Image of the title wall of the art exhibition ‘The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives,’ which took place at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10-21. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

Editor’s Note: While the majority of indentured labourers who came to the Caribbean between 1834 and 1920, after the end of slavery, were of Indian origin, people from other regions were also conscripted into the indentureship scheme, including Chinese, Europeans, and Africans.

If you wanted to explore the ways in which the history of indentureship lingers and influences identity, how would you do it? If you were Gabrielle Hosein, senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad, you might begin by going through the visual archives, looking for … something.

“I’m interested in what it means to be living a post-indenture, feminist life,” she tells me on the third day of her collaborative exhibition with photographer Abigail Hadeed entitled “The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives.” The exhibition took place at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10 to 21, shortly after the 180th anniversary of “Indian Arrival” on May 30. “I’ve been influenced by artists and scholars who have been looking at the history of indenture and how it has been represented, particularly the histories of women’s labour.”

The woman in the dhoti

Shot of the archival photo that got academic Gabrielle Hosein thinking about indentureship and the legacy it wields in contemporary life. Image by Janine Mendes-Franco, used with permission.

The photo that inspired her to conceptualise the exhibit, which was two years in the making, was of an Indian woman working on a coconut plantation in Jamaica, dressed in a dhoti; part of the Michael Goldberg West Indiana collection. Hosein became “obsessed” with the image some a number of years ago and began to think about why it was so important. Going by the description accompanying the photograph at the exhibition, it was because “labour queers gender […] the androgyny of her appearance makes this image strikingly different from other colonial-era photographs and overturns myths about Indian dress in the past. Citation of this clothing that could be masculine or feminine appears [as] a labouring woman in dhoti and dupatta [yet] wearing a traditional, silver hasuli [necklace] as a feminine form of savings and beauty.”

Hosein herself explains it this way: “When you spend a lot of time combing the visual archives, you see that all of the images of women are of them wrapped up in skirts — and those are truthful images in many ways — but as a feminist, you’re going to look for the women who history doesn’t want to remember, who history has forgotten, who don’t fit the mould.” It’s the only archival image she has come across in which a woman is dressed in a way that could be read as “against the grain,” and it inspired a series of contemporary dhoti images for the exhibit — visual archives that draw on the narratives of the past, telling “particular stories that may have [otherwise] been forgotten.”

The work, she says, is coming out of a community of people who are engaging in the afterlife of indenture, a phrase popularised by Professor Andil Gosine. Hosein says she has also been thinking about, in different ways, “our relationship to the legacies of indenture.”

It is a relationship, Hosein says, that can be enacted in Carnival, in everyday home rituals and, of course, in art. “I really want[ed] to create work that was historically grounded and educational, but also extremely contemporary and feminist and political.” She was invested in work that was beautiful, too, “because when African and Indian women were brought to the plantation as labourers, they came into a work camp that did not value them as human beings. And for women, beauty is incredibly humanising, so to create beauty out of conditions that were so exploitative and violent is to look for inheritances that we might carry with us into our futures.”

The beauty of botanicals

Photographer Abigail Hadeed. Photo courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

Key in helping her delve into these inheritances is Abigail Hadeed, whose approach has always been photojournalistic, peering deep inside her subjects, respectfully witnessing their journey. “Part of this work fit into stuff that I was already doing. I’m always photographing objects … still lifes to lives. As a photographer, I think in a classical way.”

While Hosein’s jumping off point was the archival image, Hadeed was captivated by the botanicals: “[T]hink of indentureship and you think of sugar cane [as well as] their jahajin bandals [sacks in which they carried] seeds [of] all these plants — tamarind and moringa — all of these things came with them and became part of their backyard gardens, their sustenance; they brought all that stuff to Trinidad and the Caribbean.”

The ‘Botanicals’ section of the exhibition. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

It is an aspect of the exhibit that pays homage to the work and memory of Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo, who did a lot of research around indentureship and said of the cleverly made cloth parcels in which they carried their belongings, “The list [of] flora which were fitted into this jahaji bandal is long and impressive” — mango, guava, pomegranate, sapodilla, rice, string beans, turmeric, ginger, cumin, bitter gourd, cinnamon, mustard, black pepper, onion, ashoka, neem, cucumber, lotus.

A shot of some of the photographs in the ‘Botanicals’ section of the exhibit, in which you can see the ghosting and movement Hadeed describes. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

There is so much there that, in Hadeed's mind, the botanicals “aren't quite resolved,” but they are visually mesmerising. The rice, for instance, has a lot of movement: “I love that [it] hasn’t quite gotten to the stage where it’s ready to harvest. The botanicals are exposing the continuities and transformations of life, in which plants are the subject of their own histories. Incorporating the movement into the imagery serves as a metaphor for the passage of time and the ethereal nature of memory. The blurred or ghosted visuals represent the past — moments that are intangible and elusive — while the static elements anchor the viewer in the present. This interplay invites contemplation on how history lingers in the contemporary, influencing identity.”

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While movement has always been a part of Hadeed's work, she says there is even more now, because in thinking about past, present and memory, she realises, “So many things are blurring now. The world is just moving so fast, so I feel movement is very important to show.”

The square strips of printed cloth that form the base of the ‘jahajin bandals,’ which were made by Lina Vincent and a team of designers from India: Setika Singh, Gaurav Maurya and Dhanya Kolathur. Image courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

The article in which Samaroo wrote about the contents of the jahajin bandals was “a pivotal moment” for Hosein: “I began to think about the ways that I could create imaginative archives, ways of recording and memorialising this history of Indian indenture and legacies that are popular in the sense of being able to move in the landscape of daily life, and that are themselves so visually articulate that they convey what they're meant to memorialise.

