To 26-year-old Navin Lalwani, India just means a herd of elephants and sweltering heat. “Oh and maybe tandoori chicken and paneer as well,” he tells me as he struggles to figure out what India means to him. Navin is an Indian citizen, born and brought up in the Philippines to Sindhi parents. How did he get to be here, though? It’s an interesting and unexpected story that mixes migrating ancestors with the greatest tragedy of Indian Independence, Partition.
“India means very little to me,” he continues, after giving the matter some thought. “We have no family there and I rarely go back. I speak English at home and don’t identify with Indians of my age. I have an Indian passport because of my Indian origins but that’s about it.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by many young Sindhis who were born and brought up in the Philippines. Despite the occasional eating out at Indian restaurants and the general extravagance that characterises their marriages, much like the stereotypical big Indian wedding, they have hardly any ‘Indian-ness’ left in them, they say. All of them are Indian passport holders, though. But legally, most of the members of the approximately 25,000-strong Sindhi community in the Philippines trace their roots to Hyderabad in Pakistan. Still, they chose to be Indian citizens instead of obtaining Filipino or Pakistani citizenship.
“The Indian passport holds much more weight internationally,” 28-year-old Anita Keswani (name changed to protect identity) says. It is easier to get jobs back in India and even abroad, she believes. Living and working in Bangalore, she yearns for Manila and believes she will always be more Filipino than Indian.
Yet not every Sindhi Filipino feels the same way. “We try and make our life in the Philippines as Indian as possible. After all, no matter what we’ve gone through, out hearts will always remain Indian,” 78-year-old Narain Das tells me over the phone. His voice is firm and clear despite his age. He has agreed to talk to me only after a lot of persuasion by his niece.
Narain Das is one of the few senior citizens left among the Sindhi community that originally moved to the Philippines in the aftermath of Partition. He does not like to dwell on the times that made him leave his country and his voice is still full of emotion as he talks about India. Driven out of their ancestral home in Sindh’s Hyderabad and forced to live in refugee camps in erstwhile Bombay, Narain Das was only 14 when he left the country. In 1946, he flew from Calcutta to Manila on an old Chinese airplane, he says. He and his family landed in Manila with next to nothing to build a new life with the help of friends who had moved there in the 1920s.
Yet as fate would have it, he and his family found themselves in a Philippines that was still an American colony and the site of many a battle between the Japanese and American troops. “What little we had to build a business here was gone by the time the war ended,” he says, “And by the time we had built up our businesses and made money to go back home, we had nowhere to go back to. Our ancestral homes in Sindh were razed to the ground. We did not even get visas to go back.”
Narain Das and his friends stayed on and built the foundations of the Sindhi community that flourishes in the Philippines today. In his heart he still lives in his homeland. “We stuck to our Indian traditions. We celebrate Diwali and Holi. We wait for special occasions to go back to India to meet our relatives who fled to Madras and Bangalore during the bad times. We make sure our children marry from Sindhi families back in India,” he says with pride.
That last point, however, is not something that a lot of Sindhis are happy about. Real estate broker and Filipino-born Sindhi Rani Lalwani, 55, says, “My husband was born in Allahabad. I was born and brought up in Manila. Yes, I was Indian by origin, but he was Indian all the way through. It was an arranged marriage and we started quarrelling on the honeymoon itself. Sometimes just being born Indian does not make you so. I could not pretend to be Indian you see.”
Rani barely speaks Hindi or any other Indian language. She does not cook Indian food and her two children have no idea that they are from Sindh, a region that is now not even in India. The family’s only association with this country was the Hindi movies they saw when Rani’s husband was alive. But after he died, even that tenuous tie snapped.
As Rani rapidly talks to her maid in Tagalog, she hands me the sole picture she has of her parents’ wedding. Two very Indian faces and people swathed in wedding attire stare out at me from the slightly yellowing black and white picture. “I’m considering getting a Filipino passport. But I still wonder about giving up my Indian passport completely,” Rani says.
Rani’s quandary over which citizenship to retain seems to be reflective of her community’s state of being a people caught between the land of their ancestors and the land where they were born.
— The writer is a freelance journalist based in Manila.
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