history of the Caribbean. This dissertation is significant because the patterns revealed extend far beyond these subjects, geographical locations, and this historical period of time.

This dissertation shows how white colonialists employed racialized and gendered language in their justifications for the establishment of imperial surveillance practices.

They created government systems, customs, and laws along with hegemonic attitudes of white superiority that led to unfair and unregulated discriminatory practices against individuals of color. Discussions regarding the physical, sexual, and reproductive labor of women of color dominated white colonial male discourse from the rise of the transatlantic slave system to the present day. Discriminatory language and its accompanying arguments became so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the colonized people that, in places like the Caribbean where groups of diverse ethnic origin converged, much of that rhetoric persisted beyond the colonial era. The scope of this dissertation ends in the 1960s, just as colonies such as Jamaica and Trinidad gained

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their independence from Britain, and the research shows that in the power struggle for the emergent nation, men who identified as AfroCaribbean and IndoCaribbean used the same systemic racialization and gendered language to try to assert their own dominance over one another and over the female inhabitants of the region. Through an examination of mid-twentieth-century music, poetry, street fights, customs, and institutionalized discrimination, it is readily apparent that the colonial racialized and gendered hegemonic ideals were still very much at play, even in the absence of the white colonial power structure.

DEDICATION

For Mom, who never stopped believing in me. I wish you were here to see this.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I’d like to thank my dissertation committee—Drs. Martin Wainwright,

Martha Santos, Steve Harp, Maria Alejandra Zanetta, and Tim Scarnecchia—your feedback was indispensable and greatly appreciated. I am grateful for the time that the five of you spent in carefully reviewing and providing suggestions on this dissertation. It will all be immensely useful as I develop these ideas throughout my career.

My graduate school journey has been a long, strange trip. I’ve met so many people, had such a variety of experiences, and have changed and grown so much along the way. Because of this, there are numerous individuals and groups to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. First, the professors in Kent State’s history department, where I completed my master’s degree, were the first to challenge the way I thought, the way I wrote, and the way I saw the world around me. Drs. Clarence Wunderlin, Ann

Heiss, Tim Scarnecchia, and Elizabeth Smith-Pryor pushed me, encouraged me, and prepared me for the rigors of a doctoral program. Dr. Heiss made me a better writer, Dr.

Wunderlin supplied unrelenting encouragement, and Drs. Smith-Pryor and Scarnecchia first exposed me to the importance of politics and the global history of race relations and power.

Looking back on my time as a doctoral student at the University of Akron, I realize how fortunate I was to be surrounded by such great scholars. Dr. Steve Harp saw potential in me that I never saw in myself, gave me opportunities I’d never dreamed

within my reach, and contributed immensely to my personal growth and conceptualization of myself as a capable, intelligent, and impactful global citizen. His mentorship truly made me a better teacher, scholar, and person. My primary advisor, Dr.

Martin Wainwright, sparked my interest in empire and migration that informed and inspired the rest of my graduate work. Without his knowledge and excitement for the subject material, flexibility in allowing me to explore my options, and sustained support and encouragement, I would not have been able to hone my research interests and find my path.

I am especially grateful, as a woman in academia, to have had the immense pleasure of working closely with several brilliant professors at the U of A, such as Drs.

Lesley Gordon, T.J. Boisseau, Martha Santos, Janet Klein, Shelley Baranowski,

Constance Bouchard, Kira Thurman, and Toja Okoh. Those who knew me early on in my graduate career can attest that I knew embarrassingly little about feminist politics and women’s and gender history, and that my naivety about gender inequities shone quite brightly. However, thanks to the examples, mentorship, and teaching of these women, my mind opened and I was able to see the world and its history much more clearly. Through my coursework, preparation for qualifying exams, and research and writing of this dissertation, these women’s voices and actions inspired me every step of the way. The contributions of Dr. Martha Santos to my success were immeasurable and worthy of special mention. Dr. Santos consistently went above and beyond the call of duty to help me conceptualize complicated ideas and make meaningful connections. She challenged me to rethink my phrasing, sourcing, and structure at several points throughout the process of writing this dissertation. Because of her, it is a much stronger final product.

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Additionally, her administrative support and quickly-returned and thoughtfully-edited drafts were essential to my completing this project and my degree.

Financially, I am grateful to the University of Akron’s Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences for their support by way of a research grant, and to the Department of

History at the University of Akron for the support of the Robert W. Little Fellowship, which allowed me a year of research and writing without the extra burden of teaching. I am also grateful for the archivists who assisted me at the National Archives in Kew, the

British Library, the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine, the Indian Indenture

Museum of Trinidad, the National Museum of Trinidad, the Library of Congress in

Washington, D.C., the American Antiquarian Association, and the Centre of Diplomatic

Archives in Nantes.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to the friends that provided me support and encouragement along the way. The camaraderie of fellow graduate students often kept me going. To Erika and Alex Briesacher—thank you for opening your home for gatherings, setting up our softball team, and always being there to read my drafts, recommend books, or just hang out and study together. Erika, I cannot ever adequately express my gratitude and love for you. Your friendship has been one of my life’s greatest blessings. Also, thank you to so many others for your friendship and fellowship over the past several years—Hannah Vazquez, Johnny Livigni, Jennifer George, Denise Jenison,

Austin McCoy, Kelly McFarland, Stacy Maruskin, Emily Boetcher, Andy Tremel,

Natalie Hall-Hiles, Valerie Schutte, Angela Riotto, Jana Russ, Rose Eichler, Megan

Allen, Devaun Tyler-Wolfe, Amanda Lamadanie, Karen Lamandanie, Fatima Shendy,

Soufiane Aityahia, Amal Almahd, Sheffa Almahd, Ahlem Zaaeed, Ahmad Deeb, Mohsin

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Vora, Runah Assad, Sehar Shaikh, Moe Mishal, Ola Mishal, Sondos Mishal, Iman

Mishal, Lama Abu Amara, Marihan Al Bitar, Tristan Wheeler, Abdou Soulah, Mounif

Ammoura, Gwendolyn Szeligo, Aleric Taylor, Angela Taylor, Vincent Corriol,

Dominique Avon, Alexandre Manceau, Vincent Damiens, Elisabeth Lamothe, and everyone else with whom I have traveled, broke bread, had a drink, played a sport, or spent meaningful time. Each of you left a very special mark on me.

Finally, after so many years in graduate school, I owe an enormous debt to my family—both some blood-related and some made family by choice. To my daughter,

Julie, your joy and love has brought me innumerable smiles and consistently motivated me to keep going. I have tried my best to provide a solid example for you to follow. To my mom, who just left this world a few months ago and did not make it to see me cross the finish line, I am eternally grateful for the thousands of times you told me how proud you were and how much you loved me. To my stepmom, Cindy Nicholson, and my mom’s lifelong best friend, Shirley Foucher, thank you for always checking in on me, reassuring me, and being there to talk when I need it. To Ivana Zajkovska, Muhamad

Musa, and their girls, my chosen “family,” thank you for all your love and support— though the miles now separate us, you are always with us. And finally, to Omar, my partner in everything, I am grateful for your unwavering support, and the bright light you have brought into my life. Thank you for listening to my ideas, helping me talk through chapters, and calming me down when I became overwhelmed. Let’s finally get started on all those dreams we planned to pursue “once I finish school.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….1

Setting……………………………………………………………………..3

Historiography………………………………………………………….....4

Theory, Method, and Sources……………………………………………..9

Overview…………………………………………..……………………..19

A Note on Terminology……...…………………………………………..22

II. SLAVERY TO PRISON PIPELINE: THE CREATION OF THE COLONIAL SURVEILLANCE STATE…………………………………………………..27

Women’s Labor……………………………………………...…………..34

Being Unfree……………..…………………………….………………..38

The Promise of Freedom………………………….……………………..49

Freedom Denied……………………………………..…………………..53

III. CHANGING THE FACE OF LABOR: INTRODUCTION OF INDENTURED INDIANS…………………………...……………………..75

Recruitment……………………………………………………………..76

Contracts and Terms……………………………..,……………………..81

The Indian “Middle Passage” …………………………………………..82

Early Settlement and Interactions……………………………...………..91

IV. THE “PROBLEM” OF INDIAN WOMEN: RECRUITMENT AND SCRUTINY………………………………………………………..………..98

The “Sex-Ratio Problem”……………………………….……..……….99

The Right Kind of Woman……………….…………………….…...... 101

Indian Women Blamed as Tensions Mount...…………………..……..104

Subjects of Scrutiny……………………...……………………..……..108

Missionaries and the Morality Solution………….……………..……..111

Looking for Pleasure……………….…………………….……..……..115

V. LITTLE HIDERS: INDIAN GIRLS AND THE SOCIETY OF INDENTURE…………………………………………………..….…..…..122

Girlhood as a Category of Analysis…………………..…….….….…..123

Indian Migrant Communities…………………………….……..……..141

Education and Christian Missionaries..…….…………….…….……..149

Uneven Success………………………….…………….……….……..165

VI. WISHING TO BE LOOKED UPON: NEGOTIATING INDO-CARIBBEAN IDENTITY POST-INDENTURE………………………………..………..173

Migration, Identity, and Community………….…………..…….……..175

The End of Indenture……….…………………………..…….………..177

Creole Popular Resistance to Colonial Rule…….…….….….………..180

Who are They? Creole Communities……………….….…….………..185

Who are We? Indian Communities…………...…….…….….………..192

Who am I? Possible Selves……………………….…….……………..202

VII. EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………..214

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………..…………………………………………………..220

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Like everything in culture, looking relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, and economics. Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation, national identity and race all structure how one looks, but these myths are in turn closely linked to class, politics, and economic relations. The possibilities for looking are carefully controlled. . . Looking is power…1

E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of the power of looking relations inspired this dissertation by setting up a framework for the exploration of the relationship between

British colonizers and colonized people under their control in their Caribbean colonies.

White British colonizers asserted dominance via surveillance by looking upon colonized people through their lenses of nation, identity, race, and gender. The practice of surveillance, made up of racialized and gendered acts of watching, judging, regulating, and policing, was integral to British colonial power in the Caribbean.

This dissertation shows how the four acts of surveillance served separate purposes in the establishment and maintenance of colonial control. First, white colonizers gathered intelligence through acts of watching people of color under their influence. Then they compared the data to their cultural sensibilities, norms, and values and passed judgment on the behaviors of the colonized as part of a process of “othering” the people they

1 E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.

watched over. Third, informed by the data and judgments, colonizers determined acceptable behavior, roles, and treatment of colonized people. Finally, white colonial leaders imposed and maintained racialized and gendered hegemonic formal policies and informal practices that affected colonized peoples’ lives in their labor, their interactions with one another, and the establishment of their own identities. This dissertation traces the impact of colonial surveillance, primarily in the Caribbean colony of Trinidad, from its implementation during legalized slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century through the end of British rule in the middle of the twentieth century.

While this dissertation explores themes of colonial control, labor, migration, and identity broadly, the analysis presented below first examines these themes narrowly in the colonial experiences, labor, and surveillance of Trinidad’s enslaved and free women of

African descent and continues into a broader analysis of those themes centered on female migrant contract laborers from the Indian subcontinent and their descendants. The title of this study is “Purloined Subjects” in reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The

Purloined Letter,” because the women at the center of this study were, like Poe’s letter, stolen and hidden in plain sight.2 The British followed the system by which they stole and enslaved African women by force almost immediately with a system that recruited and ensnared Indian women into contract labor based on lies and misrepresentations of opportunity. Colonized women performed labors essential to the colonial project and community construction, yet they have been sorely under-represented in historical scholarship. This is due to a lack of explicit representation of these women in traditional

2 Edgar Allan Poe, Terrifying Tales (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

archival materials explored by historians. To reveal women’s history in traditional sources, one must creatively read “between the lines” and evaluate language and omissions of data. Thus, colonized women, essential to colonialism but absent from sources and histories, are “hidden in plain sight.” Exposing their stories reveals that, once in the islands, colonial officials, and planters subjected people of color, especially women, to intense scrutiny and regulation, making them ideal candidates for studying racialized and gendered ideologies and practices of surveillance that underscored colonial domination.

Setting

The oft-overlooked and understudied colonies of the British colonial Caribbean are the optimal setting for this dissertation, because within this space, British colonists brought together individuals from around the world and forced them to labor and live alongside one another. The Caribbean was a valuable space for British colonizers and is a critical geographic region for investigating race and gender relations and emergent ideas in the colonial context because of the Caribbean’s importance to colonial officials, investors, and estate owners. While the Spaniards and the Portuguese first encountered the islands in the fifteenth century, they soon lost interest in favor of pursuits of conquest and protection of interests on the mainland. As a result, the space of the Caribbean became the location of international power struggles and conflict during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as private investors determined that the climate and soil were optimal for growing profitable crops such as sugar, cocoa, and coffee. This environment

of a small geographical space that produced an extraordinarily pluralistic society allows for the tracing of individual and collective histories of people under imperial control.

Trinidad’s history forms the bulk of the narrative of this study due to a relative abundance of sources compared to other British colonial Caribbean holdings. Since

Trinidad, a major sugar-producing colony, received a high number of Indian migrants after the emancipation of slavery, diverse experiences of colonized people of color in

Trinidad and colonial processes at work are clear. However, when comparing sources on the Indian experiences found in Trinidad with those in other British Caribbean colonies that received Indian indentures such as Jamaica, Grenada, and Guyana, commonalities in experiences and processes of colonial control are apparent and continuous. Therefore, when applicable, this study includes case studies and examples from other colonies.

Taken together, an investigation of the histories of Caribbean colonies that received indentured Indian migrants provides a more complete and inclusive history of the

Caribbean and its people than other studies that exclusively focus on one island or a more narrowly defined time period.

Historiography

This study provides a valuable contribution to the corpus of literature about the

British Empire and Caribbean history because scholars have published very few works on the islands as a whole, as colonies and as independent states, outside the slew of monographs and articles that deal exclusively with the Jamaican Morant Bay Rebellion of

1865 and the 1979-1983 Grenadian revolution.3 Additionally, historians have conducted very few studies on Indian migrants and very little research exists that hones in on the history, experiences, perceptions, expectations, and colonial processes that targeted female Indian laborers as a separate group. This dissertation builds upon the works of prominent historians of the British Caribbean such as Beverley A. Steele, Ron Sookram,

Nicole Philip, Bridget Brereton, Patricia Mohammed, and Rhoda Reddock, while incorporating some of the methods of study applied to the broader Caribbean or global indenture system by such notable scholars as Hugh Tinker, David Northrup, Walton

Look-Lai, Basdeo Mangru, Brinsley Samaroo, David Dabydeen, Marina Carter, Lomarsh

Roopnarine, K.O. Laurence, and Moon-Ho Jung.

Several monographs informed and inspired this research. The preeminent historian of Trinidad is Eric Williams, who served as the country’s first Prime Minister after gaining independence from Britain. Williams’ History of the People of Trinidad and

Tobago informed every scholar that has written about the island since its publication. His purpose in writing that book was to give the people of the newly independent nation a history of their own. To do this, as he helped construct the new nation, Williams illuminated the colonial past and highlighted the subjugation of the peoples under British

3 For further reading of significant work done by scholars of the Caribbean but not directly related to this dissertation see: Robert Beck, The Grenada Invasion: Politics, Law, and Foreign Policy Decision Making (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Stewart Bell, Bayou of Pigs: The True Story of an Audacious Plot to Turn a Tropical Island into a Criminal Paradise (Toronto: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 2008); Gordon Lewis, Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Manning Marable, African & Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop (New York: Verso Press, 1987); Brian W. Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993); Anthony Payne, Paul Sutton and Tony Thorndike, Grenada: Revolution and Invasion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984); Gary W. Williams, U.S.-Grenada Relations: Revolution and Intervention in the Backyard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);

colonial policy and also provided the people of Trinidad with a sort of “call to action” to maintain their strength and unity as the nation.4

Most other scholarly works on Trinidad focus on the inhabitants of African descent, legacies of slavery, or cultural practices, such as music, art, and religion.5

Caribbean historians Rhoda Reddock, Verene Shepherd, and Bridget Brereton have written several monographs and articles that highlight Indian experiences and even the particularities of female experiences under the system of indenture, but scholarship generated in the Caribbean typically gets a regrettably small amount of attention outside of the space of the West Indies academic community.6 It is works such as theirs, both historical and sociological, that make a study like this one possible.

There are abundant secondary sources on the more general topics of British indentured labor and colonial Caribbean history, though they focus on the male migrants and British policy in the region, and even then, only investigate the few colonies listed

4 Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1962).

5 Tina K. Ramnarine, “Historical Representations, Performance Spaces, and Kinship Themes in Indian- Caribbean Popular Song Texts,” Asian Music 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 1–33; Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop Journal 26, no. 1 (1988): 1–27.

6 Books on Trinidadian and Caribbean women consulted throughout this dissertation include: Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, eds., Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Bridget Brereton and Kelvin A. Yelvington, eds., The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1999); Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present: A Student Reader (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996); Rhoda Reddock, “Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1917: Freedom Denied,” Caribbean Quarterly 9 (1986): 41–68; Rhoda Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (1985): 63–80; Rhoda Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History (London: Zed Books, 1994); Shobhita Jain and Rhoda Reddock, eds., Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998).

above. The mention of Indian women in monographs and articles on Indian indenture is nearly non-existent in these broader studies and when present is generally without much substance. Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery was groundbreaking when published in 1974 because it was the first to examine, in detail, the dark side of Indian migration within the British Empire.7 Tinker drew upon contemporary historiography from a wide breadth of regional and area studies on various colonies within the empire, though he felt scholars sorely neglected the small island colony of Mauritius, off the east coast of

Africa. He sought to correct that omission by exploring Mauritius’s indentured labor system, and then applied his conclusions to the larger body of scholarship on indenture to paint a more complete picture of what this form of semi-free labor was like for Indians.

What Tinker did not anticipate discovering was just how horrific the conditions were for the indentured Indians and how much the new system looked very much like its predecessor, slavery, in terms of treatment and colonial ideologies about the humanity (or lack thereof) of the laborers.

Tinker’s challenges to the inhumanity of indentured servitude are his richest arguments. He argues that the managers of the estates often treated the indentured laborers no better than they treated slaves, and, at times, even worse in instances when the overseers or estate managers knew they only had the Indians with them for a few short years. Colonial reports stated that Indian indentured laborers worked eighteen-hour days, often without sufficient compensation or even enough rations or adequate shelter.

Then, when the laborer had finally fulfilled his or her contract, colonial administrators

7 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

and planters found ways to deny rewards of land, a return trip home, or monetary compensation. Faced with little options, the laborers continued working on the estates under these dismal conditions. Tinker refers to this outcome as the “human debris” of the indenture system. He emphatically concluded, “Indenture and other forms of servitude did, indeed, replicate the actual conditions of slavery.”8

David Northrup challenges Hugh Tinker’s thesis that indentured servitude was an extension of slavery in his concise monograph, Indentured Labor in the Age of

Imperialism, 1834-1922.9 Though he ultimately disagrees with Tinker’s conclusions,

Northrup pays much homage to Tinker’s research and undoubtedly draws on Tinker’s meticulous work on the indenture system. According to Northrup, the system of indentured labor that developed after the British outlawed slavery in the 1830s was not slavery in disguise but a brand-new system of labor that replaced the old. He bases his arguments on the idea that indentured laborers were much more like modern North

American free migrant laborers than they were like slaves because of the wages paid, the benefits given (albeit limited), and the psychological freedom they possessed.

According to Northrup, the indentured workers left home by choice for a multitude of reasons that did not involve kidnapping or chattel-based sales, as was the story with slaves under the previous labor system. For Northrup, it was a much more benevolent program of relocation. He concludes by positing that rather than serving as a prison for indentured workers, the lands to which they migrated became home to them,

8 Tinker, New System, xiv.

9 David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

and their place of origin became a foreign land to which they had no desire to return.

Northrup either glosses over or ignores entirely much of Tinker’s most fascinating and compelling evidence. Northrup’s study dismisses kidnapping and forced labor as isolated incidences, and he does not think that the high mortality rates amongst migrants, especially across the Indian “Middle Passage” are indicators of similarities to the slave system.

The discussion regarding how much the indenture system was like slavery is not the central concern of this dissertation. The conclusions of this study are both in agreement and opposition to Tinker’s and Northrup’s arguments. The system was abusive and oppressive and, as such, indentured laborers shared common colonial experiences with the enslaved Africans that preceded them. However, in his focus on abuse and oppression, Tinker ignores how colonized laborers resisted colonial oppression and established new communities and identities for themselves. While Northrup erroneously downplays the horrors of indenture and ignores the processes of control implemented by

British colonizers, he was correct that what resulted was something entirely new. This dissertation, by centering the narrative on the history of colonized female laborers not only exposes processes of colonial control and the legacies of these processes but also it illuminates the active roles the colonized peoples had in forming new communities and complex individual identities.

Theory, Method, and Sources

Using interdisciplinary methodological techniques, which interrogate and synthesize a broad array of historical, sociological, anthropological, economic, and

political source material, this study builds upon the theoretical work of pioneers in women’s studies to illustrate the creation and recreation of colonial power by applying a thorough investigation of the pluralistic space of the nineteenth-century Caribbean. The unique microcosm of globalized cultural contact and the interconnectedness of humanity produced by imperialism characterizes the Caribbean experience. A study of the

Caribbean, therefore, can serve as a paradigm for understanding the development of the emergent globalized world and prevalent ideas and values that developed within it. The approaches presented in this study are essential contributions to the larger body of scholarship, because by investigating the work, experiences, and treatment of women of color in this context, it is possible to gain an understanding of the phenomenon of globalization as it evolved and shaped transnational ideas regarding gender, race, power, policy, and practices of labor.

Why focus on women?

In the 1970s, feminist scholars sought to emphasize the importance of women’s roles in history to rectify the marginalization of female contributions that had been characteristic of prior historiography. In the introduction to her 1978 essay collection,

Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, Asunción Lavrin challenged women’s historians to draw out of their sources the relevance of women’s historical roles in the building and maintenance of their communities:

In the case of the history of women it is necessary to stretch the boundaries of our inquiry and to concern ourselves with their attitudes, motivations, and actions, both as individuals and as members of the family and other social institutions. The objective of an inquiry into the roles, status, thoughts, and actions of women should no longer be that of finding superhuman beings, but rather of considering normal individuals who were engaged in everyday activities and were representative of their times and societies.10

Traditionally, women were only mentioned in historical analyses if they exhibited some fantastic quality, participated in a cataclysmic event, or otherwise were seen as a significant anomaly and therefore worthy of mention. For Lavrin, it was time scholars examined women in their everyday environments and doing their daily activities for the worth and importance of work they did that previous studies described as menial or quotidian. She demanded that historians revisit their sources, read them creatively, and find new avenues, theories, and methods of research that would illuminate alternative histories by which to uncover the particularities of the lives of women.

In large part, this research is an answer to this call to action. It is the goal of this dissertation to promote thought and further study about colonized women of the British

Empire that are underrepresented in historical scholarship. By interrogating source material that illuminates the subjects’ experiences, beyond the fantastic and exceptional stories and into the daily routines, it is possible to provide a thoughtful summary and nuanced analysis of a range of issues and themes that governed these individuals’ lives.

10 Asunción Lavrin, ed., Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978), 4.

Women’s Labor

In her article on nineteenth-century women workers of France, Joan Scott addresses the regrettable neglect of scholars to include women as workers in their historical analyses. She argued, “Historians who treat women workers as marginal to processes of urbanization and industrialization perpetuate uncritically the terms of the nineteenth-century discourse and so miss the opportunity to analyze its operation.”11

Scott argues that much of public policy and debate involved the regulation of not just workers, but specifically female workers, and to marginalize their contributions and their roles in shaping those debates not only prevents scholars from presenting a more accurate examination of the past, but also serves to reinforce the system that subjugated women in the nineteenth century through the same ideas and language employed by their male contemporaries. Scott’s demand for historians was to place the women workers at the center of analysis to draw conclusions about their significance and roles in larger processes such as industrialization and modernization.

To investigate women’s labor, one must first redefine the category of women’s labor or women’s “work.” When women’s labor is defined in the same manner as men’s labor, in terms of wages earned or production value outside the family unit, historical studies of labor traditionally concluded that most women did not work. A rethinking of women’s labor broken down into separate spheres and categories of analysis proves that women provided many forms of labor to their societies, communities, and families. First,

11 Joan Wallach Scott, “‘L’ouvrière! Mot Impie, Sordide . . .’: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-1860,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 163.

in the colonies, whether a woman performed strenuous manual labor was mostly dependent on her race and her classification of relative freedom and servitude. While it is true that elite white women did not engage in fieldwork, antiquated assumptions about labor as only the performance of manual tasks ignore or downplay the work of women of color and women in other classes and various kinds of servitude.

Second, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argued, Marxian labor analysis provides an incomplete model because it denies female acts of human reproduction and child- rearing as labor:

I would argue that, in terms of the physical, emotional, legal, custodial, and sentimental situation of the woman's product, the child, this picture of the human relationship to production, labor, and property is incomplete. The possession of a tangible place of production, the womb, situates women as agents in any theory of production.12

For Spivak, the act of carrying a child in utero and raising the child in the home is central to the work of women. To take this assertion one step further, this dissertation argues that reproductive labor is not merely the birthing and rearing of the child, but also the process of instilling cultural norms and values in the next generation through the close contact that mothers typically have with their offspring. Reproductive labor has two products, the actual human beings that women reproduce, and the values, norms, language, customs and religion that are parts of the final product of culture. Cultural reproduction was of great concern to colonial officials who desired to spread their brand of “civilization” amongst the colonized peoples, so a close analysis of the agents involved in this type of

12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Donna Landry and Gerald M. MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 56-57.

reproduction is vital for understanding the colonial machine as a whole and women’s place within it.

The third form of labor not thoroughly explored in colonial studies is sexual labor.

Sexual labor, forced and not, refers to the acts imposed upon and performed by women for sexual gratification. Acts contained in this category are rape, sex trafficking, prostitution, concubinage, and any other means by which men used women’s bodies as sexual objects. An analysis of sexual labor of colonized women includes not only the rape and exploitation of captive, semi-free, and free women living under colonial rule, but also acts the women engaged in on their own volition, such as prostitution, with the intended product of these acts not being the reproduction of the human race but rather for sexual gratification. Whether men compensated women for their sexual labor does not affect the value of this type of labor as a category of analysis.

In her analysis of sexual exploitation of indigenous women in colonial North

America, Sarah Deer explains how the colonial process of removing native women from their homes and families was a key step in the removal of their individual liberties and the reduction of their bodies to sexual objects:

Dispossession and relocation of indigenous peoples on this continent both necessitated and precipitated a highly gendered and sexualized dynamic in which Native women’s bodies became commodities— bought and sold for the purposes of sexual gratification (or profit), invariably transporting them far away from their homes.13

Deer links colonized women’s migration, in this case the dispossession of Native

American women by British colonizers, to sexual labor. She further explains that as

13 Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 62.

European law overtook indigenous norms and customs, colonized women’s bodies became commercialized products and the sexual use of their bodies as objects, even where illegal, continued without enforcement.14

Beginning with Lavrin’s demand that women’s daily tasks be reexamined for their worth and adding to the mix Scott’s call for an examination of women’s labor,

Spivak’s idea that human reproduction is a labor performed by women, and Deer’s assertions that sexual labor was an inherent part of the colonial process, a much broader definition of “women’s labor” becomes available. Instead of including only work in the fields or factories as labor we are able to consider the myriad of other tasks and acts traditionally performed by women as “work.” Not only the reproduction of future generations, as Spivak argued above, but also acts of home and community management, social networking, education and spiritual guidance of children, and various means of providing sexual gratification can be reexamined through the same Marxian lenses traditionally reserved for the work of men. Women were responsible for the reproduction of not only human beings in the physical sense, but also culture, values, and norms. By viewing all of this work of women for its relative use-value, scholars can employ the thought-provoking “reading of Marx beyond Marx” that Spivak demands.

Patriarchy and the Gaze

Historians often accept patriarchy as an imposing force without significant analysis of its origins. Because of this, much of the existing scholarship interprets

14 Deer, 62.

patriarchal ideas as a given constant instead of a process, resulting in literature that focuses on explanations of acts carried out in the name of male gender bias. Similar to the way that Gerda Lerner attempted to trace the origins of patriarchal thought in The

Creation of Patriarchy, this dissertation seeks to explain the process of establishing a society with patriarchal values built into its very core.15

White male colonial administrators, planters, and colonists employed the acts of looking described above to embed notions of race- and gender-based power in the colonies. To explain how this took root, this study applies film theory and sociological studies of the power of the “gaze” and “looking relations.” In a pivotal 1975 essay on film studies, Laura Mulvey described men as “bearer[s] of the look,” and explained that

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.”16 Essentially, this means that men look because of their power, and women are powerless against the male gaze because their lack of relative prevents them from returning the look. While Mulvey was specifically interrogating film, her ideas apply to other art media such as drawings, painting, and photography, as well as real-life situations. By understanding this idea that men, because of their power position in an imbalanced world, can assert their power through their gaze, it becomes evident that there is actual real power in the look itself and power can be derived from hegemonic ideas about the correct place of individuals in a society’s hierarchy. In the British Empire,

15 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). While some scholars argue that this book is outdated, it provides several useful models for investigating the formation of a patriarchal state, transference of ideas of inferiority, and how control over women’s reproduction and labor results in their commoditization.

16 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 837.

with white males at the top of the power structure, this meant that the gaze fell downward on the hierarchical pyramid to anyone not a white male.

In this dissertation, the subjects of study variably occupy positions as gazers or those upon gazed upon (and sometimes both simultaneously). In the colonial Caribbean, during slavery, the gaze usually originated from white male planters or overseers onto laborers. In the anti-slavery movement, the power of gaze belonged to white inspectors and anti-slavery activists, empowered by their elevated position in the racialized and gendered hierarchy. In prisons that rose up after emancipation, the guards had gazing power over inmates; in tourism and travel writing, the gazed emanated from traveler to the “native.” There are times in which white men in positions of power temporarily and with control relegated the control of the gaze to men of color. For example, white men allowed men of color to watch other people of color as plantation drivers and prison guards. Men of African and Indian descent assumed the power of the gaze over women in their communities by scrutinizing their roles and behaviors. White missionary women viewed and judged women of color. Women of color, however, at the bottom of the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the British Empire never assumed gazing power over men or white women. All the variations of the gaze and its implied and conferred power show the colonial racialized and gendered hierarchy was always active in the act of looking.

Sources

Any study of the history of a group subject to domination by another begins with the problem of readily available sources. In the cases of the histories of colonized people

of color, white middle-class men wrote traditional archival sources from their perspectives or to serve their gains. The documents that fill the boxes and bound volumes in the world’s archives are rife with bias, misinformation, and omitted information, resulting in a body of evidence that is ultimately “fragmented, fractured and disassembled.”17 Because of the lack of inclusivity in archival materials, a study of race and gender that centers on colonized women of color, must employ creativity in attaining, evaluating, and interpreting potential source material. This study is not a rejection of the archive, but rather, an inclusion of sources beyond the archive. To illuminate the implementation and power of surveillance and looking relations, several arguments in this dissertation rely upon images such as drawings, paintings, and photographs published in travel writing, propaganda, or printed on postcards. An analysis of the language used in personal written accounts from inspectors, abolitionists, and missionaries provides context and reveals racialized and gendered attitudes and prevalent colonial hegemonic ideals. Also, an autobiography, written by a Christian Indian woman living in Trinidad, one generation removed from indenture, complicates the role of religion and missionaries in the work of empire. Finally, in the years before independence, song lyrics, letters to editors of newspapers, and children’s recorded aspirations for their future illuminate how colonized people of color negotiated their identities under the legacy of empire.

17 Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 9, quoted in Antoinette Burton, “Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism, and the Domains of History,” Social History 26 (January 2001): 66.

As such, this dissertation is an answer to Antoinette Burton’s call to “Think beyond the Boundaries” of traditionally defined parameters of political, cultural, social, economic, and intellectual domains of history.18 While this dissertation involved the consultation of archival legal codes, government records, and official correspondence, it is not a political history. Art and literature are analyzed for messages conveyed through their text and images, but this is not a cultural study. A wide range of sources are interrogated to uncover customs, traditions, family dynamics, and the workings of religious institutions, but the label social history does not suffice. Nor is this an economic history or an intellectual history, even though labor systems and formations of ideologies and identity are discussed throughout the following pages. Rather, this dissertation is representative of all those historical fields and is thus a feminist history. This study illustrates how, when taken together, all the disciplines, sources, and fields discussed above reveal complex historical processes, ideologies, and legacies of imperial practices of race and gender-based imperial domination.

Overview

This study begins with a discussion of early plantation labor in the West Indies to explain the context of the emergence of Indian indentured labor. Chapter two explores how British colonial actors constructed and preserved a racialized and gendered hierarchy through which to maintain control and dominance over its colonies in the wake of rebellions, and changing politics, demographics, and power dynamics. What the chapter

18 Kale, Fragments of Empire, quoted in Burton, “Thinking Beyond the Boundaries,” 60-71.

shows is that the central method of controlling the population employed by the British involved reinforcing the race and gender-based assumptions that informed their established Caribbean hierarchy. Through investigating the origins of the colonial surveillance state, chapter two reveals a historical trajectory from slavery to the present day linked by the legacies of looking relations.

Chapter three moves past the era of slavery and focuses on the period immediately following apprenticeship and the crisis of labor that ensued. As former slaves refused to return to agricultural labor, planters petitioned the government for a replacement of labor that would return them to their former glory. Chapter three details the experiences of the migrant indentured Indians on their “middle passage” from India to the Caribbean, the terms of their contracts, the demographics and goals of the migrants, the recruitment process, the differences in expectations and recruitment based on gender, and finally, the migrants’ challenges in settling into their new homes and communities.

Chapters four and five also deal with the Indian indentured migrants but focus on the female laborers. Chapter four analyzes the labors of Indian women (physical, reproductive, and more abstract and quotidian labors). Through this analysis, it becomes evident that nineteenth-century ideas about race and gender underscored struggles over access to women (their bodies and work), resources, and power in the colonial Caribbean.

This chapter explores how British colonial administrators and Indian men scrutinized the behaviors of women to blame their actions or moral character on social problems that developed in Indian communities under indenture. Chapter four also discusses the dangers and opportunities presented to Indian women of the diaspora. Some women decided to enter into a labor contract because of a desire or a need to leave India. Famine

and hardship characterized the experiences of many Indians in nineteenth-century British

India and the chance to earn wages and gain independence was undoubtedly enticing.

Some women enlisted to escape family, issues with their reputation in their community, or to provide better lives for their children. Instead of opportunities, the migrants encountered unexpected disappointment and extraordinary hardship migrants upon their arrival and throughout the duration of their contracts. Domestic violence attributed to the

“sex-ratio problem” that blamed women for not being sufficient in number, was prevalent. Also, estates paid female workers significantly less for their labor, a symptom of a society that placed limited worth on the labors of its women. In all, the indenture system itself put an exorbitant amount of pressure on Indian women not only to do physical work (for less compensation), but also to reproduce communities by raising children and being “good wives,” all while being subject to constant threats of domestic and sexual violence because there were so few women amongst many men. Finally, chapter four discusses the portrayal of Indian women in postcards as spectacles and objects of imperial “looking relations.”19 The postcards’ photographs featured Indian women and captions that emphasized the allure of the exotic and promoted tourism in the islands. This showcasing contributed to the commoditization of Indian women as sights to be gazed upon, removed of their humanity, and gawked at for their “otherness.”

