Reading Cultural Representations of the Double Diaspora

Britain, East Africa, Gujarat

Maya Parmar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030180829
• eBook ISBN: 9783030180836
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Reading Cultural Representations of the Double Diaspora: Britain, East Africa, Gujarat is the first detailed study of the cultural life and representations of the prolific twice-displaced Gujarati East African diaspora in contemporary Britain. An exceptional community of people, this diaspora is disproportionally successful and influential in resettlement, both in East Africa and Britain. Often showcased as an example of migrant achievement, their accomplishments are paradoxically underpinned by legacies of trauma and deracination.

The diaspora, despite its economic success and considerable upward social mobility in Britain, has until now been overlooked within critical literary and postcolonial studies for a number of reasons. This book attends to that gap. Parmar uniquely investigates what it is to be not just from India, but too Africa—how identity forms within, as the study coins, the "double diaspora". Parmar focuses on cultural representation post-twice migration, via an interdisciplinary methodology, offering new contributions to debates within diaspora studies. In doing so, the book examines a range of cultures produced amongst, or about, the diaspora, including literary representations, culinary, dance and sartorial practices, as well as visual materials.

© The Author(s) 2019

M. ParmarReading Cultural Representations of the Double Diasporahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18083-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Producing Culture in the Double Diaspora

Maya Parmar¹

(1)

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Maya Parmar

Email: [email protected]

Three generations of my family have been born on three different continents: most of my grandparents in India, both parents in Kenya, me in England along with my sister and cousins. Asia. Africa. Europe. Every continent we’ve been through has left a mark on us.

(V. Patel 2016, 222; my emphasis)

End Abstract

Vinay Patel, in the penultimate paragraph of his short story and this epigraph, rightly alerts his reader to the deep-rooted mark left upon the ‘double diaspora’, by their multiple migrations and travels through three continents. Yet, in Britain today and historically, there is a gap in the everyday modes of popular twice-migrant representation: an absence in how members of the diaspora mark themselves out. As I explore in detail throughout this book, the diaspora that has migrated from Gujarat to East Africa, and later settled in Britain, is hidden in literary and cultural studies, and often obscured in relevant scholarly debates. Patel’s short story appears in the critically acclaimed collection entitled The good immigrant (Shukla 2016).¹ It is amongst several accounts that do gesture towards Indian East African twice migration and the prolific British diaspora that emerges from this journeying; nonetheless, this theme is never fully surfaced and probed. The collection of short stories is not exclusively about the Indian East African community in Britain; rather, it is about a range of migrant experiences. However, the trope of twice migration appears in four of the 21 narratives in some shape or form (those by Sabrina Mahfouz, Himesh Patel, Vinay Patel and Nikesh Shukla).

For example, Himesh Patel, in ‘Window of opportunity’, offers the classic double diaspora account of migration, diligence, hardship and economic savvy. His family, from India, and later Kenya, moved to Britain (2016, 58–9), to eventually establish corner shops in two Cambridgeshire villages. His intergenerational narrative is one of entrepreneurship, which resonates throughout the double diaspora experience, though it is never fully explored through this lens. Himesh Patel is an actor known for his role as Tamwar Masood, a British Pakistani Muslim, in the BBC soap opera EastEnders (2007–2016). In his short story Patel suggests that the Masood family is ‘widely regarded as a kind of generic representation of the South Asian family’ (2016, 66), while also drawing comparisons between his own identity as a Hindu Gujarati and his character’s religious identity. If this conflation of ‘Asianness’ is useful in articulating Patel’s own formulation of identity, it conversely and simultaneously serves to hide the very specific lived experience of the prolific double diaspora.

An exceptional community of people, this diaspora is disproportionally successful and influential in resettlement, both in East Africa and in Britain. Often showcased as an example of migrant achievement, as Himesh Patel does, their accomplishments are paradoxically underpinned by legacies of trauma and deracination. Reading cultural representations attends to this gap, by studying the cultural life of the prolific Gujarati East African community in Britain today. Subsequently, I probe what it is to be not just from India, but also Africa: how cultural identity forms within, as this book popularises and discusses later, the ‘double diaspora’. First, we must consider the historical trajectory that led to the emergence of the British double diaspora.

