Indo-Caribbeans in Canada

Kenneth Grant Mahabir, Indo-Caribbean pioneer to Canada (1908) 

INDO-CARIBBEANS

By Frank Birbalsingh 

Origins

The term “Indo-Caribbean” best describes the descendants of people who left India more than a century ago to live in the Caribbean. There is no connection between Indo-Caribbean people and the indigenes or aboriginals of the Caribbean and the Americas – the so-called Indians, as they were misnamed by Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. “Indo-Caribbean” is best understood within the context of European colonial history as it impinges on the Caribbean region. During the nineteenth century, the imperial, colonizing states of Europe, particularly Great Britain, transported large numbers of people from India to its other colonies, such as Fiji in the Pacific Ocean, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, and Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea.

Caribbean region applies both to the islands surrounded by and the mainland territories that border the Caribbean Sea. Those territories range in size from the large islands of Cuba and Hispaniola to tiny ones like Curaçao or St Kitts, and to mainland territories in Central and South America like Belize (formerly British Honduras), Guyana (formerly British Guiana), or Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana). Historically, these islands and mainland territories were settled, administered, and developed through the same colonial process, and they were shaped by broadly similar social, economic, and political influences.

Arrival and Settlement

Indo-Caribbean ties to Canada go back to the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1864 a Canadian Presbyterian missionary named John Morton made a visit to Trinidad for health reasons. His visit had far-reaching consequences for Indo-Caribbean people, for it led to the establishment of a Presbyterian Church mission, later known as the Canadian Mission, which devoted itself to working almost exclusively with Indian indentured labourers, especially in Guyana and Trinidad. The first mission was established in Trinidad in 1868, with others in Grenada in 1884, in St Lucia and Guyana in 1885, and in Jamaica in 1894. While there were other Christian denominations active in the Caribbean, only the Canadian Presbyterians concentrated on indentured Indian immigrants.

The Canadian Mission began its work at a time when British colonial governments in the Caribbean gave little priority to providing indentured Indians with social services. This was the vacuum which the Canadian Mission attempted to fill. Although the main aim of the Canadian Presbyterians was to establish churches and proselytize, they also established schools at the elementary as well as secondary level for both boys and girls, and built teachers’ training colleges and residential centres as well. An important effect of the Canadian Mission was to provide Indian labourers with access to Western education and culture and thus to enhance their capacity for material progress, professional development, and social integration. The fact that the work of the Canadian Mission was more intense in Trinidad than in Guyana is probably the main reason for the faster rate of Westernization and social integration of Indo-Trinidadians.

The Canadian Mission also encouraged Indo-Caribbean students to seek higher education in Canada rather than in England, which had traditionally attracted students from British colonies. Most of these scholars returned home after their training abroad, but those who remained in Canada formed the nucleus of the first Indo-Caribbean communities in Canada. An example is the Indo-Caribbean community in Nova Scotia, many of whose members first came to Canada because Canadian missionaries had referred them to several Canadian universities including Mount Allison University in Nova Scotia. The Carindo Cultural Association, formed in 1978 “to more adequately cater to Nova Scotians from the West Indies who are of East Indian origin,” is one of the earliest Indo-Caribbean organizations in Canada.

Until the 1960s, Canadian immigration policies restricted immigration from the Caribbean to students and professionals such as teachers, technicians, and doctors. Only a few of these immigrants were of Indo-Caribbean background. Following the revision of the Immigration Act in 1967, however, a new system was introduced and an applicant’s education, skills, and other qualifications were considered. The effect was to allow a wider cross-section of people to enter Canada, including extended family members from all racial groups and women who would previously have been denied entry because they lacked professional skills. The increased immigration from the Caribbean included a greater proportion of women and a larger Asian Indian component from Guyana and from Trinidad and Tobago.

It is not possible to document precisely the current Indo-Caribbean population in Canada because the relatively recent classification of “Indo-Caribbean” has not been adopted by Statistics Canada, which continues to use the term “South Asian” as a general descriptor not only for people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal but also for those of Indian descent from the Caribbean, East Africa, and Fiji. Using statistics for all immigrants from the Caribbean territories, however, it is possible to make a rough estimate of the number of Indo-Caribbean immigrants who have entered Canada. If we assume that 80 percent of immigrants from Guyana and 60 percent of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago are Asian Indian, this means that a total of 91,650 Indo-Caribbeans came to Canada between 1962 and 1992. If another 10,000 are added to account for natural increase and illegal immigrants, the current Indo-Caribbean population of Canada can be estimated at about 100,000. And although small numbers of Indo-Caribbeans may be found in most provinces of Canada, for example, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, the majority have settled in Ontario, and predominantly in the greater Toronto area, where they are particularly noticeable in suburbs such as Scarborough and Mississauga.

Economic Life and Culture

The primary concern of Indo-Caribbean Canadians has been survival. As a thrifty, energetic, industrious people, they have prospered in Canada and achieved a material standard of living that is much higher than the one they left behind in the Caribbean. In Toronto, for instance, they have excelled in their traditional professions of law and medicine. Most of all they have shown an aptitude for retail business that is evident in the many Indo-Caribbean groceries, restaurants, and roti shops that can now be found all over Toronto. While most of these establishments are patronized chiefly by Indo-Caribbean customers, the roti shop, with its menu of spicy, exotic dishes and its organization as a fast-food outlet, has made the strongest impact on the wider Canadian community. Indo-Caribbean real-estate agencies are another successful business enterprise. Evidence of Indo-Caribbean activities in business and the professions may be found in numerous advertisements in Indo-Caribbean newspapers in Canada.

One of the continuing frustrations of Indo-Caribbean Canadians is the uncertain perception of their identity by other Canadians, who generally consider them either as West Indian, that is to say, black or Afro-Caribbean, or as South Asian, which implies familiarity with South Asian languages and customs. Both classifications erase or distort Indo-Caribbean identity. Caribbean people of Asian Indian origin are not Afro-Caribbean because they are not African; neither are they South Asian (except by race and ethnicity) because their culture derives from the Caribbean. Their main difference from South Asians is that they generally speak no South Asian languages: their language is standard English or Caribbean varieties of English.

There is cultural dualism in other aspects of Indo-Caribbean culture as well. The foods and eating habits of the Indo-Caribbeans, for example, reflect styles of cookery associated with those regions of India from which indentured immigrants first came, in particular Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in north India and, to a smaller extent, Madras in south India. The rotis, dhals, curries, and other dishes that were brought from these regions of India underwent some adaptation depending on what ingredients – vegetables, fruits, and spices – were available in the Caribbean. Thus, although Indo-Caribbean Canadians have retained the food preferences, taboos, and general style of Indian or South Asian cookery, there are significant differences in their choice, preparation, and presentation of various recipes and dishes. Vegetarianism, for instance, is less strictly observed among Indo-Caribbeans, many of whom are partial vegetarians, with a diet that includes meat but not beef or pork. This suggests greater flexibility in Indo-Caribbean eating habits. The differences between Indo-Caribbean and South Asian cookery are evident in the menus of the Indian restaurants and Indo-Caribbean roti shops which have appeared in Toronto, mostly within the last fifteen years. The roti shops tend to be more informal in presentation and carry a more limited or specialized selection of foods.

In other areas of everyday life – in dress, housekeeping, social activity, musical entertainment, sport, and even in sexual habits and marriage customs – Indo-Caribbean patterns of behaviour reflect the same flexibility that derives from dual loyalty to India (South Asia) on the one hand and to the Caribbean on the other. Indo-Caribbeans have a deep appreciation for Indian films and film music yet participate actively in Caribbean musical forms such as the calypso and in festivals such as carnival. They also tend to depart from more puritanical Indian attitudes towards sexual and marriage customs. Divorce, for example, is now as common among Indo-Caribbean (Hindu or Muslim) couples as among couples from any other group. Intermarriage with other ethnic groups has also increased. Generally, Indo-Caribbean Hindus are less bound by general taboos and caste restrictions than South Asian Hindus, whose more coherent religious practices were not subjected to the cultural mixing and fragmenting influences caused by indenture.

