Abstract
The export of Indian indentured labour to British oversea colonies containing sugar, cotton and indigo plantations began around mid-nineteenth century. One of the destinations was Fiji, the British island colony in the Pacific, to which the Indian labourers, men and women, mainly went from East UP and West Bihar where Bhojpuri was spoken. While archival documents can help us trace the fortunes of individuals, their own feelings and sentiments are best preserved in their songs orally carried from one mouth to another for decades. The earlier songs contain mournful dirges over separation, the misery of those whom they left behind and their own afflictions in Fiji’s harsh white-owned plantations. As the migrations ceased, the Fiji–Indian people’s interest shifted to restoring their connection with Hinduism and its customs, and this has become more prominent in later folk songs. The gender problem (women outnumbered by men) was severe earlier but has now eased as with the passage of generations, the sex ratio has normalised.
The history of human migration is usually written from the information drawn from archival documents. But in the last three decades there have been attempts to write the history of human migration by concentrating on the emotional world of human beings placed in an alien environment. Cultural anthropologists are increasingly rediscovering stories, folk songs and other oral evidence to bring out how issues of migration and identity have been seen and felt by migrants. In the west, this retrieval of the migrants’ lost past has been the subject of much research. For instance, there has been a great deal of interest taken in Irish folk songs popular among the migrants from Western Ireland who have settled in different parts of the United Kingdom. Anthropologists have argued that these songs carry an inbuilt sense of migrant identity amidst an alien population. This form of oral culture is, of course, different from literary cultures. Orally carried compositions are believed to be fluid whereas literary works tend to get fixed. This has to be taken into account when one studies oral evidence of any kind. 1
In this article, I examine the oral songs circulating among Indian migrants to the distant Pacific island of Fiji from where no return to the migrants’ motherland was possible. The abolition of slavery by the middle decades of the nineteenth century created a great demand for manpower in the plantations which had been established in various European colonies. Much of this demand for labour to replace slave inductions, was met from India which had a large under-employed labour force under the colonial regime. A region which supplied large numbers of migrants to British plantations in West Indies as well as Fiji was the Bhojpuri-speaking zone of Eastern UP and Western Bihar. In the west, the region stretches from the Ganga to beyond the Nepal frontier, up to the lower ranges of the Himalayas. In the east it extends beyond the Son river to the Chota Nagpur Plateau, where the Bhojpuri zone touches those of the Bengali dialects of Manbhum, the Oriya dialects of Singbhum and scattered tribal languages. The area where Bhojpuri is spoken is roughly 50,000 sq. miles, containing more than 15 per cent of the total Indian population.
The descendants of the earlier migrants have now been somewhat integrated into the societies of the host countries to which their ancestors were originally taken as coolies, but they continue to show a cultural inclination towards their ancestral languages or dialects. Bhojpuri language continues to be an important element in the cultural construction of identity among the people of Indian origin in Fiji, Mauritius, Surinam, British Guyana and Uganda, as well as in some parts of Nepal and Burma. 2
For the majority of the Bhojpuri-speaking people abroad, migration, in introspect, was an unwelcome development, a phenomenon which inflicted a heavy emotional loss. Many of the age-old relationships were thrown to the winds—for instance, wives were separated from their husbands, sisters from their brothers and parents from children. But there was hardly any other option which could hold back the exodus outwards. The extent of distress in India, left little choice but to migrate, once the stream of migration from the region had begun. The economic compulsion continued to be represented in the folk tradition of the people of the Bhojpur region and the following song put in the mouth of a migrant’s wife left behind expresses their pain and sufferings:
The migration of the Bhojpuri-speaking people took place mainly from the 1830s to the mid-1910s. The separation that emigration entailed led to the birth of a distinct folklore which emerged as an expression of the anguish of the migrants’ loss of the familial ties which had bound them socially in India. Bidesia (one in a foreign land) was the affectionate form of address used for the migrants by their beloved ones who were left behind in the homeland. So it lends its name to the new folk culture that emerged out of this migration. 4
Indian emigration to Fiji has largely been discussed on the basis of archival documents, the most important of which are the Emigration passes. In fact, indentured emigration was a highly differentiated and diverse process in terms of the social and regional origins of the emigrants, with important variation and changes in the pattern of migration itself. Brij Lal has argued that seen in the context of nineteenth-century north Indian and eastern Indian social and economic life, indentured migration hardly ever seems to be an unnatural phenomenon; it rather appears as a rational or conscious act. However, such an analysis is often not supported by the sentiments expressed in the Hindi folk songs which movingly illustrate the real feelings of the emigrants.
