The convenience of forgotten histories

Many of us take our histories for granted - personal or collective, written or sung, remembered and forgotten.

As I watched "From Canefields to Freedom," a dance performance by the Tribhangi Dance Collective, enacting the arrival of the first indentured labourers to Natal in the late 19th century, I realised that one can derive so much of one's personal identity from a place of origin. By naming one's place of origin, one conjours its linguistic and cultural contours, evoking memories that sometimes rest firmly in the imagination. Remembering a place thus almost conveys a sense of belonging without ever having to even be there.

Despite serious misgivings about the dance performance itself - a patchouli of half-baked slideshow presentations on modern India spliced into a dance-theatre rendition of the historical journey, with too little dance and too much theatre - the performance was a reminder of how difficult it is for many immigrants to construct the narrative of their identities without a continuous, uninterrupted chain of stories. I realised that my dissatisfaction with the dance performance was less about the fact that I felt it did not live up to my exacting standards, but more about the fact that I was expecting a linear, well-constructed narrative - a narrative of someone whose memories and shared histories remained intact. 

In fact, the Indian indentured labourer experience was the exact opposite. Cut abruptly from the source of all their memories, the Indian indentured labourers in South Africa carved and creolised identities for themselves based on a patchwork of memories that much resembled the choppy dance performance. Their personal memories thus became subject to the whims of sea captains and colonial officers that mandated the number of belongings they could take with them on a ship. Crossing the "black waters" or the "Kala Pani" meant that as required, lightening the ship's load literally meant that more memories were cast overboard. "From Canefields to Sugarcane," indeed, pointed out that the journey over the Kala Pani was in fact a great leveller - formerly disparate castes and cultures began to communicate and co-exist with every lurch of the ship.

Even alighting on land may not have allowed for a more grounded sense of cultural identity. Harsh labour conditions and an ambivalent place as former British subjects in a country that was quickly caught between British Natal and the independent Boer Republic (Transvaal) meant that South African Indians were constantly struggling to gain a foothold in a landscape that seemed to slip and slide beneath them, as if they were still on a ship, crossing the Kala Pani. Then the shock of living in a system such as apartheid that denied any detailed knowledge of shared cultural history that wasn't white further damaged this broken storyline.

A trip to Fordsburg (Johannesburg's Indian neighbourhood and market area) reveals that links to modern day India are alive and well - indeed, some memories were dredged out of the Kala Pani and resurrected. Oriental Plaza like any Indian bazaar worth its salt, offers tantalizing arrays of spices, fabric, footwear, utensils, bollywood DVDs, and wedding paraphernalia in a chaotic, colourful atmosphere that is almost as exhausting as a trip to Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi (not quite). And the remarkable thing about these bazaars is that the clientele ranges from local Indians and "Indian" Indians to non-Indians of all kinds - South African and otherwise. Being Indian, in a way has become global in more ways than one - it has global reach and currency that it never had before.

Thinking on this, the concept of Indianness travels relatively well these days. What the Kala Pani adventurers has to cast overboard for fear of weighing their ship down is marketed, distributed, and sold in millions of Indian franchises across the world. Airline restrictions notwithstanding, bindis, bangles, baltis, and bollywood movies today make it safely past borders without forsaking their Indianness. Being Indian today is way more marketable than it ever was - the New Global Indian is a commercially viable entity like it never was before.

The "Old" Global Indians of South Africa

The only thing constant to the concept of a "Global Indian" may be the fact that being "global" to many Indians may be hardly new.

South African Indians are living testament to the timelessness of the Indian diaspora. Despite the fact that many Indian indentured labourers were brought to South Africa during the Dutch colonial era in the 17th century, the period between August and October 2010 is set to officially mark 150 years since the ships carrying Indian indentured labourers touched the shores of Durban. “Shared Histories” is a celebration across three cities that commemorates this milestone, with a melange of back-to-your-roots culture and cuisine extravaganzas that promise to titillate the senses and twist the tongue.

South African Indians that celebrate this momentous arrival mostly hail from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—an origin that is betrayed by the creolisation of South Indian names that is likely the handiwork of a lacklustre immigration official –“Govenders,” “Moodleys” and “Chetty’s” bear a suspicious similarity to the South Indian caste names of “Gounder,” “Mudaliyar” and “Chettiar.” These migrants were so abruptly severed from their cultural ties that few amongst these immigrants from South India claim a “village” back in India to which they trace ancestry. This forced migration was the manifestation of the cruel ebbs and flows of a voracious British empire, which institution quickly realised that one way to constructively exploit Natal’s abundant sugarcane fields and cotton fields was to import cheap labour from a society already familiar with indentured servitude.

While this month celebrates their arrival in hordes, South Africa, like any other location in the world, has been home to Indian immigrants from all over the country, and at different periods in time--the most famous of all of course, being MK Gandhi, who arrived in South Africa as a young lawyer and eventually volunteered in the Indian Ambulance Corps during the Boer War. Tangible evidence of global nature of Indian identity is the fact that Indian civil disobedience as we know it, was famously born on foreign shores. Everyone is familiar with the old anecdote of Gandhi being manhandled off a South African train at Pietermaritzburg, for refusing to move from a first class compartment even while holding a valid first class ticket. His subsequent response would give rise to one of the most prominent global social movements in history.

