Re-visiting Migration and Memory in Satendra Nandan’s Select Poems and Totaram Sanadhya’s The Haunted Lines

Abstract

Renowned Indian-origin personalities like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Bharti Mukherjee, and Sujata Bhatt migrated from their homeland and achieved success in literature. In 1879, the first batch of Girmityas from India, under the agreement, arrived in Fiji in search of a better life, unaware that returning home was being erased from their lives. Many Indo-Fijian writers and historians, such as Subramani have preserved the history and memory of their ancestors' migration. Satendra Nandan is a well-known writer whose ancestors were Indian. His poetry reveals the struggles and pain they faced when they realized the dark reality of working on sugar plantations. The migration was not just a migration for them. It came with their establishment of a new identity, which was Indo-Fijian, and they thrived in the field of literature and politics. The paper is an attempt to trace out and focus on Nandan’s poems, Lines Across Black Waters and Sailing Together, highlighting the agony of the migration of Indians to Fiji, unaware of the misery that awaited them, by keeping the memory alive, and Totaram Sanadhya’s The Haunted Lines, which depicts his personal story. The paper concludes that although migration had mentally devastated the Girmityas, it enabled Indo-Fijian writers like Satendra Nandan to succeed in education and politics, and that migration did not let them fall but instead helped them rise again to establish an identity for themselves. Today, the Girmitya writers are well known, and justice has been done to their future through their writings.