Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  As for the mysterious name, some see, Rorschach-like, the shape of a rabbit in the steaming loaf. Others hear it as a combination of bun and aachaar, a kind of Indian pickle that is not actually part of the dish. Ganda's grandchildren say "bunny" comes from bania, the British pronunciation of vaaniyaa, the name of the merchant caste in Gujarat—which in South Africa came to mean any Indian shopkeeper, regardless of caste or language. And "chow," they say, means simply food.

  The precise date of the bunny chow's explosion onto the culinary scene was not, alas, recorded by any of its inventors or consumers. But a clue lies in the story of bread itself.

  For even as the South African government was harassing Indian entrepreneurs and African customers, it was propping up other segments of the economy. To aid white family farms, the government had been heavily subsidizing local wheat and controlling wheat imports since 1917. Over the next few decades, the effort intensified so that, during the worldwide Great Depression, wheat growing was the most profitable branch of farming in South Africa. During World War II, to keep the consumption of wheat steady despite higher wartime production costs, the South African government began subsidizing bread. In 1941 the "standard loaf," a regulation-size loaf of brown bread, was introduced.

  Subsidized and sold at the low, uniform price of five shillings a loaf, bread soon became a staple for all classes of South Africans. And this subsidy may well have been the tipping point that made loaves cheaper than rotli, cheap enough to be used on a large scale.

  Rice, eaten mostly by Indians, and corn, eaten mostly by black Africans, were not subsidized. Shortages of other commodities persisted.

  But bread became cheap, dirt cheap. As cheap as rhetoric.

  "Vote for white bread and a white South Africa," urged the campaign signs of South Africa's newly formed National Party. The year was 1948, and the party's candidate for prime minister was a man named D. F. Malan, a seventy-four-year-old Afrikaner. Back in 1912, when Ganda was stirring his first pots of curry for the masses, Malan had made the pages of the Indian Opinion as a young politician representing South Africa at an imperial conference. The treatment of Indians throughout the British Empire was the conference's central issue. Restricting Indians, he had told the assembled leaders frankly, was simply "self-preservation for the Europeans."

  More than three decades later, Malan was the leader of a party espousing a new policy that it claimed would solve South Africa's racial problem once and for all: apartheid, or total segregation. To keep South Africa as a white man's land, it was necessary to banish Africans to "homelands," except those who were needed to work for whites, and to send the Indians back to India.

  Malan was a statesman, able to read his constituency's desires. The ultimate aim of all anti-Indian legislation over the years had remained consistent: to induce Indians to leave South Africa altogether. Although more than eighty percent of the Indian population was by this time born in South Africa, Afrikaners and their elected representatives continued to speak wistfully of repatriation, not peaceful cohabitation, as the final solution to the "Indian problem." Various governments had introduced schemes offering free passage and cash bonuses to those who agreed to go back to India and stay there.

  A few went back for other reasons, like Ganda's daughter, Parvati; her marriage was arranged in India, where she had never lived but would stay the rest of her life. But for most of South Africa's Indians, established for generations—especially the shopkeepers and small landowners, those whom the whites most wanted to get rid of—life in India held little appeal. Ganda's business was thriving; his son had married, joined the family business, and made Ganda a grandfather. Three generations lived together in the Grey Street apartment. It was a good life—better than the one he could have had in impoverished India.

  White South African propaganda made much of this. One brochure published by the Durban City Council in 1947 proclaimed that Natal was an "economic paradise" for Indians. The glossy twenty-eight-page mini-magazine featured photographs of large Indian mansions, Indian children in art class, Indian men playing golf. "Is there any country in the world where Indians are better treated than they are in South Africa?" it asked. "Why was it that so few of them were willing to accept a free passage back to their own country?"

  The audience for such arguments was an international one, particularly around and after 1947.

  On August 15 of that year, the British colony of India was split into the two free nations of India and Pakistan. All over the world, Indians held independence parades. Grey Street was festooned with the colors of the new national flags, the sidewalks filled with celebrants who came to hear patriotic speeches, to cheer, and to feast. The new Indian prime minister sent his daughter, Indira, to visit South Africa; on Grey Street she met local leaders and ate a bunny chow.

  By this time, approximately 1.2 million people of Indian origin were living outside the Indian subcontinent. As the Narseys were putting down roots in Fiji and the Kapitans in South Africa, so the great world-tree of the diaspora had put down roots. And the Natal census writer's fears of a rapidly multiplying race had come true. South Africa, with its 266,000 Indians, was second on the list of countries with a substantial Indian population.

