Of our karma bhoomis

From the earliest expeditions across the Silk Road, from traders landing on the shores of Zanzibar and Aden a thousand years ago to the indignities of indenture, India has always known a global diaspora. The Pravasi Bhartiya Divas – a special annual festival commemorating the special link which the motherland has to peoples of Indian origin --  will this week be hosted in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This year’s edition has a special significance to it through the unique century-old Gandhian link between India and South Africa -- Gandhi being regarded as the greatest pravasi. 

“This subcontinent has become to me a sacred and dear land, next only to my motherland. I leave the shores of South Africa with a heavy heart, and the distance that will now separate me from South Africa will but draw me closer to it... its welfare will always be a matter of great concern.” So said Mohandas Gandhi a hundred years ago from a hastily erected podium at Cape Town harbour, as he departed after a stay of two decades in the country.  To him, the act of undertaking the shipbound journey would serve more as a symbolic link between the two great countries rather than act of separation. 

The long decades he had spent in South Africa would have a huge and lasting impact on Gandhi. It was his great experimental lab, as it were. Here he learnt and evolved the arts of Satyagraha and mass mobilisation as a political strategy --  in the by-lanes of Johannesburg, in the prison cells of what is now Constitutional Hill and amid the serene environs of Tolstoy farm and the Phoenix settlement. Gandhi would not have shied away from calling South Africa his “karma bhoomi” -- that which turned him from a  western-educated lawyer with an outlook which reflected as much, into a Mahatma; Indian in cause as much as in clothing.

It’s worth considering that unique amongst the other freedom fighters – from both countries -- was his duality. For he was, at different stages of his life, both a pravasi as well as a fully fledged returned national. It is this great duality which gave him a distinctive perspective -- and allowed him to say what he did at Cape Town harbour about having two sacred lands to revere. A century on, perhaps this is his true legacy for modern South African Indians (now one of the largest diasporas in the world) as inheritors of his vision – for while we retain a fierce loyalty to South Africa, we doubtless have a temperament forged in steel from our motherland. 

The Pravasi Bhartiya Divas (PBD), which will be celebrated this week in Gujarat from the 7-9 January, was a brainchild of a former Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the early 2000s. Using the inspiration of Gandhi --  the Mohandas who became the Mahatma principally because of his time as part of the diaspora -- Vajpayee sought to have his country inculcate a deeper engagement with its vast community of ethnic Indians who are now citizens of other countries.  According to the latest statistics, we now number something like 25 million, spread across 110 countries.

And this year’s commemoration will draw on many of these countries. Donald Ramotar, the President of Guyana, will be the chief guest, and there will be representatives from Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, the United States of America, the United Kingdom and several Gulf States. But I’d like to think that South Africa will be featured prominently this year, and that our diaspora’s experiences -- both from the sepulchre of apartheid to our latter-day experiences – will be explored. 

And what are our latter-day experiences? The horrors of life under apartheid for South African Indians (as well as India’s principled support of the opposition to it) have been well documented. But the joys of our subsequent journey are equally worthy of exploration. No doubt this is a subject worthy of serious and meticulous sociological scholarship, both of which I cannot offer. What I can paint with a few broad strokes though, is an interesting vignette. 

As I write this, the country’s New Year’s Test match has been unfolding in Cape Town. This year  as I watched, I noted some subtle changes were on hand. Perhaps it  was because I had the PBD on my mind, with the resultant ideas of Indian diaspora and reconnect lingering heavily. But there it was for all to see -- the Proteas, led out (for the first time ever in the city which had once legislated from its Parliament building that people of colour should be second-class citizens) by a person of Indian ethnic origin. Hashim Amla, he of the flashing blade and the most famous beard in cricket, had been made national captain entirely on merit. Which was just as well, since the head of the country’s national cricket board was also of Indian origin. As Amla led his team out, they crossed over the national sponsor’s logo on the field. The logo didn’t belong to a vast multinational mining house, or to one of the world’s largest brewers – two White companies which have traditionally being associated with South African industry. Rather, it was that of Sunfoil, an independent, family-run company – and one founded by people of Indian origin. On the second day of the Test, as Amla completed his fiftieth run, one of the many thousands of people who applauded him sat in the long room alongside his wife. It was the former Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, in his day an anti-apartheid activist and one of the founders of the South African Constitution; and one whose forefathers would have originally hailed from the same region as Amla’s.

And if perchance you couldn’t make it to Newlands that day to watch the cricket, you could listen to it on radio – and hear the erudite commentary of a Gujarati descendant, Aslam Khota, guide you through what was happening.

Such an observation isn’t mere self-aggrandisement; it points instead, in microcosm, to how deeply and profoundly the Indian diaspora has contributed to the South African landscape in so many fields of endeavour – predictably business and sports, but also crucially – and uncommonly among Indian diaspora -- in freedom movements  and political leadership. Curiously enough, it so happens that all the people I noted above trace their ancestry to Gujarat, but the South African community – again, uncommonly – exhibits diversity, with heritage and great flair also from Tamil Nadu, Bihar and (like myself) from Uttar Pradesh.  In fact, each community of South African Indians – from Chatsworth and Phoenix in Natal, to Lenasia and Roshnee in Gauteng – have distinct identities with contrasting textures of lived experiences. 

I’d like to think that Gandhi would have been pleased at the progress of the diaspora in the land which he called his second home. A hundred years on from his departure, his duality of a fierce loyalty to South Africa, but matched with a temperament forged in steel from our motherland, lives on. 

The author is a columnist for South Africa’s Daily Maverick newspaper  @kalimrajab