On two previous occasions, in 1915 and 1917, I had been asked by the Indian leaders to go out to Fiji, in the centre of the South Pacific, to enquire into the conditions of Indian indentured labour recruited for those islands. My friend, Mr. W. W. Pearson, accompanied me on the former of these two visits and we wrote a joint report, on our return, strongly condemning the indenture system as leading inevitably to moral degradation.
On my second visit I was obliged to travel alone and made a stay in the South Pacific of more than six months. The state of things under indenture was much worse than before, and it became quite clear that the whole system ought to be abolished as soon as possible. This was finally accomplished on January 1, 1920, when those still under indenture were at last set free. That date was a red-letter day in the history of Indian labour. For not only in Fiji, but in all the British colonies, Indian indenture was abolished.
The system had become almost world-wide, and its abolition was world-wide also.
All this took place nearly twenty years ago, and in one sense it is past history. On the other hand, the after-effects of a long-established practice of this kind, which had produced evil results, cannot be cleared up in a day.
Last year, 1936, I was requested by the Indian community in Fiji to go out once more on an entirely different errand. For after the Indian labourers had been set free from indenture and the system had been brought to an end, citizen rights, on an education and property basis, had been granted by the Administration. But these rights had been seriously threatened in 1935, and the Indian leaders requested me to come out in order to defend them. While engaged in this work, I spent some weeks in the Islands and went round to all the centres where Indians had congregated. In addition, I visited Australia and New Zealand. In this way, old memories were renewed and comparisons with the past could be made.
This book is primarily the result of that journey. For I found such an improvement since the old in-denture days that it seemed necessary to me, as one who had witnessed both the old and the new, to write down my impressions; for there are not many things to encourage us in the world as it stands to-day!
There has been strangely little realization as yet, even in India itself, how far the emigration of Indian indentured labour had spread throughout the colonies where sugar is cultivated. To-day, after nearly a century, half the population of British Guiana and Trinidad has come from India originally. Mauritius is now almost an Indian island. Natal owes most of its development as the "Garden of South Africa" to Indian labour. Fiji, as this book will show, tells the same story. Thus, in every part of the world, Indian settlement has now become a permanent factor in colonial life. Everywhere we find the same frugal, industrious, law-abiding agricultural workers making up in different colonies a great part of the population.
Three questions of grave importance have come to the front as this Indian immigrant population has settled down:
(1) The indenture system (as the first chapter will show) has left behind it very serious evils which must rapidly be got rid of.
(2) The close relationship between the Indian settlers and the original population in each colony has to be carefully adjusted.
(3) The position of Indians born in the colonies, with regard to India, their mother country, must be defined.
It will be seen that these are not merely local questions, but ultimate problems which are similar to those that have to be faced everywhere, wherever any large body of mankind has changed its habitat. Strangely enough, and quite accidentally, a laboratory experiment of world magnitude has been attempted by India in these colonies and the experiment is not yet complete. Herein lies the fascination of the subject. For what has happened, owing to migration under indenture in the past, is likely to happen on a vaster scale in the future, when inter-communication by sea and air becomes far more rapid and cheap.
Ever since I went out to India, more than thirty-three years ago, these questions have been brought before me in a practical form. During the years 1913-1936, I have visited not only Fiji, but also nearly all the other colonies where Indians have settled. Every-where I have received the warmest welcome, and have learnt at first hand what hardships Indians have suffered. Thus, a great part of my life has been occupied with these very problems. Yet hitherto I have written nothing about them, except in reports and newspaper articles.
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