Abstract
In this introduction Parmar establishes the critical approach and aims of the book, whilst too building a historical framework, highlighting existent scholarship on the subject of the South Asian in East Africa, and delineating chapter aims. Underlining the paucity of intellectual debate around the cultural life of the South Asian East African diaspora in Britain, Parmar charts her offer of a much-needed contemporary comprehensive study within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies on the subject of the ‘double diaspora’, or that community that has migrated to Britain from India, via East Africa. This chapter introduces the texts and cultural practices under scrutiny, which shed light on this doubly displaced community. They include Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The settler’s cookbook, forms of Gujarati Hindu Navratri festival dance, sartorial practices and memory making via photography. Parmar argues that language is limited in its capacity to represent twice deracination; thus the exploration of suggestive forms of embodied practices is essential.
Three generations of my family have been born on three different continents: most of my grandparents in India, both parents in Kenya, me in England along with my sister and cousins. Asia. Africa. Europe. Every continent we’ve been through has left a mark on us.
(V. Patel 2016, 222; my emphasis)
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Notes
- 1.
In my conclusion I signpost additional, recent work by Shukla, which addresses the theme of the twice migrant.
- 2.
See also Tandon and Raphael (1978, 6).
- 3.
For figures, see Mangat (1969, 39). See also Bhana and Pachai (1984) for a study that elucidates indentured condition for Indians, with particular reference to South Africa.
- 4.
See also Mangat (1969, chap. 1).
- 5.
Ghosh’s In an antique land (1992) illuminates the significant mercantile activity in the Indian Ocean that existed long before the advent of the Europeans in the area, who—according to the text—upset established and amiable links.
- 6.
Whilst some migrants came from Punjab and Goa, amongst the South Asians in East Africa, Gujarati-speaking communities accounted for a tremendous 70% of the population. See, for instance, Tandon and Raphael (1978), Ghai and Ghai (1971), D. P. Ghai (1965) and Mehta (2001). In his first chapter, Bharati (1972) details a clear breakdown of the South Asian community. Writing more recently, Herbert (2006, 134) echoes these assertions that a ‘majority’ of ‘East African Asians’ were Gujaratis, but ‘there were also Goans and Punjabis’.
- 7.
Mehta (2001) firstly outlines the recent return—on invitation of the region’s president—of Gujarati businessmen to Uganda to rejuvenate business. The article secondly suggests that the initial success of the Gujarati as trader and entrepreneur lies in the kinship networks established amongst the community in East Africa. It seems to me, as such, the Gujarati traders were paramount to the economical development of their adopted African homes. In addition, as evidence of ‘Eurocentric historiography’ that marginalises the Indian social and economic contribution to East Africa and refuses their longevity in the region, Mehta also cites James Stapleton in The gate hangs well (p. 1738). It is also worth noting, again, Ghosh’s In an antique land (1992) for the alternative historiography to western records that it offers of non-European communities in the Indian Ocean.
- 8.
Dwyer (1994, 166) discusses the advantageous geography of the state, which, she suggests, has contributed to Gujarat’s commercial success.
- 9.
The largest population of Indians in East Africa fell easily to Kenya (2.3% of the population), then Uganda and Tanzania (1% of the population respectively).
- 10.
See Bharati (1972, chap. 3) for a detailed account of the economic and entrepreneurial endeavours of Indians in East Africa. Bose also discusses the ‘Ugandan Asian’ ‘business-minded people’ (1982, 457).
- 11.
See Elkins (2005), which discloses the genocidal, undocumented end to colonisation in Kenya.
- 12.
Africanisation policies primarily sought to privilege the African population over minority groups in East Africa. Bharati (1972, chap. 3) outlines some of the initial moves to elevate the African above the South Asian. For example, he delineates the withdrawal of import licences after 1965 in East Africa, which ‘automatically “discriminate[ed]” against the Asian’ (113). Mamdani too outlines pre-independence intentions of elevating the African (1976, chap. 7). He, however, also illustrates post-independence changes (chap. 8). For example, he discusses the policies that were introduced to expand the volume of trade carried out by Africans (236). Of course the most notorious of Africanisation policies falls to Idi Amin’s act of expelling Indians from Uganda in 1972. He gave the community only 90 days to leave with limited possessions and virtually nowhere to go. According to Mattausch, this period of 90 days was a caustic play on the 90-day credit Indian shopkeepers extended to customers (1998, 134).
- 13.
See Bharati (1972, chap. 5) for scholarship on Indian relationships with Africans.
- 14.
Figures on the number of South Asian Ugandans expelled vary. The sum of 80,000 expellees, according to Tandon and Raphael (1978, 18), is a misleading exaggeration disseminated by the National Front. More realistic estimates are around 30,000.
- 15.
See Tandon and Raphael (1978).
- 16.
See Mangat (1969, 175) and Y. P. Ghai (1965, 151) for information regarding the younger generation’s differing sense of homeland.
- 17.
Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (2003) exposes a similar sentiment: the father of an Indian family that has fled East Africa to ultimately settle in the US, longs for his home in Uganda and fights to return.
- 18.
See Ghai and Ghai for details on how the Indian government remained ‘aloof’ during this fraught period of displacement (1971, 7).
