Homemaking in Girmitiya Diaspora

The emigration of Girmitiyas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to remote plantation colonies like Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname rendered a specific Girmitiya diaspora. Pivotal for the emergence of the Girmitiya diaspora is that the labourers settled in their newly adopted homelands and literally had to make a home. Homemaking refers to the rooting of migrants in new physical and social environments by attaching to places and creating familiarity and safeness. However, homemaking has been taken for granted in the literature of the Girmitiya diaspora. This chapter addresses this void. Theoretically, the chapter departs from the proposition that nostalgia was the driving force in homemaking. Nostalgia not only refers to a longing for an idealised past but also connects past, present, and future as well as different points in space. The argument of the chapter is based on a historical qualitative analysis of Girmitiya peasants in Suriname, a former plantation economy on the north-eastern coast of South America. The analysis deals specifically with homemaking in an agrarian context as it was the peasants who established the ethnic community rather than the labourers. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the Girmitiyas possessed agrarian capital as they originated from rural areas but required an ethnic community to deploy it. In addition, it is argued that the possession of agrarian capital and the ethnogenesis enabled the peasants to make a cultural, a geographical, and an economic home. Finally, the chapter explores what features of homemaking in Suriname apply to other Girmitiya societies. The perspective developed in this chapter thus contributes to three strands of literature: homemaking, ethnogenesis, and the Girmitiya diaspora.