Historical Context: The Indian in East Africa

The Indian East African community that now exists in Britain, and which is both prolific and celebrated as dynamic, is a product of multiple migrations and resettlements that span many generations. They first migrated from India to East Africa—specifically Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania—in several capacities over an extended period of time. During the late 1800s many Indians undertook both voluntary and coerced indentured labour in East Africa under British colonial rule , as African labour in the region was either ‘unavailable or unreliable’ (Bharati 1972, 8).² By 1895 it is recorded that Kenya had over 13,000 of these workers who constructed the railways that still function in the territory. Figures of Indian indentured labour during this period in East Africa totalled approximately 32,000. Whilst some of these workers—who were not only labourers, but clerks, surveyors and accountants—remained in East Africa, others returned to India or died during their service (Ghai and Ghai 1971, 2).³

Despite the ubiquitous understanding that the massive importation of labour during the 1890s was the first appearance of Indians in East Africa, ‘one of the essential characteristics of South Asian settlement in this particular region of the world is its antiquity’ (Twaddle 1990, 151–2).⁴ Long before the introduction of indentured labour in East Africa, there existed Indian and Arab traders and adventurers in the coastal cities.⁵ This is the consequence of a long, shared oceanic history between India and Africa, a narrative of South Asian maritime navigation and encounter, which is underrepresented in critical study. The Indian Ocean was indeed in pre-colonial times a productive conduit between two territories: a space of transformation, modernity and mobility. It enabled criss-crossing, mercantile and cultural, long before the intervention of European influence in East Africa.

As a result of these maritime networks, in 1844 it was estimated that 1200 Indians already lived in the coastal cities of East Africa (D. P. Ghai 1965, 3). As time went on more members of this community penetrated the interior provinces of East Africa and engendered an established Indian presence. Significantly, these Indian communities, while being religiously, linguistically and by caste heterogeneous, by and large derived from the western region of the subcontinent, primarily Gujarat.⁶ Thus, despite a ‘Eurocentric historiography’ that ignores the presence of a South Asian community in East Africa before the imposition of colonisation, Indians—Gujaratis in particular—have long been in the region. It is from the colonial period onwards that we can recognise an established and substantial diaspora of South Asians in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Subsequently these migrants have been integral architects of East Africa’s economy.⁷ As discussed later, they have not only contributed to building the region’s railways, but further actively provided commerce in the form of dukas (shops), and later have contributed significantly to the commercial public sphere in Britain.

The role of South Asians in developing the East African economy can, however, be attributed to influences other than simply the longevity of the population in the region. The western region in India is acclaimed for its commercial endeavours, and within the subcontinent itself Gujarat has thus been identified as the ‘entrepreneurial hub of India’ (Mehta and Joshi 2002, 73).⁸ Concurrently, in a similar vein of enterprise, it is not surprising that ‘wherever freed indentured labourers have formed communities of rural labourers, they have been followed by Gujarati traders and businessmen, who supply them with Indian clothes, jewellery and foodstuffs’ (Collingham 2006, 244). Although here Lizzie Collingham refers specifically to the diasporas in Mauritius, Trinidad, Jamaica, South Africa and Fiji, this is indeed true of East Africa as well, as attested by my own family history. Following indentured labourers from India, who chose to stay in either Uganda or Kenya, many South Asians sought to fill the gap in the market for Indian commodities. They also catered for Western settlers and Africans, proving cheap and resourceful in the service they offered. Interestingly, D. P. Ghai describes the dukas as being ‘owned almost exclusively by Gujarati speaking Asians’ (1965, 14). It is these migrants who came to Africa of their free will and formed the overwhelming majority of 360,000 Gujarati Indians in the region (Tinker 1975, 15).⁹ The identification of financial opportunity, and the success the Indian community had in seizing this prospect in East Africa, suggests that entrepreneurial skills were transferred from Gujarat to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.¹⁰

