Ramesar also produced seminal documentaries on the pioneers of the steelband movement, traditional Carnival characters, indentureship, emancipation, religious rituals and the myriad festivals and celebrations of Trinidad and Tobago.
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Solving East Indian Roots in Trinidad. Freeport Junction. H.E.M. Enterprise. Indentureship contracts were sometimes exploitative, to such an extent that historians such as Hugh Tinker were to call it "a new system of slavery".
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Although they were allowed to continue their religion they were met with contempt or indifference by the non-Hindu residents of the country. The Hindu and Muslim clashes that occurred in South Asia continued to occur in Trinidad and Tobago during the days of indentureship and especially while in the Partition of India was going on back in South Asia. During indentureship and even in the beginning after independence from the British, Hindus were treated as second class citizens. The Hindus in Trinidad and Tobago struggled during the early days after independence and even before during British colonial times over the granting of adult franchise, a Hindu marriage act, Hindu schools, cremation ordinance, the right to Diwali as a public holiday, and others.
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He was educated at Dagenham County High School (1957–63) and, aged 17, was hired by the Barking and Dagenham Advertiser. After serving a three-year indentureship he joined the Lancashire Evening Telegraph in Blackburn as a sub-editor before spending 18 months as a sub- editor at the Manchester office of the Daily Mail.
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He was informally adopted by a Hindu couple who gave him the name Gokool. Once he was old enough, Gokool secured his own indentureship contract with the Concord Estate. He renewed his contract once it expired, and then went out on his own. He purchased a donkey cart and made a living hauling sugarcane to the factory at Usine Sainte Madeline, then the second largest sugar refinery in the world.
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Martin Bickham, which concerned the loss of cargo from a ship owned by Bickham and ran from 1802 to 1829. Bickham had a son, whom he named Stephen Girard Bickham, and arranged for him to be indentured to Girard. Girard invested $1,500 in training the boy in business, though his indentureship remained uncompleted upon Girard's death in 1831. Stephen Bickham later became a successful merchant in his own right.
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Various nationalities were contracted under this system, including Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese. Of these, the East Indians were imported in the largest numbers, starting from 1 May 1845, when 225 Indians were brought in the first shipment to Trinidad on the Fatel Razack, a Muslim-owned vessel. Indentureship of the Indians lasted from 1845 to 1917, during which time more than 147,000 Indians came to Trinidad to work on sugarcane plantations.Deen, Shamshu (1994).
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West was a free woman of color, of mixed race, or a "high yellow". She was born in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1835 she was contracted to James Morgan in New York to work as an indentured servant for one year in Morgan's Point, Texas, at the New Washington Association's hotel as a housekeeper. Several months into her year of indentureship, on April 16, 1836, West and other residents were kidnapped by Mexican cavalry.
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Some abolitionists opposed placements of children with Western families, viewing indentureship as a form of slavery. Orphan trains were the target of lawsuits, generally filed by parents seeking to reclaim their children. Suits were occasionally filed by a receiving parent or family member claiming to have lost money or been harmed as the result of the placement. The Minnesota State Board of Corrections and Charities reviewed Minnesota orphan train placements between 1880 and 1883.
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Pundit Ram Lakhan Mishra was from Bhelupur, Bihar, India. After indentureship, Pundit Ram Lakhan and Ganga Mishra had settled in Boodhoo Trace in Penal in southern Trinidad. In 2012, Persad-Bissessar visited her paternal great- grandfather's village on a state visit to India. When Persad-Bissessar was sixteen she wanted to go to the United Kingdom to study, but her traditional father and uncles insisted she stayed in Trinidad and Tobago, however, her mother eventually convinced them to send her.
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He became indentured to Stockton printer, Mr. M. Eales. On completion of his Indentureship in 1825, he moved to Edinburgh (termed "The Modern Athens") and worked in the offices of the publishing company of Ballantine where he remained for almost three years, gaining valuable experience. At the end of this time in 1828, he accepted a sub-editorship at the Leicester Chronicle, and moved to Leicester. In 1838, the Whig-sympathetic Gateshead Observer required an editor and Clephan applied successfully for the post.
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David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation)"David Dabydeen: a series like ‘Roots’ would help the British public understand indentureship", Talking Humanities, 19 September 2017. from 1997 to 2010 and the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015.
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According to a written reply to an enquiry from the Guiana Emigration Agency at 8 Garden Reach, Calcutta, which was responsible for emigration of Indians to Nevis, acting President Spencer Churchill declared that all Indian immigrants were freed from indentureship in April 1879. Some Indian labourers broke their contracts before the five-year indenture period ended so that they could migrate to Trinidad. Others emigrated after completing their contracts. No Indian workers in Nevis chose to re-indenture after completing their initial five-year contract, however, many chose to remain in Nevis as free workers.
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The migration of Caribbean workers to the Panama Canal is often used as a narrative foundation. Maryse Condé’s novel Tree of Life (1992) discusses the involvement of family ties and how people seek to improve their lot in life by working to build the Panama Canal. Another contemporary classic about migrant cultures isRamabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003), which explores trauma of displacement, Indian indentureship, and the phenomena of invisibility relating to women. Caribbean stories and poems are ripe with references to storms, hurricanes, and natural disasters.
