India Before & Beyond Modi: Two Quick Notes on Two Big & Neglected Subjects

Scott Hamilton

This statue of Manilal Doctor stands in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. In Mauritius and later in Fiji, Doctor acted a lawyer and advocate for indentured workers. Working with guidance from Mahatma Gandhi, he played a vital role in freeing thousands of Indo-Fijians from a system not far removed from slavery. After being deported to New Zealand, Doctor became a tenacious advocate for Indian independence here, before returning to his homeland. Doctor deserves a statue in Suva and mention in histories of Aotearoa and the South Pacific.

1. Gandhi and the South Pacific

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Aotearoa is getting enormous media attention here, but there is a long though little-remembered tradition of Indian political leaders taking an interest in the South Pacific. Mahatma Gandhi never visited our region, but he helped change its history.

Gandhi had begun his political career campaigning for the rights of the Indian diaspora in South Africa, and he was well aware of the miserable situation that Fiji's Indian population suffered in the first decades of the twentieth century. Thousands have been brought there as indentured labourers, and lived as virtual prisoners on plantations. Gandhi dispatched the lawyer Manilal Doctor to campaign for the end of indenture and to aid indentured workers who found themselves before colonial courts.

Doctor was accepted as a leader by Fiji's Indians, and waged a series of legal battles on their behalf. Pressure from Indian nationalists was crucial in persuading Britain to abolish the indenture system in 1919. Indian workers used their new freedom of movement and speech to organise unions and stage strikes. In 1921 a strike by sugar workers and public sector workers shut down Fiji. Thousands of workers staged demonstrations in Suva, demanding not only better wages but a share of political power. A spooked colonial administration asked for and received New Zealand troops to put down the protests. On a bridge over the Nausori River a New Zealand machine gun opened fire on a group of Indo-Fijians, killing one man and wounding several. The colonial administrators deported Doctor to New Zealand, blaming him for the turmoil in Fiji.

New Zealand was not a welcoming place for an articulate and passionate Indian nationalist in 1921. The Returned Services Association had recently backed a call for a 'White New Zealand' at its national conference, on the spurious grounds that 'Asiatic' migrants were taking jobs and businesses from Pākehā veterans. A series of small but vicious anti-Indian riots had broken out in small towns. In Kihikihi's pub Pākehā drinkers attacked and brawled with a group of 'Hindus'. In Carterton a mob surrounded a home recently occupied by Indian workers, throwing stones and threatening to burn it down, and not dispersing until the police moved the Indians out. Doctor was prevented from practising law in Aotearoa, and was refused membership of the Auckland Legal Society. Showing considerable courage, he travelled to a series of small towns and gave public lectures on India and the Indian independence movement. A lecture in Dargaville attracted a large crowd and won grudging praise from local media.

Manilal Doctor lived in Mauritius for many years, and his campaigning on behalf of its Indian workers is remembered today by a large statue in the centre of its capital city of Port Louis. But Doctor remains little-known in Aotearoa. Gandhi has been given a statue outside Wellington's train station, but very few New Zealanders outside the Indian community are aware of the interest he took in the South Pacific and the role he played in the fight for liberation from indenture in Fiji.

CF Andrews was an Anglican clergyman who became famous for his friendship with Gandhi and his advocacy of Indian independence. In 1915 Andrews visited New Zealand on his way to meet Doctor in Fiji. He took the time to visit some of the small Indian communities in this country, and to report on them in letters to Gandhi and to another of his distinguished Indian friends, the poet, educator, and Nobel Leaureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore scholar JH Broomfield eventually found the letters in an archive, and published them in the New Zealand Journal of History. Andrews felt that Indians were doing well here and not suffering prejudice, but seven years later another important visitor would reach a different conclusion.

VS Srinivasa Sastri was a moderate Indian nationalist who served as India's representative to the League of Nations founding conference in 1919 and undertook other high-profile diplomatic missions. Although he was greeted politely by New Zealand's government, he was critical of local immigration laws and prejudice against Indians. In 1920, under pressure from the RSA, an hysterical media, and large parts of the union movement, the Massey government had passed an immigration law intended to keep non-whites out. Sastri said that the law and the prejudice puzzled him. Why, he asked, could people not move freely from one British possession like Fiji to another like New Zealand? And why were some British subjects perceived as inferior to others?

