Caribbean Hinduism

Published on 9th December, 2018, in Mumbai Mirror. Fifty years before Swami Vivekananda gave his famous speech on Hinduism in Chicago, the religion was being practised in the Caribbean. Even today, it is an important religion among Indians who live in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. This is the result a migration that began 150 years ago. After slavery was abolished in the 19th century, European-owned sugar plantations of the West Indies desperately needed new workers. They wanted cheap and skilled labour fast. The people they had enslaved before refused to submit to exploitative conditions, so plantation owners turned to European colonies. Chinese immigrants, ..