Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture: Belonging, and Banishment from and in the Sea of Islands

ABSTRACT

This is a written version of the Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture delivered for the Pacific History Association (PHA) conference at Warrnambool on 4 November 2023. It is in memory of Brij V. Lal, who died on 25 December 2021. In November 2009 he, and later his wife Padma Narsey Lal, were banished by Fiji’s military regime from their birthplace. This address considers the troubled questions of belonging and banishment in Oceania. The first section explores this in relation to Brij’s life, as well as other examples of political exile. The second part considers how other Oceanians might not quite belong because of the circumstances of their parentage or gender, or through the different mental and embodied spaces they inhabited. The lecture concludes by posing questions about how the present is invested in the past, and what the future holds for Oceanians who may be forced, chosen, or persuaded to leave their islands.

Key words:

• Brij Lal
• belonging
• banishment
• Pacific
• migration
• identity

This is the Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture for the Pacific History Association (PHA), and I am deeply honoured to be delivering this. At times I found writing this lecture distressing. Brij was my peer and my friend who died before his time.¹

In November 2009 Professor Brij Lal, and in January 2010 Dr Padma Narsey Lal, were banished by Fiji’s military regime from their homeland because Brij was ‘prejudicial to peace, defence, public safety, public order and security’.² Had they incited violence, insurrection, or staged a coup as had in various ways Sitiveni Rabuka twice in 1987, George Speight in 2000, and Frank Bainimarama in 2006? No. As Brij often cited, ‘the power of the word is mightier than the sword’. Brij had used that weapon to attack Bainimarama’s military regime in the media.³

Brij and Padma were banished from their birthland, where they had lived for much of their lives. Brij had a Fiji passport that expired in June 1993. He did not apply for its renewal. He had held a United States passport since 1993 and an Australian passport since 1995. Dual citizenship in Fiji was only possible after 10 April 2009. The Lals’ expulsion was technically legal (their Fiji passports had expired) but it started with brute force when Brij was arrested and beaten in the Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Suva. In an affidavit Brij stated that he was placed in a cell, interrogated, and physically abused by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Qiliho:

He covered my face with his spit and slapped me continuously to the point of breaking my glasses. This ordeal has remained with me all these years, impossible to forget. At the end of the interrogation, he told me that unless I left the country by the first available flight, my family would have to fetch my body from the morgue.⁴

This horrific lesson in how to try to silence criticism sent shivers to many in Fiji and was also a strong lesson in how to create an academic martyr. Not that Brij would have wanted that title.

Several years earlier, Brij published the poem Fare Well, Fiji, of which the following excerpt is drawn.⁵

Fare Well, Fiji

Mother’s endless tears for her departing son,

Ben at the airport, deep, sad, silent

Staying put while we moved on;

Both now gone, never to return.

I miss them, as I miss the touch of smell and sound,

The pungency of cane fires, embers reddening the ground,

The feel of warm rain on grass fresh mown,

Swimming in swollen rivers, menacing, brown

The list goes on, inscribed in agony,

Of faces vanishing beyond recall,

Uprooted, unwelcome, on the move again

Waiting for their turn in the scorching sun.

Ni sa moce, goodbye, my land,

As I consider my fate’s rough hand,

Seeking respite from storms of memory.

Before fading light darkens my farewell.

Part One

Migration and dislocation ran through Brij’s life, his heritage and works, and his belonging and banishment. I first met Brij in the National Archives of India in New Delhi in 1978 when I, a Pākehā from Aotearoa New Zealand, was 23 years old. Here was this young charming Fiji–Indian man from the Australian National University (ANU). I was from, what I thought was, the back blocks of Ōtepoti (Dunedin). We became life-long friends and colleagues and both taught at the University of the South Pacific (USP) during the early 1980s.

During those early years when subaltern studies became prominent within South Asian historiography, Brij and I both restored in different ways ‘little people’ stories in the Pacific.⁶ Brij was not a great fan of theory for theory’s sake, and was even more distrustful of post-modernism. When he read the draft of my book Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji, he wanted Foucault expunged!⁷

In this address I consider the troubled questions of belonging and banishment in Oceania. I also ask who is dislocated, whose histories are not told? This is also an exercise in reflecting on Brij and Padma’s banishment from Fiji, when they clearly belonged to Fiji and Oceania. Throughout I will pick at the two sides of belonging and banishment.

