Revisiting Mythology through Women Writing from irmitiya Indian Diaspora

Abstract

After the abolition of slavery, several Indians were taken to different sugar colonies of Mauritius, Reunion islands in the Indian Ocean, Fiji, Trinidad, Caribbean islands such as Guyana, Martinique and Guadeloupe in order to meet the demand for cheap, unskilled labour between 1834 and 1917. This system came to be known as Indentureship and the people were referred to as Girmitiyas. Initially, the recruits were males but eventually recruitment for women was also encouraged, leading to a huge feminine presence on the islands. However, Colonial history, migrant discourse and nationalist discourses in India failed to pay attention to the fate of these women migrants who were both empowered and subjugated by this migration at the same time. The stories of these migrants are now narrated by their great granddaughters in “retrieval” narratives that recount their tales and become sites of archives with their recipes, songs and tales. In this article, I focus on Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge, to examine the rewriting of myths around the epic of Ramayana by women writers from post-indenture Indian diaspora in ways that allow them to challenge passive and stereotypical representations of women and find means to connect women across generations. I am particularly interested in understanding the evolution of myths far from the motherland within the diasporic context and how that informs our understanding of mythology and women today from the Indian perspective.