Part 1 of 4: Women in Indian Indenture - A Spectacle of Historical Persistences
BUTAKOCI (STOLEN) the musical theatre production on Human Trafficking, lends a delicate hand-brush to the excavating of Indian women’s histories which reside in the deeper sediments of the overall ‘archaeological’ site of indenture.
A REVIEW: BUTAKOCI (STOLEN) — A Musical Theatre Production on Human Trafficking in Fiji
AUTHOR: Mary Rokonadravu
DISCLOSURE OF INTEREST STATEMENT: This is an Independent Review. I am not associated with any organisation, institution, company, artists or employees directly associated with the production. This Review is not a Commissioned piece of writing.
“To be an artist is to believe in life.” — Henry Moore
Butakoci (Stolen) is the most recent instalment in a sporadic but growing series of art productions on social causes in Fiji. It is a deeply moving study of historical persistences related to human trafficking in Fiji — an artistic study that could mark the beginning of a cultural upending necessary for national healing and transformation. For a nation that prides itself on its commitment to the pulpit and megadecibel-speakers-aided public calls for sulphur and miracles, addressing the national scourge of gender+ violence and human trafficking is the needed miracle, and Butakoci, the production, offers a way.
Curated and produced by iconic Fijian singer-composer, Talei Draunibaka, and boasting an impressive ensemble of local artists, Butakoci has surges of brilliance. Among other things worth celebrating, it marks the arrival of Draunibaka as a formidable force in performance curation and production; and arguably unparalleled in lighting design.
Clocking under 45 minutes, Butakoci is artistically intelligent. Draunibaka’s curatorial knife plunges through 150 years of Fiji history to extract rich ores in Indian Indenture and Melanesian Blackbirder histories. Given the assignment to draw attention to human trafficking in Fiji; which is pervasive to the point of being entrenched and normalised, yet little-acknowledged and dismally under-reported, Draunibaka employs the technique of using vignettes as a collage to propel the national awareness campaign. Even with the prefacing cushion of a trigger warning compassionately presented by host Michelle Tevita-Singh, the performance is flecked with moments that derail the hardiest viewers. It is a bitter serving of Fiji history and a wake-up call for action by government and people.
Lean on time and muscled with the weight of history of Indian Indenture and blackbirded Melanesian slave labour vignettes, it is a punch to the gut that leaves the unprepared stunned. Its third vignette, a contemporary indigenous Fijian iTaukei story, offers a skeletal frame to string a latticework of micro-stories or depictions of human trafficking across time.
The performance runs on non-linear storytelling through a weaving of flashbacks supported by comprehensive narrations and voice-overs. While the lengthy narrations would be distracting in other performances, in this context, it is necessary for Fiji viewers who need the complex background knowledge of history to fully appreciate the theatrical production — a necessity given this is a cause-related artistic endeavour, linked to human trafficking with the goal of inspiring action in communities. Had it not been for this clearly stated goal, the longer narrations would have been distracting as they lean on the side of ‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’.
Butakoci features performance blocks comprising Indian Indenture (from British-colonised India to Fiji, 1879–1916; globally 1838–1916); blackbirded Pacific Islanders (from an unnamed Melanesian archipelago, 1860s-1911); and the contemporary iTaukei (indigenous Fijian, current-day). Draunibaka curated and produced the vignettes with Oceania Dance Theatre, Shobna Chanel Dance Group, and Mata Dance Fiji.
Indian Indentured Labour as Human Trafficking
THE BRITISH LEGACY IN FIJI
The Indian Indenture story traces a young Makhani (Patricia Niumataiwalu, In above photo), a young Indian woman abducted at a railway station, sold to labour recruiters, ending up in a sugarcane plantation in Fiji. The sequence is performed by the Shobna Chanel Dance Group. It is to the group’s founder and choreographer Shobna Chanel’s credit that the group’s signature classical kathak and modern fusion is stylistically muted to generic hints of motherland India in order to spotlight character and story. A necessity given the tight challenge of condensing 145 years of Indian indenture history in Fiji into a performance sketch of 12 minutes.
This is critical to Draunibaka’s curatorial emphasis in the performance introduction and in subsequent media interviews that Butakoci’s goal is to elicit emotion. Chanel’s choreographic approach captures the dark human trafficking elements of Indian Indenture histories. The sliding scenes from a railway station in India to a sugar plantation in Fiji draw us into the terror of abduction and its aftermath.
The routine that may remain etched in viewer memory is Makhani’s repeated dream of her distraught mother searching for her back in India. Makhani has disappeared. Her mother’s call filters through ocean and time as a call for the more than 1.6 million Indians who were shipped out of India to colonial outposts across continents from 1838 to 1916; a mere five years after the abolition of slavery in 1833. This was the new form of slavery to provide labour for the British Empire.
Makhani awakens from fitful sleep to the reality of desolation in a remote Fiji plantation — as for most Indians of indenture, it is probably her children and grandchildren who will sever umbilical ties with the motherland, but they will assume losses of a different kind, including, generational unbelonging and belonging.
