AN ISLAND’S DARK SECRET BY SAYANTAN CHAKRAVARTY As our motor boat pulls away and Les Saintes fades behind us in the distance, the tiny island of Ilet A Cabrits begins to rise from the deep blue waters, much like a dark green rock emerging slowly out of the Caribbean Sea. The immensely forested rock, otherwise a speck in the vast blue waters of the West Indies, holds a secret from the 19th century. Fifteen minutes by boat separate the two islands. Ilet A Cabrits (meaning Island of Goats) is covered with dense forests, and is uninhabited. It has been declared a naturally protected site by the Conservator of Coastal Areas and Lakes in Guadeloupe. But, once it was a prison, referred to in a lighter vein by locals as Guadeloupe’s Alcatraz—the high security American prison just off the bay area in San Francisco. It is at the Ilet A Cabrits that the Indians who rebelled and wanted to return home were sent for punishment. And then left to rot and die. Euphemistically, the prison here was referred to as the House of Correction, as though correction was the real purpose of sending those who wanted nothing but freedom. Between 1854 and 1883, out of the 42,873 Indians who sailed from India to Guadeloupe, only 39,800 disembarked alive. Some also arrived from places like Trinidad and Tobago (then part of the British West Indies) under hastily prepared informal business agreements between British agents and French plantation owners in Guadeloupe. The bulk (about 70 per cent) emigrated from the south of India via the port of Pondicherry. The rest came from the eastern region, including the French outpost at the time—Chandernagore. Right up front on arrival they were to be greeted by tough taskmasters and hostile conditions. Life in the plantations was very hard. The minds of the plantation owners were still set in the slavery period. Even though slavery itself had been abolished by France on April 27, 1848 by law, the plantation owners wanted to exploit the Indian workers ruthlessly, even savagely. Indians who wanted to return home after the completion of the indenture period of five years were often not allowed to do so. Unscrupulously, the plantation and estate owners would flaunt contract documents before the Indians who could hardly read or write a word of French. They were told that holidays would not count, so they had to work more in order to serve out the indenture. The servitude of the Indians was thus extended by months and years. Most of those who arrived were to also lose their emigration documents over time. The record rooms would mysteriously catch fire, and the documents would be forever lost. This ensured that future generations would find it almost impossible to track down their ancestral roots in India. Discouraged from returning to India, many of the indentured workers continued to labour hard, hoping that the future would turn out to be better. Their ties with India were permanently cut. The blood, sweat and copious amounts of tears that they shed at the sugarcane plantations wasn’t wasted as far as the colonial power and plantocrats were concerned—they helped swell the coffers and treasuries of France. Even as the sugar economy in the island boomed, the physical and financial condition of the Indian indentured workers remained far from healthy. For a considerably long period, they even remained citizens of nowhere with neither Indian passports nor French ones. Some of the Indians who were recruited in the India for work in Guadeloupe were lured by stories of how they’d find gold when they reached their destination. The stories were, of course, baseless, but played on the minds of the underprivileged classes. After undertaking perilous voyages across the Indian and Atlantic oceans, the Indians discovered that they’d been tricked by the recruiting agents. There was no gold. Instead, they were asked to cut down sugarcane from dawn to dusk, and until they would fall from fatigue. Outraged at the lies of the recruiters, some of the Indians would want to return home. A few that had the courage would try and rebel, but the whips of the plantation owners and the sight of the guns of the French police were usually enough to silence them. But not everyone could be silenced by the whips or the sight of the guns. At the Ilet A Cabrits (see cover picture, and separate story) lies a secret that has been unraveled only in 2012. Thirty four Indian men and one woman that rebelled and wished dearly to return home were forcibly sent to a prison in this isolated island. This information was dug out from the archives by Michel Rogers, 75, a research, historian and genealogist. The 34 men and single woman were chained inside small cells and guarded day and night. There was no way to escape, because after the prison lay the waters and the sharks. It does appear that in order to teach them a lesson, all 35 were left to die. They could not have died if normal prison rules were followed, and they were fed regularly. This story of imperial high-handedness and scant respect for the life of a human being remained a secret until in 2012 records were dug up from the archives. Between 1860 and 1874, thirty four convicted men and one woman were deported to Ilet A Cabrits on grounds of insubordination. The convicts were divided in two lots, observed one Captain Bonnemaison. The ones who were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment were lodged in a separate penitentiary. The ones convicted of more serious offence were sent to another building with one large room, about 70 feet long and eight feet wide. All of them, including some African prisoners, were kept here, much like cattle would be herded into a barn. There were no beds, and no benches. They were sometimes made to do hard labour. Otherwise, they awaited deportation to French Guiana, on the border with Brazil in mainland Latin America. At Les Saintes is the memorial dedicated to these Indians who were convicted and left to wither away by power-drunk authorities who knew very little other than using the force of the whip and the sharp rap of the stick on human beings brought from afar. Bonnemaison has recorded that “they showed us the disciplinary cells. They were tombs of stones, 2 metres long 1.50 metre wide, 2.6 metres high. The prisoner would sit on the bare floor with his shoulder and head against the wall, his feet shackled and dangling 0.25 metres above the floor.” It amounted to inhuman treatment of the indentured laborers at its deplorable low Led by Mr Michel Narayninsamy, the GOPIO Guadeloupe led a campaign to recognize a memorial to those 34 Indian men and single woman who valued their freedom above all else. The GOPIO Guadeloupe believes that the Indian story in Guadeloupe needs to be told to the world. It is a result of the toil and hard work put in by the Indians brought in from the erstwhile French territories in India—Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe, Yanam and Chandernagore—that France’s plantation economy prospered. Yet, the manner in which these laboring men and women were treated by the colonialists leaves much to be desired. The memorial in Les Saintes and the remains of the prisons in Ilet A Cabraits are stark reminders that those who sailed away from Indian shores in search of a better life were often being pushed to the brink. Survival could not have been easy. And some were dying for merely asking for freedom to be released from their bondage.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 23:58:38 +0000
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