Sun doesn’t set on Indian diaspora
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Chandan Mitra
Over the centuries Indians have migrated to distant lands, sometimes out of choice but often as indentured labour. They still retain their Indianness in their adopted homelands.
At the height of Britain’s imperial glory in the early-20th century, it was a fact that the Sun never set on the British Empire. Never in history had any one country exercised such phenomenal dominance over others on a global scale. From Hong Kong in the East, New Zealand, Australia and the island of Fiji Down Under, through South-East Asia, India, Aden and Palestine, East and South Africa, Gibraltar and islands in the Atlantic, the Caribbeans down to Falkland Islands, it was a reality that at any given point during the Earth’s 24-hour rotation, the Sun would be up in the sky somewhere or the other.
When I visited the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London’s Whitehall, it was almost tragic to walk down a corridor that still boasted the Colonial Office. A board outside had the official seals of the remaining British colonies mounted on it, mentioning a few scattered islands in the West Indies and, of course, the Falklands where sheep outnumber humans but for whose retention Mrs Margaret Thatcher fought a multi-billion pound war in the early-1980s.
The Sun began setting on the British Empire from 1947 when it gave up the Jewel in the Crown and by the late-1960s, when London withdrew from Africa the Sun’s descent beyond the horizon was complete.
In the course of its 200-plus years of imperial history Britain, however, did create living room for its people. The British populated America and despite the subsequent metamorphosis of the US into a melting pot of people and cultures, the bulk of its inhabitants still trace their lineage to Britain and Ireland. Britain also populated Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some of South Africa. Barring South Africa, the others still recognise the monarch of the United Kingdom as their Head of State. In fact, a piquant situation arose when India resolved to become a republic but remain within the Commonwealth. It was after a great deal of tortuous negotiation that a formula was evolved whereby the British monarch was designated Head of Commonwealth instead of Head of State for the republics of India and Pakistan.
Apart from peopling virgin lands in vast countries like Canada and Australia, the British were responsible for another great human migration. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they transported thousands of Indian agricultural workers to distant islands — from Fiji in the East to Jamaica and Guyana in the West Indies, with Mauritius thrown in, in between.
Of course, there were migrants besides indentured labour. In East and South Africa, the British encouraged traders and semi-skilled labour from India, particularly Gujarat, to settle.
In Malaya, Tamil rubber plantation workers were lured with work offers. The need to open up the vast, under-populated highlands of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, South Africa and Rhodesia for cultivation and communication spurred the British colonialists to import cheap labour from overpopulated India. With the giant leaps in commercial shipping in the 19th century and growth in the demand for commodities like tea, coffee, cotton, jute, sugar and rubber, the British sensed a huge prospect of dominating international trade. The Caribbean islands, Fiji and Mauritius provided just the right locations for cultivating sugar cane. And who better than industrious Indian labourers from impoverished eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to supply the work force?
Regrettably, a comprehensive history of Indian migration to these distant lands and the subsequent evolution of a hybrid culture there, largely based on the retention of the rudiments of the Indian system, has not been seriously undertaken. As a people, Indians are not just indifferent to their history; they are positively ignorant of it. I have, on several occasions, pointed to the staggering inadequacy of our knowledge about the extent of India’s cultural and linguistic influence on Indo-China, Malaysia and Indonesia. While our sarkari historians remain obsessed with making a politically correct reassessment of Aurangzeb, trying to make him out as a benign, ‘secular’ ruler, they dismiss the contribution of mediaeval South Indian kingdoms to the spread of Indian socio-cultural influences beyond our shores.
It came as a surprise to me in Bali to discover the deep devotion to Hinduism and the prevalence of Hindu practices among the islanders. A couple of years ago I visited Mauritius for a week and although it wasn’t a surprise to note the extent of Indianness that prevails, I was nevertheless impressed by the continuity of the linkages. Indian migrants to Mauritius carved out a society for themselves in consonance with the religio-cultural artifacts of India that they carried with them.
With no communication with the motherland once they disembarked from cramped ships at Port Louis nearly a century ago, they mutated into a society that integrated with other migrants but successfully retained Indian characteristics. For example, I found married women invariably donning the sindur, bindi and mangalsutra; many of them wore saris too. Hindu temples, representing the architectural heritages of different ethnic groups, Telugu, Tamil and north Indian, dot the island. I was told by an Indian friend working there that he once heard an elderly Mauritian woman of Indian origin lecturing an idol of Hanuman in fluent French, complaining about the god’s inability to cure her ailing grandchild!
The migrants created their own holy waters, naming a volcanic lake Ganga Talao, over which they built a huge temple to Shiva. This could be apocryphal, but I was told they have even created a god named Mauriteshwar!
Few of the migrants were actually Rajputs, but the majority that emigrated from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar took advantage of their distance from home to sanskritise and arrogated Rajput status to themselves. I recall when the former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago visited his home village in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district some years ago, the welcoming posters pointedly referred to his original caste, saying “Swagatam! Basudeo Pandey (Ahir)”.
When asked about this in Delhi, he explained: “There are two types of Pandeys. One who are original pandits, others like my ancestors whose job was to provide drinking water to passengers on the ships that ferried people to the West Indies. People called out to them saying ‘Pani de’ (give water). That’s how they became Pandeys!” It is probably this tyranny of such caste hierarchies that the migrants were happy to escape. Mauritius makes a fascinating sociological study, so I am sure does the West Indies or Fiji.
The Indian diaspora in these places shows how resilient our culture actually is, how firmly it has withstood the pressures of local customs and religious influences. Sadly, however, the languages don’t seem to have survived.
Although there are several Hindi radio channels in Mauritius and multiplexes seem to screen only the latest Bollywood offerings, the present generation doesn’t speak Hindi. “My grandmother still speaks Bhojpuri. We understand, but can’t quite talk in it,” was the standard reply I got from whoever I asked. For a community as big as the Indian diaspora, that’s a pity. It may be a legacy of the Empire but the Indian diaspora is as widespread as the Empire was in its heyday. The Sun does not set on the Indian diaspora.
Source: http://www.dailypioneer.com/302972/Sun-doesn%E2%80%99t-set-on-Indian-diaspora.html
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Filed Under: Culture
