K.L. Gillion and the Making of Fiji’s Indian Migrants

Abstract

One of the legacies of Indian indenture is literary, whether fiction, poetry, contemporary eyewitness or participant accounts and, not least, the corpus of academic writing on the subject. Among the latter is K.L. ‘Ken’ Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants, which concerns the 61,553 indentured labourers (girmitiyas) who went from India to Fiji between 1879 and 1916. Contracts of indenture varied over time and place; in the case of Indians in Fiji, the labourers were bonded ‘for five years at a wage of 1s. [shilling] per day, with penal sanctions to enforce the contract; and … entitled to an optional free return passage after spending another five years in the colony’ (Gillion 1962:16, 105, 210–12). Published in 1962, Fiji’s Indian Migrants traverses a broad canvas: the rationale for Indian indentured emigration to Fiji, the administration of the system at both ends, the voyages and plantation life, the settlement of Indians in Fiji and repatriation, finishing with the campaign against the indenture system and its abolition in 1917. Previously, the scholarship relating to overseas Indians was largely the preserve of anthropologists. Historical studies, such as they were, focused on the administration of the indenture system within colonial contexts and barely touched upon the experiences of the Indians in their new places of abode.