Brij V. Lal & K.L. Gillion: The apprentice and the sorcerer

Abstract

Brij Lal was mentored by Ken Gillion during the former’s doctoral work at the Australian National University in the late-1970s. The resulting thesis was a pathbreaking quantitative analysis of the 45,439 North Indians who went to Fiji as indentured labourers between 1879 and 1916 – centering on such variables as the places of origin, their age, gender, marital status, caste, and family circumstances. 1 The much-reduced monograph that derived from the thesis is a thoroughgoing statistical profile that has stood the test of time and been a model for subsequent work. 2 So we can thank Ken Gillion for his part in the ‘making’ of Brij Lal. Gillion and Lal became good friends, each holding the other in high regard. I knew them both, Lal far better than Gillion. As will be seen, Lal and I have contrasting views on Gillion as a person and as a scholar. Bringing to bear my own observations dating back to 1973, the archival record and a reading of Gillion and Lal’s writings, I discuss the evolving relationship between these two major historians of Indo-Fijian indenture.