Migration and Displacement: A Historical Perspective

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The modern Indian diaspora is often described as though it began with software engineers boarding flights to San Jose in the 1990s. In fact it is roughly two centuries old, it was built largely by people with no choice in the matter, and it reached almost every ocean before it reached Silicon Valley. Understanding today's Indian communities in Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Britain, the Gulf, Australia and North America means understanding several quite distinct waves, driven by different pressures, governed by different laws, and leaving behind very different communities.

The first great wave followed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which took effect from 1834. Plantation economies in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and later the Pacific suddenly faced the loss of coerced labour, and planters turned to indentured recruitment in India as a replacement. Workers signed contracts, usually for five years, in exchange for passage, wages and rations, with a return passage promised after a further period of residence. The system began with shipments to Mauritius in the mid 1830s, extended to British Guiana and Trinidad from the late 1830s, to Natal in South Africa from 1860, to Suriname under a Dutch agreement from 1873, and to Fiji from 1879. Most recruits came from the Bhojpuri speaking districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and from the Tamil and Telugu south. In the Hindi speaking stream the migrants and their descendants became known as girmitiyas, from a local rendering of the English word "agreement".

Indenture and its long shadow

Whether indenture amounted to a new system of slavery has been argued about since the nineteenth century, and the argument is not merely rhetorical. Recruitment was frequently deceptive, with recruiters concealing the destination or the nature of the work. Mortality on the voyage and in the first years on the estates was high. Movement off the plantation was legally restricted and breach of contract was a criminal rather than a civil matter, so labourers could be jailed for absence. On the other hand, the contracts were real, wages were paid, and a minority did return. Historians generally now describe indenture as a distinct form of unfree labour rather than as slavery or as free migration, and note that its coercive character varied sharply between colonies and decades. Campaigning in India, in which Mohandas Gandhi's years in South Africa from 1893 played a part, together with rising nationalist objection to the humiliation of Indians abroad, led the colonial government to end recruitment in 1917 and to abolish the remaining indentures in the early 1920s.

A parallel and larger movement was less formalised. Under the kangani system in Ceylon and Malaya, and the maistry system in Burma, a headman recruited workers from his own district and advanced them money, binding them by debt rather than by written contract. These flows carried very large numbers of Tamil workers to the tea estates of Ceylon and the rubber estates of Malaya, and Tamil and Telugu workers into Burma's rice economy and its cities. Because passage was short and cheap, movement was often circular, with people returning home between seasons. Alongside the labourers travelled traders, moneylending castes such as the Chettiars, clerks, and soldiers of the Indian Army. Indian labour built the Uganda Railway in the 1890s, and a portion of that workforce stayed on, seeding the East African Indian communities.

Partition, and the migrations of the independent era

The largest single displacement in Indian history was internal to the subcontinent. The partition of British India in August 1947, which divided Punjab and Bengal along hurriedly drawn lines, set off a communal catastrophe and a population exchange of a scale for which there was no precedent. The commonly cited figures are of the order of fifteen million people uprooted and hundreds of thousands to perhaps a million or more killed, but these numbers remain estimates, contested among historians, because no one was counting. Refugee resettlement shaped the cities of Delhi, Amritsar, Karachi, Lahore, Kolkata and Dhaka for decades. A second mass flight followed the 1971 war, when very large numbers crossed from East Pakistan into India before the establishment of Bangladesh.

Post war Britain, short of labour, drew Indian and Pakistani workers into textile mills, foundries and transport, on the basis of the British Nationality Act 1948, which gave citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to enter and settle. That door was progressively closed by the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968 and the Immigration Act 1971. In 1972 Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Asian population, most of them of Gujarati origin and many of them Ugandan citizens, giving them ninety days to leave; a large share resettled in Britain, with others going to Canada and India. In the United States the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national origin quotas and opened a route for professionals, which is why the American Indian community skews heavily towards graduates and later towards technology. Australia's dismantling of the White Australia policy through the late 1960s and its formal abandonment in 1973 eventually produced one of the fastest growing Indian origin populations anywhere, concentrated in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.

The other great post war corridor runs west across the Arabian Sea. After the oil price rises of 1973, the Gulf states embarked on construction programmes that required far more workers than their own populations could supply. Migration from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain became one of the largest labour movements in the world. It differs from the older diasporas in a crucial respect: Gulf states do not offer naturalisation, so migration is temporary by design, families often remain in India, and the relationship is sustained by remittances. India has for years been among the largest recipients of remittances of any country, and in Kerala in particular that money reshaped housing, education and consumption in ways local economists have studied closely.

Migration within India, finally, has always dwarfed migration out of it, and much of it has been forced. Large dam and mining projects have displaced very large numbers of people, disproportionately Adivasi communities, with compensation and resettlement records that official audits have repeatedly criticised. Communal violence, insurgency in the north east and Kashmir, and recurrent flooding have each produced their own displaced populations. Any honest historical account has to hold two things together: the Indian diaspora contains genuine stories of enterprise and ascent, and it rests on a foundation of coercion, contract and catastrophe that the celebratory version tends to leave out.

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