  As the list of countries had grown, so had the backlash. Back in London, the India Office, the vast apparatus that managed not only India but all issues relating to Indians throughout the British Empire, found its in-box cluttered with dispatches from "Her Majesty's Subjects" in distress. Indians in Madagascar: discrimination in the matter of taxation. Indians in California: decision of US Supreme Court regarding eligibility of Hindus for American citizenship. Racial discrimination against Indian passengers in Lake Kioga in Uganda. Restrictions placed on Indians in the Belgian and French Congo ... in South Africa ... in Canada ... Entry of Indians into the USA: protest of Mr Prag Narayan against the treatment of his relative Mr B N Gupta by American immigration authorities at Ellis Island. Laws were passed against Indian traders in Gibraltar and "coloured alien" seamen in Glasgow; Indians in Kenya were assaulted. Canada introduced voting discrimination; in Fiji, segregation was proposed in the mining town of Tavua. Indians faced sanctions, violence, or discrimination in Guatemala, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, Kenya, Iraq, Trinidad, Panama, Rhodesia, Indochina, Malaya, Morocco, Zanzibar, Hong Kong, New Caledonia, and places whose names seem to come out of antiquity: Abyssinia, Arabistan, Jabaland, Sarawak, Somaliland, Mesopotamia, Palestine. The map of the world shifted, and as it did, India's diaspora shifted and expanded to cover it. The tree branched and branched again, grew gnarled and complex, and found everywhere the fierce competition for survival.

  Because of empire, impoverished Indians left home; because of empire, they had somewhere to go. And when the backlash came, it was empire to which they turned for redress. The battle that the Indians of Grey Street were fighting in South Africa was not unique but an inherent part of a worldwide phenomenon that had developed alongside the sudden, rapid growth of the diaspora.

  The Indians, especially the mercantile Gujaratis, found themselves caught in what academics call "pariah capitalism." In this particular incarnation of the "free market," members of one group—typically Asians or Jews—occupy a middle or "pariah" position between the true but invisible ruling class and the truly oppressed. Over and over, this multilevel hierarchy would lead to a dangerous backlash against Indians in nations as far-flung as Uganda, Burma, the United States, Fiji—and South Africa.

  Gandhi, arguing for the rights of South African Indians, had counted upon his status as a subject of the British Empire. He based each of his petitions on a few lines in the proclamation that Queen Victoria had made in taking possession of India from the British East India Company in 1857: "We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects," the queen asserted, adding, "We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of
their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law." On the strength of this promise, Gandhi and those who came just after him had attempted to argue for equal rights.

  But Gandhi's great work was India's independence. In South Africa, the festive atmosphere masked, for a day, a grim situation—for Gandhi's fragile compromise of 1914 had come to seem a trick. The bargain had been no new immigration in exchange for equitable treatment of Indians already in South Africa. Instead, the inequities had multiplied.

  Every pretext was used, from "unhygienic" conditions to the "unassimilable" nature of Indians. Indian activists pointed out that their people, at only 3.5 percent of the population, might have assimilated if they had been allowed to spread out across South Africa, instead of being forced into certain areas. But "unassimilable" became a self-fulfilling prophecy; ghettos were used to justify further ghettoization. The Pegging Act of 1943, passed in a hysteria over supposed Indian "penetration" into the white areas of Durban, temporarily halted all property sales from one race to another. The Asiatic Land Tenure Act of 1946 strengthened it and made it permanent. Dubbed by Indians "the Ghetto Act," the 1946 legislation allowed the government to assign racial designations to areas and to forcibly relocate Indians.

  For decades, Grey Street's Indians had organized, rallied, and filled up government files in London with urgent blue-and-white telegrams, rows of capital letters with undertones of panic and outrage. Atop them, undersecretaries of this and that attached coolly worded memoranda that recommended no response.

  Now the once-powerful British Empire had softened into a weak thing called the Commonwealth, with virtually no sway over its independent members' actions. Instead, the Indians of South Africa placed their hope in a brand-new invention: the United Nations. To the first sessions of this new world body, born of the promise of worldwide peace and justice, they brought their case, their petitions and their erudite arguments. Eventually they would win a precedent-setting resolution requiring the government of South Africa to meet with the government of India and then report back to the council of nations about its treatment of Indian residents.

  Even this victory, achieved by a long passive-resistance campaign and years of organizing, was not effective in changing conditions on the ground. South Africa's politicians insisted, as they would for the next forty-five years, that racial politics were a strictly internal matter. And internally, a major shift to the right was taking place.

  In a postwar South Africa struggling to find its economic footing, Malan's platform struck a chord. Pogroms to banish Indians to India and black Africans to the margins would improve the economy for white South Africans, he vowed; the country's leadership had gotten away from what mattered to the common man. Bread was a potent symbol of the problem. Brown bread was a reminder of wartime rationing and hardship. Although the price of the "standard loaf" was steady at five shillings, the size of the loaf had been reduced. And white bread was dear: manufactured only by permit, it was both scarce and, at six shillings and two pennies, expensive.

  So Malan and his party promised to bring back the luxury of white bread for all. It was a move of populist genius, a classic "chicken in every pot" electioneering tactic. Linking white bread with "a white South Africa" made the message memorable and crystal-clear.

  For good measure Malan vowed to break with Britain once and for all. No longer would Afrikaners have to abide by British policies. And if the other members of the Commonwealth did not like what South Africa did with its brown and black people, well, who needed the Commonwealth?

