Walkshop (24/04/2023)

The first picture here is an image of one of the women depicted in the Irish Famine memorial, on the docks where the majority of Irish emigrants would have left Ireland. I found this sculpture really striking in light of having completed this project because the woman here is similar to the way the Indian women in the opening of The Swinging Bridge are portrayed, as women carrying and wearing everything they can before they leave their homelands. The second picture is the entirety of the Jeanie Johnston, a replica famine/coffin ship that Lilac has discussed already.

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16th april

For our final reflection, we all wrote a paragraph each to summarise our general thoughts and experiences on the project. Why we chose this topic, how we worked as a team and the progress weve made over the past few weeks. Bilqees: As an Indo-Trinidadian young woman whose great-grandfather was an indentured labourer from Bihar, having arrived to work in Trinidad in 1873, this was the most illuminating project I've undertaken as it relates to Indo-Caribbean history. I think society is generally given a brief, reductive outline of what indentureship was in the context of the Caribbean. There is a disconnect between our idealized tropical modern-day reality and the harsh history that its backdrop. Little Indo-Trinidadian people know the socio-economic state of British India that even led to the indentureship programme (or, scheme) that brought hundreds of thousands of Indians to the Caribbean. In working on the excerpt from Espinet's "The Swinging Bridge", I was able

2nd April

This week we all met up on Zoom to check in on eachothers progress in completing our parts in the group project. Everyone is working together efficently and were all putting in an equal amount of effort. We all are equally interested in the topic that we chose, and we are enjoying learning new things and expanidng our knowledge on the topic. The bones of the blog was made today and is working after having some technical issues last week. We created a google doc to keep progress on whos working on what. We have split the work up evenly throughout the five of us to complete an adequate story map and blog that expands on the Kala Pani and the Swinging Bridge. When researching the two Canadian locations mentioned in The Swinging Bridge (Montreal and Toronto), it was hard to find information on the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, particularly related to Ramabai Espinet. We have all decided to call again next week to check up on eachothers progress. Its quite challenging to find a day that suits

Kala Pani

What is Kala Pani ? ''काला पानी'' ( Kala pani ) translates literally as 'black water'. A hindi phrase, it refers to the taboo practice of crossing the seas and leaving India, prohibited in the Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu), a prominent legal, religious and moral Hindu text. Kala Pani was specifically banned as it was 'associated with contamination and cultural defilement' [Mehta], usually meaning a breakdown in the caste system present in Indian society throughout history. Kala Pani and Transoceanic crossings Today, the term Kala Pani is used to refer specifically to the crossings made by indentured labourers originating in India, with many ending up in the Carribean. As described in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge , those considered as occupying a lower rung in the caste (in this example, widows, or rands ) were often the people who undertook the Kala Pani and became indentured labourers. As a result, there are many communities of descendan

Indentured Labour: A connected classrooms project

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