Ramcharan-Crowley

THE MATERNAL MEMORAT The memorat of the maternal side of the family is earlier, hence less detailed, but just as adventuresome. A Kshatriya who was probably named Ramdialsingh came very early as an indenture, between 1845 and 1848. The piece of land he received after indenture was at Sumsum Hill in the east center of the island, and it proved to have oil on it, so much that one of his heirs, lighting a cigar, was blown up by the escaping gases. He apparently married a Kshatriya woman and in 1863 she bore him an important figure in our family history, Jumni Ramdialsingh, my wife's great-grandmother. As a child, Jumni was married to a Kshatriya indenture named Teelucksingh, from Arrah, west of Patna and north of Varanasi, an eldest son who had chosen indenture for the adventure of seeing "the golden streets" of Trinidad. He was astute in business, and so was she, so they soon prospered, and decided to return to India with their two young children. But in India they were unhappy because his family considered his overseas-born wife "outcast," especially when the non- vegetarian little girl kept calling for chicken to eat, so they returned to Trinidad. This decision committed them to Trinidad. They now broadened their scope, dealing in many other things such as groceries, hardware, and imported goods. But what is rare1y mentioned is that they also ran a rumshop, or that they were money-lenders, and often foreclosed on property on which they had lent money. Soon they owned substantial cacao, coconut, and sugar estates, and had their own barges to bring imported products from the Port-of-Spain wharves to Monkey Point, where their teams of horses transported the goods to their general merchandise store in the village of California south of Chaguanas. They had a fine home, lived well but worked hard, and had seven children. Then in 1897 at age 52, Teelucksingh died. His widow Jumni, then age 28, soon discovered that, as a Hindu widow, she had no legal rights to the wealth she had helped earn, and no power to control her life. Her teenage sons, already given to Scotch whiskey, gambling, and wild women in the distinguished Trinidad tradition, were totally in charge. Jumni bided her time for a few years, secreting gold coins in the flounces of her long qanghri skirts or petticoats ( worn with jhulna blouse and long orhni head veil,) then ran off with "a Frenchman" named Sellier, her sons in hot pursuit. She was 34, Sellier (a Martinique Creole of African/European ancestry) was 21, a bookkeeper in a nearby sugar estate. He proved to be a real gentleman, marrying her after the fourth of the six children she bore him, at which time she became the Catholic Mrs. Christine Sellier. She "kidnapped" her two younger daughters by Teelucksingh, opened a very successful business, and became famous for driving her own dashing horse and rig into town. On her own, she invested in real estate, had a street named after her in St. Augustine (now near the University campus), and died a wealthy woman in 1928. Although her Indian sons forbade their wives and children to have any contact with her or her "Coloured" family, the women secretly kept in close touch down to the present. Source: Chronicle: Memorats of Migration: Stories of an East Indian Family in Trinidad S13