Chapter five also shows how imperial missionaries, supported by the colonial government, built schools and religious institutions that served as places of assimilation

19 The model for analyzing the female role as spectacle and therefore an object of gaze is inspired by Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Women: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).

to British culture and customs. Missionary-led schools and churches sought to convert children in the islands to Christianity, teach them English, and implement imperial education initiatives and norms as universal throughout the British Empire. These schools targeted Indian girls, especially, in hopes of reproducing British culture by influencing those who would be in charge of establishing and preserving communities in the future.

In doing this, not only did the British strengthen their authority through the spread of cultural dominance, but the schools also served as sights of colonial surveillance where the girls’ behaviors and ideas could be carefully monitored and controlled.

This dissertation concludes with a chapter detailing how constructions of community and identity in African and Indian communities resulted from struggles against each for power brought about by class conflict and the legacy of colonial hostilities. As white Europeans began their departure from power, questions of hierarchy, race, class, and power came to the fore in African and Indian communities. Relations between them remain difficult today, a phenomenon indicative of the lasting effects of empire. Chapter six examines these tensions as expressed in negotiations of community construction and the complex development of notions of self.

A Note on Terminology

In her book, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, E.

Ann Kaplan articulates a problem she had with writing her book that is also present within this dissertation. The utilization of communicative terms that refer to people of a

“non-white” background is loaded with inherent bias and power by the nature of the words themselves. As Kaplan explains, there are no suitable terms for describing general

populations based on race or ethnicity in the English language because the English language itself contains within it inherent racism. The term “non-white” implies “white” as the standard and all else as an “other.” The term “minority” implies inferiority instead of indicating numerical comparative presence, and commonly used phrases such as

“person of color” confer the problematic idea that white is not a color (and therefore, the standard by which all else is measured). The utilization of any of the above terms is not ideal, but this dissertation remains limited by the constraints of the English language in discussing comparisons between European colonizers’ ideas and experiences, and those whom contemporaries deemed were not members of that European hierarchically superior position. As Kaplan stated, “It will take some more years of struggle for the language problem to evolve. Anglo-Americans will know that there has been some shift in race relations once language begins to register the interlinked social changes.”20 It should be noted that Kaplan wrote that in 1997 and here, in 2019, the problem persists.

The best course of action is to be sensitive to the words chosen, and also acknowledge and express to the readers that such words are not without complications. For this dissertation, when discussing groups of people in general that shared common experiences as subjects of “white” individuals, the marker “of color” is used. Otherwise, for clarity and attempted temporal consistency, the referent descriptions applied to communities are in line with how members within the community and their contemporaries referred to themselves. For example, Trinidadians used the word

“Creole” with a capital “C” to refer to people of African descent born on the Island.

20 Kaplan, Looking for the Other, xxiii.

Therefore, when describing later generations of African migrants and former African slaves, the term Creole is used. For those that claimed origins in the Indian subcontinent, the label “Indian” is employed as that is how they referred to themselves.

Also, the word “Coolie” may be offensive to some readers because of the negative connotations associated with the term. A recent monograph by journalist Gaiutra

Bahadur, titled Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, addresses issues with this term head-on in her preface. She makes plain that it is important for readers to understand why the term can cause displeasure as well as why some appropriate the term with pride.21

While the origin of “Coolie” is often debated, Bahadur relies on Hugh Tinker’s definition in A New System of Slavery that explains that “Coolie” came from the Tamil word “kuli” which referred to a worker hired for wages.22 Used as early as the sixteenth century by the Portuguese, it caught on quickly, and by the nineteenth century, the term went from being specific to dock-workers at the Indian ports to a term that was commonplace amongst Europeans to refer to any non-European (typically Asian) workers paid meager wages to do menial work. In the sources used for this dissertation, the British used the word “Coolie” most often to refer to Indians, but it would not be uncommon to see the word “Coolie” in documents of European origin referring to other laborers from the

Asian continent (especially China).

Bahadur explains planters used the word “Coolie” in the same way that other derogatory terms of race were applied on plantations: to establish and enforce the racial

21 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

22 Tinker, New System, 42.

hierarchy. Because of this, the term grew to be something that the Indians resented.

Bahadur cites an Indo-Guyanese folk song that exclaimed, “Why should be called coolies! [sic] We who were born in the clans and families of seers and saints.”23 The

Indians felt that the term was a misnomer that signified degradation and belittled Indian historical accomplishment. Regardless of the job or the position an Indian occupied, the

British referred to all Indians as “Coolies.” Today, there is a movement in the Caribbean to reclaim the word and to honor the ancestors that lived under that label. By stressing the hard work and the endurance of their predecessors, Indo-Caribbean individuals proclaim that there is no shame in earning an honest living and surviving the toughest of conditions.

For this dissertation, the word “Coolie” is only used in quotations or to make a larger point about language, race, and power. It is not the job of the historian-from-afar to impress judgment calls on groups or individuals about the appropriate use of such terms nor should historians decide what should and should not offend people. Instead, as with the other difficult terms discussed above, the words have been chosen carefully, with sensitivity, and with as much knowledge as possible about the origins of the terms and their connotations.

Finally, the term “native” as used by the British imperialists implies race more than it does origin. Colonists, government agents, and British people referred to any people deemed not “white” by British standards as “native” without regard to their ancestral homeland. The use of the term in the Caribbean as applied to any of the

23 Ved Prakash Vatuk, “Protest Songs of British Guiana,” The Journal of American Folklore 77 (1965): 226, quoted in Bahadur, Coolie Woman, p. xx.

colonized, non-white people, including those of African, Indian, and Asian descent shows its fluidity. Ironically, none of those people, including the British, were native in terms of having origin in the Caribbean. However, no white colonialists used the word “native” to refer to white people in colonial settings, even if born there, thus “native” refers to race and carries with it British assumptions about race. Unless indicative of origin, as in the phrase “native language,” this dissertation uses the word “native” in quotation marks only to interrogate British attitudes about race and what it meant to be “native.”

CHAPTER II

SLAVERY TO PRISON PIPELINE: THE CREATION OF THE COLONIAL

SURVEILLANCE STATE

A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.1

In 2018, several news stories highlighted the phenomenon of white civilians policing people of color. In the United States, there were viral stories such as one involving a white woman, nicknamed “BBQ Becky” by internet users, who called the police to report on a black family for having a picnic outside the sanctioned picnic area of a park. Another story featured a white woman, dubbed “Permit Patty” who called the police on a pre-teen girl for selling water without a permit outside her apartment building.

Most infamously, was the instance where a white Starbucks employee in Philadelphia called the police on two black men for sitting in Starbucks without first buying a beverage. In all these cases, journalists, attorneys, and civil rights activists argued that the reason the white women called the police was that the alleged offenders were people of

1 Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Press, 2014), 3.

color, and if other white individuals displayed the same behaviors, there would have been no police involvement whatsoever.2

Similarly, in the twenty-first-century Caribbean, even though white people are a small minority (0.59%) and cultural dynamics have shifted since the colonial era, the language and behaviors of racial hierarchy instilled by colonialism have remained.3

Today, in the example of Trinidad, it is more common to read about racial tensions between Trinidadians of African and Indian descent, rather than between white individuals and people of color due to the demographic shift in the post-colonial era.4 As of the last census taken in 2011, the population of East Indian ethnic descent in Trinidad had a slight majority over those of African descent, 35.4% to 34.2% respectively. White

Trinidadians are so few they are listed as part of the census group, “other,” which amounts to only 1.3%.5 Even in the absence of a white power structure, racist

2Gianluca Mezzofiore, "A White Woman Called Police on Black People Barbecuing. This Is How the Community Responded," CNN, May 22, 2018, accessed July 17, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/22/us/white-woman-black-people-oakland-bbq-trnd/index.html; Niraj Chokshi, "White Woman Nicknamed 'Permit Patty' Regrets Confrontation Over Black Girl Selling Water," The New York Times, June 25, 2018, accessed July 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/us/permit-patty-black-girl-water.html; Elizabeth Dias, John Eligon, and Richard A. Oppel, "Philadelphia Starbucks Arrests, Outrageous to Some, Are Everyday Life for Others," The New York Times, April 18, 2018, accessed July 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/us/starbucks-arrest-philadelphia.html.

3 Scholars of U.S. history often ignore or overlook the historical trajectory of other geographical areas that were also once part of the British Empire in their own works. This chapter aims to combat this air of American exceptionalism by highlighting consistencies between the remnants of colonialism in the post- colonial United States with the post-colonial Caribbean.

4 Chapter six of this dissertation explores the racial tensions between Trinidadians of African and Indian descent in greater detail.

5 The Central Statistical Office, Trinidad and Tobago 2011 Population and Housing Census: Demographic Report (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Ministry of Planning and Sustainable Development, 2011); Central Intelligence Agency, "The World Factbook: Trinidad and Tobago," January 31, 2019, accessed February 18, 2019, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/td.html.

assumptions imposed on people of African descent by British colonizers remain in the collective consciousness of Trinidadians. In attempts to assume their place atop the island’s shifting racial hierarchy, both Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians assumed the roles of the white, British colonizers in publicly monitoring, stereotyping, and making assumptions about one another and people within their group. In the modern, technology- driven world, these acts have taken the form of social media attacks and political posturing through which Trinidadians report on and respond to news about other

Trinidadians with racialized and gendered comments aimed at preserving a power dynamic rooted in racialization.6

For example, a January 2016 lock-down of homes and businesses in the country’s capital, Port-of-Spain, following an armed robbery of a nightclub captured the news headlines. As the police searched for the alleged perpetrator, the story garnered a lot of social media attention, especially assertions regarding the individual’s race.

Overwhelmingly, the comments on the news articles and social media presumed the individual to be black. Also, where the commentators referred to the alleged race of the offender, they used language with gendered connotations, such as referring to him as

“boy,” when the reports identified him as of majority age.7 Using gendered language that demotes a man to the place of a child was typical during the colonial era, and persists today, as a way of attempting to remove black men’s sense of manhood and individuality

6 Jolynna Sinanan, Social Media in Trinidad: Values and Visibility (London: UCL Press, 2017), 77.

7 Flora Thomas, “Crime in Trinidad & Tobago Brings Out Netizens’ Racial Prejudices,” Global Voices (blog), MacArthur Foundation, January 30, 2016, accessed July 17, 2018, https://globalvoices.org/2016/01/30/crime-in-trinidad-tobago-brings-out-netizens-racial-prejudices/.

while simultaneously injecting paternalistic undercurrents into the hegemonic dialogue.8

After the police captured the alleged robber, one of the most telling comments read:

“Hats off to the police for a good job. When they do something good, we most praise them. No disrespect to the Afro Trinis but i am almost 100% sure the bandit is a lil black boy. What a shame [sic].”9 A few hours later the media revealed that the alleged robber was of East Indian descent. However, his actual race mattered little because the court of public opinion already tried and convicted him by assigning him blackness, itself criminalized, before police identified him. What this chapter illustrates is how this act of surveillance, judging, and policing is part of a long-standing trend of racialized assumptions beginning in the colonial era that extends throughout the post-colonial world in the modern period. Initially to preserve the slave trade, white European colonists constructed ideas and norms about relations between races and assumptions of people of color, and that process of evaluating, differentiating, and stereotyping persists today.

Context and Chronology

For purposes of analysis, the chapter is divided chronologically into three eras: the transatlantic slave / “unfree” era prior to the declared end of slavery in the British

Empire in 1833; the era of “promised freedom”, from 1833-1838, during which former slaves were forced into apprenticeship status on estates; and the subsequent era of

8 For a discussion on the use of “boy” to infantilize black men and thus justifying their subordinate position to white men regardless of the age dynamic, see Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 28; Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Raising Empires like Children: Race, Nation, and Religious Education,” American Literary History 8 (Autumn 1996): 412-419.

9 Thomas, “Crime in Trinidad & Tobago.”

“denied freedom,” following full emancipation of slaves in 1838, that witnessed the rise of a global prison system and the entrenchment of colonial racialized and gendered surveillance through incarceration, tourism, and indentured migrant labor. The subjects at the center of analysis in this chapter are laborers of African descent in the British

Caribbean, both free and unfree. When the Indian migrant laborers arrived in the islands in the middle of the nineteenth century, they entered into a racialized labor system that had already been firmly established. To understand the society as it operated at the time of Indian arrival and the preconceived notions and set practices that the Indians faced, it is necessary first to examine the dynamics of the racialized hierarchy and the methods of control that the British employed to maintain their African labor force, both during slavery and after.

The unfree era began in the early days of the slave trade and forced African migration to the Caribbean islands and includes the 1807 Abolition Act, which ended the transatlantic slave trade but allowed slavery to continue throughout the British Empire.

Slavery is the starkest example of an institution built upon removing individual liberties.

In the European-led slave system that took root in the Americas, slavery not only meant a life sentence of hard labor and no legal freedom for the slave but also for any offspring of enslaved women produced throughout their lifetimes. Slavery was a system of complete control and regulation over the movement of bodies, whether it related to labor, migration, or day-to-day activities. In the 1820s, in response to abolitionist complaints and concerns over increasingly limited access to new slaves from Africa, Parliament adopted policies of amelioration on the plantations aimed at improving the health and lifespan of the slaves. At the same time, the British began constructing prisons in the

colonies. In these prisons, life sentences were common, thus extending “unfreedom” indefinitely for some individuals, regardless of other political changes. Prisons also regulated all movements of individuals under their control, much in the same way as the slave system did, and painted unfreedom as a result of criminality. The reproduction of attitudes in the post-colonial world regarding the criminality of black people has its roots in this process of criminalizing former slaves to preserve colonial access to African unpaid labor.

The second era, in which acts of government promised freedom to slaves, began with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, continued through the period of so-called

“apprenticeship” that followed, and ended with the full emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire in 1838. The Abolition Act allocated £20 million to each slave owner to appease their complaints and compensate for their losses and instituted a transitionary period following abolition called apprenticeship.10 Through this system, former slave laborers who worked in fields were required to continue to work for the estates 40.5 hours per week, but they could also sell their labor for wages or work for themselves during the time not committed to the estate. They could, in theory, buy their freedom before serving out the entire apprenticeship period if they earned enough.

Apprenticeship policies required that the estates provide apprentices with food and clothing allowances, medical treatment, and housing. The official policies applied equally

10 This was 40% of Britain’s national budget that was just paid off in 2015, meaning that the British people, including descendants of slaves have been helping to pay this debt through their taxes for over 150 years. "Slave Owner Compensation Was Still Being Paid Off by British Taxpayers in 2015," RT International, accessed July 18, 2018, https://www.rt.com/uk/418814-slave-compensation-bristol-taxpayer/.

to men and women, but it is unclear from the sources how uniformly the estates followed them and provided these provisions.11

The third era is one of denied freedom primarily because almost immediately following the official emancipation of slaves in 1838, the colonial government orchestrated a drastic increase in the building of prisons and the incarceration of freed or nearly-freed peoples of African descent. From 1842 to 1867, nearly 150 prisons were built throughout the British Empire following Jeremy Bentham’s model, which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of systems of a massive push for a tourism industry in the islands and the introduction of indentured labor, that continued this tradition of regulation of free movement of colonized people of color through constant surveillance. In the cases of indentured and wage labor, these systems cannot be considered as “free” because even though the individual could enter into work contracts under their own volition, in reality, they were often forced into the contracts initially, or forced to stay in contracts beyond their expiration due to legal loopholes unbeknownst to the worker. Also, once under contract, it was commonplace for individual liberties such as freedom of movement or rights to privacy to be suspended until the laborer fulfilled their contract. Scholars often contrast indenture with unfree labor such as slavery or laboring under life sentences in prison by arguing that, under indenture, there was at least the potential for an end to the restrictions and limitations. Whether or not the end ever came was dependent on the

11 Sheena Boa, “Experiences of Women Estate Workers During the Apprenticeship Period in St Vincent, 1834-38: The Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Women’s History Review, no. 3 (December 2006): 382.

unique circumstances under which the individual worker labored. Even in the case of prison without a life sentence, prisoners had the psychological benefit of believing that one day they could be released. The connection to the imposed tourism industry - as a form of denied freedom and labor - is elaborated later in this chapter and revisited in chapter four, but the argument is grounded in the premise that former slaves and later, former indentured laborers and wage workers were, with the goal of promoting an exotic and safe place for white Europeans to go on holiday, subject to extreme methods of surveillance, policing, stereotyping, and restricted movements much in the same manner as experienced by slaves, prisoners, and indentured laborers.

Women’s Labor

This chapter explores these measures of freedom through a gendered lens centered on women’s labor. By highlighting the experiences that were unique and specific to women and girls, this study supplies meaningful insight into an understudied demographic and exposes an important trend of imperial control that not only sought to maintain a racial hierarchy but also patriarchal hegemonic values. Within the three eras related to “freedom,” women labored alongside men, though when considering women as laborers, it becomes necessary to break down what exactly is meant by the term “labor.”

This ambiguousness is because traditional studies of labor tend to exclude the work of women since women have often been unpaid for the labors they perform(ed). Colonial agents not only forced and coerced women into physical labor, but also reproductive and sexual labor.

Colonized women’s physical labor in slavery, imprisonment, and indenture looked much the same as men’s labor. Planters forced women to work in the fields, on the prison gangs and treadmills, and as domestic servants. Young girls who were too small for the fields or women not bound by a contract or too frail to cut sugar cane or harvest crops performed handicrafts and sewing. Girls in missions’ schools performed these tasks as part of their training on how to be a good Christian wife and mother, further reinforcing patriarchal European values.12

Reproductive labor is the work of creating the next generation of workers. During the peak of the slave trade, the reproduction of children held value in that it produced the future generations of unpaid labor. This was because in the enslaved status of the child followed the status of the mother. While plantation owners embraced the gains from forced reproductive labor of enslaved women, they preferred to continually purchase new male slaves as it was cheaper and easier than raising children.13 After the trade ended in

1807, however, women became the largest target of amelioration policies because of the perceived slave population crisis that would follow. In her book Laboring Women:

Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan explained how forced reproduction “became a kind of symbolic work for enslaved women.”14 She also cautioned researchers not to diminish the physical field labor in favor of studying

12 More on the role of missionaries and cultural colonization through the education of girls in Chapter five.

13 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100-4.

14 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 7.

reproductive labor because the enslaved women did both forms and suffered doubly as field laborers and reproducers of new field laborers.15

Another aspect of reproductive labor is the work of socio-cultural reproduction.

To analyze this type of labor in the Caribbean context, this dissertation uses sociologists

Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner’s definition of social reproduction in “Gender and

Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,”

Writing on the gendered division of labor, feminists use social reproduction to refer to the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. Social reproduction can thus be seen to include various kinds of work-mental, manual, and emotional-aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.16

Laslett and Brenner explain social reproduction as not only the physical labor of having children but also the work of raising them. What this chapter does is take this definition a step further and show that as women were raising children, providing clothing, shelter, socialization, etc., their work was not done in a vacuum but in the socio-cultural and political context of the eras of limited freedom in which they lived. This is significant because women, seen by colonial powers as the creators of the next generation, held the responsibility of keeping children alive, helping them to grow physically, and teaching

15 Morgan, Laboring Women, 7.

16 Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, "Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 382-3.

them the cultural values necessary to behave as good and obedient slaves and, later, good and obedient subjects of empire.

Finally, reproductive and sexual labor, though at times related, are not the same.

For purposes of this analysis, this chapter defines forced sexual labor as the acts of men in positions of power that appropriated the use of women’s bodies not to produce goods or future generations but to supply them with sexual gratification. During slavery, mass incarceration, through the rise of a tourism industry, and the introduction of indentured migrant labor, rape and concubinage became commonplace in the colonial Caribbean.

Prostitution during the Colonial era was also a common form of sexual labor, though scholars debate whether it empowered women to profit from the use of their bodies or if it exploited them because of the power dynamic involved in interracial colonial sexual transactions.17 Political pressures and the promotion of Victorian morality resulted in different methods and degrees of surveillance, restrictions, and allowances of these acts throughout the periods of slavery, apprenticeship, and emancipation, but this type of women’s work was always present and prevalent.

The forms and performances of the labors discussed above were linked with the colonial legacy of surveilling, policing, and regulating individuals of color, especially women. The connection between all forms of labor is that they took place in a colonial racial and gendered hierarchy where white men carried out the acts of watching, looking,

17 Jenny Sharpe and Samantha Pinto, “The Sweetest Taboo: Studies of Caribbean Sexualities: A Review Essay,” Signs 32 (Autumn 2006): 247-274; Philippa Levine, “’A Multitude of Unchaste Women:’ Prostitution in the British Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 15 no. 4 (Winter 2004): 159-163; Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Richard Phillips, “Heterogenous Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality in British West Africa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 no. 3 (July 2005): 291-315.

perceiving, and controlling. In the context of slavery, the white men who had the power to cast their gaze had direct and legal control over the movements of the colonized bodies of people of color under their eye. Then, even as white men promised, granted and denied varying degrees of freedom to the colonized people of color, they preserved these powers via assertions of the racial and gendered hegemonic ideologies in place.

Being Unfree

During the first era, characterized by colonial policy that asserted complete control over the labor and activities of the colonized, the primary institution of control and gazing was slavery. The physical labor of enslaved women during this period was very much like that of men. As stated above, slaveholders had little motivation to promote a practice of women serving as reproducers of the next generation of slaves, so they directed most of the laboring time to fieldwork.18 In figure 1 below titled Cutting the

Sugar Cane, the artist depicted women depicted working alongside the men, doing the same job.

18 Diana Paton, "Enslaved Women and Slavery Before and After 1807," History in Focus: Overview of The Victorian Era, May 1, 2007, accessed July 08, 2018, https://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Slavery/articles/paton.html.

Figure 1: Cutting the Sugar Cane William Clark, 1823 Ten Views in the Island of Antigua British Library, London

Aside from the observation that women were working as cane-cutters without any separation or apparent accommodation, it is also notable that in the center of the picture, even the woman with the small child is subject to care for her child while simultaneously performing the labor of gathering the cut cane. She was not granted an exception for providing reproductive labor; rather, she was subjected to two forms of labor at once, field and reproduction. For an illustration of the performance of colonial power on the plantation, note the position of the overseer. He is high atop the horse for perhaps several purposes. Maybe, it is to assert his superiority by actually assuming a visibly higher position than those he is overseeing. It is perhaps because being on horseback while being one man in charge of several slaves wielding cutlasses is safer if the need for an

escape arises. But, significantly, from his position high atop the horse, he could look upon all those in his charge. His view and, therefore, his power had no obstruction. From there, his position was clear.

For slave women, sex and labor were intertwined. Enslaved black women were subject to two prevailing European stereotypes used to justify not only forced physical field labor but also forced prostitution, concubinage, and rape. The first view of slave women was that they were inherently passive and subservient and, as such, naturally accustomed to being objects of submission. The second perception was that African female sexuality could be characterized as promiscuous, immoral, and “sensuous in an animal-like way lacking all the qualities that defined ‘decent’ womanhood or women of

‘purity of blood.”19 The act of assigning these qualities to slave women as generalized characteristics of a people void of individuality was grounded in the power of the colonizer’s ability to look upon them, define them, and judge them. Also, it allowed the planters who engaged in sexual acts with the women to avoid regulation or punishment for their promiscuity or immoral behavior by blaming the women for being seductresses by nature and thus subjecting them to any regulations or punishments deemed suitable for violating Victorian moral code.20 Rape, concubinage, and prostitution were therefore inextricable from the power of the British colonizers because slavery not only meant the

19 Kamala Kempadoo, “Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean,” Paper presented at O Desafio da Difernça Symposium, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, April 2000. See also Fernando Henriques, Love in Action: The Sociology of Sex (London: Panther Books, 1970), 201; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society: 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

20 Kamala Kempadoo, “Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean.”

right to the field labor of women but also the right of white estate owners, slaveholders, and overseers to use the bodies of the slave women as they wished.

As this system became more entrenched in colonial Caribbean society, the privilege over enslaved bodies theoretically extended to all white men in the colonies, regardless of their class position. In summary of the findings of sociologist Fernando

Henriques, Kempadoo explains,

Even the European bond-servant, who stood at the margins of white society in an almost comparable position to that of slave, was seen to have “augmented the process of their masters” through engaging in clandestine sexual affairs with slave women, due to the privilege that their whiteness conferred upon them.21

This phenomenon is an important shift in the power hierarchy because it signaled that the process of watching over and controlling bodies of color would not be limited to the elite.

Over time, white men of lower classes were able to grasp at power by positioning themselves (figuratively and literally) over the bodies of black and brown people. Also, as racial mixing and migration occurred in the Caribbean, various perceived levels of

“whiteness,” “brownness,” and “blackness” and the racialized and gendered hierarchical pyramid that distinguished them became more complex. New social categories emerged, such as that of the mixed-race woman who became particularly exoticized and desired by white men. In the long-term social schema, a light-skinned woman of mixed-race may have had much more social mobility, but she herself was still “legally and ideologically placed outside of white society” because her very existence represented to Europeans

“racial impurity and moral, racial, and social degradation.”22 Examples such as this are

21 Kamala Kempadoo, “Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean.”

22 Ibid.

excellent illustrations of how this process of watching, judging, and regulating was variable, but always entrenched in the values preserving the racial hierarchy.

To justify continued use of the slave system in the face of increasing abolitionist opposition, the British colonists publicized a message to the people of Britain that the slaves were happy with their conditions because they had food and shelter. In a journal kept during a six-month visit to the West Indies in 1825, British writer and editor Henry

Nelson Coleridge, nephew of poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, explained how he believed the slaves in the Caribbean to be happier and better off than the poor of

England,

…it is nevertheless a certain truth that the slaves in general do labor much less, do eat and drink much more, have much more ready money, dress much more gaily, and are treated with more kindness and attention, when sick, than nine-tenths of all the people of Great Britain under the condition of tradesmen, farmers, and domestic servants. . . .I say, in some measure the slaves receive no wages, because no money is paid to them on that score, but they possess advantages which the ordinary wages of labor in England doubled could not purchase. The slaves are so well aware of the comforts which they enjoy under a master's purveyance that they not unfrequently forego freedom rather than be deprived of them.23

This was a common pro-slavery argument: the slaves were content where they were, and therefore, there was no concern for rebellion. Claims like Coleridge’s assertion that many slaves would reject freedom if offered must be subject to a critical analysis instead of the acceptance of a generalized assumption of Stockholm syndrome. Indeed, some slaves who had been borne into slavery and perhaps had “kinder” masters may have preferred their condition to that of other slaves, but it cannot be assumed of the masses as there is

23 Henry Nelson Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies in 1825 (London: William Tegg, 1826), 314.

no actual evidence pointing to that and, in fact, as will be shown later, there were several slave accounts that spoke to the contrary.

To provide visual “evidence” of the contentment of the slaves, planters and colonial officials circulated drawings or paintings that showed slaves and, later, free blacks engaging happily in some sort of festival or joyous occasion. Artists like Agostino

Brunias painted and sold their works to planters that wanted to communicate pro-slavery messages to the British people.24 Brunias’ painting below (Figure 2), titled “A Negro

Festival Drawn from Nature in the Island of St. Vincent,” is published in an 1801 monograph written by British politician and proponent of slavery, Bryan Edwards.

Figure 2: A Negro Festival Drawn from Nature in the Island of St. Vincent Agostino Brunias, 1797 The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (John Stockdale, Piccadilly: London, 1801)

24 For more on the creation, sale, and distribution of artwork like that of Brunias, see Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

A drawing such as this sent several messages to the intended English audience. In her book, The Global Eighteenth Century, Felicity Nussbaum, a specialist in Anglophone studies at UCLA, argues that one of the most important dimensions to this work and other by Brunias is the clear representation of the racialized and gender-based hierarchy that characterized African life in the Caribbean. Many of Brunias’s works feature the light- skinned mulatto woman (seen in the drawing above on the right, dressed in white, with the tall hat) so as to “mobilize the mulatress’s ambiguous social and racial status – her in- betweenness – in order to represent civilized society ‘under development.’”25 Depicting

Africans in various stages of dress based on social codes of acceptability that conformed to European standards and that followed the skin-color based hierarchy, showed

“progress” based on one’s real or performed level of “whiteness.” The choice of a fair- skinned, “almost-passable-for-a-proper-Englishwoman” figure as the focus was a result of long-standing European notions that a society’s relative level of “civilization” can be measured by how well the women of a society were “taken care of,” meaning provided for, dressed, and protected according to the standards of white elites. So, this painting not only showed happiness and a moment of joy to lend credence to the argument that slaves were happy; it also gave white viewers a sense of relatability to the subjects, thereby easing their fears of a culture too unknown to them. The fact that the viewer did not know the status of the subjects regarding whether they were free or slave was irrelevant because to the white, European eye, it makes little difference. It is also worth noting that the fairer

25 Felicity Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 198; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 139-173.

the skin and the more European the dress, the more the women were engaged in the joyousness of the festivities. The woman in the bottom-right corner, in tattered clothing and with a darker complexion, shown in a laboring position, draws attention to her role as a worker, not even allowed to sit idly and watch the dancing with the others.

In opposition to such arguments, of course, abolitionists claimed that the slaves’ inability to picture a life without bondage was not a good enough reason to deny them their human right of an existence free of chains. Abolitionists often countered this argument with accounts from slaves themselves, such as that of Mary Prince, who spent time in the harsh slave system of the Caribbean. About these “Stockholm” claims, Prince was of a different opinion,

… they come home and say, and make some good people believe, that slaves don’t want to get out of slavery. But they put a cloak about the truth. It is not so. All slaves want to be free – to be free is very sweet. . .I have been a slave myself – I know what slaves feel – I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery – that they don’t want to be free – that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra26 man say so, till I heard tell of it in England. Such people ought to be ashamed of themselves.27

Prince outright challenged the assumption that slaves were somehow content in their situation. While her account is written for purposes of abolition and therefore may contain a measure of bias, read against the account of Coleridge, it is clear that

Coleridge’s assertions on the content nature of the Caribbean slaves are at the very least exaggerated, if not completely fabricated.

26 Buckra was a slang term, sometimes used by Caribbean slaves, for the slave master.

27 Sarah Salih, ed., The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 38.

On May 1, 1807, an act of Parliament officially abolished the slave trade “and all manner of dealing and trading in the Purchase, Sale, Barter, or Transfer of Slaves, or of

Persons intended to be sold, transferred, used, or dealt with as Slaves, practiced or carried on, in, at, to or from any Part of the Coast or Countries of Africa.”28 In 1823, Foreign

Secretary George Canning proposed new practices for ameliorating the conditions of the slaves throughout the British colonies. In 1824, the colonial government passed several orders in Trinidad based on recommendations from Foreign Secretary George Canning’s amelioration proposals aimed at prolonging the viability of the slave system. These proposals

included new rules for punishment, including abolition of the flogging of slave women and girls; provision of the slaves with two days off work, one for the Negro market, and Sunday for religion; manumission reforms, including mandatory freedom of slave girls born after 1823; and judicial changes allowing slaves to admit evidence in court, and establishing a "Protector of Slaves" who would keep a legal record of slave punishments.29

Trinidad was supposed to be an example for other colonies to take it upon themselves to improve their slaves’ conditions and slave laws. Other colonies did take up amelioration policies, but with resistance as the estate managers did not want to change their accommodations or accept any blame for current conditions on their plantations.30

Amelioration practices continued a long-standing tradition of targeting women to exploit their reproductive labor. Prior to amelioration, Juanita de Barros explains,

28 An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 47 George III, Session 1, c. 36, 1807.

29 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1944), 197-8.

30 "Emancipation," The National Archives, November 10, 2006, accessed February 23, 2019, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/pdf/emancipation.pdf.

From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, some planters had attempted to encourage population growth by offering new mothers cash or other rewards, including lighter work duties; others freed women who had borne a certain number of living children from performing onerous physical labor. . . Planters also built additional slave hospitals (or ‘hot houses’) and lying-in facilities and hired more European physicians and overseers whose slaves reproduced themselves. All wanted to ensure that more children were born and that they survived into adulthood.31

After the end of the trade, the looming slave population shortage caused a great deal of fear and anxiety for slaveholders and estate managers. This fear launched an official pro- natalist campaign that pushed the colonial government to codify earlier planters’ efforts at encouraging slave population growth into amelioration laws.32 The colonial government hoped that by directly promoting better physical treatment of potential slave mothers natural population increase would occur.33 Reforms specifically aimed at women and reproduction included

the encouragement of marriage and the nuclear family and the discouragement of ‘illicit’ relations, which tend to reduce fertility; restrictions on the work hours of female slaves, especially pregnant and nursing ones; improvement in the nutrition of pregnant slaves; provision of facilities such as infirmaries for newborn slave infants; the allocation of ‘provision grounds’ on which slaves could produce their own food; and the allocation of minimum yearly clothing allowances.34

While official policy called for changes in treatment on estates, planters inconsistently and sporadically initiated these reforms. During the 1820s, some planters did build additional slave hospitals, “lying-in” facilities, and brought in more doctors. Even still,

31 Juanita de Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 19.

32 Rhoda Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” 70.

33 De Barros, Reproducing, 19.

34 Rhoda Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” 71.

the enslaved women still had fewer than desired numbers of children and the children they did have often did not live to become the laborers the plantations needed.35

Instead of acknowledging their actions and the roles of strenuous labor, climatic conditions, and inadequate health care and nutrition, planters blamed the women for the low birth rates and childhood death.36 Dave St. Aubyn Gosse argues that the decline in slave population was actually due to poor plantation management resulting from the widespread practice of absentee landholding, in which the owners were not physically present to watch their estates. Those left in charge of the day-to-day operations of the plantation were inexperienced attorneys or uneducated men not willing or able to adapt to changing needs. These managers did not fully carry out the amelioration policies. Instead,

Gosse explains that it was much more common to find “improper housing, the planters’ refusal to allow African women to bond with their children and the improper use or unavailability of proper baby linens.”37 The fault of the low birth rates and child mortality, then, rested on failures of plantation management, regardless of their denials.

During the period of amelioration, the “watchers” were the colonial officials, the inspectors, and the estate managers. Amelioration policies tasked inspectors with visiting the plantations and reporting their findings and recommendations back to the colonial government who, in turn, issued regulations in response to these practices of surveillance.

However, there were layers to the power plays involved in this process. The colonial

35 Rhoda Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” 67-68.

36 Dave St. Aubyn Gosse. Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica: 1807-1838. Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2012, 75.

37 Ibid. 79.

officials gave their power of surveillance and watching to their inspectors, who watched over not only the slaves but also the estate management. Since estate managers lived alongside the slaves and were dwellers in the Caribbean, their power position in the white hierarchy was lower than that of the inspectors and government who resided in London, but because of their whiteness, they were still empowered as the official overseers and implementors of colonial government policy on the ground after the inspectors left.

Therefore, even though the hierarchy was dynamic, the racialized and gendered fundamentals upon which it was built were not changed. In other words, while white men could be subject to a power-gaze from other white men in higher positions than themselves, they still had more power than any woman and any people of color and thus retained that power throughout the entire “unfree” era.

