Banyan Tree

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of looking at the overseas communities from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. One way is that which Tagore adopts in the letter quoted on the title-page which he addressed to C. F. Andrews when contemplating a visit to Java. Tagore perceived the Indians going overseas as taking their India with them, and recreating new Indian colonies in the lands of their adoption. This view is probably the most widely held; both in the sub-continent and among foreign observers. The other approach is to see the Indians as always victims of circum stance in the lands where they settle, required to perform econo mic roles dictated by the structure of the colonial or metropolitan system. According to this view the capacity of the Indians to work out their own identity beyond the seas always yields to the pres sures exerted upon them, which turn them into a helot or satellite group.

The present book offers a great deal of evidence that can sub stantiate either view: but in the last analysis it suggests that it is the dominant population-the 'Host Society' as it is sometimes misleadingly called-which determines how the Asian immi grants and their children emerge. The present writer has en deavoured not to produce an explanation which is, in effect, a label: the Asians are not herein invariably depicted as victims, nor as heroes; but neither are they saddled with the stereotype of exploiters or spoilers of the lands where they settle. Least of all are they described as part of a world revolution of the oppressed; not, at any rate, in the time-scale with which this book is concerned. The book is about things as they are, not how they might be, or ought to be.

In a sense, my thinking about this subject began on a day in January 1941 when I looked down from the deck of a troopship, anchored at Durban, to see, standing on the dockside a dark, The term 'Asian' became current in East Africa in the 1950s instead of the term Indian and has been introduced elsewhere as synonymous with South Asian. It is thus employed in this book.