Girmitiyas, (Kaithi: , ) also known as Jahazis (Hindustani: , ) or Jahajis (), were indentured labourers from British India transported to work on plantations in Fiji, South Africa, Mauritius, and the Caribbean (namely Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, Suriname and Jamaica) as part of the Indian indenture system.
Girmitiyas, (Kaithi: , ) also known as Jahazis (Hindustani: , ) or Jahajis (), were indentured labourers from British India transported to work on plantations in Fiji, South Africa, Mauritius, and the Caribbean (namely Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, Suriname and Jamaica) as part of the Indian indenture system.
== Etymology == thumb|Caribbean Hindustani#Sarnami Hindustani|Sarnami Hindustani (Roman script) plaque at Suriname Memorial, [[Garden Reach, Kolkata, West Bengal, India]] The word girmit represented an Indian pronunciation of the English word "agreement" - from the indenture "agreement" of the British Government with labourers from the Indian subcontinent. The agreements specified the workers' length of stay in foreign parts and the conditions attached to their return to British India. In Indic (Indo-Aryan) languages such as Hindustani, the word Jahāz (), which is sometimes pronounced as Jahāj in certain languages such as Maithili, means 'ship' (from the Arabic/Persian Jahāz/ جهاز), with Jahazi implying 'people of ship' or 'people coming via ship'. These Indian-origin labourers referred to one another as जहाज़ी भाई jahāzī bhai (ship brother) or जहाज़ी बेहेन jahāzī behen (ship sister), reflecting the brotherly and sisterly bonds made on their voyage from India to the West.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).