  Malan's rhetoric was not only populist but also calculated. It masked the insidious side of the National Party's politics, which included a fascist agenda of restricting press and civil liberties even for white citizens, concentrating power under a strong central government, and enforcing that power by use of a secret police. A small cohort of thinkers had been formulating this agenda for years; for inspiration they had looked to Hitler, who rode into office by popular election on a tide of economic depression. In South Africa, as elsewhere, racial politics were a ready distraction from the underlying agenda. And although black Africans would be the main targets of apartheid, it was the Indians who, in election season, made an ideal rhetorical scapegoat.

  The Indians sensed that they were being set up as South Africa's Jews, and they were afraid. In panic, they tried to organize. "The dark shadow of Fascism is moving swiftly over South Africa," warned one activist, Yusuf Dadoo, who was known to enjoy a bunny chow now and then at Ganda's place, in a pamphlet prepared for circulation at the United Nations as well as within South Africa.

  But on election day in May 1948, the Indians were armed only with pamphlets and endless, carefully composed petitions and pleas and delegations. The whites were armed with the vote.

  AT LAST WE HAVE GOT OUR COUNTRY BACK, blared one headline declaring victory for Malan's party.

  For hard-line Afrikaners, the election was a victory of epic proportions. It was vengeance for the political battles with London they had lost in the century and a half that they had been subjects of the British Empire, vengeance for all the small compromises to sovereignty and dignity. The truce between British and Afrikaner was over. No longer would they bow, even symbolically, to the foreign king or queen. No longer would they share the illusion of equality with the black and brown savages who had somehow been allowed, for far too long, to have their way in South Africa. It would at last be a country properly run, for the benefit of its rightful rulers. The white man was about to have his day.

  For all others, it was to be a long day indeed.

  The morning after the election, of course, nothing had really changed. It took some time for the machinery of fascism to be built, the newspapers to be censored, the new policies to be discussed and implemented.

  One campaign promise was kept quickly. On November 1, 1948, a new bread policy was introduced. White bread was liberated, so that any baker could make it without a permit; and it was subsidized, set to sell at five shillings and eight pennies. The change was a boon for bakers and millers, and made white bread widely available for the first time in six years.

  It made little difference to the Indians of Grey Street, who kept serving up bunny chows in the "standard" brown loaf, still four pennies cheaper—or to their customers, working Indians and Africans for whom every penny mattered.

  From the front door of G.C. Kapitan & Son Vegetarian Restaurant, the view consisted of the wide gray boulevards named for South Africa's old rulers, the imposing mosque built by Indians where five times a day the faithful were called to prayer, and, arching over them both, the great blue African sky. Africans themselves were present in numbers that ebbed and flowed according to the jobs available in the city and the laws permitting or prohibiting freedom of travel.

  To Ganda they must have appeared as they did to most of the Indian trading class—useful as customers, but otherwise alien and even frightening. One Indian wrote that black South Africans

  are the descendants of some of the slaves in America who managed to escape from their cruel bondage and migrated to Africa. They are divided into various tribes such as the Zulus, the Swazis...

  Such startling ignorance might be humorous were its author not one of Natal's most learned Indians and civil rights activists: Gandhi. That Gandhi could make such a statement in a memoir of his twenty-one years in South Africa shows how small a role actual Africans played in the imagination of his class of Indians at the time.

  In fact, the black Africans who were Ganda's customers and countrymen—the great majority of South Africans—fell into several groups, with long and complicated histories. The main groups in Durban were the Xhosa, traditionally cattle farmers but now mostly wage laborers, since the whites had taken over their grazing lands; and the Zulu, who had fought fiercely but found that in the end their spears and swords were no match for cannonballs and guns. All in all, eight wars of dispossession (the "Kaffir Wars," in Br
itish histories of the period) and dozens of minor skirmishes had been fought before southern Africa came under the rule of white men. The land was soaked with blood by the time the first indentured Indians arrived in 1860. In Ganda's time, defeated men of all these tribes and others could be seen in the streets of Durban.

  But few Indians knew or cared to know their story, past or present. When Indians did think of Africans, it was to object to being lumped together with them. The Natal Indian Congress, the group founded by Gandhi and his posse of Gujarati merchants, wrote in one of its first petitions that it was "most humiliating for their dignity to be classified and as it were to be equalled with the coloureds." In 1912, the year Ganda became a restaurateur, the Indian Opinion published an appeal to the government by the Johannesburg Indians:

  As some of our Indian children are by force of circumstances receiving their education in Coloured Schools...[and] as our numbers are large enough to fill a good-sized school, such as the present proposed building, we feel we are justified in asking for our children to be educated by themselves, under one roof.

  By the end of the year, a Gujarati school had sprung up in Johannesburg, built by Indians and subsidized by the white government. Segregation per se was not a point of contention. Gujaratis and many other Indians, accustomed as they were to a caste system back home, objected to neither racial separation nor racial hierarchy—only to economic inequality and the indignity of being assigned to a place near the bottom, near the Africans.