Indians after Indentureship – The rice industry

When indentureship ended in 1917, some 239,000 men, women and children had been hauled from India in ships, to labour on the sugar plantations of this land. Only a quarter of them ever returned to their native land – the others decided to make Guyana their home. As it was, the home was not exactly hospitable.

Wracked by diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and TB; housed in logies that were dank and leaky; bound by contract to toil for a pittance in the cane fields from dawn to dusk, the death rate far exceeded the birth rate.

In 1917, the colony’s Indians that survived did so only by dint of their own labours. Working on the sugar plantations meant at best a subsistence existence. Very quickly they understood that if they were to attain the financial security for which they left India (and which they had been promised) they would have to resort to their own ingenuity.

Two historical moments converged to offer them the opportunity.

In the decades preceding the end of indentureship, sugar prices had plummeted sharply, and the planters responded as they always did: slashing the wages of the sugar workers. In a bid to retain those workers, they offered Indians marginal, swampy land abutting the plantations in exchange for their renunciation of their return passage to India. They would kill two further birds with this ploy: the Indians would supplement their meagre wages with cash from whatever they planted on their acreage, and still be available for in-crop labour.

The second moment was the discovery of gold in the interior at the same time- during the 1880-1890’s. This created a class of entrepreneurs (mainly wealthier Portuguese) that demanded a change in the laws that had made the acquisition of crown land prohibitive. Their agitation and mobilisation led to the relaxation of the terms of sale for land in the interior and on the coast.

Rather than go into the interior as workers in the burgeoning gold mining industry they bought up or leased land all across Guyana but especially in the Corentyne.

They were going to utilise the land to plant rice and rear cattle. These were occupations that they many of them had practiced – especially those that came from the Bhojpuri belt of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. And it was from this area most of the Indians originated. They had maintained the skills to bring the marginal lands into fertility but it demanded unstinting labour from every man, woman and child if they were to be successful.

From 1880-1890, Indians were cultivating about 3,000 acres of rice – mostly the land that had been exchanged adjoining to sugar plantations. But following the relaxation of the Crown Lands regulations, this jumped to 17,500 acres by 1903 and 47,037 acres by 1914, when WWI broke out. Before Indians took up rice cultivation, the grain had been imported from the East in massive quantities – almost 20,000 tons annually and caused a huge outward flow of foreign exchange.

The local production began to replace the imports, and by 1914, the beginning of WWI, our imports had not only dropped to zero but we were filling the gap of wider West Indian demand – forced by the cessation of those imports due to WWI enemy action. Between 1913 and 1918 Guyana had exported more than 60,000 tons of rice, bringing in millions of dollars in foreign exchange.

This was a massive achievement for a people who had been seen as merely hewers of wood and drawers of water. In the estimation of the historian Clem Seecharan, “The development of the rice industry in British Guiana from the 1890’s was the single most important achievement of the Indians in the colony. It was a rare milestone in Caribbean economic history – a section of the peasantry, with little official encouragement and often in the face of vigorous official discouragement, created and sustained an economically viable industry in an environment dominated by sugar monoculture.”

His view is echoed by a contemporary account. The BG Journal of the Board of Agriculture wrote in 1921: “Within a short space of years they (the Indians) have developed the resources of the colony in an unexpected direction and to a phenomenal extent. They have left a permanent mark on its history and enlarged its prospects; and that without any aid but that afforded by a series of congenial seasons and favourable markets.”

But the Indian contribution to the development of Guyana through rice cultivation was not always – even today – appreciated (as Clem Seecharan noted) but was often actively discouraged by official policies. Right after WWI (1919-1922), a new governor imposed price controls on the domestic sale of rice and an embargo on exports that plunged most farmers into bankruptcy. But the farmers persisted. Similar misguided policies of 1964-1992 also drove a later generation of rice farmers into bankruptcy and nearly broke the industry. It is to the credit of the tradition of the Indian people that they have stuck with rice against all adversities and at tremendous costs to themselves and their families, and Guyana can today feel comfortable in the face of global food insecurity.