Fiji's surprises and extremes can show more when compared to other complex realities than when measured against an ideal type of normal governance. To put this differently, Fiji is not simply a successful, a normal, or a failed state. Fiji's troubles are part of the failure of a global nation-state system. Multiple, partial, all too common, and increasingly general failures of the theory of self-determination in reality, I think, are the cardinal problem for the political anthropology of our times. Many of these problems are well known. One of the best sources for contemplation of them is the magisterial review of UN declarations, protocols and treaties compiled by Brij Lal and others in the 1996 Fiji constitutional review document, *Towards a United Future* (Reeves, Vakatora and Lal 1996)*.* Other problems are more obvious in reality than theory, notably the prevalence of political armies, military governments as an alternative grammar to the relationship of nation and state, and/or states in perduring military occupation of part or even all of their citizenry, with or without such a legitimating 'political army' (sometimes legitimacy depends on who you ask). Here, some new comparisons may be rewarding. Many modes of comparative study of Fiji's politics have already been fruitful: much has been gained by comparing Fiji to other Pacific Island histories, as Stewart Firth (2000), for example, has brilliantly shown, along with many others including Doug Munro (1990), Epeli Hauʻofa (1993), and Nicholas Thomas (1991). The comparison of the indentured labor colonies of the British Empire has its own political and social stories to tell, with insights in particular from Brackette Williams (1991), and much to be learned from the ethnographies of Thomas Blom Hansen (2012), Viranjini Munasinghe (2001), Aisha Khan (2004) and others. The questions of racism and communalism in Empire have drawn many to compare the political duality in Fiji with that of South Asia's Hindu/Muslim politics and the traumas of partition (see also Kaplan and Kelly 2017).

A different comparison will highlight different local and global patterns. Especially because of the increasing role, and increasing strangeness, of Fiji's military in government, let us compare Fiji's political trajectory to that of the part of our planet that has been most persistently dominated by military government in the era of decolonization. That is the Asian Highlands.

## **Highland Asia's Endless Warfare: India's Other Decolonization Trauma, and What Nehru Found "Absurd"**

Compared to military incursions in many locations in Asia's Highlands, Fiji's coups are small affairs. Afghanistan is now deep into its second decade of US counterinsurgency occupation, and that after a decade of US-backed war against Soviet occupation engineered by Pakistan's Directorate of Inter-services Intelligence (ISI), and then the rise of the Taliban. Death tolls from militarized conflict in Afghanistan since World War II are in the millions, and military conflict has disrupted everyone's lives. Pakistan, too, has lived a heavily militarized and violent half century, its own highlands held in amber in striking continuation of British colonial indirect rule policy, and simultaneously managed as a conduit for the episodically continuing warfare in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Before supposing that the military conflicts of the Highlands are somehow determined by Islam and jihad, notice the episodically raging and simmering conflicts, also, in Tibet, and the struggles in Nepal (the only major independent nation-state in the Highlands) and the fifty years of Indian army occupation in Northeast India, where twice as many people have died in counterinsurgency occupation violence as have died in Kashmir. I am unaware that anyone has the full story on violence, conquest, and social reorganization in Yunnan. From the days of the Long March through its sudden prominence for Chiang Kai-shek and the Burma Road in World War II, Yunnan transformed from a sleepy outback into a strategic conduit. And meanwhile the extraordinary unraveling of Burma's democratic order, its civil wars and long military dictatorship changed utterly what the Burma Road offered China, though China clearly has never forgotten or given up on its plan for Burma and commercial development. If everything from Tibet to Burma is evidence against blaming Islam for highland political strife, highland Burma's story among many should caution us, also, against ascribing highland struggles mainly to the Cold War or other larger geopolitics. Let us track the rise of military government in the era of nation-states by considering the region with so many, from Afghanistan and Pakistan and Kashmir to Tibet, Nepal, and Yunnan, to Northeast India and Burma. While religious conflicts and Cold War proxy-fighting will be important, we have another story to unearth in this long and sad history: to put it simply, and oversimply, the fate of tribes in the era of nation-states. Without a quasi-evolutionary view of the tribal as primitive (in contrast, e.g., to Ahmed 2013), Fiji's fate hinges on the category itself, and a unique extreme sympathy. Fiji was shaped and is still path-dependent on a unique British sympathy for the people they saw as tribal, a sympathy sufficient to justify precedence for Fijian chiefly claims of sovereign right. Why did colonial Fiji insist on what Nehru found "absurd"? Let us seek to understand this strangeness in Fiji amidst the devastating ubiquity of military occupations more generally.

Consociational democratic theorists often point at India's partition and Hindu/ Muslim minority issues in both India and Pakistan as fertile ground for testing conceptions of community, minority, and democracy, with South Asia's partition seen as the failure of its potential for consociation. But it may not solve the only, or most important, problems with postcolonial states if the cosmopolitan world simply teaches reliance on power-sharing to ameliorate the unresolvable among citizens' differences in cultural and religious value-orientations. Here we learn about sustained, perduring structures of violence from the other trauma of South Asia's decolonization. In the interests of time and to insure that we move from whole to part, our story starts long after it actually began, and we barely touch on its roots, above all looking over the shoulders of the famous progressive anticolonialist, Jawaharlal Nehru. Thus we will start with the real impact of the famous 1955 African-Asian Conference at Bandung on Highland Asia to clarify why, in a range of styles, the substance of politics in Highland Asia from Afghanistan to Burma has been endless military rule, usually with explicit impunity for military violence against civilians (from China's endless imprisonments and the American drones and their 'collateral damage,' among the most imperious, to India's staged 'encounter killings' of Northeast dissidents, among the most hypocritical).

This account of the Bandung Conference, examining Bandung from the points of view of the one hundred million people who live in Highland Asia, will not follow the typical modes for writing the Bandung Conference story. 7 Yes, at Bandung, Asian leaders took control of Asia's political destiny. But in the same moment, one hundred million people lost their last best chance at a right to self-determine via independent nation and state. There were no representatives of Tibet invited to the table at Bandung. And Tibet is merely the most charismatic of many highland groups whose diplomatic and military claims on nationhood and statehood were neglected. Consider for example the Karen on the Thai Burma border, seven million, in the 1940s armed, trained and organized by the British Special Forces to fight the Japanese, then abandoned when the keys to the one-time kingdom were handed by the British, in 1948, to leaders of the Burman lowlanders, most of whom had allied with the Japanese. The Naga, the Wa, and myriad other highlander groups would have similar stories to tell: what some Pathan thought, and more important, did about the partition of India and Pakistan started the troubles that have never ended for semi-partitioned Kashmir, without any recognition of a Kashmiri nation, let alone a Pathan one. 8 Jean Michaud (2006), Willem van Schendel (2005) and James Scott (2009) have led scholarly reconsideration of these highlands (uplands, massif) as a geographical,

7 On the model of Henry Louis Gates's (1991) critique of "Critical Fanonism," let us resist "Critical Bandungism." Gates argued that a generation of postcolonial theorists were over-reading Frantz Fanon and misrecognizing his French roots, because they wanted a social theorist to proclaim authentic voice of the colonized, the third world, the global south, the wretched of the earth. Similarly, not only in the non-aligned movement itself but in global nostalgia for its quest for a third way outside of the soviet communism and western capitalism, there was vast hope to see only some things, and not others, planned and produced out of the diplomatic discussions at the Africa-Asia Conference in Bandung.

8 On the Wa, see Fiskesjö (2010). On Kashmir and on Northeast India, a good place to start is Ramchandra Guha (2007); for Northeast India see also Baruah (2005).

historical, and political entity – here termed not 'Zomia' but the more user-friendly Highland Asia, or Asian Highlands. Leaving aside geographic determinism, leaving aside any romantic notion of the region as culturally anarchist, and above all, leaving aside the British allochronic cultural fantasy that the region was tribal in the sense of primitive, we reconsider the fate of the Highlands at Bandung, in effect at the moment where James Scott's more romantic and geographic story leaves off, after World War II and ensuing events have engaged what Scott (2009) calls "distance demolishing technologies" to make Highland Asia a part of the rest of the world. What happened to the Highlands at the Bandung Conference?

In short, Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou En Lai made a very large deal, a deal all about borders, metaphorical and literal. The deal was already made in outline the year before, in conversations between them in Delhi in 1954. Each made major concessions. Zhou, against Mao's advice, sought a diplomatic foundation for 'peaceful coexistence' with his neighboring states. Arriving at Bandung with the experience of tens of millions of war deaths behind him, from China's World War II through Revolution and warfare in Korea and Vietnam, Zhou led an exhausted and depleted warfare state. He was willing to sign on to the United Nations rules and definitions for legitimate and illegitimate warfare, and even rules against political intervention into other countries. 9 Nehru, contrapositively, was willing to act outside of the UN's mantle, despite his achievements there, and challenged the West's Cold War by planning Asian history in Asia, for Asia. 10 Reflecting careful compromises and strong political will, the final Bandung communiqué was about other things too. It famously condemned colonialism in all its manifestations. 11 In its ten points, built from seven drafted by Zhou, Nehru, and the Burmans, it added as point one an endorsement of the UN charter on human rights, and in its last two points called for economic and social cooperation among its signatories. From this the story of birth of a non-

9 Mao, like Che Guevarra a decade later and elsewhere, was highly skeptical that the political lackeys of global capital (a category in which Mao included Nehru) could be trusted to stay peaceful and abide while a socialist revolution consolidated. Four years later, when the Dalai Lama fled from China to India, Mao was privately critical of Zhou and publicly of Nehru, and his unforgiving diplomatic criticism played a major role in the increasingly hostile exchanges between India and China that led three years later to the Sino-Indian border war. This war, a classically Maoist exercise in demonstrating that power flowed from the barrel of a gun, enabled China to declare exactly where the borders would be and left Nehru more bitter than any political event in his life (Ramachandra Guha 1999, 2007).

10 See also Mazower (2009) on Nehru's 1946 UN triumph versus Smuts and global racism, and Ramchandra Guha (2007) on the UN's deliberate reconfiguration of Kashmir politics in a mode that stymied Nehru's effort to mobilize the UN against Pakistan. In 1955 the UN still refused to recognize the legitimacy of Mao and Zhou's China, but Zhou was willing even to abandon the phrase "peaceful coexistence," and redeploy rhetoric from the UN charter (Wright 1956), to enable in substance Nehru and Zhou's deal to settle borders and sovereignties and end legitimate war in Asia – which was to say, between states in Asia, not between each state and those resisting among its claimed citizenry.

11 Zhou ignored the anti-Soviet debate leading to this phrasing and insisted it referred only to European empires. "There cannot possibly be any other interpretation," he told the National People's Congress in May 1955 (Kahin 1956: 62).

aligned movement has real roots. But the remaining seven points are an expansion and consolidation of the five-point deal between Nehru and Zhou, which was also accepted by Burma's rulers before the Bandung conference began: a deal for recognition, non-intervention, and respect for settled borders of three new nation-states, India, China, and Burma. The observers of Bandung from the Nanyang (overseas Chinese) world trusted Nehru little and Zhou less, and argued that the non-intervention promise was never seriously embraced by the mainland Chinese state. 12 But at Bandung this sovereignty question was basic: would Revolutionary China, with its updated doctrines founded on Lenin's united front strategy and permanent revolution, would this China seek to claim via sovereign authority over Southeast Asia's tens of millions of Chinese-heritage residents a right to rework government across Southeast Asia? Zhou, cognizantly, was trading away any sovereign claim of right to sponsor Southeast Asian revolution. And what he was getting in return was not small: it was Tibet. Nehru agreed, first of all in Delhi in 1954, to withdraw the remnants of an originally British claim to suzerainty in Tibet, a small chain of sleepy post-offices with armed guards styled as government outposts. He also agreed, generally, not to interfere in future events there, construed as 'internal' matters for China. In return he got a promise of peace and room for national industrial development policies, all the rage in the mid-twentieth century on all sides of the Cold War. Nehru was trading for peace and prosperity, and he traded away other people's freedom. This did not happen by accident. In 1956 he met the Dalai Lama for the first time, and the Dalai Lama managed to find, in a private garden walk, the occasion to brief Nehru about efforts to organize resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He implored Nehru for help, much preferred to that of the American CIA. It would not be fair to say, of this meeting, that Nehru did nothing. In fact, he returned with the Dalai Lama, who was there as part of Zhou En Lai's entourage for this diplomatic visit, and continued to negotiate with Zhou.

Any attribution of a particular motive to a Nehruvian action, for example his military occupation of Kashmir, has to reckon with the many levels and types of intellectual tensions that organize his thinking. 13 Let us outline not his motives but

12 Here see also Tan and Acharya (2008). The Singaporean and other Southeast Asian skepticism that Mao's state accepted Zhou's commitment to peaceful coexistence had evidence and consequences. In an era informed by Lenin's advice that revolutionary parties form 'united fronts' with bourgeois parties to decolonize, and then betray them, the 1960s were scene of tense suspicion and violently exploded alliances: after the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, while China's left led a succession of cultural revolutions against Zhou's state, Singapore's PAP acceded to the 'Cold Store' of its leftists, arrested before elections, and 1964 became Indonesia's year of living dangerously, in which erstwhile allies turned murderously onto Indonesia's Marxist left, killing a half-million people. And even the good fences of partition could not bring peaceful coexistence to North and South Vietnam.

