All images (c) Preston Merchant

Actually, there was not much sleeping — it was more of a Hang Out than a Sleep Out and we had pizza and burgers — but the issue wasn’t lost. Finding warm and dry shelter is a challenge for an increasing number of South Asians, mostly Sikh men, in the southwest London neighborhood of Southall.

Lodging isn’t supposed to be a problem. Southall is the center of London’s vast Punjabi community, one of the most significant Little Indias in the world, home to one of the largest gurdwaras outside India, and a cultural nexus that brought the bhangra phenomenon to nightclubs around the globe. It’s also a hardscrabble quarter that, like New York’s Lower East Side, gave immigrants the means to establish themselves in a new land. The community took care of its own and looks back fondly on its achievements.

So it has come as a shock that in 2010 there are about a hundred homeless men, mostly Sikhs but including Sri Lankans and Somalis, sleeping rough in one of London’s proudest immigrant neighborhoods.SWAT, the Sikh Welfare and Awareness Team, is working to alleviate the problem and to call attention to it (it was the sponsor of the sleep out on February 27). The volunteer group was the first to call attention to the plight of the homeless, posted video interviews, in Punjabi, with some of these men on youtube. It has also started a Facebook group, which has attracted over 5,000 followers.

SWAT is collecting money and clothing, working with gurdwaras and other community organizations, providing drug and alcohol counseling, and trying to make other public services available to them. Its volunteers from other parts of London come to Southall regularly to deliver clothing.

But the challenges are complex. In addition to providing basic necessities, SWAT is trying to raise support for people in circumstances that are often considered shameful. The presence of the Sikh homeless runs counter to the narrative of the hardworking self-sufficient immigrant, and discussion of drug and alcohol problems within the community is still taboo.

“People feel that helping the Southall rough sleepers will only further fund drug habits,” says Tina Gahir, one of the organizers of the sleep out and a volunteer with Crisis and Shelter from the Storm, two prominent homelessness organizations in the UK. “For most Indians, charity begins at home. Many send remittances to their village or relatives in India or make donations to a religious cause. We don’t really have a sense of uniting to tackle problems in the UK currently.”

She hopes that community activism among younger people can alleviate some of these problems and promote honest discussion about them.

But some initiatives take time. Our 20-odd crew of Londoners stamped our feet to keep warm, made bathroom runs to a nearby house, drank tea, and enjoyed conversation beneath the sodium-vapor lights of Norwood Green Park. The neighborhood was silent and still, except for the occasional car slowing to see what was going on. The intermittent rain became steady, and we huddled under umbrellas.

We had been expecting about 70 people who had responded to the Facebook invitation, but there is always a challenge in translating online support to offline action. But people came through in the end — to the tune of £7,000 to support SWAT.

Let’s hope this is the start of something big on behalf of Southall’s homeless.

Photo by Preston Merchant

Manjula Sood was born into a wealthy family in Ludhiana, in the Indian state of Punjab. Her father was a doctor, her mother a teacher, and the family placed a high value on education, especially for women. After earning a master’s degree in sociology at Punjab University, she became a senior researcher in a program sponsored by Johns Hopkins University that worked on women’s and children’s health issues in rural Punjab.

“My spirituality developed at a lot,” she says of her time working in the villages. “I had so much at home; these people had nothing to eat.”

She came to Leicester in 1970, joining her husband, Vijay Paul Sood, who had arrived six years earlier to pursue an engineering degree and had begun working for General Electric. She came on a snowy December day at a time when Britain’s tolerance for immigrants was under strain. Leicester’s Asian population had been increasing by over fifty percent annually for a decade, with many arrivals from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. The whites-only National Front party was agitating against immigration, stoking nationalist and racist fervor. This was the era of Enoch Powell’s famous “rivers of blood” speech, in which the Conservative MP railed against the influx of immigrants, blaming them for the breakdown of Britain’s social and physical infrastructure.

Two years after Sood arrived, during the crisis sparked by Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, the Leicester City Council (over which Sood now presides), placed advertisements in the Uganda Argus, the state-run newspaper, claiming that Leicester’s housing and schools were overloaded: “In your own interests and those of your family you should not come to Leicester.” In December of 1970, Sood’s house was cold since she and her husband could barely afford to heat it. Paul worked long hours. After a week, when the snow stopped, she asked him, “How do you make a phone call here?” She went out to a shop with a pay phone, called Ludhiana, and asked to come home. Her grandfather said she was in Britain now and Leicester was her home. “You have an education,” he told her. “Now use it.”

