New family

We return to my great-grandfather Rambishoon’s life as a Girmitiya on the De Willem sugar plantation in the closing years of the 19th century, caught in the twin pincers of the planters’ strategy to survive in a depressed market due to competition from beet sugar. Not that Rambishoon was aware of the grand rationales, but as the plantations consolidated and factories modernised their equipment to lower production costs, they needed increasingly greater amounts of sugarcane, which meant his tasks became more onerous to complete for the same one-shilling daily.
Married to Sanichari late in 1894 after he had re-indentured, his life had become more settled now that they shared their own logie room. He considered her two-year-old son Banka, whose father Budhu had died within a year of his birth, as the one he had left behind in Ishmailpur. During the day, Banka was left with the other children at the estate creche, along with their parents, when they went into the fields, and in the evening, after picking him up, Rambishoon would play with him while Sanichari prepared their dinner. Sometimes his mother-in-law Rookoo, whose husband Kaliyan had passed in 1885 and had remarried a man named Bishun, would drop by with her own five-year-old son Bissoon. The imbalance in women in the logies ensured very few women remained single.
Rambishoon was not surprised at how well she spoke the polyglot “Bhojpuri” that had become the lingua franca in the loges since she had arrived when three. Rambishoon himself had spoken Magadhi, which had much in common with the other dialects of Hindi spoken by most other immigrants, but Rookhoo’s Bagdhi variant of Bengali was as different as that of the Girmitiyas who had arrived via Madras from the south. Her father, Doerga, spoke Bengali and married her to a Baghdi boy, Kaliyan; they then spoke Bengali in their logie with Sanichari. Kaliyan had passed a few years before, aged twenty-eight and a victim of the endemic plantation “intermittent fever” – malaria. He and Doerga had been very proud of being Tentulia Bagdis, descended from foot soldiers and named after Durga/Kali – the upholder of a fierce marital tradition and widely worshipped in Bengal.
Rambishoon found Rookhoo’s favourite lullaby to her grandson, “Khoka Ghumalo”, very touching, and this was passed down by her daughter Sanichari to my grandfather, Ramlagan. It was iconic for the Bagdhi people and, as explained by Rookhoo, bemoaned the 18th-century Bargi (Maratha cavalry) raids, which devastated the villages they were supposed to guard. “Khoka ghumalo, para juralo, Borgi elo deshe/Bulbulite dhan kheyeche, khajna debo kishe?” The meaning – “The baby sleeps, the neighbourhood is quiet, the Maratha raiders have entered our lands/the nightingales have eaten the grain, how will we pay our taxes to the landlord?” – resonated deeply with Rambishoon, whose Kurmi heritage also stressed their marital heritage – but more recently against the marauding British. Rambshoon could also appreciate the just as destructive depredations of the conquerors’ taxes that had decimated Kurmi landholdings in his native Gaya.
Before Sanichari’s grandfather, Doerga, had passed, their conversations were centred on commiserations of the lives they had left behind in their homeland, since both had arrived in Demerara as young men – Doerga at twenty-five and Rambishoon at nineteen. Doerga missed the increasing public worship of the goddess after whom he was named and the feeling of togetherness the festival had inspired. For Rambishoon, it was the Chaath Puja mentioned earlier, where the offerings of produce by the agrarian castes, like Kurmis, to the sun would be prepared and taken to the waterway by men. While there are two Chaath Pujas annually, the primary and largest Chhath festival takes place in autumn during the Kartik month, which in 1888 was celebrated nine days before the Allanshaw landed in Guyana on November 18. The year before, he had accompanied his then-pregnant wife with the large basket (dowra) loaded with their produce on his head.
None of these stories resonated much with Sanichari, who was more consumed with the freedom to dress in the newer women’s styles that was all she knew of in Demerara. In the afternoons and on Sundays she would join the women’s circle in front of their logie with their sewing needles, stitching the Jhoolas (blouses) that went over their below-knee-to-ankle, heavily pleated Ghangris or skirts. Sanichari sewed her Johhlas – meant to be loose – more like the tighter blouse (Cholis) and shorter Ghangris. imitating the white women she saw in the Overseer quarters.