Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
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New Homelands - Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,734
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New Homelands - Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa (Hardcover)
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When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were
abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly
set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African
laborers. The new system of "indentured" labor was supposed to be
different from slavery because the indenture, or contract, was
written for an initial period of five years and involved fixed
wages and some specified conditions of work. From the workers'
point of view, the one redeeming feature of the system was that
most of their workmates spoke their language and came from the same
area of India. Because this allowed them to develop some sense of
community, by the end of the initial five years most of the Indian
laborers chose to stay in the land to which they had been taken. In
time that land became the place in which they joined with others to
build a new homeland. In this fieldwork-based study, Paul Younger
looks at the present day descendents of these workers and their
post-indenture societies in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South
Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. He finds that they still cling to
the fact that it was an arbitrary British decision that took them
there and made the society pluralistic. This plurality seems to
require them to search their memory for a distinctive religious
tradition that they can pass on to their children. They know that
there was a loss of culture involved in their move to these
locations and consider it important to recover from that loss. But
they are also intensely proud of their new identity, and insist
that they have established a new religious tradition in their new
homeland. For generations, says Younger, these people had struggled
in their situation and now they had come up with a sense of
community and purpose and were prepared to make the historical
claim that they had developed an appropriate religious tradition
for their specific community.
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