So she enrolled at Leicester University, pursuing postgraduate studies in teacher training. During her first year, she found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to her first son, taking only minimal time off from her studies. “Coming from a wealthy family in India and now having to face all these challenges was difficult,” she says. “We didn’t have any money. But you make the best of it.”

After completing the program, she started teaching at a primary school in Leicester, far from her home, which required her to take a bus to the city center and then change to another line. During the winter, she would wait in the foyer of Leicester Town Hall.

“On the day I became Lord Mayor, I thought of those times. Back then I was a woman seeking shelter from the cold. I had no money for warm clothes. I never thought I would own this building!” she says. “This is how destiny works.”

As one of Leicester’s first Asian primary school teachers, she developed a multicultural curriculum, teaching the students about Christmas, Eid, Hanukkah, Diwali, and other religious festivals, but was reproached by her principal. Sood marks this as a turning point for her: “’When in Rome, do as the Romans,’ he told me, and I was boiling inside. When I told this to my husband, he said, ‘You have to get into politics.’”

It would be a while before Sood entered elected politics, though Paul became a Leicester City Councillor in 1982. The couple had become successful and established in Leicester, starting an insurance company and travel agency. When Paul died suddenly in 1996, she was asked to stand for election to fill out the remainder of his term. When the term ended, she had hoped to step down, but the Council urged to run on her own. “They wouldn’t accept my resignation,” she says.

But these were difficult times for her. As a widow, she felt isolated and alone, she says, pointing to the marks on her arm where she burned herself with incense sticks. Politics was a difficult environment for her, requiring her to confront racism. “It’s not all love-care-share like it was in primary school,” she says. Wanting to withdraw completely, one day she found solace in the silence of a Catholic Church. Before an image of the Virgin Mary, she heard the words, “Why are you defeating the woman in you?”

Now having served three terms on the Leicester City Council, Sood is a mainstay of Leicester politics. With her elevation to Lord Mayor, which is a one-year post conferred on the longest serving city councillor, she has become a popular national and international figure. In her career as a city councillor, she has championed education, mental health, and women’s issues. She is a director of the Leicester Council of Faiths, an advisory group to the city council, and has won a raft of awards from national and international women’s groups and Britain’s Labour Party. She has named the Special Olympics as the Lord’s Chosen Appeal, the designated charity during her term. Leicester will host Britain’s games in 2009.

As an immigrant Punjabi Hindu, finding inspiration in Christianity, and pioneering a multicultural school curriculum, Manjula Sood is the contemporary face of an office that dates back 800 years — Leicester has had a mayor since 1209 (and a Lord Mayor since 1928). She is fifth Asian so honored in Leicester and the first Asian woman Lord Mayor anywhere in Britain (women are called Lord Mayors, as holders of the office).

Sood is part of an early generation of Asian immigrants to Leicester who arrived with an education, skills, a work ethic, and a willingness to participate in government. The Indian and East African immigrants from the 1960s and early 70s had been financially secure in their former homes and were now eager to raise their living standards in their new one. Integration and not isolation has become part of Leicester’s identity.

But Leicester and the rest of Britain are facing significant challenges in the post 9/11 world. The Iraq War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exacerbate tensions between Muslims and other groups. Muslims in Leicester have been victims of racist attacks. There are new questions about the ability of Britain to absorb and integrate its new arrivals, including Somali refugees, who are attracted to historically Asian centers like Leicester and Southall, a London suburb, because of the number of mosques.

Emigrating from Zimbabwe to Britain in 1976, Suleman Nagdi — a member of the Leicester Council of Faiths, the Federation of Muslim Organizations, and recipient of an MBE — says, “Democracy has given us an opportunity to flourish. We are confident we will make a contribution locally, nationally, and internationally. We are British, not a collection of smaller communities.”

Manjula Sood sees the way forward through good governance, community involvement, and a sense of compassion. Despite her personal trials and the challenges that lay ahead for Leicester, she says, “I never want to give up.”

