Here we intend to publish the full list of all Indentured workers, by country. Presently, only South Africa has a comprehensive databank. GGI is now developing a record for Fiji. Our intention is that the full list of the Girmitiyas – all 1.2m of them – would be posted here in a search-enabled format, within 5 years.
For Your Information:
CD-ROM to help South African Indians trace roots
By Fakir Hassen, Indo-Asian News Service
from Yahoo India News
Friday February 13, 2004. 8:13 AM
Durban, Feb 13 (IANS) A CD-ROM painstakingly compiled here by a veteran researcher will help South Africa’s 1.2 million Indians – mostly descended from indentured labourers first brought in 1860 – trace their roots.
Joy Brain took more than 25 years to compile the information in the CD and discussions are on with publishers and those who can fund the project on whether it should be sold as a commercial product or put into the public domain.
“We were not allowed to photocopy the original documents because of their fragility. The details (of the early immigrants) were recorded in books that are now very delicate and falling to pieces in the archives of Durban,” Brain told IANS.
“It took so long because we had to copy everything by hand. There was no other way of doing it from the books that are up to six feet long, with often difficult handwriting legibility.”
Brain said the resumption of ties between India and South Africa a decade ago after nearly 40 years of isolation because of apartheid had resulted in a resurgence of interest by local Indians in tracing their roots.
“There was a time when there was not much interest. But now they are interested in finding the village where their ancestors came from or to get a certificate of Indian origin, for which they need proof from the archives.”
As a church historian, Brain saw Indian names cropping up frequently in her research, which prompted her to start researching the history of South Africa’s Indian community. After visiting India, she wrote several books in this area.
The latest work collates all the information that was recorded by the authorities in the then British colonial territory of Natal, which brought in the Indians to work on sugar plantations as indentured labourers. The majority of them opted to remain in the country when their periods of employment expired.
“This work will be useful to anyone, even those not living in Durban. Up to now they have had to pay somebody to research their queries or phone me about it,” said Brain.
“More importantly, it preserves for posterity the important documents in a form that will avoid people ripping the originals to pieces.”
Brain said the Genealogical Society of South Africa had done a lot of work in the complicated task of indexing the content that had been captured for the CD-ROM.
Brain also set out to disprove the “myths and legends” about the early Indian settlers that had persisted through generations but had no documentary or other evidence to substantiate them.
“Some of these distress me a lot. The descendants of those early Indians need to be proud of what their ancestors did, rather than constantly moan and groan about how they were ill-treated (by their colonial masters).
“It was courage, enterprise and hard work that built them up into what the Indian community is today.
“I heard a woman on the radio this week saying how they had been promised that all the families would go together to (wherever they were allocated) and then they weren’t, but that’s not true. You can prove from the state registers that they kept families together.”
Another claim that Brain disputes is that recruiting agents and ships’ masters deliberately sought out Indian women of easy virtue to go on the lengthy boat trip to South Africa.
“This is an insult to Indian women. Perhaps there may have been 150 out of the 150,000 women who came here who were like that, but to generalise the issue is unfair.”
Brain now plans to research and write about the caste system and its impact on the recruitment process, as well as why people in certain areas in India appeared to have been amenable to going to South Africa while others were not.
“They sent out recruiters all over (India). Some were very successful while others were not. Some got more people than they could handle while others got none. We want to investigate the reasons for that.”