Dear reader, I hope you will have the time, interest and patience to read this to the end. Perhaps not in one go but over many reading sessions. Treat this piece like a short story, a mystery or detective story because that’s what it is. It’s also a travelogue in more senses than one; we travelled physically in India to find places we did not know and through time to find people we thought we knew and met people in the present that we knew nothing about. And if you do enjoy reading this even half as much as I enjoyed writing it, I will consider myself lucky.
1. Introduction
Almost a century and half since the first indentured labourers arrived on the shores of Suriname from Calcutta in India, a young Dutch woman of Surinamese Indian heritage living in Amsterdam, Ragna, undertook a trip to India in 2024. Her aim was to visit those places from where her foremothers almost five generations ago left for a destination that they did not know, never to return. Ragna was planning a book about her ancestry to be published in the following year to coincide with 50-year anniversary of Surinamese independence from the Netherlands and this trip to India was the first part of a two-part journey that included Suriname. I accompanied Ragna on her journey in India. We retraced in reverse what we think is the trajectory of these women’s journey, from the port in Calcutta from where they were shipped to Suriname to the areas in India where they purportedly came from as mentioned in their documents which were more than a century old.
In the first of this two-part blog I wrote about the history of Indian indentured labourers sent to British, French and Dutch colonies in Africa and the Caribbean to work on plantations and to replace slaves freed since the abolition of slavery in the European countries from 1838 onwards. They were variously known as girmitiyas, jahajins and coolies. The expansion of the capitalist world economy under imperialism necessitated a colossal demand for labour which was met by indentured labour from India, which is why I chose to call the indentured, the worker bees of imperial capital. As we embarked on this journey in October 2024 in search of our ancestors, my question was whether and how they were remembered in the land that they left. This blog is about the ambiguous nature of memory, the collective amnesia of this history and remembering as an active project that shapes memory.
Prologue to our physical journey
In preparing for the physical journey in India in search of these ancestors or rather the memory of these ancestors there was a lot of preliminary work to be done. I immediately recruited my friends most likely to be in the know of people, events, readings and places that could help us in our search. Rajashri more or less took over the responsibility for the Calcutta end of our visit while Sushil provided the references that helped me research the history I wrote about in the first part of this blog. Ragna’s archival documents showed that her ancestors came from eastern UP near Varanasi. And so I recruited my friends Jashodhara and Abhijit who knew the state of UP very well having lived there for decades and worked on women’s health for which they were well known. Through their contacts we were able to among other things find our research assistant Shantanu who did much of the groundwork that made our physical visits possible. The search for Ragna’s ancestors became a collective project for us Indians, a process of learning about a chapter in our history that we were vaguely aware of or not at all.
Ragna traced her ancestry through her foremothers and had collected the documents from the archives in Suriname (in Dutch) pertaining to the two women who left India for Suriname: her mother’s paternal and maternal foremothers. Despite my long years of academic training in feminist epistemologies which question the nature of truth produced by using objective scientific methods, and despite my having taught generations of students that the visible world of empirical evidence does not necessarily reveal the not so visible world of social relations, I nevertheless fell into the positivist trap when we began the search for the villages mentioned in the archival documents of the first generation. The trap was to read these documents as sacrosanct, as transparent evidence of the truth of who these women were and where they came from, and to see the lack of certainty as a failure. The search for ‘origins’ which in itself is questionable was in this instance compounded not only by the fact that more than a century had elapsed between our search and when these documents were written but that the documents first written in colonial English were translated into colonial Dutch from the information that the recruiting agents (who in turn obtained it through their networks of scouts in the villages) gave to the colonial officers in charge of migration who then had to fill the personal data sheets according to a set format. In the process the social relations of the recruitment chain were imbricated in the production of information about the subject that fitted the registry form.
Given this the search for people and places named in the archival documents became lessons in archival history, colonial linguistics, Indian administrative practices and the fuzziness of data. And most importantly I learned that the search was in itself important and was full of uncertainties. The so-called truth about the ancestors we were seeking was not one coherent story but a composite of various pieces of evidence and a large dose of conjecture.
Finding Lawaur and Badrapur: What’s in a name
Our first step was to find the places mentioned in the archive. Abhijit the incredible researcher that he is immediately scoured the government internet sites to come up with the official documents listing villages and towns in the state of Uttar Pradesh. There are several government agencies that have village records and among them the revenue department and the Block development department are two key agencies. The revenue department has existed for as long as there have been rulers who required a system for tax collection. In fact the Urdu word tehsil or the tax administration area identifying the location of villages comes from the same Arabic word meaning collection or levying of taxes which means that it dates back to the onset of the Moghul era (1500s). The Block development department is relatively more recent in that it was created in the 1950s by the Indian government as administrative units for development work and to provide facilities and services to the villages. These administrative units and the villages that fall under each may or may not coincide; the revenue units are larger than the Block. So where were we supposed to look? We decided to use the Block administrative units and refer to revenue lists too.
In the summer of 2024, Ragna sent me a mail describing what she had found in the archives about her foremothers. Here is what she wrote about her foremother from the paternal side.
‘My mum's great great grandmother of the paternal line is Ootmee Ramtahal, then 24, came with her 1 year old daughter Beerunjeea from Lawaur, district Mirzapor in UP. They travelled with Shibdaree Gangaram, who is assigned as the father of the girl, but the official documents state that he is 2 years old at time of departure and came from a different village: Shanpore in the district Morufferpore. They travelled on the ship, the Clive setting sail on 4.7.1877 and arriving at Paramirabo on 29.8.1877. Beerunjeaa is the mother of my great grandfather Wulfing Roeplall, father of my nani Mathilda.’
Apart from the strange information on Shibdaree’s age which we assumed to be a mistake, I thought that the data was helpful: we had the name of the district Mirzapor (Mirzapur in today’s spelling) and so all we needed to do was find Lawaur. Abhijit set to work and found several possibilities in Mirzapur district the closest being Lalapur and Lohrohgram panchayats. The gram panchayat or village government is the smallest administrative unit of the Block and there are approximately 25 to 30 gram panchayats in in a Block. The spelling was different but that was understandable given that these names were originally in Hindi/Urdu and they were written in colonial English as they were then pronounced. We spent several Zoom call sessions trying out pronunciations of the place names, writing them into English and then looking for the closest equivalent in the Block lists of Gram Panchayats and Lohroh came up as our best option. So we settled for Lohroh in Hallia Block. We felt vindicated that we had been thorough in our search till Shantanu our research assistant joined the team searching for Ragna’s ancestors.
