Prof Brij Lal - Greatest academic export of Fiji

The high flying trajectory of Professor Brij Vilash Lal’s career demonstrates so well that academics do not need to live in Fiji to make outstanding contribution to the vast body of knowledge that comprises the history of Fiji. In doing so, Prof Brij, as a Fiji-born academic, overcame many obstacles along his journey – academic, political and social, some not known to his academic peers and the general public, or even USP academics who think that life for ANU academics must be a bed of roses. It wasn’t.

As his brother-in-law (he was married to my sister Dr Padma Narsey Lal) and also as a Fiji parliamentarian who interacted with him during his stint on the Sir Paul Reeves Constitution Review Commission for Fiji, I saw sides of him different perhaps from what the general public saw with some disagreements along the way.

This contribution is in two parts. Part I covers Brij’s stellar academic contributions. Part II covers his broader constitutional contributions to Fiji, some of our disagreements, and the many personal and academic challenges he had to overcome to achieve the heights he did.

Part I: Brij Lal – the academic

Prof Lal’s eminent record is a great standard for other Fijian academics to emulate and compare as academics, community educators and political activists. I now recognise many similarities between Brij’s journey and that of many of us who stayed working at USP all our lives, despite the pull of metropolitan universities, and for economists, tax-free salaries at World Bank, ADB and the CROP organisations.

Following his 1974 graduation from The University of the South Pacific (USP), Prof Brij and Padma Narsey Lal after teaching briefly at USP, went abroad to enhance their academic qualifications- first to the University of British Columbia in Canada, then later to Hawaii University. They finally made it to Australia which they made their permanent home, partly because Padma could not get jobs in Fiji despite being well qualified for them. But Prof Lal’s heart, his sharp mind and his prolific writings remained passionately focused on Fiji until the day he passed away.

Unique for an academic Prof Lal also made a historic national political contribution to Fiji’s peaceful constitutional development after the 1987 coup, through his proactive participation in the Sir Paul Reeves Constitution Review Commission for Fiji. This effort with that of Tom Vakatora and Sir Paul Reeves, resulted in the 1997 Constitution, the last lawful constitution for Fiji, passed unanimously by the democratically elected Rabuka Government in the Fiji Parliament of which I was then a member for the Opposition National Federation Party.

Prof Lal’s career can be objectively assessed by the sheer breadth and depth of his academic work, the academic awards he has received, the national awards he has received from Fiji and Australia, his moving account of his personal journey as an academic, the opinions of his academic colleagues, the praise of his students, the views of his close friends and family members, some of whom saw what the public rarely saw. It was not always smooth sailing for Prof Lal (and Padma) and with us family members.

Brij Lal Books: A selection

This is just a small selection of Brij Lal’s books which give a flavor of the topics he canvassed over the years. Not included here are the more than dozen he edited or co-edited with his colleagues.

Journal articles

Prof Lal published hundreds of articles in journals in Australasia and globally, reaching a vast readership and leaving a phenomenal historical track record behind him. He published in the following journals, many multiple times:

Journal of Pacific Studies. (USP) Fijian Studies: A Journal of Contemporary Fiji (Fiji)
Quarterly Review of Historical Studies.
Journal of Pacific History, 1980. Indian Journal of History, reprinted in the Journal of Intercultural Studies Pacific Perspective.
Journal of Intercultural Studies.
USP Sociological Bulletin
Hawaiian Journal of History.

The Contemporary Pacific Meanjin

National recognitions

Prof Lal is probably unique as an Australasian academic in that his work both as an academic and contributor to political development in Fiji has been recognised by the governments of both Fiji and Australia. In 1995, Brij’s academic contributions led to him being awarded the 25th Anniversary of Fiji Independence Medal in recognition of “distinguished contribution to education in Fiji”.

In 1998 for his contribution to the Reeves Commission, Prof Lal was awarded Officer of the Order of Fiji by the President of the Republic of Fiji for “distinguished contribution to the public life of Fiji”. A reflection of the political biases of the Fiji Government at the time, Prof Lal’s colleague on the Reeves Commission, Tom Vakatora, was awarded the higher Companion of the Order of Fiji (equivalent to the knighthood of colonial times).

