Perhaps the fear is that, with dual citizenship granted, there is not enough new for the government to offer the pravasis each time. But that is, in my view, beside the point. The interactions are worthwhile as ends in themselves. No doubt this will mean putting up with new demands from NRIs — voting rights, for instance (India, shamefully, is one of the few democracies that denies the vote to its own expatriate citizens). But so what? A government that seeks the allegiance, support, and money of its diaspora should also be willing to be accountable to it. Hosting a forum once a year where the pravasis can make their views known seems to me a very small price to pay indeed.
The dialogue between India and its diaspora has only just begun. Let us not interrupt it.
*
“Oh, you'll feel right at home,” a friend from Delhi said when she learned I was traveling to the Gulf for the first time. “The place is crawling with Indians. And most of them aren't just Indians, they're Keralites like you.”
This didn't entirely surprise me. My home state of Kerala, with its long sliver of coastline, had long been known for its intrepid travelers. Keralites had plied the waters of the Arabian Sea for millennia, taking cloth and spices to the Arab world, and returning with dates — and gold. Keralites sailed to the Gulf as if it were an outpost of their own land. They brought back wealth and ideas. Islam came to Kerala on the lips of traders and travelers, not by the sword. A society evolved in Kerala of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews living amicably side by side, open to the influences of the rest of the world. The Chinese came, and either acquired or left behind their fabled fishing-nets. Keralite sailors went to China, and returned with the favorite cooking pot of the Kerala housewife, a wok known in Malayalam as a cheen-chetti—literally, a “Chinese pot.” Xenophobia is as unknown to the Keralite as snow is to a Bedouin.
As a result, Keralites are all too willing to travel to make their fortunes. And harsh economic reality makes travel necessary. Kerala is an overcrowded place with little industry, so many Keralites have no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Under the British, the route to advancement for hardworking Kerala men was to learn to type in English and take up clerical work in cities across the subcontinent.
So it was entirely in keeping with the Kerala spirit that, when oil-fueled prosperity caused a boom in the Gulf countries in the 1970s, the people of my home state leapt at the opportunities that arose. There was far more work available than locals to do it, and so Keralites flocked to the Gulf in droves. They took every job, from salesclerks in shops to schoolteachers and yes, stenographers. Perhaps a million Keralites have worked in the Gulf at one time or another; it is estimated that they account for a quarter of all the expatriate workers who have lent their sweat to the Gulf sheikhdoms. At one point in the late 1970s, it was reliably reported that the most populous ethnic group in the Gulf state of Bahrain was not Bahrainis but Keralites.
A generation later, this is no longer true. Economies were not the only things that boomed in the Gulf; demography did, too, and many of the Gulf states doubled and even trebled their populations, leaving fewer openings for foreigners to fill. War and terrorism have not diminished the attractiveness of Gulf salaries, but the first Gulf war witnessed the expulsions of Keralite labor from Kuwait and some of its neighbors, and, though many returned, the numbers just aren't the same. No longer does every other Kerala family boast of at least one member who is remitting part of a Gulf salary home every month. The Malabar Coast is dotted with incongruously fancy abodes rising among thatched-roof dwellings, built on the proceeds of employment in the “Gelf” (as Keralites pronounce it). But today there are fewer garish new mansions being built in Kerala's villages. So I wasn't as sanguine as my Delhiite friend. “I'll believe it,” I replied, “when I see it.”
Indeed, when I landed in Doha, the capital of the Emirate of Qatar, to be greeted by a young Arab in flowing robes and then driven to my hotel by a chauffeur who spoke only Arabic, I made a mental note to tell my friend how out of date her information was. And there seemed to be more Romanians than Indians on the staff of my five-star hotel. But then, for my first dinner in the country, my host invited me to a fancy restaurant on the water's edge, and I realized I should have stowed my skepticism. The maître d’ who greeted us bore a common Muslim name — but he had only to utter a few words to give his identity away. The accent was unmistakable: he was a Keralite. It was the same story with the waiter who took our order and the busboy who cleared the dishes. “Where are you from?” I asked each of them in Malayalam as soon as I heard their accent, each time earning an enthusiastic response and terrific service.
The next day, I visited the offices of Qatar's leading English-language newspaper, the Gulf Times. I was formally received by the editor in chief, a distinguished Arab gentleman in robes whose modest conversational English suggested he served as the paper's presiding deity rather than as the wielder of the blue pencil. That role clearly belonged to his vice editor, an experienced Englishman from Liverpool, who duly suggested that I might wish to pay a visit to the newsroom. I gladly shook hands with each of the journalists on duty. And then it struck me: every single one of them, without exception, was from my home state.
“Is there anyone here who isn't from Kerala?” I rather crassly asked the news editor, K. T. Chacko, who was taking me around.
“Oh, there's Ramesh Mathew,” came the reply. “He's from Bombay.” A sheepish look came over the news editor's face. “But his parents were from Kerala.”
Clearly my Delhi friend was absolutely right. Even Doubting Thomas would have felt right at home.
*
“Here,” said Mr. Shankardass, leading me to his garden, “we live in heaven.”
I looked around the lush African foliage, multicolored flowers ablaze amid the verdant Nairobi green. “It certainly looks like paradise,” I replied.
“I don't mean the garden,” my eighty-six-year-old host replied. “I mean Kenya.” Mr. Shankardass's garden was a metaphor: a fertile place in magnificent bloom, it stood for the life that Indians were able to lead in this corner of East Africa.
Mr. Shankardass and his wife were both born in Kenya, when it was a British colony. They had grown up amid anticolonial ferment, in which most Asians — descended mainly from nineteenth-century migrants and indentured workers from the Indian subcontinent — made common cause with their African fellow subjects. But when independence came, some Africans looked on the Asians as inter-lopers, foreigners depriving the locals of jobs and economic opportunity. In next-door Uganda in 1972, the dictator Idi Amin gave his entire Asian population seventy-two hours to leave the country for good. The mass expulsion of Ugandan Asians, mainly people who had never known any other home, sent tremors through the Asian community in Kenya and Tanzania as well. But their fears proved unfounded. Asians stayed on in Kenya as honored and respected citizens, building flourishing businesses and excelling in the professions. Mr. Shankardass's garden was emblematic of that.
But I couldn't help wondering, as I devoured a delicious Punjabi lunch on his porch with three generations of his Kenya-born family, whether the garden was an oasis as well, isolating the Asians from the Africans among whom they prospered. Indians abroad are often an insular people, focusing on their own community, customs, and (as I could savor it) cuisine. Did Mr. Shankardass's heaven have room for African angels, too?