A ‘girmitiya’ embarks on project milap

AGRA: From being a policeman in London, and serving as a politician in the Borough of Greenwich, Satish Rai, now a documentary film-maker, has come a long way. But it was only about a decade ago that Rai discovered his parental roots, what many take for granted. Now he is on mission to help others like him discover their roots.
He says, “I am a descendent of ‘girmitiyas’ (indentured Indian labourers brought to Fiji and Caribbean countries by European settlers to work in fields).When we were growing up, no one told my brothers and I about our history. But we assumed that we must have settled in Fiji at least a 1,000 years ago. We were totally unaware of where India was. Our only exposure to India was through Bollywood films, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It was a romanticized notion of India.”
The yearning for the idea of home began in the years after the coup in Fiji, when Rai first felt he didn’t belong in the country anymore “Some of us started searching for our roots. I was living in London then. So it was easier for me. I had flown over India. Now, I decided to make a stop over.”
The home-coming was neither smooth, nor easy. But Rai, a film-maker, likes to tell it like a story. Clearly inspired by the years of Bollywood cinema viewing, Rai describes how he reached visited India for the first time in 1994 – to Basti district – where his cousins were settled. “I met a rickshaw-wallah and told him my name. He told me I am a Bhumihar Brahmin. And that was my first initiation into discovering my roots.”
The first trip yielded little result. A year later, Rai returned, accompanied this time by his brother, Prakash. They were accompanied by ‘Shastriji’, a Brahmin priest, Rai says, who promised to help them trace their roots in exchange for an all-expenses-paid round trip. However, they went back empty handed. Then, for many years, the search was nearly dropped.
“In 2001, though, my cousin, a senator then, asked me to accompany her to help her find her own roots. This time I put in my own conditions; that I’d go if she’d let me document her travel. And she agreed,” Rai said. The visit resulted in Rai’s first documentary film of the theme of girmitiyas, and resulted in progress, if only in baby steps, towards his own search for his ancestors. Rai said, “During that time in Basti, there was a man who helped us and took us to Balrampur. He made me meet some people. Then, three months later, I got an email from him telling me my family had been traced. In 2004, I came back again on a sponsored trip by the Indian government, and went back to Balrampur.”
There’s a twist to the tale at this point, he says. The man Rai met told him his cousin was called Naeem Rai – a Muslim name – when Satish already knew his grandmother was a Hindu. “it couldn’t have been the right family,” Rai said, he had thought. Nevertheless, the next morning, we went on a 15 km trek into the belly of Balrampur to dig for his roots. “When I saw them, I felt the connection. The resemblance was uncanny,” he said.
But how did it happen? Here’s how it did. Rai’s grandmother was married to a Rai Bahadur, a dominating, violent man, Rai said. After suffering many years of domestic violence and abuse, his grandmother walked out on the Rai Bahadur, and took a ship to Fiji with Rai’s own grandfather, going to the foreign land as indentured labour. Later, when the irate Rai Bahadur found out, he issued a diktat that no Hindu family in the region would be allowed to marry. His grandmother’s family was left with little option but but to convert herself, and her four children, to Islam. But they retained the family name of Rai, a surname that carries on two generations later, with Satish and Naeem emerging as cousins.
But Rai’s quest for his roots hasn’t stopped at finding his own family. He has since been on a mission to document the girmitiya history and make documentary films on the subject. So far, he’s made four, and he’s now venturing into a series of feature films – the first of them already an idea waiting to be executed, and awaiting UP government’s film subsidy. “My feature film will be set in the years between 1915 and 1917 and wants to trace the history of the movement to allow girmitiyas to return to India, of which Tota Ram Sanadhya and Mahatma Gandhi were at the forefront. “I am making the film with a friend in Bollywood and am hoping to convince Ben Kingsley to play the role of Gandhi, again,” Rai said.
His feature film is still a while away, but Rai is also running a parallel mission to help other girmitiyas discover their roots. His project is simply called Milap-Discover Indian Roots Project. And already many other girmitiyas have found their roots, as far away as Orissa.
In the session on girmitiyas, professor Kapil Kumar, director, Indira Gandhi Centre for Freedom Struggle Studies & Chairperson, Faculty of History, School of Social Sciences, IGNOU, New Delhi suggested to the UP government that a chapter be introduced on the history of girmitiyas in UP text books, that a new set of direct flights be started to connect India with Fiji and Caribbean Islands (they don’t exist yet), and that all children of persons of Indian Origin or Ancestry be allowed to study in Uttar Pradesh's schools and colleges as par with other students. This, he said, will allow more NRIs and PIOs to come back to India, and also increase UP's tourism potential.