On journey to India, searching for roots

By Shubha Singh, New Delhi, Nov 1: Five people of Indian origin are on a journey to India to visit the villages that their ancestors left over a hundred years ago to work on sugar plantations in Caribbean colonies.

Budhan Devi, an insurance consultant from New York, said: "It has always been a burning desire to find out about our grandfather; he was estranged from his family. We did not know how to locate the ancestral village, but my cousin managed to obtain some information from the archives. Now we have finally got in touch with some distant relations in Rudhouli."

Devi is thrilled to be travelling with her mother, Radha, to Rudhouli village in Basti district in Uttar Pradesh.

The group of five are people who have themselves migrated from Guyana to Canada or America. Having been displaced from their moorings in Guyana, they were keen to discover their Indian roots. But locating an ancestral village is not easy, even if the name and address is available.

It was the International Foundation for Vedic Studies, a not-for-profit organisation based in Canada that undertook the ancestor search programme for 10 search requests. The foundation contacted the Uttar Pradesh-based NGO, Sri Ramanand Saraswati Pustakalya (SRSP), which sent out its researchers into the countryside to locate the villages.

An ebullient Evelyn Swamy discovered the ancestral village of Jamuni from where her maternal grandfather's mother had made the journey to Guyana. Part of the family has moved out of the village and one distant cousin lives in Panipat, Haryana.

"It has been a long-time dream of mine to go to my ancestors' home and maybe meet some relatives. I never thought it would be possible after such a long time, but the ancestral search programme located the village." Evelyn spoke to her relatives and they were anxious to meet her, she said.

There was a slight problem as Evelyn speaks "very little Hindi". Finally, she got a call from the cousin in Panipat who could speak a smattering of English. There was great excitement and the family decided that one of the younger relatives in the village would go through a crash course in the English language so that they could communicate with each other. And Evelyn said, "It doesn't matter. They speak a little English and I speak a little Hindi and we will manage; after all we are kin."

The others in the group include Ashwini Kumar Rajpal of the International Foundation for Vedic Studies who located his ancestor Gangaiah's village in Doriaghat while his wife Sita found her great grandfather Chutkan's village, Gohna, in Basti district. Govind Prasad Sukhram's ancestor came from Azamgarh.

The process of locating ancestral villages was a not a simple search on the map; it entailed a good deal of field work. Village addresses are usually obtained from the indenture documents of migrants. Many villages have grown larger over the years and been bifurcated, others have had their names changed and even the districts have changed. To make the task even more difficult, the old documents used archaic spellings that bear little resemblance to present-day names.

The SRSP is based in Jokehara village of Azamgarh district and is involved in gender empowerment and imparting vocational training to youth and women of the area. Its workers were familiar with the region and they visited small towns, looked at land records and spoke to the elderly men and women in the villages to identify the places from where people had migrated many decades ago.

Sita's ancestor Chutkun's village was listed as Gohna, but there were two villages with similar names, Gohna Deeh and Gohna Tal, in the district. Fortunately, the SRSP researchers could identify the village as Gohna Deeh when they met an old woman who recalled her mother-in-law saying someone from their family had left for 'demra dweep' (Demerara was a region in British Guiana).

Evelyn now plans to initiate a search for her grandmother's relatives somewhere in West Bengal. Unfortunately, there are no records available about their antecedents, but he has not lost hope. The desire to revive bonds of kinship and belonging are even greater now.

(Shubha Singh is a writer on the Indian diaspora and international affairs. She can be reached at shubhasingh101@gmail.com)