How this Fijian ‘girmitiya’ found his India home

LUCKNOW: His life’s story is the stuff films are made of. And though Satish Rai’s own story remains untold – until right now – the Sydney-based documentary filmmaker makes do with telling the tales of others like him, who set out in search of their roots, and stumbled upon cousins and family they never knew existed. For the uninitiated, Rai is the descendant of girmitiyas – indentured Indian labourers who travelled to Fiji and Caribbean Islands to work on sugar plantations in the early 19th century, upon signing an “agreement” – distorted eventually to be known as ‘girmit’ – with the British Government that promised them to return to India after they completed the term of their contractual agreement for work in Fiji and the Caribbean Islands.Many contracts were reneged upon, and only a few could return home. And for those like Satish Rai, the real homecoming could only happen nearly a century after his family first left the Indian shores. Rai’s first visit to India was in 1994 – to Basti district – where his cousins were settled. A brush with a local rickshaw puller gave him his first brush with his caste – and his roots. “He told me I am a Bhumihar Brahmin. And I didn’t know what that meant,” Rai said. The first trip yielded little ground. After two more visits, one in 1995 when a Brahmin priest led him on a wild goose chase, and a second in 2001 when he accompanied a cousin on her quest to find her family, Rai’s own story saw mild progress. He 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 went back to Balrampur.” And here’s the twist in Rai’s tale. Satish Rai met his cousin, thrice removed, a man they knew by the name of Naeem Rai. “This was a Muslim name. And I already knew my grandmother was a Hindu. So I knew it couldn’t be the right family,” Rai said. Whether it was curiosity or sheer desperation that drove him 15km into Balrampur’s belly is unclear. But Rai was on his way the next morning, looking to dig for, and to find his roots. “The first time I saw them, I felt the connection. The resemblance was uncanny,” he said. But how did it happen? After the initial rush of emotion, the mystery unravelled. Rai’s grandmother was married to a Rai Bahadur, a dominating, violent man, he said. And after suffering many years of domestic violence and abuse, she walked out on the Rai Bahadur. Staying away from the powerful landlord within the village would have been impossible, and Rai’s grandmother took the next best available option; she boarded the ship to Fiji with Rai’s grandfather, a man headed for greener pastures in the faraway lands. When the irate Rai Bahadur found out about her escape, though, he did the only thing that remained in his power to do: issue a diktat that disallowed all Hindu families in the area to wed. “My grandmother’s cousin at that time had four children. And to escape the bizarre diktat, they all converted to Islam. The family name of Rai, however, stuck.” For Satish Rai, the family name served as the final missing piece in his quest to find his family. A century after his grandmother boarded that ship to Fiji, Satish hugged his cousin Naeem and celebrated his homecoming.