Merchant-kings and Everymen: Narratives of the South Asian Diaspora of East Africa

Abstract

The building of the Uganda railway at the turn of the nineteenth century brought about radical shifts in the notion of territory and the conception of time within East Africa. A sense of Indian Ocean continuity and cosmopolitanism signified by the pace of the dhow and the seaward perspective of coastal communities was substantially replaced by a new sense of time and territory determined by the speed of the train and the inland focus of colonial ambition. This paper explores this long moment of transition through a number of texts: the first year of the East African Standard (1902–03), the journal of Ebrahimji Noorbhai Adamji (1902–05) and three recent novels. These texts delineate the role of the South Asian diaspora in both the expansion of the colonial economy and the maintenance of an older sensibility. The founder of the African Standard, Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee, held the contract for the recruitment of indentured labourers for the building of the railway and financed the establishment of Nairobi. While his newspaper displays complicity with colonial projects, it also reveals the disparity between the overtly expansive ideals and the narrowly national/racial aims of the empire. In Adamji's journal, the oscillation between the use of British time and Arbi – the Arabic Swahili system of time – is a notable imprecision that signifies the writer's position on a cusp between the world of coastal trade and life under colonial rule. Beneath the biographies of businessmen like Jeevanjee and Adamji, the history of the Asian presence in East Africa figures labourers, discarded wives, unsuccessful traders and children of mixed racial parentage: people whose position in the racial hierarchy of colonial East Africa becomes ever more obscure. The paper concludes by tracing the way in which three writers use the novel form to tell the relationship between class complicity and racial hierarchy which defined the Asian East African position during the period of British colonial rule.

While historians suggest that a sea-faring people of India's West coast were possibly conducting trade between ports of the Indian Ocean as early as 3000 bc, the first extant mention of a relationship between India and East Africa is in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea .1 This guide to the Indian Ocean, written by a Greek merchant-seaman sometime near the end of the first century ad, describes Indian dhows carrying produce and wares ‘of their own places’ – including wheat and ‘honey from the reed called sacchari’, cotton and glass – and exporting ivory and rhinoceros horn from the Arab dominated East African coast. 2 As Robert Gregory comments, the Periplus ‘creates a strong impression of a vigorous commerce between India and eastern Africa’. 3

Between the writing of the Periplus and the formal establishment, late in the nineteenth century, of British colonial rule in Kenya and Uganda, the centuries are marked by the pragmatic affiliations of the Indians of the coast.4 While the move to Portuguese rule over the Ocean trade during the 1500s and 1600s disrupted the fortunes of Indian traders, those who had been the accountants and bankers for the Arabs simply took on the same roles for the Portuguese. And when the Omani's regained power between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, not only did the Sultan's lenient policy of a flat 5 per cent duty on all imports encourage Indian commercial activity, but – once again – as R. Coupland notes, the ‘financial side of the government itself was entrusted largely to them; and the key post, the collection of custom, was always held by a ‘banyan’ [Hindu].5 Gregory estimates that by1856, there were more than 2,000 Indians living in Zanzibar who – if they were not working for the Sultanate – were shopkeepers, traders or moneylenders serving an overall population of about 60,000.6 Coupland notes that by the same time on the mainland, ‘Each Arab coast town had its little group of Indian traders’.7

This pre-colonial history suggests that the ‘beginning’ of the Asian diaspora in East Africa may be imagined as a shrewd and self-serving business man traversing the Indian Ocean in both directions, looking out to sea rather than in to land – a dynamic and cosmopolitan figure that is not entirely displaced by the experiences of Indian indentured labourers. Indians contracted to work on the Uganda railway – beginning in 1896 and continuing until 1922 – were not subject to the same conditions as plantation workers in other parts of the empire. The railway contracts were not as tough as the early plantation contracts. By the time the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) approached the government of India for labourers, the administration had become wary of a system that had led to – in the language of the time – ‘unfortunate’ incidents in other parts of the empire. The government had instituted laws governing the recruitment of labour and, among other strictures, outlawed flogging.8 Where plantation workers were often only eligible for a return ticket after ten years, the railway workers were contracted initially for three years and then had the option of renewal or return.9 Working from reports of the time, Gregory notes that ‘Only 10 to 15 percent of coolies and a slightly higher percentage of the more skilled Indians renewed their contracts’.10 He recognises that ‘what proportion of the indentured servants stayed in East Africa has long been a matter of conjecture’ because of incomplete and inaccurate documentation. However, from records kept of the workers returning between 1896 and 1923, he estimates that of 39,771 who went to East Africa, 32,493 returned and around 7,278 (18.3 per cent) remained in East Africa.11 This is approximately equivalent to the predominantly Ismaili trading, artisan and administrative population well established in Zanzibar by 1875 (Cynthia Salvadori estimates 5–6,000).12 By contrast, Brij Lal suggests that by 1870, only about 21 per cent of plantation workers had returned home – almost the inverse of the East African ratio of return and settlement.13 Without attempting to gloss the strange histories of coercion and the harsh conditions suffered by the labourers, these figures nevertheless suggests that railway workers had greater access – both psychological and physical – to routes back which were not available to workers of the plantation colonies. They had access to possibilities and practical lives built around the potential of travelling-back. Of the indentured workers who remained in East Africa, J. P. Lovegrove writes that

a few became market gardeners near the towns, others settled in Kavirondo and grew rice, cotton, linseed and sim-sim, while some carried on their trades as carpenters or stone-masons. But the majority who made a home in East Africa earned a living as traders, opening small stores wherever there was an opportunity to sell their wares. 14

Merging into the trading diasporas which preceded and accompanied the railway, they joined or created communities whose identities, even in remote parts of Uganda, were built around elaborate connections to Gujarat and the Punjab, Bombay and Karachi. The continuity within East Africa between the older trade diasporas and newer colonial diasporas signifies a broadly different relationship to capitalism, modernity and empire from the forced migrant histories of the Atlantic.

