Migration of Women Indentured and Their Narratives by Women Writers: Jahajin by Peggy Mohan
Dr. Neerja A Gupta, Principal of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Sheth R A College of Arts and Commerce, Ahmedabad (Gujarat)
I sit on the ground and listen to the waves again and again.
I imagine you adorned—red and gold bodice, nose ring, foot ring and silver bangle.
Did you board the boat alone at midnight? - Janet Naidu, “A Deeper Ocean”
And when I left the estate, in some time, I would be freer, and happier . . . I had friends. And I was strong, and able to work. - Peggy Mohan, Jahajin
In the eighteenth century some of the earliest Indian migrants overseas were transported as slaves by the French. Tens of thousands of Indian slaves were shipped to the Mascarene islands and South Africa over the course of the eighteenth century, while considerable numbers of Indian convicts were transported by the East India Company to penal settlements in Southeast Asia, such as Penang, Arakan, Malacca, Singapore, and the Tenasserim coast. Later, more were sent to Mauritius, the Port of Aden, and the Andaman Islands (a favorite destination for the mutineers of 1857), and a few to Australia. The total number of Indian convicts transported to Aden, Mauritius, and Southeast Asia totaled at least one hundred thousand. They were an extremely important source of labor, providing an infrastructure and facilities at the very inception of these colonies.
Convict indents and slave registers reveal that there was a far wider and more diverse migration of Indians overseas than is commonly realized. The records of transportees from London to Australia, for example, included several Indian lascars (sailors) who had left ships and settled ashore in London and who subsequently committed an offence and were transported. One can deduce that there were many others more fortunate who, apart from fleeting references, remain invisible in the historical record, not least because British records in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are almost completely oblivious to concepts of race. Racial profiling of offenders, in local government records and in census returns, does not become commonplace until the second half of the nineteenth century:
Kangani is a person “who was himself an immigrant working on the plantation as a foreman, or even as a labourer of some influence and standing. The employer would send him to India provided with money, to go to his village and district and recruit labourers among his own people. . . . There was now scope for the migration of families rather than individuals. . . . When the kangani returned to Malaya with his group of labourers and delivered them to his employer, they were employed in that plantation, usually under the kangany who had recruited them. Thus there was a continuing connection. . . . [T]he kangany had subtle means of keeping the labourer on a lead, attached to and dependent on him.” (Arasaratnam,16)
In reappraising the role of the kangani, it should be recognized that the transformation of India into a source of cheap labor for the British Empire, and the increasing involvement of overseas capitalists in recruitment for plantation economies, resulted in competition both among colonial recruiters and between them and local employers. (Robb.P, 159-85). The sourcing of recruiters from within the ranks of migrants became crucial to the effectiveness of labor mobilization, but in the process the increasing autonomy of these agents subtly altered the balance of power between laborer and employer, with far-reaching consequences for the plantation societies to which they resorted in large numbers.
Recruiting sirdars, men and sometimes women who had been overseas and could speak with firsthand experience of conditions in the colonies, emerged— both formally and informally (they did not always bear the title of sirdar)—as a "middleman" network between the subaltern and employer. This undoubtedly typified the involvement of sirdars in recruitment for industrial labor within India as much as abroad. For this reason their demonization and later disappearance from contemporary records post-1914 (noted by Chandar-varkar) should be taken with a grain of salt. Their role was never quite what it seemed in the first place and is unlikely to have disappeared immediately once they lost either official sanction or their usefulness to employers.
Women migrants within the indenture system have been commonly considered the greatest "victims," "super-exploited," and subjected to patriarchal controls by a double layer of colonial and male oppression. A recent study that has sought to "recast" women labor by portraying the debate between imperial policy makers and Anti-Slavery Society reformers in terms of a battle that was "lost" by the latter merely takes the discussion into a different cul-de-sac. The Anti-Slavery Society reformers, based in England, often had a less than firm grasp on conditions and events in the colonies. Their "insights" were frequently as wide of the mark as the more extravagant assertions of estate owners. Some of their wilder claims—for example, that family life was nonexistent on the colonial sugar plantations—have been taken up by historians and anthropologists and contributed to the persistence of absurdities such as Hugh Tinker's depiction of overseas Indian women as "sorry, broken creatures" and the notion common among anthropologists until recently that "caste" and community disappeared once Indians had embarked on a migrant ship. The reality was a far slower and complex transmutation of ideology, form, and substance.
