A SOUTH SEA HINDU STATE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3524, 27 September 1921, Page 55

A SOUTH SEA HINDU STATE.

[All Rights Reserved,]

COOLIES IN FIJI

By

Te Pana.

(Written for the Witness.) The sugar cane fields hi Fiji stretch for I miles across low undulating land. The | wisp of a breeze floats in from the sea ! and tempers the heat of a blazing sun. | Down at the rattling mill on the river | bank, black forms, their bodies wet with | perspiration, cleave at the green cane ! stalks with huge, razor-edged knives; they j slash and hack and shovel with even ; strokes to the beat oi the machinery they I feed. Along the roadways are the same j black forms; in the fields and on the | railway tracks, on the river barges, and j in the stokeholds of the sugar engines | they toil like weary animals. _ Hindu ! coolies, the cane plantation workers oi j Fiji. Sweepings from the bazaars of . ! Delhi, and outcast mongrel breeds from ! j Calcutta; hill men from the north, under- ; sized tribesmen from the Gauge*. They 1 1 sweat in the Fijian sunshine by day and ■ | they read the Koran by night: and day j 1 and” night they pray for the end of their . 1 “indenture.” And they toil do these | j coolies; the white overseer sees to that. , | Under the five year indenture system before ! tlie war the daily task for drain digging , 1 was three hundred and sixty cubic feet for , ; cue shilling ; and sugar cane cutting worked i out at thirty-six hundredweight for the i I same pay. j The average coolie in Fiji is a low caste , } importation. Recruiters of labour are not P ! particular about selection. They take j am- old thing that offers. To them . ; Brahmin and Panc-liama are just "labour.’ They have c-oine from different language e* ! districts where each other's dialects art v not understood. Hindustani is mangier 1 i bv Tamilo and Telugus, and it is im possible to maintain auv intellectual life » ; or prevent the toilers from becoming any s i thing but a rabble. With every hundrec ■ 0 men recruited forty women are allowed c and the competition of the hundred hr (1 | the forty leads to outrage, wild orgy, am IC , j a straying into the folds of the Fijiai ! maids. They are all stealth]y-footed fol i. lowers of Mohammed, making converts <> (1 I the native women, re-converting then v ! from Christianity to the bosom of Islam—,n and their own. , 0 | The coolies live in “lines"- rows of ta Jg | painted huts—adjacent to the cane fields ! They drink a fighting mixture caller t, ] “bhang,” and eat rice at al] meals. Whe ; 0 I time lingers on his hands the coolie vi in j concoct some fancied cause for grief an j sit in front of his hut, just out c , c | reach of the slop bucket, and, rockin m ; back and forth, burden the air with )Q | mournful wail. His audience sits i rh huddled and crouching attitudes of stupi vs immobility, while the naked youngster: i entering into the gaities; of the proeeet Jr i ings, stand in the roadway beating the r, j pot-bellies in perfect time with the wai

On Sunday the “lines” are quiet, and the day is spent in a general laze. A few men perhaps go and cut cane for “free” Indians; others wash clothes, or

husk rice and wait for the trade wind to spring up and winnow it. The majority, however, stay in their stuffy little boxes and thank all the gods whose names they can remember that there is no company’s bell to call them to their jobs. The sun J beats fiercely on the black huts, the tarblisters and cracks: but they doze on. In the afternoon they all dress up. _ The women put on their brightest clothes — a gay square of cloth about their limbs carelessly tucked in at the waist and a sleeveless upper garment which fails to make connection with the lower. All display six inches of black skin at the waist, and all are loaded down with brass leg and arm bangles. Heavy earrings show from beneath their gaudy head coverings; their noses are pierced, a bar of steel runs through the nostrils, and the skin is drawn tightly on the cheeks and secured by silver coins. They follow their men. folk to a Brahmin wedding, a wrestling match or a cock-fight, national attractions with these toilers. Usually they are back before dark and promptly proceed to make the night hideous with attempts at music. The beat oi tomtoms, the blare of couch shells, the clanging of cymbals refuse to be drowned by the loud, frantic voices of those who mangle the Indian chants and vibrate the air, which is full of smells of frizzling goat flesh, mustard oil and garlic. By midnight, even the strongest voices are hoarse, and a deadly silence hangs over the “lines” sheltering tile sleeping labourers. M it It their term of indenture completed many of the coolies take up laud in Fiji and become cane growers on a email scale; others travel the country hawking gaudy apparel amongst the natives, or establish themselves in “trade” houses. Some of the “free” men drift to All Nations street. Suva, and improving their English amongst tile cosmopolitan crowd infesting that area, eventually book passages to New Zealand, where fruit barrows on the street corners dazzle the white man’s eyes, where toilet saloons may be acquired, where cooks earn much money, and where empty bottles can be -picked up for a mere trifle. The unfortunate amongst them who have not sufficient money to gain their freedom are shipped back to India, where in the bazaars and hill villages they tell the tale of life in the Fiji sugar-cane fields. And mayhap their yarns are the means of enticing new recruits, for certain it is that the Indian persists in increasing in the colony. For more than forty years he supplied the labour for the princioal project in Fiji, and there is now somewhere about eighty thousand Indians in the group, with the birth rate and ships adding annually to the total. Fiji is not a working man’s country, nor is it ever likely to oecome a “white” Fiji. It seems to be rapidly becoming an island -‘glory hole” of Mohamrnedism. with the white man’s creed being converted into a pot-pourri of eastern, southern, and western theology doing the can-can. A south sea Hindu State seems to me to aptly describe the Fiji Islands of to-day.