Shana Chandra's book gives voice to Indo Fijians silenced by colonial shame

A DEBUT novel about the Indo Fijian indenture system is drawing attention to a largely forgotten chapter of colonial history.

Banjara by Shana Chandra follows two women across two timelines: a Banjara nomad uprooted from Rajasthan to the sugar cane plantations of Fiji in 1888, and her great-granddaughter in present-day New Zealand searching for the truth about her family's past.

Introduced by the British Empire after the abolition of slavery, the indenture system sent more than two million Indians abroad to work on colonial plantations under multi-year contracts, in exchange for passage, housing, and food.

Chandra, who was born and raised in Auckland and is currently based in Limoges, France, spent ten years writing the book. All eight of her great-grandparents were girmitiya — the Indo Fijian term derived from "agreement", referring to those brought to Fiji under the system.

In an interview with Eastern Eye, she said, "Most of the time they didn't know what terms they were going into. They were told you'll go to a land of abundance, there'll be lots of opportunity and money for you — but in reality some people thought they were just going to another state in India. They worked 12 to 14 hour days of brutal labour, they faced physical and sexual abuse, and they weren't given enough money to live."

The novel opens in 1888 with Avani Rathod, a woman of the nomadic Banjara community, who is lured under false pretences into indenture on the sugar cane plantations of Fiji. The book follows her voyage across the Pacific, pregnant, forging bonds with fellow women aboard the ship that will be tested once they reach the islands.

That storyline runs in parallel with a second set in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2016, where Avani's great-granddaughter Meera Chand sets out to uncover the true history of her girmitiya ancestors, a search that takes her to India, where she learns Odissi dance and confronts her own past.

The silence surrounding that history shaped Chandra's childhood. When she asked her parents about their forebears, she was told simply that no one had talked about it. That silence, she said, was both personal and systemic.

Book coverShana Chandra

She said, "The girmitiya weren't allowed to write about their experience of indenture, and there was a lot of shame about what they went through. I wanted to tell my ancestors that they didn't have to be silenced anymore, and that the shame wasn't theirs."

Focus on girmitiya

The Banjara thread of the novel emerged from a piece of documentary evidence: her great-grandmother's immigration pass, on which the caste was recorded as Gula, listed as a sub-caste of the Banjara community.

Chandra cautioned, however, that such records were unreliable. When she located documents for her great-grandmother's father, brother, and sister — all of whom boarded the same ship — their caste was recorded differently, as Goala, a cow-herding community unconnected to the Banjara. Some girmitiya, she explained, altered their caste details deliberately, claiming higher status in the hope of better treatment, or a pastoral identity to secure more plantation work.

She said, "I read a great deal of research material, and one book in particular helped me enormously — it was called Chak Mak, by a Banjara poet. I also travelled to India and stayed in Rajasthan for three months, where I learned Odissi dancing, a classical Indian dance form. During that time, I also became familiar with the community and some of the nomadic people in that region."

Chandra completed a Master's of Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney and has worked as a freelance writer for international fashion, arts, and culture publications.

She said she hoped the book would serve not only as a work of representation for Indo Fijians who rarely see themselves reflected in mainstream literature, but as a prompt for others with indentured labour histories, from Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, and elsewhere, to tell their own stories.

"This is just one," she said. "I want there to be more and more."

Chandra plans a UK book tour soon, and her second book is in the early stages.

Banjara by Shana Chandra, published by Moa Press, £16.99.