Remarks by PM Bissessar and EAM Dr Jaishankar at Nelson Island #TrinidadAndTobago

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-11

[00:00:01]Namaste Sith Ram and a very good morning to all of you prime minister, foreign minister, other ministers, friends, colleagues.

[00:00:14]It is indeed a great pleasure to be here today at the historic Nelson Island and it is here that the first step in history of India and Trinidad and Tibiggo was written 180 years ago.

[00:00:33]Coming here it is only natural that our thoughts turn to how those courageous people must have faced the very difficult circumstances and built new lives.

[00:00:49]Today we salute their fortitude, their determination and the resolve.

[00:00:57]Friends, these immigrants carried the way of life, traditions and faith with them.

[00:01:05]Indeed, as we heard, they carried with them an entire civilization.

[00:01:10]And it is only fitting that these are recorded for posterity as a heritage site.

[00:01:19]Today I'm very glad to join the launch of a quick impact project for the upgradation of cultural heritage on Nelson Island with grant assistance from India. And this includes a memorial monument, creating a digital hub of historical data of the national archive and setting up a digital audiovisisual experience.

[00:01:48]As those who visit this beautiful country seek to understand and appreciate its past, I'm confident that this project would help in that exercise.

[00:02:01]India Prime Minister attaches a high importance to creating a database of the Girmita community and conducting research on this legacy. on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's directions. We are working to create a dedicated Germita studies center.

[00:02:22]I'm glad that an MOU for cooperation between the National Archives of India and of Trinidad and Tobago was signed yesterday.

[00:02:33]I'm hopeful that this would help many of the people here in tracing their ancestral roots and reconnecting with their families in India.

[00:02:46]Prime Minister Modi during his visit had announced the issuance of overseas of India overseas citizenship of India OCI cards up to the sixth generation.

[00:02:59]I understand that a number of OCI applications received by the high commission are growing and it will be our endeavor to facilitate others who may not necessarily have [clears throat] the access to the reg to the required paperwork.

[00:03:17]So I take this opportunity to extend my greetings on the occasion of the upcoming Indian arrival day. As we reflect on this anniversary, we honor the resilience and enduring spirit of our ancestors who journeyied across the seas and built lives in this distant land. Let us pledge to carry forward the legacy of these ancestors with pride and determination. Let us continue to celebrate our shared heritage to teach our children the stories of the past and to contribute positively to the society we live in. Thank you very much.

[00:03:59][applause] Minister J Shanka. Thank you.

[00:04:14]What strikes me about the remarks we have just heard is something I've come to believe about places like this. They do not merely receive history. They generate it. They create the conditions in which leaders are compelled to speak with honesty and depth that is not always available to them in a conference or a parliamentary chamber. Nelson Island has a way of doing that, of stripping away the formality and asking simply, "What do you feel? What do you intend to do about what you feel?

[00:04:44]The prime minister of this republic is a leader who has never shied away from that question. She has governed with a clear sense of both who we are and where we must go. And on an island that connects us so viscerally to the origins of a significant part of our national identity, it is a fitting honor that her voice and thoughts be added to the repository of historic moments on this island. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my highest honor this morning to invite Prime Minister, the Honorable Kais, [applause] [applause] Mr. Sweet, thank you very much for your welcome and uh we know you working very hard to get this program going. So, thank you again from the office of the Prime Minister, our CEO of the National Trust. May I also welcome the prime minister's secretary PS uh head of the public service PS bar. I know they've been working very hard to get us off today. So all protocols observed except I want to make a very special mention of his excellency Dr. Jay Shanka visiting us at this veryious time. Thank [applause and cheering] you very much.

[00:06:05]So I would say thank you all ministers, counselors who are here, please have your seats ladies and gentlemen all as we say in Trinidad and I see um excellency minister he said sit around.

[00:06:19]So we greet each other. Seat around to all of you today. Very distinguished guests.

[00:06:26]Um we've had a very hectic schedule in the one day that excellency has been here Dr. um external affairs minister and um it's going to be a very hectic day. So we'll spend some time with you and then we are heading from the north.

[00:06:41]We will move to [clears throat] central and then we move down to the deep south.

[00:06:45]So we welcome you sir on this journey which our ancestors would have taken when they landed here at Nelson Island and then went to various parts. A short while ago you'd have seen us uh Mr. Jakar and I we walked together through the ruins of this island. We stood before the old barracks where many of our indentured Indian ancestors stayed after they endured many months on the calip. Those very treasurous waters across which they were trafficked. We saw the quarantine buildings where the sick were treated and the weathered ruins of imperialism.

