Colonial Violence: Race and Gender on the Sugar Plantations of British Guiana

COLONIAL VIOLENCE Race and gender on the sugar plantations of British Guiana Randolph B Persaud Standing there drinking in the perfume and soothed by the soft and silent breeze your eyes gazing upon flowers and plants and lawns trimmed neat and in order you begin to realise that the luxuriance of tropical life has been brought within the bounds of law and order Nature here is no longer wild and wanton but civilised and chaste Rev L Crookall 1898 at the Botanical Garden in Georgetown British Guiana nor even admits the advantages of instruction Landowner 1853 66 This spokesman for the planters goes on to quote a letter sent in 1839 to London by Sir C T Metcalfe the Governor of Jamaica According to Metcalfe introduction 1820 and 1835 Since sugar is a labour intensive industry the significant increase in production in such a short period would not sustain an argument of chronic shortage The year 1829 in fact was one of the most profitable years in the colony when 100 million pounds of sugar was produced Analyses of the historical connections between race and international relations have been developing with gathering momentum for some time now and by all indications the subfield which has emerged is here to stay There are many areas where new work needs to be done but two in particular stand out First a lot more attention needs to be paid to the administration or more accurately the techniques and practices of colonial reshuffling with significant emphasis on the routine forms of governance In doing so even more effort needs to be spent investigating the quotidian character of violence Second despite frequent acknowledgement of the raciogendered character of colonial violence academic induction in the area has room for development These areas of investigation may lie in the broad social science form of historical analysis a kind of structuralism or the more grounded history from below perspectives Put differently the gendered character of violence in administration of colonialism needs to be tackled both synchronically and diachronically By studying the colonial gendered violence tied to sugar production in a nineteenth century colony this chapter hopes to make a small contribution in that direction Further given that the analysis here is fundamentally informed by the work of agents of colonialism what is used as a vertical vector in order to establish colonial stability it is a good deal of the violence was also among the dominated populations themselves horizontal violence I argue here that horizontal violence was a derivative of the vertical form where the latter was the integral aspect in the maintenance and reproduction of colonialplanter power cultural propensity of East Indians to keep women at home and that women who did make the voyage must have been of what I shall call fallen status Secharam 1997 29 makes the astute observation that the fallen status has been hardened into an unexamined dogma and that scholarly opinion is in its infancy often hovering around robust speculations The chapter focuses specifically on the murder of indentured women by indentured men a form of colonial violence that demands further elaboration Much like slavery and in fact because of the end of slavery the violence examined here is linked to the supply management and reproduction of labour power Without necessarily falling into economic determinism I must insist that to understand this colonial violence it is necessary to go beyond the corporal body itself an object of pain to the general body politic including the systems of political and cultural power and economic accumulation Indian workers were also shipped off to the tea plantations of Sri Lanka In fact it was the competition from other sources of labour Mauritius Malaya and Sri Lanka that pushed the arkhatis into the northern United Provinces specifically eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar after 1860 This part of India at the time was increasingly being penetrated by British capital which caused dislocation including accelerated commodification of labour and the making of a wage dependent population There was also a severe depression in India from the late 1820s through the 1850s Levine 2007 70 The caste configuration of the social formation entailed land concentration in the hands of the Brahmans Kshatriyas Bhumihars Banias etc Seechan 1997 24 states that these upper castes controlled 798 per cent of the land in the Bhojpuri districts which were the major immigrant sources after the 1860s Michel Foucault has demonstrated in convincing fashion how different techniques apparatuses and regimes of punishment are consistent with the general socioeconomic and political order Thus up to the end of the eighteenth century inflicting pain on the body in public and as a spectacle was central to the production of order This supple which is corporal punishment painful to a more or less horrible degree was itself a technology of political power as much as it was a form of punishment for crimes committed Foucault 1973 83 By the early nineteenth century changes in the political and economic order saw the decline of torture and the introduction of more panoptic strategies of surveillance accompanied by penal reform In the second phase the panoptic strategies were not for power itself nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society its aim was to strengthen the social forces to increase production to develop the economy spread education raise the level of public morality all of these being necessary requirements of a rising industrial capitalism Foucault 1979 208 It might be useful to review some of the major explanations of the violence against women during the period under consideration K O Laurence has