My Twenty – One Years in the Fiji Islands & The Story of the Haunted Line

My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands provides a vivid account of the lives of Indians, indentured and free, in early Fiji: the coolie ships, the coolie lines, the struggles with the overseers and law courts, the towns, the bazaars, and Indian religious rituals and festivals. An appendix to the book provides further information about people, places and events described. Also included is Totaram Sanadhya’s The Story of the Haunted Line, a moving story of a man saved from fear and despair by Hindu devotion and the friendship of indigenous Fijians.

Totaram Sanadhya came to Fiji as a girmitiya, or indentured labourer, in 1893. In 1914, he returned to India and together with Bernarsidas Chaturvedi wrote this book, a powerful indictment of the indentured labour system and the treatment of Indians in Fiji. In India My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands was immediately translated from Hindi into several other South Asian languages. It was one of the most frequently used sources of information and argument during the public movement in India that led to the abolition of indenture in the 1910s, the movement that Gandhi later called the first national satyagraha. It was first published in English by the Fiji Museum in 1991.

This book is a window into early Fiji as seen by the immigrants from India. It should be of interest to anyone who seeks to understand Fiji’s history.