Assuming the burden of memory: The translation of Indian indenture in Peggy Mohan’sJahajin

Abstract

This paper explores Peggy Mohan’s novel Jahajin (2007), in which she returns imaginatively to the past history of Indian indenture in order to explore its relevance and remembrance in late twentieth-century Trinidad. As Mohan’s unnamed narrator traces her family’s matrilineal involvement in this past, the novel examines the way in which Indian women, in particular, have been edited from official versions of both Trinidadian and Indian migratory histories. Jahajin’s narrator is a translator of Trinidadian Bhojpuri and, despite the difficulties of translation and challenges of accessing the Indian indentured past, this novel attests to the continued importance of oral narratives as counter-histories in facilitating the remembrance of this neglected history. Translation is also used figuratively in Jahajin to think about how Indian indenture could be “translated”, or interpreted, for twenty-first-century readers who otherwise might not have access to stories about this past. In order to examine the relationship between descendants of Indian indentured labourers and the past of indenture, I borrow Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”, or the belated “memories” experienced by those who did not directly witness traumatic events. Postmemory is especially useful in thinking about how Mohan, and other contemporary Indian-Caribbean writers sharing an empathetic connection to this past, can explore the remembrance of Indian indenture in the absence of direct experience or its associated trauma.