Published Paper Details:

Pitched uneasily between political exile and promising life, the girmits created a history of being a stranger estranged by their own strangeness. Indentured servants from India were taken to far away lands to work on plantations, with little or no pay, for a specific period of time. It was imposed involuntarily other judicial punishment, sometimes a voluntarily for purported eventual compensation of debt repayment. The lives of these people changed terribly and underwent transformation which was addressed rarely. The ancestral trauma of dislocation, the treacherous journey across the sea, hardships upon their arrival, and the ongoing process of loss of identity in the diasporic setup, resulted in the direct impact on the present experience of post indenture Indians across the world. Torabully takes on the journey for self-exploration to the first stone of memory where humans were treated as 'coolies' bound for plantation colonies. He coined the term 'coolitude' to feature an extended narrative and dwell on the necessities of the memories of homeland. In this paper, I will talk about the loss of identity and pain, as found in the poems of Khal Torabully and Sudesh Mishra, who have captured this essence of indentured servants.