Vijay Mishra, presently a professor of English in Canada, introduced us to the pleasures of English literature. With a fluent command of the language, a well tended goatee beard and flamboyant clothes, he cut a striking figure. He started a class library of classics which each of us had to read and talk about during the ‘morning talk’ period everyday. We read, while still in grade eleven, novels by Patrick White, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, William Golding, and many others. With Vijay we began to cherish the pleasures of the imagination. When he left, Subramani, now professor of English at the University of the South Pacific, took over. He was more reserved, reflective and moody, but no less effective as a teacher. To Vijay’s list he added Joseph Conrad, whose Lord Jim he dissected for us with great brilliance. My most enduring memory of him, though, is of the day he played for us in class a gramophone record of T.S. Eliot reading his ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The words of that poem still ring in my memory.
By the time I finished high school, I knew I was hooked on the humanities. At the University of the South Pacific, recently opened and keen to impress its seriousness as a place of higher learning, I encountered teachers who nourished our intellectual appetite. Ron Crocombe, lively and energetic, made history come alive with his intimate, anecdotal knowledge of Pacific people and events. Ahmed Ali introduced us to the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized. Walter Johnson, the great American historian, taught the history of the civil rights movement with stirring passion. But my best history teacher, without doubt, was June Cook, a middle-aged, chain-smoking English woman. A Cambridge graduate, she had worked at the United Nations before coming to the Pacific. She taught us the history of European expansion and of the Spanish empire. Why the latter, I have no idea. She read her lectures, word by word, perfectly balanced sentences, perfectly timed, with great authority and clarity. She did not compromise her standards. I somehow felt that she was talking to us the same way she would have talked to students in England or the United States. She expected us to raise our standards. We did. June detected a talent for history in me, and urged me to leave the Pacific-it was too small, too much on the margins, too poorly documented, I was destined for bigger things-and specialize in European or Asian history at a good English or American university. For a while, I toyed with the idea of studying European fascism in the inter-war period, and even corresponded with Marjorie Jacobs of the University of Sydney! June’s personal interest in my future and the belief that I could amount to something pushed me on. I have never met anyone quite like her. And she was the one who persuaded me-insisted actually-that I give up the idea of law as a career. Thank you June, wherever you are.
All these people in their own way provided inspiration, guidance and encouragement. I learnt from their example that teaching was a noble profession, that a life devoted to reading and writing was not a life wasted, that making a difference was somehow more satisfying than making a quick buck. For this and much more, I am more grateful than I will ever be able to express. Closer to home, Padma has been my companion, supporter, critic and encourager from the very beginning. Without her, there would have been no journey to undertake. I need say no more. But I want to dedicate this book to Ben, my brother, who died unnaturally young. He was among the kindest, gentlest, most generous human beings I have ever known. He was gifted, wise beyond his years; and he knew the meaning of pain. He sacrificed so much of his own so that we-not only his younger siblings but also nieces and nephews and other children from poor homes in the village and the community at large-could complete our education. To him, alas, my debt will never be repaid except in the memory of the heart.
To the people who have assisted me in the production of this volume, I offer my sincere thanks. They include Jude Shanahan, the resident artist and word processing expert in the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University, to whom I am grateful for many things, but on this occasion especially for designing the cover and preparing the volume for publication. Carol Taylor helped with the technical production of the manuscript. William Copeland at the Fiji Museum reproduced the historical photographs. Kate Vusoniwailala, Director of the Fiji Museum, encouraged me to complete this project which, she said, would contribute to the Museum’s plans to reach out to the Indo-Fijian community whose history and heritage she is keen to give more focused representation than in the past. I applaud her vision and wish her success. Doug Munro has been a helpful and constructive critic over the years. He encouraged me to put my essays together. I am grateful to him for that as well as for his own words in the book. I also acknowledge Aubrey Parke’s interest in the making of this book. Aubrey was District Commissioner Northern in the late 1960s when I was completing the last years of my primary education. He has read my words with care and understanding and a critical eye. His affection for this Labasa kisan’s boy is warmly appreciated. Vinaka Vakalevu, Dhanyabad, Thank you.
A final word about the title of this book. An exact translation is impossible, so I have translated ‘chalo’ as ‘let’s go’, and ‘jahaji’ (from jahaj-ship) as ‘my ship mates’. It could just as easily have been translated as ‘let’s move on/leave, my fellow travellers/friends’. Whatever the words, the sense is of a shared, open-ended physical journey to some distant place, across the seas, over the horizon. Some Indo-Fijians were barely able to suppress an embarrassed laugh when I told them the title of the volume still in preparation. They reacted as if they had been reminded of some vaguely mirthful misadventure of long ago. ‘Jahaji’ is a word of a bygone era, and’chalo’ is colloquial, rough, rustic equivalent of the standard Hindi ‘chalen’ or ‘chaliye’. Their reaction is symptomatic of the general Indo-Fijian ambivalence about their past. They have moved on in the world, made something of themselves; they do not want to know, or be reminded of, the sorry circumstances of their forebears and the long distance that the community has travelled since girmit ended nearly a century ago. For them, the past is past. There is no need for literary or intellectual engagement with it. There is no consciousness of history in the community and, sadder still, no urgency to know about it-sad because Indo-Fijians place so much store by education which has made them what they are. I hope this volume will contribute in a small way toward reversing this trend.