DEENBANDHU CHARLIE: GIRMIT AND GANDHI

JOINED IN SPIRIT AND ACTION, FOR THE DISMANTLING OF THE GREATEST IMPERIAL EXPERIMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY.

Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan is currently working on an historical novel, tentatively titled ‘Bury My Bones in the Wounded Sea’, set during the Indenture, as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. His fourth book of essays, Dispatches From Distant Shores, and fifth book of poems, Across the Seven Seas, will be published in March.

CONTINUED FROM MONDAY

Note: This is part three of a series on The Abolition of Girmit and the noble role played by Rev C F Andrews—a most remarkable man and his deep friendship with Gandhi and Tagore.

Part one of this series was published on Sunday, January 15.

Part two of the series was published on Monday January 23.

So via Melbourne and Sydney, Andrews arrived in Fiji waters: in early November under a leaden sky broken with bars of golden light, the mountains of Fiji loomed along the Northern horizon. And the loveliness of the islands was palpably visible, breakers on the reefs, white ribbon of palm-fringed beaches.

One lad said to him: Everything God made is beautiful in Fiji, only man is vile. The view from the deck of a ship though was different from the one he confronted in the coolie lines and in the plantation lives. Andrews was in Fiji for five weeks and worked in different areas, meeting workers, sirdars, coolumbers, planters and officials of the colony. On December 7, he met the Planters Association. He gave warm thanks to some for the resettlement of freed labourers who opted to remain in Fiji after completing their 10-year indenture. But he made it clear the Indenture system must go: I am anxious that Indians should come to Fiji but the conditions must be consistent with India’s self-respect - He set conditions: No labour contract could be contemplated which was not free civil contract. No recruiting except in family units; good houses with proper privacy and not the filthy lines with respect for the sanctities of family life. A good public steamer service should replace the disgraceful coolie ships and Fiji must be kept in a healthy contact with India. Andrews said you’ve treated their religion as if it were nothing at all and insisted the sacred side of their marriage ceremonies must be recognised. The evidence that Andrews presented was never challenged by the company’s unsympathetic officials in Sydney; but when the Viceroy Lord Hardinge saw it, he accepted Pandit M M Malviya’s motion for the abolition of indenture and on March 20, 1916 he announced in the Imperial Legislative Assembly: I have obtained from His Majesty’s government the promise of the abolition of the system in due course--that is, within such reasonable time as will allow of the alternative arrangements being introduced. Andrews wrote to NB Mitter, his interpreter in Fiji: We feel today that God has overwhelmed us with his goodness in allowing us to have our share in this great fact. It means taking away of one more abomination form God’s earth.

In 1916 Andrews stayed at Tagore’s Shantineketan, helping Tagore in his translations. He also accompanied him to Japan and the USA.

It’s here he saw how beauty of a civilisation can change into the idolatry of war. After all Japan had defeated the Russian fleet in 1905. But these warring achievements didn’t impress either Tagore or Andrews. Tagore was called by some Japanese cynics the poet of a defeated nation; Tagore replied with the ‘Song of the Defeated’. Of course we know too much about Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima and Nagasaki to gloat about these things and the consequences of aggressive militarism which found expression in an equally aggressive nationalism. But neither Tagore nor Andrews could prevent the partitioning of India once the frenzy of religious fanatics took over. He did get to see the beauteous temples and ruins of Buddhism and while visiting Borobudur in Java he thought of the Gautama Buddha: There came to me a new vision of humanity in its suffering and sorrow, its sacrifice and love of service, intimately bound up with the supreme personality of the Buddha himself… preaching to the human race -- nay preaching also as St Francis did to the very birds and beasts and trees and flowers, the same message of universal love.

