Poonamma and a people’s history
The popular notion that the indentured workers were primarily male is a misinformed one. Women made up at least a third–as required by government statute–and sometimes close to 40 to 45 percent of the labourers being transported from India.
The continued migration of Indian women through the nearly 100 years of indentureship facilitated greater degree of exclusivity around racial and ethnic boundaries in Trinidad and elsewhere. It also made racial mixture with other groups–particularly the Afro-Trinidadians–less likely, and which often threw up situations of resistance and resentment.
Recent decades have seen education and political participation help the Indo-Trinidadian population to integrate into mainstream Trinidadian society. But there still exist exclusive ethnic enclaves in certain pockets of Trinidadian society, which was made possible by the presence of Indian women from the very beginning.
Sumita Chatterjee presents a brief portrait of one of the few surviving women of that generation of indentured workers who was born in India, and who had re-created a new home and a new identity in Trinidad.
I met Poonamma Armoogam for the first time on a hot afternoon at her daughter Sookia's modest house in Tunapuna, Trinidad, in 1995. A widow, she was living alone and, at 86, still maintained an independent livelihood. Visiting her daughter's house, she reminisced about her remarkable and tenacious life, a life that straddled almost a century, and one, that had witnessed the traumas and turbulence of colonial displacement in very personal ways.
Poonamma emigrated from Madras in 1915 as a six-year-old with her parents who were travelling on indentured contracts to Trinidad. On being asked about what she remembered of the long sea journey, she recalled the excitement of seeing a submarine! Not surprisingly, as a child who could not have known of the hard plantation work that was awaiting their arrival, she had only fond memories of the voyage.
But, of course, other sources tell us of the harrowing nature of the journey, ominously termed "Kalapani" (Black Waters), by many who recalled the details of the travel. Migration became a metaphor for loss—a loss of their sense of self, their homes, their identity, their roots. It would take many decades of struggle to reimagine a space they could call their own–a home outside the realm of the plantation barracks and semi-servitude.
Poonamma started rural work in the children's gang on plantation Petit Morne, and laboured on different sugar estates all her adult life. After indentureship was abolished, Poonamma married a jahaji bhai (ship mate travelling together from India) with whom she set up home on a small piece of marshy land.
After marriage, Poonamma continued to divide her time between the home plot and the nearby Caroni sugar estate in order to make ends meet. The labour and creativity of women like Poonamma were extremely crucial in setting up alternative modes of survival, away from the plantation economy.
She recalled, with a great degree of pride, her own mother's role in shaping her identity, be it in the handing down of rituals of birth, death and marriage, or in the example she set by the life she had led of hard work and self reliance. Interestingly, Poonamma's mother, Amrawaddy, did not follow her husband and only son back to India after indentureship, but decided to stay back in Trinidad to be around her two daughters—Meena and Poonamma.
Poonamma's daughter, Sookia, acknowledged that it was her grandmother and mother who were responsible for her fluency in both Tamil and Bhojpuri. Significant aspects of the oral tradition, from reciting the Ramayana, to learning the songs of Chhatti and Sohar were handed down from mother to daughter. Poonamma, like her mother before her, continues to remain fiercely independent, tending her land and garden.