By country · Caribbean & South America
Part 5 of Temples of the Diaspora. Denied land to build his temple, an indentured labourer named Sewdass Sadhu built one in the sea instead, by hand, over decades. Trinidad's Hindu temples are monuments to a stubborn refusal to disappear - and to a diaspora that made an island its own.
Part 6 of Mother Tongues. Carried across an ocean by indentured labourers, the Bhojpuri of the Ganges plain became something new in the Dutch colony of Suriname - Sarnami Hindustani, a language of its own, now spoken as much in Rotterdam as in Paramaribo, and quietly fading in both.
In 1838 two ships landed 396 Indians in British Guiana — the very first indentured labourers of the whole system. Their descendants are now the largest community in Guyana.
Part 1 of Mother Tongues. When labourers from a dozen Indian districts were thrown together on Fijian plantations, their languages fused into something new — a tongue that is now the mother language of a people.
External Affairs Minister Jaishankar signed an archival cooperation agreement with Trinidad and Tobago to help members of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora trace their ancestral roots. The Government of India is creating a comprehensive global Girmitiya database.
The Government of India has extended Overseas Citizen of India eligibility to the sixth generation of Indian-origin diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago — recognising the descendants of indentured Girmitiya labourers who arrived in 1845. A historic outreach with implications for other long-tail diaspora communities.
