To translate the Hindi, “my name is Roland”. Am I fluent? Hardly. What very little I do know is from the sparse few relatives who themselves knew bits and pieces.
Apparently when my great-great-grandparents emigrated to the West Indies from Bihar, one of the many things they did not pass down was the language. I probably will never know if that was by choice or not; I don’t even know if they willingly became Christians either.
My cousin Gaston recently returned from India where he gave a lecture on the Indo-Caribbean diaspora of indentured Indians in the 19th and early 20th century called kali pani (lit. ‘black water’), so named for the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic. I hope this is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue to open the minds of native Indians to the history and travels of other Indians in the world.
The Indians settled in many ports of call in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Guyana being the largest, but that’s not where my parents call home.