The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain’s Caribbean Empire

Chair: Marta Fernández Campa (Independent scholar)

Speaker: María del Pilar Kaladeen (Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

Between 1838-1917 over half a million people from India were brought to the Caribbean to work on British colonial plantations. Labouring under temporary contracts called ‘indentures’, the majority never returned to India and alongside African-Caribbean migrants, they later formed part of Generation Windrush (1948-1971). In this talk I will discuss the creation and operation of the system of indenture, its legacies as they relate to the idea of ‘The Other Windrush’ and I will also introduce some of the novelists and poets who have articulated what it has meant to be part of this double, imperial migration. This talk will also feature a reading from The Other Windrush.