At some point between March 1879, when the first cargo of 463 recruits was shipped off to the South Seas, and January 1920, when the last of the bonded servants saw freedom, girmit entered the idiom of Indian workers transported to Fiji. The appearance of this noun among the Fiji-based recruits marked a watershed moment in the history of indentured labor. For the first time since the system’s inception in 1838, Indian agricultural workers had performed an act of self-appellation by permanently assigning a name, a neologism, to a historical event in which they were notable actors.1 The upshot was a subaltern perspective on a migratory experience that was differently phrased in colonial and archival documents. In all likelihood, girmit was a term circulating among Indian coolies serving their contracts in many of Britain’s far-flung colonies–Trinidad, British Guiana, Mauritius, and Natal–but it appears to have had no more than an ephemeral presence in these places. (Writing about his experiences in South Africa between 1893 and 1915, M. K. Gandhi, for instance, makes a passing reference to the term in the context of Natal-based laborers: “The indentured laborers were those who went to Natal on an agreement for fi ve years, and came to be known there as girmitiyas from girmit, which was the corrupt form of the English word ‘agreement.’ “)2 Among the Fiji-based recruits, on the other hand, girmit became charged with a surplus eventfulness that rendered it a memorable subaltern category. No communal memory of girmit survives among the descendants of recruits based in Natal, Mauritius, or Trinidad, while the term resonates strongly among Fiji’s Indians to this day. This article does not intend to account for what is doubtless a tantalizing anomaly. Instead, it seeks to demonstrate how the Fiji-based recruits transformed a neologism into a subaltern knowledge category, into a shorthand signifier for an unofficial discursive regime. In so doing, they left for posterity a divergent, supplementary,3 heterological4 account of one of the major episodes in the history of plantation capital and, by extension, in the story of modernity.
