When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1834, it led to a surge in another form of exploitation: indentured servitude. In this arrangement, a contract outlined a worker’s debt to their employer, for costs such as transatlantic passage and room and board. Labourers from India and China were recruited to work on plantations — at times using coercion and fraud — and sent to colonies in Africa, the Pacific and the Americas.

Toronto author and novelist Andrea Gunraj heard one such story of trickery in her own lineage: two distant relatives promised a better life, then sent on a one-way journey from India to Guyana (then British Guiana).

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In her new essay collection, Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present, Gunraj examines the reverberations of her own ancestors’ migration to the Caribbean and Latin America, part of the 1.6 million Indians who entered indentured servitude between 1834 and 1917. While she puts a critical lens on how this history has been told, or undertold, she focuses on the present-day echoes of this form of exploitative labour.

Gunraj spoke with Sadiya........

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