In The Rise of Our East African Empire, published in 1893, Frederick Lugard writes that ‘It is not as imported coolie labour that I advocate the introduction of the Indian, but as a colonist and settler’.15 Gregory points out that by 1895 Lugard, as an official of the IBEAC, was in fact promoting the use of coolie labour. His primary argument, however, was that this would further free Indian immigration and initiative.16 Gregory sums up this expanding contingent migrant population:

Although these Indians at first catered to the needs of the construction workers, they gradually developed a flourishing trade with the Africans and eventually with the Europeans who settled the highlands. … When the railway was completed, they remained in Africa; and as they prospered, they sent for their wives, children, and friends.17

Fourteen years after Lugard, Winston Churchill writes with capitalist enthusiasm in support of the Indians and against new white settler strategies for ‘squeezing’ them out. His impression of East Africa is a testimony to the success of Lugard's policy:

It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anyone else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies perhaps the larger part of the capital yet available for business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not hesitated to recur for financial aid.18

In his work on the transformations of the East African economy through British imperial expansion, Lawrence Sakarai picks up the motivations behind the early arguments of Lugard and Churchill. His work explores the growth of merchant wealth in the Indian Ocean and its subsequent conversion into capital after the industrial revolution.19 Towards the ultimate goal of generating an outlet for British manufactured goods, this process involved recognising that ‘the Indian merchants in whose hands rested the entire economy of the area had to be made to serve the interests of British imperialism’.20 Protecting Indian wealth, the British used the traders to introduce a money economy to the interior. They shifted the focus of Indian merchants, bankers and administrators from complicity in the slave and ivory trade towards the creation of markets. Sakarai argues that colonialism transformed the ‘pristine’ (meaning self-serving) merchants into a ‘petty bourgeois trading class’ by encouraging the use of their wealth to introduce cash crops, facilitating the distribution of money and control over the peasantry. He explains the traders’ easy acceptance of British patronage in terms of a long history of coming to terms with the prevailing powers on the coast – from Arab to Portuguese and back to Arab rule – and the fact that they had been dealing in British goods imported from Bombay since the 1820s.21 Sakarai describes the Indians as the ‘vanguard’ of British colonialism in East Africa.

Lugard's and Churchill's enthusiastic and Sakarai's more critical understanding of the Indians of East Africa as ‘colonial vanguard’ is perhaps most emphatically and prominently demonstrated by the public life of Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee. During the 1890s, Jeevanjee held the contract for the recruitment of labour for the building of the railway. Further, when the railhead reached the halfway point between Mombasa and Lake Victoria in 1899, and the financially strapped British administration decided to convert the area into the major railway township, Jeevanjee was contracted to build Nairobi. In his own words:

I may say almost I have made the country. All the best property in Nairobi belongs to me. I built all the Government buildings and leased them to the Administration. I built all the hospitals and post-offices between Mombasa and Port Florence [Kisumu]. I was the sole contractor on the Uganda Railway.22

In 1902, Jeevanjee also established a newspaper, the African Standard, Mombasa Times and Uganda Argus. In her biography of her grandfather, Zarina Patel explains that Jeevanjee established the paper in order to drive the first regional newspaper, East Africa and Uganda Mail, out of business. The British owners of the Mail had schemed with officials to undercut Jeevanjee's contract to supply oil to the railway. Jeevanjee then purchased all the oil in the country, forcing them to buy it from him at an inflated price. In retaliation, the Mail published a vitriolic article about Jeevanjee and the policy allowing him to create this monopoly. Jeevanjee's retaliation was the Standard, which led to the collapse of the Mail three years later. Having achieved his aim, Jeevanjee sold the newspaper in 1905.23

Despite Jeevanjee's defeat of the Mail, the initial shape of the Standard reveals the precariousness of the Indian East African position within the discourses of British colonialism. By the 1910s, laws reserving land for whites and preserving areas of Mombasa and Nairobi as ‘European only’ were in place. Jeevanjee famously fought these measures, taking pride in working within the rhetoric of empire.24 Focusing on the style and debates of his newspaper at a crucial moment of transition – just after the completion of the railway and just preceding the critical establishment of white settler power – highlights both Jeevanjee's own manipulation of imperial rhetoric, as well as the structured futility of his later appeals. The first year of the Standard draws out the racial lineaments and national ambitions already running through colonial strategies in East Africa and inevitably exasperating Jeevanjee's later arguments for equal rights between Indians and Europeans.

Launching into competition with the Mail, the Standard's intended readership was the British administrative and growing white settler community. There are some indications of an intended Indian readership – an occasional column of ‘Indo-Portuguese notes’, the advertisement of an ‘Ashram or Hindoo Hotel’.25 But in response to an enquiry from ‘an Indian’ indignantly asking why some people insist on calling him ‘native’, the editor copies a dictionary definition with the placating aside that ‘In any case, we are proved to be considered a native – of England!’26 The editorial ‘we’ of the newspaper indicates complicity with the predominantly white readership. In the first issue of the paper, Jeevanjee's editor, a young English journalist, William Henry Tiller, writes with excitement of the new opportunities being opened up by the railway. He emphasises the necessity of an objective newspaper – ‘We shall give the facts as they reach us’ – to what is ‘practically a new land’.27 But despite this statement, his editorials clearly promote measures that would forward Jeevanjee's financial interests in the ‘new’ country of the interior.

Tiller's editorials bear titles like ‘The Proper Way’, ‘The Making of Africa’ and ‘Advance East Africa’. ‘Free Trade Within the Empire’, he writes more than once, ‘is an admirable object to have in view.’28 Further, under the heading ‘Britain's Fiscal Policy’, the editor argues that ‘If the British Empire is to remain intact, some scheme must be formulated by which the Mother Country can retain the allegiance of her children. … Free Trade Within the Empire is an admirable object to have in view.’29 A few months later, this is followed by an article entitled ‘The America of India: An Indian view of East Africa’, which defines East Africa as ‘a growing market for [India's] manufactured goods’.30 These points are brought together in the first anniversary editorial. Entitled ‘The Retardation of East Africa’, Tiller assesses the achievements of the year against the measures he has been promoting. In explanation of the perceived ‘retardation’ of expansion, he suggests the British government should have spent its energy prompting new enterprises in its territories rather than mooting a proposal to settle ‘fifteen to twenty thousand pauper alien Jews’ in Uganda.31 This refers to the issue dominating the paper in September and October of 1903.

