A
commentary on Bridget Brereton’s article “The Indians” in her book “Race
Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900”
Introduction:
As the second half of the 19th century drew to a close,
certain newspapers in Trinidad executed a protracted editorial policy that
would serve to lay the foundations for the negative stereotyping of East
Indians in Trinidad and Tobago. As a result, Afro-Creole and European-descended
Trinidadians as well as immigrants from other West Indian islands came to accept
that stereotyping and perceived Indian indentureship and the presence of
Indians in the colony as having a deleterious effect on the society as a whole.
Through the use of newspapers like the New Era,
Public Opinion, the San Fernando Gazette and
the Port of Spain Gazette, amongst
others, a relatively small coterie of educated men—French Creoles, Afro-Creoles
as well as a sprinkling of Europeans who had formed what was described in the first
instance as the Creole Party, later to be know as the Reform Movement—sought to
achieve their political ends by gaining public support in denigrating those who
were perceived by them as different, alien or outside of their group. In
harnessing public opinion in such a manner they, perhaps unwittingly, put into
opprobrium an entire people living in their midst, painting all Indian
immigrants and their descendants with the same broad brush. In so doing, they
set a mechanism of mediatised prejudice into motion that has been reinforced by
the Independence political process and arguably continues up to today.
Bridget Brereton in her book Race
Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900 examined this media stigmatisation
in the late 19th century. [1]
Other social scientists—CLR James, Ricky Singh, Selwyn Ryan, Raymond
Ramcharitar et al—have since written and commented on this. This article looks
at Brereton’s groundbreaking research in her Race Relations and examines the reasons for the Creoles’ impulse to
segregate themselves as an ‘ingroup’ and the Indian segment as an ‘outgroup’,
thus laying the roots of Indophobia in Trinidad and Tobago.
***
“One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate
people differently depending on whether they’re a member of our ‘ingroup’ or
‘outgroup.’ Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people
making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race,
religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where
do these types of group distinctions come from?”
This, at first glance innocuous, but quite pertinent question was posed
by Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale
University, in an article published in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology in June of 2013. [2]
In a segmented society such as Trinidad and Tobago’s, the roots or
origins of the prejudices that shape our collective consciousness appear opaque
or even lost in the fog of our historic experience. While a lot has been done
to untangle the web of our entrenched and in many instances dearly held views
of each other, we are still a segmented society.
One of the more eye-opening, or should I say mind-expanding experiences
that I had when I started exploring Trinidad history in 1983 was Bridget
Brereton’s Race Relations in Colonial
Trinidad 1870–1900. Part of this enduringly significant (and eminently
readable) work carefully examines the several segments that make up our diverse
society. It discusses the point of arrival and the social and political
conditions of the European, African and Indian segments. It deals with their
offshoots, the products of miscegenation and its various outcomes, and the
attitudes and reactions of those who saw themselves at various points in
history as the ‘ingroup’ when faced with the arrival of others who were
considered by them as an ‘outgroup’.
Nelson Island
One such ‘outgroup’ was the indentured East Indians, whose initial point
of arrival was Nelson Island. Neilson’s Island, called Nelson Island, was a
quarantine depot through which tens of thousands of Indians, possibly all
indentured Indians, passed on their way to the various estates where they would
spend the next five years, if they were men, or three years, if they were
women, as indentured labourers, and in some cases, the rest of their lives.
Like Ellis Island in the United States, it was their first point of
disembarkation and their first encounter with natives of their host country.
I had the good fortune in the 1980s to meet Gregor Duruty, who lived to
a great age. In his youth, Duruty had worked in the Colonial Secretary’s office
and was around for the arrival of the last of the indentured Indians to come to
Trinidad aboard the S.S. Ganges in
1917. He arrived on Nelson Island with some of his friends, a camera and a
gramophone, and took a quantity of pictures, capturing a unique moment when
cultures clashed.
Duruty told me that the newly arrived had never seen these devices, a
machine that produced musical sounds, and as for the camera, they had no idea
what it did. Interestingly, the record that he played that day was the
world-famous Cab Calloway singing, “I ain’t got nobody and nobody cares for
me”. This refrain, both tragic and ironic, was 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 before beginning the long journey towards an uncertain destiny. The
meaning of the words of the song may well have been lost on all of them, the
significance of the occasion—it being the last of the indentured to arrive in
Trinidad—hardly grasped. Such is the naiveté of beginnings!
The transportation of some 143,939 persons to Trinidad from India over
the period 1845 to 1917 radically altered the ethnic configuration of
Trinidad’s already heterogeneous body politic. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the composition of Trinidad’s population differed from
other islands in the Caribbean that had come into the hands of the British from
the early 17th century on to the end of the Napoleonic wars. In the older
British colonies these societies, based on plantation slavery, had already
developed discernible social and cultural patterns that in a sense had matured
over time. Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados for example had populations made up
almost entirely of people of African descent, with relatively small populations
of mixed-race people and a complement of Europeans: British administrators, low
status whites, writing clerks, accountants, transients, planters—the majority
of whom were absentee landlords represented by an attorney—the military, police
and local merchant families of long standing.
Trinidad’s population, however, virtually arrived almost all at once.
This was triggered by the Spanish government’s issuance of a Cedula of
Population in 1783. The population rose from 126 whites, mostly Spaniards, 295
Free Blacks and Coloureds, [3]
310 African slaves and 2,082 Amerindians in 1783, totalling 2,763, to a
population of well over 90,000 in 1861-1871. This was comprised of 3,632 whites,
of which about 80 percent were French Creoles, 18,724 Coloureds and 40,354
people of African descent, the descendents of the formerly enslaved, both native
born and immigrants from other West Indian islands. [4]
Almost all of these would have spoken French Patois and were in the main
Catholic. There were some 2,000 Chinese and 26,281 East Indians, as
well as about 571 tribal people.
There was a steady and enduring influx of West Indians coming from both
Catholic and Protestant islands, mostly black, some arriving Portuguese, and
Africans taken off slave ships bound for Brazil and indentured in Trinidad.
