Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (review)

An odd combination of historical essays, autobiographical musings, and analytical demography, this volume purports to be a journey through the history of indentured labor in Fiji. (Indians were shipped to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 as coolie labor and worked in sugarcane plantations run by various concerns, the largest being the Australian-owned CSR company.) Barring six papers and two translations of Totaram Sanadhya's reflections on his time as a coolie in Fiji, the bulk of the book is the work of Brij Lal, the outstanding historian in this area of study. Lal has always been a historian of the empirical rather than the theoretical school; he is strong on archival research and data analysis and the best of his essays display this strength. Unlike the historians of the Subaltern Collective, however, he gives short shrift to the important and difficult issue of methodology. As Guha, Chakravarty, Prakash, Spivak, and others have demonstrated, a self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of history writing is essential to any postcolonial project attempting to reconfigure a discourse whose codes, rules, and procedures stem from Europe. When the subject under discussion is indentured labor (girmit), that most subaltern of all subjects, the question of methodology becomes even more urgent. For this reason, instead of Doug Monroe's rather pointless eulogy of Lal's oeuvre, an extended meditation on the act of historical mediation would have been, I think, a better way to start the book. Lal is an important historian and sooner rather than later he will need to grapple with this aspect of his work.

For those familiar with Kenneth Gillion's Fiji's Indian Migrants (1962) and Hugh Tinker's magisterial study, A New System of Slavery (1974), the first seven chapters provide little that is honestly new. With the exception of the second chapter, which narrates Lal's journey to his ancestral village of Bahraich, the remaining chapters furnish a broad-brush account of migration trends according to districts and provinces; the "push" and "pull" factors determining population movements; caste, gender, and age composition of the migrants; the part played by recruiters as well as their agents; life in the depots prior to emigration; conditions aboard sailing (and later steam) ships during the passage; statistics on suicide in the plantations; and so on. Much of this information can be gleaned from earlier studies, including Lal's own Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (1983). It may be that the real worth of these initial macro accounts is preparatory, since they clear the ground for the truly path-breaking "micro studies," such as "The Wreck of Syria," "Veil of Dishonour," and "Kunti's Cry." In the earlier chapters Lal struggles to say something original, and even his provocative observation that Tinker's "new system of slavery" argument glosses over the fact that a clutch of laborers benefited from indenture appears to miss the point regarding the structural nature of the new slavery. That some laborers, when confronted by a brutal form of unfreedom, participated in the hierarchical relations of exploitation (by becoming sirdars [sub-overseers], for example), tells us a great deal about the power mechanisms (ideology) sustaining the system. It does not make the structure any freer. Clearly it is the slave structure of this new system of industrial agriculture that laid the conditions for the emergence of the subject, whether one is thinking of the coolie, the sirdar,the overseer, or the planter.

While he fails to critically reflect on his methodology, what is compelling about Lal's "micro studies" approach is his growing concern with agency as an elusive thing, spiraling out of the hands of the subaltern agent. In "Kunti's Cry," Lal...