Brij Lal’s ‘Bittersweet’ Reveals Trauma of Indo-Fijians By Francis C. Assisi

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At the end, along with most Indo-Fijians, one is tempted to ask: For how many generations must a people exist in a land before they are allowed to call it home? For how many years must Indo-Fijians toil with their blood, sweat and tears, before they are allowed to live in peace?

In this the first rung of the 21st century, it is still the desperate lamentation of these children of Bharat Mata who crossed their Kala Pani some 125 years ago. ‘Bittersweet’ marks that milestone.

Bittersweet can be considered to be the pulse-beat of Indo-Fijians, revealing the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into the making of this diaspora.

The book very well sums up the “story of a people brought from India to work under conditions of extreme servitude, a people who have made something of themselves, often against great odds, but who still feel uprooted and unwanted.” And that’s how Brij Lal offers Bittersweet’s Indo-Fijian perspectives; his own as well as those of twenty others. The trauma is laid bare for the entire world to see.

In fact, the main thread that runs through this volume is that one hundred and twenty five years after arriving in the Fiji islands, the prospects for Indo-Fijians look almost as bleak as it did for their forebears when they embarked from Calcutta and Madras to destinations far and wide. Fiji was only one such outpost.

True to its title, the 24 chapters of Bittersweet give us a glimpse of the way Indo-Fijians locate themselves on their national stage. As Susan Tridgell noted, the writers tell of schooldays and festivals, family and village relationships, suffering and discrimination, sharing and achievements, education and psychology, sports and marriage. There is affection for Fiji, mingled with regret; outspoken bitterness and generous remembrance. Each piece speaks from a different position, a different angle. Almost all the pieces are highly personalized. This is as true of the historical essays as it is of those reflections which take on the form of a memoir.

That’s how the diverse and scattered fragments in the book illuminate the broad pattern of the Indo-Fijian experience.

And who could have accomplish this better than Professor Brij Lal, and his team of 20 Indo-Fijian writers, scholars and activists, including his wife Padma Lal, an expert in agricultural and natural resources economics at the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government. Himself the grandson of Girmitiyas, Lal ponders how “violence and rupture” have replaced the tranquility of the islands, and how “the pride of an Indo-Fijian being a part of Fiji replaced by despair and dejection, the sense of being at home in the islands overtaken by a desperate desire to leave for some place else at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Naturally, everything about the deftly conceived Bittersweet touches some aspect of the community’s life and a culture that is under siege. We are reminded that nearly 100,000 have left in recent years, mostly to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and USA – “the best and the brightest, taking with them skills and talents the country can ill-afford to lose.”

Girmit Experience Multi-layered

Lal, the historian par excellence, does not subscribe to the dominant and popular thesis that renders the indenture experience of girmit-as-slavery. Though he admits that suffering and pain and violence were an integral part of the girmit experience, he sees girmit as a complex multi-layered experience. For example, he says that it was a limited detention of five or ten years, not a life sentence; that there was change over time; that the girmitiyas were not devoid of will and agency; that the plantation system was not a ‘total institution’ everywhere; that, for some, migration and indenture could well have been a liberating experience from a vicious cycle of poverty and degradation at home, with no possibility of improvement in either this life or the next; that painting the girmitiyas as helpless victims does them and their legacy a grave injustice.

As Lal likes to describe them, “the indentured recruits were a much maligned lot, disrespected by their contemporaries and despised by their employers. They were assumed by everyone to be an unrepresentative sample or, alternatively, a rotten sample, of rural India. If men were bad enough, women were assumed to be worse: individuals with light morals from broken homes, cast adrift by society, beyond the pale of salvation. Indians were often reminded of their lowly origins by the colonial officialdom as part of the ideological underpinning of European dominance in Fiji.”

The situation, Lal reminds us, was, of course, much more complex.

In fact, says Lal, “the recruits were a representative sample of rural India, comprising all castes and social groups, not only the lowly ones. More importantly, most of the migrants were dispossessed cultivators or labourers, down on their luck or down and out, looking for a better future. Migration provided a way out.” He adds that women too probably migrated for economic as well as social reasons. Lal observes: “The fact that the women were prepared to leave the familiar for the completely unknown suggests that they must have been individuals of remarkable courage and self-respect.” Which is why those became the values they nurtured within their homes, observes Lal.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, women were aware of the high regard for marriage and family and other institutions of Indian society, says Lal. But they were themselves at the mercy of the overseers and Indian sirdars who supervised them while at the same time harassing them for sexual favors. “The women could not refuse partners chosen for them by their overseers, nor the solicitations of influential men on the plantations. Powerless and vulnerable they had little choice in the matter of morality. Their world was turned upside-down …..”

Lal sums up the Indo-Fijian girmitiya experience thus: “The world of the gimitiyas was a complex one, full of turmoil and tension and uncertainty, goodness, greed and curiosity. Old habits had to be discarded and unfamiliar challenges faced. New experiences posed problems requiring creative responses. A new vocabulary had to be learned, an unfamiliar geography explored, a new terrain mastered, new pragmatic social relationships established. The girmitiya dealt with the challenges in their own way, modifying thought and behaviour, incorporating resilient threads from an old and frayed fabric into a new and unique garment.”

Ahmed Ali, another distinguished Indo Fijian scholar and Muslim activist, agrees. “Girmit with its cramped barracks, where women were perpetually insecure and moral values were under assault, with oppressive plantations where over-tasking and physical violence were frequent, where the sirdars greed and the overseers whips were the rule of the law, was branded narak by the girmitiyas. It was slavery, but not for life; it was an oppressive contract for five years. The impact on human lives of its brutality, its anguish and emotional scarring cannot be underestimated even if its legal servitude and bondage was not for life…all the evils of the plantation capitalism and colonial racism could not destroy the indomitable spirit of Hinduism and Islam.”

Ali reminds us that Urdu was the connecting link for the Muslims in Fiji. Hindi as it developed in Fiji, played a similar role for the Hindus. Lal recounts: “Hindi has remained with me all these years. Some of the fluency has gone with the passage of time and long stretches spent away from home, but I am grateful for what remains, especially when I think of the sadness that the absence of the language has caused our Indo-Caribbean cousins. Their sense of loss, of rootlessness and alienation, is deep and painful. Hindi is the language of my emotion and prayer. I use it to connect with my past and my people, my cultural roots, my inner self.”

An Emerging Indo-Fijian Diaspora

Like the Indians who were forced to flee Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s and seek asylum in the West, the Indo-Fijians too are being forced to leave their paradise and start all over in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or the United States. As Vijendra Kumar, the first Indian to hold the editorial reins of the 134 year old Fiji Times, writes from Australia, “In a strange twist of fate, they seem to be experiencing a new chapter in the girmit saga.”

In his Bittersweet memoir, Goodbye to Paradise, Vijendra Kumar explains: “I left Fiji in 1991, sad and disillusioned. Sad, because the country of my birth, where our ancestors’ bones lie interred, no longer made me feel welcome. Disillusioned because a nation once internationally hailed as a peaceful paradise and a showcase for democracy and multiracial harmony turned out, in the end to be a purgatory for half its people. For, beneath the thin veneer of a civilized and enlightened society, lurked serious undercurrents of racial tension and hostility.”

He adds: “Since arriving in Australia I have returned to Fiji only once, in 1995. This visit reinforced my belief that Fiji Indians face a bleak future in their own country, feeling marginalized and alienated, uprooted and unwanted…the country has since been on a mad roller-coaster ride and no one knows where or how it will end.”

Of the 21 contributors to Bittersweet, 16 are in Australia/New Zealand. The authors include professionals as well as academics. The voices include that of farm laborers, poets, student, a journalist, historians and social science researchers.

It’s clear that within the larger framework of the Indian diaspora we have the makings of an Indo-Fijian micro diaspora.

And none of them are thinking of returning to Fiji, even though many can recall the songs they recited in school: Fiji desh hamaara hai/ Praano se bhi pyara hai…The nation of Fiji is our homeland/More beloved than life itself. Lal recalls the haunting Rafi song that lay on ‘Masterji’ Sita Ram’s bedside: Chal ud ja re panchi/ Ke ab ye desh hua begaana… Go, fly away little bird/This place is not your home anymore..

From Suva to Sydney and San Francisco

Reporting on their ongoing study, John Connell and Sushma Raj of the University of Sydney, explore the emergence of the new Indo-Fijian diaspora. They focus on Sydney, Australia, where the Indo-Fijian presence is substantial. They note that as their numbers in Australia increased, especially in New South Wales, so too have their links with Australia and with the old homeland of India, where many of them are learning to locate their roots.

Sushma Raj reports that since Sydney has attracted a large proportion of Indo-Fijian migrants, the second generation youth have created one form of a new popular culture centered around the dance party scene with its remix of bhangra and Hindi film music. “Not only is this a major component of youth culture in Sydney it is a major location for the construction of social networks that are at once Indian and Australian,”observes Raj.

The scenario of elderly people from a farming background being left behind, and the younger Indo-Fijian generation migrating to other countries is now common in Fiji says Raj. The author observes that while for many Indo-Fijians, India reflects their identity and dreams of motherland, many are also discovering that India is a perplexing and unfamiliar place that can offer no illusion of homecoming for the children of girmitiyas.

Today’s Indo-Fijians may be said to be caught between India, the mythical and sacred homeland of the past; Fiji, the emotional homeland the land of their birth; and Australia, the new and secure homeland. As one of them says: “Maybe I have three homes – India, Fiji and Australia. Or maybe I have no home at all.” Now settled in the Bay Area of California, Asish Janardhan writes: Home is where the heart is, but what the heart wants, the heart does not always get.

The book underscores the fact that outside their own worlds, Indo-Fijians are indistinguishable from Desis in any other part of the world. Though they have retained substantial parts of their Fijian social lives, and regularly communicate with kin back home, the passage to Australia, Canada or USA, has also been, in several ways, a passage to India.

Vijendra Kumar explains the Indo-Fijian predicament thus: “through their blood, sweat and tears, our forefathers transformed this South Pacific backwater into the most prosperous and progressive nation in the region. But their sacrifices are not appreciated today. A steady exodus of betrayed Indians continues to seek new homes abroad. Those doomed to remain behind face a new form of serfdom. They are virtually landless and are being deprived of their political rights as well as religious rights.”

There is hope for the Indo-Fijians in Australia, because, as Kanti Jinna, a prominent member of Canberra’s Indian community observes: “A good educational and social base inculcated by the quality of life and cultural mores in Fiji has helped many a person to settle so well within the multicultural society of Australia,” but adds that “it would take a bitter person to say that their love for Fiji has diminished.”

In essence, Bittersweet reveals the complexity of the Indo-Fijian experience, the fears and fractured hopes that have been forced upon ordinary men and women from India – and their resilience in the face of tremendous odds; the extraordinary lives of ordinary Indian folk. As Padma Lal concludes at the end of her interview with Aisha the woman cane farmer, “Indo Fijians are innocent people caught in a tragedy not of their making, living in a world over which they have no control, living in vanishing hope and on the sufferance of others.”

Which is why Poet Mosmi Bhim writes in Bittersweet: Colour my country red/ Because it is bleeding/ Bleeding like the soldiers shot in the mutiny/ Bleeding from the wounds/ Inflicted on its people

Note: Pandanus Books is part of the Research School of Pacific and Asian studies, The Australian National University, Canberra. Their website: www.pandanusbooks.com.au

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