I also consider how other Oceanians might not quite belong because of the circumstances of their parentage, gender, or sexuality, or through the different mental and embodied spaces they inhabited. Banishment was not always being cast away from the ‘Sea of Islands’, but could be manifested in other ways, sadly portrayed in Sia Figiel’s 1999 novel Where We Once Belonged.⁸ Or banishment from history, land, or livelihood – hardly something I need to reiterate on the Country on which I am a guest today.

Brij and I were also drawn together by being outside the conventions of the history discipline. We were among a wave of graduate students treading into new historical methodologies: quantitative analysis, oral history,⁹ and ethnographic fieldwork. Brij had far more perseverance than me to crunch big data, 45,439 Girmitiyas from North India who entered into contracts of indenture to Fiji, 1879–1916, whereas I had a population of under one thousand Indians in Aotearoa before the Second World War.¹⁰

While Brij’s analysis of big data revealed new insights into the origins of the Girmitiyas (from all sorts of castes and religions),¹¹ his wider impact came when he wrote about his own connections to his past, as a descendant of indentured labourers. Brij’s grandfather arrived in Fiji in 1908, and married the daughter of Girmitiya parents.

Migration inspired and determined the fate of my dear friend in all sorts of ways. It shaped the fate of his ancestors, and himself when he moved from Tabia¹² to Suva as a young student, as he said to me ‘from the backblocks of Fiji’, then later to Canada, Canberra, and Hawai‘i, before retiring with Padma in Brisbane. His life and background might seem one of flux, as reflected in books with names such as Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, Crossing the Kala Pani, Intersections, Turnings, Broken Waves, Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations, and Stopover, a beautiful book with Bruce Connew’s photographs of the aftermath of the 2000 coup in a cane community.¹³ Even then Indo-Fijians were considered by many to be on a stopover ‘on the move again: the same insecurity, the same anxiety about their fate’.¹⁴

Violence underpinned this fear but also political and economic uncertainty, and the question of who was Indigenous and who belonged to Fiji. At the most extreme, Fijian nationalists wanted Indo-Fijians expelled. But increasingly more Indigenous Fijians questioned where they belonged in post-coup Fiji. They too left. The 1990 Constitution defined Fijianness on an exclusionary basis and only those on a register of Fijian landowners, the Vula ni Kawa Bula (VKB), were ‘Fijian’. This meant that those who did not or could not register were excluded from voting – around twenty thousand in 1992.¹⁵

The ethnically divisive electoral system was upturned by the 1997 Constitution, which brought in the inclusive category of Fiji Islander for Fijian citizens. Even Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, Fiji’s former president, defended the right of Indo-Fijians to be identified as Pacific and as Fiji Islanders: ‘They may have a distinct and different appearance and characteristics and been late arrivals, but islanders they are’.¹⁶

Impermanence but also belonging and place run through Brij’s writing. His very personal and moving essay of Mr Arjun’s stopover in Australia evokes the sense of belonging to place and community in Tabia. In Brij’s words:

Place matters. It gives us identity, shapes our imagination and experience, and informs our understanding of the world around us. It is both matter as well as metaphor, a source of material as well as of cultural and spiritual sustenance. It can be ‘home’ or ‘away.’ It sets limits on those who live there. It connects us to time and locality, perhaps even to life and death.¹⁷

Pacific scholars Epeli Hau‘ofa and Teresia Teaiwa emphasized the sea, the saltwater that has connected Oceanians across time and space. Yet place, history (inclusion and exclusion) is also about those connections to land and identity – vanua, whenua.¹⁸ Joakim Peter (Jojo), from Uleletiw, Ettal Island in Chuuk wrote:

We need to belong to places, the physical plots, taro fields, coconut groves, sandy beaches, portions of reefs, fishing corals, and the island in general … If there is a frightening notion that most islanders share, it is the concept of being lost, being out of place, or the inability to make connection with a place.¹⁹

Brij was firmly rooted to his place and as a descendant of Girmitiyas in Fiji, but he also came to belong to a community of scholars, family, and friends, and globally to the Indian diaspora. Brij told me about the transition in his sense of belonging that took place when he started at USP in Suva in 1971:

I came from a very rural isolated family and went to Labasa Secondary and then it was essentially Indo-Fijian. I had never met a Pacific Islander. And one of the great things about USP in that first year was that … students interacted with each other … I think that broadened my cultural horizon.²⁰

On the Laucala campus Brij shared a cubicle with Edward Masika from Solomon Islands, Sefarana Fatiaki from Rotuma, and Filip Koloi from Tonga. Students forged a regional identity and belonging, through living, studying, playing, and partying together.

