Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (8 page)

He sent the photo to her brother in South Africa, whose granddaughter—herself now white-haired and kindly—gave it to me in 2001.

On December 9, 1904, Ganda turned eleven years old in Navsari, India. An orphan, perhaps he had stayed with relatives a while after his sister's marriage. But most of his uncles and male cousins were already in South Africa. He decided, or it was decided for him, that he would join them in a land rumored to be rich with opportunity.

Of the three-week journey, his grandchildren know only that he traveled illegally. They like to think he was a stowaway; it lends a certain romance and swashbuckle to the tale. Nostalgia, a soothing gloss upon history.

Aboard ship, conditions were most unromantic. Who cared for him, who fed him? The details are lost—but fortuitously, an Indian professor visiting South Africa the same year, 1905, wrote of his own sea voyage. From his account we can catch a flavor of the times, a glimpse perhaps of Ganda's world.

"There were, say, a hundred Indians, traveling as deck-passengers," the professor noted. "I could not see any place where they could sit, put their luggage and take undisturbed rest for a while." In fierce rains and winds, they "had to stand or lie down exposed even at night"; cooking equipment was so scarce that some fasted for days, waiting their turn.

But the journey was perhaps the easier hurdle, compared to the arrival. For the world was divided into 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 arrived in 1887. Soon free Indians were carrying on a thriving trade throughout Natal, and spreading to neighboring colonies as well.

But the whites of South Africa never resigned themselves to this situation. Unlike colonial administrators in Fiji and other indenture colonies, they were not mere sojourners, content to stuff their pockets with profits and go home to Britain. Indeed, the majority were so many generations removed from the Netherlands that South Africa was their only home. They formed a hardscrabble tribe with a distinct language that came to be known as Afrikaans, called themselves Afrikaners, and possessed a mythology and single-mindedness to rival any others in Africa. According to their own Bible, they were a chosen people; a core of their theology was the superiority of the white race to the black and brown. They had fought wars and spent two and a half centuries making sure that Africans did not own their own land. The idea of sharing their God-given territory with mere "coolies" was shocking, offensive, and nearly heretical.

Yet they were caught in a bind. "There is probably not a single person in Natal who does not, if spoken to on the subject deplore the Asiatic invasion," wrote the
Witness,
in 1890, "but ... We want labour, is the cry; the Government will not force the native to work; and so we must take what offers and what is cheap."

So they continued to bring in Indian workers, who continued to exercise their right to stay after their contracts expired; and they continued, reluctantly, to admit passenger Indians. Ganda's uncles soon called over their sons and cousins, establishing themselves in Johannesburg and in Durban, the main city of the colony of Natal.

By 1904, more than a hundred thousand Indians were living in Natal—outpacing, for the first time, the white population. The census taker warned, "To any one knowing the rapidity with which these Eastern Races increase, through early marriages, etc., this question should form matter for serious consideration ... It is appalling to consider what the Indian figures may be in the near future."

"Appalling" was, in the rhetoric of the day, an understatement. Afrikaner politicians and newspapers were railing against what they called the "invasion." Keeping within the letter of the British Empire's requirements, each of the four South African colonies began to apply its own legislative thumbscrews. Natal forced indentured Indians to pay a hefty annual tax at the end of their terms, in the hope that they would either go home or re-indenture. The Transvaal forbade Indians to own land in certain areas, particularly its gold-rich terrain, and tried to close its borders to Indians seeking to move north from Natal. The Cape Colony also restricted immigration and trade, while the Orange Free State barred Indians altogether and expelled the few already present, declaring it did not need indentured workers. Some cities required Indians, as members of an "uncivilised race," to register if they entered the town limits. Others compelled free-roaming Indians to carry "passes" to prove that they were not runaway indenturees, and forced Indian shops and homes into segregated "bazaars" or "locations." Towns barred Indians as well as Africans from using taxis and trams, owning guns, drinking liquor, even walking on certain sidewalks.

Of the dozens of laws aimed at Indians decorating the legal gazettes of the South African colonies, perhaps the most urgently debated and carefully crafted were the ones on immigration. Although Ganda's uncles had entered South Africa freely, by the time he made his own journey in 1905, the net had tightened.

