When the indentured landed finally in Fiji, Mauritius or elsewhere they had to start life from scratch, in basic and often hostile conditions. Unlike the slaves from Africa, they retained their culture, clung to their religion and kept their names.
Girmityas (the indentured) are an unfortunate chapter of India’s colonial past. The circumstance of their uprootedness, the pain of being an outsider in a strange culture and a strange land, has intrigued and fascinated many. But their life of misery has remained a largely untold story. Now, at last, veteran diplomat Bhaswati Mukherjee brings it all alive. Her book, “The Indentured and their Route: A Relentless Quest for Identity” is a deep dive into the struggles of a people, how they perpetuate themselves, and how each generation helps to liberate the coming one.
One of the first questions that engages the enquiring mind is whether the difference between a slave and the indentured is merely of terminology and a piece of paper called contract. The colonizers soothingly argued that the indentured had the security of a contract, disregarding the fact that the girmit could neither read nor write. So it did not make any difference for them whether they were called one or the other.
The real reason for the change in nomenclature was quite simply the rising sentiment against slavery in West. This resulted by 1811 in prohibition of transporting slaves. It was then that the contract form was introduced to side step that restriction. Over the next century more than 2.2 million indentured were moved from India to 26 countries. It was the largest such exodus in the world then.
There were other reasons as well for this large scale shift out of India to many of the mosquito infested swamp lands across the seas. The principal reasons for this forced move were two. While the Indian rulers used to compensate farmers during periods of famine, the British simply looked the other way. Second, the British increased the level of tribute they extracted from farmers from the earlier 10% to 50%. It was a question thereafter of their bare survival. It was this state of penury that led them to sign the contract.
Since the farmers were the ones who suffered, is it any surprise that most of the indentured were from Bengal, Bihar and Orissa—all three being agriculturally rich but after the Permanent Settlement imposed by the British many peasants became tenants. Around this time a system of sirdars came into being. They were the recruiting agents who trapped and temped the unlettered into signing the girmat.
When they put the stamp of their thumb on the dotted line they simultaneously banished themselves from the land they called theirs. Thus began their journey from Calcutta docks on ships that had earlier transported slaves from Africa. Disease infested these ships. If malnutrition didn’t pull them down, there were skin diseases and cholera lurking in every corner. The cholera infected were simply thrown overboard.
When they landed finally in Fiji, Mauritius or elsewhere they had to start life from scratch, in basic and often hostile conditions. It is remarkable that they managed to hold up as well as they did. Unlike the slaves from Africa, they retained their culture, clung to their religion and kept their names. Their descendants have been able to forge a mostly positive relationship with the country they were consigned to.
For Hindus among them, the story of Ram’s exile and eventual return became both an inspiration and a source of hope that one day they too might return home. The more conservative had other worries. They believed that by crossing the kalapani they had cut their links with Ganga; thus breaking the cycle of reincarnation and the possibility of their rebirth.
Besides loneliness and disease, they also had to contend with the hostility of the freed slaves and the original inhabitants of the place.
It is inconceivable that the accounts of their misery would not have reached India. But some Indian leaders were not moved. They were taken in by the propagandist claim of the British that indenture was the answer to poverty and unemployment. In fact even leaders of the nationalist movement like Mahadev Ranade and Surendranath Banerjee welcomed this initially.
It took nearly a hundred years, after the abolition of slavery, for the first serious move to ban the practice of indenture. In 1915, Viceroy Hardinge recommended to the government in London that while a substitute for indenture may be difficult “it is not the duty of the Government of India to provide coolies for the colonies”. A part of the reason for Hardinge’s plea was the rising nationalistic sentiment in India. Indeed, Gokhale had protested saying, “India is currently the only country supplying indentured labour…why should India be marked out for this degradation?”
Another reason, ironically, was the British need to supply Indian soldiers to fight in World War I. All through this period Mahatma Gandhi kept up the protests against the practice of indenture. He was given strength in this effort by other leaders like Malviya, and their combined efforts finally led to the abolition of indenture on 1 January 1920.
The end of indenture was a laudable step, but it did not act as a salve to the wounds of those who had already suffered. Bhaswati Mukherjee feels the pain of these historical wrongs, and she has rich credentials to analyse the issue with a clinical eye. She was India’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO in Paris and took up the issue of indentured at numerous UN fora arguing and succeeding in making their case heard.
But as she maintains in her book, the act of colonial deception must be investigated as a reminder that it must not be repeated. A truth commission needs to be established by the UN, and it alone can give the answers that the indentured seek. This is necessary to understand the whys and wherefores of those injustices because history must make us think of what happened. Such a truth commission is not meant to be a report card on what happened, but an enquiry into what should not happen. This is needed even more now than ever before because the world is in turmoil, and it is this state that leads to displacement and exile.
It is for this caution of history that the key which unlocks a door into the past fascinates. But even when we feel it has some special personal significance, we don’t always imagine what that is. Against this background, Mukherjee’s writing of this book may have begun as an intimidating prospect because there was so little by way of an archive. Her persistence has turned it into an engrossing read.
There is one area that deserved a little more detailing because it wasn’t just men who crossed the kalapani, there were women too. Sadly, there are only patchy accounts available, in published texts, of their lives. Perhaps their story, or for that matter, the bigger story of Indian women can be the subject of her next quest.
A former diplomat, Rajiv Dogra is an author and a commentator on foreign policy.