6. First Person Singular?

North Indian Migrant Narratives from the Era of Indenture

Anand A. Yang

Forum: Translation, Migration, Narrative

History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025)

Between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, over one million people from India served as indentured laborers in European-dominated colonies scattered across the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean. To understand this mass migration at the individual and micro-level, scholars have recently turned their attention to the autobiographies of two “translated” people, Totaram Sanadhya and Munshi Rahman Khan, because their texts offer firsthand accounts of indenture from within that system. Sanadhya spent twenty-one years in Fiji after arriving there in 1893, and Khan went to Suriname in 1898 and stayed there for the next seventy or so years of his life. Their reminiscences, which translate into words the lived experiences of migrants from North India, offer crucial insights into the language practices they had to negotiate and the different subjectivities they had to assume (or were assigned) not only while en route to indenture but also during and following their period of indenture. Such information cannot be extracted from the official archives that historians typically rely on to compile macro- or meso-histories of mobility in colonial India. But migrant self-writing also has limitations: many personal stories of indenture are organized solely around the theme or plot of suffering and coercion, as demonstrated in Sanadhya's testimonio, and many self-narratives represent the experiences and thoughts of a single historical agent, as evidenced by the autobiographies of both Sanadhya and Khan.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge