1. Engendering Indian indenture and the botanical

Nearly half a million Indians were taken to the Caribbean: 143,939 to Trinidad, 238,909 to British Guiana, 34,024 to Suriname, 38,681 to Jamaica, and 42,595, 25,509, and 19,296, respectively, taken to the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana. Though involving smaller numbers of Indians, indentureship was also part of the plantation economy in St. Lucia (4354), Grenada (3200), St. Vincent (2472), and St. Kitts (337).Footnote ⁴ While women and men came independently, women arrived in far smaller numbers.Footnote ⁵ The experience of indentured Indian women has been extensively studied, though less so in relation to plants, seeds, and cuttings for sustenance, healing, and spirituality.Footnote ⁶ Given women’s role in subsistence gardening and marketing; food preparation and cooking; domestic rites and folk rituals; and care for and healing of children, the aged, and the ill—in India, during the transoceanic voyage, and after arrival in the Caribbean, the article therefore fills a gap in its attention to indenture and post-indenture botanical ecologies and gendered histories.

Additionally, we write against the grain of indenture scholarship which has focused on the male-dominated “canescape” as the primary site of knowledge, peripheralizing ancestral horticultural and agricultural practices.Footnote ⁷ As Guyanese elder Maharaji Bahoori tells Gaiutra Bahadur in a 2010 interview:

Her work was not in the cane fields, but in the domestic periphery of the plantation, and included animal care and gardening. Indians’ investments in land, given “their total disenchantment with estate life”, suggest the value of cultivation of indenture and post-indenture gardenscapes, a concept discussed further below.Footnote ¹⁰

In terms of documenting phytomigration, some attention to grains and seeds can be found in relation to food provisions for labourers on ships, which included parched rice (chura), tamarind, coriander seeds, gram (sattoo), black pepper, and pumpkin.Footnote ¹¹ Indian lascars, or sailors, also carried ganja on voyages.Footnote ¹² However, the travel of food supplies does not illuminate the transoceanic transportation of flora in terms of migrant labour homemaking. Choenni and Choenni’s interviews found that Indians travelled with vegetables and herbs to Suriname.Footnote ¹³ In Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin, Deeda, an Indian woman who came to Trinidad as an indentured worker, describes jahajees travelling with mango seeds and hardi or turmeric rather than going to a new place “khaali haath, empty-handed.”Footnote ¹⁴

Picking and Vandebroek credit the Spanish for bringing pomegranate and ginger to Jamaica and attribute sorrel, tamarind, and mango to Africans (2020). They suggest cannabis sativa was also introduced by Africans and its presence as hemp can be dated to the arrival of the Spanish in the New World. Indians nonetheless revitalised its recreational and spiritual usage, popularising the Hindustani name ganja in Jamaica. Dreadlocked Hindu sadhus, or holy men, smoking ganja out of their chillum or clay pipes to worship Lord Shiva shaped practices later birthed out of the Rastafari movement in the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁵ Leonard Percival Howell, one of the early Rastafari, bestowed upon himself the name Gangun Guru Maragh. His middle and last names are Hindustani titles used to confer respect on knowledgeable elderly persons, learned Hindu religious leaders, and ascetics.

Indians sent to Jamaica are thought to have introduced at least 75 botanical species native to India, such as turmeric (hardi), cannabis (ganja), and Bombay and East Indian mangoes.Footnote ¹⁶ East Indian mangoes are said to descend from the Rasalu mangoes taken from South India via the Madras Port, in modern-day Tamil Naidu, to Jamaica in the 19th century. Bombay mangoes are linked to the transportation of seeds of the Pairi or Paheri mango from Mumbai (then named Bombay under the British Raj). In recent decades, a secondary migration of Jamaicans, especially Indo-Jamaicans, has led to the cultivation of both mango strains in Florida. Kumar Mahabir discovered that 63 medicinal and edible plants in Trinidad and Tobago originated in India.Footnote ¹⁷ Brinsley Samaroo describes Indian indentured labourers bringing:

Based on agrarian reports in Suriname, Gowricharn added almonds (badam), hibiscus (arahoor/arahoo), and marigold (gainda).Footnote ¹⁹ This list highlights how “Indian immigration to the plantation colonies changed the geography of those colonies.”Footnote ²⁰ Writing on how flora and fauna globalised “Indian nature,” Gowricharn further argues for seeing “Girmitiya ethnogenesis,” or the emergence and expansion of an ethnic identity and community, as closely entangled with the botanical. This can be seen in the supplies which continued to be imported from India for settled Indian populations whose tastes had become a staple of Caribbean social and economic life. Framed as “coolie stores,” as Figure 1 shows, this included seeds, fruits, roots, and spices such as black pepper, mustard seed, coriander seed, arrowroot, and tamarind.

Figure 1.

Local newspaper advertisement by F.J. Scott and Son entitled “Sale of Coolie Stores” from Saturday, February 3rd, 1912. Trinidad and Tobago Association of Ottawa.

