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The Sensation Named Indian Diaspora
Sutirtha chakraborty
Guest-lecturer
Vivekananda Satavarshiki Mahavidyalaya
West Bengal
Abstract
A ‘Diaspora’ stands for a scattered population with a common origin and also refers to the movement of the population from its original homeland. The origin of the word can be traced back to the Greek word ‘diaspeirein’. The expulsion of the Jews in the sixth century b.c. to the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, all can be considered under the encompassing circle of the term ‘Diaspora’. It came into vogue after its use in cultural theory and particularly in ‘Post-colonial studies’ and studies of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’. Displacement and settlement plays a key role in it. The largest Asian Diaspora outside of South-east Asia is the ‘Indian Diaspora’, currently estimated over twenty million composed of ‘NRIs’ and ‘PIOs’. From Indentured Labourers to Educated technocrats, all appear in this flow of migration. Colonial times to the recent gulf boom, Indian Diaspora is ever increasing in sphere. This paper is an attempt to study the nature of Indian Diaspora, its meaning and its expansion throughout the world.
Key-words: Diaspora, Post-colonial studies, Race, Ethnicity, Indian Diaspora.
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The Cubans and the Mexicans in US, Chinese in South-east Asia, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, Canada and Indians in Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean and also in Britain and Canada – these are all people from different parts of the world but all of them are interconnected by one single term: ‘Diaspora’. There is no systematic way to trace the meaning of the word ‘Diaspora’, but let us try. A ‘Diaspora’ generally refers to a scattered population with a common origin in a smaller geographical area. The word can also direct our attention towards the movement of the population from their original homeland. Historical mass dispersions of an involuntary nature are the cause of such movement. The origin of the word is indebted to the Greek word ‘Diaspeirein’; where ‘Dia’ means ‘across’ and ‘Speirein’ means ‘scatter’. The term originated in the Septuagint (Deuteronomy 28:25) in the phrase ‘ese diasporaen pasais basileias tes ges’ (thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth) (Oxford Dictionary, n.d.). It originally meant the dispersion of the Jews outside of Israel from the sixth century b.c. when they were exiled to Babylonia. The expulsion of Jews from Europe, the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Southern Chinese during the coolie slave trade or the century long exile of the Messenians under Spartan rule, all can be considered under the encompassing circle of the term ‘Diaspora’. Scholars have distinguished between different kinds of diaspora based on its causes such as imperialism, trade or labour migrations. Other qualities that may be typical of many diasporas are thoughts of return, relationships with other communities in the diaspora and lack of full assimilation into host country. More recently, it has been used in cultural theory and especially in ‘Post-colonial studies’ and studies of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. There is the common shifting and unfinished history of displacement and settlement. Cultural identity writes Stuart Hall (1990), is constituted not as “an essence but a positioning” (p. 226). He is led to conclude that “Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall, 1990, p. 235).According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, the first known recorded usage of the word ‘diaspora’ in the English language was in 1876 referring ‘extensive diaspora work (as it is termed) of evangelizing among the National Protestant Churches on the continent’ (n.d.). In all cases the term, carries a sense of displacement and usually its people have a hope or at least a desire to return to their homeland at some point, if the ‘homeland’ still exists in any meaningful sense. According to William Safran (1991), most scholarly discussions
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of ethnicity and immigration paid ‘little if any attention … to diasporas’ (p. 83). This claim was beginning to be out of date, as Safran recognized, even by the time it appeared in print. And obviously no one would think of making such a claim today. There has been a veritable explosion of interest in diasporas since the late 1980s.
