Written piece
We are the Girmitiyas!
Rajni Mala Khelawan
Canada
About this piece
This highlights Fiji people's indentured history spanning from 1879 to 1917, when about 60,000 indentured labourers were brought to Fiji from India under the British Colonial Indenture system to work on the sugar cane plantations operated by an Australian Company.
My mother...
She would tell other stories, too, stories from our past.
My grandmother, she said, was born on S. S. Sangola, a merchant ship of the British India Steam Navigation Company.
My grandmother arrived in an unusual way. Head first, like a bag of stones, with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
This journey had been the ship's third time on the great oceans, bringing the Indian labourers from the heat of Calcutta to the plains of Fiji.
Just like the birds that migrate south in search of the warmth of the sun, leaving behind the harshness of winter ...
So the Indians came to Fiji with lotas filled with hope, fleeing the chill of poverty.