Rajgir, December 24, 2025:
The first major thematic session of the evening at the Nalanda Literature Festival 2025 unfolded as a deeply reflective and historically resonant dialogue on India and the Indian Diaspora, with special focus on the Girmitiya experience. The session brought together scholar and cultural thinker Sarita Boodhoo in conversation with facilitator Anil Joshi Sharma, offering the audience a layered exploration of memory, migration, language and cultural survival beyond national boundaries.
From the outset, the session distinguished itself through its seriousness of purpose. Rather than approaching diaspora as a romanticised narrative of global success, the discussion anchored itself in the lived historical realities of indentured labour, displacement and endurance. The term “Girmitiya”, derived from the colonial word “agreement”, became the central conceptual and emotional axis of the conversation. Dr Boodhoo framed it not merely as a historical label, but as a lived inheritance that continues to shape identity, language and cultural expression across generations.
Dr Boodhoo began by situating the Girmitiya story within the broader history of colonial exploitation. She reminded the audience that the Indian diaspora, particularly in regions such as Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean and parts of Africa, did not emerge solely from voluntary migration or economic aspiration. It was forged through coercive systems that uprooted individuals from their land, language and social networks, transporting them across oceans under contracts they scarcely understood. Yet, she emphasised, what followed was not cultural erasure, but an extraordinary act of preservation.
One of the session’s most compelling strands was its focus on language as an archive of memory. Dr Boodhoo spoke of how Bhojpuri, Awadhi and other Indic linguistic forms survived in diasporic spaces long after they had evolved or diminished in their places of origin. In plantation societies far removed from India, language became a vessel of continuity, carrying songs, idioms, prayers and oral histories across generations. This linguistic survival, she argued, was not accidental. It was an act of resistance, a way of asserting humanity in conditions designed to strip it away.
Facilitator Anil Joshi Sharma guided the discussion with restraint, allowing Dr Boodhoo’s reflections to unfold without interruption. His questions were directed not towards academic abstraction, but towards lived experience. He invited her to reflect on how Girmitiya communities negotiated identity in spaces where India existed only as memory and myth. In response, Dr Boodhoo observed that for many in the diaspora, India is not a geographical certainty but a civilisational idea, sustained through ritual, narrative and collective remembrance.
The session repeatedly returned to the role of women in preserving cultural continuity. Dr Boodhoo highlighted how songs, folk narratives, domestic rituals and oral storytelling were often carried forward by women, becoming quiet but powerful repositories of cultural knowledge. In contexts where formal education was denied or limited, these practices ensured that identity remained embodied rather than institutional. The audience responded attentively as she described how culture survived not in grand monuments, but in kitchens, courtyards and communal gatherings.
Another significant dimension of the discussion was the redefinition of diaspora beyond nostalgia. Dr Boodhoo cautioned against reducing the Girmitiya experience to sentiment alone. While longing and loss are central to the narrative, they coexist with creativity, adaptation and self-fashioning. Girmitiya communities, she noted, did not merely preserve Indian culture in static form. They transformed it, blending inherited traditions with new geographies, climates and social realities. What emerged was not imitation, but evolution.
In this context, the session acquired particular relevance within the setting of Nalanda. Dr Boodhoo remarked that holding such a discussion in Rajgir, close to the ruins of an ancient global university, carried symbolic weight. Nalanda once attracted scholars from across Asia, transcending borders long before the modern nation-state. The Girmitiya story, she suggested, is another chapter in India’s long history of transnational cultural exchange, albeit one shaped by suffering rather than scholarly pilgrimage.
Anil Joshi Sharma steered the conversation towards the question of contemporary relevance. How does the Girmitiya legacy speak to younger generations today, many of whom inhabit digital, globalised spaces far removed from plantation histories? Dr Boodhoo responded by emphasising the importance of documentation, scholarship and cultural education. Memory, she argued, cannot be inherited passively. It must be taught, interpreted and re-engaged with, lest it be flattened into vague ancestry.
The session also touched upon the politics of recognition. Dr Boodhoo noted that Girmitiya histories often remain marginal within mainstream narratives of the Indian diaspora, which tend to foreground professional migration and economic success. By centring indenture, the conversation challenged comfortable hierarchies of diaspora identity and called for a more honest reckoning with the past. Literature, she asserted, plays a crucial role in this process, offering space for voices and experiences excluded from official histories.
As the discussion drew to a close, the atmosphere in the hall remained contemplative. There were no rhetorical flourishes or performative conclusions. Instead, the session ended on a note of quiet insistence: that language, culture and memory do not survive by accident. They endure because individuals and communities choose, again and again, to carry them forward.
The India and Indian Diaspora session on Girmitiyas emerged as one of the most intellectually grounded engagements of the evening. It reaffirmed the Nalanda Literature Festival’s commitment to conversations that move beyond celebration towards understanding. By foregrounding histories of displacement alongside narratives of resilience, the session reminded the audience that cultural continuity is neither automatic nor effortless. It is earned, often painfully, through remembrance, discipline and the refusal to forget.
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