Shantanu found while researching Lohroh that Indian villages often share similar names and that too within a single district. For example, Lahraon/ Lohoroh in Hallia Block, Lahaura in Chunar Block and Lauria/ Lauirya in Mirzapur Block in the same district had similar sounding names with different English spellings. To complicate matters these spellings in English of the villages also differed in the different government administration lists. As we say in India: what to do. Having settled on Lohroh (which Shantanu in his reports wrote as Lahraon, the n being silent, probably taken from the revenue list or his own English rendition of how he pronounced it) as our destination we had to decide which of the other similar sounding villages we would visit. Shantanu visited Lohroh in Hallia Block before Ragna and I did but wanted also to visit Lahaura in Chunar Block because both were in the jurisdiction of the same police station, the Ahraura Police Post mentioned in the Suriname archive which he later did.
We faced similar difficulties locating the village that the maternal foremother came from. According to Ragna’s translation of the Dutch archival documents the maternal lineage could be traced back to the village Badrapur in the Jaunpore district of UP, where her first grandmother Sumaria Shehonundun came from. Her husband, Khaor Musai (Moesai in Suriname) came from the same village, but a different police post is mentioned for him than for Sumaria which could because of the way information was gathered from the pair. The pair was 25 and 30 years old when they arrived with the ship Mersey in 1896 . Yet again it was Abhijit who researched the locations and found that Badrapur was probably a misnomer and that it was more likely to be Badlapur which was in Jaunpur district in UP.
Faced with these difficulties we decided to consult a proper linguist who would know more about this than us. We were fortunate that Peggy Mohan was available to talk to us from her home in Delhi. Dr. Peggy Ramesar Mohan is of Indian heritage from the Caribbean, Trinidad to be precise, and is an eminent scholar of linguistics. Besides her academic publications is also the novel Jahajin a semi biographical fiction which is a fascinating read more so because the experience of indenture is captured in the memories and folk tales told by one of the central characters, an old woman. Peggy clarified for us that there was often in colonial as also contemporary English pronunciation when for example ‘dla’ is enunciated as ‘dra’. She gave us several examples of how this happens and concluded that Badrapur was probably Badlapur.
There were some places which were impossible to locate although we did speculate what they could be. As for example, Shibdaree’s personal data said that he was from a village called Shanpore in Morufferpore and the police post was Bissanah. Morufferpore sounded unlikely no matter how we pronounced it and did not resemble any names that exist now. We speculated that it could be Muzzaffarpur in Bihar which is both the name of the district and that of the capital city of the district. But here we came to a dead end since Shanpore or something similar was not to be found in the district. However, we later discovered that Bissanah now written as Bisanah is a village in Muzzaffarpur district.
Finding Ootmee
When we went searching for the places mentioned in the archival documents we postponed our questions about the identity of the people we were looking for. Beeurnjea, Ootmee’s daughter, we knew was part of Ragna’s grandmother’s living memory. But who really was Ootmee and what was her journey from being a young woman from a village probably Lawaur/ Lohroh in Mirzapur district in eastern UP to becoming an indentured labourer and resident of Dutch Suriname. We had to wait till Ragna was in Suriname on the second part of her search to trace her two foremothers in the colonial archives and to piece together some parts of Ootmee’s life story in Suriname.
I was puzzled by the way her name was written in the in the Suriname archives. Her name is written as Ramtahal and her surname is Ootmee whereas Ragna had introduced her as Ootmee Ramtahal. For anybody familiar with Hindi Ramtahal sounds very much like a surname and as a first name it is more likely to be a man’s name. Ragna’s research showed that indentured labourers did not have surnames in the western sense. However, since a name and surname were essential to fill the personal data form they were probably given surnames; these could be father’s first name or his nickname or even a place name. Ootmee’s name/surname is an example of how the social relations of the recruitment and registration process produced information about the subject that was fit for the Register that needed to be filled first in India and then in Suriname when they were handwritten into Dutch by the authorities to fit their requirements. According to Choenni the names and surnames were frequently interchanged in the process (Prof. dr. Chan Choenni, ‘About the origin of Surinamese family names’ in the online journal Hindorama 2025 https://www.hindorama.com/over-het-ontstaan-van-surinaamse-familienamen-prof-dr-c-choenni/ accessed on 8.10.25). As for example, half of the Ramtahals in the Suriname archives are registered with this name as their surname, for the other half it is their first name. Through the bureaucratic processes of naming the archival subject Ootmee Ramtahal was manufactured; in real life she was an indentured labourer, a wife and mother who left traces of her existence throughout her lifetime in the Suriname registers.
Her daughter Beerunjeaa who was 1 year old at the time of arrival in Suriname also had her name and surname interchanged: Beerunjeaa was written as her surname while Bissessor was given as her name. But since Beerunjeaa is within the living memory of Ragna’s grandmother who is still alive, Ragna was able to confirm that Beerunjea was the first name. She was Ragna’s grandmother’s aaji (paternal grandmother) and lived in the same courtyard as the family. In the archives Beerunjeaa has a different surname to her mother Ootmee. Bissessor a well-known surname in Suriname in the meanwhile could have been the name of her biological father since Shibardree who in the records is written as her father has a different name altogether.
And here begins another series of unknowns about Ootmee that can only be speculated about based on the history of indentured labourers but never confirmed. Ootmee was presumably from a village Lawaur/ Lohroh in Mirzapur district in eastern UP according to her documents whereas her husband Shibardree was from a place in probably Muzzafarpur district in Bihar. Since they did not share the same address which would probably have been the case if they were married as it was for Ragna’s maternal ancestors Sumaria and Khaor Musai, it probably meant that they, Ootmee and Shibardree, were not married at the time of recruitment. A standard practice was for women travelling alone to be married off to men at the depots in Calcutta where they were housed before they boarded the ship. The authorities were very keen to tie women to men because they were trying to avoid men only shipments of labourers which would jeopardise life in the plantations. It was also safer for single women to be married. Ootmee was probably a single woman travelling alone and was married off to Shibardree either in the depot in Calcutta or in Paramaribo. Was Beerunjea Shibardree’s child? Shibardree and Ootmee are linked in the Suriname archive but Beerunjeaa is only linked to Ootmee as her child which leads us to speculate that Ootmee was a single woman travelling with a child. Was she fleeing from a bad marriage, or widowhood or having been abandoned? These are questions for which the archives have no answer but research shows that many women widowed or abandoned early in life by their husbands chose this opportunity to leave rather than lead a difficult life in the village in 19th century village in UP (Kumar 2017).
