Indentured! A Labourer’s Journey is a story that begins in 1883 on the deck of a British indenture ship carrying labourers from India to South Africa. The protagonist, Amir Sing is a young Indian man from the northern region of British India, who becomes an indentured labourer destined for the cane fields of Natal, South Africa. The storyline of the novel follows his journey through the new and often cruel world of colonial indentured servitude, which was a step away from colonial slavery. Amir meets fellow Indians and as shipmates they bond together in lifelong friendships. The friends marry and raise families in an alien land, where the determined cultivation of their native traditions and spirituality brings much-needed reprieve from the humiliation and injustices of oppression under indenture. Their individual stories are played out in subplots. The reader sees the warmth of new friendships along cultural lines and sometimes connections that cross those lines. In the historical perspective, Amir’s family joins the SATHYAGRAHA movement alongside
Mohandas Gandhi, who had started court skirmishes against the British colonial masters in South Africa in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. As Africa’s history has shown, the communities of Indian labourers grew in numbers across the continent and established their own ‘little India, ’ as was the case in Natal, South Africa. It was an era marked by colonial bigotry with its barbaric treatment of non-whites. Set against this historical/sociological background, INDENTURED! pitches into vivid relief the bonds of communalism and the resiliency of the human spirit. The author Vicki Bismilla was born and raised in apartheid South Africa. Her grandfather was indentured by the British Raj in Muzaffarnagar,
India and arrived in South Africa as a sugarcane labourer in 1883. Indentured! is based on the story of her grandfather Amir Sing.
