I
“Sugar. Yes please.” (Song by Maroon 5 in their 2014 album “V”)
Sugarcane is one of the thirstiest and most demanding agricultural crops on earth. It needs a warm, tropical climate, plentiful rainfall, and extensive human labor. To plant the crop, a worker will lay sections of stalk directly into the soil and cover them by hand (sugarcane is grown this way rather than from seeds). Once the crop grows to roughly 6 to 13 feet over the course of about a year, the worker will set the fields on fire to burn away dry leaves and debris, and to chase out snakes. The worker will then use long machete-like blades to cut individual stalks at the base, as close to the ground as possible, because sucrose concentration is highest in the lower portions of the stalk and diminishes toward the top. The leafy tops will also be cut off and discarded or left as mulch. Hacking away at the stalks, one by one, a worker might cut several tons of cane in a single day. The thick, dense lower stalks, thus harvested, will be sent to a sugar mill for extraction and crystallization. It is an arduous process defined by heat, smoke, and relentless physical repetition.
The history of the crop is as brutal as its agricultural production. Sugarcane originated thousands of years ago in what is now Papua New Guinea and the broader New Guinea region, where people chewed wild cane stalks for their sweetness long before anyone thought to refine them into crystals. From there, the plant spread to the Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, and ultimately to India. By the Gupta period, around 350 AD, Indians had developed and perfected the technique for boiling and refining sugarcane juice into solid crystals, which they called sharkara – the root of the modern word “sugar.” This knowledge spread westward through Persia and into the Arab world, coinciding with the transfer of the Indian knowledge of mathematics (and zero). Arabs subsequently brought sugarcane cultivation across North Africa and into Spain and Sicily during the medieval period. For several centuries, sugar remained a rare and expensive luxury across most of Europe, where people relied heavily on honey, dried fruits, figs, dates, currants, and berries for everyday sweetness.
History is replete with winners, losers, and turning of the tables. In the late 1870s, descendants of the inventors of sharkara were picked up by the British from the fertile plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India, and shipped off as “indentured” laborers to work the cane fields of Fiji, a Pacific island thousands of miles away from home. These laborers were known as Girmityas; Girmit being a distortion of the word “agreement,” a five-year contract signed by the British, often extended to ten or more years through debt, coercion, and manipulation. The arrangement uprooted families and saw a heavy death toll just from the voyage across the sea that took months in packed vessels. On the island, the workers were assigned to plantations, and made to work from dawn to dusk under the tropical sun, hacking away cane, to meet their quotas or face beatings. Women were doubly exploited with their bodies and their labor. In British parlance, this indentured system of formal contracts was a “humane alternative” to African slavery, which had been abolished in the empire in 1833.
Forced labor fueled the consumption patterns of the metropole, and the comforts of many empires were built upon the broken backs of millions. The Girmityas of Fiji never went back. They couldn’t afford the passage, or they had children born in Fiji who knew no other home. Sugar drove slavery elsewhere too. The Portuguese and Spanish had established cane plantations in Madeira, the Canary Islands, Brazil, and the Caribbean, building a mass sugar economy using enslaved African labor. The Caribbean became synonymous with sugar production, and the crop drove an enormous share of the Atlantic slave trade. By the 18th century, sugar had become affordable enough in Europe to sweeten everyday tea and coffee.
The indentured system in Fiji formally ended in 1916. The descendants of the Girmityas, the Indo-Fijians, constitute roughly a third of Fiji’s population, down from nearly half in the mid-20th century. Emigration and ethnic tensions after two coups have steadily reduced their numbers. Fiji still produces sugar, though the industry has declined significantly. The cane fields remain, sprawling across the western lowlands, reminders of the warp and weft of history.
II
The journey westward from Los Angeles to Nadi, Fiji’s gateway for tourists, takes about 12 hours. Somewhere above the vastness of the Pacific, the plane crosses the international date line, a human invention sketched arbitrarily across the expanse of the ocean. In an instant, hours vanish or reappear based on the direction of travel. The descent into Nadi begins over an endless blue with strange patterns composed of atolls, reefs, and islands emerging from the water. The turbofans slow down, the wheels extend, and the plane drops through layers of humid air before its tires meet the tarmac with a jolt and a screech. The landscape outside the windows is a riot of green. This is Viti Levu, the largest of the 800+ islands and islets that constitute the Fiji archipelago. Most are uninhabited. Some are barely more than coral outcroppings. But together they form a nation scattered across an area of ocean larger than many countries.
The first impression stepping off the plane is that of any quintessential coastal town. The air is thick, warm, and distinctly smells of the sea: laden with salt, humidity, and vegetation. I think human brains have a strange archival and recall mechanism – a smell, a tune, or a scenery can trigger vivid involuntary recalls of past experiences. For me, the smell of Nadi airport and the particular combination of heat, humidity, and sea brine transport me to Kerala, to a specific establishment called Kadavu in a town I once spent time in as a student. The connection makes no logical sense, but the olfactory memory is powerful and immediate.
The drive from the airport into town passes through lush fields of sugarcane, palm groves, and patches of forest. It is the rainy summer season this time of year, and the earth is soaked in yellow ochre mud and verdant green. Scattered along the roadside are homes made of concrete, corrugated metal, or thatched wood. There are small shops with brightly painted signs. A temple appears, its gopuram rising incongruously, a piece of South India transplanted halfway across the world.
Nadi is located on the western side of Viti Levu, in the heart of what was once the sugar belt and where Indo-Fijians are most concentrated. The city is a curious place, neither fully Fijian nor fully Indian, but something in between. There are many temples, including the large Sri Siva Subramaniya temple, apparently the largest Hindu temple in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a large structure built in Dravidian style, with towers painted in vibrant hues of red, yellow, and blue. My visit coincides with the festival of Thaipusam, and I get to witness the decoration, the commotion of devotees, and a piece of India.