In costume design, the black shifts with overlays hinting at the Greek peplos and chiton; and at Roman togas, morph into Indian langha (lengha) and blouses. With the odhni (veils), these visually draw Niumataiwalu’s Makhani into the shifting smoky black, blue, and deep-straw tinted atmosphere to accentuate the dread, isolation, and terror of sale, fraud, transportation to a foreign land, and hard labour in Fiji’s sugar fields. This costuming decision presents visual rewards impacting viewer emotions as attention is drawn to the faces of performers, particularly Makhani’s.
Even make-up is stripped to focus on deep eyelining work to accentuate eyes to underscore heightened facial emotions. There is nothing pretty in abduction. There is nothing beautiful in sexual violence. There is nothing elegant in coercion. Chanel’s attention to make-up and costume give us the grit of indenture — a true ode to the Jahaji Bhais and Jahaji Bahens — the men and women who often forged thicker-than-blood relationships on ships. Those whose feet left the docks of Calcutta (Kolkata) and Madras (Chennai) and other ports in India to cross the Kala Pani.
This sequence is made powerful by the lyrics and composition of the song, ‘Mera Sooraj Kahaan Kho Gaya’ (trans. ‘Where Has [My] The Sun Gone’). According to the Butakoci playbill, this is written by Draunibaka and Viveka Nand with vocals led by Dr. Baralika and Shennan Sidal (the latter is absent from the Playbill). For those who understand Hindustani, the song can speak and fill the hollows of the unspeakable in our collective history as Girmitya descendants in Fiji. Its English translation is in the Butakoci playbill.
Chanel’s thoughtful inclusion of the Indian sooph (soop) or dala, the winnowing basket of woven stripped bamboo or reed skin, gives authenticity to this sequence. It also lends it a sentimental edge as the soop was a feature of most Indo-Fijian homes and farms over the last 145 years. It is still used in some rural and remote farming communities where thinning agricultural collectives of Indo-Fijians reside. In the performance, a related visual frame of abandoned soops as the women abandon grain winnowing (for nightly dinner preparation, or going to, and returning from the fields) is a powerful metaphor for women’s vulnerability and their excruciating burden of physical work.
There is a marked absence of Indian indentured men in this sequence but given the production’s approach to focus on eliciting emotion to creating conversation on Human Trafficking, the obvious choice is to centre the experience of Indian women in indenture, to focus on the gender aspect of indenture. Butakoci lends a delicate hand-brush to the excavating of Indian women’s histories which reside in the deeper sediments of the overall ‘archaeological’ site of indenture. It emerges as a 12-minute sequence that performatively describes women in indenture in Fiji. This has not not been captured in the genre of musical theatre previously — thus lending it added significance.
Chanel and Draunibaka’s collaboration moves several rungs upward through inclusion of scenes in India. The railway tracks, the train station, and the resting train in the backdrop become a metaphor for the brute presence and force of the British Empire. The cold iron and steel are cold glints in the eye of an Empire spreading its paths and vehicles of relentless savagery upon thieved landscapes. It is a beast, its lacerating reach, extensive. Even its down-soft cache of benevolence rests upon bloodied talons. Against this backdrop, Makhani’s disoriented calls for her sister are the weakening sounds of downed prey.
There is powerful use of lighting in the production, evidence of Draunibaka’s appreciation for its often unharnessed potential, and more importantly, of her openness to risk-taking. There is minimal use of ‘daylight’ in this sequence. With routines drenched in night, or in the crepuscular light of twilight and predawn; some with the wide-stretched canvas of open sky and silent stars, Draunibaka’s lighting direction presents portraits of humans in nature, of women and nature, and of women in the fist of the British Empire.
One sees in the plantation backdrops (projected images), man’s destruction of the wilderness in Fiji, the ‘taming’ of the land, the orderliness of swathes of sugarcane, the upturned soil, sizeable glimpses of the sprawling monochromatic green of cane — pointing to the clinical ‘orderliness’ of the British Empire — rendered in the serif type fonts of early printing presses in London and in the administrative capitals scattered in the Empire, and in the elegant, bewitching, cursive handwriting in ledgers and journals. Makhani’s life in the plantation is representative of the larger indentured labour project.
Abuse is an offence, but in all its colonial manifestations, is neatly recorded and presented in heavy documentation: on clean white pages which yellow with time; with stamps of imperial approval; then bound and shipped to foreign archives and libraries during, and at ‘return’ of power; often one, or several centuries later.
This clinical orderliness is today duplicated in the digital world where nuances and contexts of the human condition critical to understanding root cause and their transfer to meaningful solutions-design, are reduced, sanitised and presented as data, and their visualisation that deliver predominantly one-size-fits-all answers ignore or conceal the facts of irrelevancy and failure that occur in significantly many projects in the development industry.
This is critical to appreciating Draunibaka’s light direction and choice of plantation sequence photographs which create the backdrops in this phase.
