The mass migration of Caribbean immigrants to the UK commenced with the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in June 1948. From 1948 to 1971, people from countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados were invited to the UK to address post-World War II reconstruction needs and labour shortages. Referred to as the 'Windrush generation,' they significantly influenced modern British society and culture.
Notably, individuals of Indian origin were also part of the arrivals, coming from places like India and established Indian communities in the Caribbean. Their story is intertwined with the broader immigration narrative from Commonwealth countries during that time. Similar to Caribbean immigrants, many Indians came to the UK to contribute to reconstruction efforts, ultimately leading to the diversification of British society and culture.
“Indentureship shaped the demography, economies and cultures”
Dr Nalini Mohabir holds the position of Associate Professor within Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment. Her expertise lies in teaching subjects related to feminist and postcolonial migration geographies and primarily researches the realm of Caribbean studies, with a specific emphasis on indentureship.
While she does not have indenture stories that were passed down, digging through the archives led her to the level of her great-grandparents. “My great-grandparents on my father’s side emigrated from Ajmer (British India) to British Guiana, in 1912. They were indentured to Rosehall Sugar Estate. Often men and women emigrated as individual labourers.
“However, my great-grandparents were married and travelling with a three-year-old child, my grandmother. According to the emigration pass, their caste was “Sheikh”, although, from their names, I suspect my great-grandmother was a Hindu and my great-grandfather was a Muslim.
“Around the time of independence (in the 1960s), my mother (from Trinidad) and my father (from Guyana) migrated to the UK for further studies. I followed in their steps, when I completed my PhD in the UK, on the legacies of indentureship.”
Shedding some light on the critical aspects of Indian indenture in the Windrush, Dr Mohabir said, “The formation of a diasporic Indian community in the Caribbean, and their subsequent migration as part of the Windrush Generation, is part of the complex migration flow from India to the Caribbean, then outward again, from the Caribbean to the UK. Yet the Indo-Caribbean diaspora tends to disappear under the homogenising force of a term like ‘Asian’.
“Indentureship shaped the demography, economies (including wage and labour systems), and cultures of all the countries involved and yet it remains a vastly under-considered phenomenon. In part, this is due to the limited availability of historical data documenting the lives and experiences of indentured workers, and the considerable difficulty in accessing reliable data, even about the experiences of descendants of Indian indentures.”
According to Dr Mohabir, after immigrating to the UK, integration challenges for Indo-Caribbean people in the UK were eased by the fact that they were migrating from the Caribbean, a space that was not only predominantly Christian and English-speaking but also multicultural. However, she adds that “the challenge was now two-fold – how do you fit into a country that you were taught was the “mother country” (UK) even though your presence is unwanted; and how to do you navigate the multiplicity of your cultural identities?”
“With greater access to our history, we can find our role within the Windrush generation”
Professor David Dabydeen is a Guyanese novelist, poet, and scholar. He held diplomatic positions as Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and its Ambassador to China from 2010 to 2015. At the University of Warwick, he was the Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and a Professor of Postcolonial Literature from 1984 to 2017.
Of his many literary contributions, Prof Dabydeen has notably produced a Macmillan edition of John Edward Jenkins' "Lutchmee and Dilloo", which is considered the first novel depicting Indo-Guianese life.
Narrating his personal story of indenture, Prof Dabydeen recalled, “My great-great-great-grandfather came to British Guyana, from India, as an indentured worker in a plantation in Guyana. Of his roots in India, we only know the port he left, which was Calcutta. He went through the normal processes of living in relative poverty and working hard.
“That was the first journey. The second journey, of course, was across the Atlantic to Britain and we were a part of the ‘Windrush generation’. I made the journey from Guyana to England because there was no university back home. Initially, my father came to study and then the rest of us joined him in order to pursue school and university.”
Prof Dabydeen believes that the resilience of the indentured labourers was remarkable because even though they had very low wages, they were able to save whatever they could to put a premium on education. They sacrificed everything for their children’s education. It is a result of that resilience that within two generations, we have people going to Oxford and Cambridge,
According to him, there are underlying factors for a relative ascendancy in post-indenture societies. He explains: “While I believe that the UK is ultimately and basically a tolerant society with ideas of fair play, there's always been initial hostility to newcomers, to immigrants. We were able to survive with the same mechanisms that our ancestors developed previously.
“So, despite the discrimination in terms of jobs and housing, we focused on establishing a career for ourselves and went into professions where we didn't have to depend on white people Secondly, we carried the values and education instilled in us by our parents and grandparents.
“Religion played a major part in helping the indentured build a legacy. Initially, the people were vulnerable and many of them fell back in their religious faith. Building temples and mosques and so on were very important markers of our vulnerability, but also our desire to be stable and to create stable communities.”
Prof Dabydeen is of the opinion that given the fact that the West Indians were a minority within a minority, they actually became invisible and their struggle was never highlighted. “I think the Jamaicans saw themselves as the West Indians and the rest of us was marginalized by them. Now things are different. There's an assertion, there's greater knowledge. We now have greater access to our history and if we want to find out our history and our role within the Windrush generation, our role as Indo Caribbeans, then we can.”
Currently, Prof Dabydeen serves as the Director of the Ameena Gafoor Institute. The institute is dedicated to studying indentureship and its enduring impact and has established a strong partnership with Cambridge University to establish a unique program. This initiative will enable a scholar to engage in an eight-week research period at the university. The program's duration is set for an initial period of five years.