In 2003, Prof Lal was award The Centenary Medal of the Government of Australia for “distinguished contribution to the Humanities in Australia”.

In 2015, Prof Lal was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia in the General Division for “significant service to education, through the preservation and teaching of Pacific history, as a scholar, author and commentator”.

But behind all these official recognitions and publications is the rich account of Prof Lal’s academic journey and his personal trials and tribulations.

Brij’s road from Tabia

Prof Lal has a fascinating account of his personal academic career “Road from Tabia” which is Chapter 7 in a soon to be published book Serendipity designed and edited by Brij himself before he passed away. This project is being completed by his long-term friend, Doug Munro, who was also a former USP academic in history and politics. The book is a collection of a dozen or so Pacific historians’ own accounts of their different journeys, as historians.

The Introduction to that book notes that the historians’ accounts of their journeys were “moving, full of sorrows and regrets as well as achievements and satisfactions: a large part of many careers were spent doing things other than scholarship,… careers disrupted by shrinking university budgets, family needs and demands, relocation from one place to another, and loss of jobs…. but they took the opportunities and made the most of them”. Angela Walcott in her Foreword wrote: “The essays show how place of birth, class, ethnic background, sex and sexuality, educational opportunities and mentoring all matter in shaping how a life unfolds and a career develops. And just how much serendipity can help”. We can all empathise with these observations.

While Prof Lal also attributed his success to “serendipity” – the chance occurrence of positive outcomes which were never sought or planned for, I suggest that more important factors were Brij’s passion to excel in his more nuanced analysis of Indo-Fijian history and politics, and a remarkable command of English one would not expect of a boy from Tabia, a settlement in rural Fiji.

As Prof Lal wrote “My parents were both unlettered, living a meagre life on a leased ten-acre plot growing sugar cane and subsistence crops just sufficient to make ends meet. That was the lot of our people then. Padma and I could also make similar observations about our “unlettered” dhobi parents working in a small laundry in Toorak. Prof Lal also wrote of his childhood “Our horizon was both limited and limiting”. But Prof Lal went well beyond the horizon.

As was also my experience at Marist Brothers High School, Prof Lal also says that he “struck gold in the form of great teachers” who had recently graduated from NZ. He quotes names familiar to all of us who know Fiji’s history of education for the last fifty years: Vijay Mishra, Subramani, Sarwan Singh, Amraiya Naidu, Venket Rayulu, all who came from similar backgrounds to Brij.

Prof Lal says his English teachers opened up a whole hitherto unknown imaginative world with the great classics of English literature: Dickens, Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I similarly appreciated at MBHS a fantastic teacher (Geoff Ryan) former Principal of Auckland Teachers’ College who introduced me to Steinbeck, Camus and Sartre and a Brave New World of radical writers not generally approved by Marist Brothers.

But it was Prof Lal’s history teachers who introduced topics such as the causes of World War I, the Russian Revolution, Hitler and his National Socialism, the unification of Germany and Italy, that planted in him the seeds of becoming a historian. Prof Lal also wrote about the many academics who he came in contact with at USP, and who were instrumental in facilitating his later appointments at the University of Hawaii and Australian National University. At USP Prof Lal came across June Cook, a Cambridge graduate and Ron Crocombe who Brij felt “had little sympathy for Indo-Fijians. His sympathy lay with Pacific islanders”. But Crocombe did help Prof Lal get a place at UBC as teaching assistant and also air tickets to Vancouver. Also helpful to Prof Lal were Walter Johnson previously a professor and chairman of the History Department at the University of Chicago and Margaret Prang, chair of the History Department at the University of British Columbia.

Prof Lal also writes about the senior USP staff who made little to no effort to help him go for his Masters and PhD training abroad. Prof Lal wrote that Dr Ahmed Ali who had originally managed to secure a junior lectureship for him, refused to give him a three-year leave of absence. Prof Lal writes he was not supported by the then USP Vice Chancellor (James Maraj) or the then head of History. Prof Lal had to resign from his USP job in order to go to ANU. Padma, too, had to resign from her job in the School of Natural Resources (USP) and later Fisheries Department to join Prof Lal in Canberra. Another similarity to Prof Lal and Padma’s trajectory, I also could not get USP financial support (as did many others) to go to Sussex University to do my PhD. My partner Joan Yee had to resign from her job at USP Library to join me at Sussex.

