(From our archives: this article was featured in our October 2011 issue 'Dust of the Road')
I recently visited the Indian Caribbean Museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum did not have other visitors at the time. Its friendly curator, 69-year-old Saisbhan Jokhan, came out to greet me and quickly proved to be a trove of information. The museum commemorates the history of a million Indo-Caribbeans, whose ancestors came as indentured labourers from the Subcontinent between 1838 and 1917. Graphic panels at the museum include details on immigrant ships, copies of girmits (indenture agreements) and rare archival photos of life on Caribbean sugarcane plantations. Evocative objects abound: an improvised sarangi, a pair of wood slippers, a rotary sugarcane press like the ones still used in mofussil India, even a life-size model of an indentured worker's hut. Other displays show milestones in the life of the community, such as a 1970 photo of the first 'Indo-Trini' policewoman; a panel on Alice Jan, the first lady of Indo-Trini culture; and Indo-Trinis winning the right to build their own schools in 1952, allowing them to replace Christian with Hindu teaching.
Well before the arrival of Subcontinental labour, Trinidad was colonised by the Spanish in 1592. A backwater for much of the next 200 years, it passed into British control in 1797. By then there were also many French slavers, known to be the worst on the island. Hundreds of Africans were enslaved and taken to Trinidad each year just to replenish the diminishing numbers due to the brutal regime of work and disease-prone living conditions on sugar plantations. Over the decades, tens of thousands were imported. Children over the age of six were made to work, and corporal punishment was widely used. Errant slaves were also disciplined in jails through flogging and torture; some were even mutilated or executed.
In 1802, there were close to 200 sugar estates in Trinidad, with 2261 whites, 5275 'free coloureds' and around 20,000 slaves. By this point, the local Caribs and Arawaks had been decimated, their estimated pre-Columbus population of 40,000 having fallen to about 1000. When at last the British government announced a ban on the transatlantic slave trade starting in 1807, the estate owners protested bitterly, with a petition calling the move "a vexatious and most injurious interference with the authority of the master over his slave". In fact, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the Caribbean islands, and slavery itself persisted in Trinidad until the late 1830s. At that point, slave owners demanded and received compensation from the British government, which equalled the average market value of each slave.