Fiji Indian Research Articles

A (paid) passage to India: Migration and revealed willingness to pay for upper‐caste status

AbstractHow much are individuals willing to pay for privileged status in a society with systemic discrimination? Utilizing unique data on indentured Indians in Fiji paying to return to India, I calculate how much upper‐caste individuals were willing to pay historically for their status. I show the lower bound of the value of the uppermost castes in north India equaled almost 2.5 years' gross wages. The ordering follows hypothesized inter‐caste hierarchies and shows diminishing effects as caste status falls. Men entirely drive the effects. My results show some of the first evidence quantifying caste status values and speak to caste's persistence.

Postcolonial control of Fiji soccer and the return of subjugated knowledges: From the 1970s to the 2010s.

The primary aim of this article is to use Foucault's idea of subjugated knowledges to search out areas and viewpoints within Fiji soccer which are suppressed by the governing authorities. To fulfill this aim, we explore and assess, via ethnographic research, the racial and ethnic aspects of Fiji soccer, from the 1970s to the 2010s, and how cultural hegemony facilitates continued Fiji Indian control and dominance within the sport. Next, and although we note the positive dimension of Fiji Football Association's 2014 Veterans' Dinner, we suggest that some ex-Ba players were apparently discriminated against by, puzzlingly, not being invited. The regulator was also unaware of, or insensitive to, ex-players' transportation needs as some were poor or invalid. We then look at the cases of Sweats Soccer Club (SSC) and Nadi Legends Football Club (NLFC) to show how, in the face of the regulator's indifference to the financial plight of an Indigenous village club (SSC), the ex-Nadi players set up instead a self-help organization (NLFC) to assist and encourage ex-players going through hard times. The latter was a cross-ethnic group/cross-class collaboration between ex-officials and ex-players and was largely outside the regulator's sphere of interest or intent.

Bhojpuri folk songs of Indians in Fiji

The export of Indian indentured labour to British oversea colonies containing sugar, cotton and indigo plantations began around mid-nineteenth century. One of the destinations was Fiji, the British island colony in the Pacific, to which the Indian labourers, men and women, mainly went from East UP and West Bihar where Bhojpuri was spoken. While archival documents can help us trace the fortunes of individuals, their own feelings and sentiments are best preserved in their songs orally carried from one mouth to another for decades. The earlier songs contain mournful dirges over separation, the misery of those whom they left behind and their own afflictions in Fiji’s harsh white-owned plantations. As the migrations ceased, the Fiji–Indian people’s interest shifted to restoring their connection with Hinduism and its customs, and this has become more prominent in later folk songs. The gender problem (women outnumbered by men) was severe earlier but has now eased as with the passage of generations, the sex ratio has normalised.

‘My language, my identity’: negotiating language use and attitudes in the New Zealand Fiji Indian diaspora

One result of colonial and post-colonial migration is the development of large diaspora communities. The Indian diaspora is currently one of the largest world-wide. Over 20 million people of Indian descent live outside of India, many of them in an English-speaking country. Maintenance of the heritage language and use of the majority language are important aspects of identity construction among members of such diaspora communities. Matters become more complex for twice-migrants, i.e. in situations where movement to a secondary diaspora has become necessary. This paper takes up these issues in a case study on the Fiji Indian diaspora in Wellington, New Zealand. Based on data from sociolinguistic interviews, it looks at discursive identity construction around the notion of language use and attitudes towards different languages and their varieties. An important aspect turns out to be the positioning of Fiji Indians not only vis-à-vis speakers of the host community but also relative to Indian migrants who have come to New Zealand directly from the Indian subcontinent.

Below-replacement fertility of ethnic Indians in Fiji: a decomposition analysis of the components of changes in the total fertility rate

The population of Fiji consists of two major ethnic groups, Fijians and Indians; it also comprises other groups, such as Europeans, Chinese and other Pacific Islands. The 2007 Census showed that there were 56.8 % Fijians and 37.5 % Indians, with the remaining 5.7 % consisting of other groups. This paper examines ethnic variation in fertility using current fertility estimated directly from the census data. As the Fiji census continued to gather information on the relationship of mothers with their own children, this information has been used to estimate fertility trends over the past 15 years preceding the census by the application of the own-children method. Fiji has recently undergone a spectacular decline in fertility but with a marked variation between Fijians and Indians. The total fertility rate (TFR) among Indians dropped to 2.8 in 1986 and 2.5 in 1996. It continued to decline further, approaching below the replacement fertility of 1.9 in 2007. By contrast, Fijian fertility reached 3.9 in 1996. As with that of Indians, Fijian fertility also fell sharply, to 3.2 in 2007. This paper uses a decomposition analysis technique to determine the components of changes in the TFRs due to marital structure and marital fertility among Fijians and Indians, covering the intercensal periods, 1966–1976, 1976–1986, 1986–1996 and 1996–2007.