From 5 September, the newspaper is full of articles, editorials and letters rallying against the plans for ‘Jewganda’. ‘Our readers will not need any apology from us for the space we have devoted to the Zionist scheme’, writes Tiller,

the story of our undoing cannot be too clearly made known. … After struggling through the hopeless muddle into which the London papers have got regarding the geography of this country, we come to the conclusion that [some members of the British government have]. … beseeched the foreign pauper Jew to come and squat on what should be a heritage of England.32

Tiller's protest points to what Benedict Anderson famously describes as ‘the inner incompatibility of empire and nation’. 33 Tiller's outrage only makes sense in terms of a belief in the rhetoric of empire that presents England's territories as a continuous and organic national whole. However, the parliament in London can debate whether or not to allow a Zionist state to be created within the territory of Uganda because it is potentially consistent with the actual and ultimate aim of colonial expansion – to shore up the wealth and power of a rigidly and racially defined ancestral English nation.

To exemplify his thesis, Anderson looks to the pursuit of Thomas Macaulay's notorious ambition to create ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect’. He explains how, despite their training, their colonial status barred them from movement between colonies and into the metropolitan centre because the ideological purpose of colonialism – the strengthening of the English nation – was necessarily resistant to foreign rule, the outcome if colonials were allowed to fulfil the potential of their Anglophile education.34 In a footnote, Anderson points out that his emphasis ‘is on officials: Indian labourers, merchants, and even professionals, moved [around the colonies] in sizeable numbers’.35 But a consideration of Jeevanjee's position within the rhetoric encouraged by the Standard lends another nuance to Anderson's thesis. Jeevanjee's flamboyant gift of a statue of Queen Victoria to the new town of Nairobi symbolises a strategic commitment to the nation-empire which within the newspaper becomes the encouragement of a new kind of temporality and geographical sensibility.36

On 10 March 1903, the Standard issued a ‘Notice of Alteration’ in its days of publication to fit the changes to the railway timetable.37 And the 11 July 1903 edition contains notice that, as the railway has reduced its service to one train a week, the paper will also now only appear as a weekly.38 These decisions signify a commitment to the new pace and geographical perspective of empire. An article on ‘The New Bohra Mosque’ financed by Jeevanjee concentrates on the British Commissioner's statements that it is evidence of the community's faith in the ‘future of East Africa, seeing the amount of money which must have been spent’ on the building.39 Such weekly features on the activities of the local Bohra and other Indian communities – primarily their investment in civic activities – intersperse regular columns on ‘Cables and Telegrams’, ‘Letters from London’, ‘Occasional Notes’ with quotes from British newspapers and ‘News from Home’, meaning London. The milieu being presented and promoted is one – not of the ‘mental miscegenation’ Anderson describes being pursued through the local administrative stratas – but of inter-communal harmony and respect, in which race is an irrelevant factor in the mutual capitalist ambitions of the Indians and British.40 Through this format, the Standard links the local communities to the new tempo of the railway to a central if distant scene, giving the impression – to paraphrase Anderson – that the short, tight skin of the English nation stretches over East Africa.41 Following Anderson's analysis of the confluence between the ‘imagined community’ of the nation and the ‘imagined community’ assumed and conjured by the newspaper (and novel) genres, the Standard can be seen to gather together all these disparate ‘plotlines’ to generate the sense of a secular ‘meanwhile’ easily shared between England and East Africa (and indeed India). But this is a ‘meanwhile’ that by definition only includes those classes and races that had access to and a use for the railway, in effect the European and Indian communities.42 To make apparent the equality of capitalism, the newspaper relies – in its very silences – on a sharp divide between the Europeans and Indians, and ‘the natives’.

Amongst Tiller's energetic exhortations and the gossip from Britain, the Standard published an occasional column entitled ‘Some Swahili Exercises’. This offered lists of vocabulary and occasional grammatical lessons ‘with the hope that they will be of considerable use to readers’.43 But this ‘use’ is not given a context. The African ‘natives’ appear infrequently in the paper, and then only as an often amusing aside, not an economic or cultural constituency. While the newspaper is striving to smooth over the uneasy racial interface between the Europeans and the Indians by gathering them into a common tempo, at the same time it hardens distinctions between Europeans/Indians and black Africans. The letter from ‘an Indian’ with which I began this discussion of the Standard highlights the newspaper's general insistence on this racial division. The Indian's very eagerness to deny nativity in order to claim equality glosses over centuries of an Indian coastal culture. Where an almost indigenous right could in fact have been claimed, it is explicitly denied in favour of strategic solidarity with the white community. But in promoting a hierarchy of racial difference, the newspaper sustains the concept of ancestral purity that colonial policy was designed and continually redesigned to entrench. Tiller's response to the Indian – ‘Afterall, we are considered to be a native – of England!’ – is suggestive. It points up the always present and prior ambitions of native English nationalism. If, in 1903, this still favoured the Indians, it is the same ambition that as the1910s approached favoured the white settlers and indeed in the late 1960s favoured decolonisation itself. Characterising, as Jeevanjee did, these changing strategies as betrayal and dissonance only reveals the rigidities of colonial logic with which he was always already complicit in his promotion of the new temporality and the new geography of the railway. His story reminds us that recognising what Walter Benjamin terms a ‘blasting’ temporality is – as Homi Bhabha always tells us – a necessary method of discursive challenge.44

