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Lomarsh Roopnarine, Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1838-1920, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2007, 175 pp.
Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1838-1920 gives a comprehensive analysis of Indian migration and settlement in the Caribbean colonies with special emphasis on Guyana (British Guiana). Lomarsh Roopnarine has been able to penetrate a highly saturated field by reintroducing debates on resistance, gender and culture. According to the author, "indentured servants individually and collectively used indentured emigration to better their lives, resist domination, reproduce and reinvent their culture, adapt and turn adverse circumstances to their advantage" (p. 5).
Roopnarine' s interest in this topic goes back to his years as a graduate student, and the research for this book was actually undertaken for his doctoral dissertation. The work consists of four chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. It also provides an extensive bibliography on Caribbean indentureship, as well as statistics and documents relating to Indo-Caribbean migration. The chapters are organized according to themes, and each chapter presents a combination of theoretical and empirical information. The structure of the book makes for easy reading, and the comprehensive notes at the end allow the reader to assess the sources on which the facts and analyses are based. This book asks questions and offers answers crucial to the migration of Indians into the Caribbean region. Drawing on works done by Hugh Tinker, Brinsley Samaroo and other historians, Roopnarine notes that there might be another side to the indentureship story which has been omitted from the existing historiography. He posits questions relating to the reasons for migration, despite the authoritarian colonial structure and the preconceived docility of the girmitiyas (bonded labourers). The author states that "the colonial regime took East Indians out of India, but they never took India out of the East Indians" (p. 5). The author also uses modern sociological approaches to help us understand why "social maladies existed" (p. 99) in the Indo-Caribbean diasporic communities.
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