13 Issues of Race and Multiculturalism

1.  INTRODUCTION

This being the final unit in this module, you might be already familiar with issues of racial conflicts of Indians located in diasporic spaces. Race and racism are terms centred round the ideas of discrimination among people of different skin colour, ethnicity and place of origin. Physical attributes were the ostensible basis for discrimination among people of different skin colour, ethnicity and place of origin, etc. There is no substantial agreement between countries and policy-makers about what is the proper definition of racism. But any discriminatory practice that nationals of one country or citizens of one group perpetrate or face as opposed to others, on the basis of different origins and attributes is termed a racist practice. Racism is one of the most pernicious of evils dividing human beings. Fear of miscegenation or mixing of the races through sexual intercourse is the most feared among problems associated with race and racism. There is another problem associate with this fear: that of the implicit superiority of the Caucasian races in terms of their whiteness. Together, these two problems have always compounded into bitter race relations the world over.

1.1.Fear of miscegenation

Fear of miscegenation is primarily due to the skin colour of offspring being different from that of the parents: it is believed that the colour of skin indicates racial purity or affinity, and a departure from that is a kind of betrayal to the notion of tribe, community, nation, etc So, the greatest fear is of the intermingling of races by marriage. Racist practices are primarily targeted at keeping communities, specially men and women, apart from each other. In the past, the visible physical differences were also attempted to be correlated, by sections of the then scientific establishment, notably physical anthropology, to mental, intellectual and psychological differences: the white colonial masters started this trend to keep indigenous communities separate and at bay. Thus arose the notion of the ‘ superior’ class which is strong, rational, active and intelligent and therefore fit to rule over ‘inferior’ natives. White skin indicates racial purity or affinity, and a departure from that shows inferiority.

European colonization is a fairly recent phenomenon but there have been other waves of colonization from ancient times as well, and race conflicts have always been a part of these. In India the Aryan-Dravidian conflicts were later subsumed into the Persian/Muslim versus Indian/Hindu conflicts, and finally into white/native racial differences. Indian society with its long standing heterogeneities, has been colour conscious, and the social and cultural value of white skin is high. Yet this does not translate into stereotypical racism, because caste is the ordering principle and within a single caste, a range of skin colours and other physical attributes can be often found to coexist. It is arguable whether casteism is synonymous with racism, and the debate on this has not been resolved. However, in very recent times, the Indian diaspora has been facing race related issues in large numbers in a variety of global locations.

2.  PHASES OF INDIAN MIGRATION AND RACIAL UNDERPINNINGS

As you have been studying in this course, Indians are found in several locations abroad as a distinct ethnic community. A number of historical circumstances have resulted in widespread forced as well as voluntary migration of groups from India to several locations abroad. There have been people from the sub-continent in South East Asia for many centuries and in Africa and the Caribbean and the Asia Pacific, more recently. The subcontinental presence in these spaces in the early times has been affected by questions of class and gender along with the problems of migration. The history of subcontinental migration has three phases: the first phase was pre-colonial i.e., until the 18th century; the second phase of periodization is colonial: 19th and early 20th centuries and the third phase, post independence when the Indian sought better opportunities to migrate to the west. The last is the phase when the Indian community was identifiable in public spaces and services abroad.

The spurt of immigration from the 1980s is a direct result of the tremendous upsurge in human and financial mobility brought in by globalised capital. Recent trends show that there are many Indians going, for better jobs especially to the Gulf and for academic reasons and careers in IT to the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and Singapore

Racism towards Indians can be looked at region wise , i.e. according to host countries as well as chronologically. In the colonial period, some Indians went to England where they experienced racism from the whites on account of their being considered dark, native, inferior people. Indians also migrated as indentured labour to British and, to a smaller extent, French colonies, and here the dynamics was more complex. Here too they were subjected to racist treatment, but there was some difference made between the Indian immigrants and the native people by the colonizers, sometime to Indian advantage. In addition, Indian migrants themselves generally kept a social distance from the indigenous people and this could be interpreted as a form of Indian racism. When these countries got independence from colonial rule, the indigeneous inhabitants often singled out the immigrant Indians for discriminatory treatment for a variety of reasons; so this is another form of racism. The twentieth century migrations to the west have been associated with varying degrees and kinds of racism, but also with tolerance, acceptance and recognition, as well as the evolution of a policy of multiculturalism.

