Living the Legacy of Indenture from Mauritius to Guyana from South Africa to Fiji

A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MARÍA DEL PILAR KALADEEN, SUMAYYA VALLY, AND GITAN DJELI
ARTWORK BY SHIVANJANI LAL

The Indian diaspora formed by the indenture system (and its French equivalent, “Engagisme”) is almost as vast as the British Empire itself. It was crucial for us to commission this epistolary dialog between three descendants of indentured laborers in Guyana (María Del Pilar Kaladeen), South Africa (Sumayya Vally), and Mauritius (Gitan Djeli) about diasporic commonality and the shared experience of this legacy. They are accompanied in their exchange by the work of Fijian-Australian artist Shivanjani Lal.

María ///

Between 1834 and 1917, under a system called “indenture,” Britain transported over one and a half million Indian men, women, and children from the Subcontinent to other parts of the British Empire. Conceived and implemented in Mauritius and the Caribbean as a response to the abolition of the use of enslaved labor, the system of Indian indenture later spread to Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa, and beyond. While indenture was intended to continue the cheap cultivation of sugar, the products that indentured laborers worked later included tea, rubber, cocoa, and coffee.

The abolition of indenture in 1917 arguably had as much to do with the fact that it had outlived its usefulness, due to the growth in the manufacture of beet sugar, as it was related to any humanitarian awakening on the part of the British or as is frequently claimed, pressure from the “Jewel in the Crown” over the treatment of Indians overseas.

By the time it was terminated, the system had left Indian diasporic communities in countries on five continents and had helped to facilitate the transport of Indians to French and Dutch colonies like Guadeloupe and Surinam. Despite its reach and cruelty, British children and young people are not taught about indenture in schools and the system is rarely acknowledged in museums and cultural institutions in the U.K. This is indubitably because its presence in 19th century history disturbs the preferred narrative of an Empire that abolished slavery, rather than one that attempted to forge a different system from its ashes.

Indentureship was not slavery; it was however defined by coercion, brutality and carcerality. The level of connivance and deception involved in the process of recruitment means it should be referred to as a form of unfree labor.

In recent years, the descendants of the system of indenture have been able to find fruitful and creative communion with each other across the Indian indentured labor diaspora. In 2018, the first anthology of writing by descendants of indenture from across the former British Empire was published and, in 2022, an exhibition in New York united diasporic artists from across the Caribbean.

Dear Sumayya,

In my work I use this phrase, “indentured labor diaspora,” although I don’t think it adequately represents the way that it can sometimes feel as though we are all family to each other.

In the noughties, in the middle of my PhD, I traveled to Mauritius. A gentleman came to our room when we complained the shower wasn’t working. He fixed the shower and invited us to his village to meet his mum and the panchayat. He had spied my books on the way into our room: “From Guyana,” he had said, “then we’re the same people.” He was right. Not in the way that scholars talk about the fact that most of the recruits came from Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, and how this makes us the same; but correct in the sense that all of us grew out of a mishmash of Indian communities and landed in places where we met others from elsewhere. In my family, there are stories from Nepal, Madras, and Bihar. The way that we came together like this—in Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji and Malaysia—is what makes us “the same people.”

The year that you were born, I was fifteen. It was the first time that my father spoke about his family’s history, and I think it was because he felt so distant from this particular story. It wasn’t a story from our indentured past, and it concerned the only one of his great-grandparents who wasn’t an indentured laborer.

I recall it now because it seems to me that we meet as the children of ancestors who were conveyed across continents in an imperial board game of infinite pieces; I want to show you the pieces I have assembled, the pieces on my part of the board.

That year I had disappeared into myself, and I believe he was trying to bring me back, feeding me a fragment of the past to nourish me. I would not receive another for almost a decade when in university, my father’s sisters told me the story of their paternal grandmother Butchia, and the woman, Manetoria, who brought her from Benares to Calcutta, and then across an ocean to Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1878.

The story concerned his mother’s grandfather Daoud, a man who had come to British Guiana via a daring escape from the colonial prison in French Guiana. He had swum a great distance, traversed rainforest and experienced a treacherous voyage by sea. My father prefaced his story by telling me that nobody knew if it was true or not, but that it was universally acknowledged that his mother’s grandfather was Muslim and of North African origin. He had remained part of a distinct group in British Guiana, who lived within proximity of each other and behaved as though their ties were familial.

Over a decade later, in the archives, I found letters from the colonial office in Britain asking French authorities to take responsibility for the number of abandoned boats in Trinidad and British Guiana, left there either by escaping prisoners or those who had served their terms and refused to remain in French Guiana, a condition of their release.

That same year I found, in the colonial diary of a magistrate, more evidence of the veracity of this family story. A community had formed and settled in British Guiana, and the story that my father heard in childhood, that his great-grandfather was an escapee from the colonial prison system in French Guiana, almost certainly had a seed of truth.

