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Jahajin
From Calcutta to Trinidad they went, the girmitiyas, crossing two oceans to reach their new homes on the other side of the world. jahajin illuminates for us the extraordinary experience of that jouney, the train ride from faizabad to calcutta, the passage down the hooghly. the three-month voyage around the stormy cape and up the Atlantic to Trinnidad, where the weary migrants settled into life as indentured labourers on the sugar estates. The novel opens with the narrator, a young linguist, talking to 110-year-old Deeda, who came to the caribbean on the same ship as her great great grandmother. Deeda speaks of leaving her village in basti with her son and sailing across the seas to "Chini-dad", the land of sugar, and about the life and friendships she built on her estate.Nested within this larger story is the dreamlike myth of Saranga, torn between her monkey-lover and her prince. Deeda's stories of a lost world captivate the younger woman, encouraging her to make the journey back across the kala pani. Alive with compelling characters and the lilt of Trinidad Bhojpuri, Jahajin gathers up the various narratives of relocation and transformation across a century in a tale that is part history and part fairy tale.
254 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 10, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 12, 2026
A few weeks ago, I was in Bangalore on vacation. My favourite pastimes there are (a) visiting all the bookstores and (b) discovering new eateries and having great food. I did more of the former on this trip, and on my annual pilgrimage to Blossom Book House, Amir, a dear friend of mine, hit me with this, “Did you know that Trinidad and Tobago is home to one of the largest Bhojpuri-speaking diasporas in the world?”
That immediately caught my attention. I’ve grown up on West Indian cricket, and I knew of names like Rohan Kanhai, Alvin Kallicharan, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Sunil Narine and then like… but Bhojpuri-speaking folk?
“Do you know of the story of how Bhojpuri-speaking North Indian/Bihari folk migrated to Trinidad as indentured slaves, pre-Independence?”
This sounded too good to be true. Amir handed me Jahajin, a part-autobiographical, part-fantasy, part-history lesson story about Indian indenture and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Trinidad.
The title is important here—a jahajin is a woman who crossed the sea on an indenture ship; the related idea of jahaji identity comes from the shared experience of people who crossed the ocean together and consequently developed a new sense of community.
That’s what it seemed like on the surface—the story of a journey. The first journey is of a young Trinidadian linguist (also the narrator; I’ll call her the woman with no name, Sergio Leone style), who plans to travel to India to understand the story of the Bhojpuri-speaking immigrants. But she needs to talk to Deeda, the 110-year-old OG immigrant who journeyed from India to Trinidad. So, in essence, this is a story about two journeys—the linguist’s journey from Trinidad to India to recover her ancestry through language, and the journey of Deeda and other indentured labourers from India to Trinidad.
But this wasn’t just a story about these two journeys. As I read the book, I realised that I would have a lot more to unpack. Jahajin is also the story of women crossing boundaries. Emotional, social, geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. And the moral of the story is that no matter what boundary or how many boundaries you cross, you are not necessarily free from your old ones.
There is also the little matter of Saranga and Sada Birij. This is where Peggy Mohan gets into fantasy territory. Deeda narrates this Bhojpuri folktale to our narrator, and we realise that Deeda sees a lot of herself in Saranga. What made it fascinating was that it was a story with a woman at the centre who crosses an irreversible boundary… leaving her partner, Sada Birij behind. Now, usually, in Indian stories, you’d see a heroic man leave behind his heroine, who waits for him. Saranga turned the ‘formula’ on its head.
Funny how it mirrors both Deeda’s and the narrator’s journeys. How? For this, I’ll have to get into the characters.
Let’s talk about Deeda first. My favourite character from the novel, also its emotional core. While on the ship with her son Kalloo, she befriends Sunnariya. Who is Sunnariya you ask? Well, she’s our narrator’s great-great-grandmother (I’ll come to her later). Now, for a woman who’s gone through displacement, indenture, exploitation (on the Trinidadian plantation) and the like, you would assume she’s been a victim of her circumstances, and that you’re most likely going to read a harrowing tale of how she overcame a difficult life. But Peggy Mohan gave Deeda AGENCY. She didn’t leave India because someone forced her to. She left of her own accord, and consciously took the decision to leave behind poverty (and possibly, a worse kind of servitude). And while colonial Trinidad had its own share of oppression, it at least gave Deeda an out from the casteist, patriarchal restrictions she would face back home. For her, Trinidad represented FREEDOM (and it wasn’t even 1947).
