Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (5 page)

Three centuries before my great-grandfather's time, when the British East India Company formed for the purpose of trading in India, Surat was the logical place to begin. Company ships made several attempts to reach India by sea around the perilous Cape of Africa, succeeding at last in 1607. The Portuguese and the Dutch were already in Surat, both established enough to try to blockade and fire upon the English ships. But the English persisted, and set up a trading post. Surat was their first toehold in the land that would become "the jewel in the crown" of the British Empire.

John Ovington, chaplain of the English trading post from 1689 to 1692, said the city was "reckon'd the most fam'd Emporium of the
Indian
empire," its streets and bazaars "more populous than any part of
London.
" Cotton, indigo, and opium were the main draws, but the list of items traded at Surat was long: Copper, tin, quicksilver (mercury). Carpets, linens, yarns. Vermilion, sandalwood, lead. Elephants' teeth, tortoise-shell, cowries, coral, amber, ebony, diamonds, agates. Soap, sealing wax, rosin, borax, ammonia, saltpeter (for gunpowder), camphor, turpentine, enamel, gum. Tea, sugar, wheat, rice. Cloves, cinnamon, ginger, tamarind, pepper, saffron, cumin, myrrh, musk. Gold and silver, in the form of coins, ornaments, bars, and threads woven into exquisite silks. And cloth, in varieties unimaginable, a riot of colors, textures, and designs.

John Ogilby, His Majesty's cosmographer, writing in 1673, found "Por-tugefes, Arabians, Perfians, Armenians, Turks, and Jews" doing brisk business in Surat. Demand for the goods traded in Surat was so fierce, he wrote, that the city "fwallows all the Gold and Silver which comes from the Perfian Gulph and Arabia, as alfo a great part of the Riches of India, and the Gold of China."

Soon, Surat was swallowing the riches of England as well. In London the craze was for calico, muslin, chintz—varieties of cotton cloth from India. Parliamentarians fretted: Asian luxuries pouring in meant Britain's gold bullion was pouring out, creating a drastic trade imbalance. And textile makers took notice as well: homegrown British cloth could not compete with cheaper, higher-quality cottons and silks from India. British weavers marched and rioted. By 1701, as one historian writes, "the clamour reached [such] a climax that the English Parliament had to pass an Act forbidding the import of cloth from Surat and banning the use of Indian silk in England."

Slowly Surat's fortunes—and those of the countryside surrounding it—began to fade. The river port was capricious, flooding the town each monsoon and at other times silting over, becoming impassable. The city was plagued by chronic conflict among various European and Muslim rulers, as well as attacks by pirates and marauders lusting after its treasure houses. Soon the British, impatient for stability and greater control, decided to establish a port of their own. They took their business 160 miles down the coast, where they made a new island city they called Bombay. From there, through a combination of strategic alliances and military battles, they consolidated power in India. Eventually they drove out their rivals, and India—once a trading partner so wealthy it seemed to threaten the economy of London—became a colony of the British Empire.

In and around Surat, where it had all begun, the transformation was dramatic. The city was reduced from a great international port to a strictly local one. The region's thriving and diversified economy became dependent almost entirely on cloth.

There is a sense in which village life seems unchanging, so that I feel I might intuit, just under the surface of the Navsari of today, the Navsari of my great-grandfather's time.

Motiram's people occupied a small neighborhood on the western side of town, and would have socialized only with their own kind. Neither wealthy nor poor, the Khatris followed the hereditary occupation, weaving. "As a class they are said to be thriftless and idle, and ... excessively fond of strong drinks," commented an 1877 British survey of castes in the area. "Their features are regular and complexion fair." Few were educated or even literate.

