Paris Olympics 2024: Why two-time Olympic champion Fiji has no Indians in its Rugby 7s team

The population of Fiji is roughly 60 per cent indigenous and around 37 per cent Indian-Fijian. The Indian Fijians are a huge part of the islands but are largely absent from the imagery of popular culture and sport.

File Photo: While rugby is emblematic for Fiji, it isn’t completely representative of the entire Fijian population. At none of the three Olympic Games that it has taken part in, has Fiji fielded an Indian-origin player – a major part of the demographic.  | Photo Credit: Getty Images

They might comprise nearly 40 percent of the population of Fiji, yet persistent cultural stereotypes mean that no Indian has ever been a part of the country’s iconic rugby sevens team. The outfit is all set to compete in the Paris Olympics as two-time champions.

Fijian rugby 7s legend Waisale Serevi – a winner of two World Cups and three Commonwealth Games medals and widely considered one of the greats of the format – says reactions were almost unanimously positive when he announced in June this year that he was headed to India to coach the sport here.

Waisale Serevi, called the King of Rugby.

There was plenty of support on Fijian social media too, but interspersed with less charitable comments here and there.

“Indians also play rugby?” asked one. “They will be playing real rugby not Bollywood rugby,” read another. While those might seem like outliers buried in a sea of otherwise encouraging messages, the sentiment is all too familiar.

When it begins its campaign at the Paris Olympics, the Fiji men’s rugby 7s team goes in as defending champion. Indeed, it also won gold at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, when Rugby 7s was introduced in the Olympic roster. That gold medal was the first-ever for Fiji at the Olympics. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Rugby is immensely popular in the archipelago nation. The national Rugby Team’s Facebook page has 600,000 followers in a country with a population of a little over 900,000. The Flying Fijians - as the national team is known - have punched well above their weight. This is especially true in the Rugby 7s, which features seven players on each side in contrast to the 15-a-side matches of the traditional format.

When they begin their campaign at the Paris Olympics, the Fiji men’s rugby 7s team goes in as defending champions. Indeed, they also won gold at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, when Rugby 7s was introduced in the Olympic roster. That gold medal was the first-ever for Fiji at the Olympics.

Rugby is more than a sport in Fiji. Gareth Baber, who had coached the Fiji 7s Rugby team to a gold at the Tokyo Olympics, calls the islanders’ connection to the sport and team as an emotional and spiritual one and not just a sporting one.

“... it’s about connection with national pride, connection with Fijian people, and particularly how they’re perceived overseas,” Baber had said in an interview with the BBC back in 2021.

Not entirely representative

But while rugby is indeed emblematic for Fiji, it isn’t completely representative of the entire Fijian population. At none of the three Olympic Games that they have taken part in, has Fiji fielded an Indian-origin player – a major part of the demographic. Infact, only two players, that too of part-Indian ancestry – Jack Prasad and Ben Volavola – have ever represented Fiji at the international level.

Ben Volavola (L) is one of two people with Indian ancestry to represent Fiji at the international level. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Fiji isn’t, of course, the only country where players of a certain ethnic origin seem to lack representation in certain sports. No Indian origin players have played for the Springboks (South African rugby team) or the Wallabies (Australian rugby team) either. However, neither of those countries have nearly the same ratio of citizens of Indian origin as Fiji does. Four out of ten Fijians are of Indian origin. None of the members of two-time Olympic champion rugby teams are.

Nearly 40 per cent of the population of Fiji are of Indian origin – the descendants of indentured farm labourers who were brought from India to work in the country’s sugarcane plantations in the 1800s – at a time when both nations were part of the British colonial empire. That number used to be upwards of 50 per cent even a couple of decades ago until a number of Indians emigrated from Fiji following military coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006 - the first two of which were in response to the election of a multi-ethnic government with Indian-origin Fijians having a share of power.

It’s a phenomenon that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“The population of Fiji is roughly 60 percent indigenous and around 37 per cent Indian-Fijian. They are a huge part of the islands but they’re largely absent from the imagery of popular culture and sport. The imagery of Fiji itself, the national, almost ethnic national imagery of Fiji is the muscular indigenous Fijian, in a traditional dress. You rarely see the Indian Fijian in popular Fiji culture This is true particularly in sport with a couple of exceptions – probably Vijay Singh in golf and (ISL player) Roy Krishna in football,” says Dr. Jack Sugden, lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University and the author of ‘Untangling complexity: The ethnic, gender and class dimensions in Fijian sport and society’.

