Mapping locations in indenture ship lists to current locations in India

India’s sugar indenture (1834–1920) happened during British Raj when India was divided into 17 provinces (earlier presidencies) and 565 Princely states. Thus, the locations in the ship lists are based on how India was structured during that time. The places from where the laborers were recruited are mentioned in terms of Zillah, Thana, and Villages. Today’s India is organized into 28 states, 8 union territories, 640 districts, 5564 subdistricts, and 6,64,369 villages, which is significantly different from the pre-independence era. The focus of this chapter is that knowing the location, from where these laborers came, is critical for Indian-origin people across the globe to trace their ancestry and also to understand labor migration patterns. The chapter delves into navigating many challenges for the mismatch with archival records like how the spelling errors in indenture data due to challenges in accent, continuous evolution of Indian states, and many more lead to problem in fetching details of Girmitiya ship locations. Using data quality and machine learning programming techniques, I mapped locations in South Africa ship lists to today’s locations in India. The next phase of the project is to map locations from Fiji and Suriname.