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फ़िजी के हिंदुस्तानी Fiji ke Hindustani | |
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![]() Fiji ethnic map (2017 census) red is for Indo-Fijian | |
Total population | |
460,000 37.6% of the population of Fiji (2007) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
![]() | 313,798 (2007 census)[1] |
![]() | 61,748 (2016 census)[2] |
![]() | 38,310 (2022 census)[3] |
![]() | 30,890 (2000 figure)[4] |
![]() | 24,665 (2016 census)[5] |
Languages | |
Fiji Hindi • English • Pidgin Fijian • Fijian Bau • Others | |
Religion | |
Majority: Hinduism (76.7%) Minority: Islam (15.9%), Sikhism (0.9%), Christianity (6.1%), others (0.4%)[6] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Indo-Caribbeans, Indians in South Africa, Indo-Mauritians, Indo-Guyanese, Indo-Surinamese, Indo-Jamaicans, Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian, Indian Singaporeans, Malaysian Indians, Indian people, Indian diaspora |
Indo-Fijians (Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी के हिंदुस्तानी, romanized: Fiji ke Hindustani), also known as Indian Fijians (also colloquially known as "Findians" or "Findus"), are Fijian citizens of South Asian descent, and include people who trace their ancestry to various regions of the Indian subcontinent.[7] Although Indo-Fijians constituted a majority of Fiji's population from 1956 through the late 1980s, discrimination and the resulting brain drain resulted in them numbering 313,798 (37.6%) (2007 census) out of a total of 827,900 people living in Fiji as of 2007[update].[8]
Although they hailed from various regions in the subcontinent, the vast majority of Indo-Fijians trace their origins to the Awadh and Bhojpur regions of the Hindi Belt in northern India.[9] Indians in Fiji speak Fiji Hindi also known as ‘Fiji Baat’ which is based on the Awadhi dialect with major influence from Bhojpuri. It is a koiné language with its own grammatical features, distinct to the Modern Standard Hindi spoken in India.[10] The major home districts of Fiji's North Indian labourers were Basti, Gonda, Lucknow, Kanpur, Faizabad, Ballia, Ghazipur, Gorakhpur, Sultanpur, Siwan, Shahabad, Saran, and Azamgarh, in the present-day Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh and the present-day Bhojpur region of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand.[11] Others (in a smaller quantity) originated in the Telugu regions. A small contingent of indentured labourers came from Afghanistan and Nepal. A small amount of free immigrants also came from Gujarat and Punjab.[12] Many of the Muslim Indo-Fijians also came from Sindh and various other parts of South Asia. Fiji's British colonial rulers brought South Asian people to the Colony of Fiji as indentured labourers between 1879 and 1916 to work on Fiji's sugar-cane plantations.
Mahendra Chaudhry became Fiji's first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister on 19 May 1999.
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