Editor’s note: This article quotes historical sources using terms now considered racist to describe Asian workers.

South Asian laborers—East Indians, as they were called by British colonial administrators—first arrived in Jamaica in May 1845, onboard the Blundell Hunter. Upon disembarking, making “the best appearance they could,” Indians were selected by planters and dispatched in carts or schooners or by rail to the estates on which they were to work.[1] Between 1845 and 1921, when the practice of indentured labor ended, approximately thirty-seven thousand Indian laborers were imported to Jamaica, many of them serving out their indentureship in the parishes of St. Andrew, St. Mary, Portland, Clarendon, Westmoreland, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas in the East.[2] While Indian laborers had first been brought to Guyana in 1838, to work on sugar plantations, it was not until the 1840s that the practice of using Indian labor became established across the British Caribbean. Jamaica received the smallest number of Indian laborers of any colony within the British West Indies, yet their presence on the island was the subject of much public debate and was described in tourist guides and captured in photographs.[3]

Carefully staged and taken at close range, the surviving photographs of Indian workers in Jamaica are for the most part arrangements of women, men, and children in various settings on the island. Some show how Indian laborers lived in self-contained communities (see fig. 12.1). Others depict their domestic architecture (figs. 12.2, 12.3), and further images show Indian laborers at work (fig. 12.4) and involved in cultural and religious celebrations (figs. 12.5, 12.6). Taken together, these photographs provide a fragmentary record of a community of immigrants and their settlement into a new society. On one level, they might be seen as straightforwardly documentary, presenting a narrative of colonial labor migration for audiences—tourists, investors, missionary supporters—back in the metropole. However, the photographs also show how Indians strove to maintain connections with their distant home, a connection that travel writers also reported, evocatively describing how in Jamaica, “the habits of India (at least of its laboring castes) may be studied as well as on the banks of the Ganges or the Indus.”[4]

This chapter considers why this connection to an Indian “home” might have been important for readers and viewers when they looked through the tourist guides, postcards, and missionary reports where these images circulated. The question is particularly significant when we consider that these very photographers valued the picturesque. When photographing Afro-Jamaican workers, for example, this commitment led them to make choices—such as in framing a background and choosing locations—that naturalized and placed black Jamaicans as “natives” belonging to a locale.[5] Photographs of South Asians, who by the 1880s and 1890s had gradually become absorbed into Jamaica’s visual and historical landscape, nevertheless establish a clear delineation between the communities of Indians and of Afro-Jamaicans (rarely are the two groups shown together), with seemingly little attention paid to location. Indians are shown in ways that accentuate their foreign and even exotic status while providing a picturesque sight within the Jamaican landscape. These photographs embody a paradox: they attempt to position Indians both as permanent members of Jamaican society and as itinerant laborers. These images tell us much about Indian laborers. But this chapter argues that they also document the role of photography in the evocation of a broader imperial history within which we find the specific narrative of a modernizing Victorian Jamaica. I intertwine the story of photographs with the stories of laborers, for the images connect the histories of India and Jamaica, economically, visually, and materially. Such an approach reveals how these images emerged from a colonial ideology wherein the economic mobility of labor provided viewers with material impressions of the connectedness of empire and the modernizing project of commerce.

Indian laborers came to Jamaica for mostly economic reasons. Since the 1830s, British industrialization had gradually undermined the Indian domestic market and handicraft industry, throwing millions of people back into the agricultural sector just as it was undergoing its own severe transitions under British taxation and land-tenure laws. The resulting widespread social displacement and disruption of village life, along with domestic pressures such as famine and traditional debt bondage systems, led to the rise of an increasingly mobile Indian laboring class. Overseas migration was “an extension and overflow of an internal labor fluidity within the colonial Indian economy itself as it adjusted to the British imperial impact... Indian migration was more the product of these ‘push’ factors than ‘pull’ factors.”[6] Thus, this is also a story of how the industrial revolution shaped India’s colonial position as it became a prime importer of British goods and an exporter of products required by the metropolis.[7]

One of these products was human labor. As Jamaica was a slave-owning colony, its sugar industry had been the source of large profits for British interests. After emancipation in 1838, this economic investment underpinned the colonies’ continued importance to Britain’s imperial image and policies. However, the labor force required to maintain sugar production in Jamaica was diminishing, and sugar exports fell by 30 percent in the first three years following emancipation.[8] Furthermore, since sugar production continued on the slave plantations of Cuba and the United States, West Indian planters faced competition in maintaining their position in the British import market. Plantation managers sought ways of attracting and holding on to workers, but many free black laborers preferred to work their own freeholds rather than stay on the plantations.[9] In Jamaica, where many Afro-Jamaicans remained employed on the sugar plantations, planters complained that their workers were less productive and no longer as easily controlled by coercive tactics.[10]

