One Sunday morning, ‘Bushman’, ‘Spider’, ‘Tall Boy’ and ‘Crab Dog’, all Afro-Guyanese diamond miners, gathered at a rum shop in the Guyanese coastal village of Mahaica, about thirty kilometres east of the capital, Georgetown. They were joined by Terry Roopnaraine, an anthropologist gathering information for his study of gold and diamond mining in the Pakaraima Mountains in the interior. A man in a hurry might quickly knock back his ‘quarter’ of rum, just as Italians on the way to work gulp down an espresso standing at the counter of their local café. But with a ‘large’ (whole bottle), a bowl of ice and some glasses on the table, these men had clearly gathered for a lime: a companionable session of drinking accompanied by gaffing or aimless conversation. The rainy season had driven them out of the interior, where they dug for diamonds, and Spider, who was flush with the proceeds from a big strike, was treating the others from his earnings. As they sat and drank, the men regaled each other with stories of missed strikes, stumbling over seams of gold, and difficult periods when they were out of luck and had run out of credit. As the level in the rum bottle steadily fell and another bottle was called for, the talk inevitably drifted round to sex. Crab Dog waxed lyrical about the willingness of the Brazilian girls in the mining settlement of Monkey Mountain to engage in acts that Guyanese girls always refused to perform.
Eventually Bushman announced that he had killed an iguana the day before. ‘So, let’s cook him,’ the men declared. The exceptionally short Tall Boy, who worked as a cook out in the mining camps, was assigned the task of preparing the food. The owner of the rum shop was a friend and allowed him to use the kitchen in the back of the shack. He set some cheap coconut oil to sizzle in a pot over the fire and threw in some onions. While they softened, he slit the belly of the iguana, cleaned out its guts and roughly chopped up the carcass. After adding a generous helping of curry powder, he threw the meat into the pot and poured in a good glug of high wine. Bush-meat cooks assert that this strong cane spirit is an essential ingredient, as it counters the rank, musty odour of the flesh of wild animals. While the curry was simmering, Tall Boy set a pot of rice to cook and the men drank yet more rum. When the food was ready, they eagerly wolfed it down and then sauntered off to doze away the afternoon.1
How did a group of diamond miners descended from African slaves come to be making a bush-meat version of an Indian curry on a Sunday morning in 1993? The answer lay 15 kilometres down the road from Mahaica, in the village of Annandale, where, on that same Sunday morning, Savitri Persaud was preparing a breakfast of roti and dhal for her family. She had set the lentils to simmer an hour earlier and was frying up garlic, chillies and cumin seeds to add flavour to the soupy mix. Most of the family’s cooking was done in the bottom house, the shady concrete space in between the stilts that most coastal houses in Guyana stand on to raise them above the water during the seasonal floods.
Unlike weekday breakfasts, when Hari Pal had to hurry off to his work at the state-owned Guysuco sugar-cane plantation, the Persauds were able to eat a leisurely Sunday breakfast. As the family drifted in, Savitri took a disc of dough, and set it to heat on the tawa. The Indo-Guyanese oil their rotis generously, and as they take them off the heat, the women clap them between their hands. The result is a rich, flaky, paratha-like bread.2 Savitri’s hands were bright red from the heat by the time she had finished making the rotis. She handed each of her family a bowl of dhal, and a roti as it came off the griddle pan. Sitting on benches, they dipped pieces of the warm, soft, oily bread into the spicy lentils, savouring the food as they enjoyed a light morning breeze and chatted happily about the Bollywood movie they had watched the night before at the village cinema hall.3
Indian food had come to Guyana with the Persauds’ ancestors. Between 1838 and 1916, about 240,000 Indians were shipped to the colony to provide a disciplined workforce for the sugar plantations when the abolition of slavery enabled the Africans to turn their backs on sugar work. And it was they who taught the ex-slaves how to make curry.
