Back in Amsterdam after a month's sojourn in India, Atman speaks
wistfully of his soul-searching journey, "At least now my
mother can die in peace."
However, the task he had assigned to himself was by no means
simple. The last two years that he spent contacting people and
officials were harrowing, to say the least. An email message
floated by Atman on the Net paraphrases his agony:
"My mother is 85 years old. Her last wish before she dies is
to know her roots. The registry of Indian immigrants at the MGI/Mauritius
Archives belongs to all of us. It should be free and accessible to
the public. I am requesting ANYONE, also on behalf of my mother to
help me fulfill her last wish. Let me have the access code so that
I can check for info on my ancestors online."
With the Government officials of little help, Atman had to rely
totally on the help offered by faceless strangers. It proved to be
an exasperating experience. One such incident exemplifies this
frustration: An official in the Uttar
Pradesh State
Archives when approached, asked
Atman to furnish all the details, something Atman himself was
looking for. Atman's obvious reply was, "If I knew I wouldn't
be asking you!"
During that dark period of information drought, Atman plastered
the various interactive Indian newsletter groups as varied as the
Bhojpuri (dialect) group and the Nagpur City group with messages.
A stranger responded saying he knew about the villages mentioned
by Atman and that he would do his utmost to help him.
Within seconds of receiving the email, Atman called his mother in
Mauritius. Tears of joy welled up in her eyes. Says Atman, thanks
to this man, I could see my mother's dream coming true at long
last.
Soon more people reached out to him and Atman started following
the leads on village Anjorpur (in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh)
where his great grandmother Laxminia Kokil, who migrated to
Mauritius around 1896, was born and brought up.
Once the coordinates were ascertained, Atman began searching for
documented evidence t from the local registrar of births and
deaths in Ballia and for the list of indentured labour in
Mauritius and India. He drew a blank on several occasions, but
undeterred, he persisted. Eventually as things began falling in
place, Atman decided to take a trip to his land of ancestors.
He was able to trace some of his family members, both near and
distant, and true to his calling, lost no time in capturing them
on camera. He also clicked for eternity, the "landscape"
on which his grandmother was brought up.
While he was shooting, the villagers started complaining about how
their "Masooms," their innocent children, were whisked
away to Mauritius. "The British not only took away our sons,
husbands and brothers but also our children and exploited them to
the hilt for their vested interest."
While the grown ups knew what the British were up to, the children
or the Masooms (often unaccompanied by their parents) had no idea
where they were being taken. They were locked in sub-depots in
Chapra (Bihar) and "transported" to a larger depot in
Kolkata (Calcutta), from where they were "shipped" to
Kala-pani.
This
brought back a flood of memories for Atman. "My mother
remembers my grandfather Ramessar looking into her eyes while
cradling her and saying, 'Tor
ankhwa Bharat ke masoom laika ke tarah ba,'
meaning you have got the same innocent look like those children
who came from India."
While Atman was researching the archives of indentured Indians in
Mauritius, Guyana, Suriname and South Africa, he came across names
of many children from former British colonies registered as
indentured immigrants. He says: "That very moment I decided
that whenever I would travel to the land of my ancestors, I'd
shoot a photo-serial and capture this look of innocence and freeze
it for posterity."
A selection of these photos of "Masooms" were show cased
in Agfa, Germany and an exhibition of indentured immigrants was
held in Maurituius last year.
Though Atman carries no seeds of bitterness within him, he is
acutely aware that his family, like so many other families of
famine and epidemic-struck economically depressed states, was a
victim of some ugly twists and turns of history engineered by the
imperialist British.
Atman's maternal great grandfather was 14 when he was taken for
some "light labour" to "the land of milk and
honey" (Mauritius) on an arbitrary 8-year contract. In return
he was "free to eat as much as possible." Nothing could
have been further from the truth. Indentured by a sugar estate in
Flacq, he was forced to work from dawn to dusk on the cane fields.
When his "par-nana" reached the age of 18, the sugar
estate owner forced him to marry an indentured girl of his age.
Soon, Atman's grandfather Ramessar Sobrun was born, but because of
sheer overwork, his great grandfather died before he could realise
his cherished dream of returning to his homeland. There were still
three more years to go before the contract ended.
During the quest for his roots, there were many moments of
reckoning where Atman stood face-to-face with a totally unknown
and hitherto uncovered facet of his family history. One of the
villagers showed him an old-fangled film projector which his
paternal grandfather had requisitioned to show movies to the
villagers. On seeing it, Atman broke down and sobbed like a child.
"This is where I must have inherited my love for film-making.
It was there in my genes," he says in a choked voice.
There was also an element of surprise for the villagers who took
Atman for a "videshi" brown sahib (westerni foreigner)
and tried to converse with him in broken Hindi-English. They were
taken aback when he talked back in fluent Bhojpuri!
Atman's India trip proved to be a journey of discovery in more
ways than one. He was appalled by the condition of the archives
both in Lucknow and Chapra. "The records were kept in bundles
of gunnybags in Chapra. There was no index. We managed to open 25
bags to check for info on Tarrowa village (my ancestral place),
unfortunately most of the records were already moth-eaten and
therefore unreadable. It was raining, the roof of the collectorate
building was leaking, and most of the gunny bags were wet. Some
were even floating. The condition of the State Archives in Lucknow
was equally bad."
Atman's ancestors left their homeland due to the cruel
exploitation by the zamindars (landlords), besides excruciating
poverty and disease. But 150 years down the line, he says nothing
seems to have changed. A note in his India diary reads:
"There is still no infrastructure, no running water, no
electricity, no proper housing, no sanitation. There is
lawlessness, corruption, violation of human rights and the
zamindars are still exploiting the poor."
There were many other jarring notes too.
Recalls Atman, 'I had written to the District Magistrate of Chapra
a dozen times from Amsterdam. Leave alone a reply, there was not
even an acknowledge-ment. Later when I visited Chapra, I saw all
my e-mails addressed to him still in the PC at the collect orate.
The DM and his secretary told me they could not reply because they
did not know how to use the computer!' Shaking his head in utter
disbelief, Atman adds cynically, "I guess instead of
exporting its IITians abroad, India should keep them within the
country."
Unfortunately, the rigors of the trip took their toll on Atman and
he fell sick while searching for Tarrowa village in Chapra,
forcing him to abort his journey midway, and he returned to
Amsterdam.
However, a rejuvenated, feisty Atman says, "This is not the
end. I will be back in India to make a video-diary soon."
For, as they say, tomorrow is yet another day, especially for
someone who is looking for his yesterday
Article came from Atman Ramchalaon
