The Tamils of Guadeloupe, more French than Indian?

GOSIER, Guadeloupe — It wasn’t a slave ship that brought the first South Indian Tamils to the French Caribbean. But it was close. For the men, women and children transported as indentured labor in the 19th century, the passage from French outposts in and around Pondicherry could be brutal.

Contemporary historians call it “semi-slavery.”

In Guadeloupe, despite the sheer horror of the long voyage, followed later by cultural and religious difficulties under pro-Catholic or secular French laws, the emigrants adapted and survived to become the largest Tamil population in the French Caribbean. Of Guadeloupe’s 395,000 people, Tamils account for between 10 and 15 percent of them — all French citizens living in an overseas department (province) of France, and thus part of the European Union.

Yes, they came from an advanced, largely coherent society with skills, compared with most African slaves who were ripped from their cultures and kin. The South Indians, mostly Hindus, got work contracts, which could be renewed after five years. They could “earn” their passage back to India after 10 years, if they had papers to prove their cases. Or they could chose to strike out on their own and find jobs or plots of land to farm, some with hitherto unknown Indian plants.

Aboard emigrant ships there were regulations about treatment imposed on recruiters and captains, records show. Translators were employed to handle disputes, unlike on the European vessels that brought millions of African slaves to their Caribbean and South American colonies.

“But, despite all these safety norms, sexual abuse of women and cruel punishments to resenting men were the norms of the voyage,” says Suresh Kumar Pillai, an interdisciplinary artist and writer who has studied cultural communities in India and the Caribbean. (A Keralite now living in Saugerties, New York, Pillai is the founder of the creative and increasingly popular Atina Foods, based on Ayurveda principles.)

“These voyages of vessels full of labor emigrants became an essential part of the commercial and mercantile enterprises of the Europeans in their colonies in Asia and the New World,” Pillai wrote. In other words, it was a business.

Ironically, the trade in South Asian Tamils, and people from other ethnic groups in India contracted for agriculture work in the Caribbean, was a direct effect of the abolition of slavery in the British, Dutch and French overseas territories in the 1830s-1840s.

“The abolition of slavery threw the Caribbean sugar plantations into a major crisis of labor shortage,” Pillai wrote in an essay titled “Hindu/Indian Cultural Diaspora in French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.”

The Tamils who arrived in Guadeloupe in the mid-to-late 19th century were thrown into an already complex social and cultural mix. Guadeloupe, comprising five islands, once had an indigenous Carib (Amerindian) population, long ago overwhelmed by invaders. There were white colonial settlers, mixed race people and thousands of freed African slaves. The Tamils had to find their niche.

Till today, the descendants of colonial families — white-skinned beke, as they are known — form a very small minority who cling to an inherited conservative elitism, says Mirva Lempiainen, the Finnish-born writer and resident of Guadeloupe who is the author of the lively English-language online “Quick Gwada Guide.” In a conversation over lunch at a seaside marina, she added: “The beke are the rich one percent of Guadeloupe, and the class divide is still very clear.”

Dr. Kumar Mahabir is president of the Association of Caribbean Anthropologists and the author of “The Indian Diaspora in the West Indies/ Caribbean: A Cultural History of Triumphs and Tribulations.” Drawing on the work of various researchers, he has tracked the progress of Tamils from the large plantations of Grande-Terre, and the hills and rugged seacoast of Basse-Terre to Tamil successes in the civil service, labor organizations, politics and business. Along the way, however, there was a “loss of retention.”

“Upon arrival, Indians were urged to assimilate, and by so doing, abandoned their native clothes and traditions, but more importantly their mother tongues,” he wrote. Today there are only a few Tamil-speaking communities remaining, among them at Moule on the north coast of Grande-Terre and in southern Basse-Terre.

“In 1905, their practices suffered another blow with the introduction of a law in France which made Catholicism the religion of the state and, therefore, of its colonies. Hindu ceremonies and marriages ceased to be recognized,” he wrote. Some Tamils became Catholics. (Christianity, brought to South India from the Middle East centuries earlier, was not unknown to them.)

After 1946, when the French Caribbean islands became an overseas department of France, the education system and other institutions were brought into line with the European mainland, a threat to both African and Tamil traditions. But when an Afro-Creole movement arose to counter this, Tamils did not support it, seeing it as designed to exclude them.

Indians had borne considerable antagonism from Afro-Guadeloupeans, who were often frightened by the clamor and trappings of Tamil religious festivals. Tamils began to organize associations to preserve their distinct identity and cultural-religious practices. They maintain many temples for worshippers, from which they often bar outsiders.

“This resurgence of interest in Indian identity was led largely by a class of elites of Indian background with important positions in business, the civil service, and the intellectual elite of the island,” Mahabir wrote. “In essence, they have undertaken to become actively involved in re-discovering and re-claiming their Indian roots.”

Caribbean Tamils can still feel a sense of isolation. They have been petitioning, so far without success to be named PIOs by India. And while the dramatic new museum in Guadeloupe dedicated to the story of slavery is built on the site of a demolished sugar factory, there is no space to include the stories of the indentured Indians who sailed more than 9,000 miles to work in the sugar cane plantations that saved the economy of Guadeloupe when slavery ended.

------------------------

Barbara Crossette was formerly the New York Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia, and the paper’s UN bureau chief from 1994 to 2001.