13 At present I have a book underway that addresses many dimensions of Nehru's complex decisionmaking here. Nehru is a free agent and is no one's Subaltern. To grasp many of his actions we need to consider at least seven dialectical tension points in his thinking. For example, there is his waning, originally intense commitment, to international socialist revolution (in his 1934 history lesson for Indira, he explains who Gandhi is, in Indian history, by calling him "the Lenin of India"). Second, there is his

his actions, to understand how clear and sustained the line of events was that consolidated the Indian nation-state and undermined sovereignty claims and other political claims at many locations in the highlands.

In Kashmir, on 22 October 1947, diplomat extraordinaire V.P. Menon (Source) tried to complete his exhausting diplomatic brief and arrange the political "accession," as they called it, of one of the last of over 500 so-called "princely states" into union with the nation-state of India. Most had acceded on the promise of favorable terms before India's own independence on 15 August 1947. But Kashmir resisted, the Maharaja long a rival of the Muslim-led Congress Party in his own electoral assembly, until the October "invasion" of Kashmir from its north-west by a large and unprecedentedly well-armed Pathan raiding party. Beyond doubt the new weaponry was courtesy of the new state of Pakistan; whether it was intended for border patrolling rather than the traditional raiding on the lowlands, let alone whether a war of conquest was chartered by the new Muslim state, are matters still murky and doubtful. But once Menon was in the capital on 26 October, the fearful Maharaja was immediately woken to sign a standard treaty of princely accession. While the Pathan raiders surprised the cities by turning back to their homelands, in no small part because their carts were already overladen from the abandoned towns in their path, it was the Indian Army that occupied the famous southern Kashmir valleys. Stanley Tambiah, in his modern classic study of violence, *Leveling Crowds* (1996), calls it "focalization" and "transvaluation," paired processes, when events are stripped of their contingencies, here for example Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah's leadership of the

Gandhian commitment to *satyagraha, swaraj* and *ahimsa,* i.e., insistence on the truth, self-disciplining self-rule, and nonviolence. Third, his anticolonialism, manifest for example in his efforts to negotiate on behalf of the Indian National Congress working committee the meaning of World War II as grounds for Indian participation: where, in September 1939, he and the congress pledged to join any war effort that genuinely supported democracy and freedom against fascism and imperialism (Zaidi 1985: 26), the king pledged of war of right against might (21) and viceroy, a struggle of reason, right, justice and human freedom (and not, independence) against the rule of force (and not, imperialism or colonialism) (21–23). Fourth, there is his statism, his commitment to one big union, which links to his faith in the United Nations as well as his many actions once in office that, for reasons of state, worked to consolidate central power at the expense of regional and foreign interests. Fifth, his anthropology, especially in his appointment of amateur anthropologist Verrier Elwin to a series of executive posts in control of various so-called tribal territories in newly independent India (see also his call for highlanders to sing, dance, and ignore the modern world, Nehru [1952] 2006). Sixth, his complex responses to America. While in prison during World War II, his writing *The Discovery of India* (Nehru 1946) in the end metamorphosed into a discovery of America, especially after he read Nicholas Spykman's *The Geography of the Peace* (1944) from which he confronted the theory that the future of the world would be shaped in response to the two waxing "super powers," leading Nehru to the chapter "Realism and Geopolitics, World Conquest or World Association: the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R." Seventh, and I think in sum, the influence on his vision of H.G. Wells's version of benevolent, scientific, democratic socialism (see, e.g., Wells 1920). In the end it might be his commitment to scientific solutions and his Elwinian, essentially ninteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, as well as big-state geopolitics, that led Nehru to see self-ruling Highlanders as not only dangerous but "absurd," despite his long experience of the politics of condescension.

Kashmir National Conference, closely allied with India's Congress Party. Focalization reduces complexity to a simple script, as when the complex ethnic and religious lines of Kashmir's many parts, only some of which are Muslim majority and one of which is mostly Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim, become a province with a Muslim majority and a Hindu raja. The politics of 1947 – when Mountbatten undertook personally to forestall Nehru and Jinnah, while Abdullah held out for an election to decide which country to join (which he clearly thought India would win easily), and while the Maharaja negotiated for a 'standstill' agreement in preference to an accession and merger in order to retain his title – all gets simplified to the story of a Hindu maharaja wanting the Hindu nation-state while the Muslim majority allegedly wanted the Muslim nation-state. Simplified and also falsified: that is the extreme in transvaluation, which unlike focalization is the adding of meaning, theme, and even detail to a story to render it intelligible and significant in a larger, more global narrative – here the story of Hindu-Muslim communalism which, by August 1947, was already traumatically saturated by the blood of a million and more dead.

But the transvaluation, and the real tragedy for peace, prosperity and freedom in Kashmir was yet to be locked into place. That happened in early 1948, when Nehru was stunned at the United Nations. Here, again, we need a bit of background. Michael Mazower (2009) has shown, vividly, in his book *No Enchanted Palace* about the utopian and realist diplomacy surrounding the establishment of the UN, that Nehru shocked the UN establishment with a remarkable victory in 1946. Nehru and the rest of the Indian delegation attacked South Africa for the racism of its emerging apartheid system, as another form of colonialism repugnant to global conscience. Jan Smuts, architect of the UN's original, permissive colonial policy and author of much of its black letter law on non-interference in internal affairs of member states, was correctly confident that he was on the right side of UN policy and procedure. But Nehru won the vote in the General Assembly to find instituted racism a matter of global concern and South Africa beyond the bounds of civility. That's where Mazower's story ends – as he sees it, the first glimmer of decolonized dominance in the General Assembly votes – and our story begins, the payback. In 1948, in short, Nehru was shocked when the Security Council accepted Pakistan's definition of the Kashmir issues, a malformed and incomplete border, rather than the case he himself had brought, the need to reverse an invasion. Nehru had hoped to use the UN prestige and escort to push Indian troops through the Pathan north without violence. Instead, he got a 'line of control' across the center of Kashmir at the limits of his own military occupation of the Southern and Eastern districts. This transvaluation had Cold War thematics. Both the British and Americans wanted Pakistan as an ally against the Soviets. But the payback dimension should not be discounted, as the Security Council takes back the UN from Nehru's nascent global south. And Kashmir became the irreconcilable territory, by UN deliberate choice. Pakistan, to increase pressure for a unification into Pakistan, built its ISI, Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, notorious engine of jihadist insurrectionists, to sponsor the sorts of movements in southern Kashmir that would pressure for accession into Pakistan.

Democratically inclined Sheik Abdullah was the odd man out. And even a generation later, in the wake of 9/11, ISI would still be plotting how to manipulate presences and absences of global jihad in order to gain the rest of Kashmir, oblivious to the impact of the jihadist politics they fomented elsewhere, notably Afghanistan.

Thus the prospects for a Pathanistan, in northern Kashmir and Pakistan, were never part of any serious global diplomatic discussion. While Menon signed up over 500 princely states by getting *rajas* and *nawabs* to sign accession treaties, including Manipur, an Ahom satellite state in a major rice valley in Northeast India, no one undertook similar diplomacy with the so-called 'Hill Tribes,' even though their populations were, in many cases, in the multiple millions. Neither Mountbatten, Jinnah, Nehru, nor anyone from the Congress or Muslim league ever campaigned for accession arrangements among the Pathans or, in Northeast India, with the Nagas, Kuki, or any other upland group. The English speaking, American Baptist missionary-educated Naga elite was campaigning throughout the mid and late 1940s for a Nagalim, an independent Naga nation, more fiercely after Nehru's government banned the American missionaries. The leading Naga newspaper called for it with an elegant dialogic reworking of Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Nagas, at least one faction claimed, wanted government "of the Nagas, for the Nagas, by the Nagas" (Guha 2007: 268). Congress responded by appointing ex-missionary, ex-Gandhian amateur anthropologist Verrier Elwin to manage the tribal territories. When Nehru finally visited – not the Naga hills but the adjacent, plantation-rich and six-times more populous Assam valley, on a campaign swing in 1951 – Naga leader Angami Zapu Phizo was able to present the case for Nagalim directly. Nehru avowed no knowledge of the famous story that Gandhi, meeting with Phizo shortly before his death, had advised the Naga to stay in India but affirmed their right to depart, promising to stand with them against the Indian Army if necessary. And Nehru did not say yes or no to the Naga demand. He said, "absurd." Anthropologically inflected? Nehru suggested that the Naga should be protected from the modern world, that they were "Above all … a people who sing and dance and try to enjoy life; not people who sit in stock exchanges, shout at one another and think themselves civilized" (Nehru 1952: 3). He blamed foreign missionaries, whom he thought unsympathetic to the Indian National Congress, for independence movements against India, and hoped, implicitly, that the hill tribes would abandon their Christianity. Focalization and transvaluation in the locality: since the 1950s, Christian conversion has galloped in Nagaland, and 71% of Naga adults are now registered members of the Baptist Church, which compares to Mississippi, the highest similar percentage among American states, at 51%. But finally, in justifying his hold on the hills, Nehru the statesman cited, above all, a heterogeneity of "security concerns," in one stew the problem of his Chinese and Burman borders, and also the prospect that if he acceded to independence for the Nagas, his troubles in Kashmir and even in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere would explode. Nehru was perfectly ready to override the political will of highlanders, especially when engagement with the central government would obviously be good for them – an astonishing social theory from the world leader of anticolonialism.

Finally, the clearest case of this trend is Burma, and Nehru's largely underestimated role in its history of civil war. Even the estimable historian Ramachandra Guha (2007) with his exemplary attention to Kashmir and Northeast India misses this key piece of the puzzle that is Nehru's highland policies and practices. In February 1949, the Burma highlanders came the closest to claiming sovereignty over a large state of any highland army in the postwar period – and Nehru deliberately sabotaged them. In Burma, the violence of World War II had never really ended. The Karen, the Kachin, the Shan and many other highland groups had been courted by the British and provoked to campaign against Japan's Coprosperity Sphere, which ruled lowland Burma for most of the war but never sought to penetrate the highlands except for its failed efforts to shut down the famous Burma Road. The British and even the Americans had good reason for a wartime highlands policy: the Japanese had cut off China's armies from all seaports, and 'flying the hump' was not practical as the sole means of provisioning China's army. The Allies not only managed to reopen the road connecting Mandalay to Kunming in Yunnan, but with remarkable engineering efforts they managed to build a new road from Assam through the mountains, the Ledo Road or Stillwell Road. This road connected the railhead in India with cities in reach of Chiang Kai-shek's army.

Ordinarily, military victors would remember who were their friends, and who their enemies, but other currents ran deeper in decolonizing Asia. Under pressure from both the Indian National Congress and their own wrecked finances to decolonize as quickly as possible, in 1948 the British gave the keys to Burma to the Burman government centered in Rangoon. The hills erupted in rebellion, and were vastly better prepared for actual fighting, especially Smith Dun's Karen National Union army with a long memory of continuous bloody skirmishing with Japanese and Burmans. By February, 1949, ten thousand Karen National Union soldiers surrounded Rangoon, and the nascent Burman state came to be called the 'Seven Mile Government.' The Burman Prime Minister U Nu appealed to Nehru for support and aid, and got it. U Nu's career is long and interesting. Foreign Minister in the Japanese sponsored occupation government, ally of Aung San and his successor when Aung San was assassinated in 1947, U Nu is the same Burman leader who helped Nehru and Zhou sponsor the Bandung Conference and was the third signatory to the deal between Nehru and Zhou securing the borders before that conference began. In 1962 he would lose power to Ne Win's military coup and in 1988 would fail to regain it for himself and Aung San's elected daughter Aung San Suu Kyi. But in February 1948 U Nu was desperate. And Nehru saved him. The means were subtle. Nehru brokered the ceasefire and offered to sponsor the negotiations between the sides. He then called in the British Commonwealth to mediate, for the first and only time in his career, with predictable results: gathering in Delhi, Commonwealth diplomats devised a power-sharing peace plan and declared publicly their willingness to lead the peace talks and orchestrate a plan for new government in Burma. U Nu and his leading general the future dictator Ne Win fiercely declined. By then they could afford to. Nehru had quietly but decisively rearmed and equipped the Burman national army, requiring that the Burmans keep the military support entirely secret (Bayly and Harper 2007: 464–67). The Karen National Army was pushed back into its hills, where it still holds territory today, though few states recognize its claim to be the independent nation-state Kawthulee.

