The occasion of Girmit Day provides an opportunity to reflect on the many tyrannies connected to coercive labour systems such as indenture.
The oppressive history of indenture is better understood if we look at the system’s origins.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain created the plantation system in the Atlantic and Caribbeans.
The American anthropologist Sidney Mintz called the sugar mills the first modern “factories” and the plantations “factories in the fields”.
Because the system was labour-intensive, enslaved Africans were transported to the Caribbean in what was known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
The British perfected the plantation system in the 17th century.
Sugar became so vital for the British economy that it fought bitter wars to maintain its grip on the Caribbean islands and its monopoly of sugar production.
When slavery was abolished in the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Britain put in place the indenture system at the behest of the plantocracy in British and French colonies.
The intention was to provide planters with a regular and cheap labour force similar to what existed under slavery.
Britain turned to the Indian sub-continent with its so-called “super-abundant” population to fill the gap left by slaves.
The import of Indians on five-year indenture contracts began in Mauritius in 1834 and West Indies in 1838 for John Gladstone’s estates in British Guiana.
The system was terminated in 1839 following investigations that revealed high mortality rates and appalling labour practices.
However, it was reinstated in 1842 and extended to Natal in 1860, Suriname in 1873 and Fiji in 1879.
The architect of Indian labour recruitment to Fiji was Governor Gordon.
Despite opposition from European planters keen to use Pacific island and iTaukei labour, he went ahead with the system.
During its more than eighty years of operation, the system was responsible for transporting some 1.2 million labourers from India to the sugar colonies.
The fact that Girmitiya called indenture “narak” or hell, and some historians argued it was a new form of slavery, gives us an insight into the system’s brutality.
The literary scholar Carl Plasa points out that abolitionists viewed the sugar industry as cannibalistic, equating eating sugar with “consuming two ounces of human flesh” and the commodity “stained with spots of human blood”.
The British historian Hugh Tinker said the evidence concluded that indenture replicated “the actual conditions of slavery.”
He suggested there were many continuities between indenture and slavery: both led to the dehumanisation of individuals; there was a brutal work regime and severe punishment in both systems; both used surveillance systems to control and suppress workers; there was sexual violence against women in both systems.
The work on the plantations was back-breaking, and labourers were overtasked and underpaid.
Tinker said, just as they had done with slaves, planters used coolie men and women to haul loads and ploughing.
Hence, the coolie was an “all-purpose work animal”.
If a labourer did not complete a task on time and resisted the established order, they were punished severely.
Again, Tinker argued that the right of planters to use brutal punishment was “derived from the days of slavery” and “occurred as a regular routine element in plantation discipline right into the twentieth century.”
Planters used the cattle whip in the West Indies, the cane in Malaya, and the rawhide cattle lash (sjambok) in Natal as instruments of discipline and torture.
There was also an alarmingly high rate of suicide among the labourers.
From the early 1880s to 1920, 333 Indians committed suicide, the overwhelming majority indentured labourers.
Tinker said the official narrative stated it resulted from sexual jealousy “arising out of the disproportion of the sexes on the plantations and the tendency among indentured women to unduly trade amongst their countrymen.”
He explained that contrary to the evidence, Indian indentured women were described as “morally lax”.
Walter Gill, who worked in Fiji in the last days of indenture, described indentured women “as joyously amoral as a doe rabbit”.
Tinker said such perceptions “gave the sirdars and overseers the licence to treat the women with little respect and to view them simply as objects of sexual gratification.”
As a result, indentured women suffered sexual abuse and impropriety at the hands of overseers and men from their community.
They also “became convenient scapegoats for all the ills of the system,” including murder, prostitution, infant mortality and suicide.
But sexual jealousy was not the only cause of suicides.
Other factors included the brutality of overseers and sardars, the general isolation of plantation life, and the unrelenting pace of plantation work.
It must be noted that Dravidian South Indians were victims of the cultural prejudices of North Indians and committed suicide in disproportionately large numbers.
Because of the growing awareness of the abuses under the system, there was anger among Indian nationalist leaders, who considered indenture brutal and an extension of slavery.
