Banjara
by Shana Chandra

In 1834, the British Empire began the controversial practice of relocating thousands of people from India to work in the agricultural fields of various British territories. The people who signed up called themselves Girmitiya – the people of the agreement. The scheme seemed sensible on paper: the recruitment was to be voluntary; the workers were to get free passage and fair wages; they had a choice to walk away after five years and return to their homeland.

The reality, as usual, was more dismal. The people worked under brutal conditions and lived in tiny barracks within labour camps. They had no protection against exploitation. All children born to them were automatically indentured themselves. The journey back was close to impossible to make. By the time the practice ended in 1916, more than a million Indians had been displaced. Fiji was the last British territory to adopt the scheme. Even so, by 1916, more than sixty thousand people had been transported, forever changing the ethnic and cultural landscape of Fiji, and leaving generations to deal with the psychological scars of displacement.

Shana Chandra’s captivating debut novel, Banjara, is about the Girmitiyas of Fiji. The story tells of two women, Avani and Meera, born one hundred years apart, and of the transformative journey that each of them makes – Avani crossing two oceans in order to flee India and the past, and Meera who desperately retraces the path back to the forgotten land where she hopes to uncover the mysteries of her origins. It is a story of how members of the diaspora community live with the inevitable fractures that form within their psyches – created by the sudden rupture from home – and how they evolve in order to survive, and eventually, triumph. Through Chandra’s elegant prose, we witness the transformation of two women aided by their spiritual traditions.

The novel opens in 1888 when Avani, a young woman living in the remote villages of Rajasthan in India is assaulted and impregnated by a British colonial officer. Facing ostracism and the loss of her caste, she decides to kill herself, but Jaj, a British man who shows great concern for her, puts her on board the Hereford, together with 500 girmitiyas bound for Fiji. Avani becomes one of them, her child destined to be indentured as well. She is fearful, wondering how she will survive once disconnected from the land which she had always considered part of her identity:

Our people – the Banjara – are made of the red dust of Rajasthan. Though we roam and we roam, it is this land we are moulded from …. The dust bleeds from the cracks in my skin.

As a healer, Avani is dependent on her knowledge of the land’s gifts – leaves, seeds, barks, petals – to stop diseases and ward off death. How can she fulfil her dharma in a land whose plants she cannot name? Though she hasn’t yet accepted the child growing inside her as part of herself, she is nevertheless aware that this new cord of life shall never be able to join the others under the ancient banyan tree ‘where all our navel cords are buried, each of them intertwining to form nets so strong they tether us to this land’.

Generations after Avani, Meera, born in Aotearoa from Indo-Fijian parents, grows up in Auckland feeling disconnected and rootless. Meera has a burning desire to trace her origins back to India, but all her parents know little about their ancestors and the past. (No one talked about it back then,’ they tell her.) Her research reveals that few of the indentured made the voyage back from Fiji.

For their family members back in India, it was as if their relatives had simply vanished. They woke up one morning not knowing where their brother or sister had gone. It would only be many years later, when a long-lost descendant would return and a grand-aunty would recognise the line of the nose in front of them, the almond shape of an eye, or the smile with tips of white teeth showing, that the landscape of this descendant’s body would reveal their sibling’s survival. I wondered if my paradadi had gone back, even when her face sagged and her cataracts clouded, what feature of hers her family would have recognised. Was it a feature she had given me?

This need to recover what was left behind leads Meera to fall in love with Vihan – an Indian man who himself is trying to navigate two lives, one in India and the other in New Zealand. She clings to Vihan like a lifeline to the past, as if he might bring her ancestors to her just as he brings back Indian cookies from his trips. The relationship seems a dead-end: Vihan’s parents are arranging a marriage for him – a practice Meera cannot embrace although her own parents were matched through their astrological charts. Even so, she researches her past with renewed fervour, hoping that her origins might satisfy Vihan’s conservative parents.

Meera’s mother grew up in Fiji. While her siblings agonise over the negative impacts that the Fijian coup will have upon their ‘beloved island’, she does not share the feeling of loss. She remembers getting up at dawn to work weeding the field before going to school. When they watch a Bollywood movie together, she tells Meera that the Fiji Baat word for beautiful, ‘julum’, was said to have come from the Hindi ‘zulum’ meaning ‘tyranny’ or ‘cruelty’. The map of Fiji becomes for Meera ‘an exclamation point…a warning of the contradictions, of the exploitation and yet survival that had taken place there.’

This strengthens her resolve to travel to India. ‘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 had been born to, to know who they were before Fiji moulded us.’

The novel interrogates the naming of peoples and experiences. Meera debates the implications of being called ‘Fijian’ versus ‘Indo-Fijian’. She makes the case for the preservation of ‘Girmitiya’, the term that the people chose for themselves and which marks ‘the significance of what we went through’. Who is doing the naming is important, revealing society’s power dynamics. A dog belonging to a British officer is named Vishnu. The Colonial Sugar Refining Company becomes ‘Chelsea Sugar Refinery’ to sweeten its bitter history. Meanwhile, Meera’s father and his siblings have to live with different family names because of bureaucratic errors made by the British registry office.

While Meera is obsessed with discovering the name of her great-grandmother, Avani herself is ambivalent about it: ‘My home is the red dust of the Thar, which is the hue of my skin and more myself than my name. That has always been changeable.’ At one point, Avani is referred to by the number ‘299’ which she accepts: her real identity, validated by spirits that dwell in trees and rocks, is untouched.

Banjara is more than a story of these two women. Both Avani’s and Meera’s journeys are undertaken with the help of a squadron of strong feminine characters. From the recruitment camp in Kolkata to the great Indian and Pacific Oceans, Avani’s long voyage offers wonderful scenes of camaraderie and friendship. Women from India’s various regions, castes, and faiths – Brahmin widows, Muslim girls – are packed together in cramped quarters, eating, worshipping, and sleeping side by side. ‘[T]hose deemed ‘untouchable’…who are used to congregating only in corners, are touched by us and touch us too.’ The women exchange practical wisdom from their own cultures. They protect each other from the cruelty of shipmen, as well as from threats of cholera and smallpox.

There’s a great sense of freedom and independence among these Girmitiya women – a sense that creative forces are churning in the ocean foam and that new identities are being formed even as they make their way over the waters. As Salman Rushdie observed in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands, the experience of the migrant is embodied within the word ‘translation’ itself, the concept of being ‘borne across’. As migrants move from place to place, they generate new worlds with their ever-changing identities, creating new universes of meanings. This is exactly what happens to the women as they travel across the world and make their new lives in Fiji.

Banjara is a novel that celebrates feminine power. All its words lead to Shakti, the feminine energy that makes life in the universe possible. But it is not her manifestation as the nurturing, preserving Parvati that is invoked here, nor the warrior and defender Durga. The repeated emphasis is on Kali – goddess of transformation and destruction, who razes the old in order to call forth the new. ‘In the last strike of lightning, I see … the face of Kali.’

Immigration demands fresh cycles of incarnation, the sacrifice of obsolete identities, in order to create avatars suited for the alien world. Without Kali’s black protruding tongue – ‘the devourer of all things’ – no evolution is possible. Kali’s tongue is not just the tongue of fire that consumes: it is also the tongue from which new words, new names, new identities can spring forth.

Banjara is a beautiful and profoundly spiritual book. Chandra treats the psychic trauma of migration with penetrating insight, respect, and tenderness. It was as if Avani herself has come to show us, with the seeds of stories that we already have, how humans can withstand anything by recreating ourselves.