The Politics of Representation in the Indian Labour Diaspora:

West Indies, 1880-1920


Prabhu P. Mohapatra


(Prabhu P. Mohaptra is Reader, Department of history, Delhi University)


Preface

Contrary to the trend of neglect towards labour history research, which is true not only in the case of India but also in the world over, the recent past has witnessed a revival in Indian working class history. The turn of the present century has seen some helpful spurts of resurgence of the discipline with efforts to stimulate academic thinking and substantive research into the changing profile of the Indian working class. The establishment of Integrated Labour History Research Programme (ILHRP) at the VV Giri National Labour Institute, as a collaborative initiative with the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH) was in some sense is a part of this renewal and revival of labour history. Apart from instituting an 'Archives of Indian Labour', the programme initiated a 'Writing Labour History Series' and specially commissioned essays by leading labour historians in order to disseminate research in labour history to a wider public. Prabhu Mohapatra's essay, 'The Politics of Representation in the Indian Diaspora' forms a part of this series.



In the essay, the author brings together two important histories of labouring experience, which have been seen separated in the historiography. The first relates to the history of Indian labour emigrants in the colonial period to the overseas colonies of British empire, which the author sees now as an integral part of the larger history of Indian labour migration in the 19th and 20th centuries, which as is well known, contributes the basis of the formation of Indian working class. The second set of issues that the author discusses is the history of country formation on the one hand and the formation of class identity on the other.



The essay also examines the process of identity formation of Indian emigrants in the West Indies by locating it firmly in the context of the changing labour regime in the plantations, where the migrants have been placed as indentured labourers.



The author argues against the emergence of a singular identity in the Indian labour diaspora in the West Indies and demonstrates that neither cultural persistence nor "assimilationist" theories of identity formation can capture the multiple possibilities that could and did coexist during the period under study. The essay also successfully transcends the dualities of culture and economy as well as class and community, which have plagued the study of diasporic formations, especially those that were formed through long distance labour migration.

I hope that the publication of this essay will add new dimensions to the study of Indian labour diaspora and hence will be a valuable addition to the written history of Indian working class.





(Uday Kumar Varma)

Director


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On 25th of June 1887, a curious incident was reported in the San Fernando Gazette of Trinidad. At the end of the month of Ramadan that year, on the great festival day of Eid Ul Fitr the Indian Muslims of Victoria village and of nearby estates congregated for the mass prayer in the Little Masjid. A fracas began unexpectedly when several Muslims objected to facing east in the direction of Mecca for the prayer- they argued instead that they should face west as they were wont to do in India. Theological debates soon gave way to free exchange of blows between the votaries of Eastward and west ward prayer. Peace was restored after considerable period but with appeals to eminent lawyers Messers Wharton and Farfan to mediate in the dispute. Was the dispute simply due to ignorance as to the true direction of Mecca or was it a case of "following Custom" the much maligned traits that the Indian Muslims shared with their compatriots? [i]



This incident a small footnote in the longer history of community formation is significant for another reason - indicative as it was of the travails of travel. Migration always meant transformation of lives and styles and involved living with changes that one did not choose or anticipate. Cultures had to be created ;they simply could not be transplanted.



However, what interests me in this description of the incident is the ways in which one can find the reflection of two competing and divergent theoretical formulations about the larger question of community and ethnic identity formation in the diaspora context . The first view is widely known as one of cultural persistence which was popularised largely though the work of the anthropologists in the 1950sand 1960s. Main features of this theory may be summarised briefly. It argues that cultural identity is central to the process of distinctive community and ethnic formation in the diaspora- and that this cultural identity is transmitted largely through deeply embedded cultural symbols and value systems. In case of the Indian community formation the centrality of religious, caste and family patterns are stressed as institutional embodiments of these value systems. More specifically in the case of the diaspora in the Caribbean it was argued that wherever Indian community was found in large numbers the deeply embedded institutional patterns of caste, religion and family values were carried (the so called cultural baggage) by the migrants to their new home land. These cultural values transplanted in the new surroundings shaped the emergent forms of community identities. In this view culture emerged as deeply resistant to change unleashed by modernsing forces of the new society. The classic ethnographic description of this process of cultural continuity is to be found in the work of Morton Klass and Arthur Niehoff on Trinidad conducted in the 1950s.[ii] Persistence of cultural values of the homeland in the disapora, it was argued, shaped the distinct ethnic identity of the diasporic community and prevented their assimilation into the prevailing cultural norms of the new societies. This explanation of ethnic distinctiveness was reinforced and transformed by the emergence of the enormously influential theory of plural society enunciated in the work of M.G Smith in 1965 on the British West Indies. In this study Smith characterised the multi racial societies of West Indies as being composed of population segments marked by distinct ethnic attributes that lived in a state of “economic symbiosis and mutual avoidance”.[iii] Following as it did on the work of J.S Furnivall on the Colonial Dutch East Indies, Plural society theorists emphasised the fact that each ethnic group held on to its inherited cultural traits and only interacted in the market place or due to the overarching political compulsions of the State. The influence of plural society theories was largely due to the close fit it had with the emergence of racialised politics of post independence West Indies. ( Despres 1967, Singer 1967. Clarke 1986, Leys and Peach 1985, Ryan ) As is clear cultural retentionist arguments focused strongly on reified cultural traits that had been inherited from by the immigrant communities from their homeland- very much like the votaries of Eastward prayer in the example I have cited in the beginning of the essay.



