The Hosay Riots

 One of the more turbulent periods in Trinidad’s history was towards the end of the 19th century. This was a time when crown colony rule was challenged on many levels. The ‘Cannes Brulee Riots’  pitted the police against some of the island’s best stickfighters and white French creoles spearheaded a reform movement that brought them into confrontation with the colonial administration. But it was the Hosay Riots of 1880 that blood was shed to the extent that it was described as a massacre.

From 1845 to 1917, tens of thousands of Indians were shipped to this island to work in the cane. Amongst the multitude of faces of the bedraggled that stumbled ashore at the lighthouse jetty after the period of quarantine at Nelson island, there were those of a different timber.

Sharp-featured, bearded, harder, moving to the beat of a different reality, the Shiite minority was even a minority within the minority of Muslims who arrived in Trinidad. They brought with them a unique festival, a commemoration that marked a death.

The protector of immigrants, the official who oversaw the activities, work and welfare of the Indians, remarked that smoking ganja “helped to put the people into a state of exaltation on the day of the festival and with the drinking of rum it all degenerated into a mob as excited and wildly noisy and quarrelsome rowdies.”

Plantation servitude, endless hours of back-breaking work, the terrible homesickness, loneliness, frustration, disappointment and a multitude of other unrecorded factors were the cause for terrible emotions. Some of the Indians released them in the ferocious drumming, chanting, dancing, light and colour extravaganza that is the mourning ritual of Hosay. Whatever the reason, Hosay by 1880 had acquired a sort of symbolic value in the eyes of the Indians. Their cultural and national life and their self esteem were concentrated in the celebration of Hosay, a Mohurrun festival. Fr. Anthony de Verteuil, former principal of St. Mary’s College and renowned historian, wrote in his book ‘Years of revolt’:

“Every year the Hosay festival was celebrated on the 10th day of Mohurrun, the first month in the Islamic calendar, in order to coincide with the anniversary date on which imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, was slaughtered at Kerbala, Iraq, some 1,370 years ago.”

Hosay was brought to Trinidad by the Shiahs, a sect within Islam representing perhaps 5% of the world Muslim population. Hosay itself was taken into India by the Islamic mogul conquerors more than 800 years ago. The faith of the Islamic invaders was adopted by many Hindus and adapted, for many of the converted did not completely give up their traditional and customary forms of religious expression. In this manner, the austere forms of this observance originating in Muslim Persia, became in India and as a result of transportation to Trinidad and occasion for colourful processions and the production of ‘Tadjahs’, drumming, elaborate rites and ceremonies. Great tadjahs were constructed on the estates, replicas of the tombs of the martyrs, and both Hindus and Muslims assisted financially. The building of the tadjah was passed down as an inherited craft from generation to generation., The creation was sometimes a result of a promise to God, or was a devotion to avoid misfortune.

The processions, the wild drummings, the spinning red and blue ‘moons’, the seizing of the day was alarming to all aspects of creole society both black and white.  Memories of the Indian mutiny of just over 15 years before, when tens of thousands of English were massacred in India by both Muslims and Hindus, was fresh in the minds of the administrators. The other classes saw it as an opportunity to point out just how alien the Indians were. Against the reality that in 1881 there were 48,820 Indians in Trinidad, 31.8% of the population, and bearing in mind that almost all the Indians were adults and most of them male and concentrated in particular areas, the alarm felt and expressed was not entirely without reason. Clashes had been taking place for several years between the Hosay of adjoining estates, beginning at St. Joseph and eventually all over the cane belt. The reaction to this by the Sunni sect, the majority of Muslims was the penning of a letter to the Governor Sir Stanford Freeling, condemning the Hosay and distancing themselves from it and the appeal for its discontinuance.

The result was that the celebration was to be controlled, in fact regulated, and the processions were not to be allowed to enter the towns. During this period of the 1880s, there was increasingly for the first time labour unrest on the cane estates arising from various conditions, the most onerous being the nature of task work, but also actual living conditions. Tensions were rife because of the lack of women. Also by this time there were in fact a large percentage of Indians who had either served out their indentureship or had grown up here and were so acclimatised that they had left behind the subservient character of the freshly arrived indentured.

Nelson Island

Neilson's Island, called Nelson Island, was a quarantine depot through which tens of thousands of Indians, possibly all Indians, passed on their way to the various estates where they would spend the next five years or, in some cases, the rest of their lives.