This was a period when in the popular mind Trinidad was idealised as
Iere, the land of the hummingbird. There was, interestingly, “a small emerging
middle class of educated and respectable creoles of all colours who shared a
common love of country and a common sense of identity,” as Anthony de Verteuil
writes, [5]
quoting John Jacob Thomas, the leading black intellectual of the day, from his
book Froudacity. [6]
This emerging middle class had its roots in the nucleus of European-descended French
Creoles and the French and Patois-speaking Free Blacks and People of Colour of
the late 18th century who had arrived here from the French islands as a result
of the upheavals caused by the French revolution as well as those who were
attracted by the generous terms of the Cedula.
The French-descended segment saw themselves as a racially pure,
exclusive, aristocratic enclave, notwithstanding their elaborate and indeed
intimate relationship with the Free Blacks and Coloureds. These were described
by Brereton as “Like the white Creoles, they cherished the past … There was the
same nostalgic feeling for aristocratic traditions and the same respect for
birth and breeding.” Brereton quotes the French Creole historian Pierre Gustave
Louis Borde who cites family traditions and describes relations between the two
sectors before the British conquest as “cordial; ill-feelings crept in under
the British regime”. [7]
The French Creoles and Free Coloureds shared the same page in the
history of the Caribbean, bound together by a Francophone identity, shaped by a
common past that included plantation life, miscegenation and slave-owning, as
royalists and republicans, settlers and as refugees in Trinidad. Out of this
grouping would emerge what we would call today a pressure group that would come
to see itself as the Creole Party.
The Cedula of 1783 as the basis for the
Afro-French-Creole impulse
To grasp the Creole Party’s hostility towards Indian indentureship, it
is useful to understand what we call in this paper the Creole impulse. This was
shaped by the Creoles’—both black and white—attitude towards what they
perceived as the British occupation of Trinidad. In coming to Trinidad the
French colonists, along with the Free Blacks and People of Colour, had been the
net beneficiaries of the Cedula of Population of 1783. Carl Campbell observed:
“If taken seriously—and the Cedula must be taken seriously as the outcome of a
deliberate plan—it amounted to a new constitution for Trinidad.” [8] Collectively, the Cedulants gave to
Trinidad a distinct French flavour expressed in language, dress, cuisine, the architecture
of the town, their attitude to the English, and a dedication to religion and to
the festival arts.
The Cedula of Population of 1783 was an especially liberal document for
its time, if only for its recognition of the civil rights of the Free Blacks
and Coloureds and its almost equitable land distribution aspects, as Campbell
further notes: “The Cedula of 1783 laid the foundation for a plantation society
in the colony, and this development was the most important thing to have
happened in Trinidad since the Spanish came ashore in 1498.” [9]
The contents of the Cedula had been accepted in the drawing up of the
articles of surrender when Trinidad passed from Spanish rule to English in
1797. This was upheld by the British government in 1829 when challenged by the
colony’s first civil governor, Sir Ralph Woodford. A descendant of the Cedulants,
a man of colour from the Naparimas, Jean Baptiste Philip, became its champion
by bringing it to the attention of the British government, which upheld its
contents, thus officially recognising the positions of both the resident French
and the People of Colour in Trinidad. This recognition, defined by law, placed
Free Blacks and People of Colour in Trinidad in a unique position for personal
advancement. As Brereton comments:
“The government in London issued a law (March 1829) which abolished all
‘Disabilities to which His Majesty’s subjects of European birth or descent’
were not subject. This was the grant of full legal equality between whites and
free coloureds which Philip and his colleagues had struggled for. In the words
of the historian Carl Campbell, it was their ‘new charter of liberty’. It
arrived in Trinidad in July 1829, just two weeks after Philip died, still in
his early 20s.” [10]
As descendants, broadly speaking, of those who came to Trinidad under
the terms of the Cedula the French Creoles, both black and white, came to
believe themselves to be the founding fathers, a patriciate, or the ingroup.
They represented, notwithstanding their differences, the biases of a class:
economic, institutional, racial, ethnic, cultural, populist, patriotic,
incipiently nationalistic and individualistic in nature. They considered
themselves to be the true Trinidadians, the Creole Party, as they originally
described themselves. [11]
Their Francophone identity and nascent nationalism was expressed in the work of
individuals such as John Jacob Thomas and Pierre Gustave Louis Borde. Thomas
wrote The Theory and Practice of Creole
Grammar, a description of Trinidad’s French Patois, becoming the first
linguist of African descent to produce a grammar of a Creole language. Borde, a white French Creole, wrote Histoire
de l'île de la Trinidad sous le gouvernement espagnol in French in two
volumes. This was the first history of Trinidad written by a Trinidad-born
historian. Its first volume and most of the second deals with Spanish times; it
is in the last third of the second volume that Borde’s true intention expresses
itself, for it is here that he relates the founding of modern Trinidad and
gives a partial account of the life of the island’s ‘coloniser’, Philippe Rose
Roume de Saint Laurent, a French Creole from Grenada, the promulgation of the
Cedula of Population of 1783 and the establishment of the ‘founding fathers’.
This volume also contains a partial list of the names of both the white French
Creoles and the French-speaking Free Blacks and People of Colour, the earliest
beneficiaries of the Cedula, the Cedulants.
The descendants of these settlers bridled at absolute British Crown
Colony Rule and yearned for greater representation in the colony’s affairs. In
essence, they tended to see the British as an occupier—a feeling that fuelled
the Creole impulse. This Francophone cum Creole identity produced a distinctive
culture that was based on an agricultural paternalistic lifestyle and expressed
in a manner that was often seen as subversive by the colonial authorities. [12]
The Beginnings of Indentureship
Around Emancipation in 1834, the British government began to experiment
with the importation of indentured labour into Trinidad to work the sugar
estates. Small numbers of Chinese and Portuguese from the Atlantic islands were
introduced in the opening decades of the 19th century. [13]
However, as is known, these did not prove suitable for agricultural labour and
tended towards commerce. The British then turned to India as a source of
labour.
