Treasuring wisps of memory of a village nestling by the Padma river that I have visited but never spent a night in, I am always astonished when someone flies off the handle when asked where he or she comes from, as charity worker Ngozi Fulani did at a recent Buckingham Palace reception. A second development that I cannot understand is the ferocity with which people are still resisting an inevitable gesture of humanity towards beleaguered Hindus in India’s neighbourhood.
The former must be attributed to a psychological handicap reflecting the pressures to which many individuals have to adjust to ensure a discomfort-free life. The latter represents the tragically high price that Partition seems to extort for all time from its humblest victims. One belongs to the past, the other to the future, both bound by an inexorable chain. Asked about his nationality amidst the tumult of the dismantled refugee camp near Kalyani that he did not want to leave in 1972, a Hindu peasant from Khulna boldly retorted, “Consider me an Indian resident in Bangladesh.” Like it or not, there may be no alternative to accepting that most of the 13 million or so Hindus, constituting just above 8% of Bangladesh’s population, may eventually fade away or seek sanctuary in this country.
Distractions like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register cannot conceal the natural justice of India’s deeper obligation rooted in the enlightened vision of the Indian State that the founding fathers entertained and which Partition could not damage. There is a fundamental difference with the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey for despite a plethora of protest petitions, the unqualified rights of Indian Muslims are in no way affected. Fulani’s extreme response to being asked — “interrogated” she says — where she “is really from” also masks a deeper global phobia that treats antecedents as unfashionable as if individuals are born fully grown from the ocean foam and blown ashore on a scallop shell like the legendary Venus. That Khulna refugee was not coy about the logic of his past determining his future.
Immigrants in Britain are especially touchy on the subject, bristling at the slightest hint of origins elsewhere. “You must never ask someone where he comes from” an Oxford don once warned me. “The most you can say is ‘Where was your father’s home?’” Fulani saw such questions as a slur on the colour of her skin. Nothing could be a deadlier insult for someone who considers herself British because she was born in London than to be asked “What part of Africa are you from?” Would an African have been similarly outraged to be asked what part of Europe he or she was from?
Clearly, Fulani’s interlocutor was taken in by her aggressive dreadlocks and exotic attire. Such mistakes are not uncommon in Britain. Resplendent in scarlet robes and glittering chain of office, the mayor of a small English town once stomped up to me at a public reception I was covering for the local paper where I worked to express her strong support for Afro-Asian decolonisation. On another occasion, a government minister turned to me at the end of a press conference that I was reporting to say how kindly Mr Nehru had received him in New Delhi. Placing a hand on my arm, he looked around for the photographer but it was teatime and the man had gone.
To be fair to Fulani, we must not underestimate the ability of an 83-year-old English dowager, with 12 generations of earls behind her, close to the Queen and widow of a peer of similarly ancient family who chaired the British Broadcasting Corporation for a decade, to convey disapproval without uttering a word. But in denying an ancestral desh or muluk, Fulani was also denying herself an authentic identity. It would have made visual and aural sense and also demonstrated respect for her own kith if she had proudly announced that she belonged to a Caribbean branch of the Igbo tribe which fought and lost the war for an independent Biafra. Instead, she fell into the trap of pretending not that physical differences don’t matter — which would have been morally justified if practically naïve — but that they don’t exist, which is absurd. That absurdity rules London’s West End theatre where one of several unmarried sisters in a Brontë story about a 19th-century county family can be a black girl dressed exactly like her peaches-and-cream debutante sisters.
“Home is where the Heart is” Elvis Presley sang in Kid Galahad. But contrary to Blaise Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of …”, heart and home can be calculated choices. According to Shaibal Kumar Gupta of the Indian Civil Service, a colleague rebuffed relatives, denied his Indian blood, and claimed to be Scot because he had built a house in Scotland to retire to. Some civilians talked of ‘going home on furlough’ when holidaying in Britain. Others aped their British colleagues who allowed their children to speak only pidgin Hindustani until they could be packed home to prep school so that no ‘native’ accent tainted their English. K.C. De, also of the ICS, explained these complexes by telling the Islington Commission that he had “to adopt the European mode of life in toto” so that Indians might give his brown skin the respect they usually gave to the white.
Colonial coercion having yielded to the complexes of migration, Diane Abbott, the first Black woman elected to the House of Commons, rushed to Fulani’s defence and denounced the suggestion that a Black Briton is an oxymoron. Her demand that the monarchy should take a multiracial view of Britain moves a personal challenge to a dangerously political plane, seemingly making common cause with Prince Harry’s wife, whose mother is Black and whose unborn child’s colour apparently prompted speculation. I must confess that I, too, wondered casually from a distance what the baby would look like, recalling the politically highly incorrect limerick in John Masters’ Bhowani Junction — “There was a young lady called Starkey/ Who had an affair with a darkie/ The result of her sins/ Was quadruplets not twins/ One black, one white and two khaki.”
However, desh is a far more powerful factor than any biological conundrum. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, tracing the story of a Gambian teenager who was sold into slavery and of seven generations of his descendants in the United States of America, wouldn’t have been so popular otherwise. Despite the smug satisfaction implicit in V.S. Naipaul’s “I have no tribal home”, the fact that he visited ancestral India of choice and kept going back, and that he robustly exercised the birthright of all Indians by expressing his disapproval of many aspects of the country’s life and governance, indicated that even the ultimate globetrotter was not altogether immune to atavistic pulls.
Bengalis would have understood his multiple status on which a polite formula, used in wedding invitations, bestows society’s recognition. Describing the groom or bride as an expatriate from one locale and resident of another, it uses the terms, probashi and nibashi, exile and resident, to neatly reconcile two states in a union that defies distance and political division. It’s a pity Faluni did not have a similar sense of indivisibility to fall back on. The saving grace of two identities welded into one is that it keeps hope alive for people like that man from Khulna who was forced into a repatriation truck almost at bayonet point.