The ingenious writings of the women sensibility have been an appealing aspect of Indian writers. When women move outside their traditional roles of being mother and wives, they are obliged to enter the semantic space which has already been occupied by male. Their journey has been long and arduous whether it is in literary orbit or elsewhere.. In addition to this, the scenario of contemporary literature has been transformed by the rising tide of globalization, literature is now crossing borders of nation and cultures as newly emerging writers express myriad voices of those once considered subalterns. At the top of this new literary wave is a birth of new generation of South Asian Women writers or in other words, Women Diaspora writers who have been creating their unique space upon the world of literature. Moreover, post colonialism leads many writers and scholars to explore post-colonial with new perspective which includes race, identity, diaspora and other concepts. Most of the post-colonial writers have experience of diaspora such as cultural hybridity, loss of cultural belongingness, confusion of national identity and many more which will be discussed further. Research has increasingly demonstrated that the vast majority of women who migrated to the sugar colony of Mauritius sustained their family ties throughout the period of indenture." Moreover, an analysis of individual life histories of indentured women reveals that the decision to migrate was usually made within a wider family context and that most women accompanied kin members or were summoned to rejoin family overseas.'2 If this has been established in the case of one Indian Ocean destination, then such may also have been the case in the migrations to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean too. New research by Veronique Bragard and others is leading in this direction, addressing the means Indian women found to survive and prosper in the Caribbean and in which they were able to assert themselves in social and cultural terms.
Jahaji-Bhain: A Brief Historical Overview
As the epigraphs by poet Janet Naidu and novelist Peggy Mohan illustrate, the sea journey made by female migrants from the Indian subcontinent to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean, the female bonds of solidarity developed during indentureship and the struggle to be free of the plantation estate, all have profound significance for Indo-Caribbean women writers. About 130,000 Indians travelled to Trinidad as indentured migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. The early migrants went from villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and spoke variations of Bhojpuri, Khari Boli, Braj Bhasha, Bundelkhandi, Urdu and Hindi. Many could not understand each other. But over the years, Bhojpuri emerged as the dominant language of the Indian community on the sugarcane estates and other dialects and languages faded away.
Recruited for the purposes of indentured labor, administered by British colonial officials between 1838 and 1917, young girls and women traveling with families or alone referred to themselves as jahaji-bhain , translated from the Hindu/Urdu as ‘ship-sister,’ a feminization of the more common appellation of jahaji-bhai (ship-brother) to refer to the first generation of migrants who experienced the process of recruitment, transplantation and resettlement in the plantation colony. The transoceanic journey signifies the momentous catalyst for migration which not only radically impacted individual destinies but also irreversibly remapped colonial and post-colonial cartographies. Similarly, the notion of fraternity signified by ‘bhai/bhain’ emphasizes a shared collective destiny fuelled by deeply engrained social and cultural principles of communalism. Experience of women Diaspora is more intense than that of male Diaspora. Unlike men, their shifting is not merely geographical or physical but it’s a shifting of their inner self. Literature produced by women Diaspora creates a different perspective; a question rather than an answer, question of Identity and Indianness dominate most of their writings. Their identity depends on the sense of displacement, loss of home, longing to return, culture, ethnic consciousness, religion, caste, language and so on. Most of the women abroad find it difficult to adopt both regional identity and identity of being an Indian. They wrestle with their existential dilemmas of women.
