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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Even those people had considerable experience as cultivators, renting land, of course, not owning land, but also as agricultural laborers.
So the people who were taken, most of the indentured laborers who were taken to British Guyana and Trinidad and Suriname and so on, had considerable agricultural experience there.
And they were able to maximize the advantages that were thrown up on the Guyana coast on these swampy lands.
Because these swampy lands were ideal for the wet rice culture.
Whereas in many cases that militated against the kind of crops that African villagers were cultivating.
So there was already a conflict there which had started with the inflow of indentured laborers.
And that was magnified by the fact that Indian villages after the 1870s, the 1880s were emerging all along the coast to the point where when some African villages or bits of land owned by Africans could not be profitably cultivated, some of these lands were bought over by Indians only.
which exacerbated that discordance that had already emerged.
Yes, I just want to add to what Neha is saying there, because I think that the whole process, as Neha was saying, that it's not just people from the lowest caste.
You had people from a broad cross-section of castes, including some minority of Brahmins and Kshatriyas who were upper caste people.
But you also had a significant amount of people from agricultural castes.
If you go to eastern UP today or western Bihar, what is known as the Bhojpuri area, Bhojpuri speaking area, that Bhojpur culture, the agricultural castes like the Kurmis and the Ahirs and the Koris and so on,
These people were among the best agriculturalists in 19th century, late 19th century Eastern UP and Western Bihar.
And many contemporary writers spoke about the great agricultural skills of the men, even more so of the women.
But what was interesting about it here is that these people, although they were the best agriculturalists, they owned very little of the land.
so when they went to a place like british guiana or trinidad or surinam and found that although they were from the lowest caste and they now had the means to acquire some land even small parcels of land
That was magical for them, because in spite of their agricultural skills, in many of these places, there was absolutely no way they could acquire land.
Acquiring land was magic.
And that explains why, or to a great extent, that explains why in, say, a place like British Guyana, only about 28, 29% of the people returned.
I think in Trinidad it was less.
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