Faith in transit: Caste, conversion and colonial Christianity under indenture in British Guiana

This article examines Indian conversion to Christianity in British Guiana during the indentureship period (1838–1917), reframing it as a pragmatic and affective response to caste disruption, dislocation and colonial discipline. Drawing on missionary writings – particularly H.V.P. Bronkhurst’s The Colony of British Guiana and Its Labouring Population (1883) – as well as colonial records, Indo-Guyanese cultural memory, recent historiography and later Indo-Caribbean literary texts such as Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and Samuel Selvon’s ‘Turning Christian’, which illuminate gendered respectability politics and interior ambivalence, this study analyzes how Hindu labourers selectively navigated spiritual uncertainty and the institutional pressures of missionary life. While most retained ancestral religious practices, a minority embraced Christianity as a strategy for survival, education, or recognition in a system where access to resources, schooling and mobility was unevenly distributed through Christian institutions. It traces how conversion was shaped by emotional geography – the way displacement, attachment and uncertainty became tied to specific colonial spaces and institutions (ship, estate, mandir, mission school, church) – and by localized adaptations, including Hindi ritual terms and the role of Indian catechists. Rather than frame conversion as mere submission or resistance, this study presents it as a complex negotiation of identity, faith and opportunity under Empire – contributing a more situated account of religious change in the colonial Caribbean and its literary afterlives.