Question

Describe the family which Kumar had left behind in India.

Answer 1

Hemanshi Kumar, a high-school senior and the great-great granddaughter of Raj Pali, is a first generation Indo-Fijian Australian. Four generations of her ancestors worked on sugarcane plantations in Fiji. Over Skype from Sydney, she recounts the family’s expectations before moving from India 139 years ago. “It wasn’t meant to be permanent; my great-great grandparents were assured that they could come back,” she stressed. “Each labourer was made to sign a contract, upon which an Emigration Pass would be issued.”This pass listed details like their name, names of father and spouse, age, caste, height, village, bodily marks and measurements, and previous occupation in India. It required the migrant’s fingerprints and specified the date and ship they were to board. It verified that “the above-named individual were fit to emigrate, free from all bodily and mental disease”. The very bottom of the pass bore the signature of the Surgeon Superintendent and Depot Surgeon of the particular ship.The contract of the labourer, publicly available on Girmit.org (a resource on the history of Girmitiyas), was for a stipulated time period of five years, and subsequently extendable. If one completed the contract terms, they could return to India after five years at their expense, or at the expense of the colonial government after 10 years. The contract also included hours and days to be worked (nine hours on every day of the week, excluding Sunday), wages paid every Saturday (adult males would be paid not less than one shilling and adult females not less than nine pence; children aged below 15 would get wages proportionate to the amount of work done), and details of food rations, dwellings and medical supplies.

Working conditions

“But very soon,” Kumar said, based on the stories she had heard, “the labourers realised that they had been brought to the colony under deception, for many facets of the contract were not upheld. For instance, my family, which was first sent to the plantations in Suva and then in Labasa, was hardly paid in the beginning and it became difficult to save and survive. Conditions were harsh. Days were long, beginning at 4 am or 5 am, [and spent] working mostly on the fields. The first generation of emigrants barely had any time for themselves.”

Kumar says their children used to be taken away and looked after by native Fijians, and their houses were inhumane dwellings called Coolie Lines. Kumar tells me that her grandmother, Prabhu Wati, used to show her – just as her grandmother, Raj Pali, had once shown her – where they would be whipped on their hands if they didn’t make enough in a day. For the labourers, home had become a term to which there remained no assigned image. “The India they left behind was retained in the few things they could bring with them.”

She shows me an aged and torn photograph of Raj Pali and tells me that it’s likely it was taken at the time of the contract being issued. She extracts two necklaces, a mangalsutra, and a black thread through which is strung a gold mohur. And finally, she shows me silver shillings bearing the face of King George V. In Chalo Jahaji: On a journey through Indenture in Fiji by Brij V Lal, there’s a photograph of Girmitiya women in traditional finery, and around their necks are similar necklaces of mohurs.Some of these objects possessed by Kumar were brought with Raj Pali on her journey to Fiji, but the shillings, Kumar claims, were collected over a long period on the island. And though she is wary of the oral testimony behind these shillings, she tells me what her Aji remembers of them: “After they had been on the plantations for years, they would be rewarded from time to time, based on a certain number of hours or if they really impressed the officers. Life was often full of sadness and uncertainty on the plantations and so sometimes, women would get together and string these shillings into a necklace.”Badal Singh, Kumar’s great-great grandfather, was a Brahmin and when displaced from India, found the religious dislocation most traumatic. Like him, many other men carried religious scriptures like the Ramayana and the teachings of Tulsi Das. Much of the Indo-Fijian diaspora is fervently religious even today, since faith was one of the few ways in which their forebears were able to reclaim identity. Somehow, despite being what could be seen as slave labour, they were free to practice their religions on the island. Many would even get together and sing bhajans, or devotional songs, not from books, but from memory.