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Writing As Healing —— Fijiindians – the Twice Banished?

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Writing As Healing —— Fijiindians – the Twice Banished? Writing as Healing —— Fijiindians – The Twice Banished? KAVITA IVY NANDAN Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.1 VISITED THE TOWN OF LEVUKA, FIJI’S FIRST CAPITAL, on the island of Ovalau, one of Fiji’s 333 islands in the sun, for the first time. I Having completed a research project on Fijiindian2 migrants to Aus- tralia and New Zealand in early 2007, I was keen to view the monument to the Leonidas – the first ship to arrive in Levuka Harbour through the Waitovu passage on 14 May 1879, carrying 463 Indian indentured labourers.3 In my 1 V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (London: Heinemann, 1994): 9. 2 I use the term ‘Fijiindian’ instead of the commonly used ethnic marker – ‘Indo-Fijian’ for Indians born in Fiji in order to show the merging of once very separate identities, ‘Fiji’ and ‘Indian’, and the formation of the unique identity of Fiji Indians over the past 128 years. 3 After Fiji was ceded to Britain on 10 December 1874, Indian indentured labourers were introduced in Fiji in 1879, by Fiji’s first Governor Sir Arthur Gordon. It was decided that the plantation system was to be the mode of economic development in Fiji and that sugar was the main crop. The Australian-owned Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) was invited to establish itself in Fiji which it did so from 1882 to 1973. As it was the Governor’s native policy to protect the Fijian way of life from ‘outside influences’, an alternative source of labour was needed. Gordon had previously been the Governor of Trinidad and Mauritius and witnessed first hand the success of Indian indentured labour. For further details, see Brij Lal’s book Bittersweet, where he sums up, with the objective gaze of the historian and I believe the bittersweetness of a descendant of indentured Indians: ‘European capital, Indian labour and Fijian land underpinned the Fijian economy in the century between cession and 270 KAVITA IVY NANDAN search down the one-street town with its historical colonial buildings, now shabby with disrepair and time, I stopped on the way at historical repositories and significant checkpoints: the Museum, the Deed of Cession obelisk, and the tuna cannery, Pafco, the main source of employment for the locals. I asked the Fijian woman manning the museum where exactly I could find this memorial. She smilingly responded there was no such monument or com- memorative plaque; the Kiribati lady in the second-hand shop had not heard of the Leonidas and a group of young Fijiindian tourists from Suva were more intent on enjoying themselves than answering my bothersome question. The two Fijian teenagers making out at the War Memorial on the hill which has only European and part-European names on it4 pointed in the vague direction of the lone Anglican school. Not surprisingly, I did not find it there, either. No one seemed to know where this monument was, or, for that matter, really care. I began to realize it didn’t exist. I came back to Suva and persisted with a friend whose former home was Levuka. She looked at me with surprise, herself from a mixed Indian and Fijian background, saying regretfully: “You’re right, there is no monument. Why?” In 1979, Fiji commemorated the centenary of the arrival of the indentured labourers with a fifty-cent coin minted by the Royal Australian Mint. On May 14 of 2007, Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi, the former Vice-President of Fiji, said in a speech at the launch of a famous Fijiindian poet, that Fiji should institute a national holiday on this day to mark the girmit5 experience. Incidentally, on 14 May the first Fiji coup in 1987 was carried out. Belatedly, the Fiji Museum located in the heart of Thurston gardens in downtown Suva devotes a room to the girmityas, the ancestors of most Fijiindians. independence”; Bittersweet: The Indo-Fijian Experience (Canberra: Pandanus, 2004): 6. See also K.L. Gillion’s Fiji’s Indian Migrants: A History to the End of Indenture in 1920 (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1962). 4 Even though they fought in the same world wars, there is a separate War Memorial, on flat ground, in the middle of the taxi stand engraved with the Fijian names. Metuisela Tabaki, a Levuka tourist guide said, with the typical irony of the local towards the ex-colo- nizer, “We have the Fijians down below and the Europeans on top.” 5 ‘Girmit’ is a distorted version of the word ‘agreement’ or contract between the inden- tured labourers and the colonial Fiji government. The ‘girmityas’ could not say the word agreement as most of them were illiterate. The book launched was Satendra Nandan’s The Loneliness of Islands: Collected Poems, 1976–2006 (Nandi: Ivy Press International/Pacific Writing Forum, 2007). .
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