By Steve RE Pereira
For those of us who are East African Asians and of a certain generation, Hafsa Zayyan’s novel We Are All Birds of Uganda is far too disturbingly familiar. Published by #Merky Books, a British imprint founded in a collaboration by the British rapper Stormzy with Penguin Random House UK to publish stories ‘far too often underrepresented’, the novel is a timely reminder of a watershed moment in the history of the South Asian diaspora.
WHAT’S GOING ON?
On Saturday May 1, 2021, the Australian government headed by Scott Morrison announced a temporary travel ban that applies to any travellers who have visited India within 14 days of their intended arrival date in Australia. Breaches of the travel ban could lead to up to five years’ imprisonment. This travel ban is a consequence of changes to the Biosecurity Act which means that Australians could face up to five years in jail and heavy fines if they leave India return home. As the ABC reported, “It is understood to be the first time Australia has banned its own citizens from returning, to the point of there being criminal sanctions for those who make it home.”
WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
As Indu Balachandran and a team of concerned citizens note, ” Infection rates in the USA and UK peaked in January 2021 at 89 and 76 cases per 100,000. India’s rates today are 27 cases per 100,000. Yet there is a ban on citizens travelling from India today. No other Aussies have faced this indignity. India’s health and administrative systems are buckling under the care of Indian citizens. Yet one of the richest countries in the world says, “look after ours as well, thanks”. “
Sadly, one Australian man has alreday died in India after contracting COVID-19. Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-08/australian-resident-dies-in-india-covid-19-crisis/100125780
As Sukhmani Khorana writes in The Conversation, “The real question is why those flying from India are being singled out. Such drastic steps were not in place when the US, the UK and Europe were going through similarly deadly and infectious COVID outbreaks in the past year. One possible explanation is the Indian community in Australia is simply an easy target, especially when India is in an unprecedented crisis. Indian officials and media are likely to be preoccupied with more pressing domestic matters and may not complain about the treatment of Indian-Australians the way they did during the student attacks a decade ago.”
As Mohan Dhall writes in Indian Link, “It seems to me it is hard to defend the accusation that it looks racist. When assessing justice, there is a notion called ‘apprehended bias.’ This means bias that is perceived. Apprehended bias is widely felt – not only by Indian Australians but by the Australian Human Rights Commission, high profile commentators and numerous others.”
As Sandeep Varma and the SAARI Editorial Team write, “The Australian government’s travel ban preventing Australian citizens and permanent residents in India from returning to Australia is fear-based and explicitly discriminatory. The ban, created as an emergency determination under the Biosecurity Act 2015, is an abrogation of the responsibilities this nation owes its citizens and residents under law, and is shoddy political action to score points with emotionally-charged supporters.”
THIS COULD BE ME: HOW THIS AFFECTS OVER 600,000 AUSTRALIANS OF INDIA ORIGIN
There are over 9000 Australians stranded in India, many of who left Australia to go back to India to care for loved ones dealing with COVID-19. As Melissa Cunningham reports in The Age, “Many of the people trapped are children who are stuck in India without their parents after travelling to the country with their grandparents.” Her article documents the heartbreaking stories of many Australians stranded in India.
“Bhaumik Dholakiya wept, cradling his 11-month-old son in his arms, as his father succumbed to coronavirus in a crowded hospital ward in India last week. The Melbourne man’s entire family, including himself, his wife, Laxita, and their baby boy, Reyansh, have been infected with COVID-19 during India’s deadly second wave, as hospitals run out of beds and oxygen and people die in lines waiting to see doctors…“We have been so scared for our lives,” says Dholakiya, an Australian citizen of more than 15 years. “We feel like we have been left here to die.”
Read more of Bhaumik Dholakia’s story and the stories of many others stranded in India here, as reported by Melissa Cunningham
As George Megalogenis writes in The Age, “Race cards might have worked in 1996, when migrants were in the minority and the English-born in Australia still outnumbered the total number of migrants from all Asian countries. But not now. Australia is a majority migrant nation, with almost 51 per cent of the population either born overseas (29.8 per cent on the latest figures for 2020) or with at least one parent born overseas (20.9 per cent)…Migrants born in India were already the largest community in Melbourne ahead of the Chinese, and ranked second behind the Chinese in Sydney.”
