Why India Resisted the Caribbean Diaspora’s Attempts to Return Home

Almost as soon as Anand Mohan Sahay took charge as India’s commissioner in the British colony of Trinidad in 1950, he began receiving Indian-origin visitors seeking repatriation to India. They were either former indentured labourers or their descendants. “Some of them are persons of moderately independent means and propose to set up some small trade to maintain themselves for the rest of their lives in India,” Sahay wrote in a December 1950 letter to Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt. He added that, in some cases, younger, well-off people were willing to financially support parents who wished to die in the land of their birth. After the indentured labour system was abolished in the Caribbean in 1917, some Indians decided to move to India, while the majority remained in the West Indies. By the time India attained independence in 1947, Trinidad and British Guiana (now Guyana) had more than 3 lakh people of Indian origin. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Indians in the Caribbean loosely organised a “Back to India” movement, appealing to both the British colonial authorities and the Indian government. When the colonial authorities in the West Indies, who had established a repatriation fund to cover one-way passages, offered to sponsor the return of people of Indian origin, New Delhi rejected the proposal outright. The Indian government argued that it had yet to solve the problem of resettling and rehabilitating “hundreds of thousands of refugees from West Pakistan” and about “two million more refugees” from East Pakistan. “In the circumstances, repatriates from Trinidad, unless they have sufficient financial resources to be able to stand on their own in India, will find it extremely difficult to rehabilitate themselves in India,” the Trinidadian government said in a press release in December 1951. “In deference to the wishes of the Government of India, it has been decided to postpone action in regard to repatriation until such time as the Government of India are in a position to receive those who wish to return.” Sahay, however, suggested to Dutt that the government consider individual cases, since such people would not be “burdening” India. “They are not very many and we will take every care to see that only desirable cases are helped,” Sahay wrote. While the number of people approaching the Indian commissioner in Port of Spain was small, CB Mathura, a local journalist-turned-politician, tried to exploit the sentiments of the Indian community in Trinidad. He even threatened an “agitation” on behalf of those who wanted to “end their days on the banks of the Ganges”. Mathura told the Port of Spain Gazette that the local authorities should have gone ahead with the agreement to send willing Indians back. “I cannot lose sight of the fact that if Indians from the Colony were repatriated according to the agreement, all those who were entitled for repatriation and were anxious to leave long ago, would have already left these shores,” he told the newspaper. In January 1951, Badruddin Faiz Hasan Badruddin Tyabji, joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, who would later become vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, responded to Sahay. He said India’s policy on repatriation remained unchanged and that it was “absolutely impossible” for there to be any other policy. Andaman proposal India had been dealing with disgruntled repatriates from the Caribbean since the 1920s. Around the time Mathura was demanding that Indians in Trinidad be sent to the subcontinent, a group of Caribbean repatriates in Calcutta asked to be resettled in the Andamans. Examining the proposal, the Ministry of External Affairs said an earlier scheme to help returnees had failed in the 1930s. “Several emigrants had returned to India from British Guiana and Trinidad during the period 1921 to 1938,” the ministry said, adding that most had no roots in India and had been away from the country for decades. “They could not therefore adjust themselves in the altered conditions here and began agitating for being sent back to the colonies,” it said. In 1931-’32, rumours began circulating within the community that they would be allowed to return to the Caribbean if they assembled at one place in Calcutta. When a large number turned up, virtually penniless, the colonial authorities tried to find a solution. Their Caribbean counterparts said the repatriates were welcome to return but refused to pay for their passage, arguing that they had already paid for them to return to India. The government then offered to settle them on land in Bijoygarh, near Calcutta, and provide loans and other assistance. When the returnees were asked to register with the Protector of Emigrants for the scheme, only 112 people turned up. Of these, 62 agreed to try to cultivate the land with assistance in the form of loans and grants. Within a year, 48 settlers had deserted the land. In 1951, the Ministry of External Affairs consulted the Home Ministry on the viability of resettling Caribbean returnees in the Andamans. The Home Ministry said its own experiment to resettle six people from British Guiana on the islands had failed. The group returned to Calcutta after spending less than a week in Port Blair. “In this connection, the Chief Commissioner, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, informed us that while in Andamans the representatives of the emigrants made no effort to do any kind of work: they did not even bother to go out and see the country to assess the possibilities of their settling down there as cultivators,” the Home Ministry said in a memo. It added that the men were interested only in “extort[ing] concessions” from the government of Rs 5,000 per family. When their proposal to relocate to the Andamans with government support was rejected, the Caribbean returnees wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru asking him to intervene. At the time, the Ministry of Rehabilitation was looking to settle 150 displaced agriculturalist families from East Pakistan in the Andamans. The request from the West Indies returnees to be resettled there made the External Affairs Ministry even more cautious about allowing mass repatriation from British Guiana and Trinidad. Individual cases The correspondence between Sahay and Tyabji continued through the first few months of 1951. Tyabji had made it clear that only those with the financial means to pay for their voyage and support themselves in India should be encouraged to move to the country. He also insisted on a full inquiry, both in the Caribbean and in India. The governor of Trinidad told Sahay that the colonial government was willing to pay $142 for the return passage of any Indian who wanted to leave. When the commissioner conveyed this to the External Affairs Ministry, he was instructed not to agree to the condition. There was little India could do, however, if the colonial authorities sponsored the voyages of individuals. At the time, people in the colonies held British passports and were free to enter India as citizens of the British Commonwealth. Sahay suggested that India should not object to individuals accepting money from the colonial authorities while continuing to oppose mass repatriation. He argued that this would “avoid bitterness” among individuals towards India. Tyabji rejected the suggestion, saying that despite any “unpleasantness”, the commissioner should not entertain proposals for repatriation from the colonial authorities. “We do not want any encouragement being given to repatriation, either from our side or from that of the Government of Trinidad,” the joint secretary wrote. The commissioner responded that allowing fewer than a dozen people to return to India would do no harm. Refusing to do so, he warned, could instead lead to a major agitation organised by people seeking political power. “It will be wrong to believe that because the two Governments have decided that there shall be no repatriation for the present, Indians desirous of returning home have gone to sleep and there is no demand for it,” Sahay wrote in response. He added that those seeking to leave the Caribbean broadly fell into two categories: destitute and illiterate Indians who were too old to work and believed India was a cheap place to live; and “sentimental fools who think that if they die on the sacred sand of the Ganges, seats in Heaven will be reserved for them as a matter of right”. Sahay regularly faced aggressive visitors who came to his office demanding assistance to return to India. The only obstacle preventing Indians from leaving the Caribbean was the $142 required to secure passage on a ship. In one case, a young woman who had the money to travel asked the commissioner for assistance to enrol in a music school in India with government support. Even this request was rejected by the External Affairs Ministry. Some Indians in Trinidad and British Guiana managed to secure private passage back to India, but the vast majority remained in the West Indies. In September 1955, the MV Resurgent carried 258 people from British Guiana back to India, making it the last ship to repatriate former indentured Indian labourers and their families from the Caribbean. In a 1995 research paper for Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), academic Nalini Mohabir wrote that more than 100 people aboard the ship had arrived in the Caribbean during the final years of indentureship, between 1912 and 1917, giving them a realistic chance of reconnecting with relatives in India. The group arrived in Calcutta in October 1955.