The manager requested the transfer of five men he deemed ringleaders, a move that would have separated them from their families on the estate and its nearby villages. They were summoned to the courtroom, where the police attempted to force them into cars waiting to take them away to a different estate. Supported by a crowd of immigrants who had gathered outside the courtroom, the men refused to get into the cars. But while the court temporarily let the men go, twenty-five armed constables were posted to Rose Hall, where they loomed over estate life, searching the labourers’ barracks and clashing with informal pickets on the canefields. As the tension grew, another fifty constables were sent in from New Amsterdam. When a corporal tried to arrest an Indian labourer, another man intervened, and the policemen and the immigrant fell into a trench. Police fired into it, and both men were killed. A volley of police bullets followed, into the crowd and towards the barracks, where immigrants were shot while sitting in their rooms. It was the deadliest among the many acts of police violence in British Guiana during the indenture period. (1) 

Most of the lives of the indentured were lived off the books, beyond even the margins of the administrative records that fill the folios and boxes of today’s national archives. This was in part a deliberate strategy – a successful attempt to shelter their lives from the surveillance of the colonial state, just as free people hid plantation escapees across the periods of slavery and indenture. But it was also a matter of official concern – the state cared about the effectiveness of indentured labour, and it cared about the metropolitan respectability that ensured the system’s imperial sanction. Everything else – all that gave meaning and comfort to the indentured, the hopes or anxieties that animated their inner worlds, and their own perspectives on their working lives – was left out of the official record.

Often, the best we have is the stories handed down across generations, or the recipes and songs shaped by the experience of indenture, or the plants grown from seeds that were carried from India on board indentured voyages. But occasionally, objects appear in the official archives that have slipped through the cracks of colonial power. The following documents are seven such objects. They appear among more than 1000 thin sheets of paper in an enormous folio at the United Kingdom’s National Archives, on which the evidence from the investigation into the Rose Hall killings is printed. Most of the evidence is testimony from government officials, estate managers and police officers, men invested in sweeping aside the brutal violence of that day, and of the labour system lurking behind it. But among them are seven interviews with indentured labourers at Rose Hall estate. The interviews provide a direct and all-too-rare perspective on life and labour in the final years of indentureship in British Guiana. They give voice to the crushing work, the fear of evictions, and the horrors of the police killings. But they also testify to intimate aspects of life usually left out of the official record – marriage, family, memories of life in India, and motivations for migration. Here, they are freely accessible beyond the walls of the colonial archives for the first time.

–Ben Jacob, May 2025

(1) This brief summary of the Rose Hall Uprising is drawn from Gaiutra Bahadur’s account in Coolie Woman, accessible online here.

(Note: in the documents, ‘I.E.I.I.;, or ‘I.E.I.’, stands for ‘indentured East Indian immigrant’.)