Suriname: the Lalla Rookh and the Hindustanis of the Dutch Caribbean
The Dutch took Indian indentured labourers too. Their descendants — the Hindustanis — are the largest community in Suriname, and a sizeable diaspora in the Netherlands.
Indian indenture was not only a British story. On 5 June 1873 the Lalla Rookh reached Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Suriname, carrying Indian indentured labourers from Calcutta — the first of tens of thousands the Netherlands would bring to its sugar colony.
It happened by treaty. In 1870 the Dutch signed an agreement with Britain allowing them to recruit from British India, and recruitment began in 1873 — ten years after the Netherlands had abolished slavery in Suriname. The labourers came from the same heartland as the British crossings: present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and beyond. They went to the cane, under the familiar five-year bond.
Their descendants call themselves Hindustanis, and they have become the largest single community in the country — about 148,000 people, more than a quarter of Suriname's population, per the 2012 census. They kept Sarnami Hindustani, a language of their own descended from Bhojpuri, alongside Dutch.
What makes the Surinamese story distinctive is its second act. When Suriname approached independence from the Netherlands in 1975, a large share of the Hindustani community — fearing instability — migrated again, to the Netherlands. Today there are sizeable Surinamese-Hindustani communities in The Hague and Amsterdam: an Indian diaspora that reached Europe by way of a Dutch plantation in South America, two migrations removed from the village it started in.
It is the Indian diaspora Europe almost forgot — and one of its most travelled.
Continue the series · Children of the Girmit
