Introduction

‘Emigrants don't write, they are written about.’ However, Ramchandra Rao, Totaram Sanadhya and Munshi Rahman Khan were no ordinary emigrants and they have recorded their experiences as girmitiyas. In this chapter, I have dealt with the memoirs of two indentured labourers in Fiji who wrote their experiences as girmitiyas after their return to India. The handwritten manuscript of Munshi Rahman Khan from Surinam has also been consulted in this context. Before dealing with Ramchandra's autobiographical manuscript and Totaram Sanadhya's book of reminiscences as an indentured labourer in Fiji, it should be noted that Baba Ramchandra was already established as a peasant leader of Awadh when he began writing his Fiji memoirs. Ramchandra came back to India in 1915, but wrote this autobiographical fragment only in 1939. There is a considerable time difference between his return from Fiji and his writing about his Fiji sojourn. On the other hand, Totaram Sanadhya returned from Fiji in 1914. He didn't write his experience of indentured life himself, but he narrated it to Banarasi Das Chaturvedi – a Hindi writer and one of the prominent nationalist anti-indenture campaigners. The language of his text is Hindi. It bears the inf luence of Banarasi Das’ thought – it comes across as a condemnation of indenture system within the framework of nationalist enterprise. Similarly, Munshi Rahman Khan also wrote his manuscript in 1943 when there were differences among Hindus and Muslims, and separate groups emerged based on one's communal identity in Surinam.

By all accounts, including their own, Ramchandra, Totaram and Rahman Khan were no ordinary girmitiyas. To begin with, both Ramchandra and Totaram were high-caste Hindus and unfamiliar with the hard-working-class life to which they had enlisted in order to travel overseas. Their experiences also relate to just one colony – Fiji, where the conditions of Indians were probably the most depressed. Nonetheless, their narratives are worth recounting, since they highlight many of the issues central to the abolitionist debate.