Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  The sea had shaped the village since its origins. Because of its strategic coastal location, Navsari was more cosmopolitan than many other Indian hamlets. Temples and shrines of four faiths dotted its streets: Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Zoroastrian. It was the Zoroastrians who, fleeing persecution in Persia, had founded the town in 1142.

  In Motiram's time, the region that encompassed Navsari was divided so that it looked, on the map, like a pastiche of jerry-rigged dots and shapes. Most areas were under the direct rule of the British. The rest belonged to a local ruling family entirely beholden to the British, and as rapacious. Their territory was disconnected; Motiram's hometown of Navsari fell in one of the larger chunks, at the tip of a free-floating amoeba just four miles long. As hub of its subdistrict, Navsari had modern conveniences: post office, train station, library, and a new town hall complete with clock tower.

  Despite these innovations, colonization and corruption were taking their toll.

  In 1909, for example—the year that Motiram left home—the kingdom's major sources of income were sales of cotton, indigo, and opium, supplemented by heavy taxes on land, salt, and liquor. Navsari, a town of 21,000, had more than six hundred liquor shops and a single high school, which graduated five students in 1909. The maharaja, whose stated objective for his regime was to be "like the English," spent twice as much on his palace as on the entire school system. His annual report devoted a paragraph each to hospitals, plague relief, and the problem of child marriages—but several pages described a twenty-city world tour undertaken "for the benefit of his health," the royal youngsters' progress at Harvard and Oxford, and the fireworks exploded to entertain the visiting British viceroy.

  For centuries, weaving the plain cotton saris worn by working-class Indian women had provided an adequate living for Motiram's clan. In a typical home, a loom sat in a pit in the floor of the house. For each garment the weaver first set up the warp, the regularly spaced vertical threads that dictated the width and length of the cloth. Then, sitting on the floor, legs resting down in the pit, he or she threw the threaded shuttle from one hand to the other and back again. This horizontal motion created the weft. Gradually, over perhaps four days, a complete sari would grow from the loom.

  Every few weeks a broker went from house to house to collect the completed saris, which he would sell in the markets at Surat and elsewhere. The broker would bring a few rupees to pay for the work and a batch of soft raw cotton for the next order. This cotton was the training ground for children as young as five, who learned to spin sitting at floor level above their weaving parents. Using a simple wooden wheel, they could stretch and twist the soft clouds into thread.

  Generations of our ancestors had worked in the same way. And until the eighteenth century, textile workers in England competed on an equal basis. The level of artistry varied, but in both places cloth-making was a home-based industry. One weaver could keep up with the output of four spinners; a whole family working together could earn a living wage.

  Then came the machines, the push for speed.

  The flying shuttle, in 1733, quadrupled the pace; now one English weaver needed sixteen spinners to keep up. And for the first time a weaver could make cloth wider than the span of his or her arms. The family was no longer sufficient; the product had outgrown the human.

  The spinning jenny, of 1765, allowed English spinners to make thread more quickly, to keep up with their weavers. Faster and better machines followed. Giant looms were powered by river water flowing through wooden mills; from these origins, all future cloth factories would be known as mills. Spinning and weaving, in England, became mill—or factory—work. In 1785 a steam engine powered a cloth-making factory for the first time, a priest invented the power loom, a Frenchman introduced chlorine bleaching of cotton, and a hot-air balloon crossed the English Channel. The world was growing smaller. The great change that would become known as the Industrial Revolution was well under way.

  In village India these developments were felt as distant murmurs. There were rumors of great machines that did the work of a hundred men, of massive boats that ran on fire and water. But Britain, concerned with competition, did not allow the export of textile machines until 1843. Ten years later, India opened its first cotton mill, in Bombay.

  Still, for a time the damage was limited. Thread from Europe's spinning machines was weaker and looser than that spun by hand. As late as 1866 the textile scholar Forbes Watson called European muslins "practically useless" compared with the Indian product, because they fell apart after several washings.

  Inevitably the technology improved, and price overtook the desire for quality in the marketplace. By 1875, when Motiram's parents were perhaps starting their young family, nearly three-quarters of the cloth consumed in Gujarat was made by machine.

  In rural Gujarat, the shift was evident as farmers turned their fields to cotton to feed the mills. In 1900, three million acres were devoted to cotton; seven years later, cotton took up four million acres. By 1918, the figure was 4.75 million, or 13 percent of the entire region's occupied land. In certain districts, cotton accounted for more than half the cultivated area.

  The cotton boom, along with an aggressive tax policy, made Gujarat—renowned for centuries as one of the most fertile provinces of the world—unable to feed itself. The British-controlled portion of Gujarat was importing half a million tons of grain in a normal year, two million in a famine year.

  The new cotton farmers saw little profit. Instead they struggled to keep up with a tax structure designed to ensure that, whether the crops thrived or failed, London would get its due. Small cotton farmers were taxed now not only on their harvests but on the land itself, so they bore all of the losses caused by Nature's fluctuations. In a good year, farmers could sell their cotton, pay current and back taxes, and have enough left over to buy food. In a drought year, they had neither a food crop nor cash profits. Many people simply starved.