Brij later recalled: ‘to a large extent, who I am, what I stand for, the things I believe in and cherish are a direct result of the formative influence of my undergraduate years’.²¹ When Brij met Fijians outside his own ethnic community it became an important grounding for Fiji’s future leading historian and an architect of the 1997 Constitution.²² Many of Brij’s fellow students and colleagues (Vijay Naidu, Claire Slatter, Jone Dakuvula, Sitiveni Ratuva, Simione Durutalo, William Sutherland, Sitiveni Halapua to name but a few) criticized the Pacific Way advocated by Ron Crocombe.²³ They questioned the neocolonial tradition, which glossed over power and inequality. Patriarchy within the Pacific was also challenged. A later generation – the niu wave, such as Teresia Teaiwa, Robert Nicole, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, Susan Sela, Mosmi Bhim, among others, and Sudesh Mishra, continued to challenge the Pacific Way but also invoked an inclusive sense of belonging in the sea of islands that Epeli had so passionately written about.²⁴

Brij witnessed that despite awareness of regional belonging in Fiji there were national and ethnic tensions. He regretted that most Indo-Fijians did not really get to know i-Taukei.²⁵ Yet wider ethnic divisiveness was also present at USP and not just on the sports fields. I don’t need to tell this audience of the role of colonial power and policies in shaping ethnic boundaries, allocating who and where people could live, work, even who they could sleep with and marry. Or how political and economic changes shaped migration, whether forced or voluntary, bringing millions of foreigners to the Pacific. Colonialism wrought massive transformation in rural India leading to Rama’s Banishment, the title of Vijay Mishra’s collection to mark the centenary of the first Girmitiyas to arrive in Fiji. Mishra had taught Brij at Labasa High.²⁶

Banishment could also be the start of a new belonging. Brij wrote in Mr Arjun’s tale, that these ‘were ordinary folk from rural India, shouldering their little bundles and leaving for some place they had not heard of before, keen to make a new start’. Even if they called indenture narak or hell.

Was this simply banishment or the beginning of a new belonging? The colonial state would try to shape what this belonging would be. For example, Indian men had a very limited franchise after 1929, while Fijian land could only be leased. Let’s not forget i-Taukei who, although they had a form of political representation through indirect rule via chiefs, only got the vote in 1963, the same year that women could vote in Fiji.

As for the workers of Fiji, banishment was a heavy-handed way that capital, in cahoots with the state, maintained control, especially over those who brandished the power of the word, such as foreign troublemakers. After Fiji’s first general strike in 1920, activist and barrister Manilal Maganlal Doctor, and activist wife Jayakumari Devi, were deported to New Zealand.²⁷ Manilal was prevented from practising law in several colonies, eventually returning to India. In 1916 the British tried to deport Australian Edward Sanday (who was married to a Fijian), and Setareki Nasoki, the Turaga ni Koro (village leader) of Namoli, who organized the Fijian Wharf Labourers’ Union and a strike over poor pay and dangerous working conditions.²⁸

Apolosi Nawai was exiled three times between 1917 and 1946; twice to Rotuma and finally to New Zealand. He had set up the Fijian cooperative Viti Kabani, promising the expulsion of British colonialism: ‘Fiji for the Fijians’. Nawai was seen as a threat to those chiefs who collaborated with the British. As Robert Nicole points out in his excellent book, Disturbing History, not only was ‘the man from Ra’ banished from his home but he was also banished from Fiji’s history textbooks.²⁹

There are many other examples throughout the Pacific of exile for those who were highly articulate and charismatic, and challenged colonial regimes. Peter Hempenstall has documented such resistance and exile within the German empire in the Pacific.³⁰ In 1909 Lauaki Mamoe and nine other chiefs and their families were exiled from Samoa to Saipan. The New Zealand government sent a ship during 1915 to bring them home but Lauaki died during the return voyage from dysentery.

Not that the Kiwis were immune from using the weapon of exile. In Samoa during 1934 the Mau leader Olaf Nelson and two others were deported to New Zealand for ten years. Two years later the Labour government revoked this.³¹

Part Two

I turn now to some of my work to consider the reclaiming of hidden, silenced, lost, and banished histories in the Pacific. In my book Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians, I restore an unknown history, and also expose one side of the racist underbelly of Aotearoa’s past.³² Sekhar Bandyopadhyay called this a ‘story of exclusion’ that renders Indians’ ‘existence invisible in historical narratives of the nation, although their story challenges several discursive planks on which New Zealand past national identity was being constructed’.³³

Along with many historians (including Brij), I emphasize human agency, where people are not just victims³⁴ but also forge their own histories. Like Brij I also did not want to turn this into a celebratory vision of the past. The oppression and constraints people labour under or accommodate to must also be told.

