Name: Garvin Tafari Parsons

ID# 808010915

Course Code: HIST 3003

Course Name: Women and Gender in the History of the English Speaking Caribbean

Question: Explain why so few women in relation to men both from India and China were

imported into the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth century period of indentureship.

Date: Friday, November 11th, 2011

Indentureship in the Caribbean came about as a solution to labour shortages on the sugar

plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1834. This form of contractual labour saw the

importation of persons into the Caribbean who were to work on the plantations as indentured

servants thus, helping in the continuance of the sugar economy and by extension, allowing the

plantocracy to maintain its wealth. The majority of indentured servants were imported from India

and China between 1838 and 1917 and statistics point to a gender disparity whereby, the number

of indentured males exceeded that of females. There were factors which contributed to the

disparity and they can be classified into internal and external factors.

On the one hand, internal factors were those factors that influenced the Caribbean planter’s

decision to import more men than women. On the other hand, external factors refer to those

factors that operated in India and China that resulted in the emigration of fewer women to the

Caribbean. To fully understand how these factors were instrumental in the creation of a gender

disparity, the factors as they relate to Indian female indentureship and Chinese female

indentureship must be examined. Thus, in analysing the planter’s attitude towards the

immigration of indentured males and females and the circumstances surrounding their

emigration from India and China, one can appreciate why so few women in relation to men were

imported into the British West Indies between 1838 and 1917.

Indian Female Indentureship

The importation of indentured persons from India into the British Caribbean occurred between

1838 and 1917 with a break in 1848-51 and from the beginning, there was a noticeable numerical

disparity in the sexes. In 1838, British Guiana received some migrants from a group of 6000 men

and 100 or so women1 and although the numbers do not give a fixed figure as to how much

indentured males and females were sent to British Guiana, it can be reasoned that the British

colony did receive more males than females. In a way, the arrivals in British Guiana predicted

the trend that would dominate the immigration of indentured persons until 1917. For example, in

1845 the ratio of Indian indentured labourers arriving in Trinidad was 206 men to 21 women2

and women comprised just 11 per cent of the total 261 in Jamaica3. The factors, both internal and

external that contributed to the arrival of so few indentured females from India were mainly

social in nature but some of them were indeed driven by economic and political considerations.

Also, both factors were equally significant in causing the gender disparity among Indian

indenture servants.

Internal Factors

The post-emancipation gender ideology which was modeled after the Victorian Gender Ideal and

stressed the importance of complying with traditional gender roles on the British Caribbean

plantations was one social, internal factor that influenced planter’s preference to male indentured

labourers. As Verene Shepherd puts it, “… men were encouraged to take up their ‘proper station

in life’ as provider.”4 In essence, it implied the exclusion of women from all forms of

compensated labour and relegated them to their traditional roles of wives and mothers. As a

result of the hypocritical application of the gender ideology to all women in the British West

Indies, the planters adopted prejudices towards the imminent arrival of labour from India. Indian

women were not regarded as capable agricultural labourers and Indian men were believed to

1 Rhoda Reddock. “Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago 1845-1917: Freedom Denied” Caribbean Freedom. (Kingston, 1993) 225.2 Reddock 225.3 Verene Shepherd. “Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post Indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica 1845-1943” Engendering History. (Kingston, 1995) 237.4 Shepherd 237.

have worked more efficiently and productively.5 Since Indian women were perceived as

incapable agriculturists, the planters did not see the need to import them because the underlying

factor behind the importation of indentured immigrants was to provide labour on the plantations.

Furthermore, in the 20th century when steps were being made to import more women from India,

Jamaican planters objected to paying to import women who were, in their words, ‘not as good’ as

male agricultural workers.6 We note that, the post-emancipation gender ideology helped to shape

the attitudes of Caribbean planters towards Indian female indentures which effectuated the

arrival of so few of them.

Within the economic realm, the internal factor of the decline in the British Caribbean economy

following the abolition of slavery must be considered. The exodus of freed persons from the

sugar plantations especially those in Trinidad, British Guiana and Jamaica where there was an

abundance of unoccupied land, led to a decline in sugar production around 1840 and naturally,

the planters were not economically stable. This factor coupled with the fact that for example in

Trinidad, they had to assume two-thirds the cost of recruiting and transporting indentured

servants7 leads one to believe that the planters did not want to spend a ‘bad cent’. Their concern

for economic loss was reflected in their attitudes towards Indian female indentureship.

Women as a source of labour were seen as financial liabilities due to the financial risks of child

bearing and rearing8 and the planter’s initial unwillingness to finance the cost of reproducing a

5 Shepherd 237.6 Shepherd 237.7 Howard Johnson. “Immigration and the Sugar Industry in Trinidad during the Last Quarter of the 19 th Century.” Journal of Caribbean History, Vol. 3. (Nov. 1971) 29.

