Indian-Caribbean Trauma: Indian Indenture and its Legacies in Harold Sonny Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body

In between 1838 and 1917, more than 400,000 Indian workers travelled to the British Caribbean in order to supply labour to the plantations following the abolition of the British slave trade.2 From the start of this system comparisons were being made between the enslavement of Africans and the bondage of Indian indentured migrants; in 1840, the British politician (and later, Prime Minister) Lord John Russell referred to it as a ‘new system of slavery’.3 There were certainly many similarities between the systems of slavery and Indian indenture; for example, often Indians were lied to, or even kidnapped, by unscrupulous recruiters and transported to the Caribbean in unpleasant and overcrowded vessels,4 and mortality rates on board the ships frequently were high, with cholera and typhoid the main causes of death.5 Once in the Caribbean, indentured labourers commonly were given the former slave huts in which to live, and initially performed identical work to the slaves, labouring under the rule of the same cruel and often sadistic overseers and plantation owners.6 Yet, despite these similarities in the conditions and treatment of the workers, there were significant differences between the two systems. Unlike the system of slavery, Indian indenture was, in the main, a voluntary migration, and labourers were not considered the property of plantation owners; indenture was (on paper, at least) for a fixed period, and children of workers were born free (though parents were often pressurised into signing them into indenture too).