Figure 1. Long description

A vertical newspaper advertisement with black text on a light background.

At the top, the header reads Sale of Coolie Stores in large bold font, followed by AT NO. 14, St. VINCENT STREET, ON Saturday, 3rd February, 1912.

The main body text states: UNDER instructions received the undersigned will offer for sale the following Surplus Coolie Stores ex S S SUTLEJ from Calcutta.

A centered list of quantities and items follows:

- 10 Bags RICE

- 94 Tins GHEE

- 23 Tins MUSTARD OIL

- 8 Tins GINGERRI OIL

- 21 Bags URHUR DHOLL

- 14 Bags FLOUR

- 11 Bags CHOOKAH

Below the list, a paragraph mentions additional items: Chillies, Blackpepper, Mustard Seed, Turmeric, Coriander Seed, Garlic, Fenugric, Sago, Arrowroot, Tamarind, Coconut Oil and sundries as will appear.

Further down, it notes SALE AT 10 A M and includes a separate entry: For other interests - 1 American Bay Gelding Carriage Horse standing over 16 hands.

The advertisement concludes at the bottom right with the names F J SCOTT and SON, Govt. Auctioneers, 12 St. Vincent Street.

In the context of pre-emancipation plantation life, Picking and Vandebroek observe that African provision grounds were both a source of sustenance and income, were often on the borderline of estates and their foothills, and were valuable for food, medicine, religious practice, and self-sufficiency.Footnote ²¹ Carney calls them the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed.”Footnote ²² Sylvia Wynter has argued that these provision grounds or Creole gardens “nourished traditional folk culture grounded in reverence for the earth and its gifts” and “inspired cultural resistance to the superstructure of the plantation, even as they provided the material base of its production.”Footnote ²³ Enslaved Africans and their descendants’ use of “plants as tools for self-definition, cultural continuity, survival, and insurgency was a radical reversal of the extractive plantation system” with its logic of monoculture and a “relation of the labourer to the plant world beyond the scope of the cash crop.”Footnote ²⁴

Lydia Pulsipher describes “at least three types of slave-grown gardens: common grounds, ravine and mountain grounds, and houseyard gardens” in Montserrat, with each having a distinct impact on Caribbean landscapes. In addition to provision grounds, she writes, “depending on the amount of shade and moisture, other plants in house-yard gardens would have included herbs, leafy greens, roots and tubers, legumes, medicinals, cosmetics, ornamentals, and plants used in performing household chores or in making household items.”Footnote ²⁵ As with enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans, Indians also planted crops around barracks and plantation edges to supplement insufficient rations, and later built a peasant economy around homes in villages.Footnote ²⁶

For example, Figure 2 shows what was considered a picturesque “typical native garden of East Indians” in Jamaica in which the rich hues of photographic colouring techniques emphasised that the indenture and post-indenture experience was a source of wealth and bounty, rather than exploitation and hardship, and a generous opportunity for reconstitution of stable patriarchal family life. It is a photo of masculine peasant proprietorship. A man seems to be in his own garden, watering his plants, and surveying his fields. Such colonial-era images of Indian women’s land ownership or engagement in agriculture are rare. Indian women’s housewifisation obscured their roles in agriculture and within the heteronormative family labour of kitchen gardens, and their subsumption under men’s historically larger share of rural land ownership.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 2.

Postcard entitled “Typical Native Garden of East Indians, Jamaica, B.W.I.” University of Florida Digital Collections. Penn Libraries.

Figure 2. Long description

A colorized photo postcard depicting a rural scene.

* In the foreground, rows of low-lying green leafy crops and vegetables fill the lower half of the frame, organized into neat garden beds. A small brown basket or pot sits on the ground to the right.

* In the mid-ground, a person wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and light-colored trousers stands with their back to the viewer, positioned near the entrance of a small dwelling.

* The dwelling is a rustic hut with walls and a steeply pitched roof constructed from dried palm fronds or thatch.

* To the left of the hut, a tall banana tree with large broad leaves and a cluster of dense green trees provide a canopy.

* In the far background, the sky is a pale blue-grey, and the faint silhouette of another thatched roof is visible on the right horizon.

* At the bottom center, printed text reads Typical Native Garden of East Indians, Jamaica, B W I. dash 54.