All photos by Preston Merchant

Manjula Sood and Chris Rhodes, Civic Attendant, with the Lord Mayor’s robe

Manjula Sood greets Abu Taher, president of the Bangladesh Development Trust, who will present her with a donation to the Special Olympics

Members of the Leicester Council of Faiths

Leicester Town Hall

Leicester’s city center

Leicester’s Central Mosque, one 36 mosques in the city

A prominent labor lawyer in private practice, Sivanesan spends his weekends driving the length and breadth of peninsular Malaysia, speaking to groups of Indians about the events of November 25th, 2007 and collecting money for the families of the HINDRAF Five. On that date, HINDRAF (the Hindu Rights Action Force) organized a rally in Kuala Lumpur, drawing tens of thousands of Indians for a peaceful protest in defiance of the Malaysian government, which had denied the request for a permit. Riot police deployed tear gas and water cannons shooting skin-burning chemicals. Many were injured in the melee. Soon thereafter, the five men who are HINDRAF’s leaders were detained indefinitely without trial under the Internal Security Act. They remain in prison.

After the crackdown, the two-million-plus Malaysian Indian community (which is predominantly Tamil) and minorities everywhere were shocked. So was the Malaysian government, a coalition of ethnic parties called the National Front (known by its Malay initials as the BN). One key pillar of the BN is the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC). The government had not expected tens of thousands of Indians to march on Kuala Lumpur.Sivanesan says that surveys used to show that 87% of Indians supported the ruling coalition. Now, that figure has dropped to 35-40%: “Why? We are left out of the mainstream of development, we are marginalized, and we are not given opportunities in the government sector or universities.”

November 25th and HINDRAF, which began as an organization promoting Indian culture and religious education, have become shorthands for dissent, dissatisfaction, and — in the mind of the government — sedition.

Sivanesan is at the center of it. His own prominence as a lawyer and active member of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Malaysia’s largest secular opposition party, have so far insulated him from the government’s interference. His co-counsel for the HINDRAF Five is Karpal Singh, lawyer and chairman of the DAP. Their clients are lawyers. All are well respected, and the fact that these men — professionals, educated, elite — are risking their lives and livelihoods on behalf of Malaysia’s Indian community is helping to mobilize support among people who have considerably less to lose. Though there are some high-profile exceptions, most of Malaysia’s Indian population is working-class, with few opportunities for advancement.

They are angry and energized like never before. Despite their entrenched second-class status in Malaysia and their failure to gain a foothold in the surging economy, most Indians would probably not have challenged the status quo. But when property developers began destroying Hindu temples, often historical but unused, the Indian community began to protest. The November 25th rally was the largest of a series of agitations, provoked by the temple destruction and the failure of Samy Vellu, president of the MIC, to halt the practice. The MIC was no longer seen as an effective Indian voice in Malaysia’s government. The indefinite detention of the HINDRAF Five was the final straw.

Toward the end of Sivanesan’s speech in Mentakab, men circulate among the crowd, collecting donations to support the families of the HINDRAF Five. When the money is counted, the crowd of about 400 have contributed 7,000 ringgits (about $2,177), which is not a negligible sum in rural Malaysia. “These are average wage earners. Why are they coming forward now?” Sivanesan says later. “They feel this is the only opportunity they have to tell the government enough is enough — give us what is rightly owed to us.”

Sivanesan’s barnstorming tours of Malaysia recall those of another British-schooled lawyer who fought for the rights of a minority population in a former colony. Mohandas Gandhi’s work in South Africa was about securing for Indians what was rightfully theirs under the law. Sivanesan, and those who have rallied behind HINDRAF, are only asking for their due. “We’ve got the quota system in Malaysia. It’s a policy matter that Indians should be given ten percent in all sectors,” he says.

Elections are scheduled for March 8th, and while there is little chance that the BN will be ousted from power, there are hopes that the opposition parties will pick up seats, taking them away from the Malaysian Indian Congress, which has always counted on Indians as its vote bank. Sivanesan himself is contesting a seat for the DAP in Perak state, which will pit him against MIC vice president S. Veerasingam.

MIC president Samy Vellu recently issued an ominous statement, saying, “Don’t be emotional when casting your votes or you will destroy the community with your own hands.”

Sivanesan, too, knows the stakes are extremely high in the next election. “If the government is going to garner the same support, then the Indians in this country are finished.”

All photos by Preston Merchant

The Batu Caves complex is home to a number of shrines inside vast limestone amphitheaters at the top of a mountain.

Shrines at the base of the Batu Caves

A bus driver, Mr. Govindasamy has lived in this house, built by his father, for 45 years. Nearby property development has turned the area into a slum. The land was owned by the Batu Cave temple corporation, who sold it to a developer, who has in turn evicted the family. Refusing to leave, they squat in their family home.

The Subramaniam family lives on a former rubber plantation, where Mr. Subramaniam worked as a rubber tapper. When the estate was parceled and sold to developers, the workers were fired. They are supposed to receive a compensation package based on their tenure. Since the Subramaniams have not been paid, they refuse to vacate their home, which is their only leverage.

