Another Australia

by Sweatshop Anthology

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

A suburban psychic's ominous warning. A conversation in Yuwaalaraay. A glimpse of a shameful, hidden history. A love that moves a mountain. In this unwavering follow-up to After Australia, twelve more boundary-pushing Indigenous writers and writers of colour show us all that is and could exist in our versions of Australia.



Featuring Shankari Chandran, Osman Faruqi, Declan Fry, Amani Haydar, Shirley Le, L-FRESH the LION, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Omar Musa, Sisonke Msimang, Sara Saleh, Nardi Simpson and Anne Marie Te Whiu.

Release date: May 31, 2022

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

In the northern part of the Indian subcontinent there’s a region that was once home to one of the oldest cultures in South Asia. It’s known as the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Indus Valley Civilisation existed alongside other historical empires in Western Asia and North Africa, including ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was more geographically widespread than either of its contemporaries and technologically advanced. It consisted of hundreds of planned cities made up of brick houses and marvels of ancient engineering, including complex water and drainage systems. Its citizens were renowned for their craftsmanship. Thousands of pieces of their art, including sculptures made of clay and bronze, statues and jewellery, can be found in museums all over the world.

After 2000 years of existence, the Indus Valley Civilisation collapsed. We don’t know why, and probably never will, but the best evidence we have suggests climate change, earthquakes, or a combination of the two. But different cultures and communities in the region have flourished for thousands of years thanks to its proximity to one of the world’s mightiest rivers, the Indus, and its tributaries. Those five tributaries, the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej and Beas rivers, are where the region derives its name. Known in Ancient Greek as Pentapotamía, in Sanskrit as Pañcanada, in Persian as Panjab, it’s now known as Punjab. All translate to ‘Land of the five rivers’. Punjab’s fertility and proximity to a number of powerful empires made it a regular target for conquest and imperial ambition. It was ruled by a succession of different powers including the Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Huns, Arabs, Mughals, Afghans and Marathis, before eventually being annexed by the British East India Trading Company and subsumed into the British Empire, at the peak of European colonialism.

For the next one hundred years, Punjab remained a contiguous province under British rule. Its diverse population consisted of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians, all speaking the same dialect, eating the same food and sharing the same cultural traditions. Religious differences had long played a part in the internal politics of the subcontinent, and they were ruthlessly exploited by the British, who deployed a strategy of divide and conquer in order to keep their colonial subjects fighting amongst themselves, instead of organising amongst each other to resist the rulers.

For generations the British strategy worked but ultimately solidarity always prevails. During World War II, Indians organised themselves into the largest volunteer army the world has ever seen, a force of two-and-a-half million. They fought the Axis powers alongside the Allies across three continents: Asia, Europe and Africa. The war was a galvanising process for the independence movement. Indians from different religious and cultural backgrounds fought alongside each other, on behalf of their British rulers. They played a vital role in helping to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, and they wanted their reward: freedom. After hundreds of years of agitation, culminating in decades of violent protests, riots and mass civil disruption, the anti-colonial movement finally succeeded in expelling the British Empire and freeing India from imperial rule.

Even though the Indian independence movement only succeeded because it was diverse and pan-religious, centuries of oppression and division had created fear and resentment amongst many. Some Muslims feared that in an independent India they would be marginalised by the country’s Hindu majority. They advocated for their own state, a country governed by Muslims for Muslims.

So, in 1947, one of the greatest tragedies in modern history took place: the partition of India along religious lines. Punjab was where the schism was most acutely and violently felt. As one of the most religiously diverse regions in India, its future was hotly contested. It had a slim Muslim majority, which Muslim leaders argued should see it belong to the newly created Muslim-governed dominion of Pakistan. Hindu leaders argued that significant portions of the region had Hindu majorities, who wouldn’t be safe in Pakistan. Sikhs were worried they would be caught in the middle.

To resolve the dispute the British sent a lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, to India to consult and finalise boundary plans. After arriving in India, Radcliffe was given just five weeks to decide how to divide a region that had, more or less, remained a cohesive state since the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation thousands of years before. Radcliffe had never before been to India. In fact, the closest he had ever been to the subcontinent was Paris. Ultimately, he drew a line somewhere along the middle of Punjab, dividing communities, households and families. What followed was one of the largest forced population displacements in human history, along with mass violence. An estimated twenty million people were displaced as Muslims fled India for the newly created country of Pakistan and Hindus fled to India. Up to two million people were killed.

Partition was a horrific and traumatic end to British colonialism on the subcontinent and its ramifications will be felt for generations. Partition is also the reason for my existence. My father’s father was a soldier from Uttar Pradesh, in what is now India, who enlisted during World War II hoping to fight. He was still in training when the war ended and so his first deployment ended up being domestic peacekeeping. His unit was given command of a confiscated German half-track and ordered to patrol the streets of Calcutta during the violent sectarian protests that broke out during partition. Like all Muslim soldiers who resided in what had just become India, he was given the option to stay or to migrate to Pakistan – the country that had been created ostensibly for people like him. Without the opportunity to speak to his family and knowing that he might never see them again, he decided that he would accept the offer of a ship to Pakistan and attempt to rebuild his life there. He eventually settled in Punjab.

My mother’s grandfather was a pro-independence activist and politician, closely allied to Mohammad Ali Jinnah – Pakistan’s founding father. He was an advocate for partition, wanting a homeland for India’s Muslim minority and went on to become one of the longest serving speakers in the Punjab legislative assembly. There’s a street named after him in Punjab’s capital, Lahore, the city where my parents met and where I was born. Like so many millions of others, in so many countries around the world, my very existence is the result of intertwined political and social forces across hundreds of years.