We need not conclude that highland nation-states are the Shangri-La lost to history by failures to recognize true nations. The history of Nepal is sufficient to suggest problems with that interpretation. (And Veblen, as we shall see, would point us in the opposite direction, toward a terrain of state military investments and their interests that precede, bound, inform, enable and delimit every venture in citizenly sentiment.) The highlands social history and political geography – even its historic economics of highland meat traded for lowland rice, its political economy of trading and raiding, hiding and seeking – create complexes that ill fit the nation-state model. These highlands gained their social contours while functioning for a millennium on the periphery of empires (and including two perduring highland empires: the Ahom galactic polity emanating from Assam until the 1820s, and the Lamaist Tibetan Buddhist theocracy, finally destroyed, not coincidentally, in 1956, the year after the Bandung Conference; see also McGranahan 2010: 67ff). More important to us is the reconfiguration of social relations, and social regard, in the highlands worked by the British Empire, and its consequences. In short, and to speak broadly, in British eyes the lowlanders became Orientals. The vast populations of lowlanders were seen, depicted and dealt with by way of all of the attendant stereotypic characteristics: as Orientals, imagined morally suspect, deceitful, and of uncertain masculinity but vast intelligence and resourcefulness. And the highlanders were generally seen as tribal: hill tribes, imagined to be primitive, emotional more than rational, fearful of the outside world, in need of moral guidance and protection, childlike, and hyper masculine. It never surprised the British when highlanders were adept at skirmishing warfare, from the Pathans to the Karen, though they ascribed it to race rather than history. 14

The general point, here, is not about military intervention as a distortion of normal development of nation-states, but rather the opposite: that state power has, for a very long time, constituted and distributed the opportunities for states, and nations, to develop – with violence where necessary. Review of this reiterated history of coercive, military rejection of claims to sovereignty deemed 'tribal' makes the question of joining or resisting a national formation – the question, belonging to what? – less naïve. Ali Sastroamidjojo's Conference-orienting question, "Where do we stand now, we the people of Asia, in this world of ours today?" better situates the matter, as one recognizes the opportunity for nation-building, and nation-joining, as a function of larger forces. And if, indeed, military conditions of possibility are the rule, and not

14 The fascinating story of the British Army's own commitment to their fantasy, and turn to reliance on Gurkhas, and the attendant scramble in Nepal for increasing numbers of families, clans and villages to stake claims to Gurkha identity, has been well documented elsewhere (Des Chene 1991). A similar history makes ethnic Fijians valuable in the postcolonial British army (see May 2014).

the exception, for national prospects, we should neither neglect the colonial roots of most postcolonial situations, nor neglect the postcolonial appropriation – precisely, for Asia, at the Bandung Conference – of this precedent power. The British, fearful and respectful of highland warfare, but not highland politics, and no more respectful and equally fearful of lowland political aspirations, carved boundaries and built political and civil institutions according to their own anticipations and expediencies. Their empire set baseline contours and political preconditions that, at the Bandung Conference, new Asian powers deliberately locked into an order of allowed nation-states for Asia. Whether Nehru too was a racist is not the first question. He inherited an Assam already constituted, in British colonial capitalism, with an inner line sharply separating the populous lowland plantation zone from the so-called tribal highlands. While British courts carefully managed the investments and labor contracts for tens of millions of workers on myriad lowland Assam plantations, only Christian missionaries regularly entered the highlands, which knew little law of any kind, even Ahom. Thus, when Nehru called Phizo "absurd," and couldn't imagine a Pathanistan, nor allow a Burma ruled by highland groups, we need to track his own deliberate critique of colonial and postcolonial theories and realities. Nehru was highly influenced by Verrier Elwin's romantic ethnography. Nehru enabled Elwin to impose a protectionist allochronic regime that led inexorably to fifty years of bloody counterinsurgency conflict in Northeast India. But this 'anthropology,' and Nehru's own vision of progress and primitivism, owed more to nineteenth century anthropology than to the twentieth century Boasian cultural relativism, with its nostalgia for savage, natural men. Nehru's source for this imagery was, I think, the same as his source for unalloyed, ultimate confidence in science, industry, and state-led benevolent planning as the foundation for all human progress: the British social democratic intellectual leader, H.G. Wells.

Most pertinent for us, why was Fiji so different? Let's reconsider Fiji's place within a British Empire becoming Commonwealth, to grasp the distinctive politics of its tribes in a world of nation-building.

## **Tribals and Orientals in British Imperial Fiji: From Gordon's Vision to a Political Army State, and beyond It**

One reason why the Japanese military swept through Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of British Southeast Asia was because, when it came to military affairs and techniques, the Japanese were unhesitant and state of the art. A British imperial army of 80,000 fell almost immediately to a Japanese invasion force of 20,000, because most of that British defense force was sepoys from India, whom the British refused to arm with modern weaponry or train in advanced tactics. The British rarely liked the idea of armed 'Orientals,' in Fiji no more than in Asia. The very last thing the British wanted, in Fiji, was Indo-Fijians seeking to express a military potential. Ironically, the recruits for Fiji's plantations, especially the north Indian recruits, came from precisely the towns and cities that were the cachement, for centuries before, of the military labor market (Kolff 1990). Far from the image of eternal peasants uprooted from soil and oriental tradition by the lies of recruitment, Fiji's South Asian plantation laborers came from towns and villages that for centuries had seen foreign service in caravan armies make boys into men, i.e., men with financial stakes and personal alliances capable of supporting independent households and thus ready for marriage. The British Raj disarmed the caravans, and put the military labor market out of business, creating the massive dislocation and underemployment that made this recruiting belt ripe for the lies of plantation recruitment, lies especially about hardship, distance, and types of work required. And in Fiji the state deliberately sustained its hostile distance from the lives of the *girmitiyas,* "a working population and nothing more" in the words of the colony's second Governor (Kelly and Kaplan 2001b: 149).

But this notwithstanding, Fiji's history is in other ways decisively different, specifically in its Pacific Romance that Martha Kaplan (1995), Brij Lal (2010, 2011, 2012) and others have delineated in their scholarship on colonial Fiji and its contours. The very history of resistance to recognition of the sovereignty of armed, multi-million strong highland societies should signal the extraordinariness of Gordon's legal and social policies for Fiji, above all his configuration of forms of aristocracy and even sovereignty for the ethnic Fijian chiefs. Fiji, too, has in its land policies an echo of the inner line, but almost in reverse: it is tribal lands that are protected, bounded, catalogued and reserved. Gordon's land settlement plans included a very important nuance: the ethnic Fijian land reserve policy did not stop him from cutting out and assigning to the Colonial Sugar Refining (CSR) company a vast amount of Fiji's best agricultural land, and in fact his promise to leave the rest in the Fijian reserves was crucial to his ability to entice CSR, Australia's leading sugar refiner, to invest in Fiji. The plan all along was simultaneously to secure Fijian chiefly right and CSR monopsony, a plan for which Gordon credited J.W.B. Money's critique of the causes of the Mutiny in India, and the need to keep races in their places (see also Kelly 2004).

Fiji too has its official deployments of ethnological theory: rather than Verrier Elwin's love of primitivism, it had the more sober and professional Rusiate Nayacakalou, student of Raymond Firth. Nayacakalou channeled by way of Firth the evolutionary vision of Henry Maine as he advised the Great Council of Chiefs about Native Administration and managed the Native Lands Trust Board through Fiji's decolonization to the end of his life in 1972. Nayacakalou explained Fiji's political dilemmas as ethnic Fijian problems with the culture of capitalist individualism and political democracy. Drawing on Maine's famous status-to-contract vision of social evolution, he influentially declared the ethnic Fijians people of "status" and not "contract."

Critics of British policy toward ethnic Fijians in Fiji deployed as many easy evolutionary assumptions as did the champions of the policy: ethnic Fijians were either kept backward, frozen away from progress, or else protected and shepherded more slowly. Leaving aside evolutionary tropes and allochronic judgments, something very different took shape in the circuits of affection animating many British institutions in Fiji, notably the army and the Great Council of Chiefs. As the army in Fiji metamorphosed from white ('European') officers and enlisted men, to white leaders over ethnic Fijian men, to ethnic Fijian officers and men, to ethnic Fijians joining the British as well as Fijian armies, and favoring the former (see also May 2014), the army in Fiji increasingly became a nexus of ethnic Fijian sovereign expression. When its special forces led coups, its *mana* thus expressed made it the classic political army, vehicle of national self-determining by taking over the state. With no democratic give and take, Fiji then was neither a nation nor a state legitimated by contractual transaction among citizens. Nor was it a pre-emptive state, like Nehru's destroying Naga claims to sovereignty in order to protect them, a state pre-emptively protecting. Eventually, yes, the political army renewing Fijian sovereignty and ownership of Fiji would give way, in the latest, strangest coup, as the military destroyed even the Great Council of Chiefs, and ended the districting that privileged Fijian votes, in what its leader told the UN, in 2007, was the "coup to end all coups" (Fraenkel and Firth 2009: 455, 458n13). But until 2006, Fijian sovereignty, ownership, and political will asserted itself with extraordinary lack of limit, without balance of any alienation, without recognition of other right. Whereas the Wilsonian liberal nationstate paradigm relied on vast contractual rules, abjuration of all right of violence, and remade the nation from blood into law via the new being expressed by state, this Fijian nation was not alienated from kinship (especially, in Sahlins' sense of shared substance), not made in public, not even dependent on any larger justice than its own. The Indo-Fijians were not then invited to join it, could not become the *taukei* or owners of the land, nation, or state. And remarkably, despite the limited actions expected from them, they found powerful means of their own to resist, withdraw, object, and peacefully not cooperate.

"Belonging to what?" then, metamorphoses into "belonging or what?" After so many have asked what Fiji's ethnic landscape meant for prospects of postcolonial citizenship, let us ask instead about the implications, and options, for diasporic ex-Indians in the wake of Fiji's unique deployments of colonial and postcolonial state power, about the effects of Fiji's unique relations between 'tribe' and 'state,' and about the metamorphosing consequences of the vectors of sympathy ensconced in institutions of violence. We find in Fiji, from the first Governor to the last, from the already elegiac Sir Arthur Gordon of the 1870s to the unpleasantly sardonic Tim Hardy, "The Reluctant Imperialist" of the 1960s (see also Kaplan's comments), we find ensconced in the 1970 independence Constitution, a colonial and then postcolonial state remarkably different in the orientation of its implements of violence toward the relationship of state and tribe. Publishing in 2009, thus with the condescension, also, of hindsight, Hardy remembers shuttering most of the Special Branch offices uselessly probing for revolutionaries among the Indians and labor unions, and predicting that "the only serious threat facing Fiji for as long as it was possible to foresee was that, if provoked by the formation of a government perceived by Fijians to be dominated by non-indigenes, the Fiji military might stage a *coup d'etat*" (2009: 338). But Hardy's British Empire was more concerned with whether the ethnic Fijians would accept independence, than with the limits of their commitment to democracy. In fact, he recalls a "blimpish junta" of British colonials, reveling in Fiji's imperial backwater.

That blimpish junta continually warned Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs that without the crown's protection the weak, 'backward' Fijians would fall under the domination of Indian 'immigrants,' resulting in the liquidation of the system of chieftainships and the end of Fijian culture. By nature conservative in the first place, the chiefs weren't hard to convince. Indeed, the blimps' propaganda terrified them. (ibid.: 353)

Almost no one in decolonizing Fiji protested the impropriety of an army built up entirely of ethnic Fijians – not because the asymmetry was ignored, but because it was a comfort for the chiefs.

Hardy served in British and then Malaysian Sarawak before Fiji, through much of the 1960s, through the tail-end of counter-insurgency against Chinese communists, integration of Sarawak into decolonized Malaysia, the failure of Indonesian pan-Malaysian political plans, even Indonesia's year of living dangerously. He assiduously tracked actual, and increasingly pathetic, Maoist rebels in Sarawak, especially after the slaughter in Indonesia, and in 1965 gathered evidence of mainland China's refusal to send arms or funds to them.

All were happy to hear of 'O's plight and of China's refusal to help but some of the heavies in KL, London, Labuan, Washington and Kuching were none too pleased to be shown proof that one of their articles of faith – that Mao handed guns to every third-world troublemaker who asked for them – was, simply, untrue. They had exploited the line that Mao was behind every gun pointed at Western interests in Asia to support their continuous – and successful – clamour for more weaponry for themselves. They didn't change their tune. (ibid.:300)

Hardy knew how far colonial state antipathy for both Chinese and Malay political agents could go, especially antipathy for Chinese communists. Serving in postcolonial Malaysia, "a foreigner in the service of a sovereign Asian nation … I had to keep my opinions to myself" when a wrongheaded colonial identification of a Chinese village as communist led to a perimeter fence and curfew, a policy "vindictive, unjust, small-minded, politically daft and materially wasteful" (ibid.: 313). He was disgusted, more than surprised, he says, when "the Indonesian army turned its back on Malaysia and turned its weapons on its own people" (ibid.: 314).

Fiji, then, appalled Hardy differently, not especially for its state violence, since it was clearly more peaceful, but for the more complete absence of justification for it. "They spoke darkly of 'subversives' like the local Indian political leader, A.D. Patel" (ibid.: 321), but there were no actual subversives. Like New York Times political reporter Henry Kamm (1988) in Fiji a generation later, observing after Fiji's second 1987 coup the many military checkpoints, and realizing that the military were deploying a technique learned in Middle Eastern peacekeeping, against a population bereft of insurgents to catch, Hardy quickly realized in decolonizing Fiji that the state's affections and contempt were generating both ritual pomp and widespread fear. Hardy did what he could to dismantle Special Branch, he says, and left, this time, at independence.