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Indo-Caribbeans or Indian-Caribbeans, are people of Indian descent who live in the Caribbean. They are descendants of the jahaji Indian indentured workers brought by the British, the Dutch and the French during colonial times from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. A minority are descendants of Indians and/or other South Asians who came after the indentureship period as shopkeepers, businessmen, etc. Most Indo-Caribbean people live in the English- speaking Caribbean nations, Suriname and the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, with smaller numbers in other Caribbean countries and, following further migration, in Europe and North America.
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As a child of nine, Agnes Sam's great-grandfather had been 'shanghaied' into indentureship and brought to Durban in 1860 on the Lord George Bentinck II. Sam was thus born into an Indian family in Port Elizabeth, and grew up there, near the family business. She was educated at a Roman Catholic school in Port Elizabeth. There the Indian experience was never mentioned in history lessons: Sam went on to study Zoology and Psychology at the National University of Lesotho, and trained as a teacher in Zimbabwe. After briefly teaching science in Zambia, she went into exile in 1973 in England, bringing up three children there while also attempting to take a further degree.
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This novel is not just about Chinese people, it is about the struggle of three generations of a family to find a secure footing in Guyana on a sugar estate, and the price they paid for it, especially the women who struggle to rise above the hardship and humiliation of indentureship and racism in colonial British Guiana. Clarice Chung is a fiercely strong and ambitious woman who exerts her influence mercilessly over her family. Her female descendants find it difficult to follow her example about which they are ambivalent, especially her granddaughter, Joan Wong, who fights against her legacy and tries to escape from it by fleeing to England where she settles down.
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In 1660 Elizabeth Key won the first freedom suit in Virginia. She challenged being classified as a slave in a complicated case related to a lengthy indenture and an estate. The mixed-race woman, daughter of an African woman and English planter, argued that she was free due to her white English father who had acknowledged her as his daughter, had her baptized as a Christian, and tried to protect her by establishing a guardian and indentureship for her as a girl when he was dying. After this case, the colonial legislature adopted the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, saying that all children born in the colony would take the status of their mothers, regardless of paternity.
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Rajkumari Singh (13 October 1923 – 1979) was an Indo-Caribbean, Guyanese writer, political activist, educator, and cultural leader. Rajkumari was the first published Indian woman from the Caribbean and although she never wore the term "feminist," her life's work contributed to this movement in her hemisphere of the world, in addition to her advancement of a national Guyanese culture of integration while still upholding Indian culture within this new mold. Her iconic poem, "Per Ajie," epitomizes the journey of Indians to the Caribbean, through the eyes of an Indo-Caribbean visualizing her paternal great-grandmother making the voyage on one of the historic migratory ships headed for Guyana. It was written in a Shakespearean style of language, in order to elevate the topic of Indian indentureship into circles of serious literary critique.
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Indian indentureship ended in 1917 to the Caribbean (Jamaica, Trinidad, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Croix, Guadeloupe, Martinique, British Guiana (now Guyana), Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), French Guiana, and Belize). The labourers were given one suit of clothing, agricultural tools and cooking pots on their arrival, divided into groups of 20 or 40 and sent, first by mule cart and in later years on overcrowded freight trains to the plantations in Portland, St. Thomas, St. Mary, Clarendon and Westmoreland. Here they would work for a shilling a day and live in rudimentary barracks, with several families having to share a single room. Two shillings and six pence were deducted from their meagre wages for the rice, flour, dried fish or goat, peas and seasoning which constituted their rations.
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72Gordon K. Lewis and Anthony P. Maingot, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (2004) pp 96–97 In 1838, with the abolition of slavery at its onset, the British were in the process of transporting a million Indians out of India and into the Caribbean to take the place of the African slaves (freed in 1833) in indentureship. Women, looking for what they believed would be a better life in the colonies, were specifically sought after and recruited at a much higher rate than men due to the high population of men already in the colonies. However, women had to prove their status as single and eligible to emigrate, as married women could not leave without their husbands. Many women seeking escape from abusive relationships were willing to take that chance.
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Despite these descriptions, it was not truly a new form of slavery, as workers were paid, contracts were finite, and the idea of an individual being another's property had been eliminated when slavery was abolished. In addition, employers of indentured labour had no legal right to flog or whip their workers; the main legal sanction for the enforcement of the indenture laws was prosecution in the courts, followed by fines or (more likely) jail sentences. People were contracted for a period of five years, with a daily wage as low as 25 cents in the early 20th century, and they were guaranteed return passage to India at the end of their contract period. However, coercive means were often used to retain labourers, and the indentureship contracts were soon extended to 10 years from 1854 after the planters complained that they were losing their labour too early.
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Workers often deserted, including 50–60 who were mostly Chinese, and efforts were being made by the manager William Dudley Scott to recover them with mixed success. The facilities at Peter's Hall included a small "hospital", a "gambling room" and a one-room school that the teacher complained the children were discouraged from attending by the driver (supervisor). The high number of Indian workers may reflect the high levels of Indian migration to British Guiana as planters attempted to replace slave labour freed after abolition. Over 238,000 Indians migrated to the colony as indentured labour between 1838 and the end of the migration in the early 20th-century.An overview of Indian Indentureship in Guyana, 1838–1917. Basdeo Mangru, Stabroek News, 4 May 2013. Retrieved 4 March 2019. Most came via Calcutta as there was a strong planter preference for north Indians as south Indians were thought to be weaker and liable to become "hospital birds".Rodney, p. 95.
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