Review: Banjara, by Shana Chandra

An Aotearoa-born (now France-based) writer of Indo-Fijian and Girmitiya descent, Shana Chandra has written widely across global magazine and digital platforms, engaging critically with fashion, art, design, and culture. In Banjara, her captivating debut novel, she turns to fiction in a work that seeks not only to tell a story, but to recover one. Drawing on research, oral histories, and imaginative reconstruction, the novel moves between past and present in two narrative strands, exploring how the legacies of Indo-Fijian indenture continue to reverberate across generations.

Avani, a young woman from a nomadic community in Rajasthan, is torn from her home during the girmit era – the period between 1879 and 1916 when the British transported more than 60,000 Indians to work on sugar plantations in Fiji as indentured labour. She must survive the brutal journey across the ocean to a country and a future she does not know. A century later, her great-granddaughter Meera, born in Auckland, seeks to make sense of her fractured heritage. Together, their stories trace a lineage marked by displacement, colonial labour extraction, and an ongoing search for belonging. 

Avani’s story is firmly embedded within the friendships of the women taken aboard the Hereford with her, relationships that sustain her throughout the journey and upon her arrival in the new land. These female characters, vividly drawn and purposefully centred, offer a counterweight to the brutality of the journey and the conditions of indentured life. Chandra’s choice to place these connections at the emotional core of Avani’s narrative humanises the experience of indenture, highlighting the resilience, agency, and solidarity of the Girmitiyas in the face of their exploitation. The women’s strength, while compelling, softens the viscerality of their fear and confusion, the depth of their uprooting, and the strangeness of the new land. As well, the narrative rarely lingers on the perpetrators, the Gora, except where necessary. This restraint may well be a deliberate choice, one that privileges survival over spectacle, though it may leave some wanting a fuller reckoning with the violence and dislocation that underpin the story. Whether this lightness registers as a strength or a limitation will likely depend on the reader.

In the contemporary strand, Meera must reckon with the broken links of her heritage. Language becomes both a link to her past and a reminder of her estrangement. As her understanding of Fiji Hindi – both ‘a broken Hindi’ and ‘a language of repair,’ stitching together fragments of dialect, English, and Fijian – begins to slip away, becoming ‘ghost words’, Meera searches for connection elsewhere. She finds it in her relationship with Vihan, an ‘Indian-Indian,’; in traditional dance; and ultimately in her journey to reconnect with the homeland of her ancestors:

‘I wanted to know who we were before Fiji, before indenture had withered our backs and the coups had slapped us with shame. I needed to understand the land that my people had been born to, to know who they were before Fiji moulded us.’

This inheritance – complex, conflict-filled, and largely unspoken – is one shared by a significant proportion of Fiji’s population today. To that end, Banjara speaks not only to the past, but to the ongoing realities for descendants of the Girmitiya and the legacies they continue to navigate. A colonial history shaped by divide-and-rule policies, land tensions, and political instability, leading to military coups in 1987, 2000, and 2006, has contributed to further waves of displacement, as many Indo-Fijians leave Fiji to begin again elsewhere.

This produces a particular dislocation of identity, of not quite being recognised as Pasifika, yet only feeling distantly connected to India. It is this tension, and the silences that surround it, that Chandra explores through Meera’s story. Fiji becomes, at once, a ‘mythical land’ of ancestral departure and a tourist paradise masking a more difficult history – one built, in part, on the labour of those who were forced to produce the sugar that fuelled its economy.

In the end, Meera arrives at a different, more expansive, understanding of belonging:

‘I had been looking for a land mass, a continent, an island to tell me who I was… The South Pacific Ocean was our birthplace… We were South Pacific people.’ 

Chandra, whose eight great-grandparents were Girmitiya, has taken on no small task with this novel. Weaving together oral histories and sparse archival records, and drawing on her own inheritance, she has produced a novel that is both thoughtful and resonant, and that deepens our understanding of a significant yet often overlooked history while opening space for reflection on identity, inheritance, and belonging. Banjara is a book that deserves a wide readership, and one that will, I hope, inspire many other stories like it.

Tracey Sharp is a Pākehā/Fijian writer from Tāmaki Makaurau whose work is shaped by questions of inequality, identity, and belonging. She holds Master’s degrees in Sociology and Creative Writing from the University of Auckland.