The distribution of power is remarkably different, clearly, in the vast India shaped by the Indian National Congress, and the comparatively tiny islands of Fiji ruled through several elections after 1970 by the increasingly chiefly Alliance Party. Consideration of sovereignty frustrations among Asian highland groups more than ten times more populous than ethnic Fijians can remind us of the unique benefits, not least in recognition of the political rights of ethnic Fijians, that Gordon's original legal system provided the islands. But, this comparison suggests, Fiji's problems stem from more than the failure of its colonial and then postcolonial governments to grant, in similar full measure, recognition of citizen rights and full participation in sovereign activities for the rest of the population of its new republics. Even the idea of coup culture does not fully fathom or locate the problematic principle in its roots, which is the willingness to deploy military force on missions of culturalist counterinsurgency. Sanjib Baruah, in his brilliant monograph on Northeast India's politics, *Durable Disorder,* quotes Mrinal Miri's "admonition that the idea of a nation having a 'policy' towards part of itself is odd" (Baruah 2005: xvii). Independent Fiji inherited not just a split population, but a long colonial history of very different kinds of policies towards parts of itself, ensconced deeply in its extant social institutions. While the unbalanced social roots and sympathies of the almost entirely ethnic Fijian army made the first four coups and their ethnic vectors clearly legible as interest group politics, we should not be distracted thereby from the fundamental strangeness of the deployment of military force on a mission of cultural protection and provision. In its latest coup, the military clearly seeks to use its tools politically against all claimants of right: it now has policy for, and after all against, everyone's political aspirations.

## *Shanti* **and** *Mana,* **Grace in Exile and Redemption from Alienation: Belonging to What? Belonging or What?**

"Man needs a master," Immanuel Kant famously concluded in thesis six of his critique of all philosophies of history (Kant [1784] 1991). The end of enlightenment required public control to establish the peace necessary for advance of private reason. Kant here accepted Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ([1762] 1968) commitment to the common will as condition of possibility for private reason, but not John Locke's ([1689] 1988) more sanguine location of natural laws and interests behind the necessary violence of the state. Kant's student and trenchant critic Johann Gottfried Herder placed Kant's certitude, correctly, in the "Averroan" tradition, influenced not merely by Hobbes ([1651] 1982) but by the whole discussion of human nature renewed from Aristotelean roots by Ibn Rushd ([1178] 2017), Ibn Khaldun ([1379] 1989), and others on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. It was Herder, constituting a strong argument for constitution of society by human culture, not by political states, who declared that "man needs a master" was a pernicious and erroneous doctrine. 15 A strong cultural approach (from Herder to Durkheim to Sahlins) locates the fundamental dynamics of society in cultural wholes precedent to and inclusive of the realms and reasons of state.

A very different critique of Hobbes begins with Montesquieu. Herder's simple reversal, that "man needs no master," rendered states, especially strong states like Rome and all future conquest empires simply evil. But Montesquieu worked a sea change, much like that wrought onto Sigmund Freud by Marcel Mauss (1973). It is thanks to society that an unconscious is possible, Mauss and his heir Michel Foucault ([1976] 1978) have shown, not thanks to unconscious needs that society was constituted. Similarly, Montesquieu ([1748] 1989) showed, war begins with states and their specific means and ends. States necessitate war, Montesquieu argued, far from the Hobbesian vision of a natural war of all against all as the thing necessitating states. Humans, then, do not so much need a master as inhabit a different world when they have one. Perhaps the most trenchant, and certainly the fiercest, critic of Kant in this light is Thorstein Veblen ([1917] 1998), present at the creation of the American century, and mordantly observing its roll-out. Precisely as Woodrow Wilson at Versailles began to articulate what has eventually become known as the 'end of history' doctrine – national sovereignty as the only legitimate form of sovereignty – Veblen observed realities at odds with the mandates of theory: states coming before nations. Where Wilson depicted self-determining nations expressing their political will via states of their own, Veblen observed states ascribing duties before awarding rights. States grant citizenship and other forms of representation sometimes for some, but tax any and all in blood and treasure, Veblen argued, according to the needs not of nation but of state. Anticipating the new American problematic of 'nation-building' not as global challenge but as global fraud, Veblen saw the deepest problem in all doctrines of political necessity, dialectical and otherwise, lumping Marx and Wilson into the Kantian basket as grand teleologists. Veblen saw a simpler world, not one composed of irreducible wholes with internal dialectics, but merely one of situations that evolve; Veblen resituated the state from a Kantian to a Darwinian universe. Thereby, Veblen also resituated citizenship, rights, and duties into problems inevitably to be negotiated with extant leviathans. Veblen's point of view moves dilemmas of belonging from special case to general question: how do any and all citizens seek peace effectively?

15 "The proposition ought to be reversed: 'The man who needs a master is a mere animal; as soon as he becomes a man, a master is no longer necessary for him.'" Herder ([1800] 1966: 447).

Observing trends globally, let us list many unintended outcomes of the UN era's global distribution of self-determination in reality. New forms of elite diasporic migration, a kind of self-determination by other means, join with many other unexpected global developments, from the rise of NGOs to many new kinds of low intensity and asymmetric warfare, peacekeeping interventions, and political armies of several kinds – all this despite the American premise that it would be democracy, and not the army, that in the first instance connected the nation to the state, and, as in Fiji, vice versa. To understand the contemporary geography of anger, it is useful to grasp the problems, even the bad faith, in the Wilsonian vision of self-determination as a global economic solution: everyone to set by their actions the terms of their own fate. Self-determination comes originally from John Locke's ([1689] 1988) Protestantism of free will, versus Calvinist predestination in which God decides who finds heaven or hell in their future. Only in the hands of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles did this Christian otherworldly moral doctrine become a vision of how to arrange, or at least imagine, this-worldly fates, and in fact, this-worldly fates not of individuals but of collectives, nations with their own states. The idea made decolonization imaginable, with limited liability to ex-colonizers. It reconfigured as aid and gift all assistance to those whose economic interdependence and even simple economic dependence could henceforth be occluded. Separate but equal, as the Americans once would say approvingly.

But while the American civil rights movement reconsidered the logic of separate but equal at home in the United States, and 'super power' Cold War transvaluations disrupted efforts at peaceful coexistence between nations and states more globally, new kinds of diaspora, after decolonization, have become the exceptions that disproved the rule. Their dilemmas of belonging are not moments of failure in the order of nations and states. They are the actual reality at the limits of all citizenship, in a world where states precede and delimit the structures of opportunity. Precisely where neither self-control nor peace can be taken for granted, such dilemmas are resolvable only by the profoundest value commitments.

As in Fiji: late colonial Fiji's chiefly leadership was famously ambivalent about independence, not surprising given the grounding of their power in the valorization of cultural difference and the protections and supports of Empire. Ironically, the more Fiji's coups restored privilege, and the more the *mana* of chiefs usurped civil order, the more the resulting instability again suggested threats to settled order and the need for more secure protections. Most recently, for Fiji's latest and strangest coup, New Caledonia's Noumea Accords have unfortunately provided an all too attractive military model. In New Caledonia (to finish, here, with a military governmentality closer in many ways to contemporary Fiji's) the perduring French colonial state enforces a policy against open politics in its civil space. The Noumea Accords create highly temporary peace between indigenes and settlers by banning elections, in order to break cycles of election tension and conflict. The states in both New Caledonia and Fiji hope that demography and new economies will transform political interests. But in fact, as in the closely kindred counterinsurgency occupations in Highland Asia and elsewhere, such military suppression of democratic political activity almost inevitably generates, instead, a new and growing geography of anger. Thus Fiji has moved from the problem of Indian belonging, to the problem of anyone bearing actual rights. In quest for road maps, the military has traded the cartoons of the colonial blimpish junta for blank pieces of paper.

Compared to Burma, Tibet, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, most of Northeast India, and most of the rest of the Asian Highlands, Fiji today looks peaceful, prosperous, and even in some ways free. In Fiji, the demographics might well bring a happy ending if and when ethnic Fijians can accept democracy after all, and there is nothing like absence to make the heart grow fonder. Indo-Fijians have sustained their commitment to *shanti* – morally-uplifting peacefulness – and are already among the world's leaders in recognizing the emergent reality of global citizenship. Ethnic Fijians operate socially and politically by way of a volatile mixture of evangelism, nostalgia, rent-seeking, and cultural pride, interrupting the market models of self-interest more congruent with legitimacy for neo-liberal democracy, such as it is. That is why, for a long time now, the biggest conflicts in Fiji have not been between Indo-Fijians and ethnic Fijians but among ethnic Fijians, a trend that will continue.

This conclusion does not proffer for Fiji a general political solution, but instead observes the positive content that this postcolonial political history has rendered for Fiji's citizens and cultures, on many sides. Many ethnic Fijians, especially those not privileged in the capitalist economy, still treasure their heritage of self-definition with a tribal counter-concept, in a quest for life without alienation. This self-determination is of and for a culturally collective self, and it is as often committed to *loloma,* kindly love, as it is to the aggressions of *mana*. Indo-Fijians, meanwhile, still face the cardinal Maussian problematic of how to give without subordinating self to other, and feel existential risk regardless of whether they are staying or going. Continuing peace in Fiji depends still on whether those two goals can be reconciled, *mana* and *shanti,* regardless of how long the military keep all sides frozen via antipolitical strategies. Fiji's best hope is that anger against its antipolitical state will simultaneously be firm enough and yet moderate enough to provide the common ground on which not so much one nation as an acceptable interdependence can be realized. In fact, Fiji is ironically well positioned to pierce in practice the illusions of independence and purely self-determination, and in a shared cultural field of recognized and reconciled differences, to move toward a common future without the need, in the end, to build one nation or even to want one.

### **References**

235–49. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʿi Press in Association with the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

———. (1997) 2011. *A Vision for Change: AD Patel and the Politics of Fiji.* Canberra: ANU E Press. http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p151821/ pdf/book.pdf?referer=458.

———. 2012. *Intersections: History, Memory, Discipline.* Canberra: ANU E Press. Accessed February 15, 2018. http://press.anu.edu.au/?p=209021.

Mazower, Mark. 2009. *No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations.* Princeton: Princeton University Press.

# **7 Guests without a Host: The Indian Diaspora(s) in Mauritius**

*Burkhard Schnepel*

## **Introduction**

The ethnohistory and situation of the Indian diaspora in Mauritius today is not only well-documented in archives (see Carter 1996; Deerpalsingh and Carter 1996a, 1996b), it has also been thoroughly studied by a number of scholars. 1 Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to systematize and analyze the body of knowledge that already exists and situate it within the broader framework of the Indian diaspora. More concretely, I wish to identify seven characteristics particular to 'Persons of Indian Origin' (PIO) in Mauritius, especially in comparison with Indian diasporas elsewhere. These 'particularities' are closely linked with one another and/or build on one another. This is not to claim that one or the other cannot also be found in other Indian diasporas, but both individually and in combination they make the Mauritian case specific. Due to rather than despite this specificity, they may eventually also tell us something about the contestations and strategic maneuvers that individuals and groups in Indian diasporas engage in to make their lives possible, bearable, and even successful elsewhere in the world as well.

1 See, among others, Beejadhur (1995), Benedict (1961), Bissoondoyal and Servansing (1986), Boodhoo (1999), Carter (1995, 1996, 2000), Hazareesingh (1966, 1977), Hollup (2000), Link (2002), Meisig (1999), and Nirsimloo-Anenden (1990).

## **First Particularity: The Indian Diaspora(s) in Mauritius Has (Have) Many Different Roots and Routes**

The Indian diaspora in Mauritius is manifold and even heterogeneous in its social, caste, class, religious and linguistic respects, and, perhaps most importantly, in places of origin on the Indian subcontinent. Most of the ancestors of today's Indo-Mauritians came to the island as sugar plantation workers ('coolies') under the 'indentured labor' scheme. The scheme was introduced after 1834, when British abolished slavery. 2 The majority of the Indians shipped to Mauritius (mainly from Calcutta and Madras, but also from Bombay later in the nineteenth century) came from rural areas and belonged to the lowest and poorest castes and classes on the Indian subcontinent. 3 Later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the 'coolies' were joined by clerks, priests, and merchants from the higher castes and better-off strata of Indian society.

As for their geographical roots, almost two thirds of immigrant laborers (today roughly 700,000 Indo-Mauritians of a total 1.2 million Mauritians) came from the north of India, mainly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. These people were and are known in Mauritius as Biharis, and they spoke and sometimes speak Bhojpuri, a local north Indian variant of Hindi. Approximately the remaining third came from the south of India, being further divided into Tamil- and Telugu-speaking groups of roughly equal size. The merchants mainly came from western India, so that today three to four percent of the Indo-Mauritians are Marathis and Gujaratis who retain their own group consciousness and language affiliation. 4 Looking at religion, around 65% of Mauritius's PIOs are Hindu, 25% Muslim, and 10% Christian, with many Tamils especially having converted to Christianity. Within these categories there are also various, sometimes quite important further sub-distinctions, such as between orthodox Hindus and Arya Samaj Hindus,5 Sunni and Shiite Muslims,6 and Catholics, Protestants and Pentecostals. However, Hollup (1994: 300) prefers a categorization based on what he calls "ethnic populations." According to his estimates (based on the 1972 and 1983 censuses), Hindus make up 40.2% of the total Mauritian population (58% of PIO), Tamils 7.3% (10.5%), Telugus 3.0% (4.3%), Marathis 2.1% (3.1%), and Muslims 16.6% (24%). These various regional backgrounds, mother tongues and ethnic and religious identifications combine dynamically with other

2 On indentured labor, see especially Tinker (1974). Carter (1996), who seeks to offer a balanced picture of indentured migration by discussing both the cruelties *and* the opportunities it offered, pointedly calls it "a rescue package for sugar plantations" (1996: 19).

