Despite becoming victims of indentured labour and racism in Fiji, Indians worked hard to prosper and grow but strategic blunders like spurning military service have made them a defenceless and disenfranchised diaspora forever in search of a homeland.
The south Pacific country of Fiji was home to one of the most inhuman gulags in history. Deceptively beautiful, the emerald island was the place where the British led tens of thousands of Indian indentured labourers into virtual captivity. After being hauled halfway around the world the men and women were beaten, tortured and made to work long hours – often longer than Auschwitz prisoners – while being given bare minimum food rations.
In his book Tears in Paradise, author Rajendra Prasad, a descendant of indentured labourers, has given a vivid account of the harrowing ordeal of such labourers. It was a regime of violence that was not only horrendous but quite unnecessary. “The victims of the indenture system bore the rigours of a system that not only exploited them but also made them feel that they were serfs who should be grateful for the privilege to be in Fiji, working for the sahibs,” writes Prasad. “The shame was so overpowering that it also permeated the lives of their children who were unfortunate enough to be born during that gruesome period.”
“In essence, the British destroyed the lives of a whole generation of Indians in Fiji; it inflicted on them such ghastly physical and mental wounds that recovery within their lifetime was well nigh impossible for the majority.”
The Island of Cannibals
When the British discovered Fiji in the 18th century, the country was populated by wild tribes that practised cannibalism. In The Story of Civilization, Will Durant corroborates this practice among the natives: “The Fijians complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.”
After the British subdued these tribes, the plantation merchants sailed in. They wanted to grow sugarcane in the virgin country but found the natives had little interest in progressing beyond their hunting-gathering ways. And why would they – that’s how they had lived the past 1000 years.
Enticing the Indians
But the British had other ideas. In 1879, they sent in the first shipload of over 400 Indian indentured labourers. How the Indians reached here is a story in itself. Initially, the labourers were recruited from eastern Uttar Pradesh and were told they were embarking on a journey of a few days down the Ganga; the actual trip was closer to three months.
There was a reason why thousands of Indians undertook this perilous journey to the world’s end. British land acquisition policies, such as the notorious Permanent Settlement Act, had dispossessed millions of Indians of their hereditary land holdings. For the first time in India’s recorded history of at least 10,000 years, there was now a new class of people – landless farmers numbering in their millions.
Only during the heights of Islamic depredations under the Turks, Afghans and Mughals had the Indian countryside known such economic devastation. But the British went a step further – they dictated what crop could be grown and what not. Indigo and cotton, needed by the Manchester mills was okay, grain needed to feed people was not. Under the colonialists, India’s education and industry were also being systematically destroyed, so the landless now had nothing to do. Millions dropped dead like flies because of famines caused by the British policies.
It was in such desperate times that the offer of migration to Fiji, the Caribbean and Africa was made.
Also, it was barely 20 years after the First War of Independence of 1857, during which the British had managed to cling on to their Indian possessions by their fingernails.
Consequently, the British coerced many landless people into boarding ships on pain of internment; men and women wandering around the countryside were told they would be branded criminals and jailed if they did not accept indentured labour.
The deal was this: Indians were to come to Fiji and work for five years plus five more years as a Khula, a free labourer. The indenture agreement (which became known as Girmit in the dialect of the Fiji Indians) stated that upon the completion of 10 years in the colony, the labourer would qualify for a paid trip back home. Also, those who did not wish to return could stay back as British subjects.
Fiji’s colonial authorities established recruiting offices in Kolkata and from 1905 in south India. The recruiting office hired sub-agents, who used many tricks to entice illiterate people from the Bhojpur region. For instance, potential recruits were told Fiji was a place near Kolkata, or they exaggerated the wages paid to labourers in Fiji.
Fiji Prospers on Indian Toil
The increasing number of Indian labourers arriving in Fiji soon transformed the country. The Europeans and the native chiefs fattened, but the money flowing into the country did not transform the conditions of the Indian workers, who remained ghettoised.
In 1920, after years of protests by nationalists in India and heroic resistance against the inhuman conditions by the labourers, the indenture system was ended. Another reason was the harrowing tales of torture had trickled back into the hinterlands in India and consequently the British were not able to recruit any more people.
Free from their shackles, Indians in Fiji became a growing social and economic force, and their organizational skill on the plantations was quickly replicated to organize in other sectors. Now they clamoured for social and political empowerment, and launched a series of strikes that brought the Fijian economy to a near standstill. After all, sugar was Fiji’s only source of income and the Indians were the only people who worked.
One of the key leaders of the Indians was the mystical Basist Muni. Following the strikes, the British deported him, but as he was being led away, Muni predicted that lightening would strike the government building in the capital, Suva, and burn it to the ground. Incredibly, the prediction came true.
Because of the violent wars of revolution that continually endangered their rule in India, the British never trusted the Indians. Now after the strikes, their attitude towards the former indentured labourers hardened.
The British drew up a Fijian Constitution that completely left out the Indians. It was Indian sweat and toil that had enriched the British plantation owners and the native chiefs, and yet under the new Constitution, the Indians lost the right to own land and could only lease it from the natives. This was a body blow because now they were at the mercy of the Fijian islanders’ whims.
