Dr Fazal Ali
The truth never bows. Truth never apologises. On 18 January 1869, P J Keenan, Esq., boarded the West Indian mail packet. He arrived in Trinidad on 6 January. On 10 February, the Gazette published a notice stating that he was there to inquire into the state of education.
In Note 140 of his report, he states that the “intellectual necessities” of the indentured class of Asiatic immigrants were “overlooked”. “The C****e’s mind was left a blank” (p.48).
David Babydeen has since written works titled “C****e Odyssey” and “C****e Mother.” Khal Torabully has articulated the principles of C****etude, a cousin of Negritude, aimed at building pride for a broad group of people scattered everywhere.
Imperial capitalists didn’t recruit indentured labourers for their sugar colonies. Rather, they manufactured masks. The enlistment model uprooted horticulturists, loom operators, palanquin-bearers, goldsmiths, shepherds, shipbuilders, soldiers, Sufi saints, and swamis, with centuries-old identities and repackaged them into indistinguishable workers without caste or heritage.
High-caste Hindu women left India for Trinidad. That is a fact! But they left India as a “c****e”. They were labelled to remind them of their lowliness in an ethnic hierarchy. And they were at the bottom of the sugar colony. That is also a fact.
Women had greater reason to flee. Greater tyranny to flee. They left their villages earlier, left their husbands before leaving their communities, and finally they left India. Were they sufferers, or did they take charge of their own destiny?
What is certain is that indentureship turned them into stock characters with formulaic qualities that shaped who they were and narrowed what they could be. Mislabelled and degraded, they could not take on Radha’s power to name themselves.
Those who survived crossing the Kaala Paani, and those who didn’t run away, burned Ravan in effigy at the climax of their Ramleela. They reminded their children that the colonialists, in their oppression, surpassed even Ravan.
On arrival, exposed and washed in collective baths, their caste concerns drifted down the stone slabs of Nelson Island, into the Gulf of Paria. The “janew”, that sacred white thread, slipped through their fingers downriver as they showered themselves in dehumanising baths of tears.
The Colonial Office papers, doubtful ethnographers seldom tell tales of rape and unrecognised children. In 1914, a Demerara woman resisted the overseers’ attempts at sexual assault. She wounded him with a cutlass. Officials dismissed her statement of case. She was imprisoned for five years.
On June 19, 1913, in Berbice, a celibate “sadhin” was sentenced to death for infanticide. Was she raped? How does a “sadhin” come to be with a child? The colonial records are blank.
These indentured women stood in the sugar fields like banyan trees, displaying the glory of their roots in their choli and orhni for all to see. Their ghagra gathered at the waist with a drawstring and safety pin, held high above the sapate mud and piercing cane stalks raised in threat like the jagged edge of a beer bottle, while ash from the singed sugarcane leaves falls on everything like grey snow.
LLMs generally do not prioritise or centre muted and minimised life worlds because their training data comes from the broader internet, which historically reflects Eurocentric records. AI bias affects our historiography.
Colonial administrators, plantation owners, and shipping companies constructed the records that built the Colonial Archive. As a result, most online data is structurally biased toward overseers’ perspectives, including ship manifests, court records of “runaways,” and economic ledgers.
First-hand accounts were erased because indentured women’s minds were left blank. As a result, indentured narratives are statistically rare in the global dataset compared with colonial records.
Experiences of systemic rape and other estate violence were suppressed, underreported, or reframed to protect the economic model, drivers, and overseers, leaving a very small digital footprint for AI to learn from.
Because AI models rely on pattern matching and statistical frequency, their “understanding” of these events rests entirely on data curation. Today, AI architectures respond with an “Objective Bystander Tone” to human prompts about the life worlds of indentured women in Golconda, Trinidad.
LLMs adopt a neutral or passive tone rather than “pointing out” the planters’ wrongdoing or “pointing to” the pain of women. This happens because the model blends a few critical historical texts with a vast sea of generalised, disinfected colonial entries.
A blind spot in intersectional awareness remains. Standard training datasets fail to capture the ideographic intersection of gender, ethnicity, and invisibility. The specific trauma of women in sugar colonies, who faced discrete exploitation dynamics and plantation hierarchy, is drowned out by Eurocentric histories.
While the model’s vast architecture contains knowledge of these events, it does not automatically centre the victim’s perspective unless the AI is directed to draw on specific, critical historical frameworks.
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.
