Anjali Singh. Voices and Silences: Narratives of Girmityas and Jahajis from Fiji and The Caribbean New Delhi: Manohar, 2022, 215 pp. INR1295/- USD 16.22 ISBN-978-93-91928-70-4.
Pradeep Trikha
V
oices and Silences: Narratives of Girmitiyas and Jahajis from Fiji and The Caribbean, provides a critical study of the works of a couple of Fijian and Caribbean writers who have written on the life experiences of the indentured labourer from India. The book is structured in five chapters that seek to interrogate the current significance of Totaram Sandhya’s ‘polemical text.’ My twenty-one years in the Fiji Islands (translated), Rajendra Prasad’s Tears in Paradise: Suffering and Struggle of Indians in Fiji, 1879-2004, Peggy Mohan’s Jahajis and Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Women: The Odyssey of Indenture, and also its likely to influence future scholars working in the area. In the ‘Preface’ Anjali Singh suggests that ‘The authors have also mined the rich oral tradition in indenture to project the original Girmityas, who have recounted their experience in the bidesiya songs’ (11). The books under consideration bring together the then history of the period (the 1830s-1920s) which is often ignored by mainstream historians. The stories are also about family life, the individual’s bond to landscape and the desire for an egalitarian society. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the impact on indentured labourers dispatched to Fiji and The Caribbean. ‘The Girmityas of Fiji: A Forgotten Generation’, focuses on the formation of the collective identity of jahaji bhais and jahaji behns, it also takes into account their trauma and nostalgia, exile and betrayal, resistance and resilience. For instance, Singh points out:
The narratives of indenture are not just memoirs of pain, anguish, trauma and betrayal, they are also accounts of courage, resourcefulness and resistance…. There is a dearth of girmitiya voices during the period of indenture and most oral resources are undocumented.
…The conditions in Fiji determined the sensibility of indenture to a large extent…. While it was traumatic for all girmitiyas, nostalgia was a key determiner in the way the Fijian Indians looked back at their homeland. (p.83)
While chapter 3 ‘The Jahajis: Indentured Indian in the Caribbean’ covers the areas like Trinidad and British Guyana. Major thrust areas of analysis are the ethos of assimilation and acculturation especially in the case of coolie-women.
The jahajis in the Caribbean experienced the trauma of uprooting and displacement on a very large scale. They moved through liminal spaces seeking connections with the host land and reconnections with the homeland while continuing to occupy the position of the ‘other’ in both lands…. The women fostered a sense of agency and despite all odds were successful in rebuilding the family structure in the adopted land. (p.129)
These two chapters are essential and nicely conducted since Singh manages to keep her focus on the act of writing. She does not, in fact, simply insert any empirical data or figures she connects them to the essence of the writings taken up for discussion and this is a tour de force. The theoretical references to Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, David Dabydeen, Vijay Mishra, Avtar Brah, Frantz Fanon, Brij Lal, Michel Foucault and several others are all the more significant in that there is a questioning of Sanadhya, Prasad, Mohan and Bahadur use of language and their authorial intent. Wwhile their public involvement on social, political and cultural issues is mentioned, the book does not expand on the slight report that some readers may see between literature and politics.
The author in the first chapter, ‘Cartographies of Indenture: Historical Overview’ outlines the structure of analysis which is based on literary and theoretical frameworks, Singh even tries to point out indenture experience for many ‘en slaving as well as ‘liberating’ because for centuries in India people had suffered due to stringent social stratification of caste. Notions of identity and citizenship and home and belonging are discussed in details Singh, reiterates:
This process of (re) visioning indenture history likes place at the level of individual narratives, tying than with the larger community of the indenture diaspora spread across the world’ (p.38).
Words, language sounds and silence construct alternative spaces for issues of identity place and belonging. The writer also expands her concern for masculine and feminine identity but she avoids entering the debate on the grounds of ambivalence. A reposition of the colonial (history) of the Indian indenture as (her) story.
Chapter 4 ‘The Aesthetics of Narrative: Poetics of Indenture’, starts on a philosophical note: ‘There are two kinds of tales, one true and other false’, which is a reference to Plato’s statement. The chapter argues in and around the narrative techniques and frameworks of the authors discussed in the preceding chapters. Dr Singh considers their narrative through the literary framework, plot setting, point of view, characterization and the style employed by them respectively. She highlights magic realism, polyphony and frame narration. It is stated:
Indenture writers utilize various techniques to revise and recreate history in order to challenge the hegemonic discourse that privileges the west and tries to dominate over and silence the ‘other’…Apart from describing the social, cultural, economic, psychological and political perspectives and experiences of the subject, these writers also analyze the structures and the techniques that are the framework on which the colonial discourse is built. (p.170)
‘Emerging from Indenture/ship: Evolving Being and belonging is the fifth chapter that concludes the research through convergences and divergences of the experience of indenture in Fiji and the Caribbean. Singh shows how suffering is necessary at a narrative and an ontological level, yet she also interrogates the value of redemption through post-structure list claims, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s use of ambivalence and terminal reality. The reference to Gaiutra Bahadur’s ‘Coolie Women: The odyssey of Indenture relies on the post-colonial debate of belonging and also on the evolution of ‘being’ and ‘belonging’.
The book is a memoir of the origin and legacy of the life of Gaiutra Bahadur’s great grandmother who was brought to British Guiana around 1903 to work in a sugarcane plantation’ (36). Singh suggests that there might be various interpretations of the works of Totaram Sanadhya, Rajendra Prasad, Peggy Mohan and Gaiutra Bahadur and their approach to indenture experience, culture and history but their narratives are embedded in the state of transformation that the migrant must undertake. One of her ideas is in a globalized and post-reconciliation environment there could be an inter-dependency between the fate of the indentured migrant and non-indenture.
This new critical book is an excellent contribution to the study of Indenture.
******
Pradeep Trikha, is Professor in the Department of English, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
Leave a Reply