For example, consider a national narrative common to both Australia and Aotearoa – the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). After the First World War, white racists in Aotearoa demanded that resident Indians be excluded from various occupations, and even from the nation, because they had not shed blood for the empire. Not true. At least 74,187 Indian soldiers died during the war, and one million Indian troops fought overseas. Let’s not forget that there was a willingness among many Kiwi-Indians to fight for New Zealand but most were denied.³⁵

Similarly, Brij depicted how the Second World War was a ‘powerful symbolic event in Fijian history, bequeathing a legacy of suspicion, division, distrust, and hostility among the communities’.³⁶ Disloyal and cowardly Indians were contrasted with heroic and loyal Europeans and Fijians. Indigenous Fijians saved the nation from alien invasion and were loyal to the Empire. Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna called for Fijians to sacrifice their blood, which John Kelly suggests brought ‘blood credentials’.³⁷ The war cemented the narrative of a special bond between Fijians and Europeans, adding fuel to Fiji remaining a colony until 1970. So i-Taukei belonged.

Exclusion and belonging are also central to other narratives I have looked at such as destitution and madness. Sukudaia’s story illustrates one extreme of belonging in a new land. She was banished in multiple ways: from India, her caste, as a sole mother, as destitute, and being considered mad. She was one of 149 adult women among 522 Indian indentured labourers on the Leonidas, the first ship carrying Girmitiyas to Fiji.³⁸ In 1882 officials suggested that Sukudaia and two other mad Indian women, Janki and Montumi, be banished to Makuluva Island.³⁹ Somehow Sukudaia made her way to Suva, where it was reported:

There is an insane Indian woman who wanders about, choosing the most populous parts of the town, in a state of sometimes more than semi-nudity. She has long been an eyesore to residents, and to our personal knowledge is a difficult subject to restrain. Usually her child accompanies her and the whole conduct of the two is most repulsive to anyone with the most remote sense of decency.⁴⁰

Sukudaia was regarded as ‘a disgrace to our civilization’. She certainly did not belong to colonial society, so officials suggested that she and her daughter Ramsomjh be deported to India (where she would never have been accepted) because there was no lunatic asylum in Fiji.⁴¹ But other arrangements were made, and in 1884 a lunatic asylum was established in Suva. Sukudaia was the second patient. Now she was banished from public view. She died two years later there.

Not only the state banished the mad or bad but Pacific people sometimes banished their own, as depicted in Where We Once Belonged. In one vignette, Siniva, the wandering ‘village fool’ had ghost sickness (mai‘aiku).⁴² She was teased and banished from her ‘aiga (family) and village, and ‘walked, walked, walked’ the streets of Apia.⁴³ There she was both highly visible and ignored; a state of not belonging that led to her suicide. Other people who were banished from their communities sometimes took to the bush. Banishment from the community was extremely serious in Samoa,⁴⁴ as within many Pacific societies, depicted in the 2011 film The Orator (O Le Tulafale), directed by Tusi Tamasese, where both Saili and his wife Vaaiga are excluded from their communities.

Banishment and separation were features of other health measures in the colonial Pacific for diseased bodies, especially the visibly diseased.⁴⁵ Like mental asylums, leprosaria were among the most feared spaces where Pacific bodies could be exiled. Stigma surrounded these sites of banishment – metaphorically as well as in relation to place. Islands offered ideal spaces for separating diseased bodies. For example, between 1890 and 1925, leprosy sufferers in the Cook Islands were isolated on motu (small reef islets).⁴⁶ A leprosy colony was established on the site of a former penitentiary in the remote Belép Islands in New Caledonia in 1892 before sufferers were transferred to Ile aux Chèvres near Nouméa, and in 1918 to Ducos, a former high-security penitentiary.⁴⁷ No one was discharged from Ducos until 1976.

Language also referred to spaces and processes of banishment. Despite colonial health authorities in the 1960s trying to paint over the term lunatic asylum in Fiji with the name St Giles, locals referred to it as vale ni mate (place of death). In the 1960s Dr Macgregor opened up the hospital by demolishing many of the foreboding concrete walls but it became known as bakava (tin shack) because of the wire fencing.⁴⁸ In Hawai‘i, Hansen’s disease was referred to as ma‘i ho‘oka‘awale ‘ohana (‘the disease that separates families’). Between 1865 and 1900 around five thousand sufferers were banished to the ‘natural prison’ on Kalaupapa Peninsula on Molokai Island.⁴⁹ Kerri Inglis writes poignantly about this as does Anne Perez Hattori concerning the banishment of Chamorros from Guåhan (Guam) to Culion leper colony in the Philippines and the pain of the families who could not care for them.⁵⁰ Pacific Islanders from the Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, and Samoa also were separated great distances when sent to Makogai Island in Fiji between 1911 and 1969: ‘The dread was not primarily over what the disease did to one’s body, but rather over how government policies relating to the disease separated sufferers from their loved ones’.⁵¹ The separation of leprosy sufferers in Samoa from ‘aiga (family) under the Isolation of Leprosy Regulation 1896 was associated with Samoan understandings of shame, banishment, and punishment.⁵²

New communities were also constituted within sites of confinement and banishment such as the Central Lepers’ Hospital on Fiji’s Makogai Island between 1911 and 1969. Jane Buckingham wrote of the ‘inclusivity of exclusion’ among leprosy-affected people banished from their loved ones in Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, Samoa (and Fiji), forging a multicultural, pan-Pacific community.⁵³ At Kalaupapa some kin lived and cared for their loved ones, or were kōkua (helpers), forging a new community of belonging.⁵⁴

I also wrote about belonging within the ethnoscape of Fiji, when I was part of the project headed by Judy Bennett and Angela Wanhalla to research the children born in the Pacific to American GIs.⁵⁵ Exclusion and belonging for those called ‘mixed race’ varied between Pacific cultures. Adi Ro Mera and Martha Naua of Fiji both had American fathers from the war. Their parents could not marry, and these children – called Kai Merika – were estranged from their birth fathers.⁵⁶

Adi Romera was registered as Fijian under her stepfather’s mataqali, which qualified her as a landowner, but that did not always mean acceptance within her village:

Because of my skin colour and history, at times the family members treated me like an outcast but my mother was always strong and she protected me. There were times when I was told that I was not a Fijian but a descendant of an America[n] soldier.⁵⁷

Martha could not be listed in Fiji’s register of Indigenous landowners, the Vula ni Kawa Bula (VKB), as a Fijian:

We can’t very well demand, we don’t have a full say as a Fijian, because of our blood … I know a Fijian way of life, I know it, I know it very very well, but we were always classed as different.⁵⁸

Conclusion

Brij and Padma’s exclusion reminds us of how people who once belonged can be banished due to violence and state directives. But words do endure, and modern communications can disrupt the banishment of the past. Kurdish asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani may have been expelled from Australia to a camp on Manus Island but he was able to get his story, and those of other detainees, out as a book⁵⁹ – bit by bit via a mobile phone.

Brij Lal cannot be banished from history because of his prodigious contribution, not only as a scholar, but also through his legacy of defending an inclusive democracy in Fiji and bravely speaking against the military regime. Brij also reminded us how the present is invested in the past, including the misreading and manipulation of history,⁶⁰ and the future – especially environmental tragedies and climate change, and what belonging means for Oceanians who may be forced, chosen, or persuaded to leave their islands. As Katerina Teaiwa depicts in Consuming Ocean Island, this is not a new dilemma.⁶¹ During the 1960s and 1970s, the Tokelau Islands Resettlement Scheme aiming to deal with high population densities in Tokelau, and the severe damage from a tropical cyclone in 1966, was one wave of the much bigger Pasifika diaspora to Aotearoa. Such belonging can be fractured but can also be inclusive – belonging to several places, cultures, kin, across the sea of islands. But what if you cannot return to that place because it is uninhabitable, if the borders are closed because of a pandemic, or because authorities forbid you?

So, back to the beginning of my talk. A lot has been spoken about the morality, and inhumanity, of the state’s action towards Brij and Padma. Bainimarama’s regime continued to use expulsion against those considered a thorn to it. In 2021 USP Vice-Chancellor Pal Ahluwalia, and wife Sandy Price, were woken in the middle of the night and deported: deemed (as was Brij) to be prejudicial to the peace, defence, public safety, order, morality, health, security, or good government of the Fiji Islands.⁶² This order was eventually lifted, as was that against Brij and Padma, ironically when Fiji’s first coup maker, Rabuka, was elected prime minister in 2022.

Finally, Padma could bring Brij’s ashes home to Tabia. As Brij wrote:

Nothing lasts forever except words.

In the end we all have to live with ourselves. And we all know that all that tyranny needs to triumph is for good men and women to remain silent.⁶³

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the Eastern Maar peoples to whom this land belongs and which imparts belonging. I pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. This land was never ceded. Vinaka vakalevu to the amazing organizers of this conference and to PHA for inviting me. My special thanks to Helen Gardner, Jonathan Ritchie, and Deakin University. I especially welcome Padma Narsey Lal, son Niraj, his wife Jenny, and their children.

