About this series

Between 1834 and 1920, more than a million Indians were carried across the British Empire under indenture — the “girmit”, the agreement that gave a whole diaspora its name. They went to cut cane in colonies most Indians today could not place on a map: Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Suriname, South Africa.

This series tells their story one country at a time — who arrived, what they endured, and what their descendants became. It is the journalistic companion to our Girmitiya topic page and to GGLASC, the archive that traces these family lines back to the indenture ships.