2.1 Early migrants and racism: class, occupation and gender

The data for racism towards precolonial Indians is very sparse. Some glimpses of Indians in England can be had from books in which precolonial and colonial periods mingle . One of the useful and interesting publications for this is Ayahs, Lascars and Princes (1986). It reveals a strong Indian presence in the underbelly of English life in the period between 1700-1947 Many Indians in England were from the working classes: they were travelling semi-professionals, traders, skilled craftsmen, skilled labourers, entertainers, others who travelled as sailors and ship hands and lascars. There were even servants, cooks, nurses or ayahs, dancers and performers or gentoos, magicians, masseurs and quacks who gained notoriety in the upper-classes with their secret remedies for hidden ailments like the ‘shampoo doctor’ Sake Dean Mohamed.

Michael H. Fisher (1997) writes about Sake Dean Mohamed and his life in Britain after he marries and has children. He shows how the ‘shampoo surgeon’ remained ignored and marginalized by British mainstream society in Bristol, which benefited largely from the excellent commercial success of his skills, and yet gave him no place in the city offices, though he was a law-abiding and decent citizen as well. Fisher records how very little information is available on Mohamed ’s Irish wife Jane, and how spouses and children of Indo-British marriages were the butt of ridicule and contempt in British society then.

In the 19th century, students from upper classes also migrated. These groups faced racism in differing degrees. Moreover, there were women who accompanied their white and Indian mistresses as servants and slaves, as ayahs or nurses to Africa and Europe. Some upper class families migrated to Britain, in order to be able to fully imbibe Western influence. Again, these women and families experienced racist reactions. Young women who traveled there with their husbands, or families, like Hemangini Bonerjee and her daughters, who first went to England in 1864 or the poet Toru Dutt and her sisters, who were in England between 1871 and 1873 were received well as they were from the upper classes, but their uneducated mothers were isolated, like Hemangini Bonerjee (Burton 2003, 52-3).

    Very rarely, they went as students themselves, like Anandibai Joshi, Cornelia Sorabji and Sarojini Naidu. The latter were very well received in the U.K, but Anandibai Joshi suffered greatly on her journey home from the U.S., while she was suffering from tuberculosis. She was not looked after by a doctor or attended by nurses during her journey due to her race and after her arrival in India, because she had travelled abroad and lost her racial purity. As Pooja Thakar (2008) writes the journey back home took a further toll on Anandibai, and she died soon after reaching India. Moreover there were the male student migrants from India and the Caribbean in the U.K. All of these peoples faced racism in their daily interaction with the host communities, as M.K. Gandhi My Experiments with Truth shows.

Other than England, the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia, Africa and Guyana were places where Indians faced several types of racist persecution as indentured labourers or girmitiya, i.e., those who had made agreements with the government or agents to work abroad for a definite period of time. Vinay Lal (2009), Vijay Mishra (2007) and Brij.K Lal (2006 ) discuss these in their writings. The Caribbean Indians first arrived in Trinidad aboard the Fatel Rozack, on 30 May 1845, to provide the sugar plantations with a large and cheap labour force. Many of them were engaged in agriculture, but over the next few decades they began to make their presence felt as professionals and entrepreneurs. Later, as in the rest of the Caribbeans, the Afro-Trinidadians and Indo -Trinidadians had increasing inter -racial divisions, till it all culminated in unmistakably clear discrimination against the latter in job quotas, discriminatory Africanisation of history, of endeavours to represent Trinidad as a country of exclusively or predominantly African origins.

An early photograph of Indian indentured labourers on Caribbean Shores. The first immigrant ship from India, Fatel Rozack, shown here, arrived in 1845 after a journey of five months, carrying 225 Indians, most in their twenties, and over eight men for every woman. Source: www.shunya.net

Some of the oral narratives of the Indo-Caribbean women and women in Mauritius who went from U.P. and Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are being uncovered from wedding songs, songs sung during Ramleela and other cultural discourses.

Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies contain interesting account of the women’s journeys and the life in their new homes.

Indian were first brought to Fiji in 1879 to work as indentured labourers on sugar plantations owned primarily by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company of Australia. There was a lot of violence perpetrated on Indian indentured labourers but they did enjoy some measure of freedom from the stronghold of caste and oppression against women. There was no protection available to them against inhuman labour conditions, and though through their hard work, the states of Queensland and New South Wales were developed, the Fijian Indians were systematically excluded from political representation by the ethnic Malinese and the white majority. Till the 1990s when Mahendra Chaudhry formed the government in Fiji, Indians had to fight for ownership of the land they tilled, against repatriation moves, against no voting rights, unjust citizenship laws and forced migration to other locations. Even today these problems continue. (Vinay Lal 2002:6-8)

In Australia itself, the Ghan Express is a route that brought Afghan camel trainers by the thousands between 1860 to 1930s on contract, for three year periods. It was named after the travelling migrants believed to have come from Afghanistan, diminished to “Ghan”.