But Ootmee’s story does not end there. Ragna’s archival research found that in Suriname Ootmee left Shibardree and went on to have ten more children with another man on the same plantation, Bheekee Khodabux. Intrigued by this time Ragna dug deep into the archives to find Bheekee Khodabux to try and confirm if the two of them were a couple. Bheekee and Ootmee met at the first plantation where they were contracted. He was Muslim and Ootmee converted from Hinduism to Islam when she married him; Ragna found this information from the Surinamese census of 1921. In the UP of today she would probably have been arrested or more likely Khodabux as the extreme Hindu nationalist government in the state penalises interreligious relationships.
Ootmee's first child born on the plantation is called Rahimbuckus, a Muslim name with a referral to the 'Bux' in Khodabux but now spelt as the registrar thought fit. Shibardree, Ootmee and Bheekee all lived on the same plantation during their entire five-year contract after which Shibardree was hired by a different plantation as Ootmee and died soon after. Ootmee went on to work in different plantations for almost twenty years. She is recorded as a farmer too probably having inherited land from Khodabux since women could not get land in their own right according to the Dutch colonial administration.
Getting to know Oothmee was a privilege.
2. The Kolkata Chapter: October 2024
Durga comes home
Our physical journey in search of Ragna’s ancestors began in Calcutta (Kolkata in the meantime). I arrived a week before Ragna and just before the city of 15.8 million residents transforms into a huge street festival, the Durga puja, which is now inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It’s very difficult for a Calcutta Bengali like me to actually describe what this festival is because it is part of me and so I recommend you watch the video on the UNESCO site.
Simply put this festival is celebrated on the occasion of Durga puja, which while it is has a Hindu religious connotation, is also a huge social, cultural and economic phenomenon. It’s the world’s largest public art festival – an immersive blend of worship, artistic expression, and social messaging. The myth around which this massive festival is organised is that of the goddess Durga descending from her Himalayan abode with her four children to her parents’ home for six days. There is also a good conquers evil story in that the goddess with ten hands holds a spear in one with which she is seen slaying asura (equivalent of the devil but not quite). That’s the nice thing about Bengal – our gods are mostly all-powerful females.
The festival is organised by neighbourhood communities that have formal bodies which raise funds throughout the year, plan every single step in meticulous detail. The huge statues of the Ma Durga (Mother Durga) and her children made of unfired clay collected from the Ganga (the river) and mounted on straw and wooden frames are made by the potters of Kumartoli (the potter’s neighbourhood in Calcutta) in small artisanal workshops; they receive their orders almost a year ahead. The statues are housed in temporary bamboo structures all over the city, ornately decorated with cloth cladding called pandals, and look like architectural wonders. There are competitions between the Pujas of which there are almost 4500 in Calcutta city and its environment for the best statue or the best pandal and so forth.
Despite the bad press from which the city administration habitually suffers it is during this festival that they shine. Suddenly the unruly traffic of Calcutta transforms into a disciplined flow; hundreds of policemen manage the pedestrians encouraging people to stay behind the barricades cordoning off the vehicular traffic and not jaywalk as they trek from one pandal to the next. On the tenth day when the immersion of the statues in the river takes place the city administration is stupendous regulating the routes through which these huge statues will be transported to the river; when and where the 4000 odd statues should enter the water; and fetching the debris out of the water with huge cranes after the immersion. The clay gets recycled.
This was the first time in thirty years that I was in Calcutta for Durga puja and I had invited Ragna to celebrate with us. Like Durga I was also coming home although she does this annually. Ragna was also coming home in the sense she was in search of her ancestors who had called this land home. Her foremothers had to leave just like Durga but unlike the goddess they were never to return.
Suriname Ghat
Thanks to my friend Rajashri we were in touch with a number of people in Calcutta who could help us in our search. One of them was Sabir Ahamed, a researcher and educator, and his organisation ‘Know your Neighbour’ which literally acquaints Calcutta residents with the diverse communities living in the city. While interacting with colleagues in academia and media, Sabir found that even well informed and well-intentioned residents of Kolkata were quite ignorant about the syncretic cultural history of the city and, for example, Muslim areas of the city. The Know Your Neighbour (KYN) initiative therefore was started as a way to build familiarity between communities who lived in close proximity but knew little about the other, and often harboured stereotypes about them. Whereas heritage walks in the city often catered to elite tastes and restricted themselves to the colonial history of the city the KYN events are typically designed as visits or walks to places with a predominantly Muslim population or places that still retain a syncretic character. KYN is a volunteer run organisation and all its members earn their living elsewhere, including Sabir, and give up their weekends to take people on these walks.
One of these is an area called Metiabruz right next to the Calcutta port area where Suriname Ghat (Ghat here means the flight of steps leading down to the river) is located and from where the indentured labourers boarded the ships that took them to their destinations. Sabir told us that until recently there used to be families in the area whose ancestors were returnee indentured labourers. The depots where in the 19th century the indentured lived before being transported were no longer there. These buildings were not considered as heritage and therefore not preserved probably because they were used to house indentured labourers who were poor, anonymous and working class. Their importance to the colonial economy was forgotten and not considered part of our heritage unlike the grand old colonial buildings in the city.
Suriname Ghat is now commemorated with a plaque installed as recently as 2011 and that too on the initiative of the Royal Netherlands embassy in Delhi and the Suriname embassy. The letters on the plaque were already fading so that one had difficulty reading it. But before I describe our visit to Suriname Ghat I want to touch on the bureaucratic challenges we faced in accessing it which while being farcical was apparently a cover up for something more sinister as Sabir explained to us. Sabir had told us that his group was finding it difficult to get permission from the authorities to take visitors to Surinam Ghat which was in the port area. There was no clear regulation saying that visitors needed permission to visit but in the aftermath of Covid it became an unwritten practice especially for organised tours like those organised by KYN to have to ask for permission. I was part of their tour before Covid and can testify to the informality. This time round though we sent our names and identity details well in advance to KYN for the application. By the time we arrived we had not heard back from the authorities and we didn’t know why. Repeated phone calls to the authorities yielded no information. And all the time we were made to feel as if we had done something wrong or that KYN had in wanting something so innocuous as to visit Suriname Ghat.