Candlelight protest in Kuala Lumpur against the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Evening in Brickfields, one of KL’s Indian shopping districts.

The Petronas Towers

A. Sivanesan, a labor lawyer turned political activist, spends his weekends speaking in temples and gatherings throughout Malaysia, raising money for the families of the HINDRAF 5.

Sivanesan speaks.

Prayers for the HINDRAF 5.

A rally for the PAS, the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party. An opposition party, the PAS gained support from Indians and Chinese, most of whom are not Muslims, after the Nov. 25 violent crackdown on the Indian protest organized by HINDRAF. Non-Muslims see the PAS as one of several alternatives to the Barisan Nasional (National Front or BN), which has ruled Malaysia since independence and promotes Malay-first policies that discriminate against minorities.

Lim Kit Siang, leader of the Democratic Action Party, the largest opposition party in Malaysia’s parliament: “The continued marginalization of the Malaysian Indians will become an international issue, even more so for the Indian diaspora with a population close to Malaysia’s population – over 20 million.”

At the Rumah Kebajikan Anbu Illam Home for Underprivileged Boys.

With the demise of the rubber plantations, which began in the late 1960s, the main employer and social safety net for Malaysia’s Indians has been destroyed. Homes and livelihoods are gone, the government provides no support, and the unskilled and semi-skilled are forced to move into low-paying jobs like driving trucks for hire.

Krishnamara (80), Saraswathy (70), Saraswathy (53), Mahalaxmi (60), and Silachama (75) at a private old folks home in Kuala Lumpur.

Madurai Veeran shrine at a scrapyard.

Puja at the Madurai Veeran shrine, built by the owner of a scrap metal shop.

HINDRAF, the Hindu Rights Action Force, a political and cultural organization serving the sizable Indian community here, was one of the march’s participants. In November, HINDRAF had organized a rally that drew at least 10,000 (the number is disputed) Indians protesting the government’s Malay-first policies in education and government hiring, the destruction of temples, and the increasing anti-Indian chauvinism among the Malay. The protesters were met with batons, tear gas, and water cannons. Five of HINDRAF’s leaders were detained as terrorists under the Internal Security Act (with alleged links to the RSS and the LTTE). Some fifty more protesters were arrested. A few were released, while others will stand trial for various incitement and disorderly conduct charges.

Tonight’s candlelight procession was simply to remind the government that people have the right to assemble and to express their concerns legally and peacefully in public. The silent march occurred without incident and was effectively over, with only small groups of protesters lingering to talk after the streets had been reopened, when the riot police arrived. People who had left the area returned; photographers made their way back to the scene, and everyone knew what was coming, as in Chekhov’s famous dictum about not introducing a gun in a play unless you intend to fire it.

In the end, though, all of this was for show. There was almost no one left to disperse when the cannon came up. The real action came from the unarmed police in yellow vests who charged after the stragglers in an angry show of personal force. This was really the point—Malaysian riot police running down Indian protesters, breaking up the crowd, restoring order to an otherwise quiet night in the monsoon drizzle.

More photos below.All images by Preston Merchant

“If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.”

Hindus, mostly from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, went to the temples here, some dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century and earlier. Families arrived in private cars and taxis, the women bedecked in silk and jasmine. Laborers came in the backs of flatbed trucks fitted with benches to seat them. They smashed coconuts and prayed for good fortune.

Earlier, they had shopped at Mustafa’s—a postcolonial Marks and Spencer, the Walmart of the East—jammed with every conceivable consumer good: electronics, South Asian and western suitings, cosmetics, jewelry, luggage, appliances, fruit, dry goods, DVDs. The store in Little India is itself a little India and larger than the Little Indias in most non-Indian cities.

Tourists enjoyed the spectacle. The Australians wore shorts and sipped Singapore Slings in commemorative glasses at Raffles Hotel, a colonial-era shrine to steamer trunks, Noel Coward, and Dicky Mountbatten. The daughter of a wealthy Chinese businessman married a wealthy Chinese businessman and had her photo taken in the courtyard of the Empire Cafe.

Singapore goes about its business, which is business.

Elsewhere, at the Malaysian High Commission, in a leafy residential neighborhood, Seelan Palay, the 23-year-old grandson of a gravedigger, stages a one-man hunger strike to protest the detention, in Kuala Lumpur, of the five leaders of an Indian minority-rights organization.

