‘Migration is not gender neutral’: Peggy Mohan

Women, by nature, do not migrate, Indo-Caribbean novelist and linguist Peggy Mohan has said.

Lecturing on ‘Marking their memories: ‘Indenture literature’ at MBIFL on Friday, she pointed out that languages and cultural continuity happen when women travel and set down roots. 

 “All the big migrations to India have involved men. If women came, it was only when things were set up. The other unusual thing was that these women were very rarely married to the people they were going with. Many women were running away from arranged marriages. My great-grandmother was thrown out of the house. What will you do in such a situation? Suddenly somebody is offering you the chance to go to the Caribbean and you will take it,” says Mohan.

She talked about Jahajis. Jahajis were indentured labourers from British India transported to work on plantations in Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa and the Caribbean.

“When I wrote my book, I feminised the word, ‘Jahajin’, because I was looking at that unusual situation where women migrated,” she says. 

Literate men from India wouldn’t enjoy the idea of being bonded to anybody. So they have a very different take on their writing. But women always have a circle of friends, mostly other women. They fine-tuned and edited their stories. In the course of editing their stories about the past, one thing they did was gloss over the negative things.