Fiji: the Leonidas, the girmit, and a century of upheaval
The word 'girmit' itself comes from Fiji's cane fields. The Indians the British shipped there built the colony's economy — and have spent a century since being pushed to its margins.
The Indian diaspora's name for itself was born in Fiji. Girmit is a Fiji-Hindi corruption of the English word "agreement" — the indenture contract — and the people who signed it became the girmitiyas.
The first of them arrived on 14 May 1879, when the Leonidas reached the colony with 463 men, women and children aboard. Over the next 37 years, nearly 60,500 Indians were carried to Fiji on dozens of voyages to work the sugar plantations of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.
The conditions were brutal even by the standards of indenture. Workers were housed in barracks called "coolie lines" — partitioned sheds of cubicles roughly ten feet by seven — and worked from before dawn for wages that barely cleared subsistence; a labourer who left the estate could be criminally prosecuted. The system was abolished in 1920.
What the girmitiyas built, their descendants were not allowed to keep in peace. By 1987 Indo-Fijians were nearly half the population and the backbone of the economy, but indigenous-Fijian anxiety about Indo-Fijian political power erupted into the coups of 1987, which deposed an elected government and triggered a wave of Indo-Fijian emigration. A 2000 coup followed the election of Mahendra Chaudhry, Fiji's first Indo-Fijian prime minister; another came in 2006. Decades of what Fijians call the "coup culture" hollowed out the community, and skilled Indo-Fijians left in such numbers that they slipped into a minority.
Today the girmitiyas' descendants are as likely to be found in Sydney, Auckland or Vancouver as in Suva — a second migration, out of the country the first one built. But the word they coined in the cane fields outlived all of it. The whole indentured diaspora, from Mauritius to Trinidad, now calls itself by Fiji's name for the agreement: girmit.
Continue the series · Children of the Girmit
