Aapan Jaat: Unpacking Caste in the Indo-Caribbean Community

Did Indian indentured labourers belong to the lowest of low castes? Did caste barriers immediately disappear once they crossed the kālā pānī and reached the West Indies?

In the past few years there has been this narrative on social media that all indentured labourers from India belonged to the lowest of low castes. Words like Dalit and untouchables are thrown around oftem. These talking points appear to be from a place of bad faith or, as we say in the West Indies, perhaps bad mind. Maybe the intention is to make Indo-Caribbean people and other descendants of indentureship ashamed of their roots, somehow grateful to European colonisers for “saving” them through the system of indentureship from the harsh daily realities of the caste system in India, or to make us weary of India and broader South Asia being an ancestral homeland. There have been many people who have commented under posts made by this page and sent direct messages along the lines of: “You all are so obsessed with India. Go back to India, see how they treat you.” Let us unpack the realities of caste and indentureship. In doing so, it is important to remember the terms our ancestors used to refer to their own lineage. The Hindustani term they utilised was “jaat” and the equivalent English Creole one would be “nation”. So what “nations” did our older heads really come from?