Notes

1 See Clive Moore, ‘Brij V. Lal (1952–2021)’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 58, no. 3 (2023): 307–11; Doug Munro, ‘Memorial Address: Reflections on Brij V. Lal’, Indenture Papers: Studies on Girmitiyas 3 (2023): 3–11.

2 C.K. Chen, ‘Exile and a Land of Memory: Brij V. Lal, Indo-Fijian Scholar Activist’, in Levelling Wind: Remembering Fiji, ed. Brij V. Lal (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019), 479. On 15 March 2015 Chen observed a question in Fiji’s parliament that was asked by opposition member Prem Singh about the Lals’ expulsion. The reply was from the Minister of Immigration, Lesi Natuva. Details were published in Fiji’s Hansard, Mar. 18, 2015.

3 And in academic papers, e.g. Brij V. Lal, ‘One Hand Clapping: Reflections on the First Anniversary of Fiji’s 2006 Coup’, in The 2006 Military Takeover in Fiji: A Coup to End All Coups?, ed. Jon Fraenkel, Stewart Firth, and Brij V. Lal (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2009), 425–47. For a later reflection see Brij V. Lal, ‘Fiji: Troubled Journey of a Beleaguered Nation’, The Round Table 110, no. 6 (2021): 645–62.

4 Brij V. Lal, affidavit to the Metropolitan Police, London, cited on Fiji Leaks, 25 Dec. 2021, https://www.fijileaks.com/home/rip-professor-brij-lal-passes-away-in-brisbane-on-xmas-day-we-did-our-best-to-get-his-torturer-sitiveni-qiliho-arrested-in-london-but-he-escaped-by-fingertips-again-strip-immunity-for-rabuka-bainimarama (accessed 24 Oct. 2023).

5 Brij V. Lal, ‘Fare Well, Fiji’, Conversations: Occasional Writing from the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies 2, no. l (June 2001). Reprinted in Brij V. Lal, Mr Tulsi’s Store: A Fijian Journey (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2001), 207–8.

6 See, e.g., Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Lomarsh Roopnarine, ‘Brij Lal’s Subaltern Approach to the Study of Indian Indenture’, Indenture Papers: Studies on Girmitiyas 3 (2023): 13–24.

7 Jacqueline Leckie, Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020).

8 Sia Figiel, Where We Once Belonged (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 1999). Figiel’s debut novel is a coming of age novel that depicts aspects of Samoan culture and the colonial burden. The novel is told through the Samoan storytelling form of su‘ifefiloi (linked vignettes).

9 E.g. Morgan Tuimaleali‘ifano and Paul D’Arcy, ‘Oral Traditions in Pacific History’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, vol. 1, ed. Ryan Jones and Matt Matsuda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 276–95.

10 Brij Lal, ‘Leaves of the Banyan Tree: Origins and Background of Fiji’s North Indian Indentured Migrants 1879–1916’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1979); Jacqueline Leckie, ‘They Sleep Standing Up: Gujaratis in New Zealand to 1945’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 1981).

11 See Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The Origins of the Fiji Indians (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1983).

12 On looking back, see Lal, Mr Tulsi’s Store; Tessa Morris Suzuki, ‘Unfettering the Mind: Imagination, Creative Writing and the Art of the Historian’, in Bearing Witness: Essays in Honour of Brij V. Lal, ed. Doug Munro and Jack Corbett (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017), 231–46.

13 Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Division of Pacific and Asian History, The Australian National University, and Suva: Fiji Museum, 2000); Brij V. Lal, ed., Crossing the Kala Pani: A Documentary History of Indian Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, and Suva: Fiji Museum, 1998); Brij V. Lal, Intersections: History, Memory, Discipline (Lautoka: Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, and Sydney: Asia Pacific Publications, 2011); Brij V. Lal, Turnings: Fiji Factions (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013); Brij V. Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991); Brij V. Lal, ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1992). Among other collections that Brij co-edited relating to movement in the Pacific were K.R. Howe, Robert D. Kiste, and Brij V. Lal, eds, Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, and Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994); Brij V. Lal and Hank Nelson, eds, Lines Across the Sea: Colonial Inheritance in the Post-Colonial Pacific (Brisbane: Pacific History Association, 1995). See also Doug Munro, ‘Bibliography of Brij V. Lal’s Academic Writings’, in Munro and Corbett, Bearing Witness, 307–33; Bruce Connew, Stopover: A Story of Migration (Wellington: Victoria University Press, and Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).