The recruitment and shipping of Indian indentured workers was intended to ameliorate the much-debated “labor problem.” Discussions about indenture began in the 1830s, when attempts were made to import “white Europeans, Blacks from North America and the Caribbean, free Africans from Sierra Leone and Chinese from the mainland.”[11] Indians emerged as the frontrunners after administrators saw that their importation to Mauritius had been successful. Indians were considered a form of tractable labor. The primary hopes among planters in Jamaica was that Indian immigrants would provide them with a controllable labor force and that regular importation would create a pool of surplus labor, which might in turn lead to a reduction in prevailing wage rates and ultimately restrict and return black laborers to the estates.[12]

Upon arrival Indians worked on banana and sugar plantations or in livestock pens. They were often put into “gangs,” working alongside Afro-Jamaicans and supervised by an Indian or Afro-Jamaican headman or driver. Both groups worked according to a schedule demanded by the plantation or pen. Their specific labors, however, could at times be differentiated by racial stereotypes about physical capacity, such that Afro-Jamaicans might be given heavier tasks than Indians received.

The Indians shipped to Jamaica came from across the subcontinent, including the Northwest Provinces, and Bengal, and some were also recruited from Madras. Most were Hindu and came from the middle to lower castes, but a small minority were Muslim or came from higher castes.[13] Originally planned as a form of transient labor for the estates, the Indians who came to Jamaica were expected to move on or to return home, but about 62 percent remained in Jamaica at the expiration of their five-year contracts.[14] Indians were brought across under conditions of servitude and, at least initially, were seen as a stopgap rather than as permanent members of colonial Jamaican society. Yet they became central to the establishment of a new plantation economy that could be controlled and manipulated by planters and owners even after the end of slavery.[15]

The ocean journey across the kala pani, or “dark water,” was considered a taboo in Hindu culture, signifying danger and an irreversible break with the life-giving waters of the Ganges essential to the Hindu cycle of reincarnation. It was essential for authorities to convince prospective workers of the benefits that indentureship entailed. Recruiters described the Caribbean as part of the great Raj’s “lands across the sea.” It was “rich and beautiful... with the warm sun of Hindustan, where the soil is so fertile that the plantations yield abundantly to the toil of the labourer whose earnings are trebled.”[16] After agreeing to the move, laborers listened to contracts read out in their own language and were then sent by “forwarding agents” to depots in port towns such as Calcutta. At the depot, they were given medical inspections, their details were entered in government records, and they were given chores to complete. Upon departure, laborers received a new suit of cotton clothing and headgear that seems to have been color-coded to indicate regional origin. While onboard for the long journey of around eleven thousand miles, the Indians often formed family groups, naming each other “shipbrother” or “shipsister.”[17] As many were leaving their families, these new relationships provided Indian workers with support networks and communities that would shape their life on the plantation, too. Tourist guides described the differences between Indians and Afro-Jamaicans through cultural and physical markers as well as ethnicity: the Indians were artisans, made jewelry, ate differently, lived in fairly enclosed communities, and wore traditional dress.[18] While written records of their stories on the island are virtually nonexistent, the photographs discussed here suggest that in maintaining such traditions, the indentured Indian community was able to re-create aspects of the places they had left behind in the new geography of Jamaica.

Photographs are best understood as objects assembled through technological means and formulated according to social constructions. Many scholars have unpacked the complicated relationship between photography and the various registers of British colonialism. They have shown how these mechanically produced images fused together visual and conceptual formations that created tangible connections across an imperial geography in the late nineteenth century.[19] Scholars have also made clear that advances in photographic technology intersected in complex ways with networks of commerce in the late nineteenth century within the colonial world. New forms of media, new kinds of travelers, and new kinds of workers were reshaping the ways that local communities and global structures interacted. These interactions were also redefining the colonial landscape, for, as Krista Thompson has pointed out, the intersection of tourism, trade, and photography served to present the island “like a picture” to possible investors and tourists and exerted “a social and spatial control.”[20]

Photography provided a systematic way of constructing images that could naturalize and transform observable reality into a readily understood narrative. The invention of celluloid film to replace glass and plates, in 1898, and handheld cameras such as the Brownie greatly facilitated the project of colonial photography and heightened the visual experience of a burgeoning tourist trade by affording greater portability and faster reproduction. In Jamaica, that project was principally invested in creating a tourism industry that would, it was hoped, inspire future investment, trade, and settlement of white migrants. Photographs showing well-kept, orderly tropical scenes in which black Jamaicans are pictured alongside the abundance of the landscape aided this project by highlighting both the picturesque modernity of the island’s subjects and structures and the resonances of scenery and inhabitants.[21] Photography thus helped promote, advertise, and in fact shape “a new period of economic prosperity and modernization based on the projected successes of the burgeoning tourism trade.”[22]

