Brij V. Lal is a distinguished historian focusing on the history of the Indo-Fijian people and the broader Pacific region. His work frequently delves into the complex intersections of cultures and the enduring impact of historical events on the present. With a keen interest in societies that possess unwritten pasts, he explores themes of cultural identity and diaspora. Lal offers insightful perspectives on the histories of the Pacific and their connections with Australia.
Professor Brij Lal¿s life is a remarkable journey of a scholar and an intellectual whose writings are truly transformative; a man of moral clarity and courage who also has deep pain at being cut off from his homeland.¿ ¿ Professor Michael Wesley, Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University
Indians of the indentured diaspora have a remarkable lot in common. Meeting as 'foreign' students in India, the girmitiya descendants from Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji and Natal immediately develop a close bonding because of their use of common words, similarity of names, culinary preferences and transported texts. In similar manner, when Brij Lal visited Trinidad in 1998, both his physical as well as his spiritual being enabled him to blend immediately with his Bhojpuri brethren in Chinidad Tapu. His book, Chalo Jahaji, focusses ostensibly on the girmit experience in Fiji. It seeks to tell the story of 60,000 Indians who were indentured there between 1879 and 1916.
To read this evocative book is to be thrust into a Fiji that has, for the moment, been snuffed out by military a Fiji of political parties, parliamentary politics, elections, manifestoes, campaigns, democractic defence of interests, party manoeuvres, and constitutional protection of rights and freedoms. It is a comprehensive and eloquent re-telling of the story of Fiji politics from independence in 1970 to 1999 through the perspective of Fiji’s greatest living statesman, Jai Ram Reddy, by one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of its history and politics.