The legacy of traditional rice cultivation by descendants of Indian contract laborers in Suriname

Abstract

Background Some 35,000 indentured laborers from India were recruited to work on plantations in Suriname between 1868 and 1916. It is likely that most were familiar with farming before they were shipped to this former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Around 1900, those who did not return received a piece of land where most of them started growing rice as a staple crop. Agronomists characterized their traditional landraces as inferior and infested with weedy rice and started to ‘purify’ these landraces. No research has been done on whether these ancient rice varieties still exist. We aimed to document the rice varieties (both landraces and more modern cultivars) grown currently or in the recent past by (descendants of) Hindustani smallholders in Suriname, their origin, morphological and agronomic characters, local uses and cultural and spiritual relevance. Given the rapid decline in small-scale rice cultivation in the past 40 years, we wanted to know why people continued or abandoned rice farming and what aspects of traditional practices still survived. Methods We interviewed 26 (former) small-scale Hindustani farmers and asked about the varieties they cultivated and traditional agricultural practices. We collected seed samples, local names and associated information, and compared these to information from agricultural reports from the colonial period. We also interviewed 11 Maroons, one Javanese farmer, and three persons of mixed ethnicity, who were somehow involved in the cultivation of East Indian rice varieties. Results and discussion Hindustani smallholders in Suriname largely lost their traditional rice landraces. Most of the interviewed farmers grew modern cultivars, developed after 2000. Some cultivars from the 1950s were still planted for fodder, but these were heavily mixed with weedy rice and other weeds. Maroon farmers in the interior, however, still actively cultivated varieties with names like ‘coolie rice’, which probably descend from landraces introduced by the Indian contract laborers, although this needs to be confirmed by molecular research. Although traditional cultivation practices seem to have been lost, smallholders still retain pleasant memories of the manual planting, harvesting, and processing of rice, as well as the gender-based practices and beliefs associated with the cultivation of the crop. The oral history of former rice farmers and traditional rice varieties (possibly obtained from Maroon fields) could play a role in museum settings as living vehicles for memories of the descendants of Asian contract labourers in Suriname and Guyana.

Vernacular names of traditional rice varieties reveal the unique history of Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana

“…In our analysis, we also included rice names collected previously by other researchers: Ramdayal (2020) among Saramaccans, van Andel et al (2016,2019) among Aucans, Vaillant (1948) among Aluku and Aucans, Price (unpublished, 1960s) and Hoffman (unpublished, c. 2006) among Saramaccans, the SNRI/ADRON seed bank (unspeci ed Maroon communities), Geijskes (1955) among Aucans and Paramaccans and Fleury (2016) among Aluku. Additional Maroon rice names were collected from specimens in the herbarium collections of Naturalis and the Herbier du Cayenne in French Guiana.…”

Living on an ever-changing coast: French Guiana populations facing coastal mobility

“…Certainly, given the chronic shortage of workers in French Guiana, it was impossible to maintain a model after the abolition of slavery that formerly relied on the use of slave labor to dig canals and build dikes. It is worth noting that in Suriname, the polder system was reinvested and used by Indian contract laborers to grow rice (Ramdayal et al, 2021).…”

Rational Choices of Labor Workers in Increasing Family Income in Indonesia Forest Fringe Communities

“…Employment consists of activities as farmers, planters, and as freelance laborers in the agricultural and plantation sectors. People also farm rice and have jobs outside of agriculture (Ramdayal et al, 2021). The main one is the differentiation of farmers' income, which is seen from the increasing diversity of income sources (including agricultural plantations and non-agricultural employment) (Jiang et al, 2021).…”