Image of a homeland

Within three decades of India’s independence, the brain drain raises a furore, as demographic migration to the West becomes a popular trend amongst the educated. In enlightened self-interest, the future generations of India’s freedom fighters willingly choose to break tradition and swear new allegiances. They actively ignore perceptions in the mother country of being mercenary, traitors to the nationalistic ideals of their forefathers. The assumption may be that people choosing to emigrate base their decisions on felt affinity with their destination regions. However, the emotional reactivity that tends to surface later suggests that the choice may have been economic opportunism.

A century or two earlier, while India was a colony, it was routine to forcibly shunt workers to other lands as cheap manual labour. The colonizers then decide to harness the Indian intellect as well, to increase profitability. The “Baboo culture” is thus born - that is, educated Indians, the Baboos, inducted to maintain the system, become the backbone of bureaucratic functioning. Education in India is structured along Western lines, replacing the indigenous universities of its more ancient civilization. Missionary schools spring up all around the country dispensing knowledge and conversions to Christianity. University colleges for higher studies open doors to Western sciences in the presidencies of the north, south, east and west. Obviously, the medium of study is also mainly English.

About the first quarter of the twentieth century, things begin to change politically. Satyagrahis (freedom fighters) burn symbols of Western affluence, clothes, etc., on the streets as demands to end colonial rule gain momentum. Eventually, independence is achieved. But the price of freedom, people realize, is empty coffers. Almost overnight, the erstwhile rich colony is stripped of its wealth. The Partition that carves Pakistan out of undivided India displaces thousands on the grounds of religion. Hindu families in Pakistan and Muslims in the new India are evicted from their respective homelands and pushed across the new borders.  The thousands upon thousands that are forcibly unsettled, that lose their homes, their lands, their families and their very identity in the political machinations, feel that they go from frying pan into fire. Ironically, they preferred to forge bonds with their erstwhile masters, and rage at one another. The traumatic wounds of this separation continue to bleed to this day between neighbours in the sub-continent.

At independence, there are about six hundred kingdoms and princely states in India. It is a momentuous task to bring them under the banner of a secular, democratic republic. Obviously, no consensus can be reached on elevating any one regional tongue over others as the national language, and there are twenty-two of them officially, along with thousands of dialects. English, the once foreign tongue, is the common medium of communication around the country, indianizing according to the grammar and speech patterns of each state. The bureaucratic system also survives social and political turmoil. Even today, the country’s civil administration is sustained by the “baboodom” of yore. It functions as before with paper files and manual entries, is loath to adapt to the modernity of electronic communications, and its incumbents often occupy the same spaces and look very much like their predecessors of that bygone era.

 

The traditional joint family structure that society is built upon disintegrates, post independence. The extended branches of family are now often separated by the new borders. Each splintered segment is compelled to find their own financial stability. The outlook towards women also has to change. For economic reasons, their education links to employment for the first time. Learning from European and Anglo-Indian teachers becomes a matter of course for boys and girls born in the new democracy. In the early days, knowledge dissembled is swallowed unquestioningly. What comes out of the Book is gospel truth – including for instance, nursery tales picturizing the white mother as thinner, prettier and smarter than any other, black, red or yellow!

No surprise then that the children learn to identify more with blonde hair, blue eyes, and the English language than they can with their own shattered roots. The image of the “homeland” also blurs. In the 1970s and ’80s, skilled young adults being westward bound are perhaps the logical conclusion to the childhood aspirations.

Moreover, the leaders of the new India struggle to run the fledgling democracy. The country joins the ranks of penurious developing nations. The people that had sought to become their own masters find they have to seek aid just to get by. Clearly, it will take decades for India to be at par with the leading nations. Getting out to richer pastures makes most economic sense. Besides, the architects of the new democracy failed to include compulsory service to the nation in the constitutional duties for its citizens and hence, the governments watch helplessly as new crops of graduates fly away to bring fame and fortune to their overseas employers. The brain drain leaves a vacuous workforce in the nation that, thinking future, nurtures the cream of its youth through years of subsidized education. The countries that grew fat on the gullibility of Asia and Africa are able to call the shots in the reconstruction of the nations they previously ravaged. They are now the lands of plenty beckoning India’s new intelligentsia.

 

Traditional values in India base on strong family relationships across generations. The family buffers its members against adversity, providing the social security and support the state cannot. Children live with their parents and care for them in old age. These are the just rewards for the many sacrifices they make to raise them to adulthood. But in the new reality, the elderly left behind in India find themselves unable to cope with living alone or in the care of hired help. Bereft of the traditional extended family environment they have grown to expect, their emotional suffering is acute.

The immigrant communities soon find out that their relinquished citizenship does not guarantee integration into the new society in the West. People brought up on collectivistic values gradually realize that multiculturalism in the West is a patchwork of demographic fractions maintaining minimal social interrelationships outside of work. While socializing in distinctly dissimilar cultures is difficult in itself, the immigrants from the Asian sub-continent and Africa also carry the colonized stigma. Consequently, each social group becomes inward-looking, fearing the decimation of their unique cultural identity. Realizing perhaps a little late that money is not everything, their focus shifts to forging strong intra-group bonds. They form a Little India, a Chinatown and so on, to preserve culture through the associations, norms, customs and rituals experienced in childhood. These become the heritage to keep alive in their adopted homelands thousands of miles away from their origins.

First-generation immigrants probably carry a suppressed sense of guilt that they abandon their familial duties for riches. Indeed, they are more strident in their attempts to recreate the way things were back home. They demand obedience and respect from their offspring in the mould of the traditional culture. They dream of establishing continuity with the past they renounced a few decades ago, including the segregation of gender. But often, they are unaware that the homeland itself has evolved beyond that point, while they cling to some obsolete image of it. Children reared in the West are caught between cultures. On the one hand, they imbibe the liberalness of the here-and-now environment they live in. On the other, they are bombarded with parental projections of there-and-then traditions that scarcely match their present experience of life. In a new cycle of change, this dichotomous image of a homeland may seem alien and meaningless to the rebellious young. The older generations thereby perceive their liberal leanings as mercenary, traitors to the cultural ideals of their forefathers...