‘The light within’

“WE WANT temples wherein to worship. We should like the government to establish a Coolie location, and let us build a shrine there. They will nominate the holidays when the temple is built, as the law of the Colony allows. Whatever ceremonies are fixed, the free Coolies would celebrate the feast ... and the assigned Coolies would take leave to attend for those three days (annual leave).”

- PROFESSOR ASHWIN DESAI PROFESSOR GOOLAM VAHED

The above testimony by Rangasammy to the “Coolie Commission” of 1872 reveals the desire of Indians to reconstruct their cultural and religious lives in Natal from the earliest days of settlement.

Over 80% of the indentured who arrived in Port Natal were Hindus. It is one of the fascinating aspects of history that the first official recognition of Diwali was in 1910, 50 years after the very first landing.

To the colonial white population in Natal, Hindu migrants were “heathens” and this very word was written under “religion” on official documentation when one married.

As the anthropologist John D Kelly wrote: “The colonial Europeans had little comprehension of, or patience for, the Indian religious tamasas, ritual festivals of indenture days. They saw heathen, ungodly, lewdness, dangerous tumult and disorder, and all the more evidence of the Indians’ bad character.”

For the authorities, the indentured were beasts of burden, cogs in a labouring machine. Witness the words of Katharine Saunders, the wife of a huge plantation owner.

She told the Wragg Commission of 1885, of which her husband was a member: “In regard to housing, sanitation and water supplies, I haven't the slightest doubt that the commission will report — forgive me — that the Coolie prefers to live in a wretched grass hovel, and that sickness and the pollution of streams are due to his own insanitary turn of mind. This colony already seems to believe that, because a person's skin is a darker colour, he is less than human, and doesn't require human conditions of living. Slavery is still so close behind us.”

There were certain sugar barons who demanded that an indentured woman spend her wedding night with him. Overseers who brazenly raped women on the sugar cane field.