According to Donald Wood the sustained influx of East Indians from 1845
was hardly noticed at first, but accelerated swiftly to form
“by 1851, 6 per cent (4,169) of the population of 69,609; in 1861, 15.9
per cent (13,488) of the population of 84,438 and the largest immigrant group;
in 1871, 25.1 per cent (27,425) of a population of 109,638, and 4,545 of them
had been born in Trinidad itself. Over 20,000 were still working on the estates
in 1871, either completing their industrial residence or on other forms of
contract.” [14]
By 1901, Indians and their descendants made up 33% of the population.
The indentured Indians were drawn from a variety of casts, sects, religions and
backgrounds and also from different parts of the Indian subcontinent, and as
such were in themselves a heterogeneous population. Trinidad’s ethnic mix was
well underway to being unique.
One feature of East Indian indentureship was that the immigrants were
separated on the cane and other estates from the main population. However, as
their numbers grew and as they appeared in startling quantities in the towns,
the ingroup increasingly perceived them not as transients but as permanent
residents who, in the not so long run, could become a majority.
The Stigmatisation of the India
Indentureds in the Creole Media
In Race Relations, Brereton
explores in her chapter “The Indians” possibly for the first time in Trinidad
and Tobago how a small ingroup harnessed the media to protest against Indian
indentureship.
However, the words and arguments that were used in the editorial drew
the attention away from the indentureship issue. Rather, the newspaper campaign
led to the promotion of general racial prejudice against Indians among the
wider Creole population. To achieve mass support, media manipulation was used
by the Creole Party to create a vehement xenophobic reaction in a population
that was ironically comprised of immigrants who had almost all arrived a
generation or so before or were in many cases themselves immigrants from Europe
or other West Indian islands. Ramcharitar, quoting Gilroy, interprets this as a
mechanism to inculcate and institutionalise cultural insiderism. [15]
Faith Smith in her book “Creole Recitations” points out that Indians became
“crucial to definitions of the identities of … Black Creoles in the Caribbean”
and adds “When Trinidadian elites assert Black respectability, this is
sometimes secured by belittling Indians.” [16]
These newspapers were principally: the New Era,
[17] the San Fernando Gazette, Echo of Trinidad, the Port of Spain Gazette [18] and Public
Opinion. [19]
These papers were owned or influenced by the Creole Party, whose members
towards the end of the 19th century began to call themselves the Reform
Movement. Over time, the membership’s proportion of European-descended
“Cedulants” shrank and more Afro-Creole members joined the ranks of the
movement. However, their delineation between ingroup and outgroup continued.
What was the purpose of this “Creole impulse” to fan the flames of anti-Indian
sentiment in the population?
The Creole Party’s, and later the Reform Movement’s, aim was principally
to change the nature of Crown Colony rule while seeking for themselves, as men
of education and substance, greater participation in the administration of the
colony and more meaningful representation in the City Council and in the
island’s legislature, in as much as these institutions were dominated by
British planter and merchant interest. To achieve the mass support needed they
singled out an outgroup’—the Indian immigrants—and positioned themselves as the
‘ingroup’ opposed to Indian indentureship. Their opposition to indentureship was
not based on humanitarian grounds, but on perceiving Indian immigration as a
symbol of the power and privilege of the British planters and merchants,
representing the dominance of British Crown Colony rule to which they were
opposed.
By singling out Indian indentureship as a policy of the colonial
government and by stereotyping the arriving Indians, the Creole Party / Reformists
sought to and actually established an absolute sense of ethnic and cultural
difference between themselves as residents and the Indians as aliens, all
through the use of newspapers. This anti-Indian media thrust was undertaken by
a relatively small coterie of men who were in the first instance almost all
French and English Creoles, [20]
notably Louis de Verteuil, Philip Rostant and Robert Guppy, but who would be
joined over time by coloureds and blacks who, according to Brereton, were
“involved in the local press to a considerable extent,” [21] and who
would eventually take over the movement.
The newspapers mentioned above promoted ideas that encouraged the population to think along the lines of greater
political involvement and of reforms in the constitutional structure of the
colony. As Brereton notes, “Through papers managed by these editors and
printers, therefore, educated blacks and coloureds had an outlet for the
expression of their grievances and aspirations.” [22] She gives
the example of editor Samuel Carter who, in an editorial published in the San Fernando Gazette, summed up this view:
“A Crown Colony is a despotism tempered by the Press. . . In Trinidad,
more than in any of the other Colonies, has the existence of the independent
Press been an absolute necessity; in none has it done more good.” [23]
As Brereton notes later in her Race Relations, “These papers took
the position that Indian immigration was carried on to serve the selfish interest
of the planters, to the detriment of the wider community.” [24] Using Indian
immigration as an example, the newspaper editors framed their arguments to
demonstrate the overwhelming power of the occupying British imperial government
so as to arouse indignation in a population that had not previously shown any
particular resentment to newcomers.
Brereton’s thought-provoking research in her chapter “The Indians” of Race Relations demonstrates how through
the use of newspapers the attitude of the majority of Trinidadians towards the
arriving indentureds, especially of those who considered themselves born and
bred Creoles or ‘Trini to the bone’ as one would say today, became one where
the Indians were stigmatised, distinguished from the rest of the society in a negative
way. Their differences, racial, cultural and religious, were made distinctly
obvious and perceived as odious.
