It happens every year as we celebrate Indian Arrival Day. I get phone calls and emails, and it comes up in conversation with friends, colleagues and family. And it always centres on one question: Why celebrate Indian arrival when it has had so many negatives?
My answer has always been the same: we celebrate the resilience of our ancestors. We celebrate their courage to survive and thrive in spite of the myriad colonial obstacles that sought to keep them relegated to subsistence workers.
I recently read a passionate commentary by Guyanese-American writer Rajiv Mohabir (http://aaww.org/indian-arrival-day/), who offered his answer to the perennial question.
“Why the hell should I celebrate colonization?” he asked, adding: “To celebrate Indian Arrival Day is to celebrate the beginning of our slavery sentences...To celebrate Indian Arrival Day is to celebrate the cause of each ill: diabetes, racism, alcoholism, homophobia, and domestic violence. To celebrate Indian Arrival Day is to celebrate death.”
In the same commentary, Canadian-based Indo-Trinidadian Dr Andil Gosine is quoted as saying that when we celebrate Indian arrival, “We are implicitly erasing the history and actual experiences of indentures.” His view is that Indians were “merely the cargo of the system of Indentureship, and it is ridiculous that we would celebrate the beginning of bondage”.
Everything about Indentureship was wrong. We need to continue to question why Britain freed one race and almost immediately after emancipation subjected another to what some British officials characterised as “a new system of slavery”.
But we should not let the horrors of indentureship blur our view of what it is we are really celebrating as Indian Arrival Day.
We can continue to highlight the negatives to justify our objection to the celebration or we can see a different, more positive picture in which Indians have overcome the degradation, moved away from the sub-human plantation experience and have risen above it all to become responsible citizens.
We celebrate not leaders and professionals but the unnamed and forgotten thousands who kept people and culture alive in spite of the adversities they faced.
To appreciate today we have to go back to the beginning.
The export of Indians to Trinidad that started in 1845 resulted in the movement of more than 147,000 Indians to Trinidad by the time indentureship ended in 1917.
In 1945—100 years after the first Indians landed in Trinidad—the Indian population was 35 per cent of the national population (195,747) comprising the descendants of indentured Indians and former contract workers.
During the first 100 years, many Indians had migrated from the periphery to occupy influential spaces in the national community and they were contributing to the state in every facet of life.
They put education at the forefront of family life, and helped their children rise out of the ashes of the plantations.
Many achieved success in business and a few had entered politics.
It was a landmark year and the community staged the first Indian Arrival Day, at which the acting governor, Sir Bede Edmund, congratulated the community on its achievements. And Mahatma Gandhi sent a telegram stating, “Domicile Indians prove worthy of Motherland”.
Fifty years later in 1995, Prime Minister Patrick Manning declared May 30 a public holiday and it has remained a grand annual event.
What we celebrate today—and what we did in 1945 and the intervening years before the day became a national holiday—is the Indian spirit of survival.
Indians were abused. They faced adversities like depression, malnutrition, disease and social stress leading to alcoholism and domestic violence, demons we continue to confront.
But they refused to let those negatives impede their will to survive in order to create a better life for future generations. Had it not been for their strength, and their conviction that they could do better, their story would have had a tragic ending.
But it didn’t. Theirs is a story of survival through a determination to stand firm and defeat a system of bondage and servitude so future generations could be free in the new land they embraced as home.
They preserved their rich and diverse cultural and religious traditions and adopted the best of their new environment to move forward and conquer the system through education and cultural persistence.
In the end, we the people won—all of us, Indians and non-Indians alike. We won because THEY won and together all of us have contributed to building a diverse state that is still evolving.
They created opportunity out of misery. That is the legacy of a people who defied colonialism, bigotry, ignorance and persecution through their strong spirit of survival.
They created new communities dedicated to preserving the richness and glory of the motherland while embracing and enhancing their new home.
That is what we celebrate.
Jai Parasram is a journalist, communication and media specialist and author. His forthcoming book Beyond Survival is a photographic narrative celebrating Indians in T&T 1845-2017.