However, very early on the arguments of cultural retention came under scrutiny in historical and other anthropological studies. Instead of cultural persistence, what was emphasised now was the ways in which central features of a putative ethnic culture had been adapted to and changed in the diasporic context. This process of adaptation and transformation was termed “creolisation”. In case of the Indian diaspora it was argued for instance that the institution of caste identities had been largely attenuated through the experience of migration and in the new society- where caste status bore no implications for occupational and social mobility or resource control.(Schwarz 1967,Smith 1955, 1962, Nevadomsky 1982). Similarly changes in the language patterns had led to extensive creolisation of original language(Hindi, Bhojpuri) of the migrants and there was evidence of distinct adaptation to the dominant creolised English. Creolisation thesis, as is clear, emphasised radical discontinuity and cultural transformation in diasporic identity formation .(Rodney 1981, Vertovec 1992) In recent years the creolisation thesis has received much support from the Post modernist turn in social sciences with celebration of hybridity ,migrancy and emphasis on improvisation in the formation of identity. (Ulf Hannerz). One might with some qualification think of the upholders of the creolisation thesis as votaries of Westward prayer in the example cited at the beginning.



My aim in this essay is not to provide a substantial critique of these two major views on identity formation that I have telegraphically described above, what I intend doing is to draw on the insights of both these formulations in order to historically examine the process of identity formation among the Indain immigrant labourers in the West Indies ,specifically in British Guyana and Trinidad focused mainly in the period during which Indian labourers came in large numbers under the indenture system to populate the plantation societies of the West Indies.



At the outset I might briefly set out the main points of difference that I have with both the creolisation and cultural retentionist arguments. The first relates to the notion of community identity in the diaspora. Both the theories, I believe are pitched at a general level and are applicable without discriminating between the different diasporic contexts-that is, it is assumed that the concept of diaspora itself is unproblematic .[iv]In the process what is lost sight of is the process by which immigrant communities are formed through their insertion into specific socio economic context. In case of the Indian immigrants in the West Indies – the way in which the immigrants were forced to relate to the wider society through their position in the labour regime on the plantations has been insufficiently explored in the studies on community identity formation. I intend to demonstrate in this paper the crucial role of the changing labour regime in shaping the process of community identity of Indian immigrants. However by emphasizing the relationship which the labourers had with the labour regime I do not mean in any way that the community identity was in some sense directly derived from the structure of the labour regime. It is here that I wish to focus on the ways in which identity is formed in the crucible of practices of representation – it is through these practices of representations that structures of labour regime impinged on the process of identity formation. However it is also my contention that there exists no pre formed cultural identity that is then expressed through representations- in cognitive terms there is no identity imaginable outside representations (except perhaps as unconscious). This allows one also to think of identities as historically amenable to transformation and contest and also to imagine the coexistence of multiple identities along with different representations.



With these preliminary excursus on the weighty question of identity what I propose to do however is far more modest – mainly by examining four different sets of representations of community identity during the period 1880-1920 i.e in the last phase of the career of indentured labour regime in the West Indies. The first of these is about collective representations of community enacted and staged in the Muharram festival by the Indian immigrants in West Indies. Then I take up three different styles of representations of community identity in public sphere activities by three individuals. Two of these were irrepressible and prolific letter writers in the colonial news papers while a third is the author of one of the rare literary text produced by an |Indian during the period of indenture in the West Indies. What I will focus on of course is the different styles of representations of the community identity in its relation to the dominant labour regime and thereby hope to provide some clues as to the contradictory and often contested nature of the process by which community identity was fashioned during the period of indenture.





