Sugar and the Arrival of Indians

This chapter explores the lives of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, as well as time-expired labourers or ‘free’ Indians as they were known in the colony. In this chapter, the term ‘free’ is used when referring to specific citations from archival documents or how these people were referred to by the colonial administration, and ‘time-expired’ is used when discussing this group in my own words. The first ship carrying Indian indentured labourers to Fiji, the Leonidas, arrived in Levuka in 1879 (see Figure 3.1 for a map of Fiji). This was the beginning of Fiji's 37-year Indian indenture era during which over 60,000 labourers arrived in the colony from India. The story of Indian indenture in Fiji is not a straightforward one. Unlike Indian Ocean and Caribbean colonies, Fiji was not a former slave sugar plantation colony. Instead, as small plantations were opened by white Australasian settlers, labour was found through blackbirding, a practice which involved forcibly recruiting (often kidnapping) labourers from neighbouring Pacific islands. Blackbirding was eventually outlawed, with indenture taking its place. In addition to Indian indentured labourers, there were also Fijian and Polynesian indentured labourers.