BRING AUSTRALIANS IN INDIA HOME NOW
Register your protest by signing this petition: https://me.getup.org.au/petitions/bring-australians-in-india-home-now?source=facebook-share-button&time=1620043171&utm_source=facebook&share=3416b704-b6d2-4fba-9b6b-cfbc2543456d&fbclid=IwAR1oYKjs-fp0thEneZR3u_J1LhHDSGWnw0Y6fOrk1QB53IQ7Ke_DL6sYZvQ
Do you have a loved one in India? Are you are appalled by the Morrison government’s racist travel ban? Share your story here: https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6331058/India-travel-ban-Share-your-story
SYDNEY VIGIL FOR INDIA ON MAY 13 AT SYDNEY TOWN HALL
More here: https://fb.me/e/iEMKK6cW8
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A review of Andrew Kwong’s One Bright Moon
By Devika Brendon
Andrew Kwong’s voice in One Bright Moon, is both rational and compassionate, and the fusion of the two enables and generates restorative harmony. Reading this memoir is a healing experience. I’m sure that writing it must have been cathartic for the writer, but rarely have I read a life story that has given me not only admiration for the author but hope for myself, as a fellow human being, as his reader.
A Southern Crossings Collective Statement linking the unfolding politics in India and Australia
As the 26th of January comes upon us, urgent deliberations continue about the Invasion of this land that has been held in custodianship by Indigenous Elders and First Peoples for eons. At the start of this new decade, the questions have become even more pronounced as Australia burns, and we, with the world, watch the devastation of this land brought about by resource extrction through savage capitalism and colonisation. The fires raging across this land are a salutary reminder of the deeply knowledgeable and respectful processes by which Indigenous Peoples managed this land through ‘cool fires’ and mitigated the risk of such scorching summer infernos. At this time, questions also arise about the exclusionary lyrics of the Australian national anthem and what they signify for this modern nation-state.
Eight thousand kilometres away, on the other shores of the Indian Ocean, as another nation burns due to political reasons, we are witnessing the astonishing reclaiming of a national anthem, not for the nationalistic purposes of a resurgent nation-state, but by those seeking the essence of what a ‘nation’ means. This is the reconceptualising of the nation as ‘we the people’ as enshrined in the Constitution of India, and protesting against the divisive mechanisms sought to be brought in by the current ruling government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the Citizenship Amendment Act, and its proposed concomitant handmaiden, the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Continue reading
by Mridula Nath Chakraborty
Come January, Australia Day loometh and along with it, urgent deliberations about the Invasion of this land that has been held in custodianship by Indigenous Elders and First Peoples for eons. At the start of this new decade, the questions have become even more pronounced as Australia burns, and we, with the world, watch the devastation of this land brought about by resource extraction through savage capitalism and colonisation. The fires raging across this land are a salutary reminder of the deeply knowledgeable and respectful processes by which Indigenous Peoples managed this land through ‘cool fires’ and mitigated the risk of such scorching summer infernos. At this time, questions also arise about the exclusionary lyrics of the Australian national anthem and what they signify for this modern nation-state.
Eight thousand kilometres away, on the other shores of the Indian Ocean, as another nation burns due to political reasons, we are witnessing the astonishing reclaiming of a national anthem, not for the nationalistic purposes of a resurgent nation-state, but by those seeking the essence of what a ‘nation’ means. This is the reconceptualising of the nation as ‘we the people’ as enshrined in the Constitution of India, and protesting against the divisive mechanisms sought to be brought in by the current ruling government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and its proposed concomitant handmaiden, the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
Since the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Bill into law on 11 December 2019, a series of public protests have rocked the Indian nation for its discriminatory treatment of Muslims, and its connection to a proposed National Register for Citizens that will impact India’s marginalised the most: the poor, the indigent and the minorities, i.e. those whose access to documentation is most precarious. Widespread opposition to, and peaceful protests against, the unconstitutional nature of the Act, have incited brutal attacks by the government against its own citizens, leading to condemnation from all quarters of the world. Some of the most poignant protests have been staged by the women of Shaheen Bagh, whose entry into public space is an unalloyed claim to citizenship. As they peacefully sit-in in solidarity with the students of India who have borne the brunt of draconian state power, they also attest to India’s soul and its encounter with its democratic destiny in the twentieth-first century.
