Discounting the World War’s gift of flu, which baffled all medicine, Fiji shows how the gradual fall in the death rate can almost be measured in terms of medical effort. I wish we could be smug and say that the trick is turned, both in Fiji and Western Polynesia. But there’s the other puzzling factor: the East Indian.
Today in Suva the tourist admires the picturesqueness of these Asiatics, brightening the streets with turbans and silken saris. In the early ’80’s they were first brought in as laborers, and succeeding shiploads increased them to 50,000. With natural progeny they grew to some 85,000, by the 1936 census. Fiji colonials began by believing that such immigrants were needed for industrial development; but in 1916 the indenturing of Indians ceased. Since then more of them have left than have entered. Those who leave are usually old; the re-entering ones are usually young adults.
During forty-five years the Indian birth rate far surpassed the Fijian. The steadier Fijian rate shows a rise. In the early ’90’s there was an excess of 7,000 native males over females, but the margin steadily narrowed until 1936 when the excess was reduced to 2,087. This indicates a healthy tendency. But wait. The Colony’s annual medical and health reports, 1921-1936, show that the Indian woman outbreeds the Fijian woman by 25 per cent; soon the Indian population must overtake the native Fijian. There is a greater loss by death among Fijians than among Indians. The Fijians lose more people from tuberculosis than the Indians do from all causes; the Fijians lose more children under five than the Indians do from all causes; the Fijians lose more from causes other than tuberculosis and death under five than the Indians do from all causes.
Add this up. Fijian mortality is three times that of the Indian, and the fertility of the Indian woman is 25 per cent higher than that of the Fijian woman.
The Indians in Fiji are survivals of thousands of ancestral generations of exposure to disease. Fiji with her better food, wages, housing and free medical attention was an unmixed blessing to these newcomers. Far from the teeming Punjab they dropped the shackles of caste, and brought with them a devouring hunger for land and freedom. The larger the family the larger the workable holdings; and there is no stigma on illegitimacy.
In 1922 the East Indians were spreading. Today they are spreading even faster until Fiji is threatened with becoming an annex to India. The Asiatic population is running about neck-and-neck with the native. Something should be done about it, of course, but what? Is it survival of the fittest? Not entirely. It is partly the artificial stimulation given to the oriental through medical science and a vastly improved environment. Some evils have come with the banishment of their old caste system. There is no longer the invisible barrier between Hindu, Brahman, Chamar, Pariah—and Moslem. The Indian found a new freedom in the tropic isles, and the immigrants were mostly very low-caste. Their ideals were vague, their women scarce, the recruiting system led to degeneracy, the marriage tie weakened, little girls were offered for barter. Cult priests from India would froth up fanaticism and loud-mouthed little Gandhis kept the pot boiling. India’s Nationalist Movement made a pretty mess of attempted social equality. The Indians had been allotted three seats on the Legislative Council on an equality with elected Fijian chiefs. The Asiatic members put up a howl for a common franchise, and when this was defeated in council, they promptly resigned. Then came the school question. It was fantastically impossible for the Government to build the hundred schools which the Indians demanded, while they declined to contribute their share to Government-fostered mission and private schools. So about a sixth of their children went without education.
I am taking no sides. I only report that the Indians are becoming conquerors by infiltration of an archipelago where the native deserves his own land and customs. In Fiji the Asiatic is developing a kindly fraternalism which Mother India never quite crushed out of him. Very often when one of them has been stranded in India, after a holiday, his friends in Fiji—Hindu, Pariah and Moslem—will chip in on a purse to fetch him back. At one time in our Suva household we had three Indian servants of three discordant faiths: a Hindu cook, a Moslem gardener, a Christian chambermaid. Back in the old home-town they might have cut each other’s throats every morning before breakfast. But here it was the song of songs, close harmony. I wish Eloisa had them now....
No, I am not against the experiment to bring back the East Indian. Only I wish they hadn’t tried it on Fiji, whose native people I have learned to love deeply.
Now how about the Fijian?
When you number his islands at 250 you include large Viti Levu, which bulks about 4,000 square miles, and its slenderer, somewhat smaller sister Vanua Levu to the northeast; then there is a scattering of fair-sized fellows scaling down to mere pin-points on the map. If some super-Hitler should decide to combine them there would be enough to fill New Jersey, almost. They are heavenly things, the tiny islands, with rounded bases of iron-brown rock and palms dipping toward the sea; so many fern baskets set around surprising blue inlets—blue and silver in the morning. Then you coast around toward larger footholds, elegant cliffs with threads of waterfall and great white shells on the shore, like bleaching skulls. In summer, which is December, the thermometer seldom rises above ninety-two degrees, and July Fourth is in the very ecstasy of spring. I have no real estate to sell in Fiji. So I speak only out of a homesick heart when I say that it is the best winter climate in the world, and the best climate, any time, for me.