The Girmitiya Saga

By Giriraj Kishore

In May, 1893, a 24-year-old-attorney arrived at Durban on a year’s girmit (contract) to fight a lawsuit for Dada Abdullah and Co. Thrown out of the train to Pretoria, he was to taste the racial discrimination that plagued the land at that time. Subsequent experiences in South Africa sensitized him to the plight of the girmitiyas (bonded labours). Suspended between despair and a hope for an implausible escape to their promised land, the girmitiyas found in this young attorney a voice that would guide them to a new dawn. In The Girmitiya Saga, Giriraj Kishore retraces the socio-political background of the 19th and 20th-century South Africa, highlighting the importance of the young attorney’s actions in South Africa and their monumental significance for humanity as a whole. After having carefully researched the subject in South Africa, England, Mauritius and India, Giriraj Kishore has imaginatively cast the facts in the mould of an arresting novel—Pehla Girmitiya. First published in Hindi in 1999, the novel was very well received in the world of Hindi literature. The following year, the author was honoured with the Vyas Samman by the K.K. Birla Foundation, and the Mahatma Gandhi Samman by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan for this book. A flesh-and-blood human being, Mohandas Karamchand is an average man who finds himself, along with many others, in a particular historical and sociological configuration that sets him off on a life-altering path—towards becoming the Mahatma…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: Mar 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9788189738457

Book preview

lips.

I

When they seized other countries, the whites took their dreams with them.The first task they set themselves was to weed out, one by one, the dreams of the natives and implant their own dreams in their place. The land belonged to the natives, the dreams to the whites. The natives, they believed, weren’t exactly born on the land either. They arrived in Natal in the middle of the seventeenth century and became natives.We arrived a little later, and stayed non-natives. Born of slaves! Actually, reduced to misery by the tyranny of the whites, these so-called natives had arrived here in the middle of the seventeenth century from the newly born country of America. America hadn’t yet quite become America. The natives of the land were still being uprooted. The trees of their dreams were still being cut down by the whites. Along with the trees, those who had planted them were also being displaced. They were falling from the skies to land on trees all over the place. South Africa was one of the trees where they had landed and they were now busy making their homes there. They formed the majority of the natives. They had their own languages: Zulu, Swazi, Bush and so on. Languages formed tribes. Then came the whites. In the nineteenth century, there were about a hundred thousand whites and about five hundred thousand natives. The natives became slaves and the whites became the masters. On this land, which stretched up to the horizon, the masters were in a hurry to plant their own dreams. The slaves were dubbed kaffirs. The whites were of course whites. And they were the masters too.

The natives knew little about themselves, about the power they could wield or about the fertility of their lands. For them, the colour white was a flag the very sight of which made them think of themselves as powerless and of the other as all-powerful. They felt all their power being drained into the whites. They were reduced to mere ‘folk’. In some sense, though, the power of their tribal chiefs was greater than that of the whites. If there was anyone after God to whom everyone in the tribe paid complete obeisance, it was the chief. His was the bread they ate, the work they did, and the glory. Before him, even the whites paled into insignificance.

Every kaffir had more than one wife. Mother of his kids. The more kids a wife had, the more fortunate she was reckoned. And one got an additional hand with no wages to pay. The more wives one had, the wealthier he was. The wives put in the labour, the men enjoyed the fruits. They smoked tobacco and refreshed the chief’s pipe. The problem before the whites was to find someone to work in their fields. They themselves were sahibs; to work in the fields you needed labourers. The workers were to be found in the tribes. The chief could let them have the labourers, or not. It was his sweet will. He could give you a few or many. He could call them back halfway. He could ask for any sum and you would have to pay.

In their temperate clime, the whites wanted to grow crops of temperate regions. The natives only knew how to grow corn. In some places they could also grow wheat. The whites’ dream of striking it rich on agriculture was falling to pieces. How far could they go on corn alone? The land was so fertile that a good crop would spout gold! How to harvest this gold? The whites could neither understand their language nor make themselves understood.They thought of Mauritius: any white who had landed there weighed himself in gold.

~

October 15, 1851, Friday, a room in Durban Government School:

One pompous white followed another! Each in his own coach. Some were drawn by two, some by four horses. The coachmen as well as the masters were white. The coach would pull up in front of the room; the white master would get off and would walk into the room.

The coach would turn around and would join the other coaches in the parking place.

The coachmen were all in a fluster; their masters were going to import coloured labour from across the seas. The natives themselves were proving to be a handful; how did they think they were going to handle the coloureds?

‘Those people know magic. They’ll use magic to become our masters while our masters will turn into their slaves.’

‘What are you saying? Have whites ever been slaves?’ ‘It’s all a matter of magic.’ ‘Magic works only with those who are afraid of it.’ ‘That depends on the magician.’

‘Our masters too are learning magic. Black magic.’

John Miller was a big farmer. He was the last one to arrive. His coach had four horses. Everyone stood up when he entered the room. There were twenty to twenty-five whites in the room. He walked straight on to the stage and sat down on the chairman’s seat. There was applause. John Miller was a man of few words. It was believed about him that when it came to farming, his was the last word. He knew and understood each and every secret of farming.

John Miller pointed towards another farmer, Evans. Evans started by badmouthing the natives. ‘They are shirkers, illiterates and understand nothing about farming. The kind of farming they have been doing generation after generation is of no use to us whatsoever. They can neither fill their stomachs nor earn any money by that sort of farming. Eventually, they will just go and drown themselves in the Indian Ocean.’ When he read out his proposal, everyone was stunned. It was an abusive proposal. The least harmless of his proposals was this: ‘It is sheer stupidity to trust the kaffirs of this colony to maintain a regular supply of labour to us according to our needs. To grow temperate crops, it is essential that we import coloured labour.’