3 On the situation in India, see Carter (1992) and Prakash (1992).

4 On Gujarati merchants in Mauritius, see Kalla (1987).

5 On the Arya-Samaj in Mauritius, see Hollup (1995) and Ramsurrun (2001).

6 On Muslims in Mauritius, see Donath (2009), Hollup (1996), and Jahangeer-Chojo (1997, 2002).

identity-making and identity-unmaking criteria, such as education, a rural-urban divide, and differences in economic success and professional standing. 7

One should therefore be cautious in speaking of *the* Indian diaspora in Mauritius as a homogenous group. Rather, we should think of a plurality when it comes to describing and analyzing the *internal* socio-cultural, politico-economic, and religious aspects of the Indo-Mauritian diaspora(s). However, more important than these statistics is that Indo-Mauritians themselves often strategically emphasize and adopt different identities in different situations. Thus, in some situations – and in structural opposition to the other, non-Indian, inhabitants of Mauritius, as well as the island's Indo-Muslims – some PIOs may stress that their 'ancestral language' is Sanskrit and their religion Hindu, while in other situations Hindus and Muslims may point to their common Indian origin as opposed to fellow Mauritian nationals with African, Chinese, or French roots. In yet other situations, when it comes to defending their social, educational and economic privileges, well-off or well-educated Indians may ally with *Gens-de-Couleurs* and/or Franco-Mauritians of similar standing, at the expense of solidarity with rural and poor Indo-Mauritians. In other situations, internal differences may fall away, not only within the community of Indo-Mauritians, but between all ethnic groups and other communities living on Mauritius, as when Mauritius has an important soccer match against Réunion, or when relations between Mauritians and tourists are at stake. 8

In a nutshell, PIOs in Mauritius adopt multiple, overlapping, and situationally shifting 'fusion-and-fission' forms of identification, both within the category of Indo-Mauritian and when transcending this category, for example, when they see themselves as belonging to larger entities such as the Mauritian nation, or as Asians, or even as Creoles (e.g. when the southwest Indian Ocean is compared and aligned with the history and the state of affairs in the Caribbean). Some of these identifications, namely those derived from the region of origin on the Indian subcontinent, or those referring to the three main religions or language markers on Mauritius, are more important from the actors' points of view than others, and therefore tend to be 'essentialized' more strongly. 9

## **Second Particularity: Indo-Mauritians Have Established a New Life Relatively Close to 'Home'**

In the nineteenth century, 'coolies' were better off than African slaves, who were forcibly deported in chains, in terrible hygienic conditions, and under severe penal

7 In addition, an estimated 5% of Indian emigrants to Mauritius were *adivasi*s or tribals. See Hollup (2000: 222).

8 On the socio-cultural and economic impact of tourism on Mauritius, see Schnepel and Schnepel (2008, 2009a) and Schnepel (2009).

9 Plantation owners did not hesitate to make use of inner-Indian ethnic cleavages to 'divide and rule.'

regimes. The average death toll on vessels transporting Indian laborers was around three to five percent, while the death toll for slaves had been roughly ten percent. Certainly three to five percent is bad enough, and is therefore an advantage clearly to be understood in relative terms. Indian 'coolies' were also crammed into inhuman and unhygienic spaces on often old and unsafe vessels at risk of shipwreck, and were prone to the spread of epidemic diseases (see Carter 1996: 45–47). The disruptive journey through which family, neighborhood and friendship ties were severed for a long time, if not forever, as well the potentially bleak and insecure life in an unknown and often hostile world, placed a severe mental burden on those who journeyed across the 'black waters' *(kala pani)* to new shores. 10 Once safely there, communication with and remittances to families back home in India were uncertain, and a return journey would only be possible, if at all, after the standard five-year contract had been completed.

A journey to Mauritius took around eight weeks from Calcutta and six weeks from Madras or Bombay (see Carter 1996: 32). The passage to Mauritius was therefore long and hard compared to that to Sri Lanka and Burma. Moreover, from Sri Lanka and Burma it was easier to return to India frequently and to maintain some ties with home, and there it was also possible to be joined by members of one's family, caste, village, and sub-region on a larger scale. This made it possible to try and 'copy' one's socio-cultural life at home, with all its established networks of solidarity and its traditional caste-based social organization. This socially more integrated system of migration was known as *kangani.*11 In contrast, trips to Mauritius were by and large made by individuals, rather than being family, sub-caste or village affairs. While on board, one might meet neighbors or friends, or make new friends. These new relationships became known as *jehaji bhai* or 'ship brothers,' and later on the island, they could assume the character of quasi-kinship bonds. 12

Nevertheless, compared to other destinations in the world-wide indentured labor scheme,13 Mauritius was still relatively close to home. South and East African destinations as well as Malaysia were just a week or two further away and may be

10 Moreover, Carter (1996: 51) estimates that around thirteen percent of immigrants died during their first five years on the island.

11 On the *kangani* system of importing labor, see Jain (1993: 6–11).

12 The issue of caste in Mauritius deserves a separate discussion that would go beyond the scope of this article. Here it suffices to state with Hollup: "Among the Hindus of Mauritius, there is no system of hierarchically ordered groups, but caste populations still exist as kinship groups, although the endogamous groups have undergone considerable change" (1994: 298). See also Hollup (2000).

13 In all, approximately 1.5 million Indians left India as contract laborers before 1914, according to Carter (1996: 20, 22) and Tinker (1974: 62, 114). These numbers are roughly distributed as follows: Kenya 32,000; Seychelles 6,315; Reunion 26,000; South Africa 152,184; Fiji 60,965; Mauritius 453,063; Jamaica 36,412; Guadeloupe 43,326; Martinique 25,509; Trinidad 143,939; British Guiana 238,909; Dutch Guiana 34,304; Grenada 3,200; St. Vincent 2,472; St. Lucia 4,350. In this scheme, Mauritius not only received the largest number of contract laborers, it was also the first such destination. In many ways, Mauritius was used as an experiment and model for other countries. See McPherson (2009).

comparable in this respect. Destinations in the Caribbean or Fiji were so much further away (19 to 20 weeks on board) that these longer distances made a significant qualitative difference.

Indo-Mauritians who had completed their time as contract laborers could return to India, and about a third did so. However, many of these returnees did not stay in India, but re-emigrated to Mauritius, this time bringing their wives and families with them. The relative proximity of Mauritius to the Indian homeland, accompanied by the gradual improvement of postal communications and maritime transport, therefore enabled a sort of circular or chain migration to develop. The significant number of those who stayed in Mauritius, the ever-increasing number of new arrivals (among them many re-emigrants with their wives and families), and the increasing number of female coolies (which resulted in marriages and island-born offspring)14 all gradually resulted in the establishment of more traditional forms of social cohesion among Indo-Mauritians and, as we shall see in the next 'particularity,' in the important numerical strength of PIOs on Mauritius.

## **Third Particularity: The Indian Diaspora in Mauritius is Substantial in Absolute Numbers, but Even More So in Relative Numbers**

It is estimated that more than twenty million Indians live abroad today, as reflected in the statistics shown in the table next page. Two major historical waves of Indian emigration are largely responsible for these numbers. 15 The first wave consisted of migration in the nineteenth century to the plantation economies in southern, subtropical parts of the world. The second wave, starting after 1945 and arguably still continuing, has brought Indians to the industrialized countries of North America and Europe, as well as to Australia and, for several decades now, to the oil-producing Arab world. By and large, the descendants of those who came with the first wave are today regarded as Persons of Indian origin or PIO, while substantial numbers of those who came with the second wave or their descendants are Non-Resident Indians or NRIs.

The Indian diaspora on Mauritius is substantial, and exceeded in absolute numbers only by those in Great Britain, Canada, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the USA, and the United Arab Emirates. However, only Malaysia and Myanmar – two countries with their very own special *kangani* histories –

14 Towards the 1870s, it was made obligatory to have at least 40% of women on coolie-ships. At the end of the century, Indians born locally on Mauritius started to outnumber new immigrants (Carter 1996: 149).

15 For overviews, see among others Jain (1993), Schnepel (2005), van der Veer (1995), and Vertovec (2000).

#### **Table: Estimated Size of Overseas Indian Community**

These figures have been selected from the more detailed information "Estimated Size of Overseas Indian Community: Countrywise" found in Ministry of External Affairs (2002: xlvii–xlx).

had larger first wave immigration. Furthermore, in relation to the total population, the Indian diaspora in Mauritius holds *the* top position, with more than two-thirds of the population having an Indian background.

With the gradual democratization of Mauritian society from the first half of the twentieth century onwards, and the granting of full electoral and citizenship rights today,16 this demographic dominance has allowed Indians great political influence, and even assured their dominance within the Mauritian political system. Indeed, with the exception of Paul Berenger, a left-wing Franco-Mauritian who led the country for periods in the 1990s and 2000s, all Mauritian prime ministers have had an Indian background. This numerical and subsequent *political* superiority was accompanied, if not also decisively triggered and supported, by the gradual *economic* liberation and upward *social* mobility of PIOs in Mauritius. Today, substantial numbers of Indo-Mauritians are well-off and highly educated, and are thereby 'upwardly mobile' citizens. Therefore, the politico-economic and social standing of contemporary Indo-Mauritians has improved greatly when compared not only with their initial state of 'coolitude,' but also with the descendants of their former relatives and neighbors who chose to stay behind in India. 17

## **Fourth Particularity: The Indian Diaspora in Mauritius Is Not the Only One There**

According to the 1982 census (the last of its kind), the population of Mauritius totaled 1.2 million people, and was categorized as follows: Hindus 52%; Muslims 16%, Sino-Mauritians 3%, and General Population 29%. Even at first glance, therefore, it is obvious that Mauritius is a multi-ethnic and poly-religious society. This diversity is expressed by the 20 annual nationwide holidays which demonstrate that most religious and ethnic groups on the island are equally acknowledged and their interests and self-esteem are respected. Another symbol of plurality (and unity in diversity) is the national flag, which features an abstraction of the colors of the rainbow. 18

If we look at the categorizations used in the census more carefully, some incongruities appear. The distinction between Hindus and Muslims is obviously a religious

16 On democratization processes and ethnic politics in Mauritius, see Bräutigam (1997), Carroll and Carroll (1999 and 2000), Mathur (1997), and Mukonoweshuro (1991).

17 For the economic development of Indo-Mauritians, see Allen (1999: chapter 6), Carter (2002), Carter, Deerpalsingh and Govinden (2000), Metha (1995), and Srebrnik (1999).

18 For the demographic development of Mauritius, see Lutz (1994), Dinan (2003), and Royle (1995). The difficulty of categorizing sections of the Mauritian population into clearly defined and 'politically correct' groups is expressed by the fact that, during more than a century of state-run census activities, a number of different criteria were tested and rejected until, in 1982, all such endeavors were discarded. See Christopher (1992).

one, and we have already noted that the ancestors of both Hindus and Muslims in Mauritius today originally came from India, especially North India. However, given that various Muslim groups on the island have recently started to claim that they originate from the Arabian peninsula and to call Arabic (not Hindu or Urdu) their 'ancestral language,' these common local roots in India should again be emphasized. Hence, both Hindus and Muslims are *Indo*-Mauritians and were actually labelled as such in censuses until 1947, the year of India's independence and the partition into India and Pakistan. However, the third largest census group, 'Sino,' was not a religious categorization but rather one based on region of origin, namely China or East Asia. This group could be subdivided into Hakka and Cantonese speaking Chinese. Subsumed under the 'General Population' label are such heterogeneous groups as white Franco-Mauritians (accounting for 2% of the population), 'Creoles' (in the Mauritian context the descendants of African slaves) and 'Coloureds' or *'Gens de coleur'* (a hybrid category denoting the offspring of mixed, usually 'black' (female) and 'white' (male) unions who were barred from inheriting their father's estates but often received better education and other privileges, allowing them to climb the social ladder). 19 Strikingly, the descendants of former slaves and former masters now found themselves in the same demographic melting pot, one called 'General.' This indicates that, in post-colonial Mauritius, the descendants of indentured laborers had become such a majority that they could be split into two religious groups and also be distinguished from the East Asian 'Sino-group.' The unified category of 'General Population,' made up of the two distinct groups that first populated the island in the eighteenth century, can therefore be defined negatively, as all those who did not come from Asia.

