Khankhandaan

This website is for the decedents and relatives of Mowla Khan, Soobhanee, Mymood Khan and Moolemia .

History of Indenture Labourers

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent.

From 1872 to 1921 the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent… ‘Modernisation’ and commercialisation were accompanied by pauperisation.

It was the very same British Empire that brought misery and subjugation and, ironically, created an opportunity for ‘escape’ to places like Natal. Many were filled with hopes as they crossed the kala pani’ (the black water -the sea). Dreams of a better life and the opportunity to save money and return to the village as ‘success stories’ were not to be for many who returned ‘home’ with less than they had started outwith, and who found that home was not the same place. Neither were they the same people. Caste had been transgressed, parents had died and spaces for reintegration closed as colonialism tightened its grip. Home for these wandering exiles was no more.

A substantial number came to the realization that the place of exile was the place of home. They wondered, ‘…where do we go when it falls apart in our hands and we are left with less than we started with? Begin again? And with what?’ And so, many made the return journey. To Africa. To begin anew.