Evans’ words reflected not only anger but also fear. One could see clearly how scared the whites were of the natives. The great pomp and show they put up made you feel as if they were the bravest of the brave that they could pick up the Table Mountain by their little finger and dash it to the ground like a glass vessel. Table Mountain was close to Cape Town and was known as the Friendly Mountain. Evans was of the view that forcing the natives to work for them was not free from risk. Every white citizen, no matter what his trade, needed to be provided with a gun.

Someone butted in: ‘Why not import white labour?’

Evans dropped his own line and started on the mover of the proposal. He was now spewing venom on him, ‘What will white workers do? What do they know about temperate crops? Are we growing apples or berries here? Do you know how much a white labourer costs? In Australia a white worker gets twenty pounds as annual wages plus two meals a day. His food bill for the year is another twenty pounds. Are you willing to pay that much?’ He continued after a pause: ‘A coloured labourer in Mauritius costs practically nothing. Half the wages and a lot more labour. If we hand them guns and teach them how to fire them, they will take care of these kaffir natives. We won’t have to do anything. To tell you the truth, the coolies are the true antidote to the natives.’

Morewood had been listening silently. He could not hold himself any longer. He stood up to speak, ‘Dead wrong! That we’ve been listening quietly does not mean you can go on saying whatever comes to your mind. I have been in this line of work for the past thirteen years. I never had to face shortage of kaffir labour. You deal with them kindly and they will never give you a reason for complaint.’

That day, Campbell had come to the meeting with the avowed intention that he’d keep his mouth shut. Every time he opened his mouth, he was misunderstood. But now he got so annoyed that he could not keep quiet, ‘We already have so much labour available. You bring in more labour— white or coloured—and the wages will go down further. Even survival will become difficult for them. Who will be responsible?’

Dr. Johnson stood up with a serious mien and spoke very slowly, ‘I agree that kaffirs aren’t treated properly. If they can manage white labour in Europe, why can’t we? I’m sure we can keep them under control the way the captain of a ship keeps his crew.’

Byron did not understand anything. He suddenly started speaking in a loud voice, ‘Everyone knows a kaffir is a kaffir. He cannot be trusted. Absolutely not. Here we have the most beautiful land, ideal for temperate crops. And what are we doing? Busy sweet-talking the tribal heads! No attention to land or produce, which is what we most need to do! We need a regular supply of labour. Any bottleneck there, and we will find ourselves sitting twiddling our thumbs. It is absolutely essential that we import coloured labour.’

The concluding motion was to be proposed by Dixon, but he’d forgotten and was dozing. The Chairman had to prod him, ‘Are you sleeping, Mr. Dixon?’

Dixon jumped. More than startled, he was embarrassed. He immediately started rattling off the resolution, without any comma or full stop,‘Let’s establish a company for the import of coloured labour. No temperate crops like cotton, sugarcane, etc., can be grown till we initiate some action in this direction. It is also essential to present a petition to the Governor seeking land and financial support.

Although the decision to import non-native, non-white labour was taken after much heat and dust had been raised, it lay in cold storage for four years. The petition was finally made ready in 1855 and was presented to the Governor by a group led by John Miller.

Among other things, the petition included a very amusing detail: ‘There are thirty thousand native workers. Ten thousand of them work as servants to the whites as personal attendants, garden hands, watchmen and so on. Absenteeism is the worst trait of the natives. They work six months in a year, and rest the remaining six. For full six months, the relaxing ten thousand lie in their corrals smoking tobacco and enjoying the services of their women folk. At any given time, only ten thousand natives are at work. Tribal chiefs, leaders and old folk have to be discounted anyway: they are good for nothing. Therefore, if the whites want to have a future and grow crops, they must be given permission to import non-native workers. They must be given land and financial support. Otherwise, the white community will shrivel up like a creeper drying up on a tree.’

‘Can’t we train the natives?’ The Governor asked.

‘Even if we could, would ten thousand natives be able to meet the farm requirements of a hundred thousand whites?’

Another member added: ‘If India can supply labour to Mauritius, why can’t it supply us?’

‘We’re ready to offer better terms.’

The Governor laughed, ‘We can’t force them. It all depends on the sweet will of the Indian government.’

‘India is a British colony. So is Natal. The whites are in power there, and so are they here. That’s such a big country that it’s hard to feed everyone. What possible objection can the Indian government have?’

‘Only the Indian government can answer that question.’ The Governor looked annoyed. The members could read the signs on his face. As the Governor stood up, so did they. Miller had been quiet. Now he spoke for the first time, ‘It was not our intention to comment on your observation, Your Excellency. We are only concerned about the development of this colony and our own problems.’

The tension on the Governor’s face eased a little. ‘The matter can be discussed with the Indian government,’ he said as he walked away.

The white farmers lingered on for a while after he was gone. Then they shrugged and withdrew, wondering when the discussions would be held and when, if at all, the workers would arrive.

‘Meanwhile, we just hang around here, far from home and hearth, doing nothing.’

~

November 17, 1860. The immense water mass of the Indian Ocean rising and falling. At Eddington Port, people were straining their eyes, shading them with their hands, to figure out something towards the north.

Something, which looked like a bird, could be seen floating. People were taken by surprise. No one had ever seen a bird like this, nor had there ever been any traffic from this direction. The people clustered together and seemed to join their eyes together in a kind of communal sighting effort, in a way that suggested that if all their eyes came together they would see farther and much more clearly.

