Launching of Fiji Girmit Website
Monday 19 April, 2004
By Biman Prasad
Associate Professor and Head of Department of Economics USP
The launching of the Fiji Girmit website is
an important occasion for many reasons. It is a celebration of
an event that took place 125 years ago which brought to Fiji a
group of people who chose to stay in Fiji and make Fiji their
home. While the atrocities, trials and tribulations of the
indenture system in Fiji have been well documented, the
descendants of girmitiya's have moved on and the third and
fourth generations Indo-Fijians are truly part of Fiji's
landscape and this is going to remain the case no matter what
the circumstances in this country is going to be in future.
There are some in Fiji and the Pacific
Islands who view Indo-Fijians as not being part of the Pacific
Islands and Pacific culture. This is regrettable and advocates
of this view are bordering on racism. There are other groups
who arrived many years ago in Fiji, so have Indo-Fijians who
are now third or fourth generation people since the arrival of
the first lot of Indians in 1879. Just like Solomon Islanders
who are different from Samoans but are Pacific Islanders, so
are Indo-Fijians who are descendants of the Girmitiya's and
who have a different culture but are Pacific Islanders. While
they cherish their cultural heritage and have maintained them
to a large extent, they are Pacific islanders. This fact will
remain no matter what others continue to view them as.
The celebrations to mark the 125th
anniversary of the arrival of Indo-Fijians should move away
from articulation of the past in a way that reinforces the
victim mentality that we have somehow created amongst the
Indo-Fijian population in Fiji. While recent political events
have let to overt racism against the Indo-Fijians from the
state institutions and by some who are associated with them,
it should not let us only to believe that we are the victims
of oppression as an ethnic group.
Our political leaders have to rethink the
language, the posturing and how they: articulate the problems
and plight of the Indo-Fijians. There is a tendency to
articulate them with short-term political objectives and in
particular for electoral success and the problems of the
Indo-Fijians have not been addressed properly. We need a new
culture of dialogue, unity, and cooperation with political
leaders of other ethnic groups to forge a new approach to
politics in this country.
I
wish to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Ganesh Chand for
taking this initiative to launch the website. It is going to
be an extremely useful source of information on the history of
Indo-Fijians in Fiji and how they have come to make Fiji their
home. I am therefore happy and pleased to launch the new Fiji
Girmit Website. Thank you.
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