Origins

Indo-Fijians (also known as Fijian Indians) are the descendants of about 60,000 male and female indentured labourers who left India between 1879 and 1920 to work on plantations in the South Pacific island of Fiji. At that time, Fiji, like India, was a colony of the British Empire. The labourers came from all parts of India (about two-thirds from the north) and they represented a wide range of class, caste, ethnic, religious (about 80 percent Hindu, 20 percent Muslim), and linguistic backgrounds. The severe conditions of the indenture labour system levelled to a considerable degree the cultural differences among pioneers. This made possible the development of a uniquely Fijian Indian culture and identity.

Most Indians in Fiji continued in agricultural pursuits after completing their period of indenture, chiefly as tenant cane farmers working on land leased either from the indigenous Fijians or from a foreign sugar company. The British colonial administration left Fijian Indians for the most part to their own devices from the turn of the century until the end of colonial rule in 1970. The British were much more concerned with controlling the native Fiji population, most of whom remained village-based subsistence farmers organized under appointed chiefs.

For their part, the Indians remained poor and heavily in debt, although they quickly established their own community structures that allowed them to practise a range of distinctive Hindu and Muslim religious and cultural activities. Hindi was the predominant language spoken by the first indentured labourers, and it eventually became the lingua franca for all Indians, regardless of what language they spoke upon arrival. Some of the earliest workers became entrepreneurs (chiefly in small-scale retail trade and transportation) even before several thousand Gujaratis and Sikhs came to Fiji during the 1920s to 1940s expressly for this purpose.

By the 1940s, Fijian colonial society had become increasingly polarized and its political life was almost entirely ethnically based as one after another new occupational niche became the domain of either the Indians or the native Fijians. Along with cash-based cane farming, Indians soon came to predominate in a number of urban occupations, including shopkeeping, transportation, and many mechanical trades. At the same time, Indian elementary schools, newspapers, Hindu temples, and mosques flourished.

In 1970 Fiji became an independent country within the British Commonwealth. Numerically, the Indians were rapidly becoming the dominant element, so that today, of the island country’s 750,000 people, they comprise 49 percent of the inhabitants as opposed to 47 percent of native Fijians. Despite their numbers, the Indians have remained a political minority. The native Fijians continue to own most of the land on which Indians work, and when in 1987 an elected Indian-dominated coalition was about to take office, the native Fijian military leader Sitiveni Rabuka overturned the elections, declared Fiji a republic, and under a new constitution (1992) took over leadership of the country as prime minister.