The Cultures of Belize: The East Indians People of Belize

The History of Indo-Belizeans

As a British colony, slavery in Belize — then known as British Honduras — effectively ended in 1838. But the British still wanted to wring profit out of their single Central American colony even as the mahogany and lumber industries began to recede and the promise of slave labor ceased to exist. Fortunately for the idle European landowners in Belize, restrictions on raising agriculture in Belize were lifted with the formal establishment of the colony. Sugar plantations began to supplant the lumber industry by the 1860s and 1870s, and many landowners in the American Confederacy fled to Belize in the wake of the Civil War with plans to start their own plantations.

These former slaveowners would quickly learn that they couldn’t simply resume their old way of life in Belize, but the British did offer a reasonable alternative for cheap labor in the form of the Indian indenture system. The British East India Company seized control over India in 1757, and it was just on the horizon of becoming a British colony when the indenture system was first put in place in 1826. Those who voluntarily agreed to indentured service would sign a contract ranging from 5 to 7 years, receive food and shelter, and receive roughly $4 a month that would be paid out at the end of their contract. While the conditions may have been dire, the British system of rule ensured that it was a choice of preference for many laborers on the Indian subcontinent.

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An initial wave of indentured laborers would arrive in Belize in the immediate wake of abolition. By the time that indentured servitude was abolished by the British government in 1917, it’s believed that roughly 40,000 Indians had relocated to Belize, although a lack of contemporaneous records makes it difficult to be precise on the demographic makeup or timeline of these arrivals. It’s known that a thousand members of India’s failed Sepoy Revolution were granted the right to immigrate to move to Belize. The 1880s saw an influx of Indian indentured servants who had finished their time of service in Jamaica and were looking for a new place to call home. There were similar migrations from the other Caribbean and Central American colonies like Guatemala. While the British government encouraged many Indians to return home after their service was complete, many decided to stay behind.

Indo-Belizeans Today

There haven’t been any major migrations of Indian peoples since the abolition of indentured servitude, although the twenty-first century has seen a minor influx of entrepreneurs from India. And while many of them bring with them the cultural traditions of contemporary India, the Indians that arrived decades prior are far more integrated. For these earlier waves of immigrants, intermarriage and cultural integration have led to them largely abandoning their traditions from home. That’s the case of both Hindu and Muslim communities, both of which arrived during the time when indentured servitude was still legal. Both of these religions have been almost entirely replaced by local forms of Christianity, and most East Indians see their heritage as simply a racial designator rather than one with cultural and historical implications. As a result, Inso-Belizean people have little role to play in the larger conversations among the Indian diaspora.

Despite that, it’s important to not undervalue the important role that immigrants from the Indian subcontinent had in Belize’s history. Their unique understanding of tropical agricultural techniques likely had a major role to play in the success of Belize’s sugar plantation industry even getting off the ground, and their culinary traditions have carried into the larger food culture of Belize. This can most prominently be seen in the development of tacari spice — a combination of curry and ginger. The descendants of early East Indian immigrants are largely centralized in the communities where their ancestors originally worked. The district of Toledo is home to the largest population of East Indian people, and it’s one of the few places where Indian cultural and religious traditions still remain. The population of practicing Hindus numbers in the low hundreds, but Corozal and Belize City are both home to beautiful temples that celebrate popular festivals like Janmashtmi and Diwali.