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In the 19th and early 20th century Indian indentured workers were emigrating to different parts of the world, chiefly to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Mauritius, Fiji, Malaya, Natal, Suriname and the British and French Caribbean. Of these, Mauritius was the largest recipient of Indian labor under the indenture system. The movement to British Guiana, the largest importer in the Caribbean, commenced in 1838 (1835 to Mauritius and 1845 to Trinidad and Jamaica); it was stopped the following year; it recommenced in 1845, suspended three years later and continued uninterrupted from 1851 to the demise of the system during the First World War. Within this 80 year period roughly 238,979 Indians landed in Guyana (143,900 in Trinidad and 36,412 in Jamaica) from the ports of Calcutta and Madras, of which 65,538 were repatriated. By 1917, Indians comprised 42% of the Guyanese population (today below 50%).
The importation of Indian indentured workers into postemancipation British Guiana was part of a continuing search by the sugar planters for a labor force that was tractable, disciplined and accustomed to plantation agriculture under harsh tropical conditions. They perceived immigrant labor as a means of restoring the control they had exercised under the iniquitous slave system as well as enabling them to keep plantation wages down and reduce operational costs. Their attempt to introduce black labor from the overpopulated West Indian islands, West Africa and Southern United States, and white labor from Europe and the Portuguese Atlantic islands, had limited success. It was India with its teeming millions in heavily congested areas which satisfied their needs, and the planters never stopped reiterating the importance of Indian labour to resuscitate the sugar industry and prevent an impending ruin.
In January 1836, John Gladstone, father of William Ewart Gladstone and owner of plantations Vreed-en-Hoop and Vree-es-Stein, wrote to the Calcutta firm of Messrs. Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Company inquiring whether the firm could supply 100 “young, active, able-bodied” laborers on contracts for his estates. The exporters replied that they did not envisage any recruiting problems, “the natives being perfectly ignorant of the place they agree to go to, or the length of the voyage they are undertaking.” This reply virtually set the stage for the deceit, fraud, coercion and kidnapping which permeated the whole recruiting system.
After some correspondence, two sailing ships—the Whitby and the Hesperus --landed in British Guiana on May 5, 1838 with 396 Indians of whom only 22 were women. This shortage of women was to continue throughout indenture with disastrous social consequences in the Indian community. Inter alia, it produced unstable marital relations and an alarming incidence of Indian wife murders in nearly all the recipient colonies. The revelation that Indian women were leading immoral lives in the sugar colonies produced bitter resentment in India and galvanized articulate Indian nationalists into a massive anti-indenture campaign which paralleled the Anti-Slavery movement a hundred years earlier.
Despite social conservatism, caste prejudices and the traditional non-migratory nature of the Indian populace, villagers left their Matribhumi for a variety of reasons. Among these were the socio-economic plight of landless laborers, rackrenting by landlords, rural indebtedness, exploitation by Banias and the loss of a traditional livelihood due to the importation of cheap manufactured goods from Britain. Recurrent famines in North India was another significant factor in colonial emigration. Famines often broke the morale of villagers and produced a state of complete desperation. Indeed, there was a strong correlation between economic distress and high migration and a good harvest and recruiting difficulties.
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