New Zealand Journal of History, 43, 2 (2009)

A History of Small Numbers INDIANS IN NEW ZEALAND, c.1890s–1930s

IT IS IRONIC, BUT NOT SURPRISING, that in an age of globalization our attention has once again been focused on the nation state and national identity, triggered by what postcolonial theorist Arjun Appadurai has called the Fear of Small Numbers. As goods, ideas and people circulate across national boundaries more freely than ever before, Appadurai argues, an ‘anxiety of incompleteness’ forms in the minds of the majorities, as minorities remind them of ‘the small gap which lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethnos’.1 This anxiety about cultural difference, he suggests, has led to a renewed search for the homogeneous nation or ‘singular national ethnos’, which has never been a ‘natural outgrowth’, but is ‘produced and naturalized at great cost’.2 In New Zealand, too, the influx of migrants since the 1990s has led to fresh debates over national identity, resulting in anxieties about cultural difference and minorities. But these anxieties are not new, although there is a consistent tendency, even in recent stories of the nation, to ignore their historicity in the process of nation-building. The imperial system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in many senses, the precursor of the present-day globalized world order. It fostered similar anxieties in the minds of majorities involved in imagining their own singular national ethnos and defining the nation’s territorial as well as social boundaries. The fear of small numbers was palpable in the white settlement colonies from the late nineteenth century, when millions of Asians began to migrate and circulate within the empire. This article focuses on a small community which migrated from India to New Zealand — or from one part of the British Empire to another — at a time when the dominant majority community in New Zealand was in the process of defining its national ethnos. The arrival of the Indians, even the prospect of their arrival, provoked an intense political disquiet. This story of exclusion has been told before.3 But when it comes to historicizing the nation, it remains outside the main narrative and challenges some of the ‘foundational fictions’ of New Zealand nationhood.4 The idea of a national community with definable boundaries was gathering strength in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand. Yet, as Peter Gibbons has argued, that national identity remained ‘blurred by the strength of imperial identity’.5 As James Belich has pointed out, colonial administrators wanted to make New Zealand ‘seem more Britain-like’. In the end the settler community was ethnically much more diverse than the ‘subsequent myths of homogeneity [would] allow’.6 But the overwhelming proportion of the non- Māori population in New Zealand at the beginning of the twentieth century was still largely British and Irish in origin, and many of them felt ‘even more

150 A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 151

British than their kin of the motherland’.7 Michael King has acknowledged that this attitude ‘heightened feelings of imperialism’, which came to be integrally intertwined with the imperial doctrines of cultural difference and racial purity.8 In other words, Britishness, whiteness and empire defined the sacred national ethnos in early twentieth-century New Zealand.9 This national community was also defined by an ‘egalitarian myth’, the idea that it had almost achieved ‘social equality and classlessness on the basis of consensus and fairness’.10 There were attempts to incorporate Māori into the national narrative from the late nineteenth century, and more especially after World War II.11 Nonetheless, their depressed conditions and assertion of autonomy continually disrupted that narrative of racial integration.12 Even in recent revisionist historiography, however, there is limited recognition that New Zealand’s egalitarian nationhood was based on the exclusion of Asians. Ann Curthoys has shown that in Australian historiography a general recognition of the ‘white Australia policy’ came as early as the immediate postwar period.13 Writing in 1968, Peter O’Connor noted with surprise that the issue of Asian exclusion was not mentioned in the general histories of New Zealand written by Keith Sinclair, W.H. Oliver or R.M. Burdon.14 Forty years on, with another half a dozen new histories written, there is still limited recognition of this trait in the mainstream narratives of the nation. In the 1990s, as New Zealand became more and more multicultural, more studies of Asian migration and of Asian migrants were written,15 but as Brian Moloughney and John Stenhouse observed in a 1999 article, these stories were never incorporated into the mainstream histories of the New Zealand nation.16 If we take the Indians as an example, their arrival is briefly noted in chapters on immigration, but their subsequent life struggles and the stories of exclusion almost completely disappear from these national historical narratives.17 The only exceptions are a brief discussion by James Belich in Paradise Reforged and a passing reference to the White New Zealand League by Michael King.18 In other narratives, the past is rendered more harmonious and harmless in order to appropriate it in the enterprise of nation-building.19 Such histories leave the location of minorities in the nation space undefined and the reasons for their marginality unrecognized. Such ambiguities only prolong anxieties about difference and exacerbate the fear of small numbers. The obvious explanation for this narrative marginality of minorities in New Zealand’s general histories is their very small numbers.20 Indeed, their numbers were small throughout the colonial period and did not really increase until the 1990s. The 1916 census, for example, recorded only 181 Indians; the 1921 census recorded 671.21 Asians in 1920–1921 probably did not constitute more than 0.5% of the total population of New Zealand.22 One may argue that these numbers are indeed too insignificant to deserve any mention in the meta-narratives of nation.23 But this smallness of numbers has an interesting history of pre-emptive exclusion which can potentially disrupt the myth of an egalitarian national community that the extant narratives of nation have tended to universalize. Another crucial aspect of this story is that the fear of small numbers of Indians — or for that matter, of Asians in general — also had a transnational 152 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY history. At least two recent studies have shown convincingly that the ‘global colour line’ was being drawn simultaneously in the self-governing Dominions of South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in the western United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. These were not parallel stories but interconnected historical developments.24 In other words, the fear of being swamped by Asians was a shared one and the reaction of New Zealand society to their arrival was not unique. This response was expressed through the metaphor of whiteness, privileged as the most important defining criterion for these emerging national communities. As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have argued, the ‘project of whiteness was thus paradoxical politics, at once transnational in its inspiration and identifications, but nationalist in its methods and goals’.25 Pre-emptive measures to stop Asian migration involved complexities. While the Chinese were clearly the outsiders, the Indians, coming from another part of the British Empire, posed a difficult challenge, raising the thorny question of the ‘imperial subject’. So it is possible to argue that in colonial New Zealand ‘some blacks were more favoured than others — or at least slightly less disfavoured’.26 But when it came to raising walls against unwanted immigration, Indians were not spared, as Dominions claimed their right to determine the composition of their national communities. Whiteness came to be defined as a metaphor of civilization, which in the imperial context was reduced to an East–West divide, or, more appropriately, a ‘civilized’/‘uncivilized’ binary. Efforts to impose immigration restrictions went hand in hand with experiments in self-government and liberal labour reforms, which were not meant for the ‘uncivilized’ Asians.27 This article looks at this history of pre-emptive exclusion and its imperial and transnational contexts. Recognition and incorporation of this story into the narratives of nation will reveal the tensions and anxieties underlying its history of construction. Historically, since New Zealand’s national history and identity had been very much embedded in the history of the British Empire, its connections with India were more substantial than is often recognized. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney have shown how goods and ideas from India regularly found their way into New Zealand in the nineteenth century.28 Imports of Indian consumer goods increased phenomenally in the late nineteenth century; Indian and Ceylon tea was a prime example.29 In terms of the circulation of people, the census of 1901 indicated that among the New Zealand residents of European descent, 1156 were born in India.30 For many people in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand, India was a prized possession of the British Empire, and was much more present in the public domain than is usually appreciated. The discourse of empire was anchored in a belief in the superiority of the Western civilization. ‘We must continue our superiority of intellect and civilization’, wrote the Daily Southern Cross in 1853, ‘or we do not deserve, and cannot continue, to rule’. The Indian empire was the icon of ‘the supremacy of the British mind’.31 That supremacy was seriously challenged during the revolt of 1857, and developments in India were widely and regularly covered by the New Zealand media. When British forces under Sir James Outram recovered Lucknow, and thus brought about A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 153 the restoration of order, it was reported in a triumphalist tone.32 After 1857 any sign of unrest in India was reported in New Zealand newspapers with alarm, alerting the imperial authorities to take note of the early signals of danger ‘which remind[ed] everyone of what preceded the mutinies of 1857’.33 In public lectures the glories of empire were celebrated and ‘the notion of emancipating the colonies from the British’ was condemned, for ‘[w]ith all its faults British power has conferred great benefits on the world’.34 The imperial discourse of civilization also created a stereotype about Indians, situating them in the imperial hierarchy of cultural difference, universalized in nineteenth-century texts like James Mill’s The History of British India (1817).35 A History masters thesis at Canterbury University in 1932 proudly declared that it was ‘in the best interests of Britain and the world that we should not withdraw the British Raj from India’. The title of the thesis was ‘Our India Problem’, and against the Indian nationalist critique it reasoned, ‘Let us consider the achievement we have already made in India and in them we shall find a fitting answer to those who criticiseour rule.’ By ‘achievement’ the author meant the modernity and progress that the imperial connection had reportedly brought to India. In other words, being lower down the imperial civilizational hierarchy, Indians would benefit from ‘our rule’, which should be read as the enlightening touch of the Raj.36 This Orientalist perception of India and the Indians was apparent very early on in colonial New Zealand’s public space. There were several proposals to bring the Indian army to New Zealand to defend the settlers. But these were rejected because Indian soldiers could not be trusted to police Māori.37 And while their services were welcome at times of crisis, their continued presence was not.38 Temporary visits, however, were not unwelcome,39 as they could exhibit imperial camaraderie in the same way as the occasional visits of Indian hockey teams affirmed imperial bonds.40 There was an interesting contradiction in the colonists’ perceptions of India as a part of the British Empire: their preference for Indian consumables or services and their sense of pride in the possession of India as a part of the empire could not be extended to an idea of common imperial subjecthood for the Indian people, because they were considered to be civilizationally inferior. This civilizational argument was soon to have expression through a racially charged metaphor of whiteness. Although in general Indians had been migrating since ancient times, mass labour migration began only during the colonial period.41 The arrival of labour migrants and enterprising Gujarati merchants in the white settler colonies of South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand created racial tension within the empire.42 This happened despite the fact that Indian migrants were entitled to enter any part of the British Empire freely and be treated as equals. Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1 November 1858 introduced Crown rule in India after the suppression of the revolt and afforded Indians all the rights of British subjects and ‘the equal and impartial protection of the law’ in all parts of the empire.43 Indians came to New Zealand from about the 1790s in East India Company ships, but little is known about these early arrivals.44 The first recorded history of pioneer Indian settlers in New Zealand is that of two Sikh brothers, Bir Singh Gill and Phuman Singh Gill, who arrived in New 154 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

Zealand in the 1890s from Punjab.45 Interestingly, it was from the 1890s that racial discrimination against Indians gained greater international attention. In 1893 Mahatma Gandhi decided to focus public attention on the experiences of Indians in South Africa.46 It was not a coincidence that around the same time in New Zealand attempts were made to restrict Asian migration. In July 1895 the Asiatic and other Immigration Restriction Bill was introduced into the New Zealand Parliament. There had been laws in 1881 and 1888 to restrict Chinese immigration into New Zealand,47 but this time the Indians became targets as well. The architect of the Asiastic Restriction Bill was William Pember Reeves, the Labour Minister, Fabian socialist and champion of the idea of New Zealand being a ‘social laboratory’, where progressive policies would be tested for the Western world to emulate.48 Yet these reforms were designed to safeguard the interests of white labour only, and therefore required ‘border fencing’ to keep cheap Asian labour out. Speaking in support of the Bill, Reeves argued that ‘some such measure was a national necessity’, because the Asians brought unfair competition into the labour market.49 While the main targets of this Bill were still the Chinese, Indians who were involved in the small peddling trade and known as ‘Hindoo’ or ‘Assyrian’ hawkers did not escape attention. As Reeves reasoned, ‘if other Asiatic British subjects are as undesirable as the Chinese are, there is no reason why we should not pass a law excluding them’. He added, ‘the so-called Assyrian hawker is about as undesirable a person as John Chinaman himself’. ‘These people are not Assyrians, but Hindoos’, he clarified, and they were undesirable because they ‘do not lead sanitary lives. They are not a moral people. They are not a highly civilised people, and in no sense are they a desirable people.’50 His economic argument of unfair competition was thus inseparable from the logic of cultural difference or the civilizational discourse of the empire. It seems that by now there was a widely shared fear that such undesirable people might soon ‘overrun New Zealand’. There was a vast agricultural population in India, as another member of the House pointed out, and they lived on as little as £4.2s.6d. per annum: ‘they may easily come here and deprive our honest working-men of their means of livelihood’.51 While the economic argument figured repeatedly in the debate over the Asiatic Restriction Bill, the fear of flooding was anything but simply economic. The ‘Asiatic race does not blend with our [race]’, claimed another supporter of the Bill. He was ‘determined that New Zealand shall be a country for white labour, and that we will not have it mixed with this degenerate race’ from Asia.52 ‘[I]t is our duty’, said G.W. Russell, ‘with the view of maintaining the purity of our race, to do all we can for the purpose of excluding these aliens from the country’.53 An interesting feature of the debate was that even those who opposed the Bill, like John Duthie, did not disagree with its underlying exclusionary principle. ‘I do not for a moment wish to see’, he said, ‘our European labour degraded and deprived of the comforts of civilisation by the arrival of hordes of people from various Asiatic countries’. Similarly, as William Hutchison conceded, ‘its principle, to my thinking, as far as the Asiatic population are concerned, is essentially right’. What they disagreed with was the projected magnitude of the problem. Asian migration, they believed, had in fact decreased since 1881 A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 155 and therefore such a restrictive law was unnecessary.54 But as another member pointed out, there was a problem insofar as the Indians were concerned; unlike most of the Chinese they were already ‘British subjects’ and could not be so easily prevented from entering the country with a piece of restrictive legislation.55 The 1895 Bill was ultimately defeated, but the question of Indian migration had destabilized several related discourses on which New Zealand nationhood was anchored — the discourses of class, civilization as well as imperial citizenship — all of them encoded into the metaphor of whiteness. The following year Premier Richard John Seddon introduced a more simplified Asiatics Restriction Bill. As a justification, he announced in a rather revealing tone, ‘As regards the contamination and the injury to our race — looking at it from a purity-of-race standpoint — I do not think there is anyone in the House who will disagree that we ought to pass it on the higher ground’. The staunchest supporter of the Bill was Sir Robert Stout, who wanted the definition of ‘Asiatic’ tightened from its current geographical definition (‘Asiatic means any native of any part of Asia’) to a more racial definition. Seddon readily obliged by replacing the word ‘native’ with ‘persons of coloured races’. There were sceptics in the House who pointed out that the Bill would possibly not get royal assent because the ‘Hindoos’ who were already British subjects could not be denied entry in such a way. But their voices were drowned by the overwhelming support for the racially explicit exclusionary legislation.56 When Seddon’s Bill was introduced in the Legislative Council by W.C. Walker, it encountered more difficulties. There was no opposition to the Chinese being prevented from entering New Zealand, but there was vacillation with regard to ‘Her Majesty’s Asiatic subjects’, mainly Indians.57 Sir G.S. Whitmore later explained: ‘It is monstrous that the Sikhs, who are here in considerable numbers … and who saved India for us, should be excluded by a small colony at one end of the world’.58 It was on this ground that the Council rejected the Bill, although most of the opponents, Whitmore included, had no qualm about imposing such restrictions on the Chinese.59 Seddon was ready to accept a compromise. He was prepared to ‘run the risk of having a few Hindoos come here without restriction, if, by so doing, we can prevent the Chinese coming here in large numbers’. He agreed to an alteration to clause 2 of the original Bill, so that it would not apply to ‘the natives of that portion of Her Majesty’s dominions known as the Indian Empire’.60 When the altered Bill was presented at the Council for the second reading, those who were still hesitating were reminded that there was ‘a general opinion throughout the colony’ that such a Bill should be passed, because it was ‘in the interests of the wage-earners’ as well as ‘in the interests of the whole community’. Such rhetoric of class and race ensured the Bill was passed by both the Council and the House of Representatives,61 but it failed to get royal assent given the ‘tradition of the Empire, which makes no distinction in favour of, or against, race or colour’.62 The imperial government’s position was pragmatic, born of a concern to keep its Indian subjects happy and contented and so avoid popular protests, such as those triggered by events in South Africa. In 1897, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain warned the New Zealand authorities not ‘to exclude, 156 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY by reason of their colour or by the reason of their race all Her Majesty’s Indian subjects, or even all Asiatics’.63 However, he was happy to approve a European language test on the model of the Natal law of 1897,64 which would have the same effect of restricting Indian migration. So in 1899 the New Zealand government passed the Immigration Restriction Act that stopped non-English speaking Asians from entering the country if they failed to write an application in a European language. Cunning Indian migrants circumvented this barrier by memorizing this application form during their stay in Fiji en route to New Zealand; therefore, the test was further tightened by way of an amending Act in 1910. The accompanying parliamentary debate showed that by this time there was almost a consensus in favour of keeping New Zealand exclusively white.65 It is difficult to determine the exact impact these restrictions had onthe numbers of Indian migrants. By 1913 there was alarm that many Indian indentured labourers in Fiji at the end of their contracts were finding their way to New Zealand. In August 1914 the Massey government proposed another Bill containing a tough dictation test in a European language. By then the Great War had started and the empire needed the services of the British Indian Army and the New Zealand government decided not to proceed with the Bill.66 Unease about the inflow of Indian migrants to New Zealand and legislative attempts to restrict migration were also responses to the wider imperial context. As the conditions of Indian migrants in South Africa deteriorated, their situation began to stir up popular protests and thus became a major concern for the Colonial Office in London. The New Zealand news media regularly carried reports of these developments,67 particularly when Indians complained to the Secretary of State for India about their mistreatment in Transvaal and Orange Colony and received a sympathetic hearing.68 In 1906 the Transvaal legislature passed what the expatriate Indians called the Black Act, requiring all Indian migrants residing in the colony to be fingerprinted and issued with a registration certificate which they had to carry at all time. The Taranaki Herald and the Evening Post printed commentaries on the Act, noting the misgivings of the Secretary of State about the legislation and reporting on meetings in India and South Africa that expressed ‘mass indignation’ about the Act.69 Then in August 1908 Mahatma Gandhi started his satayagraha movement by organizing a bonfire of registration certificates. In 1913 he staged a symbolic ‘invasion’ of Transvaal by local Indians — including women — without permits, and all the protestors were jailed. In the same year, a long march was organized involving over 2000 men, women and children in Transvaal; a mining strike followed, accompanied by renewed activities by the Natal Indian Congress. This put pressure on the imperial authorities and influenced public opinion in India and Britain.70 The New Zealand media reported all these events routinely,71 as Indians vigorously claimed rights ‘granted to them by Queen Victoria’ to enter any part of the empire as British subjects72 and protested loudly against their mistreatment in the ‘overseas dominions of the Crown’, including Australia and New Zealand.73 An editorial in the Evening Post argued that the situation faced by Indians in South Africa was becoming difficult, more so because of A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 157 the ‘doctrines preached by Mr Ghandi’ [sic]. The article summarized the core of the white anxiety in the following way: ‘To-day the Indian population within Natal alone greatly exceeds in numbers the white population there, and in the Transvaal and the Cape they are every day [sic] becoming more conspicuous. A white wholesale merchant or a white retail storekeeper cannot compete with the Indians in the same line of business. The standard of living of the Indian, even of the richest, is far below that of the average Englishman or Dutchman, and therein lies the whole objection to the competing Indian in South Africa.’74 The article was not overtly racist in tone, but it cleverly collapsed the discourses of race and class into the civilizational anxiety of a white settler society fearing similar tactics from local Indians claiming their rights. This anxiety became even more entrenched following developments in Canada. In January 1908 the Dominion government of Canada passed the Continuous Passage Act, which stipulated that anyone going to Canada had to come in a continuous voyage from their country of origin. Given the distance, it was almost impossible for Indians to do this. The law was meant to prevent them from coming at all. The Indians loudly protested against this discriminatory legislation and the New Zealand media watched with interest.75 The situation came to a head in Canada in 1914 when a wealthy Sikh in Hong Kong, in order to test the law, hired the Japanese steamer Komagata Maru and sailed towards Canada with 150 Sikh passengers. It reached Vancouver on 23 May, but the passengers were not allowed to disembark as they were not coming directly from India. Ultimately, after a lengthy legal battle, only 24 of them were allowed to stay; the rest were sent back to India, resulting in a major riot when they reached Calcutta.76 In the middle of this widely publicized saga, the Evening Post published a rather alarmist editorial entitled ‘The Hindu At The Gate’, which described the incident as ‘a symbolic fact that has a great significance for the whole British Empire’. ‘The Hindu mission’, it claimed, ‘is full of meaning both to Australasia in particular and to the white races in general’. Mr Gandhi and his followers, it reminded its readers, were trying to assert their rights ‘as British subjects to move freely throughout the Empire’. But this would mean that ‘all barriers against them, in Australia and New Zealand as well as in other Dominions, would be overthrown’. It therefore supported the legislation recently proposed by the Massey government ‘to erect against them further legislative barriers’, for ‘it is too late in the day to attempt to overthrow the principle of a white New Zealand, except by force of arms and the right of the strongest’.77 There could be no better statement of the racial exclusivity of an emergent national community and its anxiety about small numbers. What was important was the wider imperial context of making such a bold statement; it was done when Indians in other parts of the empire were seen to be demanding their rights with a powerful voice and the imperial authorities seemed vulnerable to their pressure. The same thing could be repeated in New Zealand as well. Anxieties about race and civilization were exacerbated by the fears of the labouring classes. In view of ‘the number of Hindoo arrivals’ over the previous three years, the United Federation of Labour warned the Minister of Internal Affairs in 1916, ‘[i]f employers are allowed to employ colored labour at a 158 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY lower rate than other workers are prepared to accept there will soon be trouble of a very serious character in the industrial life of Australasia’.78 In response, the Department of Labour instructed its officers to ensure that Indians were ‘employed under the same conditions as other persons’.79 Even this statement led to public fear that the government had a secret plan to bring in ‘coloured labour’.80 Yet a Ministry of Internal affairs memorandum revealed that 13 Indians came into New Zealand in 1915 and 68 departed. In the first eight months of 1916 48 Indians entered and 17 left the country.81 In other words, numbers alone could hardly justify this panic about unfair competition. At the Imperial War Conference in 1918 Prime Minister Massey declared that ‘So far as New Zealand is concerned, there is no serious trouble … [because] the people of India have never shown any tendency to immigrate to New Zealand’. However, he hastened to add that if Indians started migrating to New Zealand objections would be raised and it would then be ‘the duty of the Government to take the matter in hand’.82 Such pressure for government action was gradually mounting in New Zealand, not so much because of actual influx, but more because of a fear of it. In August 1918 the Evening Post reported that the Mayor of Wellington was already speaking of ‘A Hindoo Invasion’.83 This situation was soon addressed; the Fiji government was requested to issue passports only to those Indians who had a definite job offer in New Zealand.84 A crucial factor in this climate of fear was the fact that Indians were showing initiative and enterprise in coming to New Zealand. If not halted at the gates, this inflow could spell disaster, as had happened in other white settler societies. Such fears were apparent in a letter that Charles Groom, a ‘settler in Auckland district’, wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs in April 1919, requesting him ‘to stop India’s teeming millions from swamping out the labour market here’. Indians were already doing various jobs ‘at prices our people can’t touch’, and so ‘unless things are changed, we will soon have a colour problem here, as they will come here direct from India by the shipload and then things will be similar to Natal’.85 In other words, the dominance of the putative national ethnos would be undermined soon if New Zealand did not learn from other Dominions, particularly as the Indians were already showing signs of collective action and were not just docile victims of discrimination. Indian enterprise became even more evident when some migrants began to purchase land in Pukekohe and Otahuhu for market gardening. Their activities raised anxieties about economic competition and led to a nationwide campaign for restricting Asiatic migration. The cause was taken up in earnest by the Returned Soldiers’ Association and the farmers’ unions, who put pressure on the government for legislative action to prevent what was described as the ‘alarmingly increasing rate of immigration of Hindus and Chinese’.86 In August 1920 Prime Minister William Massey introduced the Immigration Restriction Amendment Bill, which proposed that all migrants, except those of British and Irish descent, would have to secure an entry permit before disembarkation at a New Zealand port. They had to apply for this permit before they embarked on their journey and the permit had to be approved by the Minister of Customs. As a justification, Massey mentioned two developments. First, in the six months ending 30 June, 174 Indians had arrived in New Zealand as compared with 193 A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 159 in the previous 12 months. Second, ‘taking these figures into account the Bill is the result of a deep-seated sentiment on the part of a huge majority of the people of this country that this Dominion shall be what is often called “white” New Zealand’.87 Massey hoped that getting royal assent for this Bill would not be a problem, because by now the idea of ‘imperial subject’ was in decline.88 At the 1918 Imperial Conference the reciprocity agreement of the previous year had been endorsed in a resolution which India had agreed to. It recognized that the communities of the British Commonwealth ‘should enjoy complete control of the composition of its own population by means of restriction on immigration from any of the other communities’. Indeed, the Indians themselves had proposed this regulatory resolution in order to reassure South Africa and Canada that there would be no further Indian migration. But as a quid pro quo they demanded that those male Indians who had already settled in various parts of the empire should be guaranteed the same rights and privileges as ‘British subjects’ and that their wives and children should be allowed to join them. This was incorporated in the second part of the resolution. When presenting the Bill in the House, Massey emphasized the first part of the resolution but made no mention of the second, as family reunion for expatriate Indians under the Bill would depend entirely on the mercy of the Minister of Customs.89 The Bill was extensively debated in both Houses of Parliament, and the debate only confirms that a political consensus on whiteness dominated the public domain in New Zealand in the early twentieth century. Massey’s defence of the Bill was presented overtly in a language of race: ‘Clearly, we want to keep the race as pure in this Dominion as it is possible to keep it. I have not the slightest doubt but that that object will be affected by this Bill when we pass it into law.’90 Some of the Labour members were unhappy about the unabashed use of the language of race. As Harry Holland put it, ‘the same red blood of humanity flows in the veins of all of us’. He agreed that in order to maintain the standard of living in the Dominion, restrictions on immigration were desirable. But he argued that this could be easily accomplished by a higher education test, and the threat of Indian workers pushing down wages could be averted by unionising them.91 However, Holland was a minority in his own party. Another Labour member proudly proclaimed that his party was ‘just as keen as any member of the House, or as any person or party in the country, to maintain racial purity here in New Zealand. There can be no question at all about that.’ To achieve that, Asians had to be excluded: ‘the Labour Party are wholly in accord with the desire to reduce Asiatic immigration to this country; we are satisfied that there is too much of it already’.92 However, the issue of Indians being imperial subjects surfaced again. It was difficult to forget that ‘certainly during the last Great War they did fight our battles’. ‘They were with us at Gallipoli’, the House was reminded, ‘and they were with us at Palestine and in Mesopotemia; and when fellow-subjects have shown their loyalty for the British Empire in such a way as that it becomes exceedingly difficult to exclude them by any such rough-and-ready method as we are proposing.’93 But there were others who ‘consider[ed] the Hindus a 160 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY far more serious menace than the Chinese invasion’ because it was easier to control Chinese migration than Indian, as the latter were ‘British subjects’.94 In the end, dissenting voices were drowned out by the overwhelming sense of concern for maintaining whiteness; speaker after speaker supported the Bill ‘to preserve a “white” New Zealand’, ‘to keep the purity of our race in this land unsullied’, ‘to keep New Zealand pure and white’, ‘to keep Asiatics out of this country’, to ‘keep out undesirable immigrants’, to ‘prevent intermingling with races whose standard is very much below ours’.95 As one member summed up the situation, the House was ‘practically unanimous’ on the Bill: ‘There is not a member of this House that is not desirous of excluding the foreign element — not a member of it.’96 The discourse of exclusion had another interesting dimension which made it more ambiguous than merely racist: the question of Māori. Apirana Ngata raised this important question in course of the debate: what would happen if a Māori who had gone overseas wanted to return? Massey’s reply was unequivocal: ‘The Maori is a European for our purposes … . The Maori has the same rights and privileges as the European in every sense of the word.’97 By this time the Indocentric theory of ‘Aryan Māori’ had been discredited,98 but there was greater acceptance of Māori as ‘better blacks’ or ‘honorary whites’.99 In other words, a selective incorporation of Māori into the putative nation was grounded on the exclusion of the undesirable Asiatic migrants. But the Colonial Office did not like the Bill, and asked for a guarantee that the wives and children of Indians already settled in New Zealand would be allowed access. This was given and the new regulations were quickly gazetted in January 1921.100 The Immigration Restriction Amendment Act thus reflected a growing consensus about ‘white New Zealand’; an emerging nation space in which Māori would be included, but where Asians should be pushed to the margins as far as possible. The New Zealand Census of 1921 neatly captured the national discourse of exclusion: ‘Racially the population of the Dominion is, and always has been, of a high standard of purity; indeed, the maintenance of the pure European or “white” standard of population has been invariably a consideration of immigration legislation.’101 Essentially the new law established a ‘white New Zealand’ immigration policy, where whiteness stood for the European way of life and the emerging national community was defined in terms of an exclusionary discourse that sought to keep Asians outside accepted national boundaries. The position of resident Indians continued to pose problems for the New Zealand government’s diplomatic relationships. At the 1918 Imperial Conference, the Indian delegation had emphasized the principle of reciprocity to allay the fear of continued Indian migration to white Dominions, in order to secure the rights of those who were already there. But the situation did not improve; ambivalence prevailed over the second part of the resolution. So at the 1921 conference of prime ministers a resolution was again moved to recognize ‘the position of India as an equal member of the British Empire’. It further suggested that the right to citizenship for those Indians who ‘lawfully domiciled in some other parts of the Empire’, should be acknowledged.102 South Africa objected to the resolution, but its dissent was overruled and A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 161 the resolution was adopted, disregarding for the first time the convention of unanimity followed in the imperial conferences. The meeting agreed ‘in the interests of the solidarity of the British Commonwealth, [to] the adoption of a policy of removing any disabilities under which such Indians are placed … in whatever part of the Empire they may be lawfully domiciled’.103 At the 1923 Imperial Conference General Smuts again raised the issue, circulating a memorandum which stated that ‘Each constituent part of the Empire will settle for itself the nature and incidents of its citizenship.’104 This time the Secretary of State for the Colonies had to agree that although ‘Imperial nationality is one and indivisible; real citizenship and the rights and privileges attaching thereto may be diverse’. This view continued to define the rights and privileges of Indian migrants settled in the colonies in subsequent years.105 This issue continued to be problematic in imperial affairs and it placed great stress on New Zealand’s relationship with the government of India. After the Great War, in which the Indians had made valuable contributions, the Indian government wanted to introduce constitutional reforms in the country in order to win over the moderates.106 That effort was seriously compromised by the news of discrimination against Indians in white Dominions like South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When New Zealand passed the Immigrant Restriction Amendment Act, the Indian government sent a despatch to Wellington, through the Colonial Office in London, seeking clarification about its implications for Indian subjects. Attorney-General Sir Francis Bell had to assure the Indian Government that the ‘Act was not directed specially against the immigration of our fellow subjects of British India. It was directed against the colonization of our territories by persons of Asiatic Race of whatever country they might be subject … . So far as is possible we wish this Dominion founded by men of British extraction to continue to be colonized by men and women of British extraction.’ However, he said that temporary permits of entry would be granted to Indians holding passports, and when in New Zealand they would be provided equal protection of law.107 To investigate the situation further, the Indian government sent V.S. Srinivasa Shastri to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Shastri arrived in New Zealand in July 1922 and was overwhelmed by the hospitality shown to him by the New Zealand government, including the Governor General and Lady Jellicoe. He saw everywhere ‘manifestations of sympathy for India and her people’. Shastri noted with satisfaction that the New Zealand Electoral Act gave the franchise to all British subjects, including Indians, and that the latter ‘enjoy[ed] the privilege just the same as other classes of His Majesty’s subjects’. But he also noted ‘two disabilities’ suffered by the local Indians: they were excluded from the coverage of the Old Age Pensions Act and they found it difficult to secure employment.108 On the first issue, the Massey government gave an assurance that in future the Act might be revised to rectify this anomaly and that at present there was no one in the community who would be of appropriate age.109 On the second, Shastri praised the efforts of the government in protecting the rights of Indians against racial discrimination, even though he believed that ‘colour prejudice’ was behind the situation. Finally, the government agreed with his request not to limit the number of entry permits to be issued to Indians under 162 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY the new Immigration Restriction Amendment Act.110 The visit, the report and the outcome thus reveal the crucial importance of the imperial connection in determining the position of the Indians in New Zealand. Despite nominal imperial protection, racial attacks on Indians increased from 1926 when market gardeners and shopkeepers in Pukekohe organized the White New Zealand League.111 The new organization appealed to the Minister of Internal Affairs to negotiate an agreement with the imperial authorities regarding the ‘Exclusion laws’, as the Canadian and Australian governments had done. They wanted the New Zealand government ‘to follow our sister Dominions’ example and thus protect the very fibre of our national existence’.112 But the imperial connection proved to be much too complicated when it came to the exclusion of Indians. In 1926 a delegation of the Indian Association of Auckland met Mr R.F. Bollard, the Minister of Internal Affairs, to protest against the racist campaign of the White New Zealand League. They pointed out that they were ‘not aliens within the British Common Wealth of Nations’. The ‘Indian people’, they emphasized, ‘are loyal to The King and to the Constitution of the Raj’. Moreover, ‘Indians are British to the backbone and defended the Union Jack’. The minister agreed, conceding that ‘[y]ou have been admitted here as British subjects and you have the same right to justice and protection as anybody else in the Dominion, and that justice and protection you will receive so long as you conform to the laws of the country’113 This assurance was cold comfort for local Indians, who continued to experience various discriminatory actions orchestrated by the White New Zealand League. The ripples were felt as far away as New Delhi and London. In 1932 the issue was raised again at the Indian Legislative Assembly, as the government of India received ‘serious complaints of harsh treatment received by Indian settlers at the hands of the white population of New Zealand’. While no specific instances of such behaviour, except ‘non-admission of Indians into cinemas’, were mentioned, the Indian government nevertheless lodged an official complaint with the India Office in London.114 In response, the New Zealand government assured them that although ‘the Indians in New Zealand do labour under certain disabilities’ their conditions had not deteriorated since Shastri’s visit ten years earlier, because since then the government had not received many complaints.115 The government’s observation about the paucity of discrimination experienced by Indians had two implications. First, it implied that the Indians faced fewer disabilities and acts of discrimination in New Zealand than in some other Dominions like South Africa and Canada, which continued to be the main sore points in intra-imperial relationships. Second, it implied that within New Zealand Indians were at least more preferred than the Chinese. A school history textbook in the 1930s told New Zealand students: ‘What applies to the Chinese, applies as well to the Indian, but with a difference. The Indian is a British citizen: the Chinese is not.’116 In other words, Indians still had a place in the imperial social hierarchy organized by the colonial rule of difference, while the Chinese were more clearly the outsiders. When India became independent in 1947, the Commonwealth connection made the New Zealand government extend to Indians the preferred status of ‘Commonwealth A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 163 citizens’; but a government memo made it clear that they would be ‘subject to the same immigration restrictions as they were before’.117 These restrictions continued until a major law change in 1987. What the foregoing discussion indicates is that Indians were not welcome in New Zealand, but their entry could not be totally forestalled nor their rights denied because of New Zealand’s continuing commitment to maintaining imperial connections. The situation put Indian migrants in a precarious position vis-à-vis the emerging New Zealand nation. It was not prepared to accept them, but it could not completely reject them either, and it was concerned about their assimilation because the discourse of whiteness incorporated the Orientalist notion of civilizational difference. This perhaps explains why Indians have always remained here as representatives of a diaspora rather than as full members of the New Zealand nation.118 On the one hand, Indians claimed their rights as ‘British subjects’, but on the other — as Jacqueline Leckie has shown — they exhibited a keen interest in India’s independence from British rule, and some of them even went back and participated in the freedom struggle.119 Thus, most of them remained ‘Indians’ in New Zealand, representing the duality of identity that marks a diasporic existence.120 Thus Indians have a complicated past in New Zealand, conspicuous both in their presence as well as their absence. Their existence has been made invisible in historical narratives of the nation, although their story challenges several discursive planks on which New Zealand national identity was being constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rhetoric of whiteness incorporated several discourses of nationhood, such as Britishness, civilizational superiority, class harmony, and above all an intrinsic pride in the empire. Indian migration threatened to unsettle each one of them. Arjun Appadurai has argued, following Hannah Arendt, that ‘the idea of a national peoplehood is the Achilles’ heel of modern liberal societies’.121 It is better, therefore, to acknowledge this history of difference and pre-emptive exclusion, and thus recognize the historic location of this marginal minority within the narrative of the nation. However, this story of exclusion is also a part of a broader transnational history of segregation and border control. The fear of the small number of Indians threatening the national ethnos was partly a response to similar anxieties in other white settler societies in different parts of the empire. This transnational history of nation-building is seldom recognized in the extant literature on nationalism.

SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY Victoria University of Wellington 164 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

NOTES

1 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham, 2006, p.8. Italics in original. 2 ibid., p.4. 3 The most recent and comprehensive book in this field is Jacqueline Leckie,Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community, Dunedin, 2007. Leckie has been publishing on this community since the mid-1980s. See Jacqueline Leckie, ‘In Defence of Race and Empire: The White New Zealand League at Pukekohe’, New Zealand Journal of History (NZJH), 19, 2 (1985), pp.103–29; ‘From Race Aliens to an Ethnic Group – Indians in New Zealand’, in M.C. Howard, ed., Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Pacific, Tokyo, 1990, pp.169–97; ‘South Asians: Old and New Migrations’, in S. Greif, ed., Immigration and National Identity in New Zealand: One People, Two Peoples, Many Peoples?, Palmerston North, 1995, pp.133–60; ‘The Southernmost Indian Diaspora: From Gujarat to Aotearoa,’ South Asia, 21 (1998), pp.161–80. Previous works on the Indian community in New Zealand includes Kapil Tiwari, ed., Indians in New Zealand: Studies in a Sub Culture, Wellington, 1980; W.H. McLeod, Punjabis in New Zealand: A History of Punjabi Migration, 1890–1940, Amritsar, 1986. 4 I borrow the expression from another postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in H.K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, London and New York, 1990, p.5. 5 P.J. Gibbons, ‘The Climate of Opinion’, in W.H. Oliver, ed., The Oxford History of New Zealand, Oxford and Auckland, 1981, p.308. 6 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders: From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Auckland, 1996, pp.315, 318. 7 Governor-General Lord Jellicoe in 1924, quoted in Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland, 2003, p.366. 8 ibid., p.367. 9 There were of course problems, as there were non-British Europeans as well, and among them the northern Europeans were preferred to their southern counterparts. See James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000, Auckland, 2001, pp.224, 229. 10 This ‘myth of New Zealand egalitarianism’ has recently been questioned by Melanie Nolan, who has pointed out significant disparities in terms of women’s employment status and disadvantages suffered by Māori and Polynesian people. She does not, however, mention the exclusion of the Asians from this labour market. Melanie Nolan, ‘The Reality and Myth of New Zealand Egalitarianism: Explaining the Patterns of Labour Historiography at the Edge of Empires’, Labour History Review, 72, 2 (2007), pp.113–34, quotation from p.114. 11 W.H. Oliver, ‘The Awakening Imagination’, in Oliver, The Oxford History, p.445. 12 This has been recognized recently in the bicultural readings of that past. See, for example, Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End, rev. ed., Auckland, 2004; Belich, Paradise Reforged, pp.191–206. 13 Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’ in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, Durham and London, 2003, p.75. 14 P.S. O’Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White, 1908–1920’ in Judith Binney, ed., The Shaping of History: Essays from The New Zealand Journal of History, Wellington, 2001, p.285. The article was originally published in 1968. 15 Key works include: Greif, Immigration and National Identity in New Zealand; Malcolm McKinnon, Immigrants and Citizens: New Zealanders and Asian Immigration in Historical Context, Wellington, 1996; Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 7 January 2007, URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/NewZealanders/NewZealandPeoples/Indians/en 16 Brian Moloughney and John Stenhouse, ‘“Drug-besotten, sin-begotten fiends of filth”: New Zealanders and the Oriental Other, 1850–1920’, NZJH, 33, 1 (1999), pp.43–64. 17 Jeanine Graham, ‘Settler Society’, in G.W. Rice, ed., The Oxford History of New Zealand, 2nd ed., Auckland,1992, p.114; Belich, Making Peoples, pp.318, 320, 415; Tom Brooking, The History of New Zealand, Westport, Conn. and London, 2004, p.112; Bronwyn Dalley and Gavin McLean, eds, Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand, Auckland, 2005, p.220; Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand, Cambridge, 2005, pp.117, 184. 18 King, Penguin History, p.366; Belich, Paradise Reforged, pp.227–32. A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 165

19 Interestingly, this is a trait that Jurgen Habermas found in post-war conservative German historiography. See, J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, edited and translated by W. Nicholson, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, pp.234–5. 20 For more analysis of New Zealand historiography from this perspective see Moloughney and Stenhouse. 21 Nancy Swarbrick, ‘Indians’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. 22 O’Connor, p.303. 23 However, in the 2006 census Indians numbered 104,582; to this should be added 5718 Indo-Fijians. Together Indians now constitute more than 2% of the national population. ‘Ethnic Group (Total Responses) for the Census Night Population Count, 2006’, http://www.stats.govt.nz (accessed on 22 August 2007). 24 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, Melbourne, 2008; Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, New York, 2008. 25 Lake and Reynolds, p.4. 26 Belich, Paradise Reforged, p.229. 27 As McKeown has argued, in this civilizational binary the East came to constitute not just Asia, but also the Ottoman Empire and sometimes also Russia, and the ‘exclusion of the uncivilized’ could be justified on the ground that ‘liberal institutions of self-rule may collapse under the weight of so many children of despotism who were ignorant of republican virtues’. McKeown, pp.9, 13. 28 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Basingstoke, 2002, pp.3, 66–82; Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney, ‘Asia in Murihiku: Towards a Transnational History of a Colonial Culture’, in Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney, eds, Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts, Dunedin, 2006, pp.70–75, 77, 83, 87. 29 In 1895 New Zealand was importing 3,667,585 lb of tea, and more than 97% of it was coming from South Asia – India or Ceylon. Evening Post (EP), 19 August 1895, p.2. 30 Swarbrick, ‘Indians’. New Zealand as a healthy place became a popular space for settlement for many former East India Company civil servants and officers of the British Indian Army. See Ballantyne and Moloughney, ‘Asia in Murihiku’, pp.83, 87. 31 Daily Southern Cross (DSC), 23 September 1853, p.3. 32 DSC, 4 June 1858, p.3. This had other imperial purposes as well. The Māori population, as Tony Ballantyne has recently shown, was told stories of how the mutiny was suppressed in India, with a not so covert message about the futility of resistance to the empire and its possible consequences. See Tony Ballantyne, ‘Teaching Maori about Asia: Print Culture and Community Identity in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, in H. Johnson and B. Moloughney, eds, Asia in the Making of New Zealand, Auckland, 2006, pp.22–23. 33 DSC, 25 January 1861, p.5. 34 DSC, 22 July 1876, p.3. 35 See Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism, Oxford, 1992. 36 E. Blacklock, ‘Our Indian Problem’, MA thesis, Canterbury University, 1932, p.1. Emphasis added. 37 DSC, 25 May 1867, p.6. 38 EP, 5 February 1870, p.2. 39 Otago Witness (OW), 13 March 1901, p.23. 40 Indian hockey teams visited New Zealand in 1926, 1935 and 1938 and were given positive media coverage. For details see Geoff Watson, ‘Affirming Indian Identities? An Analysis of Imperial Rhetoric and Orientalism in the Tours of Indian Hockey Teams to New Zealand in 1926, 1935 and 1938’, Sporting Traditions, 21, 2 (2004), pp.119–40. 41 For details, see N. Jayaram, ‘Introduction’, in N. Jayaram, ed., The Indian Diaspora: Dynamics of Migration, New Delhi, 2004, pp.20–22. 42 For fuller comparative discussion, see Lake and Reynolds; McKeown. 43 The proclamation said: ‘We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects’. Full text of this proclamation is included in P.J.O. Taylor, What Really Happened During the Mutiny, Delhi, 1997, pp.212–14. 44 Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans 1773– 1815, Auckland, 1997, pp. 223–7, 234–5, 289–90, 312, 491–2. 45 Leckie, Indian Settlers, pp.17–21. 166 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

46 For Gandhi’s faith in Queen Victoria’s proclamation and his subsequent frustration in South Africa, see M.B. Steger, Gandhi’s Dilemma: Non-violent Principles and Nationalist Power, New York, 2000, p.42 and passim. 47 The 1881 law restricted Chinese migration by imposing a £10 poll tax and restricting the number of Chinese that a ship could bring in to one per 10 tons of the vessel’s weight; further legislation in 1888 raised the tonnage to 100 tons for one Chinese immigrant. O’Connor, p.286. 48 Nolan, p.115. 49 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (NZPD), 1895, 89, pp.345, 347. Emphasis added. 50 ibid., p.349. 51 ibid., p.357. 52 ibid., p.365. 53 ibid., p.370. 54 ibid., pp.355, 374–5. 55 ibid., p.359. 56 NZPD, 1896, 92, pp.252–5, 258. 57 ibid., pp.371–86. 58 NZPD, 1896, 94, p.426. Emphasis added. What Whitmore was alluding to was the Sikh regiment’s role during the Revolt of 1857, when it remained loyal and helped the Crown troops to restore order. 59 ibid., p.526. 60 NZPD, 1896, 93, pp.466–7. 61 NZPD, 1896, 95, pp.246, 251; NZPD, 1896, 96, p.495. 62 Quoted in McKinnon, p.27. 63 Quoted in ibid. 64 For more on the ‘Natal formula’, see McKeown, pp.183–214. 65 O’Connor, pp.287–9. 66 For details, see O’Connor, pp.292–4. 67 See, for example, ‘Coloured Labour in British Colonies’, OW, 6 September 1894, p.42; ‘Topics of the Time’, EP, 10 June 1896, p.4; ‘The British Among Dark Races’, West Coast Times, 17 December 1896, p.4. 68 Taranaki Herald (TH), 3 November 1902, p.2. 69 TH, 30 January 1908, p.5; EP, 7 January 1908, p.7; EP, 28 October 1908, p.5. 70 For the South African situation, see B. Pachai, The International Aspects of The South African Indian Question 1860–1971, Cape Town, 1971; Judith M. Brown and M. Prozesky, Gandhi and South Africa: Principles and Politics, New York, 1996; Surendra Bhana, Gandhi’s Legacy: The Natal Indian Congress, 1894–1994, Pietermaritzburg, 1997. 71 See, for example, the reports in EP, 24 November 1913, p.7; EP, 3 December 1913, p.7. 72 TH, 19 June 1909, p.2. 73 EP, 29 December 1910, p.7. 74 EP, 3 December 1913, p.11. 75 EP, 25 March 1908, p.7; 23 June 1908, p.7; 20 June 1911, p.8. 76 For details see, Hugh J.M. Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar, Delhi, 1979. 77 EP, 9 June 1914, p.6. 78 Secretary, United Federation of Labour to Minister of Internal Affairs, 8 November 1916, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, Archives New Zealand, Wellington (ANZ). 79 Acting Minister of Labour to Minister of Internal Affairs, 7 December 1916, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 80 Dominion, 31 January 1917, newspaper cutting in AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 81 Memorandum for the Minister of Internal Affairs, Immigration of Hindoos, 12 October 1916, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 82 NZPD, 1920, 188, p.36. 83 EP, 9 August 1918, newspaper cutting in AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 84 Memorandum for the Under Secretary, Dept of Internal Affairs, 9 January 1919, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. A HISTORY OF SMALL NUMBERS 167

85 Charles E. Groom to G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs, 2 April 1919, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 86 NZPD, 1920, 186, pp.18, 765. For more on the growing concerns about Asiatic migration of this period, see O’Connor, pp.294–300; Leckie, Indian Settlers, pp.66–83. 87 NZPD, 1920, 187, p.905. In the background was a court case in 1919 in which the Supreme Court had given the verdict that the Chinese born in New Zealand were to be treated as naturalized British subjects and no time restriction on their re-entry was applicable. This Bill would plug that loophole. For details, see Nigel Murphy, ‘Joe Lum v. Attorney General: The Politics of Exclusion’, in Manying Ip, ed., Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand, Auckland, 2003, pp.48–67. 88 On the ‘decline of the imperial subject’ see McKeown, pp.210–13. 89 NZPD, 1920, 187, pp.905–906. The full text of the resolution was presented at the Council by the Attorney General. See NZPD, 1920, 188, pp.32–38. 90 NZPD, 1920, 187, p.908. 91 ibid., pp.912–14. 92 ibid., p.924. 93 ibid., pp.916–18. 94 ibid., p.920. 95 ibid., pp.919, 920, 922, 923, 925, 937. 96 ibid., p.939. 97 ibid., p.907. 98 Ballantyne, Orientalism, pp.74–81. 99 Belich, Paradise Reforged, p.209. 100 For more details, see O’Connor, pp.300–305. 101 Census of New Zealand, 1921, Part VI, Race Aliens, p.1. 102 ‘Note on Commonwealth Citizenship’, EA 1/59/2/25 Pol+1a, ANZ. 103 EA 1 159/2/25 Part 1a Legislation: Indian citizenship, ANZ. 104 ‘Note on Commonwealth Citizenship’, EA 1/59/2/25 Pol+1a, ANZ. 105 ibid. 106 For a discussion on this see Judith M. Brown, ‘War and the Colonial Relationship: Britain, India and the War of 1914–18’, in D. C. Ellingwood and S.D. Pradhan, eds, India and World War I, New Delhi, 1978, pp.19–47. 107 ‘Memorandum for the information of the Government of India on the subject of the New Zealand Immigration Restriction Amendment Act 1920’, 5 September 1921, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 108 Extract from Printed Report By The Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Shastri, P.C., Regarding His Deputation To The Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada’, AAAC 6015 ACC W4686 13A, Misc Asian Immigration 1916–44, ANZ. 109 However, this situation was not rectified until the Labour government passed a Pension Amendment Act in 1936. 110 Extract from Printed Report By The Right Honourable V.S. Srinivasa Shastri, P.C., Regarding His Deputation To The Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada’, AAAC 6015 ACC W4686 13A, Misc Asian Immigration 1916–44, ANZ. 111 See Leckie, Indian Settlers, ch.3 for details. 112 G.T. Parvin, Secretary, White New Zealand League, to R.F. Bollard, Minister of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 25 March 1926, AAAC 6015 ACC W4686 13A, Misc Asian Immigration 1916–44, ANZ. 113 ‘Rights of Indian subjects in New Zealand’, 11 June 1926; ‘Statement’ read by Dr Share, AAAC 6015 ACC W4686 13A, Misc Asian Immigration 1916–44, ANZ. 114 F.S. Bajpai, Secretary to the Government of India, to His Majesty’s Under Secretary of State for India, London, 1 December 1932, AAAC 6015 ACC W4686 13A, Misc Asian Immigration 1916–44, ANZ. 115 Memorandum for His Excellency the Governor-General, 30 May 1933, AAAC 6015 W4686 13A Misc Affairs, Enemy POWS, ANZ. 116 cit. Manying Ip, Dragons on the Long White Cloud: The Making of Chinese New Zealanders, Auckland, 1996, p.109. 117 ‘Note on Commonwealth Citizenship’, EA 1/59/2/25 Pol+1a, ANZ. 168 SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY

118 Ann Curthoys has pointed out that ‘migration does not always mean the transfer of a sense of belonging from one society to another, but rather the formation of a diaspora of people who maintain a sense of identity and practical links across national boundaries.’ Curthoys, p.86. 119 See Leckie, Indian Settlers, ch.4. 120 I have discussed this in greater detail in ‘Reinventing Indian identity in Multicultural New Zealand’, in Johnson and Moloughney, Asia in the Making of New Zealand, pp.125–46. 121 Appadurai, p.4.