In the post-colonial period, Indo-Caribbeans, in Canada as elsewhere, have made outstanding contributions in the field of literature. The works of V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad in 1932, although he has lived in England since 1950, are internationally acclaimed. His nephew, Neil Bissoondath, is the major Indo-Caribbean writer in Canada today. Bissoondath, who was born in 1955, first came to Canada as a student in 1973 and has stayed in Canada. He has already published two collections of short stories, Digging up the Mountains (1986) and On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1990), and two novels, A Casual Brutality (1988) and The Innocence of Age (1992). In two of the stories in particular – ‘Insecurity’ from Digging up the Mountains and ‘Security’ from On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows – Bissoondath illustrates a fundamental irony of Indo-Caribbean experience: while Indo-Caribbean immigrants have escaped from the psychological insecurity caused by political instability, social marginalization, and interethnic tension at home, coming to Canada has brought its own insecurity caused by urban-industrial alienation, race and colour prejudice, the impersonal secular mores of the new society, and the pressures of modern city living.

As the most prolific Indo-Caribbean writer in Canada, Cyril Dabydeen, who was born in Guyana in 1945, corroborates Bissoondath’s insights. Dabydeen has written several volumes of poems and stories and two novels; he has also edited two anthologies of immigrant Canadian writing. His titles include Goatsong (poems, 1977), Elephants Make Good Stepladders (poems, 1982), To Monkey Jungle (short stories, 1988), Dark Swirl (a novel, 1989), and the anthology A Shapely Fire (1987). Like Bissoondath, Dabydeen portrays the feelings of displacement and alienation that affect most Indo-Caribbean Canadians. In particular, he provides a frank appraisal of racism encountered by “coloured” or nonwhite immigrants in Canada. According to Dabydeen, South Asians (including Indo-Caribbeans) have responded only in subdued ways to the racial discrimination and outbreaks of so-called Paki-bashing to which they have been subjected in Canada. He suggests that the Indo-Caribbean experience of racism in Canada has, so far at any rate, tended to be more psychological than physical.

Other Indo-Caribbean Canadian writers, such as Arnold Itwaru and Ramabai Espinet, also see the Indo-Caribbean Canadian experience as largely one of increased material well-being coupled with inward unease that is the result of many factors including racism. Itwaru, who was born in Guyana in 1943, has written fiction, poetry, and criticism; his books include Entombed Survivals (poems, 1987), and Shanti (a novel, 1990). Writing with a fresh feminist outlook, Espinet, who was born in Trinidad in 1948, asserts the toughness and resilience of Indo-Caribbean women as homemakers, and suggests that the disadvantages that women suffered under patriarchal structures in the Caribbean may be reduced in Canada. News reports, in fact, support this view and discuss issues of wife abuse, child care, and employment equity in a more explicit way than they would in the Caribbean. In this respect, at least, immigration to Canada has brought distinct benefits to Indo-Caribbean women.

Religion

In the colonial period the combined effect of missionary activity and Creolization converted some Indo-Caribbeans to Christianity, but most retained their ancestral faiths – Hinduism and Islam. This is significant because most other Caribbean groups tend to be Christian, at least on the surface. Asian Indians are therefore clearly distinguished from other sections of the Caribbean population by their religious beliefs and practices.

Nothing identified Asian Indians more clearly as alien, “uncivilized,” heathen outsiders than their adherence to non-Christian religions. The fact that only Christian festivals – Christmas and Easter – had official sanction as religious holidays, together with the general awareness among Asian Indians that conversion would ease their way into better jobs and social acceptability, encouraged a flexible attitude toward religion. Some Indians outwardly converted to Christianity, mainly for official or career purposes, but inwardly retained their traditional faith. Others, although they did not convert, were familiar with Christian worship because they attended Christian schools or took part in Christian festivals and social activities. In the Caribbean, much of this has changed today, and a Hindu festival such as Divali has become an official religious holiday in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Flexibility in religion, however, remains a characteristic of Indo-Caribbeans. It is quite common to attend Indo-Caribbean funerals in Toronto, for example, where both Hindu and Christian rites are observed.

Before 1967 the majority of Indo-Caribbean Canadians would probably have been Christians, who were more likely to be Westernized or have professional status. But since the large-scale immigration of close relatives and extended family members became possible after 1967, the Hindu/Muslim/Christian ratio among Indo-Caribbean Canadians is similar to the ratio in the Caribbean itself – Hindus being the most numerous, followed by Muslims, with the Christians third. This is borne out by the recent appearance of a large number of Hindu temples and Muslim mosques in Toronto.

