Notes from Little Indias

The PBD, of course, made eminent sense for the BJP. After all, a large section of the NRI community, particularly in the US and the UK, attracted to the party’s macho (Hindu) nationalist rhetoric, was a natural constituency of support. So what if they could not vote. They could, at least, contribute handsome amounts of foreign exchange for the thirsty party treasury.

It is perhaps not surprising then that Narendra Modi attracted the largest crowds and the loudest applause in PBD 2008. The Gujarati community overseas is a strong ally. Their celebrations after Modi’s latest victory in Gujarat were second only to India’s T20 world championship win. Modi and cricket are the two things which bind this community to India more than anything else. I often wonder, though, how they square up their anti-Muslim sentiment with the outstanding performance of the Pathan brothers (Gujarati Muslims) in the much-celebrated T20 win.

However, as is often the case with immigrant communities, Indians settled abroad tend to hold on very tightly to their culture and traditions, especially religion, often in a static and outdated form. This leads to communities tending to socialise and solemnise (both religious functions and marriage) within the same linguistic, religious or caste group. This insularity abroad, often out of sync with modernity, is the cause of much alienation and angst on the part of the host population.

Increasingly, governments in Europe want to introduce various methods to improve an immigrant’s sense of citizenship, not least by making the learning of the local language compulsory. There is, of course, a danger that political opinion against immigration in the West will turn more rabid. However, immigrants too have a responsibility to ensure that their demand for multiculturalism (which is a good thing) remains distinct from insularity (which is not good but which is getting more entrenched).

The generic war on terror has not helped the cause of integration, with many ordinary British (and other western) citizens viewing anyone with brown skin with a degree of suspicion. Eminent people, like the writer Martin Amis, have added to the hysteria, by extending their newly acquired, abhorrent anti-Islamism to brown skinned people in general. Amis suggested that everyone who looked South Asian or Middle Eastern must be subjected to the harshest security measures possible at airports, including strip-searches.

Malaysia too has just made its discrimination against non-Malays in their population more explicit by targeting the Indian community. In Kenya, rioters, protesting at the result of the Kenyan general election, chose to target prosperous businessmen of Indian origin, who had ironically supported the losing candidate, whose supporters had now turned on them. At an earlier time, Fiji’s ethnic Indians were thrown out of power in an unlawful coup.

The reverberations of this violence and suspicion against pravasis — let us not forget the Haneef case in Australia — had led the prime minister to assure overseas Indians of their security. Many ordinary pravasis are now caught in an unenviable tug of war. Their adopted countries expect them to be better, more integrated citizens. Yet, at the same time, public opinion and policy in those countries seem to be encouraging alienation. The Indian government can do little to protect people of Indian origin globally. At best they can offer to protect the interests of Indian citizens living abroad temporarily, a category to which perhaps more vulnerable migrants like the workers from Kerala in the Gulf belong.

The fact, often overlooked, is that pravasis are a heterogeneous category, ranging from highly skilled migrants to the US and the UK, to low-skilled migrants permanently settled in Canada and the UK, to temporary workers in the Gulf, to settlers in the Caribbean, Africa, East Asia and beyond who have been there for many generations. Their interests are as diverse as they are themselves.

Yet, somewhere, they all retain a bit of their Indian identity, which more often than not comes to the fore when cricket and Bollywood are in the vicinity. If anything, the experience of our pravasis shows how difficult it is to melt and integrate long-held identities. The journey from a pravasi to an accepted ‘nivasi’ is indeed a long one.

The writer is a research scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge dn234@cam.ac.uk