“If we start with the story of jahajin bandals,” she continues, “they're designed as a square in which the ends, then tied to [themselves] become an archive, and they’re printed with the plants that they brought, so when these [move] outside of the gallery, they’re intended for people to take the art with them to embody it, to carry these legacies that are meaningful to them. [It’s] already telling its story visually, and that’s something that we wanted.”

Challenging stereotypes

The ‘Tools of the Trade’ segment of the exhibit. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

The exhibit then meandered, quite purposefully, towards the lives of Indian women. The writings of academics like Rhoda Reddock and Patricia Mohammed have helped Hosein question the passive and domesticated stereotype: “I’ve been telling students for decades, ‘The Indian women that you want to follow are the indentured women who were earning their own wages, leaving partners they didn't want, protesting labor conditions. This stereotype of the subordinate Indian housewife was one that was manufactured by colonial authorities in response to this very woman and, of course, the violence that she was facing as a result of that kind of politics of self-determination.”

This part of the exhibit creatively imagines Indo-Caribbean histories in the context of feminine practices of beauty, inviting contemplation about indenture histories that go beyond “a Euro-creole history of landscape painting” to the depiction of botanicals in “embodied art forms” such as mehndi, godnas and even the wearing of jewellery, which challenge colonial portraiture of Indian women and instead, visualise their resistance.

A visitor looks at the series that explores indenture legacies through mehndi. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

In these iterations, Hadeed says, they wanted to change the visual landscape to a Caribbean context, so they brainstormed the process with other collaborators — mehndi artist Risa Raghunanan-Mohammed, tattoo designer Portia Subran, jeweller Frank Mitchum Weaver, and curator and graphic designer Melanie Archer, among others. Never before had these art forms used common agricultural plants and other aspects of indenture and placed them into a visual application like this: “The simplicity of it is astounding,” Hosein says, “because you would think it had been thought of before. I don’t think there’s ever been a cutlass-wielding woman done in mehndi.”

The handmade sterling silver bajuband, made by jeweller Frank Mitchum Weaver. Photo courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

Suddenly, henna transcends body adornment and becomes a feminist, botanical archive. Godnas, a Hindu tradition whereby women had to get tattoos upon marriage that Hosein finds “very patriarchal,” are pulled out of that context and become something else in their memorialisation of the plants that helped create economic freedom for indentured Indian women. The journeys indentured labourers made in the 19th century, to places like Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Suriname, as they came off of the pagal samundar (the mad sea), sparkle in scenes of resistance and liberation, etched into a thick, silver bajuband [armlet].

Academic Joy Mahabir describes jewellery as symbolic of women’s labour, labour resistance, and liberation. Everything in this multimedia exhibition (there is also a film) is rooted in research, then reinterpreted into a modern work that is fundamentally imaginative and political in relation to the original visual archive.

Gabrielle Hosein as subject. Photos by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

Hosein had no desire to appear in the photographs in a way that was authentic to the past. Rather, she wanted to challenge everything that people thought about indenture, recalling that Gaiutra Bahadur, who authored “Coolie Woman, the Odyssey of Indenture,” wrote a piece in which she says images of the Coolie Bell were being produced at the same time that women were protesting outside on plantations — “a juncture between the colonial propaganda and what was actually happening.”

Inverting the gaze

‘The Gaze’ section of the exhibit, where the perspective is shifted. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

In that vein, one series in the exhibit considers what happens when Indian women intentionally hold a camera in their hands, “looking through the camera lens at colonial portraiture.” It’s a thought that anticipates the family album, which only came about in the 1940s, Hosein says.

Hadeed adds, “It was about the agency of giving them their own way of representing themselves, like, ‘I'm looking at you, you’re looking at me, looking back at you.’ It’s almost like you’re seeing what she’s seeing.”

In another series, Hadeed’s contemporary images include something Hosein could not find in any of the archival images: books. There were lots of images of Indian women mothering, but none of them reading, and because her own grandmother had gone to school and was able to read in Urdu, English, and Arabic — “because she had to be able to read the Quran” — it was imperative to her that reading was part of the narrative.

It was important to Hosein that books and education were represented as part of the legacies of indenture. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

The Quran from which she is reading to her daughter, was given to Hosein by her uncle. “We were really interested,” she reiterates, in challenging the hegemony of what was visualised about Indo-Caribbean histories.”

Back to botanicals

Gabrielle Hosein adjusts some of the rice grains that form the rangoli design. Photo courtesy Hosein, used with permission.

The final aspect of the exhibition comes around full circle. Rather than looking at the art on the walls, or the film on the screen, however, you must look down. On the floor is a design by rangoli artist Richard Rampersad that represents the botanicals in yet another form.

“So this is mango, pan, and people,” Hosein explains. “For me, this is very, very important because it represents the folk art tradition. You can have a very sophisticated art exhibit, but it’s ultimately coming out of a tradition of folk art.”

Rangoli art by Richard Rampersad at the exhibition. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

While Hosein describes Hadeed’s photographs as “major, major work,” she also holds that the pieces — the bandals, the tattoos, the jewellery — are connected parts of an overall vision to create “imaginative archives that can accompany us on our journeys as we think about our relationship to the past.”

For Hosein, the exhibition is not so much about Indian identity as it is about indenture history, with a starting point of post-indenture feminist politics. “The multi-ethnic importance of this exhibit,” she says, “is that while these plants were brought in jahajin bandals with indentured workers, they have made such an impact on the landscape and are so familiar to everyone in the Caribbean, that this is really a legacy of indenture that has been inherited by us all, across ethnicity, class, geography, disability, sexuality. That familiarity says that the legacies of post-indenture are a basis for us to find commonalities. This really is something that is collectively ours.”