India celebrates her 75th Independence Day on 15 August this year, marking the beginning of year-long Azadi ki Amrit Mahotsav events. These will be both celebratory and solemn, the latter a reminder of the sacrifices of those who lost their lives in India’s freedom struggle and the Partition. Highlighted at these events should also be the role of the overseas Indian community.
In the history books that all Indians studied as children, the return of the Pravasi (migrant) Mahatma Gandhi on 9 January 1915 to India from South Africa, marked a turning point in India’s freedom struggle from the moderate voice to the assertive. Gandhi’s reputation for successfully fighting for the rights of Indians in South Africa, against an intransigent racist British colonial government there, preceded him. Photographs on the walls of Gandhi’s residence in Bombay – Mani Bhavan – capture Gandhiji’s return for posterity. A diorama shows milling crowds welcoming Gandhi and Kasturba at Bombay’s Apollo Bunder where the Gateway of India now stands.
In 2011, Gandhi’s January 9 homecoming was memorialized with the institution of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas by the Manmohan Singh government. It is an occasion on which India awards outstanding Non-Resident Indians (NRI), foreign citizens of Indian origin, and overseas Indian associations with the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award in recognition of their contributions to India, to bridging the cultural gap between India and their host nations and promoting the image of India overseas.
It took independent India 64 years after Independence to institutionalize a policy that rewards its overseas community’s immense soft power, strategic influence, and economic heft. The recommendation came from the Dr. L.M. Singhvi-led High-Level Committee Report (2002) on The Indian Overseas Diaspora. But it is the foreigners of Indian ancestry as opposed to the NRI, also enumerated in this Report, who are uniquely positioned to act as a ‘civilizational bridge’ between their adopted country and their ancestral homeland of India. These Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) account for 18 million of a total of 32 million Indians residing abroad. [1]
Many of the Indians who settled overseas, especially during the high colonial period from the 19th to the first half of the 20th century, like Gandhi in South Africa participated in and contributed in ways big and small to India’s freedom.
Large-scale Indian immigration overseas occurred in the wake of a coalescing of global colonial networks of trade, finance, commerce, and the rapid acquisition of vast colonies by European powers. Indians circulated between the Indian Subcontinent and European colonies in Africa, Asia, the Far East, the Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius, the Pacific islands like Fiji, and the Central American islands, often settling overseas. Some high-profile descendants from these families are UK’s home secretary Priti Patel and UK’s prime ministerial contender Rishi Sunak who are both ‘twice migrants’ from East Africa, and Singapore’s current and first female president Halimah Yacob.
What accelerated this Indian migration was The Slave Trade Act (1873) in the UK[2] which led to large-scale recruitment of indentured Indian labour for colonial plantation economies. The colonisers also needed seasoned Indian personnel to govern their newly acquired colonies. The deployment of British Indian regiments overseas resulted in settlements in the colonies as also in the United Kingdom and the U. S. Many Sikh and Punjabi soldiers went to the west coast of the U.S. from British Colombia (Canada).
Though not all struggles abroad were moderate, like Dadabhai Naoroji’s in the heart of London, or non-violent like Gandhi’s in India, they all aimed for the same outcome: to unshackle India from British colonial rule. Often, they had a galvanizing effect on the ongoing freedom movement within India like the imminent invasion of British India by Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) and the Japanese which led to the Quit India Movement.
It was in the U.S. that the radical Ghadar Movement was founded in 1913 in Portland (Oregon) by saw-mill worker Sohan Singh Bhakna and labor contractor Kanshi Ram with a largely Punjabi following, many of who were former British Indian army soldiers. They joined forces with Stanford Professor Har Dyal Mathur who became the face of the Movement. During the First World War, overseas Ghadar fighters including Sohan Singh arrived in India to lead the armed Ghadar Uprising in Punjab, which proved abortive but left its mark.
The early 20th century witnessed the formation of another influential association: the V.K. Krishna Menon-led India League (1928) in the United Kingdom which had its roots in the Commonwealth of India League (1922) and the earlier Home Rule League (1916) founded by Annie Besant. The India League agitated for complete Indian independence. Overseas Indians were so supportive of the freedom movement in India that every time Indian freedom fighters traveled to London and Europe they were welcomed by crowds of Indians in Aden, Port Sudan, and Suez.
Overseas help arrived once again during the Second World War. The Indian expatriate-inspired and financed Indian National Army (INA) or Azad Hind Fauj whose soldiers were largely drawn from captured British Indian soldiers, arrived on India’s North East border in the wake of the Japanese invasion of British Burma. It was the impending invasion of India from outside which triggered Gandhiji’s call to the British on 8 August 1942 to Quit India. The subsequent trial of INA leaders and soldiers at the Red Fort by the British Indian government in 1945-46, triggered further unease and discontent among the British Indian armed forces whose loyalties were already divided between serving the British crown or fighting for India’s freedom. A direct outcome of this trial was the mutiny of the Royal Indian Air Force in January followed by the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay in February 1946, when for the first time in the history of that city the guns of the Navy were directed at it rather than defending it.
Let the nation not forget the sacrifices of these overseas Indian communities in India’s fight for independence from British rule. Many of these Indians were so inspired by the events of 1947 that they also went on to fight for the freedom of their host nations, as the Indian community did in Kenya. Azadi ki Amrit Mahotsav is an opportunity to reiterate the shared history and ties between India and its overseas kin, whose ancestors left Indian shores almost 200 years ago, to study and memorialize their many inspiring stories.
Sifra Lentin is Bombay History Fellow, Gateway House.
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References
[1] https://mea.gov.in/images/attach/NRIs-and-PIOs_1.pdf
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1873/88/pdfs/ukpga_18730088_en.pdfv