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Chalo Jahaji - on a journey through indenture in Fiji
by Brij V. Lal, 2000
The Fiji Museum Suva
Division of Pacific & Asian History, The Australian
National University
The book will be available for download
by end of April 2004 from Fiji
Institute of Applied Studies. Here we kindly place two
excerpts from this book.
Preface
Beginnings and Endings
Home is where one starts
from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
T.S. Eliot 'East Coker'
This book is a selection of my essays on the Indian indenture
(girmit) experience in Fiji. I have brought them together
because there is a demand for them in the rapidly growing
Indo-Fijian diaspora in North America, Australia and New
Zealand, and among an expanding fraternity of Indian diaspora
scholars scattered around the globe. I have been amazed to
find the different and complex ways-through songs, music,
ceremonies and oral narratives-in which diasporic people
retrieve and re-present their remembered pasts and the ways in
which they transmit them to the next generation. The past,
fractured and reconfigured, survives with a force and tenacity
that will gladden the heart of every scholar. If this book
contributes a little to cultural rejuvenation in the
Indo-Fijian diaspora, and to the ongoing conversation about
the nature and meaning of the indenture experience globally, I
shall be more than satisfied.
The essays reproduced here substantially in
the form in which they first appeared, were written in
different moods at different times for different audiences,
but they have an intellectual coherence, thematic unity and
chronology of their own. They show that at one level or
another, the girmitiyas were caught between the demands and
pulls of two worlds, one which they had left but not
completely escaped, and one which they had entered but not
fully embraced. They had left one home and, at least
emotionally, not found another in their own lifetime. They
lived and died in an acute state of tension and ambivalence.
They were a people caught in-between, neither here nor there,
or else everywhere all at once. These essays will, I hope,
help us understand why, by extending and deepening our
knowledge of the formative years of the Indian presence in
Fiji, exploring the local byways and alleys of an experience
glossed over in other investigations.
The girmitiyas are gone now, but their
imprint is etched indelibly on the landscape of their adopted
homes. They were, in fact, a part of a remarkable episode in
modern history, units in a grand but ultimately flawed
experiment in labour service dubbed by its critics as another
form of slavery. Whether indenture was slavery or not is a
question that will be debated long after we ourselves are
gone; but there can be little argument that it was a harsh,
brutalizing experience. The girmitiyas called it 'narak' which
means hell, an experience which robbed them of 'izzat', honour,
which denied them 'insaf', justice. The words are theirs, not
mine.
Little was known but much assumed about the social and
cultural background of the immigrants. 'Coolies' all, they
were assumed to be children of the lesser gods, men and women
of low status and few means, down trodden or down on their
luck, for whom the colonies offered brighter prospects of a
better future. Even sympathetic friends denied them agency.
Their employers and the colonial government used negative
images to remind the girmitiyas and their descendants of their
proper place in the colonial hierarchy, while their friends
used them as ammunition for their own political causes.
Girmitiyas came late to the attention of
historians and other writers, almost a century after the
beginning of indentured emigration. Always, in one form or
another, they were seen and analyzed as a problem. To the
missionaries, their religion was a problem to be resolved
through conversion, a project undertaken to various degrees
and to various levels of success in the different colonies. To
the friends of India around the turn of the century, the
girmitiyas and their plight were a blot on the face of India
struggling to find its rightful place in the international
community of nations. At the time of Indian independence,
overseas Indians were seen as a problem in imperial relations.
Still later, they were viewed as a problem in plural
societies, to be solved through expulsion or political
repression or enforced assimilation.
But things have been changing in recent
years. Scholars, many descendants of the girmitiyas
themselves, are moving away from the morally charged
indenture-as-slavery paradigm to looking at the lived human
experience of indenture, exploring the complex and varied ways
in which the girmitiyas negotiated their way in the new
environment, the way they lived, worked, felt and thought
about their predicaments, fashioned new relationships based on
a remembered past and the new realities they encountered,
resisted and accommodated themselves to the demands of the
plantation regime. The reading of indenture experience is
complicated -problematized-by new approaches and perspectives.
One significant development in recent years has been the
gendering of indenture history, removing the veil of dishonour
which has hidden the sorrows and accomplishments of women as
individuals in their own right, as victims of sexism and
racism on the plantation frontier. Another development of note
has been the acknowledgment of the vital role of culture, both
as a tool of survival as well as an instrument of resistance.