File photo: Fijian Roy Krishna has roots in Kolkata. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Internalised stereotypes

Much of this, argues Sugden, is due to the deeply entrenched stereotypes of the two communities which have their background in colonial policy. The indigenous tribal population was mostly left to themselves while Indians were brought over to work as indentured labourers on sugarcane plantations. The land itself was owned either by the state or by the native Fijians. Indeed, the native Fijians prefer to be identified as i-Taukei – which literally means owners of the land.

“You end up having two sets of people. The workers, who are the Indians, and the people that are there to symbolize Fiji, to govern Fiji, to protect Fiji - ‘the real Fijians,” says Sugden.

“When Fiji won its independence in 1970, the British left a power vacuum that people assumed would be filled by indigenous Fijians. But the economic power was in the hands of the Indian Fijians because when the sugarcane plantation owners left, they left the keys in the hands of the Indian workers. That set the scene for success in business for one group, whereas indigenous Fijians were kind of left there, almost directionless in terms of economics,” says Sugden.

In that cultural uncertainty, where other avenues for progress seemed closed for them, rugby, introduced by the British in the early 1900s eventually became a source of i-Taukei identity and pride.

This wasn’t always the case. Growing up in the capital Suva in the 1970s, Biman Singh, a former sports reporter from Fiji — who asked that his name be changed for this article — recalls how the rugby team at his school, in the capital Suva, used to be a fairly diverse one.

“Although, rugby was first brought in by the British as a way to ‘civilize’ the tribal population, everyone across communities used to play it. I remember eight of the 20 players in the team from my alma mater — Marist College — which won the national schools championships in the 1960s were from the Indo-Fijian and Fijian-Chinese communities. They weren’t the majority of the team but they were there in significant numbers,” he says.

File photo | Meli Derenalagi, left, and Bolaca Napolioni of Fiji with their gold medals following victory in the Men’s Rugby Sevens gold medal match between Fiji and New Zealand at the Tokyo Stadium during the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Singh, though recalls, that by the time he himself started playing in the 1980s, things had changed. The perception was that Indians were simply not cut out to play rugby. Like many stereotypes, this isn’t entirely untrue. 

“The Indian people in Fiji are descended from immigrants who came from Bihar, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. When you compare us to the i-Taukei people there is a fundamental difference in size and strength,” says Singh.

The stereotypes weren’t just about physicality, says Sugden. 

“I lived in Fiji. I trained with a rugby team that had one or two Indian Fijian players and when they played against other teams, these players would be targeted more so than the indigenous islanders. That is to do with perceptions of them being weaker players. It’s also to do with some, I guess, latent prejudice towards Indian Fijians that exists across the Fijian islands. Indian-Fijians can be seen as weaker, more cautious, less able to deal with physical pain or less able to deal with the rough and tumble of sport,” says Sugden.

While these stereotypes doesn’t necessarily seem to hold true consistently — Waisale Serevi, considered one of the all-time greats in Rugby sevens, is himself only 5’7— the fact is they have also been internalised by the Indian-Fijian community. 

“Even in the 1980s, if my father ever caught me playing rugby with i-Taukei players, I’d catch a thrashing for sure. He’d say I’d get injured playing against them. If that happened that could have an effect on my studies. We were told we had to focus on our studies. The i-Taukei schools on the other hand had a huge focus on rugby,” says Singh.

He wasn’t the only one who was nudged towards leaving the sport. ISL (Indian Super League) player Roy Krishna has said in an interviewthat although he loved rugby he was asked by his parents to switch sports since “you needed to be strong and tall to play well and I wasn’t one of them.”

Economic factors

There were cultural factors that aided the shift as well. If Roy Krishna started out as a rugby player who eventually had to shift to football, it was the other way around for Serevi.

“I started playing soccer when I was young. But in Fiji, soccer is mostly played on Sundays and Rugby is played on the same grounds on Saturdays. As a young person, things were very strict. We couldn’t play on Sundays,” says Serevi. With Serevi’s family, like the vast majority of i-Taukei Fijians, being devout Christians, this meant he ended up sticking to rugby.

