This story of the Indian Diaspora has many a heartrending episode that encapsulates the struggle of the earliest emigrants to foreign shores. Some were lured by agents who promised a future that would be written in gold. Many of the lured that rushed to ports in erstwhile Calcutta, Madras, Pondicherry and Bombay (now Kolkata, Chennai, Puducherry and Mumbai) to sail away did not know that they would be for ever gone. Others sailed away willfully to escape a life of poverty and hardship and into the winds of unknown possibilities.

A few left voluntarily with some money to find them enterprise. Willfully, voluntarily or beguiled, they all had to endure long, perilous journeys across the choppy seas. Some of the grueling voyages lasted over four months. It wasn’t prosperity that they walked out into on the other side—instead they stepped on to shores where life would be just as hard, unrelenting, and bonded. But there was no man-enforced starvation, only a little more money, and sometimes even a little more dignity. Through hard toil in tropical sugarcane fields and rubber plantations, or in the laying of railway lines, the majority had found their destiny.