Reimagining the Aapravasi Ghat: Khal Torabully's poetry and the indentured diaspora

Abstract

National narratives in Mauritius often affiliate the Indian diaspora with the experience of indentureship and the Aapravasi Ghat, a nineteenth century immigration depot classified in 2006 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This affiliation inevitably disregards the African, Malagasy, and Chinese laborers who also worked under the system of indenture in Mauritius during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his 2013 collection of poetry, Voices from the Aapravasi Ghat: Indentured Imaginaries, Khal Torabully returns to the Aapravasi Ghat to recast the history of indentureship and highlight the various ethnicities of the indentured diaspora, their shared trauma, and displacement. This study contends that Torabully’s poetic engagement with the Aapravasi Ghat, as an historical site of indentureship and its overlooked diversity, challenges the perception of the Ghat as a representation of Indian indentured memory. It uses Torabully’s Coolitude poetics as a conceptual frame to consider the Aapravasi Ghat as an inaugural space that facilitated the creation of a complex, open-ended identity that aspires to promote a culture of diversity but not without its limitations and contradictions. Despite efforts to disrupt ethnic distinctiveness, Torabully reproduces Indo-centric perspectives expressed through the concept of kala pani and the fakir figure.