On the day of the visit itself we had to decide what to do and of course Rajashri the super journalist with unending contacts played a key role. She had made an appointment with the former chair of Calcutta’s oldest urban renewal organisation so that Ragna could interview him. During the interview Rajashri, who knew him well, told him about our problem and asked if he could pull the right bureaucratic strings to get us ‘fugitives’ to Surname ghat. He rang the retired head of police for the Port area and after a lot of to-and-fro on the telephone we were told to first go the police station of the port who would then give us permission. So we did. Sabir’s list with names was exchanged and we the Indians gave our identity papers. We somehow smuggled Ragna’s papers in because we thought that because she is a foreigner they might object although we didn’t know why they should. After some wait we were told to follow the police car to the entrance to Surinam Ghat area; we arrived with great fanfare with a police escort. More exchange of papers ensued and we were in but we still didn’t know why we had to go through the whole rigmarole. We crossed over a railway line (the area of the port belonged to the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation who transported coal by rail from the port to their thermal power stations further inland) and then walked to Surinam ghat still accompanied by the police.
At the end of the trip Sabir told us what he had found about the web of secrecy surrounding this unwritten security rule in visiting Suriname Ghat. There was speculation that the prime land around the port and along the river was being off the record privatised and there was cutthroat competition among property developers and criminal gangs to secure land. Politicians and civil servants had connived in the whole murky business. The constant traffic of groups like those organised by KYN was likely to increase public interest in it as a heritage site. Once this was declared as heritage it could not be privatised. Thus all the secrecy and deliberate vagueness surrounding permissions, who the responsible authorities were, whether or not it was a statute created an atmosphere that kept visitors out. Later Ragna with Rajashri’s help got to contact the journalist who wrote about this in the newspapers but he refused an interview saying it was too dangerous.
The door of no Return
A decade and half ago I was at Goree island in Senegal. I visited the Door of no Return in the House of Slaves built by the Dutch to keep their human cargo, enslaved Africans, before shipment to the Americas. The Door looked out on the Atlantic and thousands of human beings had passed through it as they boarded the ship that carried them away forever. There was an irritating white US American woman among the visitors I remember giggling all the time as several of us including African American visitors stood in stunned silence and close to tears looking out on the vast Atlantic and the centuries of history that changed the world.
On the 12th of October 2024 I went to Surinam Ghat in Kolkata with Ragna, Rajashri and Sabir with our police escort in tow. As we descended the stairs to the waterfront where a century and half ago the girmitiyas like Ootmee boarded their ship to far off destinations, we found that we were not the only visitors . There were two other women there also from the Netherlands visiting the shores from where their ancestors were transported never to return. Mala, one of the visitors, spoke about her quest and wept as she talked about her ancestry. Despite generations and 150 years separating her from the ancestors who went as girmitiyas to work on Dutch sugar plantations in Suriname her tears were a reminder of how emotional the return to where the journey of her foremothers had begun was for the descendants. It was already the last day of the Durga puja when Calcutta says goodbye to the goddess and it seemed fitting that we were revisiting a chapter of colonial history that had ambivalent endings for those born on these shores.
Mala and her friend were there having worked the social network that has existed between Surinamese visitors and the local security guards at the Surinam Ghat. They had simply appealed as descendants of the people who were shipped from this Ghat to visit it and pay their respects and apparently many visitors do that. As I stood reading the plaque dedicated to Suriname Ghat I overheard the security guard telling the story of the girmitiyas in Bengali to the policeman who had escorted us. In his retelling the tragic aspects of the girmitiya story were emphasized; he appealed to the listener’s empathy for the descendants who visited and who wanted merely to remember. I saw the young policeman nodding his head. Under the parapets and away from the gaze of malevolent property developers and corrupt public officials, the security guard and his colleagues were keeping the way to Suriname Ghat open for visitors like Mala and her friend.
3. Varanasi chapter
The holy city
Can I just say that I am very prejudiced about Varanasi and my dislike is mostly for political reasons. I have been to this city renowned as an ancient pilgrim spot several times since my childhood and as an adult my last visit was in 1991. The reified image of Varanasi as an ancient Hindu pilgrim place is sold as a major tourist attraction in which orientalism plays a large part. The temples, the ghats where dead bodies are cremated, the sacred river Ganges are part of a coherent narrative about Hindu mystic, ancientness and religiosity that epitomises Indian tradition of which I am not enamoured. This image has in recent times been further embellished by two decades of the Hindutva narrative in which Varanasi is central both because of its Hinduism pedigree and because the present prime minister of India is elected from here as a member of Parliament.
However, since Varanasi was close to the areas we wanted to visit, we made it our headquarters. Despite misgivings Ragna and I did do some tourism before and during our stay. I refused to visit temples of which there are 2200 according to Wikipedia but we did start with a boat trip on the Ganges which did the rounds of the more famous Ghats. Inevitably we went past Mahakarnika Ghat where one can glimpse the funeral pyres from a distance. The boatman kept selling us a glimpse of Dashashwamedh Ghat where Hindus visit to perform religious rituals at dawn and the evening. He wanted us to stay on for the evening ritual, the Ganga Aarti, but since the performance has been recently choreographed by the India Tourism board according to the Hindutva script, I decided to give it a miss. As we landed at the ghat where our hotel was we found that the Ganga Aarti was being performed here too following the Hindutva copybook.
We met our research assistant, Shantanu a PhD student at the Benares Hindu University (BHU) face to face the first evening that we were in Varanasi. He came with a friend who had accompanied him on his reconnaissance trips to Lohroh and Badlapur where we were headed the following days. It turned out that his friend was a political consultant who worked with candidates standing for elections. Except for the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing party in power at the centre for a decade now). We became friends immediately and most of the evening was spent talking Indian politics. It was very hot as we sat in the dilapidated rooftop restaurant of the hotel eating very greasy vegetarian food trying to talk to each other over the noise of the standing fans whirring noisily. Earlier in the year India had one of its most important general elections in which the reigning right-wing BJP lost hands down in UP their citadel, and the prime minister just managed to win his seat here narrowly against a rank outsider. Meeting these two young people who did not subscribe to the ethnocentric, Hindutva narrative made me hopeful about Indian politics and to some extent improved my view of Varanasi.
Making memories: Ragna Visits Lawaur/ Lohroh
The first trip we made out of Varanasi was to Lohroh. Just a quick reminder to say that Lohroh is the name of the village where we think Ootmee came from. Shantanu had earlier visited on a reconnaissance to find out more about the village: the history, social structures and whether the older inhabitants had any memory of stories about ancestors having migrated to distant lands.
