Indian Arrival Commemorated

About eight descendants of Indian indentured workers left the waters of Blue Lagoon by boat and arrived shortly afterwards at Indian Bay.

Former minister of culture Rene Baptiste who tabled the Act in Parliament to officially make June 1 Indian Arrival Day in St Vincent and the Grenadines

There they were met by just over 30 other persons who had gathered at for the re-enactment ceremony of the arrival 161 years ago of more than 2000 people from India to St Vincent and the Grenadines to work on plantations post-emancipation.

“They did not land on Indian Bay, they landed at Edinboro where they were documented and the registers are still available to us with all the names,” President of the Indian Heritage Foundation, Junior Bacchus said at the ceremony which began around 7.30 on Wednesday morning. “That is why we have the information that was shared. And they were taken to several estates across Vincent and the Grenadines. So today we are recognizing the importance of that journey, and the presence of the Indian community here,” he said.

The early portion of the re-enactment ceremony was rich with nostalgia as those present were registered, given an original Indian name and provided with information about the estate on which their forebear were sent to work.

Bacchus noted that the arrivals and their descendants have assimilated and are living across this country as one people, “…and that’s why the Indian Heritage Foundation always has the government and opposition supporting our activities. We are non-partisan”.

The legal framework to establish June 1 as Indian Arrival Day was shepherded through the House of Assembly by Rene Baptiste when she held the portfolio as Minister of Culture, and passed into law on March 26,2007 with full support of both sides of the House.

Baptiste was part of the re-enactment ceremony at Indian Bay.

It is always an emotional day, she said, “because if you are so closely connected to your heritage, walking down this pathway and standing at the beach front, something must touch you”.

“ You must somehow feel the recollection in your head, connection by blood of the people who took that journey and to know they were coming to a place that they did not know anything about three and a half months before, to how we came to the Atlantic Ocean and arrived here, Baptiste said.”

A WOMAN receiving her certificate with her name during the re-enactment of the arrival of Indians to St Vincent

Minister of Sports, Frederick Stephenson standing in for prime minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves said, “It is heart warming that in our beautiful nation St. Vincent and Grenadines …we do not have- as Junior quite rightly mentioned a little earlier- we do not have a segregation of the Indians here and others there. But we are like a pot of callaloo cooking. We mingle and we mix together as one people,and that is important for our continued development.”

Stephenson, who is Parliamentary Representative for the South Windward Constituency, that has significant pocket of Indians told the gathering that the Indian community, “has been an integral part of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines, developing and building this beautiful nation that we call home.”

And MP for East Kingstown, Fitzgerald Bramble, who was sitting in for the Leader of the Opposition, Dr. Godwin Friday congratulated the Indian Heritage Foundation for this important activity.

According to Bramble, symbolic as the ceremony may be, “In the context of our history and our social development over the years, the importance of Indians arriving here over 161 years ago on June 1, 1861 cannot be overemphasized particularly because of the connection and the similarity between that reality, and the reality of the majority of Vincentians who are of African heritage.”

He added: “I don’t think there is any coincidence that those journeys across the ocean to St. Vincent and the Grenadines brought two very important sets of people to this land.”

The Indian Heritage Foundation has been marking Indian Arrival Day since the passage of the legislation but there were no ceremonies for the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.