DIASPORA AND INDIAN DIASPORA

The emergence of the concept of diaspora is fairly recent. This concept has elicited unprecedented interest among academicians and has provoked divergent responses worldwide. It has emerged as an important area of research in the departments of literature and social sciences. It is currently being used in both academic and popular discourse with a growing frequency and breadth. Yet this growth does not necessarily reflect a common understanding of the term.

          How to define diaspora has been the subject of ongoing debate. While some scholars have argued in favour of identifying a closed set of attributes, others have preferred to use the term in the broader sense of human dispersal. For example, Safran maintains that diaspora is that segment of people living outside homeland. Docker defines diaspora as “a sense of belonging to more than one history, to more than one time and place, to more than one past and future.”¹ The work of Brah on diaspora locates diaspora space in the intersectionality of diaspora, border and dislocation as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychological process. Gilroy uses the concept of Diaspora to argue against ethnic absolutism and unitary ethnic culture. Stuart Hall uses diaspora to emphasize the hybrid identity formation and the processes, experiences and practices that result from displacements and cultural shifts. The term trans-national community is also used as synonym of diaspora and the two-terms/ concepts frequently collapse into one. Phil Cohen is of the view that this word has become one of the buzzwords of the post-modern age. Clearly, a working definition of diaspora is in order. To make its meaning clear, It is essential to sketch the spread of the term ‘diaspora’ through a number of disciplines, pointing to some prominent examples.

          Etymologically, the term ‘diaspora’ is derived from the Greek word ‘dia’ and ‘speiro’. ‘Dia’ means ‘through’ and ‘speiro’ means to ‘scatter’. The literal meaning of diaspora is ‘scattering’ or ‘dispersion’.

          The word ‘diaspora’ was initially used by the ancient Greeks to describe their spreading all over the then known world. For them this term signified migration and colonization. It has often been used to describe the original dispersion of the Jews in the 6th century B.C. or to refer particularly to the Jews living outside Palestine among people of non-Jewish faith. “For Jews, Africans, Palestinians and Armenians diaspora signifies a collective trauma where one dreams of home while living in exile.”²

          Today the term diaspora has made a dynamic comeback in the debates around ethnicity, nationality and nationhood, boundaries and identity. It has returned to address and assist the understanding of migration, post migration and re-territorialization, people's multiple sense of belonging and loyalties beyond national boundaries. More recently, and with increasing frequency, this term is being used to encompass the dispersal of any group or community outside country of their origin. It implies that particular cultures survive, transform and remain relevant even when members of an ethnic community have not lived in the original homeland.

          In current parlance, the above-mentioned term is applied as a metaphoric designation for expatriates, expellees, refugees, alien residents, immigrants, displaced communities and ethnic minorities. It has also been used to describe the experience of displacement and to analyse the social, cultural and political formation that results from this displacement. This term refers also to the work of exile and expatriates and all those who have experienced unsettlement and dislocation at the political, existential or metaphorical levels. Emmanuel Nelson has used this paradigm to analyse expatriate writing.

          The term diaspora has now attained the full-fledged status of a concept. Today intellectuals and activists from various fields are frequently using it to describe such categories as “immigrants, guest workers, ethnic and racial minorities, refugees, expatriates and travellers.”³ It has now emerged to be a useful concept to analyse the relationship between place and identity and the ways cultures and literatures interact. Though diaspora has assumed different meanings and interpretations, since its early uses, it is currently employed to imply a wide variety of contexts, from dispersion to trade diaspora and worker/migrant diaspora. In the present day literary studies it has achieved great significance. According to this concept, different responses to migration are articulated in literature produced in the places where diasporic communities exist. Apparently a metaphorical application of the term is prevalent, encompassing a wide range of phenomenon under the very notion.

          For the last four decades, many dispersed communities, those once known as minorities, ethnic groups, migrants, exiles etc. have now been renamed as diasporas either by scholars or academicians. Up to 1960, the term diaspora was confined to the extensive studies on three classical or traditional Diasporas viz. Jewish, Armenian and Greek, of which the ideal case was the first. The disciplinary application of the diaspora term to non-Jewish and non-Christian peoples and their exile situation seems to have first been undertaken within African studies. In a now classic paper, George Shepperson spoke of the African Diaspora at a conference of African historians held in Dar es Salaam in 1965-66. Analogous to the expulsion of Jew in early times, the dispersion of sub-Saharan Africans through colonial slave trade was called an enforced expatriation, accompanied by a longing to return to the homeland. It was about a decade later that a proliferation of publications gained momentum.