I



Changing Labour Regime



Before I undertake the analysis it will be useful to mark out the terrain of the labour regime on which these acts of representations were staged. The labour regime to which the immigrants came was marked by transformations along two axes- that of the economic cycles of growth and stagnation benchmarked on the international sugar prices and the long term process by which indentured labour was changed into permanent settler.



Indentured labour from India was imported to the Caribbean colonies of British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica following the abolition of slavery in 1838. Resistance of the ex slave labourers to the unreconstructed plantation labour regime forced on the planters the necessity of sourcing " cheap and reliable labourers "from India. Several private experiments beginning in 1838 gave way to organised labour importation under colonial aegis. Planters and the colonial state jointly bore the cost of recruitment and disciplining of the immigrant labour, effected now under a series of ordinances promulgated from the 1840's onward collectively known as the Coolie Ordinances (consolidated in the late 1890s as Immigration Ordinances of British Guiana (1893) and Trinidad 1899).


These ordinances and the apparatus of enforcement and `protection' that came into existence regulated every aspect of the working and to large extent non working lives of the immigrants (e.g marriages and festivals, sickness ,housing and return to India). The central feature of the labour system that came into being was contractual servitude at fixed wages (25 cents or 1shilling per day) for a period of five years on a plantation where the labourer was obliged to reside. He or she was for bidden to be outside the plantation without explicit permission of the planters since the essence of indenture lay in prohibiting the labourer from taking advantage of competition for scarce labour. The contracts were enforced by criminal breach of contract provisions of the ordinances which punished breaches of contract by imprisonment and pecuniary levies. [v]It was to this extremely restrictive and oppressive labour regime that India immigrants were inserted to serve out five to ten years of their working lives. After ten years of industrial residence in the colonies the immigrant could seek repatriation back to India. [vi]Thia last provision was explicitly inserted in the contract in order to distinguish indentured servitude from slavery.



Who were these Indian immigrants and how many of them came to the Caribbean. Between 1838 and 1917, excepting for few years in the early decades there was continuous annual importation of labour from India- totaling 238,000 to British Guiana, 145,000 to Trinidad, 50,000 to Jamaica and 40,000 to Surinam a Dutch Colony. Smaller numbers came to St’ Lucia, Nevis and Grenada. The peak of importation was reached in the 1870s and 1880s after which the flow of immigration was relatively reduced.



While Immigrants came from practically every province of India, the overwhelming bulk - upto 80 percent were drawn from the Gangetic plains of North India from the two provinces of United Province and Bihar. Of these again most were from the eastern UP and western Bihar districts culturally and linguistically contiguous Bhojpur and Awadh region. A small but significant percentage of the immigrants were drawn from the southern India from the hinterlands of Madras from which they had embarked for the West Indies.



As to the caste and religious composition of the immigrants, the overwhelming bulk were drawn from several castes that together were identified as Hindus constituting 85 percent of the total immigrants. As with regions again practically all religious of India were represented in the rest but nearly all of them were Muslims (14.7%). Castewise the emigrants were drawn from a medley of caste but with 12-13 percent Brahmins and other upper castes, 35 percent agriculturist castes ( Koeri, Kurmi, Chasa etc),6 percent artisans and 32 percent lowcastes (dalits and other menial castes) they seemed to represent a perfect cross section of the North Indian society from which they emigrated.



If there was a severe discrepancy between the `home' context and the immigrants it was in gender and age composition of the latter. Immigrants were predominantly single , male and in the prime age group of 20-35. Family migration was not the norm with only 15 percent married couples, very few children and only 28 percent females(70 percent of whom were single). All evidence points to recruitment of immigrants individually rather than in groups, not usually from their home villages most having already been mobile and in search of employment before they were recruited in major cities and railway and road junctions of the region.[vii]



The nature of recruitment reflected particular nature of demand by the planters (of able bodied young fit for hard labour) which was geared towards continuous importation rather than local reproduction for its need of a servile labour force. Colonial labour policy militated against settlement of the labour force for the greater part of the period when indenture was in place. Deaths outs tripped births among Indian immigrants till the end of the 19th century- not an unexpected result given the skewed gender composition of the immigrants .



Community formation on the plantations was thus beset with structural problems. Yet in spite of these there emerged an embryonic community centred round the estates. The spearhead of this were the time expired labourers who had finished their terms of indenture. According to the indenture contract they could apply for a free return passage to India after completing a further five years of residence in the colonies. Thus there grew around the estates small settlements or villages of ex indentured labourers who worked on the estates as well took up several other occupations. In the end after completion of ten years , many immigrants either did not return or delayed their return. On the whole of the total immigrants who came to the colonies about 20 percent ever returned to India. This process of villagisation accelerated in the late 19th century with the sugar economy plunging headlong into a long crisis .