It’s easy to think of these things as coincidences – a soldier leaving his family behind to try and make his life in a new country, whose son ends up marrying the granddaughter of a politician that fought to create the country – but framing something as a coincidence absolves those in power of responsibility. All of the consequences of partition, from the violence, the chaos, the death, the millions of refugees, the numerous wars, the ongoing trauma, to the seemingly coincidental stories of love and the creation of new families, are the result of a series of deliberate decisions. Decisions to conquer, to colonise, to rule, to loot, to impoverish, to divide.

My parents’ decision to leave one former colony for another is the end result of a series of similar decisions. The relative poverty, economic disadvantage, violence and endemic corruption of former colonies like India and Pakistan are directly related to the industrial-scale theft of wealth carried out by the colonisers. An estimated $60 trillion, in today’s terms, was plundered from British India during colonial rule.

It was the wealth of colonies like India that allowed the British to colonise the continent known as Australia.

In 1622, the crew of the Tryall became the first British sailors to sight Australia’s western coast. The ship was owned by the British East India Company, the corporation that first annexed the Indian subcontinent. The nine merchant ships that made up the bulk of the First Fleet were all either owned by or under lease to the British East India Company. The company was used for decades to ferry convicts to the new colony, and in return was granted a monopoly on all trade in and out of it. When supplies were running short the early colonial leaders in New South Wales turned to British India for rice and wheat, farmed and processed by Indian farmers and shipped on British East India Company vessels.

Numerous colonial settlers moved from India to the new colony in the years after invasion. The wealth of English settlers in India would buy them more land and authority in Australia than it would back in the motherland. One example is that of Sydney Watson, the son of a Scotsman born in Calcutta in 1816. Eighteen years later he arrived in New South Wales. He became a wealthy pastoralist by buying up cheap land from colonial authorities. He named one of his stations, on the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory, ‘Punjaub’ . The cattle station had five rivers running through it up to the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was Watson’s ode to the country of his birth.

Australia’s early colonial infrastructure was also deeply reliant on those who had practised the craft on the subcontinent. Judges, administrators and traders moved from India to settle in Australia. Four of New South Wales’ s first five governors had all served in India, including Lachlan Macquarie. Macquarie lived in India for over a decade and fought numerous battles against Indian forces, helping conquer the subcontinent for the British. During his time in India, Macquarie bought an Indian slave, George Jarvis. He brought Jarvis with him to Australia. On the trip over, Jarvis was referred to by one of Macquarie’s colleagues, the future judge advocate of New South Wales, Ellis Bent, as ‘a black Hindu servant of Colonel Macquarie’s’. Macquarie is directly responsible for numerous massacres of Indigenous people throughout New South Wales. He also gave explicit instructions to soldiers to fire upon and hang Indigenous people if they resisted his attempts to ‘clear the country’. The British explicitly used the wealth, resources and experience they had developed in colonising India to first invade Australia and then commit violent genocide on its Indigenous inhabitants.

In some instances, the role of Britain’s Indian subjects was more explicit. Throughout the 1800s there were thousands of Indians in Australia working as cameleers and explorers, including alongside Burke and Wills in their infamous expedition. While colloquially and historically referred to as ‘Afghans’, most were Muslims drawn from British India, including Punjab. Despite the fact that they were subject to discrimination because of their racial background and appearance, the cameleers were instrumental in the early part of the colonial project. Even though many ended up settling in Indigenous communities and starting families, their overall contribution was to help the colonists map and conquer the rest of the continent on behalf of Britain.

The British never saw India as a continent where they would try to eradicate the local population and populate it with a White majority. But that’s exactly how they saw Australia, and they used India, and Indians, to help them do it. Which is precisely why my family’s presence, like that of many migrants from former colonies, is not a coincidence. The Australian colonial project was about erasing the original inhabitants, occupying their land and using the wealth generated to build a European outpost in Asia.

Most White Australians are, of course, in denial about this. Bizarrely they seem to think that the relative richness of Australia versus countries like India and Pakistan is the result of hard work, luck or ingenuity, as opposed to a series of specific processes designed precisely to create this situation. And so of course, that kind of deliberate global inequality leads to an influx of migrants from one part of the world (the Global South) to countries that have money and perceived economic opportunity primarily thanks to the violence they committed on Indigenous people, and what they exploited from their former colonies.

This situation causes confusion amongst many post-colonial migrants to Australia. We’re here because of how colonialism shaped our home countries, but we’re also on the stolen land of those who themselves have been subject to even more violent colonial forces. We aren’t White but we occupy a more privileged place in society. We experience racism but we also perpetuate it.

Many of these experiences aren’t new. In colonial India lateral violence was common and encouraged by the British. Lighter-skinned Indians from the north discriminated against darker-skinned Indians in the south. Those who were taught English by colonial authorities in turn looked down upon those without that opportunity. Muslims and Hindus discriminated against each other. That’s the sad irony of how colonialism has always, and will always, play out.

Colonial subjects are often manipulated into thinking that by acquiescing to the demands of those in power, they might themselves be rewarded with power of their own. Ultimately, it’s a futile endeavour.

White colonists have made it clear time and time again, on continent after continent, that it doesn’t matter how close to power you think you’re getting or how useful you might have been to the colonial project. When you stop being useful or become a threat, you’ll be discarded.

The Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the foundational pillar of the White Australia policy, is probably the best-known example of this truism. It wasn’t just Indian and Afghan cameleers who were impacted, but Chinese, Japanese and Pasifika workers who had laboured to build the colony for White colonists and were deported and banned from re-entering once A. . .