“When Fijians are photo, Indians are frame. You take the frame out the photo drops.”

Walk down the street in Suva city and without a doubt you will go past an Indian food shop, jam packed not only with Fijian Indians but with i-taukei, Fijian Chinese, Fijian Europeans and tourists. The point here is that when you are in Fiji, it is not just the i-taukei that are visible in Fijian society. Through food, clothing and music it is hard not to notice the very visible Fijian Indian population scattered throughout Fiji.

Within Fiji there is a dynamic cultural relationship between i-taukei and Fijian Indians.  The two are adopting each others culture quite openly as illustrated throughout Teaiwa’s article South Asia Down Under: Popular Kinship in Oceania. Although this may not be publicly visible there are many cases in which I have seen this adoption take place. For example I was having a conversation with a indigenous Fijian man who use to go to an Indian Fijian school and now lives in a share house with four Indian Fijians. He said that he got introduced to Bollywood movies by his housemates and loved them so much that now he watches Bollywood movies without subtitles cos he can now follow the script in Hindi.

In Academia it is rare to come across a paper that focuses on both Asia and the Pacific instead of the common Asia focused article or Pacific focused article. Rarely are the two discourses married. Teaiwa manages to explore the two, South Asia and Pacific, in a very personally reflective paper giving numerous personal experiences and recounts of the issues she is talking about.

I have had little contact with the Indian Fijian society in Fiji yet from what I have seen in relation to popular culture such as the Indian restaurants we have frequented so often on our lunch breaks and the Indian/Bollywood music blaring through our work office windows at the Fiji Arts Council from the streets below, I feel that the potential for popular culture to form transcending “kinships” within Fiji, as Teiawa is arguing, is so great and to an extent I believe that it is already happening in Fiji.  Even as I write this blog I am sitting in an Internet cafe with Bollywood music blaring.