The ‘man’ in Deeda’s story is Mukoon Singh. Mukoon Singh is the de facto leader of this indentured labourer group on the ship (and even in Trinidad). While caste differences would’ve definitely kept Deeda and Mukoon Singh apart in India, it’s also difficult for them to get together in the ‘freedom’ of Trinidad (for reasons you’ll understand only if you read the book).
In our narrator’s case, she’s pretty close to a Trinidadian guy, Fyzie. Ordinarily, he would be the melodramatic ‘antagonist’ that tries to stop the narrator from chasing her dreams because he’s in love with her. No. In Jahajin, Fyzie is written as a relatively passive, calm dude who doesn’t try and prevent our narrator from making her India trip. Fyzie represents the ‘comfort’ in the narrator’s life. She can choose to just not leave for India and have a life in Trinidad, but…
… she is pulled towards India by Nishant. He represents everything the narrator is looking for—an opportunity to move out of her comfort zone, a new intellectual life, a complete cultural reset and possibly, leaning more into her Indian identity. However, she won’t become the person her ancestors were—namely, Sunnariya.
I have a question for Peggy Mohan here—is the narrator’s dilemma/journey partly autobiographical? It definitely seems so!
Sunnariya. I remember saying that I’d come to her eventually. For me, she is the most important cog in the wheel of this story. And not just because she’s directly connected to our narrator, but because her experiences in Trinidad weren’t really different than what she might have experienced in India. She is, by Deeda’s admission, the most beautiful of the jahajins on board, but she chooses to stay within the confines of ‘society’s expectations’. She is the representation of the Indian woman that carries the internalised rules of caste, family and patriarchy, no matter where she goes. Fortunately, this cycle of inter-generational trauma is broken by the time the bloodline reached the narrator.
I could go on and on about these characters, but please read the book to understand them better.
What did I understand from Jahajin, though? Quite a bit.
For starters, language can be a container of memory. The fact that Bhojpuri travelled from India to Trinidad and endured for so many years through Deeda and her jahajins showed us how language contains history that official records cannot capture.
Then, I also believe that this is Peggy Mohan’s answer to the erasure of women from history. We’ve all heard stories of how great works of literature or scientific discoveries have been misattributed to men, even though women were the pioneers. It’s probably why the drivers of the story are women, and why Peggy Mohan gives them the agency they deserve.
But the most important lesson I learned from Jahajin is that memory need not be factual, it may veer into nostalgia… but that makes it a lot more meaningful then a plain retelling of accounts. I’m pretty sure Peggy Mohan at some point would’ve been drowning in her own ‘Kala Pani’ of memories (the original kala pani being the big sea that Deeda and the jahajins had to cross), but it is her strong writing that helps the story stay afloat.
Jahajin isn’t simply a novel about the history of Indian slavery in Trinidad. It’s a novel that pushes forth female agency, reminding people that women deserve to be remembered, and they deserve to be able to tell their version of history. And through the journeys of Deeda, Sunnariya, Saranga and our narrator, Peggy Mohan turns the voyage across the seas into a story about exile, transformation and the search for home.
Made my vacation rather fulfilling.
That immediately caught my attention. I’ve grown up on West Indian cricket, and I knew of names like Rohan Kanhai, Alvin Kallicharan, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Sunil Narine and then like… but Bhojpuri-speaking folk?
“Do you know of the story of how Bhojpuri-speaking North Indian/Bihari folk migrated to Trinidad as indentured slaves, pre-Independence?”
This sounded too good to be true. Amir handed me Jahajin, a part-autobiographical, part-fantasy, part-history lesson story about Indian indenture and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Trinidad.
The title is important here—a jahajin is a woman who crossed the sea on an indenture ship; the related idea of jahaji identity comes from the shared experience of people who crossed the ocean together and consequently developed a new sense of community.