The Promise of Freedom

The abolition of slavery came to the Caribbean and the rest of the British Empire on August 1, 1834, by an act of Parliament passed in 1833. However, the colonial government placed complete abolition on hold after plantation managers and estate owners panicked over how they would adjust to the loss of labor and petitioned for more time. The colonial government granted colonial planters a period of “apprenticeship” between 1834 until full emancipation came in 1838.38 Originally, the apprenticeship period was six years, but resistance and protest from the Creole communities in the

Caribbean resulted in a reduction to four years. During this period, the colonial

38 Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop 26 (Winter 1988): 54

government enacted policies to give the estate managers a transitionary time to figure out how to restructure plantations, how to train the former slaves (now apprentices) to be wage laborers, and to alleviate some of the shock of the transition out of the institution of slavery upon which the social, economic, and political systems of the empire had been built. After apprenticeship and emancipation, women, in far greater numbers than men, withdrew from plantation labor, worsening the labor crisis. Historians and sociologists argue that women refused plantation labor for several reasons, but the primary driving factor was the relentless oppression and the harsh treatment the women endured under the apprenticeship system.39

Abolitionists argued that the harsh treatment of formerly enslaved women intensified during apprenticeship. For example, amelioration laws dictated that pregnant slave women who had already produced a certain number of children were to have

“lying-in time” of rest towards the end of their pregnancy. In Jamaica, on both the

Mesopotamia and Island Estates, the planters followed these policies and removed pregnant women from fieldwork six weeks before the due date of the child and for one month after the birth. However, the planters agreed to these practices reluctantly at the behest of the colonial government because they believed that enslaved women did not

“know how to relax properly” and therefore ameliorative pregnancy reforms were futile efforts.40 After the amelioration period and during apprenticeship there were no such protective laws. The Abolition Act and the written policies supporting the apprenticeship

39 De Barros, Reproducing, 21.

40 Gosse, Abolition, 150-151.

system, written hastily by white male colonial administrators, did not contain provisions for the protection of women during the period of the apprenticeship and as a result left the former slaves vulnerable to planters’ desperate acts of exploitation. Abolitionists and travel writers, such as James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, reported that planters walked back any efforts they implemented during amelioration. After visiting West

Indies’ plantations during the apprenticeship period, Thome and Kimball argued that

“The condition of pregnant women, and nursing mothers, is decidedly worse than it was during slavery. The privileges which the planter felt it for his interest to grant formerly, for the sake of their children, are now withheld.”41 Abolitionists’ evaluative judgments of the relative harshness of apprenticeship as compared to slavery should be viewed with a critical eye as their main purpose for writing was to argue against slavery and not to be impartial observers. However, their assertion that planters engaged in the retroactive removal of ameliorative practices makes sense as the planters reluctantly implemented them in the first place and legally had no obligation to continue.42

Plantation owners’ and managers’ fears of a labor crisis following emancipation materialized after 1838 when former slaves, male and female, refused agricultural work.

The men had learned skills as apprentices, such as blacksmithing and farming, and opted to work for themselves and in small black communities within which the former slaves relied upon one another for survival. Women, jaded by their experiences as slaves and

41 James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies: A Six Months’ Tour in Antiqua, Barbados, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1837), 338.

42 Boa, “Experiences,” 386-7. Further study exploring the unique experiences of women during the apprenticeship period in relation their experiences during amelioration is needed.

apprentices, resisted plantation work. A major way that newly freed women were able to contribute to their communities was through sex work. As long-time victims of forced sexual labor, women were aware of how to use the want for sexual gratification to earn money and assume a measure of power and control over their bodies.43 Kempadoo explains that sex work in this context should be viewed “as an extension of the strategy to obtain freedom from control and domination by white men” and “as flowing from the new economic pressures in a post-emancipation context.”44 Regulations of sex work and reproductive labor of the freed women increased dramatically in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. Colonial officials argued that a population decline after slavery was the fault of the emancipated by positing that they were not yet “ready for the responsibilities of freedom.” This blame, combined with the mid-nineteenth century increase in

“rationalized medical science” and Victorian middle-class values led to arguments that sex work was reflective of a diseased society that needed more education and regulation.45

In the eras of apprenticeship and early emancipation, the “watchers” were the estate managers as well as the colonial officials in absentia who passed regulations. In the cases of female apprentices, the gaze of white men of power upon women of color that resulted in continued and even worsened oppression is evident. Monitoring the performance of apprentice women, opting to not train them for future work, choosing to

43 For more on prostitution as an empowering and feminist act, see Hilary M. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

44 Kamala Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): 9.

45 Ibid., 10; De Barros, Reproducing, 9.

ignore their medical conditions and reasons for slower production, and increasing their workloads regardless of the effects on their well-being and semi-free status in the empire were all assertions of power stemming from the initial ability to watch the women, their bodies, and their work. In the same way, government agents that passed regulations to stamp out lasciviousness in the colonies and implement forced policies of hygiene in a proclaimed attempt to prevent social degradation took part in the same processes of surveillance.

Freedom Denied

Following emancipation, a primary method of preserving white, colonial control in the British Caribbean was through the rapid development of a prison system that replicated many aspects of slavery. Planters pressured the Crown government to pass new laws that forced laborers either back onto estates to earn wages or into prisons through which their labor could be farmed out to estates. Homelessness, small trading, trafficking of rum, being idle, and other acts associated with poverty or working-class behaviors became illegal and subject to surveillance and policing.46

In 1838, Captain J.W. Pringle produced a report on West Indian prisons at the request of Sir George Grey, the Under-Secretary of State of the British colonial government. Pringle was tasked with visiting prisons in the West Indies and reporting back on their structures, operations, conditions, and the treatment of the prisoners. There were two types of penal institutions used throughout the empire in the 1830s, jails and

46 Campbell, “Carnival,” 5.

prisons. Smaller jails were for lesser offenses and the inmate populations consisted of, with few exceptions, free people not forced into strenuous labor. In contrast, the prison populations were comprised of nearly all apprentices, supervised and watched by former planters and overseers, and subject to harsh living conditions, treatment, and forced, unpaid strenuous labor.47 Pringle found that all prisons shared certain commonalities: abuse of prisoners, unsanitary living conditions, and a lack of adherence to laws and policies regulating them.

With regard to living conditions, Pringle illustrated sleeping quarters in which

“The prisoners sleep on boards or planks, with no covering but their clothes. . . a tub is in the room for necessary purposes, to be used publicly by all; a disgusting and unwholesome practice, particularly in a crowded room, which is sometimes also badly ventilated.”48 He also explained how when the prisoners were brought into the prison, they were treated very much like slaves by being put immediately into pairs and then bound together by iron collars around their necks connected by six-foot chains. It was the practice of the prison supervisors to make uneven pairs with regard to size and strength.

Guards paired large and strong individuals with much smaller and weaker ones to make escape more difficult. Pringle notes that in prisons where this practice did not occur there were no higher escape rates, so it was not even warranted. Guards did not chain men and women together but did force them to work alongside one another without any accommodations for the women. Also, Pringle explained that even though corporal

47 Captain J.W. Pringle, Report of Captain J.W. Pringle on Prisons in the West Indies: Jamaica (London: Ordered by the House of Commons, 1838), 4-6.

48 Ibid., 6.

punishment was supposed to be limited of the eleven prisoners he watched convicted in

Jamaica, guards dealt nine of them a lashing he asserted was “as severe as military punishments.”49

The “watchers” in the prisons were the guards and the colonial officials in charge of inspections and making policy. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, articulated how the gaze confers power in his discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s design of the prison panopticon. In this model, all (pan-) inmates can be viewed (-opticon) by a single person in a central and elevated position. The prisons that the British constructed throughout the

Empire reflected a conscious decision specifically arranged for the gaze of the white prison master. Foucault explained, “Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor . . . He is seen, but he does not see.”50 Foucault argues this is the intended effect of the prison: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”51 For Foucault, then, being seen and not seeing is a central concept of the structure of power itself. Pringle, as inspector, also watched from a position of power as he had the task of surveilling, judging, and making recommendations.

An interesting point to note here is that sometimes the lower-ranking guards themselves were freed blacks, charged with whipping and watching over the inmates.

49 Pringle, Report, 6-9.

50 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 200.

51 Ibid., 201.

There are multiple layers of psychological impact of this practice to consider. First, the white British local officials, by allowing freed blacks a position of power, convinced them they were somehow superior, elevated hierarchically, even “less black” than their incarcerated counterparts by passing along to them the power to view. The black guards then abused other blacks as a way to achieve a measure of power or attain some social mobility. Some may even have convinced themselves that because they were not of the incarcerated class, they were superior or an exception to the common idea that there were inherent moral deficiencies in those of African descent. This was a ruse, however. As shown throughout this chapter, even when the power dynamic appeared to shift or be flexible, the underlying racialized and gendered systems were still very much in place. In the prison, the power lay in the viewer who could not be seen. This was a key power granted only to white prison staff. Higher-ranked guards gave black guards an intermediate position and therefore intermediary power of a limited gaze while also monitoring them and possessing the ability to take back the power of the black guard at any moment.

To see how this dynamic manifested over time, consider the story of the

Trinidadian bandit from the beginning of this chapter. The quotation given in which someone assumes the bandit is a “lil black boy” was from a black man himself. Albert

Memmi explains this phenomenon in The Colonizer and the Colonized:

He [the colonized] ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname that has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. “Is he not partially right?” he mutters. “Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so many idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed.” Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized.52

When the commentator found out that the alleged robber was of Indian descent, his response was, “I have since made a gesture of admittimg my mistake ,but i know 99 % of all banditry is of my group [sic].”53 First, he assumed the criminal to be black, and later, he asserted without evidence that most crimes are committed by black individuals in

Trinidad. As he was passing judgment on the criminal activity of others, he did not see himself as part of that criminal sect of his group. This shows that the undercurrents of racial superiority established in Trinidad in the colonial era are still very much at play in the present day, so much so that they permeate even the minds of those who are members of the groups that have been historically subject to racial oppression and result in a warped sense of self, outside the boundaries of reality.

The image below (Figure 3) shows one of the methods of labor and punishment used in British Caribbean prisons, the treadmill. Treadmills, or tread-wheels, were cylindrical machines powered by individuals running in place, pushing the steps of the wheels to make it turn. Depending on the prison, treadmills purposes was to be punitive but served a double function of providing free work such as grinding grain. Note that the image shows women as subject to the same punishments and labor as men in the prison,

52 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 87.

53 Thomas, “Crime in Trinidad & Tobago.”

even if they could not keep up. Prison guards strapped prisoners by their wrists to a rail above the wheel so if they did not keep up with the others in the line, they lost their footing and the steps continuously hit their legs.

Figure 3: Tread-Wheel James Mursell Phillipo, 1843 Jamaica: Its Past and Present State London: British Library http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/carviewsvirtex/persjour/treadwheel/largeimage7 0924.html

Pringle wrote that he witnessed this on several occasions, and it was especially hard for women who could not keep up with the strength and longer legs of the men alongside them.54 He went on to explain that women were also subject to a great deal of sexual violence in the prisons, as the guards in charge of them were typically white boatswains who “had been in the practice of taking the women out in the night to have intercourse

54 Pringle, Report, 8.

with them.”55 In the prisons, then, there existed the continuation of physical and sexual labor forced upon women of color.

Also, shown in the above image of the treadmill is the black guard with the whip overseeing the runners on the wheel and another black guard administering punishment in the lower left corner while two white men dressed in elite clothing look on. The white men watching the punishment, the black guards given the power to administer the punishment, and the very act of publishing the picture for a wide British audience which allowed viewers to look upon the situation and pass judgments reflects the power of the gaze and the wide reach of the surveillance culture of the imperial prison. There was power, then, in being the actors portrayed in the image and being the viewers who consumed it. Pringle, from his position of viewing power, concluded after his visits to the prisons,

…that they hardly hold out a chance of bringing about reform in the character of the inmates ; on the contrary, afford every probability of corrupting the minds of the untried, and perhaps innocent, or of such as may be still well disposed, although convicted of a first, and often petty, offence ; and it is found that the same individuals are frequently re-committed, both to the gaols and the houses of correction.56

Pringle argued that in 1838, the prisons did not serve as rehabilitation facilities as designed; rather, they corrupted innocent people and resulted in individuals being reincarcerated instead of rehabilitated.

Another way colonists preserved their racial dominance and restricted freedoms of the colonized people in the Caribbean was through the implementation of a tourism

55 Pringle, Report, 10.

56 Ibid.

industry that lured white British elites to gaze upon exotic lands and people as a form of leisure and cosmopolitanism. In terms of oppressive labor, tourism was quite different from the prison system in practice but similar in the manner of asserting power via gazing upon an “other” and appropriating the images of laboring colonized bodies as symbols of colonial dominance. Through tourism, the gaze itself was commodified and transferable to those entitled to it based on their race and gender. The need to control the touristic gaze was necessary due the horror stories told by abolitionists and travel writers about the evils of slavery that had filled the newspapers and British imaginations for decades. In

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon conveyed a fear amongst nineteenth-century imperialists that showed a long-standing and global apprehension about the stability of colonial control. He explained, “But deep down the colonized subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and then jumps on him.”57 Following the slave rebellions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably at St. Domingue, Grenada, and Morant Bay, Jamaica as well as northward in the United States, British planters in the Caribbean, their financers, and colonial government officials sought to cultivate an air of whimsy, security, and peace in their emerging touristic colonies to deal with these fears head-on.

The artwork below illustrates the message the British needed to counter to convince people to visit the islands (Figure 4). This drawing, published in a British soldier’s account of his visit to St. Domingue in 1805, addressed the fears of rebellion by

57 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 16.

taking a nationalistic approach and blaming the French for their mismanagement of their slaves. The caption reads: “Revenge taken by the Black Army for Cruelties practised on them by the French.”

Figure 4: An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti Marcus Rainsford, 1805 The Library Company of Philadelphia https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h90b.html

Even by dismissing the rebellion in St. Domingue as something unique to the French

Empire and caused by French cruelties, images such as this resonated with Europeans in the metropoles and in their colonies. This was because news of insurrections, uprisings, 61

and revolutions spread quickly because of the interconnections fostered by migrations and trade. The celebratory look on the black soldiers’ faces and the disturbing images of white Frenchmen strung up on gallows sure to give any white colonist a fright because it upended the master narrative of white supremacy that colonizers relied upon to feel safe.

The rebellion in St. Domingue, therefore, had real consequences for other colonial powers, especially the British, due to their Caribbean holdings geographically near the rebellion and their similar systems of trade and servitude.

In response to the fears that came in the aftermath of the rebellions and insurrections, the British successfully communicated a message of social control and travel safety in their Caribbean colonies to help promote the burgeoning tourism industry that they cultivated to compensate for declining cash crop profits. As seen through travel narratives, drawings, and later, photography (especially used for postcards), women of

African and later East Indian descent, and scenes of nature, which are commonly gendered female in popular imagination, became the focus of these efforts because the message of social control and travel safety centered on the strong desire for the preservation of global white male power.

Like the drawings designed to redirect the gaze and the narrative as discussed earlier in this chapter, photography emerged, largely replacing drawings but carrying with them similar messages and serving a similar effect as Brunias’ “Negro Festival” discussed earlier. British writers and tourists employed photography in travel narratives or, more often at the end of the nineteenth century, in postcards. According to Lisa Sigel, whose analysis of risqué postcards sent by British travelers helps to inform the following analysis, the postcard industry was

. . . built upon late nineteenth century visual and ideological constructions that made certain types of people exotic and others beautiful. In particular, postcards instituted racialist images of colonial subjects and foreign people. They naturalized images of women as passive, sexual objects. They created an inherent, instinctual sexuality in children. In short, postcards reproduced pre-existing beliefs through which Victorian and Edwardian society ordered people. This social order, that carefully ranked people by social class, biological sex, race, and age, gave privileges to those with greater status, including the ability to view others as objects.58

Colonial-era photographs and postcards illustrated the notions presented here by Sigel by the staging of the objects and the people in the image, the colorization applied, the choice of poses, and the choice of subject matter. Even when the people in photographs appear naked, “theirs is a staged nakedness designed for perusal by a Western audience.”59 It is important when viewing images such as these we recognize that the photographer staged every element of the photograph. By accepting that, we assume each element served the purpose of conveying a message. How the person was standing, what they were wearing, what objects accompanied them all conveyed very specific notions that reflected contemporary ideologies.

In addition to notions of safety, the British promoted cosmopolitanism as a mark of status amongst white elites to further increase participation in the economically necessary rise of tourism. Since not everyone was able to travel, drawings and photographs of exotic colonies served as stand-ins for actual visits. A drawing or a photograph published in a travel narrative, newspaper, or sent as a gift provided a view into another culture, society, or part of the world that the individual on the receiving end

58 Lisa Z. Sigel, “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880-1914,” Journal of Social History (Summer 2000): 861.

59 Ibid., 862.

may never get to experience on his or her own. In addition, the image could serve as a tool for boasting the cosmopolitanism of the one able to travel or to assert one’s rhetorical superiority via their “looking relations” over a distant land and its people. In other words, there were implications of status in exercising the gaze, in producing it for others to consume, and in the distribution of images to serve as proxies for the real thing.

E. Ann Kaplan’s interpretation of “looking relations” at the outset of this dissertation provides a useful framework for analyzing such images. Kaplan explains that “looking is power” and looking relations are never innocent. They always involve cultural assumptions about what is normal and acceptable and allow viewers to place judgment upon the objects depicted.60 As discussed throughout this chapter, central to the concept of looking relations is that the one giving the look occupies a position of power (real or perceived) over the one looked upon. While Kaplan applies her analysis of relationships of power to film studies, her ideas and methods are easily adapted with interesting results to other forms of visual media, such as art or photography.

According to historian Krista Thompson, the image below, Cane Cutters, is a representation of Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory” (Figure 5). Rememory, as

Thompson explains, is “the ruptures in space and time and the ever-presentness of the past that are intrinsic to the memory of slavery and to the formation of the African diaspora more generally.”61 In other words, rememory is the legacy of slavery that lives

60 E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.

61 Krista Thompson, "The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies," Representations 113 no 1 (Winter, 2011): 40.

on through the lived experiences and collective memory of the descendants of the enslaved. In Cane Cutters, there are several features to note. First, the positioning and activity of the woman in the foreground is like the working woman in Negro Festival.

The staged image prominently features her body as a laborer. At the same time, her compatriots paused their work to smile at the camera. This arrangement in the photo gave the viewers a sense of security by communicating that order in the islands was at should be, as it was in the glory days of slavery. The laborers doing their job and looking happy and harmless in the field while succumbing to the voyeuristic, pleasuring gaze of the tourist communicated that the empire had everything under control.

Figure 5: Cane Cutters James Valentine and Sons, 1891 Jamaica: The David Boxer Collection of Jamaican Photography

Thompson describes photographs, such as this that were used to promote tourism in the islands, as unique, because they "capture this particular and peculiar moment when the plantation and black laborers became objects of touristic leisure; when, as photography historian Peter Osborne puts it, the 'overseeing stare of the planter with time and space in his hands' metamorphosed into 'the ludic, pleasuring gaze of the tourists with time and space on their hands.'"62

62 Thompson, “Evidence,” 53.

Figure 6: Native Woman, Trinidad Smith Bros & Co., Port of Spain, Trinidad, undated. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

The above image (Figure 6) is from a postcard printed in Trinidad and bears the label,

“Native Woman, Trinidad.” The bright colorization, the leisurely position of the woman, her jewelry, and her dress all indicate that the “native” population of the island is at once comfortable, happy, and safe, and, available for visual consumption. The focus of both figures 5 and 6 on black women’s bodies, the ability of viewers to engage that touristic 67

gaze, the intentional conveyance of a sense of stability and security characterize the theories above put into practice. The staging, production, and distribution of these images served the purpose of encouraging white travelers to visit the islands by reassuring them of their white supremacy over the Caribbean’s inhabitants.

The postcards in Figures 7 and 8 (below) further illustrate the assertion of racial and gendered gazing power by white tourists onto black bodies. In Figure 7, the sender,

Wilbur, asserts his imaginative right over the woman in the picture by declaring her to be one of his “sweethearts.” He also objectified her, not only in the symbolic acquisition of her body through the purchase of the postcard but also through his statement, “Do you admire my taste? Dark brown like the morning after.” He defined the woman by her skin color and projected an essentialized “type” onto her body. The opening comment on the postcard in Figure 8 also exhibits this reduction of real people into caricatures of “types” available for white visual consumption. The sender in this case wrote, “Have seen lots of people like this here and much worse.” She did not specify what she meant by “like this” because she knew her recipient understood the implication. Just as the card’s creator referred to the woman as “typical” in the title, the sender communicated a message that the woman represented something “typical” about the black community in Trinidad.

What she meant by “people like this” is irrelevant to understanding the power dynamic revealed in the creation, purchase, and sending of the postcard. The phrase “people like this” conveyed difference. The sender could have been referring to the woman’s skin color, clothing, headwear, lack of shoes, or anything else she saw as different from her own and her recipient’s norms. Her main goal by choosing and sending this card was to highlight difference and through the second clause of the opening statement, “and much

worse,” to claim rhetorical superiority over the subject of the picture and over all others like the photographed. It is worth noting that in both cards, the recipients were women and in Figure 8, so was the sender. This shows how gazing power reflected the racialized and gendered hierarchy. Men, like Wilbur, readily assumed the ability to look. But

Wilbur passed it on to Elvira, sharing his power with her. In the second card, Madeleine, assumedly a white woman based on her assertion of the woman in the picture being a different type of woman than herself, directly shared what she saw on her travels as well as her interpretation with Victoria. This shows that in instances of all female actors, white women held gazing power over women of color and the ability to share those that they viewed

Figure 7: A Martinique Type. Trinidad, B.W.I. Muir, Marshall, & Co., Port of Spain, Trinidad, undated. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

Figure 8: Typical Creole Vendor. Trinidad No publisher or originating city named. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

Gaze as Surveillance and Restricted Freedom

The gaze itself is a form of surveillance that can result in not only pleasure- looking but also policing of movement and activities. “If you see something, say something” has become a popular English phrase in the post 9/11 era that, while intended to encourage everyone to be vigilant, against potential threats, actually gives those who think they “see something” not only the responsibility to report it but the power to do so.

The ambiguousness of that “something” is also an issue. The definition of what constitutes a suspicious something worth reporting is up to the looker. The power to labeling people or behaviors as suspicious or as potentially dangerous based solely on appearance or what the looker thinks they see reinforces continued discrimination against people of color without reason or even need of reason. During slavery and in its aftermath, it was not only possible but commonplace, to argue that individuals were dangerous or deserved policing based on their skin color and nothing else. State-

sponsored institutions of public safety, such as a local law enforcement and corrections facilities, replaced slave-hunting posses and militias over time but the gaze and its power have remained intact. Even if the language justifying the deservedness of surveillance has shifted from being race-based outright, the underlying motive and result are the same and deep-seated in the modern post-colonial world. In The New Jim Crow: Mass

Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, civil rights activist and attorney Michelle

Alexander explains that in the twenty-first century,

..it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.63

She goes on to argue that “racial caste” still exists, just repackaged in new language.64

This proves true not only in the modern United States but in the rest of the post-colonial world once controlled by the British and entrenched in British cultural norms and values.

This is a significant revelation because the labeling she refers to is intrinsic to the power of looking upon people of color that originated with slavery in the colonial era. British colonizers, since the early days of colonization, strove to preserve their power in just this way: by redesigning and repackaging hierarchical values and practices to reflect well on themselves as benevolent colonizers (as opposed to their “cruel” French competitors), but careful to always keep the power structure in place. Historians Sandra Scicluna and Paul

Knepper explained that “Racial separation or hierarchy was never explicitly formulated

63 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 2.

64 Ibid.

as part of British colonial policy because it did not need to be. . . The prevailing outlook expressed the belief that each race had its own specific attributes and should govern, or be governed accordingly.”65

The gaze and its partners, regulation and incarceration, demonstrate the continuation of the caste system per Michelle Alexander. Whether the package was transatlantic slavery, prisons, exploitative wage labor, or Jim Crow America, the view from the top has always been the same. White people or, in some instances, those of white-determined lighter grades of dark skin have remained perched atop an imaginary pyramid, sitting in judgment and power over those they determined to belong beneath them. Variable and flexible race- and gender-based surveillance and policing of bodies of people termed “non-white” was prevalent, continuous, and complex, throughout the duration of the sociopolitical colonization of the British Caribbean. The colonial norms established during the colonial era, then, had ramifications that extended far beyond the temporal and the geographic boundaries of the British Empire. The significance of this is that this complex process resulted in the customary and codified objectification and commodification of bodies of people of color, especially those of women. Over time, the people doing the watching and those subject to the gaze change, but the premises, the assumptions, intentions, and outcomes remained much the same.

Understanding how the power of looking was grounded in the development of hierarchy and regulations of social interaction during and after slavery in the British

Empire is a necessary starting point for investigating the experiences and identity

65 Sandra Scicluna and Paul Knepper, "Prisoners of the Sun: The British Empire and Imprisonment in Malta in the Early Nineteenth Century," British Journal of Criminology 48 no. 4 (2008): 503.

formation of other colonized groups that joined the Africans in British colonies like the

Caribbean islands. The reliance on indentured Indian labor in the second half of the nineteenth century reflected how a continuation of the gaze from white people to people of color that extended beyond those of African descent to those of Indian descent. The process and implications of indenture and the unique experiences of Indians under that system are the focus of the rest of this dissertation. From the middle of the nineteenth century until 1917, the same class of white overseers and colonial officials that watched the slaves, apprentices, and prisoners, and freed blacks watched the contracted, semi-free laborers. When the estates recruited Indian labor to replace the African labor they lost, they replicated a system that functioned like the slave system that preceded by way of maintaining the hierarchy via the power of looking relations.

To sum the argument of this chapter, there is no freedom while living under a watchful eye. Slaves, prisoners, laborers, and objects of touristic gazes were all subject to deeply entrenched systems of power. These systems initially allowed the active gaze of the white elite on the passive bodies of people of color and over time passed on the power of the looking relation through a complex and variable hierarchy that was constantly shifting and adjusting due to local and global social, economic, and cultural pressures.

However, throughout slavery, apprenticeship, emancipation, the rise of tourism, and, as the following chapters show, the introduction of indentured labor, the underlying principles of a racialized and gendered hierarchy always informed and underpinned the assertions of power conveyed through surveillance and regulation. One would not be

hard-pressed to find several more examples over time and geographic space like those highlighted in the first pages of this chapter as these dynamics continue in the postcolonial world.

CHAPTER III

CHANGING THE FACE OF LABOR: INTRODUCTION OF INDENTURED

INDIANS

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire coincided with an overall decline in sugar profitability and production at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This decline resulted in an economic crisis in the plantation-dependent Caribbean. To recover losses, plantation owners and management sought out new profitable cash crops such as cocoa and coffee. However, a massive shift in production was an arduous and time-consuming process, so the plantation owners turned to cheap, imported labor after the emancipation of the region’s African slaves. Colonial officials decided to recruit contracted immigrant labor to drive down higher wages demanded by the newly freed laboring class.

Fortunately for the planters, the wide reach of the British Empire provided the estates with a plentiful pool of migrant laborers from which to choose.

While this dissertation focuses on the migration of Indians, it is important to note that Indian migrants were not the only peoples brought to the Caribbean to serve in this new labor system. From the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 through the end of the nineteenth century, more than 40,000 Africans, 41,000 Europeans, and 19,000

Chinese traveled to the British Caribbean to work as contract laborers. The reason for the

focus on the Indian immigrants here is largely due to their greater numerical significance:

South Asian immigrants during this period numbered more than 420,000.1 Also important is that the system of Indian contract labor was intended to be temporary, but approximately seventy percent of the Indian migrants, along with their imported and preserved culture, remained in the region, permanently altering the sociocultural landscape of the Caribbean.2

One of the major problems with the planters’ decision to use temporary migrant labor as an immediate fix to the economic crisis was that a massive migration of people and the development of new economic and labor systems required much planning and legislation. In practice, however, colonial officials rushed, poorly planned, and haphazardly implemented the indentured labor system. This poor execution resulted in corrupt recruitment practices, treacherous “Middle Passage” migration, weak contracts that left the migrant laborers unprotected, and long-term instability and struggle in the newly forming communities in and around the estates themselves.

Recruitment

In India, the interference of the British in the Indian trade system resulted in a shift from a producer to a consumer economy. During the eighteenth century, India had manufactured and sold a great deal of cotton textiles to Europe but as the British presence through the East India Company became stronger and more intrusive, India’s economy

1 Some estimates place this figure nearer to 500,000.

2 Juanita de Barros, Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 44.

changed to one based on the consumption of British goods. The textile industries were the hardest hit by this shift, leaving weavers and other textile workers unemployed and without any other choice but to turn to a more agricultural and subsistent way of life.3

The turn to farming was not available for most of these textile workers, however.

In British India, land policy favored large landholders and made it virtually impossible for small farmers to secure their own plots. Rhoda Reddock argues that this policy

“sought to create and perpetuate a class of large landowners to the detriment of small peasant proprietors.”4 Also, weather patterns and recurrent famines throughout the nineteenth century added to the difficulty of the peasant and rural artisan experience by making the available small parcels of land unsustainable. These policies caused people looking for work to migrate en masse to more urban areas. Once in towns, recruiters appealed to potential migrants for the indenture system by offering the workers a deal of temporary quick money and a promise of a return trip home.

There were two major recruiting agents stationed in India in Madras and Calcutta.

The agents of these stations recruited and arranged for the transportation and safety of the migrants from the time of initial contact in India until they boarded the ships headed for the overseas colonies. The British government established some baseline legislation to help regulate the new system. Basdeo Magru explains:

3 Rhoda Reddock, “Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1917: Freedom Denied,” Caribbean Quarterly 32 (September-December 1986): 41.

4 Reddock, “Indian Women,” 42.

All the government needed to do was to ensure by legislative enactments that there were sufficient precautions to prevent fraud and coercion during recruitment, that depot accommodation and medical superintendence were satisfactory, that the physical conditions en route to the recipient colonies conformed to the accepted safety and sanitary standards and that the interests of intending emigrants were protected against planter tyranny and neglect.5

At the depot, immigration agents were supposed to explain the contracts to the recruits and give them thorough medical examinations. The medical examinations ensured that the migrants were fit for field labor on plantations, that they could withstand the long overseas voyage to the Americas, and that they were not bringing any communicable diseases onboard the ship. The immigrants could be rejected for any one of the following reasons (and also for anything else the doctors at the depot deemed reasonable to protect the crew and the others onboard the ships):

Insanity; idiocy; all deformities sufficient to render a man unfit for labour; blindness of both eyes; complete cataract in one eye and incipient formation in the other; Palsy; anemia; consumption; epileptic fits; disease of liver; disease of spleen; hernia; elephantiasis; very large hydrocele; varicose vein of legs; leprosy even in its incipient stage.6

In addition to these restrictions, Madras and Calcutta agents and the legislation put into place in India, each colony that received migrants appointed agent-generals, called

“Protectors of the Immigrants,” responsible for assigning the immigrants to their work locations and securing their safety and due process as indentured migrant laborers. Under colonial government provisions, these rights included fulfillment of wage payments according to contract, adequate sanitary living conditions on the estate, food, safe and

5 Basdeo Mangru, “Early History: Indian Government Policy Towards Indentured Labour Migration to the Sugar Colonies,” in Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean, eds. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996), 162.

6 House of Commons, Reports from Commissioners, Inspectors, and Others (1875): 245.

sanitary working conditions, etc. The Protectors were responsible for prosecuting estate owners who failed to meet any of these needs or violated any terms of the contracts.7

Colonial administrators institutionalized these at the beginning of the indenture program, but a large gap emerged between the ideals of the system and actual practices.

This was largely due to the rushed nature of the implementation, the lack of means to enforce these roles and legislation (i.e., there was no accountability for the agents), and, especially early on, laissez-faire government ideology that refused to interfere in local issues in the colonies until it became absolutely necessary. In India, government policy was grounded in free-market principles and provided few restrictions on the movements of goods and people as long as they benefitted the British Empire.

Tracing the social dynamics of caste and regional identity in the Indian diaspora is futile due to lack of reliable sources. Several scholars have argued that while some elements of caste remain in transplanted Indian communities, such as a preference for endogamous marriage when possible, caste does not survive the migration process and does not exist outside the bounds of India as it does in India.8 First, reliable statistical analysis of the original migrants is impossible because colonial agents did not collect data on the migrants with regularity and when they did, they did not verify the information provided. Trinidadian anthropologist Marion O’Callaghan explained that migrants often lied about their caste or social position in their declarations to the British authorities. She explains that traveling away from India provided an opportunity for people of lower caste

7 Reddock, “Indian Women,” 42.

8 Carolyn Henning Brown, “Demographic Constraints on Caste: A Fiji Indian Example,” American Ethnologist 8 (May 1981): 314.

to claim higher caste status. These caste appropriators were called “ship Brahmin” or

“ship Kshatriya.”9 Conversely, Indians concerned that depot agents would reject their application based on their Brahmin status and perceived inability to labor in the fields due to lack of experience pretended to be of a lower caste to get through the depot.10 In these cases, the deception was a survival tactic.11 Additionally, regardless of one’s declared caste, the migrant communities did not allow for caste dynamics to play out because the populations were small in number and the plantation labor did not allow for caste-like divisions amongst the laborers. As Carolyn Henning Brown asserts, “there is a correlation between population size and complexity of social organization . . . Complex rules have certain minimal conditions.”12 The minimal conditions for caste to be replicated in another society were adequate population, a labor structure that permitted organization by jati, and enough women present in each subgroup for the group to reproduce.13 None of these conditions were present in the indentured Indian communities anywhere in the

British Empire.14 Therefore, while caste existed in memory and in communities to varying extents, with regard to labor and social organization, it was not possible to

9 Marion O’Callaghan, “Hinduism in the Indian Diaspora in Trinidad,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 11 (January 1988): 3.

10 Brown, “Demographic Constraints,” 315.

11 Reddock, “Indian Women,” 62.

12 Brown, “Demographic Constraints,” 316.

13 Ibid.

14 Oddvar Hollup, “The Disintegration of Caste and Changing Concepts of Indian Ethnic Identity in Mauritius,” Ethnology 33 (Autumn 1994), 297-298.

replicate the system as it was in India and was not as much a feature of indentured Indian life in the transplanted communities of the Empire.

Contracts and Terms

The contracts that the migrants signed were fairly specific with regard to their wages and terms of indenture. In the beginning, all contracts were for five-year terms and typically only offered to men. There was language in the contracts that allowed for the passage of women, children, or entire families, should the migrant be desirable enough to warrant the extra expense of bringing his family. Colonial agents sought healthy and strong single men as the ideal temporary migrant laborer because they believed they would produce the most output and be the easiest to send back upon completion of their contracts.

For the first decades of the indenture program, the estates paid the indentured laborers a fixed daily wage of about one shilling per day.15 At the end of the five years, the laborer had two options. They could renew the contract for another five years or request a free return passage to India. While these stipulations in the contracts were the norm, there was a great deal of flexibility offered to the guarantors. All contracts were not uniform across time and location. A few colonies accepted women as contract laborers from the beginning, for example, while others took several years to embrace the idea.16 Some contracts also did not guarantee completely free return passage but instead

15 Pay-per-tasks wages replaced the fixed daily wage circa 1870 throughout most of the estates. Edward Jenkins, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (London: Strahan & Co. Publishers, 1871): 256.