A slow but gradual mutation occurred in the plantation labour regime that came around to a policy of settlement of the immigrant labour-mainly by encouraging the ex indentured labourers to become part time estate workers and bear the cost of reproduction in small parcellised holdings. Thus grew in Trinidad by the turn of the century a cane farming small holders community and in British Guiana rice farming and a paddy proletariat emerged among the Indian immigrants. This process of villagisation transformed the character of community formation among Indians with slow emergence of differentiation within the Indian community.



This brief excursus was necessary to show the changing nature of community formation among the Indians. I have identified three phases in the process by which Indian labourers were transformed from temporary sojourners to permanent settlers in the colonies. The first phase from 1838- 1880 was phase of growth of the plantation economy with the centre of immigrant community being strongly centred on the estates and around it. Between 1880 till the end of indenture is the phase of villagisation with increasing diversification of occupation, the centre of gravity of community definitely shifts away from the estates into the villages and settlements.



The third phase in the post indenture period is marked by continuing decline in the social valence of the plantations and the increasing occupational mobility, differentiation among the Indian settlers and the move to urban areas by professionals and educated. These are necessarily broad phases -and there were overlaps between the phases and the tendency towards settlement was accelerated or retarded according to the pace of the economic and political processes. Crisis in the sugar economy accelerated diversification of occupation in the late 19th century while the crisis in the 1930's led to stagnation and strangulation of these processes. Further there were difference between Guyana and Trinidad which was very significant both in the nature and character of settlements of the Indians as well as their specific responses to periods of crisis and boom.



II





Muharram in the Caribbean


A bemused " sight seer" was once witness to the celebration of Muharram or (Tadjha as it was called in British Guyana) on a sugar plantation in Demerara in British Guyana in 1897 and had exclaimed


.... there is something very striking in the in the thought that this Muslim "Miracle play "should be so firmly rooted in this single corner of the American continent. If we count Trinidad as part of the British Guiana then this must be the only spot in the whole of the Western hemisphere where the martyrdom of Hassan and Hossein is annually commemorated. It is as though Good Friday were religiously observed in a single province in the middle of China."



This singular incongruity led him onto philosophical speculation about the East in the West and he further ejaculated:

The Coolies bring their Tadjhas and Tom Toms and we give them trousers and other advantages of civilisation. They come here with their strange customs and superstitions and we give them in return free schooling and Western standard of living. What the result of this strange conjunction of the Orient in the Occident will be, what sort of a social cosmos it is going to produce I leave to others to foretell.[viii]



He may not have been right about Good Friday in China nor about the advantages of trousers and civilisation but he was not very far from truth in his observation about the strange location of Moharram performances in the heart of West- except that he should have included Jamaica and Surinam as also the little island of Grenada where too Muharram was celebrated.



In fact wherever Indian labourers were sent as indentured labourers be it the African continent or the American from Mauritius to Natal, to Fiji and the Caribbean colonies Moharram had emerged as the most important and spectacular festival of the Indian Diaspora in the 19th century. If the " sightseer" had been more knowledgeable he would have been acquainted with the Hosay massacre in Trinidad of 1884( as undoubtedly many of the contemporary missionaries were) he would have exclaimed greater surprise at the fact that Hindus and sunnite muslim labourers had even laid down their lives in order to assert their right to celebrate a minority Shi sect festival.[ix]



On October 30 1884 , 6000 Indian labourers residents of sugar estates around the town of San Fernando took out their processions of Tazias replica tombs of the grandsons of the prophet and marched towards the town to complete the process of immersion of these tabuts to end the festival of Moharram like they had done for thirty years. But that year the Government had banned the procession from entering the town and imposed heavy punishment for infringement of the ban- yet the processionists marched on to the town to fulfill what they said was their "religious obligation". A short distance from the town troops and police mustered to stop the processionists opened fire at two entrances to the town - twenty two Indian labourers were shot dead and one hundred more injured. They had not attacked the police nor had they actually entered the town . When the dead were counted and the injuries toted up- a strange statistics emerged - 17 of the killed were Hindus and five Muslims, 76 of the injured were Hindus and nineteen Muslims and one Christian.