  It would have taken far greater power than a soothsayer's to stave off the seven years of drought that marked Motiram's childhood. Season after season, the skies remained empty, as if the gods of wind and rain had fallen into a deep, careless slumber.

  Even in relatively prosperous Navsari, hard times were evident. Hungry refugees from the rural areas poured into town at the rate of a thousand per day. Rice and millet doubled in price. The Milky Lake at Navsari's edge dropped to the lowest levels in recorded history; the Purna River slowed like the last trickle of blood from a dying man. Thousands in the region starved to death, and many more died of poverty-related disease.

  It was the worst famine in sixty years. For Motiram's generation, the calamity of 1899 was a milestone used for decades afterward to reckon dates, births, and fateful decisions.

  Historians used to speak of "push" and "pull" as the main factors in migration, principles as basic to human motivation as warp and weft are to cloth. Push begins at home; it is what makes you leave your motherland. Pull is the force drawing you elsewhere; it is what makes the foreign destination appealing. Though recently this mechanistic model has been replaced by more subtle theories of human motivation, the simple version retains a ring of truth. Despite the complexities involved in Motiram's story, perhaps a strong push was required after all. If so, the famine of 1899 might have been the spark that led Motiram and his kin to look, for the first time in more than four centuries, beyond their town's borders.

  As weaving became less and less sustainable, among the Khatris it was more and more the province of women, who could stay home and weave while still cooking the meals, watching the children, and sweeping the floors. By the turn of the century, it was common for men to branch out, seeking related work as tailors in Surat, Bombay, and other cities.

  Perhaps, for a young Khatri man in such times, the move to Fiji seemed like just another step.

  The remote archipelago once known as the Cannibal Islands was an unlikely choice. Early Hindu travelers from Gujarat were likely to follow the westward routes to Africa and t
he Middle East that had been established by their Muslim countrymen. Three of Motiram's brothers tried those routes, traveling overseas to Africa and to Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. Of them, only their passport photos remain, and their names: Raghnath, Daahyaa, Gopaal. Eventually they would die or disappear abroad, leaving no children, only their child-brides at home—stunted limbs on the family tree.

  The Fiji Islands, much farther and in the other direction, were not on anyone's lips. Until, in 1901, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company of Fiji recruited twenty Gujaratis with needed skills. Soon a couple of Gujarati jewelers followed; they found themselves in great demand as the indentured laborers, the girmityas, chose to preserve their savings in gold and silver. Fiji gained a reputation as a place where it was easy for men with talent to thrive.

  In 1908, a member of Motiram's caste went to ply his skills as a tailor.

  A year later, Motiram followed.

  To pay for his passage, he mortgaged the ancestral land. He left two brothers, his mother, his wife, and two sons at home. The year was 1909, and he was not afraid.

  Or: He was desperate. His father and three of his brothers had already died; he was the man of the house; he had to do something.

  Or: They had not yet died; he was carefree. He was young and did not think of his own death.

  Or: He thought of dying far from home. When he took his family's leave, none of them dared hope to see each other again.

  Or: They planned to meet in two years. He would work and make some money and come home.

  Or: He might never come home.

  He would come home only once.

  From the dirt roads of lower Gujarat, Motiram would have crossed the subcontinent by train, a three-day journey to the great eastern seaport. Once in Calcutta, perhaps he sought out the ancient shrine of Kali, the fierce goddess for whom the city was named, to pray for safekeeping. Waiting for a ship, he might have stayed a few days in "Black Town"—the Indian section of the city, described by one visiting reporter as "anxiously thrust away from sight by the aristocratic and splendid metropolis, like a dirty garment under a gaudy silk robe." Eventually he would have made his way to the "coolie" depots and docks.

  There, throngs of men and some women gathered under the watchful eyes of recruiters. Ships laden with hundreds of emigrants each were sailing for Malaysia, Mauritius, Guyana, Surinam, South Africa, Trinidad, Jamaica—and Fiji.

  With his life savings and a bundle of spare clothes, Motiram climbed aboard and joined the great migration.

  Shipside, conditions had improved since indenture's dawn, when "coolies" were accommodated scarcely better than the slaves who had occupied their berths only a few years before. Public outcry in Britain and India had led to reforms in the terms and conditions of travel. Still, abolitionists continued to decry the "new system of slavery," while capitalists sought to paint a picture of opportunity and prosperity. Both sides had a portion of the truth.

  By the winter of 1909, when Motiram boarded a ship, a typical cargo to Fiji consisted of 750 to 1,200 indentured Indians. A contemporary contract shows the British government of Fiji paying the firm of James Nourse Ltd. five pounds and fifteen shillings sterling "for each adult Indian (male or female) of the age of ten years and over landed alive."