I would be happy to see my work represented in this volume as
a part of this new research trend.
This book also represents a closure of
sorts, ending a journey I began more than two decades ago. In
1977, I went to The Australian National University to do a
doctoral dissertation in history on the social origins of
Fiji's indentured migrants. The topic came to me naturally. I
was born and grew up on a small sugarcane farm in rural Vanua
Levu. My grandfather was a girmitiya who had come to Fiji at
the turn of this century. Every so often other girmitiyas in
the locality would come home, smoke huqqa and reminisce about
their salad days in India or about their experiences and (mis)adventures
in Fiji. These re-unions were deeply moving moments. The
girmitiyas spoke a language none of us understood, and their
dress - kurta and dhoti and pagri, a shawl wrapped around
their closely cropped heads- set them apart. They seemed a
strange group to a little boy, alien, incongruous, indifferent
to their surroundings, hankering for a life they could never
reconstruct though they never gave up trying. My curiosity
about them grew with time.
So it was natural that for my dissertation
topic, I chose to solve a mystery of my childhood. The
research took me to India for a year, to the archives and
libraries and to the villages and towns from where the
migrants had come. I have tried to relate some of that
experience in the second chapter. It was a hard but also a
rewarding year for me. The thesis got written and my first
book presented a summary of the results. Then, teaching
commitments and changing circumstances led me to more
contemporary political topics. Still, while at the University
of Hawaii in the mid-1980s, I managed to continue my
investigation into the social and cultural history of
indenture, from which came papers on the experience of women
on the plantations, death and suicide, and resistance and
accommodation. Political turbulence in Fiji from the late
1980s to the mid-1990s drew me back into contemporary debates,
including an appointment to the Constitution Review
Commission, which forced me to suspend the research I was once
again beginning to enjoy. But with the completion of the
constitution review work, I returned to the subject, this time
in the lively company of bright honours students, some of
whose work is represented in this volume. Their genuine
interest and enthusiasm encouraged me. For this they have my
heartfelt thanks.
Every journey, however bountiful and
exhilarating, must end somewhere, and as far as the history of
the Indian indenture experience in Fiji is concerned, mine
ends with this book. I realize now as I look back that, the
number of pages notwithstanding, I have only just scratched
the surface of what is simply a vast, inexhaustible field.
There is just so much more to do-on the experience of the
South Indian girmitiyas, for example, which deserves a book
length study of its own, or the hopes and expectations of
minority cultural and religious groups on the plantations, the
pressures and demands on those who administered the system,
health and ill-health, violence. Old evidence viewed with
fresh eyes and probed with new questions will yield new
results and provoke further research. It will be interesting
to find out how the Fijian experience compares and contrasts
with the experience of other places which used Indian
indentured labour. The story of indenture is full of drama and
tragedy, raising issues which will find resonance in other
places and historical contexts. How does a subaltern group,
powerless and isolated, cope with the demands and expectations
of the dominant group? How and in what ways does an immigrant
community, illiterate and leaderless, cut off from its source
and cooped up in a hostile environment, reconstitute itself
from the surviving fragments of culture and memory? Questions
and more questions, but now for others to pursue.
I would not have been able to embark upon
this journey, let alone complete it, without the love and
support and encouragement of so many people along the way.
They are too numerous to thank individually, but some debts
must be acknowledged. First, my parents. Both were children of
girmitiyas, simple rural folk, uncomplicated and unlettered,
though late in life my mother had managed to pick up enough
rudimentary Devanagri script to get through a grade one
reader. My father never did, always affixing his thumb print
to official documents. They were members of an improving
generation, but were by no means well to do. Nevertheless,
they invested whatever they could save in the education of
their children. There was no future on the farm for all the
six boys, we were told, and that provided an added incentive
for us to do well at school. We did.
