Girmitiyas- The Making of Their Memory- Keepers from The Indian Indentured Diaspora

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Brij V. Lal is Professor Emeritus at The Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. He has written extensively on the history and politics of his native Fiji and on the history and culture of the girmitiya diaspora. His girmitiya Aja (paternal grandfather) was from Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh and his Nana (maternal grandfather) from Chhattisgarh in central India. His latest publications include works of creative non-fiction, Road from Mr Tulsi's Store (2019) and Levelling Wind: Remembering Fiji (2019).

E ARLY IN HIS excursions among the peoples converted to Islam, Naipaul visits a sacred spot in West Sumatra: 'a big dip in the volcanic land with a hot spring... where the Minangkabau people were said to have come out of the earth. This visit induces the thought that the island where he grew up in the Caribbean had no place which Naipaul could identify with in a similar fashion: the aboriginal people who knew about the scared places which had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were-in the plantation colony-people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.

The essays in this volume are as deeply personal as they are scholarly. Rooted in familial and societal pasts, these are no laments to a lost land and sacred places their forebears forsook by 'contracting to labour in an unknown country. As in the case of apartheid South Africa, poignant recollections of lack, privation and racial discrimination inflect these engage writings with a charge that is novel as it is revelatory.

'We carry our history and heritage with us and it deeply shapes our professional lives and identities as adults', writes Goolam Vahed, co-author of Many Lives: 150 Years of Being Indian in South Africa; Muslim Portraits: The Anti Apartheid Struggle and The South African Gandhi: Stretcher Bearer of Empire. Contra the advice of history dons in ancient and red-brick universities, he avers: 'I feel privileged to have worked on areas that have personal meaning to me. This is equally the case with Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie's sardonic commentary on the 'Whites Only' Archival repositories (and toilets) of Pietermaritzburg, which she mines and undermines to present portraits of Indians of all sorts-Gujarati traders as well as 'bare chested bone thin' indentured labourers, with their identification numbers dangling from their necks-girmitiyas all, the eponymous characters of this book.

T HIS VOLUME IS the result of conversations I had with a couple of colleagues who were themselves engaged in various degrees of introspection about their scholarly roots and routes and about the study of the girmitiya diaspora more generally. It soon became evident that the desire to reflect autobiographically on our journeys and transformations was widespread among us. This did not come as a complete surprise to me as the discipline of history itself is beginning to recognize the value of the autobiographical reflection of historians about the influences which have shaped them and influenced their approach to their craft. This volume is a record of our journeys, the second generation of historians from the girmitiya diaspora, as well as a reminder of the tentative beginnings of our historiography. I record my appreciation to all the contributors for their essays as well as their enthusiastic support for this project. I would like to express my particular thanks to Goolam Vahed for his early and continuing support for the idea of this volume, and to Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie for reading the whole manuscript with care and offering astute advice on it. Shahid Amin has been a friend of the girmitiya diaspora in general and of this project in particular. We collectively dedicate this book to our parents and teachers who made our journeys possible in the first place, and to our partners who have enriched them with their love and support.

While thus from theme to theme, the Historian passed The words he uttered and the scene that lay before our eyes Awakened in my mind void remembrance of those long past-hours Deposited upon that silent shore of memory, images and precious thoughts That shall not die and cannot be destroyed.

IRMITIVAS THEY WERE called, men and women who were G taken under an Agreement (girmit) to the sugar colonies across the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Agreement specified the details of their contractual obligations, conditions of work, remuneration for labour, and provision for a return journey home. They were called 'Kontrakis' in some places, 'indentured in others, or, more generically, simply 'coolies'. But whatever they were called, they were all deemed to be children of the lesser gods, flotsam and jetsam of humanity, 'harlots of empire, and people of 'bad stock in the eyes of officialdom, which then salved the conscience of those who oppressed them. They had left their homes in the impoverished Indo-Gangetic plains of north India and from the migration-prone regions of the south, all doing so, it was assumed, more in desperation than by design, enticed into emigrating by prospects of golden fortunes awaiting them in distant, unheard of places with alluring names: Demerara (British Guiana), Chini Tapu (Trinidad), Miritch Dwip (Mauritius), Sriram Desh (Suriname), Ramnik Dwip (Fiji), and Natal.

More than one million left India between 1834, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire, and 1917, when indentured emigration was finally abolished. The majority never returned, attracted by hopes of freedom and opportunity in their new homes, because of the memory of a long and traumatic sea voyage, or the genuine fear of an uncertain reception back home after having crossed the dreaded Kala Pani.