For example, the indentureds’ tendency towards frugality was used to pour
scorn on them. Thrift was perceived as lacking amongst the Creoles, black and
white. Even though much thought of as a virtue in the Victorian period, thriftiness
was portrayed as a vice in the entire Indian population. The San Fernando Gazette thought that Indians would “go
hungry, starve, live on rice and pepper as well as systematically perjure
themselves in court to defeat the ends of justice for their own interest.” [25]
All Indians were vilified and stereotyped as willing to work for
starvation wages; their frugality in lifestyle appeared incompatible with that
of the Creoles. Brereton quotes the New Era, “the
liberal organ of the black and coloured middle class”, which declared:
“The Coolie is notoriously with us only, but not of us. He gives nothing
for what he takes, and thus contributes but little to the wealth of the
country. He hoards his treasure to take it back to his native land, and while
among us, consumes hardly anything of our imports.” [26]
Historian Donald Wood writing in 1968 observed,
“A coloured editor whose paper stood for the rights of the Negro population
wrote: ‘We do however assert without exaggeration or contradiction that of the
human race, none, as regards clothing, food, or other care of the body,
approaches more to the brute creation than the Coolie. They generally go naked
and show no disposition to abandon this habit.’” [27]
The self-negating, ultra-ascetic diet of the Indian indentured is also
remarked upon by Vincent Tothill who, practicing as a physician in 1937,
observed:
“[The Indians’] evening meal will be at sundown. This consists of one
huge communal pot of boiled rice. It may be flavoured with a little curry or
coloured with saffron, and the only vegetable is a red pepper. There is nothing
else; no meat, as these people are vegetarians. The same monotonous diet day
after day and year after year; no wonder they have no physique. But what can
you buy for two shillings a day? … In Trinidad nearly every Indian agricultural
worker of thirty shows vitamin deficiency. This is manifested by a chronic
cough and emphysema of the lungs. … They are far too tired at the end of a hot
day’s work in the cane fields to do anything but cook the pot of rice.” [28]
Newspapers also resorted to more offensive stereotyping, as Brereton
notes:
“Indians were regarded as deceitful and prone to litigation; there was
no understanding that the Indian might not understand the moral force of an
oath in a western court, or that he was often forced into litigation—for
instance, to inherit his father’s property if he died without a will, since the
vast majority of Indians in the period were illegitimate in the eyes of the
law.” [29]
The San Fernando Gazette held the view that the
indentureds were not viable settlers because they had no real commitment to the
colony. The Indian was “a dead weight. . . inert in all matters of Christian
civilisation, and only a temporary aid to a development entirely material. He
has no sympathy with the social and moral wants of the place.” [30]
However, Brereton observes that in truth the Indians, through dint of hard
work, had solved the colony’s financial situation 40 or 50 years prior, after
the Emancipation of the slaves, and had become an essential adjunct to the
island’s economy by producing a substantial quantity of food as owners of
livestock and as rice and vegetable farmers on a large scale.
In various articles that appeared in this period fear of the Indian
population was manufactured, the San Fernando Gazette
commented on “the riotous tendency of coolies when banded together and the
wonderful facility with which, under the least excitement, they are led into
acts of violence and brutality.” [31]
In this statement, the editor of the Gazette
linked the 1857 mutiny in India of elements of the Indian Army that had led to
mass killings of English civilians in Calcutta and other places in India to
local wife murders and isolated cases of violence on the estates. It was said
that the shortage of Indian women at times did cause crimes of passion and
this, compounded by the sustained memory of the Mutiny, resulted in branding
the Indians with a potential for mass violence. [32]
In the 1880s, industrial action taken by Indians on the cane estates
triggered anxieties. As the Moslem festival of Hosein approached in
1884, the Port of Spain Gazette urged:
“Let it not be forgotten that these Asiatics now form one third of our
population, and that, fanatics of an effete superstition and a most corrupt
form of ethics, they must, as a matter of self-preservation, be kept in
subjection to our laws under pain of the most disastrous results.” [33]
For the Gazette thought
Indians to be a people “whose every thought and habit are antagonistic to our
system of civilisation”. [34]
Disastrous results did occur in October of 1884 when police, after the riot act
was read, shot and killed more than twelve Indians in the vicinity of San
Fernando, wounding one hundred and four in what was called then the Hosay
Riots. [35]
Brereton observed: “Although no serious Indian insurrection ever occurred, the
fears persisted.” [36]
She quotes a newspaper correspondent who wrote in the year following the shootings
in San Fernando:
“The day is not far off, when these Coolies, bent on having everything
their own way, and meeting the slightest resistance on the part of the
authorities, will break out in open rebellion, and reproduce here the barbarities
of the great chief Nana Sahib in British India a few years ago,”
and continues:
“Indians soon acquired a reputation for violence which was almost
completely undeserved. Indeed, an essential element in the host society’s
reaction to the newcomers was fear: fear of their potential for violence and
rebellion.” [37]
This intense media-generated xenophobia was heightened as the steady
increase in the Indian population was noticed by the colony’s urban population.
The Port of Spain Gazette claimed that “Trinidad
might soon cease to be a West Indian Island, as Indians came to ‘swamp’
Creoles, ‘so that the mistakes of Columbus will have been ethnologically
rectified.’” [38]
The social development of the Indian segment of the population tended to be
quite separate from Creole life. Indians scarcely had sexual or close social
relationships with Creole men and women. Brereton describes how in 1871,
twenty-six years after the first indentured Indians arrived in Trinidad, the
Protector of Immigrants believed that no single case of cohabitation of male or
female with Creoles existed and up to 1917 such cases were very rare. [39]
This again was seen as strange by the Creole population, as miscegenation had
been the common practice in the Caribbean for centuries.
As the reform militants generated these injurious notions, several
prominent white, black and coloured spokesmen such as Philip Rostant, activist
and editor of Public Opinion, and C.P. David, QC,
the first person of African descent to sit in the Legislative Council, increasingly
opposed indentureship. Henry Alcazar, a coloured Spanish Creole who also sat on
the Legislative Council, 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 black
working classes were miserably low. He thought they were unable to find more
employment than is absolutely necessary to keep starvation from their doors. [40]
Not that this was factually wrong. The policy of continuing
indentureship did indeed lead to depressed wages, which affected all labourers,
the black masses as well as the Indians who were coming out of indentureship
contracts and onto the labour market. Starvation wages were the reality for
all.
