Girmit is a colloquial distortion of the term “agreement” or contract. Girmitiya refers to those who signed and agreed to the terms and conditions outlined in the contract for indenture. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, Indians were indentured to various British colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work on the colonial agricultural estates. Girmit ideology refers to the effects and after-effects of the plantation economy on the psyche of the descendants of indentured Indians. Vijay Mishra first defined it in the late 1970s, and Brij Lal laid the groundwork for its historiography in the early 1980s. Lal not only explored the colonial records of the indentured but also looked at letters exchanged between the indentured and their families in India, their birth and death registers, remittances, the complaints received by the Protector, their testimonies in court cases, and commissions and inquiries related to them. For him, a knowledge of their Indian origins is crucial for understanding the experience of indenture.