Nonetheless, Mohammed notes that women’s labour in kitchen gardens gave them economic power and authority, and intersected with their “knowledge of cuisine, domestic gardening, ritual practices of not only religion but also child-rearing and childbearing”.Footnote ²⁸ Such economic independence is invisibilised by the gaze of colonial portraiture, which framed Indian women in agriculture and marketing as decorative coolie belles, and as exotic and consumable as the plants which they sold. Writing of Jamaica in 1890, Bouknight-Davis describes “the stereotypes of the Indian flower/vegetable girls and vegetable vendor” as sexualised by media such as The Gleaner.Footnote ²⁹ So said, in Figure 3, a young Indian woman, seemingly in town with her goods and nearly unadorned except for a nakphul or flower nose ring, earrings, and two thin beras encircling her right hand, is posed with a handful of leafy vegetables. As Joy Mahabir notes:

Typecast as the “Coolie Vegetable Seller,” the photograph is gendered, objectifying both woman and nature. Studios did not represent Indian men within vegetal aesthetics in the way that women lushly represented nature, fecundity, and the blossoming rewards of Indians’ moral, familial, and economic well-being. Together, both pictures exoticise gardenscapes and their produce to say that all is well in the colonies.

Figure 3.

Postcard entitled “Coolie Vegetable Seller, Trinidad.” Published by Davidson and Todd, Frederick Street, Trinidad. Printed in Germany. Michael Goldberg Collection.

While portraiture obscured women’s ambitions for proprietorship, historiography on Indian women’s enthusiasm for land acquisition emphasizes how the botanical mattered for multifaceted aspects of their lives: wealth and savings, food self-sufficiency, market gardening, spiritual rites and rituals, and women’s autonomy. Shaheeda Hosein describes women as the ones who tended fruit trees, flowers, and shrubs in domestic gardens, and who planted tomatoes, ochros, peas, beans, rice, sorrel, corn, and patchoi both for home and sale. As Hosein quotes one Hindu woman saying, “When we get we piece of land in the village, first thing I do is plant plenty flowers, trees, I make nice flowers garden, and I make a special place to put up me jhandi. There I plant sweet flowers, chamelhi and hibiscus….”Footnote ³¹ Samaroo similarly notes that agriculture and cultivation of crops were considered dharmic duty and Qur’anic injunctions, such that flora was associated with divinity.Footnote ³² Indeed, colonial-era photographs also provide a visual archive of their independent incomes, mobility, and participation in inter-ethnic spaces, in which the botanical was part and parcel of women’s agency, and in contradistinction to representations or expectations of them as docile, dependent, and domesticated housewives.Footnote ³³ Figure 4 shows such entrepreneurship in what is titled “Coolie Market Place, Trinidad, B.W.I.”

Figure 4.

Postcard entitled “Coolie Market Place, Trinidad, B.W.I.” Published by Stephens Limited, Trinidad. Printed in Germany. Michael Goldberg Collection.

Figure 4. Long description

The photo depicts a bustling market scene in front of a building with a wooden porch.

* In the immediate foreground, several women are seated on the ground. On the far left, a woman in a light-colored sari sits behind a tray of small round produce. To her right, another woman sits cross-legged, and a third woman crouches behind a tray of larger root vegetables.

* Standing on the left side are two women in traditional white head coverings and saris, adorned with multiple bangles and necklaces. A small child stands between them.

* In the center foreground, a man stands with his back to the camera, wearing dark trousers and a light shirt, balancing a large wooden tray of goods on his head.

* To the right, more figures are seated or standing along the edge of the porch. A man on the far right stands leaning on a staff, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and light-colored clothing.

* The background shows the dark interior of the porch and the architectural details of the building’s eaves.

* Text at the bottom center reads Coolie Market Place, Trinidad, B W I dot. Text at the bottom left reads Stephens Ltd comma Trinidad.

Writing of Guadeloupe, Lou Kermarrec notes that Indians’ “role remains invisible in most studies of the West Indian Creole Garden.”Footnote ³⁴ Additionally, scholars have critiqued photographs’ presentation of Indians as separate from other groups, and their visual reproduction of orientalist stereotypes and racialised governmentalities. However, Indian and African women’s historical proximity in markets suggests the significance of multi-ethnic mixing of “population, flora and knowledge” from India. Clearly, market vending was a site of inter-ethnic familiarity for Indian women and girls.Footnote ³⁵ In 1886, traveller William Paton described markets in Trinidad as ethnically heterogeneous, but also spaces where “everything, living or inanimate” was “distinctively East Indian.”Footnote ³⁶

As shown by Figure 5, a photograph by W.C. Ross & Co. Ltd. of Port of Spain, Indian and African women may have set up their baskets of goods in intimate proximity on roadsides and in stalls, illuminating the way that botanical histories challenge both colonial and post-colonial “canescape” representations of ethnic segregation and its gendered boundaries, particularly for Trinidad, Jamaica, and other indenture sites in the Caribbean.

Figure 5.

Postcard entitled “Roadside Market, Trinidad.” Published by W.C Ross and Co. Ltd, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Michael Goldberg Collection.

Figure 5. Long description

The scene is organized into three distinct depths:

* Foreground: Large woven baskets and burlap sacks are filled with round fruits, likely citrus or mangoes. To the right, several large bunches of bananas are stacked vertically on the ground. The text ROADSIDE MARKET TRINIDAD is handwritten in white across the bottom edge.