The Government had ostensibly banned the procession as it had argued that Hindus and other non Muslim participation indicated that the procession was not a religious one and its banning did not amount to suppression of religion of the immigrants. The enquiries followed and the governor of Jamaica Sir Henry Norman exonerated the government from allegations of interference with religion of the immigrants. Yet a timid Hindu labourer when asked by the Commissioner as to why he a Hindu had joined the Muslim festival replied'" I did so because it is the custom of all the coolies in Trinidad to join Hosay". Strange indeed are the effects of traveling cultures-and customs, more so because in that same year Moharram processions in Agra in north west provinces had become the site for a major riot between the Hindus and Muslims. In the 1880's and 1890's more conflicts between Hindus and Muslims over the Moharram procession in several cities of North India and following them came the great round of conflicts over cow killing during Bakrid. Why indeed did Muslims and Hindus who fought and killed over Moharram in India jointly laid down their lives in far off Trinidad defending their right to celebrate it?



I have elsewhere analysed the reasons for both the unprecedented hostility of the colonial state and planters to mass public manifestation of community of Indians and also the obstinacy with which the workers staked claim to public performance of community ( Mohapatra 2002). What I wish to note here is to trace the historical career of this popular community festival in the Caribbean.



If our bemused sight seer had lived till the third decade of the 20th century, he would have seen the passing of the indenture labour system into history and with it also the passing of the Moharram as the premier celebration of the descendants of the Indian immigrants. In 1932 Tadjah was banned in the British Guiana by the colonial state , but already some time before that date it was definitely on the wane. ( Williams 1991) In Trinidad Hosay, as Moharram was called had been pushed back into a corner of the suburb of St James in Port of Spain and only survives till date because of its exotic value as a tourist attraction for the Caribbean island country. In Surinam and as also in Fiji 1930's had seen the decline of Moharram, being now a minor festival in certain rural locations devoid both of its past grandeur and wide participation (Kelly 1988). In all these locations several other forms of religious festivals had already overtaken Moharram e.g. Ramlila, Ramjag and Deepavali for the Hindus and Eid Ul Fitr for the Muslims.



What then accounts for the dazzling rise of Moharram in the 19th century in the Indian labour diaspora and its subsequent fall from grace? I shall then in this section try to explain some aspects of this puzzling phenomenon associated with Moharram namely its immense popularity with the predominantly Hindu and Sunni Muslim emigrants , the cultural meanings that they derived from its performance and its unique place in the community formation in the 19th Century as also the factors leading to its decline in the post indenture period. I shall do so with reference mainly to Moharram in British Guiana and Trinidad the two most important Indian labour importing colonies. I hope too that in trying to answer some of these questions and by tracing the course of performance of Moharram over time it would be possible to get a handle on the complex process of community formation in the diaspora as well as in the context from which the emigrants came.



Let me anticipate here the main line of my exposition though some of it is already evident in the presentation of the problem itself. The coeval emergence and decline of Moharram with the indentured labour system is an important feature of the problem that I have set out. My contention is that Moharram's unique features and its wide popularity as the premier religious and community festival bears an important relation with the labour regime in which the emigrants were inserted. It follows from another proposition that community identity formation among the Indian emigrants and their descendents was deeply shaped by their relations, both involuntary and expressive ,with the labour regime. The Colonial state played a constitutive role in the labour regime on the plantations and the changes it underwent over time and directly shaped recruitment, organisation and disciplining of labour. To the extent then that Moharram symbolically expressed community aspirations of the emigrants it was necessarily refracted through their experience within the labour regime and with the colonial state. The relationship no doubt is not a simple unilinear one, it was multiplex (to borrow Craig Calhoun's facile phrase)- yet what has marked several contemporary as well as later anthropological accounts of the diasporic community formation in general and Moharram or similar cultural performances ( with perhaps few exceptions as Kelly and Chandra Jayawardane) is a deliberate erasure of the relationship these bore with the labour regime and the colonial state .



I believe and my research has convinced me that none of the major questions regarding ethnic and community festivals can be understood outside the labouring context in which they were performed. Ethnicity or community identity is not a historical entities and are part of the problem to be explained rather than the explanation itself. The origins of Moharram celebration in the Caribbean were definitely in the early years of indenture. While in Trinidad Moharram festival was traced to its first celebration in 1855 in the Philippine estate in the Naparima area -its origin in British Guiana is not well accounted for. Yet by the late 1850s contemporary news papers had taken notice of the celebration of this " tumultuous festival" of the ' coolies in Trinidad. They noted with wonder the parade of " coolie castles" or " locomotive temples" as the tabut replica tombs of the martyred grandsons of the Prophet were termed, in the main cities of the island. They also noted the high spirits of the ' noisy crowds of coolies exhibiting much earnest gesticulation, making a great noise , dancing and capering" and the vigorous fencing with sticks. There was a certain amused tolerance of this " false and foolish worship" of the heathen crowd.[x] (The Trinidad Sentinel Aug 6 1857, Port of Spain Gazette ( hereafter POSG) July 13 1859)



