Place · indenture diaspora community · Suriname
Suriname
Also known as Suriname — Sarnami and the girmitiyas
Between 1873 and 1916 about thirty-four thousand Indians went to Dutch Guiana under indenture, mostly from the Bhojpuri and Awadhi districts of the eastern Gangetic plain, and their descendants are now roughly a quarter of Suriname's population. Their language, Sarnami Hindustani, is a koiné that formed on the plantations out of Bhojpuri and Awadhi, with Dutch and Sranan Tongo layered in. It is spoken by several hundred thousand people in Suriname and the Netherlands and is nobody's standard.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 5.852, -55.204
Worth knowing
Sarnami preserves Bhojpuri and Awadhi forms that Hindi standardisation has pushed out of use in the districts the emigrants came from, so a language carried to South America in the 1870s now holds vocabulary that has gone quiet in Bihar. Suriname was one end of a system: something over a million and a half Indians left under indenture between 1834 and 1920, on five-year contracts, recruited mostly from the Bhojpuri-speaking eastern plain and the Tamil south and shipped from Calcutta and Madras to Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Natal, Fiji, Jamaica and here. It was devised to replace slaves after abolition. Recruiters had to read the contract aloud to each emigrant, so the diaspora is named after the one English word in the transaction nobody could translate: girmitiya, from agreement.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asChutney music
The two surviving halves of one emigration. Trinidad and Guyana produced chutney — Bhojpuri wedding song pushed through Caribbean rhythm into a mass genre — while Suriname, next door on the South American mainland and Dutch rather than British, produced Sarnami as a full spoken language and its own baithak gana music. The recruits came from the same districts and often the same depots; the difference in what they made is largely the difference between an English and a Dutch colonial frame around them.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sarnami Hindustani” and “Indo-Surinamese”. Theo Damsteegt on Sarnami; Dutch colonial emigration registers, 1873–1916.
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