As the first one in the extended family to go to university, I
was expected to choose a socially worthy, financially
lucrative profession such as medicine or the law. Doctors and
lawyers were the holders of real status in the community, and
always in demand. The pressure came not so much from my
parents as from relatives and members of the village who
wanted to have their 'own' doctor or lawyer as a collective
symbol of progress and achievement. They were disappointed
when I chose the arts, but I said that my arts degree was just
a stepping stone to an eventual legal career. My parents said
nothing. They stood by me as others made derisory remarks
about the uselessness of the subjects I was doing at
university, about how only no-hopers did history. My mother
died before I began my academic career, but my father lived
long enough to see some of the fruits of my work, of which, I
think, he was proud, although he never spoke to me about it.
Nonetheless, one of his most beloved possessions was a copy of
my first book, Girmitiyas, which has a picture of his parents
in it. He kept it alongside important family papers in a green
tin box underneath his bed. I have been told that he was
flipping through the book, looking at the picture of his
parents, and crying a few days before he died. Children can
never repay the debt they owe to their parents, so I will not
try. All that I can do is to pass on to our own children the
precepts they imparted to us, to live with your head held
high, with honour and self-respect. And my mother's home-grown
wisdom that no matter how thin she made it, roti-Indian
leavened bread-always had two sides.
I also want to thank my teachers who not
only taught well but also inspired us to look beyond the
village horizon. They detected and nurtured a talent that we
did not know we had. I recall with particular fondness Mr
Subramani Gounden, the rotund and bald head master of the
Tabia Sanatan Dharam Primary School in the late 1960s. A tough
disciplinarian who did not hesitate to apply the tamarind 'chapki'-thin
branch-to our tiny bottoms when we were caught stealing mango
or guava from the school compound, he worked hard to ensure
that we passed the dreaded Entrance Examination with marks
good enough to secure a scholarship for secondary education.
Regular night classes, extra lessons on weekends, loads of
homework: we virtually camped in the school for three months
before the finals. We all passed, and passed well, thanks to
Mr Gounden. He is gone now, but not forgotten.
In secondary school, we had a brilliant
array of freshly graduated teachers, not much older than us,
and full of enthusiasm and energy. Three stand out for me. The
first was Krishna Datt, our history teacher, slowly balding,
thickly bearded, and handsome. He introduced us to the great
events of modern world history-the unification of Italy and
Germany, the causes of the First World War, the emergence of
Asian nationalism, to Garibaldi, Bismark, Mao and Gandhi. He
read to us passages from the books of Denis Mack Smith, the
great historian of Italy, the English historian of India
Percival Spear, and the contemporary historian Geoffrey
Barraclough. He introduced us to student politics by
organizing a Students' Council. But my most enduring memory of
him is of the day he arrived in class with a large placard
around his neck bearing the opening words of the Communist
Manifesto. Krishna, now big and Santa Claus-like, is a Labour
member of parliament.
Vijay Mishra, presently a professor of
English in Canada, introduced us to the pleasures of English
literature. With a fluent command of the language, a well
tended goatee beard and flamboyant clothes, he cut a striking
figure. He started a class library of classics which each of
us had to read and talk about during the 'morning talk' period
everyday. We read, while still in grade eleven, novels by
Patrick White, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles
Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John
Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, William Golding,
and many others. With Vijay we began to cherish the pleasures
of the imagination. When he left, Subramani, now professor of
English at the University of the South Pacific, took over. He
was more reserved, reflective and moody, but no less effective
as a teacher. To Vijay's list he added Joseph Conrad, whose
Lord Jim he dissected for us with great brilliance. My most
enduring memory of him, though, is of the day he played for us
in class a gramophone record of T.S. Eliot reading his 'Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The words of that poem still ring
in my memory.
By the time I finished high school, I knew I
was hooked on the humanities. At the University of the South
Pacific, recently opened and keen to impress its seriousness
as a place of higher learning, I encountered teachers who
nourished our intellectual appetite. Ron Crocombe, lively and
energetic, made history come alive with his intimate,
anecdotal knowledge of Pacific people and events. Ahmed Ali
introduced us to the experience of colonialism from the
perspective of the colonized. Walter Johnson, the great
American historian, taught the history of the civil rights
movement with stirring passion. But my best history teacher,
without doubt, was June Cook, a middle-aged, chain-smoking
English woman. A Cambridge graduate, she had worked at the
United Nations before coming to the Pacific. She taught us the
history of European expansion and of the Spanish empire. Why
the latter, I have no idea. She read her lectures, word by
word, perfectly balanced sentences, perfectly timed, with
great authority and clarity. She did not compromise her
standards. I somehow felt that she was talking to us the same
way she would have talked to students in England or the United
States. She expected us to raise our standards. We did. June
detected a talent for history in me, and urged me to leave the
Pacific-it was too small, too much on the margins, too poorly
documented, I was destined for bigger things-and specialize in
European or Asian history at a good English or American
university. For a while, I toyed with the idea of studying
European fascism in the inter-war period, and even
corresponded with Marjorie Jacobs of the University of Sydney!
