<Jansher>
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Mohan K. Gautam
Part II
I Phase, 1873-1891
The convention on emigration to Surinam was signed on 8 September 1870 in The Hague between the governments of England and The Netherlands. Only after 17 February 1872 when it was ratified the "gift" of Indian labour was made to the Dutch in return to concessions to Britain (Tinker, 1974). Thereby the Dutch suzerainty on the transfer of Dutch Fort built for slave trade on the Guina coast of West Africa (nowadays known as Ghana) was surrendered. With this treaty the British government also abandoned its claim on Sumatra.
Mohan K. Gautamn Paramaribo and was followed by 7 more ships. The first two years were disastrous. More than 20% emigrants died during the voyage and in the plantations. In June 1874 the British government became alarmed of the mortality rate and stopped the sea traffic to Surinam and demanded the betterment of the conditions of the emigrants by giving more facilities on the medical aspects. During 1877-78 the traffic was resumed but it was again interrupted in the years of 1879, 1886 and 1888. Between 1873 and 1891 in total 28 ships carried 13972 emigrants. Moreover, during these years there were also protests launched by the Indians requesting for improvements and for a humane treatment. In my view, looking at the situation of the Indian immigrants the conscious desire to uphold their culture, norms and values, languages, institutions, etc had already started during the first four years of their arrival in Surinam when the immigrants were left to their own fate by the plantations and the Dutch government.
Their distribution over the plantations developed a network of the regions where more than one plantation was involved and the evenings were used to develop a conscious urge to protect their heritage which they had brought from India. Moreover, their sojourn in Surinam was only for a period of five years and they had hoped that soon they would go back to their mother country India. During these first years two things happened. Firstly, they refined and retained their Hindustani or Hindi as it was necessary to report the events to the administrators in Surinam as well as in India. Secondly, directly and indirectly they started the levelling of their dialectical differences and gave birth to the koinezation process which was definitely the earlier form of Sarnami where grammatically speaking nothing was systematic, The only good thing was that this form did work as the most important instrument of intra-communication with in the Indian community. If we look at the historical perspective we can perhaps surmise that this possible process which had already started earlier hadthe folloing reasons:
1 During the first six months before getting transferred to the plantations in Surinam it was a period of an 'accidental confrontation' when suddenly the people from various regions and dialects were brought together. This happened during the events of the recruitment procedures, life in sub-depots, transport to Calcutta, life in the Calcutta Depot, sea voyage to Surinam by the steamship, arrival in Paramaribo, transfer to the plantations and the tedious life pattern in the plantations. This period exposed the emigrants to a new world where the bureaucracy with sahibs was dominant. The
communication with these officials was always in Hindustani or Hindi. One should not forget that the emigrants mostly spoke one of the dialects of Hindi, and that Hindustani was becoming the lingua franca of emigration traffic. The people of Shahbad were the readiest recruits, they spoke Bhojpuri, a form of Hindi and they responded to recruiters willingly" (Saha, 1970; Tinker,1974; Grierson, 1903). During this period they also came to know the other fellow recruitees. Some of them spoke the same language while others became friends and were called dipua bhai or jahajia bhai (depot brother or the ship brother) who in future years became the cognate group and maintained the close kinship relations by exchanging gifts and rakhis (protection thread with promises, a ceremony between brother and sister relations taking place on the day of Raksha bandhan feast) among each other in Surinam.
2 With the opening of the Fort William college in Calcutta (1800) the British in India had already accepted and legitimized Hindi/Urdu as the official lingua franca of adminstration of India. All the officers and the newly arrived administrators were required to pass an examination in the language (Beams, 1961). Moreover it was assumed that the emigrant "would have to pick up quickly the lingua franca, the Hindustani, in which he was addressed by the British officers and the Bengali clerks of the Depot in Calcutta" (Tinker, op cit.). Between 1869 to 89 the Protector of Emigration in Calcutta was Dr. J.G.G. Grant (Digby,1991), who was assisted by his two assistants, a Bengali clerk and interpreter, and a medical officer. The Bengali clerk was Farruny Churn who was well versed in Bengali, Hindi and English. The other one was a medical officer Dr. Bipin Behari Dutta, who was a doctor-surgeon attached to the Calcutta Depot at Garden Reach. For the first time he was asked to accompany the emigrants to Surinam as the Surgeon-Superintendent of the Kate Kellock ship which left Calcutta on 16 October 1873 and reached Paramaribo on 18 January 1874. Due to some conflict and misunderstanding with Capt. Beven, Dr. Dutta together with his wife and children was put ashore on Ascension Island on the route to Surinam (Tinker, op. cit.). By this event the emigrants not only lost a surgeon but also an interpreter. One should not forget that the perception of the sea voyage was completely different in the minds of the emigrants and once they found out that the ship would take at least three months to reach Surinam they were repenting and scolding the trap ofthe recruiters. In one of the examples in 1882-83, Dr. de Wolfe was a Surgeon on the ship Sheila I and had a consignment of 451 emigrants and unfortunately 49 emigrants had died on the way to Surinam. He wrote, "many of the coolies after leaving India are very homesick, they have entered another world and everything is new and strange to them. Fear soon seizes them, they are by nature timid.....Soon after leaving port we had some squally weather. I found on going below all the coolies huddled together on the windward side of the between decks and in a state of terror as they fancied...they were all going to the bottom" (Tinker, op. cit.). The seasickness, cholera, dysentery, diarrhoea, accidents and fevers were the usual illnesses which made the emigrants more nervous. But when the weather was good they used to make music, narrate stories and heart touching events, etc and this they used to bubble out in their own vernaculars.
3 The first stage in the sojourn of the emigrants was the use of multidialectism (Gambhir, 1981) which continued together with the official Hindi or Hindustani. For example the emigrants of the first ship Lalla Rukh came from different dialect regions (de Klerk, 1953):
296 Braj speakers from Agra region,
75 Avadhi speakers from Oudh region,
49 Bhojpuri and Magadhi speakers from Bihar,
14 Bengali speakers from Bengal, and
2 Marathi/Gujrati speakers, and the rest were
1 Oriya speaker,
1 Rajasthani speaker,
1 Punjabi speaker,
1 Bundeli speaker,
1 Chattisgarhi speaker and
5 not known.
By looking at the figures it becomes clear that the emigrants spoke different languages. However during this period they started code switching for a standard Hindi which was also required by the British administrators. But they also must have tried some sort of linguistic adjustment in levelling the dialects for a common mixed language.
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