8 Reddock 226.

second generation of workers in the Caribbean.9 The issue of children also came up and as

Shepherd highlighted, “… proprietors were obliged to provide rations for immigrants’ children…

in some cases, they also had to stand the cost of hiring nurses and establishing crèches to look

after immigrants’ young children…” and “… Indian children could only be indentured at age

16…”10 without their parent’s consent. To the plantocracy, these Indian children could not work

to maintain their keep and they would not have wanted to pay for their importation and upkeep

since, they would not have yielded economic returns. The importation of Indian female

indentures would have brought all these financial problems to an already unstable economy and

thus, these women were deemed bad for business by Caribbean planters.

The last internal factor that affected Indian female indentureship was the planter’s initial stance

against family migration at the beginning of the indentureship period in the mid-nineteenth

century. Indentureship was a response to labour shortages on the plantations and one can imply

that, this was all the planter’s cared about and needed to address in the short term. They were not

interested in the social and family lives of male immigrants but the amount of labour that they

could provide during their tenure in the British West Indies. “The requirement to provide

immigrants with return passages at the end of their contracts,” writes Shepherd, “made it less

crucial to be concerned about the construction of the Indian family and the impact of a shortage

of women.”11 The obvious gender disparity did not bother the proprietors so they would not have

implemented family migration as a means of balancing the male to female ratios which further

perpetuated the imbalance. It must be mentioned that the planter’s stance against family

migration did not last for long. Faced with problems of violence against women and an economic

downturn in 1884 which made it imperative to cut costs by inducing the immigrants to remain on 9 Reddock 226.10 Shepherd 237.11Shepherd 237.

the plantations, planter’s conceded to not only promote the immigration of families to the

colonies but increase the pool of potential wives and lovers for Indian men12.

External Factors

Demographically, there was an imbalance in the ratio of men to women in India; there were

naturally more men than women in the Indian population during the nineteenth and twentieth

century period of indentureship. Statistics taken in 1911 from the United Provinces and Punjab

and Delhi where the majority of indentured immigrants were imported from, show that the ratios

of males to females were 915 to 1000 and 817 to 1000 respectively.13 It is clear that planters and

recruiters in India were already at a disadvantage when it came to recruiting women for export to

the British West Indies.

Socially, Brahmanical patriarchy was the norm in India prior to colonial times. This form of

patriarchy sought to not only subordinate the lower castes but women as well, so as to control

their sexuality and maintaining caste purity14. All authority lied in the hands of males and women

were expected to be submissive and docile. When it came to migration, one can assume that

women had to obtain permission from their husbands or fathers to do so which, was barely

granted. The prevalence of single women emigrating to the British Caribbean as opposed to

married women attests to this fact. As such, patriarchal domination was a deterrent to the

exportation of Indian female indentures; it is possible that without its existence more women

would have gone to the Caribbean colonies.

12 Shepherd 238.13 Reddock 226.14 Uma Chakravarti. “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 13. (Apr. 1993) 579.

Finally, the impact of recruitment agencies as a social, political and economic agent in India

must be examined. Unlike Chinese indentureship, recruiters of indentured labour were usually

private and hired by the British Indian government. These recruiters were as much influenced by

Caribbean planters as they were by the government. Firstly, these recruiters adhered to the

gender specific importation policies of the planters who would have voiced their preference for

male labour. The planters even stooped so low as to offer recruiters 6 annas per head for females

and 8 annas for males.15 Naturally, the recruitment agencies wanting to earn a profit would have

conceded to the demands of the planters thus, bolstering the gender disparity. Secondly, most

recruiters were of the opinion that the required proportion of women complicated the process of

recruitment. Basically, the recruiters found it difficult to find women to meet the quota as

stipulated by the government after 186016. Furthermore, recruiting the right ‘kind of women’ was

another complication and emigration agents were often at pains to explain to all parties involved

that it was difficult to recruit these women. At times, the screening process for female candidates

especially after the mid-19th century was a long one that could take up to three months17. One can

assume that, the recruiters grew weary of so many complications and developed a preference

towards the emigration of Indian males.

Chinese Female Indentureship

The years 1853-1866 saw the importation of Chinese indentured servants to the British West

Indies and like Indian indentureship, there was a definite gender disparity. In Trinidad, of the

15 Shepherd 237.16 P.C. Emmer. “The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British India to Surinam 1873- 1916” Abolition and its Aftermath. (London, 1987) 249.17 Reddock 226.

1,657 passengers who had arrived in 1862, 1865 and 1866, 309 were females18 whilst in British

Guiana the ratio of Chinese females to males was 13.64 to 100 in 186319. As in the case with

Indian female indentureship, the gender disparity can be attributed to internal and external

factors. Unlike Indian female indentureship, however, the external factors impacted more on the

planter’s decision in the Caribbean to import more men than women; to a certain extent, they had

no choice in the matter.

External Factors

The custom of foot binding or crippling of women’s feet in Canton and Macao where the

majority of indentured servants were recruited from, made them unfit for agricultural labour.

Women with small feet were considered both aesthetically pleasing and of a higher class. In

order to achieve “the tiniest feet”, girls were subjected to foot binding which involved crushing

the four smaller toes under the sole and compressing the rear of the anklebone20. The result was a

concaved foot which was painful and made it difficult to walk. If it was difficult to walk,

laboring on the sugar plantations would have been ‘hell on earth’ for these women and

understandably, they would have not been recruited for indentureship.