As always during times of crisis, culture and creativity have come to the fore, with highly inventive and intelligent posters, songs and slogans reclaiming democracy against the government’s spirit-breaking intentions. Resistance itself has been honed into an art form by citizens from all walks of life, as India ground to a halt, with a fifth of its population protesting against the government’s raft of “anti-people” policies on 8th January. Students, the future of any country, have been at the forefront of the spontaneous anti-CAA and anti-NRC movement, not just from the left-leaning institutions that usually lead them, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Jamia Milia Islamia University (JMI), Jadavpur University (JU), Delhi University (DU), but also the somewhat more reticent engineering and management institutions like IITs and IIMs. This time, they too are with us. Supporting them are students from all over the world, including ivy league colleges in the USA who have wrested back cultural festivals from the strangle-hold of Hindutva, as they plan a Holi Against Hindutva campaign.
One such protest by T M Krishna, the iconoclastic Carnatic musician, inspires this missive. On 26th December 2019, Krishna concluded his kutcheri during the Chennai concert season by singing two parts of the five-stanza poem by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, “Jana Gana Mana”, only the first part of which was adopted as the new nation’s anthem, when India achieved independence in 1947 against two-hundred years of British colonial rule. While standing to attention during “Jana Gana Mana” has been made mandatory in Indian cinema halls in some states, Krishna clarified that his audiences could keep sitting during his performance as he was not singing the national anthem, but Tagore’s song. The stanzas that he sang can be translated as follows:
Your call is announced continuously, we heed your gracious call
The Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Muslims and Christians,
The east and the west come, to your throne
And weave the garland of love…
Oh! You who bring in the unity of the people!
Victory be to you, dispenser of the destiny of India!
During the bleakest of nights, when the whole country was sick and in swoon
Wakeful remained Your incessant blessings, through your lowered but winkless eyes
Through nightmares and fears, you protected us on Your lap. Oh loving mother
Oh! You who have removed the misery of the people…
Victory be to you, dispenser of the destiny of India!
Victory to you, victory to you, victory to you…
By including the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Muslims and Christians in the collectivity that marks the nation-state that is called India today, Krishna brought the national anthem squarely into the arena of public statement and protest, gestures that are being echoed all over India today as all these community members stand up and claim themselves as Indian citizens, ringing in the new year with heartfelt renditions of the song. Krishna also alludes to those dark times of colonial oppression which are in danger of being repeated in India today, by Indian’s own postcolonial rulers: he calls for these nightmares and fears to be banished through the power of art and music. This is the true meaning of azaadi (independence) and citizenship: we the people.
Call to Action:
Come 26th January 2020, on the Republic Day of India, and in solidarity with the activism planned for Invasion Day, some of us will be joining our voices together to sing all the five stanzas of this astonishing poem by Tagore, that early critic of nationalism, who understood that the only thing that keeps a people together are the people themselves. That a nation is only so when all the people in it feel themselves to be citizens of the nation. We will be making this artistic statement, in solidarity with protesters in India and across the world, at public platforms in Australia, but other forms of supporting us are also possible. Here is the proposed plan of action:
1. If you decide to hold such solidarity statements at a public platform in your city, please do make sure to inform the relevant authorities, e.g. The City of Melbourne and relevant Councils: let them know about your plan, in writing, in advance. There are online forms available that tell you what you need to do.
2. In the lead-up to the public statement, please pratice singing all the five stanzas at home, using this handy video, but without the voice-over narration or classical raga modalities, so that you know the words and that there is some semblance of harmony on the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5onJA8WuI
Translations of the lyrics are available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8iikaxiSgk
You may also practice in groups together at convenient venues, with one collective dress rehearsal on 25th January if possible. The entire song should be sung without interruptions.
3. On the day, please congregate peacefully at the venue wearing all-white clothes if possible. You may carry flags of India and photographs of Babasaheb Ambedkar, the architect of the Constitution of India, and of any other luminaries you may want to (Mahatma Gandhi, Jyotiba Phule, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad). This event is an assertion and celebration of the Constitution of India on a day that recognises the nation as a secular republic, so we leave this to your discretion to carry any other placards that proclaim India as a democracy.
