As the curator of the Museum of London, Shehreen Lafaj, elaborates; ‘As we mark the 75th anniversary of Windrush this year, Indo + Caribbean is a chance to learn more about Britain’s colonial footprint and the diverse communities from the Caribbean that have enriched our city’. This statement reverberates across this captivating exhibition exploring the relationship between India, the Caribbean and Britain through the spotlighting of two significant episodes of migration history. The first being the history of Indian indentureship to the British Caribbean (which took place from 1838 to 1917), and the post-war migration of Caribbeans to the UK between 1948 and 1971.
To coincide with the 75th anniversary celebrations of the arrival of Empire Windrush in the UK, which saw Caribbeans invited to Britain to help re-build the country as a result of the post-World War II labour shortages to work in the transport system, factories and the newly created National Health Service (NHS), the Museum of London Docklands added the captivating free display Indo + Caribbean: The Creation of a Culture as part of its London, ‘Sugar and Slavery’ gallery which ran from May to November 2023. Indian indenture in the Caribbean is a lesser-known and an even lesser-taught underrepresented aspect of British and South Asian history. The anthropologist Steven Vertovec (1993) emphasized the challenges that Indo-Caribbeans, from the islands with the largest Indian descent populations namely Trinidad and Guyana, faced in terms of recognition in fields such as civil service and faced economic discrimination and miscategorization, as grouped under ‘Black Caribbean’ or ‘South Asian’ which failed to capture their unique cultural and historical identity.
From the system and operationalization of indenture, how the British Empire recruited workers from India, as a cheap source of labour, for their sugar plantations in the Caribbean, to the enduring legacy of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in shaping the cultural landscape of London and beyond, the complex picture of indenture is one that is continually being layered.
The descendants of Indian indenture embarked on another wave of labour migration, in the form of the 1949–1971 Windrush migrations to the United Kingdom. The Windrush generation had a high number of Indo-Caribbean and Chinese-Caribbean migrants that made this journey, but their stories rarely get told in the wider Windrush narrative. The ‘minority within a minority’ (Kaladeen and Dabydeen, 2021) as they are described by scholars as occupying a marginal positionality.
The Windrush generation became a byword for the first generation of Caribbean migrants and while their cultural legacy is cemented throughout the British social landscape, this exhibition underscores the undersung story of Indo-Caribbeans in the Windrush journey. As there was no Indo-Caribbean option on the census at the time, an accurate picture of the number of people who made that journey is indeterminable and this dearth of accessible records, as well as inattention on the topic in British classrooms possibly because it interferes with the Empire narrative of triumph, could to a large extent be posited as one of the reasons for the underrepresentation. On another level, this group, conceptualized by Maria Kaladeen and David Dabydeen (2021:1), the ‘minority within a minority’, while occupying a marginal position in the Windrush story, are finding expression in relatively new areas of scholarly study and across a range of disciplines, for example, history, sociology, anthropology, and more recently forming a part of a wider debate in the UK around decolonizing history.
Circling back to the exhibition display, this takes the observer through a broadly chronological journey, albeit not a linear one, between enslaved African labour and the start of Indian indenture following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 through which the British Empire in the Caribbean, in search of cheap labour, recruited a large number of workers from India to work on their sugar plantations. It opens with a note on the use of the term ‘coolie’ which it states is “generally considered an offensive term and should not be used. It is included in this display out of necessity on certain occasions, such as when it appears in historical documents and in academic writing.” There was a missed opportunity here to critically interrogate what was a labour-based racial slur for Indians in the Caribbean and drawing a connection to the contemporary usage of the term which is used freely and humorously in popular speech by North American diasporic Indo-Caribbeans and has been up for academic scrutiny in various ways, almost as an act of reclamation.
It highlights the first phase of Indian migration or the ‘old’ diaspora of Indian indentured labourers (Mishra 1996), their journey across the kala pani (literally meaning the dark waters) (Mehta, 2004), and life in the Caribbean for indentured labourers. The segmenting of sections, ‘Plantations and Policy’ (which explored the transition between enslaved African labour and the start of Indian indenture), ‘Voyages and Violence (which explored the sexual violence encountered by women on the treacherous ship voyages)’, ‘Sugarcane and Survival’ (which looked at the conditions faced by Indian migrants), ‘Culture and Community’ (which draws on stories of the Indo-Caribbean community in London), shines a light on various aspects of the indenture experience. It then moves to the second wave of migration of Indo-Caribbeans to Britain and their present-day lives and we see a personal account and oral history of a group of young women who are descendants of the Indo-Caribbeans on Windrush and who speak movingly about their grapple with identity, culture and sitting on the periphery of South Asian culture in London.
There was also certainly more scope to display a wider range of Indo-Caribbean voices, especially when compared to the ‘Sugar and Slavery’ section that ran alongside the much smaller display on Indo-Caribbean culture. In addition to that, the stories of resistance from within and labour resistance against indentureship was markedly absent. Stories of anti-colonial resistance which impacted policy-making processes of the British Imperial Government have so far been neglected in scholarly fields and this also signals a lacuna in the representation of the Indian indenture experience in all its multifaceted details.
Looking ahead, one hopes museums will make a continued and concerted effort to support distinctive Indian Caribbean voices and culture as part of the wider call to be more inclusive and decolonized by exploring a wide range of ideas, mediums and perspectives. This would certainly go a long way in addressing the historical and contemporary silence around this history. A corrective we are seeing being addressed more meaningfully across social media where descendants of the indentured labour system are creating and contributing to a digital archive of Indo-Caribbean identity through alternate lenses, and in a digital environment which does not reinforce well-worn dichotomies of the ancestral homeland and the present homeland, but instead centres a space of creativity and agency. As the exhibition says in its closing panel, ‘With research on the subject growing and new archival sources being discovered, Indo-Caribbean history will be understood and told in new ways for generations to come’.