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5. The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
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65 5 The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies RAJESH RAI AND ANDREA MARION PINKNEY INTRODUCTION NO OTHER FEATURE of Indian emigration has attracted greater scholarly attention than the experience of indenture. Assessments of its impact have varied from early accounts that credited the experience of indenture with improving the socioeconomic position of Indian peasants and broadening their perspectives to others, ideologically aligned with the abolitionist movement that roundly condemned indenture for its kinship to slavery. In his historical fiction, Amitav Ghosh has also repeatedly considered the themes of indenture, migration, and the transformation of self and, thereby, given voice to the experience of “coolies,” a generic term used to refer to indentured laborers from South, Southeast, and East Asia. In Sea of Poppies, his most current work to date, Ghosh trains his attention on North Indian indentured laborers, the girmitiyas, and chronicles their experiences of indenture as the phenomenon began to crest in the late 1830s. Here, we begin by examining Ghosh’s narrative depiction of women’s experience in Sea of Poppies; and then we turn to Ghosh’s portrayal of the girmitiyas ’ efforts to maintain a sense of self while simultaneously negotiating significant social and cultural transformations in the context of overseas emigration . In both instances, we find that Ghosh gives a unique perspective on the experiences of these little represented, poorly understood yet vitally important participants in the early Indian diaspora. 66 RAJESH RAI AND ANDREA MARION PINKEY BACKGROUND Prior to the advent of indentured emigration, the movement of Indians beyond the subcontinent was limited to those who traveled for pilgrimage, such as the Haj (Pearson 40–41), and itinerant traders who operated either on the sea-borne trading networks of the Indian Ocean (McPherson 32–36) or the land-based caravan routes that connected the subcontinent to commercial posts in Iran, Central Asia, and Russia (Levi 36–39). While the broad cultural impact of these pilgrims’ and traders’ experiences was great in the Indian context, the actual number of people making such extra-subcontinental journeys was numerically insignificant. Only in the mid-nineteenth century can we identify a monumental shift in the extent and patterns of the global emigration of Indians that led to the establishment of diasporic Indian communities throughout the (former) British colonies. Even more significantly, this movement marked a radical attitudinal change, particularly among Hindus who, prior to this shift, were disinclined to travel by sea due to a widely prevalent religious taboo. In 1833, slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire—an act that effectively wiped out the supply of cheap labor for the sugar plantations (Lal 46). Moreover, profits from the fantastically lucrative opium trade came under threat due to changing Chinese policies. In this newly uncertain economic reality, both factors combined to make the engagement and transportation of indentured laborers suddenly profitable. Accordingly, British officials engaged in the mass recruitment of Indian laborers; labor recruitment was also practiced by the French and the Dutch but on a much smaller scale. Those recruited signed an indenture “agreement”—vernacularized in North Indian languages as girmit—and were thereafter known as “girmitiyas ” (Mishra 122). The girmitiyas were transported to British colonies as far-flung as Mauritius and Fiji to East Africa and the Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica). The girmitiyas’ journey was qualitatively different from that of the past journeying patterns of pilgrims, merchants, and traders for at least three important reasons. First of all, for the vast majority, this movement was a terminal departure characterized by an absolute break from the homeland that made the experience exilic rather than transient (Mishra 120). Second, most girmitiyas were peasants, girded firmly to the soil on which they labored, and were fiercely resistant to migration due to concerns of the social and religious repercussions of such actions. Furthermore, as we will discuss further on, members of many Hindu communities observed a religious taboo against crossing the ocean which had historically curtailed travel beyond the subcontinent. Nevertheless, in spite of many such cultural factors that set Indian peasants in opposition to indentured emigration, when [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:34 GMT) The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Gosh’s Sea of Poppies 67 the practice was finally abolished in 1920 (Chanderbali 40), the total number of girmitiyas “exported” to overseas colonies numbered some one and a half million people (Lal 46, table 3.1). Ghosh’s focus on the girmitiyas in Sea of Poppies provides new...