Many of them stayed back, and were the first Indians to work there as labourers. Later Punjabi Sikhs joined them. They never went back, and were the first migrants from India. Australians were now afraid of more influx from India; the government had always institutionalized separation of white and non-white communities, forbade intermarriage for fear of miscegenation, and perpetrated racist attacks on non-whites. Even under such conditions, in the postcolonial phase many Indians migrated, at first especially railway workers, dock-workers from the Anglo-Indian community, and then professionals and students who stayed on to build their careers. A number of repatriation moves from Fiji, Malayasia and Africa brought new Indian populations to Australia and the trend continues till today with IT and other professionals from India. Newspapers, TV and radio stations, restaurants, cultural programmes and Indian and Indo-Fijian association activities abound, and they make representations from time to time for citizenship, visa, remittance and other assistance, as the Report on Indian diaspora shows (2002: 7-8).

The migration of Indian farm labourers to South Africa started in 1860 to work in the sugar plantations. As in other countries of the Indian indentured migration, Indians played a role in other arenas of agricultural production; there was also, by this time, a considerable presence of sojourning Indians – traders, teachers, doctors and clerks. The history of the Indian diaspora in South Africa is thus not just about indentured labour, Indians performed in farming and other arenas of agricultural production, and in other professional arenas as well.. But in South Africa the ideology of racial segregation was institutionalised and brutally enforced, first under British colonialism and then under apartheid.

Mahatma Gandhi’s own political and moral conscientization and the later role he played in the Indian freedom movement owe their origin and force to the racism he experienced from the whites in South Africa. Gandhi’s interventions in the late 19th and first decade of the 20th century, especially his ‘passive resistance’, not only mobilized the Indians in South Africa against racism, but played an important role in inspiring several African leaders in their struggle in the 20th century against apartheid. Both before and after the apartheid movement, there were many generations of Indians in Africa who lived in abject conditions. Even after the ANC came to power this continues, though many Indians have been well rewarded politically for their support during the struggle against apartheid. Black animosity has increasingly turned towards Indians. With the Kwa-Zulu writer and musician, Mbongeni Ngema releasing a song entitled AmaNdiya, there started a new wave of racial hatred and violent crimes against Indians. The nature of racism faced by Indians in East Africa under Idi Amin started in South Africa. (Vinay Lal 2002: 9-10) Indian indentured labour in Malaysia, originated in the late 19th century; and the vast bulk of the labourers of the rubber plantations were drawn from Tamil Nadu. Nearly a lakh of Indians were brought to Malaysia each year in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Indian population became preponderant in the coastal areas and they are largely found around the plantations.

There are numerous indices pointing to widespread poverty among Indians in Malaysia. Indians control very little of the country’s finances and are among the most poorly housed, educated and cared for community. They are consequently the community that has many criminals, drug and alcohol addicts and receives very poor health care. Religious discrimination against the Tamilian Hindus, the largest group of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia, is rampant at an institutionalised level. Even though the conflict, at a surface level is about religion and ethnicity, the racial element is present as an undertow. The HINDRAF, Hindu Religious Action Force, is an activist group that has been formed to resist targeting and fighting legal battles for Hindu minorities. Their being portrayed as a terrorist group is of course a pretty normal reaction to such organisations which fight for civil rights from authorities in any country.(Vinay Lal 2002: 10-11).

2.2 Later migrants of the 20th century

The 20th century migrations to the west happened due to several factors, about which you have read in the preceding modules. These and the Indian origin asylum seekers from Tanzania, and Uganda were also new additions to the Asian population in Canada, Australia, England and America after the mid 20 th century. Migration to the Gulf became a big phenomenon from the 1970s and 80s, due to the oil boom and demand for labour there

There are numerous studies that document the difficult conditions for Indian labour in the Gulf. Vinay Lal’ s (2009) writings are eloquent on the subject. There are the Gulf migrants who are not even allowed to surface in the public places, leave alone participate in public life. Labour law violations are rampant: withholding of wages for several months, lack of health care facilities, absence of safety regulations, illegal confiscation of passports, and lack of freedom of movement are the fate of these workers in Dubai, the richest country in the world. Deaths (and injuries) of workers on construction sites are hidden, sexual exploitation is rampant, unions are banned. Although at one level, these can be seen as conflicts between labour and capital, the underlying policies of discrimination towards non- Arabs and non Muslims brings in a racial dimension to the interaction. As Vinay Lal (ibid: 18) says, if the diaspora is about success, it also offers narratives of oppression, hardship and resistance.

