Written by Karina Patel, Dramaturg

Dhaba on Devon Avenue zeroes in on an Indian family making their living in what is known by many as Chicago’s very own “Little India.” The Madhwanis contend with many of the complicated feelings, internal conflicts, and external challenges that a lot of Indian immigrants in the United States grapple with — the desire to assimilate and aspire as white Americans do, the desire to remain connected to their roots, and the inherent, impossible contradiction there. This family in particular is also haunted by their generational past, the fact that before they were American immigrants, they were Indian refugees. To understand this, we must turn the dial back several centuries to the dawn of British imperialism in India and the devastation it wrought on India physically, economically, and personally.

In the year 1600, the infamous East India Company was founded by the English with the purpose of trading in the Indian Ocean. While it began as a joint-stock, monopolistic trading entity focused on purely commercial pursuits, the EIC’s economic prowess enabled it to become heavily involved in the region’s politics. By the early 18th century, it had secured its position as an agent of British imperialism in India, equipped with its own army and navy.

In 1857, a group of Indian troops under the EIC’s military organised an unsuccessful mutiny. This mutiny, now widely known as the “Indian Mutiny” or “Sepoy Mutiny,” was a pivotal act of rebellion against British imperialism. In response to the mutiny, the British government dissolved the East India Company, took control of its assets and replaced its sphere of influence with direct colonial rule: the British Raj. The British government exercised power in India for almost an entire century, from 1858 to 1947, through a combination of direct rule over the majority of the country and close relationships with the rulers of India’s Princely states who remained independent but pledged their undying allegiance to the British crown.

British rule in India was marked by profound consequences. Chiefly, the British exploited India’s people and resources for their economic benefit, leading to a huge loss for Indian artisans, a widening of socioeconomic divides, brutal famines, and increased religious and communal tensions.

The British Raj’s unabashed disrespect for Indian welfare led to burgeoning calls for independence in the early 1900s, sparking widespread civil disobedience and non-cooperation. In 1930, the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, demanded Purna Swaraj — complete independence.

The question of Indian independence involved much debate over religious statehood, with India’s large minority of Muslims (about 20% of the population) expressing their desire for varying degrees of self-governance. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All India Muslim League, initially hoped for a united India whose majority Hindu government would conduct itself with more consideration and tolerance for the Muslim minority. However, tensions escalated as opinions continued to differ on India’s relationship to the British and their position in the world at large. For instance, in 1938 at the outbreak of World War II, Hindu and Muslim leaders were deeply divided on whether to support the war effort. Moreover, in 1942 when the Hindu-majority Congress Party launched a movement that called for immediate removal of the British, Muslim leaders opposed the efforts — immediate independence would leave no time for Muslims to negotiate their autonomy.

In 1945, World War II came to an end and the British elected Clement Attlee as their new Prime Minister, who pledged to grant India independence, increasing the stakes even more for India’s divided Hindus and Muslims. This spiralled into communal rioting and widespread religious violence across the nation, making it increasingly clear to the British that they could not grant India its independence without tackling the Hindu-Muslim divide.

In 1947, Lord Mountbatten was appointed as India’s final Viceroy and tasked with overseeing the decolonisation of the country. While he was initially instructed to keep India united, the civil unrest in India between Hindu and Muslim communities convinced Mountbatten that a quick and decisive partition of the country was the only way for the British Empire to successfully remove themselves from India.

He appointed the Boundary Commission to partition Punjab and Bengal, the states with a (slim) Muslim majority, to create Pakistan. This commission was chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe — a man who had never stepped foot outside of Europe, let alone been to India. Using fairly outdated census data, Cyril effectively drew up lines that divided these states down the middle, not at all appropriate to the way Hindu and Muslim communities were spread heterogeneously throughout Punjab and Bengal. In many cases, Radcliffe divided not just districts and towns in half, but small villages, too. This created a West Pakistan (former parts of Punjab) and East Pakistan (former parts of Bengal) 1,000 miles apart from each other. It also left millions of Hindus and Muslims on the “wrong” side of each border. In “India and Pakistan: The Demography of Partition,” Kingsley Davis called this “the great demographic obstacle to the establishment of Pakistan.” Partition would only exacerbate the challenges, creating “two minority problems where before there had been only one….” (Kingsley Day, 258).

Partition resulted in one of the largest and fastest mass migrations in human history. Practically overnight, millions of Hindus and Muslims found themselves displaced in the exact areas they used to call home. Fearing religious persecution on their respective sides of the border, they had no choice but to migrate. It is estimated that 14.5 million people migrated across borders within 4 years. This mass migration was extremely arduous and highly dangerous.