The old mercantilist system of imperial trade began to crumble when the doctrine of free trade undermined its rationale. The Navigation Acts had been introduced in order to guarantee that England would be able to secure a sizeable slice of the world’s finite wealth. But in the second half of the eighteenth century, liberal economists like Adam Smith argued that commerce itself increased the sum of the world’s riches and a nation could best secure a share of that wealth by participating in its creation. After the American Declaration of Independence, the Navigation Acts had to be amended. They excluded other countries’ shipping from the commercial world of the British Empire but British North America (Canada) and the West Indies were dependent on supplies brought in by American ships now sailing under the flag of the United States. The Acts were further dismantled when in order to counter the growing influence of United States shipping in British ports, concessions were extended to other European powers. Liberal economists also objected to state-supported monopolistic trading companies.4 With Britain’s lower classes increasingly dependent on imports of sugar and tea, it made no sense to create pressure for higher wages by protecting the East India Company’s monopoly over these commodities and thus artificially maintaining their high price. Parliament revoked the Company’s monopoly over the tea trade with China in 1833, and in 1846, the Sugar Duties Act opened the British market to foreign sugars.5
The influence of liberal economics on British commerce coincided with the triumph of the humanitarian campaign to abolish slavery. The Act was passed in 1834 and came into effect in the Caribbean in 1838. This had a far-reaching impact on the way trade was conducted within the Empire. The sugar planters were now faced with the challenge of producing sugar cheaply enough to compete with the slave-produced sugars of Brazil and Cuba. At the same time, the East India Company had to find a way of dealing with foreign competition in a branch of their trade worth over £70 million.6 Indian indentured labourers played an important part in solving the problems of both the sugar planters and the East India Company, and it was thanks to them that plentiful supplies of cheap sugar and tea continued to flow into Britain.
Britain gained a raft of new sugar-producing colonies as a result of the Napoleonic Wars: the French islands of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; St Lucia and Trinidad in the West Indies; and the Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara on the North Atlantic coast of South America, which were amalgamated into British Guiana in 1831. But the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean seven years later precipitated a breakdown in the economies of Britain’s sugar-producing colonies. Many slaves continued to work only long enough to accumulate some savings and then pooled together with others to buy declining coffee, cotton and sugar plantations, where they were able to found independent villages away from intrusive planter supervision.7 More than half chose not to continue to work in the cane fields and sugar refineries. Those who stayed insisted on a shorter working week. The planters complained that the quality of their work declined, but their ability to punish negligence was curtailed as the freed Africans could now simply walk away from the job. British colonial sugar production fell drastically and the planters went in search of an alternative workforce: one they could control.8
A parliamentary committee had already been appointed in 1810 to address the question of colonial labour. A Royal Naval officer recommended the Chinese, whom he had noticed were ‘indefatigable’ workers on Dutch sugar, cotton and coffee plantations in South East Asia. The committee investigated the possibility of tapping into the Chinese ‘credit-ticket’ system of ‘free’ migrant labour, whereby about 10,000 Chinese a year pawned themselves to junk captains, paying for their passage once they reached their destination and found work on a plantation.9 Two hundred able-bodied Chinese were procured to work on Trinidad, and once the system of indenture was systematically organised in the 1840s, supplies of Chinese ‘coolies’ were regularly sent to the West Indies.10 But it was in India that British sugar planters eventually found a workforce that would keep their costs low enough to be able to compete on the world market.