14 Brij V. Lal, ‘Mr Arjun’, in Connew, Stopover. The term Indo-Fijian (or just Indian) was widely used during Brij’s years in Fiji, and in his writing. Today the term Fiji Indian is more common.

15 Robbie Robertson, ‘Retreat from Exclusion? Identities in Post-Coup Fiji’, in Confronting Fiji Futures, ed. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, 2000), 272.

16 Ratu Mara speaking of the omission of Indo-Fijians from the Pacific Vision conference of the Pacific communities in New Zealand in 1999. The conference was organized by the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. Daily Post/Agencies, 28 July 1999, cited on Paktok's Pacific Media Watch, http://www.usp.ac.fj/journ/nius/index.html.

17 Brij V. Lal, ‘Place and Person: An Introduction’, in Pacific Places, Pacific Histories: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Kiste, ed. Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 1.

18 Epeli Hau‘ofa invited Teresia Teaiwa to supply an epigraph for his 1998 essay, ‘The Ocean in Us’, The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 : 392–410. Her widely circulated line is: ‘We sweat and cry salt water, so we know the ocean is really in our blood’. See Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works, ed. Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson, and Terence Wesley-Smith (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2021), 22.

19 Joakim Jojo Peter, ‘ULELETIW: Imaging of My Paradise’, in Lal, Pacific Places, 261.

20 Brij V. Lal, interview by Jacqueline Leckie, 17 Aug. 2017.

21 Brij V. Lal, ‘Laucala Bay’, in Lal, Pacific Places, 237.

22 See Brij V. Lal, ‘Towards a United Future: Report of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission’, JPH 32, no. 1 (1997) : 71–84; Brij V. Lal and Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘From the Sideline: An Interview with Brij V. Lal, Historian and Constitutional Commissioner’, The Contemporary Pacific 14, no. 1 (2002): 168–84.

23 Ron G. Crocombe, The Pacific Way: An Emerging Identity (Suva: Lotu Pasifika Productions, 1976). See Jacqueline Leckie (with contributors), A University for the Pacific: 50 Years of USP (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 2018), 55–80 and, also in the latter, Vijay Naidu, ‘USP’s Laucala Campus as a Centre of Activism’, 183–6, and Steven Ratuva, ‘Those Naughty Student Days’, 193–5. Note that Crocombe was supportive of Brij’s academic future.

24 See, e.g., Robert Nicole, ed., Niu Waves: Contemporary Writing from the Pacific (Suva: Pacific Writing Forum and the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture, 2001); Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002).

25 Lal, ‘Laucala Bay’, 237.

26 Brij V. Lal, ‘Fiji Girmitiyas: Background to Banishment’, in Rama’s Banishment: A Centenary Tribute to the Fiji Indians, ed. Vijay Mishra (Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979), 12–39.

27 Robert Nicole, Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 184–5. Jasmine Ali presented ‘The Transnational Legal Life of an Anticolonial Lawyer: Manilal Doctor’ at the 2023 Pacific History Association conference and was also the winner of the PHA Teresia Teaiwa prize.

28 Kevin Hince, ‘The Earliest Origins and Suppression of Trade Unionism in the Fiji Islands’, New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations 10, no. 2 (1985): 4–29.

29 Nicole, Disturbing History, 85–97. See also Charles J. Weeks Jr, ‘The Last Exile of Apolosi Nawai: A Case Study of Indirect Rule during the Twilight of British Empire’, Pacific Studies 18, no. 3 (1995): 27–45.

30 Peter J. Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 1978).

31 Patricia O’Brien, Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).

32 Jacqueline Leckie, Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians (Albany: Massey University Press, 2021).

33 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘A History of Small Numbers: Indians in New Zealand, c.1890s–1930s’, New Zealand Journal of History 43, no. 2 (2009): 150, 162.

34 As in Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993).

35 See Leckie, Invisible, 127–49; Michael Roche and Sita Venkateswar, ‘Neither Natural-Born British Subjects nor Aliens’, in Experience of a Lifetime: People, Personalities and Leaders in the First World War, ed. John Crawford, David Littlewood, and James Watson (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2016), 138–52.

36 Brij V. Lal, ‘For King and Country: A Talk on the Pacific War in Fiji’, in Remembering in the Pacific War, ed. Geoffrey M. White, Occasional Paper Series 36 (Honolulu: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 1991), 18. Lal deconstructs the stereotype that Indians were disloyal and explains why they did not serve in the Fiji Defence Force.

