This post continues where my previous blog Leaving Ghazipur ended; with my grandmother Rajwantia’s decision to leave her village Sakekipur and begin her epic journey to Port Natal.
In the absence of personal testimony, all we know about her journey or think we know are the things she would have seen or heard or been made to do. Drawing on primary and secondary material- in particular Vahed and Desai’s “Inside Indian Indenture”- I have reconstructed a version of Rajwantia’s life that is largely a work of fiction. For instance, the description of her journey from Sakekipur to Calcutta assumes that the passengers from villages in Ghazipur on the Umlazi X1 (Calcutta) travelled with her all the way from Ghazipur to Calcutta before boarding the ship that landed in Port Natal on Feb 1898. This may or may not have been the case.
While the focus of our project is the search for Rajwantia’s voice to describe her particular experience of indenture, her life was played out within the overarching context of British colonial rule and this fact is central to the narrative . The British Empire was first and foremost “a commercial project: a vast get rich project on a global scale”.* Thus Rajwantia’s decision to leave India and voyage into indenture was not a lifestyle choice, but a product of the vulnerability of peasant communities decimated by social and economic exploitation in British India.
For indentured migrants like Rajwantia, once in Port Natal, the lack of dignity, and the ownership of their labour by a colonial employer is yet another example of the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law then viciously bent it to serve imperial ends: a system described by Caroline Elkin as “legalised lawlessness.”
All of which brings to mind Frederick Douglass’s observation in 1845, that slavery did not just do harm to slaves it also corrupted the morality of slave owning societies: a maxim that applies equally to the colonial practice of indentured servitude. Bonded labourers like Rajwantia were casualties of a highly organised, state-supervised system that debased all who participated in it: from the Arkati’s who recruited migrants; the colonial administrators who processed recruits into indenture; the ship’s personnel that transported the indentured like pieces of cargo and all those in British colonies who flagrantly used and abused indentured labour.
Douglas’ words frame our understanding of Rajwantia Somaru’s story . That said, it is equally important to recognise that despite the powerlessness and alienation that the indentured experienced, their stories are stories of courage, of people who carved out their own spaces, who defied being reduced to the colonial catch-all term ’coolie ‘ a designation that defined them as a form of payment for menial work.
I pick up on Rajwantia’s story when she leaves her village to journey to Calcutta. This is when her transformation into an ‘indentured coolie’ begins.
Kaliani Lyle
*Kate Phillips “ Bought and Sold – Scotland , Jamaica and Slavery”
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