The economic balance of power had tipped against India by the nineteenth century. Its textile-producing areas had enjoyed a period of prosperity when East India Company ships took huge consignments of Indian textiles back to eager consumers in Europe. But Britain now had its own industrial cotton mills, and protective tariffs were introduced in the 1820s that closed the British market to Indian manufactures. Instead, cheap Manchester cottons flooded into India and millions of handicraft producers went out of business.11 Governor General William Bentinck described the misery this caused when in 1835 he remarked that ‘the bones of cotton weavers are bleaching on the plains of India’.12 Mauritian sugar planters were the first to commission Calcutta firms to find them workers from India’s reservoir of impoverished craftsmen and labourers. They targeted men like Paravadee, a landless labourer from the Neilgherry Hills. As he was walking along the road to the town of Hazaribag in Bihar, where he intended to look for work, a recruitment agent fell into step with him. The promise of ‘five Rupees a month, besides daily Batta … of rice, doll [and] curry stuff’ was enough to overcome his fear of losing caste by crossing the kala pani (black water). He signed up to a term of five years’ indentured labour on a Mauritian sugar plantation.13
Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Indian indentured labourers – an exceptionally high proportion of them ex-weavers – were taken to work on British, French and Dutch sugar plantations all over the Caribbean, as well as in Natal, Australia, Malaysia, Fiji and Hawaii.14 To the freed slaves they were akin to strike-breakers, as they undermined the Africans’ new-found bargaining power with the plantocracy, who were supplied with an alternative ‘quiet, docile and industrious’ labour force.15 The planters were satisfied with the new arrangement. One Mauritius-based firm calculated that if all the costs of passage, food, board and lodging were included, each labourer cost the planter a mere five shillings a week.16 The British West Indian plantations recovered, and on Mauritius, production rose above the levels reached during the days of slavery.17
The indentured labourer Totaram Sanadyha later likened to slaves the 500 Indians with whom he boarded the ship bound for Fiji in 1893. The sea voyage was traumatic. Each labourer was allotted a tiny space of 1½ by 6 feet, the conditions were insanitary, the water brackish and the food horrible. When he was issued with hardtack, which he heard the sailors refer to as ‘dog biscuits’ (a common mariner’s nickname), Sanadyha – perhaps wilfully – misunderstood. ‘Oh God!’ he wrote. ‘Are we Indians like dogs?’18 The disregard for caste sensibilities was painful, especially for those ordered to clean the ship’s heads, and the crew were drunken and physically abusive. The few women on these ships were especially vulnerable, and in Mauritius, the Protector of Immigrants received numerous complaints of rape during the voyage. Around 10 per cent of indentured labourers died on the ships bringing them out to the plantations – about half the rate of mortality suffered on the disease-ridden slave ships.19
Most of the indentured labourers did not fully understand what they had signed up for, but a clear contract did exist between planters and labourers – they were not regarded as chattels. The planter did not own their children nor did he have the right to break up families; these were important differences to slavery. The overseers (often ex-slaves) were accustomed to driving a slave workforce and treated the labourers with brutality, beating them with rattans if they were slow or inattentive. However, the harsh regime became more institutionalised under indenture. Paravadee described how the planters would accuse labourers of breach of contract for the ‘least negligence or trifling fault’ and take them to court, where the justices would pass sentence of a few days’ stone-breaking.20 Indentured labour was not the same as slavery, but rather the application of capitalist rationale to wage labour at its most brutal.21
When their contract came to an end, the majority of indentured labourers chose to commute their passage home into a land grant.22 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Africans on Mauritius were outnumbered by Indians; there were more Indians living in Natal than Europeans; and in Trinidad and British Guiana, they made up a third of the population.23 Unlike British migrants, who brought to their new homes the unimaginative food culture based on the industrial ration of flour, sugar and tea, the Indians carried with them the ability to use spices to create flavourful meals even with the most basic rations. The plantation managers soon realised that their new workforce would not remain docile if they were forced to eat the cornmeal normally doled out to the slaves, and so it was replaced with rice and lentils.24 But the range of foodstuffs accessible to them was restricted, and this meant that the culinary variety to be found across Indian communities and regions disappeared in Indo-Guyanese cooking.