In his journal of trips taken in the years 1902–05, Ebrahimji Noorbhai Adamji, the youngest son of a Bohra merchant family, describes journeys from Mombasa to Kisumu, Mumias and Unyoro – towns around Lake Victoria – to chase up money and ivory due in payment for goods the family had sent for inland trade. The journal is a monotonous and precise account of every transaction, meal and travel arrangement, with particular attention paid to experiences on the just-completed railway. The narrative is occasionally broken by thanks to Allah and the Holy Five, an abstract meditation on human nature or on the frustrations of travel. But it barely describes landscapes – except in terms of cash crops – or people. Indians are referred to in relation to their trading wealth and community. Other people are simply native or European. Adamji's story is primarily a precise catalogue of train times, distances travelled and each rupee spent. Against this precision, his oscillation between British time and Arbi – the Arabic Swahili system in which the first hour of a twelve-hour day begins at 7 a.m. and the first hour of a twelve-hour night begins at 7 p.m. – is a notable imprecision. He is not consistent in his use of the different systems. He sometimes uses British notation to refer to his waking and walking time. And he often uses Arbi for train times, where he might be expected to use British notation. This day-to-day shifting between modes of temporality signifies Adamji's position on an apparently smooth cusp between the old life of the coast and the new life of the interior, from the temporality of the dhow and the Indian Ocean to that of the railway joining the coast to the interior. Conversant with both times, using both systems to describe his place in the world, he appears comfortable in this moment of transition. But the randomness of Adamji's choice of times hints at a hesitancy which becomes, in other narratives, a greater uneasiness and sense of dislocation – a longer, slower story, half-hidden by the snappy timetable of Jeevanjee's newspaper. This is a story which insists on the commonly disenfranchising effects of forced and contract labour, of both migran t and indigenous peoples, across Oceans and the realm.

In 1903, the Protector of Immigrants ‘collected up the waifs and strays … the odds and ends left over from the Uganda Railway’ to train and settle them as agriculturalists.45 While the settlement initially flourished and inspired plans to recruit other farmers from India, by 1907 the community had almost disintegrated and none of the Punjabi farming families approached had been enticed to settle in Africa.46 Against the imagined figure pacing the deck of a dhow with which this paper began; and against the histories of traders like Jeevanjee and Adamji, this anecdote figures an unnamed Indian labourer who has travelled in the hull of a ship, become marooned in Africa, and whose position in the stringent racial hierarchy becomes ever more obscure. This figure at the edge of the diaspora becomes, in yet other stories, a discarded wife, the child of mixed racial parentage or a man who has married outside his community. The second part of this paper explores the way in which three contemporary writers of fiction have used the novel form to tell the relationship between class complicity and racial disjuncture that energised and clarified the lives of some Asians in East Africa, and confused and depleted the lives of others.

Writing of novelists of the South Asian diaspora, M. G. Vassanji identifies the ‘part-legendary, part-real ancestor figure as the writer's physical and spiritual raison d'etre’. He suggests that this figure ‘is a characteristic motif in the imaginative life of South Asians abroad. … The writer as myth maker creates Adam and stipulates a year zero, the events leading from which give meaning and coherence to his life and his time’.47 In Vassanji's own work – as discussed below – this stipulated raison d'etre is constantly obscured by the recognition that his own chosen originary figure is only ever contingent and can only ever provide a qualified beginning. By contrast, both M. G. Visram's fictionalised biography of the trader Allidina Visram 48 and Kirit Patel's epic saga, In Search of Tomorrow,49 emphatically bear out Vassanji's statement. These texts clearly found genealogies in late nineteenth-century entrepreneurs whose status is smoothly concomitant with the ascendance of British power in East Africa.

Chapter 8 of Visram's novel is entitled ‘King without a Crown’. The reference is to Allidina Visram's historical reputation as the ‘Uncrowned King of Uganda’.50 From a small start in Mombasa and Bagamoyo in the late nineteenth century, Allidina eventually opened over 170 stores, reaching into Uganda along the railway to Lake Victoria – across which he ran the first steamer – and on to Kampala, where he eventually made his home. Where Jeevanjee was enormously influential in Kenya, Gregory considers that Visram was ‘[t]he most influential Indian in Uganda before the upheavals of the First World War’.51 This reputation is supported by an anecdote that tells of the British administration begging Allidina not to close unprofitable stores in more remote locations.52 Commercially and politically, he was even more important than Jeevanjee, with whom he founded the Indian Association in Mombasa in response to growing white settler agitation against Indian entrepreneurs.53 Like Jeevanjee's gift of a statue of Queen Victoria to the new town of Nairobi, Allidina's documented habit of carrying two flags, the Union Jack and the Aga Khan's emblem, was a public declaration of his commitment to the British Empire – as well as a reminder to the administration of its concomitant responsibility to ensure equal rights for the Indian traders within its territories.54 But in telling Allidina's story, Visram runs this latter signification into the former, eliding the racial politics into which the man was drawn.

In subtitling his fictionalised biography of Allidina Visram ‘story of the forgotten pioneer’, the author indicates that his novel will be a recuperation of a lost history. However, while Visram explains in an interview that he chose to use a fictional form not – and he was very insistent on this point – because he had a political axe to grind, but simply because he didn't want to be accountable to historical fact, the effect of his fictionalisation is a heavier, more tightly bound idea of history than an accountable biography could ever have produced (Visram interview)55. The novel consolidates a clearer, straighter story than a straightforward biography would allow. The author creates Allidina's life as a progressive, ‘pioneering’ narrative inaugurating a community history apparently comfortable within and regularised by the dynamics of colonialism.

Visram's dedication of the book to ‘many a pioneer who lived at the beginning of this century’ anticipates the narration of Allidina as representing a whole class and historical period of men. In a fictional letter from Allidina to a trading partner in Bombay, he asks that rupees be sent instead of goods in payment for his latest consignment of ivory because ‘[t]he monetary system in these parts of the world is in a total shambles. Rupees should work well as a medium of trade.’56 The text concludes: ‘Thus rupees came to East Africa as legal tender.’ In a postscript to the novel, Visram points out that Allidina ‘was not solely responsible for introducing rupees as currency in Kenya and Uganda’.57 He is, in other words, standing in for the men who established the currency. He is understood as having both a royal prerogative and a representative status. The telling of Allidina's life as both an ‘Uncrowned King’ and a merchant-everyman equates to the more general move of the Indian trader from merchant prince to petit bourgeois which, in Sakarai's analysis, British colonial expansion entailed. Allidina is not narrated as an everyman in the sense of an antihero – which would debunk both regal and bourgeois self-regard – but defined in terms of an extraordinary personal as well as contingent historical position which entrenches his status as a founding father.

