East Indian Women
and Labor in Guyana

by

Lomarsh Roopnarine

East Indian women were brought to Guyana from India to fill a labor vacuum caused by the gradual withdrawal of Africans from plantation labor following final emancipation in 1838. Initially, the planters favored a male force, and as a result, fewer women than men were recruited to labor on the sugar plantations in Guyana. In India, since the nineteenth century, the ratio of women to men in the population has been much lower and therefore recruitment took place in areas where there already existed an unequal sex ratio. The planters also adopted the policy that women were unproductive to the plantation system in that women were seen as financial liabilities through child-bearing and child-rearing. East Indian women themselves were against overseas migration, and East Indian men were unwilling to subject their wives and daughters to the dangerous sea voyage to the West Indies, while other women were tied to their families and to the Indian custom of child marriage. The women who did come to Guyana were mainly from the low caste and were either widowed, single, married, or prostitutes, although a sizable number of women from the high caste emigrated during the famine-stricken years in India.

From the inception, East Indian indentureship in Guyana was plagued by shortages of women. During the early phase of East Indian immigration, no legal framework existed as to how many males to females should emigrate.  But from 1857 to 1868, the proportion of women to men was revised, changed from time to time, and was eventually set at one woman to three men (1:3). Never was the ratio set above one woman to two men (1:2). The consequent sex imbalance between men and women wreaked havoc in Indian living quarters on the sugar estates leading to violence among Indian men and wife-murders as Indian men competed for scarce Indian women. All in all, the Colonial Office maintained that the problems arising out of Indian quarters on the sugar plantations had more to do with the quality of women recruited in India rather than the disparity between sexes in the Indo-Guyanese population. Towards that end, the Colonial Office ignored the familial aspect of Indian life and instead focused on maintaining and controlling a cheap and docile labor force.

But despite the unfavorable conditions under which Indian women entered Guyana, they have nonetheless made significant contributions to the plantation system. The planters were well aware that Indian women were accustomed to agriculture labor in India and used this knowledge as a justification to work Indian women on the plantations. Under the indentured system, men and women were seen as labor units and therefore Indian women’s reproductive and productive role to which they were so accustomed in India was not seen as important in Guyana.  Indian men and women were expected to work equally hard, although some Indian women performed specific functions on the estates. Indian women worked in the fields as “weeding gangs”, and supplied water to Indian male workers, while a substantial number worked alongside men “cutting and loading” sugar cane. Illness and even pregnancy did not guarantee lighter tasks. Indeed, many Indian women worked in the sugar plantations late in their pregnancy, a phenomenon that still exists, although not necessarily on the sugar plantations but in the wet-land rice fields in rural Guyana.

Apart from the sugar plantations, few other work opportunities existed for Indian women. Indian women grew provisions on small plots of land, after they retreated from their long and arduous day’s work from the plantations. In the absence of sound and reliable sources of food from the plantocracy that Indians so depended on, garden provisions were an essential means for survival. Not only did the growing of provisions help to feed Indian families, but surplus provisions were often taken to the public market on Saturdays by Indian women to be sold to bring in supplemental incomes.

A practice that still goes on today in places like Skeldon, Port Mourant and Bourda Market, for example. Like in the sugar and rice fields, East Indian women also can be seen in the market place carrying baskets of provisions on their heads weighing as much as fifty pounds. And while the market place might have provided Indian women with some degree of independence, away from the regiment of plantation life, they had to return to their homes and face additional family duties. East Indian women had the double burden of taking care of the family and household work on top of agricultural work and abuse.

With the abolition of the indentured system in 1917, many Indian women abandoned the sugar plantations and retreated to the private sphere of accepting duties at home, which was hitherto denied to them during indenture. Indentured emancipation also allowed Indian women to move away from the plantations and accept jobs in urban areas as domestic servants and civil service workers. But this outlet for employment was always small since most Indian women preferred to stick with families, and a majority of them in the 1920s were unskilled.

This reference to East Indian women being unskilled brings us to the way East Indians initially perceived educational opportunities in Guyana. In the wake of the Universal Education Act of 1876, East Indian children were for the first time since their arrival into Guyana in 1838 given opportunities to attend school. But East Indians developed a somewhat suspicious, negative and nonchalant attitude towards the Christian school system and thus restrained their children from attending. Girls were not allowed to go to school because it was believed that it would be difficult for them to find suitable partners in arranged marriage. Boys were preferred to work in the boys gang on the sugar plantations with the intention of bringing extra income, which the family hoped would be taken back to India. The British government was more than eager not to enforce the education act in rural areas because Indian attitudes towards schooling coincided with the planters’ interests.

By the 1930s, East Indians began to perceive the importance and reward attached to attending Christian schools. Slowly, they converged in Christian schools regarding them as a panacea to their social and political handicaps, but showed little disposition to becoming totally christianized. Since awakening to educational opportunities, East Indians have excelled in politics, law, literature and medicine. Unfortunately, only a small number of Indian women were involved in this feat, since higher education in Guyana mostly favored men. Moreover, the school system steered a majority of Indian women into “female careers”. Women were trained to be homemakers, teachers, nurses, and secretaries, which tended to be the lower-paid jobs. 

From the 1920s to the present, East Indian women contributed to the formation of the labor union in Guyana, and fought the imperial government for better working and living conditions for all Guyanese, especially sugar workers. It was also within this period that the rice industry began to develop and East Indian women’s presence in this field of labor has been most noticeable. East Indian women can be seen under blazing tropical heat with half-protected bodies in knee high water and mud cultivating rice. Their contributions to the rice industry have helped single handedly to build the economic structure of Guyana, which continues to feed Guyana and the Caribbean.

The period following independence, and indeed up to 1992, was hard for Indian women. The two lost decades of cooperative socialism placed enormous strain on Indian families, especially women. Poor management, a huge foreign debt, exclusion, demands from the IMF, inflation, etc, during the previous administration, combined to impact the poor and most especially women. Not only were East Indian women forced to step-out of their traditional roles and find work to bring in supplemental income but many became breadwinners and single heads of household. Grinding poverty and unemployment placed enormous pressure on stable relationships. Indian men had to migrate long distances in order to support their families. Under such circumstances, financial help did not usually arrive on time, while some Indian men faced with additional burden in their new destination simply abandoned their families. In Guyana, few mechanisms exist for securing child support from fathers, especially young men, who themselves have only few resources.

To combat financial difficulties, most Indian women turned to trading, an occupation known as higglers and hucksters in other parts of the Caribbean. Indian women bought produce, soap, plastic ware, contraband items, anything that could be sold, from one region of the country and sold them on the streets, markets, roadside stalls, in another. Trading also became international. Indian women bought goods in Suriname, Venezuela, Curacao, and North America and brought them back to be sold in Guyana. To get started in trading, women pooled their money together to help each other out. It is called “boxhand” in Guyana, “susu” in Trinidad, “sangue” in Haiti, and “throwing a partner in Jamaica.”

Today, East Indian women can be found in all portions of Guyana’s labor force. Although they have earned the reputation for being matriarchs in Guyana, women are not usually rewarded for such an astute responsibility. Indian women are still being paid lower wages than men and their role in and outside of the home is yet to be fully recognized.