* Midground: Several women wearing hats and light-colored dresses are seated on the ground or low stools, tending to their goods. One woman in a white dress and sun hat is positioned centrally, facing right toward another seated vendor. To the right, a man in a light-colored suit and fedora stands talking to a woman in a floral dress. Other figures, including a woman carrying a basket on her head, are scattered throughout the open-air space.

* Background: A row of single-story buildings with corrugated metal roofs lines the street. Signs on the buildings include the words HARDWARE and other partially obscured commercial labels. A horse-drawn cart is visible in the distance near the buildings.

The colour photograph in Figure 6 is titled “Typical Natives, Trinidad, B.W.I.” By the twentieth century, competing discourses framed both Indians and Africans as “natives,” highlighting the floral genealogies of women’s inter-ethnic mixing in Caribbean gardenscapes as co-produced by the plants brought during Indian indenture, those indigenous to the region and those sustained in African provision grounds. Such sustaining of cross-ethnic, gendered familiarity is underexplored in scholarship on the Creole Garden in the post-emancipation period, yet meeting in markets with one’s garden produce likely included sharing of seeds, cuttings, medicinal herbs, and recipes; sustained exchange of tastes as turmeric, ochro, and saijan moved across chulhas (clay ovens) and coal pots; and the blurring of languages, cultural distinctions, spiritual practices, and gendered knowledges.

Figure 6.

Postcard entitled “Typical Natives, Trinidad, B.W.I.” Coloured photograph by C. Sobrian. Published by Art Photo Studio, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Printed in the United States. Personal postcard archives of Vinay Harrichan.

Figure 6. Long description

The photograph captures a bustling market scene filled with a large crowd of people of South Asian and African descent. In the foreground, individuals are seen interacting with produce. A woman in a white and blue patterned dress and a white headscarf stands near a wooden crate of green leafy vegetables. To her right, a young girl in a pink patterned dress looks toward the center. Many men wear fedoras or sun hats and light-coloured button-down shirts, while women wear modest dresses and head coverings.

In the mid-ground, the crowd is dense, with people standing around sacks and baskets of goods. One sack is clearly marked with the initialism B. W. I. for British West Indies.

The background features several structures, including a small thatched-roof hut on the left and two larger buildings with grey hipped roofs in the center. To the right, a large open-sided pavilion with a dark shingled roof provides shade for more market activity. Tall palm trees and lush green vegetation are visible under a pale blue sky with scattered white clouds.

2. Gardenscapes as post-indenture phytoarchives

With this history in mind, the article focuses on indenture and post-indenture gardenscapes defined by Indians’ relationship to flora in personal and communal spaces, including at doorways and inside living spaces, in kitchen and market-oriented gardens, and for sustenance, ancestral continuity, economic independence, beauty, affinity with nature, and a sense of home. We draw our use of gardenscape from writing on how “society and biodiversity interact to promote processes of ethno-ecological change” in St. Eustatius.Footnote ³⁷ As a term, gardenscape describes “a portmanteau of garden and landscape that goes beyond the traditional idea of a garden as a cultivated area of plants around a home to include the presence of plants, actively managed or not, in a cultural landscape bound by human interests,” enabling a view of “ethnobotanical diversity.”Footnote ³⁸ This fits with multiple meanings of “garden” in the Caribbean, which could refer to an individual or communal agricultural plot or provision ground, backyard of vegetable plants and flowers, or front garden of ornamental flora; although, as Kabir and Beunel-Fogerty note, depending on the community or country, each of these spaces can also have alternative names and plants.Footnote ³⁹

We introduce phytoarchives as a concept to describe plants as living witnesses to and records of ancestral migration, settlement, and knowledge, as well as co-creators of cultural connection to food, medicine, rituals, seeds, cultivation techniques, and forms of resistance passed down through generations. Not simply artefacts, objects or symbols, flora alive today are species that carry memories and remember; narrate the histories of kinfolk and ‘come like family’ (and are evolutionary kin); can be sacred and sacralize space; are affective registers and evoke emotions of care; become embodied through tastes, textures, smells, healing, and nutrients; and participate in place-making. They are species with their own ecologies who exist in vernacular time—through seasons, cycles, and generations—and with whom descendants of indenture are in symbiosis.

This framing draws attention away from colonial decimation of complex Caribbean vegetal ecologies, instead emphasizing a “garden ethic” that reflects on what fits and makes sense ecologically and culturally in local landscapes.Footnote ⁴⁰ It presents a popular counter-archive to the botanical collections resulting from imperial commodification and circulation.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, the plants photographed for the curatorial project exemplify human-plant interconnection; cultural and ecological resilience; intertwined histories of labour migration and phytomigration; and knowledge associated with matrilineality, care and domesticity. They encode the affective and gendered legacy of indentured ancestors’ histories in gardenscapes across and beyond Caribbean geographies.