The text starts with Allidina at age 14, ‘unwanted’, ‘lonely’, ‘poor’ and ‘uncertain’, sitting for hours watching the dhows from Africa arrive in Cutch.58 While Allidina was in fact Ismaili, Visram avoids mentioning his community and family ties, portraying him as completely disenfranchised.59 His ‘vagabond’ childhood is described as ‘a life without yesterdays and tomorrows’.60 It is only when Allidina decides to catch a dhow to Africa that time starts to run. In reconstructing him as an orphan and glossing community affiliation, Visram emphasises Allidina's self-made image and claims him – across communities – for the whole Asian diaspora in East Africa. He mythologises him as an originary figure whose history begins and who begins history when he crosses the Indian Ocean.

In offering Allidina as an Adam figure, Visram's book seems to be countering a telling of history which takes British aspirations in East Africa as a beginning. But rather than using the fictional space he has given himself to imagine Allidina's private, family or particular community life, Visram portrays his subject almost exclusively in terms of public economic and administrative spheres. Most of the dialogue – almost all to do with the logistics of opening up trade in the interior – occurs between Allidina and his ‘valet’, Suleman, whom Visram himself describes as completely fictional and as ‘only the alter ego of Allidina’.61 Scenes take place in ships, shops, on trading routes and in offices. The public/private space of the Ismaili Jamatkhana and the private space of the home are not portrayed. In line with the nineteenth-century laissez-faire rule of law mandating the imperial project, the novel entrenches – in its very absences – a hard distinction between public and private space. This curious lack of emphasis on family, biological genealogy, cultural and religious affinities, or the logical necessity of a founding mother has the effect of further purifying Allidina's role as a communal founding father. While the inauguration of time and history represented by Allidina's crossing could suggest the disjunctive beginning of a diasporic sensibility, this possibility is excluded by the satisfied presentation of continuity through colonial rule that is not broken but rather enforced by the intertextual shaping of the novel.

Visram's omniscient narration is interspersed with fictional letters, referenced quotes from history books and dialogues labelled as ‘scenes’ and laid out as scripts. But this gathering together doesn't urge the reader towards a questioning of textual authority and the possibilities of history telling, but rather endorses the sense of Allidina's steady ascendancy. Visram's text almost fulfils Said's definition of the nineteenth-century British novel as:

an incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic form. Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power.62

Said's analysis of the novel as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society and a fortification of imperial authority finds an addendum in Visram's book. The text seems to enact the description of a ‘convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel’ and the ‘ideology’ of imperialism bound to the wealth of the (metropolitan) bourgeoisie.63 In three scenes near the end of the book, Allidina meets Winston Churchill, Sir Frederick Jackson (who was the Governor of Uganda) and the Kabaka (King) of Buganda.64 In the first meeting the subject is cotton production; in the second, a concession of land for Allidina to plant sugar; and in the third, the number of local labourers whom Allidina employs. The necessity of Allidina to the development of Uganda in line with the projections of Empire is entrenched by the simple fact of these meetings; the conversations themselves are token. The teleological narrative, from urchin to prominent businessman, is completed within the capitalist structure of the imperial project; and the diasporic community is portrayed as complete and comprehensible within the narratives of empire.

In the preface to his memoir about life on a sisal plantation, Red Soils of Tsavo (1987) Visram explains that the text ignores events which had ‘either racial, tribal or religious connotations’ because ‘like many Kenyans I feel these undertones best be left alone’.65 In interview, he again asserts a wary lack of interest in these subjects and in politics more generally (Visram, ‘Interview’)66. Paradoxically, this desire to avoid politics seems to have committed him to distilling a politically bound Allidina from history. Visram implies that an apolitical stance is commensurate with a nostalgia for the certainties of the past and of empire. Contrasting Visram's professed political neutrality, Patel's In Search of Tomorrow was written with vehement political intent. The text is packaged as an attempt to parry racism against recent immigrants to Britain and is particularly concerned to establish the rights of refugees who arrived in the country following Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asian population from Uganda in 1972.67 In the prologue, a racial insult – ‘go home you Paki’ – prompts the narrator to tell his son something of his history. At one level, Patel's agenda is pursued through accounts of culture and religion, designed to demystify Asian rituals and life. The ‘ancient customs’ of a Hindu temple are explained;68 a wedding and dowry arrangements are described;69 and the significance of ceremonies for the dead are drawn out.70 However, depicting a father laying his son in front of a statue of Rama so that ‘god would go with him always’, the narrator claims that ‘All Indians believed in this custom’.71 This portrayal of the Indian everyman as Hindu attenuates the educational quality of the text and points to the broader framework of absolutes informing Patel's novel.

The author's intended audience and the lineaments of his recuperative agenda are indicated by the epigraph: ‘Reading about me you are not learning about the Asians, but rather discovering hitherto hidden portions of your own psyche.’72 It becomes clear that Patel isn't simply promoting cross-cultural understanding, but is pointing, like Visram, to the historical necessity of Asian enterprise to the successes of British colonial rule in East Africa. Patel's argument is that this entails descendent rights to the prosperous space of a culturally heterogeneous British nation. The brief prefacing story of a father and son in contemporary Britain impels the narration of an ancestral – although not apparently biologically connected – father/founder figure, Anil, and his son, Ramesh. But in telling the story of Anil and Ramesh, the narrator constructs the Asian East African diaspora not just as, but as at times no more than a ‘portion of [England's] psyche’. The novel represents a people fully enfranchised by the British Empire and increasingly, ultimately tragically disenfranchised as the rhetoric of imperialism gives way to the contracting priorities of English nationalism.

