The Syria Tragedy and female genre fragility

Second and Final of Two Parts

Tribute to Girmityas 139th Anniversary

Mahendra Sukhdeo

May 11, 2018

The Syria tragedy is regarded as the worst maritime mishap in Fiji.

It was much more than that.

It was also a sad saga of bureaucratic inaction and culpable negligence. It took almost 36 hours for Dr MacGregor, then Acting Colonial Secretary and Chief Medical Officer, to respond to the emergency. Neither the victims’ families nor the Nasilai villagers received any compensation.

One of the painful consequences of ethnic politics is that there is no signature commemoration in the capital city of the Indian arrival and their contribution to nation building.

Vulnerable women

For Fiji, the quota of females to males had been increased to about 40% and the commission paid for registering women was substantially higher. That emboldened the agents to maximise the scarce female quota under false or misleading pretences. The common scenario choreographed was that of working for a ‘Gora’ (white) family in an island 5 kms away from Calcutta (Kolkata).

The background and moorings of most of the female recruits is shrouded in mystery. Except for those who came as part of the family, others were said to be single or widows. The narrative for both the males and females is patently inaccurate. In most of the Immigration Passes, the question, “If married, to whom?” remained unanswered.

Customary child marriage was universally accepted social norm in rural India. Visiting my own ancestral region, Basti in UP in 1960s, one observed widespread practice of child marriage that continues to a lesser extent today.

Vulnerable women, described as the ‘Odyssey of Indenture’ suffered the most under the vagaries of the scheme. The treatment meted out to the female genre is an abusive portrayal of their fragility and fecundity.

The Coolie Contract

The five-year unilateral Agreement, abbreviated by the illiterate peasants as ‘Girmit’ had a number of obvious loose ends, and in particular the legalese was open to abuse. Naturally, most of the disputes related to the hours of work and task-work. It was the case of industrial hara-kiri. The subsidiary agents such as the ‘Sardars’ and the external conduits such as the evangelists and the justice system collaborated to nip emergence of any form of grievance against the regime.

Duty of Care

It is an indictment on the Indians that the upper segmental group failed in their ‘duty of care’ to protect the illiterate ‘Girmityas’ from the excesses of the system. Among this 15% ‘higher caste’ group, the worst was the ‘Sardar.’

He was the ‘Malik’ (God), the personification of all that was evil. To maintain his comfortable position, he aligned with the pith-helmeted, Coolumber (Supervisor) to exercise absolute powers at the ground level.

Settlement Rights

The collateral advantages of the indenture system for the Indian peasants were not in doubt. An indentured labourer was able to save more and pursue a more productive lifestyle than his counterpart in India. The system at least provided an avenue for the displaced and poverty-stricken peasants to gain a measure of wealth and political influence unheard of in rural India. The Salisbury Despatch of 1875 had proposed that the ‘khula’ Indians “will be in all respects free men, with privileges no way inferior” to other subjects. In the post-Indenture period, the ‘Girmityas’ branched out in artisan pursuits and laid the foundation of the prosperous sugar industry in Fiji. In spite of the reluctance to adhere to the Despatch, Fiji Indians secured for themselves a dominant position in socio-economic and political affairs of Fiji.

Pre-mature closure

Almost a century ago in the midst of the First World War, the Indian indenture system ended dramatically. Its closure was not dictated by the indentured labourers or their immediate descendants who had made rapid progress from being ‘coolies’ to ‘kulaks’ in their adoptive countries. It had the active support of Fiji’s colonial government and the European planters who desperately needed labour to exploit the virgin resources of the country.

For the British liberals and the Christian evangelists, both the slave trade and indenture system were anathema.

The Africans cordoned by colonisation had not articulated their views on the slave trade, but for the Indians, emerging from years of subjugation, the indenture was an affront to their ‘honour’ or ‘Izzat.’

It is a pity that neither the slave trade nor the indenture system was allowed to continue under acceptable modified formats with a robust administrative and judicial structure to protect the weak.

Mahendra Sukhdeo is the author of ‘Aryan Avatars,’ which analyses the significant elements of the Indenture scheme and concludes that it was prematurely discontinued that precluded a larger proportion of poverty-stricken peasants of rural India from settling in virgin colonial outposts. An Elphinstonian from Bombay University, Mr Sukhdeo is a third generation Indo-Fijian whose grandparents were indentured in Fiji in early 1900. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The above article is the second and final of a two-part series. The first part appeared earlier today.

The two articles appeared in Indian Newslink, May 15, 2015 and July 1, 2015 issues.

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