Introducing himself as an emigrant from Hindustan, Munshi Rahman Khan describes a system, popularly called girmit, through which he went to Dutch Guiana (Surinam) to work as a plantation labourer in 1898. More than one million Indian workers, like him, left their native country to work in the sugar plantations of British and European colonies in the Caribbean, southern Pacific, and Indian Oceans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This emigration was initially triggered by the revocation of slavery by the British parliament in 1833, which compelled colonial planters to look to India for labourers to overcome the industrial depression that followed the emancipation of their Afro-Caribbean slaves.

In 1834, the British government in India introduced what came to be known as the ‘indenture system’, through which Indian labourers could go overseas to work on the colonial sugar plantations on fixed-term contracts. From 1834 to 1920, the recruitment of Indians to work on the colonial plantations of various islands was organized through this system. The model of Indian indenture system was borrowed from a practice that originated in Europe in the thirteenth century, but it became a common practice in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when European planters in the United States deputed European and Chinese labourers on their plantations.