The traditionalism of male/ female roles in China proved to be a contributory factor as to why so

few women in relation to men immigrated to the British West Indies. Traditionally, as pointed

out by Fiona Rajkumar, “… the son’s importance extended to the economic, religious and

ceremonial spheres… Girl’s on the other hand, spent the majority of their adolescent lives in

18 Walton Look Lai. “Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918” (Baltimore, 1993) 94. 19 Fiona Rajkumar. “Changing Gender Ideologies within the Twentieth Century Trinidad Chinese Community: An Investigation based on Oral History” Engendering Caribbean History (Kingston, 2011) 695. 20 Kwame Anthony Appiah. “The Art of Social Change” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24FOB-Footbinding-t.html?pagewanted=all

preparation for the roles of wife and mother.”21 The usual roles which applied to males and

females in patriarchal societies were apparent in Chinese tradition. Immigration to the British

West Indies did not fit into the prescribed roles of the Chinese female and as a result, women and

men would have seen it as a break from tradition if women participated in Chinese indentureship.

The nature of the Chinese emigration process, that is, how it operated was as important an

external factor as traditionalism in male/female roles. The Chinese men who emigrated did not

leave with the intention of staying in the Caribbean. Rajkumar called this phenomenon the

“overseas Chinese sojourner’s relation”22 and essentially, it describes the tendency of Chinese

males to leave their wives and venture to the Caribbean to work as indentured servants. They

sent remittances to their families throughout the duration of their contracts and return home.

Chinese female indentureship was therefore, hindered as women were not required to emigrate

because it was customary for the male to do so whilst they stayed in the homeland realizing their

roles as wives and mothers.

The British government in China was important in the shaping of the colonial office’s and by

extension, the planter’s attitudes towards Chinese female indentureship. Correspondence

between the colonial office and the British Consuls in Chinese ports in 1852 about Chinese

emigration patterns supports this theory. On answering an enquiry made by the colonial office in

1852 about whether or not emigrants brought their families with them, the British Consul stated

that, “Chinese women never emigrate… the emigrants would cohabit with or marry the native

females in the West Indies, as they do in the Straits… the affection which the Chinese have for

their own country induces them to save all their earnings, and return home.”23 The colonial office

21 Rajkumar 697.22 Rajkumar 697.23 Walton Look Lai. “The Chinese in the West Indies 1806-1995: A Documentary History.” (Kingston, 1998) 72.

knew that they did not have to worry about the implications of a shortage of women on the male

population and much effort would not have gone into the recruitment of Chinese female labour

on their part.

Internal Factors

The little data available on the planter’s attitudes towards Chinese female indentureship suggests

that in some instances, there was change in planter sentiments over the course of the Chinese

indentureship period. There were reports in Trinidad of indentured persons who had deserted the

estates within a year and half after their arrival in 1862; of the 200 deserters, 104 were women.24

By June 1865 there was a change in sentiment; planters heralded the work ethic of the indentured

servants especially, the women who were willing to work on the estates. However, in territories

like Demerara the problem with Chinese female and their disinterest in performing estate labour

still persisted25. It is safe to say that generally, planter’s attitudes towards Chinese female

indentureship differed from territory to territory over time. The dichotomy in the planter’s

attitudes bolsters the argument that external factors were of greater significance when it came to

Chinese female indentureship.

In conclusion, the gender disparity in Indian and Chinese immigration schemes was indeed

caused by the planter’s attitude to the immigration females and the circumstances that

surrounded their emigration from India and China. One can also appreciate…

24 Walton Look Lai. “Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918” (Baltimore, 1993) 97. 25 Walton Look Lai. “Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838- 1918” (Baltimore, 1993) 96.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "The Art of Social Change - Campaigns against Foot-Binding and

Genital Mutilation. - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World

News & Multimedia. N.p., 22 Oct. 2010. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24FOB-Footbinding-t.html?

pagewanted=all>.

Chakravarti, Uma. "Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class

and State." Economic and Political Weekly 28.13 (1993): 579-685. CSCS Archive. Web.

9 Nov. 2011.

Emmer, P.C. "The Great Escape: The Migration of Female Indentured Servants from British

India to Surinam 1873- 1916." Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context

1790- 1916. London: Frank Cass, 1987. 245-261. Print.

Johnson, Howard. "Immigration and the Sugar Industry in Trinidad during the Last Quarter of

the 19th Century." Journal of Caribbean History 3 (1971): 28- 72. Print.

Look Lai, Walton. The Chinese in the West Indies 1806-1995: A Documentary History.

Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998. Print.

Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the

British West Indies, 1838-1918. Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Print.

Reddock, Rhoda. "Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago 1845- 1917:

Freedom Denied." Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the

Present: A Student Reader. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1993. 225- 230. Print.

Reddock, Rhoda. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. Kingston: Ian

Randle Publishers Limited, 1994. Print.

Shepherd, Verene A. "Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Post-

Indentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica 1845-1943." Engendering

History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers,

1995. 233-254. Print.