Into the light as Diwali beckons

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.

Leckie said white growers frequently accused the Asian growers of enticing "their" Maori labour away.

Wildly exaggerated statements began to surface in the local Franklin Times newspaper, talking about large numbers of "Asiatics" leasing land in the area.

The settlers were described as outcasts from India and portrayed as a degraded species and undesirable immigrants.

Leckie says that in those early days, distinctions were made between the "quiet, unobtrusive, industrious and honest" Chinese and the "cowardly Hindoos".

The anxiety fuelled by Indians leasing and buying land at Pukekohe led to the foundation of the White New Zealand League at the Ayrshire tearooms at Pukekohe on December 17, 1925.

The league, of about 60 farmers, asked the Government to make it illegal to to lease or sell land to "Asiatics".

Leckie says the league was skilful in its use of propaganda, sending booklets to newspapers, trade unions and local bodies.

Indians were portrayed as a menace to morality and a sexual threat to European and Maori women.

They were criticised for working long hours, tolerating filthy living conditions and selling substandard fruit.

As the league spread to other parts of New Zealand, its targets started to organise as well, leading to the amalgamation of three Indian Associations at Auckland, Wellington and Taumarunui to form the New Zealand Indian Central Association in 1926.

Support for the league and its racist fears was falling by the late 1920s, but Leckie says the discrimination continued.

In 1937, the Fruit and Vegetable Committee recommended the compulsory registration of Asian fruiterers' thumbprints.

In the 1950s, the Wellington City Council's refusal to employ Indian bus drivers was successfully challenged by the Wellington Indian Association.

Indians, Chinese and Maori were barred for many years from the balcony of the Pukekohe movie theatre and local barbers refused to cut their hair.

The alleged economic threat of Asians created difficulties in renewing leases or buying land.

The number of Indians coming to New Zealand was wildly exaggerated by opponents of such migration, and in 1952 the Franklin branch of Federated Farmers called for them to be sent home and their land confiscated.

Leckie says other locals wrote to the Minister of Immigration about what they saw as the development of an Indian mafia.

"They are as thick as flies in Pukekohe and they are getting control of all the good land and creeping into businesses in town," wrote one person in 1953.

In the early 1990s, Indians were subjected to vicious attacks, culminating in the murder of Auckland shopkeeper Navin Govind by three youths in 1993.

But during these at times difficult years, came an emergence of Indian pride and increased religious practice.

Indians had kept their religion low profile and within the privacy of their homes.

Leckie says it took the arrivals of substantial numbers of Indian women after World War II to restore the religious practices as the hardworking male labourers had found little time for them.

Growing confidence and greater economic affluence led to Indians openly expressing their religion by constructing more visible ornate and Indian looking buildings.

Global networking, with increased travel back and forth between India and New Zealand, has also been a catalyst for the visible religious activities.

Last year the celebration of Diwali, signifying the renewal of life, attracted a crowd of more than 40,000 in Auckland.

Leckie says such popular events help improve race relations, although racism remains a problem in New Zealand.

But the dark days of reactionary Pukekohe were past.

Public attitudes had improved, and New Zealand now had legislation banning discrimination on the basis of race.

* The Indian festival of Diwali will be celebrated at the Auckland Town Hall on October 31 this year. Seminars on Indian issues are also being held at the Auckland University of Technology.

Migration diary

1810: First known Indians arrive in New Zealand.

1853: Arrival of "Black Peter", an Indian pioneer gold prospector.

1890s: Influx of Indians from Punjab, outcry in Parliament about itinerant 'Hindoo' hawkers.

1904: Indian migrants start arriving from Gujarat.

1918: Auckland Indian Association founded in response to racist attacks.

1921: Census records 3266 Chinese and 671 Indians.

1987: Influx of Fiji Indians.

1991: Census identifies 30,609 in the ethnic category of Indian, about equally divided between those born in India, in Fiji and in New Zealand.

2001: Census identifies 62,200 as Indian in similar proportions to 1991.