As seen earlier pre independence expatriation was due to colonizers creating of situations that drove people to work as slaves in sugar plantations or for railways or small traders and entrepreneurs in countries such as Africa, Maurituis, Fiji, Trinidad, Surinam and Caribbean. From their history as jahaji-bhain and indentured laborers to their current realities in the post-colonial Caribbean, the unique roles and experiences of Indo-Caribbean women in the domestic, social and political spheres of Caribbean society are central concerns in literature produced by Indo-Caribbean women writers. In their studies of plantation history, sociologists Rhoda Reddock, Patricia Mohammed and historian Verene A. Shepherd have noted that most female indentured laborers fought to maintain their independence over their social and economic conditions, even as they lived under the oppressive system of plantation labor as well as traditional patriarchal structures. During indenturedship, women brought from the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean were a minority. Although they occupied a marginal status in the plantation society, female indentured performed the same tasks as male laborers, but were often paid lower wages and subject to contractual deceptions. In their own community, incidents of domestic violence, rape and uxoricide were high, and women who claimed sexual independence were often vilified. Partly as a result of Indian and British policy makers’ efforts to terminate the indenture system, and partly due to changing commercial demands that brought about the permanent settlement of what began as a temporary labor force, the relative autonomy that women enjoyed in the early period of indenture was slowly corroded, and with it the paradigm of the single woman migrant.
As Patricia Mohammed contends, many Indo-Caribbean men sought to retrieve a “ruptured patriarchy from the ravages of indentureship,” and tried to reinforce what they perceived to be traditional gender roles. Even so, Indo-Caribbean women negotiated their own terms of survival in the post-indenture period, and recognized the importance of education in this effort. In the case of Trinidad, for example, Indians had little or no educational opportunities until primary and secondary schools were started by Presbyterian missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
However, as writers Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo have pointed out in their fiction, missionary schools brought with them the inherent biases, prejudices, values and expectations of a colonial education system. Nor is education shown to be handed to women without considerable sacrifice and initiative on their part. In 1912, when Naparima Girls’ High School, the first secondary school catering mainly to Indo-Trinidadian girls was established, many female indentured who worked on sugar cane or cacao plantations saved for school fees in order to educate their daughters, displaying a nascent feminist consciousness by investing in female independence through education.
In Trinidadian novelist Lakshmi Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind (1990), higher education for girls is celebrated, irrespective of its numerous costs, among the members of a small Hindu township; indeed, for the female members of the community it carries the entire weight of thejahaji-bhain’s struggle for self-determination: “the sacredness of knowledge and learning and the acquiring of skills by women; . . . They themselves hadn’t had the opportunity, but they were too happy to have lived to see this day, when a Hindu girl from this village was going to England.”
In Caribbean literary studies, figures such as Mahadai Das, Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo are often seen as ushering in a period of relatively significant literary production by Indo-Caribbean women in the late twentieth century. At present there is a growing interest in Indo-Caribbean women’s writing, encouraged by the current and steadily increasing number of published novelists and poets.
Rosanne Kanhai’s edited collections, Matikor: The Politics of Identity for Indo-Caribbean Women (1999) and Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women (2011), provide interdisciplinary perspectives on the cultural work of Indo-Caribbean women, and Brinda Mehta’s Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (2004) is the first monograph devoted to Indo-Caribbean women’s literature.
Suffice it to say, Indo-Caribbean women writers have been subject to a tradition of underrepresentation and misrepresentation in the development. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005) includes Indo-Guyanese poet Mahadai Das’ historic poem “They Came in Ships,” a tribute to the laborers’ arrival to Caribbean shores.
Women writers rectify this typecasting by endowing even their most victimized of characters with a voice—that is, “as a thinking, acting subject, rather than as an object of fate or destiny.” Where diasporic memory and feminist poetics intersect, therefore, Indo-Caribbean feminism(s) can be located within a particular model of social and cultural praxis that comes directly out of the history of female indentureship. For instance, in her earlier survey of Indo-Caribbean women’s fiction, Mariam Pirbhai considers ‘jahaji-bhain ’— a term replete with socio-historical and ontological significance for this labor diaspora—as the root metaphor in Indo-Caribbean’s women’s writing:
The figurative shift in emphasis from the jahaji-bhain to the matrilineal chain of the jahaji-bhain, a female-centered principle of affiliation, suggests that Indo-Caribbean women writers strategically begin their stories in a gender-inclusive restructuring of the imaginative and discursive framework that has come to define the shared migration history and collective ethos of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.
