Name: Garvin Tafari Parsons ID# 808010915 Course Code: HIST 3003 Course Name: Women and Gender

in the History of the English Speaking Caribbean Question: Explain why so few women in relation to men both from India and China were imported into the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth century period of indentureship. Date: Friday, November 11th, 2011

Indentureship in the Caribbean came about as a solution to labour shortages on the sugar plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1834. This form of contractual labour saw the importation of persons into the Caribbean who were to work on the plantations as indentured servants thus, helping in the continuance of the sugar economy and by extension, allowing the plantocracy to maintain its wealth. The majority of indentured servants were imported from India and China between 1838 and 1917 and statistics point to a gender disparity whereby, the number of indentured males exceeded that of females. There were factors which contributed to the disparity and they can be classified into internal and external factors. On the one hand, internal factors were those factors that influenced the Caribbean planters decision to import more men than women. On the other hand, external factors refer to those factors that operated in India and China that resulted in the emigration of fewer women to the Caribbean. To fully understand how these factors were instrumental in the creation of a gender disparity, the factors as they relate to Indian female indentureship and Chinese female indentureship must be examined. Thus, in analysing the planters attitude towards the immigration of indentured males and females and the circumstances surrounding their emigration from India and China, one can appreciate why so few women in relation to men were imported into the British West Indies between 1838 and 1917. Indian Female Indentureship The importation of indentured persons from India into the British Caribbean occurred between 1838 and 1917 with a break in 1848-51 and from the beginning, there was a noticeable numerical disparity in the sexes. In 1838, British Guiana received some migrants from a group of 6000 men

and 100 or so women1 and although the numbers do not give a fixed figure as to how much indentured males and females were sent to British Guiana, it can be reasoned that the British colony did receive more males than females. In a way, the arrivals in British Guiana predicted the trend that would dominate the immigration of indentured persons until 1917. For example, in 1845 the ratio of Indian indentured labourers arriving in Trinidad was 206 men to 21 women2 and women comprised just 11 per cent of the total 261 in Jamaica3. The factors, both internal and external that contributed to the arrival of so few indentured females from India were mainly social in nature but some of them were indeed driven by economic and political considerations. Also, both factors were equally significant in causing the gender disparity among Indian indenture servants. Internal Factors The post-emancipation gender ideology which was modeled after the Victorian Gender Ideal and stressed the importance of complying with traditional gender roles on the British Caribbean plantations was one social, internal factor that influenced planters preference to male indentured labourers. As Verene Shepherd puts it, men were encouraged to take up their proper station in life as provider.4 In essence, it implied the exclusion of women from all forms of compensated labour and relegated them to their traditional roles of wives and mothers. As a result of the hypocritical application of the gender ideology to all women in the British West

Rhoda Reddock. Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago 1845-1917: Freedom Denied Caribbean Freedom. (Kingston, 1993) 225.
2

Reddock 225.

Verene Shepherd. Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post Indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica 1845-1943 Engendering History. (Kingston, 1995) 237.
4

Shepherd 237.

Indies, the planters adopted prejudices towards the imminent arrival of labour from India. Indian women were not regarded as capable agricultural labourers and Indian men were believed to have worked more efficiently and productively.5 Since Indian women were perceived as incapable agriculturists, the planters did not see the need to import them because the underlying factor behind the importation of indentured immigrants was to provide labour on the plantations. Furthermore, in the 20th century when steps were being made to import more women from India, Jamaican planters objected to paying to import women who were, in their words, not as good as male agricultural workers.6 We note that, the post-emancipation gender ideology helped to shape the attitudes of Caribbean planters towards Indian female indentures which effectuated the arrival of so few of them. Within the economic realm, the internal factor of the decline in the British Caribbean economy following the abolition of slavery must be considered. The exodus of freed persons from the sugar plantations especially those in Trinidad, British Guiana and Jamaica where there was an abundance of unoccupied land, led to a decline in sugar production around 1840 and naturally, the planters were not economically stable. This factor coupled with the fact that for example in Trinidad, they had to assume two-thirds the cost of recruiting and transporting indentured servants7 leads one to believe that the planters did not want to spend a bad cent. Their concern for economic loss was reflected in their attitudes towards Indian female indentureship.

5 6

Shepherd 237. Shepherd 237. 7 Howard Johnson. Immigration and the Sugar Industry in Trinidad during the Last Quarter of the 19th Century. Journal of Caribbean History, Vol. 3. (Nov. 1971) 29.

