In India, Kala Pani is associated with the Cellular Jail in Port Blair where freedom fighters and dissidents were sent by the British colonial authorities in the early 20th century. When used in the diaspora, it refers to the large-scale migration out of India in the 1830s when hundreds of thousands of Indians, both willingly and unwillingly, left the subcontinent and crossed the Kala Pani (the ‘Black Waters’) to work in the sugar colonies as indentured labourers, or ‘bound coolies’. These emigrants were responding to the need for labour on plantations after slavery was abolished in 1834 and terminated in 1838. Some 1.25 million emigrants were taken to Fiji and Mauritius, as well as the British, French and Dutch Caribbean.
However, even if the historiography is now abundant and detailed, even if the academic criticism that has been published has made creations in literature, film and the arts shine brighter, the diasporic point of view has prevailed. Ashutosh Kumar had remarked there was ‘a curious lacuna regarding indenture as far as 19th century mainstream Indian political and politico-economic discourse [was] concerned’. And yet, it seems that by the time MK Gandhi returned to India in 1915, the tragedy of the indentured labourers had found a firm and sympathetic expression in literary works emerging from Bihar and eastern UP, the area that had witnessed most of the migration. Consequently, several major journals dedicated large sections to the distressful condition of indentured labourers in Mauritius, British Guiana, Fiji, and South Africa.
Chand was among the most influential Hindi journals of that era. It devoted an entire issue (January 1926) to the migration, and Premchand’s short story Shudra was the highlight. Kamal Kishore Goenka calls Shudra the first work of Hindi fiction on the indentured, and perhaps the first Indian work as well.
— source thewire.in | Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Judith Misrahi-Barak | 20/May/2022