Evolving in the literature is a wide range of concepts including race, religious practices, nationalism and labor activism that are interconnected to Indo-Caribbean feminism(s). In many cases the novelists and poets directly address those cultural traditions that continue to promote patriarchal or neo-colonial oppression, while identifying the various ways in which Indo-Caribbean women assert a female independence that creates progressive and communal alternatives. Female subjectivities and gendered political affiliations are therefore always in focus in the essays in this collection, suggesting that whether the contributors examine the literature through queer, post-colonial, eco-critical or Caribbean cultural theories, these diverse approaches invariably intersect with feminist concerns, and propose new directions for Indo-Caribbean feminist poetics.
Jahajin
For the purposes I shall primarily take up Peggy Mohan‘s Jahajin and through a close reading of the text, look at how the sudden displacement of the system of indentured labourers affected the labourers in their attitudes towards gender, language and caste and religion. In this respect, Mohan‘s text is suitable as it is the only one which covers all four aspects in an attentive manner through the actual archival collection of oral narratives.
Jahajin is a debut work by writer of Indian descendent from Trinidad Peggy Ramesan Mohan. In her very first novel she weaves together different stories: hundred and ten years old Deeda who sailed on the same boat as narrator’s great grandmother, saga of Saranga, narrator’s own experience as a descendant of jahaji tradition. Novel opens as a young narrator records experience of deed and how the lives of Indians who were recruited to work on sugar plantations in Chinidad. Deeda narrates different stories from her memories in Trinidad Bhojpuri, which take us back to era of colonial rule. Along with this Mohan uses folklore of Saranga, writes own experience. At certain extent Saranga’s story is heart of the narrative. It has multiple layers of meaning and can be analysed, interpreted in different ways. Mohan’s use of Saranga story works as watermark to the beautiful picture she wants to create with her words. All the stories combined together shapes the narrative.
Etymologically the word jahajin owes it origin to Hindi language. It comes down from Hindi word ‘jahaj’ meaning ship, boat, jahaji/jahajin refers to the indentured labourer who made long sea journey, crossing the kala pani to reach their promised land, work on sugar plantations; travelled by means of water transportation. very title of Mohan’s debut novel is suggestive that there is a woman at the centre herein Deeda’s narration of Sarnga’s story it is female monkey and writer’s narration she has centered upon recorded conversation with Deeda. Narrator is a researcher at University of West Indies. She is working on various dialects, use of Bhojpuri spoken in Trinidad. Which in now limited to a language spoken by people of particular community, how it evolve and how it disappear over a period of time. As a descendant of jahaji tradition narrator traces involvement of her great ancestors working on sugar plantations, king sugar.
Peggy Mohan’s engrossing tale is well-researched history leavened with the beguiling memories of 110-year old Deeda, who travelled alone to ‘Chini-dad’ (as the migrants called Trinidad) with her young son, Kallo. Jahajin is the story of a Trinidad born linguist researching the roots of Bhojpuri in the Caribbean through interviewing old people who came on the indenture ships. Heavily drawn on the author’s own experiences as a linguist, the book relates the history of the community and the experiences of the narrator’s own family in Deeda’s stories narrated in earthy Bhojpuri, rich in idiom and imagery. The indenture migration has largely been written about as the migration of Indian men to the new colonies. But Mohan states that the migration became a self-perpetuating community in the Caribbean islands only after the arrival of Indian women.
Under the indenture migration rules, about 30 percent of the recruits on every ship had to be female. Some women travelled with their husbands and children, but the narrator asserts that according to the records, most of the women were adults travelling alone. This statement, which is contrary to popular opinion, was accepted at a University of the West Indies’ seminar only because it is corroborated by interviews of old people conducted in Bhojpuri, a language forgotten by most of the audience. It is the women who build a home, teach the language, and hand down values and traditions to create a new community in a new land. Caribbean Bhojpuri is similar to Bhojpuri that was spoken in the Basti region about a century ago, which was the time of peak migration from that area.
According to Mohan, that was also the time of a surge in the number of women migrating - with a resultant increase in the number of children on the estates. The small children were left in the care of an older woman called a “khelauni” while the mothers went to work on the estates. This was the period when the children were learning their first language and slowly Bhojpuri emerged as the common language among the Indians. But a century later, Bhojpuri in Trinidad faced language death, a situation where only the older people speak it. The language was not passing on to the younger generation since their parents did not speak the language.