Lohroh is a small village with a population of approximately 1000. Like most villages in UP there is an array of castes the most populous are the Dhankars, a scheduled caste. Besides them there are others including the Lohar community from whom the name of the village probably derives. There are a handful of Brahmin and Rajput families who own the majority of the agricultural land which is no surprise when one has some inkling of the political economy of UP. For the families with little land the income from the land does not support them throughout the year and so family members migrate for work both locally and all over India. The houses in the part of the village where the scheduled caste communities live are kutcha houses with thatched roofs with an open space in front. A joint family would have separate houses facing this communal space like a courtyard.
On his first visit Shantanu had talked to older male residents about their memories from their father and grandfather’s time. Although they could recall stories of the British Raj they heard from their parents and grandparents they did not recall any stories of the past that featured people from their village having migrated abroad.
Shantanu, Ragna, and I set off on October 16, 2024, to visit Lohroh. On the way we picked up Sandhya a social activist working on women’s health who had worked with Abhijit and Jashodhara. Sandhya had acquaintance of the area and she also spoke Bhojpuri the local language besides Hindi. Bhojpuri was the main language of the indentured who migrated from this part of India. As it turned out all residents of the village now spoke Hindi. On the way we discussed the main themes we wanted to discuss in the village. We were going to focus on the women since Shantanu had interviewed only men. Since there seemed absolutely no evidence of stories and memories of the past featuring indentured labourers who migrated, we decided that we would talk to people about the here and now. We wanted to focus on the migration patterns today, women’s and girl’s education and health, the kind of services that the public services provide, and more generally about what they wanted to talk about.
We left the car some distance from the village as the mud tracks to the village was not motorable. As we walked towards the village some people who approached us seemed to recognise Shantanu from his earlier visit. An older woman strode up to us and asked what we wanted and we said that we wanted to talk to the women preferably older women. She immediately took charge of us saying I am the oldest woman in this village. This was Malati Devi. We walked with her to the village and she gave orders to the younger people to fetch a charpoy (a bedstead of woven webbing of jute or synthetic rope stretched on a wooden frame with four legs) a very common and often the only piece of furniture in rural households. Ragna and I sat on the charpoy with me balancing on the edge as the jute webbing is really hard and bites into the skin (of middle-class urbanites like me). The space where we sat was a large empty space of land like a village square with large trees on the perimeter giving shade. Facing us and on the ground sat about twenty women whom Malati Devi assembled in the first ten minutes. There were lots of children of school going age around and a few teenagers too. Behind us was Shantanu talking to a group of men.
There was a lot of activity before we settled down to have a conversation with the assembled women. Ragna was busy setting up her camera to video, Sandhya was talking , I was asking questions, and the children playing and making a noise. I suddenly looked back at Ragna and found she had tears in her eyes. Before I could speak she was busy apologising that she was always very emotional. I realised suddenly how foolish and insensitive I was in not fully appreciating what this experience of being in Lohroh meant to Ragna. She was visiting for the first time the place which could be where her family’s story in Suriname began. She was the embodiment of the generations that went before her whose origins may or may not have been here in this particular Lohroh but the search and the tenuous archival links had connected Ragna to not just to a place on the map but a place that was part of her history. She was here and despite the absence of certainty it was a memory that was in the making both for Ragna and for the place and people she visited.
Malati Devi: the matriarch of Lohroh
The first part of the conversation we had with the women was dominated by Malati Devi. She had declared herself the oldest woman in their part of the village and I didn’t see anybody older when we went on our walkabout. Age is a relative concept here among people who never had birth certificates; she probably was the same age or younger than me and Ragna’s mother. Malati’s idea of age was based on her life story; she had married and had children, worked hard to raise them especially because she was the sole income earner since her husband was injured relatively young in a work accident; and now she was retired and looked after the grandchildren. She no longer remembered when she was married and her natal village was nearby in the next Block. Her health had endured nineteen pregnancies that did not come to fruition and six live births. She said that her health started failing when one of her sons who was 18 and in High School died due to a sudden illness. She now has four sons, a daughter and two grandchildren. Her husband was still alive and sat behind us in the men’s group. Her sons worked on their own land but also as day labourers in the farms of the rich.
Throughout our conversation Malati Devi emphasized their working-class status. She role-played how they were treated by the landlords when she was younger, how they forced people to come and work on their fields even when they were ill, the tone of command that they used when talking to them, and how they oppressed them to recover the loans that they had given to the labourers during the lean seasons. What was different now I asked. It was different because although they still took loans from the landlords, the landlords did not treat them in the same way as before. What Malati Devi was referring to is the shift in relations between the landlords and labourers from being one of master and serf to a landowner-employer and worker, a shift made possible by the intervening politics in the region which before this regime was part socialist and part dalit politics. The political economy had also changed in the meantime; many more people from here migrated within India for higher wages resulting in labour scarcity during peak agricultural seasons hiking up the wages here too. Labour was in demand and in order to secure it on time the high caste landowners have learned to mitigate their arrogance. This does not mean that inequality has disappeared or that the low caste people are treated better by the upper castes; it is that the lower castes, the labourers now know their own worth.
Naukri and Networks
In his article ‘Naukari, Networks, and Knowledge: Views of indenture in Nineteenth Century North India’, Ashutosh Kumar (2017) shows that migration as indentured labour from these parts was not the first time that people went out of their own area for work. Naukri means work, employment, service in Hindi. According to him people migrated to other parts of India as far back as the thirteenth and fourteenth century when skilled artisans migrated to set up their trade where it was needed and others went in search of markets; and some went to man the army of the small kingdoms returning during the agricultural seasons to manage their crops and land. The tradition of migration in the agriculture off seasons continues to this day as we have seen. Conversing with women we were informed that today migration patterns extend far and wide in India including to the southern states of Tamil Nadu (Chennai in particular) and distant Kerala. Local networks of knowledge about places of work , the kind of work and the conditions circulate within the labouring population. Returning migrants contribute to this knowledge as do agents recruiting migrants for work in different cities.
One of the women in the group, Prachi, gave us an account of her experience of migration. Prachi was a young woman in her late thirties. She and her husband have been migrating for the last two years with their children to Pune in Maharashtra state not far from Bombay although the husband had made this trip alone for a number of years. She has three sons and a daughter whom they take with them along with their youngest boy. The other two sons stay with their grandfather and attend the school in the village. The husband-and-wife team works on separate ten-hour shifts in different factories moulding tyres on machines; he works the night shift and looks after the children during the day when the wife goes to work. She comes home in the evening and does all the daily chores at home and looks after the children. Inevitably Prachi gets paid less than her husband for similar kind of work and the same hours. They come back to the village once a year.