I want you to know that in spite of knowing only this one story about my father’s family, I both knew and didn’t know that I was Indian, and that I both understood and didn’t understand that my father was also from the Caribbean. In the first form of secondary school, we had a supply teacher called Mr Chatterjee. He had asked my father’s name, and when I told him my father’s real name and not the name that he used for English people, he nodded confidently; finally sure of what he had suspected all along.
There are things that we will never locate in official archives. I know that you know this, because I watched you in a video, talking about the Mangrove restaurant and the other Windrush places that were part of Indian-Caribbean life here too.

I want to tell you about London in the year that you were born because I remember it so well and because I want you to see how it was in the early 1990s, with Kensington Market all labyrinthine and funky and everything so suddenly hopeful. One day I had been in Kensington Gardens with Beth and Laura, and Laura had screamed that a man was “ice-skating” down the road, and we laughed and called her a fucking idiot, and then we both had to eat shit the next month when we learned about rollerblades.

It felt like Soul II Soul had made us cool again and that maybe the white people would leave the word “Paki” in the last decade. Sarita Choudhury was in a fashion spread in Sky magazine and I was a little bit in love with her. It felt like something incredible was about to start. But like all great decades, it just didn’t follow through in the end, and we went from the explosion of Unfinished Sympathy to the lament of Bittersweet Symphony.

All last summer I walked in and out of your meeting place in Kensington Gardens without knowing you’d designed it. I would enter a bit sheepishly and leave ashamed—thinking it couldn’t be right to be somewhere so companionable alone. I meet you here instead in this story of my father’s family and my siblings.

I want to tell you what was going through my mind last summer as I drifted through the park and past your meeting place, waiting for my little boy to finish his activity camp. That Van Gogh exhibition that goes everywhere had arrived in the park. My husband had come with us once on our daily trot across West London. He had seen the sign and questioned the fact that it was advertised as “a multi-sensory experience”: “If we go in, can we taste Van Gogh?”, he’d asked, and we’d laughed about it for the rest of the summer.

I was thinking about my brother who had died during the pandemic and how that park was where we had played as children and how later it became somewhere that we snuck into at night. I remembered New Year’s Eve January ‘92, when he had decided to swim across the Serpentine believing that the shock would cure his addiction and how he had ended up in hospital with hypothermia instead. I was thinking that I had four brothers and now I only have two and that nobody will ever know me like that one did, the one that had died in the pandemic, whose body they advised us not to view.

I want to finish my story about Manetoria and Butchia because it’s the only real ending I have. Both women re-indentured after completing their first term and accepted land in lieu of a return voyage home, I know this because Butchia divided the land up among her children and my dad was born on a patch of it in Albouystown. Butchia, who was a little girl when she went to British Guiana, married a man called “Kalidin” and had eleven children. One of these children, a son named Beharry, married the granddaughter of this escaped prisoner Daoud. This granddaughter’s name was Ameena, and Ameena and Beharry were my grandparents.
Sometimes in my office I stand in front of my desk and open my arms, like a bird about to fly. I breathe in and out and let go. I am summoning the energy of all these men and women who lived before me and peopled my father’s family line, the ones that lived in India, the man Daoud of unknown origin. I am asking them to hold me up so that I can salvage something from the past and make up for the other broken lives. As though the past was something real that could be conjured, and I was a magician.

María

Sumayya ///

Dear Gitan,

Make a cone with a third of the length of the filo strip
Fill with filling
Fold bottom left to the top middle, press the air out of the filling
Fold top right to top left, again press the air out of the filling
Seal the last fold with flour and water paste
Fold the final edge far left to right and squeeze to seal

I have memories of both my grandmothers folding samoosas at my mother’s kitchen table. Though these traditions in my family have long been replaced with more ‘efficient,’ less communal, even gourmet varieties; I clearly remember standing over my grandmother’s table—forty days before Ramadaan—the shortest girl in a production line of samoosa-filing cousins.

I don’t know a lot about why my paternal great-grandfather arrived in South Africa in 1901, or why my maternal grandfather arrived in 1937—alone on a ship at the age of six. My parents looked perplexed when I first asked them. I am of the first generation at liberty to ask so many questions.

Sometimes, I think about this long elastic strip of filo—connected like the band of the Indian Ocean, and I think about both of them coming to South Africa—folding their lives edge to edge on the map, just like the points and edges of the pastry in their hands.

I think about what it must’ve been like to leave Gujarat in 1937—as Hindu Nationalism was on the rise; the same year that Winnie Mandela was born in South Africa, and a time in which several laws further restricted the mobility of non-whites in South Africa.

