Read Online Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Minal Hajratwala
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places that welcomed Indians, like Fiji; places that did not, like Europe; and places that were deeply ambivalent—like South Africa. Did the emigrants feel the currents of history swirling around them? Surely Ganda, a mere child, knew nothing of the greater forces of empire and conquest that were at play. He did not intuit the heart of his new country, nor could he have foreseen how it would invent, over his lifetime, the world's most thorough and systematic net of anti-Indian restrictions; how it would grow more and more hostile to all its dark citizens, against the flow of human progress, till it became a world pariah; or how fiercely his people would have to fight, in that golden land, for the right to earn their daily bread.
Grain, sugar, cattle, diamonds, gold: the riches of southern Africa were abundant. The saga of how they came to be concentrated in the hands of a white minority, at the expense of a vast African majority, is too long and tragic to be given justice here. But the bare outlines can be sketched out, for they are the shape into which Ganda's story must be poured.
The first whites settled at the tip of Africa in 1652, charged with setting up a rest stop for the ships of the Dutch East India Company, the world's greatest trading corporation of its time. The Cape was well situated midway on the route between the Netherlands and the Indies. To supply the company's ships with fresh grain, fruit, vegetables, and meat, the Dutch built a fort, orchards, and farms, using the labor of slaves—most from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Over time, the rest station of eighty-one people became a settlement of nearly thirty thousand whites and slaves, sprawling north over a vast territory.
Once the Dutch were well established, the British swooped in for the spoils—drawn again by the strategic location, halfway to India. Over centuries of warfare, the two European groups managed to subdue, by brute and near-genocidal force, the Africans who inhabited the land.
They also established an edgy truce with each other. The British, the official rulers, installed a semi-democracy in which all white men had a vote. The Dutch descendants formed the numeric majority and therefore could control most local policy through their elected legislators. Between them, they divided southernmost Africa into four colonies, one of which possessed a climate suitable for sugar: the Colony of Natal.
Named for the day it came into view of Vasco da Gama's ships—Christmas—Natal had a coastline blessed by the warm winds of the Indian Ocean. But its Africans, recently conquered, were seen as neither docile nor industrious enough to plant and work sugar. "The fate of the Colony hangs on a thread and that thread is Labour," one newspaper editorialized in 1859. In 1860, by a now well-refined formula, the first indentured Indians arrived in Natal.
As workers bound by contract, the Indians were welcomed. Once their contracts expired, however, a backlash began.
"The ordinary Coolie ... is introduced for the same reason as mules might be introduced from Monte Video, oxen from Madagascar or sugar machinery from Glasgow," editorialized the
Natal Witness,
the newspaper of the planters, in 1875. "He is not one of us, he is in every respect an alien; he only comes to perform a certain amount of work, and return to India."
But the "ordinary Coolie" did not wish, most of the time, to return to poverty in India, choosing instead to try his or her luck in the new land. The whites found themselves unable to force the Indians to go home, for back in India, the British government was still trying to relieve population pressure. Britain insisted that its colonies had to allow Indians to travel freely, to buy land, and to settle at will—or it would cut off the labor supply.
Under the provision that Indians must be allowed to travel freely, Gujaratis entered South Africa as free, or "passenger," Indians. Among them were Ganda's uncles, the first of whom
Grain, sugar, cattle, diamonds, gold: the riches of southern Africa were abundant. The saga of how they came to be concentrated in the hands of a white minority, at the expense of a vast African majority, is too long and tragic to be given justice here. But the bare outlines can be sketched out, for they are the shape into which Ganda's story must be poured.
The first whites settled at the tip of Africa in 1652, charged with setting up a rest stop for the ships of the Dutch East India Company, the world's greatest trading corporation of its time. The Cape was well situated midway on the route between the Netherlands and the Indies. To supply the company's ships with fresh grain, fruit, vegetables, and meat, the Dutch built a fort, orchards, and farms, using the labor of slaves—most from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Over time, the rest station of eighty-one people became a settlement of nearly thirty thousand whites and slaves, sprawling north over a vast territory.
Once the Dutch were well established, the British swooped in for the spoils—drawn again by the strategic location, halfway to India. Over centuries of warfare, the two European groups managed to subdue, by brute and near-genocidal force, the Africans who inhabited the land.
They also established an edgy truce with each other. The British, the official rulers, installed a semi-democracy in which all white men had a vote. The Dutch descendants formed the numeric majority and therefore could control most local policy through their elected legislators. Between them, they divided southernmost Africa into four colonies, one of which possessed a climate suitable for sugar: the Colony of Natal.
Named for the day it came into view of Vasco da Gama's ships—Christmas—Natal had a coastline blessed by the warm winds of the Indian Ocean. But its Africans, recently conquered, were seen as neither docile nor industrious enough to plant and work sugar. "The fate of the Colony hangs on a thread and that thread is Labour," one newspaper editorialized in 1859. In 1860, by a now well-refined formula, the first indentured Indians arrived in Natal.
As workers bound by contract, the Indians were welcomed. Once their contracts expired, however, a backlash began.
"The ordinary Coolie ... is introduced for the same reason as mules might be introduced from Monte Video, oxen from Madagascar or sugar machinery from Glasgow," editorialized the
Natal Witness,
the newspaper of the planters, in 1875. "He is not one of us, he is in every respect an alien; he only comes to perform a certain amount of work, and return to India."
But the "ordinary Coolie" did not wish, most of the time, to return to poverty in India, choosing instead to try his or her luck in the new land. The whites found themselves unable to force the Indians to go home, for back in India, the British government was still trying to relieve population pressure. Britain insisted that its colonies had to allow Indians to travel freely, to buy land, and to settle at will—or it would cut off the labor supply.
Under the provision that Indians must be allowed to travel freely, Gujaratis entered South Africa as free, or "passenger," Indians. Among them were Ganda's uncles, the first of whom
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