This year their youngest son fell and broke his arm. The doctors in Pune whom they consulted told them that he needed an operation. According to Prachi they chose to return here to their village because the medical costs in Pune were very high. They had the operation done in a private clinic in Mirzapur and the boy could be seen running around with a plaster on his lower arm. This had set the family back by a year but they planned to return to their jobs in Pune once the boy was healed. I did wonder why they chose to go to a private clinic rather than avail of the public hospitals in Pune and I asked her but she could not tell us why they decided on private treatment. It was clear though that the decision to come home was made for reasons other than the cost: emotional support and familiarity, access to community and advise about which clinic and doctor was the best under the circumstances were some of the reasons. In Pune they did not have these networks. What working class people lack in terms of resources they make up for by relying on social relations.
Whatever may have been the reasons, Prachi’s life as a migrant is precarious; a minor health problem can ruin the chances of the family members in the long run. As for example, their jobs are not waiting for them and they have to begin again securing a job, a job that requires the skill they have acquired. They were probably replaced by countless others migrating for work. Health expenses account for a large proportion of personal indebtedness among poor people; Prachi’s family will have incurred major debts. Neither of the two children who accompany them have been enrolled in school because according to Prachi they could not be admitted in school in Pune without birth certificates which they did not have. The boy is still quite young and will still be able to catch up if and when they secure the birth certificates but for the girl who is ten its already very late. A girl child without an education will reproduce the disadvantage that her mother’s generation faced.
The indentured labourers who migrated from this part of the world all over the globe a century and half ago suffered all sorts of indignities and deprivations. As I have shown in the first part of this blog on indentured labourers, the employers of these workers built a system to force work out of the workforce through a structure of punishment and coercion placing them effectively in servitude by curtailing their mobility and economic independence. There are no evident parallels between their life and that of Prachi except that today’s burgeoning non-unionised labour force is faced with insecurities and deprivations which although very different from that of indentured labourers one and half centuries ago, nevertheless, renders them dependent on the good will of employers and powerless against adversity.
Shushma’s Dream: Hum Doctor banenge (I want to be a doctor)
We were in Lohroh during the holiday season, the happy time between Durga puja and Diwali, which is why we could meet and talk to several school children about their education. As it turned out most of the children hanging around us were school goers which may sound obvious but as we learned from Prachi it cannot be taken for granted that children go to school. The overall literacy rate in UP is around 78% and for females much lower at 64% and so meeting girl children who were in school, especially high school was a treat. There is a government school which is free nearby which helps because the children can attend till they reach high school. After that they have to travel five kilometres to the nearest High School which is private and one has to pay fees which according to the assembled women is quite expensive and not many can afford to send their children. School going at the primary level had become the new normal which it was not, even twenty years ago.
We focused on the high school going girls and those who would be eligible for high school in the following year. For the latter group there was a choice to be made one in which the parents played a major role because it would cost money. Many of the mothers talked about not sending their daughters to high school because of the expense. Malati devi told us, ‘Our people can’t afford to send the children to private schools or to pay for tuitions. We earn about Rs. 300 as daily wage labourers from which we have to spend on food, clothing, medical treatment and other costs – where is the money for schooling or tuitions?’ We discovered that several girls present had indeed to discontinue after Class 8 on the brink of High School.
Given this Sushma’s ambition to study medicine seemed like a pipe dream. Sushma told us that there were three of them from the village who were in high school in Class 11, a year before they would be eligible for the school leaving exams. They cycle together to high school and were determined to continue. Will your parents support you, I asked. I want to study she said adamantly and added, I will study hard. What if your parents get you married, I enquired to which her reply was there is nothing I can do about that but I will still study. Intrigued by her determination but rather sceptical of her chances I asked her about practicalities; to do medicine one has to choose the science stream at the high school level and had she done so. Of course she had, came the prompt reply. I discovered that two of the three Class 11 students had taken the science stream. What was very interesting was the mother’s attitude, a mother who was a widow. ‘She should complete school, she can also do her BA (first university level degree)’ she said. I interrupted the mother that the daughter wants to be a doctor which is much more difficult that studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree but it did not make an impression on the mother.
Meeting Sushma and talking about her ambition was one the best experiences of coming to Lohroh. I was well aware how difficult it would be for a dalit girl to realise her dream with all the structural difficulties she was likely to face because of her social status and her gender. But who was I to even entertain the idea that she might fail when Sushma a dalit girl from Lohroh could confidently declare ‘Hum doctor banenge’ (I want to be a doctor). It must have been courage like this that prompted Ootmee another young woman to travel to an unknown destination 150 years ago.
Sex, sexuality and identity
One of the fears in educating girls was that they could be harassed by young men on their way to school. Even the fact that a boy other than a relative or an acquaintance from the village spoke to a girl seemed to be seen as harassment and something to be fearful about. I asked what the parents/ guardians would do if something like this was reported the answer was, we would take it to the police. Would the girl continue her education? Yes, said Malati she will continue in school. All of this sounded like an overreaction or symptomatic of so-called traditional society but seen from the perspective of the dalit residents of Lohroh these fears were always real, always a threat lurking at every corner. Harassment and rape of young dalit girls by for example upper class young men is not in the distant past but according to the press reports of several high-profile cases recently, very much a present reality in UP.
Whereas this was a genuine fear the response to Sandhya’s question as to whether the community would allow a girl and boy in love to marry the response was ‘yes, if they are the same caste’. If they elope (because they are not the same caste)? Then they are dead to us, said Malati Devi. I tried to argue that the couple was somebody’s child and grandchild and could be hers. But it didn’t seem to matter because ‘they did not think of us when they acted as individuals why should we think of them’. One woman went as far as to say that she would kill the girl if it was hers: the girl being the embodiment of their honour. Apparently the same punishment would not befall a boy. Sandhya jokingly warned the teenage girls present ‘don’t fall in love’ which because it was said in derisory way made clear that we did not see eye to eye with the women.
Sandhya then asked whether they had heard of stories from older generations about people from their village migrating for work abroad back during the British Raj but as we had half expected they had not. Later on our walkabout in the village I introduced Ragna to Malati Devi and some of the other women as a descendant of a person who probably migrated from this village during the British Raj to work very far away across the seas. There was stark disbelief in her eyes. The others too had not understood the significance of what I said. For them the idea of distance was probably as far as the places they migrated to for work. It was hardly conceivable that Ragna tall, fair skinned and decidedly foreign (perhaps from Delhi) could be one of them. Which is why Malati Devi in her embarrassment quickly changed the subject.