These early reports noted that the local black population participated in these parades in great numbers as onlookers in search of novelty while they scarcely mentioned the religious denominations of the Indian immigrants. It was and remained for along time a festival of coolie religion which was broadly termed idolatry. What was noticed consistently was the public display of Moharram - which was by the late 1850's called " Hosay" or " Hosein" in Trinidad in imitation of the lamenting chant of " hai hassan hi hosein" and simply Tadjah in Brtish Guyana. (In Jamaica it was known as Hussay). The ignorance as to the religious import of the festival was widespread and it was left to the missionaries specially interested in proselytising among the Indian immigrants in the 1870's to decode it for the edification of the public and officials alike. A bewildered Trinidadaian newspaper wondered in 1871 if the Tabuts displayed were " Gods" and if the god worshipped was the amorous Krishna. John Morton the first Canadian Presbyterian missionary in Trinidad had to dispel (He had arrived in 1865 in Trinidad) these notions by providing the basic information on the story of Kerbala and its religious meanings for the Shhite sect of the Muslims. However , the missionaries both in Guyana and Trinidad were deeply hostile to the Muharram celebrations- disliking the idolatrous aspects of the Muharram celebration, unruly congregation as also the attractions it held for the Christian lower class black population. From the 1870's Christian missionary opposition to Muharram's public festival aspect was an important ingredient in the making of the colonial state and planter's reaction to the festival.



In spite of occasional forays by the missionaries, contemporary accounts of the Muharram remained fixated on its processional and public manifestation. It was only in the 1882-84 in the prelude to the Hosay massacre in San Fernando that somewhat more detailed accounts of celebration of muharram can be found in the Official correspondences, judicial reports and the major enquiry report on the incident by Sir Henry Norman. The first somewhat comprehensive anthropological account of the Moharram was by Mary Beckwith a folklore specialist who studied the festival in 1923 in Jamaica. It is from these scattered sources that I have tried to delineate some of the important features of Muharram in the English speaking Caribbean in the 19th and early twentieth century.



Hosay, tadjah or Hussay was in the 19th century celebrated on the first ten days of the first Islamic month of Muharram or twelve new moons after the last celebration( since Islamic calendar was lunar one with alternating months of thirty and twenty nine days). The festival commemorated the death of the Prophets' grandsons Hassan and Hosein and especially the latter's death in the battle of Kerbala at the hands of the Ummaid enemies of the house of Ali. The festival consisted of three parts: ritual construction of the replica Mausoleum of the martyrs over the period of ten days at the sighting of the new moon, taking out of Alams or Flags representing the martyrs and their families and other memorabilia associated with them e.g Horse shoe shaped Nal sahibs representing the horse Dul Dul of Hosein and parading them from the seventh night onwards accompanied by tassa drum beatings and fencing with the sticks and finally climaxing on the tenth day when the tabuts were taken out and displayed in public, and a grand procession of tazias of various estates were sent off to be immersed in the river or sea in a grand procession accompanied by singing of ritual lament or Mersiahs by women. For most part of the 19th century, the grand spectacle of the Muharram procession found its culmination in the coastal cities of the colony Georgetown, Port of Spain , San Fernando. It was there that the elites of the colonies witnessed the parade of tazias from their balconies and as the years passed they witnessed with horror the growing size of the processions and the " diabolical activities accompanying it namely stick fighting and the incessant chants of "hai hussain hai hassan". By 1880's for instance the procession in San Fernando a cute little planter town with population of 5000, was invaded annually by the Hosay procession consisting of about 15 to 20000 Indian labourers.



It is clear from the accounts of the 19th century from which the above descriptions of the festival has been gathered, that the Muharram was by far the most important community festival of labourers. The question that needs to be answered however is what cultural meanings were sought to be represented in this festival and in what way was community identity of the Indian immigrant labourers expressed through this festival? By answering this it is possible to explain the reasons for the marginalisation of this festival in late indenture and post indenture period.

Community identity can be best understood by examining its concrete manifestation in public and collective performances. Through collective performance community was affirmed , powerfully inducing feelings of solidarity and a sense of belonging. A common sense of belonging is the result as well the pre requisite of community performances.


