Warning: This article contains extreme racist hate speech and acts.
Over the years I’ve been writing, much of my time on this blog has been spent talking about colonial racism against Māori and Indigenous peoples. Today I want to talk about anti-Indian racism, operating through all of us.
The haka happened, yes, but that was not all:
- There was also the graffiti in front of Papatoetoe Central School (that’s a school for five to eleven year olds, many of whom are Indian) saying “Kill All Indians”.
- A further call to kill all Indians was then spray-painted in a public space in Royal Oak
- MP Shane Jones declared that the NZ-Indian Free Trade Agreement would result in a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”
- Mayor Wayne Brown called an Indian RNZ staff member a “Muslim terrorist”
We can’t deny that these are all connected. The news did not really report on the incidents collectively (and even their individual reports did not get strong uptake in mainstream media) – and that in itself seems to speak to the normalising of anti-Indian hate in Aotearoa. When the haka and “butter chicken tsunami” was discussed in Māori spaces, though, what we saw was an outpouring of racism and gaslighting of the Indian community. In one moment, they were being told the haka was not about them (even though it clearly referenced their culture). In the next moment, they were being told that they were responsible for the words and actions of Parmjeet Parmar, that they should be doing more to shut her down, that there *are* too many of them over here, that they don’t “assimilate” enough into “New Zealand” culture, that they threaten our jobs, our access to housing, our national identity, that they needed to “toughen up” and take it, that this is their “FAFO” (f**k around, find out) moment. They were called an “imported problem”. And throughout it all, there were hundreds of likes, laughs, and loves of these extremely racist sentiments, from our own.
Even though many may assume that the harm begins and ends with the act or speech itself, for the affected communities, the ripples of harm keep hitting them as they watch the public comment over and over again with more racism against them.
Coincidentally, it was also ANZAC week, which is already a week of complex feelings for so many of us. Many of our tīpuna returned from the war completely jaded about the experience, regretted going, upon return were maltreated by the very country they believed they were putting their lives on the line for (and this remains the case even for today’s soldiers). For quite a few, it seems cruel that the price of citizenship is still demanded, even though the Crown itself does not uphold te Tiriti in the slightest. I have immense respect for the fact that many of our Pāpās were committed to the idea of going overseas to fight against violent racism and great sadness that in spite of that sacrifice, it is still all around us, today.
But even back then, anti-Indian racism was rampant in Aotearoa, and Indian soldiers were also maltreated by the nation they laid their lives down for. One of the earliest hate crimes against non-Māori was in 1920, when a group of Indian scrubcutters were surrounded by torch-wielding pākehā in Greytown, Wairarapa. That same year, the RSA had passed a resolution that the ‘influx of Hindus and Chinese’ posed a threat to New Zealand, in spite of the fact that Indian soldiers fought for New Zealand alongside the Māori Pioneer Battalion.
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As a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, it’s hard to miss the fact that the term “Hindus” was used as a racial slur against Indians. It’s a classic mark of the Doctrine of Discovery, that being non-Christian is what targets you as an enemy-of-Christ. It’s present in the very papal bulls which set the colonial project in motion:
“we grant to you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be” (Dum Diversas 1452)
The Saracens were the Muslim. The pagans were anyone with a belief system tied to nature (ie Indigenous peoples). Indians became the intersection of these two categories of enemies of Christ. While 19th century racist scholars such as Max Müller referred to Hinduism as “nature worship” and placed it on a chain of existence below monotheistic (“single God”) religions, there was also a melding of Indians with the Middle East, in-part influenced through political developments such as the British partitioning of Pakistan and India, and in part also because the colonial gaze tends to meld all brown people together. Along this journey, the turban also grew to become a “Muslim” marker, regardless of the actual faith of the person wearing it. And so when Wayne Brown saw an Indian RNZ staff member wearing a turban and said “Security can’t be very tight if we’re being escorted by a Muslim terrorist”, he was speaking directly to a colonial fusion of Muslim and Indian people that goes back generations.
By 1926, with the support of Prime Minister Gordon Coates, the “White New Zealand League” was established to protect New Zealand from Chinese and Indian migrants, who apparently posed a threat to the racial integrity and economic prosperity of “White New Zealand”, and it found support among grower associations, labour organisations, local bodies, and the Returned Soldiers’ Association. Like many aspects of colonialism, these ideas were absorbed by Māori, and even though they were called the “White New Zealand League”, many Māori were co-opted into the “White New Zealand” movement.
Crucially, the White New Zealand League suggested that Indian and Chinese immigrants posed an existential threat to Māori communities, and in particular posed a sexual threat to wāhine Māori. This eventually led to the government establishing a special committee to investigate and condemn intermingling of Māori with Chinese and Indian people.
By this time British officers and civil servants who had previously served in India, had already named New Zealand places Khyber Pass, Khandallah, Berhampore, Cashmere. A kind of memorium for the lands they just finished colonially plundering.
The coloniser would love you to believe that your colonisation was an isolated event, and that Indians are to blame for it. What the coloniser doesn’t want you to see is that colonialism is a single integrated global system in which the colonisation of one people was directly connected to the colonisation of others, including in India, what it doesn’t want you to know is that colonial domination is what drives migration – and what the coloniser is absolutely terrified of you doing, is standing together in unity against him.
This history of naming places after Indian sites of colonial plunder is in turn, is layered over another pertinent history – that the predecessor to the New Zealand Company, responsible for so much colonial land theft, is the British East India Company, both joint-stock-trading companies whose commercial purpose was colonial land-theft, and both receiving royal charters to do so (the East India Company in 1600, the New Zealand Company in 1841).
