Footsteps: Out of Time!

Zorina Shah

There was a time when the Cedros peninsula was really one large coconut plantation, divided into several estates, each with its own set of barracks which eventually transitioned into villages. The estates bore such lofty names linked to its original owners, Ste. Marie, Perseverance, Columbia, St. Andrew, Constance and St. Quintin. 

Barracks at St. Andrew Estate

St. Quintin was of particular interest to me. It remained a row of slightly elevated barrack houses well into the 1980s, its roads were sand tracks, sand as from the coastline, that is. It was a short walk from where we lived on Columbus Beach. We visited Budhia often, but I did not know why. I never found out until I saw this emigration pass, the Register of Indentured workers now a part of the UNESCO Memory of the World. Budhia was from Uttar Pradesh, Siswa Bazaar near what is now the Nepalese border. 

Emigration pass for Budhia

Those were the days long after another indentured worker, Gopaulsingh, had moved from one estate to the other, with upward mobility, until he came to San Fernando with his one daughter Rookmin, and became the grandfather of a well known family, the Gopeesinghs. My story on Gopaulsingh was published in the June 8, 1975 edition of the Sunday Express and was discovered online by his great grandson Christopher Johnstone, a Canadian, in 2020. 

Part of the screenshot from Christopher Johnstone

The following year, Chris came to Trinidad to trace one leg of his great grandfather’s footsteps which originated in Benares and led to Constance, St. Quintin to Icacos, Fullerton, Bonasse, and San Fernando. In checking information ahead of his visit, I learnt that the Gopeesinghs ran a boat service from Cedros to Point Fortin, the roads being what they were at that time.

Full story from NALIS. I clearly did not know how to write.

Many of the stories of Indian indentureship are rooted in sugar and tend to omit other areas of agriculture and economy. It also largely excludes those who are not Hindus and definitely sidelines Indians who belong to the Christian faith. 

Before I entered my teens, I remember a young man from my village of Fullerton agitating for recognition, calling for a day of celebration and later publishing a book with a yellow cover. He went from one event to the other even before Indian Arrival was declared a holiday. If you have heard of Fr. Thomas Harricharan who became a Benedictine monk, you know who I am speaking about. There was a function at my Catholic primary school when he was ordained and he spoke about indentureship in the presence of the Archbishop of Port of Spain, his family and community. I had no clue at the time what he was referring to, the same way I did not understand about Budhia.

My cousin Ronald Tagallie, a Catholic priest in the 70s and 80s made a conscious effort to include elements of Indian culture in the mass. In Couva, the community joined as one to celebrate this part of our history. Ronald told me the story of how a parishioner came to him and said she never felt such belonging as when she experienced the presence of her ancestors inside her church. There has been further work, research and encouragement from Fr. Martin Sirju, another Catholic priest also from my village of Fullerton. His is mainly linked to Hinduism, but an outcome of his ancestry, nonetheless." 

Before I move on, I must mention the role of the Presbyterian Church, it's huge presence among indentured workers and the continuing debate on its influence in learning and evangelisation.

I had encountered numerous indentured labourers but never seen sugar cane until I came to Chaguanas to live at 11 years and even then I was faced with the large expanse of Endeavour (de Verteuil) Estate with coconuts, now converted to Orchard Gardens. On a previous trip to that same house, my great grandmother who was lying on a single bed spoke to me. I was only about six years old and had no interest in either old people or indentureship. 

By the time my friend Carol Lawes took me to Clarendon Estate in Jamaica in 1979, I had already worked in the sugar belt both as a reporter (I wasn’t yet a journalist) and an employee of the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factories Workers' Trade Union. Clarendon was home to large estates and the famous Monymusk sugar factory. Michael Manley’s People’s National Party had organised the industry into co-operatives for worker participation and workers basically joined with the state to run the companies in that parish. I stood before the head of one co-op, a tall man of east Indian descent, well dressed, hair greying only above his ears and curled on his forehead like an Indian film star. He had come from the fields to the union to the management. Sugar was not yet taking a beating on the global market and he had such dreams for making the industry work, for keeping sugar alive, though not as king. That title is now reserved for Charles, King of Jamaica.

He told me that his grandparents had come from India. His aji, yes he used that word for his grandmother, would never imagine him managing a sugar co-op. I could not imagine him ever having grease on his hands and soot on his clothing. He had no further education, but he possessed knowledge of planting, reaping, machines, manufacturing, world trade and a deep feeling for the future of his community and country. 

But governments come and governments go and Jamaica’s sugar industry eventually passed into the hands of private investors. I haven’t made the effort to find out why.

In Trinidad, the previous year and even two years later, we were still sitting across the table from Gordon Maingot and Russell Wotherspoon at Sevilla to negotiate a five cents increase on the task, or went up to Errol Mahabir’s office in Salvatori building to threaten him with a strike. Their sole interest was to meet the European quota, not to pay more to the workers making it possible. In Chaguanas, while I was at school,  I had prepared the worksheets for Poptee, not really my aunt but much more than an aunt, when she worked every single day during the crop season. The spreadsheet was just a copy book page with columns I had put in so I could enter the days, the number of tasks, how much she was paid for each unit of work and a total at the bottom for each fortnight. It was on par to what women worked for when they dug out copra for five days at the un-unionised Columbia Estate. 

On a Cubana airlines flight in 1978, I had met two members of the Guyana Agricultural Workers Union and their problems were even worse than ours. Crushed by the country’s problems of race, they still saw hope. Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney were alive. That was all they needed to know. About three decades later, I joined with a number of young people at Guyana Times Newspaper to produce an Indian Arrival magazine for the 172nd anniversary of arrival of the the very first indentured workers to the Western Hemisphere. It was an exercise in joy, co-operation, learning and achievement. In that magazine we carried a lovely story about Raj Baba Merhai tracing his family to India. In doing research on the cricketers of East Indian descent who made it to the West Indies team, I completely omitted Leonard Baichan, the opening batsman.

Raj Baba Merhai's story

In that same year, 2010 I walked among Hindustani and Javanese workers in Suriname. There was an increase in sugar production even as former sugar workers in Trinidad struggled in the aftermath of the closure of Caroni Limited. That is before Caroni distributed its land and they were able to balance their finances better, or pressed for cash, many of them handed over their property to real estate scouts for less than its value.