Crossing the border during partition was an extremely dangerous experience for refugees on both sides. Towns were looted and burned in riots, entire communities were killed in a fervour of religious violence. Trains crossing the border in both directions were susceptible to violent raids, in some cases massacres, by mobs — these trains were known as “blood trains.”

Even after successfully making it to the other side, this did not mean safety. Refugees slept in crowded camps if they could find the space, and tried their best to integrate into a new community just as torn apart by violence and destruction as the places they had fled from. 

A group of refugees from a western, Muslim-majority province had a particularly hard time resettling: they were Sindhis, like the family we meet in this play. During the British Raj, Sind was a province in India that had a slim Muslim majority, and for this reason it eventually became a part of West Pakistan after partition. Sindhis form their own ethnic community, with traditions, culture, and language that is unique to them. In 1941, before independence and partition, Sind had a population of 4,535,008, of which 1,229,926 were Hindus (about 25%). Hindu Sindhis typically occupied positions as merchants, shopkeepers, money-lenders, landowners, teachers, and administrators. They stood apart culturally from other Indian Hindus (from other provinces) in various ways, such as in their practice of the Hindu religion and habits, like meat-eating. 

After partition took place in 1947, Hindu Sindhis became religious, linguistic, and cultural minorities in West Pakistan. Almost all of these Sindhis became refugees, fleeing across the border to India to avoid persecution. What Sindhi migrants faced was more than just the loss of their physical homes, though — it was a loss of homeland, and of belonging. 

In Dhaba, Neeraj says:

“There wasn’t really a place for my parents back in Sindh. Dadima’s entire family was killed when they tried to cross the border into India - she was the only one who survived. There was no place for her in the refugee camps, but she found a corner to sleep in anyway. There was no place for my father to find a job in Amritsar, but he did, at the Dhaba where he eventually met my mother. There was no place and no possibility for them to have a child, but they had me nevertheless. And when we got here, we fought for every inch of land and money. For respect.”

In this way, the Sindhi identity has been defined not only by their unique language, culture, and religious practices, but also by their singular experience of partition. This legacy, complicated as it is, trickles down into the experience of identity for generations far removed from the partition era. We see this in the way Neeraj navigates his cooking, the pressure he places on getting Sindhi dishes just right — because if he doesn’t, that’s another Sindhi memory lost to time, migration, and displacement. We see it, too, in the way Neeraj’s family approaches assimilation — a survival instinct ingrained in their blood, the Sindhi legacy of being persecuted for being different in both of the places they should theoretically have belonged to: the province of Sind, where they were minorities for being Hindu, and India after partition, where they were minorities for being Sindhi.

Sindhis, and Indians in general, began migrating to the United States in much larger quantities after the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, which eliminated quotas on immigration from certain “less desirable” parts of the world, namely Asia. By 1980, Indians were referred to in their own category in the U.S. Census as “Asian-Indians”. Today, they are the second largest foreign-born group of immigrants in the United States, after Mexicans. In fact, Indians are the largest group of migrants in the world. The search for belonging and the growing pains Sindhis experienced in their understanding of identity as migrants in the Indian subcontinent is something that Indians at large now experience in diaspora internationally.

SOURCES

Bagoria, Mukesh. “TRACING THE HISTORICAL MIGRATION OF INDIANS TO THE UNITED STATES.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 70 (2009): 894–904. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44147737.

Barnouw, Victor. “The Sindhis, Mercantile Refugees in India: Problems of Their Assimilation.” Phylon (1960-) 27, no. 1 (1966): 40–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/273320.

Bharadwaj, Prashant, Asim Khwaja, and Atif Mian. “The Big March: Migratory Flows after the Partition of India.” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 35 (2008): 39–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40278723.

Davis, Kingsley. “India and Pakistan: The Demography of Partition.” Pacific Affairs 22, no. 3 (1949): 254–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2751797.

Khan, Adeel. “Pakistan’s Sindhi Ethnic Nationalism: Migration, Marginalization, and the Threat of ‘Indianization.’” Asian Survey 42, no. 2 (2002): 213–29. https://doi.org/10.1525/as.2002.42.2.213.

Sadarangani, Umeeta. “Descendant of the Storm: On Being a Child of Refugees and Teaching Partition Narratives.” Modern Language Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 63–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40346980.