Farrukh Dhondy | Will India too leave divided histories', like US & Britain?

“I never believed that caterpillars

Would fly on sprouted wings

Or why poets hearing chirpings

Could say the nightingale sings

Or that all the people born

Within minutes on the same day

Were destined to a certain path

Along this Milky way

Or that scattered haphazard stars

Make shapes in the night sky

So, tell me fellow traveller,

Has beauty passed me by? “

From The Ruins of Bachchoo by Bachchoo

The mass protests occasioned by the killing of black citizens by the American police gave a universal and spectacular boost to the Black Lives Matter movement founded several years ago. The current phase of support has had some expected and some unexpected corollaries.

The demonstrations in the US resulted in a battlefield of verbal swordplay – and in this world of Twitters, Instagrammatic jitters and Facebook litters, that’s not surprising. Everyone in the world thinks they have something to say which amounts to news or wisdom.

One predictable consequence was that the BBC and national theatrical organisations announced that they would set aside funds and make space to include people of “diverse” origins and proclivities.

An unpredictable consequence was the statement from the supermarket chain Sainsbury who announced its intolerance of racism: “We proudly represent and serve our diverse society, and anyone who does not want to shop with an inclusive retailer is welcome to shop elsewhere.” Now Sainsbury is 22 per cent owned by Qatar and a recent UN report said that country practices “structural racial discrimination through a de facto caste system based on national origin”. Under this system, European, North American, Australian and Arab nationals “systematically enjoy greater human rights protections than South Asian and sub-Saharan nationalities”.

I am the proud holder, gentle reader, of both a British passport and enjoy the status of an Overseas Citizen of my native India. The word “nationality” then is an ambivalent one. Will I enjoy full human rights in Qatar? And would Barack and Michelle Obama? I shall keep going to Sainsbury, but Qatar? Maybe not.

One of the consequences of the public explosion that was BLM is that people in Britain who were deemed to have had a background of political activity in the cause of justice and progress for the immigrant population are in demand to speak and comment on the media.

For most of my short and happy life, from the late 1960s, gentle reader, I have been, I hope, an energetic (if nothing else) member, first of the Indian Workers’ Association of Leicester, then of the British Black Panther Movement and then of the collective Race Today.

I am aware that at the time one subscribed to the ideology and vigorous activity of these organisations, which entailed demonstrating in favour of demands, propaganda and relentless agitation, pamphleteering and making a nuisance of oneself by battling the police and taking the long march through the institutions of Britain to ensure equality and progress, one didn’t think of “history”. Whew! (Kamaal hein! Did you really do all that? -Ed. Hanh yaar, read my autobiographical fiction – fd. Bathaya na toojhey, no advertising! -Ed.)

So, the BBC and filmmakers, documentary producers and newspapers and blogwallahs have been turning up by phone or Zoom, or physically with cameras, to ask all the colleagues from those days about the determinations, events and campaigns that we undertook. They now want to call it history, but those who were in it never think it is. Or perhaps people like the Mahatma, or Napoleon or Churchill do.

In this flurry of enquiry and interviews, apart from recounting the “history” of campaigns and exploits, I’ve been repeatedly asked what one should make of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite meetings with their organisers and asking them very specific questions, I still don’t know that they are an organisation with a structure, a membership, clear aims and staying power. What one can see is that the upheaval they have caused, perhaps with the resources of the social media at their disposal, brings to the fore a singular fact.

America is a nation with roughly two parallel “histories”, or more accurately two distinct experiences of that single history. The Africans were brought to America as slaves and have that cruel past, however hard they had fought against it. The white nation, consisting of the descendants of refugees from European persecution and the “wretched of the earth” in search of liberty, have the inheritance, however problematic, of the master race. If the BLM movement did a single thing, it pointed to this history and made the world see that a very substantial section of the contemporary American population, black and white, want to leave this divided history as just that. A new dawn?

So too in Britain, where the new communities carry with them the histories of colonialism. Immigrants from South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa were not brought or allowed into Britain to regale it with Carnival or to feed it tandoori chicken. They came as cheap labour for the sectors of the economy abandoned by the white working class. As such, they brought with them the history of oppression and fought in several ways over the past six decades for social and political equality. The mass support, “diverse” and white for BLM, indicates that Britain too wants to leave divided histories behind.

And India?