After all in one of the sacred texts when a sage asked the other what happens when a man dies, the reply was: When a person dies, his voice enters fire, his breath enters the wind, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his ears the quarters, his body the earth, his self space, his hair of the body the plants, the hair of his head the trees, and his blood and life giving fluids repose in the waters… Andrews knew his classics and the Bible and India’s multiple religious texts. And he was probably the most travelled activist traveller of the day. Faced with the indenture experience in Fiji, he set three major and immediate tasks: First to increase the wages of the labourers; he got them increased by 25 percent. Three pence a day from August 1917. He also ensured that the woman too got freed of her indenture once her husband’s term expired. Thirdly he asked for the cancellation of all remaining indentures by Jan 1, 1920. The governor’s committee disagreed until a new system of migrant labour was installed. So when he returned to India, Andrews laid the devastating official medical report, especially as it related to the treatment of women, of the Government of Fiji in front of the Secretary of State in India: That settles it said C Montagu. Ask what you like, he told Andrews. On January 1, 1920 the last indentured labourer was freed, as Andrews had stipulated. It was a great achievement, against powerful odds.

The distinguished civil servant (Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency) who had known him since his Cambridge days, says this was Andrews greatest single service to the Indian people. Andrews visited Fiji again in 1917 to give ideas and advice on building healthy Indian community life. Fiji had no colour prejudice unlike South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, colonies he had visited, but there was racial discrimination of many kinds. And at many levels. He spent his time among the poorest and the ordinary. It is here in Fiji he was given the moving sobriquet of Deenbandhu, the brother of the poor, as the ‘Mahatma’, the Great Soul, was bestowed on Mohandas Gandhi for his work among the indentured in South Africa. Both were friends and their love remains one of the great and sublime stories of the British-Indian encounter-perhaps the noblest in the multiple narratives, tragic and inspiring, that CF Andrews had in India. It ennobled both, Andrews and India. And it benefited the people of Indian origins in many remote and obscure colonies of the British Empire. CF Andrews, believing in the British sense of justice and fair-play, and his faith in his Christ and Christian upbringing, wanted for the indentured and their descendants equality of citizenship and rights for generations had fought in Britain and elsewhere, and justice and human dignity to which all men and women were entitled in the embracing love of Christ, the echoes of which he found in the Indian scriptures and individual lives of a galaxy of Indian friends and followers such as Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, among numerous others. Lord Salisbury had declared in 1876, as the approval of Indian Indenture to Fiji was being considered: Above all things we must confidently expect as an indispensable condition of the proposed arrangements that the colonial laws and their administration will be such that Indian settlers who have completed their term of service will be in all respects free men with privileges no whit inferior to those any class of Her Majesty’s subjects resident in the colonies. CF Andrews and Tagore died before India’s independence as the Second World War created its own havoc and after it the greatest empire unravelled, the world changed more radically than ever before; India was tragically partitioned in 1947; Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948.

In Fiji, the struggle for that equality has taken us almost another century to achieve. Only in the current constitution we have that. And it’s a momentous and historic achievement, finally made possible under the courageous and visionary leadership of a man of the seas: a commodore. CF Andrews enduring contribution is part of that story which we ought to know ourselves and teach our children’s children for a Fiji that Andrews saw as a place of beauty and possibilities despite chapters of cruel history. We may not be able to change history but we can certainly learn the lessons and avoid the disastrous pitfalls so common among so many so-called post colonial nations and their myopic, murderous leaders. As we commemorate the Centennial of the Abolition of Indenture, it’s important to remember how close the indentured labourers’ fate and journeys were to both Andrews and Gandhi--and how both were significantly shaped by the Fijian experience: an extraordinary achievement generated by a small colony in the South Seas. And the acts of both attempted to redeem India and Britain from the shackles of an oppressive past.

Andrews like Gandhi was a writer and had written over a score of books; the last on The Life of Christ -- remained incomplete, except that he himself had lived the life of his Christ in relation to other men, women and children. He gave his best years to India and the Indians, including the indentured. He became their Deenbandhu--there’s a school which bears that name in Suva. Only the Mahatma, I feel, is more revered in the hearts and history of the indentured.

Above all things we must confidently expect as an indispensable condition of the proposed arrangements that the colonial laws and their administration will be such that Indian settlers who have completed their term of service will be in all respects free men with privileges no whit inferior to those any class of Her Majesty’s subjects resident in the colonies. CF Andrews, believing in the British sense of justice and fair-play, and his faith in his Christ and Christian upbringing, wanted for the indentured and their descendants equality of citizenship and rights for generations...