Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Diaspora: a people dispersed. From the Greek dia, asunder, and speiren, to sow. A scattering of lives.

  The Jews were the original diaspora, and for centuries they held near-exclusive claim to the word. My old Webster's, 1940, extends the word to "Christians living among the heathen." Today the world is globalized, and the heathen have their own diasporas—Chinese, African, Arab, Indian, each growing and multiplying at phenomenal rates. Among these are my family and I, sown asunder, trailing our threads of culture and nostalgia around the globe.

  In the psychology of diaspora many pathologies have been defined: disorientation, alienation, difficulty in assimilating. Studying deaths among early Indian indentured laborers in South Africa, the scholars Joy and Peter Brain note that nostalgia was a diagnosed condition, often described as the reason for suicide, a leading cause of death among the immigrants. Is the grief I have felt, sometimes, in this writing, a kind of transmitted nostalgia—a mourning for what was lost, against the narrative of progress and accomplishment that characterizes most contemporary stories of our diaspora? I think sometimes of the villages where my ancestors lived, which I have visited for only a few days in my life. And I wonder what it would be like to know that out of legendary time, your fathers and forefathers lived and died on the same patch of soil where you yourself would live and die.

  In such a life, I imagine, the circular nature of time must be clearer, less bound to a narrative of motion through space. No dispersal; no progress. Lifetime upon lifetime must unfold in much the same manner, personalities changing, circumstances remaining the same. And perhaps because of this it would be easier to see around the bend of Time's corner, as my great-great-grandfather Narsai did.

  Narsai was a poor man, but he was intimate with destiny. In a pan of water, Narsai could find a lost child, a stolen gold ring. In the half-moon of your thumbnail, he could forecast the clouds on your horizon. The villagers referred to him by this skill, hazrat-waalaa: one who prophesies. When the fashion of surnames took hold, generations later, ours became Hajratwala—but that is getting ahead of the story.

  If I had his second sight, perhaps I could scry to find out where we have been and what we have lost. Instead I must trace the story of my family and our travels using imperfect methods: documents, memories, legends. No dates or details of Narsai's biography are recorded, only the legend of his ability to water-gaze.

  Of his wife, Ratan, we know little more, except that she lived to see the dawn of 1928—long enough to coddle her first grandchild and to have her memory committed to paper, captured in black and white. A single photograph of her survives. It is a studio portrait, taken at a point in history when her sons had attained some prosperity, by perhaps the town's only photographer.

  At first glance my great-great-grandmother looks stern, because of the rigid posture that she has been instructed to hold, or that she herself feels is appropriate for such a moment. She wears a sari, its border draped stiffly across a cotton blouse and drawn over her head. She appears to be in her late thirties or forties, though it is hard to tell exactly. She is already the mother of a daughter and six sons. Widowed, her forehead lacks the red dot that is the mark of a married woman in our community; in its place is a slight furrow. Her hair is pulled back severely from her face, whose features contain, however, a softness. It was not the fashion of the time to smile for the camera, but one senses that, given permission, she might.

  Narsai and Ratan remain to me mythical beings, partially veiled. On the edge of history, they are the first to emerge from its mists. Do they sense, somehow, that theirs is the moment just before everything changes forever? Can they guess that on the plot of land where they live, their sons' sons will build houses several stories high and populate them with their own families, then watch them go vacant and even crumble as the children migrate overseas?

  Of their six sons, the fourth was my great-grandfather, Motiram. Family legend has it that his father taught him the art of soothsaying.

  But every Hindu fortuneteller knows the ancient curse: As long as you prophesy you will always be poor. So Motiram, in a season of drought, plague, and migration, decided the art would die with him. Forsaking the tiny, clear pools of water that were his father's domain, Motiram set out to master a greater sea.

  Part One: "Coolies"

  1900

  Estimated size of the Indian diaspora: 373,609

  Countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin: 6

  1. British Guiana

  2. Trinidad and Tobago

  3. Mauritius

  4. Natal

  5. Jamaica

  6. Fiji

  2. Cloth

  What is Fiji? It is heaven!...You will eat a lot of bananas and a

  stomach-full of sugar cane, and play flutes in relaxation.

  —Recruiter of Indian indentured workers, 1893

  YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER wanted to go to Fiji, so he went.

  In our families, migration stories are told like this—the motives purely personal, almost arbitrary. In the books, the recovered histories, I find other origin myths: not desire but economics, politics, the needs of colonial powers. I have set out to find the meeting place, where character intersects with history.

  What we know for sure about Motiram is this:

  He was born late in the nineteenth century in the village of Navsari, near the great port of Surat, in southern Gujarat, in the far western elbow of India.

  In 1909, he went to the Fiji Islands.

  In 1911, he established a small tailoring shop, later to become one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific isles.

  He was not a prophet.

  He made it possible for two of his brothers, their children, and all of their descendants to exit India.

  History helped. As the nineteenth century slipped into the twentieth, young men from all over India were converging on the great ports of Calcutta and Madras. There they boarded ships to seek their fortunes, or at least a respite from chronic poverty.

  A century later, I will never know how Motiram weathered his first days at sea, if he was afraid; nor can I calculate the precise combination of ambition, wanderlust, and desperation which led him to cross two oceans.

  But I know what pulled Motiram across the seas: an empire in need.

  August 1, 1834, was Emancipation Day in the British Empire. After centuries of moral and political wrangling, abolitionists won the great victory. All slaves were to be freed.

  For a few hundred years, Africans in chains had supplied the labor necessary for rapid imperial expansion. Without them, the plantation economies of the colonies verged on collapse. Panicked memos traveled back and forth to London; a scheme to keep former slaves as "apprentices" failed when the slaves learned of their liberation. The Crown compensated owners for the loss of "property," but money alone could not harvest the crops.

  Casting about for a practical solution, the imperial eye landed on India. There, legions of peasants were languishing in idle poverty, eager for work, if only they could afford the sea passage. So it was decided: they would mortgage the trip with their years.

  Abolitionists cried foul, but over the next several decades an old system of travel and bondage was reincarnated and implemented on a grand scale: indenture. Weeks after Emancipation Day, the process of replacing slave labor began at the docks of Calcutta. It was the beginning of the modern Indian diaspora.

  White colonists found the scheme nearly as cost-effective as slavery. The Indians signed up for five years' bonded labor, six days a week, nine hours a day. In return, they received round-trip passage on a converted slave ship plus a small wage, with deductions for food and illness. Those who enlisted called it the girmit system, a mispronunciation of the word agreement.

  Perhaps the phonetic abridgment was appropriate—for as an agreement the system left much to be desired. Poor Indians were lured, tricked, or kidnapped outright by profit-hungry agents, who received a commission for each worker they managed t
o deliver. Largely illiterate, the new recruits relied on these agents to translate the English contracts. The agents often promised work elsewhere in India, or nearby, with the freedom to return home at any time. But the papers—most of them "signed" with thumbprints and X's—committed people to field labor, thousands of miles and oceans away. And those who tried to leave their jobs were beaten, whipped, or imprisoned.

  By their sweat Queen Victoria's realm continued to swell. Sugar sprawled over the Pacific and Caribbean; trains steamed across continents; mines tunneled deep into Africa. Eventually 1.5 million Indian men, women, and children would cross the seas as what they called girmityas—or what the whites called "coolies."

  Thousands more boarded the same ships as free agents. Some were recruited for special skills; others learned of opportunities and took a leap. By a quirk of economics and tradition and groupthink, many hundreds of these travelers came from Gujarat, from the region where my ancestors lived. They were ineligible for indenture, since bonded workers could be recruited only from provinces the British determined to be teeming with excess population. So they went as paying passengers: traders, entrepreneurs, skilled workers.

  Motiram would become one of these, riding the crest of the first wave of the modern Indian diaspora.

  In the Export Trade Gallery of the Calico Museum of Textiles in Gujarat's commercial capital, Ahmedabad, one walks amid walls draped with gorgeous cottons and silks, each behind a layer of glass. Occasionally the harsh cry of a peacock from the gardens outside punctuates the silence. Otherwise, the few visible staff members and even fewer visitors move about quietly, perhaps squinting a bit.