June's personal interest in my future and the belief that I
could amount to something pushed me on. I have never met
anyone quite like her. And she was the one who persuaded
me-insisted actually-that I give up the idea of law as a
career. Thank you June, wherever you are.
All these people in their own way provided
inspiration, guidance and encouragement. I learnt from their
example that teaching was a noble profession, that a life
devoted to reading and writing was not a life wasted, that
making a difference was somehow more satisfying than making a
quick buck. For this and much more, I am more grateful than I
will ever be able to express. Closer to home, Padma has been
my companion, supporter, critic and encourager from the very
beginning. Without her, there would have been no journey to
undertake. I need say no more. But I want to dedicate this
book to Ben, my brother, who died unnaturally young. He was
among the kindest, gentlest, most generous human beings I have
ever known. He was gifted, wise beyond his years; and he knew
the meaning of pain. He sacrificed so much of his own so that
we-not only his younger siblings but also nieces and nephews
and other children from poor homes in the village and the
community at large-could complete our education. To him, alas,
my debt will never be repaid except in the memory of the
heart.
To the people who have assisted me in the
production of this volume, I offer my sincere thanks. They
include Jude Shanahan, the resident artist and word processing
expert in the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian
National University, to whom I am grateful for many things,
but on this occasion especially for designing the cover and
preparing the volume for publication. Carol Taylor helped with
the technical production of the manuscript. William Copeland
at the Fiji Museum reproduced the historical photographs. Kate
Vusoniwailala, Director of the Fiji Museum, encouraged me to
complete this project which, she said, would contribute to the
Museum's plans to reach out to the Indo-Fijian community whose
history and heritage she is keen to give more focused
representation than in the past. I applaud her vision and wish
her success. Doug Munro has been a helpful and constructive
critic over the years. He encouraged me to put my essays
together. I am grateful to him for that as well as for his own
words in the book. I also acknowledge Aubrey Parke's interest
in the making of this book. Aubrey was District Commissioner
Northern in the late 1960s when I was completing the last
years of my primary education. He has read my words with care
and understanding and a critical eye. His affection for this
Labasa kisan's boy is warmly appreciated. Vinaka Vakalevu,
Dhanyabad, Thank you.
A final word about the title of this book.
An exact translation is impossible, so I have translated 'chalo'
as 'let's go', and 'jahaji' (from jahaj-ship) as 'my ship
mates'. It could just as easily have been translated as 'let's
move on/leave, my fellow travellers/friends'. Whatever the
words, the sense is of a shared, open-ended physical journey
to some distant place, across the seas, over the horizon. Some
Indo-Fijians were barely able to suppress an embarrassed laugh
when I told them the title of the volume still in preparation.
They reacted as if they had been reminded of some vaguely
mirthful misadventure of long ago. 'Jahaji' is a word of a
bygone era, and'chalo' is colloquial, rough, rustic equivalent
of the standard Hindi 'chalen' or 'chaliye'. Their reaction is
symptomatic of the general Indo-Fijian ambivalence about their
past. They have moved on in the world, made something of
themselves; they do not want to know, or be reminded of, the
sorry circumstances of their forebears and the long distance
that the community has travelled since girmit ended nearly a
century ago. For them, the past is past. There is no need for
literary or intellectual engagement with it. There is no
consciousness of history in the community and, sadder still,
no urgency to know about it-sad because Indo-Fijians place so
much store by education which has made them what they are. I
hope this volume will contribute in a small way toward
reversing this trend. By showing that girmit is a site of
inspirational, not embarrassing, history. That history
matters. That, as Francis Bacon said so long ago, 'the best
prophet of the future is the past'.
Brij V. Lal, Canberra
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