3. Indian inheritances and flora mnemonics

The Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies curatorial project invited submissions that highlighted:

1. 1. Plants/flora brought from India by indentured workers/through indenture

2. 2. The impact of plants on the landscape

3. 3. Roles of these plants in religious, healing, and cultural customs across ethnicity, religion, and location

4. 4. Mainstreaming of Indian names for these plants and Caribbean/Creole names given to them (words brought and created)

5. 5. Plants encountered in the Caribbean and assigned Indian names

6. 6. How ecology/landscape connects us across ethnic and other differences

7. 7. How ecology connects us across ethnic and other differences to the legacy of indenture

8. 8. How Caribbean diasporic communities transplanted these plants in new homelands

9. 9. How these plants appear in popular culture and music

10. 10. Comparative use of historical images (plantation agriculture/subsistence planting) to show histories of plants becoming embedded in new landscapes and cultural terrains.

The call for photographic and textual memorialisation mobilised what we introduce as ‘floral mnemonics’ in which the botanical is an organic site of affective recall and familiarity. In this framing of the submissions discussed below, flora is a visual cue evoking personal or collective narratives which symbolise and materialise indenture and post-indenture histories and genealogies. Recorded through a participatory and transnational approach to the production of a contemporary archive of Indian indenture, the botanical thus affirms cultural inheritances, knowledge traditions, spiritual continuities, and family stories, and orients the gaze to a multisensory and multispecies living legacy of indenture. Photographed in backyards, agricultural plots, religious spaces, markets, life cycle commemorations, foods, and with friends and family, portraits of plants visibilise a journey in which they are co-migrants and co-creators, crossing space and time in their own life cycles of seeds, roots, cuttings, and fruit; in tastes, smells, and textures; and in practices of care and consumption. As mnemonic devices, these images affirm a world of meanings which were carefully cultivated and still matter.

4. Participatory plant portraiture and the botanical afterlife of indenture

In 2024, 107 photographs and 18 videos were submitted via an online form and directly via Instagram and email. These visuals spanned six countries: Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, and the United States (Central and South Florida). Most were accompanied by text providing religious, cultural, historical, and personal context. Eleven contributors were women while five were men. Thank you to the contributors: Ejima Baker Morales, Lou Kermarrec, Aliyah Khan, Miranda Madar, Max Mahadeo, Lelawatee Manoo, Madan Prem McCoon, Keith McNeal, Jenny Raghoo, Nutan Ragoobir, Anston Rambarran, Kaveeta Ramchal, Dhanraj Ramcharan, Joan Rupram, Brandon Siew, and Sandrine Soukaï. As we explore gardenscapes, we examine six photo submissions from Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guadeloupe, and two from the US. These were chosen as they show the afterlife of indenture in diverse geographies associated with agriculture, backyard cultivation, ritual, home, and roadsides.

5. Caribbean gardenscapes

Figure 7, captured in 2024, shows a field of bora. Also referred to as Chinese long beans, snake long beans, and yard long beans, “bora” is the Hindustani name for these legumes. It has been adopted in wider Guyanese vernacular and is used by the general population regardless of descent. Whether it is fried and eaten with chicken or curried and paired with “jhinga” (shrimp), bora is a local staple. A similar variety, slightly shorter in length, is found in Trinidad. It is known by the Hindustani name “bodi,” and is prepared and cooked similarly to bora. This plot of bora is situated in Helena No. 2, Mahaica, Guyana. According to Kaveeta Ramchal, who took and submitted the photograph, village lore claims that Helena No 2. was named after a colonial governor’s daughter and is “one of, if not the, first Indian village settlements in Guyana post-indentureship.”

Figure 7.

Bora field in Guyana. Photograph by Kaveeta Ramchal. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

This field is owned and tended to by farmer Motilall Chumandath, himself a descendant of Indian agricultural workers. As noted by Ramchal, he continues to plant and harvest the field and to sell bora to the nearby markets. Crops such as bora were seen as an asset to the village as well as a point of pride for the individuals. The magnitude of the bora fields showcased in this photograph recalls a popular chutney song named “Chalbo Ki Nahi” by singer Sundar Popo. Although both the composer and artist are Indo-Trinidadian, this track is well-known across Indo-Caribbean groups since the 1990s and reflects a wider community sentiment. Some verses of “Chalbo Ki Nahi,” along with their translations, are:

The lyrics portray bora/bodi not simply as a crop, but as attractive to a potential partner. The plentiful long beans in the narrator’s village can be interpreted as a sign of prosperity in their family or home. The picking of the crops and selling of them are paired in a way to symbolise the symbiotic relationship between a husband and wife, and recognition of women’s roles as market vendors. Working as partners to get the bora, or bhindi (okro), baigan (eggplant), and kohara (pumpkin), mentioned in other lines of the same song, from land to market is a test of their compatibility. The theme of harvest was further explored by Lou Kermarrec, in her contribution from Guadeloupe, exemplifying the legacy of indenture in the French West Indies.

