Dr Fazal Ali
Wealth accumulated through the triangular transatlantic slave trade fuelled the Industrial Revolution. But this capital reversed India’s development. The resulting de-industrialisation of India created the poverty and displacement that fuelled indentured labour, as per capita income fell and economic vulnerability deepened.
The array of social and economic deprivations that followed made cities like Ayodhya magnets for women who left their husbands, villages, and India. These castaways turned Ayodhya into an oasis for recruiters. Michel-Jean Cazabon was born in Trinidad on September 20, 1813, at Corinth Estate, Northern Naparima, on the outskirts of Golconda.
By 1851, Cazabon would notice Naparima’s shifting social contours as women from India arrived. Localised historical narratives of these women’s life worlds remain steeped in the sour, sticky scent of scorched canes that spike the evening air as the sun sinks like a brass gong behind Couva, into an ocean of purple-green stalks, while the yellow, chartreuse glow of fireflies turns every dusk into Divali.
To give voice to the reminiscences and experiences of descendants and relatives of the indentured women in Golconda, Lawrence Scott conducted audio-taped interviews with people tied to sugar settlements for generations. In one interview, a woman described a relationship between an indentured labourer and the overseer.
“When she had the baby, this baby born was a boy, and this baby had blue eyes. So then the husband ask she, ‘How you get this child with this blue eye?’ She say, ‘Well, she don’t know.’ When the boy became an adult, he got married. His wife asked him, “How you have this eye? None of your brother don’t have this eye,” (Golconda, p.32, 2009).
Badal and Laungee were indentured to Vriesland, a Demerara River plantation. They were from different castes and arrived in Guyana separately. Laungee deserted Badal for a time, and when she returned, they fought.
Laungee arrived at the hospital in a mule cart, bearing thirty-five wounds. On 31 October 1903, the city jail raised a black flag to signal that an execution had taken place. On the scaffold, Badal cried, “Hai Ram. Hai Ram,” in a bid for salvation.
Living under the gravitational pull of a sugar colony could also be disorienting. In 1838, one-third of the labourers on Plantation Belle Vue, Guyana, crossed the shark-infested Demerara by boat at night, searching for a way back to India.
The dream of return to India was a nightmare for indentured women. Surgeon-Major D W D Comins, the government-appointed protector of indentured immigrants, reported that an indentured labourer, upon arriving in Calcutta from Guyana with his wife and child, told them to sit while he got tickets. He heartlessly abandoned them at the Howrah railway station. He could not take them to meet his family.
Indentured narratives are statistically rare in the global dataset compared with the imperial archives’ rich holdings. The National Archives (Kew) holds official UK government correspondence and administrative records from the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office.
Key series include Colonial Office correspondence and files under series CO 295 and CO 111, along with the emigration and General West Indies Records under series CO 318 (West Indies), and emigration department files such as CO 384, CO 386, and CO 571.
These files focus heavily on imperial administration, policy, and government correspondence rather than on comprehensive individual genealogical registers or the personal names of every woman indentured to a sugar colony.
The expectation is that the national archives and the records departments of companies such as Tate & Lyle in Couva preserve detailed, name-by-name registers, such as ship arrival lists, immigrant certificates, and estate records.
In 1937, Tate & Lyle established Caroni Limited by merging Caroni Sugar Estates Co (Trinidad) Ltd and Waterloo Sugar Estates Ltd, and by acquiring the Brechin Castle, Usine Sainte Madeleine, Reform, and Orange Grove sugar factories.
AI ethics is not the preserve of any one continent or country. Did the training data used to build AI models prioritise the muted life worlds of indentured women? Did AI model developers use archival materials from Tate & Lyle to train their models?
If not, the data lakes are likely structurally biased towards overseers’ perspectives, court records of “runaways,” and unreliable anecdotes about women sent to jail.
Narratives by women in sugar colonies are statistically scarce in the global dataset compared with data scraped from colonial digital archives. This data gap and data poverty leave a faint digital footprint for AI to learn from.
Training datasets fail to capture the specific trauma experienced by women in sugar colonies, who faced distinct patterns of exploitation.
Right now, AI models can only blend a few critical historical texts with a vast ocean of generalised, sanitised colonial digital archival records. A blind spot in intersectional awareness persists.
Dr Fazal Ali completed his Master’s in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies. He was a Commonwealth Scholar who attended the University of Cambridge, Hughes Hall; the Provost of the University of Trinidad and Tobago; the acting President of UTT; and the Chairman of the Teaching Service Commission. He is the President of NIHERST and an external services consultant with the IDB.
