Guyana: the first crossing, and the country indenture built
In 1838 two ships landed 396 Indians in British Guiana — the very first indentured labourers of the whole system. Their descendants are now the largest community in Guyana.
The story of Indian indenture begins not in Trinidad or Fiji but in British Guiana. On 5 May 1838, the Whitby and the Hesperus landed 396 Indians from Calcutta — only 22 of them women — on the sugar estates of the Demerara coast. It was, quite literally, the first crossing of a system that would carry more than a million Indians across the British Empire.
The trigger was emancipation. With slavery outlawed, planters who would not pay a living wage went looking for labour they could bind by contract instead. Over the next nine decades some 239,000 Indians arrived in British Guiana; about 75,000 took the return passage home. The rest stayed, and became the ancestors of today's Indo-Guyanese.
They came overwhelmingly from the Bhojpuri- and Awadhi-speaking districts of what are now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, with a Tamil and Telugu minority from the south. The indenture bound them to an estate for five years; after ten, a labourer could claim a passage back to India or a grant of land and a little money to begin again.
Indian nationalists campaigned against the system as a new bondage, and it was finally abolished in 1917. By then the descendants of the Whitby and the Hesperus were rice farmers, shopkeepers and, increasingly, a political force. The towering figure is Cheddi Jagan, the Berbice-born dentist who founded the People's Progressive Party in 1950 and became the most consequential Indo-Guyanese leader of the century.
Today Indo-Guyanese are the largest single ethnic group in Guyana, close to two-fifths of the population — a community that began with 396 frightened people on two ships, and the first agreement of the girmit.
Continue the series · Children of the Girmit