Experience of migration and the long sea voyage bound the Indian immigrants together and their closeness was enhanced further by the fact that most immigrants were recruited from the same linguistic and cultural region in India( nearly three quarters of Indian immigrants came from the Bhojpur and contiguous Awadh region in the Gangetic United Provinces and Bihar). Further the Plantation labour regime provided an overarching commonality of experience irrespective of inherited differences of creed and caste to the Indian immigrants. The primary identity of Indian immigrants in the plantation setting remained that of "Coolie", nominally meaning an unskilled wage labourer but in fact a pejorative racial appellation for all Indians. Nothing marked out the Indian immigrant as the member of the lowest social group in Trinidad more than the spatial and temporal immobilisation which was imposed by the five year indenture. It was this attribute of immobilsed labour implicit in the term "coolie" which was extended to the whole community of Indian immigrants and their descendants. Understandably, community aspirations of Indians was asserted in opposition to the "coolie" identity and the physical and cultural immobilisation imposed by the indentured labour regime.



The structure of Hosay and the procession provided an adequate frame for expression of community aspirations of the Indian immigrants and their decedents. First of all given the popularity of Muharram as an important public festival in northern India, most of the immigrants were familiar with the rituals and observances associated with it. The festival and the procession incorporated a spectrum of practices, which allowed for participation by all the Indian immigrants irrespective of caste and religious affiliations. These ranged from the strictly religious observances of prayer, fasting and keeping of vows and construction of the Taziyas by the devoted to ostensibly secular ones of ritual stick play, singing of mersiahs(in which women were most prominent) ,carrying banners and other memoribilias , tassa drumming and as spectators. Secondly, since the festivities centered round the estates, the pooling of resources in the construction of the tazias and participation in the procession as members of the estate reinforced estate based solidarity of all the immigrant labourers. Finally it was the procession in which various estates came together that allowed for congregation of all immigrants from various estates thus physically representing the whole community of Indians. The visual impact of the massed participants undoubtedly provided a powerful stimulus to community feeling as did the proud display of the magnificent structure of taziyas as unique cultural symbols of the community.



It was the processional aspect of Muharram , which was perhaps the most important reason for its popularity among the immigrants. The articulation of community identity in a processional form was specially important in the context of the spatial immobility of the community engendered by the indentured labour system. Through the Hosay procession, the community manipulated already existing spaces and places but gave them a new albeit temporary meaning. The Hosay procession performed at least three functions which were crucial for expression of community identity: an integrative ,a transgressive and a reiterative one.



The route of the procession integrated normally segregated plantation communities and physically linked the bounded space of the plantations with the city or town centre. It was thus that the community was structured by the procession and at the same time as it imprinted itself on the existing space. In its' transgressive aspect, the procession narrated a counter discourse to the normal spatial immobility imposed on the immigrants. By occupying the highway and marching through the centre of the towns Indian immigrants laid claim to the public spaces which were ordinarily denied to them. While indentured immigrants were bound by law not to be outside the plantations without explicit permission of the managers even non indentured immigrants and their descendants were required by law to possess with them certificates of exemption from indenture and were liable to be arrested as vagrants or deserters. Public spaces, highways and towns were especially fraught places for the Indians. By occupying spaces and places in the procession, even though temporarily, Indian labourers symbolically transcended both their "coolie" status and the implicit bounded space in which they were located. The Muharram procession then literally mobilized an immobile community.



However, the counter discourse of space was not formulated in opposition to the established authority structure even though the procession did not draw its legitimacy from any explicit legal right to occupy spaces and places. Rather, the transgressive and liminal aspects were normalised through the reiterative function of the procession. By repeating over the years ,fixed routes, destinations and orders of estates in the procession, the community arrogated to itself an implicit right to occupy, and march through pubic spaces. It was custom rather than any specific legal right which was invoked by the participants in the Hosay procession of 1884 to go to San Fernando. The heavy investment in customary spatial rights was also at the root of conflicts over orders of precedence in the procession. Custom also made space sacred as was asserted by the Babajees about San Fernando in 1883. By integrating, mobilising and investing customary rights on public places and spaces , the Muharram festival and the procession powerfully articulated community aspirations and religious belief, the sacred and the profane were not separated either in the practices or in the minds of the participants.



A final feature of the processional form of Muharram needs to be noted here. While I have drawn attention to the relation between the expressive forms of community and the specific condition of labouring existence (Integration, mobilisation,public representation) it must not be inferred therefore that the procession was in some sense a direct expression of the labouring identity of the indentured immigrants workers. In fact in the Muharram and the procession if any thing was visually absent was any direct reference to the labouring condition on plantation. I would even suggest that Muharram procession allowed the Indian immigrants to negate their overwhelming existence as Coolie labour and represent themselves as full-fledged moral and cultural community. Muharram drew its sharpest meaning for the participants in the evident contrast with their daily condition of labour- and this was the meaning that was powerfully conveyed to the wider public through the Procession. However despite this caveat, because of the way in which the processional form of Muharram became an expression of community assertion- it also emerged as potentially powerful vehicle for representing collective grievances. In my analysis of the 1884 Hosay Massacre I have demonstrated the special conditions in which the community assertion and class grievances were uniquely combined in the Muharram procession in Trinidad.