The praise by Brij’s fellow historians

Prof Lal’s long term historian colleague and friend Doug Munro writes that historians like Prof Lal “lived at the interface of scholarship and practical engagement in such capacities as constitutional advisers, defenders of civil liberties, or upholders of the principles of academic freedom. As well as writing history, they “made” history, and their excursions beyond the ivory tower informed their scholarship”.

Max Quanchi writes: “I will remember Brij as one of the great scholars of our time but also because he was a top bloke – friendly, a conversationalist, argumentative and above all a very humble person.” Organisations that continue to do good work like the Pacific Manuscript Bureau, the Journal of Pacific History, Contemporary Pacific Journal of which Prof Lal was founding editor. Pacific History Association, and the Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies – which Prof Lal founded in 2004 — are Prof Lal ‘s legacy to future generations of Pacific historians.

Quanchi recalls that Prof Lal was also a patriot. He wrote that Prof Lal never stopped talking about and worrying about Fiji. To Max it was an enormous travesty of justice for a boy from the cane fields, a USP graduate and a proud Fijian to be exiled from his homeland for an innocuous comment in a radio interview.

The praise by Brij’s students

One of the great KPIs of any academic is the knowledge that he passes on to the next generation of students. Their assessments are a wonderful reflection of the mentoring that academics like Prof Lal could do and did do with great dedication as well as personal acts of kindness.

One of his students Nick said: “To be supervised by Brij was a great privilege. Supervision was a vocation rather than a routine task for Brij, and he went above and beyond the typical expectations of a supervisor. It was a form of mentorship, collegiality, and nurturing that is difficult to articulate, and impossible to replicate.”

Student (Dr) Jone Baledrokadroka said: “Brij taxed your thinking and brought out the best in you. We argued on iTaukei issues although I grew in my understanding of Indo Fijian and iTaukei politics. He taught me how to prepare and speak before the TV camera. He’d throw out a draft paper I thought was good and told me to rewrite it. (Brij was) Always driving for the best in pursuit of academic excellence.”

Mr Baledrokadroka wrote that Prof Lal also cared for the welfare of his students: “… if I had a touch of the flu in bed, Brij would visit me with groceries knowing that I was on a scholarship allowance and also had a family to take care of. That was the boy from Tabia. I salute you noqu qase mai Tabia. Gole e na vakacegu nei Tamada sa cecere ni sa mai cava nomu i tavi e Vuravura.” (translation: “I respect you my Elder from Tabia. Go with the peace of our Most High Father as your earthly duties have come to an end.”

Vanisha Mishra-Vakaoti wrote glowingly of Brij: “He made you feel comfortable. He listened. And he really cared about Fiji, Fijian scholarship, and the development of the country …. Where some students were told by their supervisors that they could have 20 hours of their time over their entire doctoral degree, we often got twenty hours of Prof’s time a month. And even that is an understatement…. In his work, he championed the voice of women. In my work, he ensured that no gender difference was overlooked.”

(Dr) Joeli Veitayaki wrote: “After housekeeping for them for 6 weeks while they were away in India, they offered for me to continue to occupy their self contained bottom flat at their Aranda home for the rest of my stay in Canberra. I very quickly became one of the well off students as I was spared the $800 per month rent at the John 23rd Halls of residence. Prof. Lal and his family were very proud Fijians and genuinely believed in the potential of our homeland. I remembered them allowing us at one time to dig up their immaculately manicured front lawn to make a lovo so that we, the Fijian students in Canberra at that time, could celebrate a lovo meal with them.”

To leave USP and Fiji or to stay?

One of the great challenges faced by Prof Lal was whether to stay at USP and in a comfort zone or venture out into the brave new world. Brij dared to leave Fiji’s comfort zone and his stellar career at Australian National University, University of Hawaii, and other international arena were the results. Unfortunately, Prof Lal did not hide that he was critical of the quality of academics who remained at USP and the quality of USP, views somewhat dismaying to us who remained at USP.