That’s what it seemed like on the surface—the story of a journey. The first journey is of a young Trinidadian linguist (also the narrator; I’ll call her the woman with no name, Sergio Leone style), who plans to travel to India to understand the story of the Bhojpuri-speaking immigrants. But she needs to talk to Deeda, the 110-year-old OG immigrant who journeyed from India to Trinidad. So, in essence, this is a story about two journeys—the linguist’s journey from Trinidad to India to recover her ancestry through language, and the journey of Deeda and other indentured labourers from India to Trinidad.
But this wasn’t just a story about these two journeys. As I read the book, I realised that I would have a lot more to unpack. Jahajin is also the story of women crossing boundaries. Emotional, social, geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. And the moral of the story is that no matter what boundary or how many boundaries you cross, you are not necessarily free from your old ones.
There is also the little matter of Saranga and Sada Birij. This is where Peggy Mohan gets into fantasy territory. Deeda narrates this Bhojpuri folktale to our narrator, and we realise that Deeda sees a lot of herself in Saranga. What made it fascinating was that it was a story with a woman at the centre who crosses an irreversible boundary… leaving her partner, Sada Birij behind. Now, usually, in Indian stories, you’d see a heroic man leave behind his heroine, who waits for him. Saranga turned the ‘formula’ on its head.
Funny how it mirrors both Deeda’s and the narrator’s journeys. How? For this, I’ll have to get into the characters.
Let’s talk about Deeda first. My favourite character from the novel, also its emotional core. While on the ship with her son Kalloo, she befriends Sunnariya. Who is Sunnariya you ask? Well, she’s our narrator’s great-great-grandmother (I’ll come to her later). Now, for a woman who’s gone through displacement, indenture, exploitation (on the Trinidadian plantation) and the like, you would assume she’s been a victim of her circumstances, and that you’re most likely going to read a harrowing tale of how she overcame a difficult life. But Peggy Mohan gave Deeda AGENCY. She didn’t leave India because someone forced her to. She left of her own accord, and consciously took the decision to leave behind poverty (and possibly, a worse kind of servitude). And while colonial Trinidad had its own share of oppression, it at least gave Deeda an out from the casteist, patriarchal restrictions she would face back home. For her, Trinidad represented FREEDOM (and it wasn’t even 1947).
The ‘man’ in Deeda’s story is Mukoon Singh. Mukoon Singh is the de facto leader of this indentured labourer group on the ship (and even in Trinidad). While caste differences would’ve definitely kept Deeda and Mukoon Singh apart in India, it’s also difficult for them to get together in the ‘freedom’ of Trinidad (for reasons you’ll understand only if you read the book).
In our narrator’s case, she’s pretty close to a Trinidadian guy, Fyzie. Ordinarily, he would be the melodramatic ‘antagonist’ that tries to stop the narrator from chasing her dreams because he’s in love with her. No. In Jahajin, Fyzie is written as a relatively passive, calm dude who doesn’t try and prevent our narrator from making her India trip. Fyzie represents the ‘comfort’ in the narrator’s life. She can choose to just not leave for India and have a life in Trinidad, but…
… she is pulled towards India by Nishant. He represents everything the narrator is looking for—an opportunity to move out of her comfort zone, a new intellectual life, a complete cultural reset and possibly, leaning more into her Indian identity. However, she won’t become the person her ancestors were—namely, Sunnariya.
I have a question for Peggy Mohan here—is the narrator’s dilemma/journey partly autobiographical? It definitely seems so!
Sunnariya. I remember saying that I’d come to her eventually. For me, she is the most important cog in the wheel of this story. And not just because she’s directly connected to our narrator, but because her experiences in Trinidad weren’t really different than what she might have experienced in India. She is, by Deeda’s admission, the most beautiful of the jahajins on board, but she chooses to stay within the confines of ‘society’s expectations’. She is the representation of the Indian woman that carries the internalised rules of caste, family and patriarchy, no matter where she goes. Fortunately, this cycle of inter-generational trauma is broken by the time the bloodline reached the narrator.
I could go on and on about these characters, but please read the book to understand them better.
What did I understand from Jahajin, though? Quite a bit.
For starters, language can be a container of memory. The fact that Bhojpuri travelled from India to Trinidad and endured for so many years through Deeda and her jahajins showed us how language contains history that official records cannot capture.