Plantation Diaspora Testimonios and the Enigma of the Black Waters

The Indian plantation diaspora has few surviving written testimonios that give contemporary accounts of the subaltern lifeworlds of the indentured labourers. In the case of the Fiji Indian plantation diaspora, Totaram Sanadhya's two testimonios show the effects of crossing the black waters on the labourers, the role of the recruiters and the creation of a collective memory of the homeland. A key symbol of the recall took the form of memorial reconstructions of songs of love-longing and departure. Through these songs – often cast as songs of the rainy season – the people of the diaspora, like the men and women on board the Ibis in Amitav Ghosh's memorable Sea of Poppies (2009), lamented their lost homeland. The essay examines the emotional capital of these songs by reworking them back into the real, material conditions of indenture so graphically outlined in Sanadhya's testimonios. Using memory as an affective source, the essay connects the material conditions of indenture to memories of the author's own frail mother.

The Leonidas Fijians: a minor history

ABSTRACTIn Fiji's Indian Migrants, K.L. Gillion remarks en passant on five Fijians who travelled with the first batch of Indian coolies from Calcutta to Fiji in 1879. The men were recruited to work as topazes, or menials answerable to the ship's surgeon, aboard the ship Leonidas, in exchange for a passage home. While Gillion fails to dwell on the presence in Calcutta of these Islanders from the South Seas, his provocative aside troubles the popular view of Fijians as sedentary subjects of a colonial policy that discouraged the disruption of traditional life-worlds. It also calls into question the general perception that girmit or ‘indentured service’ was an exclusively Indian affair. Although they were not indentured to colonial plantations, the Islanders shared with the coolies the micro-political spaces of the depot, the ship and the quarantine station. They participated in the regimes and regulations of the indenture system. These Fijians unsettle two distinct accounts of history by not conforming to either. They furnish another instance of Islander mobility in the time of modernity.

Home Is Where You’re Born: Negotiating Identity in the Diaspora

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgmentsI would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the informants of the Fiji Indian Community in Wellington who agreed to participate in this project, and to Sunita Narayan for introducing me to her network. Katja Christine Meyer, Katrin Forrer, Anja Neukom-Hermann, Simone Pfenninger, Manuela Neurauter, Brook Bolander and André Huber all worked on the transcription of the interviews at various stages of the project. Special thanks go to Brook Bolander for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

The origins of military autonomy in Fiji: a tale of three coups

Alongside Thailand and Pakistan, Fiji has gained a reputation as the most coup-prone state in the Asia-Pacific region. Following a succession of coups, Fiji's military eventually established a longer-term authoritarian administration, inviting comparisons with Burma and Indonesia under Suharto, where military rulers also saw themselves as playing an overarching guardian role transcending ethnic cleavages. Yet, unlike Burma and Indonesia, Fiji's military has no heroic history of involvement in a national liberation struggle and faces no serious threat to territorial integrity. This article examines the dynamics of Fiji's three coups and the accompanying shifts in military orientation. During the initial coups, the military served principally as an instrument of the country's ethnic Fijian chiefly elite. Since the third coup, in December 2006, it has not only confronted key institutions of Fijian power, including the Great Council of Chiefs and the Methodist Church, but also dismantled core bases of Fiji Indian politics, including sugar cane farmers’ organisations and municipal councils. International focus on the electoral timetable has distracted attention from these deeper-seated changes. Fiji has reached the end of a long era of bicommunal ethnic politics, with schisms amongst indigenous Fijian factions likely to dominate the country's politics in the future.

Trajectories of Transformation: Fiji Indians from Common Roll to Consociationalism

The scholarship on Indian indentured migration and settlement in the far-flung ‘King Sugar’ colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean has flourished in the last two...

Trajectories of Transformation: Fiji Indians from Common Roll to Consociationalism

Trajectories of Transformation: Fiji Indians from Common Roll to Consociationalism

Immigrants from the Pacific: “Drain on the Economy” or Active Participation in the Labor Force?

