Mother India opens her doors

FROM Sri Lanka to Surinam, from Trinidad to Thailand, the sun never set on the idea of the Indian diaspora. Indentured labour were forced to set sail by the boat full in the late 19th century to cultivate the sugar plantations of the British Empire. They carried small potlis of the earth of Mother India. In Mauritius, they simply called the local river Ganga.

Much earlier, in Southeast Asia, a new ferment had christened another local river the ‘Mekong’, a corruption of the words ‘ma’ and ‘Ganga’. In the Arab world, traders mixed spices with philosophy over the centuries to create unique cocktails. While in boomtown China, the acknowledgement of the mother country as the source of Buddhism was enough, even today, to put the fear of God into party apparatchiks.

But as India lumbers into the new century, it seems to have at last made peace with the refugees of its past. Walking out on Vidia Naipaul, for example, no longer seems a statement of rebellion, just juvenile histrionics. If anything, it would be his prerogative to exercise his legs, whether in Neemrana or New Delhi. (Happily, he didn’t, so we lived to enjoy his immensely rewarding and hugely entertaining ‘‘conversations’’ later in the Capital.) Stripped of the tedium of political correctness, which once enjoined that India either fawn upon its expatriate population or ignore them just as if they did not exist, we seem to have at last come to terms with the kaleidoscope of colours that make up this community.

It wasn’t so, of course, until recently. Newly independent from the British, a sort of national stiff upper lip was self-ordained as correct behaviour. If you voluntarily left the mother country, according to the unstated bottomline, you opted out of the huge task of nation-building. Since you had opted to quit the flies and the faeces, the disease and the dirt, you had absolutely no right to instruct or interfere. You belonged to the country of your adoption.

How harsh those words were. They were flung on the faces of all those Indians who lived abroad, accompanied by a self-satisfied ring of no fear or favour. Soon enough, envy had added ballast to the rejection. As India grew more and more insular in the ambience of the Cold War, the falseness of the divide with the outside world led to an increasingly hermetic existence. The West was a lie, said the official dogma, only made-in-India was any good. From this ghat to the one damning the diaspora was but a short step.

Until Salman Rushdie, himself a half-and-half, began to colour purple the house Mr Naipaul had begun to build some four decades ago. In the back rooms, lived all those thousands of doctors and lawyers, carpenters and electricians, failed specimens and successful citizens. Many of them had no voice. They made no films, wrote no books, but they exercised their elbows by keeping in touch with home. In the sunlit, side and front quarters — perhaps facing a vine of pink Edward roses for inspiration — began to live the heroes of our time. The Nairs, the Ghoshs, the Khuranas...these were the sons and daughters of the soil, who took the flight out, but never left.

Certainly, though, the BJP-led government’s attempts at paying tribute to the diaspora seem to be limited to the non-resident Indian largely in the western world, whose standard of living is driven by a fat bank balance. Unfortunately, New Delhi’s idea of a person of Indian origin doesn’t accommodate those who live in the subcontinent, whether in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka (Pakistan’s 50-year-old diaspora is a political hot potato). It must be the biggest irony of our times, how the refugee from Trinidad or Surinam or East Africa or even England is given far more importance than the ‘Indian Tamil’ who left India 150 years ago.

Maybe that could be the subject of the ICCR’s next literary festival — the diaspora of the Indian sub-continent. Imagine, Michael Ondaatje rubbing shoulders with Hanif Kureishi, even as Taslima Nasreen has a heart-to-heart with Bhisham Sahni. Then the sparks would really fly under the Neemrana sky.

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