South African Indians, however, have capitalised on being both “Indian” and “global” – creating a truly creole identity, ranging from the fanciful concoctions of names that represent musical variations on traditional themes—try your hand at Kerishnie, Primarishi, and Thavashan--to an entire cuisine that would seem unfamiliar to an immigrant with a more recent footprint on the subcontinent.

“Bunny chow” is a most delicious quarter-or half-loaf of bread, beheaded and stuffed with veg. and non-veg. curry, "sambals" are an assortment of chutneys and sauces, and “samoosas” are the two-dimensional versions of the subcontinent’s favourite snack.

The influence of Indian cuisine on the Indian palate must be epic, if despite involuntary deportation, limited freedoms, and a completely different geographic setting—the taste of curry leaves and chopped cumin remains.

Culinary creolisation notwithstanding, the Indians in South Africa have carved a unique role for themselves in the country’s history, and still occupy a rather interesting position. The Group Areas Act of 1974 witnessed the creation of massive Indian townships alongside black and coloured ones. Several Indians rose to prominence in the fight against apartheid—global Indians can count amongst their luminaries such stars as Ahmed Kathrada, Frene Ginwala, Mac Maharaj, and Fathima Meer, pioneers in the campaign for South African civil rights.

On an imaginary Richter scale of cultural upheavals, then, South African Indians have experienced changes of seismic proportions. If the recent proliferation of angst-ridden post-colonial writing on the Indian diaspora hints at the deep emotional and psychological trauma experience by recent immigrants, just imagine then the countless memoirs of colonial angst that could be written of the involuntary uprooting, transportation, subsequent servitude, and exposure to forced segregation?

Despite this unique patchouli of experiences, the events that mark the milestone of Indian arrival on South African shores seem to have essentialised being Indian into the relatively discrete and globally representative categories of what constitutes Indianness--Food, Classical Dance and Music, Yoga, and Bollywood. How odd, it seems, that despite the unique histories that Indian migrants have carved for themselves throughout the world—from Suriname to Nairobi, Trinidad to Manila, we hang on to manifestations of what the world perceives as Indian?

In the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about the events in Shared Histories and the collective experience of the events' attendees.

Something about chicken tikka masala…

If you’re calling yourself a desi, then you’re really not Indian or so it seems. In fact, the usage of this term came about when Indians emigrated to British colonies as well as the US, especially around the 60s. Little Indias spawned into big Indias, with corner shops of chicken tikka masala take away to Amitabh Bachchan dvds, all in the name of desi or “South Asian” culture. It catered to a box that you could at last check to mark your identity in foreign lands. So does this fusion identity make it into the NGI box? Well, if we are going to be strict about definitions here, of guarding our new niche, then it fails to gain membership. For starters, our desi here is not really applying for membership in the first place! She does not count herself as Indian. And say, for argument sake, she does want to belong to our newly nurtured acronym, she would probably interpret “global” as being stationed abroad. However, in our little corner, “global” mean movement, movement of self and ideas. And besides, the quintessential desi is about identity pontification, the kind of material that psychologists dream of but the run of the mill Indian wastes little time in self reflection on their “Indianness.” So here you have it, a new boundary for the NGI!

Who is an NRI ? The Coke ad tells all

Remember Aamir Khan's ad for Coke

What’s in a name anyway?

Apparently, there is a need for a new acronym – NGI: the New Global Indian. Perhaps the NRI (Non Resident Indian) label has worn off, after almost two decades of well-advertised clichés of the yuppy Indian coming “home” to show off the latest gadgets and titles, and recently manicured foreign accent. But let me be honest here; our team inherited this title, we did not invent it. In fact, much of this title is perplexing. Is there an “old” global Indian that we can speak of? And when we say “global,” are we talking about people who have an outlook that has been shaped from years of arm-chair reading of international affairs or maybe something as simple as someone who is turned on by sushi as much as idli-dosa? There are of course other less economical and more elite ways of earning this title, having lived in different parts of the world, coming back regularly with their potpourri of anecdotes on British bar talk to the New York subway life. In fact, this title is much like the “expat” title, where although there are several Indians who travel and live abroad, we distinguish the “immigrant” from the “expat” by sheer class and education. So evidently, the New Global Indian is not the Kerala housemaid who has moved to Dubai to support her family but the doctor who has set up his pediatric office in Menlo Park, California, with his kids skyping regularly with their dada and dadi in Gurgaon.

So granted, we’ve talking of a certain class of people and although the liberal guilt should kick in when addressing this niche populace, we should, for all realistic purposes, be accustomed to it. After all, it’s a national hobby to segment ones demographic. There are many ways of slicing the pie, from Khushwant Singh jokes, Bollywood vs Tollywood people, Banglorians vs Mumbaities to the Infosys gang versus the rest of the world. So why not actually have a blog that addresses those Indians who have traveled and/or lived/worked abroad, who continue to be tied to India and, for all purposes, do not qualify to be within the current plethora of clichés. And in this vein, why not leverage on our common cultural capital of what being Indian is supposed to be like and then, through our multiple and often contesting experiences, make you slightly uncomfortable with such notions. This weekly blog hopes to serve this need.