Lou Kermarrec’s contribution, shown in Figure 8, was plucked karaila/karaili (bitter melon) and bhindi (okra/ochro). She is more focused on the practice of home gardens versus mass crop cultivation for commercial purposes. As an ethnobotanist, Kermarrec argues that indentured labourers in Guadeloupe, though relatively small in numbers and arriving over a shorter period (1854–1889), compared to their neighbours in Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname, “contributed to the diversification of plant species with regards to culinary and therapeutic uses. The plants that Indians in Guadeloupe say they have ‘inherited from their ancestors’ are still used today by families of Indian descent.”

Figure 8.

Bowl of Karaila/Karaili and Bhindi in Guadeloupe. Photograph by Lou Kerramac. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

While Popo references everyday crops for cooking in his song lyrics as motifs of partnership and compatibility, Kermarrec looks at plants such as tulsi (holy basil) and pipar/pipal trees to illustrate how religion comes into play. She comments: “In parallel to the process of creolisation, the perpetuation of the Hindu faith and its spiritual values has allowed a transmission of knowledge and symbols through the use of plants grown in domestic spaces.” Most indentured migrants were Hindu and brought with them a cosmology which incorporates the natural world into divine worship. Certain forms of vegetation are also ascribed sacred meaning, personified, and treated as deities.

Max Mahadeo submitted Figure 9 from Ramrick Sadhoo Temple in San Juan, Trinidad. This 2024 photo features a bael or bilva tree, the former name being of Hindustani origin and the latter Sanskrit. Mahadeo provided a brief history of the Hindu establishment: “Ramrick Sadhoo’s children left the temple many years ago and migrated to Canada. The temple was reopened in 2019 by Pandit Parmanand Sharma, the son of Satnarine Sharma, a.k.a Sat Pandit. The bael tree was easily a few decades old but was cut down recently.” Bael is an offering employed in the worship of Lord Shiva. Devotees will observe fasting on Mondays and piece together a “mala” (garland) of bael leaves to adorn the neck of their Shiva “murti” (idol). But in some cases, and according to the holy text of the Shiv Puran, the bael tree can be worshipped directly as a physical manifestation of Lord Shiva himself. This photo depicts a garland hung around the stem of the tree, an adornment typically reserved for esteemed human beings, grooms and brides, and humanlike avatars of God. It is even wrapped in cloth with a “deeya” (holy light) near it. The bael tree at this mandir is personified as a holy deity and, as Mahadeo notes, is treated as such: “This particular bael tree (the fruits of the original) is worshipped with offerings according to the Puranas (earrings, flowers, water, incense).”

Figure 9.

Bael tree in Trinidad. Photograph by Max Mahadeo. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

Before there were mandirs and masjids in the Caribbean, Indian indentured labourers and subsequent Indo-Caribbean generations relied on the privacy of their homes to conduct religious services and express their spirituality. Madan Prem McCoon’s submission (Figure 10) displays a neem tree sprouting up and over a fence in the back of his parents’ property in Diego Martin, Trinidad. While the photograph was taken in 2024, McCoon remarks that the trees were “planted by my parents over the last forty years.” Neem is a symbol of purity and healing in Hinduism, often incorporated in various rituals or utilised in folk healing practices, and is believed to contain amrit, an elixir of immortality, that one can consume. There is a popular local baithak gana or chutney song entitled “Raat Ke Sapna,” popularised by Surinamese singer Ramdew Chaitoe in 1977, Trinidadian artiste Sundar Popo in 1980, and Indian vocalist Kanchan in 1982. It references the comforting and protective quality of neem trees on one’s property:

The narrator, a married young woman, asks her lover to show her what she has been dreaming about. In her visions, she notes that her marital home feels incomplete without a nimbiya ke perwa (neem tree) in the angan (courtyard) to provide shade, warmth, and familiarity. This discomfort she laments exemplifies how implicitly linked flora were to East Indian practices of homemaking.

Figure 10.

Neem Tree in Trinidad. Photograph Madan Prem McCoon. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

Next to the neem is a potted peepar or peepal tree. This is an interesting placement as peepal trees and neem trees bear almost the same significance in Hinduism. In the right corner of the photo, there are jhandi (coloured flags) mounted upon bamboo poles. These are erected following the conclusion of puja (worship rituals) at home and occupy a sanctified space on the land. McCoon additionally states that his family’s yard is home to an extensive array of vegetation, namely “tulsi” (holy basil), “paan” (betel), “aam” (mangoes), “kush” grass, “dhub” grass, buttercup flowers, “arahoo” (hibiscus), and “chameli” (jasmine). He concludes in his note: “All of these flowers, plants, and so forth were planted for the specific usage in pujas and sanskaras.” This affirms the botanical as a connection between spaces of home and spirituality, rendering home gardens sacred and providing botanical mnemonic devices for spiritual practices.

