Revisiting Indentured Narratives: Reconstruction of Alternative History of Indentured Labour and Kala Pani Crossing in Krishna Gubili’s Viriah

Abstract

Since the past few years, the studies on Indenture system of the colonial times have been focusing on how the indenture system originated after the abolition of slavery, how it focused on shipping Indian labourers to foreign countries, the contracts with those labourers, the challenging conditions under which they worked and how they contributed to boost colonial economy. Most of these migrants were illiterate and hence finding proper records of them in the colonial archives create a challenge for historians and writers. It was while the Indian South Africans commemorated their 150 years since their arrival as indentured labourers to that country, several speculations and researches of the descendants on those migrants in search for their ancestral roots began. These studies contributed to expand the archive of the indenture and gave rise to an alternative historiography written from the perspective of the marginalised labourers within the bigger corpus of colonial history. The descendants of these indentured labourers travelled across countries, spent hours in several libraries to gather information about their ancestors. They also used the stories heard from several of their family members about those ancestors which helped them to fill the gaps in their research. One of such narrative is Krishna Gubili’s Viriah which contends the colonial archives of Natal by putting forth a personal touch through integration of his family history with the colonial archives and thus broadening the lens through which the readers can approach the history of indenture. This article attempts to study how Krishna Gubili’s Viriah attempts to present the life of his great-grandfather, an indentured labourer, and the hardships endure by them during Kala Pani crossing, through the process of combination of facts, memory and imagination to recreate an alternative historiography.