Sastri was coopting some of the rhetoric of British imperialists and turning it to what he perceived as Indian ends. His visit and his criticisms were widely and awkwardly reported in papers. By the twenties Indian New Zealanders had begun to protest against discrimination. Jelal Natali was an Indian migrant who became a very successful businessman, living in the King Country and later in Auckland. Natali protested against racial segregation in places like pools. Auckland's Tepid Baths reserved certain pools for Pākehā and made not only Indians but Māori use another. Natali and others protested against the refusal of barbers in towns like Hamilton and Pukekohe to cut Indian hair, and against the White New Zealand League, which was formed in Pukekohe in the '20s and soon won support from unions and MPs in many parts of the country.

Independent India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru never visited New Zealand, but he did meet Prime Minister Sid Holland at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. Three years earlier Pukekohe's Indians had named a community hall after him. The building still stands, a rebuke to the bigots who were so vociferous and successful in the 1920s.

2. The uniqueness of India and its consequences

The visit from Narendra Modi is one of a series of events that suggests Aotearoa is belatedly recognising the importance of India in the twenty-first century. But India is much more than a populous country with a booming economy and a growing military. Its unique qualities need to be recognised. Despite the best efforts of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party government, India has a combination of openness and complexity that cannot be found amongst the world's other major powers.

India is an open society: it has a massive and relatively free media, a huge trade movement and innumerable NGOs, and ancient and thriving literary, art, and musical traditions. But alongside this openness India has a radical complexity that Europe and the United States lost during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In European countries the rise of capitalism saw a drastic decline in cultural, linguistic, and institutional diversity, as enclosures, urbanisation, and proletarianisation saw power centralised and a 'national' culture and identity imposed on populations. A statistic from Graham Robb's masterful book The Discovery of France comes to mind. Robb notes that as recently as 1880, only 20% of 'French' people spoke the French language. By 1930 the figure was close to 90%. In the US colonisation ravaged indigenous societies, radically reducing diversity.

The situation in India was and is vastly different. There is no ethnic or linguistic group that comes close to being hegemonic. Tamil, Bengali, Urdu and a dozen other languages have ancient literatures. Hinduism is less a religion, in the Western sense of the word, than a diffuse collection of faiths, practices, and theologies, many of them locally and linguistically specific.

Modi's and the BJP dream of making India an ethnostate and Hinduism a religion with the unity of the great monotheisms. They have worked to marginalise religions outside Hinduism like Islam and Sikhism, but they have also attempted to standardise some Hindu practices and been hostile to versions of the faith they associate with regionalism and with relative egalitarianism, like the Shivaism of India's south. But India's complexity makes it very unlikely that Modi and his successors will achieve their dream. Both the British and the Mughal empires were forced to recognise India's complexity, and to rule large parts of the country indirectly through deals with local sovereign powers. The creation of new Indian states and the ongoing resistance to Hindi as a lingua franca show the continuing strength of centrifugal forces in the twenty-first century. It is notable that, for all his authoritarianism, Modi has never made a power grab like the one Indira and Sanjay Gandhi tried with their 'Emergency rule' in the 1970s. Modi has been too canny to avoid that disastrous overextension of central power.

China has the complexity of India, especially in its southern and western regions, but lacks India's openness. It is interesting to compare the fate of Marxist parties in the two countries. Whereas the Chinese Communist Party has become perhaps the most powerful organisation on the planet, controlling the Chinese state and preventing for many decades the development of a civil society, free media, and a legal trade union movement, India's Marxist movement splintered early, and has been very diverse ideologically and organisationally. In Bengal and in Kerala, Marxist parties have won elections and held state power, yet the Naxalite movement has famously rejected such 'reformist' tactics and waged a decades-long guerrilla war in the jungles of states like Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. India's complexity has made its Marxism complex.

The lack of complexity of the United States and Europe is one the causes of the revival of far right politics there. When they equate ethnicity with citizenship, and insist that one nation should use one language, far right groups like Britain's Restore Party and France's National Rally hark back to the nineteenth century, when centralisation and homogenisation on the home front accompanied violent imperial expansion outside Europe. Their rhetoric gains credibility and potency from real history. But India has never been run as an ethnostate. Its far right is not able to appeal to an era when one ethnic group, language, and culture was sanctioned by the state.

India's mix of openness and complexity should be especially relevant to us in Oceania. Those of us interested in ideas like decolonisation, language revival, and multiple sovereignties can study post-independence India's efforts to accommodate ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. It is easy to forget that India has the largest indigenous population in the world. Adivasi is a Hindi term that translates as 'original inhabitants'. Scholars suggest the term covers over 100 million Indians. Adivasi religions and forms of social organisation have many parallels in Oceania.

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