Gina Cole
Banjara by Shana Chandra (Moa Press, 2026), 336pp, $37.99
The salt in the water lifts me up, so different from the fresh-water pond back home, and I wonder if the salt that I spent so much time hating on the ship is the very thing that carried us here. Ambha teaches me to jump with each wave, one coming with so much force it pushes me around to face the shore. But just as in Kolkata, I am not as scared as I thought I would be. It’s as if I’ve known this blue before.
Girmitiyas were Indian indentured labourers transported by the British from India to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 to work on colonial sugar plantations. The term ‘Girmit’ is an Indian pronunciation of the English word ‘agreement’ and refers to the contract under which Girmitiyas migrated. Some sought a better life, although historian Hugh Tinker referred to this practice as a ‘new system of slavery’. Dr Brij Lal, while recognising the brutality, legal coercion and suffering of Girmitiyas, focussed on how they exercised their own agency in navigating, resisting, surviving and creating an Indo-Fijian identity.
Some Girmitiyas returned to India after completing ten years of residence in Fiji (an initial five-year girmit, plus another five years as free labourers). But the economic reality for others was that they could not afford to return, or they had built families, small farms and new lives in Fiji.
In the late twentieth century, the definition of seeking a better life shifted again for the descendants of Girmitiyas in Fiji. Following the ethnic nationalism of the coups in 1987 and 2000, hundreds of Indo-Fijians migrated to New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States.
Banjara is a novel that explores these two great historical shifts in the Indo-Fijian diaspora through the eyes of two women. Avani is a young Banjaran woman, a desert nomad living under British colonial rule in Rajasthan, India, in 1888. Avani’s great-granddaughter, Meera, is a New Zealand-born teenager living in Auckland over 100 years later. Structurally, each woman’s story is told in alternating chapters, which are so distinct that I often felt like I was reading two different stories. Yet common thematic threads act as an intergenerational lens, weaving their lives together, creating a kind of call-and-response experience for the reader, in which similar motifs, themes and occurrences reflect the two women’s lives as mirror images.
The book opens with Avani digging a hole in the ‘red dust of Rajasthan’ in which she buries an anklet to keep herself safe when she dances for the British colonial officers (the gora). She is being watched by a man with blue eyes. We learn he is an officer in the colonial guard named George, whose name she pronounces ‘Jaj’.
Jaj’s gora colleague, ‘the one with the barren head’, says they must strip the land of its native trees and plant mesquite forests. Jaj approaches Avani to learn about native trees such as the khejri. She wants to tell him ‘how each tree has a spirit in it, that they must not be hurt because our ancestors are within them, and that is why they help us heal.’ And so begins a process of seduction in which Avani meets regularly with Jaj to educate him about the spiritual, ecological and medicinal importance of the trees, their bark and leaves, and everything else in the natural environment to her people. Avani becomes increasingly attracted to Jaj. However, she does not understand his selfish motives, nor that he will profit from recruiting her.
In the second chapter, we meet Meera, who lives in Auckland in 2013. Although she has no photos of her paradadi, her great-grandmother, she senses a connection with her: ‘I know now it was her helping me to dig … her silent spade was slung over my shoulder, unearthing snatched fragments and strange moments that pointed the way.’ Meera learns her grandfather worked in the sugarcane fields in Fiji as a Girmitiya. At Auckland’s Chelsea Sugar Refinery, she discovers that Fiji supplied unrefined sugar to the factory, owned by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, ‘the same company that had owned my ancestors’.
Meera’s story traces her search for her Girmitiya identity through dance, language and history. At university, she studies Bollywood film and Indian and Indo-Fijian history, including why her ancestor may have signed the girmit. ‘I have never seen this agreement and wondered, if I saw my paradadi’s, whether I could read her story in the lines of her thumbprint—if its swirls could tell me why she made such a bold move.’
Meera learns Sanskrit and about the mix of Indigenous Indian words blended with English and Fijian that make up a distinct Indo-Fijian language called Fiji Baat, which she refers to as a language of ‘ghost words’. She is drawn to Vihan because he speaks Hindi and is an ‘Indian-Indian, someone who actually came from India,’ unlike herself. However, a stark difficulty emerges when Vihan says that he cannot get too close to her as he will ‘eventually have an arranged marriage’.
Avani’s life takes a dramatic turn when Barren Head becomes jealous of the growing friendship between her and Jaj and puts an end to their meetings. Avani runs from Barren Head, but he pursues her and sexually assaults her. When she discovers she is pregnant, she cannot bear the shame and attempts to throw herself into the well. Jaj stops her and tells her to go to ‘Fee-jee’. He dupes her with promises that he will follow her. He takes her to a holding camp in Kolkata where he makes her place her thumbprint on the girmit, although she does not know what she is signing.
In the holding camp, the women and men are separated and locked in their huts at night. When Avani enters the hut, ‘Twenty sets of eyes look at me. Women from each soil and sea of our land are huddled together, each with their own story of despair or desperation, each with her own story of desire.’
The women Avani meets are from different castes and religions and wear different clothing. They receive little food or water and must compromise on their religious food choices and usual caste divides to survive. Friendships grow between the women as they band together in the holding huts and later during the gruelling voyage from Kolkata to Fiji.
A dominant theme in both women’s stories is the power of dance to survive hardship. While pregnant, Avani endures a harrowing three-month voyage from Kolkata to Fiji aboard the Hereford. Many do not survive the terrible food, cramped, unsanitary conditions, and smallpox and cholera that sweep through the ship. As Avani’s pregnancy advances, she escapes every morning into the fresh air on deck with Ambha, who teaches her Odissi dance. There are many lyrical references to the moon during Avani’s journey across the Pacific Ocean: ‘the moon has swollen to the shape of a melon wedge.’ The moon becomes another linking motif in the women’s lives.
While Avani travels towards Fiji, Meera begins a journey towards Rajasthan. She learns at her grandfather’s funeral that her family originated from Rajasthan and, mirroring her great-grandmother’s dance classes on the Hereford, enrols in a three-month Odissi dance programme at a school there. Meera learns that the British had outlawed Odissi and that the dance had nearly vanished. For the women who maintained these dance steps throughout history, dancing Odissi had become ‘an act of resistance, an act of reclamation’. For both Avani and Meera, the dance preserves a connection to their ancestry and becomes a means of survival.
The friendship and support of other women are equally important in Avani and Meera’s lives. Both face challenges without the men they love, relying instead on female friendships to sustain them. Avani lands on Nukulau Island, Fiji, as a single, pregnant woman, in the company of other women who are again locked up. Ambha and Avani continue to practise Odissi dance on Nukulau. They meet a native Fijian man who secretly teaches them about the healing properties of Fijian plants. Similarly, Meera arrives in Rajasthan single, joining other women in dancing and learning about her people’s customs and the power of Indian deities.
Both women follow their ancestral nomadic spirits, undertaking long-distance solo journeys across the globe. Avani travels from Rajasthan to Kolkata, then to Fiji, and her descendants travel to New Zealand. Meera travels to Japan, Australia and Rajasthan. When Vihan leaves Meera and moves to Christchurch, she moves to Melbourne for a ‘new life’. But the coups in Fiji also prompt her to look towards India. ‘Not only because of Vihan. I wanted to know who we were before Fiji, before indenture had withered our backs and the coups had slapped us with shame. I needed to understand the land that my people were born to, to know who they were before Fiji moulded us.’ Where Avani journeys from Rajasthan to Fiji, learning dance along the way, Meera travels in the opposite direction, from the Pacific to Rajasthan, to learn the same dance.
The separation between the two women’s stories is inevitable given the distance between them in time. Few of us have the privilege of meeting our great-grandmothers. We may only know them through stories, archival photos and documents. Meera finds her identity through family stories about Avani, the sounds of drumbeats from Rajasthan, and dance, music and languages that feel to her like ghosts. Ultimately, although Avani and Meera come from vastly different times and circumstances, their emotional journeys mirror each other through dance, travel and the sustaining friendships of women. Banjara suggests that, although we may not know our ancestors, we carry both their joy and their trauma in our own lives.
The Girmitiya influence on Fiji is undeniable. Girmitiya culture, cuisine and language form part of the fabric of Fijian society. Banjara is a moving and lyrical homage to the Indo-Fijian people and their ancestry, and an important addition to the body of work exploring Girmitiya history.
GINA COLE is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based lawyer, fiction writer and essayist. Her writing is inspired by her experiences as a queer Fijian woman. Her short story collection Black Ice Matter received the award for best first book of fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her first novel, Na Viro, was published in July 2022.
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