Migration

Although it is possible that a few Indo-Caribbean people now living in Canada may have come from French-, Dutch-, or Spanish-speaking colonial territories, the vast majority are from former British colonies. This means the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, two countries that contain more than 80 percent of the English-speaking Indo-Caribbean population. The poor economic conditions in these two countries help to explain the large-scale Indo-Caribbean emigration in the 1970s and 1980s.

When they first arrived in the Caribbean in the middle of the nineteenth century, Asian Indians felt excluded from the established three-tiered plantation social structure and entrenched Creole culture that confronted them. As unlettered labourers who were brought to the Caribbean to take on the duties of former African slaves on sugar plantations, the Asian Indians occupied a position at the bottom of the Creole social hierarchy, below the freed Africans. More important, the Asian Indians brought with them alien languages and customs that made it more difficult for them to be integrated into a society that used English as its language of daily intercourse and had Afro-European or Creole customs as its basic cultural pattern in everyday life.

For their own survival, the original Asian Indian immigrants had to undergo a process of social and cultural change – generally called creolization – by which they gradually shed or adapted their native languages and customs for Caribbean or Creole linguistic, social, and cultural habits and manners. After five generations, Asian Indians could claim a distinct Caribbean culture of their own. Cultural links with the South Asian homeland survived, but they decreased sharply after 1917 when the cessation of the indenture system cut off fresh cultural contact directly with India. By the 1970s, the Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians were as much Caribbean in culture as anything else.

The circumstances that provoked Indo-Caribbean emigration derive from the undemocratic social structure in Britain’s Caribbean colonies generally, at least until shortly before World War II. The original Asian Indian indentured immigrants were at the bottom of the social structure, and their descendants retained their lowly status until the 1940s, except for a few families who had acquired wealth and yet fewer families who had entered the professions – chiefly law and medicine. In Inward Hunger (1969), Eric Williams, distinguished historian and former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, gives the following account of Indo-Trinidadians in 1911: “There was no question that the Indian occupied the lowest rung of the ladder in Trinidad. Cribb’d, cabin’d and confin’d in the sugar plantation economy, from which other racial groups had succeeded in large part in escaping, the few who did not escape to the Mecca of Port-of-Spain were concentrated on the outskirts of the town in a sort of ghetto popularly known as ‘Coolie-Town’ – today St James, a bustling suburb of the capital – which tourists interested in Oriental scenes and ceremonies were advised to visit in order to see ‘the Son of India in all his phases of Oriental primitiveness.’” The situation of Indo-Caribbeans in Guyana at this time was fairly similar, although not identical in all respects. Indo-Trinidadians became westernised at a faster rate and achieved a higher degree of social integration than Indo-Guyanese. Nevertheless, Williams’s remarks illustrate popular attitudes towards all Indo-Caribbean people in the early decades of this century.

By the 1930s and 1940s, agitation against British colonial rule had developed momentum throughout the Caribbean, and, in a struggle that lasted until the 1950s, at least superficial solidarity was established between blacks (Afro-Caribbeans) and Asian Indians (Indo-Caribbeans), who shared similar grievances as common victims of British colonialism. At this stage, there was no significant Indo-Caribbean emigration except for the occasional adventurer or the handful of students who temporarily went abroad, mainly to Britain, for higher education. But as independence approached in the early 1960s and British control gradually came to an end, a political vacuum was created that had to be filled by local Guyanese and Trinidadians. The non-democratic structure of colonial society, based on criteria of race, colour, and class, now ensured that political competition manifested itself basically in racial terms. This sharply polarized Africans and Indians, the two largest ethnic groups in Guyana and Trinidad, destroyed their fragile solidarity, and resulted in interracial riots, communal violence, and bloodshed in Guyana. The consequences were not as deadly in Trinidad, although racial polarization occurred there as well.

In Guyana and Trinidad departing British colonial administrators were succeeded by Afro-Caribbean governments, led by Forbes Burnham in Guyana and Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago. Even if these governments were not publicly regarded as Afro-Caribbean, they were perceived as such by their Asian Indian constituents. The fact that both of these leaders and their parties remained in power for long periods – twenty-eight years continuously in Guyana, and thirty years in Trinidad – intensified the feelings of alienation and insecurity of the Indo-Caribbeans, who felt unrepresented, marginalized, and to some extent disenfranchised. In these circumstances emigration became a desirable option for many Indo-Trinidadians and in particular for Indo-Guyanese, who seemed desperate to escape the Burnham regime which they considered oppressive.

The feelings of alienation that led to emigration evolved out of a paradoxical situation in which Indo-Caribbeans remain a political and social minority in all Caribbean societies, even though in two – Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago – they form a majority of the population. Because of their relatively late arrival in the region, there is an ambivalent attitude on the part of Afro-Caribbeans about the legitimacy of Indians as Caribbean citizens and about their capacity for holding political power. Consequently, Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trini-dadians were disqualified from exercising political power equivalent to their numbers by a perception, supported by historical precedent, that they were an alien minority, or, as Williams said in a widely reported speech, “a hostile and recalcitrant minority” in a region first dominated by African slavery and later by Afro-Caribbean manners, customs, and interests.

It is not surprising that the sense of marginalization and consequent neglect among Indo-Caribbeans led to frustration and cynicism. In addition to these political frustrations, there was ruinous post-colonial economic decline, especially in Guyana. Even in colonial times, the promise of better economic opportunity was always a prime motive of Caribbean emigration, chiefly to Britain. Now, exacerbated by post-colonial disorder, evident in shortages of numerous foodstuffs and other necessities, and the breakdown of essential supplies of water and electricity, the motive for emigration intensified in Guyana and Trinidad, particularly among the Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians.

By the 1980s Asian Indians formed a majority of the population in Guyana – 51 percent – and the major group in Trinidad and Tobago – 40 percent. Since the percentage of Asian Indians in other English-speaking Caribbean territories was considerably smaller and in most cases insignificant, it is clear that the Indo-Caribbeans who migrated to Canada came mainly from Guyana and from Trinidad and Tobago where the total Indian population was about 400,000.