Photo above, smashing coconuts at the Ceylon Temple.

More pictures below.Photos by Preston Merchant

Reflection of the Veeramakaliamman Temple in Little India

Preparing for puja at Veeramakaliamman

Tourists at Veeramakaliamman

Veeramakaliamman

Courtyard of the Raffles Hotel (photo by V.V. Ganeshananthan)

In the Raffles Hotel Museum (photo by V.V. Ganeshananthan)

Mustafa’s

Garlands in Little India

Little India

Jewelry store, Little India

Veeramakaliamman

Vaibhav on New Year’s Eve

Musical chairs on New Year’s Eve

Ganesha gallery at the Ceylon Temple

Seelan Palay outside the Malaysian High Commission

For this junket through Southeast Asia, I’ll be joined by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Sugi is Sri Lankan, a writer, and a newly elected member of the SAJA board. Her first novel, Love Marriage, will be published by Random House in April. She, too, is working on diaspora issues, especially those affecting the Sri Lankan communities around the world.

We’ll be posting here, jointly and separately, during the first few weeks of January from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and other places in between.

Tamils from India and Sri Lanka, along with Malayalees, Punjabis, and Sindhis have been in the region for a very long time, as traders even before the colonial period. In the late 19th century, Tamils were brought over in great numbers by the British as laborers in the rubber plantations and railroads (the majority of persons of South Asian origin in Singapore and Malaysia are Tamil). Singapore even served as a penal colony for Indian convicts and as a conduit for indenture, as the city was built partially on forced labor. Singapore even had its own Sepoy Mutiny in 1915. If you have been following the recent news, people of Indian and Sri Lankan origin in Malaysia have been protesting the government’s Malay-first policies. In late November, some 10,000 Indian protesters clashed with police in KL and the leaders of HINDRAF, an Indian rights group were detained. Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has been making the right noises about minority rights, including plans to halt the destruction of Hindu temples, but tensions remain high and the outcome unclear.

It’s a dynamic region, one of the most culturally diverse in the world. In addition to the various South Asian communities and the native Malays, there are large and important Chinese, Thai, and Indonesian populations, a big mix of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, and animists (indeed, it’s often unclear where one ethnicity ends and another begins). There’s a huge amount of money at stake. Malaysia is well integrated into Tom Friedman’s global supply chain for the manufacture of computers by American and Chinese companies. The Straits of Malacca are the most strategic choke point for the global shipping industry (piracy, terrorism). Malaysia still exports rubber and the surprisingly lucrative substance of palm oil. Plus, it makes a lot of the furniture you buy at Ikea.

South Asians have been involved in, and have benefited from, all this growth. In the next few weeks, Sugi and I will be posting about this stuff. Stay tuned.

And a personal request: we’d like to meet Mutineers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, informally or in an organized meet-up. So if you are interested, send up a flare. You can also post in the thread I started in the SM Facebook group.

A few weeks ago, Amardeep wrote a nice report from a conference about Indo-African writers:

Desai argues that there were some members of the Asian community — especially artists, playwrights, and poets — who were trying to envision a sense of shared culture with their black African neighbors.

On that note, I thought I would share the work of my friend Sharlene Khan, a South African artist I met in 2004. She was born in Durban to Muslim and Christian parents (she is Christian) and lives now in Johannesburg, having collected two masters degrees in art, despite her deep antipathy toward all things institutional and official, and done residencies in Cairo and the south of France — like any good artist, trying to avoid joining the work force.

Indian painting has become very popular (and lucrative) in the global art market these days, with post-modern, post-cubist, semi-abstract renderings of Hindu deities and Indian village scenes being all the rage — the proteges and imitators of MF Husain. But Sharlene’s work is none of that.

Her themes are African, her sensibility humanist. One of her series concerns the plight of laborers and street musicians in Durban. She also did an installation based on the little tents that itinerant barbers, often immigrants from other parts of Africa, set up on the sidewalks of South African cities. She has painted murals like Diego Rivera and designed clothing for a fashion show, painting the fabric and inscribing it with text.

A good phrase to describe her stance is the title of the painting above: “It Started Off as Them and Ended Up as Me.”She once emailed me about her disdain for the term “diaspora,” since the notion behind it (a people outside their homeland) has been a political issue in South Africa: “”It chiefly recognises similarities at the expense of equally important localised differences. I don’t really consider myself as part of such a diaspora, I am a South African Indian who is very located in this specific country at this specific juncture in time. And while I realise that the sense of ‘Indianness’ is probably a valid one among many migrant communities, in South Africa it was promoted by the apartheid government to ensure that Indians in this country were made to feel like outsiders. Indians have been in SAfrica since the 1820′s.””

