The tongue is a muscle, but for those of us born into the scattered seeds of diaspora, it is also a battlefield.
Growing up, my relationship with my mother tongue, Fiji Hindi, was not one of tender embraces or whispered lullabies. It was a love-hate relationship, fraught with a quiet, inherited turbulence.
Fiji Hindi was like a step-sibling I never asked for: The one I was forced to sit next to at the dinner table, the one I had to acknowledge within the safe, hidden confines of our home or the rigid walls of a classroom, but the one I viciously ignored the second we stepped out into town or traveled overseas. In the public eye, my mother tongue became a ghost I pretended not to see.
I REMEMBER the distinct sting of those days when aunts, uncles, or cousins would visit us in Fiji.
They would arrive draped in the sophisticated air of the world beyond our shores, and their mouths would spill “Hinglish”—that polished, sanitised mixture of Hindi and English. It was a linguistic compromise, a way of diluting our raw, sugarcane-sweetened dialect into something more palatable for the modern world.
In return, I would weaponise my own syllables. I would flaunt my command over English, rolling my Rs and sharpening my consonants, building a fortress of colonial grammar around myself.
Looking back, it breaks my heart. I wonder now, with a profound sense of grief: Why did I do that? Was I so deeply ashamed of the very breath that gave my ancestors life? I remember doing the exact same thing years later, when I returned to Fiji for the first time after migrating to New Zealand. By then, my English was a shield, and speaking Fiji Hindi felt deeply uncomfortable, almost cringy.
Yet, I was brutally committed to that discomfort, choosing the coldness of a foreign tongue over the warmth of my own.
This shame was not born overnight; it was meticulously cultivated in the corridors of my youth. In school, I actively despised taking the Hindi language as a subject. The tragic irony was that it was the subject where I scored the highest marks. The language flowed through my veins, intuitive and undeniable, yet I treated my aptitude like a dirty secret. I would hide my test papers from my friends. I would rather be known for anything else – math, science, history – anything but the language of my own blood. I was silencing myself before the world even asked me to.
When we migrated to New Zealand, the erasure of my identity shifted from a subconscious habit to a deliberate strategy of survival. I enrolled at Massey University’s Northshore campus in Auckland, and suddenly, the world was overwhelmingly white and unfamiliar. I was the only Fiji Indian student walking those manicured grounds. The isolation was deafening. I felt like a solitary drop of brown ink in an endless ocean of milk. I was so starved for my own reflection that I used to beg my mum and dad to drive me to South Auckland – to Papatoetoe, to Otahuhu – every single weekend. I needed to see Fiji Indian faces. I needed to hear the loud, unapologetic cadence of our laughter, the familiar scent of our spices, the rhythmic chaos of our existence. I went there to breathe.
But back at university, Monday through Friday, I strictly wore western clothes, crafting a heavy armour of assimilation. I actively dodged questions about my culture, my food, and my history. I wanted to be a blank slate, convincing myself that if I erased all my edges, I could not be cut. But a human soul cannot survive as an empty page. The more I tried to scrub away my origins, the more my lecturers and peers grew genuinely curious about the vibrant history I was trying to hide.
The mask began to suffocate me. I remember sitting in the campus library one rainy afternoon, staring at a blank screen, feeling utterly hollow. My mother called, and for the first time in months, I didn’t answer in my crisp,
Carefully practiced New Zealand English. I heard her voice -warm, loud, tinged with the familiar cadence of home – and my throat tightened. The exhausting effort of being a shredded, diluted version of someone else finally broke me.
I realised that in my desperate attempt to fit into this new world, I was starving myself of the very things that kept me alive. In the quiet moments of that night, a haunting question echoed in my mind: Who am I? If I am not my language, if I am not my history, if I am not the soil of Fiji and the resilience of the Girmitiyas, then what am I? Just an echo of someone else’s culture?
Slowly, unequivocally, and with a fiercely beating heart, I stopped running. I turned around and faced my reflection. I began to reclaim the step-sibling I had abandoned. I allowed myself to become immensely, unapologetically proud of being Fiji Indian.
And the universe responded. It is a profound truth that the moment you step into your authentic power, the world makes room for you. Because I embraced my roots, doors at the university suddenly swung open.
