Historically, Indian workers who had moved abroad were mostly people who were working in low-paying jobs. Jobs which are called blue-collar jobs. From the late sixties, However, Indians were going abroad to study and to work in high-paying (or white-collar) jobs. These were the middle-class Indians. By the late eighties, it became common for Indian students to take the SAT and GMAT exams and apply to foreign universities. The United States was the country of choice for most people but many also went to Britain, Canada and other countries. By the late nineties, there was another group—Indian professionals who were hired abroad for jobs in medicine, law, finance and information technology.
Over the years, many of these groups have mixed and merged but traces of each stream can still be seen in the twenty-first century. It’s interesting that many of these people, though they may never have been to the subcontinent, feel very ‘Indian’. They may live in Sweden or Canada but they will probably relish snacks from India with great fondness. Many of them also feel very proud of India’s economic growth.
What does it mean to be Indian in the twenty-first century? There are about twenty-five to thirty million Indians living outside India. Through hard work, education and entrepreneurship, they have become very successful in fields ranging from business and politics to literature. With success, they have become more confident about their identity. They are also able to have business, personal and cultural connections with India, thanks to globalization and communications technology.
Globalization means the coming together of ideas, cultures, worldviews and products from across the world. Eating a foreign chocolate may have been a rare treat in the time of your parents but now, you can get a bar of Toblerone quite easily!
Richer and better off socially, these Indians living abroad share passions ranging from Bollywood to cricket with their cousins back in India.
None of this is just one-way. Indians within India tend to be very proud of the personal achievements of people of Indian origin even if they have no direct link to the subcontinent. An Indian-origin governor of an American state, a Nobel Prize winner or a CEO of a multinational company can make headlines in Indian newspapers. Simply said, Indians in India and Indians living abroad have a sense of shared identity. In response, the Indian republic has tried to create different forms of citizenship—like Overseas Citizen of India and Person of Indian Origin.
The Indian has come a long way: from the docks of Lothal to the boardrooms of London, New york and Singapore.
PUT YOUR HANDS UP, BOLLYWOOD STYLE
The journey from Gondwana to Gurgaon has been a long one. You may have got a sense of the twists and turns, the abrupt shifts, as well as the surprising continuities in India’s history from this book. It’s amazing how pieces from this long history are often piled up next to each other. For example, the brand new city of Gurgaon is being constructed right next to the aravalli ridge, the oldest geological feature on this planet.
If you look north from one of Gurgaon’s tall office blocks, you can see the Qutub Minar, built by a Turkish slave-general to mark the conquest of Delhi. Just below this tower, Indians with international tastes enjoy Thai and Italian food at the expensive restaurants of Mehrauli, an urban village that is steadily changing. Metro trains slither nearby on their elevated tracks.
A short drive south of the imperial inscriptions of Junagarh, the Asiatic lion is slowly making a comeback. A survey in 2010 reported that there are now 411 lions in Gir. The sanctuary has now become too small for these animals and some of them are wandering into the countryside surrounding it. Some have even been seen on the beaches of Kodinar!
Just across from this beach is the island of Diu, which was controlled by the Portuguese for four centuries. At some point during their rule, they had presented a group of African slaves to the Nawab of Junagarh. The direct descendants of these slaves now live in hamlets just outside Gir National Park. And so, there’s one more genetic mix in India—african Indians! This community, called the Sidi community, is Muslim, but they retain customs, music and dances from Africa.
The last hundred years have not been kind to India’s tigers. It is estimated that barely 1707 of them remain in the wild—down from over 3600 in the 1990s. Poaching is a big problem, but worse is the destruction of their habitat. But the symbolic value of the lion and the tiger is still alive in the minds of people. Every year, the drums of Kolkata beat for Goddess Durga, who rides a lion when she battles with evil. In Singapore, tourists take snaps of the Merlion, half-lion, half-mermaid, a mythical beast that through many twists and turns traces its origin to the ancient Indian merchants who brought their culture to this place. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army, flying a lion flag, defeated the Tamil Tigers in the long civil war.
The Indian government came up with a proposal recently to bring the cheetah back to this country from Africa. There were furious debates about whether the Asian and African cheetahs were from the same species. There are even more furious debates about mining. The ancient forests of Gondwana are now rich coal fields in Jharkhand. India’s new economy needs more energy—which can be obtained from these old forests. But we really must think how we can do this without destroying the environment.
We live in a time of massive change—mass urbanization, climate change, globalization, and a changing international community. India has seen all this before but have we learnt from the past? The Ganga is still considered to be a sacred river but it’s clearly dying because of human activities and thoughtless civil engineering. Maybe this is how the Harappans felt when they watched the Saraswati drying up. Maybe they desperately prayed to Indra to break the dams and let the waters flow again.
As we have seen, in spite of all these changes, Indians do have a memory of their past. It also influences our present in many ways. A lot can be known about a culture and its people from the way they remember their saddest moments. When New york observes an anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, there are serious speeches given by political leaders. But how did Mumbai remember the terrorist attacks of 26 November 2008? A day after the fourth anniversary, a flash mob of 200 young boys and girls suddenly appeared in the middle of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, a busy train station, which had been one of the places attacked on that night of horror. The flash mob then danced for five minutes to a popular Bollywood song—Rang de Basanti (which means ‘the colour of sacrifice’). Then, when the music stopped, the mob disappeared into the crowd. In any other country, this would have been seen as an insult to the memory of those who died that night but in India, most people thought this was appropriate. The whole episode was filmed and became an instant hit on the Internet. But, why do Indians remember a horrible event by dancing?
The answer may lie in the fact that Indians view history not in a political way but as a civilization. When Americans raise their flag at the 9/11 sites, they see in it the strength of their nation. When Indians dance at the site of the 26/11 terror attack, they celebrate their civilization.
The history of India’s geography and civilization reminds us of each generation’s insignificance in the vastness of times. The greatest of India’s kings and thinkers also felt this. So they left behind their stories and thoughts recorded in ballads, folktales, epics and inscriptions. Even if these memories are not exactly true, what matters is that they carry the essence of India’s civilization. On the island of Mauritius, descendants of Indians who moved two centuries ago have a lake called Ganga Talao, named after the Ganga river, which they hold as sacred. A very long time ago, their distant ancestors would have remembered the Saraswati the same way as they shifted to Ganga. Geography is not just about the physical Land but also about the meaning we give it. And so, the Saraswati flows, invisibly, at Allahabad.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in Puffin by Penguin Books India 2015
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Copyright © Sanjeev Sanyal 2015
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Cover illustration by Joy Gosney
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The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 22