( Mohapatra 2002) The Muharram of 1884 in Trinidad came in the wake of a unprecedented strike wave that swept through the colony between 1882-1884 as planters tried to counter the crisis of falling sugar prices by intensification of work . The threat of insurrection appeared imminent to the planters and the colonial state as they panicked in face of massed display of Muharram procession. By banning the procession and brutally enforcing the ban the colonial state sought to unlink the class and community assertion expressed in the Muharram.



Having elaborated the cultural meanings that were sought to be expressed through Muharram I need to explain its eventual decline over time as the premier community festival of The Indians in the diaspora. Muharram grew in size and importance with the growth of the plantation economy and its decline coincided with the severe crisis of plantation economy in the late 19th century. But the most important factor for its decline remained the unabashed hostility of the colonial state to the Moharram procession. The first attempts at controlling the procession had been initiated in Guyana in 1869 when a special ordinance required specially chosen headmen to be seek permission and be responsible for order in the procession. This was followed in Trinidad in promulgation of ordnances banning the procession from public roads and towns and confining it to the estates. Finally the large scale shooting down of the workers in 1884 to enforce the ordinance broke the back of this community festival. A new ordinance in 1885 In Trinidad made the celebration of the festival a Muslim affair with punishment for non Muslim celebration. I have argued that community representation in public spaces was the most powerful source of popularity of the festival- denied this vital expressive quality and by confining the festival to individual estates this festival was starved of the oxygen of publicity. Allied to this was the sustained hostility of missionaries and orthodox sections Muslims to the pagan display in the festival. But the factor that worked incessantly in the background was the gradual move away from the plantation and the process of villagisation that was initiated as a response to the crisis of the late 19th century. As the locus of community formation shifted away from the plantation and the estates Muharram could no longer become the preferred mode of community assertion. There was a definite shift from public display of community to more inward and exclusive forms of religious observances (such as ramayanjag, flag worship for hindus and EID for muslims).This process of retreat from Public display however was soon overtaken by a new form of engagement in the emergent public sphere in the colonies.





III



Voice of the Settler Indian : A Son of India in Trinidad




In the aftermath of the crisis of 1884 , a new mode of public sphere activity emerged quite suddenly in the Caribbean. This was in the form of writing letters to the leading journals of the colonies. The first letterwriter to emerge from the ranks of the |Indians wrote under the nom de plume of A Son of India in the San Fernando Gazette in 1888 a widely circulated daily in Trinidad. This was the leading Creole (Black) newspaper of the colony and championed the cause of the educated Creoles who were demanding greater share in the affairs of the colony. It is in this newspaper that A son of India began writing a series of letters and essays drawing attention to the demands of the Indian community. Three factors seem to have given rise to this public representation form .First the emergence of a substantial number of Indians, ex indentured labourers who had diversified out from the Plantations and had formed the nucleus of the Indian settler community. Second from within this small but rapidly growing section there emerged a miniscule group of Indians educated in English largely through the proselytising effort of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad which opened its first school for Indian children in 1871 (By 1888 there were 52 Schools in several estates and villages with three thousand children of the settler Indians and 10 educated Indian were employed as interpreters and shop clerks in 1880) Third the institution of the Royal Franchise Commission enquiring into the question of electoral enfranchisement in the colony in 1888 gave a fillip to public agitation for elected and representative government largely led by progressive Creole middle class .[xi]



It is significant that the first letter of A son of India in December 1888 was written as an address to the new Governor William Robinson , articulated the demand of the growing settler Indian community.[xii] The themes set out in the letter seemed to have persisted through out the career of this pioneer Indian letter writer. First there was the demand that efforts should be made by the government to retain the Indian labourers in the colony rather then repatriate them. Secondly the most important incentive for retention was for the government to intervene actively to provide education to the Indians taking into account their special needs as the bulk of them were outside the purview of any education effort at all. In it there was the demand to provide for compulsory education to all Indian children. Thirdly, the language of Imperial citizenship is deployed by the author to seek governmental welfare and stake a permanent claim on the colony.( “It is not too much to ask from the Governmen