Totaram Sanadhya’s Experience of Racism in Early White Australia
This chapter presents a fictionalized narrative of Totaram Sanadhya’s brief visit to Sydney in 1914. Pundit Sanadhya migrated to Fiji as an indentured labourer and spent twenty-one years on the Pacific Island. He became a nationalist and collaborated with C.F. Andrews in bringing down the indenture system. The story is based on the evidence provided in Sanadhya’s journal, published as My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands (1991). As a work of fiction the narrative transcends temporal boundaries and refers to historical events that took place outside Sanadhya’s real time, such as Srinivasa Shastri’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1922–3 to inquire into race relations in these parts of the British Empire. This narrative embodies the process of circulation of people and ideas central to this book, with Sanadhya becoming an archetypal ex-indentured Indian from Fiji, visiting white Australia and encountering its racist bigotry.