State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Series. Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2017. xvi, 333 pp. (Coloured photos, illustrations.) US$53.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-760-46121-8.
Festschrifts are usually rather dull affairs, full of pious platitudes surrounding a selection of essays from dutiful students and colleagues. Bearing Witness is pleasingly different, more personalized, satisfying, and serving up contributions that explain Fiji’s tortured post-colonial history in insightful fashion. The editors have assembled a volume that is “part intellectual biography, part book review, part memoir, part reflection, part tribute” (3).
Its subject is the historian, political commentator, and constitutional actor Brij V. Lal, born to illiterate Indo-Fijian parents in Fiji, dedicated to self-improvement and higher education, and a prolific author who has enjoyed an academic career at Pacific universities, ending with a long tenure at the Australian National University in Canberra. The Festschrift consists of seventeen essays by contributors who were Lal’s colleagues, friends and/or students; a detailed introduction by the editors; and some quirky, affectionate tributes in verse and prose. The book is divided into four sections. The first gives us three interviews with Lal carried out by Doug Munro (1997), Vilsoni Hereniko (2000), and Jack Corbett (2015). Straddling the trajectory of Lal’s life and career, they give us a wide-screen overview of his evolving ideas and positions. Some repetition is unavoidable but nonetheless one gets a vivid sense of Lal’s various intellectual and creative “turnings.” A selection of essays follows, reflecting on Brij’s influence on indenture studies. Section three contains four, mostly original essays on Fiji’s politics, though Stewart Firth’s chapter on the Fiji elections of 2014 is republished from Round Table. The final section, “Family Album,” is a collage of essays, personal memories, and poems that touch on Lal’s creative writings and his influence on a range of students and colleagues.
For the readers of Pacific Affairs, perhaps the most valuable part of this Festschrift is the analysis of Fiji’s conflicted post-colonial history and its political crises. Robert Norton provides a detailed analysis of the gradual deterioration of Fiji’s political environment as colonial ruler Britain struggled with balancing the interests of Fijians, Indians, and Europeans. He retells the familiar story of mistakes made, concessions given to indigenous Fijians, the insufficient respect for Indo-Fijian resentments, indeed Indo-Fijians’ own insufficient respect for compromise over their absolute political demands, particularly around a common electoral roll after independence. Norton argues in the same forensic spirit of Lal while gently disagreeing with him about the efficacy of a common franchise had it been introduced in the 1970s. Martha Kaplan and John Kelly discuss how different Fiji’s decolonization history was from other international cases. Decolonization was a more complicated, local operation than grand theories allow, a point their essay emphasizes in the spirit of Lal, with his historian’s eye for the local, the particular, the contingent. Yash Ghai follows up with the importance of constitutions, Fiji’s 1970 constitution being “a ticking time bomb” (170) according to Britain’s last governor. Ghai takes the reader through the subsequent explosions as coup followed coup, constitution followed constitution, chiefly power eroded and military rule grew, with its negative impact on democracy and the rule of law. Ghai’s is a no-holds-barred analysis whose prognosis for Fiji is less than optimistic. Stewart Firth on the 2014 elections serves up a similar dose of cold reality as he traces the attempts to preserve the dominance of indigenous Fijians and especially of their chiefs, until all collapsed under military interventions that paradoxically have ushered in the triumph of the common electoral roll that Lal and Indo-Fijians championed for so long. But Firth documents a conspicuous lack of respect for representative institutions and the instruments of a free press in the “new” Fiji, with its powerful military always looming. What happens after the modern, charismatic Frank Bainimarama leaves the scene? This collection of essays provides a useful primer of readings on Fiji’s political history and its future possibilities, bearing witness in the way Brij Lal himself did continually over thirty years.
Of course, as Nicholas Halter, one of Lal’s own students, points out, Lal “also played an active role in shaping his nation’s history and bringing to the fore voices previously unheard or ignored” (198). This Festschrift makes clear his significance as a scholar of the indenture experience for Indian émigrés to Fiji, and the extent to which his early quantifying approach and later more social history-oriented work were inspirations to scholars working on the Indian diaspora. Lal’s reputation also rests on his membership in the committee that reviewed the 1990 constitution. That the 1997 draft, with its commitment to multi-ethnic government, racial harmony, and national unity ultimately fell foul of vested interests in Fiji’s parliament cannot be laid at the committee’s door. Lal’s other career-long activities that this book celebrates are his robust commentary on Fiji’s political life through the years, and his creative writing as a historian who believes some greater historical truths lie in imaginative storytelling. The former ultimately ended in a vindictive government banning Lal, along with his blameless wife, Padma, from entering Fiji. His “faction” writing attests to Lal’s essential restlessness as a historian of and in the Pacific, for whom creative writing is a release from the “gut-wrenching” (54) experience of tracing Fiji’s history as citizen-historian over the twentieth century.
Lal’s writings have sometimes been criticized as too empiricist, lacking theorized frameworks. But he himself rejects that, highlighting a lightly applied set of beliefs and values that impregnate his analyses. He writes what Kaplan and Kelly dub “deliberately modernist works,” his Broken Waves a “textured and reliable history” (156) of the Fiji Islands on an epic scale that will stand the test of historiographical time. This Festschrift bears witness to a personality whose gravitas and stubborn adherence to principled political values are balanced by emotional attachments and his “bad habit” (280) of obsession with cricket. This celebration of his professional life is well produced, though some errors in spelling of names and imprecise book titles occur. It is occasionally sentimental in tone, but its intentions are admirable and its subject equally so.
Peter Hempenstall
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia