Though landed in an alien territory and bound to the rigours of life as a labourer on sugar and cocoa plantations, indentured immigrants from India (whose era of influx lasted from 1845 to 1917) flourished and took firm root in the land of their arrival. Their labour had saved the sugar economy from certain collapse and they proved both reliable and hardworking. This led the colonial authorities to introduce an incentive to entice the Indians to settle permanently, thus forming a peasant class and a fixed labour supply for the plantations.
From 1866 to 1880, those who had completed their five-year contracts were offered repatriation to India or, in lieu of that, five acres of land and £5. Towards the end of the 1870s this was reduced simply to the cash gratuity with which crown lands could be purchased for £1 an acre. On these smallholdings, the Indo-Trinidadians evolved and lived economical lives, tilling the earth and saving every cent for educating their children or adding to their wealth.
In 1887, JH Collens wrote of the success of the Indo-Trinidadian peasantry thus: “He is frugal and saving to a fault, living on the plainest and coarsest of diet, often denying himself sufficient even of this fare to gratify his love of hoarding. The Coolies, though mostly labourers and small shopkeepers, yet managed to deposit in the Government Savings Bank the sum of £49,254 during the year 1887. It is a significant fact that at the close of the preceding year, 830 labourers, presumably most of them Coolies, managed to have at their credit in the San Fernando Branch Savings Bank no less a sum than £18,311. What a lesson in thrift.”
For the sugar industry, the Indo-Trini peasant was also a boon. By 1880, as much as one quarter of the sugar cane fed into the maw of the huge Usine Ste Madeleine refinery was produced by independent cane farmers. These small farmers usually cultivated fields of five and ten acres which were individually cut and carted to the nearest weighing station and thence forwarded by rail to the factories.
Others kept small shops on or near estates which supplied credit to the mainly labouring population, thus earning the proprietors cash to speculate in real estate. Transport was also a vehicle for economic mobility and the owners/drivers of mule and bull carts were considered a class above the cane cutters. Haji Gokool Meah, who, before his death in 1940, was a millionaire and owner of Globe Cinema, began his commercial life as first a mule-cart driver and then owner.
This was the era in which the indigenous religions of Hinduism and Islam were beginning to be practised with some modicum of freedom. The Green Street mandir in Tunapuna is reputedly the oldest existing one of its kind, having been founded in the 1860s. As a result of the thriving peasant and small merchant class the ex-indentureds founded, they established a new identity for themselves that hybridised the old world and new, thus creating a unique and resilient people in the diverse ethnic and cultural landscape of T&T.