Every year for Indian Arrival Day, ethnic ideologues repeat the canard that indentured laborers were tricked, fooled, or forced into emigrating from India.

While it is true that this happened in some cases, the vast majority of indentured laborers left India because of oppressive conditions there, ranging from food shortages, caste disadvantages, or societal rejection (this last particularly affected women).

In 1913, because of these allegations of unfair practices, the British government appointed a two-man commission to investigate the state of indentured labor. James McNeil, a magistrate in the Indian Civil Service, and Lala Chimman Lal, an honorary magistrate and business manager, visited Trinidad for six weeks, conducting interviews and perusing documents. They found that relationships between estate owners and laborers were generally benign and emigrants benefited more from emigration than otherwise.

Their 1914 report stated, ‘While it would probably be untrue to state that each individual recruit has all the conditions fully and clearly fixed in his mind, it is undoubtedly true that a good deal of trouble is taken to make matters clear and that where ignorance and misapprehension exists, it is due to obtuseness and indifference on the part of recruits and not to systematic deceit.’ (p. 312) The fact that 93% of laborers chose to remain in Trinidad by the end of indentureship in 1917 confirms these findings. Nor, to dispel another common falsehood, was this because all Indians were offered land if they remained. Of the 147,500 laborers who came to Trinidad, only 3,979 land grants were provided from the Crown on this basis between 1869 and 1889 when the scheme was stopped.

Kevin Baldeosingh
Freeport