usefully identified the major arguments First there is the jealousy contention In this explanation the shortage of women caused great sexual jealousies and it was this that led to violence The shortage of women gave many options not the least of which was the one of moving from one relationship to another Many women were kept and there were instances of women engaging in multiple marriages The logic of this explanation is that shortages set up the objective conditions for intense competition betrayal shame and then violence In the case under study indentured women were widely abused and more tellingly dozens were maimed or murdered on the sugar plantations in British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago Reddock 1985 Mohapatra 1995 The historian Basdeo Mangru 1987 217 reports that the official statistics showed 23 murders of Indian women by their husbands or reputed husbands in the period 185964 11 between 186570 36 between 188495 and 17 between 19017 There were 35 cases of cutting and wounding of Indian wives with the hoe and cutlass between 1886 and 1890 There is little doubt that many cases of wounding were never brought to the attention of the authorities since by reading the violence was employed to punish and control Further suicides which were rife have not been taken into consideration in the text literature on violence in the colony It is important to note that the violence against indentured women by male partners had identifiable patterns of public display As Prabhu P Mohapatra 1995 40 has noted In most instances the women were hacked to death by cutlasses issued to them for cutting cane This will be examined later Violence therefore was embedded in indentureship from the very recruiting grounds and depots in India where many of the women recruited were tricked or kidnapped across the keda pani and finally in the system of labour and social control on the sugar estates Court records show significantly disproportionate numbers of indentured immigrants convicted for crimes relating to the labour laws and to matters in civil society Trottman 1986 It is first necessary to map the objective economic political and social conditions of the colony leading up to the period under consideration together with the tension of separate experiences The attempt to link violence in the colony to the supposed cultural backwardness of the indentured labourers the slaves before them is difficult to sustain This is especially so given the fact that other immigrant groups were also harshly treated or more accurately brutalised on the plantations Chinese indentured immigrants were also at the receiving end of brutal whippings and other forms of violence administered by the planters their overseers and their agents Clearly structural and direct violence were integral elements in the maintenance of the colonial socioeconomic order Four central arguments of the chapter may be reiterated First while there is a voluminous literature on violence by the colonisers against the colonised there is not nearly enough about the violence among the colonised themselves This is obviously understandable given the utter brutalities of the coloniser as happened in Leopolds Congo and also on account of strands of revisionism which construct more benign history of what occurred during several centuries of colonial domination spread across the globe While there is great need for further study of the violence of the coloniser as well as the imperialists and neoimperialists much may be gained by also studying violence in broader terms including violence among and between the colonised themselves The gendered character of this violence is also clearly visible Second in this particular instance while we have examined how violence against indentured women by indentured men was in and of itself a macabre state of affairs we have also had the occasion to push beyond the proximate circumstances and situate this violence into the very body politic of colonial society We were able to see that four elements of the colonial system worked in tight formation to sustain and reproduce colonialplantocratic power these being a the necessity of vulnerable labour power after emancipation as a response to the emergence of a labour market and labour militancy b the dire conditions of the indentured servants including spectacular violence against indentured women c the tradition of law and order including forms of public punishment and even suggested decapitation and mutilation of the body of the criminal wife murder and d a system of Orientalised knowledge that sutured these elements together into a coherent and structured totality Thirdly central to the ghastly murders was an economy of sex hatched as it were specifically for the labour requirements of the sugar plantations and combined with the gendered assumptions of industrial sugar production The sex act which has been viewed as the cause of the murders was actually a form of violence itself a gendered form of violencethat is an emasculatory form of violence against indentured men Moreover this economy of sex was also built on the racialised assumptions of both Indian indentured men and women The women were assumed to be of loose morals and as such a smaller number of them would suffice to service the surplus of men The English also routinely carried around in their heads the idea that Indian men are effeminate a formulation that must have translated into assumptions about the relationship between desire and the modes of satisfaction Fourth and finally for the system to have sustained itself as long as it did it was necessary that colonial officials and the planter class work hand in hand a necessity occasioned by the constant threat of popular uprisings There were several lines of possible violence all of them of course real