A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Thursday, May 4, 2017
Part 3: Indian Plantation Workers Overseas – Fiji, The Caribbean
By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –May 3, 2017
In Fiji, the racial divide between Indians and Fijians, the suspicion,
fear and hostility, led to the military coup of 1987 which prompted many
Indians to emigrate. They, like their parents and grandparents, had
been born in Fiji; had believed and felt it to be home, but suddenly
home was no longer home. This imperial legacy is similar to that
experienced by descendants of indentured labour in Sri Lanka and
Malaysia. In Satendra Nandan’s The Wounded Sea (1991), Fijian Indians are like Rama in the Indian epic TheRamayana who,
on the eve of his coronation, in an abrupt reversal, is sent into
exile. But to Rama and his wife there was a triumphant return; to the
Indians, a dispersal, insecurity and unease. By law, most of the land is
reserved for Fijians, and though the first batch of indentured workers
reached Fiji in 1879, their children cannot own land; cannot have the
claims and the feelings which flow from such rights. “Coolies” do not
make history: they merely suffer it. As Nandan shows, suffering without
hope, many degenerate into alcoholism, crudity and violence (77).
Satendra Nandan is a contemporary writer (born 1939), and for an account
of the earlier experience of indenture in Fiji, one must turn to
Totaram Sanadhya’s My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands and The Story of the Haunted Line, both
now in one volume. Sanadhya arrived in Fiji in 1893, at the age of
seventeen, returned to India in 1914, and published these works which
were subsequently translated into several Indian languages. Even as an
adult, the remembrance of the poverty his parents endured in India
brought “clouds of sorrow” (32) to him. He ran away from his widowed
mother (because he was unable to be of help, and didn’t want to be an
additional burden on her) and met up with an arkati or recruiter. The arkati trained
their victims to answer “Yes” to all questions, and the latter found
they had “voluntarily” bound themselves to go to Fiji, a land whose very
name they had not heard before. Those recruited were known as grimitiyas because they had signed a grimit, an
Indianisation of “agreement.” The trapped grimitiyas, prior to
embarkation (Sanadhya’s voyage took three months and twelve days) were
forbidden to speak to each other, in case information was exchanged and
the true nature of things discovered. The food given was so hard it
first had to be soaked in water. On arrival, they were immediately
surrounded by police, indicating their captive status. They woke at four
in the morning, and were working by five. An impossible amount of work
was set, and failure to fulfil the quota meant a fine. This last reduced
the grimitya’s pay and set him down the road into inextricable debt.
The government inspectors who came round were “White”; they stayed with
the planters, were their guests and wrote positive reports. Women
suffered the most, getting up at three-thirty in the morning to prepare
food for the day; working ten hours, and retuning home to cook for the
night and to clean. There was “a corpse-like shading to their faces”
(61). A woman desired by a man with power was assigned work in a lonely
place so that she could be raped. One woman, forced back to work only
three days after giving birth and being unable to cope, was so badly
beaten that she ended up mentally deranged. Brij Lal records cases such
as an English overseer pouring acid on the penis of a grimitya; of a
woman who just after giving birth was put to work breaking stones, and
when unable to complete the task, being beaten senseless (41). Since the
ratio of women was about thirty to every hundred men, prostitution,
infidelity, suspicion and violence were rife. In The Story of the Haunted Line, women
lament their fate, comfort each other and resume work (119): work was
both destroyer and distraction. The author himself was tempted to commit
suicide but was stopped by thoughts of his mother’s love for him, and
of his love for, and duty towards, her.
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Caribbean. If the ancestors are texts waiting to be written (Dabydeen
1988, 12) then it is the children of those who went West, to the
Caribbean and to Guyana – who have done the most to commemorate, to
indict, to celebrate: I have already referred to several works from this
region. The “coolie” mother in Dabydeen’s work, Coolie Odyssey, has
incredible courage; is iron-like in her determination that her son will
have a better life, and so, though her feet and hands are cracked,
though she’s coughing blood, she continues to labour.