16 Chapter four focuses on the female Indian laborers.

required that the migrant have some of his or her daily wage withheld to help pay that expense. However, all contracts contained stipulations that allowed the planters to change or nullify all or part of the contract for a myriad of reasons. These could include unsatisfactory work (as determined by the planters or his representatives), leaving early, frequent illness, and excessive absences. Lomarsh Roopnarine explains that these loopholes “essentially gave the planters the right to exploit the labour of servants until their contracts were over.”17 Not only could these breaches nullify the contract, but they also could result in fines, imprisonment, or extension of service. Planters approved and accepted this system because it protected and benefitted estates and not laborers.

Work on the plantations usually involved tasks dealing with the planting, harvesting, or processing of sugar and, less commonly, coffee, cocoa, and coconut. Tasks differed from worker to worker, estate to estate, and by the time of year. During peak harvest or production, workers could expect a minimum of fifteen hours per day of hard, manual labor. Workers, especially at harvest times, included not just all able-bodied men, but any women and children and elderly who were able to participate were forced to do so as well.18

The Indian “Middle Passage”

The shortfall of protection for the laborers as well as the chasm between theory and practice of these regulations was glaringly evident in accounts of the voyage from

17 Lomarsh Roopnarine, Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1838-1920 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2007), 7-8.

18 Reddock, “Indian Women,” 51.

India to the Caribbean. Termed “the Middle Passage” by V.S. Naipul to invoke a sense of similarity between the indentured Indian migration and the transatlantic slave passage, the overseas voyage for Indian migrants was both dangerous and dehumanizing. This was due to poor oversight and the greed of the bureaucrats and officials in India, ship owners in London, and planters in the colonies.

Captain E. Swinton of the laborer transportation ship, Salsette, logged the dangerous and inhumane conditions in a journal he kept, published by his wife in 1859.

This journal, written in 1858, documented a 108-day journey embarked upon to transport

Indian migrants from Calcutta to Trinidad. The first notable information from the journal was the mortality rate aboard the ship. According to Captain Swinton, the ship departed with 324 Indians, 274 being adults, and lost 120 en route, an average of more than one death per day.

John Wreinholt, an immigrant agent in Calcutta, warned Swinton of the risk to the migrants’ lives prior to embarking, evidenced by the following note saved in his log:

My Dear Captain Swinton, Government will only pay you on so many Coolies landed alive. The Roman Emperor lost 86 out of 288 taken on board here, consequently lost £1000 – not one man died this side of the Cape. Another ship lost a larger sum; so be cautious. – Yours Truly, John Wreinholt.19

Since Swinton knew that it was in his monetary interest to ensure the healthy and safe arrival of the passengers aboard his ship, it is unlikely that the deaths resulted from extreme neglect from the Captain and his crew. In fact, throughout the journal, there were several instances of the Captain and his wife went out of their way and gave up their

19 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Immigrants from Calcutta to Trinidad (London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1859), 4.

possessions or comforts for the sake of the laborers. Henry Mitchell, M.D., the Agent-

General of Emigration in Trinidad who received the migrants upon their arrival, assessed the migrants upon arrival and concluded:

I certify that, notwithstanding the heavy mortality which occurred on board the ship Salsette, among the Indian immigrant passengers, I believe that the said immigrants were carefully attended to, both by Captain Swinton and his officers. I believe, further, that the mortality depended on causes beyond their control.20

The Captain recorded daily entries beginning March 17, 1858, and ending on July 21,

1858. On the first day, he reported that they had left Calcutta for Trinidad, but already, on the first day, he noted: “several coolies sick.”21 The following day, he logged the first death, an “old woman” who had died of cholera. Each day of the log follows a similar disheartening and disturbing pattern: “little girl, six years of age, died of dysentery in her mother’s arms;” an old woman died of diarrhea;” “saw a little boy dying on deck ; a most dreadfully emaciated creature, won’t eat.” These examples are just from the first week.22

The initial entries contain several points of interest. First, many migrants on board did not fit the ideal of the strong, young man. Many of the deaths he records were that of the elderly, very small children, and nursing mothers. One mentions a blind man who died aboard the ship.23 In addition, the Captain elaborated on the dire situation of the children on board. On March 26, he reports, “An infant found dead below ; its mother was sick and unable to nourish it. Preserved milk much needed ; sad howling of infants

20 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 4.

21 Ibid,, 5.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid,, 9.

who were dying for want of milk.”24 He continued reporting much in the same way. He accounted for the deaths of several elderly men and women, babies, young children, and a few otherwise healthy, young, male laborers that could not withstand the conditions of the ship.

Second, the colonial government paid the sircars based upon on how many

Indians boarded the ships.25 This meant that sircars accepted people in various states of poor health – emaciated children, people with communicable diseases like cholera – things that depot agents should have disallowed but were overlooked in favor of profit.

On March 27, the Captain called forth a family consisting of an old man and his sons to inquire how they boarded the ship in an already poor state of health:

An old man and his sons were called on deck and asked if they had not been rejected by the doctor, when they replied they had ; but the Sircar told them if they did not go he would beat them . . . This is the second instance of such an occurrence.26

He also wrote on May 9 that an entire family died from spleen enlargement about which depot agents knew before departure.27 These entries in the log are important for two reasons. First, they show that the Captain not only had little control over who boarded the ship, but he had no knowledge of what was happening at the depot prior to departure. His account, ten days into the voyage, was one of surprise and disgust that agents not only allowed this entire family to board but also forced them into doing so. Second, the system

24 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 5.

25 A sircar was a clerk or accountant at the depot station that ran the station’s day-to-day activities.

26 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 5.

27 Ibid., 8.

of paying sircars for immigrants boarded and captains for immigrants landed resulted in the commoditization process of these Indian laborers from humans into goods that could be counted and evaluated based on quality (in this case, quality meant to be alive and breathing).

The Indian “Middle Passage” was also reportedly dangerous and full of uncertainty for the migrants. In addition to regular reports of children dying from starvation or communicable diseases, there were also accounts of violent deaths on board the ship. One such instance, on April 7, explained that “a little girl, five years old, died with marks on throat and back, and foot bruised.”28 The Captain reported that he did investigate but blamed and flogged the girl’s mother and father. In terms of uncertainty, the Captain recorded that by April 26, many of the migrants were “pining” and “in doubt of their destination.”29 It was clear to both him and his wife that adequate translation of contracts, explanation of expectations, and preparation for the voyage was not part of the protocol at the depot. Many of the migrants had no idea how long the voyage was, as they would have no concept of how far away the Americas were, nor did anyone tell them when they were signing their contracts.

The last significant message the Captain and his wife sought to convey through this journal was that the crew and ship provided to them were too small and ill-prepared.

They did not have enough medical personnel, sterile facilities for treatment or places for quarantine, or individuals trained in the culture and language of the migrants. Beginning

28 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 6.

29 Ibid., 7.

in May, the Captain began reporting that there were many deaths on board because people were hiding their illnesses from the crew and medical staff. On May 13: “Several sick not reported;” June 7: “many sick found who are afraid to take our medicine;” June

19: “Several won’t confess their illness.” The Swintons believed distrust of doctors and rejection of medicine resulted from all the prior deaths throughout the voyage as well as a wariness to take medicine that differed from traditional herbalist medicine in India. The doctor suggested they stop trying to force their treatments on the laborers, but the Captain decided since they “had no country medicine (i.e. herbs), which their faith lies in” then what they had on the ship needed to be continued, even if it must be forced.30

The Captain’s wife, Jane Swinton, provided several remarks at the end of the

Captain’s journal that reinforced his argument and added some more clarity, as she spent much more time with the Indians themselves, trying to comfort and care for them. She explained that the Captain had no choice in the selection of migrants, doctors, or crew and only received a roster just before departure. Mrs. Swinton also explained that the doctor at the depot had only one day to inspect all the would-be migrants and he did not even speak their language. She pleaded that in the future more and better-trained medical personnel be present on these voyages. She argued that the sircar received too little pay to do his job well or was too motivated by greed. He therefore sent anybody he could aboard the ship. She reported that “a great many on board were not calculated for the labour they would have to perform” and that the food and medicine provided were not enough or of the right types. Finally, she suggested that future voyages have a “native

30 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 16.

apothecary” on board so that they will have the medicine to which the migrants were accustomed as well as a native speaker of the language so that the Indians could communicate their ailments more clearly.31

The Captain’s report, as well as the comments from his wife, the doctor, and the agent-general reflect that the plan put forth for the indentured immigration system was poorly implemented, much to the detriment of the migrant laborers. With little oversight and the only motivation for the clerks and bureaucrats being that of turning a profit, the

Indian laborers were subject to inhumane treatment, dangerous conditions, and, for many, loss of life. The pragmatic suggestions offered by the Captain and his wife indicate that this suffering would have been avoidable if there had been better management and execution of the indentured program from the beginning.

For the surviving migrants, arrival at the colony was not easy, either. Mrs.

Swinton described the reception at the depot in Trinidad as resembling something that looked “very like slavery.” She explained that the people were afraid to disembark at first because they did not seem to have any idea what was going on. All they appeared to know was that they needed to present themselves at their best to increase their chances of selection. Upon arrival, the migrants lined up at the depot for inspection, and the planters or their representatives chose their workers based on their perceivable strength, endurance, and docility.32

31 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 12-16.

32 Ibid., 14.

Figure 1: Coolie Depot, Nelson Island – Trinidad. Goodwille & Wilson, Ltd., Port of Spain, Trinidad, undated. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

The migrants first arrived at a small island depot near the main colony, such as Nelson

Island pictured above. Here, agents quarantined the migrants and the doctors examined them again and took notes on their general health. Agents sent orphaned children under ten years old to an “orphan asylum” and those over ten into the labor pool with the adults.

Those deemed too sick by the doctors stayed quarantine or in hospitals until such a time that they were ready to begin their duties on the island. All those fit for labor stood out on display for the estate managers. The managers arrived and selected their workers based on health, strength, and size and the plantation’s needs.33

33 Captain and Mrs. Swinton, Journal, 11.

After receiving several reports such as Swinton’s, the Colonial Office pressured local authorities into ordering an investigation into the recruitment practices in Calcutta.

A summary issued on August 21, 1861, uncovered several of these issues. The inspector,

Mr. Beyts, reported

Recruitments were not sufficiently controlled by the local government; that no Regulations had been issued with regard to them; and in consequence, the recruiting agents had not only assumed absolute sway over the labour market, but, availing themselves of their being almost free from restraint and responsibility, were committing irregularities which urgently required to be checked.34

Beyts indicated that the laissez-faire capitalist policies in India allowed for unrestricted movement of people as goods and this lack of oversight or restraint resulted in corrupt practices. This argument is consistent with the accounts of Captain and Mrs. Swinton.

Beyts further makes the claim that recruiters ensnared the Indians by means of deception:

The Coolies who are ensnared by these unprincipled intermeddlers are often grossly deceived. Those who are desirous of going to a colony of their own choice, either because they have been there before, or have their relatives there whom they wish to join, or who are induced to go there by the fate experienced there by others who have returned to their homes are either inveigled away by deceitful promises or taken fraudulently and without their consent to the depot of another colony. Women are enticed away from their husbands and families. Those Coolies who, resisting promises and despising threats, escape from the stratagems devised for the purposes of entrapping them, see their families held in durance, and in open defiance of the authority of local laws, the servants of the local industrial establishments are decoyed away from their masters.35

Beyts’ description here helps to explain the confusion among the immigrants that Jane

Swinton witnessed. If they thought family would greet them or some would transport them to a different colony than the one in which they arrived, they would have naturally

34 House of Commons, Reports from Commissioners, Inspectors, and Others (1875): 240.

35 Ibid., 240-241.

reacted with confusion and shock. Since repercussions for such deceitful tactics did not exist, the local agents and employees of the agents in India had many opportunities to exploit the prospective laborers and only concern themselves with the profitability of their enterprise.

Early Settlement and Interactions

Not surprisingly, the ill-managed and poorly regulated system carried over from recruitment and emigration to the day-to-day operations of the plantation. First, problems arose with personal interactions between the laborers. Reddock explains that women and men often married in rushed ceremonies at the depots or on the ships because of convenience. The Indian men wanted women to cook and care for them and the women wanted some sort of protection in a new and foreign place. Government agents performed the marriages on the ship or at the depot, but did not provide documentary evidence of their legality, and therefore allowed for no legal recourse if either party violated the marriage contract or wanted out of it. Once living in the islands, religious marriage ceremonies conducted on estates or in the small Indian communities typically occurred without official registration and documentation, as this was the normal practice in India.

Indians had elaborate cultural and religious ceremonies that they felt legitimized the union well enough that they did not need political legitimacy from the British Empire, so they did not seek it out. These practices of undocumented marriages created cause for concern amongst colonial officials later when issues arose of divorce and inheritance. For example, in 1881, 274 Indian men complained to the governor of Trinidad that their wives abandoned them in favor of other men. They demanded recourse in the form of

monetary compensation and imprisonment for both the male and female parties in the adultery. However, without documentation of the marriages and with little evidence of

“enticement” any measures the colonial government tried to introduce proved difficult to enforce. This resulted in confrontations between the Indians when the husbands sought recourse for their absent wives.36

In terms of interactions between the migrants and their managers, there was a lot of tension and mistrust between overseers and laborers as well. The overseers were, at times, targets of physical violence motivated by revenge for oppressive conditions on the estate or by squabbles over women.37 Colonial administrators attributed the fights over women to the disparate ratio of Indian women to Indian men present in the Caribbean, fostering an environment of competition over them amongst the man. To make matters worse, it was not just that Indian men fought each other over the women, but white overseers often forced the already scarce Indian women to live with them as their mistresses, further aggravating the competitive situation.38

In general, as with the depot and travel experiences, the laborers enjoyed very few rights while fulfilling their contract on the estates. Managers and overseers treated them inhumanely through physical and verbal abuse, as documented on several occasions by advocates for Indian rights. One such person, Major Fagan, a retired Indian army officer,

36 Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “'Restoring the Family': Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860-1920,” Studies in History 11 (August 1995): 257.

37 Disputes over women are discussed in more detail in chapter four.

38 Walton Look-Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 142.

became an outspoken critic against the treatment of the indentured Indians after his short stay of two years in Trinidad where he served in a bureaucratic position tasked with safeguarding the welfare of the migrants. Walton Look-Lai explains Fagan’s experience in Trinidad:

During his short term of two years, he articulated a number of complaints about the maltreatment of the immigrants, including their forcible ejection from some estates by planters when too ill or disabled to perform their functions, and their being left to wander aimlessly over the countryside, often to die like dogs on the roadside. This was done even to women, who were driven from their estates naked, penniless, and in every way helpless, to starve or to become victims of loathsome disease from prostitution.39

Rhoda Reddock argues that such poor treatment of women went largely undocumented for the majority of the nineteenth century because colonialists did not believe the abuse of the women was a problem until it escalated into frequent bouts of violence. Reddock holds that this omission was “symptomatic of the instability that resulted from poorly executed plans – the plantations were largely working un-checked.”40 Chapter four explores colonial views of Indian women in greater depth and explains increased interest in women’s behaviors and experiences as colonial administrators and plantation managers attempted to stabilize the indenture system.

Finally, the first wave of Hindu and Muslim migrants to the islands believed that they would return after the contracts were up, so they worked hard at not losing the culture of their homeland. The resisted the breakdown of caste, and they tirelessly fought against the estate management that attempted to limit the laborers’ efforts to practice their

39 Look-Lai, Indentured Labor, 159.

40 Reddock, “Indian Women,” 51.

religion. Muslims and Hindus formed alliances of sorts with one another to secure rights to as much religious freedom as they could muster and to share resources.41 This collaboration amongst the Hindus and Muslims to maintain an ideal, “pure” homeland culture did not necessarily work out in practice. First, a certain amount of acculturation and a shift in identity politics did occur, regardless of how much the Indians resisted it.

This is seen through the breakdown of imported Indian social stratification as well as through actions such as drinking and gambling, both prohibited in Islam and many sects of Hinduism but reportedly widespread in these communities.42 In addition, shifts in communal and individual identities occurred over the course of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, as new generations were born in the islands.43 Anthropologist

M.G. Smith explained, the Indians remained loyal to their Indian culture, but over time,

Indian identity shifted in the sociocultural climate of the Caribbean and resulted in “the slow growth of a Caribbean national sentiment.”44

African Creoles also participated alongside Indian Muslims in the Hosay festival each year. Hosay, or Muharram, Shi’a Muslim in origin, is traditionally a ten-day long

41 Nasser Mustapha, “Historical View of Muslims in Trinidad,” Trinidad Guardian (May 30, 2000). Many of these mosques and temples are still standing today. There is even a very small city in eastern Trinidad called Kernahan that has a one little building where Christians, Muslims, and Hindus all worship together.

42 Brian L. Moore, “Leisure and Society in Postemancipation Guyana,” in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History, eds. Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press of the University of the West Indies, 1999), 122.

43 The shift in identity conceptualization in Indian communities is discussed in chapter six.

44 M.G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 12.

observance at the beginning of the Islamic New Year for mourning the martyr, Hussein.45

In the 1850s in Trinidad, it became less about religion and more inclusive of all the island’s downtrodden inhabitants. Seen as an alternative to Carnival and Canboulay,

Hosay became a time when Indian Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Hindus, and Creoles came together regardless of religion to build massive floats, play music, have parades, and celebrate.46 Brian L. Moore explains how Hosay changed in meaning: “Although fundamentally religious, the celebrations consisted of massive processions of gaudily costumed participants engaged in a variety of acrobatic, dramatic, and magical feats under the influence of liberally consumed alcoholic beverages.”47

45 The British called Hosay by several other names: Hosein, Hussein, Hasan and Tajah, Tajoh, or Tadja (named after the floats).

46 Before emancipation, when a fire broke out on an estate, drivers forced all the slaves of the neighboring estates to come help cut the sugar cane before it burned. After emancipation, former slaves celebrated Emancipation Day with a Canboulay celebration. Canboulay, derivative from the French cannes brulées or “burnt canes” was a procession that involved carrying flaming torches and banging on make-shift drums. Modern steelpan music can be traced back to this celebration. The British outlawed Canboulay and placed severe restrictions on Hosay in the late-nineteenth century for being a “threat to law and order.” Moore, “Leisure and Society,” 122; Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop 26 (Winter 1988): 8-9, 15.

47 Moore, “Leisure and Society,” 122.

Figure 2: Coolie Tajoh Festival, Trinidad, B.W.I. Stephens, Ltd., Trinidad, undated. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

Hosay itself is supposed to be a festival of sadness, where some Shi’a engage in self- flagellation in remembrance of the betrayal of Hussein. This Carnival-like shift reflected syncretism and solidarity for survival in the islands.

These interactions between Creoles and Indians led to cross-cultural sharing of experiences and ideas. Inspired by knowledge of slave rebellions, maroon communities, and labor strikes, indentured Indian workers attempted to resist the poor treatment they received on plantations. Some ran away to Venezuela where Indian refugees formed maroon communities. This became enough of a problem that, in 1878, Trinidad’s colonial government passed an ordinance providing for severe punishments for anyone caught conspiring or attempting to escape. Between 1882 and 1884, indentured Indians

staged several recorded attacks on overseers and strikes against their employers.48

Watching over these developments and fearing too much collaboration, the colonial government passed an ordinance in 1884 limiting participation in Hosay only to Indians on their estates. In San Fernando, Indians and Creoles rejected this ordinance and took to the streets with their Hosay procession in defiance of the colonial ordinance. Police responded brutally by opening fire into the crowd, killing at least twenty participants and wounding at least a hundred.49 This brutal response successfully quieted Hosay celebrations and reduced the interactions of the Creole and Indian communities, drawing a line between the two that lingers still today.

What is notable about these festivals and about this solidarity is that it both complements and complicates the arguments presented throughout this chapter. The rushed and haphazardly implemented indenture system created many unnecessary hardships and served to violate the humanity and dignity of the migrant laborers in the process. As will be discussed in chapter six, the systemic racism and divisions in the communities that resulted from colonial rule made construction and maintenance of intercommunity partnerships and alliances untenable. The Caribbean today is still a plural society as M.G. Smith explained it in the 1960s. There are sharp divisions between the

Indian and African communities. However, also a shared colonial experience characterizes the sense of Caribbean nationalism amongst all the previously colonized inhabitants.

48 Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop Journal 26, no. 1 (1988): 19.

49 Ibid., 16.

CHAPTER IV

THE “PROBLEM” OF INDIAN WOMEN: RECRUITMENT AND SCRUTINY

People blame victims so that they can continue to feel safe themselves.1

The subjects of this chapter are the first Indian female migrants who lived (and died) under indentured servitude in the Caribbean. While many scholars argue that women, their labors, and their roles in forming the modern world are woefully underrepresented in historical works, this is especially true in cases of women of color who lived and labored under the controlling eye of colonial rule. This chapter rectifies this omission by centering the narrative on indentured Indian women to illustrate how administrators and planters deeply embedded practices of colonial surveillance in British

Caribbean society during the second half of the nineteenth century. By reading between the lines of archival sources into the subtext of what colonial actors wrote and believed about Indian women, as well as interrogating non-traditional historical sources such as a photographs and postcards for the hegemonic ideals they represent, nineteenth-century

European ideas about race and gender radiate from the stated biases, prejudices, and

1 Barbara Gilin, quoted in Kayleigh Roberts, “The Psychology of Victim-Blaming,” The Atlantic, October 5, 2016, accessed February 1, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/the-psychology- of-victim-blaming/502661/.

judgments placed upon Indian women. Colonial administrators, planters, missionaries, tourists, and Indian men asserted their power over Indian women through practices of watching and judging their behaviors and assigning blame to Indian women for troubles rooted in the indenture system. The scrutiny imposed upon Indian women’s bodies to deflect the blame for social problems from the empire to women of color thus reflects the centrality of race and gender-based surveillance in colonial modes of control.

The “Sex-Ratio Problem”

After the initial introduction of indentured Indian laborers, plantation owners claimed Indian men to be hardworking and relatively docile when compared to the freed ex-slaves in the islands. Since the early nineteenth century, slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint Domingue, plantation management feared uprisings and sought submissiveness as a desirable trait of their labor force, second only to productive capacity. Because of this, in the first decades of the indenture system, colonial agents increased in their desire to keep Indian men on the islands and encouraged the recruitment of female migrant workers. While planters did not always employ Indian women in the strenuous physical plantation labor (though there were exceptions), colonial agents targeted them for their reproductive labor of creating and maintaining a stable community and the financial affairs of the family, thus promoting the stability of the indenture system itself.2 Plantation managers and owners’ perceived “unattached”

2 Basdeo Mangru, “The Sex-Ratio Disparity and Its Consequences under the Indenture in British Guiana,” in India in the Caribbean, eds. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: University of Warwick, 1987), 225.

men as prone to recklessness or irresponsibility, so colonial authorities and estate owners decided that they needed to encourage Indian men to marry and develop communities of their own. Planters and colonial officials believed that not only would the family units serve a reproductive function, but also that an influx of female migrants would tame the more aggressive or “wild” men, resulting in a more sustainable and stable workforce of

Indian men.

The numbers of female migrants varied widely over the period of indenture. The recruitment of adequate numbers of women proved to be very difficult due to the complex and poorly managed system the British had created in India. Because British colonial authorities in the Caribbean wanted a certain number of female migrants, they made deals and developed quotas with the colonial officials in India to obtain the desired quantities of women. These quotas fluctuated with frequency during the late 1850s and early 1860s, as officials struggled with continuous discontent among migrant male workers that resulted from the uneven distribution of the sexes. In 1857, the Colonial

Office set the official recruitment quota at thirty-five women to every one hundred men.

Soon after, officials raised the quota to fifty women. Because of the increased pressure on depot agents to fill their quotas, they disregarded appeals from the planters and Indian male migrants for certain types of women. Soon thereafter, colonial officials determined that requiring too many women resulted in the recruitment of “undesirables,” and subsequently they fixed the quotas at forty Indian women for every one hundred Indian men from 1868 until the end of indenture in 1917.3 This obsession with counting women

3 Mangru, “Sex-Ratio,” 212.

100

and the argument that inadequate numbers of women were central to the problem of creating communities resulted in redirected colonial surveillance toward Indian women as colonial agents inventoried and ordered the women from India like commodities.

The Right Kind of Woman

The difficulties in fulfilling these quotas faced by emigration agents in Calcutta and Madras reveal the inherent paradox in the demands for not only more women, but specifically, women of the “right kind.”

By the mid-19th century, much concern was being voiced over the “kind of women” who were being recruited. Many of the alterations in the official recruitment ratios were made with this in mind. Throughout the period, contradictions continued between the planters’ short-term preference for adult male migration and their long-term need for a self-reproducing, cheap and stable labour force. Among the male Indian workers, their desire for docile, secluded and controllable women as befitted their aspirations for higher caste status, conflicted with the planters’ need for women as labourers and the non-availability of women of ‘the right kind’ for migration to the colonies.4

As Reddock explains, it was difficult for emigration agents to recruit women who were both hard workers, as desired by the planters, and submissive, higher caste women that the Indian men wanted for their wives. An interesting phenomenon that should be noted at this juncture is that many Indian men hoped their emigration to the other side of the world would lead to an opportunity to increase their social position by escaping the caste rigidity in India that was, in part, a result of British control. Some Indian men claimed to be from higher castes upon their arrival to the West Indian colonies and the British

4 Rhoda Reddock, “Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1917: Freedom Denied,” Caribbean Quarterly 9 (1986): 44.

101

receiving agents who registered them would not have known the difference.5 Since these men placed a substantial amount of importance on maintaining their new social statuses, they rejected lower-caste women, women deemed sexually impure, or women unsuitable for any number of other reasons. In this context, the demand for “good” women placed an extraordinary burden on recruiters to supply a substantial number of women and, paradoxically, when the women arrived in the Caribbean, planters and Indian men rejected many of them because they did not meet the desired standards. As a result, the more women who arrived, the more discontent appeared amongst the Indian populations as the men did not get the wives they were expecting, and the women became displaced and unwelcome.

Another issue beyond the difficulties faced by emigration agents was that the women who migrated on their own accord were already independent because of life experiences that led them to migrate in the first place. The women who volunteered to emigrate knew they were signing up to move to an unknown land many thousands of miles away from everything and everyone they knew. The experiences that led to the desperate fleeing from India and the resultant independence gained from the voyage itself made Indian women disinclined to be subordinate or “quietly accept subjection” to husbands or planters.6In a 1915 piece published in the newspaper, The Indian Emigrant,

Indian Civil Service Officer and Member of Parliament Sir Henry Cotton explained: “The women who came out consist as to one-third of married women who accompany their

5 See discussion in chapter three regarding “ship Brahmin” and “ship Kshatriya.”

6 Rhoda Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History (London: Zed Books, 1994), 30

102

husbands, the remainder being mostly widows and women who have run away from their husbands or been put away by them.”7 The refugee mindset of Indian women and the expectations of Indian men and planters led to disputes amongst all involved as no group felt satisfied with the arrangements. In search of a scapegoat, colonial authorities, estate owners, and the Indian men proclaimed many of the recruited women to be unstable, immoral, and wild, thereby defeating the original purpose for recruitment and leading colonial agents to conclude that “fewer women were preferable to uncontrollable women.”8

The monitoring of the women that emigrated and subsequent evaluation of their suitability as wives by both Indian men and colonial agents reflects increased surveillance informed by racialized and gendered ideas of power. The emigration agents in both India and the Caribbean, the colonial administrators such as Sir Henry Cotton, and the Indian men all evaluated the women in terms of qualities deemed desirable by men. The recruiting acts of white colonial agents and the ability of Indian men to reject women they judged to be inferior reflected the power of contemporary global patriarchy. In these situations, the majority of the power lies in the hands of white men, but even men of color assumed a higher hierarchical position and enjoyed patriarchal privileges over women of color.

7 Sir Henry Cotton, “Indian Indentured Labour to Other Colonies,” The Indian Emigrant, July 1915.

8 Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics, 30.

103

Indian Women Blamed as Tensions Mount

The reduction of the number of Indian women in the islands did nothing to solve the problems that existed before the initial raising of the quotas. There were still not enough suitable wives, not enough female laborers, and not enough stable communities.

Indian men, frustrated for want of sexual partners, caregivers, and companions, and by the nature of being subordinate contract laborers in a race-based hierarchy, suffered an affront to their self-conceptions of masculinity and became continuously more distraught.

The increased frustrations of Indian men resulted in violent crimes directed at the few

Indian women present. Indian men’s indenture contracts, social status, and limited rights under English law left them unable to challenge their colonial masters and taking it out on the women that resided at the unprotected bottom of the social hierarchy was, as K.O.

Laurence explained, their way of “provid[ing] their own solution” to their powerlessness.9

Colonial government officials found it difficult to step in, because of their uncertainty throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the underlying cause for aggression against women. They primarily blamed the “low class” of woman sent by immigration agents. Officials argued that women shouldered the lion’s share of the blame because they knowingly violated Indian cultural norms. They posited that it was not the colonizers’ responsibility if Indian women did not abide by their communities’ known informal codes of conduct. Travel writers reflected these attitudes by employing racialized language and explaining the violence as uniquely Indian

9 K.O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875- 1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 240–241.

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behavior transplanted from the subcontinent and grounded in Indian insularity and insecurity:

The coolie will not intermarry with the African, and as there are not as many women brought with them from India as formerly, these women are tempted occasionally into infidelities, and would be tempted more often, but a lapse in virtue is so fearfully avenged. There is but one serious crime prevalent in the colony, and that is committed by the East Indian who with one sweep of machete beheads his wife if she proves unfaithful to him.10

Travel writer James Henry Stark’s statement above rendered judgment for blame squarely on Indian women for being tempted into infidelity and dismissed the act of murder, even though a “serious crime,” as something the women provoked through their

“lapse in virtue.” By the late nineteenth century, widespread British colonialist beliefs regarding wife murders were that “chopping up women was simply the Indians’ national way of resolving sexual difficulties.”11 The surveillance of Indian behavior and conclusions drawn that essentialized Indian culture and placed the blame for such behaviors outside the responsibility of the colonial system is reflective of the standard modus operatus of colonial administration. They watched, judged, and reported on the colonized “other” and using their interpretations intelligence collected about the norms and behaviors of the colonized’s culture, colonialists constructed a narrative that justified their inaction and rejection of their responsibility.

The exploitation of Indian female sexual labor extended beyond the interactions of Indian men and women. British planters sexually exploited and assaulted Indian

10 James Henry Stark, Stark’s Guide-Book and History of Trinidad Including Tobago, Grenada, and St. Vincent (Boston: J.H. Stark, 1897), 81.

11 Laurence, Question of Labor, 240.

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women by taking them as concubines (willingly or unwillingly). In Manliness and

Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire,

John Tosh asks, “How many historical situations cannot be fully understood without articulating the masculinity of participants?”12 For Tosh, masculinity was a major motivation for the actors in many historical events. With regard to the Indo-British encounter, Tosh asserted that British men moved to the colonies to prove their manliness in ways that staying in Britain would not allow them to do. Self-sufficiency and prosperity were not available for many men in England due to rising urbanization and poverty, and men considered to be failures or overly effeminate in the metropole could move to the colony, prosper and feel “like men.” In the Caribbean, this preoccupation with proving masculinity by both Indian and British men proved dangerous for Indian women that were in short supply and high demand. In competition with one another, both groups of men struggled for access to the limited quantity of Indian women and both groups felt a sense of entitlement to control the women’s bodies. In this context, a connection emerges between the indigenous women in North America, as discussed by

Sarah Deer in chapter one, and the Indian women who migrated to the West Indies. Both groups of women were separated from their families, removed from their cultures, relocated, and subject to a hypermasculinized power dynamic in which they, as objects to be obtained, were lured in, bought, sold, kidnapped, raped, surveilled, and controlled without regard to their well-being, wants, needs, or desires.

12 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 18.

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While men were more likely to take out their frustrations on women because of easier access and less repercussion, disputes over these women did sometimes result in

Indian men carrying out violent attacks against the overseers or plantation managers. In a testimony before the West India Royal Commission in 1897, an Indian by the name of

Bechu expressed the frustration of Indian men in finding suitable mates when the white male authority figures were “keeping” Indian women for themselves.13 In one such recorded case, an estate manager in Trinidad reportedly had impregnated seven Indian women within a small period of time.14 Increasingly over the course of the indenture period, the docility of the Indian male laborer came into question, in part because of instances in which Indian men retaliated with violence against white estate managers and overseers. Examination of white and Indian male competition over Indian women’s bodies is illuminating because it shows not only the European and Indian patriarchal ideas regarding women as property of men and provides a stark example of the types of sexual labor imposed upon Indian women, but it also reveals a racialized element. These tensions between the Indian and white men lay bare intersections of race and gender in the manifestation of racial resentment that resulted when white men claimed authority over women of color that men of color believed to be their property.

13 Walton Look-Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 142.

14 Ibid., 143.

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Subjects of Scrutiny

The primary target of Indian men’s frustration with the disparate sex-ratio and the white men’s commandeering of Indian women’s bodies were Indian women. The British press and official colonial documents refer to events of “wife murders” or uxoricide in several instances. In colonial writings on Caribbean society, the term “wife murders” applied to any murder involving a colonized female killed by a colonized male. The victims were not always wives but sometimes sexual partners or young girls sold by their fathers for a high bridewealth, but then did not go through with the marriage upon arrival.15 The sexually and reproductively exploitative practice of buying and selling young girls became commonplace in the last decades of the nineteenth century as quotas became nearly impossible to fulfill by standard recruitment centers and men became more frustrated with the limited numbers of suitable mates.16

Charles Kingsley, British historian and novelist, described his visit to the

Caribbean in the 1890s as an eye-opening experience to some disturbing cultural practices. In particular, he discussed child marriages as “a very serious evil.”17 To promote and preserve the indentured communities, estate owners encouraged, even to the point of providing the funding, Indian men to send letters to India offering substantial

15 Because of the disparate sex-ratio in the Caribbean and the poverty faced by many families in India, the Indian system of dowry was reversed. Instead of fathers paying men to marry their daughters, Indian men paid a bridewealth. In this system, Indian men from other colonies sent money to India to purchase girls from the fathers.

16 Charles Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (London: Macmillan Press, 1910), 491–492.

17 Ibid., 491.

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sums of money to parents who would ship over their young daughters.18 Newspaper accounts report that fathers sold girls as young as nine years of age to men with the highest bridewealth offers, often old enough to be their grandfathers. This practice resulted in disastrous cases of physical abuse. First, young girls who were not physically ready to be sexual partners to much older men were subject to a practice by which a speculum-like tool “mechanically enlarged their genitalia” to prepare them for their future husbands.19 Also, there were several reported instances in which fathers sold their daughters to more than one man and when the girls arrived in the colony, the men squabbled over who would rightfully possess her. The men usually took out their anger and mounting frustration on the young girls.20

Colonial officials, watching from afar, attempted to implement policies to discourage Indian men from taking matters into their own hands. The 1881 Indian

Marriage and Divorce Ordinance allowed Indian men to sue men that lured away wives for compensatory damages, and divorce women married under British law.21 The seducer could be Indian or European as sometimes planters and overseers, as described above, brought Indian women they found attractive into the main house and kept them as concubines. The seducer could be subject to a variety of punishments under the

Ordinance, depending on who he was. If the seducer was a white overseer, the court

18 Mangru, “Sex-Ratio,” 225.

19 The Royal Gazette, 1869.

20 Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 67–70.

21 Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History, 34.