There is considerable fluidity in the intraethnic relations of Indo-Caribbean Canadians in Canada, in religion as in other areas. Indo-Caribbeans are different from South Asians in important respects yet similar to them in race and ethnicity and in religious practice. The membership in Toronto’s Hindu temples reflects the cultural dualism among Indo-Caribbean Canadians. For instance, the president of Vishnu Mandir, one of the largest Hindu temples in Toronto, is a medical doctor from Guyana, but his congregation consists of Hindus not only from the Caribbean but also from other sections of the South Asian community in Canada. The same fluidity is evident in the joint worship of Indo-Caribbean Muslims with other South Asians and people from Africa and the Middle East. If their classification as “Indo-Caribbean” separates Indians of Caribbean origin from other South Asians, it does not do so completely, just as it does not completely separate them from black Afro-Caribbeans with whom they share many linguistic and other cultural traits.

Group Maintenance and Ethnic Commitment

It will be possible for Indo-Caribbean Canadians to survive as a group only if they can overcome the feelings of displacement and alienation that are so deeply rooted in their history and experience. Victor Ramraj has argued that Indo-Caribbeans have always been marginalized in historical accounts of their region, and that feelings of marginalization were the impetus for their migration in the 1970s and 1980s. It would be ironic indeed if having emigrated from the Caribbean in order to escape being marginalized, Indo-Caribbean immigrants, classified as South Asians in Canada, should now face the risk of becoming culturally invisible. Yet to be identified only as South Asian and grouped with people whose numbers are much greater, and whose cultures are older and more homogeneous, may threaten the very survival of Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada.

Bissoondath’s story “Security” raises the issue of the second generation of Indo-Caribbean Canadians who are becoming culturally differentiated from their parents because of their rapid absorption into mainstream Canadian life. And Kamala Jean Gopie suggests that the experience of Indo-Caribbean Canadians may follow the general immigrant pattern in which the original immigrants are inwardly sustained by memories of their native land and culture and thus resist wholesale assimilation, while their children are quickly assimilated and show little interest in the culture of their parents. It is then left to the children’s children – the third generation of immigrants – to try to recover their cultural roots. The conflicts between Indo-Caribbean Canadian parents and their children, so often discussed at conferences and workshops, suggest that Indo-Caribbean youth are becoming assimilated into mainstream Canadian culture and turning away from their parents’ customs. At the same time, the existence of Indo-Caribbean student organizations, for example, at Ontario’s York University and the University of Toronto, suggest that all Indo-Caribbean youth seek to retain their cultural identity.

Gopie speaks of the need to collect and record information about Indo-Caribbean experience for the use of younger Indo-Caribbean Canadians in the future. As we have seen, this need is already being partly met in the literary work of the remarkable group of Indo-Caribbean writers in Canada. The more practical job of classifying, recording, and stimulating Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada has also been started by the Ontario Society for Services to Indo-Caribbean Canadians (OSSICC), which holds conferences, workshops, and lectures and brings out publications on Indo-Caribbean culture, for example, Indenture and Exile (1989). The OSSICC also holds an annual event called Indo-Caribbean Heritage Day, which includes a formal dinner, Indo-Caribbean music, awards for community service, and a keynote address by a distinguished speaker. Previous speakers include Cheddi Jagan, former president of Guyana, and the late Reverend Roy Neehall, an Indo-Trinidadian who was a minister of the United Church of Canada.

Indo-Caribbean culture was also sustained in Canada by several Indo-Caribbean newspapers, for example, Indo-Caribbean World (1983– ), Equality (1984– ), Caribbean Camera (1990– ), and Guyana Times (1992– ). These papers are all based in Toronto where they appear fortnightly or monthly. Numerous radio programs serve a mainly Indo-Caribbean audience by providing music and information on community events. In addition, there are several religious organizations (both Hindu and Muslim) and social groups such as school alumni associations that serve to propagate Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada through the organization of conferences, religious festivals (for example, phagwah), concerts, recitals, and picnics. These are all public events that can stimulate group solidarity.

