Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2024
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The journal is a bi-annual peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Pluto Journals in partnership with the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and Its Legacies (ameenagafoorinstitute.org). The journal is a unique and unprecedented academic space where the study of indentureship, as a distinct form of unfree labour, can be analysed in all its forms. No such journal currently exists anywhere in the world, despite the critical importance of the system of indenture to world history.
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Contents
List of contributors vi
Introduction
1. Amar Wahab 1
Introduction
Articles
2. Brij Lal 5
A girmitiya’s grandson
3. Brinsley Samaroo 19
Girmitya antecedents
4. Patricia Mohammed 29
The generous genius of Brinsley Samaroo
5. Margaret Mishra 47
Unveiling stereotypes about Fiji’s girmitiya women
6. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein 61
The botanical afterlife of indenture: Mehndi as imaginative visual archive
Public Talk
7. Bridget Brereton 94
Brinsley Samaroo, historian (1940–2023)
Visual Tribute
8. Professor Brij Lal 100
A visual tribute
9. Professor Brinsley Samaroo 108
A visual tribute
Interview
10. Nazrina Rodjan and Amar Wahab 112
Stories of reclamation, speculation and joy: An interview with Dutch-Surinamese Artist, Nazrina Rodjan
11. Keshav Maharaj, David Dabydeen and Ben Jacob 127
‘All you have to do is be your freest self on the field’: In conversation with Keshav Maharaj
Exhibition Review
12. Kavyta Raghunandan 148
Indo + Caribbean: The Creation of a Culture – An exhibition review of the great experiment of Indian indenture
Book Reviews
13. Purba Hossain 153
Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak (eds.). 2022. Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspective (London: Routledge), 242 pp.
14. Goolam Vahed 159
Jonathan Connolly. 2024. Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 272 pp.
15. Michael Mitchell 163
Jennifer Rahim. 2023. Goodbye Bay (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press), 276pp.
16. Michael Mitchell 170
Ryhaan Shah. 2013. Weaving Water (London: Cutting Edge Press), 320 pp.
Poems
17. Devarakshanam [Betty] Govinden 173
Marigolds
18. Ashley Anthony 176
‘Hair’, ‘Kanaima’, and ‘The remainder’
Submission guidelines 181
Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
EDITORS
Amar Wahab, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, David Dabydeen
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Eve Kanram, Lynne Macedo
AMEENA GAFOOR INSTITUTE ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD
Grace Aneiza Ali (New York University)
Gaiutra Bahadur (Rutgers University)
Eddie Bruce-Jones (Birbeck College, London University)
Ajay Chhabra (Actor and Artistic Director)
Richard Fung (OCAD University)
Rajrani Gobin (Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius)
Andil Gosine (York University Toronto)
Betty Govinden (Alumna, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal)
Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington)
Aliyah Khan (University of Michigan )
Brij Lal (Professor Emeritus, The Australian National University)
Shivanjani Lal (Artist)
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Ryerson University)
Kathleen López (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
Paloma Martin (University of Guyana)
Heidi Safia Mirza (Professor Emeritus UCL, Institute of Education, University of London)
Judith Misrahi-Barak (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
Michael Mitchell (University of Warwick and University of Paderborn)
Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University)
Patricia Mohammed (Professor Emerita University of the West Indies)
Satendra Nandan (Professor Emeritus University of Canberra)
Ken Ramchand (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway University of London)
Lomarsh Roopnarine (Jackson State University)
Brinsley Samaroo (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies)
Verene Shepherd (Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies)
Nur Sobers-Khan (British Library)
Janet Steel (Commonwealth International)
Stephanos Stephanides (Professor Emeritus, University of Cyprus)
Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto)
Mark Tumbridge (University of Guyana)
Athol Williams (University of Cape Town)
Lisa Yun (State University of New York)
Contributors
Ashley Anthony graduated from Yale University in 2023 and currently works as an engineer. Although her most recent degree was in engineering, she also holds an undergraduate degree, in the History of Science and Medicine. Her senior thesis for this degree focused on how British medicine was used as an agent of colonialism during indentureship in the Caribbean. These poems, while not a historical account of the legacies of indentureship, were penned as she was writing that thesis, and serve as a means of exploration of the deeply personal and enduring effects of colonialism on descendants of indentured Indians today.
