Girmitiyas: The Making of their Memory-keepers from Indian Indentured Diaspora

They are scattered around the globe now, descendants of girmitiyas, indentured labourers, and other subaltern groups of Indians. The journey of their forebears, from India to the tropical sugar colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was fraught, but they emerged from the debris of subalternity to lay the foundations of many a colony, from South Africa to Suriname and many places in-between. For the most part, however, they have been ignored by history books as a people without agency or humanity, unworthy of consideration. This picture has been changing in recent decades largely as the result of scholars such as those represented in this volume. In the essays in this volume, scholars from the Indian subaltern diaspora write about their improbable journeys and serendipitous transformations in the face of great odds, of the influences that shaped their thinking and approach to the study of the past of their forebears. This is scholarship up close and personal, not desiccated a nd dry. Fascinating, often moving stories in themselves, the essays collectively provide indispensable insights into the emergence of a field of history which their intervention has rescued from certain obscurity. In the process, both the writers and their forebears are ennobled.