THIS year, on the occasion of my daughter’s 18th birthday, we proudly continued a rite of passage where Tamil women pierce their noses to wear the beautiful Mookuthi (nose pin) to signify their passage into adulthood.
My daughter takes her place alongside her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, who continued the grand traditions of generations that came before them.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, I decided to announce this proud moment to the world via Facebook, by juxtaposing pictures of my daughter alongside pictures of my mother and grandmothers, who proudly wore the Mookuthi.
The picture that I shared of my paternal grandmother, Amurtham Varden, was that of her green identity card, a photo that my mother kept as a remembrance when Amurtham passed in 1983.
Even though I have written extensively about the story of indenture in South Africa, I never once considered tracing my own heritage despite having ready access to the information.
My typical laziness in returning the green identity card to the file it was originally stored in, where it sat on my writing desk, forced me to look closer at the details.
The identity number of SA Burger/SA Citizen 800 46595 A never loses my gaze as I read and write about the story of indenture almost on a daily basis.
Staring at the number goaded me into action in search of my ancestral roots. Who were her parents? Who were her grandparents? From where in India did they come from? What ship did the ancestry of my grandmother come on?
Despite yielding little dividend, Amurtham Varden’s identity number 800 46595 A became my obsession.
The number had to be recorded in other documents beyond the green identity card. I decided to go in search of any information related to the identity number.
I painstakingly searched every Excel spreadsheet for the surname, Varden, listed as part of the 152 184 indentured workers who came on board 384 ships between 1860 and 1911, to grow the economy of colonial Natal through capital expansion.
In South Africa, the tracing of Indian indentured ancestry has been made easier because of the exhaustive and painstaking work of the late Professor Joy Brain in cataloguing and analysing the personal and social details of the indentured passengers.
Professor Brain and her colleagues at the then University of Durban-Westville, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, completed the final compilation of the ships’ list in 2003, publishing it in a digital format as a CD-Rom after painstakingly photographing each physical archival page of the list volumes of the 384 ships.
This data was later posted on the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre’s website in the form of nine Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that are downloadable in a PDF.
Today, anyone with internet access can search for their roots if they know the ancestry ship number, by clicking on a “Trace your roots” link (http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/SHIP/Ship_print.htm).
The surname of my grandmother’s ancestry was nowhere to be found on the spreadsheets. Out of frustration, I decided to cast my investigation further afield by going to the KwaZulu-Natal Archives Repository in Pietermaritzburg.
It was here that I went in search of Amurtham Varden’s identity number in the form of her birth certificate. Amurtham was colonial-born.
Her birth certificate had to be on the colonial registry located at the archives. By sheer deduction, in using the age of my mother and the age of my grandmother, Amurtham, at her death, I paged through the Union of South Africa birth registers.
After about an hour into my search, I elatedly found the identity number on a birth certificate.
My grandmother was born in Isipingo on January 14, 1916. Her parents were listed in the column for parent’s names and colonial numbers, with her father named as Varden no 3299, and her mother named as Polammah no 21247/903/314.
The colonial number on forms such as these is understood as one’s ship number.
My great-grandfather was listed as a farmer under the father’s occupation column. On seeing this metadata, my eyes began to well up knowing the significance of what I had found that day.
In the case of my great-grandfather, Varden, the single number 3299 meant that he was born in India.
In the case of my great-grandmother Polammah, her three numbers, 21247/903/314, meant that she was colonial-born.
Her numbers excited me tremendously. On seeing number 314, I stood up from my comfortable seat at the archives, knowing that I had found something that was poignantly symbolic to the work I do in researching the story of indenture in South Africa.
Polammah’s father was listed as ship no 21247, and her mother was listed as the colonial-born child of ship numbers 903 and 314.
Without even searching the Excel spreadsheet, I knew that passenger number 314 was on the SS Truro because only 342 passengers arrived here in Natal on November 16, 1860. This meant that I am a direct descendant of the first indentured workers who arrived in Natal.
When I got back home I exclaimed to my family that we had found our indentured roots. I immediately turned my attention to the first Excel spreadsheet, looking for the details of numbers 314 and 903.
Indenture number 314 was listed as Chillee Nursoo, a 28-year-old female who arrived from Nellore aboard the SS Truro on November 16, 1860. Thirty-year-old, Vencategadoo Daspah, number 903, also arrived in 1860 from Madras, aboard the Lord George Bentinc.
Chillee and Vencategadoo were assigned to the same estate, married here on the sugar cane plantation of Natal, and had a child who was the mother to Polammah, my great-grandmother.
My next search focused my attention on number 3299, my great-grandfather, Amurtham Varden’s father. My initial foray into searching the Excel spreadsheet yielded no result because of the variation in the spelling of Varden.
On the spreadsheet, number 3299 is listed as 6-year-old Vurden Rungin. Two rows above, at number 3297, Vurden’s mother is listed as 29-year-old Camachee Camachee. She was a single mother with three children, who arrived in Port Natal from Madras, on board the indentured ship, Saxon, in August 1864.
Below Camachee no 3297 were listed 10-year-old Nootialloo Runghen, Vurden Rungin, my great-grandfather, and his brother, Kistnen Rungin, 4. The listing of the name Rungin denotes the name of Vurden’s father. All people of indentured ancestry did not have surnames as the column listed next to everyone’s name belonged to that of their father.
Camachee no 3297’s story grates at my consciousness. My discovery of her being has become an obsession to write her story.
Her life story has led me to a reading of history Professor Charles van Onselen’s The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine; a rereading of Hugh Tinker’s New System of Slavery; a reading of revisionist scholars like Clare Anderson, PC Emmer, Crispin Bates, Khal Torabully’s Coolitude and even colonial apologists like David Northrup; all Professor Brij Vilash Lal’s books; a triple reading of Inside Indian Indenture by Professors Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, all the scholarly work of Professors Uma Dhupelia Mesthrie, Surendra Bhana, Bridglal Pachai, Mabel Palmer, Hilda Kuper, Kalpana Hiralal, Jo Beal, David Dabydeen and Ashutosh Kumar.
I’ve turned to Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies; Gaitura’s Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, whose great-grandmother’s story is very similar to my own Camachee; to Joanne Joseph’s story of Shanti in Children of Sugarcane; to Professor Dilip Menon’s work on Caste; to Betty Govinden’s writings of her ancestral roots in Kearsney; and to reams of countless writing on indenture and beyond, to gather information of substance to one day write the full story of my beloved Camachee.
This is a challenge to write Camachee’s full story and draws further inspiration from the lyrics of the Tamil song, Mannile Eeramundu, from the movie titled Jai Bhim, which was released in 2021.
Mannile Eeramundu Mulkatil Poovum Undu
Even in a rocky field, there is moisture. Even in a thorny jungle, there are flowers.
Nambinal Nalai Undu
If you trust, there will be another tomorrow
Kai Thanga Jeevan Undu
To hold you up, there will be another soul
Enge Ponalum Pon Vanam Kannodu
Wherever you may go, the golden sky will be by you
Ellai Ingillai Va Kalam Nammodu
There are no limits … Come … Time is ours
Naidoo is the great-great-grandson of Camachee, indenture no 3297. He also co-authored The Indian Africans with Paul David, Kiru Naidoo and Ranjith Choonilall.