threats to production and privilege These included the possible violence among the freed slaves the indentured and the Portuguese shopkeepers which actually happened in 1846 1877 1889 intraindentured violence including wife murder and popular uprisings exslaves and the indentured against the colonial state and planters In management of these multiple threats both to white privilege and to colonial production evidenced in the supplicé of terror and the kind of panoptic apparatus discussed by Foucault In his analysis of the transformations of punishment and penal forms Foucault 1979 207 himself goes to great length to demonstrate that the panoptic schema without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties was destined to spread throughout the social body its vocation was to become a generalized function The same may be said of British Guiana here namely that gendered violence was generalised throughout the system This is another way to understand the catastrophic violence against indentured women on the sugar plantation Notes Nalini Mohabir 2010 243 identifies three strands namely indenturedship as a result of coercion 2 as voluntary immigration and 3 as an oppressive system driven by exploitative and crosscutting processes of capitalism and racism For an outstanding critique of colonial texts on nineteenthcentury British Guiana see Persaud 1991 In July 1842 a Select Committee report was released The major findings include labour shortage in terms of headcount but it also noted two other problems that had nothing to do with shortage per se First the planters found that the former slaves were demanding very high wages on what would be an poor master Second the report also stated that many of the indentured have had gone into work other than in the sugar industry The report thus pointed to a crisis of industrial relations in the postemancipation period See Ireland 2009 1897 Bibliography Abadeer A 2008 The Entanglement of the Poor into Involuntary Labor Understanding the Worldwide Practice of ModernDay Slavery Lewiston NY The Edwin Mellen Press Agathangelou Anna M 2004 Power Borders Security Wealth Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11 International Studies Quarterly 48 3 51738 Jahadur Gaitanjali 2011 Coolie Women Are in Demand Here The Virginia Quarterly Review Spring 4861 Hallagan James C 1969 White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia A Study of the System of Indentured Labor in the American Colonies New York Franklin Publishers JavanmardTorres Elham 2016 Colonial Desire and Civilizational Discourse The AustralianPacific Hired Labor Trade Honolulu University of Hawaii Press Beaumont Joseph 2017 These Slavery An Account of the Indian and Chinese Immigrants in British Guiana London N M Moin Dorsett K U 2017 The Geographical and Historical Geography of British Guiana and West India Islands Demersar Anterior between 1838 and 1917 the political economy society and culture of British Guiana was structurally transformed These transformations began almost immediately This essential characteristics of the Hindustani by the colonizer as Hoefte 1998 103 reminds us were bloodthirsty querulous cantankerous revengeful and so excessively frugal as to be able to kill somebody for a dime and eat dirt to save money The violence against women was not only reduced to crimes of passion but considered natural and therefore understandable violence James Rodway 1912 208 gives us a typical Orientalist pronouncement what I see as patriarchal thuggery on the subject From the legal standpoint perhaps the greatest difficulty with the coolieman is his jealousy Unfortunately the number of women brought from India is insufficient some of them leave their husbands when offers of rich jewelry are made by other men In such cases the husband does not hesitate to chop the faithless woman to pieces Possibly he wonders that the law takes cognizance of such a thing and wants to hang him for after all it is one of the primary laws of nature to kill a woman under such circumstances We can hardly help admiring this trait in his character Rodways observation above was typical of the times meaning that raciogendered hegemony was both deeply and widely embedded in the colonial mind It was based on the counterinscription of the late nineteenth century a period when colonial expansion actually accelerated in territorial terms and deepened in terms of its Orientalist repertoire Prashad 2007 The danger of this separating indentureship from the legacy of slavery has been noted by Nalini Mohabir 2010 who looks into indentureship and its dialogic relationship to the institution of slavery in Guyana Most importantly Mohabir moves away from binaries towards a relational account and complicates next divisions that exist in some of the scholarship on the subject The postemancipation conundrum of race The voice of a landowner In the immediate aftermath of emancipation the colony faced real problems with labor supply Planters were caught between the antislavery policies of the British government in London and the requirements of labor on the plantations The era after emancipation also revealed cultural contradictions of a deeply radicalised division of the world between the Saved and the Damned Persaud and Walker 2001 Hobson 2011 In general much is made of the intrinsic nature of Indian culture Indian men and women and oriental religion more Hinduism than Islam in accounting for the macabre practices of violence against women in nineteenth century plantation life Indentured labourers were racially constituted in two ways on the one hand they were seen as hard working and thrifty Hoefte 1998 103 Rodway 1998 a construction that distorts and intertextually derived from the supposed dialectical opposite of the African The Indian was also seen principally as laborers