Introduction

Summary

This book concerns what has been called the ‘first wave’ of Indians who travelled overseas to work on colonial plantations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a migration facilitated and supervised by the British colonial government of India under what became the indentured labour scheme. Under this scheme, workers would sign a contract, popularly known as a girmit, or agreement, which bound them to work for a single employer at a fixed wage for a fixed period of three–five years. Indentured migrants identified themselves with specific terms such as angaze in Mauritius, kontraki in Suriname and girmitiya in Fiji. However, the British commonly called them ‘coolies’ – a term already familiar to them from its usage in South India and China.

The indenture system was introduced to overcome the crisis that emerged from the banning of slavery in the British Empire by the British Parliament in 1833. The system attracted huge criticism and opposition from the very beginning; however, it continued until 1917 when it was finally abolished, under pressure from Indian nationalists and the greater importance of moving troops and supplies during the global conflict of World War I. Another reason was the crisis in the sugar industry as the production of sugar beet undermined the demand for plantation sugar cane in global markets.

This volume explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those who did not return after expiration of their contract, but chose to stay in their respective host countries. These communities of South Asians abroad struggled to adapt to their new situations, standardizing the languages spoken and preserving some cultural and folk traditions, whilst discarding others (notably many of the distinctions of caste) – in short, forging for themselves entirely new identities as ‘diasporic Indians’.

Many books and essays concerning the history of Indian indentured migration in the colonial period begin with numbers. They attempt, with overused tropes, to generalize in a few lines the experience of labour migration across multiple destinations throughout the globe and a period of more than a century. However, the numbers themselves are uncertain. Many more millions of South Asians migrated without contracts of indenture as ‘free migrants’, otherwise known as ‘passenger Indians’. And many re-indentured, or re-migrated from colony to colony, without ever returning home (what Reshaad Durgahee has termed ‘subaltern careering’) – thus evading enumeration in official statistics.