Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Professor Biman Prasad has called for an international day to recognise the history and struggles of indentured Indian laborers, or girmitya, urging global acknowledgment of their sacrifices and suffering.
While addressing the "Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Indian Diaspora: The Way Forward" conference at the University of Calcutta, Professor Prasad says for many years – we ourselves did not understand fully our own histories.
He says they learned from their grandparents about the brutal and horrific circumstances under which ancestors were uprooted from their villages across India.
Professor Prasad says what they learned from their ancestors was very different from the way in these histories were told in official records or taught in schools.
He says there was a deliberate effort for a good part of a century to deny them their own history.
The Deputy Prime Minister says all families hold stories of their grandparents being kidnapped from their villages and families across India; being handcuffed; often drugged on their journeys to the then Madras, Calcutta and other Indian ports.
He says they have told stories of their grandmothers being ripped from their families, subject to inhuman sexual violence; often in chains when bundled onto the slave ships, in full view of authorities and officials.
Professor Prasad says they have not heard of one account of his ancestors going to British colonial officers in Lucknow or elsewhere voluntarily to sign up for the indentured worker scheme.
He says yet this is the story that was sold to everyone. The Deputy Prime Minister says theirs and the stories of all girmitiyas need to be remembered, preserved in folklore, bhajans, music, arts, in films and museums but that is insufficient.
He further says more than a million Indians were forcibly removed from their homes and villages for nearly a better part of the century.
He says this evil was hidden and buried in broad day light from Indians themselves and it was not until Mahatma Gandhi’s journey to South Africa that India began to learn about the scale and depth of the inhumanity of the indenture system.
While addressing the Government that incubated, expanded and sustained this inhumanity for well over a century, Professor Prasad says ‘girmit’ is their own history.
He says one of the most difficult words in the English language dictionary is “sorry” and a heartfelt “sorry” is reparation enough for him.
Professor Prasad adds healing and reconciliation will be infinitely more complex but we need to make a start somewhere.
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