Skip to main content

Screened around the world, film on Indian slave labour in Jamaica has few takers in India

While it is well known that Africans were taken as slave labourers to Americas in 18th and 19th century, few know that the British enslaved Indians, too, taking them all the way to Jamaica to work in sugar and banana plantations. A unique documentary, “Dreadlocks Story”, written, directed and produced by Linda Aïnouche, ethnographer-researcher and cultural analyst, has highlighted this unknown fact by tracing the cultural roots the Indians who over the last about two centuries have mixed with the Africans in Jamaica, a Caribbean island.
Screened in Holland, the UK, the US, the Cayman Islands, Hungary, Croatia, Belize and Poland, but still unable to find audience in India, a writeup on the film says, the documentary highlights the culture of the enslaved Indians in a new light. It particularly shows the “spiritual history” behind the dreadlocks hairstyle, pointing towards how it has its roots into the Indian sadhu tradition and how it became a symbol of fight against enslavement.
Filmed in four countries -- France, India, Jamaica and the US – and made in four different languages, French, Hindi, Jamaican Patois and English, the documentary covers “a part of Jamaican and Indian history”, says the writeup. “It also gives a new approach to sensitive topics about beliefs and taboos”, it adds.
A poster of the film
The documentary especially focuses on the hairstyle of the descendants of the Indian slaves, calling it “the most universal and unavoidable form of body art”, regretting, few have cared look into its roots, which are to found in the Hindu tradition. The film was shot in 2013, and was completed recently to be screened for public viewing.
It is based on interviews with Helene Lee, an expert in the rebel Rastafari culture in Jamaica; Prof Verene Shepherd, social historian, University of the West Indies; Prof Ajai and Laxmi Mansingh, researchers studying Indian presence in Jamaica; and Monty Howell, eldest son of Leonard Howell, top Rastafari rebel.
The film seeks to highlight how Indians and Africans joined together to “rebuild their culture suppressed by brutal stultifying European domination”, the writeup, forwarded to Counterview, says, adding, “Within this context, it is an attempt for the survival of African culture and an up-front anti-slavery, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle.”
Highlighting how the British colonists ruled in Jamaica until 1962 but Indian workers were brought to the island from 1845 to 1917 to work as slaves, the film particularly shows how both Afro-Jamaicans and Indians “were kidnapped and sent to work on sugar and banana plantations throughout Jamaica, where they created positive relationships through their common oppressive hardships.”
Linda Ainouche
“The role played by Indians in Jamaica reminds us that enslaved people have not come only from Africa”, the writeup says, adding, the film highlights how an “original and unique way of life” arose from “the cross-cultural mixing between the sons of African slaves, as well as African and Indian forced workers ‘under contract’ in the plantations.”
Enslaved Indians are followers the the Rastafari movement, an Abrahamic religion which developed in Jamaica in the 1930s to fight against slave oppression, the writeup recalls that, one of its early leaders, Leonard Percival Howell wrote a pamphlet in 1935 “under a Hindu pen name, which unveiled relevance between the lifestyles of Rastas in Jamaica and sadhus.”

Comments

TRENDING

Patriot, Link: How Soviet imbroglio post-1968 crucially influenced alternative media platforms

Adatata Narayanan, Aruna Asaf Ali Alternative media, as we know it today in the age of information and communication technology (ICT), didn't exist in the form it does today during or around the time I joined formal journalism at Link Newsweekly as a sub-editor in January 1979. However, Link, and its sister publication Patriot, a daily—both published from Delhi—were known to have provided what could be called an alternative media platform at a time when major Delhi-based dailies were controlled by media barons.

60 crore in Mahakumbh? It's all hype with an eye on UP polls, asserts keen BJP supporter in Amit Shah's constituency

As the Mahakumbh drew to a close, during my daily walk, I met a veteran BJP supporter—a neighbor with whom we would often share dinner in a group. An amicable person, the first thing he asked me, as he was about to take the lift to his flat, was, "How many people do you think must have participated in the holy dip?" He then stopped by to talk—which we did for a full half-hour, cutting into my walk time.

Breaking news? Top Hindu builder ties up with Muslim investor for a huge minority housing society in Ahmedabad

There is a flutter in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur area, derogatorily referred to as the "border" because, on its eastern side, there is a sprawling minority area called Juhapura, where around five lakh Muslims live. The segregation is so stark that virtually no Muslim lives in Vejalpur, populated by around four lakh Hindus, and no Hindu lives in Juhapura.

Morari Bapu echoes misleading figures to support the BJP's anti-conversion agenda

A senior Gujarat activist phoned me today to inform me that the well-known storyteller on Lord Ram, Morari Bapu, has made an "unsubstantiated" and "preposterous" statement in Songadh town, located in the tribal-dominated Tapi district. He claimed that while the Gujarat government wants the Bhagavad Gita to be taught in schools, the "problem is" that 75% of government teachers "are Christians who do not let this happen" and are “involved in religious conversions.”

An untold story? Still elusive: Gujarati language studies on social history of Gujarat's caste and class evolution

This is a follow-up to my earlier blog , where I mentioned that veteran scholar Prof. Ghanshyam Shah has just completed a book for publication on a topic no academic seems to have dealt with—caste and class relations in Gujarat’s social history. He forwarded me a chapter of the book, published as an "Economic & Political Weekly" article last year, which deals with the 2015 Patidar agitation in the context of how this now-powerful caste originated in the Middle Ages and how it has evolved in the post-independence era.

Caste, class, and Patidar agitation: Veteran academic 'unearths' Gujarat’s social history

Recently, I was talking with a veteran Gujarat-based academic who is the author of several books, including "Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature", "Untouchability in Rural India", "Public Health and Urban Development: The Study of Surat Plague", and "Dalit Identity and Politics", apart from many erudite articles and papers in research and popular journals.

Justifying social divisions? 'Dogs too have caste system like we humans, it's natural'

I have never had any pets, nor am I very comfortable with them. Frankly, I don't know how to play with a pet dog. I just sit quietly whenever I visit someone and see their pet dog trying to lick my feet. While I am told not to worry, I still choose to be a little careful, avoiding touching the pet.

New York-based digital company traces Modi's meteoric rise to global Hindutva ecosystem over several decades

A recent document, released by the Polis Project Inc.—a New York-based digital magazine and hybrid research and journalism organization—even as seeking to highlight the alleged rise of authoritarianism in India, has sought to trace Prime Minister Narendra Modi's meteoric rise since 2014 to the ever-expanding global Hindutva ecosystem over the last several decades.

What's wrong with those seeking to promote Sanskrit? An ex-Hindi professor has the answer

Ajay Tiwari  I have always wondered why certain elite sections are so fascinated by Sanskrit, to the extent of even practicing speaking a language that, for all practical purposes, isn’t alive. During my Times of India stint in Gandhinagar, the Gujarat state capital, I personally witnessed an IAS bureaucrat, Bhagyesh Jha, trying to converse with a friend in Sanskrit.