According to historian Eugene D’Souza, Mahatma Gandhi “was the prime mover and inspirer of the struggle against indentured labour.”
Gandhi sent the missionary C. F. Andrews to Fiji in 1915 and 1917 to study the conditions of the indentured labourers.
He also inspired others like Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Pandit Malaviya to take up the struggle against the system.
Gokhale became a strong critic of indenture and, in 1912, introduced a resolution in the Imperial Council for its abolition.
Even though his resolution was defeated, it was supported by all the Indian members.
The role of women in the fight against the system must be noted.
During the Home Rule Movement, Annie Besant led the campaign to abolish indenture.
Jaijee Petit, a Parsi lady of Bombay, led a delegation of prominent women to the Viceroy, urging him to end the system.
Miss Garnham went to Fiji to investigate the system as a representative of Australian women supporting abolition.
Her report was critical of the system because of “the hardship and misery” that Indian women suffered.
Under pressure from Indian nationalists and abolitionists, the British Government appointed several committees to examine the system and make recommendations.
The 1910 Sanderson and the 1914 McNeill- Chiman Lal Committees suggested improving the system, but neither recommended its abolition.
But the mounting pressure from critics forced the British Government to suspend the system in 1917.
However, labourers under contract were required to complete their terms of service.
The indenture system in Fiji officially ended in 1920, with the last labourer being set free on January 1, 1920.
A British Government of India legislation passed in 1922 (Emigration Act VII) sought to eliminate this labour form.
The indenture system was a coercive labour system that brutalised millions.
It was about power and repression, enrichment and impoverishment, and admission and exclusion.
The system uprooted millions of Indians from their homelands and transplanted them thousands of miles away in new lands.
It turned them into working bodies or beasts of burden for the prosperity of the British plantocracy, bankers, aristocrats and the monarchy.
It traumatised and scarred humans physically and psychologically.
I’m not against marking the day with a public holiday or national expressions of cultural pride.
But given the tragic undertones of indenture, the word “celebrate” is perhaps not the right word to use.
Do we celebrate slavery?
Do we celebrate the two world wars?
We should instead mark the day with quiet reflection, contemplation and remembrance.
Remembering is crucial because we, as a nation and species, seem to suffer from historical amnesia.
I believe the key to maintaining a collective memory is educating youths.
I have noticed university students’ lack of awareness of the significance of past events.
This is a result of the way history is taught in high school.
Currently, students are acquiring historical knowledge rather than developing a historical consciousness.
Developing a historical consciousness is not done through rote learning but through engaging critically with history.
Developing a historical consciousness leads to the understanding that what happened in the past transcends time and place and has
implications for the present and future.
Therefore, educators must seize every opportunity to educate the youths about our history.
One of the ways they can do that is by encouraging them to read – literary or historical texts – not to accumulate knowledge but to form a historical consciousness.
The idea “if we do not remember the past mistakes, we are bound to repeat them” may be a truism, but fitting given the current state of humanity.
I do not need to remind anyone of Fiji’s political upheavals.
But looking beyond our borders, we see wars fuelled by greed and ethnonationalism.
And we see the continued existence of coercive forms of labour despite the end of slavery and indenture.
According to the International Labour Organisation, around 21 million people are trapped in coercive labour.
These include human trafficking, sex trafficking, child labour, debt bondage and modern-day slavery.
These coercive forms of labour even exist in Fiji.
So, we should mark Girmit Day by celebrating the end of Girmit and reflecting on how we can eliminate such brutal labour regimes and never
repeat past mistakes.
Or better still, we should commemorate January 1 instead, when the last labourer was set free.
The United States marks the end of slavery on June 19, referring to it variously as Juneteenth, Emancipation Day or Black Independence Day.
• Dr ANURAG SUBRAMANI is a writer and academic in history and English literature at USP. His new book is The Fiji Times at 150, a history of The Fiji Times and Fiji from 1869 to 2019. The views expressed by him and not necessarily shared by this newspaper.