Then, I also believe that this is Peggy Mohan’s answer to the erasure of women from history. We’ve all heard stories of how great works of literature or scientific discoveries have been misattributed to men, even though women were the pioneers. It’s probably why the drivers of the story are women, and why Peggy Mohan gives them the agency they deserve.
But the most important lesson I learned from Jahajin is that memory need not be factual, it may veer into nostalgia… but that makes it a lot more meaningful then a plain retelling of accounts. I’m pretty sure Peggy Mohan at some point would’ve been drowning in her own ‘Kala Pani’ of memories (the original kala pani being the big sea that Deeda and the jahajins had to cross), but it is her strong writing that helps the story stay afloat.
Jahajin isn’t simply a novel about the history of Indian slavery in Trinidad. It’s a novel that pushes forth female agency, reminding people that women deserve to be remembered, and they deserve to be able to tell their version of history. And through the journeys of Deeda, Sunnariya, Saranga and our narrator, Peggy Mohan turns the voyage across the seas into a story about exile, transformation and the search for home.
Made my vacation rather fulfilling.
November 18, 2022
Disappointed
I am a bit disappointed since this book painted the picture that only the Jahajins and their descendants who converted to Christianity in Trinidad prospered. This is not true because I know of many families who never entertained the idea of conversion and their descendants have prospered. My great grandparents and my grandparents did not convert, neither did my parents or my generation if siblings and we all prospered in life.
I am a bit disappointed since this book painted the picture that only the Jahajins and their descendants who converted to Christianity in Trinidad prospered. This is not true because I know of many families who never entertained the idea of conversion and their descendants have prospered. My great grandparents and my grandparents did not convert, neither did my parents or my generation if siblings and we all prospered in life.
July 21, 2011
"And at that moment it suddenly came to me, as clear as the sky, that I was never going back, that I would live and die across the kala pani."
Loved the book. It's the story of a woman who migrates from Bihar to "Chini(sugar in Hindi)-dad", or Trinidad as it was known to the girmitiyas who went there to work on the sugarcane fields. The author, an Indian-origin Trinidadian interviews old jahajins (or people who came on the boats) for their stories as part of her linguistic work, and soon sees her own history in their stories. The character of Deeda, a hundred year old jahajin is key here; not only does the book tell her whole story, but she also narrates an old folk tale of Saranga and her lover and "what the wily princess has to do to try and be with him. The folk tale and Deeda's narrative provide a backdrop of women's voices to the whole book, this also ends up being an oral/folk history account. My own problem with it is that the author seems to have made Deeda a composite character of a lot of people she interviewed, so it's unclear whether the story is of her life only or many people's stories. Fact or fictional? You'll just have to take the book at face value.
Howevre, the mythical tale, Deeda's crossing and the author's own dilemmas make for wonderful reading. The stories of Indian immigrants to places like Africa and the West Indies hasn't been read enough and this is a great start.
Loved the book. It's the story of a woman who migrates from Bihar to "Chini(sugar in Hindi)-dad", or Trinidad as it was known to the girmitiyas who went there to work on the sugarcane fields. The author, an Indian-origin Trinidadian interviews old jahajins (or people who came on the boats) for their stories as part of her linguistic work, and soon sees her own history in their stories. The character of Deeda, a hundred year old jahajin is key here; not only does the book tell her whole story, but she also narrates an old folk tale of Saranga and her lover and "what the wily princess has to do to try and be with him. The folk tale and Deeda's narrative provide a backdrop of women's voices to the whole book, this also ends up being an oral/folk history account. My own problem with it is that the author seems to have made Deeda a composite character of a lot of people she interviewed, so it's unclear whether the story is of her life only or many people's stories. Fact or fictional? You'll just have to take the book at face value.
Howevre, the mythical tale, Deeda's crossing and the author's own dilemmas make for wonderful reading. The stories of Indian immigrants to places like Africa and the West Indies hasn't been read enough and this is a great start.
July 25, 2011
As a Trinidadian of non-Indian ancestry I have always been fascinated by the link that history has forged between my country and India. After visiting India myself, I can say with confidence that this book is one that all Trinis need to read and enjoy. It is simply packed with facts that we've always wondered about. Yes, the facts are there to be researched, but thank you Ms Mohan for distilling them into this very intriguing and readable book. I was truly sad when I came to the end. And cannot wait for Ms Mohan's next work.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews