New Homelands : Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa

When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African laborers. The new system of "indentured" labor was supposed to be different from slavery because the indenture, or contract, was written for an initial period of five years and involved fixed wages and some specified conditions of work. From the workers' point of view, the one redeeming feature of the system was that most of their workmates spoke their language and came from the same area of India. Because this allowed them to develop some sense of community, by the end of the initial five years most of the Indian laborers chose to stay in the land to which they had been taken. In time that land became the place in which they joined with others to build a new homeland. In this fieldwork-based study, Paul Younger looks at the present day descendents of these workers and their post-indenture societies in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. He finds that they still cling to the fact that it was an arbitrary British decision that took them there and made the society pluralistic. This plurality seems to require them to search their memory for a distinctive religious tradition that they can pass on to their children. They know that there was a loss of culture involved in their move to these locations and consider it important to recover from that loss. But they are also intensely proud of their new identity, and insist that they have established a new religious tradition in their new homeland. For generations, says Younger, these people had struggled in their situation and now they had come up with a sense of community and purpose and were prepared to make the historical claim that they had developed an appropriate religious tradition for their specific community. Contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 12 Story One: Mauritius: A Parallel Society......Page 28 Story Two: Guyana: Invented Traditions......Page 64 Story Three: Trinidad: Ethnic Religion......Page 104 Story Four: South Africa: Reform Religion......Page 134 Story Five: Fiji: A Segregated Society......Page 176 Story Six: East Africa: Caste Religion......Page 208 Conclusion......Page 240 Notes......Page 258 References......Page 280 A......Page 291 B......Page 292 C......Page 293 D......Page 294 F......Page 295 G......Page 296 I......Page 297 L......Page 298 M......Page 299 N......Page 300 P......Page 301 S......Page 302 T......Page 304 Z......Page 305 This book is the story of how in six different locations indentured workers from India were able to design Hindu communities for themselves, and how those communities continue to thrive in those postcolonial societies