- 19.
See Robinson for a full breakdown of where Indians settled in Britain (1995, 334). See also Mehta (2001) for a discussion of how kinship networks attributed to the economic success of the Gujarati East African.
- 20.
Alibhai-Brown comments upon this characteristic of the Indian East African diaspora in Britain: ‘Real links [with India] did weaken, but the mythical India kept a hold and has followed us [Indian East Africans] here [in Britain]’ (2009, 12).
- 21.
See Bhachu for a discussion of the Indian East African diaspora’s paradoxical commitment to ‘fundamental traditions’ and their permanent settlement in Britain (1985, 4–5).
- 22.
There are of course exceptions to this. Notably, the invitation of return from the Ugandan government to the Indian expellees.
- 23.
Regarding this success see Bose (1979) and Marett (1989).
- 24.
Whilst the advertisement has been widely commented upon, see Virdee for the full wording of the advertisement (2009, 5). Virdee also outlines the support the advertisement acquired from authorities and other newspapers.
- 25.
See Herbert (2008) for a vigorous, multivocal examination of Leicester as a multicultural city.
- 26.
Whilst there are no exact figures, writing in 1979, Bose (1979) estimates that 70% of the South Asian population in Leicester was Gujarati.
- 27.
As well as Bose (1979) and Herbert (2008), see Virdee (2009) for a further a reading of Asians in Leicester.
- 28.
Bhachu’s research is limited to the East African Sikh diaspora in Britain, thus whilst I interpret her ethnographic work to comment upon the wider East African community in Britain, read independently it is unilateral in its focus.
- 29.
Knott (1994, 223) notes that younger generations of Gujaratis in Leeds generally aspire to study university-level engineering, accountancy and ‘a range of other science-based subjects’, as well as law, highlighting a silence where the pursuit of the arts and humanities is concerned. The devaluation of more creative subjects such as music and dance as a ‘waste’ by Indian parents in East Africa (Bharati 1965, 53) goes some way to foregrounding this later disavowal of the arts and humanities at university level, and perhaps concurrently accounts for the lack of literary production within the diaspora. I return to this idea in my conclusion chapter.
- 30.
Noteworthy too is Merely a matter of colour: Ugandan Asian anthology, which, as Ruvani Ranasinha (2007, 52) discusses, is a literary collection comprised of Caribbean and East African South Asians. Included in the anthology are works by Nazareth and Mahmood Mamdani, and the collection’s aim was to subvert the mainstream negative rhetoric proliferating around the arrival of South Asians from East Africa.
- 31.
Though not concerned with diaspora, of the same fusion genre is Laura Esquivel’s widely acclaimed Like water for chocolate (1993).
- 32.
In the arts, a notable pioneer is the co-founder of Tara Arts, a landmark theatre company established in response to the racist violence and abuse of 1970s Britain, Jatinder Verma. Verma was born in Tanzania before growing up in Kenya, and then migrating to Britain in 1968.
- 33.
Whilst I have listed postcolonial authors here, there are a number of diasporic writers in English from an earlier period; see Ranasinha (2007) for an analysis.
- 34.
Whilst the Indian population in East Africa consisted of a Gujarati majority, there were Indians from other regions such as Goa and Punjab. I choose to illuminate the Gujarati East African experience in Britain because not only am I a member of this community—thus have an invested interest in my research—but also because it is members of this community (e.g. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Gurinder Chadha) that have produced recent instances of cultural production concerned with the British Indian East African diaspora which I shall incorporate in my research.
- 35.
Sheikh (2010), with reference to Gujarat in particular, explains that a unified India itself did not exist in the imaginations of its people in pre-colonial times and that regions were demarcated by princely states that operated independently.
- 36.
For example, the region of Kashmir is violently disputed, and divided, between Pakistan and India. See Kabir (2009).
- 37.
The preference of the term ‘Indian’ is particularly evident in the early sections of The settler’s cookbook where Alibhai-Brown outlines the history of the Indians in East Africa. She persistently refers to herself and her community as ‘Indian’, rather than, for instance, ‘Pakistani’.
- 38.
The Ismailis, united by their allegiance to Karim Aga Khan—a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad—are a Shia Muslim subsect. Sila-Khan (2004) offers information on this Muslim group, outlining how historically they both cohered with other South Asian religious factions and also faced persecution.
- 39.
In her introduction Shukla discusses the term Indian diaspora in depth. See also Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk (2005).
- 40.
Referring to Indian cookbooks in English, Arjun Appadurai suggests that recipe books are ‘artefacts of culture in the making’ (1988, 22). His article also reveals the importance of these cookery texts in understanding nation making. Goody (1982) also underlines how the cookbook can divulge discourses of class and hierarchy.
- 41.
See Bal, Crewe and Spitzer (1999) for an interdisciplinary discussion of cultural memory and its relationship to experience.
- 42.
The ethical dimensions of using YouTube materials are noted in my chapter on the same.
- 43.
Soja (1996) adopts a similar theoretical structure, denying binaries, identifying a ‘spatial turn’ and a third space.
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Parmar, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Reading Cultural Representations of the Double Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18083-6_1
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