To be hybrid is a position of power. The ability to absorb, intuit and resonate across geography and cultural conditions is itself a language of imagination and empathy.
Our hybrid histories are held in recipes, songs and traditions—between myth, fact, skinner (rumor or gossip in Afrikaans).
These whispers are charged with different futures—waiting latent to be manifested into form.
My own geography and history is left to be imagined from these fragments. History was not passed down in words or stories but in being—in the idioms we said from elsewhere; in the superstitions made for other weathers.
In my grandfather’s politics and distaste for his birth country’s nationalism.
In what we wore and how we learned to eat with our hands and set a dastarkhan for guests.
In the fragrant grammar of the specific vocabulary of South African Gujarati my maternal grandmother spoke.
In the Afrikaans I learned to speak to my paternal grandmother.
In the ability to “speak back” to patent languages both of these dialects have.
In the way my own Englishes do that too.
In South African bunny-chows (a hollowed-out half-loaf of bread filled with curry) with entirely ambiguous origins—is said to have originated as a way for non-whites to transport and consume food while walking as they were not allowed sharp utensils or to linger in public space.
In the technique that my other “grandmother” Yasmeen Lari used to construct the chullah stoves she made—where the reading of suppleness, and the mixing and preparation of clay draws on women’s deftness in kneading chapati dough.

Passing down a recipe is writing love letters to the future.

Sumayya

“Sometimes in my office I stand in front of my desk and open my arms, like a bird about to fly. I breathe in and out and let go. I am summoning the energy of all these men and women who lived before me and peopled my father’s family line, the ones that lived in India, the man Daoud of unknown origin. I am asking them to hold me up so that I can salvage something from the past and make up for the other broken lives. As though the past was something real that could be conjured, and I was a magician.”

Gitan ///

María and Sumayya,

This exchange of letters across oceanic diasporas feels magical, indeed. There is intimacy, kindness, attention, anticipation…

My journey to understanding indenture really starts with you María, your scholarship, your generosity, your dedication to community. Your writing and reflection about your own journey and the care you put into bringing scholars and dreamers together continue to inspire me.

So thank you.

I must also tell you that the beautiful anthology you conceived in 2018 with two other editors, was also the work of a magician. It conjured the poet in me. When I went to the archive to write about my family story, the information was so fragmented that only words emerged from the page. And they poured down in scattered lines. Today, also like magic, but with long sprinkles of inspiration and craft, I have a collection of poems ready for publication next year. It is about this ocean journey that connects us to each other, but also to the diaspora of the last five hundred years of colonization.

Last week, before I wrote this letter, I wondered who to dedicate the pieces to—family, loved ones or the ancestors. And then, I remembered a conversation with two young women of the Mauritian diaspora in France, Sabrina and Amanda (see their newsletter Island Pieces), who told me that they felt their history was stolen from them. This was in relation to the nationalist, apologist, and romanticized histories imparted to them.

To me
To us
By our family silences
By postcolonial state narratives
By a plantation mentality that keeps us caged
in ignorance

When you say, María, that Indenture is not taught in schools or discussed in the media, or Sumayya, when you write that you do not know much about your parents’ journey of migration, it seemed apt to me

To write
On the second page of the manuscript
To the generation of stolen histories
At the same time, as you rightly say Sumayya, history is passed down in so many ways, in food, in songs, in tongues, in new tongues or very often in the loss of tongue, in the ceremonies of care, even in the silences necessary to reinvent lives in new places, to not pass trauma to the younger ones in the hope that they might have lighter futures. We are indeed, at least the three of us, the first adult generation born after independence and the end of colonial apartheid. To be curious and accountable and to work towards solidarities and repair seems natural to me, to us.

Thank you Sumayya for reminding me of the necessity of ritual and repetition behind the folding of those triangles of delight. I will remember your words when the soul drenching urge for samousas calls (notice the infiltration of the colonial French “ou” here). There is so much comfort in the meals our mothers, aunts and grandmothers made and make for us, and we share this across the diaspora—Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Ocean. I have to mention the work of Mary Rokonadravu, who teaches us so much about the migration of Indians in the Pacific (Fiji). She also has a visceral remembrance of her mother’s keer, but also of the love, responsibility and shame that comes with the rituals passed down through food. It actually made me think of the labor of care expected on women across continents today, of women who leave their own families to perform care work elsewhere for an insignificant wage under unsafe conditions, of women in nuclear families solely responsible for house work, care work, self-care, and intellectual work.

I hope I do not come across as harsh or dismissive of the dedication that goes into the responsibility of sustaining life. But I’ve seen, and still see, women in the diaspora being denied a career after marriage and isolated for looking after their family. I’ve witnessed women in my community making dalpouris, the most treasured delicacy in Mauritius, under circumstances of marital violence that I do not wish to describe here. I’ve seen the hierarchy of class, caste, and gender in India when it relates to the unrecognized work of preparing food. I was also surrounded by women who refused the subjugation, the seclusion to the private sphere, the violence of the public space on those who dared use it, the silence around their health from painful menstruation to menopausal fatigue.

