Why ‘settling abroad’ has been an important part of being Indian

The outrage against Aamir was odd for a nation and an economy that is so smitten by the NRI dream — coming, especially as it happened to do, at a time when many Indians are swooning over 20 years of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, the film that explored all dimensions of the NRI’s ghar wapasi tensions.

This is also a particularly interesting time to review departures from India, historically speaking. Each of these departures carried its own unique boarding pass of circumstances and baggage. Last week witnessed someone with a Goan connection, António Costa, being sworn in as the Prime Minister of Portugal. The story of the journey from Goa to Portugal that Costa’s father, a communist poet, made is a short course in Portuguese and Indian history.

Many different reasons have promptedjourneys out of India over hundreds of years. Legend has it that even Zen Buddhism, something of a buzzword currently, was actually something that a Buddhist from South India, Prince Da Mo, as he was known when he went to China, came up with.

There were the tens of thousands who were taken on large ships to make a new life on lonely islands in distant oceans, Indians of the kind that Amitav Ghosh speaks of in his Ibis trilogy. UNESCO is in the process of charting the Indentured Labour Route — the trip that was made across continents 181 years ago by some 4,62,000 workers, mostly from India, after being duped, tempted or compelled.

Then, there are the NRIs of more recent vintage — those who have made Telugu virtually the second language in Silicon Valley, or maybe those who have ensured that Malayalam, spoken fluently across hospitals in West Asia and Europe, has come to be known as the language of healers.

Indians have been made more acutely aware of those who have left, and settled abroad, over the past 18 months — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent so much time with them. Spectacles honouring the “NRI” have got enormous airtime on Indian television as the foreign office has celebrated India abroad at regular intervals. Several participants in those shows were second- or third-generation Indian-origin persons, and several who now swear allegiance to other flags. But their act of heading out of the Motherland has never been seen as a problem — and it has generally been accepted that they have been driven by history, circumstance, need, opportunity and, sometimes, persecution.

The first banner of revolt against imperialism from this part of the world after 1857 was, in fact, raised by people who might be called “NRIs”. The Ghadar Party was formed by peasants, students and revolutionaries who experienced deep discrimination as they sought work outside India. Clear in their understanding of imperialism even before the First World War broke out to split the loot of the colonised world, the Ghadar revolutionaries fought the British and paid for it with their lives. Ujjal Dosanjh, the former premier of British Columbia in Canada, clearly had all that at the back of his mind when he tried to put some perspective into the rage against Aamir Khan’s supposed utterances.

Cut to modern India — and even the oil shock experienced by the sudden spurt in oil prices in 1973-74 was cushioned by remittances diligently sent home by working class populations employed in West Asian countries. Several enterprising Gujarati communities speak fluent Hausa and Swahili because they made their way to the far and unknown to eke out a living. Their progeny, and progeny of progenies, now in dramatically different circumstances, bear testimony to the different circumstances of their departure — some pushed out, some who jumped.

As the Indian government fetes the affluent and aggressive “NRI”, we should perhaps remember that the prospect of migration, or “settling abroad”, has been a very important part of being Indian, however odd that may sound. You have to just go to any country, even in the subcontinent, to see the numerous dimensions and chapters of Indian history embedded in lives lived by millions of Indians and un-Indians everywhere.