A different kind of settler: the indentured laborers from South Asia. Sujaria was 260 kilometres from her village, in the city of Faizabad, when an agent for the British Empire registered her for its sugar colonies. Faizabad was known as a magnet for wanderers. Temples and holy sites, then as now, were natural places for runaways to seek refuge and alms. Labour recruiters looking for people desperate enough to cross kala pani or the “dark waters” of the Indian Ocean, thus losing caste according to Hindu orthodoxy, found them in exactly such places. A British colonial administrator, writing in 1882, noted that Ayodhya “furnishes many recruits (for indenture) from among its pilgrims”. It may have been where my great-grandmother met her recruiter. The fact that she was registered there raises questions: Why was she so far from home? Had she run away? Was she thrown out The Daily Chronicle reported on the immigrant laborers: “The women, moreover, were pretty and youthful. Coolie women are in demand here, as ... a large number of vacancies for coolie wives exist; but the difficulty about the shipment is that all the ladies seem to be very much engaged already to their fellow passengers of the male ‘persuasion’. There were very many more men than women on board. British Guiana was struggling to deal with a shortage of women on its plantations. There were just 41 women to every 100 men among the indentured workers who had replaced freed slaves. The effects of this skewed ratio could be fatal. Just days before Sujaria landed, a coolie was executed for hacking his wife to pieces with the same machete he used to cut sugarcane in the fields. She had been unfaithful to him. That season, four other women were killed in the same way, for the same reason. In order to separate a cheating woman or her lover from a jealous husband, plantation managers transferred workers from one sugar estate to another 47 times that year. cooliewoman/
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 20:53:28 +0000