Chartered joint-stock companies such as the British East India Company became the blueprint for “corporate empire”: state-backed private entities exercising sovereign-like powers to organise extraction across territories. That’s exactly why corporations have more power than voting citizens these days. Prior to British colonialism, India was a textile trade-giant. Through colonialism, this model restructured a sophisticated Indian textile economy into a colonial supply chain in service of Britain, shifting production from high-value manufacturing to raw material extraction, and relocating profits to imperial centres.
This pattern became foundational to the global political economy. Whereas the Doctrine of Discovery created the concept of slave-destinies for particular races, its application in India became the basis of slave-labour which would be normalised in service of the global textile trade. This continues to shape contemporary textile industries, where production is outsourced to India or Bangladesh, value is centralised, and exploitation is a foundation stone of the entire economy. Many of your own favourite Māori clothing brands source their textiles from India, and while some (shoutout Aho Creative) openly speak to their commitment to work with ethical Indian suppliers, many do not. Shout out also to Misty Scurr for raising this awareness amongst our own.
So when we speak about India as “whenua pōhara”, we must understand that term within the context a land that has been plundered by our own coloniser, a colonial brutality that includes the British Crown enforcing some 30 famines upon Indian people, to the point where it permanently changed Indian bodies for all of their uri.
We need to understand that colonial plunder of India and South Asia is ongoing, through a system that we, too, are complicit in. The global fashion industry is economically propped up by everyone’s silent support for Indian enslavement. Nor is this confined to the textile industry. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation economies across the Caribbean and Pacific suddenly faced a labour shortage. Instead of ending exploitation, the system replaced enslaved Africans with “indentured” labourers from India (this ran concurrently with the practice of blackbirding across the Pacific, which saw large numbers of Pacific islanders illegally abducted, and trafficked into the plantation economy to replace liberated Black people). The indenture system carried Indians to Fiji, and one example of this history is The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR Sugar) who needed labour for sugar plantations after enslavement of Africans was abolished, and initially they used blackbirded workers, but then the British-Fiji colonial government later shifted toward Indian indentured labour as a more “regulated” supply.
![THE INDIANS IN FIJI
(To the Editor.)
Sir, — Your correspondent "From the East" has missed the main point mentioned by Mr. Fraser and criticised by me, and that was about the Indians' treatment in Fiji. It is clear from Mr. Fraser's letter that he is of opinion that the Indian is well treated there, while I still hold that he is a poor ill-used creature. Let us go back to the strike period of 1919. Whilst articles had risen 200 and 300 per cent in price, my countrymen had been receiving only 2/ as a daily wage, which was entirely insufficient to keep body and soul together. And this at a time when all growers of cane were doing unusually well. Three years after the war had begun, while prices had been rising in every direction, the indentured labourer himself was obtaining exactly the same wage as before the war. The average savings sent to India by indentured labourers, according to the Rev. Andrews, did not amount to more than 6/ per head per annum. As Dr. Manilal said in writing of the unfortunate position of these people "Hundreds of Indians are yearning or panting to see a ship to go back to India and leave this Hell on earth created by the greed and avarice of the English planters and their Fiji Government." — I am, etc.,
JELAL KALYANJI NATALI.
[This correspondence is closed. — Ed.]](https://i0.wp.com/tinangata.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-14.png?ssl=1)
The “indentured” labour model, where they were promised pay, housing, and a return ticket home, but wound up more often than not being forced, underpaid or unpaid, confined to the plantation, violently abusive and their return home denied, came to underpin the model of labour utilised throughout the Pacific, and is still a common story told by Pacific workers in the horticultural industry in Aotearoa, today. Of course, as the global political economy took shape in the 20th century, and New Zealand, leveraging off its colonial alliances, asserted itself as a regional bully in the Pacific region, extraction and exploitation came to characterise its approach to trade and politics across the Pacific region.
So when I look at the fact that today, research indicates that Indian, Asian and UAE people are the “least welcome” migrants here in Aotearoa, I can’t help but look at the intersections of anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism and Islamophobia. I can’t help, as a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, but be aware of how being dark-skinned has operated as a signifier for slave-destinies, and it’s only through that fact that “dark-skinned” qualifies as an insult. I can’t help but be aware of how that intersection of anti-Black and anti-Asian racism has transmuted into our voluntary blindness for enslavement of Indian people in service of our fashion choices. I can’t help but see how this profoundly shaped our Pacific economies and labour practices.
I can’t help but look at the graffiti of “Kill all Indians” in Royal Oak and connect it to Destiny Church, who last year tore and stomped on religious flags belonging to the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Palestinian communities. I can’t help but connect it to Islamophobia, to genocide in Gaza, and to the slaughter of Muslim prayer communities here in Otautahi (which we swore would never happen again, but are now charting a pathway to). I cannot help but see all of that within the fact that Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim are the “least welcome” religions in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I can’t NOT connect these two images
I cannot help but look at this same message painted in front of a school for five to eleven year olds just last week and think of those poor babies seeing that on the ground, and the fear it struck into their hearts. I can’t help but see this, and consider the work of Ara Alam-Simmons and other researchers who have tracked and documented the extreme racism that children from these communities experience every day in New Zealand schools.
I cannot help but view this in light of the fact that we know, not think but know that hate crime stems from hate speech. That it does not occur all by itself, but is a culmination of people degraded and abused for political and personal point-scoring, and dehumanised until their very lives become expendable.
I cannot help but connect that to the fact that the Doctrine of Discovery is based upon destroying everything that is most sacred to non-European, non-Christian communities, and always has been. Their ceremonies, dance, prayer, markings, and even their children.
I see all of this, and I cannot help but stand against it – because I understand, absolutely and completely, that the story of their oppression, is the story of my oppression too.
And to finish, I leave us with this beautiful composition from two of my favourite Māori poets, Abby Hauraki and Rangimārie Sophie Jolley
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