Indian labourers began to arrive in Trinidad in 1845. The contracts or indentures under which they came involved them being assigned to a sugarcane plantation for five years. If they signed up for a second five years they would have their passage paid back to India, or, if they chose, they could have land of their own instead of a passage back. With the incentives to stay laid out in this way, most chose to stay, and a community of Indian villages developed on the previously unused land of the island. Although Indians eventually constituted over forty per cent of the population on the island, for a number of generations they remained a primarily rural and somewhat marginalized segment of the population.

The Indian labourers who came to work in Trinidad came on ships that left from Calcutta or Madras, with the majority being from the Hindi-speaking north Indian plains via Calcutta and the minority being from Tamiḻ and Telugu-speaking districts fairly close to Madras. The north Indians were recruited from a wide range of castes and included some higher castes such as Brāhmans and Kṣatriyas, a significant number of Muslims, and a much larger number of Chamārs, who were once leather-workers but had become general agricultural labourers. The south Indians came from a more rigidly structured caste system and were all from agricultural labouring groups (Brereton). The different caste groups from north India had rituals they tried to keep up in the new environment.