HELLO JI!
A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR
Indian indentured labourers arrived in South Africa after an arduous journey from the subcontinent. Image credit: SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY ONLINE.
Indian Arrival Day is marked on various days in the month of May in the Caribbean, Fiji and Mauritius, commemorating the arrival of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent. Across Canada, South Asians celebrate May as South Asian Heritage Month.
What comes first to mind when we hear the words culture and heritage? Song and dance? Food and dress? The ways we worship and the ways we celebrate our special festivals?
But culture and heritage, while encompassing all of the above, pack a lot more. They include our thinking, our instinctive response to situations, to people.
Dr Vicki Bismilla has a priceless piece of family history, a document listing Amir Sing’s landing in South Africa in 1883. Amir Sing was her grandfather, one of many indentured labourers, or girmitiyas, shipped by the British from India to far-flung corners of their empire to work on plantations.
In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh details how villagers signed agreements which they pronounced girmit – and thus indentured labourers came to be called girmitiyas. They endured horrific suffering on the passage and toiled in fields for years before they were able to earn their freedom. They were completely cut off from families they left behind as many of them were illiterate and with few means of exchanging letters, there are so many accounts of last rites having been performed for them in the absence of any news for years and years. But they carried memories and preserved them.
I know a lady whose family is from Guyana. Originally from India, her grandparents had passed down old devotional songs to their children and grandchildren. Her daughters now sing those bhajans flawlessly – without speaking the language.
We’d carried a feature in Desi News back in 2001 in which Jiantee Jagessar chronicled a man’s efforts to trace his roots. Discovering extended family in a village in India, he was invited to share a meal in a hut. He recalled sitting cross-legged on the floor, and being served a simple meal on a brass thali – the bowls being placed in the exact same order his mother placed them in another country, in another age. The food tasted the same. His mother had just been doing what her mother had done before her.
Dr Bismilla shares her grandfather’s story in our cover feature this month. I tell her that I have my parents’ old books, and among them, a copy of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe that my father received as a prize at school! I have my mother’s favourite books by Daphne Du Maurier and Pearl S Buck, AJ Cronin, Nevil Shute and Somerset Maugham. The many medals my father received in a long and distinguished career in the Indian Navy. And old photographs.
This is the precious cargo we carry with us as we fan out across the world. And our children carry that inheritance forward in the diaspora.
Happy South Asian Heritage Month!
Happy Mother’s Day!
Eid Mubarak!
Shagorika Easwar