On Sat­ur­day May 30, our coun­try will com­mem­o­rate the 175-year mile­stone of East In­di­an ar­rival to our shores. In­ci­den­tal to this is the 82nd an­niver­sary of the in­clu­sion of St James in­to the City of Port-of-Spain.

This his­toric event took place on June 1, 1938.

Since then, St James has de­vel­oped from a sleepy vil­lage in­to a vi­tal sub-di­vi­sion of Port-of-Spain.

Orig­i­nal­ly, St James was set­tled by Tamil In­di­ans and that event was im­mor­talised by nam­ing a large per­cent­age of its streets af­ter the cities and re­gions in In­dia. Hence we have Bom­bay, Cal­cut­ta, Madras, Bar­o­da, Ben­gal, Kan­da­har, Luc­know, Agra, Pat­na, and Benares to name some.

More­over, the two re­li­gions as­so­ci­at­ed with In­di­ans of Trinidad Hin­duism and Is­lam, are very well es­tab­lished here and the Hosay com­mem­o­ra­tion is a ma­jor re­li­gious and cul­tur­al event which has be­come very well known.

Fur­ther­more, all forms of In­di­an cui­sine whether in di­rect form or in­di­rect­ly in the man­ner in which food is sea­soned have be­come char­ac­ter­is­tic of St James house­holds re­gard­less of eth­nic ori­gin, and of food vend­ing out­lets all over the coun­try.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, ar­chi­tec­ture in St James and the en­ter­pris­ing spir­it of its peo­ple re­flect the phi­los­o­phy of life of the In­di­an im­mi­grant.

All of those char­ac­ter­is­tics have caused St James to be con­sid­ered as the most vi­brant sub di­vi­sion of Port-of-Spain and, in­ci­den­tal­ly, the best ex­am­ple of cul­tur­al and eth­nic har­mo­ny in the Trinidad land­scape.

Most na­tives of St James are proud to be “St Jame­sians” and are quick to ac­knowl­edge the con­tri­bu­tion that the In­dia Im­mi­grant made to the cre­ation of this out­stand­ing com­mu­ni­ty.

In­di­ans in St James al­so par­tic­i­pate in events of oth­er eth­nic groups thus re­in­forc­ing our na­tion­al mot­to: “to­geth­er we as­pire, to­geth­er we achieve.”

Rishi Lakhan, via email