[00:07:23]We moved through these grounds. I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the human history embedded here in this island. For this island is not merely a heritage site. It is a memory and a testimony. Under British colonial rule, military fortifications were erected here through the labor of enslaved African ancestors.

[00:07:48]They also helped to shape the foundations of our great nation. And so originally this island all of us know or think we know was named Neielson Island which was then converted and contorted into Nelson Island. But even before that it was known as Stephenson's island. It later became came into the possession of a British landlord, land owner and his name was then Thomas Nielsen from which is derived Nelson Island the unjust legacy of colonialism.

[00:08:26]This island's true identity was shaped by the thousands of Indian ident after leaving behind the India some of them would never see again in India they are known as the contract diaspora and I would I would try to pronounce it but I think excellency you will forgive me if I butcher the word a little bit um you're talking about the gitas is that correct yes thank you the contract contract for they were contracted for laboring here and that's where that word came from. They were contract and they were contracted by the colonial powers and the land owners here. When they crossed the Calabani, they became the Jajis, the both people whose shared suffering and survival forged a unique society that would transform Trinana and Tobago, the Caribbean and the wider western hemisphere.

[00:09:27]So during uh they stay here in between the 19th um and 20th centuries here also served as a quarantine station, immigration processing site and detention center. Records show that more than 140,000 East Indian immigrants passed through this island between 1845 and 1921.

[00:09:57]In the 1930s, some of us may not know that Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust were also detained here. And here also, national labor leaders and icons such as Tuba, Buzz, Uriah Buzz Butler, and George Weekes were here. They were incarcerated right here. Later on during the Second World War, the United States Navy occupied the island and they constructed military foundations right here. So there's quite a history to this little island here.

[00:10:35]Urina. Even today, visitors walk these grounds searching [clears throat] for names of ancestors, standing before the old barracks, quarantine buildings and prison cells that still bear the witness to the many human stories embedded within this island. May this month is a verb observed across many Commonwealth nations as Indian arrival month and honors a defining part of our history. the first of these arrivals to the new world.

[00:11:08]As I said before, between 1845 and 1970, born 1917, more than 143,000 Indians across the Calipan arrived here under the lettership system.

[00:11:24]Many came from very impoverished agrarian regions of Bihar. My own ancestors came from Bihar on one side of the family and excellency reminded me from the other side of the family came from Madras. So I learned something more from excellency last night. Um others came from UP from Bengal from departed from Kolkata now known as Kolkata and arrived under the system as I said making a threemon voyage. They did not know where they were going.

[00:11:59]They do not know what they would meet, but they went in hopes of a better life.

[00:12:04]They did not come with travel checks.

[00:12:10]They had no travel checks. They had no whatever you could use for the forms of money exchanges. Okay. You know what they had though?

[00:12:19]They came with a raind.

[00:12:21]They came with a Gita and they came with the Quran. And they came with a dream of a better future for themselves and their children. They could not even speak English. They did not understand the contracts that they had entered into.

[00:12:37]Today, as we honor our ancestors, we must also speak honestly about the unjust and inhumane system into which they were drawn.

[00:12:46]I said yesterday and I repeat it.

[00:12:49]Indentership was a form of human trafficking bearing many of the same labor controls, abuse and humiliation of the transatlantic slavery slave trade that preceded it and designed to sustain the British Empire Empire after emancipation.

[00:13:07]From here their hardship continued on plantations across Finland. They were known as bound koulies and indeed when we were growing up and up to now we are referred to they are generations for they are still referred in some places in some parts as kies bound kies and I feel no shame at that we were coolies and I said the other day it took a little ky girl from a place down in Sabar to become the prime minister.

[00:13:36][applause] So they were confined by oppressive past laws. They were jailed for breaches of labor contracts and they were forced to toil from dusk to dawn.

[00:13:52]As Mahatma Gandhi declared, indenttorship was truly a remnant of slavery. But perhaps the greatest thing born from that suffering was what is known as a jihadi bond. Jihai, Ji Behim, ship brother, ship sister. For upon those ships crossing the calipani, cast, village ties, and economic status no longer mattered. Because why?

[00:14:20]Survival mattered. Most of all, survival became everything. The jihadi was your family in an unfamiliar world. the person beside you during illness, the one who would adopt your children if death visited you on the voyage. And despite every attempt to break them, our poor parents preserve the ancient Indian civilization itself, its languages, its religions, family life, cuisine and culture. History books portray them as destitute laborers carrying a sack cloth tied to a stick but endorsed jihadi bundles with seeds, spices, sacred texts, clothing and traditions.