  The final condition was necessary; the journey took eleven to eighteen weeks by steamer, long enough for at least a few of the indentured to die of suicide or meningitis, the fiercest of the diseases that spread on the crowded ship. The paying Indian passengers—rare—were accommodated no differently from other "coolies"; everyone shared the same floor space for their bedrolls, the same communally cooked food, the same rationed water.

  Steaming in toward Fiji, perhaps the sojourners glimpsed the Union Jack hoisted at their arrival. But the ship veered to the outlying island of Nukulau, white quarantine buildings stark against green jungle. From there they could catch a first leisurely view of the mainland curving around the bay where a famous Fijian king had killed his first man in a fierce canoe battle and where, in mythical times, the Fijian shark god slew the great sea serpent. In the harbor, the masts of ships from Sydney, London, Auckland rose like anachronistic telephone poles, triangle sails slicing upward against the flat sea and sky.

  The quarantine island was a temporary holding site for those entering Fiji, as Ellis Island and Angel Island were for newcomers to the United States. Immigrants to Fiji—the vast majority of them Indians—spent a week or two in what amounted to a large barn as they were processed and deemed disease-free. One contemporary arrival complained, "When we arrived in Fiji we were herded into a punt like pigs and taken to Nukulau where we stayed for a fortnight. We were given rice that was full of worms. We were kept and fed like animals..."

  At last, several months after leaving home, Motiram disembarked at Fiji's harbor capital, Suva.

  Suva was all water, a revelation of blues and greens. The blue of distance; the green of abundance. The wharf was a long tongue lapping toward the opposite shore, whose dramatic volcanic peaks framed the bay. Turning toward land, Motiram would have passed under the palm trees that graced the waterfront, and walked uphill. The city was edged by jungle, sea, and swamp. If the day was dry, his feet tramped on red soil padded over coral that had been harvested from nearby reefs. If it was rainy, he slogged through streams of red mud.

  For Motiram the difference between the old and new lands was also in the tongue. Of the three thousand free Indians who lived in Suva in 1911, two dozen, at most, spoke Gujarati. The rest spoke a local version of Hindustani, quite distinct from any known in India. This linguistic innovation—and its sister tongues that were developing in Trinidad, Guyana, and other indenture colonies—was a uniquely diasporic phenomenon, born of necessity. Flung together in these foreign lands, people from various parts of India blended their languages and invented a new way of communicating across regional barriers.

  Among the colonies, Fiji had been a latecomer both to the indenture scheme and to the British Empire itself. Its fierce coral reefs and fiercer inhabitants, with their reputation for eating missionaries, had staved off colonialism for decades. Not until the 1850s did American and British enclaves become well established; in 1870 Australians moved in. Conflicts ensued, with rogue pirates and official navies duking it out at sea. Each colonial power also demanded, tricked, or forced the native Fijians to yield more and more of their land.

  After one skirmish, the Americans claimed that the Fijian king owed them compensation for damages. But Fiji was rich in tropical beauty, not in cash. As the "debt" mounted, the Americans threatened war if the king did not pay.

  Unwilling to tax his people into starvation, the king gazed at the warships in the harbor and begged Britain to take over his lands and debts. This "tragic episode," as Leo Tolstoy called it in an essay against imperialism, ended in 1874 with Britain taking possession of the more than three hundred islands of Fiji.

  It was an early British governor of Fiji who brought Indians to his tiny colony. He needed to show a profit quickly; empires are not built of charity, and every outpost had to be self-supporting. He would not conscript the native Fijians, who after all had voluntarily given their country to the Crown. Besides, the Fijians were considered poor workers: they were under the illusion that the land would provide, as it had for generations.

  Fresh from postings in Trinidad and Mauritius, where Indian labor had converted tropical jungle to lucrative plantations, the governor decided to apply once again the magic formula of sugar plus indenture. In 1879, the first girmityas arrived in Fiji.

  Thirty years later, Motiram arrived to an established Indian community. Despite the language barrier, its familiar sights and smells must have been a comfort. Parts of Suva resembled any Indian city: women in saris haggling over vegetables at the market, men in turbans and dhotis walking the streets, whites in their official ghettos sweating in the attire of the colonist. An English guidebook of the times advised visitors to wear knickerbocker suits with leather leggin
gs as a protection against mosquitoes. Swamps, snakes, and the heat troubled the English, who believed that their Indian workers had an easier time laboring in the savage conditions.

  By 1909, enough Indians had served out their indenture terms that they were settling where they wished, farming and building, transforming the colony. Along a pockmarked road that ringed the island's black mountain, Indian towns were rising. As always in the economy of plantations, workers outnumbered their masters. Indians made up nearly a third of the islands' population in 1911, owing both to continued immigration and to the fact that the native Fijian population was shrinking from measles and other new ailments. One in four Indians was Fiji-born.

  In Suva, free Indian workers were busy at the docks, loading ships with crops grown by indentured Indians on the plantations. Sugar was the main commodity, with coconuts and bananas also profitable; exports had tripled since the first girmityas' arrival. Indian hawkers filled the city's markets with fresh vegetables and fruit, grown on their own patches of land in the countryside.