          Since the mid-1970s, African historians deliberately employ diaspora as a concept and topic within African studies. As Harris summarises, the African diaspora concept subsumes [....] the global dispersion [voluntary or involuntary] of Africans throughout history; the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition; and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa. As the term took of within African studies, it also became applied within social sciences. The seminal article ‘Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas’ by John Armstrong in 1976 investigates in general perspective migrant groups with regard to their socio-economic position and the range of tolerance or repression they faced in multiethnic states.

          Various scholars within Sociology and Political Sciences took up Armstrong's approach and usage. For example, various authors in Gabriel Sheffer's by now classic volume Modern Diasporas in International Politics explicitly refer back to Armstrong's study. Sheffer, an Israeli political scientist, summarises what a diaspora is understood to mean to his opinion:

Diasporas are distinct trans-state social and political entities; they result from voluntary or imposed migration to one or more host countries; the members of these entities permanently reside in host countries, they constitute minorities in their respective host country (thus for example, Canadian of English descent are not regarded as diaspora community); they evince an explicit ethnic identity; they create and maintain relatively well developed communal organisations; they demonstrate solidarity with other members of community, and consequently, cultural and social coherence; they launch cultural, social, political and economic activities through their communal organisations; they maintain discernible cultural, social, political and economic exchange with the homeland, whether this is a state or community in a territory within what they regard as their homeland; for this as well as for other purposes (such as establishing and maintaining connections with communities in other host countries), they create trans-state networks that enable exchanges of significant resources; and have the capacity for either conflict of co-operation with both the homeland and host country, possibilities that are in turn connected to highly complex patterns of divided and dual authority and loyalties within the diasporas.⁴ 

Daniel J. Elazar regarded diaspora as ethno-religious communities, which as a catalytic minority would influence the host society. And Esman specified in his working definition that a diaspora is a minority ethnic group of migrant origin, which maintains sentimental or material links with its land of origin. Where as the ethnic factor according to Sheffer, is decisive, the religious ingredients would only help to strengthen some ideological, cultural and emotional identification and relation with former home country.

          It would be impractical to list all the authors in disciplines such as linguistics, history or anthropology etc. who during the 1990s took up the term in order to relate it to expatriate, national, ethnic or religious cultural groups.

          It is interesting to note that the early 1990s witnessed the conceptualisation and systematisation of this term. In 1991 Khachig Tololyan launched a journal named Diaspora. As an editor of this journal, he said:

 We use Diaspora provisionally to indicate our belief that the term that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meaning with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugees, guest workers, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community.⁵ 

          In the 1991 inaugural issue of the journal, Diaspora, William Safran has attempted a kind of ‘ideal type’ representation of diaspora. In his popular article ‘Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’ he has suggested six key characteristics of diaspora and compared a wide range of diaspora situations and related homeland myths. According to William Safran, the concept of diaspora can be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteristics:

§  they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign regions;

§   they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland  --  its physical location, history, and achievements;

§  they believe that they are not -- and perhaps cannot be -- fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulted from it;

§   they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return -- when condition are appropriate;

§  they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and

§  they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethno-communal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.⁶ 

          Scholar like Robin Cohen has also used the same perspective formula of constructing an ideal type of a diaspora. He proposes that perhaps these features need to be adjusted and some other elements should be added to the list proposed by Safran. He indicates that the concept of diaspora denotes:

§  dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign regions;

§  alternatively, the expulsion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions;

§  a collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its location, history and achievements;

§  an idealization of the putative ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its creation;

§  the development of a return movement, which gains collective approbation;

§  a strong ethical group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief of a common fate;

§  a troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack of acceptance at the last or the possibility that another calamity might befall the group;

§  a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in the other countries of settlement, and;

§  the possibility of a distinctive yet creative and enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism.⁷ 

          Cohen has clearly attempted to move the debate forward. His emphasis on ‘strong links to the past’ pushes the debate decisively forward. Such attempt to define diaspora undoubtedly offers useful insights and correctly reflects the formative influence of a sense of loss and displacement and the primacy of the relationship of diaspora with a homeland.

          James Clifford suggests that members of a diaspora maintain such characteristics as:

 i. dispersal from one centre to at least two peripheries;

ii. a memory of the homeland;

iii. a belief that they will never be fully accepted in the host country; 

iv. a belief in returning to their ancestral home,

v. a commitment to the maintenance of their homeland, 

vi. group consciousness and solidarity.⁸        

Van Hear proposes more minimal criteria of diaspora. According to him they are:

 The population has been dispersed from their homeland to two or more other territories; the presence abroad is enduring, although exile is not necessarily permanent and may include movement between the homeland and the host country and that there is social, economic, political and cultural exchange between or among spatially separated populations comprising the diaspora.⁹ 

Marienstrass is of the view that the concept of diaspora is used today to describe any community, which in one way or the other has a history of migration. Peters points out that diaspora implies a decentralised relation to ethnicity, real or imagined relations between scattered people who sustain a sense of community through various forms of communication and contact and who do not necessarily depend on returning to distant homeland.

