MASSES IN ACTION

Precious little emerged out of the hope that the interior offered Guyana a brighter future. All that came of the scheme of communication with the hinterland was the Rupununi cattle track, which was opened in 1917. The gold rush of the 1880s had declined considerably in the early years of this century. Mushroom companies had collapsed as yields proved unremunerative, and the diamond industry was to fol­low a similar pattern. Both minerals continued to pro­duce regular revenue, but the scale of operations was small. At a glance, it seems that Guyanese had over­estimated their resources, but it was those who believed that the country had only minor alluvial deposits of gold and diamonds but no supplies at great depth, who were living in a world of fancy. The woeful ignorance and apathy of the colonial regime militated against the rational utilisation of Guyana’s resources.

Indentured Immigration

The conception of change which the Guyanese workers entertained during the war was by no means restricted to the exploration of the interior. On a number of vital fronts, they were prepared to wage a struggle against the forces of oppression. One of their most crucial battles was for an end to indentured im­migration, and subsequently for the prevention of exploitation of the same ilk.

There were veiled indications in the Guyanese press that when McNeil and Chiman Lai, the two commissioners from India, visited Guyana in 1916 to investigate the indenture system, they were care­fully guided to their sources of information; and there were strong assertions on the part of the Indian and Negro workers that they had struggled uncompromisingly against the system of indenture. The commissioners report was not decisively condemnatory, but in any event, the 18th April, 1917 saw the arrival of the last ship bringing indentured immigrants from India. By the time that the last indentured contracts were served, all sectors of the society became nominally free.

Indenture, unlike slavery, was constantly pro­ducing free citizens in large numbers, some of whom were repatriated at the expiry of their contract. In­deed, the rate of repatriation was quite high. In the twenty years between 1891 and 1911, a total of 36,016 Indian immigrants returned home, compared with 65,764 who arrived during the same period. Many of the Indians who remained in Guyana, like the freed Negroes, moved away from the sugar estates and attempted to set themselves up as an independent peasantry. In 1890, 30% of the East Indians earned their living outside of the sugar estates; while by 1911, less than half of these labourers brought to Guyana in the interest of the sugar industry were still to be found on the sugar estates. The population of Guyana in December 1917 was 314,000, out of whom 137,000 were Indians, and only 62,000 of them were on the sugar estates.

Rice

Rice provided the basis for the East Indian with­drawal from the sugar plantations. Some African slaves and their descendants had planted rice in Guy­ana and elsewhere, but it was not a crop which was widespread in West Africa, in contrast to India, whence the indentured immigrants brought techniques of irrigated rice farming. As early as 1905, Guyanese rice imports began to drop, and shortly afterwards the local rice industry was not only taking care of the domestic consumption, but was also exporting. Under wartime conditions, the rice industry was able to set its sights clearly on exports, because it was easy to capture the West Indian market which was starved of food imports. In Guyana itself there were food shortages, making it necessary for an embargo to be placed on the export of rice in 1917. However, in March 1919, permits were once more issued for the export of rice to the West Indian islands, so that the rice industry emerged from the crucible of the war as Guyana’s second agricultural activity.

Naturally enough, the East Indian peasants wanted land.  The planter and government attitude towards the settlement of indentured immigrants on small holdings was not initially favourable, but both in Trinidad and Guyana, they were prepared to grant small amounts of land if this would keep labour from returning to India.  Besides, the land had to be properly drained and irrigated for rice farming, and the crop needed to be financed and marketed.  All these problems have only been successfully tackled in the last few years, so that for decades the rice farmers waged a constant struggle against drought and flood, and against the voraciousness of the Georgetown merchants who advanced credits and then bought the paddy or rice at ridiculously low prices.   Yet, for all this, the East Indian peasant, like the ex-slaves – who had managed to set up free villages in Guyana, had to some extent escaped the toils of the plantation system, and it is probably significant that, according to Chandra Jayawardena, “the Indians of the rice-growing villages consider the Indian plantation labourers to be disorderly and immoral”. (4) Through­out the Caribbean the heritage of sugar is one of degradation.

Indian “Middle Class”.

While the mass of the East Indian population were either labouring on the sugar estates or in the rice fields, there were also small numbers of merchants and professional men of that race, already prominent by 1917, precisely because indenture had long been producing free citizens. Clearly such individuals had already acquired interests quite different from the East Indian workers and peasants. It was an East Indian landowner and rice miller, Guyadeen, who was a principal opponent to the scheme of setting up a co­operative rice mill, when this was proposed late in 1918. His intention was that the peasants should be entirely dependent on him, and he issued a thinly- veiled threat to increase the rent of the ground and the houses of the East Indian peasants over whom he held the whip hand. Veeraswamy, a Georgetown lawyer, was accused of hypocritical posturing when he called upon the East Indian workers of Guyana to fight for king and country, while allowing himself to be persuaded that he was too valuable an asset to Guyana to risk enlistment. However, it was the small East Indian section of the “middle class” to whom the indentured and ex-indentured immigrants looked for guidance and leadership, and in turn, the lawyers and merchants sought to articulate the interests of the East Indian community as a whole. (5) For instance, when there was a serious disagreement on a sugar estate, the labourers would trek to Georgetown and seek the assistance of prominent individuals like Luckhoo and Veeraswamy.