Walking through Nadi’s streets, there is a strange sensation of familiarity mixed with alienation. The local clothing is recognizable: women in sarees and salwar kameez, men in plain shirts and trousers, and the colors distinctly reminiscent of small-town north India. Names of shops are familiar – Shriji, Meenoo’s, Makanjee’s – and collections and displays familiar. And yet, the context seems wrong. There is the tropical heat, the trees are different, and occasionally there is an Indigenous Fijian face. This is not India, but its echo – a place shaped by India but fundamentally transformed by distance and history. The language is “Fiji Baat,” a creole evolved from the dialects brought by the Girmityas. It is rooted in Bhojpuri and rural vernaculars of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but reshaped by over a century of isolation from the subcontinent. I can understand it, mostly, but it requires effort. The vocabulary is familiar, the grammar recognizable, but the rhythm is different. The intonation, the stress patterns, and the way sentences rise and fall all deviate from what I know. Some words are pronounced in slightly different ways, and the pauses fall in unexpected places. It’s a reminder of the beauty of languages and how they evolve, adapting to the environment and shaped by the confluence of cultures. Fiji Baat is a living link to the past, to the laborers who stepped off the ships more than a century ago. They brought only their dialects, their gods, and maybe hope. Language and faith are portable, and both have survived, adapted, and taken root in this foreign soil. India itself doesn’t appear to exist in the imagination of the local Indo-Fijian community, and the only connection is perhaps by lineage and ritual.
Nadi’s main street is a modest affair, a single road lined with low-rise buildings housing shops, pharmacies, travel agencies, and small eateries. I didn’t see any colonial quarters here, nor any carefully preserved historic district. Perhaps the town was never meant to be a showcase, and was just a service town for the sugar industry. There is a quiet commerce, with shopkeepers sitting in doorways, and shops with displays of cheap clothing on mannequins, knock-off sandals, and sunglasses. Obscure Bollywood music of the '80s and '90s, of the type that might be heard in Indian villages, spills out from crude speakers placed at the entryways of larger establishments. I walk the length of the main street in perhaps 20 minutes. It is not a place designed for strolling; the heat discourages aimless wandering. There are few tourists here; they tend to stay in the resort areas along the coast. Nadi doesn’t give the impression of an exotic paradise from tourism brochures. It is strikingly ordinary; a modest and unassuming working town that does not perform for the tourist gaze. It’s not interested in being picturesque, and it simply is – powerful in its lack of pretense. At least for me, there is also a pervasive sense of melancholy, as if the displacement never fully healed.
III
There is sea all around, achingly beautiful and utterly indifferent. It is the provider of fish and livelihood, the highway connecting the islands, and the source of myths, folklore, and life itself. Capitalism worked its magic and led to the development of Denarau, a purpose-built enclave on reclaimed land, home to marquee resorts and conveniently disconnected from the quotidian humdrum of Nadi town. Port Denarau is a picturesque marina lined with luxury cruisers, catamarans, and charter boats that ferry tourists out into the blue-green waters, generating significant employment and livelihood for locals in the process. There is a cheerful, slightly manufactured atmosphere here: drinks flow freely, Western music accompanies the sunset, and the mood is resolutely holiday. Every morning, day tours depart from Port Denarau, heading west to the Mamanuca Islands, a scattered chain of atolls and islets. Along the way are sand bars, crescents of white sand rising improbably from the middle of the ocean, sometimes just a few meters wide, surrounded by shallow turquoise water perfect for snorkeling. There is Castaway Island, made famous by the Tom Hanks film, and several other islands with resorts that have manicured the wilder edges, turning paradise into product, carefully packaged and priced.
Mamanuca Islands (Image courtesy: Tourism Fiji)
From my privileged vantage point at a fine-dining table at a Denarau resort, I see the white sand and hear the sound of waves breaking at a distance. The sun descends toward the horizon, and the sky moves through shades of orange and pink. The menu offers a delectable “farmer’s thali,” an Indian assortment that has undergone the same transformation as the language of Indo-Fijians. The ingredients are recognizable: dal, sabzi, roti, rice. The spices are familiar. But there is something distinctly foreign about the food: the proportions adjusted, the flavors recalibrated for this place. It is Indian food that has evolved beyond India, and does not project the hubris of India’s modern-day nationalism. It belongs entirely to the people who brought their culinary traditions to this remote archipelago and eventually made it their home. On the table sits a small bowl of sugar sachets. The irony is sharp and inescapable. This pack of crystals carries within it the weight of centuries: the labor that extracted it, the empires that profited from it, the lives it consumed and reshaped. It is simultaneously a symbol of exploitation and of survival, of brutality and of the stubborn persistence of communities that endured.
I think of the Polynesian and Micronesian navigators of the Pacific Islands centuries ago, who perfected inter-island travel on canoes, traveling between islands separated by vast stretches of empty ocean, navigating without instruments or maps. They read the stars, the shape and rhythm of ocean swells, the nature of wind, the flight patterns of seabirds, the color and temperature and smell of the water, the presence of certain fish, the way clouds gathered over distant islands, and everything that the sea below and the sky above offered. They were the original astrologers, with a now-lost knowledge system of extraordinary sophistication, developed over millennia, encoded in chants and passed orally.
The system used by these navigators was called “etak,” which is an inversion of perspective and perhaps a useful metaphor for life. Instead of imagining the canoe moving across a static ocean toward a fixed island, they envisioned the canoe as stationary and believed that the “island comes to you.”
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