37 John D. Kelly, ‘Diaspora and World War, Blood and Nation in Fiji and Hawai‘i’, Public Culture 7 (1995): 491.

38 Colonial Secretary’s Office (hereinafter CSO) 241/84. Sukudaia is the name on admission papers to the Public Lunatic Asylum. She is recorded as Sudaia on Colonial Secretary’s Office Minute Paper (hereinafter CSO MP) 82/2287 and as Sookdaie on CSO 241/84. Her emigration pass is no. 79 and Ozeeari’s is no. 406. General Register of Indian Immigrants, 1879–1916 [microform] (Fiji: Department of Immigration and Central Archives of Fiji and the Western Pacific High Commission). See Leckie, Colonizing Madness, 26, 87–8.

39 See Margaret Mishra, ‘The Curious Case of Montowinie (Emigration Pass 8871⁄2)’, JPH 55, no. 4 (2020): 475–91.

40 Suva Times, 11 Mar. 1882, 2. See also Sudesh Mishra, ‘“Bending Closer to the Ground”: Girmit as Minor History’, Australian Humanities Review 52 (2012): 5–16.

41 Acting Agent General of Immigration to Colonel Secretary, 20 Feb. 1882, CSO MP 82/568.

42 See Richard A. Goodman, ‘Some Aitu Beliefs of Modern Samoans’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 80, no. 4 (1971): 463–79. On wandering, see Jacqueline Leckie, ‘Insanity in a Sea of Islands: Mobility and Mental Health in New Zealand’s Pacific Sphere’, Journal of New Zealand Studies 32 (2021): 166–82.

43 Figiel, Where We Once Belonged, 179.

44 Safua Akeli, ‘Cleansing Western Samoa: Leprosy Control during New Zealand Administration, 1914–1922’, JPH 52, no. 3 (2017): 364.

45 Jacqueline Leckie, ‘Pacific Bodies and Personal Space Redefined, 1850–1950’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, vol. II, The Pacific Ocean since 1800, ed. Anne Perez Hattori and Jane Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 490–513.

46 Raeburn Lange, ‘Leprosy in the Cook Islands, 1890–1925’, JPH 52, no. 3 (2017): 313.

47 Ingrid Sykes, ‘Disability, Leprosy, and Kanak Identity in Twentieth-Century New Caledonia’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10, no. 2 (2016): 173–89.

48 Leckie, Colonizing Madness.

49 Kerri A. Inglis, ‘Disease and the “Other”: The Role of Medical Imperialism in Oceania’, in Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas, ed. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 400; Kerri A. Inglis, Mai Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).

50 Anne Perez Hattori, Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898‒1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 61–90.

51 Kerri A. Inglis, ‘Nā hoa o ka pilikia (Friends of Affliction): A Sense of Community in the Molokai Leprosy Settlement of 19th Century Hawai‘i’, JPH 52, no. 3 (2017): 289.

52 Akeli, ‘Cleansing Western Samoa’, 364.

53 Jane Buckingham, ‘The Inclusivity of Exclusion: Isolation and Community among Leprosy-Affected People in the South Pacific’, Health and History 13, no. 2 (2011): 65–83.

54 Inglis, Mai Lepera, 78–108.

55 Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla, eds, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and US Servicemen, World War Two (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, and Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016), 183–201.

56 Jacqueline Leckie and Alumita Durutalo, ‘Kai Merika! Fijian Children of American Servicemen’, in Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific, 183–201. Martha’s father Samuel Anthony Francese was not named on the birth certificate. Register of Births, Fiji National Archives (FNA), reel 69, no. 155.

57 Adi Romera, pers comm., 7 Sept. 2010.

58 Martha Naua, interview by Jacqueline Leckie, Suva, Oct. 2010.

59 Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Translated by Omid Tofighian (Toronto, Ontario: Anansi International/House of Anansi Press, 2019).

60 Lal, Levelling Wind, 217.

61 Katerina Martina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

62 See Brij V. Lal, ‘A Pacific Turbulence’, The Round Table 110, no. 2 (2021): 278–9.

63 Email from Brij Lal to ‘Edward Brown’, 1 July 2015, Fiji Leaks, https://www.fijileaks.com/home/rip-professor-brij-lal-passes-away-in-brisbane-on-xmas-day-we-did-our-best-to-get-his-torturer-sitiveni-qiliho-arrested-in-london-but-he-escaped-by-fingertips-again-strip-immunity-for-rabuka-bainimarama (accessed 19 Feb. 2024).