Preparing to leave India

As an adult, I would be the one to trace the details of Rambishun’s journey, starting from a copy of my Nana’s birth certificate, which I found while rummaging through his papers. His “father’s name” was declared to be “Rambishun”, and below that, No. 39043; “Allan Shaw 1888”. This was standard information provided for the children of immigrants born in the colonies: the number was a unique one for Rambishun’s ship “pass” to the Allan Shaw, the ship that had brought him to British Guiana in 1888. The pass of each immigrant would have all the details recorded about him in India. The passes for each ship are bound together in one crumbling volume and filed in the National Archives of Guyana. There, I was able to confirm, sometimes rectify, and give certainty to so many details that had been passed on orally from Rambishun to his son, daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter, my mother.
As part of the emigration laws, he had to appear before a magistrate and declare that he was emigrating willingly. However, he had been registered at the Barrackpore sub-depot, more than 300 miles from his village of Ishmailpur, where he had been brought by train on July 27, 1888. The Arkatiya should have registered him closer to Ishmailpur – at Patna, for instance – but Rambishun did not want to register at any sub-depot close to home, where someone who knew him might inform his family. When I saw Rambishun’s “pass” at the National Archives for the very first time, I became very emotional: here in my hands, thanks to the bureaucratic imperatives of the British Empire, were the details of the life of Rambishun as extracted from him by some clerk in the atmosphere of a British court, all distilled on a single, crumbling page.
The Emigration Pass declared it was composed at the British Guiana Depot 2064 at Garden Reach in Calcutta and indicated he was proceeding to British Guiana. Each colony had its own depot – simple, one-storey buildings. He would have been transported the 20 miles from the Barrackpore train junction by boat along the Hooghly, passing under the Howrah Bridge. The document indicates that he was to await the ship “Allan Shaw” to receive its full complement of human cargo. The ship finally set sail down the Hooghly River into the Bay of Bengal on August 25, 1888. He had spent a month at the B.G. Depot in Calcutta, where many new relationships were initiated – including some couples who decided they would proceed as married.
And there I learnt that Rambishun’s father was named “Bhooidhar”, which had never been mentioned in all his stories. Even in my generation, one does not refer to one’s parents by their names: Rambishun would have been asked by my Nana about his Aja. Rambishun’s age was given as 19, and his caste was “Kurmi”, but his wife’s name was left blank. It would be the beginning of his erasure of her and his son. It also described him – five feet, two inches tall, with a wart on the right side of his nose and a scar on his thigh. My mother confirmed the wart.
Rambishun became impatient for the trip to start: he wanted to return with money to see his son live comfortably. He had been examined medically and given several changes of clothing when he entered the depot at 16 Garden Reach in Calcutta. He remembers thinking he and the others looked like prisoners, especially with the guards preventing absconding. But since he was fed adequately and allowed to sleep, he adjusted to the routine and strengthened the friendships he had formed on the rail trip to Barrackpore. He was amused at the discomfort of the “upper” castes having to be served food from a single pot and eat in the same line as “lower castes”.
Finally, after another medical examination, they were given another set of clothing along with a tin tag with their number, a plate, a cup, and a blanket before they boarded the Allan Shaw to sail down the Hooghly River and into the Bay of Bengal. The three sails billowed in the wind as the sailors were kept busy following the barked orders to control them. The emigrants were allowed to remain on deck to take a last look at the land they were leaving behind. Many wailed as the mangrove trees in the Sundarbans of the Hooghly disappeared. Interestingly, they would espy similar mangroves when they finally reached British Guiana.