‘What could it be?’ ‘Anything but a bird. You surely couldn’t see a bird from this distance.’ ‘Then maybe it’s a ship.’ ‘A ship from this direction? It’s said they used to come once, but have never been seen more recently.’ ‘Well, it’s not impossible.’ ‘If it’s a ship, then whose ship is it? And why is it coming here?’ Everyone held his peace. No one could understand whose ship it might be. The nearer it came, the wider became its occupation of the water-space, as happens with domination, or with a squirt of colour. The shrill wail of its siren sounded as if it was challenging the sea shore. A variety of sounds began to be heard: the mass of water striking the ship, the ship, in turn, slicing the water as it surged forward. A shiver ran through the people collected there. Of course, ships did come, from the neighbouring colonies, from London, but a ship from the north was coming after a long, long time, like a stranger who had lost its way.

The ship dropped anchor a little distance from Eddington Harbour. People waited, holding their breath. More people had collected from the neighbouring places. The shore was a little distance from where the ship had dropped anchor. Little boats were dispatched from the shore to fetch the passengers ashore.

Since few ships arrived at this site, the number of boats available was also small.

Those who were standing on the shore became more and more curious.The language the passengers spoke was, of course, strange; their faces and their dress too looked quite outlandish. Their speech sounded like gibberish. Large eyes, colourful dresses. Men had their heads wrapped in cloth. Women covered their heads with the same length of cloth which was also wrapped around the rest of their body and their legs. People were wondering how they could possibly have managed this feat.

Some officials were also present. One of them declared: ‘This ship is called Touro.’

‘It’s written up there on the ship. It’s coming from Madras.’ ‘From Madras?’ ‘Yes, the recruiting agent had sent word that coolies were being sent on the Touro.’ There were two or three whites among them. One of them observed: ‘Something is better than nothing. At least they won’t behave like the natives.’ ‘It’s a new place for them. They must be feeling scared.’ ‘Should be thrown into the sea, if they don’t.’ ‘They can then swim back home, or make it straight to heaven.’ They roared with laughter.

~

By sheer coincidence, Touro had arrived on a Friday. Nine years ago when the white farmers had met in a classroom at the Durban Government School, it had been a Friday too. The sun had gone down. Shadows of trees enveloped the earth. It showed how enormously shadows grow before they die. Birds swarmed the sky as if they had just been released from their cages, had rediscovered their open sky and now flew fearlessly. They were now slowly descending and beginning to circle round their trees and the nests built in them, as if performing a ritual circumambulation before landing and seeking the tree god’s permission to land. Cattle were returning from the day’s grazing. There was dust all round. The passengers on the ship were reminded of their village: the cattle home after grazing, the villagers feeding the cattle, the milking to follow. They forgot they were on a ship. A few of them found their fingers moving by themselves. The swish-swish of the milking motion began to echo in their ears.

When the Touro announced its arrival by sounding its hooter, the birds were the ones to be disconcerted most. They took off on a steep flight as if the ship was here only to catch them and as if it was a big bird-catcher. Suddenly the sky had become a safer place for them than those trees where they spent twelve hours out of the twenty-four. After a short while, the birds had landed again, still a little frightened. Everything was now back to normal. A question however had lingered like a desire in the minds of the people on the ship: ‘Will it ever be their fate to return to their country or will they return to dust on this land?’

When the ship reached the harbour, the Natal coolie agent, Edmund, was absent. The government officials present were at a loss to understand what to do next. The necessary documents were with Edmund. Those who watched the scene from the shore always felt that those who came riding the waves brought all kinds of calamities with them: death, diseases, infections, adultery! They might blow them all into their faces like chilli powder the moment they got off the ship. New people, new diseases!

Only Philip Allen was present there. Though a white, he had been posted there by the government. In the absence of Edmund, he did one good thing: he got the men he had brought with him to start constructing temporary barracks close to the harbour. He also dispatched a man to fetch Edmund. Edmund lived in Pietermaritzburg, which was the capital of Natal. Durban and Pietermaritzburg must at least be about seventy to eighty miles apart. He was under the impression that Touro would still take a long time to arrive. When he heard that it had already arrived, he was speechless. Edmund ordered his horse to be harnessed and took off. He rode the whole day without stopping. He did stop at night to take rest for a few hours. He refreshed the horse and resumed his journey again at the crack of dawn. Edmund reached Eddington a little after noon. Had he followed the main road, it would have taken him longer. As he occasionally chose crosscuts, he reached relatively quickly.

Two things kept bothering Edmund along the way. A horde of non-native coolies must have descended from that ship; what sort of habits would they have? How would we remember their names? What would their food habits be like? How would we understand their talk? God alone knew what language they spoke. How would he manage them single-handed? He had no staff, no office, and no furniture. Even recording their identification features would be a problem. Without such a record, even identification would be a problem. They were carrying nothing except their girmit. Even the girmits had only their thumb-impressions. A few of them did have signatures, but the writing was strange indeed.

When Edmund arrived, Allen was already there. ‘Hello, Edmund,’ he said, the moment he sighted Edmund: ‘So late! They are stuck on board. They keep breaking into noisy protests from time to time. As far as I am concerned, I know nothing about them.’

‘I don’t know much more either, Allen! I have nothing except their girmits.’

‘The ship has to go into quarantine first. Only then will they be able to disembark.’

‘Aren’t the Health Department people here yet?’

‘They’ve been here since yesterday. They aren’t letting a single person get off.’

‘The Health Department certification is of course obligatory before they can get off.’

‘But they have to be unloaded first. How else can they be examined otherwise? Who knows how many of them are there? In what condition? In my opinion, they must first land on the terra firma.’

‘The numbers I have are based on the girmits. There are three hundred and forty-two girmits. I have no knowledge how many have died during the journey. I’ve heard when they start dying, they die like rats.’

It was only after a lot of entreaty on the part of Edmund that the Health Department allowed the passengers of Touro to disembark. It was, however, made clear that no passenger would leave the spot. They would be handed over to Edmund only after a thorough examination. Edmund agreed to each of their conditions. Only after an agrrement with the Health Department could Edmund start sending his boats to fetch the coolies. The boats positioned themselves beside the ship. Ropes were dangled from the ship. They would descend directly into the boats with the help of the ropes. There were children, women, and of course men. When they were told that they had to use the ropes to descend, they started to cry and wail as if they were being led to their execution or to be drowned into the sea. Their wailing drowned all other sounds. It was not possible to make them see reason.

