Showing posts with label migration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label migration. Show all posts

Monday 29 March 2021

A Death in the Ganj. The Death of the Dream that was The Ganj.

A Manifesto for McCluskiegunge

A Death in the Ganj, Konkana Sen Sharma’s debut as a director, is on Amazon Prime. It’s worth watching.

Featuring Mukul Sharma's iconic
blue Ambassador
It’s worth the time purely as a 70s nostalgia trip. 

The film is based on a short story by Konkana’s father Mukul Sharma - the the MS behind the Mind Sport column that used to appear in the Illustrated Weekly of India. 

It is about the Anglo-Indian community, like 36 Chowringhee Lane, Konkana’s mother Aparna Sen’s debut as a director (which remains the best movie ever made about Anglo-Indians). 

It prominently features a blue Ambassador, which is based on a blue Ambassador that Mukul Sharma owned during Konkana’s childhood. 

It involves an endless vacation where there is absolutely nothing to do except spend time with family members, and unspecified people who are sort of like family members, whether you want their company or not. Twenty first century vacations somehow don’t have those vast vacant spaces. 

But to me the most interesting thing about the movie is the setting – McCluskieganj – the settlement on the Chota Nagpur plateau which was meant to be a homeland for Anglo-Indians. The narrative arc of Death in the Ganj parallels the death of McCluskieganj itself.

The Anglo-Indians are (roughly) the children of British colonial officers who served in India and their Indian women. They were proud of their British roots, their (relatively) fair skin, and generally adopted their father’s names, religion and language.

Through the Raj, the Anglo-Indians remained a privileged class in Indian society. For example, an Anglo-Indian in the Indian Railways was paid more than a native officer of the same rank, but less than a white Britisher. They remained faithful to the Crown through the tumult of India’s freedom struggle. In their own eyes, they were “domiciled Europeans and 100% British”.

However, as the prospect of Indian independence became ever more plausible, and as the prospect of lakhs of Anglo-Indians being warmly welcomed “home” to England became ever less plausible, some amount of soul searching was perhaps inevitable.

Mr Ernest Timothy McCluskie of Park Street, Calcutta, a successful property broker and a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, responded to this historical moment by dreaming up McCluskiegunge. He found a land parcel of 10,000 acres that was watered by the Damodar and Jagriti Rivers and was connected by train to Calcutta. He leased this land in perpetuity from the Raja of Ratu, named this development after himself, and invited Anglo-Indians from across India to buy property here.

Mr McCluskie’s vision was much bigger than just a property deal.

McCluskiegunge was packaged as a clarion call to heroic adventure (see advert/ manifesto above), an exhortation to vigorous Anglo-Indian youth to shed their lethargy and bring civilization to the virgin forests of Chota Nagpur, sort of like American pioneers or Zionist kibbutzim. This could be read as a sacred duty, as McCluskiegunge was a “mulk” for Anglo-Indians, a promised land of their own.

If “mulk” is a self-consciously Urdu word (Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam ul Mulk), the McCluskiegunge advert/ manifesto even more explicitly references Pakistan, “We see in McCluskiegunge the beginnings of what the Moslems call Pakistan but we call Anglo-India. A place in India where we can foregather and mix freely.”

And for a while, this dream worked. For a while, the forests of Chota Nagpur became Chota England. Spacious bungalows, tiger hunting, afternoon tea parties, ballroom dancing, piano music – McCluskiegunge had it all, everything the Anglo-Indians wanted, everything except jobs. There never was a reason why the kind of jobs vigorous young Anglo-Indians might want to do would migrate to The Ganj, and in the absence of those vital jobs, the Ganj went into a spiral of decline. Like Salman Rushdie’s Peccavistan, McCluskiegunge was incompletely imagined.


By the 70s it already was a quixotic museum piece, a parable about the dangers of putting ethnic purity above just-rub-along pragmatism. Today, with only twenty odd Anglo-Indian families left in The Ganj, it’s not clear if its unique Anglo-Indian flavour will even live on.