Anil's story begins with the establishment of the East India Company, which is portrayed as taking a country of ‘internal turmoil and anarchy’ and ‘reorganising it as a land of peace and security’.73 The years of the British Raj following the company's success are told as an originary utopia. Anil, like Visram's version of Allidina, is an orphan – he is an emphatic and simple year zero. Further, growing up without, in the author's absolute phrase, ‘one single Indian as his friend’, Anil's sense of self is completely bound to the patronage of an army captain who allows him to grow up in the closed world of the barracks.74 Encouraging Anil to go to East Africa, this British captain is described as speaking to a son he has nurtured and prepared to take advantage of the greater global scope of Britain's colonial territories. But suggesting that if Anil goes to East Africa he will necessarily ‘act as a middleman’ between the English and the African ‘natives’, the words aren't those of a father encouraging adventure and enterprise, an expansion of character, but the voice of paternalism and colonial propriety that moves men into their proper place.75 It is thus only when the narrative reaches the morning Anil leaves for East Africa that he is portrayed as having a sense of an Indian self outside the idyll of his life with the army. Praying to Rama to look after him on his journey, Anil becomes, against any explication of his character so far, Hindu. Rather than losing caste in crossing the ocean, he comes to define himself and be more clearly defined as an Indian the more fully he pursues a role within global imperial structures. He is portrayed as coming most fully into a complete sense of self in finding a proper place within the subtle hierarchies by which the English ordered their dominions

However, in another shift of narrative, during the crossing to Africa, Anil becomes a hero who fights against the brutal ship's captain for proper food and shelter for the labourers being taken to work the railway.76 Like Visram's Allidina, Anil is both distinct from and representative of the people. This rare but comfortable hybridity is highlighted later in the text when, as a wealthy pioneer coffee grower, he is ‘the only Indian allowed to go and drink in the Nile sports club’. This statement is not followed by a critical assessment of white prejudice, but rather an end of chapter suggestion that there was ‘no compulsion’ about this segregation.77 And yet – in seeming contradiction – the preceding chapter ends with an anecdote about an officious and insensitive district officer who threatens to take Anil's child from him under the Crown's authority. He is, in Anil's ‘furious’ thoughts, ‘rude and unsympathetic to our beliefs’ due to the fact that ‘now they are sending Englishmen from England who think they own us; the others [trained as officials in India] thought of us differently’.78 Patel's novel, oscillating between a rhetorical endorsement of the empire and Anil's surprised anecdotal experiences of oppression, find coherence in the slow run-down of old structures as the cause of an uncivilised prejudice. Like Jeevanjee over half a century before him, the author Patel does not recognise the apparent travesty of imperialism as an in-built component of colonialism.

The novel concludes with the story of Anil's son Ramesh, who comes to Britain as a refugee from Amin's Uganda. His wife dies because she is not given proper care in a camp; he is unable to find a job and he is ‘daily criticised and insulted for keeping his own customs’.79 In his suicide note he writes about both the racism he has experienced and against those who have ‘discarded thousands of years of Indian heritage’.80 He states that ‘life without my culture is no life’ and describes his love for an ‘uncivilised and savage’ Africa.81 But the narrative has notably not established either a cultured India or a ‘savage’ Uganda as an origin. There is a literary lapse between the description of Ramesh's sense of damaged identity and the history grounding his sense of righteousness. Ramesh's tragic disorientation is not s o much explored within the novel as symptomatically reflected in the text's inability to offer a coherent idea of the history which has brought Ramesh to exile. The synoptic feel of the narrative, the construction of characters as representative types, is less to do with Patel's subsumption of an aesthetic to a political agenda than with the impossibility of tracing the complex consolidations and fragmentations of his diasporic history from a romanticised beginning in the Raj. The history of imperialism, valued in its own terms, is, Patel's novel demonstrates, not useable to either ground an Asian East African community identity or to argue for a British nation accountable to its colonial past. As in Visram's text, the particular men Patel is attempting to value are overwhelmed by the progressive historiography the author is attempting to sustain. Contrasting the silences within these two novels, it is not so much through narrative as through other, stranger, more troubled silences that M. G. Vassanji pursues his version of history.

In a piece for a collection entitled Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, Vassanji discards one of his given terms of reference, suggesting that the concept ‘South Asian’ is ‘purely geographical, artificial … devoid of any imaginative force’.82 This continues a refutation Vassanji began three years earlier, when he changed the name of The Toronto South Asian Review – the journal and publishing house he founded in 1982 – to The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad. In the editorial heralding this new identity, Vassanji admits the possibility that ‘South Asian’ might eventually ‘attain imaginative charge’ within North America and describe a ‘cohesive’ identity challenging the ‘bitter divisiveness of the subcontinent from which it takes its definition’.83 But in nevertheless insisting on changing the name of the journal, he suggests the greater importance and implies the growing urgency of acknowledging the ‘confusion’ of smaller community and broader diasporic identities that the term obscures.84

In place of South Asian, Vassanji claims ‘Third World’ – an arguably more homogenising term, but one capable of describing a demographic that, for him, is imaginatively loaded.85 His insistence on its descriptive and generative impact reveals the configuration of his commitment as a writer. Against the reductive emphasis on race and origin implicit in ‘South Asian’, Vassanji suggests that ‘Third World’ can frame his own position, generations and many locations – from Tanzania and to Kenya, to the United States and to Canada – removed from South Asia. It allows him to centre a world-view of people operating within, across and beneath national boundaries and inter-national dynamics – people whose ‘cultural roots lie strewn around’.86 His novelistic reclamations of smaller community narratives, marginalised by – even as they have been complicit with – colonising historiographies seem a refined expression of this ‘Third World’ sensibility. But it is in the almost unclaimable silences within these very narratives that he locates a deeper concern, and a more agonised and disruptive definition of the term.

Uma Parameswaran suggests of Vassanji's writing that ‘the main point is not so much the politics of a country but the history of a people’.87 Taking this further, it may be argued that his subject is not so much the history of a people, but a people as the history of their margins. Vassanji's work defies purities – any self-contained idea of a national, religious, racial or communal construction of a people. Asked about the relationship between his work and his life, Vassanji replies that his writing ‘is essential for [him] to come to terms with [his] guilt’ at having left East Africa.88 In his novel The Gunny Sack (1989), this guilt can be read as binding him less directly to the telling of his diaspora and more to the narration of the disenfranchised figures at the edges of the community.

In all his novels, Vassanji's creation of ‘part-legendary, part-real ancestor’ figure, his own stipulated raison d'etre as a writer, is constantly obscured by the recognition that his chosen originary figure only ever provides a qualified beginning. He is always deferred back to a less known father, a less acknowledged mother, a beginning elsewhere in time, further back in geography. In an interview about The Gunny Sack, Vassanji points out that ‘his characters don't mean anything until they have a history’, but he also says that he ‘does not see, nor want to give the impression of, a simple, linear historical truth emerging’.89 The imperative to value history and provide a genealogy around which identity can cohere conflicts with the imperative to undermine the kind of un-reflexive linearity that flows from the conceptualisation of ‘a year zero’.