In May 2008, a major controversy about the participation of Pacific Islanders and their descendants in the New Zealand economy was initiated by the release of a report claiming they were “a drain on the economy,” were becoming an “underclass” and displayed “significant and enduring underachievement.” This report received considerable media attention at the same time that the first results of New Zealand's Longitudinal Immigration Survey (LisNZ) were released. The results of the LisNZ received much less attention in the media, even though they contained considerable information about the participation of Pacific migrants in the labor force. This paper reviews some of the findings contained in the May 2008 release of LisNZ data as well as some additional information relating to the larger group of Pacific migrants who entered under all categories of approval spanning skilled migration, business migration, family sponsorship, humanitarian provisions, as well as the special Pacific categories. Three simple indices of labor market participation are used to compare migrants entering under the special Pacific categories with Pacific migrants who gained approval for residence under the other categories. Greater attention is then focussed on the labor market participation of three groups of Pacific migrants – Fiji Indians, Samoans and Tongans. Fiji Indians are included because they are the largest single group of immigrants from a Pacific country in the LisNZ survey database. The evidence generated by the first wave interviews of the LisNZ does not support an argument that Pacific migrants are failing to gain employment in New Zealand and thus becoming a “drain on the economy” or that “Polynesian immigration fuels an underclass.” On the three measures of labor force participation there were generally small differences between the Pacific migrant groups, however these were defined, and the rest of the migrants interviewed in the LisNZ. There were some expected differences in occupation distributions, education levels, and ways of obtaining work in New Zealand. But these differences are not indications of “underachievement” or any systemic failure of policies regulating immigration from the Pacific.

Fiji

Fiji Jon Fraenkel (bio) Fiji’s three coups have each occurred in two stanzas: first an illegal over-throw of the elected government, and then a later abrogation of the constitution. Unlike its predecessors, the 5 December 2006 coup took twenty-eight months to reach the second denouement. On 10 April 2009, the constitution was ditched, the judiciary sacked, and the scheduled date for elections was pushed back to 2014. The military was digging itself in for the long haul, in defiance of domestic and international protest. Domestic criticism was to be silenced by stiff media censorship, public emergency regulations, travel bans, corruption charges, clandestine firebombs, as well as cancellation of pensions. The inevitable storm of international protest after 10 April was less easily silenced. In response, military commander and interim Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Frank Bainimarama claimed to be a victim of Australian and New Zealand “bullying” and appealed for solidarity from the Melanesian Spearhead Group states. Over 2009, as Bainimarama’s enemies faltered, he visibly grew in domestic self-confidence. On the international stage, he projected an image of a wronged and misunderstood champion of modernism in Fiji. In January 2009, Bainimarama refused to attend a meeting of Pacific Islands Forum (pif) leaders in Port Moresby, insisting that severe flooding in Fiji required him to stay home to assist clean-up operations. The pif meeting, attended instead by Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, settled on yet another ultimatum to Fiji’s interim government, insisting that a credible timetable for elections be drawn up by 1 May. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said “a line in the sand” had been drawn (Post Courier 2009). Bainimarama responded that he had no intention of complying with the ultimatum and said that the inevitable suspension should have been immediate (FijiLive, 29 Jan 2009). His nonattendance at the pif summit generated some controversy within the ranks of the interim administration. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ratu Isoa Gavidi and Fiji’s High Commissioner to PNG Ratu Isoa Tikoca were both sacked after urging Bainimarama to make an appearance in Port Moresby. Gavidi said later that Bainimarama’s familiarity with top-down military authority made it difficult for him to accept advice (Fiji Times, 3 March 2009). Over the course of 2009, other regime insiders urging a more conciliatory stance—including Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office Parmesh Chand, as well as Robin Nair and former Citizen’s Constitutional Forum activist Jone Dakuvula—also found themselves demoted, sacked, or marginalized. During late 2008, hopes for some resolution to the coup-related impasse had focused on the scheduled President’s Political Dialogue Forum, which the United Nations and the [End Page 416] Commonwealth had been invited to chair. But preliminary dialogue sessions with political parties—assisted by interlocutors Hawai‘i-based Tongan academic Sitiveni Halapua and Robin Nair, a Fiji Indian who formerly worked in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade—gave little cause for optimism. Through early 2009, meetings were regularly canceled or delayed, and Bainimarama made clear that he wanted to exclude Laisenia Qarase’s Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua (sdl) party and any others who refused to sign up to his government’s People’s Charter (for details, see Fraenkel 2009). Qarase’s sdl, together with the National Federation Party (nfp), and former Opposition leader Mick Beddoes, as well as trade unions and civil society organizations, met under the auspices of the Democracy Movement in January, but this too was soon silenced. In March, there were attacks on the homes and vehicles of prominent government critics, including Democracy Movement President Attar Singh, Fiji Times editor Netani Rika, and Colonel Sakiusa Raivoce, a former army officer who is also head of Global Risks Fiji, a recruitment organization for security personnel bound for Iraq. Qarase traveled to Australia in February, where he claimed his life was at risk in Fiji, but he nevertheless returned to face trial on corruption charges in March. The deposed prime minister spent much of 2009 away from Suva on his home island. In January, he was installed as the new chief of his Mavana village on Vanuabalavu. Reports of that event were carried...

