Clem Seecharan

speaker

199 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 May

Clem Seecharan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Indian Indentured Labour · 21 May 2026 podcast

Because the conditions were so awful.

And there was a high mortality rate among the first batch of indentured labourers.

And it was restarted again in 1845.

But what is interesting to note here, Misha, is that those freed people of African descent...

The former slaves, they understood their bargaining position because British Guyana was not a developed slave society like Jamaica or Trinidad was not a developed slave society like Jamaica or Barbados was.

So there was considerable amount of land and the freed people realized that they had a bargaining strength, a bargaining advantage because of their access to land.

And they started to buy land and to acquire small villages and so on, on the periphery of these plantations.

but they were very conscious that they could bargain with the planters.

In fact, they went on strike in 1842 in British Guyana, and they were able to get an increase in wages.

But when those same freed African people went on strike in 1848, by then indentureship had started again, and therefore those Portuguese and Indian indentured labourers were able to undercut the bargaining position of the freed people.

Yes, primarily because the indentured laborers had access to a considerable amount of land on the Guyana coast.

Because as I said earlier, it wasn't a mature slave society in the way Jamaica and Barbados were, some of the islands in the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands.

So after 1870 in particular, because conditions started to improve, there were reforms happening,

The system that Prabha is discussing from the 1830s and the 1840s had undergone some reforms from the 1870s to the 1880s.

So increasingly, people were able to, or some people were able to move out of the plantations.

So you had an interesting relationship where Indian villages were being created on the Guyana coast, on the periphery of the sugar plantations, in the same way that African villages were created.

But in many cases, the Indian villages were substantially more successful because this is a place that's below sea level, tends to be very swampy during the heavy rains.

And what happened there was that many people, many indentured laborers who came from agricultural castes or people who were forced into agriculture because of the penetration of the economies of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, where many of the caste professions had become defunct.

So virtually everybody was thrown onto the land.

So even the lowest of caste, people like the Chamars and the Doms and the Dusads, who today I presume are considered Dalits, or at the time were seen as untouchables,

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