The family tree prefacing The Gunny Sack is entitled ‘The Descendents of Dhanji Govindji’. Dhanji Govindji himself, however, is listed within a second generation. The top spot is occupied by Dhanji's mother-in-law, who is only ever referred to as ‘The Zanzibari Widow’. She remains an obscure if formidable figure in the text, her significance distilled to her location, namelessness and sex. Coming from Zanzibar, out of centuries of pre-British, pre-Portuguese, Indian Ocean trade, she represents – more fully in her namelessness – generations of coastal presence in East Africa preceding Dhanji, newly arrived from Junapur and ostensibly signifying a ‘year dot’. However it is the widow's sex that becomes most significant, that invites the reader to trace a line through mothers and daughters rather than fathers and sons. But the presence of the Zanzibari Widow not only skews and diffuses Dhanji's position as an ‘Adam’. In grounding the line drawn through Dhanji's official wife Fatima, she oppresses the genealogy of Dhanji's other, African wife, Bibi Taratibu.

The narrator Salim asks:

What was she like, this gentle one, this Bibi Taratibu given to my ancestor for comfort on lonely, breezy African nights. … Slave women wore a colourful cloth around their bodies. She must have been dark dark … 90

Ji Bai, from whom Salim inherits the gunny sack, is the daughter of Fatima and Dhanji. In choosing not to hand the sack down through generations more linearly connected to herself, but to hand it across to the descendents of Dhanji's other wife, Ji Bai makes a gesture of recognition and redemption. Nevertheless, where Salim traces his ancestry back to his great-grandfather Dhanji Govindji through a proliferation of stories and anecdotes, he can only track back to his great-grandmother, Bibi Taratibu, through moments of speculation that arrest the pace of the story. From the strange, recurring memory of a hushed ride home after his ‘dark dark’ father is mistaken for a Kikuyu during the Mau Mau years, to the disappearances of Bibi Taratibu and her son, Salim's recuperative narrative is constantly silenced.91 His just authorized representations of family and community are always already refracted back into these discomforting, half-complete stories at the edges. Salim's self-conscious trailing into ellipses acknowledges the vulnerability of his telling of this one particular peripheral community history to other histories from more and yet other more peripheral locations. The point inexorably becomes a questioning of all renderings of history, which in other narrative strands of the novel plays metaphorically on story, textuality and the weight of words.

The novel doesn't just narrate the racism which blanks and shames the genealogy of Bibi Taratibu in terms of a community failing to break out of old, exclusivist patterns of behaviour. Its ethnic absolutism is rather portrayed as a major breach of historical faith. That is, a failure to value an even older, grounding, central narrative of hybridity, inclusiveness and adaptability. And it is from this close perspective of a pre-colonial form of hybridity that the text moves carefully towards a larger version of the diasporic shape of history. Not, crucially, the other way around.

Salim speculates on his ancestor's name:

How much lies buried in a name … Dhan, wealth; Govind, the cowherd butter-thief gopi seducer, dark Krishna. A name as Banya in its aspiration for wealth as Hindu; yet gloriously, unabashedly, Muslim. For the esoteric sect of the Shamsis there was no difference. But Govindji, the elders will now tell you, is not a family name – where is the attak, the last name, that can pin you down to your caste, your village, your trade? Absent … 92

The unusually laden name of the ‘official’ founding father itself carries a traditional potential to embrace multiple and impure narratives, the very kind of diffusions half-evoked by the suppressed stories of Bibi Taratibu. The name Govindji is also, however, an absence, the name of an undefined nobody; caste, village, trade have all been lost in conversion and migration. The comments of the elders ‘now’ relates to the novel's push against the stultifying, communal sense of identity, portrayed as a more recent development. But also, in being the name of a no man, the name Govindji signifies an anonymous everyman. The history he symbolises is offered as a wider metaphor. This careful binding of a bigger historical picture to the small narrative of a particular community is more fully signified through Vassanji's name for the Ismaili communities of his novels. In calling them ‘Shamsi’, he is appropriating a term bound to a very particular history but lost in time and available for fictional appropriation.

In resurrecting the now obscure name ‘Shamsi’ – from the North West Indian communities converted by Pir Shamas – rather than using the general ‘Ismaili’, into which these particular conversions have long been subsumed, Vassanji is highlighting the parameters of his work. The name positions the community as both closely factual and broadly fictional. Salim, having described himself in search of a beginning, goes back to a place and time which both grounds his specific family and community trajectory and constructs it symbolically back in a vague, folk, pre-history which opens it up to a wider reading. The story is emphatically entitled ‘The Beginning’:

One quiet night they sat outside their doorways in little groups, gurgling hookahs and talking in murmurs. … A tall bearded man came in sight, in a long white robe and a white skull cap. Pausing in the distance, his long wide shadow merging with darkness of the trees and forest, he began clapping his hands in rhythm and dancing the rasa … Then like a ghost he disappeared, as he had come. The next night again he came and did one full circle of the rasa; and sang. … The whole village danced and sang. Then the man initiated them into the secret. He taught them new prayers and he taught them songs … Thus was the village of Junapur in India converted to an esoteric sect of Islam that considered thundering Allah as simply a form of reposing Vishnu. 93

The heightened tone and parabolic shape of the story take it outside the main narrative, giving it the feel of a self-contained story beyond the novel's tempo. This suggests that ‘The Beginning’ can only ever be yielded as a mythology. But it also suggests that the story can be read as a symbolic beginning; that it may be read outside this particular history to point up Ismaili, Asian East African or ever more diverse beginnings. The view Vassanji offers is of a world of peoples constituted by diasporic encounters, shaped back through ever older cosmopolitanisms, before any one moment in time and concept of territory the global reach of which seems so absolute and so modern. Locating both the community's enabling qualities of adaptability and disabling qualities of racial exclusivity in a pre-colonial history, Vassanji's writing carefully recognises and then carefully side-lines the effects of colonialism. Through the enthusiasms of Jeevanjee's newspaper, the sparseness of Adamji's diary, the confidence of Visram's work, the awkwardness of Patel's writing and finally the perplexed silences of Vassanji's novel, the Asian East African diaspora may be understood as representing an – albeit uneasy and wavering – continuity between pre-colonial globalisations and colonial expansion that defies both imperial and post-imperial claims to a radical global perspective.