Political Activism: The New Mantra for Fiji Indians in Global Sydney

Political Activism: The New Mantra for Fiji Indians in Global Sydney

The Emergence of Feminism in Fiji1

This article traces the etymology of Indo‐Fijian (Fiji Indian) feminisms in Fiji. In the first section, the resistances of female indentured laborers (for example, Sukhrania, Naraini and Kunti) are recovered as reflections of early forms of individualized feminisms in the early 1900s. In the second section, it is proposed that the informal and organic, yet socially significant movement of Indian women laborers in Fiji in the 1920s comprised one of the first collective intersections of gendered, classed and ethnicized relationships in Fiji. The 1930 (post‐indenture) women's movement, with its main emphasis on economic empowerment, is included in the discussion of Indo‐Fijian feminisms in the third section. The conclusion highlights that while each phase of the early feminist movement in Fiji focused on a different set of concerns that impacted on the lives of Indo‐Fijian women, this group of women have played and continue to play a prominent role in furthering the rights of women nationally and regionally.

The Fiji Indian Chutney Generation: The Cultural spread between Fiji and Australia

Chutney, an Indian side dish made with zest, brings flavour to bland Indian dishes such as rice and dhal, while tickling delight to the senses. The term, used as a metaphor in Chutney Generations, the world's first exhibition tracing the complex Fiji Indian identity in a visible expression, staged at the Liverpool Museum in Sydney, Australia, is applicable to Fiji Indian migrants across the globe that savours the product and lives the word. In the processes of migration and globalisation identities fuse, cultures, dreams, ideals, ideologies, histories and the present merge and crush, in a way similar to the process of making chutney, where ingredients are blended to the point where there is no single identity; thus a new generation of humankind is created. This paper presents chutney as a paste of civilisation and a new concept to identity creation where strongly felt inclinations to retain cultures, histories and identities are neutralized in the fusion of ideas, ideals and dreams. It also engages in the chutnification of the Australian-Fiji-Indian community across three physical spaces India, Fiji and Australia, recording their past, present and aspirations of their future, through their lifestyles and treasured collections. Migration and globalisation have opened new possibilities for chutney, beyond the familiar ingredients and tastes. The community is complex and contradictory, being Indian, Fijian, Australian and global citizens, all at the same time.

Women and Men on the Move

Fiji Indians emigrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and United States of America as early as 1970 when Fiji gained its independence. Emigration has continued since then with peaks during times of political crises, such as the coups of 1987 and 2000, and periods of political uncertainty, such as national elections and the formulation of a discriminatory Constitution in 1990. It has experienced troughs during periods of political stability and economic growth. Emigration is fundamentally the consequence of deficits in human development, especially in relation to human insecurity encompassing political exclusiveness and socio-political and economic insecurity arising from discriminatory socio-economic policies. This article outlines the magnitude and nature of emigration of Fiji Indians. It also discusses the trends, motivations and consequences of their emigration.

Seldom a transition with such aplomb

British officials initially had difficulty persuading the indigenous Fijians to accept the prospect of self‐government, so crucial in their eyes was the colonial state for their security. By the late 1960s, however, the officials were preparing to accede to a Fijian demand for political control provoked by a militant Fiji Indian campaign for the replacement of communal representation with the common franchise. The Fijians' stance was soon tempered by the Indian leaders' new strategy of conciliation which led to a bi‐partisan proposal to move to Independence under the leadership of the Fijian chief minister, Ratu Mara. The rapprochement, less than 18 months after a dangerous crisis of ethnic conflict, was facilitated by the death of A.D. Patel, staunchest campaigner for a common electoral roll. The paper highlights the changing importance of international and domestic arenas of political action, and the part ironically played by the Government of India in moderating United Nations pressure on Britain to introduce the common roll.

International Migration from Fiji: Gender and Human Development Issues

Fiji Islanders have emigrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America since Fiji became independent in 1970. Emigration has continued since then with peaks during times of political crises, such as national elections. It has experienced troughs during periods of political stability and economic growth. The trends in Fiji suggest that deficits in huamn development, especially in relation to human security, underlie the emigration of Fiji citizens, particularly the Fiji Indians. The gender dimensions of emigration and its implications for human development are explored in this article.

A family business: Women, children and smallholder sugar cane farming in Fiji

Abstract: This paper highlights the contribution of women and children to the sugar industry in Fiji by examining the importance of family labour in the historical development of the smallholder system and describing the present situation for the study participants. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 1996–97, on the island of Vanua Levu in the northern region of Fiji. The twenty smallholder households in the study comprised both Fijian and Fiji Indian respondents who relied primarily on selling sugar cane for their cash income. How inequalities within the household in terms of allocation of labour and resources are legitimated is outlined. Resource distribution within the household in regards to two important issues for the sugar industry, land and trade liberalisation, are examined. In light of global trends in trade liberalisation and probable falls in sugar prices, future strategies for survival identified by Fijian and Fiji Indian smallholders are also discussed. The case study demonstrates that the sugar industry is still largely reliant on family labour and, particularly for low socio‐economic smallholders, the unremunerated labour of family members makes an essential contribution to the production of sugar cane.