Unveiling stereotypes about Fiji’s girmitiya women

Abstract

This paper pays homage to the late Professor, Brij Lal, for the critical role he played in debunking colonial and patriarchal myths about Fiji’s Indian indentured (girmitiya) women. From as early as 1985, Lal critiqued the way the British administrators wielded power over displaced female labourers by misrepresenting them in internal and external exchanges. My specific focus here is on the way he deconstructed colonial and patriarchal tropes associated with indentured women such as their alleged immorality and promiscuousness, ‘sexual jealousy’, ‘maternal negligence’ and madness, by situating these constructs within a specific historical context. With these interventions as the foundation for this paper, I will illustrate how my own interdisciplinary investigations in the interconnecting fields of gender, indenture, subaltern studies and minor history have attempted to address Lal’s concern that girmitiya women’s perspectives were absent in the historical records.