3. GLOBALISATION, RACE AND MULTICULTURALISM .

Globalisation in the late 1980s brought new compulsions in race relations in host countries: the migrant communities could not be ignored anymore, as they were people from countries with whom the host had trade agreements of large scale and consequences. Thus the new era of multicultural policy emerged. This ideally stood for a harmonious existence of all communities and races and ethnic groups, each recognized for its cultural distinctiveness as well as integration in the host society. But at a deeper level, so goes the criticism, there is exoticisation of some over others, and a kind of consumerist approach to culture. In the world of fashion, Madonna’s embracing of the exotica of Asian culture, the tattoos, mehndi, bangles, bindi worn with lycra or jeans and tank tops, brought unprecedented popularity to Asian Kool not only to Britain but to the international culture scene.

With globalization, new cuisines from Asia, China, Mexico, Turkey, Lebanon flooded the eat-streets of Europe. The blandness of European food was easily replaced by the subtle Chinese or the spicy Indian cuisine. Chicken tikka masala became the national favourite of the U.K. whereas the Middle Eastern döner kebab became the favourite street food of Germany which hosts so many Turkish immigrants!

However in these societies, at one level, there is eager consumption of exotica, yet not many years ago had happened the famous ‘dot buster’ movements of New Jersey, the petrol bombs in the U.K. the burning of the long hair of Sikh children, calling them towelheads, and the setting of fire to dupattas. Thus diaspora Indians are cautious of celebratory approaches and tokenisms shown by these societies from time to time.

3.1 New policies in relation to multiculturalism

New policies in relation to multiculturalism emerged, wherein public celebration of festivals was introduced. However, other laws were enforced which made the ethnic communities follow more mainstream practices, like use of or competence in English or the host language. The term “ethnicity” was more easily attached to the European migrations which started around the two world wars. In North America, phrases such as ‘visible minorities’ were developed to categorize non-European immigrants who formed part of new diasporas, and neatly encapsulated as well the indigenous groups and those descendants of African slaves who had been an uneasily acknowledged part of the ‘nation’ for many centuries. Hence multi-culturalism is often perceived as a covert means of indicating racialized differences. The need to deconstruct the ‘natural’ facade of racialization is clear when one notes that groups such as Ukrainians in Canada and Greeks and Italians in Australia were designated ‘black’ at various historical stages. Further difficulties encountered by indigenous groups are highlighted in Australia where the Aborigines refuse to be included in multicultural discourses on the grounds that these refer only to cultures of migration, whereas in New Zealand ‘biculturalism’ is the preferred official term because multiculturalism is seen as a diversion from the Maori sovereignity movement. In Canada, First Nations are occasionally included in multicultural discourses and practices and are also consistently trapped between the French-English divide. This has complicated continuing debates on cultural appropriation.

10.  The countries to begin practicing multicultural policies were Canada, U.S.A and Britain, soon to be followed by France, Germany, Australia and other European countries like Netherlands, and now Sweden. The idea was to make people feel that officially, the country was welcoming them, respecting their culture but they need to integrate willingly to stay happy and feel welcome. “Of course, voluntary and successful integration is the ideal. People who learn the language and get the jobs” as Charles Taylor says in an interview to Prospect magazine.

Lord Bhikhu Parekh (2000), puts forth the idea of Britishness as a plural identity that celebrates difference. However Britain has recently experienced a wave of responses from multicultural communities themselves. These communities argue against the increasing stringency of immigration controls and the introduction of citizenship tests and ceremonies which do not celebrate difference. Instead policies now segregate and differentiate according to racial profiles. Many would agree that there is overall a paradigm shift in British political discourse from multiculturalism to social cohesion, or from celebrating difference to affirming shared values.

11.   Differences in policies in the various countries have been major: Canada practised the cultural mosaic idea, in which communities maintained their differences yet stood together as Canadians, U.S.A insisted on the melting pot culture where differences were to be subsumed under a pan-American ideal, and Britain where separatist ethnicisation was another name for multiculturalism. Charles Taylor (2008) says: “Canadian multiculturalism was always strongly integrative. The famous white paper of 1969 had four aims: one was to break down cultural barriers, another was to make sure newcomers learned one of the two languages.” He adds how it had “a very strong notion of liberal integration where immigrants were looked upon as guest-workers at first, and there was no idea what to do with them when they began to stay.”

