ABSTRACT
The many Indian musical traditions and influences found today in Guyana, and in Indo-Guyanese communities in the United States, are the legacy of Asian Indian immigrants who came to work on Guyanese sugar plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the country was the British colony of British Guiana. These immigrants were indentured laborers brought in to replace African slaves on the colony’s plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1834; the system of Asian Indian indentured labor began in 1838 and ended in 1917, half a Century before Guyana gained its independence in 1966. People of Asian Indian ancestry in Guyana, and their culture, are commonly described as Indo-Guyanese, or simply East Indian (figure 1).
