In Exile at Home-A Fiji Indian Story
Author Name
Dr Satish Rai
Author Address
Producer/Director/Writer/Music creator
Raivision Academy of Film, TV & Music
Doctor of Creative Arts -Film Production (Sydney)
Email:
[email protected]
Keywords
Indian diaspora in Fiji, Film, Exile
Abstract
This paper is essentially about researching and making a film about the exile of approximately 60% of the indentured Indians laborers in Fiji who are now commonly known as girmitiyas. First let me briefly explain this term as it is repeated throughout this paper and the film. Girmit and girmitiya are derived from the word ‘agreement’ under which the Indian indentured laborers were taken to Fiji. They could not pronounce the word agreement, calling it “girmit”. The word became part of the local language and today the indenture system is referred to as girmit system and the indentured laborers as girmitiyas by most historians.
To many descendants of Fiji’s indentured Indian laborers, the word girmit and the girmitiyas meant little; the same was true for me for a major part of my early life. These terms began to have meaning for me when I started searching for my identity after feeling exiled in the United Kingdom after the two coups in Fiji in 1987. This study, therefore, is the result of a search for self-identity; it involved research into my girmit history. A chance discovery that some forty percent of Fiji’s girmitiyas had returned to India ultimately led to an application for my doctoral research.
In 2003 I participated in the India Week celebrations in Fiji with Tourism India-Sydney. This experience gave me the necessary stimulus to think in terms of discovery of ‘roots’ and projection of my findings into the medium of documentary film. My participation included a week-long seminar in the Discover Indian Roots Project in the capital Suva and Lautoka city, and the launching of my first documentary film Milaap- Discover Your Indian Roots, made in 2001.
In the week-long seminar on the Discover Indian Roots Project, I provided information to some nine hundred people and assisted some sixty people to obtain Indenture Agreement Passes, through which their present-day descendants can trace their ancestral roots in India. It was during one of my visits to the National Archives in Suva, which holds all the Immigration Passes of the Fiji girmitiyas, that the late Dr Ahmed Ali, a prominent researcher in Fiji’s girmit history, informed me that most of the early Fiji girmitiyas had, in fact, returned home to India, before or after their girmit terms were over. He informed me that some 25,000 Fiji girmitiyas, making some forty percent of the total who were brought to Fiji, had returned, most of them during the early part of the girmit system in Fiji. At this meeting Dr Ali also informed me that he was engaged in research on Fiji’s Muslim girmitiyas and requested me to investigate the reasons why the rest of the girmitiyas had not followed in their footsteps.
Listening to Dr Ali, I realised that I had always been fed the popular information (or misinformation) that the Fiji girmitiyas had ‘fled India’ for a better life in Fiji or that they ‘chose to remain in Fiji’ after the girmit term had expired. Dr Ali had provided me with the stimulus to pursue another line of thinking that flowed against the popular knowledge that was available and current in Fiji. I decided to act on his suggestion to investigate this matter further.
The question that was foremost in my mind was: if most of the early Fiji
Conference
International Conference on "Global Migration: Rethinking Skills, Knowledge and Culture"