In the earlier group of host countries, there are new bodies of peoples entering and settling. The U.S. is full of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Cuba, in the U.K. East Europeans, especially Polish, Croatian and Serbian immigrants abound. Canada, New Zealand and Australia are seen as more “white” countries, so there are many younger people from the mainstream relocating there from the erstwhile Empire, especially the U.K. In Europe, especially in Germany, Sweden and France there are many new groups of migrants entering every day, as exiles, asylum seekers and as illegal migrants. Travelling with no passports, papers, passes, entering the country as stowaways in the most harrowing conditions, some even die or fall ill out of the exhaustion of the journey. Those who survive tell their tales in films made on their journeys by people like Fatih Akin, Ken Loach, Danny Boyle, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and several documentary film makers, though these are not all necessarily about Indian immigrants. Even Bollywood has repeatedly turned its gaze outward to the diaspora by making films on them which have turned into huge commercial successes, like Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, Pardes, Dilwale Dulhaniya le jayenge, My Name is Khan, Namaste London, London Dreams etc.

12.    Overall, multiculturalism, as a philosophical concept and as a policy, is seen as both a solution and a problem. On the one hand, it is praised for professing equality and social recognition and on the other hand, it is criticised for creating more inequality and social fragmentation. Caroline Howarth & Eleni Andreouli (2012) discuss how the theory of multiculturalism has been a grand failure. The position of Indians in the diaspora has always been precarious. Though they are a majority population in many spaces, they are treated as minorities. Though they are economically successful, their socialization and host-national identity are questioned, sometimes rightly so, due to their social aloofness. In a number of countries like Africa, Fiji and Malayasia, Indians were sacrificed to nationalist politics. One of the features of Indian presence in multicultural societies is a dichotomy in both Indian behavior and hostland perceptions. . Their religious beliefs, diligence, food habits and gregarious identity are very distinct and have always attracted admiration and curiosity from their hosts. But these very characteristics have also created distances, suspicion and hatred between them and the host communities. Indians themselves also practice exclusivity: they prefer not to socialize at work, nor to share food from the hosts, stay away from active politics, play minimal social roles, though in terms of entrepreneurship, education and the professions they are very participative and contribute their best.

Conclusion

Indians are often illegal migrants, and they face innumerable problems as in the Gulf. Moreover, religion, especially Hindu fundamentalism is raising its head everywhere, the recent visit of the Indian Prime Minister to the U.S.A has had many Hindu radical associations reaching out to more people in the diaspora than before. Indians abroad are still politically insulated, they hardly perform their political duties but demand rights in the host country.

The stages these Indian migrant populations followed were those of integration and assimilation in the 1960s and 70s, and were finally co-opted into the project of multiculturalism from the 1980s and 90s. In the early phases, especially in countries where they were few in number, they attempted assimilation by abandoning their own cultural habits and values in order to accept the new country totally, to be accepted as a part of the majority culture. Later, they tried to integrate as if by holding on to some aspects of their own culture at the same time merging into to the new cultural environment. In the still later phases, despite the project of multiculturalism which exoticised “outsider” communities by tokens and shows of acceptance, many Indian communities practised separation by avoiding contact with the majority culture as much as they could. However, some of the new global communities of Indians may be said to practise marginalization, a strategy by which they neither practice their original cultural traditions nor integrate in the new culture, thereby living in a kind of non-identity.

The future is complicated: Indian governments cannot be expected to look after illegal migrants; militant Hinduism is not reducing poverty and solving issues of citizenship; political participation of diasporic Indians must be made stronger and less exclusive.

The groups and generations of migrated Indians have been victims of racism in different countries, yet they have made continual attempts to integrate/assimilate, they have been rewarded for their tendency to be economically successful and integrated, but they have been socially and maritally aloof. The post-globalisation trend of multiculturalism has had mixed consequences: Indians are prized for their ethnicity in many ways, and they lend themselves to it; yet the world is a global village today, so they carry little Indias with them wherever they go, thus remaining virtually “back home”, and thus participating little or not at all in the host country’s politics or societal dynamics..

REFERENCES

• Burton, Antoinette. (ed) Janaki Agnes Penelope Majumdar, Family History. New Delhi: Oxford, 2003.
• Espinet, Ramabai.The Swinging BridgeLondon: Harper Collins, 2003.
• Fisher, Michael H. (ed) The travels of Dean Mohamed1794. California: University of California Press, 1997.
• Gandhi, M K .An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments With Truth 1927. trans. Mahadev Desai.Ahmedabad: Navajivan,1983.
• Ghosh, Amitav. The Sea of Poppies. London: Penguin, 2008.
• Lal , Brij Vilash. (ed) The Encyclopedia Of The Indian Diaspora. London: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Mishra, Vijay. Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2007. Visram Rosina. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.1700–1947. London: Pluto, 1986.