On May 10, 1845, a ship named Maidstone had arrived at Old Harbour Bay, Jamaica. In it were 261 people from the Indian Subcontinent – 200 men, 28 young women and 12 children. Most of them were from the northern Indian states of Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They had sailed the rough seas in search of a new beginning and a new life – free from poverty, destitution and caste discrimination. But little did they realize that they were heading out to a new world as post-slavery slaves. Their lived experience was rather different from what they had imagined. But their story is one of survival and hope.
Their new beginning resulted from ending an old system of oppression. With the abolition of slavery in 1834, the former slaves were emancipated. Unencumbered from their colonial masters, they sought other jobs and economic independence. Labour was in short supply. The colonial planters wanted to stop the freed slaves, mostly of African descent, from making economic gains. After many failed attempts to attract Europeans to flood the market with cheap labour, they looked to India with a simple strategy – woo people who could toil for a pittance. As they could not have slaves anymore, they invented an ingenious new term – “indentured labourers”.
Many of them were lured into their ‘contracts’. In 1861 a report of Beyts, the Protector of Immigrants wrote:
The coolies who are ensnared by those unprincipled intermediaries are often grossly deceived… women are enticed away from their husbands and their families.
The next year (1846) 1,852 people had arrived – five times more than the first batch of people from India who had set foot in Jamaica. The year after that (1847) 2,439 people had arrived in Jamaica. In seven decades between 1845 to 1921, over 36,000 Indians migrated to Jamaica as ‘indentured labourers’.
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