As the Indians left the fields on the estates to move into other jobs and later into white-collar occupations, they turned to Creole and then to English as their main language while some people stuck to a more formal Hindi.
The narrator’s own family emphasis was on moving up in society - from estate worker to artisan (goldsmith) to office worker to highly educated linguist. As Deeda said: “Things are plenty better now.” Jahajin paints an evocative picture of an Indian community moving out from the estates to a comfortable urban life. Deeda’s story is a string of memories - of the drought that makes her leave home, and the meeting with the arkatiya (recruiter) woman. She recalls her first journey on a train, sitting on the upper berth, the amazing new sights at the harbour, and boarding the ship with trepidation. Sailing the vast ocean meant long weeks of enforced idleness and violent storms - the time was spent making friends with other migrants, building bonds to replace the old family ties and forge new relations as ‘jahajibhai’ (ship brothers) to last a life time in the new land.
The narrator discovers that Deeda had travelled with Sunnariya, her great grandmother on the ship, Godavari; Deeda and Sunnariya were ‘jahajin’ and their stories are closely entwined. Deeda inspires the young linguist to retrace the steps of her own ancestor across the seas and to go back to ancestral land. Running through the story is a magical folk tale related by Deeda, of Saranga and her lover, Sada Birij, a tale of loss and yearning, that weaves through the main story’s narrative of relocation and identity and hope.
The narrator travels to India, but it is a modern India of the 1970s that is so different to the imagined homeland. There is, however a sense of reconnection in Patna when she meets a man who recognises her Bhojpuri as the language spoken by a very old woman in his village. The book is an enthralling work in which all the strands of the narrative come together when an elderly man sings Saranga’s song at the young linguist’s ancestral village in Faizabad. What Jahajin does as a text is to amalgamate the existing concerns of the Jahajin experience, while giving it a definite direction. As Mohan is a trained linguist and an academician, her observations cannot be swept away simplistically, especially those which are related to the continued sustainability of Bhojpuri as common language amongst the Jahajiya community. Intertwined into this basic framework is a constant reminder for the need to question long unchallenged notions of gender, especially those relegating women to a speechless, spectatorial and spectral presence. The book constantly asserts the active and interventionist role of women in initiating, sustaining and successfully transposing the community to its new location in Chini‘ (Trini)dad. What is perhaps most disturbing is the acceptance of these women of the death of their roots, most explicitly stated by the central character, Deeda when she refuses to fret over the younger generation speaking Creole instead of Bhojpuri. The acceptance, even welcoming of change, and the fading away of the past, sets out a different world view from those who would seek to preserve and forcibly sustain a dying culture. Finally, the book asserts both the continued play of caste in the new world and its gradual demise, as well as the movement away from Hindu religion towards Christianity. Combined together, the four points converge to present a challenge to the continued existence of the Jahajiya identity itself. At the same time, the willingness to archive, to tell their stories, to chronicle their journey and hardship shows a willingness to engage and assert themselves. It is neither the passive acceptance of, nor the raging against of death but the willingness to create new dynamic meaning that sets apart this narrative of a displaced people from others.
Mohan‘s Jahajin, as the title itself suggests, refocuses attention on the narrative of the women of the Jahajiya community. Her acknowledgement begins by thanking two women Jahajins and the entire narrative is framed around the act of archiving the narrative of Deeda and her experiences on her journey from a remote village in India to Trinidad. The first chapter closes by invoking Parvati, whom Mohan describes as the most independent of all goddesses.(Mohan 10) and the second chapter is titled A Cargo of Women. She makes a pressing case for recognizing the uniquely gendered nature of the indentured population: Roughly thirty per cent of the migrants on every ship were female. Some of these were women coming with their husbands, of course, and children. But most of the men were not travelling with wives. According to the records, most of these women were adults travelling alone (Mohan 12).