[00:15:10]These became woven into the cultural fabric of TNT transforming our culture, cuisine, agriculture and national identity. Their descendants merge the traditions of India with the rhythms of Trinidad and Tobago to create entirely new forms of expression including chutney music while preserving and enriching enduring traditions such as Rama Diwali. They build community out of suffering and a nation out of displacement. That is the jihadi legacy. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi reminded the world only a few days ago that at the praasi varta div convention that Indian civilization has always stood out not for conquest or domination but for conscience and humanity.

[00:16:04]Our forebe parents are testament to that. They arrived here armed only with faith, culture, resilience and of course hope. And despite exploitation and displacement, they preserve civilization in circumstances designed to break them.

[00:16:22]Despite exploitation and displacement, as I say, they preserve civilization in circumstances that were meant to break them. That remains one of the great gifts of the Indian diaspora to this day. And as um Dr. As you reminded me last night, I went back to check a bit about my great-grandmother and um how she toiled.

[00:16:53]She arrived here in the early 1980s. Her name was Somaria.

[00:16:58]She arrived on this very island from Madras. All she could have spoken as butchuri.

[00:17:05]and she encountered the hardships of poverty and entrenched colonial discrimination as so many others did.

[00:17:12]She toiled in the estates of South Trina living in a ty kia a mud hut and raising her children alone after her husband passed away. She would wake before dawn she would leap around her hut. She would drink only a cup of goats milk and then walk barefoot for miles to labor beneath the Hudson often with her children and to I do not believe Samara could ever have imagined I mentioned it before that one day upon the very shores where she arrived her great granddaughter camel would stand as prime minister of India.

[00:17:52][applause] She could never have dreamed that the descendants would welcome their esteemed government rep of India with whom she would have left behind where her people also endured poverty and canolium expression. She would never know that we would welcome you on these very shores that she landed on and she would have been very proud. When I went to India the first time, your president told me um on the stage they were welcome for the Praasi convention. She said someone near and dear has come from very far away.

[00:18:30]Dr. I say someone near and dear has come from very far away to meet [applause] people.

[00:18:40]And so I believe that the spirits of those jihadis and their families torn apart by British colonialism are now rejoicing that their descendants stand reunited as equal people of proud and independent nations. Those waters before us now as I said are truly panon waters of unity and reunion.

[00:19:05]As I close, I say I believe the time has come for TNT to honor our indented ancestors in a more permanent and meaningful way. After independence, India reclaimed its identity from the legacy of British colonialism. Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai and Kolkata became Kolkata. These were acts of historical reclamation, cultural dignity and national self-determination by a free people. So too much mustan to begin show that our national spaces reflect the people whose suffering, sacrifice and resilience truly shaped our nation. Indeed, since this vendance, we have started doing so. King George V Park became Nelson Mandela Park while colonial era streets have been renamed after national icons such as Queen Janelle Kamisha, Black Stalin, Lord Kitchina and others. This island's future identity also must reflect the people who gave it its deepest name for its significance not in colonial ownership but in the jihadi experience itself. Because here in TNT jihadi is not simply a historical word. It is a memory belonging and civilization carried across oceans. It was here that the thousands first came to Trinidad crossing as I said the calipani carrying faith, memory, hope, helping to build a modern TNT through their labor, sacrifice, culture and resilience.

[00:20:48]Indeed, the jihadi experience helped shape our national identity identity. So my government will begin consideration of the formal renaming of Na Island so that this sacred space [applause] this sacred space may properly honor the jihadi legacy. I will look to all of you as we ask you to send in suggestions and recommendations and PS Barrow and the National Trust will form a committee to consider the suggestions that come for us for us to rename this island. Do you agree we should rename it?

[00:21:27]>> Yes, we shall. We will with your help.

[00:21:29]So PS, that's your job together with the National Trust to set up a website so that people can send in their suggestions. Thank you so much. So my government as I say will begin consideration with a formal renaming of Nasa Island to properly reflect and honor the jihadi legacy. In closing, Shri Jashankar, I sincerely thank you for your visit and the kindness and respect you have shown to the people of Trinidad and Tobago. May this island forever remind us that whilst colonialism once divided our ancestors through slavery, indenttorship and trafficking history, humanity and freedom have united reunited the descendants.

[00:22:18]Please again sir convey our greatest um asurances to your prime minister and to the people of India for your generosity in assisting us with taking this project forward and in the other ways if you I know Minister Darl who's in the office is very excited about he just told us about the way we can use the records and digitize and all those nice things that we want to do. We thank you for your donation and grant funded. Can we thank the government and people? [applause] So from the suffering now arrives friendship, achievement, nationhood and hope greater than that which was once stolen from our ancestors. May these ancient bonds continue to prosper for generations to come. And may almighty God forever bless the peoples and nations of Trinidad, Tobago, and India.

[00:23:12]I thank you very much.

[00:23:14]>> [applause]