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could grant the petitioner monetary compensation. If the seducer was another Indian man, he could be flogged, shaved, imprisoned, fined, or shipped to another estate.22 The reality of these types of ordinances was that they were not effective as they were difficult to enforce. As discussed in chapter three, many marriages conducted in the Caribbean were not official according to British law because government-sanctioned celebrants did not perform the ceremonies in approved locations. Depot marriages, marriages performed in

India, and marriages performed in Indian communities in the Caribbean without British clergy or government agents present were all invalid under colonial ordinance. This meant the husband and wife never had official documentation of their marriage and therefore had no legal recourse if anything went awry. The effectiveness of the policies aside, implementation of ordinances that regulated personal relationships, marriages, and sexual encounters of Indians according to British law resulted from observing and judging the colonized Indians and then attempting to control them.

The new official policies served to benefit Indian men, in that it gave them more control over their wives and their situations, but they were not good for Indian women.

By enacting laws that specifically protected men from wayward women with no mention of reciprocal options of recourse, these laws restricted women’s day-to-day activities even more than previously by placing the patriarchal relationship between husbands and wives under the bounds of imperial law and therefore further relegating the women into positions of legal minority to their husbands. In other words, the laws, which were designed to protect the men and create more official and legal marriages, resulted in more

22 Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History, 70–72.

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male control over their wives and left the wives with virtually no mobility and no way to get out of bad situations with abusive husbands.

All this scrutiny of Indian women’s activities, how they lived, what they did with their bodies, not only restricted freedoms of the Indian women and supported colonial rule but these practices also affected their identity and their place in their communities by discursively denying them their humanity. As discussed in chapter two, regardless whether women were under contract, kidnapped, sold, or arrived on their own volition, the constant gazing over their actions, judgments passed on their behaviors, and rules governing what they were allowed to do or who was allowed to harm them, meant that women of color were never really free under colonial rule. Indian women were subject to a double-jeopardy in the colonies of being subject not only to the watchful eyes, controlling measures, and doling out of punishments from the white British men, but also that of the Indian men. Every move Indian women made was seen and subject to dehumanizing and undignified processes of social control.

Missionaries and the Morality Solution

British missionaries who traveled to the colonies and attempted to impose their standards of morality upon Indian women reinforced the racialist British views that

Indian women were at fault and that Indians were inherently inferior. In this way, the missionaries contributed heavily to processes of watching and judging and their records supply excellent examples of colonial processes in action. British evangelicals observed,

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noted, and reported back to England on the “reprehensible behaviors” of Indian women.23

The following missionary report, printed in a British newspaper in 1885, faults Indian women for all manner of corruption in the Indian communities:

The wife, if she be young, goes wrong; the children, ill-fed, uncared for, become weakly and die, or else they take to the streets . . . moral corruption that is festering at the base of our social fabric . . . The training of young girls, not yet out of the stage of infancy, to the trade of harlotry is widely practiced . . . So much for the Christianity of Trinidad.24

Ideas such as this represent an interesting paradox in the thinking about colonized women. For colonialists, it was logical to place blame on women that they had reduced to objects and stripped of humanity. Even as colonialists argued that Indian women should not be allowed to choose their sexual partners, whom they married, or whether they lived or died, colonialists simultaneously subject the women to harsh judgment for not conforming to Victorian-era, Christian standards for all women. In the quote above, the missionary judged and attacked the practices of reproductive and sexual labor of Indian women without regard for colonized women’s level of agency or victimhood in these situations.

As women became more necessary and prevalent in the islands, so did missionary presence. The late-nineteenth-century push for the recruitment of more women coincided with the establishment of missionary-led educational institutions for Indian girls and women designed to teach them housewifely skills and Christian morality, thus increasing

23 Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: A History, 57.

24 The Colonies and India, June 19, 1885.

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the surveillance and regulation of women and girls.25 The imposition of Christian values, traditionally grounded in European patriarchal norms, was an important mechanism of colonial control over the Indian communities. The missionaries viewed the Indian women as backward and ignorant and saw their work as honorable because it brought the women to “civilization.” Central to the missionary goal was strengthening Indian families through the promotion of Christian patriarchal legal unions and the preservation of these marriages once successfully impressed upon the Indians. Missionary John Morton explained how this was not always an easy task:

March 9, 1878. Yesterday Juraman wrote that his wife, Soobhie, had run away; that he and Balaram had found her and brought her back, and that, as Mr. Christie was in Port of Spain, I should go over. It was 3 p.m. when I got the letter, too late to go that night. Next day I went by van, met Mr. Christie in San Fernando, where he had been selecting pitch pine lumber for his new church, and drove with him from Monkey Point to Esperanza. He told me that Soobhie wanted to leave her husband and go to live with a certain man on the estate. As in that case she would have taken her hoe and labour in the field, I concluded that Soobhie was not in her right mind.26

This passage is interesting for several reasons. First, the missionary makes clear when he first hears that she will leave that he understands the profit motive by keeping her and her labors on his friend, Mr. Christie’s, estate. Mr. Morton assessed Soobhie’s value as a provider of physical labor and determined she would be a loss to his friend. This indicates that Morton recognized his role as not only spiritual advisor but as a tool in the preservation of the empire. In addition, it is important to note that the act of leaving her

25 Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 59. The roles of missionaries in the lives of young girls, especially as educators or harbingers of morality is discussed in greater depth in chapter five.

26 John Morton, quoted in Sarah E. Morton, ed., John Morton of Trinidad: Pioneer Missionary of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the East Indians in the British West Indies : Journals, Letters and Papers (Toronto: Westminster Co., 1916), 188.

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husband was subject to judgment, but the reason causing her to do so was not. Morton continues:

Before I had talked with her fifteen minutes she quite broke down and began to cry. After a little she said that her head was turning – that if let go she would run away somewhere – anywhere. After further conversation she said, “I will stay [with] Juraman, only let me go to Iere Village till I feel better.” So I made them join hands anew. March 18th. Monday. A note from Mr. Christie says that Soobhie, who returned suddenly to Couva on Thursday, has left Juraman and has gone to live with the man spoken of before. That she is sowing grief and sorrow for herself is certain.27

Morton, Christie, and Juaraman continuously monitored Soobhie's movements and leveled harsh judgments upon her. She may have resisted restrictions on her by leaving her husband for another man, but it is significant that the men who stood to benefit from her regulating her body and labor scrutinized her every move and criticize her for inconvenient to them.

March 23rd. Sat. Juraman came over yesterday and is here to-day. Soobhie got afraid that he would prosecute her and brought back all her bracelets to him; he made her give up the veil sent her by Mrs. Morton. She must be crazy as well as wicked. Some of these Indian women are hard to understand and I fear are not much good when you do understand them. But then it is the result of long ages of ignorance, mistrust, and degradation. And we cannot hope to raise them, nor must we be discouraged by drawbacks. July. Soobhie wishes now to come back to Juraman, but he will have nothing to say to her. [She never returned to her husband].28

Throughout this passage, the missionary John Morton made clear not only his position of power as a man of religious influence in the colony, but also his racialized and gendered prejudices against the Indian women. In his statement about Soobhie’s wickedness, the

27 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 188.

28 Ibid.

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difficulty and devaluation of Indian women in general, and the fact that he never considered why Soobhie wanted to leave her husband were all comments made by

Morton from his place as a white man atop the colonial hierarchy. Missionary accounts such as this reflect the normalization of British hegemonic values through evangelical activities, which therefore, served to deepen the imperial gaze into the private lives of

Indians and the preconceived notions about gender, values, and race the missionaries brought with them were embedded into the core of colonial society. Missionaries, then, were some of the most significant “watchers” and agents of colonial control.

Looking for Pleasure

The acts of watching and judging colonized people did not only serve bureaucratic or economic goals, but white colonial men also employed them for their pleasure. Like the drawings and photographs shown in chapter two, postcards also provide significant insight into other cultures, societies, or parts of the world that individuals on the receiving end may never get to experience on their own. Postcards, today replaced by Instagram posts and other forms of social media, served as a tool for showing friends, colleagues, and family that one was well-traveled, thus implying wealth or education beyond the grasp of the receiver of the image. The very act of selecting a postcard or taking a picture and sharing it with others is an assertion of rhetorical superiority over a distant land and its people. Whatever the motives of the senders, these communicative images and their accompanying messages became extremely popular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For researchers, postcards serve as fascinating sources for historical analysis because they express, through commoditized looking,

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interpretations of the world from the perspective of those who lived in it. To the careful eye of the researcher, the image on the card as well as the text that accompanies it has the potential to illuminate ideas, attitudes, and feelings about the sender’s sociopolitical stance and biases. Taken together, careful analysis of postcards allows a researcher to draw conclusions regarding hegemonic values in a given society at a given time as well as illuminate the relationship between power and the look.

Recall from chapter two E. Ann Kaplan’s assertion that looking relations are never “innocent.” She explained that “the possibilities for looking are carefully controlled” and that “looking is power”29 because it involves cultural assumptions and the power of being able to gaze upon someone else and pass judgments or evaluations. The following images of postcards are exceptionally interesting representations of looking relations because they visually represent layers of ingrained imperial ideas regarding race, gender, and class hierarchy. This is because people typically send postcards when one travels and encounters places and people different from oneself. Local tourism agencies produced the postcards for buyers traveling in Trinidad from Europe and the

United States. The individuals able to travel and buy postcards and postage were typically white Europeans or U.S. Americans30 of at least enough wealth to travel as tourists or as part of an imperial program. After 1886, when postcards became authorized forms of mail by the Congress of the Universal Postal Union and the ability to send postcards

29 E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.

30 I use the term “U.S. Americans” to refer to individuals from the United States of America, to distinguish them from peoples from other parts of the Americas.

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internationally resulted, the industry took off. Tourists sent an estimated 140 billion postcards around the globe in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.31

Figures 1a and 1b below are images of a postcard that feature a photograph of a young Indo-Trinidadian woman on the front side and a telling comment on the reverse.

This postcard was sent in 1911 from a man in Trinidad to a man in New York City with no accompanying text besides the postal information and the phrase “What would you do with her?” on the back. This particular card is significant in two ways. First, it serves as an illustration of the earlier-discussed imperial assumptions by white men that they reserved a right to “do” anything they pleased to colonized women. This is an example of the sexual labor of colonized women perceived as available for the taking. In addition, the very act of buying the image and sending it implied the idea that the woman herself, not just the image of her, can be trafficked from the buyer to the intended receiver.

31 Lisa Z. Sigel, “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880-1914,” Journal of Social History 33 (Summer 2000): 860–861.

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Figures 1a and 1b: Type of Indian Woman - Trinidad Wilsons, Ltd., Trinidad, 1911. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

The next set of images (Figures 2a and 2b below) is from a postcard sent by tourists from their stop in Trinidad to friends or family in Cadiz, Ohio. Tourism throughout the colonies was very popular at the turn of the century. The promotion of white tourism, during and after the colonial era, exacerbated racial tensions and exploitation because, as explained by Cynthia Enloe in her book, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist

Sense of International Politics, tourism as an act carries “power as well as pleasure.”32

What Enloe means by this is that the ability of white people of European descent to travel, (in this case by sailing), visit sights, acts as tourists, and look upon “natives” is a power granted to them by their position of privilege in the colonial world. In a paper on exoticism in the Caribbean’s colonial roots Kamala Kempadoo explained:

32 Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 195.

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Exoticism in the Caribbean has in the past, and continues to, romanticize and eroticize the Brown female body and subjectivity in the Caribbean, yet also to reinforce exploitative and oppressive regimes. Prostitution and the sexual exploitation of enslaved and colonized women is a prism through which we can witness the naked performance of exoticism, its lusts and desires as well as violence and oppressions.33

The power and pleasure of white tourism in the colonies exacerbated the embedded ideas about the bodies of women of color as existent primarily for the use of men. The all- seeing gaze of the tourist thus consumed women in their beauty and all their forms of labor. Within the racialized and gendered power dynamic that so strongly characterized the colonized Caribbean in place, these women paradoxically were exotic and alluring while also forbidden and dehumanized.

Figures 2a and 2b: East Indian Woman, Trinidad, B.W.I. No printing or publishing information, undated. The University of the West Indies Special Collections: Michael Goldberg Collection

33 Kempadoo, Kamala. “Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean.” Paper presented at O Desafio da Difernça Symposium, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, April 2000.

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In the case of Figures 2a and 2b, the staging of the photograph in the outdoor setting is again notable. Though it lacks the gaudy colorization of the previous postcard, it is clear that this is supposedly a candid photograph of her in her natural and “wild” habitat. Also, in this caption, she is not a “type” but an “East Indian Woman,” to make clear the distinction between her and the indigenous people in the Americas often referred to as

Indians. What is particularly provocative about this postcard is the “looking relation” it represents. According to Kaplan, the looking relation is a process that involves curiosity about the object being looked upon.34 In this case, the statement to the receiver about their travels and how the sender makes a point to stress the difference between her and the woman in the picture by stating that she sees “all nationalities” expresses and shares an interest, indeed, a curiosity, about the different types of people they encounter in their travels. With the conscious choice of a postcard with an image of a woman in dress and surrounded by foliage unlikely to have ever been seen by anyone in Ohio, the sender attempts to appear very cosmopolitan to the receiver and simultaneously spark their interest about the things the travelers have encountered. Kaplan argued that the very act of travel “provokes conscious attention to gender and racial difference” and what is seen through postcards such as this is how that conscious attention was not confined to the individual traveling, but shared and spread with their friends, family, and associates who were not able to travel themselves.35 This, in effect, strengthened global ideas of white superiority because the power-centered “looking relations” inherent in travel and tourism

34 Kaplan, Looking for the Other, xviii.

35 Ibid., 6.

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were readily shared with even those who could not travel themselves. Through this spread of “looks” via tourism and postcards, white hierarchical power became even more deeply entrenched globally.

In conclusion, intense discussions over migrant Indian women’s bodies prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth-century period of indenture in the Caribbean colonies because of the value of their physical, reproductive, and sexual labor. These discussions resulted in a deeper normalization of the scrutinizing processes of surveilling Indian women and the construction of colonial knowledge regarding difference. The practices of missionaries in changing culture and monitoring individuals’ every move and the burgeoning touristic industry grounded in the acts of viewing, judging, and consuming marked an intersection of gender and race that reflects how deeply entrenched the colonial system of control through monitoring and judging had become by the end of the nineteenth century. The next chapter reveals how missionary activity targeted young

Indian girls as the main objects of their gaze in efforts to correct the social problems previously blamed on Indian women.

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CHAPTER V

LITTLE HIDERS: INDIAN GIRLS AND THE SOCIETY OF INDENTURE

He opened schools and Churches And he taught them how to read And write the English language which some day they would need, Religion too he taught them as they must go hand in hand, For the betterment of a people And the progress of a land.1

The above stanza is part of a poem written by Anna Mahase, Sr., an Indian woman who worked for Christian missionaries in Trinidad during the first half of the twentieth century. Anna was born in Trinidad in 1899 to parents who migrated from India under the indenture system, converted from Hinduism to Christianity, and became teachers who worked for a missionary network created and run by Reverend John

Morton, the founder of the Caribbean’s Canadian Presbyterian Mission. Her poem was an ode to John Morton, written June 10, 1967, to celebrate the centenary of his arrival in

Trinidad. The poem is part of an appendix to her autobiography in which she gave a personal and detailed description and evaluation of her life as a second-generation Indian child raised in Trinidad during the waning years of the indenture system. This stanza of

1 Anna Mahase Snr., My Mother’s Daughter: The Autobiography of Anna Mahase Snr, 1899-1978 (Claxton Bay, Trinidad: Royards Publishing Company, 1992), 110.

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her poem clearly reflects her admiration for the work of missionaries in teaching Indian children Christian values and how to read and write in English for “the betterment of a people,” thus revealing a direct ideological link between the roles of religion and education in the imperial civilizing mission. This chapter explores this link by focusing on Indian girls as targets of these efforts and examining their importance to religious and government leaders, their responses to the ideas to which they were exposed, and the public and private spaces allotted to them.

Girlhood as a Category of Analysis

Why Shift the Focus to Girls?

Girls born into the complicated social dynamics explained in the previous chapters provide a unique case study for the intentions and effects of colonial projects in the Caribbean and at large. An examination of the second and subsequent generations of girls born to migrant Indian parents in the British Caribbean colonies shows how families navigated imperial social and economic obstacles. Examinations of the life stories, experiences, and memory of these Indian girls, as well as efforts by the government and religious institutions to monitor and regulate their behaviors, reveal the imperial objectives and practices of educational and religious institutions. Shirlene Robinson and

Simon Sleight edited a collection of essays that explored the dynamics of empire and childhood in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. The essays in this collection drew geographically from all corners of the British Empire but all began from a common premise that “youth is not a ‘fifth-estate,’ an entirely separate group within society,” but rather there were important interrelationships between youth and adults and

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interactions with rules and regulations imposed upon them.2 Schools, both secular and religious, served as sites of cultural colonization through their influence on their students as well as sites of surveillance and control. In the cases of missionary schools that targeted Indian girls for their social reproductive labor, teachers, aides, and missionaries became mobile agents of empire by going out in the rural areas and estates and physically bringing the girls to schools. As will be shown, colonial schools, especially those led by missionaries, reported great success not only in convincing the girls’ families to allow them to attend their schools, but also in teaching the students Christianity, the English language, and Christian family values. This occurred with the hope that they would take these ideas back to their villages and influence their parents, as well as teach these ideals to their children one day, thus creating future generations of loyal subjects. In this light, this chapter argues that the education of colonized girls was essential to the imperial initiative of maintaining and reproducing control over British subjects in the waning, late-

Victorian Era years of the British Empire.

The Indian girls were not only key components of both the British imperial mission and missionary evangelical aims. They were also central to Indian efforts to resist cultural colonization that imperial actors were imposing upon their communities. In the space of the Indo-Caribbean family home, parents taught their children their memories of India, of old-world customs and cultural practices, and of Indian religions and languages.3 Indian girls, inserted directly into the center of the matrix of policies and

2 Shirlene Robinson and Simon Sleight, eds., Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 13.

3 Throughout most of the period of indenture language spoken by most Indian migrants upon arrival in the Caribbean was Hindi and the religion of most migrants was Hinduism. While there were migrants that 124

ideologies centered on colonialism, race, and gender had to choose between following either their mothers’ influence or their missionary teachers. However, some did not and instead chose a different path, one of their own creation that involved piecing together bits of ideas from their families with imperial concepts taught by missionaries and also ideas that were wholly their own. This process paved the way for the next generation of

Indian women to arise in the Caribbean with progressive, variable, and complex ideas about nationalism and feminism.4

Who are the Girls in this Study?

A study of children is not possible without identifying the subjects included in this demographic. The answer is not as self-evident as one may think because definitions of childhood vary considerably over time and space. In the introduction to their edited collection on the subject of childhood and empire, Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Premo explained how there is not a “single correct answer” to the question of defining childhood, because “ideas about childhood and children are bound by culture and time, with each culture deciding when infancy ends, when adolescence begins, and when adulthood is reached.”5 An effort to define childhood becomes even more difficult in a colonial context in which two or more cultures interacted with one another, and

spoke other languages and followed other faiths, they were statistically insignificant until after the turn of the twentieth century.

4 Identity constructions that employed the language of feminism, nationalism, and anti-imperialism are explored in chapter six.

5 Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Premo, eds. Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 2.

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individuals from many backgrounds within each culture were present, each with their own definitions. Because all the individuals discussed here and the populations that they represent may have had different ideas about where the line exists between adulthood and childhood, this study does not seek to set distinct parameters but rather accepts a more fluid understanding of what it was to be a child. Depending on the circumstance, some children may be adults by practice and experience at a very young biological age, while others may embody very childish behaviors and character traits at ages far past variable and shifting ages of legal majority.

For this analysis, the distinction drawn between these girls and the women at the center of chapter four of this dissertation is their enrollment and participation in educational and religious institutions constructed by colonial government officials and religious leaders for the purposes of influencing a younger generation. Legally defining age was a new and inconsistent concept in the late Victorian era and as such was flexible and variable in the colonial Caribbean.6 One of the sparse government sources that mention age of immigrant children is the Immigration Act of 1869, in which the British government identified immigrant children as those under the age of eighteen, but only for purposes of defining wages paid to minors on plantations and terms of indenture contract with relation to a child’s parents’ contracts. This is not a clear-cut indicator of childhood, however, as discussed in chapter four and explored in greater detail in this chapter, because Indian migrants often arrived in the Caribbean colonies before the age of eighteen, some already having been married or widowed and thereby considered adults

6 Robinson and Sleight, Children, 7.

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based on experience and cultural norms. Since the line dividing adulthood and childhood was and is a moving target, those eligible for enrollment and participation in educational and formative activities intended to prepare an individual for the future is a consistent and useful marker for childhood.

The girls examined in this study experienced and interpreted their lives at the intersection of what their families, neighbors, and friends taught them at home and in their villages and what missionaries taught them in schools and churches. From birth, they had to contend with differing ideas regarding cultural values, gender roles, religious principles, language, and their place in the Caribbean and the British Empire. Robinson and Sleight explained:

Just as men and women experienced colonialism differently, diversity also characterized children’s experiences of living within the spheres of British influence.

Relations of empire played out within the institutional frameworks that governed individual comings of age, young people’s daily lives revealing much about the way the

British world functioned on both a local and global scale. These relations of empire also operated within more intimate spaces like the home, hospital, or classroom. Whether colonized or colonizer, young people absorbed the effects of imperial power.7

While Robinson and Sleight are correct in their assertion that empire played out in the institutional frameworks that controlled aspects of the girls’ lives, this paper argues that the children, specifically the Indian girls, did not just “absorb” effects of imperial power. Rather they negotiated it amidst Indian influences in both the institutions like

7 Robinson and Sleight, Children, 2-3.

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schools and churches, and in their homes with their families, and accepted it or rejected it on their own terms. This chapter exposes how the girls reacted to outside pressures, what they said and did when confronted with differences of opinion, and the long-term effects of placing such a high value on their importance as influencers. Through examining sources written by or about girls with their own agency in mind, such an interrogation reveals more than just the experiences or ideas of the girls. Gonzalez and Premo argue that by scrutinizing the experiences of childhood, scholars reveal a great deal about how communities, families, and institutions taught and negotiated social norms and ideologies.8 Therefore, it is possible to glean attitudes of parents, teachers, and other figures of influence in the girls’ lives from the writings of and about children because adults around them interacted with children and exposed them to their engrained ideas and negotiations of imperial power and traditional Indian influence.

As a group, the girls subject to this chaotic negotiation of identity between the ideologies of the traditional Indian culture and that espoused by the missionary agents of the British Empire, reacted in a range of responses from heavily retaining their parents’ culture to casting it off completely. Thus, they did not all choose one way or another, but rather exhibited considerable agency in selecting which aspects of each realm they adopted as their own, what values they assigned to the places in which they experienced their lives, and ultimately passed this on to future generations. Robinson and Sleight explained, as “‘Pawns of empire’ (in the phrase of literary scholar Rosalia Baena), young people found themselves in the front line of imperial undertakings, moving within

8 Gonzalez and Premo, Raising an Empire, 3.

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parameters set for them by adults, yet often exerting a much greater degree of autonomy and agency than the analogy of the chessboard implies.”9 A range of options was available to the girls and they often encountered differences of opinion from people whom they trusted or who had power over them. Therefore, some learned to question the teachings of authority figures and form their opinions instead. This concept of choosing one’s path and assigning personal values to places is significant for the emergence of twentieth century discourses of nationalism and anti-imperialism alongside feminist ideologies that blossomed amongst these girls as they grew into adulthood and influenced future generations. This was an unintended and important consequence of the efforts put forth by the imperial government and the missionaries.10

Knowledge and Power

To investigate why and how the British Empire supported the creation, regulation, and upkeep of educational and religious institutions in the Caribbean, it is necessary to consider how the colonial officials viewed the institutions through their own lenses of power. Colonial documents such as law codes, correspondence, and financial records reveal that colonial government officials placed a great deal of importance on the role of these institutions as peacekeeping spaces because they believed that by teaching the colonized peoples English and Christianity, cornerstones of imperial culture, that a docile, loyal, and obedient population of subjects would result. This method of

9 Robinson and Sleight, Children, 2.

10 Chapter six discusses these discourses and the girls’ responses to them later in life.

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colonization via religious influence and education, especially language education, was present in some way throughout the European empires.

To examine the practices of these institutions for their roles in cultural colonization, this study first applies the theoretical framework of discourse analysis originally postulated by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, but with a feminist interpretation as explained by Chris Weedon in her book, Feminist Practice and

Poststructuralist Theory.11 A common and simplified explanation of Foucauldian discourse analysis is that those in power construct and limit knowledge. Therefore, those who have power exercise control over those who do not by means of establishing acceptable ways of thinking and applying meaning. Weedon appropriates this definition and takes it further by applying a gendered dimension to it and viewing Foucauldian discourse analysis as “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledge and relations between them.” The interrogation of the social practices, means of oppression, and the relations of power is necessary to produce a meaningful gendered analysis of knowledge as related to power. She goes on to explain, “Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern.”12 In other words, discourse analysis requires more than abstract philosophical ponderance about the

11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books), 1978.

12 Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 108.

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generation of ideas and the power behind it; instead, ideas must be investigated for how they are inscribed on the bodies, minds, and experiences of the governed.

Language is the central component of power in knowledge construction. In this study of the British Caribbean, the English language is the sanctioned language of education and government in the British Empire and, therefore, there is power in the teaching and utilization of the English language. Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White

Masks theorized, “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”13 To participate in imperial society, migrants learned that they must use English and not communicate in their native tongue in imperial spaces such as schools, places of business, or other public settings. The words and accepted meanings of the words of a language in a society reflect and reinforce the

“truth” or accepted knowledge of that society. Foucauldian discourse analysis refers to this as the “general politics of truth,” meaning societies accept some types of discourses as truth while discarding or dismissing others. Those ideas accepted as truth are reflective of the hegemonic ideals in that society by allowing only certain interpretation and utilizations of language. Essentially, the hegemonic values and ideas presented in a language in any given society limit how the people living within that system can think, speak, interact, and interpret their experiences and circumstances.14

13 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 18.

14 Victor Pitsoe, “Foucault’s Discourse and Power: Implications for Instructionist Classroom Management,” Open Journal of Philosophy 3 (2013): 24; Weedon, Feminist Practice, 32. For more on the relationship between knowledge construction and limitations on people of lower ranks in a given society see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

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In British colonies, it was the role of imperial schools and religious institutions to disseminate the accepted knowledge in the sanctioned language to the masses. In his analysis of the sugar colonies in the British Empire, James Patterson Smith explained,

“British officialdom saw education, like religion, as a gentle supplement to the courts and police in ordering the lives of the poor.”15 The imperial government thought that education and literacy brought loyalty, morality, and order in the colonies. Smith explained, “The ripples effects of education were thought to extend far beyond the child in the classroom to the parents and the adult community at large.”16 British colonial officials viewed the schools as extensions of authority because they understood the inherent power in discourse that Foucault explained decades later. For the British, conformity equaled loyalty, and the institutions of religion and education were the best places to encourage conformist attitudes as they had access to the communities at large through their children. What colonial officials and religious leaders disguised as a benevolent action of free education to children that may not have previously had access was, in fact, a method of attaining and reproducing control over the colonized.

The schools also provided spaces that allowed for the surveillance of the behaviors of the colonized. As explained in earlier chapters of this dissertation, the acts of watching, judging, and regulating behaviors of subordinate individuals was important for maintaining order. Robinson and Sleight explained, “Indigenous children were also

15 James Patterson Smith, "Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the "Civilizing Mission" in the Sugar Colonies, 1868-1874." Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 27, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 263.

16 Ibid., 264.

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subject to particular scrutiny under British imperial rule. Racialized assumptions entailed that they were viewed as a threat to the purity of newly emergent societies and subject to increased official surveillance and intervention.”17 The schools and religious institutions, with their regular schedules, their daily access to students and information about the families through the students, ability to reward and punish behaviors accordingly, and their required written reports sent to the colonial officials provided a useful supplement for police and courts in their jobs of watching, judging, and regulating.

Girlhood Studies; Space & Place

In addition to theories of knowledge and power, this dissertation relies on the work of scholars in the field of girlhood studies combined with an understanding of feminist geography conceptualizations of space and place. In Making Modern Girls: A

History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos, Abosede A.

George succinctly explains the heart of girlhood studies within a colonial context: “the contested ideas of girls and girlhood . . . uniquely illuminate the implication of hierarchical distinctions of race, class, gender, and generation within programs of universal subject making in the colonial era and beyond.”18 Placing colonized girls at the center of an analysis on colonial power reveals a great deal about ideology and practices of empire. Assumptions of race, gender, class, and power inextricably inform the discourses regarding the proper behavior and roles of colonized girls. This is because the

17 Robinson and Sleight, Children, 9.

18 Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 11.

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girls, by their very existence as the harbingers of future generations of potentially perfectible and potentially problematic subjects, represent both an opportunity and a threat to colonial governments in their quests of maintaining power over the colonized.

Gonzalez and Premo argued that colonizers were acutely aware that what the children learned in the colonies was “crucial to the maintenance of the colonial order” because colonies, especially like those in the British Caribbean where very few of the inhabitants held native claims to the lands, were environments in which ideals from multiple cultures clashed and blended in the hearts and minds of the people who lived there.19 In the colonies of the European empires, the mixing of cultures between the colonizers and the colonized “altered existing social realities in the Americas and created totally new practices associated with childhood.”20 While white colonists concern over

“going native” warranted preventative measures for the white colonists that lived in the islands, it was arguably even more important to the colonial mission to remove the

“native” attitudes and practices from the colonized thus encouraging conformity as mentioned above. Steven S. Maughan explained, “Removing the ‘corrupt’ ideas held by

‘heathen mothers’ became a central concern and resulted in new strategies to change religious and moral instruction within the indigenous family.”21 The adults were initially targets of these efforts, especially in India, but later deemed to be too difficult to sway from their engrained cultural ideas and norms and so a new tactic of influencing children,

19 Gonzalez and Premo, Raising an Empire, 7.

20 Ibid.

21 Steven S. Maughan, “Civic Culture, Women’s Foreign Missions, and the British Imperial Imagination, 1860-1914,” in Paradoxes of Civil Society, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 205.

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especially girls, in hopes that they would influence their families and communities took precedent.

An examination of the significance of place in girlhood studies allows for assessments of geographical spaces in terms of their importance by interrogating the meaning of the location from different perspectives, both colonizer and colonized. This assessment uncovers what the space meant as a place to the individuals who lived within it and those who sought to regulate it. The concept of place is different from space in that place marks the significance of a location. Experiences do not just occur, but rather they occur “in place.”22 Historians can apply this idea by analyzing the past with the realization that events occurred in “a world that is deeply marked and territorialized around lived experiences of gender, race, sexuality, class, age, citizenship, and other social differences, privileges, and oppressions.”23 When looking at spaces such as schools and religious buildings in this light, historians and other scholars must consider several things. First, these buildings are places of power and influence where colonial missionaries, teachers, and preachers promulgated colonial hegemonic messages. In terms of discourses of power, Weedon explained “In order to be effective and powerful, a discourse needs a material base in established social institutions and practices.”24 The schools and religious buildings were the established institutions for getting the messages out to the youth. Second, these spaces were places of surveillance and control over the

22 Tim Creswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Somerset: Wiley, 2014), quoted in Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, eds., Girlhood and the Politics of Place (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 1.

23 Mitchell and Rentschler, Girlhood, 1.

24 Weedon, Feminist Practice, 100.

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colonized youth. The missionaries and educators recorded successes and failures in their missions of both saving souls and civilizing the colonized, personal reflections about comportment of the youth under their influence and their families and reprimanded or punished the children when they did not conform to the colonial standards assigned to them. When girls did not act in a manner befitting the imperial ideal, the missionaries, teachers, and preachers implemented punishments such as removing their access to a place of significance for them. A “time out” or a detention that physically limited the individual from being in a classroom or setting in which they desired to be was, in practice, limiting the access to a space that held significance; otherwise it would not be much of a punishment. Conversely, for the students, the schools and churches were not only places of their subordination, but also places of joy and opportunity. By studying place, it becomes evident that colonized girls were not merely objects of colonial oppression. Rather to them these places of colonial control were also places where they could “struggle to assert their rights to territory and autonomous spaces, to represent their experiences of belonging to and relating with others.”25 By investigating spaces from multiple perspectives, as varying and contested places of significance for the colonizers and the colonized, it becomes clear that the schools and religious spaces were not just sites of domination or places of opportunity. Rather they were both. These relationships to these spaces, therefore, resulted in a range of long-term consequences in the form identity formation and sense of belonging for both the colonized and the colonizers.26

25 Mitchell and Rentschler, Girlhood, 2.

26 Chapter six shows this tension by connecting the education of the colonized Indian girls to variable notions of femininity, nationalism, and community.

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Sources

At the center of this study is a rare autobiography written by one of the second- generation Indian girls discussed above and a monograph written by a descendent of an

Indian girl based on her great-grandmother’s papers and personal recollections of childhood in the islands. The first is an autobiography written by Anna Mahase, Snr.

Anna’s parents migrated from India in the 1880s and became Christian converts before she was born. Her father taught for the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad,

Grenada, and Guiana.27 Anna, following her father’s example, became a teacher for the same missionary organization and was one of the first female Indian teachers in the

Caribbean. In her autobiography, she detailed her experiences as a child of both worlds,

India and the Empire, and her role as a teacher, evangelist, and mother who was on the one hand responsible for some of the cultural colonization of Indian migrants and, on the other, dismayed by the loss of Indian culture in Caribbean society. Anna revealed personal stories and reflections from her life from childhood to adulthood, wrote poetry praising the Christian missions, and included a short autobiography of her husband as well, a useful source for contextualizing and drawing conclusions about Anna’s story.28

The second biography, written by journalist Gaiutra Bahadur, is a historical and

27 Canada’s relationship to Britain is complex and their road to independence was gradual. As a country, Canada attained self-governing status over domestic policy with the passage of the British North America Act on July 1, 1867. However, the country remained a colony of the British Empire and fell under the control of British Parliament until the issuance of the Statute of Westminster in 1931. British government allowed Canadian missionaries to work throughout their colonies as partners in cultural colonization.

28 Anna Mahase Snr., My Mother’s Daughter: The Autobiography of Anna Mahase Snr, 1899-1978 (Claxton Bay, Trinidad: Royards Publishing Company, 1992).

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genealogical account of her family beginning with of her great-grandmother, Sujaria who, pregnant and alone, migrated from India as an indentured servant. Thoroughly researched and contextualized, Bahadur’s book focuses on the experiences of Indian women like her great-grandmother, the trials of migration, and complexities of retaining and losing culture through imperial efforts of cultural colonization.29 Taken together, these are excellent case studies for examining Indian girls’ experiences and perceptions and the complicated effects of imperial education and religious influence on migrant

Indian communities and families.

