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Struggle and Sufferings of Girmitiya: A Study of Writings of Indo-Fijins Writers
Abstract
The term “Girmitiya Literature” refers to the writings created by the descendants of the Girmitiyas. During the postcolonial era, the British government suffered, while third-world countries gained from their toil, friendliness, and natural surroundings as they migrated towards the centre. Authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Satyendra Nandan, M.G. Vassanji, Vijay Mishra, Sudesh Mishra, K.S. Manian, and others used their writing as a way to communicate their suffering. These Girmitiyas gradually gained access to the administration due to their loyalty and honesty. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the creation and growth of Girmitiya literature, as well as its unique characteristics and influences on modern literature and daily life. Fiji had public events, speeches, marches, and publications to mark the century of indenture. The impulse for critical and creative response accelerated along with the deluge of publications brought on by the end of colonial rule in various Pacific Island countries. The nation of Fiji experienced political unrest during this time of growing agency and autonomy as concerns about the country’s identity and course were voiced. The pain of indenture, which many Indo-Fijians gave legendary significance and which may be seen as serving as an origin narrative for Indo-Fijians, served as a vehicle for many of these authors to express their sense of rootedness in Fiji. The indenture system, or girmit, was seen by Vijay Mishra as the fundamental ideology of Indo-Fijian writers. However, by interpreting girmit in terms of false awareness, he is able to interpret Indo-Fijian worries in terms of political blindness and cultural isolation. Instead, this chapter argues that Marianne Hirsh’s research on postmemory can help us understand girmit in a useful way. Vijay Mishra later revised girmit ideology as being based on memories of betrayal, building on Sudesh Mishra’s earlier definition of girmit as nonagreement. This chapter suggests that the pains of girmit that plague literature from the century act as postmemories by examining works from the era, especially Subramani’s short tales. The study also makes an effort to evaluate the writings of many Indo-Fijians who have immortalised their forefathers’ valiant acts in the literature. In their writings, authors such as Vijay Mishra, Satendra Nandan, Sudesh Mishra, and Subramani have skilfully portrayed these Girmitiyas as heroes of Fiji, having witnessed their struggle and suffering through the eyes of their forefathers.
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World mass migration began in the early nineteenth century, when advances in transportation technology and industrial revolutions at home enabled increasing numbers of people to set off for other parts of the globe in search of a better life. Two centuries later, there is no distant African, Asian, or Latin American village that is not within reach of some high-wage OECD labor market. This book is the first comprehensive economic assessment of world mass migration taking a long-run historical perspective, including north-north, south-south, and south-north migrations. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, both economists and economic historians, consider two centuries of global mobility, assessing its impact on the migrants themselves as well as on the sending and receiving countries.
Global Migration and the World Economy covers two great migration waves: the first, from the 1820s to the beginning of World War I, when immigration was largely unrestricted; the second, beginning in 1950, when mass migration continued to grow despite policy restrictions. The book also explores the period between these two global centuries when world migration shrank sharply because of two world wars, immigration quotas, and the Great Depression. The authors assess the economic performance of these world migrations, the policy reactions to deal with them, and the political economy that connected one with the other. The last third of Global Migration and the World Economy focuses on modern experience and shows how contemporary debates about migration performance and policy can be informed by a comprehensive historical perspective.
Where once were dispersions, there now is diaspora. It may seem anachronistic to say so, since the Greek “diaspora” is the older term, and in its restrictive usage has been applied from Antiquity to Jewish, then also to Greek and Armenian, social formations. Yet the significant transformation of the last few decades is the move towards re-naming as diasporas the more recent communities of dispersion, those that were formed in the five centuries of the modern era and which were known by other names until the late 1960s: as exile groups, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth.
This volume examines recent examples of Argentine literature, film, theatre and visual art from the children of the disappeared. By exploring their creative narration of childhood memories and the controversial use of parody, humour and fantasy, Maguire considers how this post-dictatorship generation are increasingly looking towards the past in order to disrupt the politics of the present. More broadly, this interdisciplinary study also scrutinizes the relevance of postmemory in a Latin American context, arguing that the politics of local Argentine memory practices must be taken actively into account if such a theoretical framework is to remain a productive and appropriate analytical lens. The Politics of Postmemory thus engages critically with theories of cultural memory in the Argentine, Latin American and global contexts, resulting in a timely and innovative text that will be of significant interest to students and scholars in the fields of, among others, cultural studie
s, film studies, critical theory and trauma studies.