The folk songs which gained popularity were in most cases anonymous compositions, making it difficult to identify the sex or the social status of the singers. The songs cover a wide range of themes and these emotions seem to have been shared by persons engaged in different works of life. They reflected the pressures and necessities of north Indian and eastern Indian rural society which had encouraged emigration. The deceit and corruption in the recruitment mechanism in the rural localities were naturally a source of great hardship. The uprooted people, who were often tricked to migrate to a distant land, faced problems of setting up their households and in adjusting to a new social environment. The most popular bidesia (migrant’s) composition which dealt with displacement and the sufferings of the labouring masses in Fiji ran in verse form as follows:
While economic necessities created the primary conditions for migration to a distant island, which seemingly held out glorious prospects of easy money, in Fiji there were frequent allegations that both men and woman had been tricked by the recruiters or arkatis by false promises.
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A popular story narrated the developments related to migration in the following manner:
One day the agent of the English Government found a couple quarrelling. The agent expressed pity for the woman and told her that it would be better for her to leave India to escape from the physical assaults inflicted on her by her husband. The agent told her that he would take her to such a place where there would be much fun and frolic for her. The married woman was allured by the promises of the agent and embarked on the voyage. When she reached Fiji she was exposed to the realities of the situation and she understood that her ignorance had been exploited by the agent. The English translation of the bidesia composition is as follows:
The shattered dreams of the labourers became more and more evident as the emigrants became exposed to hard labour under the hot sun and their inability to complete the task exposed them to physical ill-treatment at the hands of the kulumbars, who were part of the subordinate bureaucracy in the plantations. The life in the crowded coolie lines was thus represented in a bidesia composition:
At the same time there are also songs which the girmitiya or labourers sang in lighter vein to mock at their own conditions and also to make fun of the regulations which were enforced in the labour settlements by the plantation bureaucracy. In the coolie lines, the labourers were forced to wake up early in the morning so that they could toil throughout the day. But, as it turned out, many of the labourers were unwilling to sleep early and this exposed them to the application of force by the subordinate officials who had been entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining discipline in the settlements. A folk song had the following lines:
In one of the folk songs which could be described as a protest song, the labourers criticised the planters and the white overseers in the following manner:
Interestingly, there are also Bhojpuri folk songs in which the labourers tried to explain their experiences of living with the brutalities unleashed on them by the sardars (leaders of the gangs and overseers). Their sorrow was concealed in an apparent element of quotidian work culture. One of the songs has the following lines:
However, the girmitiya experience was just not simply explained through Bhojpuri folk songs, which highlighted the corruption of the recruiters, hardships of the labourers and the exploitation which had been unleashed on them by the planters and their staff. The folk songs also expressed the agony of being detached from one’s own religious tradition. There seem to be an emotional inclination towards reconstituting a version of subaltern or popular Hinduism. The memory of the Ramayana, Gita Brijvilas and popularity of idol-worship went side by side with recollections of the preaching of bhakti saints, notably Kabir, Surdas and Mirabai. One attempt to keep Hinduism alive was made through singing groups known as Bhajan mandalis. These Bhajan mandalis established a Congregationalist form of Hinduism where a large number of people gathered in one place to recite or sing the verses of Ramayana accompanied by cymbals and drums. There were also people who tried to seek solace through erotic and romantic compositions like ‘Saranga’, ‘Sadabraj’, ‘Totamaina’ or a form of literature which was known as Indar Sabha. Indeed, this possibly explains why through certain verses married men expressed their preferences for other women, leading to marital discords. Two lines of a song are as follows:
C.F. Andrews writing about Fiji had observed: ‘The central fact in the history of Hindu civilization is religion and the heart of Hindu religion is the sanctity of marriage.’
