Is Fiji’s ‘Little India’ facing extinction?
- Tens of thousands of Indians were taken to Fiji by British colonialists to be sugar cane workers, then remained at the end of their unpaid contracts
- Their descendants are now under threat; they own very little land, there’s far less sugar cane production, and Chinese businesses are arriving
It was 1879 when British colonialists began transporting Indian indentured labourers to sugar cane plantations in Fiji, 7,000 miles from home, where they received very low or no salary for their five-year contracts and often endured dire living conditions.
Most of the more than 60,000 Indians who arrived over a 37-year period stayed on the archipelago even after they finally could – in theory at least – leave, as they were unable to afford to return to their own country.
To survive, they leased small plots of land to cultivate their own sugar cane or opened businesses in expanding towns, gradually building thriving communities reflecting the culture they had left behind – the mix of majority Hindu and Muslim labourers living in harmony with their indigenous Christian neighbours.
But some Indo-Fijian communities are thriving no more as young people seek other opportunities, disappointed that many of the descendants of the Girmityas (indentured labourers) have little left to celebrate except Girmit Remembrance Day on May 14, marking the day the first ship carrying Indian workers arrived.
One such community is found in and around the small town of Labasa, population around 28,000, on Fiji’s second-largest island Vanua Levu. Its Indo-Fijian youngsters frequently continue their education 215km (133 miles) away in the capital Suva – on the largest island, Viti Levu – and do not return.
One of them is Mahendra Kumar, a 58-year-old Indo-Fijian farmer. He blames the youngsters’ disappearance on the fact that most land belongs to mataqali, indigenous Fijians. “It is getting increasingly difficult to renew our leases [because] their children have grown up and they want to occupy the land.”
The area is scenic, with mountainous terrain, green valleys, cane fields and rivers, all accompanying a peaceful and simple lifestyle when not tending the land. Most older people are reluctant to leave, but worry theirs may be the last generation of Indo-Fijian sugar cane farmers.
Indo-Fijians, defined as anyone who has Girmit ancestry, make up 38 per cent of Fiji’s 910,000 people but own less than 2 per cent of the land. About 85 per cent of the Pacific island nation belongs to indigenous landowning units, administered through the government’s Native Land Trust Board, now known as the iTaukei Land Trust Board. The remainder is either freehold or government-owned land. Indo-Fijians can access land through 20-30 year agricultural leases and 50-99 year residential leases.
Another problem is that sugar, Fiji’s major export earner, has been overtaken by tourism, with production dropping from 4 million tonnes in 2000 to less than 2 million tonnes.
Chaudhry, also a former general secretary of the National Farmers Union, said there were several reasons why the demographic make-up of farming was changing.
“Because of the difficulties associated with, and demands from landowners for, renewal premiums and harvesting, and with transport costs rising, and the price of cane virtually static, it is not a profitable livelihood.” He also blamed poor government planning for the huge drop in cane output.
Kumar, the farmer, said that in his area “young people are not seen. It is mostly two people – husband and wife – staying on the farms”. He said that not even 10 per cent of adults have children with them.
Kumar’s two daughters, who grew up on the family sugar cane farm, did their higher education in Suva, got married there and stayed. One of them, Karthika Devi, is currently doing a postgraduate qualification in human resources. She also runs a university canteen with her sister.
She told This Week in Asia about her childhood, saying that while farm work “is very hard”, the landowner’s village was nearby “and our relationship was very nice. They were not strict about anything, and when it came to the renewal of the lease they always allowed it”.
Karthika said she would consider farming cattle and chickens, if she was able to buy some freehold land.
Links to the past, and to India, also manifest themselves daily through religion. Every cane farming community in Labasa has a Hindu temple with some homes having their own shrines. On the Indonesian island of Bali, which is 85 per cent Hindu, the Hindu culture has been ‘Balinised’, but Labasa and its surrounding villages are still seen as a ‘little India’ in the middle of the South Pacific.
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About an hour’s drive from Labasa is Naag Mandir, a temple housing a much-revered “growing snake stone”, so called because of its association with the Hindu god Shiva, who is often depicted with a serpent. The caretaker claimed the roof had been extended three times over the decades, to accommodate the “growing” stone.
The temple is visited by thousands of Hindu devotees each year from across Fiji and overseas. Another popular site is the picturesque yellow-walled red-bordered Hanuman Temple near Labasa airport.
Priest Pandith Jainesh Maharaj has been in charge there for 20 years after training in India for 18 months, following in the footsteps of his grandfather who was a Hanuman priest for 13 years. But despite these deep ties to both his Fijian and Indian heritage, Pandith is planning to emigrate soon to New Zealand with his wife, a nurse, and their four-year-old daughter.
“A lot of educated people in this country are migrating because life here is uncertain,” he said. “We cannot buy land here. If I go overseas I can buy land.” When he leaves, his grandfather, now 87, will once again become the priest in charge.
TISI Sangham, a temple-based organisation in Labasa open to all ethnic groups, has around 1,500 students at its kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, and also runs a nursing college.
Running the organisation is not easy and not cheap. “We have to get temple priests from India at our own cost, and we have to pay their airfares and a salary of FJ$1,200 (US$535) a month. After the contract, [because of their work permits expiring] they have to go back,” said treasurer Kand Swaminaickei.
In recent years, TISI Sangham started a nursing programme “to provide alternative career paths” for Indo-Fijians who had found themselves pushed out of agriculture by land-lease and other issues.
In doing so, though, the organisation may have unwittingly encouraged young people to emigrate. Sources in Fiji’s health ministry complained to local media last year that Australia and New Zealand were recruiting Fijian nurses and creating a severe skills shortage in Fiji’s health sector.
While Indo-Fijian businesses have, over recent decades, played a key role in the country’s business sector, running many successful retail and food and drink outlets, their working world, like the world of the farmers, is altering too.
“The Chinese are very smart businesspeople,” Swaminaickei said. “They give the government money to get their support to come here and do business.” But he added that “we don’t want to make it a political issue, because from history we know that we are also migrants”.
Ami Kohli, a former Labasa mayor and now Special Administrator, said Indians still dominate the business environment at the moment. “There is very little Chinese business in Labasa. All new businesses post-Covid have been carried out by Indians.” He said in recent weeks there have been three new businesses opened by Indians – a supplier of farm implements, a cafe and a restaurant.
He agreed the Indian community in the town needs outside help, perhaps from India, if it is to continue, suggesting a “Girmitya centre” where “songs and stories of the past can be narrated and through technology we can relive the past and experience the suffering”.