Indentureship was a powerful, yet also contradictory, symbol of this imperial modernity. On the one hand, it allowed for the creation of a low-cost, mobile labor force within a pan-imperial industrial system. On the other, it was a response to what was perceived as a failure in the project to modernize Jamaica through industry. Indentureship presented a colonial hybridity.[23] The foreign status of indentured laborers symbolized the British Empire’s interconnected nature, created through commerce and made possible by the mobility of its laboring classes. However, their importation emerged out of serious problems with, and also posed a threat to, this economic modernity. The depiction of Indians’ settlement and adaptation to life in Jamaica made an important contribution to the presentation of this modernizing project, revealing how these laborers could reshape the landscape through visual and material means.[24] While these Indian bodies were positioned within new landscapes, their former cultural identity remained tangible and made a formative contribution to their self-positioning within the social, and natural, geography of Victorian Jamaica.

The central placing of these picturesque South Asian figures in photographs of Jamaica produced meanings that were different from those Thompson has described in relation to Afro-Jamaican laborers. Indian workers “wore” their connection to the land they left behind in the clothes and jewelry we see adorning their bodies. And Indo-Caribbean domestic architecture was another powerful materialization of the religious traditions and beliefs Indians brought with them, as archeologists have shown that workers’ homes were often oriented according to Hindu cosmology.[25] By contrast, the Middle Passage—the forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and beyond—involved a process of erasure. Slave traders and plantation owners attempted to force black Jamaicans to abandon their African traditions, although they were never completely successful. In depicting emancipated Afro-Jamaicans through the trope of the picturesque, photographers naturalized this history of enslavement and erasure by showing black Jamaicans as “native” to the island, like the landscape they were pictured in. The transportation of Indian workers to Jamaica, who brought with them tangible expressions of their own cultural identity, told another story, however. These photographs presented a visual narrative that domesticated the ways in which manifestly nonindigenous Indian laborers were reshaping the Jamaican landscape.

Figure 12.7 is a carefully crafted study of two young women. Not much larger than a carte de visite, this photograph, titled East Indian Girls Cooking Rice (1890s), is currently attributed to a Wesleyan missionary, the Reverend William Watson Baillie (1863–1948), who arrived in Jamaica at age twenty-three. Baillie remained in Jamaica until his death and was known as an expert photographer; his subjects included people, architecture (mostly religious), and landscapes.[26] The women crouch decorously, busy with their food preparation. They are outside; scrawling strands of grass cover their toes. The photograph seems to be a silver gelatin print, perhaps washed with sepia, darkening the skin of the girls, brightening the lighter clothes they wear—lahanga (long skirts), choli (blouse), and udhni (small veil or shawl)[27]—and making their jewelry glisten. A slight shadow falls underneath them and across the small, round pot that is probably made of clay and cow dung, called a chulha,[28] as it cooks on an open-air wood fire.

The photographer must have been standing close, for the women’s bodies, from the strands of hair falling outside their head coverings to the creases in their skin where joints have bent, are artfully clarified. The size of the image amplifies the private nature of the scene, already clear in the exclusion of all other signs of human activity. Between the girls and the front edge of the photograph, there is hardly any room. Behind them a corrugated iron fence rises; small bushes and shrubs lean into the blurred space and a large vessel sits on or next to a mound of earth. The distinction between the planes has the effect of firmly pushing the figures into our view, while the space behind them recedes outwards until it is abruptly cropped at the fence. Framed thus, the figures occupy a spatial plane all their own, in which their defined bodies, adorned with bracelets, heavy earrings, necklaces, and voluminous clothes, can both inform and entrance. Tourist guides made a point of describing Indian women in similar ways: “Near him is a coolie woman, who is gorgeously appareled, her small head decorated with gaudy kerchief and ornaments of silver, her lithe body wrapped in parti-colored garments, broad bracelets of silver and anklets of the same upon her bare arms and brown ankles.”[29] Yet the women in this photograph are also the subject of an ethnographic gaze. Appearing as if out of nowhere, these women occupy a premodern space. Their exotic difference from the presumed viewer—echoed in their accessories and posture—is emphasized by the frontal and profile views and dislocation from the landscape.

This visual formula is repeated. Although not as elaborately crafted, other photographs (see figs. 12.2, 12.3, and 12.8) also characterize the female Indian body through accessories (clothing and jewelry) and gendered forms of labor (cooking and washing). In these photographs, an Indian woman, alone or as a central figure within a family or community setting, holds our attention and anchors the photographic composition. The women are also shown in crouching or seated positions and engaged in domestic, rather than industrial, labor, suggesting a relationship between domesticity and difference. Inserted into a rural landscape, they form an exotic feature that poses no threat, rather as a pagoda or a ziggurat might sit unproblematically in a landscape garden. These photographs, like tourist guides of the same period, use the Indian female body as a picturesque trope. Her jewelry, physical features, and clothes, characteristics of her immigrant status, also form the visual elements of her picturesque quality.