4. Assign someone to record the entire proceedings, so that it may be shared on social media later that day. If you cannot or do not want to participate in the singing, please come and support us with your physical presence.
5. At the appointed hour, please start the proceedings by acknowledging that we are meeting on Indigenous land and paying respect to Elders past, present and emerging. Tell the gathering that the statement is in solidarity with anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests. Proceed with reading out the Preamble and Section II of the Constitution on Citizenship: https://www.india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/coi_part_full.pdf and then the full song.
6. Please make sure that everyone involved understands that these is a pacific demonstration, without any slogans or heated sentiments. There may be hecklers or interruptions from onlookers and passers-by. Please greet them with a smile but do not respond in any provocative or violent way. At the end of a couple of renditions of all 5 stanzas (and more speeches and songs if singers are interested), thank everyone gathered and disperse quietly.
7. For those who are interested in adding their voice to this public statement, but are unable to make it to the actual venue, please feel free to record yourself at home reading out the Constitution and/or singing all 5 stanzas of the song. Once the video recording of the public event is shared on social media, you can add your recordings too.
Thank you,
Mridula Nath Chakraborty
On behalf of Southern Crossings
Photo credit: PC from Mumbai, India
Dear Mr. Tayyeb Shah,
I came to Australia as an international student from Mumbai, India in 1998. One reason that attracted me to Australian institutions of higher education was their commitment to creativity, to intellectual rigour and to encouraging a plurality of ideas.
I wrote a book of short stories called The Permanent Resident, mainly to chronicle the lives of Indians in Australia, including the lives of international students. This book is published by UWAP. It has since won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2018 (Multicultural), been very well-reviewed in Australia and India, is on the syllabi of a number of universities and on several “must-read” booklists. This would not have happened without UWAP, particularly Terri-ann White, championing my book.
By Roanna Gonsalves
Here in Sydney, it’s the time of the spring equinox. The city submits to the Southern Hemisphere’s annual movement towards heat, fire, flowers. A large audience has gathered in the courtyard at Old Government House to experience Bhoomi: Woman and Earth. It is the third in a series of annual recitals produced and directed by Arjunan Puveendran and Indu Balachandran as part of the Sydney Sacred Music Festival.
By Rashida Murphy
“All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”
T.S. Eliot
Salman Rushdie’s 2017 novel, The Golden House, has an Australian hypnotist in a transnational cast of characters ranging from Mumbai ex-cons to Belgian filmmakers in New York. It is a typical Rushdie novel, full of verbal pyrotechnics and not-so-obscure political references, but it is the Australian character I puzzle over. Nothing wrong at all in placing an Australian in the heart of Manhattan. But one that speaks with a Kiwi accent?Rushdie’s hypnotherapist speaks in a grimly unfunny and terribly clipped way that mocks the Kiwi accent, not the Australian one. Especially when you consider that Rushdie was in a brief relationship with Australian writer Robyn Davidson in the 1980s, you wonder if the gaff is deliberate or an oversight. And whether, in a convoluted way, Rushdie is attempting to reverse centuries of negative portrayals of brown people in white fiction.
In March 2019, Sydney-based Nautanki Theatre Company invited the world-renowned theatre artist, Danish Husain, to perform live at Riverside Theatre, and to conduct an interactive masterclass at Macquarie University, Sydney. Roanna Gonsalves interviewed Danish Husain, via email, about his chosen artform and his practice as a performer within the broader context of global performance practice.
By Maria Elena Indelicato
Australia has been at the forefront of international education. It is at her shores that internationalisation as a fully-fledged policy was first introduced in the global reality of higher education in 1992. Significantly, the then Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Kim Beazley, launched the policy to counter the overseas criticism that Australia’s approach to international education ‘was too narrowly commercial.’ The birth of internationalisation is in fact tied to the commercialisation of higher education in the late 1980s, when Australian universities and colleges were allowed to provide full-cost courses designed for international students. Since then, academic and grey policy-oriented studies which try to determine international students’ market choices and needs have proliferated, leaving very little room to discuss issues surrounding the presence of international students in Australia otherwise. Discourses of economic necessity have thus overdetermined the ways in which we think of, talk about and, ultimately, relate to international students at academic and policy levels.