Bridget Brereton is Emerita Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad & Tobago. She is the author of several books on the history of the Caribbean and of Trinidad, including standard works such as Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900 and A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. She is the editor or co-editor of several more (including Volume V of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean), and the author of many journal articles, book chapters, book reviews and newspaper columns. She is a past President of the Association of Caribbean Historians. She has served as Head of the Department of History, Deputy Principal and Interim Principal of the St Augustine Campus, and is a past Chair of the Board of NALIS.
David Dabydeen is a Guyanese novelist, poet and academic. He was Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and Guyana’s Ambassador to China from 2010 to 2015. David also served at the University of Warwick from 1984 to 2017 as Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and Professor of Postcolonial Literature. Among his literary publications are Coolie Odyssey (Hansib, 1988), The Intended (Secker and Warburg, 1991) and The Counting House (Jonathan Cape, 1996). He co-edited with Brinsley Samaroo, India in the Caribbean (Hansib, 1988) and Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean (Macmillan, 1996). David has also produced an edition for Macmillan of John Edward Jenkins’ Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877), the first novel on Indo-Guianese life.
Devarakshanam [Betty] Govinden is Honorary Research Associate in the School of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is author of the award-winning book, Sister Outsiders – Representations of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (Unisa Press, Pretoria/Brill/Leiden, 2008). Her other books include A Time of Memory – Reflections on Recent South African Writing (Solo Collective, Durban, 2008); and Words on Water – Reflections on Recent Writings (Lap Publishing, Germany, 2010). Among her co-edited books are 1913 Satyagraha, and the Legacy of Passive Resistance [with Kalpana Hiralal] (Manohar: New Delhi, 2013); and Herstories – Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa [With Isabel Phiri and Sarojini Nadar. Publication of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians] (Cluster Publications: Pietermaritzburg, 2002). Betty has written poems on indenture and on South African Struggle Activists.
Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus. Her publications include, ‘No Pure Place for Resistance: Reflections on Being Ms. Mastana Bahar 2000’, ‘Modern Negotiations: Indo-Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender Differential Creolization’, ‘Democracy, Gender and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad’, ‘A Letter to My Great-Grandmother’, ‘Post-Indentureship Caribbean Feminist Thought, Transoceanic Feminisms, and the Convergence of Asymmetries’ (2020), and the co-edited collections, Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. She also writes about Indo-Caribbean feminisms in her newspaper column, ‘Diary of a Mothering Worker’.
Purba Hossain holds a PhD in History from the University of Leeds and is G.K. Roth Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. In 2023, she co-edited Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks, and Empire Building for Bloomsbury. Her monograph Voices from Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) explores how Calcuttans shaped global indenture debates and life in plantations.
Ben Jacob is a writer and historian based in London. His academic work focuses on the relationship between histories of colonialism, labour and the environment. He studied History and English at Oxford University, before pursuing an MPhil in Cambridge University’s World History programme. His current research explores the relationship between plantation ecologies, global capitalism and labour migration in the lives of nineteenth-century indentured workers in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. He is an Academic Adviser on Emerging Research at the Ameena Gafoor Institute for Indentureship Studies, and his work has appeared in Wisden, Tribune and the Byline Times.
Brij Vilash Lal was Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland. He taught History at the ANU, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the University of the South Pacific and the University of Papua New Guinea. He was a Life Member of Clare Gall, University of Cambridge. He was the author of more than twenty books and editor of another twenty on the history and culture of the Indian diaspora and on the history and politics of Fiji. Among his many publications are Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey Through Indenture in Fiji (ANU Press, 2013), Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (University of Hawaii Press, 1994) and The Encyclopaedia of the Indian Diaspora (Editions Didier Millet, 2007). He died on 25 December 2021.