Religious differences are magnified by the media
Throughout the 19th century, the political divisions in the
colony tended to be along the lines of the French-Patois-Catholic majority and
the Anglo-Protestant colonisers, each vying for dominance in the society. Part
of the Creole impulse was the opposition against British domination exercised
through the Anglican Church and ward school system that emphasized English.
However, with the influx of the Indians, both Christian denominations came
together in the ‘ingroup’, defining and indeed ridiculing in a contemptuous way
the ‘outgroup’ based on their religion.
Essentially, the Christian population increasingly had a hostile view of
the Indians, who were in the main Hindus and Moslems, and stigmatised them as heathens.
As heathens, i.e. persons who do not belong to a widely held religion and in
the case of the Hindus, have a polytheistic religion, the newspapers of the
Christian ingroup stereotyped all Indians as an immoral people, unprincipled,
deceitful, prone to perjury, and thieves. Brereton observed, “From the
Euro-Christian perspective of the dominant groups, Indians were generally
judged to be an immoral people,” and she continues, “Indeed, newspapers hostile
to Indian immigration often contrasted Indians unfavourably with the British
West Indian immigrants as potential settlers.” [41]
According to the newspapers, it was inconceivable that anyone who was
not a Christian could be moral, honest and just. The newspapers carried this
further in their judgment of Hindu and Moslem ceremonies and festivals such as
Hosein and the fire pass as “a degrading practice” and “vile customs”, “scandalous
performances carried on by gangs of semi-barbarians”, and “painted devilry.”
These views were amplified by the missionaries, whose statements were
carried in the press. They thought that the Indians possessed “a low sense of
sin.” Brereton writes that “John Morton, the pioneer Canadian missionary,
thought they were morally unprincipled and degraded; husbands and wives were
unfaithful, the women were ‘quite as wicked as the men, and more ignorant and
prejudiced’.” “A jury knows,” wrote Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office in
1871, “that a Coolie is presumably a liar”. It would appear that the jurors
were actually instructed by the legal professionals of the day to think so, as
Smith points out in her Creole Recitations:
“In 1870, ... Michel Maxwell Philip instructed a jury: ‘You have sat
there over and over as jurors, and you are all aware what value you can attach
to the unsupported evidence of coolies. You know with what unscrupulous
hardihood they violate the most sacred of the sanctions which represent as
binding them to tell the truth.’ Philip then offered ‘proof’ of Indians’
propensity to lie by reading ‘from a work bearing on this point of the East
Indian character.” [42]
Smith assumes that Philip then quoted from a travelogue, which in those
days were the heavily biased observations of transient British visitors to the
Caribbean like Trollope, Day, Froude and Kingsley, to name a few.
The Rev. R. H. Moor opined,
“The Creole, as a rule looks down on the Indian; he is a semi civilised
being. He speaks in barbarous languages and his manners are barbarous. . . He
takes work cheaper than the Creoles will do, hence he must be ill-treated when
he can be ill-treated with impunity.” [43]
Through years of newspaper rhetoric, what had begun as criticism of the
indentureship programme as a rallying point against Crown Colony rule mutated
into a widely held, fixed and oversimplified stereotype as well as an enduring
hostile attitude by the Creole ingroup toward the Indian outgroup in Trinidad.
Brereton observed:
“By the later years of the century, Creoles were well aware of the
economic threat posed by the Indians, and a systematic critique of Indian
immigration was developed by spokesmen for the coloured and black middle class.”
[44]
Other factors reconfirmed the ingroup’s attitude towards the outgroup. Throughout
the late 19th century and well into the 20th in the urban areas, the Indians
held mostly low status jobs—street sweepers, garbage collectors—and were
perceived as miserable and suffering. Indian men, women and children appeared
as street dwellers in startling quantities, destitute, the flotsam from the
plantations. In the context of their culture, some were mendicants; this too was
misunderstood by non-Indians. Often malnourished and ill with hookworm
infestation, malaria and leprosy, they were seen as abhorrent. Institutions
such as the jail, Leper Asylum, the hospital and the House of Refuge appeared
to be at times disproportionately populated by Indians. This created an
impression that Indians, in the judgment of society, could be perceived as
inferior beings.
In 1917, 70% of the Indians were agricultural workers, maintaining
religious forms, cultural practices and a clear identity by retaining their
names, and forming strong family ties, village and community interest in
settlements that were entirely comprised of Indians. Small retail businesses
owned by Indians were appearing, laying the foundations for substantial
enterprises that a generation hence would generate envy amongst all the
Creoles. Indian groupings representing particular local interest were taking
shape, such as the East Indian National Association; these would evolve
eventually into political movements. Brereton mentions that the first
Trinidadian newspaper to be owned by an Indian, the Indian Kohinoor Gazette, with material in both Hindi and
English appeared in 1898. [45]
A handful of Indian families would eventually make their way into the
colonial establishment. Here Brereton observes a reaction to decades of hostile
stereotyping.
“But we can feel fairly sure that the contempt was mutual. The Indians,
heirs to the system of caste, soon decided that by the guidelines of that
system, the blacks were hopelessly polluted. They invented a myth about the origin
of the blacks, which identified them with the ungodly and the polluted. Blacks
engaged in occupations which were ritually impure, they ate the flesh of cattle
and pigs, and in general their habits seemed unacceptable to most Indians. In
effect, Indians tended to regard blacks as the equivalent of untouchables, and
this attitude prevailed especially in the question of intermarriage.” [46]
The notion of perceiving the Indian population as not really belonging
to the island’s overall population, when coupled with other negative
stereotyping, produced in the minds of a generation of Afro-French-Creole
Trinidadians and West Indian migrants, born in the opening decades of the 20th
century, a deep animosity against a large and differentiating aspect of the
population in such a derogatory manner that it would have lasting consequences.
Over time, Trinidadians from various walks of life accepted views such as those
described in the newspapers of the time about Indians and Indian religious
practices, music, culture and later cinema, and generally tended to avoid and
to openly ridicule these.
