The Girmitiya Saga

In May, 1893, a 24-year-old-attorney arrived at Durban on a year’s girmit (contract) to fight a lawsuit for Dada Abdullah and Co. Thrown out of the train to Pretoria, he was to taste the racial discrimination that plagued the land at that time. Subsequent experiences in South Africa sensitized him to the plight of the girmitiyas (bonded labours). Suspended between despair and a hope for an implausible escape to their promised land, the girmitiyas found in this young attorney a voice that would guide them to a new dawn. In The Girmitiya Saga, Giriraj Kishore retraces the socio-political background of the 19th and 20th-century South Africa, highlighting the importance of the young attorney’s actions in South Africa and their monumental significance for humanity as a whole. After having carefully researched the subject in South Africa, England, Mauritius and India, Giriraj Kishore has imaginatively cast the facts in the mould of an arresting novel—Pehla Girmitiya. First published in Hindi in 1999, the novel was very well received in the world of Hindi literature. The following year, the author was honoured with the Vyas Samman by the K.K. Birla Foundation, and the Mahatma Gandhi Samman by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan for this book. A flesh-and-blood human being, Mohandas Karamchand is an average man who finds himself, along with many others, in a particular historical and sociological configuration that sets him off on a life-altering path—towards becoming the Mahatma…