Women as a source of labour were seen as financial liabilities due to the financial risks of child bearing and rearing8 and the planters initial unwillingness to finance the cost of reproducing a second generation of workers in the Caribbean.9 The issue of children also came up and as Shepherd highlighted, proprietors were obliged to provide rations for immigrants children in some cases, they also had to stand the cost of hiring nurses and establishing crches to look after immigrants young children and Indian children could only be indentured at age 1610 without their parents consent. To the plantocracy, these Indian children could not work to maintain their keep and they would not have wanted to pay for their importation and upkeep since, they would not have yielded economic returns. The importation of Indian female indentures would have brought all these financial problems to an already unstable economy and thus, these women were deemed bad for business by Caribbean planters. The last internal factor that affected Indian female indentureship was the planters initial stance against family migration at the beginning of the indentureship period in the mid-nineteenth century. Indentureship was a response to labour shortages on the plantations and one can imply that, this was all the planters cared about and needed to address in the short term. They were not interested in the social and family lives of male immigrants but the amount of labour that they could provide during their tenure in the British West Indies. The requirement to provide immigrants with return passages at the end of their contracts, writes Shepherd, made it less crucial to be concerned about the construction of the Indian family and the impact of a shortage of women.11 The obvious gender disparity did not bother the proprietors so they would not have
8

Reddock 226. Reddock 226. Shepherd 237. Shepherd 237.

10

11

implemented family migration as a means of balancing the male to female ratios which further perpetuated the imbalance. It must be mentioned that the planters stance against family migration did not last for long. Faced with problems of violence against women and an economic downturn in 1884 which made it imperative to cut costs by inducing the immigrants to remain on the plantations, planters conceded to not only promote the immigration of families to the colonies but increase the pool of potential wives and lovers for Indian men12. External Factors Demographically, there was an imbalance in the ratio of men to women in India; there were naturally more men than women in the Indian population during the nineteenth and twentieth century period of indentureship. Statistics taken in 1911 from the United Provinces and Punjab and Delhi where the majority of indentured immigrants were imported from, show that the ratios of males to females were 915 to 1000 and 817 to 1000 respectively. 13 It is clear that planters and recruiters in India were already at a disadvantage when it came to recruiting women for export to the British West Indies. Socially, Brahmanical patriarchy was the norm in India prior to colonial times. This form of patriarchy sought to not only subordinate the lower castes but women as well, so as to control their sexuality and maintaining caste purity14. All authority lied in the hands of males and women were expected to be submissive and docile. When it came to migration, one can assume that women had to obtain permission from their husbands or fathers to do so which, was barely granted. The prevalence of single women emigrating to the British Caribbean as opposed to
12

Shepherd 238. Reddock 226.

13

14

Uma Chakravarti. Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 13. (Apr. 1993) 579.

married women attests to this fact. As such, patriarchal domination was a deterrent to the exportation of Indian female indentures; it is possible that without its existence more women would have gone to the Caribbean colonies. Finally, the impact of recruitment agencies as a social, political and economic agent in India must be examined. Unlike Chinese indentureship, recruiters of indentured labour were usually private and hired by the British Indian government. These recruiters were as much influenced by Caribbean planters as they were by the government. Firstly, these recruiters adhered to the gender specific importation policies of the planters who would have voiced their preference for male labour. The planters even stooped so low as to offer recruiters 6 annas per head for females and 8 annas for males.15 Naturally, the recruitment agencies wanting to earn a profit would have conceded to the demands of the planters thus, bolstering the gender disparity. Secondly, most recruiters were of the opinion that the required proportion of women complicated the process of recruitment. Basically, the recruiters found it difficult to find women to meet the quota as stipulated by the government after 186016. Furthermore, recruiting the right kind of women was another complication and emigration agents were often at pains to explain to all parties involved that it was difficult to recruit these women. At times, the screening process for female candidates especially after the mid-19th century was a long one that could take up to three months17. One can assume that, the recruiters grew weary of so many complications and developed a preference towards the emigration of Indian males.

15

Shepherd 237.

16

P.C. Emmer. The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British India to Surinam 1873- 1916 Abolition and its Aftermath. (London, 1987) 249.
17

Reddock 226.

Chinese Female Indentureship The years 1853-1866 saw the importation of Chinese indentured servants to the British West Indies and like Indian indentureship, there was a definite gender disparity. In Trinidad, of the 1,657 passengers who had arrived in 1862, 1865 and 1866, 309 were females18 whilst in British Guiana the ratio of Chinese females to males was 13.64 to 100 in 1863 19. As in the case with Indian female indentureship, the gender disparity can be attributed to internal and external factors. Unlike Indian female indentureship, however, the external factors impacted more on the planters decision in the Caribbean to import more men than women; to a certain extent, they had no choice in the matter. External Factors The custom of foot binding or crippling of womens feet in Canton and Macao where the majority of indentured servants were recruited from, made them unfit for agricultural labour. Women with small feet were considered both aesthetically pleasing and of a higher class. In order to achieve the tiniest feet, girls were subjected to foot binding which involved crushing the four smaller toes under the sole and compressing the rear of the anklebone20. The result was a concaved foot which was painful and made it difficult to walk. If it was difficult to walk, laboring on the sugar plantations would have been hell on earth for these women and understandably, they would have not been recruited for indentureship.