Only split peas and chickpeas were available, so it was possible to make just two types of dhal. In India, different oils are used to give a range of flavours to dishes, but in British Guiana everything was cooked in coconut oil, the cheapest oil available and fortunately well suited to Indian cookery.25 Mustard oil was sometimes imported, but as it was precious, the workers reserved it for making pickles.26 The greatest limitation was the distribution of a pre-mixed masala of spices, or curry powder. Much of the variety in Indian cooking comes from the use of a wide range of freshly ground spices, added to dishes in varying combinations and at different stages in the cooking process. Over time, British cooks had begun to take short cuts with laborious Indian recipes and they started using pre-prepared spice mixtures that would have horrified most Indian cooks. Indeed, in the 1820s, one cookery book writer admonished her readers that ‘to use currie-powder mixed in the same proportions for every sort of viand and of taste may do very well for those who entertain a mysterious veneration for the oriental characters inscribed on the packages, but will not suit a gourmand of any knowledge or experience’.27 Nevertheless, Victorian Britons took to adding a spoonful of curry powder to what was in effect a recipe for an English stew and ‘curried’ everything, from beef to periwinkles, sheep’s trotters and brain. Thus, this typically British invention repackaged fresh aromatic ingredients and turned them into a handy, industrially manufactured flavouring. In British Guiana, indentured labourers were more discerning in their use of the pre-mixed masala and developed a range of distinctive flavour combinations such as mutton with aubergine and shrimp with pumpkin, but curry powder reduced the possibilities for inventiveness and forced them to prepare dishes that were more generic than those they would have made in their homeland.28
NELLIE HUSANARA ABDOOL’S PUMPKIN AND SHRIMP CURRY
100 g shrimp
1 lime
1 small onion, diced
5 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 red chilli peppers (or to taste), diced
3 tbsp oil
1 large tomato, diced
600 g pumpkin, diced
½ tsp curry powder
½ tsp brown sugar
sprig of fresh thyme
salt and black pepper to taste
pinch of cayenne powder
Soak shrimp in cold water and juice of one lime for at least 25 minutes to rid them of any rank smell or taste. Rinse twice in cold water. Set aside.
Sauté the onion, garlic and chilli in oil until soft, then add the tomato and cook until it has softened to make a sauce. Add the pumpkin and cook for 10–12 minutes on a medium heat. Add curry powder, brown sugar, thyme, salt and pepper. Stir and cook for another 15 minutes. Add 250 ml of water and cook for 20–25 minutes until the pumpkin is soft. The pumpkin should begin to dissolve and hardly any water should be left in the pan. Mash the pumpkin with a spoon to break up any whole pieces.
Meanwhile, add a little oil to a frying pan and cook the shrimp, salt and pepper and cayenne powder on a medium heat. Cook until all the water has evaporated and the shrimp are dry and crisp. Add the shrimp to the pumpkin mixture. Eat with a paratha roti.29
Once the Afro-Guyanese learned the currying technique from their Indian neighbours, they too applied it with British-style enthusiasm to a range of meats. After they were freed, the Africans had developed a different relationship with their new homeland, venturing away from the coastal sugar plantations into the interior to tap rubber and prospect for gold and diamonds.30 Here they interacted with the Amerindians, who taught them how to hunt and cook the forest animals. And this was how one Sunday morning in 1993, descendants of Africans who had been brought there to cultivate sugar came to be making an Indian-style curry out of a wild animal caught in the rainforests of South America.
If Indian indentured labourers ensured the survival of Britain’s colonial sugar plantations, they were also key to the creation of an imperial tea industry. In the early 1800s, the British did not have the first idea how to grow, pluck or manufacture tea. The Chinese preferred to keep this knowledge to themselves and discouraged any European exploration of the tea-growing area of Fujian.31 However, as it became clear that the government was likely to end the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade, the Company began to cast around for alternative sources of its most valuable trading commodity. In the early 1820s, an officer passing through Assam on his way to the wars in Burma had noticed that tea plants, thought previously to be indigenous to China, grew wild in the Assamese hills. At the same time, the British administration began to focus on the potential of vast tracts of Indian tribal land supposedly lying idle. When the Company lost its monopoly in 1833, provision was also made in its revised charter for Europeans to own land in India, and Governor General Bentinck set up a Tea Committee to investigate the possibility of European planters using Assamese ‘wasteland’ to grow tea.32
The British had little faith that the indigenous Assamese plant would make good tea and in 1835 dispatched the opium trader George Gordon on a mission to China to acquire by whatever methods it took – including deceit and subterfuge – seeds, plants and, if possible, some Chinese artisanal tea manufacturers.33 Gordon sent back 80,000 plants and two tea makers from Fujian’s Wuyi Mountains, where they produced the semi-fermented dark teas popular with the British.34 Nevertheless, it took three decades to perfect the plant stock, establish viable plantations and find a suitable labour force in India. The Chinese shoemakers and carpenters the Assam Tea Company recruited in Calcutta and Singapore had ‘never seen a tea plant in their lifetime’ and had no idea how to cultivate it, while those tea makers they did manage to find were indignant when they discovered that they were expected to grub out tree roots and clear the forest to make new plantations.35 The conditions on the plantations were so poor and, at half the rate normally paid to a free labourer, the wages so low that the local Assamese were unenthusiastic about working there too, even when the British banned the private cultivation of the local cash crop – opium – hoping that this would push them into waged work.36 In the end, the Assamese tea planters drew on the same pool of the impoverished and dispossessed who provided labour for the colonial sugar plantations.
