The nativists nightmare: We are all Migrants.

It is summer and it seems the world has ascended to the hills. There are cars whizzing on our village road and people looking to buy land. I am worried that land around us will soon be sold and we will be surrounded by cottages and loud city folk with their fast cars. The idyll that we expect in these sylvan surroundings will be lost!

But then who am I to object?

I too have recently come to stay here even though I have lived in this place and loved it for 35 years now. In the sixty odd years of my life, circumstances, some over which I had little control, have moved me from place to place. I know I was born in R G Kar Hospital of Kolkata, and my father was then posted at Contai and then at Howrah, so I guess I must have stayed there as an infant, and then we moved to Delhi. After five years there we moved back to Kolkata, and I stayed put there for the next 16 years. As an autonomous adult I have stayed in the outskirts of Varanasi, in Nainital district, Almora town, Lucknow, Seattle and then for a long stint of 13 years in Delhi before moving back to Nainital district, all in a span of 33 years.

I could be described as a Kolkata Bangali, but I have spent a much larger proportion of my life outside Kolkata and out of West Bengal. Keen to know a little more about my own provenance, I thought I would step back one generation. I realised I did not know where my father was born. My grandfather was a college teacher and had a transferable job, so he too worked in several places. I quickly checked with my brother who is a repository of family history. I was in for a real surprise. My father, he informed me, was born in Palamu - then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand. I have been to Palamu 40 years ago and even then, it was mostly forested territory and quite remote. I was surprised that my grandfather, with a PhD from the School of Asian Studies of the University of London, would be posted at a college in such a place. Few of India’s educated elite today would like to be posted there, nearly a century later. But I digress.

From what I remember, my father had spent time in Krishnanagar, where his father was posted,and then after my grandfather had died in 1937 (if my memory serves me right), they had moved in with his uncle and spent time in Kolkata, Giridih and Patna and maybe some other places I don’t know about. As a young WBPCS officer he had spent time in Sub Divisional towns in Bengal before being posted to Delhi and then back to Kolkata where he passed away in 1972.

If I move back another generation it is probable that my grandfather was born in Dhaka and his father (my great-grandfather) was probably born in a village called Dabua in near Chittagong, Bangladesh. In a small span of four generations my family seemed to have moved around quite a lot, not only within India and by today’s nationalist standards we are ‘outsiders’ or interlopers.

It is quite easy to dismiss my ‘outsider’ story; I belong to a very educated upwardly mobile minority. I could be considered a victim of Partition.  So, I decided to test my outsider hypothesis with my neighbour and benefactor Ram Singh Bisht.

The Buribana Story

Ram Singh Bisht is an 82-year-old ex-serviceman and a gentleman to the core. I met him for the first time in the month of May in 1987 when he had recently retired as a Subedar and Honorary Captain of the Indian Army. The village of Buribana had unanimously elected him as the Pradhan and he had invited our organisation to work in his village. We had struck up an immediate friendship which has lasted through the years. About 15 years ago he proposed that we should come and stay with them, and one thing led to another. He gifted us some land, we built a house and now we are here in the village of Buribana for good.

I have seen Ram Singhji living in the same house for the last 35 years, but we know their family has some other ancestral homes in the village as well, so I asked him about his family story. I learnt from him that he was born in 1941, in his ancestral home which is some fields away and  constructed about a century ago for the princely sum of forty-nine rupees. During those days, all the families moved down to the Bhabar (foothills) during the winter to escape the  cold and make some cash income as well. During one such winter migration a few of the villagers had stayed back and built their ancestral home to his grandfather’s instructions. His father, one of four brothers, had moved out of that ancestral home with his family and built this house when Ram Singh was 14 years old, so they moved here around 1955.

However, there was another older ancestral home where his grandfather had been born. That house still exists but needs repairs. Where did your family stay before that, I asked? Before that we did not live in Buribana, said Ram Singhji. His family was among the three earliest families that came from Supi, a village ten kilometres further down the road and settled here. But the story did not end there. Before Supi, their family was from a village in Almora and even earlier, he said they had migrated from Rajasthan.

For the next half an hour I heard the fascinating story of how our village Buribana got settled. Many years ago, and I am not very sure of the timeline here, but it is not more than perhaps 150 years or so, Buribana was all forest. The big village in the neighbourhood was Supi and people from Supi came to the Buribana forests to graze their cattle, collect firewood and timber. One ‘bagi’ or quarrelsome family fell foul with their neighbours in Supi and decided to move out and set up their home in these parts. Soon two other families followed. Ram Singh-ji’s family was one of the two others. Even today, these three families worship their family deity in Supi. Once these three agrarian Rajput families had settled, they needed ‘server’ communities like masons, carpenters, ironsmiths, so some Dalit families were given space and invited to settle in Buribana. The village now needed its own priests for all the ‘karmkand’ rituals and about 70 years ago two Brahmin families were provided land and now the village has its full complement of castes.

Rising Nativism

There is a rising trend of nativism across the world. In Europe it is against migrants with undertones of racism and religious intolerance. In the US there is a fear that non-white, non-English speakers will soon run the country. In India we have our own home-grown poison of communal polarisation with slogans like Hindustan for Hindus and Akhand Bharat.

But this is nothing new. Not many years ago it was Mumbai for the Marathi manoos, even though the city’s history is a rich tapestry of people from different places, races and religions settling and working together to weave the foundations of a fascinating megapolis. In Kolkata, the term ‘non-Bengalis’ was often used with both sarcasm and scorn by the Bengali speaking upper-caste Bhadrolok. For many years the city lived in the reflected glory of being the second city of the Empire. Today as the city is rebuilding its image as a modern mega city, I see a rising trend of anti-Muslim sentiments even among urban professionals, who also have come to Kolkata from elsewhere. The Hindu Bengalis of Kolkata forget that among ‘Bangla’ speakers of the world there are more Muslims than Hindus, and there is much more that is common among all Bengalis than there are differences: Rabindranath and Nazrul are part of a shared heritage.

Shared world

My quick mental exercise showed me how fast my family moved in the space of a few generations, and the journey of my apparently rooted neighbour is no less complex. My guess is if each one of us does this mental exercise we may discover fascinating stories of movement, integration, and coexistence. If others had not made space for us and welcomed us into their world, we would not have been who we are today.

Why then are we so insecure about others coming into our space? Others who may not look like us, wear the same clothes, speak the same language or pray to the same God. We are comfortable with hierarchy or vertical social relations; we are comfortable with secondary status of some castes or of women but somehow, we are uncomfortable with diversity or horizontal relationships.

If you do not agree, my challenge for you is to do something new. Invite to your home a co-worker whom you know to be different from you in some respect. Visit a co-worker’s or neighbour’s home during a festival they celebrate but you do not. I say co-worker or neighbour because they are people we are very familiar with, but they may not necessarily be our friends. You could also visit a neighbourhood in your city you have not really been to because ‘other’ kind of people live there. You could learn how they live and interact. Many cities now have heritage walks which cover some of these interesting but lesser-known spaces. You may just discover something new, you may even make new friends, who are different.

It is said that five different fingers make up a hand and seven colours make up the rainbow. Why then should we live in a monochrome world with one set of rules, one set of people, one language and one religion? At the end of the day, we are all migrants somewhere in the arc of history, brought together in a common melting pot.