Into the light as Diwali beckons

The Indian Diwali, or Festival of Lights, has become a public occasion in Auckland. Picture / Richard Robinson

ANGELA GREGORY looks at how a migrant group overcame racism in New Zealand

At the end of this month Auckland City will celebrate Diwali, the Indian Festival of Lights.

Public celebration of Indian religious festivals in New Zealand is a recent trend, although Indians have been in the country since 1810 when sailors jumped ship on the Southland coast.

The first Indian New Zealander of note arrived about 40 years later. "Black Peter" - Edward Peters - was one of the first prospectors in the mid-19th century gold rush to Otago.

Otago University anthropologist Dr Jacqueline Leckie has researched Indian migration to New Zealand over nearly 200 years.

She says the 19th century Indian migrants were mainly itinerants, often travelling in work gangs and employed in casual work as labourers doing roadworks, ditch digging, swamp draining, bush clearing and dairy farm work.

Some were also fruit and vegetable hawkers or bottle sellers.

By World War I some Indians were leasing sites or shops to sell fruit and vegetables in central Auckland and Wellington, prompting hostility from white retailers.

Leckie says the Indian shopkeeper has remained a potent image for many New Zealanders, eliciting hostility and fears of economic competition.

But while Indians are self-employed in significantly greater proportion than most ethnic groups, the stereotype is erroneous, she says.

"These depictions have often been a caricature and an exaggeration as there was a much greater occupational diversity."

Since the 1960s a growing number of Indians had acquired professional skills, and since the 1970s the proportion employed as factory workers, skilled trades people and labourers was similar to that of the general population.

But at the turn of last century there was less occupational diversity, and a group of Indian market garden labourers became the focus of racial tensions in a South Auckland rural community that felt threatened.

Leckie says Pukekohe was the most important rural borough for Indian settlement in New Zealand from as early as 1911.

Initially the Indians were attracted to Franklin County to work as labourers for white gardeners, but in the years after World War I some Indians and Chinese began to lease small plots of land and grow vegetables for sale.

Maori had also migrated to Pukekohe in search of work, mostly as labourers on the developing market gardens.