Gerad Tikasingh, author of Trinidad in the 19th Century: The Indian Experience, which was recently launched at the National Library, interviewed byRaymond Ramcharitar.
RR: Your thesis was the first locally-produced one to examine Indians in Trinidad. There were studies before, but sociological studies, by Morton Klass and the Niehoffs. What led you to pick the topic?
GT: At the time there were all kinds of myths about Indians, all kinds of ideas about indentureship and so on.My understanding was that those ideas were not really grounded in fact. I tried to make that clear at the launch of the book.When you're dealing with this topic, with so many myths, you have to go back to the original sources. History is not based on opinion. There are basic facts and a time sequence you have to get right. Basic first principles of history are egregiously violated.
Where? How? In Trinidad? Could you be specific?
I don't want to call any names, but yes, here in Trinidad. You did history, you should know.
Could you give me some examples of myths?
Ok, there are the ones that Indians were tricked into coming here, and they were slaves, or semi-slaves, or the Canadian missions practised discrimination by focusing on the Indians.
Were they tricked?
What do you think?Maybe some of them, but I don't think 80 per cent would have chosen to stay if they were tricked. And however they got here, they liked what they came to.Indentured immigration was one of the most intensely regulated immigrations in the 19th century. At first, when Indians went to Mauritius and British Guiana, it was unregulated, and there were abuses, and it was stopped. When it resumed, it was under government regulation. By 1864 we had the first consolidated set of requirements with regard to the recruitment of Indians. One of the requirements was that a local recruiter could no longer send a prospective immigrant to Calcutta. He had to take the immigrant to a district magistrate, who examined the person, to satisfy himself that the person had some idea what was going on.But as we all know, laws can be broken.
Actually because of a kidnapping case, two major changes were made. They had to do with the licensing of the recruiter. At first there was some confusion between the Protector of Immigrants and the district magistrates as to who licensed the recruiter. And because of this case, it was decided the district magistrate was responsible to make sure the recruiter was a local, from the village.The second change was that during the immigrant interview, the recruiter was not allowed to be in the same room.Your thesis looked at Indians from 1870-1900...
Yes, but the book has grown beyond the thesis. Once I started the book, I asked myself whether I should stick with the familiar outline: slavery ended, search for labour, Indians came. Well the outline is true, but once you begin to check that story out, you come face to face with historical assumptions we make, and you find there's really no support for those historical assumptions.
So the outline is true, but what are the insupportable assumptions?
Well, the assumption that Africans were natives of Trinidad. and that Trinidad was a slave society.Beginning with modern Trinidad from 1783, Trinidad went through four major population makeovers. In 1844, 93 per cent of the population of Trinidad was immigrant in origin. There is really no group who can say they were natives. Not even the French can say they were native.
Maybe the Spanish could–and Spanish Trinidad was never really a slave society.When you think of a slave society, you think of Jamaica, Barbados. Spanish Trinidad was what historians call "a society with slaves." It was a military outpost, a crown settlement. The number of slaves was insignificant. If you took the slaves out, the Spanish military and the Dominican missions to the Ameri Indians would continue their operations.Trinidad became a slave society beginning with the French in 1783. So the French came between 1783 and 1797 with their slaves. Then the English came, from 1797, with their slaves. In 1807 the slave trade ended, but you still had free blacks and coloureds coming in till 1834.Then from 1841–1861, the freed slaves from West Africa.
Right. So who is a native?
Now, when you did this thesis, this was the height of black nationalism in Trinidad. The PNM essentially co-opted the Black Power movement post-1970, which was initially very anti-PNM. The Indians were in an anomalous position. What were your experiences proposing and executing this thesis at UWI?Well, let me say my thesis was very narrowly focused. I initially accepted the conventional outline without thinking about it. Secondly I had to work with people whose idea of history is a little different.You're saying that people's ideas of history differed from yours, for example, I read that the first conference on Indians in the West Indies at UWI in 1973 was supposed to have met resistance...Not that I recall. At another conference in Barbados, I went head-to-head with Walter Rodney, and in a way I was head-to-head with Millette too, because they wanted to see exploitation, injustice, and so on.And that's one of the things about this book, it's from the perspectives of Indians themselves. Even when you have people living in the same area, their perspectives can be very different. For example, the sugar estates: Africans looked at estates as the scene of their slavery. So when Indians came to work on the estates, they thought, well, they must be slaves.
Then there was the contention that the sugar industry was anti-innovation. The characterisation might have been true in Jamaica and Barbados, but not in Trinidad. In Trinidad, the sugar industry made every attempt to modernise itself. Before Indians came in the 1840s, there had been changes, the economy was being restructured, the English brought their mode of management, and the sugar duties were allowing Britain to import other sugar, which meant a drop in price. And shortly after that you had a depression, which caused a lot of estates to go out of business. So you had a changing situation which brought new estate management, new personnel and so on.If you look at the data for the importation of machinery, you see every time there is an economic problem you see machinery imports peak. So to say the sugar industry was backward is rubbish.Your thesis was one of progress and optimism.
I don't want to romanticise. Indentureship was a hard thing. There was nothing easy about it. I mean, they signed up, and yes, they would make it work for them, but it was a very difficult thing. Like immigrants everywhere, they had second thoughts. Did I make the right decision coming here? People committed suicide. There was one case of a woman– something happened, and her husband scolded her, and she put on all her jewels and her best clothes and committed suicide.It was not easy, you have to admire those people for their stamina and courage. I take my hat off to them. Their belief as demonstrated by their action–they were simple people, but they had a set of values that carried them through.
What do you think of the Indian community now, having studied their origins?
It seems like they've made a lot of progress.I wonder sometimes about their moral development. It's gone a long way from where it started. Previously, they were part of the ethos of caste, and the basis of that was ascription–everything was predetermined, ascribed to you by virtue of being born.But here in Trinidad, everybody got compressed, all that went out.
Well, not entirely. The Maha Sabha still insists it's a Brahminical organisation...Well, in terms of priestly point of view, but the correlates of caste do not function, the things that make caste function do not exist. You might use it as an epithet–you might say a guy is a Brahmin, or a chamar.What happened to Indians was that they were shoved into a new situation and they had to learn something new. They had to learn that their own self-interest was foremost and not subsumed into class.
What do you hope this book will accomplish?
I wrote it for the average person. I know it's daunting, but I tried to write it in such a way that you didn't have to be a scholar, or have training in history, to read it and follow the argument. So I hope that everybody would be able to read the book and understand what Indians themselves went through. This idea of looking at Indians through black eyes I reject totally. I don't mean anything racist by that.
Do you plan to do any follow-up?
I want to be able to locate the logbook for the ship on which my father came. And I'm going to be looking at sources nobody has done.
Your father came from India, and how did that inspire or influence your work?
It was one example of wanting to understand of why people came...to get some sense of the motivation for people coming, you have to look at the district magistrates' notes of the people they were examining. How many people didn't know what they were signing up for? Who was rejected? What were the circumstances of their recruitment? From my own research, I found accounts written by about eight persons in the church archives in Canada.
Anything to close on?
My hope is the average person can read this. And when you read a book, you ask yourself certain questions about the book. You don't have to be a scholar to do this. But you want to be sure, when you read a book, what you're getting is based on fact, not opinion.