Using other categorizations in the census would obviously have produced different figures. Taking regions of origin, for example, a census would have identified macro-groups as Indian, Chinese, French and African, or Europeans, who could be distinguished from Africans and Asians. If one took religion in all instances (and not only in the first two) as the criterion, the cards would have been substantially re-shuffled: not only are all sub-groups of the 'General Population' Christians, whether black, white or colored, but so are large numbers of Mauritians hailing from South India (probably subsumed under the label 'Hindu' in 1982), as well as most Sino-Mauritians. 20 Taking yet another criterion, namely that of language, would have made things both easier and more complicated. Officially, fifteen languages are spoken in Mauritius, including English, French, Kreol, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Arabic, Hakka, and Cantonese. However, in almost all interactions, a French-based Kreol is spoken, and occasionally French. Indeed, many Mauritians speak excellent French, with most of the national media also communicating in French. The official national language, however, is neither French nor

19 Numerous '*Gens de Coleur'* today are lawyers, teachers, surgeons, journalists, managers, or in similar 'middle-class' positions.

20 On religion as an 'identity marker,' see especially Eriksen (1998: 90–97).

Kreol, but English, though (or perhaps precisely because) only a minority of educated Mauritians master the language and enjoy using it. If one looks at language less as a means of communication than as a symbolic marker of identification and belonging, another dimension is added. Asked about their ancestral language or mother tongue, Indo-Mauritians in particular tend to mention languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and even Arabic, which their ancestors could barely have spoken when they arrived. This seems strange because few Indo-Mauritians have these as their native languages today, nor would have many of their ancestors or 'mothers.' While speaking Kreol in everyday life, some other Indo-Mauritians today also speak Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri or Urdu at home and/or as a second language in community affairs. However, for reasons of identity politics, Indo-Mauritians would not call Kreol, the language of the Creoles, their 'mother tongue.' 21

In Mauritius then, we find multiple, sometimes overlapping, sometimes structurally opposed identities in action and motion. Hence, Mauritius represents a quite heterogeneous conglomeration of groups, which can be classified in a number of ways, according to country or continent of origin, phenotypical characteristics, (claimed) ancestral languages, religious denominations, and socio-cultural or economic characteristics. Among these various groups on the island, PIOs constitute the majority: about two-thirds when all Indo-Mauritians are considered, and still more than 50% when only Hindus are counted. As I pointed out in 'Particularity Number One,' these PIOs can be further differentiated or divided along various lines when different criteria are applied, not only analytically (from the point of view of an outside observer), but also by the actors themselves in their dynamic and strategic responses to various situations. This fluid and shifting situation applies not only to the PIOs, but also to other groups on the island. In Eriksen's words: "The main theoretical point here is that ethnicity is, in practice, *not* an inert, categorical property of persons (although folk models tend to depict it as such), but a property of the relationship between agents acting in situations and contexts and as such, its meaning changes with the context" (1998: 98–99). 22

## **Fifth Particularity: All Mauritians Come from Elsewhere and Value Their Diasporic Links**

The fifth particularity arises out of the fourth one, but it adds another particular dimension to the overall diasporic state of affairs in Mauritius discussed so far: each and every sector of the multi-ethnic Mauritian 'rainbow' population has come from elsewhere. This means that no single group living on Mauritius today can claim

21 Several studies discuss the importance of language identification in politics in contemporary Mauritius. See, among others, Eisenlohr (2001, 2002, 2004, 2009), Hookoomsing (1986), Eriksen (1990, 1998: 75–90), and Hookoomsing, Ludwig and Schnepel (2009), Ludwig and Schnepel (2009).

22 On the issues in this section, see especially Eriksen (1998: 14–21, 47–74, 97–101).

indigeneity and hence demand rights or privileges arising from such a claim. Some groups may have been there before others or even claim to have come first. However, today any such claim to have been 'earlier comers' or 'first settlers' is less important than sheer numbers, which eventually translate into political power. The absence of any aboriginal or officially acknowledged first-comer population makes present-day inter-ethnic negotiations and identity politics somewhat unique. On Mauritius, no group can make a native claim to possession or at least privileged access to land or a resource, as we may find in Australia, the United States, or (even more comparable to the Mauritian situation) in Fiji, where Fijian groups have sought to bar the descendants of coolies from acquiring land property on the basis that only ethnic Fijians are the 'sons of the soil,' or in Trinidad, where Afro-Trinidadians claim political privileges on account of having arrived on the island first. 23

Although, or maybe exactly because, everyone on the island originally came from elsewhere,24 the idea and ideology of an original home elsewhere remains pertinent in most contemporary Mauritians lives, whether socially, politically, economically or religiously. In other words, apart from being Mauritians and Mauritian nationals (which they are and consider themselves to be), all sections of Mauritian society also consider themselves, sometimes quite significantly, as having diasporic roots and continuous diasporic links to their real and/or assumed 'homelands.' Consequently, in both ideology and practice they exhibit and are guided by a diasporic consciousness. This is complicated by the fact that, after several decades of secondary migrations starting *from* Mauritius, there are now also *Mauritian* diasporas, some of them Indo-Mauritian diasporas, most prominently in countries like Australia, South Africa, England, or France.

## **Sixth Particularity: The Mauritian Kind of Nationalism Can Be Called 'Ethnonationalism'**

The diasporic consciousness and politics are supported by the state in both internal and external policies. In Mauritius, the idea of nationhood and the state differs radically from the nineteenth-century West European prototype of 'one culture/one language/one religion/one nation/one territory/one state.' While this 'ideal' nation was seldom if ever achieved elsewhere, after independence in 1968 Mauritius had to confront its racial, socio-cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity. Attempts to build the nation and unify its elements into both a working unit and a sentimental entity had to be modelled on the well-known slogans 'unity in diversity' and the 'rainbow nation.' 25

23 On this point, see Carroll (1994), Eriksen (1992) and Srebnik (2000: 10–11).

24 This observation also applies to most of the species of flora and fauna to be found on the island today.

25 The issue of nation-building in Mauritius against the background of ethnic plurality and strong eth-

In other words, the Mauritian nation-state had to harmonize two issues which often conflict in countries around the world. On the one hand, there was the great importance that Mauritians gave and still give to their ethnicity and roots. On the other hand, there has been an urgent need to build a unified nation in which divergent interests and identity markers are peacefully and effectively brought together under one umbrella, and with a number of 'common denominators' (Eriksen 1998). So far the goal of accommodating two (for many apparently contradictory) ideologies and community-building principles has been achieved with great success. In economic terms, Mauritius has had its up and downs and its inequalities, but by and large this neoliberal 'tiger state' can boast remarkable achievements, which are no longer based solely on sugar but on a cleverly diversified economy and a powerful 'hub strategy.' Furthermore, Mauritius has managed to establish and practice a rather consensual multiparty democracy (see Nave 2000), making it "one of the few stable democracies in the postcolonial world" (Eriksen 1998: 6). Socially, despite all the conflicts of interest and communal contestations around resources, there have been relatively few cases of violent unrest since 1968, with each of these ending within days. Furthermore, these upheavals were not necessarily based on and motivated by ethnic interests, and may be better understood as youth revolts,26 or economic or class struggles.

While the Western European ideal of nationhood remains globally dominant today, Mauritius is certainly not alone in having to build the nation along other lines. In fact, the unity-in-diversity paradigm also guides other post-colonies like India and Indonesia. Indeed, after independence many other postcolonial nation-states have found either that their territorial borders had been drawn arbitrarily, cutting across ethnic and cultural groups, or that, within the framework of the new nations, a multitude of heterogeneous groups had found themselves mingled together in the new nation, or that their migrant populations had been 'shipped together' without any consideration of socio-cultural, linguistic, or religious characteristics.

The Mauritian state's policy of (multi)ethno-nationalism instead of mono-nationalism, therefore, only becomes unique if we add two other aspects to the mix. First, all ethnic identifications on the island are closely combined with and based on diasporic imaginations: ethnic discourses in Mauritius always emphasize links to other parts in the world, to other homelands. The second aspect, which makes this sixth particularity unique in a discussion of Indian diasporas, leads us directly to the last 'particularity.'

nic consciousness is exemplarily discussed in Eriksen (1998, especially pp. 137–166). See also Chazan-Gillig (2000).

26 This was most obvious in the 1999 riots, the last serious riot in Mauritius, when there were clashes between young people of all ethnic backgrounds and the police after the famous reggae/seggae musician Kaya had died under suspicious circumstances in police custody.

## **Seventh Particularity: The Role Model for Ethnic-Cum-Diasporic Identity on Mauritius Is Provided by the Indian Diaspora, Especially Its Hindu Variant**

To repeat, nation-building activities and national ideologies on Mauritius are based on the idea of the legitimate existence of a number of different ethnic groups, which are generally represented and ideally share power in proportion to their relative numerical strength. The diversity of origins of these ethnic groups means that they all share a diasporic consciousness (to some degree) and logic in which the following (interconnected) elements are given esteem and value:

As I stated, all ethnic groups share these diasporic evaluations *more or less.* I must now stress, however, that these elements are best achieved by the Hindu diaspora in Mauritius, where a sacred dimension is attached to each element. To put it the other way round, perhaps more accurately, the Indo-Mauritian version of diaspora has become so dominant that it serves as the model and ideal for other ethnic groups as well. Let us look at these elements once again, this time with a focus on the Indian diaspora:

In this Indo-Mauritian logic of diaspora, the Muslim part of the Indo-Mauritian community finds itself somewhat included or encompassed. In this ideal type and model, the Indian diaspora – which I show in Particularity 2 to be manifold and even heterogeneous in itself – is a Hindu diaspora.

This Hindu model represents the ideal, but it is seldom achieved by all. This is evident, especially, in how Mauritians of African origin fare in these respects. As far as their country of origin is concerned, Africa is too large to qualify as a sentimental 'home country.' The violent abduction of their ancestors from concrete territorial roots, and the subsequent roots- and identity-extinguishing condition of slavery have severed any factual links to specific countries,27 and have also dampened any emotional and ideational attachments to them. Moreover, in the media contemporary Africa is typically represented as a place of poverty, misery, corrupt regimes and war, making it even more difficult for Afro-Mauritians to attach positive evaluations to their 'ancestral homes.' In terms of language identity, slavery has also cut the ties to any mother tongue. Certainly, Mauritian Creole or 'Morisyen,' contains significant Bantu elements, but even its practitioners conceive of it (wrongly or not28) as a derivative form of French rather than an ancestral language. Therefore, Creole hardly qualifies as an ethnic marker for Afro-Mauritians, let alone a sacred one. In religious matters, most Creoles are Christians today. There are few 'African' elements in the praxis of the religion, which was introduced by the colonists and the former slave masters. Culturally, Mauritians clearly identify the Sega dance as Creole rather than African in origin, and see it as a cultural product that only emerged in Mauritius under the harsh conditions of slavery. 29

From the point of view of Hindu nationalists and their dominant idea of diaspora, then, the Mauritian descendants of former African slaves serve as an example of how culture and cultural identity can be lost if one's roots are severed and/or forgotten. So, all in all, the second largest group in Mauritius (around 25%), namely Mauritian Creoles, is generally seen as a deficient and incomplete version of the (Hindu) ideal of diaspora. This is strikingly expressed by the categorization of Creoles in past censuses under 'General Population' (as I pointed out above), rather than being recognized as an independent and clearly identifiable entity in their own right. 30

27 Certainly, Afro-Mauritians are sometimes called *Malgas* or *Mozambik*, referring to an assumed origin from Madagascar and Mozambique, but these designations are meant pejoratively. It is estimated that about 45% of all slaves came from Madagascar, but many of these may have come first come to Madagascar from elsewhere. See Eriksen (1998: 52) and Allen (1999: 42).

28 Linguists have investigated and discussed this point in great detail.

29 On Mauritian Sega, see Schnepel and Schnepel (2009b, 2011).

30 On this and other aspects of the so-called 'Creole malaise,' see especially Miles (1999).

## **Conclusion**

Since the mid-1990s, India has shown an increasing interest in its diasporas spread across the world. This interest has been accompanied by a number of legal, fiscal, economic, political, and socio-cultural measures, which have substantially changed interactions and exchanges between 'Mother India' and her 'children.' Indo-Mauritians have also been affected by this new policy. The introduction of a 'Persons of Indian Origin Card' in particular – which is valid for twenty years and offers many advantages for PIO (making their status comparable to that of NRIs) – has succeeded in strengthening relations between Indo-Mauritians and India (see Kantowski 2002).

The numerical predominance of PIO in Mauritius, the opening of India to PIO and NRIs, and the ever-increasing economic power and attractiveness of India in a globalized world have led to 'Indian-ness,' especially in its dominant form 'Hinduness', increasing in strength in Mauritius and in India. Consequently, Mauritius has strengthened its relationship with India on all levels, not just an economic one. The increasing interest of 'Mother India' in their NRI and PIO 'children' all over the world (and especially in their remittances) has been accompanied by Mauritian PIO's increasing interest in India and their roots there. This search for roots takes on many forms and manifestations, such as numerous individuals of Indian background visiting the Mahatma Gandhi Institute to search for archival documents relating to their ancestors.