These photographs also evoke certain painterly conventions of sentimental genre and landscape painting that emphasized the rustic qualities of peasants by framing them within natural or domestic surroundings, often as an antidote to social and industrial change.[30] Here, the framing emphasizes the pictorial qualities of the Indian female body through her charm and her exotic difference. Earlier forms of these ethnographic views can also be found in genre paintings like those by Arthur William Devis (1762–1822). The small painting Grinding Corn (1792–1795) was part of a series Devis created to enable British viewers to identify typologies of Indian occupations that presented a preindustrial society through the language of the picturesque. Devis’s work helped formulate a series of colonial genre conventions that would remain important to British modes of representing Indian bodies well into the nineteenth century. He emphasized rustic poses of labor within idyllic picturesque settings that provided nostalgic, anachronistic visions of India, just as industrialization was reconfiguring labor relations and regional landscapes across Britain and across the empire.[31] Figure 12.9 is a photograph taken at close range in the style of a studio portrait, although set outside. It is one of the few surviving images of Jamaican East Indians that is neither a familial, laboring, nor village scene. This woman stares back at us, dignified in a dark, ruffled high-collared dress. Yet her framing is unsettling. She emerges out of the field, close to the front edge of the photograph. She seems literally captured within the photographic frame and flattened by this composition into an ornamental arrangement so that her body provides a backdrop for the pieces of jewelry she wears. As a study of a well-dressed Indian woman, this photograph incorporates the material markers of an orientalist gaze to present her for visual consumption. Turning this gaze on the Indian female body, photographers showed how Indians brought their homeland with them, evoking their domestication to simultaneously incorporate it as a picturesque addition to the Jamaican landscape.[32]

This process of incorporation also articulates deeper anxieties. Concerns over the economic impact of indentureship on relations between Indians and black Jamaicans were matched by a concern about the moral and religious influence the immigrants might assert over the newly freed black population. The gendered imbalance of Indian communities—more men were brought across than women—and their non-Christian religious and cultural affiliations were another source of concern.[33] The Baptist Union was one of the main opponents of Indian indentured labor, arguing that the religious culture of Indians would be most injurious to the moral and religious improvement of the black Jamaican population.[34] Indentured laborers were closely regulated by their employers, local police forces, and the office of the Protector of Immigrants. They were forced to live on plantation estates and given very little freedom. They could not travel without passes and were penalized harshly for infringements and paid little. Fears about their morality and pagan religious beliefs also meant that their living quarters were often carefully segregated from those of Afro-Jamaicans on the plantations, even though they did work together.[35] The scenes shown in the photographs emphasize the separateness of the Indian community and their domesticated and docile nature, while positioning them as premodern inhabitants of a modernizing social world.

This temporal positioning is significant, I would argue, for it serves to manage and incorporate Indian laborers within a social order that ultimately provided a justification for the system of indenture itself. While figure 12.4 shows a work gang of Indians performing industrial labor, their bodies, unlike in similar scenes of Afro-Jamaican laborers (see, for example, fig. 12.10), are almost miniaturized amid the banana trees.[36] They are shown at work, incorporated into the plantation landscape, but the photograph also highlights the difference between their style of laboring and that typical of Afro-Jamaican workers. Other images that depict Indians at work (figs. 12.11, 12.12)[37] in plantation settings emphasize various bodily poses (e.g., squatting, crouching) and forms of labor (e.g., grinding rice or pressing sugarcane) that evoke a preindustrial or artisanal world. In their focus on these bodily postures, these photographs may be referencing another visual trope: “the spectacle of craft labor.”[38] Saloni Mathur and Tim Barringer have shown that by 1886 the figure of the Indian artisan and Indian village scenes presented an embedded critique of British industrialization and a desire for the preservation of Indian arts and crafts that was in tension with colonial narratives of progress.[39] Despite the inherently industrialized nature of indentured labor, these images promote Indian labor as simplistic, traditional, and picturesque.

This construction is echoed in other group compositions. In postcards and photographs probably taken by the Duperly family firm, such as figure 12.13, men and women are shown at close range, in clothing—turbans, lungis, or a simple loincloth—that emphasizes their foreign status. In figure 12.14, the juxtaposition of Indians with Afro-Jamaicans makes explicit the different temporal spaces inhabited by these laborers: while the Afro-Jamaican women are shown dressed for market, the semidressed and traditionally garbed bodies of the Indian family provide a scene of domesticity redolent of primitive times. While other domestic and familial scenes (figs. 12.1, 12.9, 12.15) show that Indian laborers did dress in more European types of clothing, most of the images are composed like first-contact scenes. Framed by natural settings—washing in the river or standing in front of thatched cottages—the figures stare back at the camera with almost no expression.