Even today, while Indians tend to dominate the administrative board of Fiji football, it is i-Taukei Fijians who control that of the rugby federation. 

There is an economic factor at play as well.

“For Fijians, rugby is the main sport because even if you don’t make it in Fiji, you still have the opportunity to go abroad, play rugby and earn money. The culture in Fiji is to help your family, relatives and village when you make money so when a Fijian rugby player goes to play abroad, that money makes a big difference to people back home,” says Serevi.

“Indeed, as Indian Fijians gained more prominence particularly in the business world, a lot of indigenous islanders who incidentally suffer from poverty just as much as Indian Fijians, are quite resentful towards that. So there is that tension there as well. So when you get Indian Fijians, even Fijians of mixed heritage who are, let’s say, crossing that individual, invisible sort of ethno-racial boundary in sport, they do tend to receive abuse from the sidelines, they tend to be targeted at greater levels, and it can be hard for them at times,” says Sugden.

“They genuinely didn’t encourage us to stick around,” says Singh. “If there was any Indian-origin rugby player playing in the local leagues, some of the spectators would heckle them. They’d call them ka’india which literally means from India but it’s used as a pejorative. Even now, if I post something critical of the team, I’ll often get a comment from an i-Taukei Fijian who will ask what an Indian will know about rugby,” says Singh.

Bridging the divide

While Indo-Fijians are almost entirely absent from professional rugby, Fijians of mixed ancestry have had more success.

In recent years, Ben Volavola – the son of an Indian-origin father and a mother of indigenous descent has been amongst the most successful, competing 38 times including at both the 2015 and 2019 World Cups as a fullback for Fiji since his debut in 2015. However, according to Singh, even Volavola, who was born, raised and learned his rugby in Australia, has not had it easy.

“Ben’s father is a man named Dinesh Shankar. But if Ben went by the name Ben Volavola Shankar, I guarantee it would have been a lot harder for him to play as many matches as he did,” says Singh.

While Volavola was never included in the Olympics squad, there will still be one Fijian of Indian origin present at the Paris Olympics. That would be former New Zealand All Black Rocky Khan, who is currently the assistant coach of the Chinese Women’s Rugby 7 team. Khan, the son of an Indian-origin father who represented Fiji internationally in football and an indigenous mother from the island of Rotuma, is proud of his Indian heritage and believes his success has shown stereotypes don’t necessarily need to persist.

Former All Black Rocky Khan, who is currently the assistant coach of the Chinese Women’s Rugby 7s team. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

“I guess it was different growing up in New Zealand but my father was always a big fan of rugby and even in New Zealand I kind of went with the flow because rugby is such a big part of the culture there. I don’t really fit the mould of what a typical rugby player looks like so I’ve had those kinds of conversations as well but I use that as kind of fuel to try and achieve my goals,” says the 5 foot 10” Khan who last played as a halfback for New Zealand at the 2018 Hong Kong sevens competition.

Khan believes there’s no good reason more Indo-Fijian players don’t make a mark for themselves. “I guess the only limits are the limits that you put onto yourself. I always say, if I can do it, anyone else can,” he says.

In India, Serevi, who says he grew up speaking Fijian Hindi and eating Indian food believes the same.

“I think there’s no shortage of talent in India. There’s no reason Indian players can’t be good rugby players,” he says.

While change is slow, it’s definitely happening.

“Back in the 1980s, it was hard to even be a fan if you were Indo-Fijian. There would have been four or five of us even watching a game at a stadium in the 1980s. It’s different now. Even though Indo-Fijians aren’t a part of the team as players, there’s massive support for the team. Many of the team’s sponsors are companies run by Indians (The chief sponsors of the domestic competitions for instance is CJ Patel Industries),” says Singh.

In a way, Sugden says that rugby will end up following the overall trend in Fijian society. 

“Sport is seen as a way to bring people together. However in terms of representation, rugby is one of those sports that keeps Fiji more separate than it actually is in reality. In real life, at the community level, there’s not much hatred between most Indian Fijians and indigenous islanders. There’s lots of intermarriage. They’ll eat the same food, they often speak the same language and they’ll probably be watching the games together,” he concludes.