All these particularities, individually and in sum, create a special position for the Indian diaspora in Mauritius. The Indian diaspora(s) in Mauritius, as well as the other diasporas (African, Chinese, French, English) on the island, could be called 'guests without a host.' However, if a diasporic group such as the Indian (especially the Hindu) one does manage to achieve numerical superiority, if no other group has traditional claims to land, resources or privileges, and if this diasporic group also achieves some kind of social and politico-economic standing and educational skills, then it can flourish. In a democratic environment it can even become so dominant that it turns from being a 'guest without a host to becoming the 'host.' This process can be facilitated by the original home country, if it discovers the potential its diaspora(s) has to offer. All this was the case for the Indian diasporas in Mauritius, especially for the Hindu one.

### **References**

———. 1996. "Islamic Revivalism and Political Opposition among Minority Muslims in Mauritius." *Ethnology* 35 (4): 285–300. doi:10.2307/3773871.

———. 2000. "Kinship and Marriage in the Construction of Identity and Group Boundaries among Indians in Mauritius." In *Culture, Creation, and Procreation: Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice*, edited by Monika Böck and Aparna Rao, 219–39. New York: Berghahn Books.

Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y. 1986. "Langue et Identité Ethnique: Les Langues Ancestrales à Maurice." *Journal of Mauritian Studies* 1 (2): 117–37.

———. 2002. "Islamisation Processes among Mauritian Muslims." *Internationales Asienforum* 33: 116–26.

# **8 India Beyond India: The Indian Diaspora in East Africa**

*Roman Loimeier*

## **Conceptual Framework**

Issues of communitarian organization, identity, and belonging have long informed the history of the subcontinent (today India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), and they continue to do so. Prominent examples include the *muhājirūn* in Karachi/Sindh, Hindu-Muslim strife in Gujarat, temple and mosque disputes in Uttar Pradesh and other regions, and ethnic conflict throughout the subcontinent. 1 Communitarian organization, identity and belonging are informed by variegated historical legacies, politics, religion, social and ethnic dynamics, questions of class, and respective modes of 'othering.' The question arises, however, if such dynamics have also influenced the development of the Indian diaspora, or if questions of 'belonging' have become paramount in the context of the rise of African national states. My contribution looks into this question by focusing on the development of the Indian diaspora in East Africa and Tanzania/Zanzibar in particular. Looking at a number of Indian diasporic communities in their historical context, I ask if these communities have reproduced metropolitan (i.e. Indian) communal disputes, or if they have rather sought to find a place for themselves in colonial and postcolonial East Africa.

1 For a discussion of the term 'communalism' see Peter van der Veer (1994).

### **History of the Indian Diaspora in East Africa**

Indians first arrived in East Africa in pre-recorded times, possibly more than a thousand years ago. Due to the monsoon wind system, traders who came to East Africa with the northeast monsoon (Swahili: *kazkazi,* from December to March), had to stay on the coast for several months until they could return to India or Arabia with the southwest monsoon (Swahili: *kusi,* from May to August). The monsoon wind system thus encouraged the establishment of a temporal Indian presence on the East African coast. In the 16th century, this presence was recorded by Portuguese sources and seems to have become more permanent around this time. Indeed, the pilot 'Malemo Canaqua,' who guided Vasco da Gama straight across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in 1498, was an Indian resident of Malindi (Sheriff 2010: 110). However, it was not until the early 19th century that Indian settlements in East Africa grew significantly and became more prominent.

The development of a permanent Indian presence in East Africa was connected to the expansion of the Sultanate of Oman in the 19th century. Although Oman had started to intervene on the East African coast in the mid-17th century, its position there remained marginal until the early 19th century, when the Bū Saʿīdī dynasty in Masqat realized the coast's economic value and shifted the seat of the government to Zanzibar in 1840 (see Sheriff 1987). In 1804, the Sultan of Oman had started to 'farm out' control of Zanzibar's customs to, amongst others, Indians ('Banians,' i.e. Hindus), who paid the Sultan an annual fee for the license to collect customs fees. 2 In 1818/1819, the (Hindu) Indian trader Jairam Sewji took over the lucrative position. In 1837, the Jairam Sewji family also took control of customs on the Mrima coast opposite Zanzibar. Sewji's company retained control over Zanzibar's customs until 1886, when Sultan Barghash established a government customs department (Sheriff 1987: 84, 127). 3

In 1839, a British-Omani commercial treaty allowed British subjects (including Indians from those parts of India already under British legislation) to enter Zanzibar, and to reside and trade within the Sultan's dominions along the East African Coast (Oonk 2006: 254ff). Trade subsequently increased, as did the number of Indians on the coast, from 214 in 1819 to 2,500 in 1870, and to 6,000 in the early 1900s. The immigrants were mostly poor Muslims from Gujarat, especially from the Kutch peninsula, and were typically small shop owners, small scale traders, and craftsmen. Trading and entrepreneurial families such as the Topans, the Visrams and the Parroos even became financiers of Arab slavers. However, the major trade item was African

2 As a result of this policy, the Indian community in Zanzibar had grown to 214 persons by 1819, "and they were already described as wealthy" (Sheriff 2016: 3).

3 In 1876 however, another wealthy Indian trading family, that of Tharia Topan, managed to outbid the Sewji Company by offering an annual fee of 450,000 Maria Theresien Thaler (MTT) for the right to collect custom duties. In 1880, the Jairam Sewji family was able to regain control over Zanzibar's customs by outbidding the Topan family with an annual payment of 500,000 MTT (Bennett 1978: 106).

ivory, which was highly sought after in India, where it formed an important part of dowries. In addition, Indian traders bought spices, copal, cloves, goat skin, and dried fish. The major import from India was so-called 'Surat cloth,' various textiles which came primarily from Surat in Gujarat.

From the beginning, the Indian community in East Africa was characterized by social and religious fragmentation. Three criteria informed the formation of local communities: religion, regional origin, and occupation. Most Hindus, for instance, were Bhatias, Vanias and Lohanas,4 who came as merchants, traders, and brokers from Kutch, whereas Patels came from an agricultural background in central Gujarat. Other Gujarati Hindus belonged mainly to artisan groups, whereas Punjabi immigrants were less informed by social origin, forming a single community in East Africa. Community development was particularly informed by the development of different religious orientations in East Africa. Despite Hindu's pioneering the early trade, Muslims soon came to dominate the Indian diaspora in East Africa. A first Khōja-Ismāʿīlī Jamāʿat Khāna (community center) was established as early as 1838 in the Forodhani ward in Zanzibar. 5 The Khōja-Ismāʿīlī community included prominent members such as Tharia Topan (1823–1891) and the trader Allidina Visram (1851–1916), who all became important to funding the community's social activities. The Khōja-Ismāʿīlīs mostly came from Kutch/Gujarat (like most other Indians in East Africa), as well as from Punjab and Sindh (Daftary and Hirji 2008: 204– 206). The development of the Khōja-Ismāʿīlī group parallels that of the Bohora community6 and other Indian families that were dominated by rich traders, like those of Sewa Haji (1851–1897) and Nasser Veerjee (1865–1942). The most prominent Bohora family was the Karimji-Jivanji family, which came from the Kutchi seaport Mandvi to Zanzibar in 1818, and opened its first business in 1825. 7 From modest beginnings, the Karimji family became one of the richest Indian families in East Africa, involved in all kinds of trade, as well as sisal and cashew production. Nearly 150 years later, the Karimji-Jivanji family would become the East African representatives for Toyota (and also for Tata and Chrysler). Like other wealthy Indian families, the Karimji family engaged in charitable activities.

From the 1890s, the number of Indian indentured workers or 'coolies' (who came primarily from Punjab) increased, while Goans started to be recruited as civil

4 Lohanas are a Kshatriya group, often administrators, and are also traders today. Most Khojas are Lohana by origin; Vanias and Bhatias are comparatively small high caste groups from Rajasthan.

5 The Khōja-Ismāʿīlīs represent the Nizārī-branch of the Ismāʿīliyya. The Ismāʿīliyya are the 'sevener' branch of the Shīʿa in contrast to the 12'er or Ithnāʿsharī branch. The present Aga Khan is the 49th religious leader of the Khōja-Ismāʿīlīs. For a history of the Khōja-Ismāʿīlī community see Daftary and Hirji (2008).

6 The Bohoras represent the Mustaʿīlī-branch of the Ismāʿīlīs. The *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* (supreme guide) of the Bohoras has been Sayyid Muḥammad Burhānuddīn since 1965. He is the 52nd *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* of the Bohoras. His father, Sayyid Ṭāhir Saifuddīn directed the Bohora community from 1915 until his death in 1965. For a history of the Bohora community see Blank (2001).

7 The history of Karimji-Jivanji family has been recorded in great detail by Gijsbert Oonk (2009).

**Table 1: Indian population growth in four East African countries**

Source: Oonk (2006: 256)

servants. The indentured workers were employed mostly on the Mombasa–Uganda railway, which was built from 1895–1903. Indeed, 35,000 coolies were brought to East Africa for this project alone. By 1914, the number of Indians had grown to 38,000, and to 55,000 by 1921.

The next phase of immigration started during and after WWI and was linked with the British war effort, when tens of thousands of Indian soldiers and porters brought to East Africa to fight the Germans. After WWI, a growing number of Indians found employment in the colonial administration and economy. As a consequence of Indian mass emigration beginning in the late 19th century,8 the Brahmin idea that crossing the ocean (*kala pani,* 'the black water') would cause ritual impurity and even render Hindus 'outcasts,' became increasingly obsolete. A member of the Shree Shiv Shakti Mandir in Zanzibar and a Brahmin himself summarized this development in a conversation in 2010, when he told me that "the diaspora killed the idea of the black water, even Brahmins travel around the world today" (Joshi sr., 18 August 2010). By 1939, the number of Indians in East Africa had grown to 105,000. After WWII, the Indian population increased further, and by 1962, 362,000 Indians were living in the four East African countries (see Table 1 for an overview).

8 During this period of mass emigration, Indians not only immigrated to East Africa but also to the Caribbean, Mauritius and Fiji.

### **The Indian Communities in East Africa after Independence**

After independence (Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963),9 East African governments gave those Indians who were not automatically citizens by birth an option to register within two years. As many Indians hesitated to apply for citizenship, administrations took "their procrastination as an expression of a lack of faith in these states" (Oonk 2006: 258) and started to introduce periodic embargoes, which again increased suspicion among Indians. However, some Indian group leaders, especially those from the Khōja and Bohora Ismāʿīlīs, encouraged their members to apply for citizenship. In 1952, the Aga Khan (the religious leader of the Khōja Ismāʿīlīs) advised his followers to regard East Africa as their permanent home, to speak English rather than Gujarati, and encouraged women to wear Western dress (Oonk 2006: 261). 10

Despite the willingness of the Aga Khan to cooperate with East African governments, national politics quickly led to conflict. One of the first victims of Tanganyika (from 1964 Tanzania) President Nyerere's policies to marginalize and even eliminate old elites was the East Africa Muslim Welfare Society (EAMWS), a supranational Muslim welfare organization dominated by Indians as well as some conservative African religious scholars such as Ḥasan b. ʿAmeir. The EAMWS had been founded in 1937 by the Aga Khan. Since 1961, its headquarters had been in Dar es Salaam. In the context of emerging nationalisms in East Africa, the EAMWS that had propagated Muslim unity became increasingly obsolete and was dissolved in 1968 (see Loimeier 2007). The 1967 Arusha declaration started a period of anti-'Asian' (i.e. anti-Indian) policies in all three East African countries. These policies included the nationalization and expropriation of Indian businesses, properties and houses, and triggered waves of Indian emigration from all East African countries. The most brutal policies were applied in Zanzibar, where many Indians were killed in the revolution of January 1964 or subsequently fled; and in Uganda in 1972, where 70,000 Indians had to leave the country within 90 days (see Oonk 2006: 259). In Tanzania, the Nationalization of Buildings Act of 22 April 1971 (Oonk 2009: 105) led to an Indian exodus, and to the effective expropriation of the Karimji and other wealthy 'Asian' families' property. Between 1964 and 1972, 40–50% of all Indians in Kenya and Tanganyika emigrated to the USA, Canada, and Britain (Oonk 2006: 254ff), forming a diaspora of 'twice displaced' Indians. In the 1980s, governments across East Africa revised their anti-Indian policies. In Uganda, President Museveni even ordered the return of confiscated properties to their former Indian owners. Still,

9 In 1964, Zanzibar and Tanganyika united and formed the Federal Republic of Tanzania.

10 This policy was rejected by the *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* of the Bohoras. The Bohoras opposition to integration backfired in 1968, when the Tanzanian government expelled the *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* Sayyid Muḥammad Burhānuddīn for allegedly violating foreign exchange regulations. The *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* had been visiting the Bohora communities in Tanzania to bring them into closer compliance with the policies of the Bohora *dāʿwat* (the 'message') (Blank 2001: 240).

anti-Indian sentiment remains vibrant, and anti-Indian riots and occasional protests occur in all East African countries, especially in Uganda and Kenya.

