Conflict and Solidarity Between Coolie and Creole in Trinidad: A Study of Selected Novel The Dispossessed
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53032/tvcr/2025.v7n1.27Keywords:
Indenture, Coolie, Creole, Plantation, Victimization, Cross CultureAbstract
The paper explores explorative nature of the indenture labour system as it applies to workers brought from India to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917. It examines working conditions in Trinidad’s sugar industry shortly after World War II. The indentured labourers are doubly dispossessed on the plantation. First dispossession occurs when they are displaced from their homelands, and second dispossession takes place when they are thrown out of work at the plantations in the wake of the failing economy. The paper raises the issues of cross culture, creolization, grinding poverty, victimization, degradation and dispossession among Indian indentured immigrants in Trinidad. Apart from this, the paper explores how African and Indian indentured labourers maintain harmonious relation on the Island, and how some of the cast and religious divisions and conflicts that had existed within the community break down. Finally, the paper examines how newly recruited Indian labourers negotiated with newly emancipated Africans on the plantations.
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