Via Tipster BNB, a searing one-hour documentary, exposing the 19th-century British practice of Indentured Labour, through which more than 1 million Indian workers were transported all over the world — only to be told there was no provision to return. They were effectively only slightly better off than the African slave laborers they were brought in to replace. The latter had been emancipated in 1833, when the British government decided to end slavery and the slave trade throughout the Empire.

The documentary is brought to you by… who else? The BBC! (“The BBC: Bringing You… Post-colonial Guilt in Excruciating Historical Detail”)

Some of the speakers include Brij Lal, an Indo-Fijian who now teaches in Australia, and David Dabydeen, an Indo-Guyanan novelist who now teaches in Warwick, UK. I’ve watched about 25 minutes of it so far, and it seems to be pretty well designed — some historical overview, but not too much. Most of the focus is on the descendents of Indian indentured laborers, who are now trying to work out the implications of their history.

Incidentally, it looks like this video can be downloaded for free to your PC — in case you’re going to be sitting in a train or an airport for an hour sometime this weekend, and wanted a little “light” entertainment. (You will also need to download Google’s Video Player application.) Continue reading →

It’s kind of a famous line now, uttered by former Virginia Senator George Allen to a young political staffer named S.R. Sidarth. Many of us think it was probably responsible for bringing down the former Senator and shifting the Senate to the Democrats in the 2006 elections. It turns out that Allen’s statement would have been MUCH more appropriate if he had uttered it just under 400 years ago. On today, the 400-year-anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and the birth of what would one day become America, Francis Assisi and his fellow reporters at Indolink bring us this news culled from historical research of the last several years:

The best evidence suggests that the people from India arrived in colonial America in one of two ways. They were taken aboard as lascars or helpers aboard the trading ships of the British East India Company from Indian ports, and, on reaching England, succumbed to the promises of agents who were taking indentured workers to the New World. Or else they were taken as servants by the British “Nabobs” who amassed their fortunes in India and subsequently returned home to England and thence to the newly established colony in America – where they took their servants with them as a sign of their status.

A 2003 study prepared by Martha W. McCartney, a project historian for the National Park Service’s Jamestown Archaeological Assessment reveals that Captain George Menefie, who was assigned 1200 acres of land in Jamestown in 1624 used “Tony, an East Indian,” as a headright. This is further confirmed in a 2006 report from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation which identifies Menefie as a wealthy English merchant who arrived in Virginia in 1622, and obtained legal right to the land by paying passage for 24 immigrants, including an East Indian.

At the heart of the early migration to colonial America was the headright system designed to encourage immigration. Every Englishman who “imported” a laborer or servant to the colony received a fifty-acre land grant.

What the evidence from Jamestown/Williamsburg suggests is that the first East Indians were brought to Virginia within less than a generation of the arrival of European settlers in Virginia – and within a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. [Link]

Of course, as we know from history, Jamestown began to flounder and descended into chaos until they started profiting from growing John Rolfe’s tobacco, harvested by the first slaves in North America. After the first batch of African slaves, East Indians soon followed:

Social historian Thomas Brown, a faculty member at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas has corroborated this in a 2004 research paper. Brown explains that many East Indians were imported to the American colonies by way of England, arriving already Christianized and fluent in English. Others arrived as slaves who had been captured and sold. “It is impossible to confidently estimate the size of the South Asian population in the Western Shore counties, but “East Indians” outnumber “Indians” in the extant colonial records after 1710 or so,” acknowledges Brown.

Furthermore, he claims: ‘In 18th century Chesapeake, South Asians stood out from sub-Saharan slaves both in culture and appearance. Since South Asians were a minority among the slave population, the community’s perception of their distinctiveness persisted for a longer period of time.’ And most surprisingly, Brown adds: ‘there was a significant contingent of “East Indian” slaves in the colonial Chesapeake.’ [Link]

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Sadly, this pattern of looking to attribute motivation to the characteristics of a particular ethnic / religious group goes waaaaay back [Thanks Saheli]. While today’s attack in Virginia is the worst ever school shooting incident in US history, it is not the worst ever school killing. That bloody honor belongs to an incident almost 80 years ago, involving a suicide bomber and victims in elementary school:

The Bath School disaster was a series of bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. The bombings constituted the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. [Link]

The killer planned his attack very carefully for at least a year. Hundreds of pounds of explosive denoted but luckily enough an additional 500 pounds of explosive did not, thus limiting the damage. The terrorist filled his vehicle full of shrapnel and then detonated it, with himself inside, killing the school superintendent and some of the rescuers who had started to gather.

The killer was a school board member who blamed his financial problems on taxes levied to pay for the new school. The KKK spun this in a religious direction, saying that Catholics were opposed to paying for secular schools since it was against their religious beliefs. They provided multiple quotes from Catholic authorities strongly opposing “Protestant or godless schools” as evidence that Catholics thought that public schools were a tool of Satan (I give only two):

These forty-five lives were sacrificed to satisfy the lust of a shrewd mind, poisoned by intolerant, religious dogma. It is a self-evident fact that the Roman Catholic church, from the moment of birth, assumes the self-appointed duty of shaping and developing the mind of the Catholic born child… as the following quotations will show:

“We don’t want to be taxed for Protestant or godless schools. Let the Public School system go to where it came from – the Devil.” – Freeman’s Journal. (Catholic).

“The children of the Public Schools turn out … well versed in the schemes of deviltry… Catholics stand before the country as the enemies of the Public Schools” [Link]

Sound like a familiar tactic? They also produced quotes arguing that according to Catholic doctrine, the children at school were heretics and gave a quote from a priest in New York where he said:

“Heretics should be put to death and that if the Catholic church was strong enough, the Catholic people would hinder even by death, the spread of such error among the people.” [Link]

You see how the game is played? Nobody would believe it about white Catholics today, but they would believe it about brown Muslims. Same game, different players, and people just keep falling for it again and again.

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