Whether Indo-Caribbean culture will survive in Canada or whether, as Bissoondath’s story “Insecurity” hints, Canada will simply become another stopping place for itinerant, permanently displaced Asian Indians remains to be seen. After Columbus and European colonialism, the sense of displacement, exile, and alienation thus produced by the willing or enforced migration or trans-shipment of large numbers of people from one part of the world to another is one of the chief subjects of major post-colonial writers, especially Naipaul. But the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed the phenomenon of large numbers of colonized people flocking abroad to former centres of empire. Whether they are West Indians in London, Africans in Paris, Indonesians and Surinamese in Amsterdam, or Indo-Caribbeans in Toronto, their experience of loss and marginalization is similar because it originates in the double displacement evolving out of largely similar post-colonial conditions.

It is too early to know the full consequences of this double displacement for Indo-Caribbean Canadians. What we do know is that, since their arrival in Canada, Indo-Caribbean immigrants have acquired an increased measure of material well-being, which has so far proved a mixed blessing because it is accompanied by inner feelings of emotional unease and psychic disorientation – in Bissoondath’s phrase, “insecure security.”

Further Reading

General studies that deal to some extent with Indo-Caribbeans include V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, (London, 1960); Eric Williams, Inward Hunger (London, 1969); and Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery (Oxford, U.K., 1974).

There is, however, ample literature devoted specifically to Indo-Caribbeans. One of the earliest studies is by Dwarka Nath, A History of Indians in Guyana, rev. ed. (London, 1970). Much more recent ones include D. Dabydeen and B. Samaroo, eds., India in the Caribbean (London, 1987); Steven Vertovec, Hindu Trinidad (London, 1992); and T. Depoo, ed., The East Indian Diaspora (New York, 1993).

Two volumes in particular, both edited by F. Birbalsingh, Indenture and Exile (Toronto, 1989) and Indo-Caribbean Resistance (Toronto, 1993), are the results of conferences and other activities by the Ontario Society for Services to Indo-Caribbean Canadians and contain studies on Indo-Caribbeans in Canada; the latter work includes essays by Victor Ramraj and Kamala Jean Gopie, both of whom are discussed in this entry. There are more numerous shorter studies that address specific aspects of the Indo-Caribbean experience, including J.B. Landis, “Racial Attitudes of Africans and Indians in Guyana,” Social and Economic Studies, vol.22, no.4 (1973); Graeme Mount, “The Canadian Presbyterian Mission to Trinidad, 1868–1912,” Review Interamericana, vol.7, no.1 (1977), 3–45; Alan Adamson, “The Impact of Indentured Immigration on the Political Economy of British Guiana,” in Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920 (London and Canberra, 1984).

G. Sawh, ed., The Canadian Caribbean Connection, (Halifax, 1992), describes one of the first and more important Indo-Caribbean organizations in Canada, Nova Scotia’s Carindo Cultural Association.

FRANK BIRBALSINGH

Indo-Caribbean Pioneer in Canada

 Kenneth Grant Mahabir (1890-1942)  is probably the first Indo-Caribbean resident of Canada, and one of the earliest South Asians to come to live in Canada.

 Young Kenneth went to  Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia to study medicine when he was 18, in the year 1908, and graduated in 1912 as a doctor. He was a brilliant student and later a highly respected surgeon with a very large practice in Halifax.

 He served as a major in Royal Army Medical Corp in World War 1 (1914-1918) and was stationed in Europe during the war. After the war he returned to Canada and practiced in  Halifax, Nova Scotia. He died in 1942 of a heart attack. He was married to Jean (deceased), and had no children.

 Kenneth was born 1890 in  San Fernando, South Trinidad, the son of  Kate and James Mahabir , an organist and piano tuner at Susamachar Presbyterian Church on Coffee Street, San Fernando. .

He attended Grant C.M. School and Naparima College in San Fernando. His six sisters worked to send him and his two brothers to university abroad, with some help from the Canadian Mission. One brother, a pharmacist died young. The other, Jules Mahabir,  studied law in England, practiced in Trinidad, and was the first Indian to be appointed a magistrate in Trinidad.

Kenneth's living relatives in Canada include his nephews Winston Jules Mahabir, a retired doctor now living in Victoria  B.C.,  and Rodney Mahabir, a psychiatrist practising in Toronto, both sons of  Jules Mahabir.               

 (from a brochure by the Indo-Trinidad Canadian Association, Indian Arrival and Heritage Month 1998)