Like Ellis Island in the United States, it was their first disembarkation and their first encounter with natives of their host country. Gregory Duruty, who lived to a great age, worked in his youth in the Colonial Secretary's office and was aware of the arrival of the last of the indentured Indians to come to Trinidad aboard the S.S. Ganges in 1917. Duruty arrived on Nelson Island with a camera and a gramophone and took these pictures, capturing a unique moment when cultures clashed.

They, the newly arrived, had never seen these new devices - a machine that produced musical sounds, and as for the camera, they had no idea what it was. Interestingly, the record that Gregory played that day was world-famous Rudy Valley's singing "I ain't got nobody and nobody cares for me". This refrain, ironic, played over and over as the young Indian girls danced and arranged and re-arranged the hair of Gregory's friends, young Trinidadian women. The Indian men stood in rows for their photographs to be snapped. The significance of the words of the song may well have been lost on all of them, and the significance of the occasion, it being the last of the indenture to arrive in Trinidad, hardly grasped. Such is the naiveté of beginnings on the one hand and the enormity of an ending on the other!

The transportation of a total of 143, 939 persons to Trinidad from India over a period from 1845 to 1917 radically altered the ethnic composition of Trinidad's population. Already, the nature of the island's population had been very different from the other islands of the Caribbean which had fallen into the hands of the British at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Tobago and Barbados, for example, had a population made up almost entirely of people of African descent, and a small English contingent of planters, merchants and administrators, the vast majority of whom were transients.

In Trinidad, however, the population  in 1845 consisted of a coloured black middle class aspiring to respectability, resident French, some resident English, and Spanish people left over from the previous century, some Chinese, arriving Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Irish, a few Jews, the newly freed slaves, and Africans taken off slave ships bound for Brazil and set free in Trinidad. With the sustained influx of East Indians from a variety of casts and backgrounds, and of Indian Muslims from different parts of India, Trinidad's ethnic mix was well underway to being unique.

For the close to 144,000 Indians who arrived in Trinidad, the majority of whom stayed on and started families of their own, it meant the commencement of the creation of a parallel society, one that was to blend in part with the overall population, while at the same time becoming as Trinidadian as what was once described as their 'host environment'.

The attitude of many people towards the arriving Indians in the 1870s and onwards was much influenced by the black and coloured professional middle class, people who opposed indentureship not on humanitarian grounds, but because it was seen as a symbol of the power and privileges of the European planter class, represented by colonial rule, with whom they were at loggerheads. Crown colony rule was an economic reality. It meant employment for the ruling classes, and the educated black and coloured middle classes saw indentureship as a hindrance to their own advancement.

A negative attitude to indentureship readily progressed to hostility and the ridicule of Indians - as seen in early calypso - and opposition to the indentureship system, born of reactionary attitudes towards coloured prejudice. Despite the fact that the Indians, through dint of hard work, had solved the colony's financial situation 40 or 50 years before, reform militants generated false notions about the Indians. Several prominent spokesmen, C.P. David, Q.C., the first man of with African ancestors appointed to the legislature, opposed indentureship. Another prominent spokesman of this group was Sir Henry Alcazar, who pointed out the abundance of labour and maintained that further immigration would only depress wages and cause unemployment. He said that the (black) masses were being pauperised by the artificial state of things created by Indian immigration, and that the labour market of the colony, especially in the sugar districts, was so overstocked that the earnings of the working classes were miserably low. "They are unable to find more employment than is absolutely necessary to keep starvation from their doors."

Newspapers, owned by coloured people, such as the 'New Era' and the 'San Fernando Gazette' maintained a steady attack on indentureship.

This negative attitude towards the indentureship system per se - even though it was directed against 'white' establishment and not against the Indian labourers - contributed to negative stereotyping of Indians as a whole, and became institutionalised in Trinidad. During the period of economic depression in the latter decades of the 19th century, the wages of labourers were reduced and tasks increased. Employment was high. Charles Kingsley wrote in the 1850s: "There are 8,000 human beings in Port of Spain alone without visible means of substistence."

The creoles' anti-Indian sentiment continued as a 'gut feeling', as prejudice, long after its main cause - the opposition against indentureship as a part of the colonial power structure that took away work - had long since been forgotten. Ironically, it was a 'black' reaction to the 'white' power structure of the day that contributed to the alienation of a large percentage of the population. The Indian immigrants entered a society that was basically hostile to them, where attitudes ranged from contempt to fear to indifference. They, in turn, reacted in a defensive manner. They were separated from the local population both residentially and occupationally. Religion, family life, the cast system, all served as a buffer for the indentured towards a hostile society, and long after the root cause had been forgotten, it still served to create separation and segmentation in the body politic.