          It is clear from this brief survey that the notion of diaspora is used to refer a wide range of historical and contemporary phenomena. This brief survey offers me an opportunity to push the debate forward. I think that a diaspora exists and reproduced by relying on everything that creates a bond in a place among those who want to group together and maintain, from a distance, relations with other groups, installed in other places but having the same identity. This bond can come in different forms, such as family, community, religious bonds or shared memory of a catastrophe or trauma suffered by members of the diaspora or the forebears. A diaspora has a symbolic and iconographic capital that enables it to reproduce and overcome the obstacle of distance separating its communities. Diaspora areas and territories must be gauged first in the host country, where the community bond plays the essential role, then in the country or territory of origin -- a pole of attraction -- through memory. Thus the term diaspora has more of a metaphorical than an instrumental role. On this basis the following can be identified as common characteristics of all the diaspora:

(i) Exile: Members of the diaspora or their ancestors have been forced to leave their homelands. They have been dispersed in several places under pressure (abject poverty, catastrophe, famine, disaster etc).

(ii) Alienation: Members of diaspora are completely cut off from the main habitation. They share same fate as exile, suffering and separation. They believe that they can't be fully observed/ accepted by host countries and, therefore, feel alienated and installed. They feel that they can never be in a dominant position in the host country.

(iii) Memory:  Members retain a collective memory -- often a memory of pain, dispossession and trauma. They retain a rather strong identity awareness linked to the memory of the territory, of the society of origin and its history. From their collective memory they create/ articulate a vision of and for their homeland. In their displaced, distressed and homeless conditions, it is their mother country, which becomes their source of consolation, identity and imaginary home. With the loss of their home they depend on their mythical literature. To perpetuate their memory they celebrate the festivals of their own motherland and perform rituals of their own.

(iv) Diasporic Consciousness: Members continue to relate personally to that homeland and maintain a unique ethno- national, ethno-cultural and ethno-communal consciousness that can be treated as diasporic consciousness. This implies the existence of a strong sense of community and community life.

(v) Longing for Return: Segments of diasporic population sustain hope of returning to the homeland.

          All these characteristics find unique articulation in the literary writings of diaspora writers. While languages, customs and traditions are distinct, all diasporic experiences share a similar sense of displacement, of seeking a sense of belonging. These experiences influence literary imagination and map literary texts. Diasporic writings are invariably concerned with exile, memory, diasporic consciousness, longing for return, alienation, nostalgia, search for identity and sense of belonging. Such traits are evident in the works of M. G. Vassanji.

Diaspora can be classified into different types as:

1.     Victim diasporas.

2.     Labour diasporas.

3.     Imperial diasporas.

4.     Trade diasporas.

5.     Cultural diasporas. 

Each of these categories underline a particular cause of migration usually associated with particular groups of people. So, for example, the Africans through their experience of slavery have been noted to be victims of extremely aggressive trans-emigrational policies, or in the case of Indians, they are seen to be part of labour diasporas because of their involvement with the colonial system of indentured labour. It must be noted that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and at any given moment one diasporic group fall into several of these categories simultaneously, for example, the Jewish diaspora could be categorised as both a ‘victim diaspora’ and ‘trade diaspora’. Perhaps, the Indian diaspora is the only one that fits into all the analytic sub-types.

          Like Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, David Dabydeen, A.K. Ramanujan, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Meena Alexander, Homi K. Bhabha, Bhikhu Parekh, Farook Dhondi, Vijay Mishra, Satendra Nandan, Uday Singh Mehta, Sudesh Mishra, Anshuman Mondal, Susheila Nasta, Agha Shahid Ali and Jumpa Lahiri, M.G. Vassanji is also a prestigious literary member of Indian diaspora. Significantly enough, the diasporic Indian writing in English covers every continent and part of the world. It is an interesting paradox that a great deal of Indian writing in English is produced not in India but in widely distributed geographical areas of indenture (Girmit) i.e. Indian in the South Pacific, the Caribbean, South Africa, Mauritius, and the contemporary Indian diaspora in the USA, The UK, Canada and Australia. Although there are certain common resonances in the literary representations of the experience of the writers of the ‘indenture’ and the ‘new’ Indian diaspora, the responses and the narratives of the individual writers vary greatly. The above-mentioned literary members of Indian diaspora differ from each other not only in their socio-cultural backgrounds and the literary ancestries but also in their thematic pre-occupations and literary style. Further, the responses of the diasporic writers to India are also varied and not always adulatory; they range from sentimentality and nostalgia to a cynical celebration of their coming of age. However, their diasporic condition, their sense of exile and alienation and their effort to seek replenishment by making symbolic returns to their origins bind all this writing into unity.

          As M. G. Vassanji is a literary member of Indian diaspora, it will be proper to sketch the short history of Indian diaspora before talking of his life and contributions.

          The Indian diaspora is so widespread that the sun never sets on it, because it spans across the globe and stretches across all the oceans and continents. It is the third largest diaspora next only to the British and the Chinese. It is playing very significant role in various fields. The field of creative writing is one of them. Once upon a time people of the world were devouring the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens; now, both the novel and the English language, have been enlivened in the hands of the writers of Indian diaspora -- M.G. Vassanji, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee and Anita Deasai.

          In the Indian context, emigration has been a continuous process. It has been taking place for centuries. In pre-colonial times it was for the purposes of the trade and the propagation for religion. In the history of ancient India, we come across accounts of the Buddhist bhikkus who travelled into remote corners of Central and Eastern Asia. To spread the gospel of Buddha, King Ashoka sent monks to central and Eastern Asia in the 3rd century B.C. In the 1st century A.D., during the rule of king Kanishka, “Buddhism spread to southern India, Eastern Iran, Central Asia, China, Greece, Kandhar (now in Afghanistan), South East Asia and Indonesia.”¹⁰ The famous Greek work Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a first century Greek guide for sailors, mentions India's trade relations with Ethiopia, Rome, Malay and China.

          Maritime history of pre-colonial India records evidence of continuous contact between the kingdoms of the Coromandal coast and the islands of South-East Asia. According to Brian Harrison:

 From at least the 6th century B.C. onwards Indian traders were sailing to those lands, and down through those islands, in search of gold and tin.¹¹ 

Originally trade with South East Asia was caused by demand for spices, which sent Indian merchants as middlemen to Malaya, Java, Sumatra, Cambodia and Borneo.

          “The contact of the Palas with the Sailendra kings of Indonesia and the expeditions of the South Indian Cholas which vanquished the great Indonesia Empire of Sri Vijay are repeatedly referred to by scholars.”¹² Java was colonised by the Hindus between the 1st and 7th century. “The people of Java came to share with the Indians their religions, languages, art and architecture, their cultural mores, and legal and political ethos and forms.”¹³ This area was exposed to “the heaviest Indianization.”¹⁴ Brahmincal and Buddhist influences spread through the intervening cultural areas to islands of Borneo as well as Mindanao and the Vaishyas in the Philippines. They gradually penetrated even to the northernmost island of Luzon. “There are traces of Indic influence in the languages, literature and social customs in the Philippines.”¹⁵

          In Indo-China the kingdoms of Fu-Nan, Champa, Kamujadesha (Kampuchea), Angkor and Laos were greatly influenced by Indian culture and civilization. From the beginning of the Christian era, the Indian merchants and adventurers, princes and priests, spread the Indian language and literature, religion and philosophy, art and architecture, customs and manners in these countries. The Indian settlements had been widely spread all over the region by the beginning of the Christian era. Later they grew into small kingdoms. Within two to three hundred years nearly the whole of Indo-China and Indonesia, comprising Burma, Siam, Malay Peninsula, Cambodia and Annam in the mainland and the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, Celebes and perhaps many others were dotted over with such kingdoms and settlements. Some of these kingdoms like those of Fu-Nan and Champa grew very powerful. “These contacts lasted for more than a thousand years.”¹⁶

                The trade with East Africa, however, lead to a permanent Indian settlement there. McNeill observes: “there is some reason to think that a colony of Indian merchants lived permanently in Memphis, Egypt from about 500 B.C.”¹⁷ At the time of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) Indians settlements were in existence in the North Eastern Africa. It is said that following the suggestions of Aristotle once Alexander conquered an island of North Eastern Africa named Sokotra. In those days Indians were living there.

          The Venetian traveller Marco Polo has a word of praise for the Gujarati and Saurashtrian merchants on Africa's east coast whom he considers as the best and most honourable that can be found in the world (Travels of Marco Polo written in 1260 A. D.). Vasco de Gama touched East Africa on his historic voyage to India. He reached Malindi in 1497 A.D. and found Indian merchants in Mozambique, Kilwa and Mombasa.

          “Indian presence on the East African seaboard was quite substantial up to the beginning of the 16th century when the Western maritime powers arrived in the Indian Ocean. The use of Indian systems of weights and measures and of Indian Cowries as currency, a great demand for goods, all pointed to the fact that Indians were playing a key role in the area.”¹⁸ These early migrants to East Africa belonged mainly to small trading communities like the Ismailis, Bhoras and Banyas of the Gujarat region. Their counterparts covering Ceylon, Burma, Malaya, Thailand and Indonesia were mainly Nattukottai Chettyars of Chettinad in the Tamil region of South India.

          Before the Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean the merchants of Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and Bengal looked to the east, to the Indonesian archipelago, for direct voyages organised with their own shipping and capital. From the 16th century the orientation was suddenly reversed and turned westwards, towards the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Hindu merchants were to be found all through the Middle East in the 17th and 18th centuries.

          In India the sacred Hindu scriptures prohibited crossing the seas. Thus there was no large-scale emigration until the 19th century. Indian emigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries was unprecedented. It was the European imperialist expansion that created condition for emigration in large numbers. Due to this India witnessed massive movements of people from India to other parts of the world. Broadly three distinct patterns of Indian emigration are identifiable during the colonial period. They are:

(a)  Indentured labour emigration;

(b) Kangani and maistry labour emigration, and;

(c)   Free or Passage emigration. 

          New plantations, industrial and commercial ventures in European colonies created the need for large supplies of labourer. With the abolition of slavery in the British, French and Dutch colonies respectively in 1834, 1846 and 1873, there was a severe shortage of labourers working in sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and rice and rubber plantations in the colonies. To fulfil the enormous demand for cheap labour the colonial authorities introduced indentured system in India in 1834. Under this system millions of indentured Indian labourers were taken to the various colonies. The overwhelming majority of the labour emigrants were recruited from North India.

          Indenture was a signed contract to work for a given employer for five years. During this period the emigrant was entitled to receive a basic pay, accommodation, food rations and medical facilities. At the end of five years, the emigrant was free to re-indenture or to work elsewhere in the colony, and at the end of ten years, depending on the contract, he was entitled to a free or partly paid return passage to India or a piece of crown land in lieu of the fare. The prospective emigrant had to testify before a magistrate that he understood the terms of the contact. Unscrupulous methods were used to dupe ignorant country folks. Under this system only the young and physically fit persons were taken. The indentured were very rarely more than thirty years old. Majority of the recruits were young males. Females were few. “Although the government of India, supported by the colonial office, stipulated that there should be forty women for every hundred men, ships often left India with less than this percentage.”¹⁹ “The shortage of women affected both indentured and free labourers.”²⁰ 

          Indian labour emigration under the indenture system first started in 1834 to Mauritius, Uganda and Nigeria. Later the labourers emigrated to Kenya, Tanzania, Guyana, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent Natal, St. Kitts, Japan and Surinam, Jamaica, Fiji, Burma, Canada, Thiland. Under the indenture system some 1.5 million persons from various parts of the country migrated.

          The indentureship was a new kind of slavery. Most of the immigrants under this system were the victims of deception subterfuge. Many Indians were lured to the city by the Arkatis (agents or labour contractors or middlemen) who promised them relief from the misery of their lives and substantial pecuniary gain; and indubitably many were kidnapped or otherwise tricked. Among many other reasons, it was the scourge of casteism, poverty, famine and social discrimination that compelled them to fall into the trap of the British and to travel in search of a better land. These ‘girmitiyas’, a corruption of the word ‘agreement’, were initially bound to serve for five years, it being understood that the planters would pay for their passage, and at the end of this term the indentured labourers were to receive their freedom. If they wished to do so, they could return to India at the expense of their employer, or they could settle in their new homeland, and gain the rights accorded to free men or at least such rights as coloured people could expect. The Europeans almost never adhered to these agreements.

          From Calcutta and Madras Indian men, and much smaller number of women, especially in the first few decades of indentured migration, were herded into ‘coolie’ ships, confined to the lower deck, the women subject to the lustful advances of the European crew. Many Jehajibhai (shipmates) as they called themselves did not survive the long and brutal ‘middle passage’; the bodies of the dead were, quite unceremoniously, thrown overboard. The hardship of journey became a metaphor of their journey of life. More cruelties awaited on their arrival to the plantation. The working day was unduly long. The idea of a rest day was inconceivable. The labourers found their movement severely curtailed. They were caged within the walls of plantation. They were completely cut off from the main habitation. Discipline was enforced with an iron hand. They lived in appalling conditions, in the barracks and lines formerly inhabited by the slaves. When their indenture was completed, some immigrants stayed on the plantation while others moved out into the rural communities. They combined subsistence farming with wage labour. However, most of these migrants and their descendants did not return home though the indenture system was terminated in 1917 due to anti-indentureship campaign by Indian nationalists. When the indentured system was brought to a halt, nearly 1.5 million Indians had sold themselves into debt- bondage.

          With the loss of their home and absence of motherland, these Indians depended on the Gita, the Ramayan, the Hanuman Chalisa and the Mahabharata as Satendra Nandan explains:

We lived by such stories, our ancient epics- first our grandparents, then our mothers and fathers, now our political leaders. Our fate in Fiji had echoes of the Ramayana: exile, suffering, separation, battles but no return.²¹ 

Very often they compared their exilic life with that of Ram's banishment from Ayodhya and thereby gave their act as something sacred and heroic. In Trinidad and other island countries we find these Indian celebrating Diwali, Ugadi, Holi and Thaipusam. Thus India with her flora and fauna and festivals largely loomed in the Indian communities’ imagination. Their pre-occupation with everything that is Indian gave them several names that had one thing common to them, India. Some of these names are: “Children to the Ganges”, “Forgotten Children of India” and “Empire's Banar Sena.”²² In their displaced and homeless conditions it is their mother country India that became their source of consolation, identity and imaginary home.

          Another system prevalent to get the contract labour was Kangani system. “The Kangani system prevailed in the recruitment of labourer for emigration to Ceylon and Malaya.”²³ The word ‘kangani’ is an anglicised form of the Tamil word ‘kankani’ meaning overseer or foreman. The kanganis were Indians who were employed by the plantation owners to recruit labourers in India. “They were men with some capital who advanced money to the prospective coolies for travelling and settling down on a plantation.”²⁴ A variant of this system, called the ‘maistry’ (derived from Tamil ‘maistry’, meaning supervisor) system was practised in the recruitment of labourer for emigration to Burma. It was more or less similar to the kangani system. Under these systems the kangani and maistry recruited families of Tamil labourers from villages in the erstwhile Madras Presidency. In contradictions to indenture labourers, coolies under these systems were largely free. They were not bound by any contract or fixed period of service. “During the period 1852 and 1937, 1.5 million Indians went to Ceylon, 2 million to Malaysia and 2.5 million to Burma.”²⁵ After 1920 the kangani system of labour recruitment discontinued due to fall in demand for the Indian labour.

          Emigration from India did not cease after the abolition of indenture and other systems of organised export of labour. Emigration to East African countries namely Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Natal (South Africa), Burma, Malaysia and Fiji during the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries present a third pattern: ‘Free’ or ‘Passage’ migration. Under this pattern trader, artisans, bankers, petty contractors, clerks, professionals and entrepreneurs emigrated. Though initially indentured labourers from India were brought to East Africa to build the Mombassa railway, most of the present Indian population of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania arrived after the railway-stimulated opportunities for trade and industry. Unlike the indentured labourers who belonged to mainly lower castes, the traders belonged to the upper castes. They included Baniyas from United Provinces, Marwari from Rajputana; Chettiars form Madras, Pathans from North West and Gujaratis and Punjabis. These emigrants were not officially sponsored. They themselves paid their ‘passage’ and they were free in the sense that they were not bound by any contract.

          A new and significant phase of emigration began after India became independent. The large scale and steady emigration of doctors, engineers, scientists and teachers to the developed countries like Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is essentially a post-independence phenomenon, and particularly so of the late 1960s and 1970s. This pattern of emigration is often described as ‘migration of talent’ and ‘brain drain’. Those who migrated during this phase held from urban middle class families and were well educated and professionally trained. They formed the new Indian diaspora and maintained a close ties with the places of their origin.

The emigration of skilled and unskilled Indians on a large scale to the West Asian countries is also a post-independence phenomenon. The demand of the expatriate labourers rapidly increased in the oil exporting countries of the Gulf and North Africa. Thus during the 70s and 80s there was unprecedented immigration to the Gulf due to the oil boom. “There were only 14,000 Indians in the Gulf in 1948.”²⁶ “By 1971 their population had risen up to 40,000.”²⁷ Presently, Indian population in West Asian countries is vast.

          Now, latest type of emigration is in process. Under this type the software engineers, management consultants, financial experts, media people and other professionals are migrating to the developed countries. They are considered to be the cream of India. They are very mobile and keep very close contact with India in terms of socio-economic interests.

          In many diasporic situations, especially in multiethnic polities and where the people of India are numerically significant, the question of their image and identity has been critical. In the colonial phase, the British stereotyped Indian emigrants as ‘coolies’. Even when the upwardly mobile Indians became professionals, the prefix ‘coolie’ was always attached to their professional designation. In South Africa M. K. Gandhi was often called ‘the Coolie Lawyer’. Similarly, the traders of the East African coastline were called ‘passage Indians’. “The meaning was that they were travellers, sojourners, not settlers or   immigrants.”²⁸ In the literature on the subject we also come across references to such expressions as ‘East Indians’, ‘Girmitiyas’, and ‘the Asians’. What gives a common identity to all members of Indian diaspora is their Indian origin, their consciousness of their cultural heritage and their deep attachment to India.

          A prestigious literary member of Indian diaspora and recipient of several literary awards, M.G. Vassanji is Canada's latest literary golden boy. Like many others, he is an Indian expatriate separated from the subcontinent by generations. As a commonwealth literary hero, he must be ranked alongside Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Nigerian legend Chinua Achebe.

          M.G. Vassnji was born in Nairobi, Kenya on 30th May 1950 to Gulamhussein Vassanji and Daulatkhanu Nanji. His family was a part of community of Indians who had immigrated to Africa. As we know that emigration from India did not cease after the abolition of indenture and other systems of organised export of labour. Emigrations to East African countries namely Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania during the late 19th century present a new pattern: ‘free’ or ‘passage’ emigration. Under this pattern trader, petty contractors, artisans, bankers, clerks and professionals of India immigrated to East African countries. This is the pattern under which Vassanji's ancestors came to Kenya from the Gujarat region in northwestern India.

          When Vassanji was five, his father died and his mother ran a clothing store to support her five children. His family moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There were some reasons behind this move. During the colonial era, thousands of British and European settlers had obtained land seized from the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe. Determined to get their land back and drive out the foreigners, Kikuyu fighters took to the forests and swore vengeance against all who opposed their Mau-Mau crusade. In the 1950s Kikuyu resentment against the Asians, who dominated trade and the middle levels of colonial service, was on the rise. After independence in 1963 many Asian business were taken over by Africans. Asians were forced to leave Kenya. Vassanji's family thus moved to Dar es Salaam in neighbouring Tanzania.

          While attending the University of Nairobi, Vassanji won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study nuclear physics. He went to the United States to join MIT in 1970. In 1978 he earned a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at the University of Pennsylvania. In the same year he immigrated to Canada to work at the Chalk River nuclear power laboratories in Chalk River, Ontario. In 1980, he moved to Toronto and began writing. He joined the University of Toronto, where he worked as a research associate and lecturer in physics from 1980 and 1989 and published widely.

          In 1980s Vassanji began to dedicate himself seriously to a longstanding passion, writing. His path to this profession is a surprising one. After completing his doctorate in nuclear physics, he felt that nothing would make him so happy as writing. He felt that he had too many stories to tell. Thus he abandoned academia to pursue the unpredictable writer's life full time. In an interview with Chelva Kanaganayakam, Vassanji said of his decision to leave the field of physics:

It is the kind of thing you can keep on doing. I had reached a point when I could just churn out things. Unless you are at MIT or Harvard, or a place like that, you are not really at the forefront. Sometimes I miss that life because of the way of the thinking it demands. My writing, however, is much more important. It seems to be the mission in life that I finally achieved.²⁹  

          This decision coincided with the critical success of his 1989 novel, The Gunny Sack. In the same year he, with his wife Nurjehan Aziz, founded and edited the first issue of the Toronto South Asian Review [TSAR], which became the Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad in 1993. At present he lives in Toronto with his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, and has two children, Anil and Kabir.

          M. G. Vassanji has published five novels, The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994), Amriika (1999) and The In-Between World Of Vikram Lall (2003). His other books include a collection of short stories named Uhuru Street (1992) as well as a collection of essays, A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature (1985).

          Vassanji's literary career was launched with the publication of The Gunny Sack, the saga of an Asian African family in East Africa told through the contents of a magic gunnysack. It was his first attempt at fiction. In this novel Vassanji tells the story of four generations of Asians in East Africa. He examines the theme of identity, displacement and race relations. This novel is both the story of one extended family's existence in East Africa and a repository for the collective memory and oral history of many other African Asians. The Gunny Sack received considerable critical acclaim. In 1990 the book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book in African region. In that same year Vassanji was invited to be writer in residence at the University of Iowa.

          No New Land is Vassanji's second novel. It is a poignant story of the immigrant experience. It creates a rich portrait of a transplanted community. Vassanji's third novel The Book of Secrets is primarily set in East Africa and deals with the ambiguous situation of South Asians in East Africa. The story of this novel is based on a diary kept by a junior British colonial administrator. Here the novelist focuses on the interaction between the Shamsi (Indian) community and the native Africans, as well as the colonial administration. Even though none of the characters ever returned to India, the country's presence looms throughout the novel. This book was a national best seller and it won the 1994 inaugural Giller Prize, Canada's richest literary award for a work of fiction. In 1994 Vassanji was awarded the Harbour front Festival Prize in recognition of his achievement in and contribution to the world of letters and in that same year was chosen as one of the twelve Canadians on MacLean's Honour Roll.

          Vassanji's fourth novel Amriika is a remarkable novel of personal and political awakening that spans three decades and explores the eternal quest for home. It is set in the North America. Vassanji won the Giller Prize for the second time for his fifth novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. This novel tells the story of the in-between life of a man.

          Diasporic articulation is evident in the novels of M.G. Vassanji. They are concerned with exile, memory, diasporic consciousness, longing for return, nostalgia, search for identity and sense of belonging. They deal with Indians living in East Africa. Some members of this immigrant community later undergo a second migration to Europe, Canada, or the United States. Vassanji is then concerned with how these migrations affect the lives and identities of his characters, an issue that is personal to him as well:

 “[The Indian diaspora] is very important... Once I went to the U.S., suddenly the Indian connection became very important: the sense of origins, trying to understand the roots of India that we had inside us.”³⁰

          How much are we defined by where we live? How much do you create it? Vassanji's fiction is full of such questions. The need to find connections and contradiction between address and spirit runs through his work. Vassanji's presentation of the past is never cut and dried. He has attempted to explore his own past. Thus another major concern of Vassanji is “how history affects the present and how personal and public histories can overlap."³¹ He believes that reclamation of the past is first serious act of writing.

          Vassanji's unique place in Canadian literature comes from his elegant classical style, his narrative reach, and his characters trying to reconcile different worlds within. For Vassanji, who has experienced displacement from more than one continent, nation is an abstract thing. It is the sense of community and people that survives.

*   *   *   *

REFERENCES :

 

1.       John Docker, The Poetics of Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2001), p. vii.

2.       Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press), p. 26.

3.       Steven Vetovec, “Three Meanings of Diaspora: Exemplified among South-Asian Religions”, Diaspora, Vol. 6 (3) (1997), p. 277.

4.       Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modern Diaspora in International Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 39.

5.       Khachig Tololyan, “The Nation State and its Others: In Lieu of a Preface”, Diaspora Vol. (1) (1991), p. 4.

6.       William Safran, “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myth of Homeland and Return”, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (spring 1991), p. 83- 4.

7.       Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997), p. 26.

8.       James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (London: Harvard UP, 1997), p. 251.

9.       Nicholas Van Hear, New Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. 6.

10.     Jyoti Barot Motwani, “Early and Classical Overseas Overtures of India”, Global Indian Diaspora: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ed., Jagat K. Motwani (New York: Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin, 1993), p.  119.

11.     Brian Harrison, South-East Asia: A Short History (London, 1966), p. 10.

12.     Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (London: OU Press, 1977), p. 1.

13.     B. D. Arora, “Indians in Indonesia”, Indians in South-East Asia, ed., I. J. Bahadur Singh (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1982), p. 119.

14.     Quaritch H. G. Wales, The Making of Greater India: A Study in South-East Asian Cultural Change (London: 1951), p. 195.

15.     Ajit Singh Rye, “Indians in the Philippines”, Indian in South-East Asia, ed., I.J. Bahadur Singh (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1982), p. 144.

16.     V. M. Reddi, “Indians in Indo China States and Their Problems”, Indians in South-Asia, ed., I.J. Bahadur Singh (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1982), p. 155.

17.     William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963), p. 210.

18.     Niranjan Desai, “The Asian Influence in East Africa”, Global Indian Diaspora: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ed., Jagat K. Motwani (New York: Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin, 1993), p. 119.

19.     J. Geoghagan, Note on Emigration from India (Calcutta, 1873), p.  49.

20.     Brinsley Samaroo, “Two Abolitions: African Slavery and East Indian Indenture ship”, India in the Caribbean, ed., David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Hansib Publishing Ltd., 1987), p. 30.

21.     Satendra Nandan, The Wounded Sea (Australia: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 88.

22.     Satendra Nandan, Lines Across Black Waters (Adelaide: The Centre for Research in New Literature in English, 1997), p. 10.

23.     R. Jayaram, Cast Continuities in Ceylon: A Study of the Social Structure of Three Tea Plantations (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1975), p. 6.

24.     Ravindra K. Jain, South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970), p. 199.

25.     Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951), p. 104.

26.     C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838- 1949 (Madras: OUP, 1951), p. 528.

27.     Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (London: OUP, 1977), p. 12.

28.     Ibid., p. 3.

29.     Chelva Kanaganayakam, “‘Broadening the Substrata’: An Interview with M. G. Vassanji”, World Literature Written in English 31. 2 (1991), p. 34.

30.     Ibid., p. 21.

31.     Amin Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Post- Colonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji”, World Literature Today 67. 2. (spring 1993), p. 279.