As we said goodbye I realised that our search had been not so much for Ootmee as we already knew that people here had not heard of the migrations so long ago; it was not part of the folk lore or oral histories handed down the generations. Rather the search had brought us closer to life in rural UP and real people today; this encounter would become a memory for Lohroh residents and for Ragna who would document it, and for those of us who accompanied her. We decided to cement this relationship of memory by sending gifts at Diwali which was a couple of weeks later. Shantanu sent us photos handing over boxes of Varanasi sweets and printed copies of some of the photos that Ragna had taken. Malati Devi the matriach sat stiffly posing for the photo shoot with the gifts around her.
A surprising encounter: Ragna visits Badlapur
Our next trip out of Varanasi on October 17 was to Badlapur where our research suggested was the place Sumaria Sheonundan, Ragna’s maternal foremother, came from. I was worried about our trip to Badlapur after reading the reconnaissance report that Shantanu sent us. I was worried because I was not sure how we were going to organise conversations in an amorphous community in a semi urban area. Badlapur is the Block headquarters and a tehsil town and as such is an administrative hub around which original inhabitants, migrants and officials congregate. We needed some sort of bounded community at least to have the conversations that we had the previous day in Lohroh. We decided to begin with a lead that Shantanu had discovered, the director of a school and a journalist too who had some leads on indentured labour.
Being semi-urban Badlapur has narrow winding lanes and kutcha side roads. On one of these we found the school we were looking for. We walked in through a small gate in the main entrance into the school yard which looked like every other school yard in small town India. We were asked to go towards the administration building right next to the gate and told to wait in the front porch before Sanjay Singh, the director of the school and our main informant could see us. We could hear his voice from the porch where we sat giving instructions. We were finally called in. Sanjay Singh was a man in his fifties unsmiling and full of gravitas which seemed a posture in keeping with his position. Two women apparently administrative assistants arranged themselves around the table. As Ragna wanted to film she had to set up the phone camera and tripod which after many tries worked. One of the two women who was on my side kept arranging and rearranging things on the table which I have to say irritated me. The other held a phone filming the conversation.
The story of Sathyakam Bundely
We began with introductions and at first Sanjay Singh introduced his school which he set up inspired by his father who was also all his working life a schoolteacher. After more talk about his family one of us (Shantanu probably) asked him what he knew about indentured labour or those who had migrated a hundred and fifty years ago during colonial rule. Sanjay Singh simply said that his family had an ancestor who went to Mauritius in 1865. I was stunned. After having more or less concluded that there was a complete erasure in the collective memory of the people who were indentured we had finally stumbled on someone who could bear witness. I was so surprised that it took me some time to react and translate what he said to Ragna.
Sanjay Singh then asked one the two women to take out some files from the steel almirah next to him. I am sure he had prepared for this since it did not seem that the secretary had to look for the files. The files contained photocopies of what turned out to be several family trees for different generations meticulously handwritten, and as well, a decaying and torn in many places piece of paper which was apparently an original family tree. All around the table there were wobbly plastic glasses filled with water and coffee/tea with the irritating admin assistant reorganising them all the time. I was suddenly very nervous fearing that one of these was about to spill on these precious pieces of paper. I asked the assistant to remove them to safety and walked around the table to where Sanjay sat and looked closely at the photocopy document. He pointed out where in the family tree it was written that an ancestor had gone to Mauritius. Sanjay’s father had written the notes and the family tree in a diary dated 1978. The person who migrated was called Bundel Singh.
What was the story behind the 1978 diary and his father’s notes? In 1977 a century and more after the first ancestor departed, Sathyakam Bundely a senior politician from Mauritius (Foreign Minister) visited Delhi probably on state business. While there he asked the Indian Ministry of External Affairs whether they could link him to his family in India. For reasons that I could not make out he did not succeed in Delhi but was advised to go to Varanasi since the records indicated that the original migrant was from thereabouts. At Varanasi it did not take time for him to connect to the family that his ancestor had left since the then head of Sanjay Singh’s family was also a leading politician and Member of the Legislative Assembly in UP. Since then the families in Badlapur and Mauritius have been linked since one of Sanjay Singh’s uncles went to Mauritius and settled there. He died during the Covid pandemic and since then ties to the Mauritius family have weakened temporarily.
Sanjay Singh did not know about the circumstances leading to the out migration of their ancestor Bundel Singh. He did however say that at about the same time a major catastrophe had befallen the family. The family had been a wealthy and influential one in the nineteenth century. In fact the head of the family then had the title Rajah often conferred on persons who own considerable land and property and also have many people serving them or/and it could be that they considered a princely family because they were wealthy and held power over people and territory. As for example, the title Rajah was conferred on Rammohun Roy by the Moghul emperor Akbar II. The British accommodated these titles and depended on the Rajahs to collect revenue and punished them if they failed to pay. The catastrophe that befell the family was an armed attack on their home and estates and the looting of their jewellery, money and other valuables. While Sanjay Singh did not link this catastrophe to the migration of Bundel Singh it could be that the latter lost his property and position and was sent by the British to Mauritius to repay debts or that he was recruited into indentured labour because he was debt ridden.
Whatever the reasons behind Bundel Singh’s migration to Mauritius even though he was from a wealthy family it was apparently not uncommon as we see in the fictional account Sea of Poppies by Amitabh Ghose. In this book Neel Rattan Halder a wealthy man with considerable property and from an elite family is framed as having committed forgery and exiled by the court to a life ‘beyond the seas’ and transported to Mauritius. The court while passing the sentence regrets that the innocent family will lose caste but that this could not be a justification for making an exception of Neel because of his wealth and social stature.
Democratising memory
How is it that the search for Ragna’s ancestors has only yielded clues but no certainty whereas the Sanjay Singh family was able to establish a link with those who had migrated? Part of the answer must lie in the power and privilege enjoyed by the family both in India and in migration which made it possible for Bundely to call on governmental recognition for his search and for his family in India to recognise him because family histories were documented. Who was in a position to document their family history in nineteenth century India or Britain for that matter and why? It would be the propertied, the people who had something to pass on to their descendants. As we learn for Sanjay Singh’s account the wealth and position of the family in India was intergenerationally reproduced and by the 1970s the family was a well-known family in the region with significant links to politics and power. Similarly by the time he came searching for his family in India Sathyakam Bundley was no ordinary descendant of migrants but one with sufficient clout to demand attention.