Also indispensable to this study are the first-hand accounts of the imperial missionaries that toiled in the Caribbean doing the business of God and Empire. As

Phillip Alfred Buckner argues, “it is simplistic to describe missionaries as agents of the

Imperial government, but most missionaries did believe that the Empire was a force promoting British culture and Christian civilization and defined their mission in imperial terms.”30 While imperial aims were not their only concern, this chapter will show that missionaries worked closely with imperial governments and were aware of their role in the colonizing mission. This chapter interrogates in detail the first-hand accounts of the

Reverend John Morton, leader of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in the Caribbean, and his wife, Sarah Morton, who pioneered the founding of day and boarding schools for

Indian girls and extended the reach of the missionaries into the homes of the Indian migrants. John Morton’s writings have more empirical data and embody a style similar to

29 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

30 Phillip Alfred Buckner, Canada and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 77.

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that of a government report, while Sarah Morton’s reflections are much more personal and reflective of imperial ideas, such as inherent biases, and deep-seated motivations of the missionaries and their projects. Accounts like the Mortons’ were popular reading amongst Christians in London and in settler colonies and inspired new generations of missionaries to go out into the field. Catherine Hall explained, “Some of the missionaries recorded that they had been preoccupied since childhood with stories of 'the heathen', witness Thomas Burchell, who as a young man had loved to read conversion stories in the missionary press. These provided tales of triumph against all odds, promises of crowns of glory. Boys dreamt of a missionary martyrdom, rather than the adventures of

Crusoe. . .”31 These missionary accounts, therefore, can be read not only as indicators of imperial motivations and the messages the missionaries were given to the colonized but also can illuminate and elaborate on messages sent back home to their loyal readers.

Government documents, church records, contemporary ethnographies, and travel journals supplement the personal accounts of the Indian migrants and the missionaries and their families. Sources such as these provide necessary context for the biographical and personal records in the form of correspondence, legal rulings, acts of government, financial data, and visitor perceptions of what life was like. When trying to uncover the voice of the seemingly voiceless, documents such as law codes and acts of government reveal significance by interrogating why a law existed at all. Investigating sources like these for their purpose and effect is key. These sources reveal imperial excitement and

31Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 90.

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anxiety and are excellent for drawing out the main impressions of the Caribbean as it existed in the imperial imagination and how those impressions played out in future interactions between the colonizers and the colonized.32

As with any historical study, the sources used for this chapter are not without limitation. First, the accounts of the Mahase and Bahadur’s families are only representative of two genealogies in the islands. Furthermore, both migrants identified as from the Brahmin caste in India, which, as shown later in the chapter, held at least rhetorical significance even as caste variably broke down through migration.33 Anna’s example shows that being educated in an imperial system, in English, by Christians, affected the way migrants like her perceived of their position in the empire. Because they represent just two possible stories, it is not the goal of this dissertation to make sweeping generalizations about all Indian migrants in the Caribbean, but rather to read within the subtext of the sources to uncover prevalent attitudes, opportunities, and tribulations that can reasonably be applied more widely to understand the impact of imperialism on colonized populations. With regard to the girls not represented directly in these sources, such as those living in extreme poverty in villages, those living on plantations without access to education, those married very young and not included in the target demographic of the missionaries, Gonzalez and Premo explained that even when voices, like that of these children, are silent in historical sources, it is possible to “hear their echoes” and

32 See chapters two and four of this dissertation for more on the use of travel writing as a historical source. Also, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

33 See chapter three for a discussion on the breakdown of caste outside the bounds of India during the process of migration.

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glean “what past societies believed was acceptable for children and how these norms had an impact on children.”34 Often a careful reading of a source that does not outwardly address a particular subject or population can reveal a great deal about the invisible by noting subtle language or passing references in the greater context of the source itself. In addition, it is possible to write a history of children by “includ[ing] in its basic narrative the adults who surrounded them (be they parents, teachers, or even judges and kings) and the concepts and ideologies that shaped their interactions with them, be they local customs or even high-minded policies and rarefied intellectual ruminations.”35

Indian Migrant Communities

Family Life

Indian family and social experiences in the Caribbean were as diverse as, if not more so than, in India, because of the interactions with the other populations of Africans and Europeans in a much smaller space. The unique dynamics of race, culture, and economics present in the Caribbean colonies created a social system grounded heavily in imperial assumptions of race. “In the Indies the multitude of ‘races’ meant that one’s phenotype, comportment, and reputation largely determined one’s social standing.”36

Race was an important factor in the Caribbean because of the imperial efforts to maintain order and control via a racialized hierarchy, the extraordinary diversity of peoples that

34 Gonzalez and Premo, Raising an Empire, 6.

35 Bianca Premo, “’The Little Hiders’ and Other Reflections on the History of Children in Imperial Iberoamerica,” in Gonzalez and Premo, Raising an Empire, 244.

36 Gonzalez and Premo, Raising an Empire, 2.

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resided there, the region’s economic importance to the British Empire. While a comparative study of cultural practices and social norms of Indians in India and in other colonies would possibly produce interesting results, a comparison is not the goal of this study. Source limitations mentioned earlier make it difficult or impossible to assess the impact of prior social status and cultural norms on the behavior of Indian migrants once they arrived in the Caribbean. In this light, this dissertation does not simplify or generalize the ideas or effects of the “old world” but rather incorporates memories and traditions that the migrants brought with them to draw conclusions about the lives and experiences of the Indian migrants “in place.”

As discussed in chapters three and four, while colonial officials and estate managers initially preferred the migration of single Indian men to replace their post- slavery workforce losses in the Caribbean, it was within the first few decades of indenture that officials began to implement policies encouraging female migration and

Indian family and community life. Grenada’s Immigration Act of 1869 made clear that immigrant children under the age of 15 should not be separated from their families upon arrival and “that even friends are not to be separated unless from circumstances such separation shall be unavoidable.”37 The concept of keeping workers known to one another together was a drastic turn from the practices of slavery. John Stuart MacDonald and Leatrice MacDonald explained that in slavery, the prevalent ideology was that breaking up families and neighbors led to greater control because this practice eliminated loyalty to family and reduced chances of rebellion. In contrast, in the indenture estate

37 “Immigration Act of 1869,” Laws of Grenada and the Grenadines, 1766-1875 (London: George Phipps, 1875), 292.

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system, the managers and government leaders instead “partly decentralized” control to the family as they believed they “gained a relatively more highly skilled labor force by using the family as a socializing agent.”38 This shift represents a change in thinking about the role of the family in maintaining control over the colonized people. MacDonald and

MacDonald argue that after the process of breaking up families to serve as motivation for laborers failed, planters and government officials pivoted and instead elevated the status of the family as a motivating force in and of itself to push workers to more productivity and to provide stability for the populations so that they would stay and work in the

Caribbean after their contracts expired.39

Customs, Language, and Religion

For Indian girls in the Caribbean, the space of the family home was a place of learning about and experiencing Indian culture in the form of customs and traditions, religion, and language. Even though Anna Mahase grew up in a Christian household, her mother, Rookabai “still kept up some of the Hindoo traditions and customs and way of life.”40 Rookabai migrated to the Caribbean alone at twelve years of age after she ran away from a marriage to a much older man who frightened her.41 As a young first-

38 John Stuart MacDonald, and Leatrice D. MacDonald. "Transformation of African and Indian Family Traditions in the Southern Caribbean," Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 02 (March 1973): 193.

39 This shift and the desire for suitable female migrants to serve as wives and anchors to these families is discussed in chapter four.

40 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 12.

41 Ibid., 3.

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generation migrant, Rookabai was both grounded in memories of her childhood in India and influenced by her adult life in the Caribbean. Her persistence in teaching her children what she could remember about Indian customs and traditions indicates that, for her, it was important to maintain a connection to her ancestral homeland. As an example, Anna described the lengths her mother went to so that the family could celebrate Diwali together and with others in the village. Anna recalled special Indian sweets, games, and decorations that her mother told her were from her Indian heritage. Anna described how her mother painstakingly recreated from her memory in India, décor such as deyas (lights of Diwali) and foods that, for Rookabai, reminded her of home. In this way, Rookabai, as a first-generation migrant, did what she could to maintain her connection to India, preserve what she remembered from her youth, and pass it on to her family. According to

Trinidad’s Contact Magazine, holidays such as Diwali and Holi, and Indian folk music that evolved into the modern Indo-Caribbean music genres of Chutney and Soca are still very much a part of Caribbean life today because of the efforts of mothers like Rookabai to hold on to these aspects of their culture.42

Christian missionary activity affected but did not eradicate Hinduism in the

British Caribbean colonies. Statistically, only a minority of Indians in the Caribbean converted to Christianity and most that did, lived in urban centers.43 In addition,

Hinduism proved resilient against missionary efforts. Peter Van der Veer and Steven

Vertovec explained that Hinduism at its core is neither a flexible nor rigid belief system,

42 Verne Khelawan, “Mapping T&T’s Rich Cultural Heritage,” Contact Magazine 10 (2010): 15.

43 Bridget Brereton, A Social History of Trinidad (St. Augustine: The University of the West Indies Press, 1972), 13.

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but rather “an identity acquired through social practice and, as such, constantly negotiated in changing contexts.”44 In the context of the colonial Caribbean where Hindus faced aggressive Christian evangelical encroachment, Van der Veer and Vertovec argue that the version of Hinduism that emerged in the Caribbean colonies was necessarily rigid and resistant to influence from the outside. When Indians from diverse backgrounds came together in the Caribbean, they “set about inadvertently and purposefully to standardize and homogenize religious and cultural practices. . . [and in] the context of ethnic, racial, and religious pluralism (coupled with sustained efforts by Christian missionaries) in each

Caribbean territory effected a kind of self-consciousness about beliefs and practices heretofore unexperienced in the subcontinent.”45 While some Indians converted to

Christianity, as in the example of the Mahase family, many did not and in most small

Indian villages on the islands, the Indian populations actually became more congregational as they “grew more aware of their isolation as members of a minority religion.”46 The variety of possibilities of responses to missionary efforts is illustrated in

Anna Mahase’s husband Kenneth Mahase’s autobiography published as an appendix of her own. Kenneth Mahase’s father was a Brahmin priest who Kenneth remembered as “a very friendly man towards all irrespective of race, colour, or creed.”47 When Kenneth was fourteen years of age, his father died and his widowed mother, whose two brothers

44 Peter Van der Veer and Steven Vertovec, "Brahmanism Abroad: On Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion." Ethnology 30, no. 2 (April 1991):149.

45 Ibid., 151-154.

46 Ibid., 154.

47 Kenneth Mahase, “The Autobiography of Kenneth Emmanuel Mahase,” appendix to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 105-106.

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supported her, raised him. This painful life transition also embodied the shift from his father’s acceptance of others to rigidity in religion and apprehension about the influence of outsiders. After Kenneth completed his primary school education, the Sangre Chiquito

Canadian Mission School offered him a job as a pupil teacher, a sort of teaching assistant.

He recalled that his uncles strongly objected by arguing that Hindus should not be working for Christians. Later, when the Naparima Training College for teachers accepted

Kenneth to be one of the first Indian students, his uncles responded with great hostility because they were afraid if he spent too much time with the Christians, he would change religions.”48 Indeed, he did. Dr. H.H. Morton, the brother of Reverend John Morton baptized Kenneth shortly after he left his family home. This case study, taken with Anna

Mahase’s example is reflective of the variety of responses of migrants in the Caribbean to imperial religious reach into their communities. Anna’s parents converted and raised

Anna as a Christian, which she remained throughout her life, while Kenneth’s having a

Hindu priest father and devoutly Hindu uncles did not stop him from working for

Christians and eventually converting to Christianity.

For peoples that migrate to a place where their language is not the “official” language and only a minority of the population speaks their language, and even fewer their dialect, consciously speaking it becomes one of the most important aspects of the performance of their identity as migrants. As explained above, there was power in language and the migrants knew it. In her assessment of the relationship between migration and language, Gaiutra Bahadur both laments the loss of languages and

48 Kenneth Mahase, “The Autobiography of Kenneth Emmanuel Mahase,” appendix to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 106-107.

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celebrates how migrant families retained what they could in the space of the home. On the role of missions-led education and the eradication of non-English languages, she explains, “Over the generations, various Indian tongues have been lost as spoken languages in Guyana. The missionary-run schools during British rule taught English, not

Hindi or Tamil.” Even with these pressures from the missionaries and the schools, the families retained varying levels of speaking their native tongues in the home. In the example of Bahadur’s family, they spoke a version of creolese, a blend of both India and the colonial Caribbean. “This is what we spoke inside our immigrant home; this was our cracked, our stained-glass English, made from smashed bits of multicolored glass, a thing of beauty constructed from the fragments, including fragments from India.”49 This illustration is a celebration of the efforts of Bahadur’s family in retaining some elements of their native culture and blending it with what she described as a necessary assimilation that migrants must endure. Anna Mahase described her family’s retention of language in a similar way. Her most vivid memories of her mother and father were that they were great storytellers and that they told their children stories of India in Hindi. In Anna’s family, they spoke Hindi in the home and with their friends in the village, but they spoke

English at school and at work.50 This tight grip on ancestral language was a form of resistance to cultural colonization and this resistance took place in the home under the direction of the parents.

49 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 7.

50 Anna Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 11.

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Caste and Family

Like Hinduism, migration to the Caribbean affected the impact of caste on Indian family life but did not eradicate it. Many women and young girls from the Brahmin caste migrated to the Caribbean to escape either child marriages common to Brahmins in India

(as in the case of Anna’s mother) or to escape the shame of being widowed and unable to remarry thus having to resort to seeking support from others or turning to occupations like prostitution (as was the case with Kenneth’s grandmother). Rev. John Morton and contemporary ethnographer James H. Stark agreed that caste was still present and felt in the islands, though they disagreed to what degree. Stark, who published Stark’s

Guidebook and History of Trinidad in 1897 after spending time in Trinidad and studying the behaviors of the people, emphasized that the largest difference between the Creole population and the Indian population was that Indians had a system of caste while the

Creoles did not. John Morton accepted that Indians acknowledged and felt caste but argued that the voyage to the islands and the degradation of plantation work weakened these feelings, while Stark claimed that this was a myth and that even when degraded the

Brahmin in the islands still held a higher rank than the Sudra.51 Negotiation of caste and opinions about its relative strength in the Caribbean colonies is largely absent in available sources written by Indians, but mention of it is not. In the examples of Anna and Kenneth

Mahase’s autobiographies and Bahadur’s telling of her family story, they make clear that their families belong to the Brahmin caste by repeatedly mentioning as such in passing.

In their writings, they do not consider the strength of their position or the advantages or

51 James H. Stark, Stark’s Guide-book and History of Trinidad (Norwood, Massachusetts: Plimpton Press, 1897), 78.

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disadvantages of being Brahmin. They do tell us that, as Brahmins, their families carried on a Brahminic tradition in the islands by remaining in the occupations of teachers and religious leaders, even if the religion was not Hinduism. The fact that multiple accounts of Indian migrants that enjoyed access to education, religion, and upward social mobility self-identified as Brahmin even without interrogating the power behind that identity, supports the argument of Stark and Morton that Indians in the colonies felt caste.

However, the fact that Christian-born Anna Mahase still identified herself by her family’s

Brahminic heritage indicates that there was a measure of fluidity in the conceptualization of caste and that selective social practices and ties to the homeland were more important in caste identification than religion.52 This revelation is significant to this study of Indian girls because, as in Anna’s example, the retention of caste while choosing Christianity is representative of the variety of choices available to her.

Education and Christian Missionaries

Teaching and Preaching as Tactics of Social Control

In European imperial projects, the role of religious missions and education were two sides of the same coin. While colonial documents reflect separate regulations and theories of education and missions at times, ultimately colonial officials viewed both as tools of social control. The spaces occupied by institutions of education and religion were places of the imperial performance of surveillance, regulation, and dissemination of elements of hegemonic Victorian culture that colonial officials believed to result in a

52 See chapter three for more on the caste make-up and identification of Indian migrants.

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loyal and obedient colonized population. Victorians believed spreading the Christian religion was one of the key weapons in their arsenal of promoting peace and that church attendance was “inoculation against sedition.”53 Missionaries themselves acknowledged this role as their defenses of their work make evident. For example, in 1892, the Church of Scotland published a letter to the editor in the periodical The Home and Foreign

Missionary Record for the Church of Scotland from someone dubbed, “A European

Colonist.” In the letter, the “Colonist” criticized missionary work in British African colonies as being too sympathetic to the “natives” and argued that when presented with the carrot or the stick, the “natives” responded better to the stick. He went on to charge that missionary efforts of extending the carrot undermined imperial domination over the colonized people. Firing back in defense of missionary work in the empire, the editor responded,

A ‘European Colonist’ entirely mistakes us when he thinks we take up this position as missionaries we have more ‘sympathy for the African than the European.’ We have always held that the interests of the native and the European are one - side by side both will prosper, but apart both will suffer. Any policy of compulsory labour or oppressive taxation will be suicidal to the interests of the colonist and the planter. It will serve to drive the natives away from the centres of European life into a separate community by themselves and then where is labour supply for the colonist to come from!54

At the heart of this defense is the argument that the missionaries were, in fact, doing the work of empire. While the editor may have challenged the harsher approaches of some colonists such as “compulsory labor or oppressive taxation,” he made clear that

53 James Patterson Smith, “Empire and Social Reform,” 260.

54 Church of Scotland, The Home and Foreign Missionary Record for the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1892), 514.

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missionary work served the interests of the colonist and planter by encouraging the

“natives” to participate in empire through a promoting a sense of belonging, rather than threatening them and forcing retreat into isolation. In this way, the missionaries believed that through doing their work, they strengthened the empire economically by nurturing the labor force. For missionaries, the work of God and Empire were one and the same, and their schools that functioned as the main place of imperial evangelical work in the

Caribbean colonies exemplified the relationship between education, religion, and empire.

Colonial Caribbean Schools

Government officials and education administrators and teachers imagined the education system of colonized children in the Caribbean using the same principles as the

Victorian education model in the metropole. One of the main goals of educating the children in both England and the colonies was to teach the principle of discipline to create an ideal workforce and promote peace amongst the people. Thomas E. Jordan explained that educational philosophy in Victorian Britain was “a way to discipline a national workforce so that the mills of industry would run smoothly and public order would be maintained.”55 In addition, for the order of society, Victorians believed in socialization by gender and the segregated schools supplemented the home in serving as transmitters for the internalization of appropriate comportment and roles of each sex. In these models, primary schooling taught both boys and girls reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. However, beyond these basica skills other social factors dictated the course of

55 Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), xiii.

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their education. For the boys, what the schools taught them depended on their class and career expectation. After primary schooling, options available to boys were extended- schooling in the secondary and, in rare cases, higher education institutions. However, in most cases, the next step for boys was to learn a trade or go straight into agricultural or industrial labor.56 The Victorian ideal of a girl’s life trajectory, whether she was British or of the colonized populations, was to be a wife and supporter of her husband and family.

John Morton described the aim of his missions-led schools in the Caribbean “to teach the largest number the three R’s, a knowledge of life and duty, and to the girls sewing.”57

After primary schooling, if a girl had access to further education, the common goal of that education was to train the girl in housewifery skills such as cooking, cleaning, sewing and proper womanly behavior. Government officials desired the reproduction of these Victorian goals in colonial schools because of imperial anxieties about order and loyalty amongst the colonized population. As stated above, for Victorians, conformity bred peace and schools should teach all children gender roles and work ethic in accordance with Victorian sensibilities.

An examination of the early attempts at establishment of secular schools in

Trinidad exposes tensions that existed between the secular schools and church-built educational institutions. After emancipation, during the period of 1835-1842, the British government made funds available for the creation of secular schools for boys throughout

56 Jordan, Victorian Childhood, xii-xiii. Jordan explains that child labor laws were inconsistently written and enforced throughout the nineteenth century and it was commonplace to find children working in fields or factories rather than in schools.

57 John Morton, quoted in Rhoda Reddock, “Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1917,” Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2008): 63.

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the West Indies and Africa. These schools were initially unregulated by colonial officials and full of corrupt practices such as trustees pocketing the allocated funds instead of building the schools to their potential. Also, the schools had untrained teachers, who functioned more as babysitters than educators and “served largely to keep the children together.”58 Churches responded to the perceived lack of adequate education in the colonies by building schools that served as both places of learning reading, writing, and arithmetic and learning religion. The religious schools fared better in the early years and the government schools recorded widespread absences and closings. In 1837, the

Colonial Office appointed an Inspector of Schools for the West Indian Colonies to serve as their proxy in the region. However, the early corruption had done so much damage that, by 1842, the colonial government conceded to the churches and abandoned its school-building projects, instead providing grant-in-aid to the religious schools. This abandonment of projects reveals an uneasy partnership between the colonial government and religious institutions. While the colonial government did not want to hand over the power inherent in educating the youth, the acknowledgment that both government and religion served the same end goal in the colonies caused them to defer their efforts and power to the religious schools. The colonial government tried again to compete with the religious schools in Trinidad in 1851, this time by creating a larger machine for oversight.

A Board of Education made up of Trinidad’s Governor Lord Harris, and appointees of his choosing that held jurisdiction over newly created districts, boosted attendance by establishing schools throughout Trinidad and declaring education compulsory for all

58 Trinidad and Tobago Independence Celebration Committee, Historical Development of Education in Trinidad and Tobago (Port-of-Spain: Government Printing Office, 1962), 9.

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children. Government officials allocated colonial funds based on school attendance and wherever the government built schools, they took away the grant-in-aid allocated to the religious schools. This policy created a competition between the secular and religious schools. Missions’ organizations, such as Rev. John Morton’s Canadian Presbyterian

Mission, took up the challenge from the government and, with the support of their organization and the Presbyterian Church of Canada, they increased their school building and recruitment efforts. Again, by 1870, the government schools began to fail because the missionary organizations proved better at recruiting, especially amongst the Indian population that was entering the Caribbean colonies in peak numbers during this time. 59

Missionary Organizations

An interrogation of the role and reach of Morton’s Canadian Presbyterian Mission in the Caribbean illustrates the influence and power of missionaries not only in the

Caribbean but also throughout the Empire. Canadian missionaries became imperial heroes in the imaginations of the white Britons. In London, in Canada, and in other settler colonies, missionary writings were not only popular reading, but also led supporters to provide them with funds to carry out their evangelist activities. In addition, upon return home to Canada after completing their work, missionaries enjoyed a high status in the form of receiving honorary degrees and acquiring positions in preaching and teaching.

For the supporters and the missionaries this exchange “brought home to hundreds of thousands of Canadian men and women the reality of belonging to a global empire and

59 Trinidad and Tobago Independence Celebration Committee, Historical Development, 1-9.

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strengthened their belief that Empire was God’s work at home and abroad.”60 As explained earlier in the chapter, the missionaries viewed themselves as integral parts of the imperial civilizing project. They understood that their roles in the colonies served imperial objectives and while they experienced tensions with colonists or government officials individually, missionaries did not view their work as occurring in opposition to imperial ideology.

By working with the communities and getting to know the colonized peoples, missionaries believed they were better agents of empire than were planters, secular educators, and government officials. In the quote above, the editor of the Church of

Scotland periodical argued that the philosophies guiding how colonists had been running their colonies were the cause of imperial struggles to maintain control and exact maximum productivity from the workforce. To address these failings of colonists past, missionaries sought to build alternative communities based around the chapel instead of the plantation, since the plantation had been the center of community under slavery and the old methods of social control on the plantation had failed.61 In doing so, they restructured colonial Caribbean society around them and their activity, shifting a measure of power into the hands of the missionary leaders, all while projecting their image back home and to their target “natives” as benevolent saviors.

Missionary-led schools anchored the communities built around the chapel by teaching the principles and values desirable of the community to the children. In his

60 Buckner, Canada and the British Empire, 77-78.

61 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 978

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declaration of his organization’s mission and assessment of their successes, Rev. John

Morton explained,

These schools, besides their general influence on the men and women of the future, exert an immediate religious influence on the young, and often through them upon their parents. Many of our most hopeful converts are those who have been taught in our schools and are led at an earlier or later period in life to their stand for Christ and influence their friends and neighbors in the same direction.62

In this quotation, Morton exhibits the attitude that the Indian children were an effective vessel for the transportation of desirable knowledge to their communities. Their successes led the colonial government to acknowledge their effectiveness as agents of empire. By

1870, the religious schools in Trinidad enjoyed government support without the tense competition with secular schools for funding. The Education Ordinance of 1870 gave

“dual control in education” to the government schools and religious schools and supported the religious schools by paying the salaries of the teachers at the same rate as the secular schools and providing funds for furniture, equipment, and supplies. Two later ordinances, passed in 1875 and 1890, solidified a partnership between the secular and religious schools by further regulating the allocation of funds and declaring both legitimate places of education in the colony.63

In this supportive environment, missionary schools flourished. This was in large part because of their ability to connect with the growing Indian migrant population. Many of the missionaries learned Hindi and learned about Hindu religious traditions and stories

62 John Morton, Trinidad, its History and Resources also, Sketch of the Presbyterian Mission, from 1868 to the End of the Century (Toronto: Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church, 1901), 25.

63 Trinidad and Tobago Independence Celebration Committee, Historical Development, 2-7.

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to appeal to their intended recruits and keep the students whom they enrolled coming back. Missionaries “made use of Hindi to approach the Indians in the first place; they translated parts of the Bible into Hindi, and turned Christian hymns in bhajans; they sought out the parallels between Hinduism and Christianity as a way of making

Christianity go down better.”64 In her recollection of missionaries using Hindi to reach

Indians, Anna explains that it was not only a tactic used in schools but also in the church services put on for the Indian community at large. She explains every aspect of the

Sunday service, from the teaching of the children in Sunday school to the singing of hymns and the sermon itself, were all in Hindi, in hopes of encouraging greater attendance amongst the migrants.65 According to Sarah Morton, missionaries recognized and effectively appropriated elements of Indian culture by incorporating into their services Sanskrit dramas typically delivered by Brahmin priests that reflected ideals of

“unspotted purity and supreme devotion to married life.”66 Here Sarah explained the missionary logic behind this practice was to relate their Christian values to the Indians by way of something they recognized as their own.

64 Kenneth Ramchand, foreword to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, v. A bhajan is an Indian devotional song.

65 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 11.

66 Sarah E. Morton, ed., John Morton of Trinidad: Pioneer Missionary of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the East Indians in the British West Indies: Journals, Letters and Papers (Toronto: Westminster Co., 1916), 343.

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Missionary Education and Gender

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Victorian gender ideals promoted the exclusion of women from public life but rising concern over the social effect of colonization on the morality of the British opened an avenue for the extension of women’s roles outside the domestic sphere.67 Drawing on British assumptions of women’s superior influence over issues of morality, a fear of spread of “heathen” behaviors and ideas “enabled female missionary advocates to expand their roles as experts on social and imperial policy and theorized an extended a set of public roles for all women.”68 Against the backdrop of assumptions about women and morality and the doctrine of evangelical Protestantism, female missionaries became authorities over manners and morals and therefore, civilized behavior. Carrying with them the imperial burden of civilizing the colonized, missionary women sought to reproduce their feminine morality in schools by way of teaching it to colonized girls. This was because “women and families were of considerable importance to the way social transformation in indigenous communities was theorized . . . Families were imagined as the fundamental units of society and social change as well as the crucial agency of spiritual and cultural change.”69 Schools for colonized girls taught by missionary colonizer women became

67 Maughan, “Civic Culture,” 200.

68 Ibid., 199.

69 Ibid., 202-205.

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places of empowerment for female missionaries due to their importance as imperial message dissemination centers.70

Missions to women by women were widely sanction by missions boards made up of missionary men by the 1880s, because “they offered a ‘maternalist’ strategy for

‘civilizing’ that did not fundamentally challenge the female subordination held dear by traditionalist clerics.”71 While simultaneously empowering women by elevating their status to teacher based upon their morality and maternal nature, the missionary men only allowed the women to participate in a limited manner. Women were able to teach and minister only to other women and girls, thus keeping the male missionaries in positions of power over the colonies and the women that worked with them. The experiences and thoughts of female missionary Sarah Morton, though always referred to as a wife of the missionary leader John Morton and never as a missionary herself by her contemporaries, constitute a valuable source for understanding the activities and perspectives of these female Christian, missions-funded educators. Sarah Morton was responsible for the first opening of schools for Indian girls in the Caribbean and according to her husband, and reports of her work in both Mahase autobiographies, and her writings, she was quite effective. Still, Sarah Morton had to legitimize her writings as a woman by publishing her experiences doing missionary work within an account about her husband. Sarah’s book that is comprised largely of her own reflections and records based on her experiences is

70 For more on British women and their complicated relationship to the British civilizing mission, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

71 Maughan, “Civic Culture,” 203.

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titled John Morton of Trinidad: Pioneer Missionary of the Presbyterian Church in

Canada to the East Indians in the British West Indies. When Anna Mahase wrote the poem referenced at the beginning of this chapter, she wrote it to praise John Morton, not

Sarah, whose schools taught her mother and her sisters and paved the way for Indian female education in the British Caribbean. Anna’s poem refers to Sarah Morton only in passing. In fact, in her entire autobiography that reflects of the Canadian Presbyterian

Mission’s impact on her and her family’s lives, Anna only mentions Sarah in passing throughout, usually referring to her not by name but as the “wife of John Morton” and without placing a great deal of importance on Sarah’s work.

Sarah Morton’s schools did carry significance for Indian girls, regardless of contemporary dismissal of their importance. The story of Anna Mahase’s mother,

Rookabai, provides an example of the effectiveness of the girls’ schools. Rookabai attended and learned her housewifery skills as one of the inaugural class of Sarah

Morton’s Tunapuna Girls’ Home in Trinidad. The target demographic for the Girls’

Home, according to Sarah Morton, was

…girls from about twelve years old and upward, who having been more or less instructed, would naturally be qualified above all others to be wives for our helpers, but who through the ignorance or indifference of parents and guardians (not always Christian) were in danger of being given to non-Christian or otherwise unsuitable men.72

In this quote, Sarah Morton made clear that her goal was to make wives of the girls and not just for any husband but specifically for the men trained in the Mission's boys’ schools. Sarah elaborated further on the prime objective of the school as, “to keep such

72 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 347.

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girls in our community and future instruct and train them for taking their rightful place among us as help-meets [sic] for our trained young men.”73 The expectation for the girls was that they reproduce imperial missionary values by marrying men trained in the same and having families to whom they taught a cohesive message. The girls did not have to be

Christian to join the Home, because Sarah and her assistant teachers willingly put forth

“great toil and patience” in teaching Indian girls to read the Bible “intelligently” and eventually convince them to convert.74 In Rookabai’s case, she joined the home as a

Hindu girl in 1890 and learned to speak, read, and write English through Bible studies and in August, 1891, she converted to Christianity, was baptized, and married Anna’s father, Chandisingh, a student of John Morton’s. Rookabai then became a supporter of

Chandisingh’s work first as a teacher and then a preacher under the authority of John

Morton and the Canadian Presbyterian Mission, and Rookabai raised five children who also went on to follow the path paved by the Mortons’ schooling.

The primary goal of the Girls’ Home was to teach Indian girls to be good wives and to reproduce the values of the missionaries. However, Sarah Morton does not describe directly what a “good wife” was as she may have taken for granted that her readers at the time understood the common assumptions about wifely behavior and duties. Even though she was not direct, Sarah Morton did provide several details regarding the operations of the home that help the reader understand her mindset. First,

Sarah provided a sample daily schedule that the home followed which indicated her

73 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 347.

74 Ibid., 348.

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priorities and objectives. On a typical day, the young Indian residents of the Girls’ Home, spent 4.75 hours on religious instruction, 2.75 hours practicing and learning new sewing skills, 2 hours on reading, writing and arithmetic, and the remaining time allotted for preparing and eating food, gardening, chores, and play.75 Recall that imperial ideology of control and order promoted conformity, therefore ideals in one part of the empire should have been, in theory if not always in practice, the same as in another. The common link between the colonies of the British Empire was the metropole, therefore conformist ideologies sought to replicate the metropolitan Victorian culture. Sarah’s descriptions of activities conducted in the home illustrate this push for conformity. For sewing, the girls learned to make English dresses and other garments. When receiving religious instruction, Sarah connected the Bible studies to Hindi lessons from the “Zenana Reader, used by lady missionaries in India, each chapter containing a separate lesson on some subject suitable for wives and housekeepers.”76 The universal imperial use of the Zenana

Reader as a source “designed to transmit new [Victorian] ideas about proper femininity, conjugality, and motherhood to Indian women” shows a cohesive link between missionary activity in India, in the Caribbean, and in Britain.77

Sarah’s writings about her experiences with Indians in the Caribbean reflected imperial assumptions of white supremacy via racial stereotypes and generalizations made to indicate behaviors that Victorians would deem uncivilized. In a section of her book

75 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 348.

76 Ibid., 350.

77 Elizabeth Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144-149.

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describing the Indian people, Sarah reproduced a list of character traits of Indians written by John Morton. The list, titled Character of the People, contains four categories:

“Physically,” “Intellectually,” “Morally,” and “Redeeming features.” John Morton found

Indians to be physically weak, intellectually thoughtful and sharp, “unprincipled” in terms of morals, and he believed them to be hard workers only if presented with a profit motive. He concluded that he found Indians able to “think for themselves, as far as to oppose us at first, thereby becoming more intelligent and stable Christians, if won to the

Gospel.”78 In describing her perception of the character and comportment of Indian girls in one of her schools, Sarah wrote they were “wild and mischievous” girls who “chatter like magpies . . . and frisk about like – I had nearly said like lambs, but when I come to think of it that decent animal might with some show of propriety object to being mentioned in connection these little creatures, wise in evil and innocent of good.”79 In this brief quote, Sarah first dehumanized the girls by comparing them to animals and then demonized them by asserting that a comparison to animals was too good for the Indian girls. White imperial actors employed language like this and assumptions like in John

Morton’s Character list, that dehumanized colonized subjects, throughout the empire as a tool of social control and race-based hierarchal preservation that falsely proclaimed racial differences as inherent inferiorities of a subhuman population. Highlighting these missionary attitudes is important because it shows that deeply engrained racist stereotypes and attitudes of white superiority over other races informed all aspects of

78 John Morton, quoted in Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 52.

79 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 249.

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imperial interactions between the colonizers and colonized, not just in the political or economic realms, but also in personal and religious exchanges. The missionaries, though claiming to be “better” at colonizing than the planters and government officials had more in common ideologically with their colonizing partners than they did differences.

Furthermore, these records of racialized perceptions and evaluations of character read together with the main objectives and scheduled practices of the schools, indicate that the schools served as places of surveillance and places of control similar to the plantations, prisons, and workplaces. By subjecting a group of subordinate people, in this case Indian girls, to intense scrutiny and generalizations of their behaviors and morality, the missionaries participated in the system of watching the colonized people and asserting their dominance as white colonizers over the colonized people of color. Their choices of words such as “wild” and “unprincipled” and comparison to animals are significant because these words mean that the girls both had potential for improvement and had potential to be a threat to colonial order. Through the work of the teaching of Biblical and

Victorian principles, the missionaries believed that the “wild” children could learn these principles and therefore were susceptible to taming practices. However, missionary beliefs that, at their core the subjects began their training from the status of animal (or even worse, a being “wise in evil and innocent of good” by Sarah Morton above), drew on imperial racialized beliefs about people of color and their irrevocable subordinate subhuman status. In her book, Sarah Morton published a letter written by one of the girls’ schoolteachers, in which the teacher explained, “These girls are small, wild, and some of them very dirty. We cannot hope to make great scholars of them, but we do hope to influence for good; they will not regard Christian work or the Christian religion as their

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parents do, and the work with these little ones will tell in the future.”80 The idea that the education could improve the girls but that they always held elements of their primal nature within them that could return in the future, generated anxieties amongst missionaries and a perceived need for constant monitoring and control. By evaluating the girls and then structuring disciplined school practices around the aim of monitoring and changing the girls into more tamed and principled beings, the schools served as imperial places of both surveillance and control.

