Ex-Girmitiya's The Origins of Fiji Indian - By Dr Brij Lal, Professor of History at the Australian National University

"INDENTURED women, especially those in Fiji, unwittingly played a very large part in the movement to abolish the indenture system. The Indian public had for a long time been aware of the sorry plight of the Indian labourers overseas, but it was the news of the molestation and abuse of Indian women on the plantations that outraged them most. The campaigns in India to stop the degradation of Indian women in the colonies 'received wider public support than any other movement in Indian history, more even than the movement for independence'.1 The Government of India, which had been under pressure for some time from Indian nationalists to end the system, finally moved and waiving away protests from the colonial planters abolished the indenture system in 1916.The stories of the treatment of two Fiji Indian women, Kunti and Naraini, attracted special attention, and their names are remembered in Fiji even today. Kunti, a 20 year old woman from Lakhuapur village in Gorakhpur, had emigrated to Fiji with her husband in 1908. Her first four years on the plantation were unexceptional until 10 April 1912, when the overseer allocated Kunti an isolated patch in a banana field, away from all the other workers, apparently with the intention of molesting her sexually.Kunti resisted his demands until, nearly overtaken, she jumped into the river in desperation. She was, however, rescued by a boy, Jaidev. 2 Kunti's story was published in the Bharat Mitra and became widely known, which prompted the Government of India to ask the Government of Fiji to institute an enquiry into the treatment of indentured Indian women.Naraini's plight was equally sorry, if less sensational. The overseer of an estate in Nadi asked Naraini to present herself at work three or four days after giving birth to a (dead) child. Naraini refused, arguing correctly that it was the recognized practice for women to absent themselves from hard labour for up to three months after giving birth. The overseer, taking umbrage at Naraini's refusal, then beat her severely; barely able to walk, Naraini was carried to hospital on a stringed bed. The overseer was arrested, and the case came before the Supreme Court of Fiji. But much to everyone's surprise and consternation, he was found not guilty and acquitted. Naraini later lost her senses and spent the rest of her life as an
insane vagrant……"

Girmit - The Indenture Experience in Fiji Introduced by Ahmed Ali, Director, Institute of Social and Administrative Studies, University of the South Pacific Bulletin of the FIJI MUSEUM, No. 5, 1979

On the estates, cramped maggots, in cell-like hutments, the coolies ate, slept, bickered, or pushed their children into corners in order to gain room to copulate. On the pay-list pages were still the headings Ganges, Sutlej, Fultala and other hellships by present standards, which had brought them from the alleyways of Calcutta and Bombay, from the clutches of rural and urban moneylenders; from famine areas, or from a thousand other situations which said starve or go. The indenture they signed was for five years; slavery in the cane fields of his Britannic Majestys Crown Colony of Fiji - to them it was a girmit, an agreement - and it contained some of the most pernicious clauses thought up by man. There were such things expressed and inferred as ;a fixed immigration ratio of four men to one woman;, no choice of place or method of employment; women to work in the fields for at least the first seven months of their pregnancy; housing conditions worse if anything than those from which they had escaped; working hours unlimited. And all for a few pence a day;

If we, the overseers and sardars caught up in the rotten system of indenture servitude fathered by Big Business on that most fecund of whores, cheap Asiatic labour, had managed to survive in the tooth-and-claw jungle of the cane game, it was only by out-animalizing the horde of near-human apes in our charge. And I mean apes, because a percentage of the men and women, regardless of what they were when they left India, had been changed by the terrors and conditions of the sea journey, and their years of servitude, into something like simian humans. It was also typical of the era that we white men had no inkling of wrong-doing, and when it came to coolie eating coolie, the sardar system left the whites, as sadistic bullies, in the infant class. So if;to excuse is to accuse,; then I have done just that.