Bidesia as cultural production: a study of Bhojpuri women’s voices across Indian villages and girmit indenture

This dissertation focuses on the girmit indenture migration experience through the “old diaspora” lens and presents a feminist critique on the crucial role played by Bhojpuri women as emigrants, primary caregivers, and culture agents, in forming Indian diasporic identity and reproducing Bidesia folk culture in Mauritius. The study uses a combination of archival and ethnographic methods and relies on data obtained from Bhojpuri-speaking villages in east Uttar Pradesh and Mauritius. One important contribution of this research is its critical analysis of Bidesia songs, which act as cultural texts capturing the experiences of left-behind women. This study draws upon Steven Vertovec’s threefold conceptualization of diaspora to discuss identity and modes of cultural production in Mauritius. It also makes use of Connell’s gender framework, which is based on labor, power, and cathexis, to understand women’s work, their positioning, and their emotional lives. It finally concludes that it is necessary to understand the manner in which the contracts signed under duress and the atrocities experienced on the plantation sites impacted the lives of women and their descendants. Contracts were not mere papers; rather, they came to define the reality of lives-those of communities and a fluctuating sense of belonging that still define Bhojpuri today.