Women tied the smaller kids to their waists and took to the ropes. The bigger kids were with the men. Every moment they felt the rope would slip from their hands and they would crash into the sea. Strange sounds emanated from them even as they slid down the ropes. Tears overflowed. Sometimes it appeared there were more tears than sea water around the place. People standing on the shore were watching this ‘spectacle on the high seas’ as if a play was being rehearsed. Even after the passengers had landed safely their sobs were unabated, especially those of women and children. Even as they cried themselves, they also tried to console the others.

A strange scene presented itself when the boats beached. Whites and natives had collected on the beach in good numbers. They were watching the boats keenly as if the gates of a zoo were about to open and disgorge varieties of animals. The people who actually emerged however were neither animals nor people of their kind. A mixture of surprise and disappointment washed over their faces. They found the newcomers quite ridiculous, resembling neither the whites nor the natives, now laughing and now crying. Their kids had protruding stomachs and sunken eyes. Some of the women were like that too. When they laughed, their teeth covered their faces from ear to ear. When they cried, they sniffed and snorted a lot. Their language was impenetrable. Only God could understand the sounds they produced and the meanings they tried to convey. They spoke so fast that it reminded you of an expert tailor’s scissors snipping its way through cloth. Safe landing on the shores had of course produced a sense of relief on their faces, but traces of apprehension were still intact. You never knew what to expect next. The best thing of course was that they were impervious to what others were feeling and thinking about them; otherwise things would have been much worse for them. The way they flopped around, it suggested they were wearing outsize shoes.

A few of them wore Arab-style turbans on their heads. Their cheekbones were very prominent and shone from afar. Some of them had their hair tucked in. They walked stuck close to each other as if to separate would mean to lose your way. They wore colourful clothes, especially the women. The women’s eyes were large, a little downcast and beautiful. One could read anxiety and uncertainty all over their faces. ‘This is no place for us to be,’ they seemed to be thinking. The kids, delicate, curious, handsome, like wilted flowers, held in spindly arms, gawked, as if they wanted to find out all that there was to know just by looking. They played with their mothers’ long and thick hair, like tangled bushes. They seemed to belong to a different species altogether. The natives and the whites had got to know each other at least a little: each other’s habits, lifestyles, joys, and sorrows; but what about these people?

Alone and far from home.

~

The second ship, Belvedere, reached Durban a few days after Touro. It came from Calcutta.There were three hundred and ten coolies on Belvedere. It was smaller than Touro. The passengers had been packed in it like sardines. There was restricted supply of drinking water aboard the ship. One or two sips were all that a coolie was allowed to slake his thirst. A small cabin had been converted into a hospital. A curtained area was the toilet where they answered the calls of nature. Bath was a rare event, and this bothered the coolies the most. They could skip a meal, but craved for a wash. They could have shower only when the ship cast anchor and the shore was close by.

At times passengers would cry out even in sleep. Even if one passenger screamed, everyone ran scared. Scare was so widespread that they seemed to be looking for excuses to get scared. One night, a doctor dragged a woman to his cabin. She screamed and people got up. But when they saw the doctor, they held back.

‘She has a fit,’ said the doctor.

Her husband too was begging the doctor to let her go but the doctor was unmoved. Others were too frightened to speak. They’d been told that if a ship’s official was displeased, he could get you thrown over board. Better save one’s own life, they thought. Right at the start, the ship’s staff filled fear in people’s hearts by telling them all kinds of stories. ‘So and so was pushed overboard; even his body was not recovered.’ Such stories left the passengers petrified. They couldn’t figure out what to do: stay aboard or jump overboard.

Another problem was sickness. Every second day, someone got measles, or diarrhoea, or malarial fever. Everyone had to go to the doctor. The doctor gave you a mixture with more water than medicine in it. If you displeased him, you never knew what he might hand you, maybe medicine, maybe something else. Several times, patients had died after taking the medicine. One learnt later that the doctor had been displeased. As a result, the patient had found relief not in medicine but in the sea.

The woman whom the doctor had dragged into his cabin had screamed for a while, then had become still. No one could figure out where her voice had gone.

The ship’s captain wrote in his report: ‘In such a long voyage, with so many people on board, men and women constantly interacting, such incidents are not unnatural and only to be expected. It’s not moral turpitude.’ The Captain also said that every care was taken to lodge the women passengers in the rear part of the ship. If there was a single woman, she was lodged with married couples. Similar care was also exercised with single men. A guard is on watch throughout the night. Any single man or woman up to any mischief is never allowed to go scot-free.

The report however made no mention of the woman.

The doctor however went about with his usual airs, bullying the patients. ‘Don’t take me to be a run-of-the-mill doctor,’ he would say. That incident had scarred the relationships so badly that no one could bring himself to speak out. People felt the whole ecology of the place had been wounded with suppressed screams of victims mixed up in it.

~

The first passenger to get off Touro was as dark as the natives. A dirty white wrap covered the lower half of his body. His head too was wrapped in a white cloth, like a turban. One could see his pate clearly through the cloth. At first, no one could get his name. Later, it emerged that his companions called him Devaram. A few Christian clergy appeared on the scene soon. They had found out from Edmund who the Christians were in the lot. As chance would have it, the very first passenger was a Christian and a Catholic too. The clergy beat their path to him and sprinkled holy water on him and his family. His wife and kids, following the Indian practice, prostrated themselves before the priests.

Devaram’s wife was called Nagiyam. The recorded age was eighteen, but she looked weak and much older. The husband’s age was recorded as thirty. The son, Kube, was four and the daughter, Elizabeth, year-and-a-half. She had just about learnt how to stand on her feet.

The next family to disembark looked as if it was walking straight out of the pages of the Old Testament. It was Abraham and his family. Abraham’s registered age was thirty-six but he looked fifty. He sported shepherd-style beard and mustache. His wife, Sarah, aged thirty. Three sons, Isaac, Yakub, and Orlando, were ten, eight, and five respectively. Daughter Rachel was a little older than Devaram’s daughter, Elizabeth. In the documents, her name had been entered as ‘Regal’. Rachel had of course no inkling of it; in fact even her parents and brothers didn’t know anything about it. If they did, perhaps ‘Regal’ would have become ‘Rachel’. The way it happened, she stayed ‘Rachel’ in life and ‘Regal’ in the records.

Medical examination over, the two families were sent to the barracks which Allen had got ready. White farmers, big and small, arrived with their retinue to pick up coolies of their choice in the same style as people go to animal fairs to buy elephants, horses, camels or cattle. Some coolies were lucky; they were picked up in the very first round. The first coolie to find a master was Sheikh Ibrahim. His serial number in the roster was forty-nine. When his master left with him in tow, people of the barracks watched him as if God’s messengers were carrying him to paradise on a plane. Sheikh himself was behaving as if a caparisoned thoroughbred was being escorted by a musical band, a thoroughbred fully conscious of his pedigree and of the honour bestowed on him. In any case, he was the healthiest of all the coolies. It was the railway company that had picked him up. Among the buyers of the Indian coolies most belonged to the Natal Railway, sugarcane farmers and hotel owners. Similarly, the first person to get a job in the second lot, which arrived on the Belvedere, was Muder Seeba. He was a Thakur from Aaraa, though his name sounded Christian. Three hundred coolies who came before him had been left cooling their heels when he was selected.

When they bought the coolies, the masters tested the goods to their satisfaction. The coolie was made to trot like a horse and run with a load on his back, and even had his mouth checked for the number of teeth. They squeezed his muscles and struck at his legs to test endurance. The moment a coolie was selected, silence descended on the place. Like a slowly dying wick, the flicker in the eyes of the people was smothered by smoke. Their knees buckled. There was no will to rise again or to lift the others. They cursed the day they had allowed themselves to be talked into leaving their own country by the agents. Every face they had left behind now called out to them as it swayed on the flowers growing on the plants around them: ‘Come back! Come back!’ But how could they go back? There was the big ocean to reckon with. Could they take on so much water, so much that if it so decided it could drown the whole earth? Would it spare them? They couldn’t cry, nor could they laugh. They stopped looking at themselves and gazed at those whose eyes, across seven seas, were looking for them.

The Devaram and Abraham families had to bide their time in those barracks for three months, waiting for a master. It was perhaps easier to sell foul and rotten stuff than a fully functional man, with two hands, two feet and two eyes. They felt so crushed by this thought they could be the red ants that the jungle tribes crush to make chutney for themselves. Though the responsibility for feeding them till they were taken away by a master rested with the agent, they were lucky to get even one meal a day. Often they went hungry both the times. The adults managed one way or another but the kids cried themselves sick. If sometimes fortune smiled on them, church fathers delivered food for their kids. People of other religions then watched them eat even as their wet tongues slithered over their lips. Especially, Malabar Muslims and the Hindu coolies had no well-wishers around. In addition, they had to put up with humiliation all the time. They didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh.

When however they saw any customer approaching, even their hungry stomachs began to sing in anticipation. A gleam appeared in their eyes, even if a blank and black screen of despair hung behind them. In their hearts, the same old script started to unfold: ‘Curse the fellow who cast us in this far-off land thousands of miles from home.’ But then how could you blame him? You were the one to be caught in the web of greed and temptation. Well, maybe you often went hungry, but you were at home. Here, you were not only hungry but also dying to hear a couple of warm words of your own people.

When the customers came, the coolies made an attempt to assume a posture that would display the biceps of their spindly arms, their muscles and sinews to the best advantage. If someone had some oil or cream, he applied it to his body, not to look dry and desiccated. But though a hungry stomach may still be able to sing, it does not quite make your biceps and sinews taut. When the masters asked a question in their language, they neither understood what was said nor could they provide an answer. If the sirdar happened to be around, some sort of wobbly bridge of communication between the masters and the coolies was set up, otherwise they just picked up the coolie they liked and left. The person who put his thumb impression on the girmit turned from a human being into a girmitiya. Girmitiya meant work and slavery—a lot of work, slavery and limited rations.

During all this time, Devaram was lost in thought. If his people and the folks of his religion had not cast him out, why would he come this far? After he married Nagiyam, he felt abandoned. He was looking for work all the time. If he found any, they would eat; if not, they would go to bed hungry.

~

The agents were always on the lookout: anyone sick? Starving? Famine some place? Anyone buried in debt? Wherever they located someone, they promptly showed up. In their bags they carried colourful dreams like balloons. They worked on the psychology of the people and layer after layer, they broke down their resistance, handing them a balloon at each step. They loaned them money for food. They gave them old, used clothes. On their very first visit, they served them the dream of a paradise that existed across the seven seas. To Devaram, they unfolded this dream in slow stages: ‘There is a country called Natal. It lies across the seven seas. Whites and blacks all live together there. There is so much wealth, so much gold! No one is poor. No one goes to bed hungry!’

Devaram spent his whole day dreaming of the place and thinking about it. Slowly, his mind was made up, his intention ripening like a mango left in straw. When the agent saw that the iron was hot, he struck: ‘I can’t bear to see the plight of your children any more. Please go. I’ll get the company to pay for your ticket and the expenses.’ To him, the agent looked like a messenger from God, like someone leading the way in total darkness holding a lighted candle aloft. He looked around him. He felt that if he did not find a way out of it, the fire blazing so fiercely all around him would burn everything to cinders. What would be his options then? This was the time when he could still pull himself and his family out of this fire of hunger and hatred.