There is something distinctly illiberal about the idea of a “mulk” for Anglo-Indians, a pure ethnically clean homeland for a chosen people, far away from the cheek-by-jowl diversity and chaos of India’s great cities. So why does Konkana Sen Sharma, a strident liberal, show The Ganj in sympathetic light?

It feels a bit like Joan Baez singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.

Once an idea is completely defeated, the idea and its champions acquire a sepia-toned sweetness. Liberals respond to the underdog, or the tragic-loser status that the defeated now have, rather than the ideas the underdogs once championed.

This is a dangerous and slippery slope. Ideas have a life of their own. I’m sure Joan Baez never imagined that white supremacists waving the Confederate flag would storm the US Capitol in the twenty first century.

So, is that likely to happen in India? Are the contemporary avatars of Mr Ernest Timothy McCluskie going to rise up and demand the creation/ restoration of their “mulk”?

Probably not. Because so many of them have emigrated.

Frank Anthony (who shares a name with India’s most celebrated Anglo-Indian parliamentarian) estimates that about 50% of the Anglo-Indian population have emigrated to Canada, Australia or England. Compare that to the ~15% emigration rates from Goa and the ~100% emigration rates of the Keralite Jews.

The remaining 50% are still very much here, embedded in every major Indian city, contributing to the tapestry of Indian life, but very far away from The Ganj that hasn’t quite died yet but is clearly fading away.




Sunday 14 March 2021

The emigration of India's Jews: the diaspora becomes a diaspora once again

A Keralite King Receives Jewish Refugees 

The Jews came to India in 70AD.

They came in their most forsaken hour, when Jerusalem had fallen to Emperor Vespasian’s son Titus, when their Second Temple had been destroyed and desecrated, when God’s chosen people were being slaughtered in the streets by merciless Roman legions, they came to India.

In India, they found a new home. The Jews lived here in peace and prosperity, worshipped their chosen God, retained their distinctive customs and identity, won honour from the local kings (the Mattancheri synagogue in Cochin shares a wall with the Maharaja’s palace).

And then they left. 

After two thousand years on these shores, the Jews started going “home” to the land of their forefathers when Israel was created in 1948. Today, there aren't enough young Jews who still live in Cochin for its storied synagogue to conduct religious services.

These Jews had a choice. Their hand was not forced, they faced no famines, no pogroms, no trains filled with mutilated corpses, no extreme conditions. They obviously had no lived experience of their ancient homeland. Yet, almost all of them chose to leave. Unlike the Goans who were presented with a similar choice and chose to stay.

Why? The simplest answer is money. Israel has always been a richer country than Portugal, but that answer feels incomplete. The income gap between Portugal and Israel (see chart below) doesn’t feel big enough to explain a difference in emigration rates of ~15% vs. ~100%.

The ideal of Israel - a brotherhood of the devout, dedicating their lives to their sacred motherland, working shoulder to shoulder to make the desert bloom (I was brought up on Leon Uris’ Exodus) – may have offered something more uplifting than the Salazar dictatorship.

But the longer I think about it the more drawn to the circular logic of emigration (or for that matter, most human behaviour). 

More Indian Jews emigrated because many Indian Jews had already emigrated. There was nothing to stay for, nothing left to be a part of. Fewer Goans emigrated because only a few Goans had emigrated. Goa still felt like home.

What next? The Indian diaspora in Israel aren’t coming home to India anytime soon. But do they still feel a connection with India? Is there a kernel of goodwill, understanding and respect for us over in Israel? Maybe there is.

I was cheered up inordinately by this picture (downloaded from the BBC). It shows Israeli Jews of Indian origin wearing whites, sporting the Indian cricket team's ODI colours.

Members of the Indian diaspora in Israel
Wearing the colours of the Indian cricket team

Next stop for the IPL: CSK fan club events in Tel Aviv and Haifa?

Whistle Podu, Israel!

Sunday 7 March 2021

Do Goans really want to become Portuguese citizens?

