Satyendra Peerthum
Between 18th and 26th July 2024, the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund with its relevant stakeholders are commemorating the 18th anniversary of the inscription of the Aapravasi Ghat on UNESCO’s prestigious World Heritage List. In July 2006, this inscription ushered a new era in the history of the heritage sites in our country as it became the first Mauritian site to be given an official international status and recognition which was followed two years later by the one of Le Morne Cultural Landscape by UNESCO.
A Unique World Heritage Site
It is also the only indentured labour site listed as a World Heritage Site among UNESCO’s 1199 recognized World Heritage Sites spread across 168 countries around the world. Therefore, the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site is truly a unique site in time and space which underscores, to a certain extent, the uniqueness of Mauritian history or Mauritian exceptionalism in modern world history. It should also be noted that more than 80% of the ancestors of the Mauritian population arrived as indentured immigrants and passed through the gates of the Ghat.
Between 1826 and 1946, an estimated 5.2 million indentured and contract workers from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific Ocean World were taken to work in 68 countries, colonies, and territories out of which 3.3 million were transported to more than 30 countries, colonies, and territories in the greater Indian Ocean World. The historical importance of the Indian labour diaspora for the Indian Ocean in particular is that it was the largest movement of population to take place in this part of the globe during the 19th century and early 20th centuries.
The Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site is significant because it welcomed the largest number of these indentured immigrants. Between 1849 and 1910, more than 350,000 labourers were recruited in India and brought to Mauritian shores and passed through the Aapravasi Ghat to toil mostly on the local sugar plantations. Mauritius was the first country to introduce indentured Indian labourers on a large scale, or by the tens of thousands, and Aapravasi Ghat was the first depot, then known as the Coolie Ghat or Immigration Depot, where indentured labourers were processed.
More than two-thirds of them remained and forever altered the island’s social, demographic, economic, religious and political landscape. During the mid-19th century, thousands of Malagasy, Comorian, East African, Liberated Africans, Yemeni, Omani, and Chinese contractual workers were also brought to work on Mauritian sugar estates which also contributed to the emergence of a pluri-ethnic society.
The Aapravasi Ghat and Indentured Labour
The Mauritian experience with indentured labour and the long and complex history of the Aapravasi Ghat are unique because they provide important and well-documented insights into the nature and dynamics of post-emancipation societies which emerged in the former European colonial plantation world during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After all, the indentured labour system or modern contractual labour system created a distinctive pluri-cultural society in Mauritius where also the slaves, free immigrants, and their descendants have made important contributions. Indentured immigration into British Mauritius epitomizes the successful interaction and peaceful co-existence of communities of Asian, African and European origins which has led to the emergence of a Mauritian rainbow nation.
The Aapravasi Ghat or “the landing place of the indentured labourers” is a tangible and powerful symbol of the intimate and complex historical bonds which exist between Mauritius and India and other countries of the Indian Ocean World. The Ghat is a unique place in time and space where between the 1850s and the early 1900s, tens of thousands of Indians and non-Indians, like the Liberated Africans, first set foot on Mauritian shores. They were processed before being sent to work on the island’s sugar estates, Port Louis, and other parts of the colony.
It was on this very spot that they also spent their first two days in Mauritius which most of them adopted as their new home. These labourers originated from present-day Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andra Pradesh, Maharastra, Tamil Nadu, and from almost all parts of British India, southern Asia, and beyond. The Indian labourers who passed through the Aapravasi Ghat were adherents to the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist faiths, therefore, a truly heterogenous population which reflects our multi-cultural Mauritian nation.
It was through their toil and unwavering determination that the Indian labourers transformed this small Indian Ocean island into a garden of sugar as well as into the most important exporter of sugar in the British Empire by 1844 and after. By the mid-1850s and late 1850s, Mauritius was producing 7.5% of the world’s sugar which was estimated at a local production of around 100,000 tons of sugar and more than 1 million tons of sugar cane per year which continued to increase during the coming years. This economic process took place largely through the labour of more than 90,000 indentured and non-indentured Indians, non-Indians, and Indo-Mauritians residing on 265 sugar estates and through its 303 sugar mills and thousands more residing off the estates and in Port Louis. The Indian immigrants and their descendants, by the sweat of their brows, were the builders of modern Mauritius as well as the shapers of Mauritian history.
The Recent History of the Ghat & the Present
In April 1987, the Aapravasi Ghat was declared a national monument by the Government of Mauritius. More than a year and a half later, in November 1989, the name Coolie Ghat was changed to Aapravasi Ghat, the name of the site was coined in Mauritius. In 1996, the Aapravasi Ghat Promenade Project was completed and barely, six years later, the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund took over the site and started the long and complex process of studying, restoring, preserving, and disseminating the importance of this hallowed historic place.
On 16th July 2006, at UNESCO’s 30th meeting of its World Heritage Committee in Vilnius, Lithuania, the site became a World Heritage Site. It was inscribed under criterion 6 of the UNESCO guidelines linked it with Intangible Cultural Heritage or ICH considered to be:
“directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance.”
On 2nd November 2014, the Beekrumsingh Ramlallah Interpretation Centre was opened after 5 years of work and the Government of Mauritius spent Rs.60 million for its realization. It is the only interpretation centre in the world, or a type of public museum, which narrates and illustrates the history of indentured labour in a particular country and of the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site.
Between 18th and 26th July 2024, in order to mark the anniversary of this inscription, the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund with its stakeholders are organizing three important events namely: (1) its annual Consultative Committee with business owners and residents from the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Property Buffer Zone in Port Louis on 18th July; (2) an open day at Antoinette Sugar Estate near Barlow in the north of the island where the 2nd November 1834 immigrants went to live and work on 19th July; (3) the launching of the 2nd edition of ‘They Came to Mauritian Shores: The Life-Stories and History of the Indentured Labourers in Mauritius (1826-1937)’ written by Satyendra Peerthum, Historian at AGTF, at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute on 26th July respectively. It is through this process of commemoration that we valorize this unique site in Mauritian, Indian Ocean and world history.