Indeed, in her book centred on pre-colonial Gujarat, Samira Sheikh explains that ‘revenues from trade made a crucial difference to the finances of whatever group was in power in [early] Gujarat. This may be as true of Gujarat of the twenty-first century as of the twelfth’ (2010, 5). It would seem thus that the Gujarati’s aptitude for trade and commerce extends from skills that have been cultivated since pre-colonial times. These entrepreneurial skills can be associated with the multiplicity and diversity Gujarat is known for. The etymology of the word ‘Gujarat’ in fact signifies the non-static nature of the region: ‘The term Gujarat is widely acknowledged to derive from the Gurjaras or Gujjaras, clans of “cattle-rearers, husbandmen and soldiers” who settled in or passed through north and north-western India from about the first century CE’ (25). Because people were continually migrating to and from Gujarat, making the region ‘virtually a moving frontier of immigration’ (ibid.), the area was both linguistically and religiously heterogeneous. A legacy of migration, and the multiplicity of identity of early peoples in Gujarat, emanating from their varied origins, perhaps account for their successes in commerce: having a varied skill set and being inclined to travel far and wide must have helped in trade. As such, there was a self-prophesying mythologisation of their natural abilities as adventurers and pioneers. The Gujaratis of today, not just in the region but all over the world, are not only renowned for these skills, but are also endowed with them. The economic successes of the Gujarati are therefore self-perpetuating: if the nature and self-perception of the community are based on a productive myth of enterprise and entrepreneurial skills, a virtuous circle of further cultural and financial entrepreneurship is entered into. The Gujarati follows in the footsteps of this productive myth and maintains the relevant skills for success.

Furthermore, I contend that it is this nature and multiplicity of identity that led many Gujaratis to East Africa, where they lived affluently. As successful settlers in East Africa, the South Asian community comfortably composed the middle stratum that created a cushion between the ruling British and the oppressed and subjugated Africans (Robinson 1995, 331; Tandon and Raphael 1978, 10; Mangat 1969, 131). In this privileged position, with flourishing finances, the immigration of Indians into urban areas of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania continued, until the 1940s, when the British—in a bid to preserve the social hierarchy—prevented the ‘wholly unrestricted immigration from the Indian subcontinent’ (Twaddle 1990, 156). This was followed by the conclusion of British colonial rule in the 1960s and subsequent African independence.¹¹ As a result of controversial Africanisation policies, large numbers of Indians—long settled in this region—left their homes.¹² Whilst in Kenya and Tanzania the migration of South Asians was due to political upheaval and uncertainty, in Uganda the Indian community was brutally expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972. Accused of non-integration, being ‘the saboteurs of the [Ugandan] economy’ (O’Brien 1973, 93) and commonly dubbed as ‘brown Jews’,¹³ the 30,000 to 50,000 strong Indian population in Uganda had just 90 days to uproot, forcing them to abandon any semblance of their settled and established lives and homes.¹⁴

Historical Context: Arriving in Britain

Exercising their British nationality , over a number of years as many as 200,000 Indians chose to come to the UK to start new lives as double migrants—moving first from India and later from East Africa. Others left Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to resettle in countries that helped ‘share the burden’ (Alibhai-Brown 2001, 73), such as Canada.¹⁵ For many, ‘returning’ to India or Pakistan was not an aspiration, as they had rarely been to these places, and did not regard them as ‘home’.¹⁶ As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s cookbook memoir illustrates—as I shall explore in the next chapter —‘home’ was in East Africa.¹⁷ Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Gastropoetics of The Settler’s Cookbook: Diasporic Trauma and Embodied Narratives
• 3. The Performing Body of Navratri: Dancing Dandiya, Dressing to Impress
• 4. Picturing the Modern Self: Vernacular Modernity and Temporal Synchronicity
• 5. Conclusion
• 6. Epilogue
• Back Matter