What Is In a Name?
“Indo Fijians” and the Making of Race
The Human Thread with Sabrina Iqbal Khan
Exploring humanity, storytelling, and the social issues impacting our communities.
What is in a name? Ask ten “Indo Fijians” how they identify and the answers rarely match: Fijian, Indian, Pacific Islander, South Asian, or simply Indian in Fiji. None of these answers are wrong. What is worth asking is where the label came from.
“Indo Fijian” grew out of the machinery of British indenture. From 1879, over sixty thousand labourers were shipped from India to work Fiji’s sugar plantations under the girmit system, a word drawn from the English “agreement” that workers could barely read before they signed it. Many were stripped of freedom of movement and legal standing for years, housed in cramped lines and paid little. Colonial administrators then sorted iTaukei, Indian and European populations into separate legal categories, deciding who could own land, vote or belong.
That inherited system still echoes today, not only in memory but also in politics: the ethnic categories drawn up under empire have resurfaced again and again in Fiji’s constitutional debates and coups. New Zealand’s recent move to classify Fijian Indians as “Asian” rather than “Pacific” has denied many access to support their neighbours receive, a reminder that naming is never mere semantics. It is about dignity and it is about rights.
This got me thinking about race itself, a word we use daily yet one with no settled scientific definition. In 1950, UNESCO called race “less a biological fact than a social myth.” Geneticist Richard Lewontin later found that most human genetic variation exists within so called racial groups, not between them, a finding echoed decades later when the Human Genome Project confirmed that any two people share the overwhelming majority of their genetic code.
The American Association of Biological Anthropologists confirmed in 2019 that humans are not divided into fixed biological clusters. Scholars of International Relations now trace much of “race” to the colonial expansion of the seventeenth century, a tool built to govern and extract, not a fact of biology. Empires needed categories to decide who could be taxed, indentured, or ruled, and race supplied a convenient, false certainty.
None of this erases real history or lived difference. Communities carry genuine memory, language, and inherited hardship, and that deserves respect, not dismissal. But the boxes themselves were built by policy, not nature. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reminds us that all people are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and later international law extended that promise into a direct prohibition on racial discrimination. If a category was invented to govern people, it can be reimagined to include them instead, on their own terms.
“Indo Fijians” did not choose their name, but they have chosen, again and again, to build community through language, faith, memory and resilience. Perhaps the lesson for the rest of us is this: differences are real, but the boxes we file them into were built, not born. When we see people as they define themselves, rather than as history classified them, we lay the very bridges this column is named for. The strongest communities are not those without problems, but those willing to face them together.
ABOUT THE WRITER:
Sabrina Iqbal Khan is an international award-winning filmmaker, producer and actress, a barrister to the High Court of Fiji and admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria, 2007. She is a recipient of a Fijian Medal of Honour for community service, domestic violence awareness and poverty alleviation, and the winner of the 2025 New South Wales Human Rights Medal. Her first film, Seema, received recognition in the United States of America, where a national day was declared in honour of the film.
Sabrina has also been published in the field of cross-cultural dialogue, including developing a dialogue theory recognised by the American Center for Dialogue. With heritage connected to North West India, Bengal, Afghanistan and the wider Girmit diaspora experience, she writes on humanity, storytelling, rights, and the social justice issues impacting our communities.
