The roots of Anti-Indian Racism Non-Fiction accounts. 1838-1935

From the moment the Indians were brought into then British Guiana on May 5th 1838, they were subjected to racist discrimination and oppression. The racist assumptions that undergirded such actions were in place even before they landed. In fact, they determined their selection to replace the newly freed slaves.

The initiator of the scheme to import Indians was John Gladstone, owner of Vreed-en-hoop and several other plantations. He wrote to Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. in India about the possibility of supplying him with “Bengalees”; he had heard they were shipping to Mauritius:
“You will probably be aware that we are very particularly situated with our Negro apprentices in the West Indies, and that it is a matter of doubt and uncertainty how far they may be induced to continue their services on the plantations after their apprenticeship expires in 1840. This to us is a subject of great moment and deep interest in the colonies of Demerara and Jamaica. We are therefore most desirous to obtain and introduce labourers from other quarters, and particularly from climates something similar in their nature.”
The reply from Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. was revealing:
“The tribe that is found to suit best in the Mauritius is from the hills to the north of Calcutta….The Hill tribes, known by the name of Dhangurs, are looked down upon by the more cunning natives of the plains, and they are always spoken of as more akin to the monkey than the man. They have no religion, no education, and, in their present state, no wants beyond eating, drinking, and sleeping; and to procure which they are willing to labour.”
By the turn of the century, the opinion of whites about the East Indian had not improved noticeably: a newly-arrived pastor, Rev HJ Shirley, on July 1900, wrote the following in the Birmingham Post, about Indian workers on estates:
“If an overseer kicks a coolie into a trench…. the coolie has no remedy but what he takes into his own hand. Let him however strike an overseer and a batch of policemen are sent off to arrest him and he is severely sentenced to prison….there is an immigration agency which costs the country some thousands a year and is supposed to secure them justice, but supposition is not always paralleled with facts.”

The historian Clem Seecharran reports that a few years later:
“…in January 1904, a correspondent to the Daily Chronicle complained about the presence of “coolie rapscallions” on the sea walls of Georgetown. This observer described them as “dirty, offensive looking objects” who “infested” the benches where little children of the genteel, with their nurses, played in the afternoon. He added that their presence offended “sight and smell as well as decency and sanitation”, while their “peculiar manners’ before impressionable children, were reprehensible….”
But the scorn of East Indians was not confined to the “great unwashed class”‘. In his autobiography “Swarthy Boy”, the coloured Edgar Mittleholzer describes his lower middle class family’s reactions to the family of EA Luckhoo, the first Indian-Guianese (1912) lawyer, who lived next to them in New Amsterdam circa 1919:
“The East Indian family to the west of us had been accepted into middle class circles, for Mr Edward Luckhoo was a solicitor….but those were the days when only a very  few East Indians had ’emerged’ from the plantation swarm of coolies – a people looked down upon by socially by the whites and middle-class admixtures. So even though we were friendly with the Luckhoos – and this continued until I was fifteen or sixteen – there persisted among my aunts and my mother a continuing whispering snobbism….My sister and I were made to feel that we could go over and play with the children but it must not be overdone….”After all, they’re not really our sort” my mother might murmur. Or my aunt, “those people you can’t trust. They’re so secretive and cunning. Coolies! H’mm.”

By the 1930’s not much has changed in the way the African/Coloured population viewed Indians. This can be gleaned from the account by Arnold Apple’s “Son of Guyana”:
“I had the belief that East Indians were of the last class of people; and although my parents had a few East Indian friends, who used to come and go anytime at the house, I  had this prejudiced feeling. Of course at that time all the low, degrading, and dirty jobs were done by them. The Town Council, and rubbish destructor jobs, for cleaning the streets, gutters, digging the drains, and all odds and end jobs, were done by them; also the rice and cane fields.
Whenever my mother went into the market, and the goods were a bit too much, she would pay an East Indian four or eight cents, according to how she felt, and he would put whatever it might be on his head, and walk around the town, and bring it home…
Along the market square there were very large sheds projecting over the pavement, and that was the bedrooms of these Indians…A great sport of the bigger boys was to wait about ten o’clock, and six or seven of them started with a leather in their hand from the corner, giving every Indian that was lying on the pavement a lash.
You could hear their voices echoing, “ari-da-da” (which is an East Indian word) as the lashes registered. We called that running through the gauntlet. We never called them East Indians, we called them “Cooleys,” and I even thought that was their correct name.”