Bengal may get memorial for indentured Indian workers

KOLKATA - Bhawanipore Depot in Kolkata was where almost a million intrepid travellers spent the last few days in their homeland. They left India and were taken abroad as indentured workers in the 19th and early 20th century. Now, a group of private individuals will set up a memorial there to commemorate those who left for the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa.

The memorial will be the first commemoration of what was one of the biggest assisted migrations of that time. The host countries such as Mauritius, Trinidad, Suriname and Guyana (earlier British Guiana) have built memorials to commemorate the arrival of the Indians and a number of them hold official functions to mark Indian Arrival Day annually.

The initiative for building a memorial was originally a private effort spearheaded by British Guiana-born Ashook Ramsaran, executive vice president of the Global Organisation of the People of Indian Origin (GOPIO). Later Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobago also expressed support for the project. Since then, the West Bengal government has shown an interest.

Ramsaran qualified as an engineer and now manages his electronics manufacturing company in New York. His great grandfather was one of those indentured workers taken to British Guiana in 1853, but Ramsaran added with a tinge of regret: “I don’t know where my great grandfather came from in India.”

He is trying to gather more information about his ancestor, but the lack of detailed records in Guyana have hampered his search.

A delegation comprising representatives of GOPIO and the Kolkata-based Global Indian Diaspora Heritage Society have met director of Archaeology and Museums Gautam Sengupta in Kolkata.

“We had detailed discussions on the plans for the memorial project,” Ramsaran said.

Kolkata was the main port for the indentured workers to embark on the ships; later the ports of Chennai and Mumbai also began handling emigrant ships. “The depot at Bhawanipore was set up in 1845; it was the main depot for the indentured migrants,” Ramsaran explained.

Bhawanipore Depot was the place where a plethora of indentured workers waited, sometimes for months, for the ships that would take them to the colonies. Later as the number of indentured migrants increased, individual colonies set up their own depots for Trinidad, Fiji and Suriname. In 1889, the depot was shifted to the Garden Reach area.

“The depot held a special emotional significance for the indentured workers. It was where they prepared themselves for the momentous changes that were to come in their lives,” Ramsaran elaborated.

He was part of the team that visited the site of the old Bhawanipore depot. He said “fortunately the site is now vacant land, though the ownership is contentious.”

The land was transferred by the central government to the West Bengal government, which leased it to the Race Club.

“The land is no longer in use, but there is a claimant who says that the Race Club sold the plot of land to him. But the Race Club did not own the land, it had only leased the land.”

The heritage society has appealed to the West Bengal government to designate the site as a heritage one.

“We are working on arranging the funds to finance the project,” Ramsaran said. The memorial initiative will later be expanded into a museum which will showcase the conditions under which the indentured workers lived, the changes they made in the host countries’ economy and how the Indian community grew to become an important segment of society in the new country.

According to Ramsaran, the bonds that link the persons of Indian origin to India are still strong, “and the idea of the memorial is to emotionally connect the descendants of those indentured workers with the story of their ancestors and their ancestral homeland”.

(Shubha Singh can be contacted at shubhasingh101@gmail.com)