Through the figures’ positions, the careful spacing of their bodies, and their distance from the camera, a sense of immediacy is created. It is as if the photographer has just walked into an unknown village, and inhabitants have emerged from their huts, or stopped their work, to look back at him. This composition cleverly serves to construct the photographer, and thus the viewer, as a figure of modernity, with the technology of the modern gaze. Indians bring with them their traditional ways, but these habits and customs are carefully contained on the plantation. In meeting the gaze of the photographer, these Indians—idealized as preindustrial in a rural setting that, in reality, drove the island’s industrial production—are shown as if just entering modernity.

The rustic bodies of Indian peasants, and of Indian women in particular, also figure in paintings by the Trinidadian artist Michel-Jean Cazabon (1813–1888). Cazabon created a series of scenes depicting “coolies” in Trinidad—“Coolie Group” and “Coolie Woman” (1880). Now owned by V. S. Naipaul, these paintings were displayed at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London in 1886.[40] Thematizing the transplantation of bodies from one colonial space to another, Cazabon’s composition is a genre scene set on a plantation. Framed by vernacular architecture and the landscape, these bodies are incorporated into a Caribbean locale as domesticated subjects tied to the plantation. In Jamaica, these village scenes do not suggest an alternative to, or a critique of, the social order (unlike similar scenes in Britain itself and in other parts of the British Empire) but rather are presented as spaces—and individuals—that can be seamlessly incorporated into the industrial modernity of the island.[41] Thus these views, while highlighting the ethnic difference of Indians and their culture, ultimately present them as consonant with the culture of industrializing Jamaica.

It is worth noting here that these photographs also reference what Saloni Mathur has termed “native views.”[42] Native views—produced in India and circulated as postcards in Europe and America by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—drew on both anthropological photography of India and picturesque conventions that revolved around the body of the Indian peasant and artisan. These Jamaican images also draw on the ethnographical conventions of works such as J. Forbes Watson’s The People of India (1875), created to satisfy British interest in the Indian caste system and its organization and ethnic variety. In Watson’s project, the Indian body and material objects were tied ontologically, as archival evidence of the characteristics of those on view.[43] Such depictions provided a way of quantifying and categorizing Indian society into scientific certainty.[44] They signified a form of pictorial modernity, making the inscrutable mysteries of India accessible.

Seeing India in Jamaica was to see images of malleable, docile, and domesticated Indian laborers. Although Indians did find ways to rebel against economic exploitation, they were controlled through a harsh system of penalties designed to maximize profits. Their presence was regulated, with the aim of raising the profitability of Afro-Jamaican labor through the pressure of market forces.[45]Their incorporation into the Jamaican landscape highlighted the modernity and effectiveness of colonial economics.

Yet contemporary readings of the representation of Indians in Jamaica also reveal the tenuous nature of the modern imperial project, for the empire’s very structure was shaped by those it sought to shape. Indian laborers could draw on this hybrid positioning to reformulate, if even for a short time, the system that incorporated them into the economic landscape of Jamaica. In figure 12.5, Coolies at Worship, we are shown a group of Indians arranged around a Tadjah, Taziya, or Hussay float. Hussay—also known as Muharram—is a ritual commemoration and mourning of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandsons. Traditionally a Shia Muslim festival, transplanted to the Caribbean it became a cultural festival that was celebrated by Indian laborers regardless of their religion. In this sense, we might think of it as creolized: “a distinctive product of a meeting and interpenetration of diverse meanings and elements, new and old, on Jamaican soil.”[46] The frozen tableau of Coolies at Worship, in which docile bodies perform their religious affiliation, is offset by the frenzied activity of the postcard titled Coolie Housay (fig. 12.6). This photograph evokes what many contemporaneous written descriptions of Hussay, from across India and the British Caribbean, tended to emphasize: the chaotic nature of the procession, the disorientating noise, and the violent gesticulations of the worshipers.[47]

As well as being a religious commemoration, Hussay emerged as an expression of workers’ Indian heritage and their connection to a land elsewhere. Its celebration is continued by twenty-first-century Indo-Jamaicans for whom India remains an important, imagined, homeland. It is also intriguing that representations of Hussay worshipers are included in this photographic archive, for this aspect of Indian culture unsettled colonial administrators. While in layout and composition these photographs seem to function ethnographically, categorizing and explaining, they also evoke something of the way Indian workers consciously made use of, and performed, their hybrid status. For it is not labor or even recreation that is being depicted here but rather a form of ritual expression: a performance.

Religion provided these workers with a tangible and spectacular mode of expression. In Jamaica, initially Hussay was banned from entering the towns near the estates for fear that it might cause a disturbance. While as a result Hussay was abandoned on many estates, it did continue in modified form on others, and reports on the festival in Jamaica emphasize the disruptions that followed in its wake.[48] Hussay involved worshipers following the large, ornate Tadjah toward a river or body of water. Along the way, worshipers engaged in ritual expressions that included drumming and fighting. The latter served as a form of physical remembrance of the warriors being commemorated. Accounts of Hussay from India and the Caribbean often focused on this aspect of the procession, for it was loud and disorderly and could become violent. Once the Tadjah reached a body of water, it was thrown in, signifying a burial of sorts for the effigies of the Prophet’s grandsons held within it. Through its performative structure the Hussay festival offered Indians a way to make their mark on the Jamaican landscape. Indians created a specific geography as they celebrated around the Tadjah, their bodies marking the ground with footsteps, sweat, and sometimes even blood. Moreover their presence was voluble, spectacular, and sometimes oppositional. Their ritual became a reconstruction of the new spaces they found themselves in, even as it was an expression of self-identity and community. There are similarities here with the Afro-Caribbean festival of Jonkonnu, in terms of the spectacular processional nature of both festivals and their symbolic commemoration of a cultural or religious history.[49] In creating a performative physical geography, these worshipers also invoked a cosmology that strengthened their bond with a faraway homeland even as it confirmed their place within the landscape of this new world. Furthermore, while initially Afro-Jamaicans were banned from joining in, they too became regular participants in the festival, and so Hussay became, and remains, a space for the intersection of Indian and Afro-Jamaican communities and their musical expressions.[50]

The importance of religion to various communities living and working in Jamaica during this period is a theme that runs throughout this volume. And these photographs of Hussay provide a fitting conclusion to the narrative I have plotted here, for they suggest how religion gave these workers a way to maintain and perform their identities that was derived from their own experiences of transplantation. Photographers were able to portray indentured Indians as “transient” laborers, incorporating them into a colonial system of industry. But this narrative—one that drew on Indians’ foreign status as much as on their amenability to becoming domesticated New World laborers—could also facilitate another positioning. For indentured Indians, as for the Afro-Jamaican community, religion provided a tangible connection to the past and a mode of refiguring the present. Through rituals and acts of worship, through architecture and fashion, in the articulation of deeply held epistemologies concerning time, space, and identity, these women and men created a sensorial religious experience that gave meaning to, and drew power from, the physical conditions of their position in this new world. The visual culture of South Asians in Jamaica remains an important, and understudied, component of Jamaica’s history. While further explicating the story of the country’s industrial economic system at the turn of the century, it also leaves us with a much larger picture of the colonial commercial networks that connected a modernizing Jamaica with other parts of the British Empire. Finally, then, it leaves us with a visual testimony of the tangible ways in which women and men—shaped by these circuits of labor, movement, and industry—made their mark in the social and economic landscape of Victorian Jamaica.

Note on figures: To view the figures, please click on "Buy the book" on this page to access the original book chapter as published by Duke University Press.

Notes

[1] Swinton (Captain) and Mrs. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Emigrants, from Calcutta to Trinidad (London: A. W. Bennett, 1859), 15.

[2] Verene Shepherd, Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845– 1950 (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994), 53. “East Indians” was a term used to differentiate these laborers from the West Indian inhabitants of the Caribbean. “Coolie” was a derogatory term for Indians within the British Empire.

[3] Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Chinese indentured laborers were also brought across to the Caribbean but in much smaller numbers, and I have found very little visual representation of them in nineteenth-century Jamaican photography.

[4] Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray Aaron, The New Jamaica (New York: Walbridge and Co., 1890), 99. This work is one of a series of tourist guides in circulation on the island and in Britain during the late nineteenth century, and I have yet to find any more information about its authors. According to The Royal Scottish Geographical Magazine (1892, 229), “Evidently written as a guide to visitors to the Jamaica Exhibition, this little work contains more, and more varied, information than its purpose would lead one to expect... They have managed to produce an eminently readable geographical account of one of our oldest and most interesting colonies.”

[5] See further Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

[6] Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 26. See also Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); Morris T. Morris, “The Growth of Large-scale Industry to 1947,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c. 1751–c. 1970, ed. Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 551–676; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1974).

[7] Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 24. See also David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996).

[8] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 40.

[9] Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 55–80, 115–42.

[10] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 22–39.

[11] For discussion of this debate, see Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 22–30. The quote appears on 26.

[12] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 66.

[13] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 43–84.

[14] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 91.