The newspapers’ steady attack on Indians and indentureship lasted some
thirty years, transferring a deep hostility against Indians amongst the young
of yet another generation of the Creole ingroup, and even among the many newcomers
who were arriving in Trinidad from the West Indian islands and who had no idea
of the issues that were originally at the heart of this prejudice. This
prejudice was echoed in calypso, thus popularising in an amusing and
entertaining manner a grave injustice. It could be argued that similar to some emigrants
from parts of Eastern Europe, where the black presence is negligible, who, upon
arriving in the USA, adopted the same racist attitudes towards blacks as white
people from the deep South, many of the tens of thousands of West Indian
immigrants, on whose islands there were few if any Indians (with the exception
of British Guiana), who came to Trinidad from the period of between the world
wars on to the present, assimilated the ingroup’s Indophobia.
Brereton explains:
“Very few Trinidadians, black or white, tried to understand the culture
or social organisation of the Indian community, or the changes which that
community was experiencing in the later years of the century. The attitude of
the host society to the new arrivals from the East was almost entirely
negative. Because the Indians entered the society on peculiarly disadvantageous
terms, as indentured labourers replacing ex-slaves, it was only too easy for
black and white Trinidadians to despise them. The legal disabilities of
indentureship set the Indians apart from the rest of society, as unfree and
inferior beings; the low status jobs which they performed on the sugar estates
made it possible for the recently freed blacks to look down on them. Partly as
a result of the indentureship, partly because of the Indians’ culture and
religions, a whole collection of unfavourable stereotypes was built up during
the nineteenth century, which did much to form the attitudes of the host
society towards the immigrants and their descendants.” [47]
Indophobia is carried into the Independence process
Opposition to Crown Colony rule and a lingering adherence to a
Francophone cultural identity formed the basis of the Creole impulse, one that by
well into the twentieth century differentiated itself in race consciousness expressed
in nationalistic terms. This Creole impulse, which shaped the origins of the
later nationalistic movement, expressed by the class that had created it, would
produce personalities in Trinidad such as the white French Creole Philip
Rostant, and black and mixed race men such as Emmanuel Mzumbo Lazare, C. P.
David, Edgar Maresse-Smith, and later another white French Creole, Arthur
Cipriani who was succeeded by the Portuguese politician Albert Gomes and shape
the political future for black people. The Creole impulse, expressed as race
consciousness, was further popularised and politicised around the world by born
Creole scholars such as John Jacob Thomas, Sylvester Williams, George Padmore,
C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams. Their ideas would affect the thinking of
journalists and academics, philosophers and politicians in the West Indies,
Africa and in other colonies, as colonialism came to an end by the 1960s.
It is with interest we note that when the Independence movement
commenced in the 1950s, the Indians in the Caribbean were again portrayed as a
threat, this time to national security, or should we say international security
in the context of the Cold War. In British Guiana, where there had been a
similar indentureship programme as in Trinidad, Indians, who were in the
majority there, were perceived by the British government as having been politicised
by the left-leaning politics of Cheddi Jagan. It was believed that such
politics would also find fertile ground amongst the Indian population in
Trinidad and Tobago and particular individuals and certain Hindu institutions
were placed under police watch. [48]
On the political platforms of Trinidad’s nationalist movement many of
the 19th century stereotypes were resurrected and evoked by the
historian-turned-politician Eric Williams (born 1911), creating fresh and even
longer lasting divisions. In 1956 Williams maintained vitriolic attacks against
the Indian community in speeches made at Woodford Square and in other places
throughout the country. Winston Mahabir, a politician of Williams’ own party
PNM recalls “It contained generous ingredients of abuse of the Indian community
which was deemed to be a ‘hostile and recalcitrant minority’. The Indian
community represented the greatest danger facing the country. It was an
impediment to West Indian progress. It had caused the PNM to lose the federal
elections. There were savagely contemptuous references to the Indian
illiterates of the country areas who were threatening to submerge the masses
whom Williams had enlightened.” [49]
This speech, according to Mahabir was repeated at other venues. Vidia Naipaul,
who also heard such a speech, remarked that “Much of the hostile feeling
released by the sacrament of the square would have focussed on the Indians, who
made up the other half of the population.” [50] It was a
case of evoking an act of memory, cultivated in the present, in which the past
and the future met.
Conclusion
Brereton’s study poses several questions that lie unanswered in the
collective psyche of the non-Indian descended population of Trinidad and Tobago.
Does society need to reexamine the way in which the segment that perceives
itself as the ingroup—today’s media, the calypso fraternity and academia
included—continues to stereotype all Trinidadians of Indian descent? Has this stereotyping
continued as an inherent tradition in today’s media as the inheritor of the
ethos of newspapers of the 19th century and early 20th century? Does Indophobia
and by extension Anti-Hinduism exist in Trinidad and Tobago? And if so, is it
manufactured and perpetuated by the media? And did it come about as the result
of the machinations of the political energies of a specific ingroup, nascent
nationalists of a bygone era who were seeking self-determination during the British
colonial period at the expense of an outgroup? When the ingroup falters or
fails, does it find a scapegoat in the outgroup to blame for its own
shortcomings? Does the outgroup facilitate this by its maintenance of
difference? Is it right to maintain difference?
The answer to all these questions is clearly “yes”. The work of Bridget
Brereton in 1978 laid the first stepping-stones on the road of re-examination
of the role of the press in a pluralistic society. A healthy society should
neither condone nor allow its media to engage in stereotyping and
scapegoating—many of us will remember the events of July 1990, which, according
to Gordon Rohlehr, were a direct result of a society that was engaged in
scapegoating its own government. [51]
As New York Times columnist Frank Rich said: “It’s a story as old as history.