Uneven Success

The Mortons’ Successes

The successes of the missions and the education initiatives targeting Indians in the

Caribbean were uneven. An analysis of the papers of the Mortons, the Mahases, and the

Bahadurs illustrates a possible spectrum of responses. John and Sarah Morton reported success on regional and global levels. John asserted that many of the Indians he was responsible for converting and training as missionaries traveled into other islands in the

Caribbean and back home to India and continued missions work.81 This was true in the case of Anna’s father, Chandisingh. Under John’s tutelage, he taught and preached in several locations throughout the British Caribbean. Because her schools were training grounds for Christian wives, Sarah Morton measured her success based on marriages, conversions, and the acquisition of housewifely skills. She claimed that that her schools

80 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 254

81 Morton, Trinidad, 28-29.

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made steady gains in these areas, and referenced successful marriages and conversions, like Rookabai’s, and quantities of sewing articles completed as indicators of progress.

She dedicated almost 100 pages at the end of her book to stories of approvals for and openings of new schools and increases in attendance into the early decades of the twentieth century. The fact that Anna wrote a poem, one hundred years after the Morton’s arrival in the Caribbean commemorating John Morton and the missionary efforts implies that their mission was a success. Anna’s mother, inculcated as part the inaugural class of

Sarah Morton Girls’ Home reproduced the ideas of the Mortons in her own children, as evidenced in Anna’s later working for the Mission and praising the Mortons throughout her life and even in death by way of her writings. The missionaries succeeded at their efforts of surveillance and control and they reflected with contentment at the numbers of

Christian converts and loyal subjects of the British Empire that they won over the years.

In many ways, the missionaries did exactly what they set out to do. They taught English and Christianity; they taught Victorian family values; they maintained and reproduced imperial control. They did the work of God and Empire.

Anna Mahase and the Spread of Empire

On the surface, the example of Anna Mahase is a resounding missionary success.

She was born Christian to two of the Mortons’ Christian converts. Anna attended one of

Sarah Morton’s boarding schools and learned to be a housewife under missionary instruction. Later, she married a student of one of John Morton’s boys’ schools. Anna, like her pioneering mother, was one of the first women to attend a teacher’s training college, become officially certified as a teacher, and work alongside her husband bringing

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in new generations of Indian youth in the missionary schools of Trinidad. In this role,

Anna proudly proclaimed in her autobiography that she was the best recruiter for Indian girls in villages because she looked like them. She explained,

In those early days all the teachers went out every morning to visit and bring out the children to school. I did my share of it and the result was that all the little Hindoo and Moslem girls began attending school when they saw a female East Indian teacher . . . I’m happy that I was able to blaze a trail, the result of which can be satisfying to those who have continued and brought knowledge to the entire East Indian womanhood in Trinidad.82

Anna, as a colonized subject of the British Empire, served as a go-between for the colonial missionaries and the colonized people with great pride. She existed in a space directly in the middle of the intersection of race, gender, and imperialism. Her case is fascinating because she was able to use her subordinate race and gender to bring more girls that were once like her mother into the system of colonial domination via cultural colonization. Anna and her family members recognized and took advantage of the upward social mobility that an education in English and Christianity afforded to Indians and she intended to extend the same opportunity to other Indian girls. Sarah Morton never mentions Anna or her family by name, but if she knew of them, it is likely they would have been subjects of one of her anecdotes of evidentiary success.

Incomplete Conversions

Not all of the Mortons’ stories sang of success. In many instances, Sarah Morton lamented cases in which Indians girls taught in her schools did not follow the path intended for them. Bahadur assessed that “as [Sarah Morton] touted the housewifely ideal

82 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 38.

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– fidelity in the curriculum as much as ironing, sewing, the Bible and basic math – she witnessed the constant capsizing of that ideal.”83 To illustrate this point Bahadur retells an encounter Sarah had with a group of Indian woman in which one was a recent convert that Sarah had taught. Sarah learned that the new convert was attending church and had recently left one husband for another. She responded to the news of her convert being a churchgoer not with happiness but by saying “That will do her no good unless she changes her living.”84 For Sarah, when the convert chose to leave her marriage with one man for another, she defied the missionaries’ teachings and chose a wrong path. In addition to her descriptions of successful match-making and creation of good Christian wives amongst the Indians, Sarah complained of several cases in which she and her teachers were not able keep the girls from going back to their old ways. In one such example, Sarah told the story of an orphaned girl enrolled in one of her boarding schools by her guardian brother. The girl converted to Christianity and tried to influence her brother but was unsuccessful. The brother attempted to take the girl out of school and marry her to a Hindu man before she was yet twelve years old, the legal minimum age for marriage at that time, but John Morton threatened to go to the police and the brother backed off. When the girl came of age, Sarah reported, “he married her to a heathen man in heathen ceremony and now she lives with him seven miles away from us.”85 This story of loss from Sarah’s perspective is illustrative of an incomplete meeting of the missionary

83 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 90.

84 Sarah Morton, quoted in Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 91.

85 Morton, John Morton of Trinidad, 344.

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objective as well as an indicator that girls were subject to continuous monitoring of behavior even after leaving the home. The fact that Sarah knew what became of the girl when she left and exactly how far away she lived reveals the Indian girls remained under the watchful eye of the missionary even after release from the schools.

Mix of Two Worlds

The successes of the imperial civilizing mission in the colonies were only partial because the Indians that were the targets of these efforts resisted by retaining elements of their culture despite attempts to erase them. Full realization of complete conformity to imperial cultural ideals never occurred. When Sarah Morton discussed the students who

“chatter like magpies,” she admitted they did so in a mix of Hindi and English. Anna

Mahase’s favorite memories of her childhood were of her parents telling stories in Hindi and celebrations of Diwali that brought all the neighbors to their home to celebrate their

Indian heritage. Toward the end of her life, Anna wrote a critique of Indians who adopted cultural changes that watered-down Indian ways. For example, she explained that many

Indians gave up the naming practices of India to assimilate to European ways of life. She thought it absurd that some Indians took the surname Maharaj. She explained, “Maharaj is a calling name. You call a man Maharaj because he belongs to the Brahmin caste and his wife is called Maharajin. If one calls himself Maharaj as his surname, his wife is Mrs.

Maharaj, how ridiculous and the surname Maharaj more ridiculous still. . . Soon we East

Indians will lose our identity. No one will know who is who.”86 Gaiutra Bahadur

86 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 60-62.

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described the way they spoke in her family home as a stained glass comprised of bits of their native language and imperial words. Kenneth Mahase wrote that even though visits back home to his mother and uncles who never accepted his conversion to Christianity were difficult he still went because his ties to his family and culture were important to him. After years of traveling from island to island with Chandisingh, Rookabai left him and returned to India with her youngest daughter because she longed for home. There is no doubt that the missionaries made inroads and brought changes to the personal lives, family dynamics, and communities of the Indian migrants. However, rather than reproduce empire they instead participated in the creation of something new. What was born of imperial missionary activity amongst Indians in the Caribbean were new generations of Indians who saw themselves not as loyal subjects of the British Empire but as children of India and of the Caribbean. Inadvertently, the missionaries promoted through education, religious instruction, and their tactic of encouraging a sense of belonging by teaching in Hindi and being accommodating of Indian cultural practices, an

Indo-Caribbean identity, and a strong sense of ownership over the Caribbean as their home.

The Road Less Traveled

As colonized Indians formed new identities in the Caribbean, “Colonial observers, gazing on Indian women, saw an unsettling liberation.”87 To the dismay of the colonial powers and the missionaries, Indian women, using their acquired English language and

87 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 90.

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Biblical messages of equality and self-worth began to assert themselves as individuals in control of their own destiny. Bahadur illustrated this with a retelling of an encounter

Sarah Morton had with an Indian woman who told Sarah she was not married but found herself a ‘papa’ and she would only keep him for as long as he treated her nicely. She told Sarah, “If he does not treat me well, I shall send him off at once; that’s the right way, is it not?” and Sarah mused, “This will be to some a new view of women’s rights.”88

Perhaps the real significance of the missionary schools is that they made available spaces that served as places of intellectual explorations of identity. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provided the backdrop for the stories of the Mahases,

Mortons, and Bahadurs was a point in Caribbean history that served as an incubator of ideas of Caribbean nationalism, gender roles, and community ideals. These ideals would grow in following decades as “the education of the Indian woman [became] more than just a preparation and training for marriage.”89 The early efforts of missionaries evolved into a complex process of negotiation of power and identity in the colonial Caribbean.

Kenneth Mahase presented Anna as a liberator and role model for Indian girls. “The

Indian community looked upon [Anna] with surprise and admiration as many Indian girls were not allowed to go to school. This opened up a new era for the Indian girls in the community. Indian parents began to send out their girls to school with a sense of security as to their moral safety.”90 Ironically, the fear of loss of culture and religion as in the

88 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 90.

89 Kenneth Ramchand, foreword to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, v.

90 Kenneth Mahase, “The Autobiography of Kenneth Emmanuel Mahase,” appendix to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 107.

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example Kenneth Mahase provided of his uncles, was the reason for Indian family apprehension regarding missionary schooling. Anna recruited the girls with the intention to change them, not keep secure “their moral safety.” This tension between the ideal of promoting imperial conformity as an agent of empire and holding on to the family practices and links to Indian culture provided the backdrop of the environment in which girls like Anna and her contemporaries came of age. In this context, Indian girls had choices and Anna’s story exemplifies one such path. She chose to follow some guidance of the missionaries, even acting on their behalf, but also to retain elements of her family’s culture to the point of taking issue with other Indians who did not. This shows that new generations of Indian girls with notions of liberation did not have to follow the missionaries, the empire, or their families. Instead, as will be show in the next chapter, the impact of this realization of choice was that principles of education and religion created complex negotiations of identity that underscored British strategies of domination in the nineteenth-century Caribbean undercut imperial authority in the twentieth century.

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CHAPTER VI

WISHING TO BE LOOKED UPON: NEGOTIATING INDO-CARIBBEAN IDENTITY

POST-INDENTURE

I am sure that when I am buried and gone away my name will be still ringing in the hearts of men and my name will go down in the history of the world.1

The above quote is from an unnamed Indian teenager, taken from a 1957 government-assisted survey conducted of all high school students in Trinidad. The survey, taken forty years after the end of the indenture system in the British Empire, asked the students of Trinidad about their future career and family aspirations. This boy, and many of his counterparts, expressed not only a desire to be seen and remembered but also a confidence that he would achieve these goals. As discussed in chapter five, imperial education initiatives carried out by government and religious agents complicated the youth’s concept of self and belonging. The process of piecing together variations of blended identities introduced in chapter five is explored further in this chapter as it manifested more apparently in the waning years of British imperialism. As British power declined in the first half of the twentieth century and the colonizing power’s exit became

1 Unnamed Indian student quoted in Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni, We Wished to Be Looked Upon: A Study of the Aspirations of Youth in a Developing Society (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), 106.

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possible then imminent, the colonized communities and individuals within them underwent a process of identity conceptualization informed by the colonial experience and shaped by shifting race-relations, community construction, and personal, often ambivalent negotiations of belonging and ambition. This quote, along with others examined below, illustrates youthful aspirations and assertions of possible selves as freedom from empire loomed on the horizon.

Trinidad as Case Study

This chapter explores the Indo-Caribbean pre-independence identity formation process through a case study of the viewpoint of the Indian migrant community in

Trinidad. Trinidad is an ideal space not only for the colony’s relative abundance of source material, but also because the conditions in Trinidad reflected those in other

British Caribbean colonies that received Indian migrants. Therefore, Trinidad’s Indian experience provides a generalized model for other migrant Indian experiences in the

Caribbean (with exceptions as noted). The sources informing this chapter are excerpts from Anna Mahase’s biography detailed in chapter five of this dissertation, contemporary newspapers, reflective pieces written by scholars that were either members or direct descendants of members of these communities, and the words of the student respondents to the above-mentioned survey.

Gender as a Category of Analysis

This chapter views the formations of communities and conceptualizations of the self-described below through a gendered lens. The living conditions and experiences of

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women and girls as well as ideas regarding proper gendered behavior explored throughout this dissertation informed how Caribbean notions of identity took shape. The continual gender-based surveillance, migration, commoditization, and educational initiatives beginning in the nineteenth century formed the framework for the particular type of negotiation of identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this chapter illustrates that because of these continued processes, the status of women and girls in newly forming communities took center stage in Indian discussions of progress and as such, female roles in preserving and establishing these communities are vital subjects of study.

Migration, Identity, and Community

To explore how pre-Independence Trinidadians negotiated the question of who belongs in a community, this study focuses primarily on negotiations of identity, nuanced in variable conceptualizations of community and self. Jean Paul Sartre’s interpretation of the process of identity formation in a post-colonial context as presented in the introduction to Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized is useful here. Sartre explained Memmi’s formulation of identity during the mid-twentieth century period of

North African decolonization as a process “caught between the racist usurpation of the colonizers and the building of a future nation by the colonized, where the author

‘suspects he will have no place.’”2 Memmi, like the Indo-Trinidadian subjects of this chapter, lived in state of uncertainty, resultant from the colonial conditions of the past and

2 Jean Paul Sartre, introduction to The Colonizer and the Colonized, by Albert Memmi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), xxii.

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the possibilities for the future. As Mohammed shows, reflections on identity “…did not begin in the academy but in the cultural assertions in the nationalist and independence struggles...”3 Therefore, internal and external struggles for belonging were central to and vividly apparent in experiences of community building amongst migrants in colonies transitioning to independence and provide an excellent space for study. In this light, this chapter examines the period following the end of indenture in 1917 to formal independence of Trinidad in 1962, as a period characterized by ambivalence grounded in uncertainty about the future, struggles for power and control in the wake of diminishing colonialism, and resultant theorizations of community and individuality.

Belonging to Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization that communities are a product of people’s imagination and desire for a connection with others perceived to possess similar goals or experiences proves to be a useful framework to analyze the Trinidadian case.

Understanding that discursive processes involved in nation-building created imagined communities is key to studying how groups of people evolve and define themselves in relation to one another and to those perceived to be outside their group.4 In his study on migration and identity, sociologist Gerard Delanty explained how migrants imagined

3 Patricia Mohammed, "Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean," Feminist Review, Rethinking Caribbean Difference, no. 59 (Summer 1998): 7.

4 For more, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016) and, Aneta Pavlenko and Bonny Norton, "Imagined Communities, Identity, and English Language Learning," in International Handbook of English Language Teaching (New York, NY: Springer, 2007).

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their communities in an ongoing process involving oppositional positioning and need for conflict resolution:

Interests and identifications are not decreed once and for all by specific material/socio-economic positions, but rather evolve in a confrontation with other interests and patterns of identification in processes of problem resolution and search for social compromises. Concepts such as interest and identity are not essential but discursive categories, and as such undergo continuous transformation through processes of social bargaining.5

In Trinidad, as in other emergent post-colonial nation-states, confrontations between colonized groups on the eve of independence were at the center questions of belonging such as: who are they? Who are we? And who am I? Relations with those imagined as aligned or opposed to a group shaped how members of the group saw themselves in relation to one another and outsiders. This chapter explores this concept by interrogating how the Creole population and Indian population in the pre-independence Trinidadian communities thought about and worked with and against one another to figure out their rightful place in the changing pre-independence colony.

The End of Indenture

The indenture system officially ended in 1917 throughout the British Empire primarily due to three factors: efforts of Indian nationalists in India; a rising preoccupation with Indian women’s honor; and a shift in priorities due to the onset of

World War I. First, Indian nationalists, initially led by Mohandas Gandhi’s mentor G.K.

Gokhale and later by Gandhi himself, took up the cause against indenture by proclaiming that the exploitative labor system was “an insult to [Indian] dignity and self-respect” and

5 Gerard Delanty, Identity, Belonging and Migration (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 21.

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“an attempt to make Indians permanent coolies in the eyes of the world.”6 Couched in terms of economic progress for all Indians and principles of morality, Gandhi argued that even if indenture provided a livelihood to individuals in the short term, it was not good for India as an emerging nation. He argued, if Indians “stand to gain economically by selling our souls, we ought not to do so” and asserted that laborers needed to remain in

India, otherwise there would be no labor left to build India’s industries.7

The second reason for the indenture system’s demise sprang from the first. As nationalists brought public awareness to the dark underbelly of the indenture system, newspapers published emotional stories of the poor treatment of laborers. Even more, challenges specifically to the honor of Indian women emerged as the central polemic in the push to end indenture. Nationalists used stories of indentured women’s objectification, abuse, rape, and exploitation, like those described in chapter four, to spark moral outrage. One of Gandhi’s disciples, an ex-indenture named Totaram

Sanadhya proclaimed, “Isn’t this a thing of shame for us that our sisters, mothers and daughters across seven seas should suffer these outrages? Isn’t there even a particle of self-pride and self-protection in us?” and Gandhi publicly declared, “This business about the women is the weakest and irremediable part of the evil.”8 Nationalists directed the public gaze to the victimized Indian woman and, despite other divisions in the Indian

6 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 155.

7 Mohandas Gandhi, 1916, quoted in Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 158.

8 Ibid., 156.

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nationalist movement, there was a general consensus that for the sake of women indenture had to be stopped.

With these rhetorical attacks on indenture occurring in the background, the emergence of World War I sealed the fate of the indenture system. First, the British responded to Indian complaints by launching investigations into the treatment of Indians on plantations and when they discovered evidence of the abuse, they offered several appeasement measures designed to restructure the system and provide protections so it was less exploitative to the laborers.9 The compromise was not acceptable to the nationalists who demanded a complete end to the system on economic and moral grounds.10 For Gandhi and other nationalists, the injustices were too great to allow for any accommodation. Coinciding with this failure of the parties to compromise, colonial officials suspended Indian labor migration to other colonies under the 1915 Defence of

India Act – a security act put in place during World War I to combat perceived threats from Indian nationalists. Labor migration did not restart after the war.11 In addition, the

British navy appropriated migrant ships and the labor recruitment centers in India shifted their mandates to recruit soldiers for the war. The continued resistance by nationalists along with war needs and apprehensions about the costs of reinstating the system with the promised protections led to the end of Indian contractual labor migration in 1917 and the

9 “Emigration from India: Report of the Committee,” The Times (London), June 20, 1910.

10 “Indian Labour,” The Times (London), September 1, 1917.

11 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 339-366.

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subsequent end to all remaining indenture contracts by 1921.12 As emigration to the

Caribbean slowly ground to a halt and many indentures either chose not to or were unable to return after the completion of their contracts, the question of the Indians’ rightful place in their new Caribbean homeland was brought to a head. Competing Creole communities, newly forming Indian communities, and individual Indians engaged in discursive battles over the right of Indians to remain in the Caribbean.

Creole Popular Resistance to Colonial Rule

Exploitative urban labor and declining rural wages and positions characterized the economic conditions of popular class in Trinidad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Port-of-Spain, the country’s political capital and major port city, experienced exponential population growth amongst the poor and working class and a high infant mortality rate.13 Competition from European beet sugar drove down the profits, wages, and available work on sugar plantations. While most Creoles left plantation work in the first half of the nineteenth century, 30% remained by 1891, mostly in positions of skilled and semi-skilled labor, such as mechanics, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Many of them lost their jobs because of the declining profits on plantations and because of technological improvements that allowed for more mechanization of estate work.14

12 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 156-158; Verene A. Shepherd, Women in Caribbean History: The British- Colonised Territories (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), 138-139.

13 Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop 26 (Winter 1988): 10.

14 Campbell, “Carnival,” 17.

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The economic difficulties faced by the Creole popular class led to anxiety and labor unrest in the form of creation of labor organizations, and labor strikes. In 1897,

Creole workers formed the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA). The TWA protested insufficient representations on government labor councils, condemned government restrictions on boxing matches (a means of income for some Creole men living in urban centers), and set up a Labour Bureau that had nine branches throughout the island by 1913.15 In 1917, The TWA led oil, dock, and asphalt workers in a strike against their employers, the United British Oilfields and the Trinidad Lake Asphalt

Company.16 When Creole soldiers that fought for the British in World War I returned home to Trinidad, they returned having reported racial abuses from the British during the war and, without adequate work and wages in Trinidad, joined the TWA and rallied other workers in a general strike in 1919.17

To add to the discontent of the Creole working and poor class, colonial officials in

Trinidad took aim at social and cultural practices in attempt to reassert their control over the Creoles. Beginning with an 1868 ban on obeah witchcraft practices, central to many

Creole communities, colonial officials extended their reach into the private lives and cultural of the inhabitants with outright bans on drumming and the observance of the

15 Brinsley Samaroo and Cherita Girvan, “The Trinidad Workingmen’s Association and the Origins of Popular Protest in a Crown Colony,” Social and Economic Studies 21 (June 1972): 208.

16 Ibid., 211; Campbell, “Carnival,” 19.

17 Samaroo and Girvan, “Trinidad Workingmen’s Association,” 212.

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Canboulay festival and restrictions placed upon what the British colonial deemed to be

“proper” celebrations of Carnival.18

Drumming, often associated with obeah practices, was also part of the expression of Creole anxieties during this period of economic difficulty and social repression.

Feeling powerless against the ruling class, poor and working-class Creoles in urban centers formed neighborhood bands that allowed them to direct their frustrations into intracommunity competition. These bands, most commonly comprised of young and unemployed men, faced off against other bands by drumming, engaging in stick-fighting competitions, and through song battles. With origins in West African music tradition and as a precursor to Calypso, these bands sang lyrics that boasted their superiority and denigrated their opponents.19

Carnival and the ways in which Creoles celebrated the festival became central to

Creole identity construction and popular resistance. Originally excluded from any participation by white elites, after emancipation former slaves gradually took over

Carnival planning and activities and made the space of the Carnival festival a place for claiming power and beauty. Susan Campbell explains how, for at least the couple of days of the festival, the oppressive world of the Creole disappeared, “On Jou’vert morning, poor, powerless and degraded people, ‘black and ugly,’ felt gorgeous in their Carnival costumes; taking to the road ‘in shining rainbow crowds,’ they felt part of a potentially

18 Campbell, “Carnival,” 15.

19 Ibid., 12. See also Garth L. Green and Philip W. Scher, eds., Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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powerful mass.”20 During the festival, Creoles came together en masse and made a beautiful spectacle with the aim of pushing back against the narrative that the colonial elite fed them. Making a spectacle of oneself in this way was a form resistance to the constant subjection of the oppressing gaze of those who ruled over them. In additional to traditional brightly color costumes with plumes of feathers and shimmy fabrics, some participants used the festival to wear costumes that openly mocked government officials and members of the professional and elite classes.21

In the early twentieth century, working-class Trinidadians introduced Calypso music as part of Carnival. Calypso as it took form in Trinidad was a “cultural medium through which performers bring ideas to life, nurture hostilities, profess love, release energies and contemplate social change.”22 Pre-independence calypso as a music genre gave members of the Creole community an outlet to express frustrations, discuss politics, and promote unity in their communities, primarily through lyrics of common grievances and attacks on common opponents. Below, Calypsonian Lord Executor explains the origins of Calypso:

20 Campbell, “Carnival,” 20.

21 Ibid., 14.

22 Cynthia Mahabir, “The Rise of Calypso Feminism: Gender and Musical Politics in the Calypso,” Popular Music 20 (October 2001): 413.

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Listen to how Calypso originated Sung by folks who were uneducated, First by slaves, next laborers from the fields Would gather and shout, regardless of their needs. Soon after they got Emancipation It was the infatuation Of the native population.23

Lord Executor explained how calypso evolved from songs sung on slave estates to a main of feature of Carnival. Not that he refers to the “infatuated” Creole population as

“native,” signifying an internalization of colonial rhetoric regarding what it means to be native. While a few calypsonians were from the middle class, most were from the working class or poor class, but took on monikers that reflected an aspirational grab for power. Lord Superior, Mighty Sparrow, King Radio, Mighty Dougla, Oppressor, Iron

Duke, and Lord Executor represent a sampling of popular calypsonian names. These lyricists projected a masculine image and sang sexually explicit and violent lyrics that resonated with the feelings of powerlessness in the Creole popular class. The ideal calypsonian did not work outside the Carnival season, but rather lived off “the earnings of women who, thanks to his prowess and glory, had attached themselves to him.”24

Calypsonian King Radio explained,

. . . the Radio is living like a sheik today. Last year there was three, But this year he has seven wives, Imagine how they jealous Radio’s life! I am the only sheik in the lan’ Living the life of King Soloman!25

23 Lord Executor, quoted in Campbell, “Carnival,” 25n59.

24 Campbell, “Carnival,” 14.

25 King Radio, quoted in Campbell, “Carnival,” 25n60.

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In addition to communicating their high aspirations of power, calypso lyrics expressed working-class solidarity through airing concerns of economic competition and uncertainties. Calypsonians wrote and sang political lyrics that called out injustices in the government. And they helped to define the Creole community by employing rhetoric that defined what it was not: not the ruling British elites and not the Indian community that they wished would leave.

Who are They? Creole Communities

There had been tensions between the Creole community comprised of former slaves and their descendants and the migrant Indian laborers since the Indians’ initial arrival in the 1840s. The introduction of cheap migrant labor dealt a traumatic blow to the early developing Creole communities. While many Creoles refused the agricultural labor of the plantation, those that relied on it and the ability to negotiate with plantation managers for sustainable wages saw their chances at survival lessened with the arrival of the new labor force. This was exasperated with the sugar crisis of the late nineteenth century because as the estates laid off semi-skilled and skilled Creoles, the Indian presence on the estates eliminated Creole opportunities to replace their skilled work with task work. In the eyes of the Creoles, Indians were interlopers that never found welcome in the Creole communities who themselves struggled to find their collective identity in the shifting racial politics and economics of the colonial Caribbean.26

26 “The Legacy of Indian Migration to European Colonies,” The Economist, September 2, 2017.

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The tensions between the two communities came to a head in the early twentieth century. By that time, a Creole middle class had emerged in the form of an “historically conscious black/coloured intelligentsia” who “wished to vindicate their race by acquiring the status and power that were still the monopoly of the White upper class.”27 This group had benefited from exposure to education initiatives from government schools that targeted Creole children much in the same way as the missionary groups discussed in chapter five targeted the Indian children in their education and cultural colonialism initiatives. In addition, the discovery of oil in Trinidad in 1910 created a base for industrialization in the islands, the impetus for labor and political organization, and some

Creoles seized opportunities to work as business professionals in the growing oil industry.28 Therefore, this wish to vindicate was an assertion of identity amid changing social conditions and an attempt to prevent returning to an oppressive past. The Creole intelligentsia sought to protect and take ownership over the development of their identities and thus their future social positions.

In response to unrest amongst the skilled and semi-skilled workers in the rural areas, the educated intelligentsia aimed to elevate further the economic and social positions of Creoles in the colony by calling for a complete elimination of the indenture system and thus an elimination of Indian competition. At the outset of the twentieth century, middle class Creoles wrote letters to colonial government officials and published

27 Kelvin Singh, Race and Class: Struggles in a Colonial State Trinidad, 1917-1945 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1994), 4, quoted in Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917-1947 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 64.

28 Rubin and Zavalloni, We Wished to Be Looked Upon, 29.

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statements in local newspapers that argued that the indenture system was only benefitting the planters and showing the economic disadvantages to not only Trinidad’s Creole laborers but also to the government that funded indenture’s upkeep. They concluded that indenture was bad business for everyone.29 In 1909 as Indian nationalists in India staged their campaigns against indenture, the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London appointed the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies, colloquially named the Sanderson Committee after Lord Sanderson, who presided over it. The

Sanderson Committee was an oversight group established to consider the issues involved in Indian indenture and to hear testimony of spokespeople for and against Indian indentured immigration.30 A large part of the testimonies received by the Sanderson

Committee were the letters written by middle-class Creoles demanding an end to the system. Indentured Indians themselves received no invitations to participate even though they had been attempting to form their own political organizations at this time. Their voices remained silenced until after the end of indenture.31 This letter writing was not meant to highlight dangers or exploitation inherent in the indenture program, but rather to provide demeaning assertions of the collective character of the Indian people and to argue that their presence was unwanted and unwarranted. In Trinidad and other parts of the

29 Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 64.

30 “Emigration from India: Report of the Committee,” The Times (London), June 20, 1910.

31 Gerad Tikasingh, “Toward a Formulation of the Indian View of History: The Representation of Indian Opinion in Trinidad, 1900-1921,” in Bridget Brereton and Winston Dookeran, eds., East Indians in the Caribbean: Colonialism and the Struggle for Identity (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1982), 14.

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British Caribbean, these sentiments formed the bedrock of Creole rhetorical condemnation of Indian presence.

Assertions of Creole middle-class community identity manifested not only in political letters but also in anti-Indian rhetorical attacks in newspapers. The practices of judging and surveillance that people of color in the islands had become accustomed to by living under colonial rule informed the behavior of these Creole groups that began to assert powerful gazes of their own onto the Indian community to push them into a subordinate status to them. Letters to the editor, such as those written to government officials, called for removal of the indenture system by invoking challenges to and judgments regarding Indian character and a basic right for Indians to reside in Trinidad.

For example, in the November 1911 edition of Trinidad Review, Algernon Burkett, a self- described “representative of Black interests in Trinidad” called the Indians “people of false religions” who needed to “stay in their native country and sully their own history.”32

This denigration of Indian people, grounded in racialized attacks on perceived difference for purposes of controlling them mirrored the attacks British colonists used with regard to

African labor as described in chapter two of this dissertation.

Popular discontent directed toward the Indian population came through Creole music. Calypsonians targeted Indians in their lyrics by referencing and poking fun at

Hindu incantations and emphasizing “heathenism” of Indians.33 This invocation of religious difference was an attempt to elevate social status via shared Christian

32 Quoted in Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 67.

33 Sherry-Ann Singh, “Hinduism and the State in Trinidad,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6 (2005): 362.

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association with the still powerful British ruling elite and more deeply entrench notions of the Hindu as a foreign body in need of removal. In this way, the calypso was a vessel for the transfer of embedded imperial attitudes from the Creole community to the Indian community.

An excellent example of how calypso songwriters employed colonial ideologies in the form of racial hostilities between Creoles and Indians is seen in the 1958 song,

“Tax Them!” by famous calypsonian pioneer, Lord Superior:

Tax them doctor tax them Tax them like you mad Lord Superior say Don’t care who feel bad Down to the street girls You should make them bawl Check every Yankee man that they call And buss tax on them and all

It have some old Indian people Playing they like to beg This time they got one million dollars Tie between their leg I am telling the doctor I am talking the facts Is to chop loose the capra with a sharp axe And haul out your income tax.34

Lord Superior directed this song to Dr. Eric Williams who, by this time, was the leader of the Creole-led nationalist association called the People’s National Movement and the major political leader in Trinidad on the eve of independence. It is noteworthy that Lord

Superior, himself a working-class urban chantuel, used the medium of Calypso music to speak directly to the leader that does not call by name, but by the title, “doctor.”

34 Lord Superior, “Tax Them!”, 1958, quoted in Shalini Puri, “Race, Rape, and Representation: Indo- Caribbean Women and Cultural Nationalism,” Cultural Critique 36 (Spring, 1997): 122.

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Several lines in these verses express the Creole relationship to Indians in Trinidad as expressed through violent and sexualized turns of phrase. First, Lord Superior called for taxes on the Indians because he accused them of hiding their wealth in their capras

(bundled loincloths) and his proposed solution was to chop the capra to take this hidden money. The “street girls” in the first stanza represent Indian girls that provided sexual services to American servicemen stationed in Trinidad. Lord Superior also called for taxation on their earnings. This surface information gleaned from the song reveals economic anxieties resultant from Indian presence in Trinidad as well as character attacks on Indians themselves by suggesting that they were untruthful and miserly.

There is much more to these lyrics than those surface anxieties, however. Linguist

Shalini Puri broke down each line of these verses in the context in which Lord Superior penned them and concluded that this calypso is “implicitly a fantasy of sexual violence” and a “vicious fantasy of punishment.”35 The call to make the girls in the first stanza

“bawl” is a reference to sexual assault and the description of the use of the “sharp axe” to cut the capra in the second implies violent castration of the Indian man. These two imagined attacks on the Indians represent two important aspects of calypso music in relation to hostilities between these communities. First, the violent nature and the gendered, sexually implicit messages indicate deep resentments between the two communities. Furthermore, as explained by Bell Hooks in her book, We Real Cool: Black

Men and Masculinity, violent arguments such as these reflect direct legacies of race- based colonial rule in the historical evolution of the relationship between ideas of black

35 Puri, “Race, Rape, and Representation,” 122-123.

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masculinity and violence. Hooks shows that colonial hegemonic masculine ideals defined what it was to be a man by one’s ability to dominate. Therefore, ideas of violence and domination originated in actions and ideology passed down from the white patriarchy onto colonized people of color. Hooks explained,

Cultures of domination . . . are founded on the principle that violence is necessary for the maintenance of the status quo. . . long before any young black male acts violent he is born into a culture that condones violence as a means of social control, that identifies patriarchal masculinity by the will to do violence. Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this. As a consequence, all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent.36

Lord Superior’s violent lashing out at Indians, both male and female, in his calypso lyrics were reflective of a continuation of a learned European patriarchal ideology, an appropriation of colonial gazing power in bold assertion of demonstrative dominance and masculinity, and acknowledgment of his own powerless position in his appeal to the

“doctor.” The lyrics are show one way that the Creole community defined itself in relation to what it was not. Hypersexualized and masculine assertions in Calypso songs projected a dichotomous image of Creoles as stronger, manlier, and therefore more deserving of power and wealth in opposition to ethically, morally, physically deficient, and therefore victimizable Indians.

The significance of the animosity between the Creole and the Indian communities during the first half of the twentieth century lie in the process of community and identity formation in Trinidad. The Creole community established political and economic power over Indians by passionate assertion not of who they were, but of who they were not.

36 bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 49.

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Indians in Trinidad represented laborers who disrupted Creole successes at a moment of shifting power dynamics with the white ruling elite, and therefore became obvious targets in processes of oppositional conceptualizations of community identity. An after-effect of more than a century of white colonial domination via economic exploitation and the projection of these hegemonic ideologies onto colonized peoples, it became “one of the great ironies of decolonization that the racial tensions [took] the form of horizontal hostility between blacks and Indians.”37 This colonial-manufactured horizontal hostility was central to the processes of community creation amongst the Creoles, and following the end of indenture, their Indian counterparts.

Who are We? Indian Communities

In the space of imagined communities, groups establish norms and acceptable behaviors for community membership. Etienne Wenger et al. explained that these

“communities of practices” are formed by “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.”38 From these groups emerge discursively determined sets of values based upon perceived common struggles and goals. By

“practicing” together, communities develop “a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches. They also develop personal relationships and established ways of

37 Puri, “Race, Rape, and Representation,” 120.

38 Etienne Wenger, Richard A. McDermott, and William Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002), EBSCOhost eBook Collection.

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interacting.”39 In Trinidad, communities built along racial lines, connected by fears and ambitions regarding the post-colonial conditions of the future state, promulgated sets of ideals for thinking and behavior for their respective communities and served as the physical spaces designed for teaching and reproducing those ideals. Indian communities in Trinidad formed by practicing together and discursively determining the sets of values that would define them.