A street over from Khatri lane was the neighborhood of shoemakers. Beyond that lay the fishmongers' ghetto, where one could buy bushels of the pungent dried fish that the British dubbed "Bombay duck." For fresh groceries Motiram's mother could go to the market, or simply wait for the day's catch to come through the streets in a basket on the head of a woman who called out, "Fresh fish! Ohhhh, fish! Beautiful fresh fish!" Cows wandered the streets freely, in a kind of symbiosis: women put out leftover food for the sacred animals, and in exchange the cattle dropped their dung to be collected and smeared on the walls, where it dried into a smooth, odor-free plaster. At dawn Hindu women consecrated their doorsteps with red dye, a few grains of rice, and a few flowers. At dusk, the flames of prayer and cooking glowed from each home, as they had for generations. When people died, their ashes were scattered in the local river, which poured, a few miles west, into the Arabian Sea.

The sea had shaped the village since its origins. Because of its strategic coastal location, Navsari was more cosmopolitan than many other Indian hamlets. Temples and shrines of four faiths dotted its streets: Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Zoroastrian. It was the Zoroastrians who, fleeing persecution in Persia, had founded the town in 1142.

In Motiram's time, the region that encompassed Navsari was divided so that it looked, on the map, like a pastiche of jerry-rigged dots and shapes. Most areas were under the direct rule of the British. The rest belonged to a local ruling family entirely beholden to the British, and as rapacious. Their territory was disconnected; Motiram's hometown of Navsari fell in one of the larger chunks, at the tip of a free-floating amoeba just four miles long. As hub of its subdistrict, Navsari had modern conveniences: post office, train station, library, and a new town hall complete with clock tower.

Despite these innovations, colonization and corruption were taking their toll.

In 1909, for example—the year that Motiram left home—the kingdom's major sources of income were sales of cotton, indigo, and opium, supplemented by heavy taxes on land, salt, and liquor. Navsari, a town of 21,000, had more than six hundred liquor shops and a single high school, which graduated five students in 1909. The maharaja, whose stated objective for his regime was to be "like the English," spent twice as much on his palace as on the entire school system. His annual report devoted a paragraph each to hospitals, plague relief, and the problem of child marriages—but several pages described a twenty-city world tour undertaken "for the benefit of his health," the royal youngsters' progress at Harvard and Oxford, and the fireworks exploded to entertain the visiting British viceroy.

For centuries, weaving the plain cotton saris worn by working-class Indian women had provided an adequate living for Motiram's clan. In a typical home, a loom sat in a pit in the floor of the house. For each garment the weaver first set up the warp, the regularly spaced vertical threads that dictated the width and length of the cloth. Then, sitting on the floor, legs resting down in the pit, he or she threw the threaded shuttle from one hand to the other and back again. This horizontal motion created the weft. Gradually, over perhaps four days, a complete sari would grow from the loom.

Every few weeks a broker went from house to house to collect the completed saris, which he would sell in the markets at Surat and elsewhere. The broker would bring a few rupees to pay for the work and a batch of soft raw cotton for the next order. This cotton was the training ground for children as young as five, who learned to spin sitting at floor level above their weaving parents. Using a simple wooden wheel, they could stretch and twist the soft clouds into thread.

Generations of our ancestors had worked in the same way. And until the eighteenth century, textile workers in England competed on an equal basis. The level of artistry varied, but in both places cloth-making was a home-based industry. One weaver could keep up with the output of four spinners; a whole family working together could earn a living wage.

Then came the machines, the push for speed.

The flying shuttle, in 1733, quadrupled the pace; now one English weaver needed sixteen spinners to keep up. And for the first time a weaver could make cloth wider than the span of his or her arms. The family was no longer sufficient; the product had outgrown the human.

The spinning jenny, of 1765, allowed English spinners to make thread more quickly, to keep up with their weavers. Faster and better machines followed. Giant looms were powered by river water flowing through wooden mills; from these origins, all future cloth factories would be known as mills. Spinning and weaving, in England, became mill—or factory—work. In 1785 a steam engine powered a cloth-making factory for the first time, a priest invented the power loom, a Frenchman introduced chlorine bleaching of cotton, and a hot-air balloon crossed the English Channel. The world was growing smaller. The great change that would become known as the Industrial Revolution was well under way.

In village India these developments were felt as distant murmurs. There were rumors of great machines that did the work of a hundred men, of massive boats that ran on fire and water. But Britain, concerned with competition, did not allow the export of textile machines until 1843. Ten years later, India opened its first cotton mill, in Bombay.

