The Indian PM Narendra Modi’s visit last month precipitated discussion on the relationship between the descendants of indentured labourers from India (Girmitiyas) in their new “Motherland” and “Bharat Mata (Mother India) – to use Modi’s words. We can consider this relationship in three chronological stages: the IMPERIAL stage, between the British conquest by 1817 to 1947; the Internationalist stage, between 1947 and the early 1990s; and the Bharatiya nationalist stage, from then into the present.
Girmitiyas were created by the British Imperialists responding to demands from their white plantation owners in their colonies for cheap and reliable labour, following the abolition of slavery in 1838. There was a right of a return passage to India first after five, then 10 years, but 2/3 chose not to exercise it. These Girmitiyas were “othered” as “coolies” in the colonies to become the first “Indians” – losing regional and caste loyalties, but stubbornly holding on to their Hindu and Muslim identities.
Interest in Girmitiyas disappeared from India’s nationalist consciousness after the abolition of indentureship in 1917, for which they had agitated. Like Gandhi, they were horrified to be lumped with “coolies” in the colonies. The flow of new Girmitiyas that replenished the fount of Bharitiya village culture also ceased. There were episodic visits, however, by Muslim and Hindu missionaries, which helped maintain linkages. One 1945 academic paper on Girmitiyas predicted, “…once India comes into her own, she will demand, and, I am sure, obtain, justice for her now discriminated-against children abroad.”*
It was not to be. In the second “Internationalist” stage, P.M. Nehru abrogated the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs in 1947 and embarked on his quixotic, anti-colonial, non-aligned adventure. Even as internecine conflict developed in the colonies, he insisted that “overseas Indians” were on their own, and should subsume themselves in Third World solidarity. However, a Cultural Center to disseminate Indian culture was established here in 1972 by his daughter, PM Indira Gandhi. Meanwhile, India had increasingly less relevance in the daily lives of Girmitiyas, and at best became a “mythical” “Ram Raj” of the Ramcharitmanas, not a “homeland” to which they would return. Escapist Indian movies from the 1930s further increased this non-corporeality.
The present Bharatiya nationalist stage was inaugurated with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its accession to national power between 1998 and 2004 and 2014 to present. In 2003, the first annual Overseas Indian Day (Pravasi Bharatiya Divas) was inaugurated, and a Ministry of Overseas Indians (downgraded to a department within the MEA in 2016) was launched, bringing Indian-immigrant NRIs and Girmitiya PIOs together to collaborate.
A more positive Bharatiya nationalism was unfurled after 2014 under Narendra Modi, and certainly got the attention of Girmitiyas – and the world. In the 2015 PBD, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj summed up the new government’s policy on Overseas Indians in terms of “3 Cs”: to ‘connect’ with India, ‘celebrate’ their cultural heritage and ‘contribute’ to the development of Bharat Mata. But Girmitiyas asked what was in it for them beyond the governmental bilateral programmes? There were some initiatives, like the Know India Programme (KIP), Study India Programme (SIP) and the Tracing the Roots Scheme and OCI card to push the “connect”.
This assertive Bharatiya nationalism is now supposedly the driving force guiding India’s strategy to engage the world. Incumbent EA Minister Jaishankar has asserted: Indians “must rely on their own traditions to equip them in facing a tumultuous world. That is certainly possible in an India that is now more Bharat”.
Now that India finally had the confidence to call itself “Bharat”, many Girmitiyas hope they would unfurl a more nuanced notion of what constitutes a “diaspora” and who exactly is a “Bharatiya”. They hope Bharat would follow the African Union, which declared its diaspora as “Africa’s 6th Region” summarised in the sentiment articulated by two African-origin Caribbean PMs: “I am not African because I was born in Africa, I am African because Africa was born in me”!
However, articulating the new dispensation, Jaishankar explicitly rejected the “political romanticism” of the past Indian “soft state” with a realpolitik transactional approach, viewing all other nations as “frenemies”, This might be disappointing to Girmitiyas who hoped they would finally have a “special relationship” because of Bharat’s new, putatively expansive, culturally-grounded nationalism. In 2020, when the Guyanese elections were being flagrantly rigged against the Girmitiya-supported PPP, Bharat did not issue a strong condemnation, even after the US, UK, EU, CariCom, Commonwealth, etc did so.
