Fundamentals Of The

“Indian Problem”

What makes a Fiji-Indian? Anyone who has any am bition to find the answer or to understand the so-called Indian problem of Fiji, might do well to get down to the grass roots of it through Peasants in the Pacific, Adrian C. Mayer’s study

LIKE all sociological documents it is no exercise in light prose and the layman will have long periods of struggle over what seems the boring trivia of the meticulous scientific approach. Another defect is that Mayer did his research for this book in Fiji in 1950-51, and a great deal of water has run under the Fiji-Indian bridge since then—although it can be said, of course, that the funda mentals upon which the rural com munities of Indians were built in Fiji are the same in 1962 as in 1951.

Mayer confines himself to rural communities, and except in their relationship with other groups, ignores the post-indenture Gujarati section or the town dwelling Indian.

The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in Fiji in 1879 just under 500 of them and by 1916, when indenture was abolished, 60,000 more had arrived under the same system.

Only a fraction of the districts of then British India provided the recruits for Fiji, but 60,000 migrants, combed from the hundreds of millions of people in the sub-continent over 36 years, resulted in considerable lack of homogeneity in the new settlers in the Colony. Indians in rural Fiji were, in the years that came after, more likely to align themselves with groups that came out in the same

ship than to any caste or fact from Mother India.

In the early days they lived lives of coolies, in the labour Hr carefully segregated by Governm decree from the native Fijians fear they should disrupt the Fij way of life, and their only cont with Europeans being a remote c through their overseers on 1 plantations.

"Isolated"

The rural Fiji-Indian thereft evolved in considerable isolation a this wasn’t much changed after 1 end of indenture and the introducti of the system of tenant farmii Right up until the time Mayer v living amongst them, their conh with Fijians was usually casual because they leased land from thei and with Europeans almost sok through the CSR overseer who al frequently had the role of guide ai friend thrust upon him in additit to his professional duties.

By 1950, too, the rural Indi; community had lost most of its ti with India as well, as the local-bo Indian by then greatly outnumber! the India-born and there had evolvt a freer, less oppressed and happi personality,

(Peasants In The Pacific. Pu

lished by Routledge and Kegan Paul Lt 44/-.)