One morning, he made it to the agent’s house quite early. There were quite a few other people present there. The agent took him aside and said: ‘These people are all like you, deep in trouble. How many people can I help? The company I work for is annoyed that I pick up so many people. This is a company, not a charity, they tell me. We are not in the business of providing shelter to everyone. But I can’t bear to see your misery. It just so happens that I like you. Tell me now what you’ve decided.’

‘I’ll go. My wife and children too.’

‘Let me make one thing quite clear. If you’re single, it’s easy to get a job. But getting jobs for the whole family isn’t that simple.’

‘It’s okay, sir. Even if I alone get a job, everyone can be fed. Here we’ve to go hungry for days.’ He almost choked.

‘Okay, okay. Don’t lose heart. You can all go.’

Devaram was happy. Finally, he was going to the world he had dreamed of. In that world, no one went to bed hungry. There were gold mines. Blacks and whites lived together.

Abraham too had been sweet-talked by the agent into joining the exodus. Like any needy and poor person, he too was in search of a world where no one went to bed hungry and where no one was discriminated against. These agents carried with them a sketch of just such a world and they spread it in front of anyone who seemed to them to be in misery and a victim of injustice, be he a Devaram, an Ibrahim or an Abraham. There was something in that sketch which attracted them in their helpless state like a magnet attracted iron. And they let themselves be pulled without offering any resistance.

~

When the first two batches of coolies arrived on the Touro and the Belvedere, they had before them a strange and unfamiliar sea coast. The agent who had tempted them with the dream of a golden future was nowhere around; the people were so different, even the soil had a different colour. Like Noah’s Ark, the waves of the sea had cast them ashore on a strange continent. Noah at least had his animals, his fellow citizens, and birds, but they were totally alone. They knew the nature of sea-waves: all their life they had seen the waves of their native sea. Those waves had been their friends. As they reached here, those waves had become quite unfamiliar and hostile. You never knew where they would cast you ashore and return laughing to the sea.

One day, a white farmer showed up accompanied by the agent’s man. The man first offered him Devaram. Although short, Devaram had a strong physique. The white farmer was Mr. Crompton. The agent’s man was trying to sell Devaram as if he was an animal. ‘Look, what strong legs! He can walk miles with a ton of stuff. Thick neck, broad shoulders, and chest like that of a wrestler. And so intelligent!’ Nagiyam wasn’t a bad piece either, whether in her looks or in her body structure.

Mr. Crompton signalled to Devaram to run. Devaram kept running till Crompton asked him to come back. He was out of breath and drenched in sweat. His legs however remained steady.

Mr.Crompton asked about the kids: ‘How much do they weigh?’ ‘Never weighed them.’ Crompton picked up each child like a pup to find out if they were light or heavy, or if they would start bawling. ‘What’s the diet per person?’ ‘The question of diet would arise only if there were food available.’

Nagiyam couldn’t help muttering this time. The agent’s man interpreted it to the white master. He laughed and said, ‘They have good weight, the kids. The diet must be good too.’ ‘No, sir, the weight of poor kids is in their bones. That’s what helps them survive.’

‘They need rice for their meals. How much rice would five persons need for one meal?’

Devaram said in a whimpering tone, ‘Elizabeth is still on mother’s milk. How much rice would such a small baby eat anyway?’

‘Yes, she’s a baby today, but in a year’s time she’ll eat as much as you do.’ Crompton laughed.

It was their lucky day. Bargaining started. After very hard bargaining, it was settled that they would be given half rice and half corn. Crompton would pay forty-four pounds and eight shillings for the whole family annually, although the rate was seven pounds for an adult and three pounds ten shillings for a child. Devaram did not want to let go of the chance, so they promptly agreed to go with him. They were often served boiled corn for meals at the camp too and they had to eat it without a grudge. Beggars could not after all be choosers. In the beginning, the kids made faces but a couple of days without food and they learnt fast that in the matter of food, taste came last. What came first was whether you got a full stomach or not, whether the hunger was satiated or not. If the answer to both the questions was ‘yes’ the food was tasty on all counts: on count of taste as well as on count of quality.

~

The two families—Devaram and Abraham—wanted to stay together. If they could get the same master, it would become a lot easier to share their joys and sorrows. If one of them got hurt, the other could apply the salve; if one of them lost heart, the other could say a few words of courage. But one doesn’t get what one wants, even death, the worst thing one could ask for. He gives it to you only when He wants it. So there was another white who came and collected Abraham’s family for thirty-one pounds and six shillings. Some whites found it more economical to hire whole families. That way you could get more work for less money. This white had offered a price of ten pounds, five shillings, and eight pence each for Abraham and Isaac, the eldest son. In the eyes of Indian law, Isaac was ten years old and counted as an adult.

The younger sons, Yakub and Orlando, went for six pounds each. Sarah and Rachel would only get their meals. Sarah was very lean and thin. Their master was called Captain Bishop. The Captain had managed a better bargain than Crompton. Actually the Captain was considered an expert in the matter of coolie trading. Other farmers used to engage his services on such occasions and paid his expenses. The expenses on the Captain were minimal while the savings ran into several pounds.

After spending three months together, the two families separated. They felt as if they were once again leaving their country behind. The two families were like a country now. Both were Malabaris. When they had met at the Eddington Port, the port itself had turned into Malabar for them: same language, same religion, and same identity. Only the land was foreign, but they tended to forget about it. But when they separated, everything once again turned strange to them, except the memories.