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In Fiji, the experience of the girmitiyas was quite different. The exceptionally low ratio of females as compared to the males led to disruption in social life. Sexual jealousy, marital discords and extra marital relationships characterised the exile’s life. But in such a situation there were always groups of people who tried to bring back marriage rituals and other religious functions which were connected to the everyday life in India. There were assertions that some of the religious practices followed in India needed to be followed in some form or the other in the island as well. By the 1920s there was some enthusiasm shown for interpreting man–woman relations in terms of the Shiv Parvati stories, popularised by the Puranic tradition. One of the songs describes the marriage proceedings as follows:
The bridegroom like Shivji proceeds in the palanquin for his wedding in full vigour.
The song continues to describe what happens when the procession is at the doorsteps of the residence of the bride.
In the Anglo-Austrilian view, the Indian indentured labourers were simply characterised as a class of people of low moral standards, prone to trickery, and, under certain excitement, to crimes or violence, even when put under the strict discipline sit for plantation labour.
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The prevailing Indian male point of view of the identured woman was more complex. It was partly a manifestation of their low social esteem as people and partly a reflection of their failure to resurrect their traditionally dominant role in the plantation and in the wider Fijian society. Very often, the indentured Indian male displayed a proprietorial attitude towards women, and wives were viewed as chattel. In Fiji, an important part of gender relations revolved around the fact that Indian women were expected by their menfolk to follow the age-old ideals of Indian womanhood, notably silent acceptance of fate, glorification of motherhood and unquestioned deference to male authority and, above all, the worship of the husband. Tulsidas’s Ram Charit Manas which was composed in Awadhi dialect defined the spiritual universe of the orthodox sections of the Hindus, being the most popular religious text in the plantations. These texts provided a clear picture of the dependence of the Hindu wives on their husbands. The English translation of a portion of the text is as follows:
The women’s subordinate role, sanctioned by sages of Indian civilisation as well as by the religious scriptures, was reinforced by early marriage and the patrilineal and patriarchal structure of agrarian Indian society. However, the conditions in Fiji hardly matched those prevailing in India. Both emigration and indenture dramatically restructured the women’s position and their relationship with men. Historians like Brij V. Lal have argued that control over their own hard-earned income gave the women a measure of power and economic and social independence to refashion their own lives. However, it is doubtful whether even in the early decades of the twentieth century, Indian indentured women actually could be envisioned except under old stereotype as those belonging to ‘low caste’ and of ‘low’ character. Even sympathetic observers like C.F. Andrews shared such stereotyped ideas, as is reflected in one of his observations:
The Hindu woman in this country (Fiji) is like a rudderless vessel with its mast broken drifting onto the rocks; or like a canoe being whirled down the rapids of a great river without any controlling hand. She passes from one man to another, and has lost even the sense of shame in doing so.
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European overseers in the plantations supported such assertions without questioning their own morality and sexual practices. Walter Gill, who worked in the last days of indenture, thought that the indentured female labourer was as ‘joyously a moral as a die rabbit. She took her lovers as a ship takes rough seas; surging up to one who would smother her, then tossing him aside, thirsting for the next’. 17
Indian indentured men, again oblivious of any role that they might have played in the degradation of their women, were slightly more charitable in their comments.
Indian indentured women thus stood accused in the eyes of their own community, carrying the double bagpack of racism and sexism. The widely held, though empirically unsupported perception of them, to be morally lax, profligate individuals made the women an easy target of malicious gossip and innuendoes. It has often been stated that this sort of view provided the sardars and the overseers to treat the women with little respect and to view them simply as object of sexual satisfaction. The views of the male indentured labourers broadly resembled the Euro-Australian view of the Indian women. 18
There was, however, sorrow also for the wife left behind in India, who would be left all alone:
However, it needs to be argued that migrant women emerged from indenture as productive workers in their own right, enjoying or negotiating a measure of independence, perhaps unimaginable back home. In fact, they were veterans of back-breaking labour in the cane fields where they performed a range of services beyond the normal call of duty. However, in such extreme forms of oppression and subordination, women often played a critical role in holding substantial sections of the Indian labouring masses together by facilitating the transmission and practice of folk religion and of tradition-based sanctions.