She recognizes how this data would be a great blow to the ideal of the Indian family and goes on to describe how the ships were compartmentalized to have separate sections for single men, married couples as well as single women. This means that there were a sizeable number of widows and children as well as women who in the words of Mohan, were leaving their husbands and escaping…it may just be the easiest way to make a clean break from a bad marriage‖ (Mohan 14). This would seem to be out of place for many who would assign a secondary, passive position to women in 19th century rural India, but recent scholars have also supported Mohan‘s narrative-archival findings.
One of the long-held myths about Indian women immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago is that they migrated with their families under the power, authority and control of their male relatives and were docile and tractable. These views ignore the historical documentation on the Indian Women Problem which confronted the colonial office as far back as 1845 when Indian indentureship to Trinidad began. Contemporary research in women's history has revealed that a large proportion of Indian women did make a conscious decision to seek a new life elsewhere. They came as workers and not as dependents. The reality of women escaping marriage by signing up for indentured labour is further backed by the author through archival tapes of oral narratives of Indian immigrants primary amongst whom is the character of Deeda. The centrality of women is invoked to explain how Bhojpuri had successfully existed as a lingua franca for the Indian indentured immigrants as on the plantation and sugar estates, community child bearing was practiced. Indian women, being very few in number, while enjoying pay and financial independence found it easier to assert themselves against traditional patriarchal binds which had fettered them in India. With the loss of traditional caste roles through forced interdining and forced sharing of common spaces during the voyage and barrack living on plantations, the shortage of women, as well as relatively fluid caste identities meant a general trend towards exogamy. Today, studies show that women generally have the freedom to marry outside their community, as long as they are marrying within Indians. The fluidity of caste in Trinidad is in stark contrast with the rigid marriage rules prevalent in India today.
In the narrative of Deeda we see how women become important not only in cooking, feeding and generally taking care of the man but also how they take over functions of medical care, oversee nursing of other women and also share the work of the men on the fields in cutting cane etc. Mohan‘s narrator traces her family back not through a patrilineal descent but rather through the women, all the way back to Sunnariya, explaining how all the woman characters played crucial roles in establishing the Jahajiya community in Trinidad through their interventions in business and their entrepreneurial vision. The relative independence of Indian women in Trinidad, especially in comparison to back home in India, has been captured by various commentators- five factors governing Hindu marriage-endogamy, exogamy, prohibited kin, virgin marriage and hypergamy- were broken down virtually irreparably.
Moreover, as sociological research has now shown, the Hindu joint family among East Indians in Trinidad has almost completely vanished. First, there is no legal recognition of the system, even in a residual sense. Second, even when elderly dependents are part of an extended family (itself of a drastically reduced frequency) they are neither necessarily the patrilineal relatives nor those with decisive voice in family affairs. Marriage by choice rather than arranged marriage is the rule. And, the initiative and enterprise shown by Indian women in all kinds of businesses-from vegetable-selling to store-keeping- is there for any observer to see. Although, research is needed on the subject, there are definite indications that employed East Indian women in middle class homes maintain their separate bank- accounts. Dowry has been almost entirely replaced by an equal ex- change of gifts from the bride‘s and the bridegroom‘s side.
Deeda herself becomes the narrator of her story in some ways. Although Mohan‘s narrator persona is narrating, Deeda weaves her own narrative into songs using the rudimentary frameworks of existing folk narratives and tunes in order to produce an original narrative of her own experiences. The narrative voice is definitely feminine and is not afraid of asserting itself and its role in an otherwise patriarchal world. However, the narrative voice is also assertive and active and forces the male character to merely toe the line in some ways. Saranga always is the one to take the initiative to throw herself into the stream, and be born anew. It is Sada Birij who is always left behind waiting. This is the story of the Jahajin, the women who threw themselves into action, headlong into adventure leaving their men behind. In this fashion, the entire narrative does not become merely that of suppressed gender.
Indeed there seems to be a gradual development in the level of assertion of the feminine voice as the narrative proceeds from the time of the first immigrants to present days and also in the spatial difference between India and Trinidad. The author, when she travels back to India in the novel, realizes how much of the notions of rigid gender roles, which had disappeared from her own society, remained amongst those in India. When she is accosted by a group of professors of linguistics in Patna as to her caste, she realizes that the rigid structures of Indian society had broken down to a large extent through the female energy released in the migration. (Mohan 254).
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