The place they were housed in was a cubbyhole in a long barrack covered with a straw roof. All coolies lived here. It was known as Coolie Lines. The whites and other biggies lived in Civil Lines. One advantage of living in Coolie Lines was that you could escape the supervision of the masters for short stretches. You could then devote some time to your household chores. If there was some space in front of the barrack, they planted some vegetables or rice, sometimes even sugarcane.

Devaram’s home was no different from that of the others. There was no outlet for the smoke. There was a drain running out in one corner where they had their bath and which they also used as a urinal at night. A stink pervaded the whole house at all times. At first, even children felt nauseated. With time, they got used to it. Behind every cubbyhole there was a pit. All the water from the drain collected in the pit. Mosquitoes buzzed their way in through the drain. At times, if someone in the family happened to be sick, he was allowed to use the corner as a toilet too. Of course, things had gone so far now that they didn’t feel at home unless the stink and the mosquitoes were in place.

Crompton had a very large sugarcane farm. Large farms had sugar mills attached to them. Language presented a permanent problem for the coolies, whether talking among themselves or with the masters. The Indian coolies themselves spoke different languages. Devaram’s was the only Malabari family. They had picked up a few Hindustani words. The masters of course spoke English. They were not concerned whether the coolies understood their language or not: if they didn’t, they’d be the ones to suffer. The masters got mad at the coolies. Sirdar was the only go-between who understood both parties and interpreted one to the other. He issued commands on behalf of the master, kept the coolies on a tight leash, foul-mouthed them, and even handed out punishment.

Devaram and his family worked twelve hours a day in the fields. First they prepared the land. The soil was dug up. This was Devaram’s job. There were others too. Then drains were laid out and manure was spread out evenly. Women workers cut eighteen-inch lengths of sugarcane. When cutting sugarcane, one had to be careful that the eye of the cane was not damaged. If the eye was lost, the fertility of the sugarcane was lost, that is, the cane was lost. The sugarcane lengths were then spread out on the ground at equal distances. The eye was to face upwards, as that’s where the plant budded. Then the weeds were removed, using a trowel. Nagiyam was very skilled at this job. The children too had picked up all the jobs. Elizabeth was still too young. She either just played around the place or slept on a hammock rigged up by tying a piece of cloth between two tree trunks.

Many times when Devaram returned from work tired, he said to Nagiyam, ‘If I ever come across that agent I will ask him: You’d promised to send me to a country where no one went to bed hungry; so how come you sent me to a country where I have neither food nor any identity? All that I have is humiliation and constant worry.’

Nagiyam had just one comment for every moment of sorrow: ‘It’s all Mother Mary’s will.’ She would start speaking like Hindus: ‘This land was calling us, so how could we have stayed back? If we are fated to live here, we have to do what people here do.’

The children often remembered Abraham Uncle and his family. They would ask: ‘Will we ever see Abraham Uncle, Isaac, Yakub,

Orlando and Auntie again?’ When they received no answer, they were disappointed.

‘Mom, how sweet they were—Isaac, Yakub, Auntie, weren’t they?’

Nagiyam just gave a nod. She was reminded of her country and her people. Then she thought: ‘Poor kids. How’d they know how much one has to leave behind in life, never to find it again? If He wants us to meet them again, He’ll arrange it,’ she would mutter, as if consoling herself.

Nagiyam had never liked working with mud and clay. At times when work on the farm was slack, she was assigned to serve at Crompton’s house or to work at the sugar mill, digging up earth, mixing it with water, and kneading it, making bricks, drying them, and then baking them. When construction work was on, she had to prepare the cement mix. The master could not bear to see the workers sitting idle. Moreover there was no proper communication between the masters and the slaves. Anyone who understood the masters’ language was the boss. The sirdars functioned as the eyes and ears of the master. The whole colony functioned like this. Everything was done in the name of the government in London. The sirdars of London were running the show.

~

Karanpillay was also a coolie. He worked on another farm a little distance from Crompton’s farm. He fell sick. The rules said the master of the farm must maintain a sick-room, but everywhere the sick-room turned into a store-room. The white masters were of the view that the coolies did not need a sick-room since they were a sturdy lot. Many farms simply did not have a sick-room at all or any arrangement for a doctor. The sirdars themselves handed out pills on behalf of the master. The coolies too had come to believe that sick-room meant ‘death-room’. The master’s men themselves arranged this belief to be entrenched in the minds of the coolies so that they on their own became dead set against the sick-room. The masters anyway took any pleas of illness as excuses for shirking work. The girmit, they argued, was for work, not for illness. The five-year girmit had no provision for rest. The masters had to extract as much work as possible. At the end of five years, the workers could live or die as they chose. But the five years belonged to us! Life or death could claim the rest!

Karanpillay was getting worse by the day. He could barely walk. Two steps and he would begin to heave like the bellows. He became restless. The legs were getting swollen. On that particular day, he was worse than usual. He set out to work but staggered and fell. When he did not report to work, the sirdar arrived fuming: ‘Where’s Pillay?’

Karanpillay lay on the ground. He tried to speak but could not. Sirdar ordered his men: ‘Pick him up and take him along. The scoundrels want a free ride! Malingerers!’

Karanpillay and his family pleaded with the sirdar, went down on their knees before him but he didn’t budge an inch. They heaved Karan onto a stretcher and took him. At the site, he was still unable to get up. A report was filed against him accusing him of shirking work and violating the conditions of the girmit. He was prosecuted. The white lawyer could make out only part of what he said. White lawyers did not pay much attention to what the coolies said since they didn’t have enough money to pay their fees. Their cases often went by default and they were handed punishment ex parte. That’s what happened with Karan too. He was sentenced to fourteen days’ hard labour.

In the jail, Karanpillay pleaded with every warder. He was sick, he couldn’t move, his whole body was inflated. But the jailer shut him up with: ‘The scoundrels are getting fat on free food, and they tell me it is swelling.’

