The NRSA of Southeast Asia
By mixing with their host cultures, the Non-Resident South Asians of Southeast Asia would be protecting their own long-term interests, as well as helping bring forth a new culture.
By mixing with their host cultures, the Non-Resident South Asians of Southeast Asia would be protecting their own long-term interests, as well as helping bring forth a new culture.
For many South Asians, travelling around Southeast Asia provides a continuous feeling of "we´ve been here before". Whether it is language and scripts, customs and tradition, or religion and superstitions, there is a familiar ring to much that one sees and hears. Not surprising really, to those who know the extent of ancient South Asian influence on countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Burma and Laos.
While the South Asians of yore helped define the spiritual dimensions of Southeast Asians, however, the more worldly and materialistic traits of modern times were shaped by that other great civilisation, China. Nevertheless, a modern-day connection to the ancient South Asian bonds has been established by the over two-million strong population of South Asians from Rangoon to Hanoi. While during earlier eras, South Asians arrived as merchants, travellers, scholars and priests carrying economic, cultural and social concepts and were readily welcomed by local populations, their current presence and status is largely a legacy of British and French colonisation.
Brought here as plantation and manual labour or as traders following the colonial boots, the social composition of the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia is strikingly similar to that in the Subcontinent itself. Divided into the very familiar categories of caste, class, region, religion and language, the only thing that binds the community of non-resident South Asians (NRSA) is their common geographical origin in the Subcontinent.
Among the NRSA, Indians predominate in numbers, with around 1.5 million in Malaysia, 0.5 million in Burma, 200,000 in Singapore, 100,000 in Thailand, a few thousands in Indonesia, and a few hundred each in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The second largest South Asian population is Bangladeshi, though these are largely confined to Burma which is also home to a sizeable community of Nepalis. Pakistanis and Sri Lankans are dispersed throughout the region but in very small numbers. A handful of well-to-do immigrants from the Maldives live in Malaysia.
Top, Bottom and Middle
At the top of the NRSA pecking order are the trading families, who over the years have contributed to the region´s prosperity and have now graduated to becoming industrialists and businessmen with strings of companies under them. These South Asians have done particularly well in textiles and real estate. In Thailand, for example, Indian businessmen control a large portion of the country´s multi-billion dollar textile production and trade, while Pakistanis and Indians together own nearly 40 percent of prime real estate in Bangkok´s business districts of Silom and Sukhumvit.
There are examples of successful NRSAs in other business lines, like the Mittal group from Indonesia which has made a fortune in steel, and the Chansrichawla family in Thailand which runs a successful bank of its own. The businessman Rajan Pillai briefly made headlines in Singapore as the "Biscuit King of Asia" before being hounded out by the authorities on financial fraud charges. He died in custody last year at (of all places) New Delhi´s Tihar jail.
The base of the NRSA pyramid is, of course, much larger, and is made up of hundreds of thousands of manual and menial labourers. Malaysia and Burma are host to the poorest of these, with the picture of Tamil rubber tappers and Bangladeshi fishing boat crews providing the cliched images. In Thailand, for the past few decades, itinerant peanut, cloth and mosquito-net vendors from Gorakhpur district in east Uttar Pradesh have become an ubiquitous sight. Called "babus" by the local people, the bulk of Gorakhpuris have come here in recent years searching for livelihood, though the earliest of them came from as far back as the mid-1800s.
There is also a budding nrsa middle class, made up mostly of second and third generation migrants who have virtually studied their way up the social ladder. Apart from becoming prominent professionals, some of them in Singapore and Malaysia have even made it to cabinet positions in government. In Burma, some South Asian intellectuals have played an important political role in first opposing British colonialism and today the despotic rule of the SLORC generals.
Return of the Non-Resident
The attitude of Southeast Asian governments towards nrsa populations encompasses the extremes. While on the one hand the Burmese military regime actively threw out Indian businessmen during the 1960s and continues to persecute citizens of Bangladeshi origin, the Singaporean authorises have gone as far as to make Tamil an official language in the city state.
In Malaysia, along with the Chinese, Indians have also been discriminated against by the Bumiputera policy which lavishes special government attention on ethnic Malays (see accompanying article). Thailand and Indonesia have, however, maintained a liberal policy towards the NRSA, allowing them to carry on a variety of professions unhindered within the purview of domestic laws.
In Vietnam and Laos, there were once quite a few Indian traders and businessmen before the fall of Saigon and Vientiane to communist forces in 1975. While the NRSAs are severely reduced in numbers, however, they are not discriminated vis-avis the citizens. With the opening up of these economies since the early nineties, a number of Indian businessmen have started returning, to try and recover old property and launch new ventures.
Indians in Hong Kong have done well for themselves, but are keeping their options open as the handover to China in July nears. Indians have made their way as far away as the Philippines, including an entire village in Luzon made up of an entire crew of a British ship that mutinied in the South China Sea in the 19th century. Flilipino Sikhs used to be known semi-derogatorily as "Bumbais" and many were motor-cycle-borne rural money-lenders.
On the cultural and social front, the NRSA have failed by and large to integrate into the host societies of Southeast Asia. This leaves open the possibility of ethnic backlash sometime in the future, which can come for different reasons. In countries like Thailand, Burma and in Indochina, the South Asians themselves maintain a distance from local cultures, because of orthodoxy and even delusions of cultural superiority, In Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, however, the situation is reversed, and the NRSA have been isolated by stronger mainstream cultures. Whereas the Chinese tend to blend well into Southeast Asian societies due to cultural affinity or intermarriage with local populations, the South Asians have found it much more difficult to assimilate.
In the long run, the fate of the NRSA certainly will be defined in the countries they live in and not in the lands of their origin, however attached to it they may be emotionally. Local populations anywhere are extremely sensitive to such misplaced nostalgia on the part of the migrants, and the NRSA would do their own long-term interests a lot of good by understanding this reality. Any move towards assimilation with the host societies would not lead, as is often thought, to a disappearance of the South Asian´s individual identity. Instead, it would throw up a synergistic movement which would help develop a melting pot with both South and Southeast Asian ingredients. The ancient spiritual links, then, would live on in a modern-day culture.