The incongruously named Vijayakumar and John (2018) blame the Hindu religion. But then how come that didn’t happen to eg indentured Englishmen in Virginia? I can kind of imagine a story where first-generation laborers had no hope of settling down or raising families, committed suicide at high rates, and that ingrained suicidal tendencies in the culture that never went away. Yeah, but arduous circumstances affected dozens of different ethnicities involved in various colonization and forced labor schemes, and most of them didn’t have these kinds of suicide rates. Lomarsh Roopnarine (2007) also shows high rates of suicides among indentured Indians in British Guiana Īlthough there is no reason to doubt the existence of sexual jealousy, this emphasis on the scarcity of women disregards the arduous circumstances in which the indentured labourers were working, and the disruption of the “integrative institutions” of society – family, marriage, caste, kinship, and religion – as the underlying causes of suicide and other ills affecting the Indian indentured labour population. The intense competition for women among the indentured men was seen as the main reason for male suicides in Fiji.
The rate of indentured adult Indian females to males in Fiji was only 43 to 100. In his article ‘Veil of Dishonor’ Lal (1985) describes what officials tend to point out as the primary cause of the Fiji Indian suicides: sexual jealousy arising from the persistent shortage of women on the plantations. In Mauritius too, hundreds of indentured Indian laborers committed suicide by jumping from a particular hillock during the indenture period, which acquired the name of ‘Suicide Hill’, now turned into a monument The Fiji Indian suicide rate in the period 1900 to 1915 was the highest among all Indian labour importing colonies in Africa and the West Indies, and much higher than in India itself. So what’s going on? Social and Cultural Dimensions of Indian Indentured Labour and Its Diaspora argues that despite the mixed suicide rates in India itself, rates across the Indian Diaspora are universally high. While I can’t rule out that the Indo-Guyanese come from some micro-micro-climate of higher suicidality, this guy claims to have traced them back to some of their ancestral villages and found that those villages have low suicide rates. Indo-Guyanese mostly come from Bihar and other low-suicide regions. Statewide rates range from from 38 in Sikkim (higher than any country in the world) to 0.5 in Bihar (lower than any country in the world except Barbados). But India has a lot of weird suicide microclimates. Hmmm.ĭoes India itself have high suicide rates? On average, yes. The most Indian regions of Guyana also have the highest suicide rate. Basically no Indians went anywhere else in South America, and nowhere else in South America has anywhere near the suicide rate of these two countries. Suriname also has a sky-high suicide rate, but slightly less than Guyana’s, to the exact degree that its Indian population is slightly less than Guyana’s. Most went to Guyana, and somewhat fewer went to neighboring Suriname. Apparently thousands of Indians immigrated to Guyana as indentured laborers in the late 1800s.
Indo-Guyanese aren’t American Indians they’re from actual India. I feel like one of those classicists who has reconstructed a lost heresy through hostile quotations in Irenaeus. But in the process of telling us exactly what kind of claims we should avoid, she mentions someone bringing up that “80% of the reported suicides are carried out by Indo-Guyanese”. Is its sky-high suicide rate focused in one ethnic group? The first answer I found was this article by a social justice warrior telling us it constitutes racial “essentialism” to even ask the question. One place to start: Guyana is a multi-ethnic country. Guyana has poverty and crime and those things, but no more so than neighboring Brazil (suicide rate of 6) or Venezuela (suicide rate of 4). Guyana has the highest national suicide rate in the world, 30 people per year per 100,000.
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