This is the first collection of international scholarship on the fiction of Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh s work is read by a wide audience and is well regarded by general readers, critics, and scholars throughout the world. Born in India, Ghosh has lived in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His work spans genres from contemporary realism to historical fiction to science fiction, but has consistently dealt with the dislocations, violence, and meetings of peoples and cultures engendered by colonialism. The essays in this volume analyze Ghosh s novels in ways that yield new insights into concepts central to postcolonial and transnational studies, making important intertextual connections and foregrounding links to prevailing theoretical and speculative scholarship. The work s introduction argues that irony is central to Ghosh s vision and discusses the importance of the concepts of testimony and history to Ghosh s narratives. An invaluable interview with Amitav Ghosh discusses individual works and the author s overall philosophy".
For Holocaust survivors who have been separated and exiled from a ravaged world, memory is necessarily an act not only of recall but also of mourning, mourning often inflected by anger, rage, and despair. Children of survivors live at a further temporal and spatial remove from the decimated world of their parents. Still, the power of mourning and memory, and the depth of the rift dividing their parents' lives, impart to them something that is akin to memory. I have chosen to call this secondary, or second-generation, memory "postmemory." Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created. Much of contemporary European and American philosophy, literature, and art is influenced by Holocaust postmemory. This article examines the discourses of postmemory in the work of several artists who have attempted to find the aesthetic shapes that convey the mixture of ambivalence and desire, mourning and recollection, presence and absence that characterize postmemory. Because photographs are often read as traces, material connections to a lost past, and because many photographic images have survived even though their subjects did not, photography provides a particularly powerful medium of postmemory. The "Tower of Faces" in the United States Holocause Memorial Museum is such a postmemorial form created for future generations who, through the ordinary domestic photograph and the affiliative gazes it constructs, are included among the children and grandchildren of the people depicted in the images. The artists Christian Boltanski (French) and Shimon Attie (American) both use archival photographs-of Jewish schoolchildren and of the Jewish quarter in Berlin, respectively-as the basis for a new composite memorial aesthetic. All three texts represent the perspective of children of survivors: they need both to rebuild and to mourn the lost world of their parents.
The recent short listing of Amitav Ghosh's latest novel Sea of Poppies for this year's Man Booker Prize is an occasion for all of us to rejoice. In fact, Sea of Poppies has been received favorably by the Booker jury for the compelling story told against an epic historical canvas. The first in Ghosh's new trilogy of novels, Sea of Poppies is a stunningly vibrant and intensely human work that confirms his reputation as a master storyteller. Sea of Poppies tells the compelling story of how it is that in the ship Ibis, headed to Caribbean sugar plantations, small new worlds are forged, bringing together north Indian women, Bengali Zamindars, black men, rural laborers and Chinese seamen. The novel closes with the Ibis in mid-ocean in a storm. Serang Ali, leader of the lascars, has abandoned the ship. Few key figures survive and watch from the deck the disappearance of the long boat. If Rushdie can be said to have revitalized the Indian novel in English with the 1981 publication of the magnificent Midnight's Children, Ghosh's fiction has over the years probed the unlit corners of the genre and brought it into powerful dialogue with other places, peoples and times. Amitav Ghosh's career began in the experimental wake of midnight's children and the techniques it put into play: magical realism, satire, wordplay, mythology, allegories etc. one of the recurring themes in Ghosh's work is that globalization in terms of trade, migration and cultural contact is not new. Putting up a moderate stance, Ghosh believes that although European colonialism constitutes a great rupture in the histories of Asia and Africa, out of these tragedies communities were unmade and again made. Sea of Poppies is imbued by a deep commitment to human values. In this joint paper we propose to examine the underlying philosophy of Amitav Ghosh, in understanding the evolution of human society and to reclaim all that in our heterogeneous culture is valuable and ultimately indispensable. (326 words)
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