Once any group is successfully scapegoated as a subhuman threat to ‘normal’
values by a propaganda machine, emboldened thugs take over.” [52]
As can be seen in the case of the pronouncements made in the newspapers of the
late 19th century, they did not reflect any so-called “fourth estate”
responsibility (which is, in view of newspapers largely being owned by and serving
commercial or political interest, largely a fictitious concept perpetuated by
the media houses themselves), but the narrow political views of a handful of in
this case very ignorant people. The Creole Party/Reform Movement knew or cared
nothing about the very ancient and valid cultural, social and emotional
background of the human beings from India in their midst. As can also be seen,
the damage that the Creole Party/Reformists did through their agitation in the
newspapers was far-reaching and it has been argued that the Trinidad and Tobago
press continues to perpetuate the stereotypes that their predecessor organs set
in place such a long time ago. [53]
Carroll in Constantine’s
Sword, a book on the nature and far reaching consequences of prejudice,
quotes William Faulkner: “‘The past is never dead, it is not even past.’ It is
the act of memory, cultivated in the present, in which past and future meet.
Memory—as opposed to a mere cataloguing of bygone episodes and
doctrines—presumes a personal commitment, a sense of urgency and implicit
hope.” Bridget Brereton’s work as a historian is, to quote Carroll, an “act of
personal and institutional memory, and not merely as the repetition of records
or the reassertion of conventional interpretations”. Her work is an “act of
responsibility to the future.” [54]
It is now up to a young generation of social scientists, many of whom
are indeed of Indo-Trinidadian descent, to make their voices heard and focus
their own work on exterminating Indophobia in their own country, in their own
time—and in their own media. Because, as Carroll observes, “to expose the
biases of the past, however, does not mean one does so free of the biases of
the present, because it is the nature of bias that the one inflicted with it is
the last to know.”
Appendix
A list of members of the
Creole Party in 1871 published the Echo
of Trinidad. They were congratulating one of their number on his attaining
a position on the local bench. The individuals who may be identified as men of
colour are marked*. Those who may have arrived after the 1860s-70s are
marked #. These characterisations are based on my knowledge of who most of
these men were and having an idea of when they came to Trinidad.
L.A.A. de Verteuil
André Bernard
Charles M. Vessiny
Paul Vessiny
Charles Besson
P.J. Creteau *
H. Creteau *
Jos. S. Agostini
George Fitt #
Jas. Schaeffer #
Henry Ganteaume
John Agostini
Felix Hernandez
Ad. Wuppermann #
John Roberts
Fritz Zurcher #
Ludwig Schoner #
Wilh. Ehlers #
C. G. F. Urich #
Charles Mahand
George Wuppermann #
E. Zurcher #
Pierre B. André
P. Emile André
L. A. F. André
P. Pampelonne
D. L. O’Connor
Eugene Boissière *
Louis Boissière *
W. Norman #
F. Maingot
Alex. Coryat
Charles G. Pantin
Louis Voisin
Richard Dick #
E. Pampelonne
Fs. Martin
E. F. Lange
Ante. Sicard
J. B. Antoine
A. Joliclere
John W. Blondel *
T.R.N. Laughlin
Charles Cotton #
Charles Gibbon #
Charles Thavenot #
J. George Radix *
V. Plummer
A. M. Cook
Ths. A. Finlayson #
F. J. Scott
Jules Pollonais
Jos. P. Pollonais
F. C. Mathieu *
A. A. Ligouro
S. G. Richard
W. R. Eckstern
C. A. Frett
Philip Fort
James Henry Rat *
L.D. O’Connor
H. Massy
Arthur Demile
John de Souza
G. R. Baillie
James
Banting
Wm. Herbert
F. Hyndman.
jnr.
Ls. A.
Pollonais
Paul Ambard *
Albert Lack
John Fred.
Rat *
George Fuller
James A.
Rousseau *
Louis Boon
A. Valsaint
Em. Fernandez
Louis Bath *
Francis Damian
C. M. S. Griffith
George Greenidge
Jackson Collymore *
Jules E. Attale *
Jos. G. Rochemont
Léon Agostini
M. James Kavanagh #
Lucian F. Ambard *
J. R. Saunier
J. H. Cournand
Arnold Lamy
Chs. Salomon
Isambert Rousseau *
G. Borde
John Vincent
Ernest Desroses
George Fitzwilliam
Chs. Fitzwilliam
J. B. Léotaud
Hte. Cornilliac
W. E. Lynch
Ls. Geoffroy *
Louis Latour
Paul Giuseppi
Jose Penco *
Js. Herbert Rat *
J.
Pampelonne
Louis Jno.
Alcazar *
Philip H. Blanchard *
P. Josse Delisle
Joseph Lewis
Charles P. Savary
George Lewis Garcia
A.T. O’Connor
James Fraser
Edmund D. Felix
Fs. M. Petioni
B. Barony
Paul A. Dubuisson
John A. Bourne
L. Dumoret
Léon Giuseppi
M. Maxwell Philip *
A. Fitzjames
Fs. Blanch Fraser *
J. E. Cipriani *
R. Scott
Robert K. Wight
G. Ajax Cadet *
H. J. Clark *
P. N. Bernard
John Ross
P. C. O’Connor
Jules Espinet *
[1] Unless otherwise stated,
all quotations from Brereton in this article are taken from her Race
Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900, 1979.
[2] http://psychology.yale.edu/people/laurie-santos,
accessed 3 March, 2015
[3] This designation was a
legal definition that distinguished them from the African slaves.
[4] Besson, Brereton, Book
of Trinidad, 1991, from Hart, Daniel, Historical and Statistical Views
of Trinidad.
[5] de Verteuil, Anthony, The
Years of Revolt, 1984, 221. “Creole” first meant Europeans born in the western
world, later this definition was broadened to include white, black and
mixed-race people living in Trinidad.
