Indo-Fijians are descended from the 60,000 Indian indentured immigrants brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 and from a smaller number of free migrants who began arriving there from the 1920s onwards. Once their five-year contracts expired, the majority of the indentured labourers chose to remain in Fiji, with only about 24,000 returning to their homeland. In time, the descendants of these immigrants became, as growers and labourers, the backbone of Fiji’s sugar industry for which they had been brought to Fiji in the first place. Now that industry is in severe decline with the expiry of the preferential access to the European market and the vagaries in global sugar prices. Once nearly half the total Fijian population, Indo-Fijian numbers declined substantially to around 30 per cent of the total by 2020 and are still declining due to emigration and a low birthrate. Indo-Fijian history may in the future be a history of immigration to emigration from Fiji. Now, the Indo-Fijians, diminished and declining, stand at crossroads, unsure of their present prospects and apprehensive about their future. Once active agents and proponents of progressive change, they are increasingly its passive recipients. To discuss how this came about is the purpose of this chapter.

The Indo-Fijian quest for equality and acceptance was fraught from the very beginning. The colonial government created a racially compartmentalised society of often conflicting interests and expectations without, for its own survival, providing the conditions of common citizenship. Fiji under the British remained a colony of separate and unequal citizens. The powerful European elite, controlling all the levers of the economy, would not countenance equality with Indo-Fijians whose proper station in the colony, they asserted, was as tillers of the soil who should know their proper place in the larger order of things. ‘We have the Indians here and we have to make the most of it. We are the Colony, not the Indians,’ said the prominent European leader and member of the Executive Council Henry Scott. The Europeans justified their disproportionate legislative power and influence because of their self-assumed role as the ‘trustees’ of the Fijian ‘race’. Preserving the status quo became their major cause. Indigenous Fijian leaders always wanted their position to be paramount, not only in the management of their own internal affairs but also in the affairs of the country.