The first set of Indian immigrants who arrived in Trinidad between 1845 and 1847 were not indentured servants. This is the assertion made last night by Dr Dennison Moore who was the feature speaker at the Indian Arrival Day dinner held by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha.
Moore, a Trinidadian who now resides in Canada, said: "Most scholars and writers on Indian arrival here have asserted that the first Indian immigrants were indentured." He said: "But the authors whom I have consulted, and they are legion, have not amassed a set of historical facts that would support their contention."
Moore used retired University of the West Indies historian Prof Bridget Brereton definition of indenture: "A contract before they left India which bound them to accept certain terms. For the period that their indenture lasted, they were not free. They could not leave their employer. They could not demand higher wages, live off the estate they were assigned to or refused the work given them to do." He explained that when the British government abolished slavery in 1838, the African ex-slaves abandoned the estates in Trinidad and British Guiana in droves. Moore said: "Their refusal to work steadily on the estates created a severe shortage of labour which speculators were eager to fill." He said these "unscrupulous speculators" conned the former slaves in the smaller islands to enter into the "improvident contracts for labour to be performed in Trinidad and British Guiana."
Moore said when the labourers arrived in those colonies the speculators would sell the contracts to other parties for profit. He said to put an end to this practice, the British government issued a number of orders-in-council declaring invalid in the Crown colonies–British Guiana, Trinidad, St Lucia, the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius–all contracts for labour entered into outside the limits of the colony in which labour was to be performed. "What this means is that none of the emigrants who left India for the West Indies in 1845, 1846 and 1847 signed any contract of service," Moore said. "But the immigrants did sign a contract in India...It was decidedly not a contract of service,"
he said.
"The general engagement undertaken in India to work for hire in the colonies was not a contract of indenture. It neither bound the emigrants to work for anyone for any set period of time nor did it establish the remuneration they had to accept for their labour nor consigned them to estates under contracts which they could break." He has also disputed the actual date in which the immigrants arrived saying it was May 3 and not May 30 when Indian Arrival Day is celebrated. Moore said the number of the first immigrants who arrived was also not clear and he also said that the Fatel Rozack, the ship that brought them, may not have been the one described by scholars.