and 1917 145,000 Indians went to Trinidad to work as indentured servants. The Indians were imported to Trinidad the stable and manageable labour force which, the sugar planters believed, had been lost to them since the full emancipation of the blacks." "The system was established in such a way that male Indians who had lived in Trinidad for 10 years could be granted 10 acres of Crown lands in commutation of all claims to a free return passage to India", for which many Indians opted. "This immigration of Indians to Trinidad marked a new element to the already stratified society. Planters, officials, upper-class whites, educated coloured and black Creoles and the black working class all reacted unsympathetically to the arrival of the Indians. Interaction between the races was at a low level, and the Indians were quickly consigned to the lowest level of the socio-economic culture. This was due to many reasons, some of which were a religion differing from the norm (especially Hinduism), the lower economic status with which Indians were subjected to, and they were judged as morally unprincipled and degraded." "Indians were considered to be deceitful, prone to perjury, and abnormally fond of litigation." "The black community was also still experiencing discrimination and had begun to form their own sub-culture apart from the dominant British and Christian ideals. The nuclear group consisted of Creole ex-slaves and their descendants. They had developed a common set of cultural characteristics, which combined to form the mainstream of the cultural pattern of Trinidad, though many Europeans still refused to accept African religious practices as genuine forms of worship and treated the devotees of African religions badly But the masses combined elements of Catholicism with non-Christian religious practices: African gods and spirits were equated with Catholic saints. The membership of these Afro-Christian sects was exclusively lower-class and black." "Hostility and contempt were also the predominant upper and middle class attitudes towards artistic forms of African or slave derivation. African musical forms were subject to legal restrictions all through the nineteenth century. The instrument that evoked the most hostility was the 'African drum'. Drum dances like the Calenda, Belaire, and Bong, performed to the accompaniment of drums, were viewed with special horror even though the dances did not permit bodily contact between the sexes." "In 1883 the government introduced a Music Bill which prohibited the playing of drums between the hours of 6am