While culturally relevant vegetation is found in sacred spaces on temple and mosque grounds or on private properties, one can also encounter plants and flowers in the wild. As Aliyah Khan shows in her 2019 photograph (Figure 11), the purine or water lily leaf grows out of water canals in the capital city of Georgetown. The flowers sprouting from the leaves are called lotuses colloquially but have the Hindustani names “padma” and “kamal.” The lotus, due to its association with the Hindu goddess Mother Lakshmi, frequently appears as a floral motif in Hindu architecture. Lakshmi is believed to be the embodiment of prosperity, fortune, and wealth - not just monetarily but also spiritually. She is heavily linked to notions of purity, enlightenment, spiritual awakening, and righteous conduct, qualities assigned to the same Hindu places of worship adorned with her symbols. The fact that Mother Lakshmi, one of the core deities in Caribbean Hinduism and venerated as a maternal figure, is synonymous with the visual of a lotus speaks to the multi-dimensional significance assigned to the natural world by Hindus.

Figure 11.

Lotus flowers in Guyana. Photograph by Aliyah Khan. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

Khan summarises the religious and utilitarian use of purine leaves:

‘Figure 12 is Sandrine Soukai’s submission from Guadeloupe. It was was captured in 2024 in the gardenscape of Ernest Moutoussamy.Footnote ⁴² It features a tamarind tree. Tamarind is referred to in various West Indian dialects as “tamrin” and/or “tambran,” as well as by the Hindustani name “imli/imri.” In Hinduism, tamarind trees are regarded as sacred, with the fruits being used in cooking recipes and Ayurvedic practices. They are also considered to be an abode and resting place for Lord Vishnu. In the Caribbean, tamarind is a popular “chatni” (chutney) or condiment paired alongside Indian origin dishes such as pholourie, doubles (channa/bara), saheena, and kachorie. It can also be used to flavour drinks or made into desserts, the most notable of which is “tambran balls.” This is a sweet and tangy snack where pulp from the tamarind is rolled in sugar and spices and, sometimes, pepper.

Figure 12.

Tamarind Tree in Guadeloupe. Photograph by Sandrine Soukaï. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

Written in French, the sign on the tree reads, “Je conservais ton Colombo pour toi.” In Soukaï’s words,

This is precisely what we mean by the botanical as a phytoarchive; a living form bearing traces of the past and in relationship with the landscape in the present, which also can evoke a sense of poetics through connections that are sensory, multispecies, and metaphysical, drawing on belief systems that consider flora to have consciousness and to be communicative.

6. Diaspora gardenscapes

The pre- and post-independence years in the Caribbean coincided with a secondary wave of migration for Indo-Caribbean people settling in the UK, US, and Canada, establishing a burgeoning “brown sugar” diaspora.Footnote ⁴³ This ongoing exodus transformed those cultural landscapes as migrants brought plants and seeds nestled next to family pictures, traditional jewellery and clothing, as well as vital kitchen utensils.

One group of pictures submitted by Brandon Siew from 2024 perfectly encapsulated how these ancestral connections to land have been passed down and survived multiple migrations. Siew’s “Nana,” the Hindustani kinship label for maternal grandfather, moved from Trinidad to New York and then from New York to Florida, where he discovered favourable weather conditions for growing. In his late 80s, Nana or Ghalbaran Bansraj belonged to a generation raised alongside migrants directly from India as well as the first set of indentured labourers born in Trinidad and raised by Indian parents. He witnessed them planting rice, cutting sugarcane and grass, growing cocoa, and incorporating local vegetation in their religious practices.

Describing Figure 13, Siew writes:

From Siew’s account, Bansraj is planting out of a love for his co-created relationships with Indian indenture’s botanical legacies. While there was trauma associated with plantation labour, Indian labourers nonetheless found refuge in the botanical, and many allusions are made to the natural world in local compositions. The pleasure which ancestors found in their surroundings is mirrored by Bansraj’s happiness and bright smile in his own home garden.

Figure 13.

Nana’s Garden in Florida. Photograph by Brandon Siew. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

While bhaji and bodi can be used in traditional Indo-Caribbean recipes, Nana also tends to coneflowers and marigolds that have purpose beyond food preparation. Siew notes: “Beyond the ecological role, Nana takes these flowers and offers them to God in his puja room.” Marigold is native to Central and South America, notably Mexico, but has been disseminated to North Africa and South Asia, among other sites, through extensive trade routes. Known for their distinctly bright colour and ability to ward off pests, they have found tremendous religious significance in South Asia and, by extension, among Indians in the Caribbean. The local Hindustani name for marigold in the Caribbean is gainda. It is primarily utilised as an offering to Lord Ganesh during the 10-day Hindu festival of Ganesh Utsav, celebrating his birth in late August to early September. Anything offered to the divine in “puja,” an act of worship, is considered sacred and must be tended to with care. It is not simply a plant or crop to be plucked. Gainda is additionally used to represent adolescence, virginity, and reproduction. In this context, marigolds appear repeatedly in songs, often ones performed for Hindu weddings and birth rituals where such themes are resonant. One composition sung by many women’s ensembles, such as the Ganesh Kirtan Group, is “Gainda Na Turo Maharaj.” The lyrics are as follows:

The premise is a “dulahin” (bride) sitting up in a marigold tree alone with her “maharaj” (great king) or lover. She tells him to be cautious with his romantic gestures, not to pick her flowers, as her “bhaiya” (brother) and family may notice this change in her. Beneath the marigold, she hears a rustling, and her “sasru” (father-in-law) comes to interrupt the pair. In the latter portion, the lover tries to escape the tree only for his shirt to get caught and ripped on a branch. This multifaceted usage of marigold, in one case religious and in another sensuous, once again proves the much deeper level of meaning attached to these plants as mnemonic devices, not just for homemaking, but the intimacies of lovemaking.

Bansraj appears to be intentional about making sure his garden is preserved by his descendants as a living, breathing legacy, teaching them just as he was taught by those who came before. Siew, one of Bansraj’s grandchildren, concludes: “Nana enjoys sharing his garden with everyone, especially his grandchildren. His garden is not just for consumption and a splash of colour––it’s a living link to our Indo-Caribbean roots, thriving in Florida’s soil. Through Nana’s hands, the legacy of our ancestors flourishes, reminding us of our heritage’s strength, resilience, and beauty.”

Figure 14 shows another diasporic submission received from Jenny Raghoo, an Indo-Trinidadian residing in Florida. This image, taken in 2024, is of karipoulay, kari patta, or curry leaves in her backyard home garden. As for how this Trinidadian variety of curry leaves landed in Florida, Raghoo notes: “We were given the seeds by another Trinidadian family in the area, and despite the changes in weather, the tree survives year-round. The leaves are a huge part of Trinidadian curries.” Karipoulay is derived from the Tamil word karuveppilai, which is equivalent to the Hindustani name kari patta. This is notable as a minority of indentured labourers departed from the Port of Madras in South India, then known as the Madras Presidency, where Tamil was the spoken language.Footnote ⁴⁴ The leaves remain a distinctive element of local dishes. Raghoo confirms, “We put the whole patta in our curries but also peesay or grind them using an okhri-musar (mortar-pestle) to make curry powder. I have been told that curry leaves are meetha neem (sweet neem).”

Figure 14.

Karipouley or Kari Patta in Florida. Photograph by Jenny Raghoo. Submitted to the Indian Inheritances Across and Beyond Caribbean Geographies project, 2024.

Animism is the belief system that elements in nature, whether inanimate or animate, are sentient beings. Plants, animals, stones, water, and so forth are believed to possess a spirit or soul. Hinduism is one of the few major religions to uphold some principles of animism. Raghoo recollects, “Growing up we were always told to not pick them after 6:00 pm or when it was dark outside. Whenever picking, my parents would say to ‘beg the tree’ or ‘ask it nicely’. My Nani said in Hindustani: ‘Dui baat karke patta ture, na noche, ture’ (Say two nice things before picking the leaves, do not yank it, pick it).” This notion that the karipoule tree is living, cannot be disturbed at night when sleeping, and must be begged when awoken, agrees with tenets of animism. Picking the leaves gently rather than plucking them forcefully to avoid them feeling pain, and reciting kind words of gratitude for the leaves, further supports this claim that the plant is imbued with sentient attributes.

These and other plants constitute a post-indenture phytoarchive in which indenture legacies are materialised, metaphorised, and co-created with the botanical in contemporary Caribbean and diaspora gardenscapes. Phytoarchives thus intertwine human and botanical genealogies. They are, as Kabir and Buenel-Fogerty write, both “legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The photographs of flora and accompanying text convey histories of agriculture, sustenance, ritual, health, and family and are floral mnemonic devices also reminding of Indian indenture’s gendered and sexed intersections. Photographs and songs are visual and aural devices in which references to bora are also calls to love and companionship as much as they record women’s roles in market vending. Those which reference neem and gainda are also metaphors for heterosexual love and intimacy. Domestic rituals are also typically conducted by women, and images of the botanical in living spaces trigger memories of settlement in the Caribbean as families were established off plantations, often through women’s responsibilities for homemaking as well as agriculture. The ‘purine’ is also associated with family and religious cultural events, such as weddings and pujas, and represents the feminine divine. Finally, the ancestral knowledge of nanis or grandmothers is remembered in contemporary relationships with the botanical, still defined by folk wisdom conveyed in the sounds of Hindustani. As Ben Jacob writes,

Such flora encode history wherever they grow, reminding us of vegetal inheritances beyond the discourse of cane, coconut, cocoa, and banana plantations.