Most early discussions of diaspora were firmly rooted in a conceptual ‘homeland’ and they were concerned with a paradigmatic case, or a small number of core cases. The paradigmatic case was of course, the Jewish diaspora. When historian George Shepperson (1966) introduced the notion of the African diaspora, for example, he did so by expressly engaging the Jewish experience. As Clifford (1994) put it,
We should be able to recognize the strong entailment of Jewish history on the language of diaspora without making that history a definitive model. Jewish (and Greek and Armenian) Diasporas can be taken as non-normative starting points for a discourse that is travelling or hybridizing in new global conditions. (p. 306)
The largest Asian diaspora outside of Southeast Asia is the ‘Indian Diaspora’. The overseas Indian community, estimated at over 25 million is spread across many regions in the world. The Indian Diaspora is a generic term to describe the people who migrated from territories that are currently within the borders of the Republic of India. The diaspora is composed of ‘NRIs’ (Non Resident Indians) and ‘PIOs’ (Persons of Indian origin who have acquired the citizenship of some other country). The diaspora is very special to India. Residing in distant lands, its members have succeeded spectacularly in their chosen professions by dint of their single minded dedication and hard work. What is more they have retained emotional, cultural and spiritual links with the country of their origin. Today the Indian Diaspora constitutes an unique and also important force in world culture.
Migration in the aspect of this is very important. Let us consider the act of migration for a moment. What does the term ‘migration’ signify? Migration is intricately associated with Global social change; it is a phenomenon that has been taking place for thousands of years and can be seen all over the world. When people can no longer sustain themselves in their old world, they migrate to places where resources for sustaining their life are easily available. During historical period people migrated from one place to the other in search of food, shelter and security. Today
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they are doing so in search of career opportunities and a better way of living quality life. As a result of migration, apart from skills and expertise; culture, way of living and collective memories of the homeland retains their originality. This is a common trend amongst all the diasporas. There are most evidently three broad patterns of migration which can be seen through the ages----
a) Ancient and medieval migration to colonial powers. b) After the World War II Journey towards industrial nations. c) Recent migration to developed countries for career and better quality of lifestyle.
Now let us take a quick look at the interesting historical evolution of the Indian Diaspora. The history of migration from India goes back at least two thousand years. During the rule of Kanishka, round the 1st century AD, the ‘Romani’ people, traditionally known by the term ‘Gypsies’, are generally believed to have originated in central India, possibly in the modern Indian state of Rajasthan, emigrated from India towards the Northwest and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.
Another major migration from the Indian subcontinent was to Southeast Asia. Historically there is possibility that the first wave of Indian migration towards Southeast Asia happened during Asoka’s invasion of Kalinga and later with Samudragupta’s towards the South. The Chola’s, with their great naval power, conquered what is known today as Indonesia and Malaysia and dominated the so-called indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia. The influence of Indian culture is still strongly felt in these places. The Royal Brahmins of Thailand, the archeological wonders of Angkor kingdoms of Cambodia; and in Indonesia, the old temples, especially in Sumatra and Bali still speak aloud of their Indian influence.
However till date, India has achieved arguably the world’s most diverse and complicated migration histories, which culminated into being the modern Indian Diaspora. To some extent it is divided in three sub-sections---
1) the old diaspora 2) the new diaspoa and 3) the gulf diaspora
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The common theme uniting all three of them is labour migration. Unskilled labour starting two centuries ago, and post the mid-1960s highly skilled labor migrated from their native lands to the far-flung corners of the earth.
The origin of the modern Indian diaspora lies mainly in the subjugation of India by the British and its incorporation into the British Empire. The first wave of today’s Indian Diaspora is what we call as ‘Old Diaspora’, which started during the early nineteenth century and continued until the very end of the British Raj. According to Marjie Bloy (2010), although slavery had been a feature of human life since at least as early as 2,600 B.C.E. in Egypt, it became an extremely lucrative European trade in the late fifteenth century. It did not take Britain long to cash in on the trade in human beings. Ships left British west coast ports like Liverpool and Bristol laden which firearms, gunpowder, metals, alcohol, cotton goods, beads, knives, mirrors — the sort of things which African chiefs did not have, and which were often of very poor quality. Many of the cheaper goods were made in Birmingham and were known as "Brummagem ware". These goods were exchanged for slaves — people who had been captured in local tribal wars perhaps, or who had been taken prisoner especially for this trade (Para. 1).