[6] The pinnacle of John
Jacob Thomas’ accomplishments came in 1876, when an Englishman by the name of
James Anthony Froude published a scathing attack on the black population of the
West Indies in his book The Bow of Ulysses. Thomas replied with a
spirited attack on Froude and his odious opinions, and he published his
rebuttal in a book entitled Froudacity (1889). The book attracted
international attention, and Thomas established himself as an author of
exceptional scholarship and ability. He also published The Theory and
Practice of Creole Grammar (1869), a scholarly work on the Creole patois
spoken by the majority of Trinidadians in the 19th century
[8] Campbell, Carl, Cedulants
& Capitulants, 1992, 86-92
[9] ibid.
The plantation system endured from 1783 to the 1960s.
[10] Brereton,
Bridget, “The Free Mulatto”, Trinidad Express, 27 March, 2013 (http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/The__free_mulatto_-200355371.html?m=y&smobile=y,
accessed 3 March, 2015)
[11] A sample of the Creole
Party’s composition is given in Appendix 1.
[12] Some historians remember
it as the ‘Jamet’ culture of east
Port of Spain. The Jamet or
diametre society meaning to be outside of the diameter of polite society, is discussed
in Caribbean Quarterly 1956 by several social scientists. This laid the foundation
for calypso, carnival and steelband and endured into the 1950s when it was
subsumed and eventually overwhelmed by the new nationalist movement. Today,
these art forms are mainstream and are considered to be ‘national.’
[13] Although European, the
Portuguese were not considered “socially white” by the Creole ingroup for
almost one hundred years, as was the case with the Syrians and Lebanese, who
came from the 1910s to the present. It could be argued that this continues up
to today.
[14] Wood, Donald, Trinidad
in Transition, 1968, 158
[15] “The essential
trademark of cultural insiderism, which also supplies the key to its
popularity, is an absolute sense of ethnic difference. This is maximised so
that it distinguishes people from one another and at the same time acquires an
incontrovertible priority over all other dimensions of their social and
historical experiences and identities. Characteristically, these claims are
associated with the idea of a national belonging or the aspiration to
nationality and other more local but equivalent forms of cultural kinship.”
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic, as quoted in Ramcharitar, Raymond, Breaking
the News, 2005, 19.
[16] Smith, Faith, Creole
Recitations, (2002) 20
[17] The New
Era was established by Samuel Carter and Joseph Lewis, both
coloured, in 1869; Lewis ran the paper alone from 1874 to 1891. It was closed
at his death. Carter, a Tobagonian, acquired the San Fernando Gazette
after parting with Lewis and ran it until his death in 1895.
[18] The Port
of Spain Gazette was owned T.N.R. Laughlin, an
Irish-French-Creole and later by A.P.T. Ambard, a coloured man.
[19] The Public
Opinion was financed by Hypolite Borde and edited by Philip
Rostant, both French Creoles. Hypolite Borde was the brother of Pierre Gustave
Louis Borde mentioned earlier. Hypolite donated a fountain with a statue of
Columbus to the city of Port-of-Spain in 1897. He was also made a Chevalier of
the Légion d’Honneur by the French Republic.
[20] Brereton also notes
that, “Towards the end of the century the French Creoles lost leadership in the
radical movements of the day to coloured or black individuals like Alcazar,
Edgar Maresse-Smith, and C.P. David.” Race Relations, 55
[21] ibid, 96
[22] ibid, 97
[23] ibid, 96
[24] ibid, 186
[25] ibid, 186
[26] ibid, 188
[27] Wood, op cit, 156
[28] Tothill, Vincent, Trinidad’s
Doctor’s Office, 1938 & 2009, 132 f
[29] Brereton, op cit, 190
[30] ibid, 188
[31] ibid, 187
[32] The actual proportion of females to males dispatched from India to
Trinidad on paid-for passages (not including those that paid their own passage)
between 1844 and 1871 was 38.79%. Afterwards, a quota of 40% was established.
The average proportion between 1874 and 1917 was 43.81%. (Source: Mr.
Geogheghan’s Report, pp 1874, XLVII, 496 as quoted in K.O. Laurence, A
Question of Labour, 1994, 536)
[33] ibid, 187
[34] ibid, 188
[35] Collens, J. H. in an
historical account, 1885, wrote: “During the Canboulay Riots in Port of Spain
in 1882, his [Capt. Baker’s] policemen were armed only with cudgels and were
severely beaten by rioters. When unrest among the Indians began in 1881-82, he
was determined to use deadly force against any future dissidents.” Virtual
Museum of T&T, www.facebook.com/virtualmuseum.oftrinidadandtobago
[36] Brereton, op cit, 184
[37] ibid, 187
[38] ibid, 186
[39] ibid, 183
[40] ibid, 188
[41] ibid, 186f
[42] Smith, op. cit. 125
[43] Brereton, op. cit. 188
[44] ibid, 190
[45] ibid,
191 .
Kohinoor was a famous diamond, surrendered to the British crown on the
annexation of the Punjab. It forms today part of the British Crown Jewels. Trinidad
referred to itself as a “Crown Jewel” among the British colonies, a linguistic
parallel that may have been inspired the naming of the newspaper.
[48] “In the monthly
political report for May 1953 the then Governor of the colony [Trinidad &
Tobago] H. Hubert Rance states; ‘The latest reports indicate that the Indian
element led by the Honourable Bhadase Sagan Maraj has been working steadily
through the United Sanatan Dharam Maha Sabha Association towards their goal of
political control of the Colony.’ (CO 1031/127) (Figueira, Daurius, The East
Indian Problem in Trinidad & Tobago 1953-1962 Terror and Race War in Guyana
1961-1964, 2009, 2)
[49] Mahabir, Winston, In
and Out of Politics, 1978, 78.
[50] Naipaul, Vidia, A
Way in the World, 1994, 35.
[51] The practice of
singling out any group or indivedual for unmerited negative treatment or blame
as a scapegoat. See Rohlehr, Gordon, 1992, The Shape of that Hurt, Apocalypso and the Soca Fires of 1990,
343.
[52] New York Times October 13,
1998, as quoted in Carroll, James, Constantine’s Sword, 2001, 275