Mario Miranda's Goa

Suppose people from a poor third world country were given the option of being citizens of a rich first world country. Would they take it? Or leave it?

As a rule, people from poor third world countries don’t have the option of acquiring first world citizenship, so this remains a mostly theoretical question. Goa is an exception to this rule.

Goans who were Portuguese subjects before 1961, when India liberated Goa from the Salazar dictatorship, can choose to take a Portuguese passport. Their children and grandchildren can make the same choice. In effect, Goans who can trace their roots to colonial times can choose to be EU citizens.

How many of them have taken the option? My best estimate is about 15%.

I did a small poll of friends and family to guess this number among people I thought had enough context to hazard a guess. The range of guesstimates ranged from <1% to >80%. People like us don’t have an intuitive sense for a natural emigration rate.

My 15% estimate is a “soft” number because (surprisingly) there doesn’t seem to be any authoritative public data on this process. Google doesn’t throw up any crisp, credible results. Here is how I pieced together the estimate:

The most frequently quoted number in the press is that there are about 70,000 Goan-origin Portuguese citizens resident in Portugal, another 30,000 in the UK (as EU citizens before Brexit), and about 50,000 living in India (presumably on OCI visas). Adding these numbers up, it seems that about 150,000 Goans have opted for Portuguese citizenship.

How many Goans had the option?

Goa is tiny. Its population today is only about 1.5 million. This number includes migrants from the rest of India who settled in Goa after 1961, who are not eligible for a Portuguese passport.

The population of Goa in 1961 was just under 600,000. If that eligible population grew at a rate of ~1% per annum, about a 1 million would be eligible.

Taken together, it seems about 15% of eligible Goans chose EU citizenship. Or, 85% of those who could have moved from the third world to the first world chose to stay! My own guess was that at least 30% eligible Goans would have taken the EU passport because of the size-of-the-prize.

What is the size-of-the-prize these Goans are choosing not to take?

The chart below shows that trajectory of India and Portugal’s per capita GDP in today’s USD from 1961 onwards (sourced from the World Bank…btw, I love this online data visualization tool!).

At the time the Salazar dictatorship was thrown out of India, emigrating to Portugal was not that attractive. Portugal's per capita GDP was at USD 360 in today’s money. Portugal was basically just another third world dictatorship that happened to be in Europe.

However, after democracy was established in 1974, after Portugal joined the EU in 1986, income skyrocketed. Today Portuguese incomes are about USD 23,000 compared to Indian incomes of about USD 2,000.

Looking at the average Indian's income may be misleading. Goa is much more prosperous than the rest of India. Goa's per capita income is about USD 6000. After adjusting for purchasing power parity, that might mean emigration doubles real income rather than increasing it 10X. 

In general, demand for emigration vs. income follows an S shaped curve (first S shaped curve in the diagram). The promise of doubling income, off a relatively high base, clearly isn't enough to prompt a mass migration of the comfortably-off.

Migration is all about S shaped curves
Culture must also be a factor. Goans are stereotypically laid-back. They might care less about the extra income than other Indians. Most Goans don’t speak Portuguese. I can imagine that the psychic cost of learning a new language to gain a foothold in a new home must be daunting.

Perhaps the biggest factor limiting emigration is that many Goans have chosen to stay home.

This is certainly the most emotionally resonant factor for me, as a Tam Bram from Mylapore, Madras. I’d attended a school reunion in Chennai (nee Madras) a few years ago when only 2 out of the 75 science students from my class showed up. The rest were abroad. The large concentrations were in California, Texas and New Jersey. Another Tam Bram friend I was discussing this phenomenon with told me about his classmates from IIT-Roorkee. He is the only one, out of about fifty, who is still in India.

These people are not emigrating because of economic necessity. The quality of life they would have experienced in India was always going to be okay. A big part of the reason they emigrate is because others like them are also emigrating (this is the second S shaped curve on the diagram).

I guess that if enough people-like-us leave home, home doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. I guess its good that enough Goans are staying at home for Goa to still feel like Goa.


Paul Fernandes' Goa