In Tanzania, governments from Ali Hassan Mwinyi (1985–1995) through Benjamin Mkapa (1995–2005) to Jakaya Kikwete (2005–2015) have encouraged Indians to return and presented them as the 'saviors' of the Tanzanian economy (Oonk 2006: 260). With economic liberalization starting in Tanzania in 1985, many Indian families indeed began to rebuild business, albeit cautiously. Yet by 2010, the Indian community in Tanzania had grown to about 200,000 (Kaid Lookmanji, 7 August 2010), and even small provincial towns such as Iringa again had their own Indian Muslim and Hindu communities. By 2010, Dar es Salaam alone had 15,000 Hindus and at least ten major Hindu temples, mostly situated in or near Kisutu Street (9 temples), i.e. in the center of the Uhindini ('Indian') ward of central Dar es Salaam, and in Upanga (1 temple). These temples catered for different religious orientations among the Hindus, as well as for Hindus from different regions of origin in India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Konkan etc.). There were also temples devoted to specific gods such as Rama, Shiva, or Krishna. In addition, the Hindu community in Dar es Salaam managed one 'Hindu' hospital, the 'Shree Shiv Shakti Hospital,' as well as a library and a gym. 11

### **Indians in Pre-Colonial Zanzibar**

In the 19th century, Zanzibar's economy boomed under the Sultanate of Oman's liberal trade policies. The boom led to considerable population growth. In 1819, Zanzibar Town had a population of about 5,000 inhabitants, but by 1835 it had doubled or even tripled. By 1846, it had grown to about 20–25,000, and by 1885 had reached about 80,000 (Bennett 1978: 57; Sheriff 1987: 138). Zanzibar's population not only grew but also became increasingly diverse. By the 1840s, 5,000 Omanis and between 400 and 700 Indians had settled. By the 1870s there were about 3,000 Indians (mostly Gujaratis) living in Zanzibar, including 2,000 'Banians' (Indians belonging to different Hindu orientations and occupational groups). 12 Most Indians settled in the Kiponda, Hamamni, and Kajificheni wards and built representative houses, whereas poor Indians settled in Ng'ambo, the 'other side' of the 'creek' that separated the old town from the rural areas (see Sheriff 1992 and 1995). In addition, there were Hadrami and Yemeni communities, immigrants from Madagascar, the

11 Since 2005, an 'Indian' building boom has led to the destruction of many old buildings in the Uhindini quarter in Dar es Salaam. This building boom was linked with the fact that leases on plots of land in 'Uhindi' that had been granted by the British colonial administration in the mid-1930s expired in the mid-2000s. Indian lessees were thus able to buy 'their' plots and started to replace the old two- or three-storey buildings with new buildings that were much larger (my own observations, 11 August 2010).

12 There were also some Zoroastrians, mostly from Bombay. They were allowed to establish their own 'fire temple' in Zanzibar in 1882 (Exhibition, House of Wonders).

Comoros and Somalia (particularly from the Brāwa region), indigenous Zanzibaris, Wapemba, Watumbatu, and the 'Hadimu' people from Zanzibar's east coast, as well as Africans from the hinterland stretching back as far as Manyema (Eastern Congo), Baluchis from south-eastern Iran, and a growing community of Europeans (Sheriff 1987: 147, 149).

The 19th century was thus characterized by the development of a polyphonic society in Zanzibar Town that stressed social criteria as markers of distinctness: being an aristocrat or a slave was more important than being 'white' or 'black.' Even the Sultan's family was divided into an 'Abyssinian' and a 'Circassian' line (see Ruete 1998: 85ff). Intermarriage and concubine *(suria)* relationships led to the emergence of a large group of 'black' Arabs (Africans who came to regard themselves as 'Arab' due to their affiliation with an Arab family). The Indians in Zanzibar, by contrast, mostly refused to intermarry with Africans, yet many men maintained *suria* relationships with African women. The refusal to intermarry thus became a major obstacle to Indian integration in East Africa. Indians not only refused to marry non-Indians, but maintained practices of exclusion and social avoidance among themselves. There were, however, a few exceptions: Ithnāʿsharī communities' marriage practices were less exclusive; some early migrants from Surat mixed with the African population in Zanzibar in the early 19th century; and Hindu migrants, who were predominantly male until the late 19th century, seem to have had African concubines more frequently (see Sheriff 1987 and Issa 1995).

The emerging Indian community in Zanzibar was split into numerous different fractions. In 1870, the Indian Muslim community consisted of three major groups: the Khōja Ismāʿīlis, the Bohoras and the Memons, a small Sunni (Ḥanafī) group. In 1870, there were less than 250 Memons, mostly from Gujarat (Kathiawar and Kutch regions), usually Surat and Porbandar, or from Lohanpur in Sindh (Martin 1978: 34–5). The Khōja-Ismāʿīlī community was the largest group with 535 families in 1870, 422 of them originating from Kutch. About 2,100 people belonging to this group had their permanent residence in Zanzibar, while the other 450 members settled on the mainland. The Bohora community, another branch of Ismāʿīlī orientation, was the second largest. Most of them originated from Rajkot and Kutch. In 1870 about 250 lived in Zanzibar, while about 600 lived on the coast. Most Bohoras made a living as craftsmen, artisans, locksmiths, petty traders and ironmongers, while Khōjas were usually traders, or entrepreneurs in import-export and long-distance trade businesses. Later on, many became artisans. Memons, Bohoras and Khōjas were also marked by different social and occupational affiliations: they were either Kokni (traders from Konkan, although not all Koknis were Memon), Lohana (traders from Lohanpur, although not all Lohanas were Memon), or Bania (often regarded as Hindu traders, although some were Memon, and thus, Muslim). 13 In addition, there was a small Muslim Khumbar ('Kumbaro') population of often

13 Zanzibar National Archive, ZNA AB 1/36: Reconstitution of the Committee of the Sir Euan Smith Madrasa.

itinerant petty traders who are today pot-makers in Makunduchi, as well as a small group of Catholic Indians from Portuguese Goa, and a group of about 300 Hindus (Martin 1978: 36).

This situation was further complicated by the fact that the terms 'Bohora' (as derived from the Gujarati term *vohorvun,* trader) and 'Khōja' as well as 'Kokni,' 'Kumbaro,' 'Bania,' or 'Lohana' did not necessarily denote religious affiliation, but could also mean an occupational and/or social group that might be Sunnī or Hindu rather than Shīʿī-Ismāʿīlī (Khōja or Bohora). Religious and/or occupational groups were finally divided by non-religious splits, sometimes seeking to legitimize these splits as socio-ethnic arguments. The Memon community in Zanzibar thus split into two communities between 1945 and 1956,14 namely the 'Hindu Sunni Kokni Jamāʿat' (which became Shāfiʿī) and the 'Cutch Memon Association' (which remained Ḥanafī). The Khōja group in Zanzibar equally split due to disputes over the political reforms started by the Aga Khan in India: the dissident Shīʿa Khōja-Ithnāʿshara community emerged in fact from the larger Khōja-Ismāʿīlī-group in the course of the 19th century, when the political and religious leader of this group (the 'Aga Khan') had to flee Iran and settled in Bombay in 1844. When he began to impose his authority over the Khōja-Ismāʿīlī community there, a number of Khōja-Ismāʿīlīs split and established the 'Sunni-Khōja' group (in India in 1869) and the Shīʿa Khōja-Ithnāʿshara group (in India and East Africa in 1877) (Sheriff 2016: 8). 15 However, the new Ithnāʿshara Khōja group refused to mix with non-Khōja Ithnāʿshara Indian Muslims. Equally, the Bohora community (*dāʿwat,* lit. 'cause') has seen splits due to the fact that the community's leadership tried to secure Bohora 'orthodoxy' with respect to other Ismāʿīlī-groups in both colonial and post-colonial times by practicing *baraat,* the social ostracism/exclusion of dissident members. *Baraat,* in fact, excludes dissident Bohoras from religious rituals performed by Bohora scholars, including the *dāʿī al-muṭlaq.* It can amount to exclusion from the complete spiritual and social sphere, as well as the economic, educational and welfare services of the *dāʿwat* (Blank 2001: 180f). In January 1979 and June 1981 Bohora orthodoxy was stressed in a number of pronouncements of the *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* regarding dress and personal comportment. Since then, Bohora women have switched to the 'typical' Bohora *burqa* and its *rida,* a bonnet which can be used as a facial veil, while men were compelled to wear a beard as a sign of Bohora identity and loyalty towards the *dāʿī al-muṭlaq* (Blank 2001: 184). Communities such as the Bohoras and the Khōjas, in addition, refused to pray with other Muslims in their respective mosques and had their own Jamāʿat Khānas.

14 Zanzibar National Archive, ZNA AB 22/51: Kokni Jamat.

15 Even today members of both communities refuse to talk about the reasons for the split.

### **British Economic Policies in Zanzibar**

On 7 November 1890, Britain assumed full political control over the Sultanate of Zanzibar, making it a British Protectorate until 12 December 1963, when it became independent again (see Loimeier 2009). While Zanzibar underwent thorough political and administrative change in the colonial period, most Zanzibaris were preoccupied with economic development after 1890. Abolition in particular, which was implemented between 1890 and 1897, soon turned out to be a major problem for the British. They feared "that freed slaves would seek to be independent peasants, the clove industry would collapse, the already heavily indebted Arab landowners would become bankrupt, and the government would lose its main source of revenue" (Bakari 2001: 49). However, few slaves actually achieved emancipation. Most continued to work as contractors on the plantations of their former owners (Cooper 1980: 84ff). As tenants however, the former slaves were free to work part-time on their own plots of land, creating an increasing shortage of plantation labor. The contract system was soon abandoned in favor of a wage labor system that allowed former slaves to stay as squatters on the plantations while working. This system put increasing financial pressure on the plantation owners. Consequently, they started to hire seasonal pickers from the early 1900s. These migrant workers, often Nyamwesi from central Tanganyika, soon settled permanently (Flint 1965: 650; Cooper 1980: 92ff). The move from "slaves to squatters" (Cooper 1980), and later to wage laborers, was orchestrated by the British to prevent a shortage of labor threatening the plantation economy (Sheriff 1991: 117–123; Nisula 1999: 226).

Zanzibar's Arab plantation owners not only had to survive the abolition of slavery, which led to increasing indebtedness since they had to pay now for labor, they also had to survive economic depression, with the clove price starting to drop in the late 1920s. As a result, mortgaging of trees and land increased (Cooper 1980: 139). Many farmers lost all their trees, while others could no longer maintain their plantations and their creditors, often Indians, began to take over their properties (Cooper 1980: 142). The British authorities tried to stop the demise of the Arab plantations and the rise of an Indian creditor and landowner class by establishing the Clove Growers' Association (CGA) in 1927. The CGA provided low-interest harvesting loans, storage space and minimum selling prices to plantation owners, and was responsible for marketing the clove harvest. Its goal was to save 'Arab' plantations, as 'Arabs' and not Indians were seen as the major pillar of British rule (see Shao 1992 and Gilbert 2004). When the CGA loan-system was abolished in 1928, membership fell rapidly, and Indians continued to buy clove plantations. Consequently, Indian clove tree ownership grew from 5% in 1922 to almost 50% in 1933 (Turki 1987: 45). The abolition of slavery, the resulting shortage of labor, the world economic depression, and the fluctuation of the clove price, as well as the dispossession of Zanzibar's mainland dominions were instrumental in the demise of the big plantation owners. Even colonial officials started to consider the big landlords a 'spent force,' with peasantization of the clove economy seen as an alternative (Bakari 2001: 50). To

stop the demise of the big 'Arab' plantations and the rise of Indian plantation owners, and ignoring the protests of the Indian National Association (INA), the British transformed the CGA into a government body in 1934, authorized to license clove dealers and to inspect produce. In 1937 the CGA became the sole buyer of cloves.

### **British Racial Policies in Zanzibar**

From the late 19th century, race and skin color became increasingly paramount in Zanzibar. The British administration was particularly concerned with questions of how to identify and treat the different members of the Zanzibari population, and introduced the concept of a 'natural hierarchy of races.' Colonial history thus has to be seen as a history of framing: the framing of societies, regions, religions, and races. Such processes of framing informed ethnic classifications and led to the construction of races in Zanzibar in colonial times and a subsequent, distinct 'racialization' of Zanzibar's public life (Purpura 1997: 163). 16 Even in one of the last Department of Education (DoE) annual reports, the Protectorate was described as having been "ruled by Arab Sultans since the end of the 17th century. The Arab and the indigenous African population is exclusively Muslim, and Islam is the official religion."17 The dynamics of racialization again touched both public and private lives, and had lasting effects on pro-independence politics, the 1964 revolution, and beyond. The British colonial view, namely that "Zanzibar was an Arab land," for instance, was used by Zanzibar's revolutionaries to legitimize the revolution in and beyond 1964. In their concept of colonial society, the British occupied the highest rank. As British colonial rule was based on indirect rule and consequently sought to instrumentalize the Omani ruling elite to implement its policies, Zanzibar's Arab population was second in colonial racial hierarchies. 18 In 1917, Zanzibar's British Resident Pearce thus stated in his education report that the population of about 200,000 was divided into different ethnic groups. "For facility of reference," these complex ethnic and religious structures were simplified by a division of the population into three 'classes':