  The light is dim to protect the fragile textiles, many of which are already faded. Some are centuries old; all are remnants of a craft dating back millennia, and of a trade so vast and impressive that writers from Ptolemy to Marco Polo praised Gujarat as a lush, fertile region whose woven cloth was among the finest in the world. Today's diaspora is grafted onto these older patterns of trade and travel, like a tapestry unraveled and reshaped by the world's ever-changing needs.

  I pause before one of the museum's oldest pieces, a large square on which plump geese waddle in rings of eight. Their eyes are nested circles of green, yellow, cream, and antique red fading to pink. One goose looks forward, one back, so that they appear coupled, lustily chasing each other amid an orgy of flowers and cornices. Here and there the tapestry is torn, frayed, so that hardly a goose remains intact. Still, they are in good shape for a flock six hundred years old.

  Excavated from a medieval Coptic fort along the caravan routes outside Babylonia, this sample was originally woven and block-printed by hand in Gujarat. How exactly the geese reached what is now Egypt is a mystery; perhaps a trader took them on a pilgrimage ship to Mecca, then up the coast of North Africa to the mouth of the Nile. The design on the cloth is found also in Indian caves from the sixth century, in a painting that shows someone wearing a shirt made of such cloth. The image on the cave wall, too, is patchy with age, its paint faded as if the cloth it depicts has worn thin.

  I am sure these ragged medieval holes would tell a story, if only we could read it.

  Since before the land was named India, people have been migrating across the Himalayas and the seas. Four millennia ago, traders from the Indus Valley left intricately carved seals in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq). A thousand years ago the Gypsies trekked north from India, carrying their linguistic roots in water, hair, drink, see, man. For centuries Hindu and Buddhist monks have spread their gods across Asia, while Muslim traders built boats to transport precious cargoes of pilgrims, spice, and cloth to Arabia and Africa.

  Tales of these wonders stirred the yearning of foreigners, from Alexander the Great to Christopher Columbus, who set out for India with, in some cases, whole armies. Motiram and his family lived in a region bordered by the Arabian Sea and the Deccan Plain, swept through by various waves of invaders and conquerors—empires rising and yielding way since time immemorial, working their subtle changes on a seemingly eternal pastoral landscape.

  In the nineteenth century, the greatest of these powers was the British Empire, whose reach was so broad that one lord famously bragged, "The sun never sets upon the interests of this country." It was a quirk of geography and timing that those interests reached into the tiny village of Navsari and swept up Motiram and all of his brothers.

  Ten miles or half a day's journey north of the village on rough roads, one may enter the thousand-year-old metropolis of Surat through the Navsari Gate. The history of Surat is intertwined with the story of our diaspora: place of first contact, place of opportunity and decline and opportunity again. A point of departure; of many departures.

  Founded as a minor port by the Solanki kings, Surat was made a great one by their Muslim successors. While some orthodox Hindus believed that crossing the ocean's "black waters" would result in loss of caste, Muslims faced no restrictions and, indeed, were enjoined to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Under Muslim rule, Surat became the "blessed port" of the Mughal Empire, India's gateway to the Holy Land. Each March, four ships laden with a thousand pilgrims each departed from Surat to Mecca, returning in September.

  These religious voyages were opportunities to carry on a vibrant trade. Muslims from Gujarat traversed the entire Indian Ocean—from the Arabian Sea down the long coastline of Africa to the South China Sea—setting up permanent settlements as far afield as Japan. By the 1600s, Surat was the main trading center of the great Mughal Empire, and its reputation was international. It was a must-see port of the Orient.

  Three centuries before my great-grandfather's time, when the British East India Company formed for the purpose of trading in India, Surat was the logical place to begin. Company ships made several attempts to reach India by sea around the perilous Cape of Africa, succeeding at last in 1607. The Portuguese and the Dutch were already in Surat, both established enough to try to blockade and fire upon the English ships. But the English persisted, and set up a trading post. Surat was their first toehold in the land that would become "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire.

