'A significant history': Shana Chandra on BANJARA

Shana Chandra is a Tamaki Makaurau born writer, researcher and educator of Indo-Fijian heritage and Girmitiya descent, currently based in Limoges, France. Her writing voices the history of her displaced and forgotten indentured-labourer ancestors in their words, repairing and restoring it from beneath the empire's shadow and exploring how the violence and complexities of their indenture rooted into her life growing up in Aotearoa. After living in Japan and Naarm (Melbourne), in 2016 she completed her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Technology in Sydney. Her writing has appeared in Lindsay, Love in the Time of Covid Chronicle, UTS Anthology: The Light Borrowers and Landfall magazine. For the past decade Shana has also worked as a freelance writer and has been featured in international fashion, arts and culture publications.

Kete was lucky enough to catch up with Shana about her debut novel, Banjara.

Bula vinaka, Shana, thank you for speaking to Kete! Can you tell us about Banjara and your inspiration for writing it?

Bula Vinaka & Namaste,

It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak with you!

BANJARA is a novel that follows two women's experiences of Indo-Fijian indenture. It begins with Avani, a woman from the nomadic Banjara community of Rajasthan, who is coerced into leaving the land she has deep ties to. We follow her from the immigration camp in Kolkata onto a ship travelling in inhumane conditions to the sugar plantations of Fiji. It's essentially a story about how she becomes a Girmitiya, but also how she and the women she meets on board begin to resist the colonial brutality around them. 

The novel also follows Avani's great-granddaughter, Meera, who lives in Aotearoa. Like many descendants of Girmitiya, Meera is reaching toward an ancestral legacy that has been silenced, as well as the specific story of her great-grandmother, with whom she feels a deep affinity. She ends up travelling to India, to the place her intuition tells her is the region her great-grandmother came from, where she also encounters an ex-lover, destined to have an arranged marriage.

The inspiration for writing this story really came from my own deep longing for my great-grandparents' origin stories. We knew they were part of this horrific history of the Pacific, but we didn't know how or why they came onboard the ships that trafficked them to Fiji. A lot of that was because of the systemic silencing that occurred. So it felt vital for me to write a mythic origin story for them, primarily using research, but also my community's oral histories, and my imagination to fill in the gaps. It also felt important to have Meera as a contemporary descendant, to show how this colonial atrocity still affects our lives, 147 years later.

You’ve described the book as ‘a love letter to our ancestors whose stories live on in our genes,’ which is obviously very personal. Can you tell us about the research you did to develop the story, both personal and historical?  

I read a lot of Indo-Fijian authors but also lots of academic theses and papers, as well as historical records too, to research as much as I could. I spent a lot of time watching Girmitiya documentaries and viewing artworks by indentured labourer descendants too. It was also an amazing opportunity to sit down with family members and hear their memories of Fiji; what it was like when they were growing up there, the texture of their everyday life. I looked through friends’ photographs and listened to stories about their own great-grandparents. I was born in Aotearoa, and after the first coups many of my extended family moved here, so we stopped visiting Fiji as regularly as we once had. I never had many memories of Fiji, but was able to learn about the country through theirs which was magical.

Before writing the novel, a series of strange coincidences and dreams also began pointing the way in terms of where I needed to go, and what I needed to research. So, just like Meera, I travelled to Rajasthan, where I danced Odissi (a classical Indian dance form) for three months. It was after that, which was a kind of baptism for me, that the writing began.

What is the most interesting or complicated thing you found doing the research?

Even while writing the book, coincidences kept occurring. One of the most shocking happened the morning I woke up with a compulsion to write down the name of every woman onboard the Hereford, which was the ship my paternal great-grandmother travelled on. It took me over three hours to go through each immigration pass to find each woman’s name. After I’d finished, I read each aloud, and then burst into tears, because I knew many of these women would have helped my great-grandmother survive, even in the smallest ways, and is why I am sitting here today.

As I was going through the passes, something written on one woman’s immigration pass really didn’t sit right with me. Her baby had died on board at just fifteen days old, and the cause of death handwritten on her pass, was that her mother had suffocated her. It just didn’t feel right.

Later that same day, I happened to be scrolling through Instagram when @cutlassmagazine, a platform dedicated to documenting indenture across the world, had a new post. It retold the same story from different sources of how newborns were thrown overboard on indenture boats for being considered a nuisance, and how women actively had to hide their babies from the ship's captains. One account, from a man who had himself been indentured, described how the seas became particularly rough on his passage and the captain feared they wouldn't make it. There was an Indian mother with a newborn baby girl on board. The British captain threw the baby into the ocean, claiming it as a sacrifice to the sea to ensure safe passage.

After that, it was vital for me to weave this story into BANJARA — as a way of speaking our truths that were never written down.

Who is your ideal reader for this book? Who needs to read it?

My ideal reader is anyone who belongs to the Indo-Fijian community or has ancestors who were indentured labourers throughout the world. We have so little representation, and it's kind of the book I wish I had growing up. But beyond that, I think it's an important read for anyone who belongs to or resides in the Pacific region, because it outlines a significant history from our corner of the world that many people haven't been made aware of.

What Aotearoa New Zealand book do you wish you’d written? 

I'd love to have written Vincent O'Sullivan's Ralph Hotere: The Dark is Light Enough: A Biographical Portrait, Mark Forman's Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist, Paul Moon's Ans Westra: A Life in Photography, and Craig Robertson's Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly, just so I could have unfettered access to each of the artists' artworks, photographs and music.

But in terms of fiction, Rebecca K. Reilly's Greta & Valdin — so I could pretend to have even one iota of her wit.

What’s been your best read this year so far? 

My best read this year so far has been Dominic Hoey's 1985, for how it captures a certain spirit of community and creativity particular to that time and place in Tāmaki Makaurau. It's been such a pleasure to read it while traversing those same streets and suburbs (though they've changed so drastically) now that I'm back in Aotearoa. The ending made me cry, and I love how it reminds you that the places and people you grew up with never, ever, leave you.

And last, but definitely not least, what are you writing next? 

It's such early days, with a lot of research still to happen, and I'm still so focused on bringing BANJARA out into the world that I'm not sure I should even say it out loud yet. But I can give you a clue: the novel is tentatively called The Little Panther.