[15] As it was conceived, the system purported to allow Indian laborers liberty outside their working hours and protect them from ill usage, harsh penalties, and the withholding of wages. However, at its inception the Anti-Slavery Society expressed its opposition to the indentureship program for the “immorality attending the system, the inducements resorted to and the heavy mortality” (“Coolies in British Colonies,” Anti-Slavery Reporter 357 [Jan.–Feb. 1907]: 13).

[16] Anonymous, “The Coolie Emigrant,” in Chambers’ Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts series 6, 8 (March 11, 1905): 225–27, quoted in Brij V. Lal, “Bound for the Colonies: A View of Indian Indentured Emigration in 1905,” Journal of Pacific History 34, no. 3 (1999): 308. See also Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2009).

[17] Dabydeen and Samaroo, Across the Dark Waters, 5.

[18] See Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray-Aaron, The New Jamaica: Describing the Island, Explaining Its Conditions of Life and Growth and Discussing Its Mercantile Relations and Potential Importance (New York: Walbridge, 1890). Accounts of Trinidad and Guiana include similar descriptions. For a detailed study, see Amar Wahab, “Mapping West Indian Orientalism: Race, Gender and Representations of Indentured Coolies in the Nineteenth-Century British West Indies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 283–311; Patricia Mohammed, “The Asian Other in the Caribbean,” Small Axe 29 (July 2009): 57–71.

[19] See, for example, Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher Burghard Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Christine Barthe, “Models and Norms: The Relationship Between Ethnographic Photographs and Sculpture,” in Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor, ed. Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 93–113; Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, eds., Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009); Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004); James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet, eds., Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).

[20] Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 17.

[21] Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 47.

[22] On the materiality of the photograph, its portability, and the collecting of photographs in albums, see Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 29.

[23] Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1, 1985): 144–65. I am drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a problematic of colonial representation, one that presents, or allows, another kind of knowledge to enter the dominant discourse.

[24] Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 81–85.

[25] Douglas Armstrong and Mark W. Hauser, “An East Indian Laborers’ Household in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica: A Case for Understanding Cultural Diversity through Space, Chronology, and Material Analysis,” Historical Archaeology 38, no. 2 (January 1, 2004): 9–21.

[26] Laxmi Mansingh and Ajai Mansingh, Home Away from Home: 150 Years of Indian Presence in Jamaica 1845–1995 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999); and Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 151–81. Missionary societies took an active interest in East Indians. It seems unlikely, however, that Baillie took this photograph. From conversations with Wayne Modest, former director of museums, Institute of Jamaica, and David Boxer, former chief curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica, it seems possible that this photograph was taken by another photographer, Henry Atwell, although this hypothesis is unverified. This photograph is housed in a private album, and the history of the album requires further research. Many of Baillie’s photographs are held in the Methodist Missionary Society archive at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London, and some were reproduced as postcards.

[27] These may also be Western-style skirts and headdresses, or variants of Western-style and Indian clothing, as Indians were issued with, and forced to change into, Western working clothes—trousers, longs skirts, and head cloths—before they disembarked; see Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 54.

[28] Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2007), 93. The pattern of daily meals based on these rations was as follows: breakfast: black tea, roti with fried or curried vegetables or a chokha (roasted eggplant); midday meal: boiled rice with dhal and bhaji (vegetables); evening meal: roti and tarcari (curry) with black tea. Weekly food rations given to East Indian indentured laborers working on plantations across the Caribbean were made up of rice, dhal, sugar, tea, dried fish, atta (flour), salt, oil, and 250 grams of mutton at weekends. While lunch (roti and vegetables) was usually carried from home, when this meal was cooked on the worksite (as may be the case with this photograph), it generally consisted of rice and vegetables. Mansingh and Mansingh (Home Away from Home, 62) notes, “Using ginger, tamarind and turmeric already growing in Jamaica, these East Indian indentured laborers introduced other vegetables and herbs such as cloves.” Metal pots and cooking utensils were also used at this time; nonetheless, the photograph suggests that cooking outside was not an uncommon practice among East Indians, although it was also done in a rasoi, a shed adjoining their living quarters; see Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 61.

[29] Mansingh and Mansingh, Home Away from Home, 58.

[30] John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989).

[31] Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture: 1770–1825 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1979), 246–58. Onboard the Antelope on his way to China, Devis was shipwrecked. Marooned for a short time on Oroolong, one of the Pelew Islands, east of Borneo, he sketched images for the king, Abba Thule, and one of the king’s wives, Ludee. Archer asserts that Devis’s brief shipwreck and stay on the Pelew Islands perhaps influenced his interest in the lives of Indian craftspeople and village life: “He was greatly liked for his easy manners, frankness, generosity and good humor. His style of paintings had for many of the British a humane charm and relaxed elegance that made some of them prefer him even to Zoffany... [He was fairly successful] for he was a more accomplished and imaginative portraitist than either Hickey or Smith; and he charged less for his work than Zoffany.” His portraits “subtly exploit[ed] his already favorite idioms for trees, figures and backgrounds”; Neil Alexander, “The Economy of Human Life: Arthur William Devis and the Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures of Bengal,” Connoisseur (October 1979): 120–21. It is unclear exactly why Devis painted these scenes. Presumably he felt there was an interest in Indian village scenes, an interest that Indian newspaper reports on the project seem to support. However, once in London, the series did not seem to meet with the success he hoped for. Only a few of the twenty-six paintings were ever realized as engravings, although Devis exhibited three paintings at Royal Academy exhibitions.