By the early 1910, the bidesia compositions were definitely revealing a change in the mental world of the Indian men in Fiji. The sexual insult of the Indian females at the hands of the European and Australian plantation officials no longer passed without protest. The incident involving an attempted sexual assault on a young Indian female labourer Kunti raised a cry of protest throughout Fiji. The issues gained enough publicity amongst the leaders of the Indian National Congress in India.
In fact, this bidesia composition is largely a reflection of the changes which are taking place with the Indo-Fijian community. The absence of social cohesion, the lack of moral regulations influenced by the break-up of the old familial ties, which had characterised the essential code of conduct in rural India, was now being intensely debated. The availability of a large number of religious scriptures and the continuous traffic of itinerant religious men or sadhus from India to Fiji generated a new interest in a social order which was to be governed by the norms of shastric traditions. The honour of women seemed to have been an important factor in achieving a sort of social mobilisation and this possibly was related to the strategies of developing the Fijian Hindu identity, which was witnessed in the later decades of the twentieth century. The bidesia compositions not only reflect these changes, but they also revealed how the emergence of national politics in India under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi affected the world view of the Indo-Fijians. A bidesia composition depicts the change of mood of the Indo-Fijians when in 1920 they organised one of the biggest strikes in the sugar plantations. The strikes witnessed a great deal of repression by the police.
These folk traditions have their uses, since they represent the sentiments of the people, adding new things and ideas in tune with the changing feelings of the people. The bidesia and other folk tradition originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though there is difficulty in determining who the original authors were. There is an assumption that many of these compositions came largely from women and were employed by them to represent their own emotions and feelings about indenture. However, in course of time these compositions moved away from merely depicting the wrench felt by migrants and those whom they had left behind. As the immediacy of that wrench faded with time, the songs took increasingly the theme of morality and religion in an attempt to recreate an ideal Hindu samraj (society) in a situation where the caste system no longer operated. At a time when post-colonial studies are steadily being accepted as an important field of study and when ideas of hybridity call into question the boundaries of racial consciousness and exclusivity in terms of language use, this interest in Bhojpuri sources may seem to be somewhat misplaced. The time frame of the discussion roughly spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be explained in terms of hybridity which is usually defined in terms of creolised Hindi. In fact, there is hardly any evidence to prove that speaking the language of the coloniser implies acceptance of or coercion into accepting the coloniser’s culture. 23 In the case of Bhojpuri, it can be very safely concluded that there was not an iota of the coloniser’s vocabulary that was present or which summed up the emotions of the colonised. In fact all that it represented was an unsophisticated rendition of the migrant population’s sense of anguish over displacement from their traditional or practised rural ways of living. In that case, it can never be part of any analysis influenced by Johan Ramazani’s hybrid Muse, because the element of hybrid digestion was lacking. The survived of the Bhojpuri folk and literary tradition among the Indian diaspora in Fiji testifies to a culture beyond the control of the coloniser. The fantasy of the homeland, in the case of diaspora, is very often linked to the recalled trauma that stands as a sign of having been separated from one’s homeland. Here we have been concerned not only with the Indian diaspora but also with the nature of migration (indentured labour). This is often interpreted in terms of the lived memories of girmityas, aptly captured in the title of the book Chalo Jahaji by Brij Lal.
The Bhojpuri sources have been a matter of interest for some scholars dealing with Indo-Fijian identity following girmitya centenary celebration in 1979. The need to go beyond the colonial official archives made them realise the need for new archives, which could help them interpret the complexities, disruptures and overlapping of cultures involved here. This intellectual exercise became much more prominent when the Indians in Fiji were seen as the ‘Vulagi’, the foreigner. Undoubtedly the emotional content of the diasporic imaginary came to rely more on the association with desh (home country) while settled in bidesh (foreign country). 24 The Bhojpuri compositions frequently use the word desh based on shared ethnic affiliations to create some sense of exclusivism, and this later became a part of the religiously influenced communitarian solidarity of the Fijian Hindus with India.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out with a grant from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata. The author is also indebted to Professor Hari Shankar Vasudevan and Professor Jayati Kumar Ray for advice and assistance.