There are some things you inherit without anyone formally handing them to you. A surname. A prayer you know by sound long before you understand its meaning. And then there is language. I do not remember anybody sitting me down and saying, “This is Fiji Hindi. Protect it.” It simply existed around me. It was the language of home, laughter, relatives and neighbours. It was so ordinary that I never imagined there might come a day when I would have to make an effort to keep it alive.
AT Arya Samaj Primary School in Lautoka, language and culture were woven into the school day in ways I did not appreciate then. We had culture studies. We sat through havan, recited mantras, listened to pravachans in Hindi and learnt words whose meanings sometimes arrived years after we had memorised their sounds. Hindi was not confined to a textbook. It lived in ceremony, rhythm and repetition. Even when our attention wandered, we were absorbing something larger than vocabulary. We were being taught that language could carry belief, history and belonging.
Outside school, Hindi followed us home. At home we spoke Fiji Hindi – not the polished Hindi of Indian television, but the Fiji Hindi shaped by generations before us. Radio announcers entered our homes through small speakers. We watched Hindi news on Fiji television. At school there were even radio lessons that we listened to each week, a classroom suddenly quiet because a voice beyond the school compound was teaching us. Hindi seemed unavoidable then, part of the soundscape of growing up in Fiji.
We read Premchand. We encountered the writings of Brij Lal and, through the history of girmit, met words, voices and experiences belonging to people whose journeys had made ours possible. I began to understand that the language around me did not simply come from India unchanged. Fiji Hindi had travelled through cane fields, lines, temples, mosques, kitchens and settlements. It grew largely from Awadhi and Bhojpuri and was shaped further by life in Fiji. Our ancestors did not merely preserve a language. They made one.
Perhaps that is why I become uneasy when Fiji Hindi is treated as broken Hindi, lazy Hindi or something that must apologise for not sounding like the language spoken in India. Fiji Hindi does not need to prove its purity. Its supposed impurity is precisely its history. Every borrowed word and altered sound tells us that people thrown into a new world found a way to understand one another. Fiji Hindi is not evidence that something was lost on the journey. It is evidence that something survived by changing.
And yet I have begun to notice another change, one that frightens me more.
When I video-call my nephews, I speak mostly in English.
I did not decide to do this. There was no morning when I announced that English would become our language. It happened quietly, which is perhaps how languages are really lost. Not with a ban. Not with a funeral. A language can begin disappearing through thousands of tiny choices that do not feel important at the time. One English answer to a child. One family WhatsApp chat. One “it’s easier this way.” Until one day you realise the language your grandparents gave you has become the language you use mainly with people older than yourself.
That realisation is uncomfortable because I cannot blame somebody else for it.
I can blame globalisation. I can blame migration. I can blame schools, television, social media and the dominance of English. Those forces are real. English opens doors. Parents understandably want their children to speak it confidently. But none of that explains why I, someone who claims Fiji Hindi as part of my identity, automatically switch to English with children in my own family. The harder truth is that language loss can happen through love. We choose the language we think will make life easier for children and accidentally stop giving them the language that tells them where they came from.
I wonder when the transformation happened.
As a child, Fiji Hindi required no effort. Today, after years of living abroad, English often arrives first. Sometimes a Fiji Hindi word sits at the back of my mind and I have to reach for it. Sometimes I begin a sentence in Hindi and finish it in English. Sometimes an older relative uses a word I have not heard in years and it unlocks an entire room in my memory. Suddenly I am not an adult living overseas. I am a boy in Lautoka again, surrounded by voices I once assumed would always be there.
This is why the conversation about preserving Hindi in Fiji matters, but we make a mistake if we believe schools alone can save it. Children should have opportunities to speak, read and write Hindi, and vernacular languages should be treated as sources of knowledge rather than decorations for cultural days. But a language cannot survive simply because it appears on a timetable. If Hindi exists for forty minutes at school while English owns the playground, the phone, the dinner table and the family conversation, we already know which language will become stronger.
We also need to stop treating Standard Hindi and Fiji Hindi as enemies. One gives us access to literature, scripture, formal writing and a wider Hindi-speaking world; the other carries the particular history of Indo-Fijians. We should not have to diminish one to respect the other. A child who reads Premchand in standard Hindi and then goes home and jokes with a grandparent in Fiji Hindi is not linguistically confused. That child is rich.
My fear is not that Fiji Hindi will disappear tomorrow. It remains alive in homes, communities, humour, religious gatherings and everyday conversation. My fear is slower. What will Fiji Hindi sound like in 2040? What about 2100? When my nephews have children, what language will they use to tell them to come and eat? What language will they use when they are angry, affectionate or teasing? Will those children understand the expressions their great-grandparents once used without thinking?
Maybe they will. But inheritance is not automatic.
We speak proudly about what the girmitiya endured so their descendants could have better lives. We preserve photographs, commemorate Girmit Day and tell stories of the Leonidas. Yet one of the most intimate things they left us is not made of stone. It is sitting in our mouths. It survives only when spoken.
That is what makes language different from almost every other inheritance. A house can remain standing even if nobody talks about it. Jewellery can sit untouched in a drawer for 50 years. A photograph can survive inside a box. A language cannot. It has to be used badly, loudly, imperfectly and repeatedly. It needs grandparents correcting grandchildren. It needs parents resisting the convenience of answering every question in English. It needs children laughing at old expressions and then, without noticing, using those same expressions themselves.
I am writing this as much to accuse myself as anyone else.
The next time my nephews appear on my screen, English will probably still come naturally. But I no longer want convenience to make the decision for me. I want them to hear the language that raised me, even if I have to slow down, repeat myself or translate. Because one day there will be no grandparents left to supply the missing words. We will become the elders. And when that happens, whatever language survives will be the language we bothered to pass on.
My grandparents gave me Fiji Hindi without ever calling it a gift. I am only now beginning to understand that accepting an inheritance is not the same as preserving it.