The slaves were then packed tightly into the slave ships, so that they could hardly move. Often they were chained down; they were allowed little exercise and they were kept in horrendous conditions in the hold of the ship. By the middle of the eighteenth century British ships were carrying about 50,000 slaves a year. Royal Navy sailors said that they could smell the stench of a ship carrying slaves anything up to 10 miles downwind. The slavers sailed from Africa across the Atlantic. Any slaves who had managed to survive the journey were taken to shore and were sold to plantation owners in the West Indies, the southern colonies of America (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia) where they spent the rest of their lives working to produce goods like cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and coffee. The slave-produced goods were shipped back to Britain — the "Mother Country" — where they were manufactured or refined (if necessary) and then either sold domestically or re-exported at a vast profit. The slave trade brought in huge amounts of money to Britain, and few people even knew what was going on in the plantations, let alone cared. After 1830 when the mood of the nation changed in favour of a variety of types of reform, the antislavery campaign gathered momentum. In 1833 Wilberforce's efforts were finally rewarded when the
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Abolition of Slavery Act was passed. Wilberforce, on his death-bed, was informed of the passing of the Act in the nick of time. The main terms of the Act were:
x All slaves under the age of six were to be freed immediately x Slaves over the age of six were to remain as part slave and part free for a further four years. In that time they would have to be paid a wage for the work they did in the quarter of the week when they were "free" x The government was to provide £20 million in compensation to the slave-owners who had lost their "property."
In the West Indies the economic results of the Act were disastrous. The islands depended on the sugar trade which in turn depended on slave labour. This act of the parliament of United Kingdom abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, with the exceptions of the territories in possession of the East India Company, the island of Ceylon and the island of St. Helena. This act was later followed by other colonial powers like France, Netherlands and Portugal. Now they were in dire need of manpower to work in the sugar and rubber plantations that were once the duty spot of the African slaves. To meet this shortage, the British started system of ‘Indentured labour Migration’ from the Indian Sub-continent. Tinker (1974) holds the view that, the planters, in the British Empire (and elsewhere), deprived of their slave labour, “turned greedily to the millions of India, who they believed could be induced to labour in the cane fields for a pittance no greater than that awarded to the slave” (p. 18). In 1834, Britain first began exporting bonded Indian labour to Mauritius. The Dutch and French, both replicated the same system and also exported Indian lobours to their colonies. As Brookes (1965) puts it,
For the cultivation, reaping and manufacture of sugar, a certain type of labour is necessary…. That a labour problem should have existed in Natal may at first sight seem inconceivable. But though there were a hundred thousand Natives in Natal there was not enough labouers. (p. 81)
In just a decade, this small-scale migration became a mass movement to provide cheap labours to British and other European colonies. Absolute poverty and prospects of gaining wealth overseas prompted many Indians to sell themselves and become bonded labours. According to Satyendra
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Peerthum (2011), “Recent research at the Mauritius National Archives has provided some new information on the indentured labourers who came to Mauritius on the ship the Atlas on Sunday, 2nd November 1834. The story of these pioneer Indian labourers began almost two months earlier in Calcutta, India” (The Pioneer Indentured Labourers section, para. 1). On 10th September 1834, 36 Hill “Coolies” (or “kuli” is a wage earner) who were also known as Dhangars (originally from the hills of Bihar in eastern India who were then working and living in Calcutta) signed a five-year labour contract with George Charles Arbuthnot of Hunter-Arbuthnot & Company, a major British trading company based in Mauritius, in the presence of C. McFarlan, at the Calcutta Police Head Office. MacFarlan, the Chief Magistrate of Calcutta, read and explained in detail the indenture contract to the Indian labourers with the help of an Indian interpreter who resided in Calcutta.
Once the labourers agreed to the terms and conditions, they placed their thumb mark on the contract and on a separate list, which contained the names of the 36 Coolies, they placed an ‘X’ next to their names. The sirdar of these labourers was called Sooroop who was assisted by Subaram. In all, there were 30 males and 6 females among Arbuthnot’s indentured workers, some of their names were Callachaund, Dookhun, Bhomarah, Bhoodhoo, Bigna, Champah, Lungon, and Budhram.
The indenture labour contract which these labourers signed was written in Bengali. Furthermore, the monthly salary for the males was 5 rupees per month and for the females only 4 rupees per month. The sirdar was paid 10 rupees per month and the assistant sirdar around 8 rupees per month. In fact, they all received six months’ pay in advance before boarding the Atlas. It was Hunter Arbuthnot & Company that paid for their journey from Calcutta to Port Louis. As a result, one rupee was deducted from their monthly wages by that British company for the return passage to India and they were also going to be provided with food, clothing, lodging and medical care.
On the same day that the labour contract was signed, MacFarlan sent a letter to H. Prinsep, the Secretary to the Government of the Bengal Presidency, informing him of the agreement. The Chief Magistrate requested the Vice-President and Governing Council of the Bengal Presidency to give their stamp of approval to the contract and to allow the labourers to sail for Mauritius. On
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15th September, the Vice-President in Council gave his assent to the contract. On the very same day, the 36 Hill Coolies embarked on the Atlas and began their historic voyage to British Mauritius. The Atlas was under command of Captain Hustwick and was also transporting George Arbuthnot and a handful of free passengers as well as a large cargo of rice.
After a long voyage of more than six weeks, the Atlas sailed into Port Louis harbour on Sunday afternoon, 2nd November 1834. However, George Arbuthnot had to wait until the following day before starting the formalities in order for his labourers to be landed on Mauritian soil. On Monday morning, 3rd November, Arbuthnot, wrote an official letter on behalf of Hunter- Arbuthnot & Company to Governor Nicolay, which requested that: “they be allowed to land 36 Hill Coolies from the ship Atlas, whom they intend to employ on their Estate, under guarantee that they shall not become a charge on the Colony”. Hunter-Arbuthnot & Company provided Governor Sir William Nicolay with a financial guarantee which was kept in trust by the local colonial government in the Colonial Treasury. In addition, it would be returned to that British company after the five-year contract of the labourers had expired. As a result, during the afternoon of 3rd November, permission for the landing of the labourers was given by the British governor. However, it was only on Tuesday morning, 4th November, that the 36 Hill Coolies were landed close to the old Customs House, less than 200 meters from the present- day Aapravasi Ghat.
Later that same day, after having completed all the necessary formalities, Arbuthnot’s Indian workers were taken to Belle Alliance Sugar Estate or Antoinette Sugar Estate near the present-day village of Piton, in Riviere du Rempart district. In 1834, Belle Alliance was owned by Hunter-Arbuthnot & Company and it stretched over an area of 502 acres and had a workforce of between 190 to 200 slaves. The Indian labourers worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week and they were also required to perform light duties on Sundays. Between 1834 and 1839, they worked side by side with the slaves and then the apprentices of Belle Alliance or Antoinette in the sugarcane fields., Thus the event of 2nd November 1834 is important because, Hunter Arbuthnot and Company were therefore the first planters to follow the administrative procedure designed to ensure the safe transfer and return of emigrants to their home country.
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At the same time, the arrival of Arbuthnot’s labourers is the particular event that is commemorated each year on 2nd November at the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site. Therefore these first Indian labourers can be called, the fore-runners of a migration which was eventually to transform the character of Mauritian life and industry. After all, they were the precursors of more than 455,000 indentured labourers who arrived between January 1835 and August 1910 in British Mauritius.
Workers for plantations in Mauritius, Suriname, Trinidad and Fiji arrived mainly from the present-day states of Bihar and UP. In Guyana and East Africa, laborers originated primarily from Punjab and Gujarat. Given the proximity of Tamil Nadu to French possessions in India like Pondicherry, the workers in most French colonies, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and La Reunion, were Tamils. The majority of these migrants were males. This brutal indenture system lasted until World War I. In response to severe international criticism, Britain abolished the indenture system in 1916. By that time, more than 1.5 million Indians had been shipped to colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. However, during roughly the same period, another form of labor migration developed. Tapping into the labor surplus of South India, mostly in the modern- day Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the Colonial bosses of tea, coffee, and rubber plantations in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Burma authorized Indian headmen to recruit entire families and ship them to plantations. About five million Indians, mostly poor Tamils, migrated to these three countries until the system was abolished just prior to World War II.
Around that same time, merchants and traders from Gujarat and Sindh settled in British colonies in the Middle East, and South and East African. For example, Gujarati and Sindhi merchants became shop owners in East Africa, and traders from Kerala and Tamil Nadu were involved in retail trade and money lending to poor Indian peasants in Burma, Ceylon and Malaya. By the time of Second World War, the Indian diaspora included approximately six million migrants. Out of this total, over one million Indians were in Burma.
The Old Diaspora mainly came into form before World War II. On the contrary the New Diaspora consists of migration during the mid-1960s when large number of people migrated to more developed countries like United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia,
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Canada and Western Europe. In Britain, this population consisted mostly of unskilled workers for low wages. In the US, this population consisted mostly of Sikhs who worked in agriculture in California.
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, a Draconian legislation, was implemented to stop Eastern European Jews from entering into the land. Though targeted to the Jews, it prohibited the entry of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians to the US. According to the U.S. Department of State at the time, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.” It was in 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress passed the historic Hart-Celler Act. This legislation terminated the racist 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, abolished national-origins quotas, and made it possible for high-skilled immigrants, including Indians, to gain legal, permanent residence in the United States. The migrants were able to bring their family members as well.
After the independence of India, a group of unskilled (and some skilled) workers, most of them were Sikhs, migrated from India to the United Kingdom. Because of Uk’s Commonwealth Policy, they were allowed to live, work, vote, and hold public office in the United Kingdom.
In 1990, the rising economy and the software industry In the USA attracted qualified Indians. The US Immigration Act of 1990, effective from 1995, facilitated this process further by introducing the H-1B temporary worker program, allowing US businesses to hire foreigners with a minimum of a bachelor's degree in "specialty occupations" including doctors, scientists, engineers, and IT specialists. Indian citizens are far and away the top recipients of H-1B visas each year. As a result the Indian diaspora in the US is highly-skilled. The US Census Bureau estimates that 75% percent of all ethnic Indians working in the US hold at least a bachelor's degree, and 69% percent work in management and professional occupations. As a result, today we are the fourth largest immigrant group in the United States after the Mexicans, Philipinos and Chinese.
The latest of the Indian Diaspora is the ‘Gulf Diaspora’. As Mary E. Breeding (2010) points out,
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Indian migrants first started going to Golf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the 1970s after the oil boom in West Asia and the Gulf. During the 1970s and 1980s the composition of migrants from India was largely restricted to South Indian migrants from Kerala. During the 1990s the demand for labor in GCC countries increased and diversified across many sectors from construction, services, oil and manufacturing. As a result, the composition of Indian migrants emigrating also diversified. Indian migrants come from all states across India, but migrants from the southern states of Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu have comprised more than fifty percent of emigration clearances over the past decade. (para. 2).
Dr. Manmohon Singh(2013) had also affirmed,
Post-independence, overseas Indians have served as a bridge of friendship and cooperation between India and their adopted homes abroad. Regardless of whether they are successful professionals, traders and entrepreneurs, or second generation Indians, comfortably reconciling their two identities, or workers toiling hard to build a future for their families, they are at all times a most effective window for the world to India’s heritage and its progress.
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