Her work takes up themes of alienation and longing, the degradation of unemployment, and the simple human joys of family. Her realism is deeply sympathetic, which is a rare trait (it’s also the hallmark of the very best photojournalism, which is one reason I admire it).

So here is an African artist of Indian descent, painting African themes that touch on universal human experiences. But don’t call it diasporic.

Photograph of Sharlene Khan by Preston Merchant
Paintings by Sharlene Khan

Sharlene Khan

Madonna and Pokemon Child (2002)

A Friend Loves at All Times, but a Brother is Born in Adversity (2002)

Dotcoza (2001)

Gokarting (2001)

Ikhaya, The Long Walk (2000)

Man Down (2000)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes (2002)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes, detail 1 (2002)

Two Loaves and Five Fishes, detail 2 (2002)

Today, the community in Kenya is perceived, not without justification, as wealthy and aloof. Rajan is critical of what he sees as the community’s lack of engagement with Kenya’s many challenges. ““The South Asian diaspora in Kenya is completely nonpolitical,”” he says. ““It stays behind its security fences in [the Nairobi suburb of] Parklands.””

Historically, Indians were engaged at all levels, leading labor unions, participating in the struggle against British colonialism, and building schools and hospitals, but that civic drive was sapped somewhere along the way.

Rajan attributes the Indian withdrawal from politics to three factors: the “Kenyanization” programs of the late 1960s that redistributed land, awarded contracts and licenses and reserved government jobs for black Africans; Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972; and a failed coup attempt against Kenya’s president, Daniel arap Moi, in 1982. Fighting during that conflict resulted in significant destruction in downtown Nairobi, where many Indians ran businesses.

“”I know Indians who have never been back to the city center,”” he says.Rajan sees the lack of engagement as a real problem for the community, something that holds back Kenya’s development as a nation. Kenya is maturing politically, but Indians–a significant component of Kenya’s middle class–are not part of the process. Multi-party elections were introduced in 1992, with Moi’s 24-year presidency coming to an end in 2002. Under his successor, Rajan says, “the whole political environment has changed: people protest, there are civil actions. “President Kibaki has made lots of promises but failed to deliver. Kenyans have the right to hold him accountable.””

“”Indians are willing to build businesses and fund charities,”” Rajan says, ““but they won’t contribute money to opposition parties. Indians are politically active in the US and UK but not here.””

He cites “reverse racism” as another cause: ““It is somehow not acceptable to struggle against black leadership.””

Awaaz magazine has become active in national politics. It began as a newsletter for the Eastern Action Club of Africa, a forum for business people to speak out against racism and unfair business practices after multi-party democracy was established in 1992. Rajan was a printer by training and worked in advertising, so he knew something about crafting a message and designing a media product.

Awaaz has a multi-racial oversight board and strives to be non-communal, exploring diaspora issues but only in the national context. Rajan says the magazine is thought to be “too controversial” and “too political” by Kenya’s business elite, who refuse to support it financially.

The magazine sponsors an Asian-African cultural event called the Samosa Festival (which like all good Indian endeavors is an acronym: South Asian Mosaic Of Society and the Arts). It is also a partner with the Kenya Human Rights Commission on a campaign for the recognition of the Mau Mau movement, the eight-year insurgency that helped win Kenya its freedom from Britain.

Awaaz is a family affair, deeply rooted in Kenyan history. Rajan’s partner in these efforts, and in life, is Zarina Patel, writer, artist, human rights and race relations activist, environmentalist and campaigner for social justice. She is also the granddaughter (and biographer) of A.M. Jeevanjee, the entrepreneur in colonial Kenya who founded the African Standard newspaper in 1902 (now the East African Standard) and the East African Indian National Congress in 1914. There’s a park in downtown Nairobi named for him. Patel also serves as an editor of Awaaz.

Rajan sees Awaaz as a Kenyan nationalist enterprise, targeting the Indian community, though it attracts intellectuals throughout Africa and Europe. It is especially keen to highlight the contributions of South Asians to the development of East Africa.

Rajan laments that Kenya’s Indians are not more engaged: ““Indians are global citizens. People here are a hundred years behind.””

Images by Preston Merchant

Zahid Rajan with posters from a minority rights campaign he worked on with the Eastern Action Club of Africa

Zarina Patel