A woman whose great-grandparents — all eight of them — were Girmitiya labourers has put their stories into her debut novel.

The result is Banjara, a novel partly based on what she found, which is told through the eyes of two women more than 100 years apart.

Author, Shana Chandra told RNZ Nine to Noon she knew her grandparents were Girmitiya, but nothing of their origin stories.

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“I knew that they were part of this larger geopolitical movement under colonialism, but I didn’t have their personal stories,” she said.

“I didn’t know where they came from in India. I didn’t know what made them vulnerable to coercion. I didn’t even know their names. So really, writing the story was a way for me to write their origin story not only for me, but for them.”

Chandra said the former head of New Zealand’s Girmitiya Foundation told her that Indo-Fijians were prohibited from writing about indenture.

“It felt very important for me to write this origin story, because there was so much silence – I think, because there was so much shame over what happened.

‘Angry about the silence’
“And it was my way of saying to my ancestors, they no longer need to be silenced, and… thank you, in a way, because I used to be quite angry about the silence, but then I realized it was their gift to me, and their gift to all of us — they didn’t want us to be burdened with what they endured.”

Chandra said a lot of research went into the book, but historical records only tell so much.

“When I saw my great-grandmother’s immigration pass, she boarded the Hereford, which is actually the same boat that Avani, my character, boards in the book.

“She was only eight when she boarded, and she boarded the boat with her younger brother, her older sister and her father, and there was actually no record of her mother being on board. So because of the way indentureships were partitioned with men on one side and women and children on the other, I know that those women on board would have helped my great-grandmother and her siblings survive in a myriad of ways.

“One day, I just had this compulsion to wake up and say all of those women’s names because I knew that they would have helped them survive.”

There were shocking discoveries, too. One immigration pass was that of a 15-day-old baby who had died.

“And on the left-hand side, written in cursive writing by a colonial official, was that her mother had suffocated her. And though I know that could be true, there was something about that intuitively that just didn’t sit right in my body.”

Real oral histories
Chandra later came across a post from a site called Cutlass Magazine, featuring real oral histories.

“One about a woman who said that when her grandmother was indentured, the women on board had to hide the children because crew members would find them a nuisance and want to throw them overboard.

“And there was an actual story from an indentured man who kept on repeating the same story, how on his ship that had a particularly rough passage, the captain came, took a newborn baby and fed it to the sea as a sacrifice.

“Even just me writing the names of those women afterwards, just burst into tears… It was important to weave those other stories, those oral histories, into the book to show that other side of history.”

Chandra believes a lot of labourers were duped into signing the labour agreements, and many were promised a “paradisical island full of abundant opportunity”.

“But what they actually faced …was hard labour up to 14 hours a day or over six days a week. And a lot of them were subjected to brutal physical and sexual abuse.

“At one point, Fiji had the highest suicide rate in the world due to indenture.”

The ‘women’s gang’
Chandra said there was “amazing forms of resistance” from the women.

“There’s something known as the women’s gang.

“These women would form these gangs, and they would go to known abusers and use the only thing, only weapons they had, which was their bodies, and retaliate and beat their abusers. So my book really showcases that female solidarity.”

She said it was tough to navigate all the cultural practices and language of the time to be accurate. But what also became important was the “emotional truth”.

“That emotional honesty was almost just as important, because that’s what it’s really trying to capture, but I was lucky. When I was writing this novel, it did feel like something larger was guiding my hand. So I do partly dedicate this novel to my ancestors, who felt like they were conspiring with me from the heavens.

“I think what’s so amazing to me is that, and this is what I hoped the book would do — it would provide an emotional landscape for other Indo-Fijians to rebound off and to start talking about these stories.”

• Shana Chandra will be appearing as part of the Auckland Writers’ Festival next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A new production called Coolie: The Story of the Girmityas is shedding light on the lesser-known history of the Indian indentured labourers.

Poet and music producer Nadia Freeman’s latest work gives life to the hidden voice of her Indo-Fijian ancestors through electronic music and theatre.

“I just felt like I was losing more of my ancestry and my ethnicity, and I wanted to look more into it to understand,” Freeman says.

The show opened on Thursday at the Kia Mau contemporary Māori, Pasifika and indigenous arts festival.

“Coolie”, which is used in the production’s title, was a derogatory term used by British colonial supervisors when addressing the workers in Fiji.

“I want people who are outside that community to know what happened, to know more about,” she said.

Who were the Girmityas?
The Indian workers were called the Girmityas, which in Hindi means “agreement”. The agreement was initially for five years, but it was extendable.

On finishing five years abroad, they were permitted to return to India at their own expense or serve 10 more years and return at the expense of the British colonial government.

Some workers returned home, but many could not afford the return journey and were stuck in Fiji.

“We are still quite an angry community … angry because we haven’t healed,” says businessman and community advocate Nik Naidu.

His grandfather, M.N. Naidu, was an indentured labourer who was on a ship to Fiji in the early 1900s.

Like many Indians who were sent to Fiji, Naidu’s grandfather was also looking for a better life.

“They were living in dire poverty and were looking for money to support their families, so that’s how my grandfather got on the ship,” Naidu says.

Challenging life
Life in Fiji was challenging.

The journey took months, and many did not even make it to Fiji. That was not the end of their struggles.

“There was hardship and there were difficulties,” Naidu says.

“In the beginning, it was the harshness of plantation life, poor living conditions, you know, resettlement, displacement, realisation of not being able to return, inability to participate in their religion properly, and, you know, the caste system that existed, the difficulties and, of course, lack of women.”

Finding a companion was a challenge for many young Girmits. The disproportionate sex ratio meant there were only 40 women for every 100 men.

Journalist Sri Krishnamurthi has also heard many stories about the Girmityas from his grandparents.

Working sugar canefields
“My grandmother, Bonamma, came from India with my grandfather and came to work in the sugar canefields under the indentured system,” Krishnamurthi says.

“They lived in ‘lines’ — a row of one-room houses. They worked the cane fields from 6am to 6pm largely without a break. It was basically slavery in all but name.”

Krishnamurthi remembers the story about his grandfather, who was sent back to India, “because he thumped a coolumbar sahib” (a white man on horseback who made sure the work was done) who was whipping the workers.

Naidu says: “I wasn’t fortunate enough to meet my grandfather. I was 2 years old when he passed away and he went back to India and passed away in India.”

His family is now running the organisations that his father started, including schools.

“The colonial administration at the time did not want to educate the Fijian Indians,” he says.

“They wanted them to stay in servitude, as small farmers who were always dependent on the sugar cane plantations and uneducated.”

Addressing new challenges
A few weeks ago, the community celebrated the 144th Girmit Remembrance Day in New Zealand.

“We remembered our forefathers, who had contributed towards this development of the Fiji Indian community,” says Krish Naidu, president of the Fiji Girmit Foundation.

“It is a day where we honour and remember their struggles and sacrifices, but we also celebrate their resilience.

“It’s important our young people in particular actually understand who we are, where we come from.”

In 2023, a new challenge emerged for the Indo-Fijian community in New Zealand. The government’s decision to classify them as Asians rather than Pacific Islanders is stirring criticism within the community.

“Because we, as people with Indian biological traits, are not considered by the Ministry of Pacific,” Naidu says.

Naidu thinks that the government’s move is “unfair”.

“We get emails and messages from students because they miss out on specific scholarships,” he says.

However, he was delighted for the newly announced Girmit Day, a national holiday in Fiji.

“We were the actual architects of it because we’ve been pushing for the holiday since 2015 in Fiji,” he says.

“We are absolutely overjoyed.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.