Postcolonial Migrations: Anglo-indians in ‘white Australia’

On 15 Aug. 1947, the date of Indian Independence, HMAS Manoora reached Western Australia with more than 700 Anglo-Indians on board. In the same year that Australia began to admit refugees from Europe, the troopship Manoora had refitted to evacuate Australians and Europeans from India. As the labour Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, put it: use of Manoora should be confined to Australians and to British people of pure European descent. In the publicity surrounding its arrival, Australia was described as free, democratic and peaceful home, in contrast to the instability and communal conflict of India. But the arrival of Anglo-Indians instead of Australians or British people of pure European descent’ disrupted this fantasy of whiteness and prompted increasingly restrictive immigration policies based on racial exclusivity. An increasing number of Anglo-Indians migrated to Australia in the 1960s and 70s because they were seen as culturally European since they spoke English as their mother tongue, wore Western dress, and their domestic life was more western than Indian. Such cultural similarities came to supersede the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians in identifying them as able to assimilate and integrate into Australia at a time when the White Australia Policy was being replaced by official multiculturalism.

Australian author Suneta Peres da Costa’s debut novel Homework (1999) tells us about the predicaments of growing up in an immigrant family in contemporary multicultural Australia. Mina Pereira, the unreliable child narrator, experiences the many faces of integration not only in her everyday school life but also at home, in her family’s various attempts at homemaking in Australia. Homemaking for the parents becomes synonymous with experiences of loss and homelessness. Against this background Mina tries to recollect her and her family’s past in order to create her own Australian world a world that consists of multiple stories. It is the story of her unhappy and mad mother, who has never overcome her own refugee experiences. As a consequence the mother steals food and stores it in old suitcases under her bed. And it is the story of her father, who works for the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs while seeing himself as a freedom fighter, who is not willing to accept that his homeland Goa is no longer under Portuguese rule. He even transfers his political struggle to Australia, always claiming Goa’s independence from India.

To complicate the already complex life of Mina even further, the girl is blessed’ with a genius sister who simply knows too much’ (79), whereas Mina has to cope with a physical disability, which, from an Indian perspective, always indicates the work of karmic intervention. Her physical deformity, two antennae on her head, cannot be removed because they are rooted in her brain and to Mina’s hard luck they even start growing during her adolescence. Mina’s feelers, however, are visible indicators of her ˜otherness’. Hence, her tentacles mark her as an outsider not only in Australian society but also disconnect her from her mother’s love. It is because of Mina’s longing for this love that she eventually starts to invent alternative worlds. With these themes, the novel weaves a dense narrative web of family experiences and childhood memories that portray the life of a young Australian who experiences otherness as a part of her daily negotiations of the self, while questioning both the traditional values of diasporic Indian communities in Australia as well as the commonplace norms presented by official representatives of multicultural Australia.

The emerging imaginary home becomes Mina’s site of reconciliation as well as a fabricated net of memories and funnily unreliable stories that generates the narrative drive within the novel. References to the world of Indian myths such as the story of Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction, are also included: She [Mina reflecting on her sister’s friend Jacinta] was no suitor, no charmer, she, an incarnation of Kali, goddess of destruction, wreaking havoc on our lives and then dancing barefoot on the violated sacrificed corpses. It is the variety of cultural signifiers, dramatizing rhythms and language modes that generate the protagonist-narrator’s rich and vivid transcultural narrative style. Such stylistic novelty is characterised by the emergence of new cultural forms which are, as John McLeod (2001) reminds us, simultaneously autochthonic yet emerge out of a colonial legacy’. Mina’s narration is constantly playing with fantastic elements thus the text suggests that the construction of history, memory and truth features prominently within her act of storytelling. When the protagonist-narrator’s parents finally die in a fire accident, Mina gets rid of her tentacles, too: I ran crying and tearing those rotted knobs from my scalp. Gone for good my umbilical cord to the world! Gone my chrysalis! My antennae ripped forever from my skull, I finally knew while I ran what it was to feel the blood that might previously have surged to those organs flowing in predictable patterns only through my veins.

This plot development marks Mina’s awakening and suggests that Mina has grown into a young independent woman who realises that her longing for her mother’s love, implying an ultimate protection from the world, is rooted in nothing but an illusion: Having lost her parents, who represented her Indian heritage and the general postcolonial legacy of her family, Mina starts creating a space for negotiating and inventing her Australian self.

In an efficient combination of various storylines, the haunted pasts live on and interact with the protagonist’s presents and compose a transcultural narrative space where the postcolonial past comes alive in the protagonist’s multicultural present. Homework thus not only provides a new perspective on the discourses of postcolonial and transcultural literature by adding a fictionalised transcultural perspective of Indian-Australian women, it also enriches the literary landscape by adding a distinctive Indo-Australian aesthetic. Accordingly, this aesthetics represents modern transcultural life worlds of Indian-Australians and their postcolonial legacy. Seen in this light, the intellectual enterprise of post colonialism, indeed, has become an integral part of modern transcultural life in transforming societies. Interestingly enough, Homework represents its particular multicultural background by staging modern worlds and transcultural lifestyles not as readily available spaces but rather as spheres of constant negotiation.

The novel’s unreliable stories hence not only emerge from and combine different cultural traditions; they also highlight the novel’s struggle with its own transcultural and multicultural contents (for a more detailed discussion of the genre of the transcultural novel, see Helff 2008). [Anglo- Indians could migrate to Australia from the mid-1960s because they were seen as culturally European, but when they arrived they were often perceived as Indian.

Many Anglo-Indians suffered racial prejudice and if the colour of the skin is black, it gets worse. Anglo-Indian assimilation in Australia meant identifying with the dominant white, western culture and feeling more at home. For many Anglo-Indians, Australia felt more like home than independent India, partly because it more resembled the tradition that of in India. Unlike life in Anglo-Indian enclave in India- for example in a railway colony or in central parts of many cities- many see Australia as offering greater spatial and social freedom to integrate into a familiar culture, and see their ability to do so as different from migrants of non-English-speaking backgrounds. Unreal Narration Here Suneta the imaginary spaces vividly portray migrancy and multiculturalism by investing a great deal in combining intertexual and metafictional elements with unreliable narration. The Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1991) suggests that one needs to perceive imagination and fiction as analyses of the social world. њThe imagination as expressed in dreams, songs, fantasies, myths, and stories,ќ he argues, has gained њa peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today.

More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before. According to him Appadurai (1998), fantasy and imagination turn into modern social practices, while the ostensibly clear cut line between imagination and the social world is beginning to blur. Building on this insight this essay he proposes that imagination is a valuable source to read modern life in general and Australian realities in particular. Such a reading, however, does not foreground a cultural authenticity but rather manifold realities and multiple truths. Transcultural unreal narration combines narrative and cultural performances of transculturality with narrative unreliability. It is this amalgamation of literary techniques and cultural performances that aptly presents the changing social realities in which uncertainty and doubt have become assessable dramatizing powers.

Another significant feature of this mode can be seen in its insistent self-reflexivity, a quality that can surface on the plot level or even in the structure of a text. In this respect, it seems only consistent thet such texts challenge their own reliability, especially when the creative act of storytelling becomes a motif within the novel itself and hence points to its own constructedness.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was the first major law passed by the new Australian federal Parliament and laid the foundations of what came to be widely known as the White Australia Policy. Before 1901, immigration policies had mainly restricted the number of Chinese people working in the gold fields. After 1901, both the Chinese and Pacific Islanders working in the Queensland sugar industry were restricted and after the Second World War, immigration policies restricted the entry of non-whites more generally.