Ritika Pratap 
Girmit-era artefacts.
Girmit-era artefacts have been put on display at Suva’s Albert Park to give us a glimpse of the lifestyle of the Girmitiyas.
The majority of the artefacts are from the Suva City Carnegie Library, while some have been preserved by the Girmit descendants.
Academic, Doctor Mohit Prasad says these are valuable artefacts, and each of them holds significant stories from the Girmit era.
“Most of them are 150, 140 years old. Some of them are older than that because we don’t know their origins or their date of origin back in India. But they are genuine and have been put on display – so we can see what women wore back in the day.”
Dr Prasad says back then, jewellery was not a measure of wealth but a means of investment.
“For the Girmitiyas, if you wanted to accumulate wealth, you didn’t really have investment savings and other things, so what they really did was invested in gold, invested in jewellery for the women, and that was what people went back on. If they had difficult times then they sold it.”
The organizing committee has also set up a boardwalk, which provides a snapshot of the history.
The exhibition will continue until Monday evening.