In China, tea was grown by peasants on smallholdings and manufactured by travelling artisans.37 On British colonial territory, tea-making was transformed into an industrial undertaking. The process of growing and plucking the fresh green leaves was performed by gangs of indentured labourers working under the supervision of an overseer; this made the tea gardens reminiscent of the slave plantations in the Caribbean. In the 1860s, one planter wrote of driving the ‘coolies’ up and down the line, ‘shov[ing] them on exactly as nigger drivers in America’.38 The processing of green leaves into brown tea was mechanised, and inside the factory each worker was assigned a simple repetitive task. The pay was pitiful, the housing squalid, disease rife and medical provision virtually non-existent. Under newly enacted labour laws, the indentured labourers could be prosecuted for refusing to work; if they fled, they were pursued and usually captured, given the difficult terrain that surrounded the plantations.39 Recalcitrant labourers were routinely flogged, and there were reports of planters beating their workers to death.40 Even among other Europeans, tea planters soon gained a dreadful reputation.
However, by the 1870s, Assam was producing a passable product. When coffee blight hit planters in southern India and Ceylon, they too switched to growing tea, and 1.5 million indentured labourers from the famine-struck areas of Tamil Nadu were recruited to work in Ceylon’s plantations.41 By the 1880s, India was producing large quantities of tea. British consumers, though, had to be persuaded to switch to the strong black fermented Indian product. In the 1870s, the promoters of Indian tea were able to capitalise on the advertising campaign that John Horniman had been running since the 1830s demonising Chinese practices. Horniman’s advertisements, which had begun to appear soon after the East India Company lost its monopoly, claimed that British consumers were no longer protected from the dastardly adulteration practices of the Chinese, who supposedly mixed tea dust, dirt and sand in with their tea leaves, coated them in a gummy rice flour to make the dyes stick, and then coloured them with either Prussian blue to make the leaves look darker or, if they were green, with arsenate of copper.42 Horniman assured his customers that his Chinese tea – the first to be sold in pre-sealed packages – was free from such impurities. The Indian tea makers built on these prejudices to present their product as a complete contrast to the dubious stuff produced by the opium-eating Chinese. Indian tea was robust and flavourful, and grown, processed and packaged in a clean, orderly, British-controlled environment. By 1900, China had lost the British market to Indian and Ceylonese tea.43
During the nineteenth century, almost as many non-Europeans migrated around the globe as the 50 million Europeans who left the Continent.44 Hunger, war and the disruptive intrusion of European trade into traditional societies pushed hundreds of thousands from their homes and onto the global labour market. China was a major source of migrants. The majority came from four coastal counties in Guangdong and Fujian where explosive population growth resulted in a vicious ethnic conflict between the valley farmers and the peasants cultivating the less fertile hilly terrain. Millions fled to the nearby port towns of Guangzhou, Macao and Hong Kong and from there migrated across the globe.45
Many Chinese joined the gold rush to California in the 1840s – the Chinese ideogram for California translates as ‘Gold Mountain’ – but they quickly realised that gold was unlikely to make them their fortunes and turned to other employment. Chinese migrants helped to lay the bedrock of the infrastructure on America’s West Coast, working as navvies on railway construction crews, cutting timber and labouring in sawmills. They worked as domestic and camp cooks; made shoes and cigars; supplied the towns with fruit and vegetables grown in their truck gardens; and ran virtually every laundry on the West Coast.46 The 1858 gold rush to the Fraser Valley drew Chinese into British Columbia, where they ended up providing the workforce for the salmon canneries that began opening on the rivers in the 1860s and 1870s, transforming the erstwhile foodstuff of the disappearing First Nations into an industrial commodity.47 On a steamer voyage up the West Coast in 1888, Rudyard Kipling contrasted the immense silence and solitude of a cannery’s pine-forested setting with the bloodstained, scale-spangled, oily, noisy atmosphere within, where offal-smeared Chinamen, looking like ‘yellow devils’, stuffed salmon into cans with ‘crooked fingers’.48