Keshav Maharaj is a professional cricketer for South Africa’s national team. A prolific wicket-taker across the sport’s major formats, he is South Africa’s most successful spin-bowler since the nation’s readmission to international sport in 1991. Keshav is also the first descendant of an indentured labourer – and only the third Indian South African – to play Test cricket for South Africa.
Margaret Mishra is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of the South Pacific. Her recent articles aim to recover minor historical fragments relating to women and men in Fiji during the period of indenture and colonialism. They include: ‘The Gallows of Girmit 1886–1919’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2023; ‘The Curious Case of Montowinie (Emigration Pass 887½)’, The Journal of Pacific History, 2020; and ‘Undoing the “Madwoman”: A Minor History of Uselessness, Dementia and Indenture in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 2018. Margaret is passionate about research in the archives and hopes to publish a book on indentured women in Fiji in the near future.
Michael Mitchell is Honorary Visiting Professor at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, and Lecturer in English at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He spent many years teaching English at secondary schools in Germany. In addition to publishing a range of school textbooks in Germany, he is the author of Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial, introductions to the Peepal Tree editions of Wilson Harris novels and numerous articles on postcolonial literature, particularly the Caribbean and Wilson Harris.
Patricia Mohammed is Emeritus Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of West Indies. She has published extensively in the fields of gender and cultural studies in both text and documentary film, directing nineteen documentary films among them two award-winning films ‘Coolie Pink and Green’ (2009) and ‘Laventille: City on a Hill’ (2015). Her publications include Rethinking Caribbean Difference, Feminist Review (Routledge, 1998), Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947 (Palgrave UK, 2001), Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, (ed) (University of the West Indies Press, Kingston, 2002), Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (Macmillan UK, 2009) and Writing Gender in the Caribbean: Selected Essays 1988–2020 (Hansib Publications UK, 2021), the latter the recipient of the Barbara T. Christian literary award. She is currently completing a biography on Janet Jagan, the first female President of Guyana and co-writing the biography of Trinidadian artist Isaiah Boodhoo.
Kavyta Raghunandan is Senior Lecturer in Race and Education at Leeds Beckett University and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She also holds a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).
Nazrina Rodjan is a Dutch-Surinamese visual artist of Hindustani (indentured Indian) descent. Rodjan was born and raised in Rotterdam and holds a bachelor’s degree (2016) from St Joost School of Art and Design. Rodjan primarily works in graphite and oil. Her work represents themes of migration, queerness and diaspora, and a significant body of her work has focused on portraiture: portraits of people of colour, ancestral photographs and colonial postcards. She is committed to visually representing marginalized and invisible stories using traditional painting techniques. She spends her time painting between the Netherlands and the US.
Brinsley Samaroo was Emeritus Professor at the University of the West Indies. He published generally on Caribbean history and particularly on the Indian diaspora. He was leader of the opposition in the Trinidad Senate from 1981 to 1986 and minister of government from 1987 to 1991. He joined with David Dabydeen to produce India in the Caribbean (Hansib, 1987) and Across the Dark Waters (Warwick University Caribbean Studies, 1996). Among his other publications are Glimpses of the Sugar Industry: The Art of Garnett Ifill (Hansib, 2003) and The Price of Conscience: Howard Nankivell and Labour Unrest in the British Caribbean (Hansib, 2015). He supervised post-graduate candidates, organised conferences and published essays on the Caribbean. He died on 9 July 2023.
Goolam Vahed teaches in the Department of History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He received his PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include indentured labour, migration, citizenship and transnationalism among Indian South Africans, Islam in South Africa, and the role of sport and culture in South African society. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and books. He co-authored Inside Indian Indenture. A South African Story, 1860–1914. His most recent co-authored work is Durban’s Casbah. Bunny Chows, Bolsheviks, and Bioscopes.
Amar Wahab is Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, Canada. He has taught in the areas of critical sexuality studies, critical studies in masculinity, critical race studies, introductory and advanced sociological theory and Caribbean cultural studies. He is the author of Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth Century ‘Trinidad’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Disciplining Coolies: An Archival Footprint of Trinidad, 1846 (Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2019). His current creative research project is entitled: Trans-Oceanic Erotics: A Queer Coolie Odyssey.