The agreement
Fiji became a British colony in 1874. Its first governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, wanted a sugar industry but did not want Fijian villagers taken from their land to work it. The answer, already in use in Mauritius, Trinidad and Natal, was indentured labour from India.
Recruits signed, or put a thumbprint to, a contract for five years of work. Most could not read it. “Agreement” became girmit in their mouths, and the people who signed became Girmitiya. After five years a labourer was free to go home at their own cost; after ten, the government owed them a passage back.
The crossing
The first ship, the Leonidas, reached Levuka on 14 May 1879. Recruits were gathered at depots in Calcutta and, from the early 1900s, Madras. About three in four sailed from the north.
Crossing the sea, the kala pani or black water, was held by many to break caste. On board, people of every caste and region ate and slept side by side for weeks. The friendships made there had a name, jahaji bhai, ship brothers, and often lasted for life.
Not every ship arrived. In 1884 the Syria ran onto Nasilai Reef within sight of land, and fifty-nine people drowned.
The lines
On arrival, labourers were assigned to plantations, most of them run by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. They lived in long barracks known as the lines, a small room to a family or to three single men, and worked to a daily task set by an overseer.
The work was hard and the discipline harsh. Girmitiya had their own word for those years: narak, hell. When the five years were done, most chose to stay, leasing small plots and growing cane on their own account.
The language
In the lines, speakers of Bhojpuri, Awadhi and other northern tongues lived beside speakers of Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Out of that mix grew a common speech, built mostly on Awadhi and Bhojpuri with words taken from Fijian and English. Its speakers call it Fiji Baat, or Fiji Hindi.
It is still the home language of Indo-Fijian families in Fiji and in the cities they have since moved to, from Auckland and Sydney to Vancouver and California.
The songs
Very little came across in a labourer’s bundle, but songs weigh nothing. Many carried the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, and Ramayan circles gathered in the lines after work. With them came bhajans, wedding songs, and bidesia, the songs of those who had gone abroad and those left waiting.
These are the songs this station still plays, alongside everything the generations since have added.
The end of indenture
By the 1910s the system was under attack in India. Totaram Sanadhya’s account of his twenty-one years in Fiji and the reports of the missionary C. F. Andrews stirred public anger. Recruitment stopped in 1916, and on 1 January 1920 every remaining contract was cancelled.
Girmit Day is marked each year on 14 May, the date the Leonidas arrived.