"As the steamers sailed on towards the South," wrote the professor, "the constant talk among the poor passengers was about the restrictions of landing." At the port leading to South Africa's gold country, where Ganda might have hoped to find his uncles, four passengers were denied permission to land. Among them were a barber who had borrowed 300 rupees for the journey, an "aged man" who wept as his landing permit was taken away, and "a boy under his teens":

He was brought on board the ship in the promise of getting down on land by his relative. At the place, being fearful of himself, the relative got down quite heedless of the boy.

The boy wept aloud, the tears running from his eyes.

The boy, the barber, the aged man, and thousands of other Indians of that era, seeking to migrate for economic opportunity, were trapped in the gap between the British Empire's rhetoric and its practice. South Africa was not even the world's most extreme case as it wrestled with the common problem of what to do about the "coolies."

"The whole subject is perhaps the most difficult we have had to deal with," fretted an internal London bureaucratic memo, 1897. "The Colonies wish to exclude the Indians from spreading themselves all over the Empire. If we agree, we are liable to forfeit the loyalty of the Indians. If we do not agree we forfeit the loyalty of the Colonists."

What had seemed an elegant solution to two problems—relieving population pressure in India and providing cheap labor to the farthest reaches of the growing empire—was now a headache in itself. For the Indians were part of a larger British strategy and could not be as easily maltreated as, say, Aboriginals or native Africans. The Indians had certain rights, a certain degree of clout. Trade with India made up a hefty portion of the British economy, accounting for a fifth of British exports. By 1901, when King Edward VII inherited the throne from his mother, Victoria, four in five of his subjects—300 million—were Indian. They made the empire an empire; they had to be kept, if not happy, at least placid.

Already in Bombay a self-styled Indian National Congress was calling mass meetings and petitioning for rights; its leaders were making dangerous, fiery speeches. The "Sepoy Rebellion" or Mutiny of 1857, when Indian soldiers rioted and had to be violently suppressed, was within the political memory of the bureaucrats in London. Acts that fostered ill will in India, acts that provided fodder for the nascent independence movement's outrage, were not fiscally sound.

Because of this, London could not allow the colonies to adopt blatant racial discrimination. Subtle discrimination was, however, a different matter. To satisfy imperial politics, the legislators of Natal were forced into creativity. They could not, for example, limit
Indian
immigration; British subjects possessed the right to travel freely, and this right could not be taken away—at least, not on overtly racial grounds. So Natal imposed a "literacy" test. The immigration officer could require any prospective immigrant to answer, in writing,
in a European language,
certain questions. If the would-be immigrant was white but illiterate, the officer waived the test. But if he was swarthy, or otherwise undesirable, the test was given; and even if he was educated to the highest degree in his native language, he would not pass if he could not write his answers in a European tongue.

This creativity did not go unnoticed. In a 1900 speech to the heads of the colonies, their boss, Joseph Chamberlain, praised Natal for its "entirely satisfactory" solution. Soon Australia, which was having a problem with the Chinese (it wanted railroad labor, and received aspiring human beings), refined the solution further. It barred anyone who, "when an officer dictates to him not less than fifty words in any prescribed language, fails to write them out in that language in the presence of the officer."

Any
prescribed language. Asian immigrants were asked at the docks to take dictation in Dutch, in German, in Portuguese, by officers who laughed at their confusion. Similar nondiscriminatory discriminations spread to New Zealand, Canada, other parts of Africa. The United States considered a literacy test in 1917, but—unbound by British civility and economic interests—opted to simply exclude all Asians.

In 1913 Natal's legislators would adopt what was then known as the Australian system; they knew it as their own, and welcomed it home like a prodigal son. It allowed them to bar virtually every Indian immigrant. In the news reports of the day, one senses glee, pride, the thrill and relief of a hurdle overcome.

At Ganda's arrival in 1905, the system was not yet airtight. Even so, every Indian immigrant had to fill out a simple standard form, take dictation of words of the officer's choice in English, and give prints of his fingers and thumb. Permits were being demanded from women and from boys under sixteen, who had previously been left unmolested. In some cases even infants were required to take out and pay for permits. Shipping companies who carried illegal immigrants were fined if they allowed "undesirables" off the ship. One shipmaster locked seventy-five passengers into the hold for three days, without food or water, because their papers were questionable; only a lawyer's intervention freed them.