I am reflective of the joy that these recipes provide us that I so often feel guilty for not putting enough time and love into. Because I believe that we sometimes seal in a lot of denial, lies to oneself, religious taboos, a semblant d’être in the folds of our recipes, in our parents’ dreams for us, in refusing to acknowledge that we do harm by not knowing or not wanting to know. Our ancestors all moved and were moved to lands islands continents during and because of European colonization, but they did not travel with the same caste, social, educational, and economic background and relation to Empire. Our families do not talk about this. The older I get, sadly the further away I am driven from my aging mother. I know it should be the other way around. The more I write to ask questions, the more she wraps herself in a scarf of silence. It is easier not to know. Not to wonder. Not to ask. Not to ask the difficult questions. It is easier to be romantic, blame others. To escape it all. I know it is her way of dealing with a past of swimming with only her instincts as arms.

I also believe that some wounds do not scar fully. What might look like a ‘lighter’ present for us is sometimes amplified by such heaviness, like sea water that seeps through one’s fingers and leaves a multitude of coral and shell fragments of history and geography in one’s palm. Like diving in the calm lagoon and knowing that it contains the molecules of those who did not make it across the seas. Where I find light/ness is in the imagination of writers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Christina Sharpe that allows us to read into the actual and future possibilities, to write the silences in the archives into incarnations or incantations of what life can be. Like the symbiosis of an ori-geo-cosmos-tory of life, knowing that we were all conceived mammals, that at four weeks in the womb we had gill arches in our throat, and although they do not develop into functioning ones for ocean breathing, we found life in our mothers’ waters for nine months.

I wonder if there is a possibility of imagining recipes for our younger sisters, and add in a dash of curiosity, a bit of context, a sprinkle of poetry, a handful of liberation and joy, a jugful of oceanness, mixed with the tired hands, the continuous work of sharing knowledges. I would like to stay with this thought.

I must conclude that I was eager to write back in short poems, but they are refusing me this week. Perhaps it is the heatwave in the U.K. at the moment, perhaps I am indulging myself in the rhythm of this poetic letter writing prose. I would like, though, to share these two pieces from the collection with you. If there is one that reflects the double diaspora you talk about María, and which resonated with me as well, it is this one.

her story

i swipe and step out of the station
floor patterned with butts and flat chewing gum
i imagine her steps cautious to the ymca
a box erect modernist minimalist and functional
an architecture of compromise rooms without balconies
doors closing on windows opened at sixty-degree angle
hand washed clothes lined on rusty heaters

i scrolled in the opposite direction
down the alley by the fish and chips shop
two crystal display windows beam my reflection
of a fatigue she carried from edinburgh a leather suitcase
crimson red elephant bell pants her slimness
a white linen blouse hand embroidered flowers on its collar
hidden under a coat relieved of northernly winters

i see her anonymous in the city an uncle silenced her
exuberance aunts murmured sisters bitched a father
before my days left her to fend for herself
her mother twenty years underground from chronic birth
signs from the coastal scent her grave in goodlands
to the pity of an old couple cold shower punishment
and the toll of birthing a poet

i wimble across dons on mothers day
between sticks n sushi and polka theatre
whispers of her unfreedom brushing against my unrest
her contagious village people pouncing in my head
you are in a new town theres no need to be unhappy
its fun to stay at the ymca deforming conceived images
while i smother her unisland life

i scribble my thoughts in lines of prose
and struggle in strange gold and silver seasons
the grass blazing yellow my feet itching from heat
while mountainous forest moist skypes in
her inland voice sienna coloured eyes
sun skin against silver short hair
the yellow earrings i bought her in bath when
on holiday she was content and serene

And this new poem that I cannot seem to stop editing. There are pieces like these that never feel finished, like this conversation with you, Maria and Sumayya, that I hope will continue beyond.

before my flight

how do we write to repair and commune
with the splinters i ask sh.e rises and paces
in the mangroves to point preach rebel is
called upon how to gather in the present and
the possibility voiced in canopy skycries
breezing in and from southern coastal
lands and waters and each other

iel listens

how to walk with and hold one another
we wander across the deck on the sea
to intimately world life history ancestry
weave them in the water struggle under
out feet fresh mud swirling the ocean
beds across sound waves of mountain range
spawning with the fizzle of birds

iel crosses h.er arms

how do we practice self full love with
oneself with others we pause sit in the
wind listen to the screams of dawn
while light before us rotates to the
descent of a moon behind peaks faded
by nebulous haze we sit in parallel
thoughts we hear skies take over clouds

With much love and more magic,

Gitan Djeli