The Chinese were as unwilling to give up their habitual foods as the Indian migrants to the sugar plantations. The steamship companies that plied the emigrant route between Hong Kong and San Francisco carried jars and packets of lychees, water chestnuts, dried mushrooms and powdered shrimp, preserved ginger and duck livers to supply the Chinese grocery stores to be found wherever there were Chinese communities.49 East Asian migrants often ended up living on an adapted industrial ration. A Japanese railroad labourer described how he and his fellow workers ate a strange fusion diet of fried bacon, potatoes and onions added to salt water to make a soup, and bottera (flour-and-water pancakes) with bacon and soy sauce, all washed down with coffee.50
If the Chinese migrated in the hope of making their fortunes, so too did the 60,000 young Melanesians who signed up with passage masters to work on Queensland’s sugar plantations. For three years they endured insanitary conditions, malnutrition, disease and violent abuse – their death rate of one in four was the worst among any group of colonial indentured labourers – in order to earn their prize: a ‘bokis’. This was a lockable box packed full of Western goods – weapons, fishing implements, steel tools, household wares, medicines, textiles, clothing, tobacco, jewellery, umbrellas, tin whistles and other musical instruments. With the key to the lock hanging ostentatiously from their belts, the young men would return to their villages and deploy their goods in the gift economy to claim a wife and an honourable position in the village hierarchy. Such was the impossibility of living down the shame of returning home without a ‘bokis’ that the authorities would even give a box to those men they rejected as unfit at the colonial ports.51
In West Africa, thousands of young men from eastern Senegal and Mali would migrate to the peanut-growing region of Gambia in a similar quest for Western goods. They would pay a local chief to rent a suitable field and spend two or three seasons cultivating peanuts before returning home with their earnings converted into consumer goods.52 With the abolition of slavery, West Africa had begun supplying the Europeans with agricultural commodities rather than men. In the same way that local rulers had put slaves to work cultivating maize and cassava to sell to the slaving ships, they now employed them collecting palm oil kernels and cultivating peanuts. In the 1830s, groundnut production took off in the dry savannas of Senegambia, where the French and the British continued to struggle over control of the area’s trade. In 1845, the acting governor of Senegal gleefully reported from Albreda (the fort where la Courbe met with la Belinguere in Chapter Five) that French traders were managing to smuggle great quantities of peanuts out from under the noses of the British without paying customs duties.53 Eventually the British conceded to the French and switched to buying Nigerian palm oil to meet their needs for vegetable oil to make candles and soap. In the 1880s, cocoa was introduced on the Gold Coast and around the Bight of Benin. Following the lines of the newly constructed railways, immigrant smallholders began to move into the sparsely populated interior to set up cocoa farms.54
By the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire had recovered from the setbacks caused by the restructuring of colonial trade and created a new system for supplying its colonies with a compliant labour force. The specialisation that the Industrial Revolution had introduced into manufacturing was applied to the world’s agricultural land, as particular regions concentrated on the cultivation of specific crops. John Stuart Mill argued that the trade between Britain and her colonies could ‘hardly … be considered an external trade, but more resemble[d] the traffic between town and country’. Tropical colonies, he went on, were ‘to be looked upon … as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community’.55 Having eradicated the peasantry at home, Britain had acquired an enormous peasantry abroad. It was the coercion and exploitation of colonial subjects that provided the country with raw materials for its industries and sugar and tea for its industrial workers.