[32] For more on the idea of “incorporation,” see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

[33] The “Indian Woman” question was of particular concern in Trinidad and Tobago, where the gender imbalance was more pronounced. See Noor Kumar Mahabir, East Indian Women of Trinidad and Tobago: An Annotated Bibliography with Photographs and Ephemera (San Juan, Trinidad: Chakra, 1992); Tejaswini Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

[34] Verene Shepherd, “The Dynamics of Afro-Jamaican–East Indian Relations in Jamaica, 1845–1945: A Preliminary Analysis,” Caribbean Quarterly 32, nos. 3–4 (Sept.– Dec. 1986): 15. See also Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 65–78.

[35] As they moved off the estates from the 1880s, this racial separation was gradually eroded; see Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 19.

[36] This image was part of a series of stereographs produced by the Universal Photo Art Company, accessed September 13, 2011, http://yellowstonestereoviews.com/publishers/uphotoart.html. The Universal Photo Art Company was one of several business titles under which photographer Carlton Harlow Graves sold his photographs late in his career. He was the son of Jesse Albert Graves, an important early photographer who was based in the Delaware Water Gap area of Pennsylvania from around 1860 to 1880 and produced some five hundred generally fine scenic views of the western part of the state. Carlton learned the photographic art from his father and moved to Philadelphia to begin producing on his own in about 1880. In his early years, he seems to have taken all the views that he published, but he soon began to buy or pirate images from others. Stereoviews issued under his own name are extremely rare. At its peak, the Universal Photo Art Company seems to have been a rather substantial outfit. In addition to the headquarters and production facilities in Philadelphia, there was a western branch in Naperville, Illinois, where F. A. Messerschmidt was general manager. By the late 1890s, C. H. Graves’s company had become a major publisher, offering “Art Nouveau Stereographs” on light-gray curved mounts. His trade list offered excellent views of hunting scenes, Jamaica, Japan, Java, New York City, Palestine, and other subjects. To compete with low-priced lithographs and copies, Graves offered his “Universal Series” or “Universal Views” on black mounts with no credit to himself. The number and the title are in the negative and the images were sold at a lower price than the regular “Art Nouveau” issues. Graves also offered boxed sets, but they were not sold in the quantities achieved by the Keystone View Company and H. C. White. The company seems to have been active until about 1910, when its stock of negatives was sold to Underwood & Underwood and presumably went from there to the Keystone View Company with the rest of the Underwood photos.

[37] These images were probably taken by the Duperly family firm (for more information on this firm, see David Boxer, Duperly: An Exhibition of Works by Adolphe Duperly, His Sons and Grandsons Mounted in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of His Birth [Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica, 2001]) and may have been reproduced as postcards presenting “views” of Jamaica for travelers.

[38] Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

[39] Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 27–51; Barringer, Men at Work, 243–98.

[40] Wahab, “Mapping West Indian Orientalism,” 284.

[41] Barringer, Men at Work, 243–98.

[42] Saloni Mathur, India by Design, 27–51.

[43] For more on this relationship, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (winter 1986): 7; see also Pinney, Camera Indica.

[44] Christopher Pinney, “Underneath the Banyan Tree: William Crooke and Photographic Depictions of Caste,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

[45] Shepherd, Transients to Settlers, 43–85.

[46] Kenneth Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye: African-Jamaican Festivities in the Time of Belisario,” in Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, ed. Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2007), 122. For more on the creolization process see especially Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Richard D. E. Burton, Afro–Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

[47] Guha Shankar, “Imagining India(ns): Cultural Performance and Diaspora Politics in Jamaica” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 51–71; Dabydeen and Samaroo, Across the Dark Waters; Rebecca M. Brown, “Abject to Object: Colonialism Preserved through the Imagery of Muharram,” res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (April 1, 2003): 203–17.

[48] Shankar, “Imagining India(ns),” 51–71.

[49] For more on the ritual and the reconfiguration of space, see Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). For more on Jonkonnu, see Bilby, “More Than Met the Eye,” 121–37.

[50] Shankar, “Imagining India(ns),” 124. Shankar also argues that Hussay allowed Indo-Jamaicans a certain mobility to produce and contest local identities within their own community, rather than only in opposition to the colonial authorities.