Freedom, Festivals and Caste in Trinidad After Slavery

Dr. SookDeos book shows the relevance of the past to the present by using the case study of Trinidad that highlights the crippling disadvantages that accrue to any people experiencing segregation, no matter the era or system of government. The study challenges notions of free labor, caste and free immigration, especially as it applied to the Caribbean region at the end of slavery and Emancipation (1838) in the British Empire. One thread of commonality with more radical studies of the past is that colonialism perpetuated a caste society similar to the one experienced under slavery. In Trinidad, this was true not only in labor but in education and even when the authorities responded to mass festivals and other freedoms. Such a study is prescient and relevant today, where opportunities for healthy race and economic relations within nations such as Trinidad were lost. This has been to the detriment of national growth and development in all aspects of Trinidads life. The irony for the East Indians arriving in nineteenth-century Trinidad was that if some of them had left the worst features of caste-ism behind, they were entering another rigidly caste-structured society in the New World. The ostensibly free British citizens of India, coveted as substitutes for slaves after Emancipation, had the historical destiny to contribute to the free labor system in Trinidad, but they paid a heavy cost. In general studies of the island nation, Indo-Trinidadian indenture is separated from labor history; this author sees a continuum of many labor regimes including slavery, peonage, indenture of many stripes, and free labor. The US has unearthed evidence in the 1990s that new forms of indented immigration continue in our time. When East Indian history is written as part of Caribbean labor…