I wasn’t just another student blending into the background; I was a vibrant, culturally rich individual with a story to tell. I was given the honor of speaking on the legacy of our indentured ancestors, sharing a history forged in the Pacific that many had never heard. My face—a proud, brown, Fiji Indian face—graced the cover of the Massey University magazine and loomed large on campus billboards. I realised then that my identity was not a liability; it was my greatest currency.
Later, when I decided to become a teacher, it was this exact revelation that pushed me through the hardest doors. Standing tall as a Fiji Indian, holding the weight of my history with grace and unapologetic pride, became my ultimate strength in the classroom. I could look my students in the eye and teach them about authenticity because I had fought a grueling war to find my own. Today, I have absolutely no shame in correcting people. When they assume my heritage, I look them dead in the eye and say, “I am Fiji-Indian. I am from Fiji. I am not from India.” It is a boundary drawn in the sand, a reclaiming of a unique, beautiful history separate from the motherland but
equally profound.
But life, in its infinite wisdom, always comes full circle to test the lessons we claim to have learned. As I settled into adulthood, comfortably rooted in my reclaimed identity, the birth of my nephew introduced a new, terrifying stake.
I looked at his innocent face and made a silent vow: I wanted him to speak Fiji Hindi. I desperately wanted to spare him the cycle of shame, the exhausting years of hiding, and the painful journey of unlearning that I had to endure.
But reality is a harsh sculptor. With everyone in the family working to build a life in a new country, he spent his crucial, formative years at a daycare. His teachers, his peers, his entire daily ecosystem consisted of English-speaking natives. And so, inevitably, he grew up speaking English.
For a while, my heart sank. He understood Hindi when we spoke it to him, but his tongue could not form the Fiji Hindi syllables. It felt like watching history repeat itself, watching the language slip through our fingers into the great void of assimilation.
But I underestimated the resilience of our bloodline. From a very young age, he developed an innate, gravitational pull toward our music. He wanted to play the dholak. He learned the harmonica. He sat with us and sang kirtans.
His small hands beating against the skin of the dholak were doing more than just making music; they were pounding the rhythm of our ancestors back into his pulse. The melodies of the kirtans kept the language alive in his soul, even when it hesitated on his lips. Today, when his parents and grandparents speak to him, he responds in Fiji Hindi. He speaks it with a thick, undeniable Kiwi accent, but by god, it is a fact that he speaks it. The language survived.
Altered, shifted, but alive.
Watching him navigate this duality forces me to confront the hardest questions of all. Why are we, as a people, so often ashamed of speaking our native tongue? Why do we treat the language of our mothers and fathers as something to be scrubbed clean before we present ourselves to the world?
Is it the heavy, suffocating ghost of our colonial past? We are the descendants of indentured laborers, of people who were brought to the islands to toil under the crushing weight of the British Empire. We were taught, implicitly and explicitly, that the coloniser’s tongue was the language of intellect, of success, of humanity, while ours was the language of the dirt, the cane fields, the labourers. Have we internalised that trauma so deeply that we are still trying to prove to the ghosts of our colonisers that we are worthy of their respect?
Or is it the complex, multifaceted burden of coming from the islands? We are a diaspora within a diaspora. We are Indians who are not from India, islanders who carry the subcontinent in our DNA. In our desperation to fit into the neat, categorised boxes of the Western world, we chip away at our own edges. We water ourselves down because we think an authentic, unfiltered Fiji Indian is too complex for the world to digest. We all want to fit in. We all crave the safety of belonging. But at what cost?
Along the way to assimilation, why must we agree to the erasure of our identity? To abandon our mother tongue is to sever the invisible thread that connects us to the sacrifices of our grandparents, to the rich soil of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, to the songs sung in the cane fields, and to the raw, unpolished beauty of who we fundamentally are.
Fiji Hindi is not a broken language. It is a survivor’s language. It is a masterpiece forged from resilience, adaptation, and survival. It is time we stop treating it like a step-sibling and start welcoming it to the head of the table. Let us speak it with accents, let us stumble over the words, let us mix it with the breath of the new lands we call home, but let us never, ever let it die in silence.
- ASHNEEL JAYNESH PRASAD is a Fiji-born New Zealand citizen working as a teacher in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
