Please join us for the launch of Women, Indenture, and Resistance 2026. The book will be launched by CHL's Emerita Professor Margaret Jolly.

Women, Indenture, and Resistance examines the lived experiences of Indian indentured (girmitiya) women in the Fiji Islands from 1879 to 1920. It is set within the sugarcane plantations of Fiji in the era of British colonialism. Using the apparatus of minor history and intersecting theories in the fields of colonial, postcolonial, subaltern, and feminist history, this study sets out to retrieve archival fragments from the underbelly of the National Archives of Fiji. Dominant constructions of passive or victimized indentured women are challenged and subverted throughout the book as minute details relating to women’s individual and collective reactions to colonial and patriarchal power structures are illuminated. The narratives of trauma, resilience, and resistance presented here offer a unique contribution to the study of indentureship and gender in Fiji. This interdisciplinary investigation ends with a personal homage to a great-great-grandmother of indenture, Jasni.

About the Author

Dr. Margaret Mishra’s research focuses on feminism in the Pacific, indentured women’s activism and minor history. Margaret is a Partner Investigator on the ARC project ‘Unfreedom, Voices, Redress: Plantation Cultures of the Western Pacific’. Her new book (2025) Women, Indenture, and Resistance explores the lived experiences of Indian indentured (Girmitiya) women in the Fiji Islands between 1879 and 1920 (Oxford University Press). Other recent publications include: “Your Woman is a Very Bad Woman: Revisiting Female Deviance in Colonial Fiji” (2016); “The Suspicious Death of Depot Baby 7480: Maternal Negligence in Colonial Fiji” (2016); “Mawlee’s Murder: A Minor Historical Event” (2013). Margaret hails from Suva. She completed her BA and MA degrees at the University of the South Pacific before pursuing her PhD at Monash University in Melbourne. Margaret has taught ethics at the Fiji National University and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and gender studies and literature at Victoria University in Melbourne.

Women, Indenture, and Resistance is published by Oxford University Press.

This event is a collaboration between the ANU School of Culture, History & Language and Flinders University.

Registration is essential; please register latest by Feb 16 for purposes of finalising our catering arrangements.

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