Calcutta Docks, Indentured Labour Migration and the Girmitya Experience: Stories from British Guyana (Part 1)

This article deals with the dislocations in the agrarian world of northern and eastern India in the nineteenth century. The causes clearly emanated from the exploitative nature of the colonial revenue system. The rigid revenue structure along with the initiatives towards ‘modernisation’, mainly through the expansion of railway networks, contributed to rising rural poverty and despair. A substantial section of the propertied peasants thereby lost their earlier social status and swelled the ranks of the rural proletariat in this region. Here the Calcutta Docks are taken as the entry point of a larger discussion, since Calcutta was the principal port of transit abroad for the rural population of eastern and northern India. Despite the claimed official surveillance over this migration, it remained replete with fraud, deceit and repression. The men and women, usually young and middle-aged, who migrated under indenture, too often used the term girmit, which was later used by them to showcase their distinct cultural identity as ‘girmityas’. The ‘girmitya’ narratives, largely based on memory, reconstruct a past, hardly to be traced in government documents. Using these sources with British Guyana and Fiji as case studies, an effort is made to reconstruct girmitya histories that remain inseparable parts of our own national narrative.