Negotiating Indianness

This chapter focuses on the cultural economy of Auckland as a way to explore manifestations of diversity within the present-day Indian diaspora in New Zealand. The majority of recent migrants to New Zealand live in Auckland and are young professionals and students from Punjab and other parts of north India, whose cultural preferences differ from the more conservative earlier generations of settlers. This chapter investigates the divergence of views on what constitutes authentic Indian culture in New Zealand, particularly the tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘pop’ cultures reflected in the debates over publicly funded performing art events such as the Diwali festival. The chapter points to problems arising from New Zealand government and local council efforts to support multicultural policies and practices without due recognition of the internal diversity of New Zealand’s Indian diaspora.

Naming Charlie

This chapter discusses the racist environment in late nineteenth-century Australia which resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 designed to prohibit entry of non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth. The chapter discusses the evolution of various collective terms like ‘alien’, ‘coolie’ or ‘Hindoo’ to identify Indians as the ‘other’ of the national community. From biographical details and photographs in the Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs), which monitored the movement and identities of non-white residents, the chapter reveals how many Indians had undergone a change of name during immigration, an important marker of individual identity. The chapter argues that the most commonly ascribed name ‘Charlie’, was a means of ‘infantilizing and subordinating’ Indian migrants. The CEDT images of migrants in Indian clothes and identified with their new names are seen as locating Indian settlers in early twentieth-century Australia in a position of subordination within the colonial social hierarchy.

Circuitous Routes

The chapter traces the history of several families whose ancestors migrated as indentured labourers to sugar plantations in Fiji, the Caribbean, and to the French colonies of Réunion and New Caledonia. Once indenture ended these migrant workers travelled to Australia in search of a better life. These stories of migration across imperial boundaries, struggle against racial discrimination and restrictive immigration rules offer evidence of agency and enterprise, rather than benign profiles of helpless indentured labourers. This chapter sheds new light on the issues of gender and agency in migrant lives through the stories of matriarchs who showed courage and enterprise in keeping their families united and making a living in the hostile environment of colonial Australia. It also traces intergenerational mobility and shows how the later generations proudly reconstruct that genealogy of displacement, discrimination and agency as badges of their historic transnational identity.

Class and Caste Consciousness

This chapter moves across the temporal boundary to the more recent migrants—the so-called ‘new’ diaspora—who have entered Australia and New Zealand after the opening up of the skilled labour market and relaxation of immigration rules. It considers the first wave of these migrants—highly educated middle-class professionals—as they reinvent their diasporic identity in a cultural milieu that not only accepts, but even celebrates difference. This chapter uses examples from selected short narrative pieces by South-Asian-Australian writers and academics to illustrate the diversity and clash of caste and class experiences within the South Asian migrant community in Australia. It contends that in the diasporic situation the complex, often conflicted, dynamic of ethnicity, caste, and class consciousness is manifested psychologically and symbolically in actual practices in the public sphere.

‘Did You Know Your Great-Grandmother Was an Indian Princess?’

This chapter is based on oral history and brings valuable new perspectives to the social world of the Anglo-Indian migrant community—an ethnically and culturally hybrid Indian minority of colonial origin, whose members are primarily Westernised, English-speaking, and Christian. Anglo-Indians have migrated from India in large numbers, mainly to English-speaking Commonwealth countries, including Australia and New Zealand. While most migrated after India’s independence in 1947, a number arrived in Australia and New Zealand much earlier. This chapter explores early Anglo-Indian migration to New Zealand, focusing on the experiences of Mrs Frederica Hay, née Coventry, who migrated from Calcutta via South Africa to Dunedin in 1869 and the importance of this transnational link to some of her descendants.

Indian Migration to New Zealand in the 1920s

Racist attitudes against Indians appeared in New Zealand from the 1890s resulting in the Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920. This Act required potential Indian migrants to provide photographs and other details for certificates of registration, enabling them to re-enter the Dominion within a three-year period. Drawing on a selection of immigration files, this chapter offers a preliminary exploration of mobility patterns of early Indian migrants to New Zealand as well as an interpretation of how they represented themselves based on the portrait photographs they provided for their registration certificates. The chapter argues that this piece of legislation intending to restrict Indian immigration can now be interrogated to reveal more about the first generation of post–World War I Indian migrants to New Zealand.

‘A Rich Tapestry’

This chapter presents a micro-history of Sir Anand Satyanand, New Zealand’s first governor general of Asia-Pacific origin. Sir Anand Satyanand’s maternal and paternal great-grandparents migrated from India to Fiji as indentured labourers in the 1880s. His father moved to Auckland for his medical education and practice and his mother was a trained nurse in Auckland. Sir Anand was trained as a lawyer and eventually was appointed New Zealand’s governor general. His life story reflects the colonial and postcolonial interconnections between India and the Antipodes and the strength of the Indian contribution to the making of New Zealand. This chapter demonstrates how racial boundaries are transcended by Indian migrants through struggle, educational priority, familial relations, and intergenerational mobility.

Totaram Sanadhya’s Experience of Racism in Early White Australia

This chapter presents a fictionalized narrative of Totaram Sanadhya’s brief visit to Sydney in 1914. Pundit Sanadhya migrated to Fiji as an indentured labourer and spent twenty-one years on the Pacific Island. He became a nationalist and collaborated with C.F. Andrews in bringing down the indenture system. The story is based on the evidence provided in Sanadhya’s journal, published as My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands (1991). As a work of fiction the narrative transcends temporal boundaries and refers to historical events that took place outside Sanadhya’s real time, such as Srinivasa Shastri’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1922–3 to inquire into race relations in these parts of the British Empire. This narrative embodies the process of circulation of people and ideas central to this book, with Sanadhya becoming an archetypal ex-indentured Indian from Fiji, visiting white Australia and encountering its racist bigotry.

Introduction

The Introduction sets out the parameters of the book Indians and the Antipodes: Networks, Boundaries, and Circulation. It argues that India and the Antipodes—Australian and New Zealand—are now and historically have been linked by a shared imperial past and the networks of institutions, language, and markets which are parts of the present Commonwealth. India, Australia, and New Zealand participate in circulatory patterns of peoples, goods, services, culture, and ideas and the introduction sets out the way in which this book will analyse these pathways of connectivity. It defines terms such as ‘diaspora’ and ‘Antipodean’ as they will be used throughout the collected chapters and positions the history of Indian migration to Australia and New Zealand within a comparative Australian and New Zealand context. It argues for the uniqueness of the transnational examination of Antipodean Indian migration and the importance of the inquiry.

‘Not as a Stranger or a Tourist’

This chapter narrates and contextualizes the story of the Australian educationist Leonora Gmeiner, an Australian teacher who travelled to India in the 1890s inspired by the ideals of Theosophical education. Gmeiner lived in India for twenty-nine years, participated in Gandhian campaigns to abolish the indenture system, took part in Annie Bessant’s Home Rule League activities, and served as the principal of the Indraprastha Hindu Girls’ School in Delhi, where she was joined by other similarly inspired Australian women. Gmeiner dedicated her life to the physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual training of Indian girls to bring them out of purdah and make them politically active full citizens of the emerging Indian nation. This chapter argues for an alternative to ‘White Australian’ attitudes to India and demonstrates that the circulation of knowledge and ideas flowed from the Antipodes to India as well as through Indian migration south.