18

Walton Look Lai. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918 (Baltimore, 1993) 94.
19

Fiona Rajkumar. Changing Gender Ideologies within the Twentieth Century Trinidad Chinese Community: An Investigation based on Oral History Engendering Caribbean History (Kingston, 2011) 695.
20

Kwame Anthony Appiah. The Art of Social Change http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24FOB-Footbinding-t.html?pagewanted=all

The traditionalism of male/ female roles in China proved to be a contributory factor as to why so few women in relation to men immigrated to the British West Indies. Traditionally, as pointed out by Fiona Rajkumar, the sons importance extended to the economic, religious and ceremonial spheres Girls on the other hand, spent the majority of their adolescent lives in preparation for the roles of wife and mother.21 The usual roles which applied to males and females in patriarchal societies were apparent in Chinese tradition. Immigration to the British West Indies did not fit into the prescribed roles of the Chinese female and as a result, women and men would have seen it as a break from tradition if women participated in Chinese indentureship. The nature of the Chinese emigration process, that is, how it operated was as important an external factor as traditionalism in male/female roles. The Chinese men who emigrated did not leave with the intention of staying in the Caribbean. Rajkumar called this phenomenon the overseas Chinese sojourners relation22 and essentially, it describes the tendency of Chinese males to leave their wives and venture to the Caribbean to work as indentured servants. They sent remittances to their families throughout the duration of their contracts and return home. Chinese female indentureship was therefore, hindered as women were not required to emigrate because it was customary for the male to do so whilst they stayed in the homeland realizing their roles as wives and mothers. The British government in China was important in the shaping of the colonial offices and by extension, the planters attitudes towards Chinese female indentureship. Correspondence between the colonial office and the British Consuls in Chinese ports in 1852 about Chinese emigration patterns supports this theory. On answering an enquiry made by the colonial office in
21

Rajkumar 697. Rajkumar 697.

22

1852 about whether or not emigrants brought their families with them, the British Consul stated that, Chinese women never emigrate the emigrants would cohabit with or marry the native females in the West Indies, as they do in the Straits the affection which the Chinese have for their own country induces them to save all their earnings, and return home.23 The colonial office knew that they did not have to worry about the implications of a shortage of women on the male population and much effort would not have gone into the recruitment of Chinese female labour on their part. Internal Factors The little data available on the planters attitudes towards Chinese female indentureship suggests that in some instances, there was change in planter sentiments over the course of the Chinese indentureship period. There were reports in Trinidad of indentured persons who had deserted the estates within a year and half after their arrival in 1862; of the 200 deserters, 104 were women. 24 By June 1865 there was a change in sentiment; planters heralded the work ethic of the indentured servants especially, the women who were willing to work on the estates. However, in territories like Demerara the problem with Chinese female and their disinterest in performing estate labour still persisted25. It is safe to say that generally, planters attitudes towards Chinese female indentureship differed from territory to territory over time. The dichotomy in the planters attitudes bolsters the argument that external factors were of greater significance when it came to Chinese female indentureship.
23

Walton Look Lai. The Chinese in the West Indies 1806-1995: A Documentary History. (Kingston, 1998) 72.
24

Walton Look Lai. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918 (Baltimore, 1993) 97.
25

Walton Look Lai. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918 (Baltimore, 1993) 96.

In conclusion, the gender disparity in Indian and Chinese immigration schemes was indeed caused by the planters attitude to the immigration females and the circumstances that surrounded their emigration from India and China. One can also appreciate

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "The Art of Social Change - Campaigns against Foot-Binding and Genital Mutilation. - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., 22 Oct. 2010. Web. 11 Oct. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24FOB-Footbinding-t.html? pagewanted=all>. Chakravarti, Uma. "Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State." Economic and Political Weekly 28.13 (1993): 579-685. CSCS Archive. Web. 9 Nov. 2011. Emmer, P.C. "The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British India to Surinam 1873- 1916." Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context 1790- 1916. London: Frank Cass, 1987. 245-261. Print. Johnson, Howard. "Immigration and the Sugar Industry in Trinidad during the Last Quarter of the 19th Century." Journal of Caribbean History 3 (1971): 28- 72. Print. Look Lai, Walton. The Chinese in the West Indies 1806-1995: A Documentary History. Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998. Print. Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Print. Reddock, Rhoda. "Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago 1845- 1917: Freedom Denied." Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1993. 225- 230. Print. Reddock, Rhoda. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 1994. Print.

Shepherd, Verene A. "Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and PostIndentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica 1845-1943." Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995. 233-254. Print.