Notes

1. Gregory, India and East Africa, 5–7.

2. Periplus, 27; Coupland, East Africa and its Invaders, 15–18.

3. Gregory, India and East Africa, 9.

4. Following common usage, the paper refers to ‘Indians’ when discussing the South Asian diasporas of East Africa before 1947 and ‘Asian’ when discussing the diaspora after Partition. In East Africa today, the term ‘Asian’ is most often and unselfconsciously used as a term by and for communities and individuals whose ancestry traces back to South Asia. The change in terminology began in 1947 with the partition of the sub-continent into the independent nations of India and Pakistan (See, Delf, Asians in East Africa, xi). The trade winds traditionally brought merchants from Gujarat, Kathiawar and Sindh. These – along with the Punjab – are also the areas from which the British recruited labourers and settlers. Located between Bombay and Karachi, these places were and continue to be particularly fraught by partition. The change in colloquialism indicates a desire within the diasporic communities to limit the ramifications of these national tensions. But in deliberately eliding alliances with distant national identities, the vaguer term also points up the importance of smaller community affiliations.

5. Coupland, East Africa, 302–03.

6. Gregory, India and East Africa, 19.

7. Coupland, East Africa, 302.

8. Gregory, India and East Africa, 47; Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 15–16

9. Gregory, India and East Africa, 51; Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture’, 168.

10. Gregory, India and East Africa, 55.

11. Gregory, India and East Africa, 61. Ghai and Ghai, Portrait of a Minority, quote figures from the final report of the Uganda Railway Committee stating that of 32,000 indentured, 16,312 returned, 2,493 died, 6,454 invalided home, 6,724 stayed on.

12. Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 8.

13. Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture’, 168.

14. Lovegrove, ‘Asians and the Building of the Uganda Railway’, 36.

15. Lugard, The Rise of Our East African Empire, 490.

16. Gregory, India and East Africa, 51.

17. Gregory, India and East Africa, 62.

18. Churchill, My African Journey, 32.

19. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 1’, 292.

20. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 1’. 295.

21. Sakarai, ‘Indian Merchants, Part 2’, 5.

22. Jeevanjee, An Appeal, 13.

23. Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 19–21.

24. Gregory, India and East Africa, 177–98.

25. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2; 23 June 1903, 2.

26. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2; 8 January 1903, 5.

27. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 15 November 1902, 2.

28. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4; 5 March 1903,1.

29. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 30 June 1903, 2.

30. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 1 August, 1903, 8.

31. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 7 November 1903, 4.

32. Standard, 6 December 1902, 2, 22 November 1902, 4; 1 January 1903, 4, 19 September 1903, 6.

33. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 86.

34. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 93–111.

35. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 93, fn. 23.

36. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81.

37. Standard, 10 March 1903, 1.

38. Standard, 11 July 1903, 1.

39. Standard, 18 April 1903, 2. Bohras are a Gujarati based sect of Shi'a Muslims and a powerful community of traders in East Africa (Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 256).

40. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 91.

41. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 86.

42. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–36.

43. Standard, 22 November 1902, 3.

44. Bhabha, ‘Dissemination’. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 244–255.

45. Gregory, India and East Africa, 69.

46. Gregory, India and East Africa, 69–71.

47. Vassanji, ‘The Post-Colonial Writer’, 64.

48. Visram, Allidina Visram.

49. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow.

50. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81; Preston, Oriental Nairobi, 66; Oza, A Rift in the Empire's Lute, 123.

51. Gregory, India and East Africa, 114.

52. Patel, Challenge to Colonialism, 41.

53. Gregory, India and East Africa, 80.

54. Gregory, India and East Africa, 81; Visram, Allidina Visram, 84.

55. Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.

56. Visram, Allidina Visram, 74.

57. Visram, Allidina Visram, 131.

58. Visram was born in 1851 and in fact left at age 12 (Salvadori, Through Open Doors, 225).

59. Visram himself is Ithnasheri. He is not a descendant of Allidina Visram. (Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.)

60. Visram, Allidina Visram, 12.

61. Visram, Allidina Visram, 133.

62. Said, Culture, 84.

63. Said, Culture, 82.

64. The scene is set in 1907 but Jackson didn't become Governor until 1910.

65. Visram, Red Soils of Tsavo, 7.

66. Personal interview with M. G. Visram, 8 May 1999.

67. Mahmood Mamdani's From Citizen to Refugee which documents his time in a Kensington refugee camp, was written with a similar agenda. Excerpts were first published as ‘a novel in progress’ in an anthology of writing by Asian Ugandan refugees, Merely a Matter of Colour (1973). The full text retains some fictional aspects, particularly dialogue, but it progressed into a more autobiographical and documentary style of work than this earlier description indicates.

68. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 10–11.

69. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 44–45.

70. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 62.

71. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 54.

72. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, i.

73. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 2.

74. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper.

75. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 9.

76. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 25.

77. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 55.

78. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 54.

79. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 54.

80. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 107.

81. Patel, In Search of Tomorrow, 5. There is not room to trace the parallels with the story of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which underline the shorter reading of the novel offered in this paper., 109.

82. Vassanji, ‘Life at the Margins’, 116.

83. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 7.

84. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 8.

85. Vassanji, ‘Life at the Margins’, 119.

86. Vassanji, ‘Growing Out’, 7.

87. Parameswaran, SACLIT, 196.

88. Vassanji, ‘Broadening the Substrata’, 25.

89. Vassanji, ‘Broadening the Substrata’, 24, 22.

90. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 23.

91. The Mau Mau was an insurgent organisation of mainly Kikuyu. The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–56) was a violent uprising, attracting brutal reprisals from the colonial government.

92. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 10.

93. Vassanji, Gunny Sack, 7.