Today Mauritius, Fiji, Surinam and Seychelles not only have a sizeable Indian population, these people also have enormous political and economic clout. Many of the Caribbean Countries too have well placed Indian population.
At last we are now trying to reach out to them and building favorable relations with all such countries and the descendants of ours.
This was not always like this. They were unwanted in their enslaved motherland, when they had left virtually as slaves. Some who came back, were insulted by the powers who had replaced the British.
You may like to read the blog below, which captures the atmosphere of the time.
By Yashovardhan Sinha
I have been hearing about Bihar’s connection with Mauritius and Fiji since childhood but knew very little about it. Recently I asked some of my friends and family whether there was a good book about the Girmitiyas, indentured labourers from India, mainly from Bihar and Eastern UP, who were taken to work on the British sugar plantations in the West Indies, Fiji, Mauritius etc and had asked the group to recommend a book describing the life of Girmitiyas (the word is Bihari-ised from Agreement, the agreement letter that they signed with the labour contractors). Someone in that group recommended Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur.
In 1903 Gaiutra’s great-grandmother Sujaria, who was from a village in Chapra district, alone, pregnant, and aged 33, took the indentured ship to Guyana and delivered her son, Gaiutra’s grandfather, on the boat. As the author tries to unravel the mystery behind this seemingly unusual journey, she discovers the circumstances under which people were forced to uproot themselves and plunge into the unknown, thereby exposing a dark and ignored chapter of India’s colonial history. And this chapter does not have just our rapacious rulers as villains; our own social norms often forced our women, especially abandoned wives and defrauded widows, to choose the unknown devil across the Kala Pani over their hellish plight at home.
From 1838 to 1917, the British, who had abolished slavery in their empire, transported a million Indians, half of them to the Caribbean, to grow and cut sugar cane. The British traffic in indentured servants was a third the size of its trade in African slaves, whom the Indian laborers succeeded on plantations across the globe.
Life on the plantations was often hellish. Whipping was common, labour was relentless. Ganja was their omly solace. But the planters, who were into manufacturing rum, soon saw this as a further avenue for exploitation and soon made laws that forced these poor people to shift to rum houses from their ganja addas. Alcoholism with all its attendant evils soon became rampant in the labour lines.
But it is a poor reflection on the situation back home that despite this, most of these people preferred the plantations to India. Towards the end of the indenture system only 20 percent of the population on plantations was indentured. The rest were immigrants who had served out their time but still lived and worked on the sugar estates.The original indenture was for five years. After this, a Girmitiya was entitled to be sent home. However, from the West Indies only about a quarter of the indentured labourers returned to India. Even from these, a significant number did not remain here but opted to return to the plantations, sometimes paying for their fares but more often after signing fresh bonds.
As the name of the book indicates, it focuses on women Girmitiyas, many of whom were single. Age old caste and religious barriers got lowered if not broken the moment these people got on the outward boat. Man: woman ratio amongst the emigrants was also extremely skewed. And there was probably a fair smattering of prostitutes who chose to migrate.
All this led to a very wobbly social structure amongst the Girmitiyas in the colonies. On the one hand women could, and often did, change partners at will. On the other hand there were frequent cases of violence involving women: men killing each other, men killing or mutilating women, or men (and sometimes women) commiting suicide. And what made the situation more ugly were regular cases of liaisons between Indian women and British managers and overseers.
The Girmitiyas (who formed about half the population of Guyana) and the erstwhile slaves from Africa remained hostile to each other. But a distinct culture evolved which was a potpourri of sorts, as is evident from the Caribbean Chutney music which you can check out on YouTube.
The language they spoke was Creolese. The author describes it beautifully: “Whether educated or not, they still had to assimilate into a multiethnic society where various versions of Creolese, an English dialect that evolved from plantation pidgin, was the idiom. This is what we spoke inside our immigrant home; this was our cracked, our stained glass English, made from smashed bits of multicolored glass, a thing of beauty constructed from fragments, including fragments from India.”
Gaiutra Bahadur is Harvard educated journalist in the USA. She has obviously done thorough research and has written the book with a lot of feeling which shows most tellingly when she describes the Girmitiyas relationship with their country of origin. She writes; ” Many Indo-Caribbeans I know suffer from a kind of phantom leg syndrome. Dismembered from our imaginary homeland, we have felt the absence of the severed limb of India for generations.”
In the West Indies a child born outside a legal marriage is called “outside child”. Gaiutra describes the Girmitiyas as India’s outside child. After India became independent, Government of India, probably because it had to deal with a huge post-partition refugee problem, did not want these erstwhile indentured workers to return. The government in Guyana also did not want them to leave.
But a handful, just about 250, was determined to exercise its right to go back to India and in 1955 they boarded the last ship returning Girmitiyas to their country of origin. To quote the author once more, “When the ship docked, Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru announced its arrival. Back in Guiana, people listening to All India Radio heard him say: “Thetar log agaye.”
Their country had not changed despite the long passage of history; unwanted when they left, insulted when they came back.
