The stories they have to tell are as varied as the communities and regions in South Asia which they or their ancestors left. From the indentured labourer condemned to subhuman existence to the gutsy 'free' entrepreneurs who ventured out to make a fortune; from the unskilled working at menial jobs in the industrial heartland of the West to the highly educated, skilled professional of the global economy, they all left their home regions seeking a better future. Most people know of the latter-day migrants and how they are faring in their new countries, but accounts of the earlier pioneers are largely consigned to scholarly tomes and hardly appear in popular circulation.
About 10 million people of South Asian origin can be found living outside their 'homeland'—from the Caribbean to Fiji, from Canada to New Zealand. They are con-centrated in North America, Southeast Asia (mainly Malaysia, Burma and Singapore), Europe (mainly the UK), Eastern and Southern Africa (mostly Mauritius and South Africa), the Caribbean, the Pacific (mostly in Fiji), and now, as migrant workers, in West Asia.
The tiny Indian Ocean island of Mauritius situated 500 miles east of Madagascar ('discovered' by the Portuguese, and taken by the British in 1810 after periods of Dutch and French rule) was the first to receive Indian indentured labourers in 1834. Next came British Guiana in 1838, Trinidad, Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1845, Jamaica in 1854, Natal, South Africa, in 1860, Dutch Guiana in 1873, Fiji in 1879, East Africa in 1895, and smaller numbers in a number of other outposts.
For more than 2000 years, people from South Asia travelled and settled in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and even China and Japan and the East African coast. However, unlike many other peoples, South Asians did not migrate permanently in substantial numbers to other parts of the world till the 19th century. Large-scale migration from the Subcontinent began in earnest in the 1830s with the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. To replace the recently-freed slaves with cheap labour in the sugar and cocoa plantations (as well as coal mines and estates) in other British, French and Dutch colonies, the British government set up the system of "indentured labour" to allow recruitment of workers to go abroad on five to 10-year contracts.