FOR years, Vice President Ashok Ramsaran of the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin, and myself, held ongoing discussions on establishing a landmark and museum in Kolkota in tribute to the ancestors of  Indian indentured labourers.  We approached Indian Officials who acquiesced and cleared the project as a fitting tribute to indentured ancestors and it is scheduled to be inaugurated today (Tuesday January 11) in Kolkota. The plaque will be placed in the area where the indentured immigrants boarded the ship for their journey overseas. Some 300 VIPs from around the globe are expected to descend on Kolkota for the occasion to be followed by a luncheon. The plaque landmark is expected to be followed with the construction of a monument and a museum to honour all those who were shipped off as indentured workers bonded to working on sugar plantations.
The Kolkota memorial is a very important and significant project for PIOs around the globe. A couple million men, women, boys & girls were “transplanted” to the Caribbean, Africa, the Pacific, and Indian Ocean islands as contractual indentured servants. Some 238,000 were shipped to Guyana. This memorial will stand to the memory of the coolies (a pejorative term for those bound to work the land) captured and stored in Kolkota for weeks or months and taken overseas to grow sugar cane and tobacco to enrich the Europeans as well as to save their colonies after the abolition of slavery.
The port has a sad but rich history of almost 100 years of Indian immigration. It is the port where most indentured Indians (the other one being Madras, now Chennai) boarded ships for their far flung destinations to meet the colonial world’s shortage of cheap labor.
A memorial at the place of boarding the vessels is most appropriate to remember the Indian pioneers of the indentured system serving to remind the world of the history of Indian indentureship.
People should be taught about the indentured system given the large number of Indians who were shipped into the brutal dehumanizing economic system. The indentured system was a big business.  It was used by all the western colonial empires (British, French, Dutch, Spanish) to provide cheap labour for their failing plantations. It was a very profitable business enriching the planters, ship owners, and rulers who were only interested in profits, not the welfare of the Indians who they contracted.
There are many reasons why this memorial is important to India and to PIOs and why I applaud the Indian government for committing to it. Among them are:
1. It will serve to educate future generations so they can be educated about this system of slavery that replaced its earlier version and to make sure people are not held in bondage again. It will educate people about the history of indentureship so they can understand the cruelty and inhumanity that took place during these one hundred years of oppression began in India by the British and continued to be perpetrated on other soils including by other colonial rulers. As the famous philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
2. It will help PIOs to reconnect with their ancestral homeland, Bharatdesh, cementing ties to their mother land and with Indians.
3. It will help bring healing between PIOs and the colonial masters who
oppressed them, to bury their feelings of anger and hatred.
4. It will help to generate an interest in or motivate PIOs to trace their roots and open up more lines of communication with Mother India.
5. It will serve as a gathering place for students and scholars of indentureship allowing them to hold free discussions on the subject and giving people a place to gather and discuss important and sometimes controversial issues.
6 It will be a great way to begin looking to the future while still remembering the past.