Family and Kinship

Indo-Fijian family life provides for both cultural difference and cultural continuity in a rapidly changing world. Virtually all Indians in Fiji have maintained a core set of continental-Indian ideal values concerning family structure. They place a high value on individual commitment to one’s immediate family, especially to one’s parents, as well as the woman’s subordination to the will of her husband and mother-in-law. They set up as an ideal a patrilineal, patrilocal, corporate extended household in which an older couple oversees the activities of their live-in married sons and associated families, as well as their own unmarried children.

Immigration has altered significantly family structure in Canada, particularly because the selection process has favoured young adults. Few older couples have immigrated from Fiji until recently, when they came as dependent parents. The average of new immigrants who are married is less than twenty-five. Nuclear families predominate, although there are also many families with one or two other adults in residence: elderly relatives, unmarried children, and adult immigrants who are single. While the outward form of spousal relations in Fiji is still followed, the balance of power between husbands and wives has shifted in the wife’s favour, through necessity, reasoned choice, and sometimes overt conflict. Although they are often challenged by increasingly independent children, Indo-Fijian parents and other older family members nevertheless do command much familial authority and respect.

On the whole, Indo-Fijians have reconciled traditional family ideals with Canadian conventions more flexibly than other South Asian communities in Canada. Even in the 1970s, many Indo-Fijian parents allowed their children to date and, in some cases, to choose their own marriage partners. Indo-Fijians today marry outside their community more frequently than any other South Asians.

The Indo-Fijian kinship network is wide, and Indo-Fijians attach great significance to the maintenance of active ties to their relatives and in-laws. Because they are from a small population that long intermarried, and also because many have been selected as immigrants partly because they have kin in Canada, many Indo-Fijians living in British Columbia have hundreds of relatives there too; virtually none is without any kinship ties. Kinship ties are, thus, at the heart of the informal Indo-Fijian community. They are bolstered by a steady flow of relatives visiting from Fiji, who never number fewer than one thousand in Canada at any one time. An equally large number of Canadian residents visit their relatives in Fiji each year.