Draunibaka’s use of light and projected photography as zooming tools to reduce humans into insignificant motes on stage is stunning.
It places the individual, the one human being, in this case, Makhani; and by proxy, the viewer; under the tremendous orb of history, which is simultaneously freedom and annihilation— a metaphor for the indentured labourer, the slave, the commoner, the woman, the indigenous, the girl, the aged, the infirm, the refugee, the poor, the unremarkable, the ordinary — that single statistical entry entered into official records as the datum, 1, which increases or decreases a sum total on the fact of birth or death. Even when named, they remain a nameless 1. The dispensable 1.
Us.
Chanel’s choreography places Makhani and her troupe under Draunibaka’s tremendous sky underscoring their powerlessness, their restlessness, their agonising vigilance in the rolling of days and nights. The emotions wrought from this routine almost make the emotions of human trafficking tangible. In the live performance, one is drawn upon a visual current to connect with the women as the darkening sky looms, now as if an ocean, with the women on a sea-floor.
They move in unison. They move in a single wave. They move in the manner of resting, suspended, slow-moving sardine shoals in deep ocean, alert to the slightest trigger of a predator. They move this way for the same reasons — for safety, for protection of their most vulnerable, for rotational positioning at the centre and edges to permit rest. For the allaying of harm and possible death — our primeval instinct for flight — our petition, when in darkness, to make it to first light.
Chanel demonstrates the creative dexterity that has made her Fiji’s leading exponent of kathak and fusion, a recognition leading to her dance group being an art product generously utilised by the Fijian Government in cultural diplomacy globally.
The fact that British colonial policy on Indian Indentured Labour favoured higher numbers of men to maximise physical labour requirements led to limited women. This led to jealousies, violence, and attendant social problems — one aspect of plantation violence. It also led to women being susceptible to physical and sexual violence. Of the high percentage of women who faced vulnerabilities on the long sea voyages and on plantations, very few rose to challenge their condition; and those who did, often received harsh penalties, some paying the ultimate price with their lives.
Indo-Fijian oral histories register cases of polyandry during and after indenture as those who chose to remain in Fiji took up CSR leases or moved to lease native lands. It is also worth noting that Indians at the close of the 19th century and early 20th century paid higher lease rates than Europeans although sugar was recognised as the mainstay of the colonial Fijian economy. While polyandry may be frowned upon, and possibly denied in formal spaces, there were two forms: women simultaneously having a string of de facto relationships in loops; or the dictionary polyandry — one woman with several husbands in one setting. Polygamy was also common. Such cases may be shocking to the current generation, just as would, the practice of post-indenture altering of names in order to elevate oneself or one’s family to a higher caste. These are survival mechanisms, a means to transform oneself through new identities — pursuits to improve one’s socio-cultural standing, particularly in a time of flux.
British colonial policies directly impacted the physical and mental health of Indian indentured labourers and their immediate descendants as they navigated challenges relating to caste, food and space taboos, religious practices, sex, marriage, pregnancy, birthing, nutrition, health, economic security, livelihood, the formation of family, and continuing bloodlines and legacies in a new land.
Its recognition as human trafficking gives Indian Indentured Labour and its legacies a new lens. Hopefully, this leads to new possibilities for research; a reframing under the framework of global human trafficking; and potentially fresh ways of interrogating the costs; and meaningful ways for the descendants of indentured labourers to define and contextualise intergenerational trauma. The greater gift is the possibility of identifying new pathways to healing and growth, including in diaspora communities.
Butakoci offers a slight adjustment to the imbalance in understanding ethnic differences in Fiji. It performs and enacts the fact that even when Indians left India for the British colonial outposts in South Africa, British Guiana, Trinidad, Fiji and other destinations, there was a stark difference between the realities and promises narrated by the British and what indentured labourers found upon arrival.
Even though many came freely, they did so under false, limited, or inaccurate information, or a combination of these. Under this scenario, the definitions of force, fraud, trickery, and coercion are realised. This revises the narrative to offer a broader, genuine, and more layered understanding that can alter the national conversation in Fiji. The ways in which information is created, used, distributed and manipulated have not altered.
Of special interest should be how post-indenture Indians and Fijians suffered similar issues, yet remained vigorously separated through policies that limited any integration, let alone social interaction. Of equal, if not more urgent interest, ought to be the forms and degrees of human trafficking prevalent in Indo-Fijian communities in Fiji and in the diaspora in current times.
Draunibaka and Chanel’s synergy in this sequence deserves applause. As does Niumataiwalu’s performance, and Phil Dakei’s sound design which will be covered further on.
Recommended Citation: Rokonadravu, M., (2024) ‘A Spectacle of Persistent Histories — A Review: Butakoci (Stolen) — A Musical Theatre Production on Human Trafficking in Fiji’, Medium, Suva. Accessed: [Insert Date and Time].
This Review was first published on Medium on 11 August 2024, before the setup of this website.
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