History, memory and culture of indentured migrants: A comparative perspective

In the project of writing history of indentured migrants, apart from archival sources, oral traditions and cultural texts are equally vital sources of writing history from below . The paper focuses on oral traditions, primarily on folksongs collected from the field in India, in order to document pain and suffering of the indentured labourers and also of their families who were left behind in homeland . In spite of suffering in an alien land, the migrants have kept their cultural heritage alive in the form of rituals, folksongs and folktales. Besides, they were also engaged in a dynamic interaction with the multiethnic societies of the countries of migration resulting in much variation in the cultural heritage (intangible in this case) of these different cultural locations. The paper makes use of a comparative framework for study of similarities of Indenture experience and culture of the "sending" and "receiving" countries primarily through intangible cultural heritage.