Brilliantly written book on indentureship and early Indian experience in Guyana

Jul 26, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – Marble, Grass, and Glass by Sham Moteelall (XLibris, 2021) is an investigation of Indian indentureship (girmit labour system) through the author’s family roots. The writer, a Berbician who migrated and settled in Minnesota since 1970, narrates and describes his ancestors’ journey and their experiences and also that of their immediate descendants in Guyana. It is a family story from India, Guyana, and America with the latter being addressed briefly towards the end. It investigates the relatively little-studied experiences of the indentured labourers and their early descendants that were born and raised in British Guiana – recruitment (including kidnapping) of labourers, their experiences during the journey on board the ship, on the plantations, and after indentureship.

Although it is an account of his family travails in India, on board the ship, in the estate plantation, and life in post indentureship in Guyana, the narrative and description of indentureship is applicable to all societies where Indian indentured labourers were taken.

Marble, Grass, and Glass is a brilliantly written piece of work with significant portion on recruitment of labourers. commencement of indentureship in 1838 (British Guiana). (Indian Indentureship began in Reunion Island in 1828 and Mauritius in 1834, which was preceded by slavery of Indians in Reunion decades earlier. Recruitment of Indian indentured labourers ended in March 1917 and indentured Indians were freed by the British government on January 1, 1920). Besides the indentureship experience, it addresses the social and cultural life of indentured labourers on the plantations and post indentureship.

The book is a historical re-telling of events relating to all aspects of indenture and its aftermath. The work departs from the usual historical approach of dates and events. It is presented in a literary narrative prose describing scenes, events, episodes, conditions, the environment that make the readers imagine what was taking place. The writing flows nicely from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. There is an occasional grammatical error but overall it is well written.

It tells how and why indentured Indians came to Guyana? Who were the people brought here? What adversities and challenges they faced? How did they cope and overcame their difficulties through the 1970s.

The book is not a scholarly account with citations, but Moteelall brings forth evidence in constructing careful accounts of all aspects of indentureship. He exposes the horrors of indentureship — with the girmityas suffering from similar experiences and fates of slaves.  Few accounts have so thoroughly related the broad history of Indian indentureship with facts and experiences. The methodology used in the writing is the oral accounts of ancestors that came from India that were obtained from family members who themselves received the accounts from their parents, grandparents, and other kins. Most of it is anecdotal and empirical.

The work will be of particular interest to historians (of India’s history, Guyanese history, Indian Guyanese history, labour exploitation, and oral history – methods of gathering accounts), anthropologists (cultural studies, of Indian Guyanese culture and dialects, Indian cultural continuity and change, patriarchy, Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim relations, family life and marriage, rituals of birth and death, festivals, and religious texts, and traditions), sociologists (social and ethnic relations between Indians and Africans in the segregated villages, migration, ethnicity, gender studies, patrilinealism, women contributions to development, role of Indian women in indentured labour and their resistance to sexual exploitation and domination, Indian gender relations within the family, power relations within the plantations), political scientists (India and Guyana’s freedom or liberation movements and resistance against British rule), and economists (the primitive economy of India and Guyana, the economic lives of the poor and labourers in both in India and Guyana, and how the contributions of indentured labour and the Indian peasantry transform the colony and brought about socio-economy change).  Recollection of life back home for most girmityas, except perhaps for several of the author’s ancestors, made it not so difficult to opt to settle down in Guyana making it their new home. The girmityas had aspirations for their lives – to obtain quick wealth from hard work and savings and to return to their motherland to purchase land for agriculture and cattle rearing and provide a decent home for their kinship.

Few returned to the motherland to achieve their dreams. But many of them have been able to do make progress in the colony. A large number of them died as paupers and their descendants are still struggling today although they would have been better off than their kins at that time in rural India. In spite of distance, their lives in Guyana were connected with their custodian socio-cultural life in the villages from where they came in India.  The conditions for the labourers are no doubt an improvement to their lives in then British India. The labourers and their descendants worked hard, managed to save money, bought land, and established a better life than if they were free in India.

The book consists of 19 chapters inclusive of conclusion, plus an introduction, prologue, and epilogue, totalling 331 pages plus another 10 in roman numbers. There is no central theme and no hero — just an account of all aspects of indentureship from life in India, recruitment process, conditions aboard the ship and on the colonies, sexual exploitation and abuses of females, and survival. Although they were victims of sexual exploitation by white overseers and plantation agents, including Indian and Black men who overpowered them, they persevered to overcome their difficulties. Their labour and sex exploitation would serve as a powerful mobilising force against British rule and the indenture system.

This book is, arguably, one of the most profound contributions to indentureship history in recent years published. It is brilliantly written by someone who is not an English or History major but an agronomist.

It is written in simple down to earth language making it readable by the schooled and unschooled. It is written for general readership. It is recommended for secondary schools and colleges on Guyana history and Indian indentureship. The book is worthy for entry into recognition and honours like the Guyana Prize for Literature, The Booker Prize, and the Commonwealth Prize.

 

Yours truly,

Dr. Vishnu Bisram

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