Still, for a time the damage was limited. Thread from Europe's spinning machines was weaker and looser than that spun by hand. As late as 1866 the textile scholar Forbes Watson called European muslins "practically useless" compared with the Indian product, because they fell apart after several washings.

Inevitably the technology improved, and price overtook the desire for quality in the marketplace. By 1875, when Motiram's parents were perhaps starting their young family, nearly three-quarters of the cloth consumed in Gujarat was made by machine.

In rural Gujarat, the shift was evident as farmers turned their fields to cotton to feed the mills. In 1900, three million acres were devoted to cotton; seven years later, cotton took up four million acres. By 1918, the figure was 4.75 million, or 13 percent of the entire region's occupied land. In certain districts, cotton accounted for more than half the cultivated area.

The cotton boom, along with an aggressive tax policy, made Gujarat—renowned for centuries as one of the most fertile provinces of the world—unable to feed itself. The British-controlled portion of Gujarat was importing half a million tons of grain in a normal year, two million in a famine year.

The new cotton farmers saw little profit. Instead they struggled to keep up with a tax structure designed to ensure that, whether the crops thrived or failed, London would get its due. Small cotton farmers were taxed now not only on their harvests but on the land itself, so they bore all of the losses caused by Nature's fluctuations. In a good year, farmers could sell their cotton, pay current and back taxes, and have enough left over to buy food. In a drought year, they had neither a food crop nor cash profits. Many people simply starved.

It would have taken far greater power than a soothsayer's to stave off the seven years of drought that marked Motiram's childhood. Season after season, the skies remained empty, as if the gods of wind and rain had fallen into a deep, careless slumber.

Even in relatively prosperous Navsari, hard times were evident. Hungry refugees from the rural areas poured into town at the rate of a thousand per day. Rice and millet doubled in price. The Milky Lake at Navsari's edge dropped to the lowest levels in recorded history; the Purna River slowed like the last trickle of blood from a dying man. Thousands in the region starved to death, and many more died of poverty-related disease.

It was the worst famine in sixty years. For Motiram's generation, the calamity of 1899 was a milestone used for decades afterward to reckon dates, births, and fateful decisions.

Historians used to speak of "push" and "pull" as the main factors in migration, principles as basic to human motivation as warp and weft are to cloth. Push begins at home; it is what makes you leave your motherland. Pull is the force drawing you elsewhere; it is what makes the foreign destination appealing. Though recently this mechanistic model has been replaced by more subtle theories of human motivation, the simple version retains a ring of truth. Despite the complexities involved in Motiram's story, perhaps a strong push was required after all. If so, the famine of 1899 might have been the spark that led Motiram and his kin to look, for the first time in more than four centuries, beyond their town's borders.

As weaving became less and less sustainable, among the Khatris it was more and more the province of women, who could stay home and weave while still cooking the meals, watching the children, and sweeping the floors. By the turn of the century, it was common for men to branch out, seeking related work as tailors in Surat, Bombay, and other cities.

Perhaps, for a young Khatri man in such times, the move to Fiji seemed like just another step.

The remote archipelago once known as the Cannibal Islands was an unlikely choice. Early Hindu travelers from Gujarat were likely to follow the westward routes to Africa and the Middle East that had been established by their Muslim countrymen. Three of Motiram's brothers tried those routes, traveling overseas to Africa and to Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea. Of them, only their passport photos remain, and their names: Raghnath, Daahyaa, Gopaal. Eventually they would die or disappear abroad, leaving no children, only their child-brides at home—stunted limbs on the family tree.

The Fiji Islands, much farther and in the other direction, were not on anyone's lips. Until, in 1901, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company of Fiji recruited twenty Gujaratis with needed skills. Soon a couple of Gujarati jewelers followed; they found themselves in great demand as the indentured laborers, the girmityas, chose to preserve their savings in gold and silver. Fiji gained a reputation as a place where it was easy for men with talent to thrive.