By the early 1920s, due in part to contract fulfillments and in part to the missionaries’ education efforts, an Indian middle-class intelligentsia began to grow in

Trinidad. This small group of rising Indian community leaders was comprised mostly of men educated through missionary efforts, Hindu pundits, and Muslim imams.40 They were respected amongst Indians, historically conscious, aware of their roots in exploitative labor, and cognizant of the racial resentments emanating from Creole communities.41 Indians initially responded to Creole hostilities toward them by asserting their own nationalist sentiments of belonging, by promoting education with hopes of economic advancement in their communities, and by returning rhetorical attacks back at their opponents. Indians argued for their rightful place in Trinidad by citing the

“indispensability of their steady, reliable labour to the colony’s development” and claiming that they were just as responsible for the advancement of the colony as any others.42 They also responded to Creoles with race-based attacks that connected their

39 Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder, Cultivating Communities.

40 Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 29.

41 Singh, Race and Class, quoted in Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 66.

42 Tikasingh, “Toward a Formulation,” in Brereton and Dookeran, East Indians in the Caribbean, 18.

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paler skin tone to the white ruling elite and employing colonial hegemonic ideals of racial superiority to claim biological superiority over the darker-skinned inhabitants of the island.43

In response to exclusion from Creole political and labor organizing, working-class

Indians formed their own associations. Beginning in 1897, Indians from southern

Trinidad answered the creation of the Creole-only Trinidad Workingmen’s Association with the establishment of the East Indian National Association (EINA). Initially, educated and contractually free Indians formed the EINA to address repressive immigration practices, primarily racial profiling in the form of exorbitant requests for documentation of their free status, but the EINA evolved into the main Indian political organizing apparatus for Indian workers in the twentieth century. In 1909, coincident with Indian exclusion from the Sanderson Committee, another group of Indians residing in the north formed a complementary East Indian National Congress (EINC) and worked together with the EINA to increase Indian political participation in colonial government.

Just prior to this, the British colonial government, under pressure from the Creole middle- class made available small government positions to Creoles and Indians such as county council seats and representation on the colony’s Legislative Council. In 1912, the president of the EINA, George Fitzpatrick, became the first Indian member of Trinidad’s

Legislative Council, a remarkable victory for Trinidad’s Indian community.44

43 Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 68.

44 Ibid., 66.

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In addition to political representation, the Indian middle-class promoted a sense of

Trinidadian nationalism in the Indian communities. As their migration to Trinidad began seventy-five years prior and most Indians did not return to India, Indians living in

Trinidad by the early twentieth century were generations removed from having stepped foot in India and had no intention of returning. Trinidad was home for them. Indians in

Trinidad began to resent and reject the term “immigrant,” especially amongst those that had been residing in Trinidad for at least ten years and those who were Trinidad-born.45

In an effort to connect with the Indian community, Presbyterian missionaries supported this cause and appealed to government officials to stop the prevalent use of the

“immigrant” designation as well as the demeaning “coolie” moniker. Because of these collective efforts, government documents and print media used these terms less and less,

“reflecting changing perceptions of the status of the Indian community both on the part of the Indians themselves and the wider society.”46 The gains in political representation and increased Indian nationalist assertions formed the backdrop of increased expressions of racial resentment emanating from the Creole communities.

Following the abolition of the indenture system, hostilities between the Creoles and Indians intensified as the working-class Indians sought to secure wage labor and middle-class Indians sought political representation to secure their place as Trinidadians.

The increasingly powerful and numerically greater Creole community overwhelmed

Indian efforts and ostracized them from political positions and many professions in

45 Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783-1962 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), 108.

46 Ibid.

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majority-Creole urban centers. Due to these losses as well as the attacks on their character, Indians turned inward and formed insular communities in the more rural regions with mandates to protect and promote Indian progress. Ironically, even though they expressed no desire to return to India, Indian community leaders encouraged consciousness of community by celebrating shared Indian heritage in the forms of history and culture that emphasized ties to the Indian subcontinent while taking a conservative turn in the rejection of Creole traditions.47 For example, Creoles had practiced Carnival in

Trinidad since 1783 and free Indians took part in the festival in the nineteenth century took part to varying degrees, similar to how the Creoles celebrated the Hosay festival alongside Indians. However, after the end of indenture, Indians left Creoles out of their cultural celebrations and increasingly influential Indian Hindu and Muslim religious and community leaders declared Carnival immoral and inconsistent with Indian values. What these leaders saw as the “free interaction of semi-nude male and female bodies” and the

“sexually provocative public dancing and behavior” took center stage as a point of contention and therefore a line of demarcation between the two groups.48 Educated Indian middle class political activists and religious leaders began campaigns to promote public observances of cultural rites and religious traditions, and to incorporate protections for

Indians in legal code. They fought for (and eventually won, but not until after independence), official recognition for traditional Indian marriage, cremation and burial

47 Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 81.

48 Singh, “Hinduism,” 361.

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rites, and declaration of Hindu and Muslim religious celebrations as national holidays.49

This practice of promoting Indian culture while speaking against Creole culture widened the imaginary divide between the two communities.50

The rhetorical link with the Indian homeland was not a wholesale promotion of

Indian nationalism as it existed in the subcontinent. However, Gandhian nationalism in the Asian subcontinent promoted Pan-Indianism, a movement that proclaimed that

Indians all over the globe were one people and promoted a return to India to reunite them.

In Trinidad, Indian community leaders propagated their own brand of Indian nationalism that was “both a rejection and an accommodation of India.”51 They revered Indian cultural traditions such as food and religious rites, encouraged the speaking of Hindi in the home and villages, and were excited for and proud of Indian independence efforts from Britain as they connected their own subordinate status to their subcontinent counterparts. At the same time, Indian community leaders engaged in impassioned campaigns to claim their new collective identity not as Indians but as Indo-Trinidadians.

The adoption of this hyphenated label by the Indian communities in Trinidad in the early decades of the twentieth century reflected their desire to remain connected to their heritage but also, in the wake of their marginalization and exclusion, to claim Trinidad as

49 Singh, “Hinduism,” 362.

50 In the twenty-first century, Trinidad’s sixteen national holidays and official cultural celebrations reflect the efforts of the Creole and Indian communities to integrate their culture into the Trinidadian state as it was forming. In addition to celebrations of Trinidad as a unified and sovereign state, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim holidays are observed as well as Indian Arrival Day and Emancipation Day. For more, see “National Holidays and Festivals,” The Office of the President of Trinidad and Tobago, accessed January 5, 2019, https://otp.tt/trinidad-and-tobago/national-holidays-and-awards/.

51 Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 62.

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their rightful homeland. The Indian educated middle class professionals and religious leaders led these campaigns in efforts to construct a social conscious amongst all the

Indians in Trinidad. Significantly, in this Indian-sanctioned label, the placement of the adjective referring to India as applied to the noun that references Trinidad is indicative of how the community at large perceived and asserted themselves as Trinidadians at the core, but with important Indian influences and characteristics, not vice versa.52

Community Ideals and Protecting Women

Imagined and promoted ideals regarding the proper roles and behavior of Indian women and girls were central to the formation of the rising Indian communities in

Trinidad. Recall that fears over “sullied reputations” of Indian women united Indians in the subcontinent in the nationalist, end-of-indenture campaigns. The ideals created by men in the Indo-Trinidadian communities restricted women’s freedoms of movement and were more conservative and in line with traditional Indian and British patriarchal practices of seclusion than they had been at the end of the nineteenth century. Consistent with Indian nationalist and indenture-ending arguments regarding women’s honor, the imagined space of the community became the primary place for practicing women’s protection.

Testimonies by colonial inspectors and investigations that took place as part of the

Sanderson Committee, along with Indian nationalist newspapers circulated in India and in

52 This identification persists in Trinidad today. In a 2017 interview with Indo-Trinidadians over a traditional Indian meal, Anthony Bourdain asked the men if they were Indian or Trinidadian and they all agreed they were Trinidadian first, Indian second. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, “Trinidad,” Season 9 Episode 7, Directed by Jesse Sweet, CNN International and Roads & Kingdoms, June 18, 2017. th

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the colonies, exposed labor violations and sexual assaults on Indian women, usually at the hands of their white labor masters. One example of a story published widely and well known amongst Indians in India and in the colonies was about an attempted attack on an

Indian woman named Kunti serving under contract in Fiji.53 As Indian nationalists promoted the idea of a unified Indian diaspora and because the Colonial Office in London regulated and administered the indenture system in all the colonies, stories from anywhere in the Empire about oppression of indenture Indians captured the attention of

Indians everywhere. In the story, Kunti reported that a plantation overseer and driver almost raped her, but she avoided the attack by jumping in a river and swimming away from them. Fiji’s immigration chief and the plantation master responded to outrage over this story by blaming Kunti for being too available to the men and “branded her a troublemaker,” thus shifting her image in the public eye from victim to “harlot” and shifting responsibility to the Indian community for not securing her protection.54

During indenture, Indian women experienced both liberation and restrictions based on their sex. As migrants, the women enjoyed some measures of freedom from gender oppressive traditional Indian and British cultural practices due to the relative shortage of women in relation to men as discussed in chapter four. The sex-ratio disparity

53 Fiji, while outside the Caribbean, experienced a similar system of governmentally administered indentured servitude. Because the Colonial Office in London regulated and administered the indenture system in all the colonies, Indian nationalists that argued against the indenture system saw indenture to be a global system that affected the Indian diaspora.

54 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 157-159; Eleanor A. Allen, “Women Workers in Fiji: An Unfortunate Economy,” The Guardian (London), February 23, 1923; and Brij V. Lal, “Kunti’s Cry: Indentured Women on Fiji Plantations,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 22 (March 1985): 55-71.

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allowed women to enter typically male spaces that were normally off-limits.55 During the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries in the colonies, while it was not commonplace for sexes to mix freely, it was not entirely unusual for girls to walk by themselves to attend school, to play outside with neighborhood boys, or for women to work alongside men on estates or in religious-sanctioned activities as described in Anna

Mahase’s experiences in chapter five. Many women came to Trinidad by themselves and, on the plantations, in schools, and in early forays into wage labors, had regular encounters with men. Exposure of stories like Kunti’s, fears regarding the damage migration caused to women’s moral character, and the accusations waged against her led to discussions regarding women’s freedom of movement and access to men and spaces outside protective community boundaries where potential dangers lurked.56

Middle-class Indian men engaged in discursive debates over women’s roles and their protections and left the Indian women out of their discussions. There were very few political or social organizations for women and those that existed, like the East India

Ladies’ Friendly Society, had all male leadership. As early twentieth century feminist ideology arose in Indian communities, Indian male intellectuals responded to it with a great deal of hostility and a call for a return to conservative Indian tradition. In 1928,

Seepersad Naipaul, journalist and father of author V.S. Naipaul, wrote a social critique for the East Indian Weekly, in which he criticized Indian women and girls for wearing

55 Mohammed, "Towards,” 14.

56 Lal, “Kunti’s Cry,” 55-71.

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modern and European style clothing that “affords the maximum exposal of the body.”57

Gazing on and expressing concern over the clothing of women indicates anxiety about

Indian women being seen by outsiders as sexual objects and an assertion of Indian male power over Indian women. Naipaul ended his critique with a call for Indians in Trinidad to return to traditional Indian clothing and customs as to protect their women’s reputations and return Indians to an imagined “glorious” Indian past. 58 This passage shows that social issues concerning women in the newly forming Indian communities reflected a continuation of the patriarchal norms discussed throughout this dissertation as well as an espousal of collective Indian consciousness grounded in protections for women’s honor, connections to the subcontinent, and promotion of conservative tradition. The discussions regarding Indian women’s proper dress, behaviors, and roles took place amongst middle-class men in newspapers and political spaces but the intention was not to determine ideals for only the middle-class women. The critics employed generalized language that implied the concerns applied to all Indian women.

In addition to encountering internal pressures to remain secluded within the bounds of safe Indian community spaces, women, regardless of class or status, found it difficult to secure employment after indenture because of their lack of related experience.

Estate policies restricted contracted women’s labor to subordinate field and domestic work and limited supervisory positions exclusively to males. Their lack of work experience outside of agricultural and domestic labor restricted Indian women’s entry

57 Seepersad Naipaul, “Dangerous Feminine Evolution . . . Even Indian Girls are on the March, Bobism and What not,” East Indian Weekly, November 24, 1928, quoted in Mohammed, Gender Negotiations, 86.

58 Ibid.

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into professional fields and commerce. In Trinidad in the 1930s, only four percent of the

Indian female population worked in professional sectors. The most commonly available job for women was educator, like Anna Mahase. Some were independent merchants and shopkeepers, and a few were able to earn livings as dancers and singers, much to the dismay of their community members.59 In one unusual case in 1932, a woman named

Gladys Eileen Ramsaran of Guyana became the first woman in the region admitted to the bar and employed as barrister. That she was a remarkable and widely publicized exception to the norm indicates the difficulties most women faced trying to enter professional spaces and achieve self-sufficiency outside their communities.60

Who am I? Possible Selves

For individuals living within the spaces of imagined communities of practice, the place of the community held myriad meanings and the relative adherence to those ideals varied greatly from individual to individual. Discussed in the final part of this study, the responses to the 1957 student survey reflect that variance by bringing to light the personalized and often ambivalent responses to questions about ambition and opportunities in the students’ futures. To analyze these responses, this study employs

Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius’ concept of the “possible self”. For Markus and Nurius,

“possible selves represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming” and the critical

59 Verene A. Shepherd, Women in Caribbean History: The British-Colonised Territories (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), 131.

60 “Women Celebrate 100 Years of Existence,” The Trinidad Guardian, March 22, 2011.

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interrogation of students’ assertions of their possible selves “provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self.”61 Students’ perceptions about what their futures might bring, both hopeful and doubtful, reveal a great deal about how they experienced their lives within their communities at that moment of uncertainty and indicates that many of them were not willing to completely fall into line with the prescribed community standards. Rather, like the school girls discussed in chapter five, the youth of the subsequent generations accommodated and rejected community norms on their own terms. Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni explain there is historical value in studying the ideas of young people in a changing community because they “provide a broad perspective on the currents of continuity and change” by “anticipat[ing] the fulfillment of the social promise and bring[ing] into focus the range of value systems of the society.”62 The youth, as the expected beneficiaries of social change, thought about themselves in their present social contexts and in the promised futures and provided their thoughts on both their present conditions and their aspirations.

The shifting community ideals described above reflected overarching developing hegemonic community goals. However, individuals that made up these communities did not always follow the prescribed guidelines to the letter. How Indians during this period of change in Trinidad thought about themselves, their relationship to others, and their potential futures was a result of processes of both socialization and personalization.

Markus and Nurius explained, “An individual is free to create any variety of possible

61 Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41 (September 1986): 954- 969.

62 Rubin and Zavalloni, We Wished to Be Looked Upon, 2-3.

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selves, yet the pool of possible selves derives from the categories made salient by the individual’s particular sociocultural and historical context.”63 Therefore, the community standards mattered because they presented boundaries that potentially limited how individuals could consider their place in their community.

By the middle of the twentieth century, primary education was standard for nearly all the children of the island, and access to secondary education increased dramatically.

Beginning in 1951, the colonial government expanded funding for both public and private secondary education institutions to make schooling available to more children ages 12-18. The number of secondary schools in Trinidad increased from three private schools in 1900 to sixteen public and twenty-one private schools by 1962. Because of the increased government oversight and funding into education initiatives, and the efforts of teachers like Anna Mahase in the private schools to out and physically retrieve girls from poor, rural areas, education by mid-century was widely available to students regardless of race or class status.

In the 1957 student survey of future aspirations mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the responses of Indian teenagers illustrate the processes involved with forming a sense of self in the sociopolitical context of uncertainty and excitement that characterized the eve of nationhood. Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni explained at the time they conducted their survey, “all the students recognize that the hopes and fortunes of the individual are closely linked to the changing social pattern” and their answers reflect a keen awareness of the social conditions that regulated their communities and varying

63 Markus and Nurius, “Possible Selves,” 954.

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measures of acceptance of those standards.64 Thus, Indian boys viewed the changing world as a place of unlimited potential but not their own insular communities. In several responses, Indian boys explained that because their fathers worked hard in manual labor, they felt obligated and entitled to succeed in professions that carried more prestige and wealth, even if it meant they had to move away to achieve these dreams. As exemplified in the quotation at the outset of this chapter, an Indian boy responded to the survey with confidence in his bright future and a sense of a globalized connection to a larger world.

Another Indian boy said he “would like to be that man well-respected and talked of by all such as Abraham Lincoln, Pandit Nehru, and Sir Winston Churchill.” He went on to assert with hubris that his “death should be a shock to all and the decease of a great human being.” Another claimed he would write a “book as great as any Shakespeare play” and then “return to India to endeavor to become a genius in the film industry.” A hopeful athlete charged that he “will be the greatest footballer and athlete in England” and afterwards, “settle down to be a lawyer or engineer and also a scientist” and “do something spectacular, so that the eyes of everyone would be upon [him].”65 A recurring theme in the boy’s answers is idea of being the center of attention and the subject of the gaze of people. One boy summarized the overarching sentiment of Indian boys with a simple statement, “We wish to be looked upon.”66 Taken together, these responses show two important aspects of the boys’ concepts of their future selves in relation to their

64 Rubin and Zavalloni, We Wished to Be Looked Upon,” 51.

65 Unnamed “East Indian Boys,” quoted in Ibid., 103-106.

66 Unnamed “East Indian Boy,” quoted in Ibid., 67.

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current selves. First, their desire to be gazed upon is important. In one respect, like Bell

Hooks’ explanation that returning an “oppositional gaze” is an act of resistance against power, so to would be demanding a look based on merit. The boys’ desire for an admiring gaze in recognition of accomplishments represents an attempt at taking ownership over the look by forcing it, rather than being subject to it.67 On the other hand, as the boys were undoubtedly aware of racial hostilities and that the Indian community was losing its battle for power against the Creole community as independence loomed, perhaps the desire for a future in which they were “looked upon” reflected fears of becoming invisible in the emergent state’s system of social rank and position. In a society formed by deeply embedded colonial practices of surveillance, and in which the people living in the community had never experienced freedom from the white colonizer’s eye, the idea that they may no longer be visible would be unsettling and, in that context, the return of the gaze they were accustomed to would provide comfort.

The second significant aspect of the boys’ responses is that they show a belief that they can transcend racial subordination with an elevation in class through education, migration, and accomplishments. In pre-independence Trinidad, as a colony of the British

Empire, they belonged to a racialized subordinate group and, as with other groups resident in the periphery of the empire, these racial demarcations were rigid and difficult to overcome. However, the boys connected their aspirations with movement outside of the colony and with associations to prominent figures in the United States, Britain, and newly independent India, potentially reflecting a mature awareness of imperial politics

67 Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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and a sense that opportunities existed outside of their community’s limiting boundaries. It was as if the boys understood that beyond the coastline of their racially stratified colony and the hostilities inherent in the colonial-bred race-based competition discussed in this chapter, there existed a space of unlimited possibilities for young Indian men who, regardless of background, possessed the right skills and education. With those things, in a different place, their race would not matter.68

Women and Girls’ Negotiations of Self

In the period between the end of indenture and the rise of Trinidadian independent statehood, Indian women negotiated their roles and individual identities at a crossroads between modern ideas of feminism and womanhood and reactionary conservative ideology. In accordance with “the persistent idealization of the Brahminic norm, which placed women in subservient positions to men, centering their lives around housewifely and wifely roles,” Indian women contributed to the creation and reproduction of Indian community ideals by teaching and modeling Indian values, cultural traditions, language and religion in their homes.69 Concurrently, individual Indian women exhibited resistance to the confines of patriarchy by shifting the central focus away from the home and attending school to further their education and career prospects or, when unable, encouraging their daughters to pursue education and opportunities not afforded to the

68 For a detailed analysis of how class transcended race in assertions of identity and rank in imperial London, see A. Martin Wainwright, 'The better class' of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).

69 Mohammed, "Towards,” 27-28.

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mothers. In the example of Anna Mahase, she resisted cultural pressures and became a pioneer in women’s education, while being married and the primary caregiver to several children. She fought for women’s right to teach, while at the same time expressing her role as teacher as one that was ultimately preparing girls for marriage.70 She consciously combined her domestic role with her profession and while “she probably wouldn’t have known the word ‘feminist,’ her life and career advanced the cause of women’s liberation.”71 Anna boasted that after she gained employment as a married female teacher in Trinidad, “today there are hundreds of married women on the [teaching] staffs of so many schools.”72 In 1961, Anna’s daughter, Dr. Anna Mahase, followed her mother’s education and occupational example and pushed even further, becoming the youngest secondary school principal in Caribbean history at 29 years of age.73 Both Mahases represented possible and different responses to community pressure and their variations in levels of accommodations to those pressures represent forms of resistance to them.

Indian girls’ responses to the 1957 student survey indicate more conflicted feelings about their futures than those of their male counterparts, especially regarding the idealized centrality of marriage and family and potential career conflicts. Most of their statements regarding their futures reflected a compromise between community ideals and individualized goals. One such compromise that was a recurrent theme throughout the

70 Anna Mahase, Snr., My Mother’s Daughter: The Autobiography of Anna Mahase Snr, 1899-1978 (Claxton Bay, Trinidad: Royards Publishing Company, 1992), 46.

71 Kenneth Ramchand, foreword to Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, xiv.

72 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter, 46.

73 “Our History,” St. Augustine’s Girls’ High School, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.saghs.edu.tt/history.

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survey’s report was the idea of delaying marriage until after the girls’ finished their educations and established their careers. For example, one girl responded with “After having settled down as a dentist and having made a sufficient amount of money I would then have my own private office. Then and only then I would think of having a family” while another girl planned to resist love in favor of career: “Since marriage is closely connected with love, I would do my best to avoid all attack of it, and wait until I am

30.”74 These answers show that Indian girls’ wanted something more than a domestic life, at least initially, but could see themselves settling into a family-centered role after those desires had been fulfilled. In contrast, when asked about her plans for marriage and career, another Indian girl responded quite differently:

When I am married, I think the woman’s place is in the home, so unlike many women I would be at home instead of going to work. I would like my husband to feel that he is the breadwinner and consequently the head of the family because I thoroughly disagree with this idea of women wanting to wear the pants; or henpecked men. The marriage vow is to love, honour and obey and I think that is really as it should be. Yet, I would not be a drain on my husband’s neck, and if at all it becomes necessary for me to work, I will have had my qualifications and will be perfectly capable of doing so.75

Her references to “many women,” “women wanting to wear the pants,” and “henpecked men” indicate that she had witnessed or at least was aware of emergent mid-century modern feminist arguments and her disdain for these gendered behaviors reflect learned ideas from within her community regarding the proper roles for Indian women. However, her answer is not simply a conservative response because in last line she explains that she will still pursue education and credentialing so that she may “not be a drain.” Her

74 Unnamed “East Indian Girls,” quoted in Rubin and Zavalloni, We Wished to Be Looked Upon, 134.

75 Unnamed “East Indian Girl,” quoted in Ibid., 94.

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acceptance of subordinate status to her future husband while planning for self-sufficiency should the need arise are marks of agency and self-empowerment, like the two examples shown before hers. The girl was aware of both sides of the traditionalist versus modern women argument and chose a middle ground in which to place herself. These three examples represent the range of responses from the girls and show an awareness of contemporary social issues and ambivalence about their community-assigned identities at a time when opportunities for careers and personal successes were increasingly becoming available to them. Their negotiations of self, therefore, were both socialized from their families and larger communities and personalized on terms they found acceptable.

No Place for Mixed-Race

In developing community standards, the Indo-Trinidadian community, while promoting Indianness, excluded any kind of hybridized Creole-identity from their ideal.

Whether one was Hindu, Muslim, or Christian did not matter as much as if they possessed pure Indian lineage. A mixed Creole and Indian calypsonian named Cletis Ali, who went by the stage name “Mighty Dougla,” occupied a forbidden space between the

Creole and Indian communities and dealt with his feelings of exclusion from both and his problematic identity in his famous 1961 calypso song, “Split Me in Two:”

[Verse 1] Let us suppose they pass a law, They don't want people living here anymore Just suppose they pass a law, They don't want people living here anymore Everybody got to find their country According to your race originally What a confusion I would cause in the place They might have to shoot me in space.

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[Verse 2] From the time I small I in confusion I couldn't play with no other lil children If I go by the Negro children to play They say, "You little coolie, now run away!" I go by the Indian children next door They say, "Noweyrian, what you come here for?" I always by myself like ah lil monkey Not one single child wouldn't play with me.

[Verse 3] Hear what happen to me recently I going down Jogie Road walking peacefully Some Indians and Negroes rioting Poor me didn't know not a single thing But as I enter in Odit Trace Ah Indian man cuff me straight in mih face I ran by the Negroes to get rescue "Look ah coolie!" and them start beating me too.

[Verse 4] Some fellas having a race discussion, I jump in to give my opinion A young fella watch me in mih face He say, "You shut your mouth, you ain't got no race!" What he said to me was a real insult But is not I to blame, is mih father fault When he say I have no race, he did talking true Instead of having one race, you know I got two.

[Chorus] So if they sending Indians to India [India] and the Negroes back to Africa, Can somebody please just tell me, where they sending poor me? [Poor Dougie] I am neither one nor the other, six of one, half a dozen of the other If they serious 'bout sending back people for true, they bound to split me in two.76

76 Mighty Dougla, “Split Me in Two,” Guanaguanare. Blog. http://guanaguanaresingsat.blogspot.com/2006/10/split-me-in-two.html. Mighty Dougla performed this song at Carnival in 1961 and won the title of Calypso Monarch. “Calypso Monarchs, 1939-1980,” Trinidad & Tobago Culture Division, http://www.culture.gov.tt/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Celebrating-our- Calypso-Monarchs-1939-1980-Programme1.pdf.

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“Dougla” was a contemporary term used in Trinidad to describe a person of mixed Afro-

Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian descent. In Hindi, the word dougla means “bastard.”

Linguist Shalini Puri explained that among both the Indian and Creole communities, “the anxieties around racial ambiguity are often expressed as disavowals of the dougla – either through discursive repression of the dougla or through explicit attack on the category. . . dougla constitutes a ‘disallowed identity.’”77 As Indians turned inward for protection and promotion of Indianness, they rejected any idea of racial mixing as a threat to this effort.78 Mighty Dougla’s uneasiness in his “disallowed identity” as both Creole and

Indian and at the same time, neither, is clearly expressed in the story he tells through his lyrics. Representing a character based on his life experiences, Mighty Dougla showed he was afraid of what was to come as racial power changed hands in the new state. This was in part because of childhood experiences in which he was not welcome to play with either

Indian or Creole children and, “recently” in a situation where he could not find protection in either community amid a riot, but rather found victimization and ostracization by both.

The example of the dougla illustrates the complexity and negative outcomes of the imposition of restrictive community ideals in both the Indian and Creole communities and the legacy of a colonial system that mixed people from different backgrounds together but encouraged hostility between them.

This chapter shows that the process of negotiating identity in Trinidad on the cusp of independence was complex and inseparable from the influence of empire in the region.

77 Puri, “Race, Rape, and Representation,” 127-128.

78 Ibid., 130.

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Issues of identity, class, homeland, and rightful claims to land and power came to a head in the moment of uncertainty leading up to independent statehood. In 1962, as Jamaica gained self-determination alongside Trinidad, anthropologist M.G. Smith observed that the plural society of the British Caribbean took the form of a political unit made up of different ethnic groups arranged hierarchically and competitively.79 The divided and incompatible rival communities that formed the plural composition of the post-colonial

Caribbean originated in generations of reproduced hegemonic racial, gendered, and hierarchical ideologies, normalized practices of surveillance, introduced migration of outsiders and displacement of labor, and the imposition of horizontal competition between colonized subjects. As British power waned in the Caribbean in the twentieth century, questions of identity and uncertainty about the future due to these colonial conditions became the lasting primary legacies of the British Empire.

79 M.G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 14.

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CHAPTER VII

EPILOGUE

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.1

Practices of surveillance and government control are nothing new and not unique to British colonial interactions. In British history, the government practice of collecting mass amounts of data on its subjects dates back at least as far as the eleventh century

“Great Survey” that culminated with the publication of the famed Domesday Book.2 A recent statement from the British Security Industry Authority reports that there is at least one closed-circuit video surveillance (CCTV) camera per every fourteen people in the

U.K.3 Government funds spent on camera surveillance each year in the U.K. amount to

£2.25 billion.4 Clearly, the British government has a long and established history of collecting data on its people to regulate and police them.

1 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 165.

2 "When Did the State Start to Spy on Us?" BBC, accessed March 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/timelines/zysr4wx; "Domesday Book: Britain’s Finest Treasure," The National Archives, May 18, 2017, accessed March 17, 2019, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/.

3 David Barnett, "One Surveillance Camera for Every 11 People in Britain, Says CCTV Survey," The Telegraph, July 10, 2013, accessed March 17, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveillance-camera-for-every-11-people-in- Britain-says-CCTV-survey.html.

4 Tony Porter, “Annual Report 2017/2018,” Surveillance Camera Commissioner: Annual Reports Collection (January 2019): 9.

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The uniqueness and significance of colonial surveillance practices is in the racialized and gendered elements that informed the implementation and evolution of the practices and in long-term consequences of their use. In the colonial Caribbean, practices of surveillance formed the bedrock of the establishment of white male domination over people of color. Every relationship of power had within it a “looking relation.” White overseers and government officials watched over slaves. The same overseers observed indentured migrant laborers. White guards monitored black prisoners. Tourists gawked at people of color. Missionaries gazed into the private lives of colonized peoples. Strategic deferral of watching power allowed for people of color to occupy temporary positions of power over their counterparts.

All this watching led to the collection of data, the rendering of judgments, and activation of racialized and gendered language in assertions of domination. The normalization of racialized and gendered ideas resulted in embedded conceptualizations of an “other” identity in the colonized people and tensions not only between colonizer and colonized but also within the communities of the colonized. The uneasy pluralist society in which communities made up of people of color contest the power of the gaze characterizes the Caribbean today and is the interminable legacy of these colonial practices. In this way, even without British governmental domination, individuals in the post-colonial world remain confined to the maze created by colonialism. While free to rule for themselves, their interactions with one another and their foundational understandings of community and identity derive from the entrenchment British colonial ideologies in the region.

215

In Trinidad, the Creole community won the contest for power in the wake of independence and has continued to hold top governmental offices for most of the past fifty-seven years. Of the seven Prime Ministers to serve in office since independence from Britain in 1962, five of them have been of African descent. Dr. Eric Williams became the first prime minister and three men of African descent, George Chambers,

Arthur Robinson, and Patrick Manning succeeded him. It was not until 1995 that the first

Indian Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday, took office and in 2010, Kamla Persad-Bissessar became the first woman and second Indian to serve in the role. The current Prime

Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, is of African descent.5 The elected office of the president has reflected slightly more diversity. Of the six presidents in Trinidad’s history, four were of

African descent. This includes the first president, Ellis Clarke, fourth president, Anthony

Carmona, and sixth and current president, Paula Mae-Weekes, who is also the first woman to hold the office. Noor Hassanali, the first Indian and Muslim man to serve as president succeeded Ellis Clarke as the second and Amerindian George Richards, the third.6

Recent historical and sociological studies explore the post-colonial racialized dynamics of Trinidadian society and that of the larger Caribbean. The racial and class divide created by British colonialists persist as tensions between Afro-Trinidadian and

Indo-Trinidadian communities continue to dominate modern politics. Trinidadians

5 “The Prime Minister,” Parliament: Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, accessed March 17, 2019, http://www.ttparliament.org/members.php?mid=23.

6 “History of the Presidency,” The Office of the President: Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, accessed March 17, 2019, https://otp.tt/the-president/history-of-the-presidency/.

216

remain divided along ethno-party lines as Eric Williams’ People’s National Movement remains the powerful party of Afro-Trinidadians and the United National Congress, founded by Basdeo Panday is the party of Indo-Trinidadians.7 Uneven economic developments in modern Trinidad reflect the racial divide and imbalance of power.

Jolynna Sinanan explains that in the twentieth century, Afro-Trinidadians sought membership in middle-class by targeting professional and civil service careers while

Indo-Trinidadians built up their rural communities, aspiring to acquire wealth through land ownership. Sinanan argues that the exclusion of Indians from politics resulted from the self-segregation of both communities that made it difficult for Indians to venture in public service because residents of urban centers continued to view Indians as foreigners.8 Further study in how Afro-Trinidadians replicated British systems of surveillance and Indo-Trinidadian responses to their subordinate class and political status in the post-independence period would enrich this body of literature.

There have been a few studies on the rise of feminism in the Caribbean and how feminist groups tend to self-segregate along racialized lines as well. Most historical works focus on black feminists that drew inspiration from global civil rights movements in the middle of the twentieth century. A recent special issue of Caribbean Review of

Gender Studies examined Caribbean feminism in the interwar period and contains regrettably limited mention of Indian women. Of the fourteen articles in the special issue, only one focuses on Indian women activists by exploring feminist labor protests in

7 Jolynna Sinanan, Social Media in Trinidad: Values and Visibility (London: UCL Press, 2017), 18.

8 Ibid., 78.

217

Guyana. In that article, Aliyah Khan supplements limited archival material with literary analysis to argue that:

…real women’s labour protests and fictional stories of their descendants speak to each other in a nonlinear, genre-defying way across the spatiotemporal gap of archival absence, reshaping traditional narratives of Indo-Caribbean women and shows that the writings of female Indian migrants and their descendants provide a rich contribution to broader discussions of feminism.9

Using non-traditional sources, Khan showed that these understudied women held a great deal of significance in the shaping of their communities. Khan’s study leads to questions of the presence of Indo-Trinidadian female activists during this time and throughout the twentieth century. After the publication of the 1957 student survey in which Indo-

Trinidadian girls exhibited interest in feminist movement, albeit with ambivalence, that generation of girls virtually disappeared from historical sources. Subsequent analyses of

Indian female assertions of independence, resistance to patriarchy, and participation in twentieth century feminist and broader social justice movements do not exist even though girls coming of age in the 1950s expressed professional and personal goals that reflected feminist ideals. The bulk of studies of Indian women, like those discussed throughout this dissertation, extend only through the end of indenture, or there is only scant mention of debates about their proper roles and behaviors in community construction after indenture.

It is as though those independent-minded, educated, and inspired girls simply disappeared from Trinidad’s sociohistorical landscape. Employing feminist interdisciplinary methods like Khan describes above, including literary analysis and personal interviews, would illuminate more instances of Indian women’s experiences in the post-indenture and post-

9 Aliyah Khan, “Protest and Punishment: Indo-Guyanese Women and Organized Labour,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 12 (December 2018): 269.

218

independence Caribbean. This is necessary to uncover their stories and thus provide a more complete understanding of the legacies of colonialism and women’s contributions to resistance and community development. This dissertation leads to several questions for future historical studies. How did patriarchal and race-based British colonialism and resurgent Indian Hindu and Muslim traditionalism affect women’s career aspirations?

What were the effects of persistent surveillance on Indian women? What trajectory of events led to the appointment of a female Indian Prime Minister in 2010 and what factors prohibited that from happening earlier? How did women in the post-colonial era use art and music to express their political beliefs in male-dominated societies that limited their access to public life? The lack of interrogation of the legacies of colonialism on women of color needs to be addressed as continued failure to thoroughly explore their lives and experiences serves to reproduces the oppression that they continue to endure.

219

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