A 92-year-old Subarmani Reddy recalls how indentured labourers were badly treated by Englishmen during the colonial era in Fiji.
While speaking to fijivillage News, the 92-year-old says many of the indentured labourers who arrived in Fiji were uneducated and faced harsh treatment while working on sugarcane farms.
He recalls stories shared by elders about how English overseers used sunglasses to frighten labourers into working harder in the cane fields.
Reddy says they would place the sunglasses on a table facing the workers and warn them that if they did not work properly, the glasses would reveal in the afternoon how they behaved in the fields.
He says the labourers had very little clothing and often wore the same uniform to work every day, even when the clothes were still wet.
The 92-year-old says there were no machines at the time and labourers relied entirely on hand tools while working on farms.
He says indentured labourers used forks and spades to dig the railway route in Nagigi, Labasa, allowing trains to transport cane to the mill.
According to him, workers dug more than 200 metres by hand.
He also says that labourers were beaten by English overseers if assigned work was not completed.
The 92-year-old is now urging the younger Indian generation in Fiji to stay away from grog and smoking, and instead work hard on the land to earn income and support their families.
Meanwhile, 89 years old, Hari Ram remembers his father, Sita Ram, was brought from Calcutta as a child along with other people to Fiji.
Hari Ram says that indentured labourers worked by hand on sugarcane farms, planting and cutting cane without machines.
He stresses every task was done manually.
Ram says the Englishmen would come with ropes early in the morning to wake the workers to work in the fields.
He says the labourers worked from morning until afternoon with very little food and poor clothing, and many were beaten with ropes while working in the cane fields.
He adds that the indentured labourers had signed agreements to work in Fiji, but many were randomly selected and taken by English recruiters from India to work on the sugarcane plantations.
The government marked Girmit Day with a commemoration event at the Fiji Museum.