Karan tried to explain, ‘Give me some light work, something I can do sitting.’

‘This is a jail, not you father’s home,’ he was told.

Karan was eventually given whatever work had been planned for him or whatever was covered by ‘hard labour’. He just couldn’t do it. The warders got tougher with him and one day Pillay collapsed. The warder was a native. The natives only repeated what the whites said. He came and kicked Pillay a couple of times. Karanpillay fell into a trough of water. ‘Drink and be fresh!’ The warder laughed and moved away.

Karanpillay lay in the trough for some time. When he was finally taken out, his pulse had slowed down considerably. In a little while, he lost control of his limbs. Actually, Karan too had come on the Touro with Devaram, but he beat Devaram to a job, although he was No. 99 on the list. Though often sick, Karan was always happy. Very sincere in his work, he had the knack of keeping his supervisors in good humour too.

Devaram was informed that Karanpillay had died in jail; that he had lain in water and no one had bothered to take him out. He had died in water. For several days, Devaram went around saying, ‘What happened to Pillay can happen to anyone of us.’ No one got it that Karan was a heart patient. How could anyone? He was a poor man after all.

Nagiyam had only one point to make: ‘There aren’t too many ways for a poor man to die. Why mourn? We all are destined to die the same way. Don’t lose heart.’

But for many, many days Karanpillay kept rearing his head in the mind of everyone in that house. For Devaram especially, he had become a synonym for every coolie.

II

The Indian coolies had become commodities for sale and purchase much before Touro and Belvedere landed in South Africa. They were already being exported to places as far as North America.

Those were the days of voyages. The sea was the only route one could take to other countries. People died, ships sank, but the few who survived made it to their destination. The ship Sudderingham, laden with coolies, was on its way to Mauritius. The ocean on one side of Mauritius was so calm that it was like a mother stroking her baby to sleep; on the other side, it was so rowdy that it appeared as if millions of rocks had sprouted in the bed of the ocean, all bent upon shattering the ocean’s pride and the ocean was hitting back at them with all its might.

That day the sea was in a nasty mood. The waves roared and roared. As the ship, with a load of coolies on board, nudged its way in, they were in a fury: ‘Look at its impudence,’ they seemed to be saying. ‘It dares to intrude on our solitude!’ And they let loose their full force on the ship. This was almost the beginning of the seventeenth century. The ship found itself surrounded by a storm as if it was not an ocean but a siege laid by an enemy from which it was unable to find the way out. A hole appeared in the ship. Water rushed in as if from a spring. The water level kept rising. At first, the sailors tried to pitch the water out, but when they realized that the water was unstoppable, the captain as well as others took to the boats and scurried like rats leaving the ship.

The Chief Officer told the Captain: ‘This is your ship. If you leave it, it’ll be orphaned with no one to look after it.’

The Captain begged for mercy: ‘Please let me go. I have small kids.’

‘And who will be responsible for all these lives?’ Before the Chief Officer could complete his sentence, the Captain was in the boat and the boat was on its way to the shore. The Chief Officer looked at the sky and then at the coolies, who had staked their lives trying to save the ship. The women and the kids were in a bad shape. He muttered softly: ‘It is Thy will, Lord. How can I leave them to die?’ And he plunged into the effort.

Suddenly, there was a noise in the ship. A part of the ship had broken off. Nineteen men were swept away in the strong current. About a hundred persons survived. They floated away in different directions on planks which had broken off from the ship. Sometimes they disappeared behind the waves and then came in sight again.The Chief Officer still stood on the sinking ship, performing the duties of his Captain. Whenever a part of the ship and the people sitting on it swam into view, he waved at them. Goodbye! In his hands he had a musical instrument, which he used to play at odd times of day and night. Now as the ship was going down, he played the instrument, his eyes closed.

The other ship, Fusilier, was sailing to Africa with its merchandise of coolies. It was sailing and the sea was letting it sail. All of a sudden its cold waves turned into countless flaming tongues of fire. It started dancing, bouncing the Fusilier here and there as children bounce balls. The Captain and the seamen had no clue as to what the sea was suddenly up to. The shore was drifting away. The waves seemed to have made up their mind that, no matter what, this insolent object must never be allowed to make it to the shore. The ship cried out, in its countless voices, to be forgiven only this once: ‘O God of the waves, please pardon my error!’ But no one was listening. The sea was ready to hit the sky. It had gone completely mad. Suddenly, Fusilier broke into two. Like pomegranate seeds, seamen and coolies were flung all over the surface of the sea. A good proportion of the coolies had been wiped out by an epidemic during the journey. Those who had succumbed had been buried at sea. The survivors had thought that they might be able to find their destination.

This incident had taken place a little distance from Durban, in the Bay of Retal.

That night, the Bay had been very agitated. A little way up from the Bay, there was a big farm owned by a Dutchman. He had got a number of barracks made for his coolies on the farm itself. The farm being at a higher level, the waters of the Bay did not reach it and the people there were safe. Even so, even a little disturbance in the Bay set the poor coolies on edge. That night too, the strong winds in the Bay had kept them awake throughout. You didn’t know when the barrack roofs might be blown away in the wind, leaving you standing under the open sky. One of the coolies peeped out of the window to get a measure of the sea and the wind and saw lights scattered over the surface of the sea. He thought they were spirits and was scared stiff. He called out to his fellow men: ‘Look, what are those lights in the sea?’

Normally, the fellow men would not have responded to his call, but when they heard what he had to say they quickly gathered around him. Fire, water and wind had them badly rattled. Water and wind particularly had been behaving as if there was going to be no tomorrow. In a short while, they could also hear people screaming. These were perhaps screams of people in their last fight to save their lives. Their screams spoke of a fear of death and a strong craving for life. It