Bittersweet: The Indo-Fijian Experience (review)

Indo-Fijians of the second girmit (labor migration from India) diaspora, now twice-migrants, have ensured that the histories, cultures, and futures of Indians in Fiji are well known, and Brij V Lal, the editor and contributor of a prologue and five chapters to Bittersweet, has been most responsible for the considerable depth of research and publication on the Indo-Fijian experience. Bittersweet adds an important body of literature to our understanding of the individual and collective memories of Fiji's Indo-Fijian population. Although many of Bittersweet's authors live outside Fiji, reminiscences of mostly rural life in Fiji in the mid and late twentieth century form the central link among all the essays.

Surprisingly, as many authors note, a consistent feature of these stories is the close and diverse relationships that existed between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. In this sense Bittersweet adds as much to the general history of Fiji as it does specifically to the Indo-Fijian community's part in that history. As individual memories of this era are fading, and collective memory has been muddled by conscious political social memory, a wide audience can now be grateful that those who lived in or carried out research in Fiji in this era have found in Bittersweet a platform to tell of their experiences. Not allBittersweet's authors are of Indo-Fijian descent, but all have a story to tell about Fiji.

There are many fascinating and illuminating insights in Bittersweet. Seemingly offhand comments and short analytical asides are scattered among longer pieces. These one-line references to people and events, incidental comments on trends, and occasional summative statements remind the reader that Fiji has changed dramatically in the thirty years since the colonial era ended. Memories of school days, marriages, rites of passage,festivals,girmit,coups,and community events are contextualized by the post-independence struggles of Fiji as a nation, and more so by post-coup competitiveness and ethnic divisions in the last fifteen years. Bittersweet's authors are aware of national politics and major historical events, but the stories consistently privilege the personal and local above the national. They do challenge established histories of Fiji's recent past by stressing how ordinary rural life was characterized by varying levels of intimate and dependent relationships between Fijians and Indo-Fijians and between Indo-Fijians and the European colonial enclave that administered the colony and ran CSR (the Colonial Sugar Refinery). But overwhelmingly and repeatedly Bittersweet is a rose-colored story of schoolmates, friends, fellow soccer players, former teachers, revered religious leaders, and the annual cycle of Indo-Fijian religious and community life. It distinguishes between Hindu and Muslim Fiji but more so between life experiences as they were lived differently in Dilkusha, Dreketi, Flagstaff, Nausori, and Votualevu.

The twenty-four chapters (one in Fiji Hindi) are arranged randomly, and personal reminiscences are intermixed with straight historical pieces like those by Jacqui Leckie on the Qawa epidemic, Mohit Prasad on the early popularity of multiethnic soccer, Christine Weir on schooling, John Kellyon Indo-Fijianfestivalsasa form of colonial protest, John Connell and Sushma Raj on migrating Indo-Fijians in Sydney, as well as Brij Lal's excellent opening essay, which succinctly surveys the girmit period. The Indo-Fijian diaspora in Australia, the United States, and New Zealand is also covered in three essays. Vijay Naidu's essay "Searching" (chapter 23) comments on recent events and should have been placed after Lal's opening survey as a guide to the themes tackled personally by the following authors.

In between these useful academic accounts, Bittersweet offers its real gems—Vijay Mishra's account of the elusive community of "Dilkusha," Praveen and Saras Chandra's quest for the truth behind their great-grandfather's criminal conviction in 1913, Brij Lal's search for stories about his former teacher Mr Sita Ram, Ahmed Ali's reflections on the arrival and...