It is a tribute to Indians’ age-old agricultural skills and their legendary work ethics that not only were they able to feed the greed of the native chiefs but also prospered and turned Fiji into the world’s sugar bowl.
Strategic Blunder 1
But then they committed their first strategic blunder. The issue of continued immigration from India was – predictably – alarming from the natives’ point of view, but incredibly the Fiji-born Indians now began to campaign against it. This issue began to split the Indian community in Fiji. The locally born Indians, who perhaps considered themselves the Mayflower Indians raised specious arguments, such as the better economic strengthen of new immigrants or their inability to get along with the Fiji-born Indians, to campaign against fresh immigration. For a community that was being victimised by two races, curbing immigration was nothing less than suicidal.
Strategic Blunder 2
During World War II the Fijian Army was for the first time admitting non-Europeans but with a condition – Indians and Fijians would be paid less than a European of equal rank. The Indians took it as an insult and refused to join unless they were offered salaries that were on a par with the Europeans; the natives however had no such problems.
By 1970 when the British quit, the Indians and Fijians were equal in number out of a total population of nearly 700,000. But while the police force was only 50:40 in favour of the Fijians, the military was 95% Fijian. This was the game changer that ultimately snuffed out the Indian enterprise in Fiji.
Strategic Blunder 3
In 1987, a military coup overthrew a democratically elected and Indian-dominated government. Indians were systematically dislodged from influential positions and their agricultural leases were cancelled. The Indians now made another historic blunder; instead of resisting they started leaving the country in droves. It is worth mentioning that Fiji Indians today have very tenuous links, if any, with India; few have any knowledge or interest in India. They call themselves “Fijians”, and yet here was the majority running away from the country they called their own.
Of course, the exodus was disastrous. By the end of the decade the military government released statistics showing that ethnic Fijians were the majority population for the first time since 1946.
Despite these reverses, the Indians bounced back when on May 19, 1999 Mahendra Chaudhry became the first Fijian Indian to become the country’s Prime Minister. He was to be the last. Exactly a year later on May 19, 2000, Chaudhry, whose grandfather came from Haryana’s Rohtak district, was taken hostage by military personnel. Encouraged by the military and the Christian Methodist church, Fijians launched violent attacks on Indians and their property; arson, looting and rape were common. Indian emigration now turned into an exodus; by 2007 around 120,000 had left and 313,000 remained.
Serf Status
Today, the Indians in Fiji hold a status more like the disenfranchised guest workers of the dictatorial Gulf sheikdoms. Most of them live under daily taunts of “We’ll ship the last of you back to India”.
Many Fijian Indians justifiably feel aggrieved that India did little for them when the native islanders were trammelling upon their rights. In 1987, the year of the first coup, rumours were rife in Fiji that New Delhi would despatch a naval flotilla to the Pacific to help the Indian population. The non-arrival of the fleet caused considerable bitterness.
The reality was that India was hardly in a position to help Fiji. Today, the Indian Navy is a mighty long-range force but two decades ago, it lacked such reach. Besides, it could hardly have sailed into the Pacific without being ticked off by the Americans.
New Delhi could have at least issued a threat to the Fijian government because the Fijian natives despite all their bravado were wary of India’s strength.
Looking Ahead
The scenario looks bleak. The educated and professional classes among the Indians have all but packed up and left. In Fiji, the only Indians who remain are the very wealthy, the old, and the poor. About Fijian Indians it can be said that the exit of colonialism does not necessarily mean the arrival of freedom. With few interested in staying on in the island, they might well be the lost diaspora. Perhaps their only hope lies in belated help from the original homeland.
If New Delhi helps out with cash and institutionalised support, as it did for Indians in Mauritius, Fiji Indians might well bounce back as they have done so many times in the past.
The killing cane fields
Rajendra Prasad’s Tears in Paradise highlights numerous instances of violence and violations by British and Australians against Indian indentured labourers during the indenture period 1879-1916. These include the following:
•Habitually punching, kicking, whipping
•Pouring boiling water on a victim
•Forcing a person to drink kerosene to extort confession
•Forcing a man to wear women’s clothes
•Denial of the right to seek medical care when sick
•Making Indian children (older than 10 years) work in the plantations
•Restricting nursing mothers from feeding or caring for their children at appropriate times, resulting in Fiji recording the highest number of infant deaths among the countries using indentured labour
•Forcing a woman to get back to work just 6 days after she had given birth and then eating her unconscious for being unable to carry out the duties assigned to her
•Ritually over-tasking the workers
•Depriving or reducing the workers’ earnings
•Providing stable-like accommodation to the labourers.
About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a New Zealand-based writer. He has previously worked with Business World, India Today, Hindustan Times, and was News Editor with the Financial Express.
Editor – The West, England included, never tire of giving India sermons on human rights. They conveniently forget treatment meted out to Red Indians tribes and Indian labourers taken to British colonies. This article gives you an example of inhuman treatment and violation of basic human rights.
A pro-active Indian government should be concerned about the welfare of all Indians globally. This needs to be done smartly and if possibly subtly.
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