Early in the 1980s, Prof Lal decried the poor quality of USP academics. In Mr. Tulsi’s Store, he wrote (pp.102-3) that for USP academics: “Public engagement with the important issues of the day … [and] took over to the point where scholarship became a diversion. Had I remained in Fiji, I too, would be a part-time academic dabbling full-time in politics … regret gnaws at the heart about the missed opportunities to produce enduring, fundamental scholarship”. Doug Munro, a former USP academic, relates that his friend Prof Lal “realised, as his complacent colleagues could not, the intellectual shallowness of (USP)”.

But both these harsh criticisms were made about a university then barely seventeen years old compared to the more than a hundred years of history of top Australasian universities. USP desperately needed good regional and expatriate academics to remain and build its reputation.

In the eighties when we pleaded with Prof Lal to apply for the post of Professor of Politics being left vacant by a departing expatriate, Prof Lal’s response was that he would rather be a lecturer at ANU than a professor at USP. Of course, such statements while dismaying to us at USP were totally understandable given the steady stream of departing good academics including economists such as Dr Sitiveni Halapua and Professor Satish Chand both of whom were my junior colleagues in the USP Economics Department and later achieved greater heights in Hawaii and Australia respectively. Having to struggle to obtain USP support for our publications, we were of course also envious of the massive editorial and publishing support that Prof Lal had at ANU and the mentoring support at UH. I would suggest that intellectual life at USP in the first four decades was far from “shallow” before the Bainimarama censorship took hold around 2012.

I suspect that had Prof Lal remained at USP his career would have eventually become extremely insecure because unenlightened USP Vice Chancellors tried to base the departmental funding on student numbers which History/Politics always struggled for. There are readings in this book which explain my personal struggles as USP’s Director of Planning and Development trying to protect the smaller departments and even science departments from the attacks by unenlightened managements too focused on student numbers. But as several historians also described in Serendipity, unenlightened Australian governments also did not encourage the study of history and the arts by prescribing higher fees for students in these fields in Australia.

I suspect that if by serendipity Prof Lal had attained the highest of positions like that of the USP Vice Chancellor (which a decade later he did apply unsuccessfully for), he would have suffered the same fate as the current VC Pal Ahluwalia, given Prof Lal’s implacable opposition to military coups and any curbing of academic and media freedoms. It was also personally disappointing to some of us at USP that Australasian academics rarely acknowledged the published work of USP academics, some even prior to their own publications on the same subjects. There has always been an academic “neocolonialism” at work in the Pacific, rarely acknowledged in the literature and undermining the work of regional academics. Of those of us who stayed on at USP and tried to contribute to not just our usual heavy teaching load, but also to our people’s struggles for democracy, rule of law and media freedom, it was a tough balancing act. I am one of the few who managed to do both teaching and serving the community, as evident in my selfpublished four volumes of community education writings Fiji Developing: Volume 1: The Challenges of Growing the Fiji Economy; Volume 2: A Far Go For All Fiji; Volume 3: Our Struggles for Democracy in Fiji: Rule of Law and Media Freedom; and Volume 4: Towards a Decent Fiji. (all now 9/28/24, 3:17 PM The Fiji Times https://edition.fijitimes.com.fj/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=e4fad093-33c6-4e8c-8f9d-b19c68c8b31a 10/11 available on Amazon as eBooks). But that also came at the cost of not contributing enough to international academia as much as we would have liked. But then again, I have been personally fortunate in also being able to make at least one truly international contribution through my Palgrave Macmillan book British Imperialism and the Making of Colonial Currency Systems, Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. This was done without any institutional USP support and serendipitously occurred 28 years after I had completed my PhD and had a contract with Macmillan in London through the assistance of a Professor Larry Neal, Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois. Such a time lapse would never have occurred had I been an ANU high-flying academic like Professor Brij Lal.

• Next week: PART II: BRIJ LAL – ANOTHER TRUE SON OF FIJI • PROF WADAN NARSEY is one of the region’s senior economists and a regular commentator on political and economic issues in Fiji. The views expressed herein are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times.

Prof Brij Lal – Greatest academic export of Fiji

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