  John Ovington, chaplain of the English trading post from 1689 to 1692, said the city was "reckon'd the most fam'd Emporium of the Indian empire," its streets and bazaars "more populous than any part of London." Cotton, indigo, and opium were the main draws, but the list of items traded at Surat was long: Copper, tin, quicksilver (mercury). Carpets, linens, yarns. Vermilion, sandalwood, lead. Elephants' teeth, tortoise-shell, cowries, coral, amber, ebony, diamonds, agates. Soap, sealing wax, rosin, borax, ammonia, saltpeter (for gunpowder), camphor, turpentine, enamel, gum. Tea, sugar, wheat, rice. Cloves, cinnamon, ginger, tamarind, pepper, saffron, cumin, myrrh, musk. Gold and silver, in the form of coins, ornaments, bars, and threads woven into exquisite silks. And cloth, in varieties unimaginable, a riot of colors, textures, and designs.

  John Ogilby, His Majesty's cosmographer, writing in 1673, found "Por-tugefes, Arabians, Perfians, Armenians, Turks, and Jews" doing brisk business in Surat. Demand for the goods traded in Surat was so fierce, he wrote, that the city "fwallows all the Gold and Silver which comes from the Perfian Gulph and Arabia, as alfo a great part of the Riches of India, and the Gold of China."

  Soon, Surat was swallowing the riches of England as well. In London the craze was for calico, muslin, chintz—varieties of cotton cloth from India. Parliamentarians fretted: Asian luxuries pouring in meant Britain's gold bullion was pouring out, creating a drastic trade imbalance. And textile makers took notice as well: homegrown British cloth could not compete with cheaper, higher-quality cottons and silks from India. British weavers marched and rioted. By 1701, as one historian writes, "the clamour reached [such] a climax that the English Parliament had to pass an Act forbidding the import of cloth from Surat and banning the use of Indian silk in England."

  Slowly Surat's fortunes—and those of the countryside surrounding it—began to fade. The river port was capricious, flooding the town each monsoon and at other ti
mes silting over, becoming impassable. The city was plagued by chronic conflict among various European and Muslim rulers, as well as attacks by pirates and marauders lusting after its treasure houses. Soon the British, impatient for stability and greater control, decided to establish a port of their own. They took their business 160 miles down the coast, where they made a new island city they called Bombay. From there, through a combination of strategic alliances and military battles, they consolidated power in India. Eventually they drove out their rivals, and India—once a trading partner so wealthy it seemed to threaten the economy of London—became a colony of the British Empire.

  In and around Surat, where it had all begun, the transformation was dramatic. The city was reduced from a great international port to a strictly local one. The region's thriving and diversified economy became dependent almost entirely on cloth.

  There is a sense in which village life seems unchanging, so that I feel I might intuit, just under the surface of the Navsari of today, the Navsari of my great-grandfather's time.

  Motiram's people occupied a small neighborhood on the western side of town, and would have socialized only with their own kind. Neither wealthy nor poor, the Khatris followed the hereditary occupation, weaving. "As a class they are said to be thriftless and idle, and ... excessively fond of strong drinks," commented an 1877 British survey of castes in the area. "Their features are regular and complexion fair." Few were educated or even literate.

  A street over from Khatri lane was the neighborhood of shoemakers. Beyond that lay the fishmongers' ghetto, where one could buy bushels of the pungent dried fish that the British dubbed "Bombay duck." For fresh groceries Motiram's mother could go to the market, or simply wait for the day's catch to come through the streets in a basket on the head of a woman who called out, "Fresh fish! Ohhhh, fish! Beautiful fresh fish!" Cows wandered the streets freely, in a kind of symbiosis: women put out leftover food for the sacred animals, and in exchange the cattle dropped their dung to be collected and smeared on the walls, where it dried into a smooth, odor-free plaster. At dawn Hindu women consecrated their doorsteps with red dye, a few grains of rice, and a few flowers. At dusk, the flames of prayer and cooking glowed from each home, as they had for generations. When people died, their ashes were scattered in the local river, which poured, a few miles west, into the Arabian Sea.