For this reason Ragna’s search acquires even more significance since it is a search for people whose histories are lost because they were not part of the privileged then and now and their origins in the land they left uncertain. The search process itself builds the narrative of remembering and retracing the journey the ancestors made and establishing a link between the past and the present. The descendant undertaking this search, Ragna, now has the power to demand recognition because she comes from a land which is prosperous and powerful, prosperity that historically the migrants from India helped build. The resources backing Ragna’s search come from a wider interest in The Netherlands to know about this history which adds to the social and economic weight to the narrative of remembering.
Honouring the return
Coming back to our visit it was time for practicalities. We needed photos and scanned copies of the records which Ragna proceeded to do. As Sanjay Singh was being photographed by Ragna he donned the same serious expression. I appealed to him to smile and suddenly he grinned and the somewhat formidable visage dissipated and was replaced by a younger self who was deeply nervous. After this Sanjay Singh wanted us to meet his teachers the school itself being on holiday. As he introduced us to the teachers it became very apparent that it was a huge privilege for him that Ragna a foreigner had graced the school with her presence. He presented her with the customary scarf draping it on her shoulders which is usually done to honour distinguished guests. I got one too but Shantanu as ‘son of the soil’ did not. Although it was a formal gesture I found this presentation of the scarf to Ragna very touching. It seemed as if they were honouring the return of a descendant which she was.
Living with uncertainty and ambiguity
We also went to Mukhlispur, a village adjacent to Badlapur town because the records that Ragna had from the Suriname archives mentioned the name but called it a district. Place names and administrative units have changed considerably but since the name was mentioned we decided to visit it. Our main informant in Mukhlishpur was from the Yadav caste who was quite prosperous. In fact the whole area was more prosperous than Mirzapur district which we visited the previous day. Our informant told us about the socio-economic situation in the region and village. Most of the land was owned by six or so Rajput and Brahmin families but the Yadavs a middle caste, the most numerous community, also owned some land. The houses in the Yadav neighbourhood were brick and mortar replacing the clay houses. Cheek to jowl to the Yadav quarters was the scheduled caste neighbourhood of the next village where we went on a walkabout. There were mainly women around and when conversing with them I found that a lot of people migrate to other parts of India in search of wage labour.
We asked our informant about migration 150 years ago but there was no recognition of this history which we expected. We asked about the names of the ancestors and whether they were common in the area. He recognised the name Sheonundan (which comes from most probably Shivnandan) but could not mention anybody who at present lived in the village and had this name. Also, Shivnandan is a first name in these parts whereas in migration it had become a surname.
This visit like that of the previous day convinced me further that the search for certainty is futile and most of all dangerous especially when researching the past. My own research has shown that by insisting on certainty we create a new reality which may or may not be what happened but is inevitably coloured by dominant narratives about what happened.
4. Memory and the present
Throughout this journey in search of our girmitiya ancestors I have been wondering about the nature of memory and how memories of the past are framed in the social and political context of the present. Jenny Erpenbeck the author of the book Kairos for which she won the Booker Prize said in an interview in 2025 that memory is not something that which stays forever in a drawer that you can open or close (interviewed by Aishwariya Khosla for EYE the Sunday Express Magazine February 2, 2025). Memory she suggested is always in motion and the way we remember has a lot to do with our wishes and what gives our lives meaning. This is why memory changes in the course of one’s life and we remember our lives as we want to and how we want to remember.
This is what intrigued me about the story that Mala the Dutch-Surinamese woman we met at Suriname ghat told us about her first ancestor who left India for Suriname. In her story this ancestor had run away from home and registered as an indentured labourer. He had falsified his identity claiming he was a Parsi when he was actually from the Brahmin caste because Brahmins were not considered fit for this job. Brahmins did not cultivate and did not have the stamina for hard labour required on the plantations which is why the British didn’t want them. The way in which Mala and her family remember their first ancestor has a lot to do with their wishes and who they want to be, their identity.
Foremost is their identity as Surinamese Hindostani. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the term Hindostani referred to the geographical area Hindustan which is what colonial India was called. Its inhabitants were diverse (which it is also in the present) from various castes, class and religions but in Mala’s story the meaning has changed and the Surinamese Hindustani identity is Hindu, an identity which in today’s socio-political context of Hindu nationalism has acquired a new shine. And if it has to be a Hindu identity it has to be the top of the Hindu hierarchy, namely Brahmins. Mala’s story that her ancestor claimed to be Parsi whereas he was a Hindu Brahmin refers to a very specific cultural connotation that Brahmins are fair skinned just like the Parsis and unlike the dark-skinned proletariat, the lower castes. Mala’s story neatly dovetails into a narrative of racial superiority which makes her Hindostani Surinamese identity fit for purpose to battle against the racism and marginalisation her community faces in the Netherlands. In this remembering the story of the ancestors acquires meaning not because their hard labour and that of the African slaves before them built the riches that the Netherlands enjoys till today but because they were from a land of four centuries of ‘Hindu civilisation’.
That this identification with Hindu identity is not just an isolated story of one person is evident from the on-going battles that a certain section of the Surinamese Hindostani community has been having over the representation of Hindus and Hinduism in the media in the Netherlands. In April 2024 just before the Indian general elections in June an event was programmed at Pakhuis de Zwijger about the portrayal of ‘Hindus' in the Dutch Media. The Pakhuis de Zwijger based in Amsterdam is a progressive cultural organization but, in this instance, had succumbed to the adverse criticism that Hindus and Hinduism were being misrepresented brought by a section of the Surinamese Hindostani community. They saw this as yet another way of undermining Surinamese Hindu identity.
This raised concerns among a group of cultural programmers, journalists, academics and activists of Indian origin living in the Netherlands, including members of the Surinamese-Hindostani community. They felt that the event description was one-dimensional in that it was to discuss how the Dutch media reported the temple for 'Hindus', without mentioning the dissent against the temple and the right-wing politics it represented from within the Hindu community. Just a reminder the temple for ‘Hindus’ is a reference to the Ram temple which was built and consecrated in 2024 on the eve of the Indian elections on the land where an old mosque, the Babri masjid, had stood in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. And whereas the building of this temple was highly controversial in India and was one of the reasons for the defeat of the Hindu right-wing party in power in the state of UP from where the indentured labourers came from, their descendants were in 2024 siding with the right-wing in their search for identity. The marginalisation of the Surinamese Hindostani community has been successfully weaponised by Hindu nationalist groups in the present which is part of a phenomenon across the globe as a way to silence critique against Hindu right-wing policies and historical revisionism.
Which is why bringing Ootmee’s story home was so important for us because Ootmee’s life and the diversity of lives like hers tell a story that runs counter to the homogenized Hindu identity in the Hindutva narrative.
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