When Rambishoon had signed on to the indentureship contract in India, one of the Arcati’s enthusiastic inducements was that he would be given “free housing”. At the start of Indian indentureship in 1838, the assurance of “lodging” had been given, but the 1939 report investigating the fate of the inaugural Whitby and Hesperus labourers found the labourers had simply been moved into the mud huts and logies – vacated by freed slaves. At Bell Vue a large logie – 100 by 24 feet – was built purposely for its quota of 80 indentureds – including two with families. These accommodations would have been on dirt floors and, at best, raised a foot above the ground and surrounded by stagnant drains.
In 1869, the Inquiry into worker’s protests at Leonora found great variation in accommodation – some was “serviceable”, but other ranges were overcrowded, poorly ventilated, damp, inadequately drained and too close to stagnant trenches. The standard logie would be either 50’ x 2’4, containing five rooms, or 100’ x 24’, containing 10 rooms, each that would house either three bachelors or one family. The roof was of corrugated metal sheets that ensured the rooms were veritable ovens.
Each room was entered from a door into a 10’ open space that ran the entire length of the logie. Here each family would create a kitchen with a mud “fireside” or “chulha” for cooking on one side of their ten feet along with their few utensils and use the other side for storage. From the kitchen one would enter the 14’ x 10’ bedroom, which had a single window at the back wall. The walls between bedrooms, which had to function as apartments, were very thin and did not reach the top of the “V”-shaped roof, ensuring there was absolutely no privacy.
The Commission’s recommendations contributed to the Immigration Ordinance of 1873 calling for “suitable housing” with closer inspections and clearer estate obligations concerning housing, sanitation, hospitals and water. Clearly, nothing drastically had changed in housing after slavery and the initial “experiment” – save the floors of some logies, which were now made of wood, a foot over the ground.
In 1891, three years after Rambishoon arrived, another inquiry found basically the same abysmal conditions as 1871 and made the same recommendations. Subsequently, some logies were raised about three feet above the ground, and Rambishoon would have arrived at Plantation De Willem with the “suitable housing” consisting of a mixture of logies – some with mud floors, others with one-foot or three-foot raised floors.
He had initially been assigned to a mud-floored room along with two other bachelors. In his nostalgic moods he would wistfully describe the family housing at Ishmailpur. It was a mud-walled compound that guaranteed privacy from neighbours. Along the perimeter were several separate huts for his parents and the families of his brothers and himself – plus one open one acting as a byre for the bulls that did their ploughing. The huts were framed with timber, and walls were made of intertwined “wattle” with mud plastered from both sides a foot thick and with the roof thatched with grass, ensuring it was always cool. There was invariably an open “overhang/shed” in front of the huts all facing the courtyard, or “aangan”, which functioned as “sitting rooms” for interacting with family and friends.
Starting in the depot at Calcutta – where hundreds of prospective migrants were huddled under a single thatched roof – and then on the Allan Shaw with everyone sleeping on the floor of the lower deck, Rambishoon was taken aback that De Willem’s “suitable housing” continued the absolute lack of privacy in the communal logies. It was only decades later he saw two-family cottages built, four feet off the ground with stairs and doors front and back and a dividing wall all the way to the ceiling. It was one more instance of the planters’ conviction that the immigrants were lesser beings, bereft of sense or sensibilities.
Unlike in his village, where the women were sequestered behind their mud walls, in De Willem, the almost enforced interaction due to proximity made young bachelors like Rambishoon soon succumb to hormonal urges. He had a liaison with a young lady who bore him a child, Rambharose, but whose father married her off to another, “more suitable” man. The lack of privacy and the scarcity of women led to many such liaisons, for which the women were blamed as being “immoral”.