by    Bhoendradatt Tewarie May 14, 1992

The Indians who migrated to Trinidad beginning in 1845 might have ended up anywhere else in the British Empire. Their journey from India to another imperial outpost was part of a larger imperial plan, which led to what Bridget Brereton has described as “a global traffic in Indian Labourers", … to Assam, South East Asia, East Africa, South Africa, Mauritius, the Pacific and the West Indies," Between 1845 and 1917, some 143,900 East Indians were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers.

The Trinidad society into which East Indians came in 1845 and afterwards was already a highly complex, multi-ethnic society in which they were to be a new, different and relatively late addition. Modern Trinidad society came into being in 1783, when the Spanish established a slave society here, When the Indians began to arrive; there was already a planter class consisting of Spanish, French and English whites; a free coloured or Mulatto population; and a free Black population. In addition there were Portuguese and Chinese who had preceded them as labourers.

By the 1840's the British were looking upon India as being able to provide an inexhaustible and most profitable source of plantation labour and they were brought in to the West Indies in droves, The indentured labourer was required to assume in the plantation system a position that was in essence the one recently vacated by the emancipated slaves. Legally the indentured Indian was bound to the estate, economically he was dependent on it for survival and since he was a non-citizen, his political rights were minimal. On all counts, therefore, the indentured Indians entered Trinidad society at the very bottom of the socio-economic and political structure.