Locating Home
By N. Hyderabadi
Chicago , IL
For most Hyderabadis, the
memory of the City, the former Nizam’s princely
State, the culture, couldn’t be more haunting
than, perhaps, John Steinbeck’s Cannery
Row in Monterey, CA: “a poem, a stink, a
grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit,
a nostalgia, a dream.” For them, the good,
the bad and the ugly of Hyderabad may also seem
like Steinbeck’s “saints and angels
and martyrs and holy men.”
The author has had sustained interest in Hyderabad
and India, starting with a brief stop-over in
the city in the early 60s and returning five years
later to do her PhD dissertation on ‘The
Kayasths of Hyderabad’ (published 1978).
From then on, she has maintained and expanded
her network of contacts, and published articles
and books, e.g., Making Ethnic Choices: California
's Punjabi-Mexican-Americans, 1992; The South
Asian Americans, 1997; Muslims in the United States:
the State of Research, 2003.
The idea for this book, she says, came in 1990
when she attended a celebration of Hyderabad’s
400th anniversary in Los Angeles, and established
contacts in the LA community. Then, she initiated
this multi-site research, funded at different
times by various grants.
She knows the history of Hyderabad -- the princely
State’s 1948 merger with India, its 1956
tri-section on linguistic basis, which gradually
but effectively eroded its former cultural identity
and multi-ethnic heritage. She recognizes that
“[t]he very term Hyderabadi was a contested
term, and who was a Hyderabadi varied from speaker
to speaker,” and stresses that “[a]lthough,
I included all emigrants who termed themselves
Hyderabadis, I ended up interviewing a population
dominated by those whose families were part of
the former ruling class of Hyderabad State.”
[emphasis added]
For this book, she interviewed over 450 Hyderabadis
-- about 140 in Hyderabad/India, 100 in Pakistan
, 60 in the US and the rest in UK, Canada, Australian
and UAE. Though most of these interviews were
held 10-15 years ago; she says she gave those
mentioned in the book an opportunity to update
their information. She also sent a written questionnaire
to Hyderabadi emigrants and their relatives, but
got a very limited response, and her investigations
in different countries lacked, as the author admits,
“a uniform set of fieldwork practices of
the same intensity.”
The book is based on 11 Chapters, ranging from
‘Starting Points’ and ‘Necessary
Orientations’ through the personal accounts
of Hyderabadis in various countries (US, Canada,
UK, Middle East, Pakistan, Australia) to ‘Hyderabad:
Reorientations’ and ‘Hyderabadis abroad:
Locating Home’. There is some discussion
about diaspora (she doesn’t think the out-of-Hyderabad
efflux fits the criteria she accepts) and general
history of US immigration laws (pre- and post-1965
changes) and related matters. In addition to extensive,
chapter-by-chapter Notes (over 70 pages), there
is Bibliography (22 pages), Glossary of Indian
terms used, a few maps and photographs, and the
Index.
While the claim itself (of including “all
emigrants who termed themselves Hyderabadis”)
would obviously be an exaggeration, her decision
to interview Hyderabadis only from families representing
“a part of the former ruling class,”
appears too skewed to be considered a representative
sample of the Hyderabadi emigrant population,
in general or in any one selected country, besides
being needlessly self-limiting.
“Hyderabad city and the former Hyderabad
state are my starting points for an exploration
of migration, settlement, and social memories,”
the author asserts [p. 6], which is quite understandable,
but some descendants of the so-called “former
ruling class” can hardly be considered a
true or fair representation of all the ‘Hyderabadis
abroad’. Nor can the city be defined by
the selected tiny group, which seems to pre-occupy
the author. One cannot really a much larger group
of fairly accomplished and successful ‘Hyderabadis
abroad’ who had little or nothing to do
with the so-called “former ruling class”
that disintegrated and disappeared some 60 years
ago.
The author had originally planned to trace “a
cohesive cultural formation,” but soon realized
that this – “one of the founding assumptions”
– had serious limitations because Hyderabadi
immigrants not only had “varied and fluid
identities” but she herself saw that “no
single sense of Hyderabadi citizenship was being
reproduced or produced in new locales.”
The socio-cultural adjustments the Hyderabadis
had to make in Western or other cultures were
perhaps more demanding than what others from a
similar but linguistically-distinct culture may
have experienced.
Most people -- not just from Hyderabad but from
the rest of India and, for that matter, all over
the world -- move to other countries seeking further
education, employment opportunities and a better,
brighter future for themselves and their families,
not to mention escaping religious, ethnic, dictatorial
persecution. Once comfortable in the adopted countries,
many bring their relatives over to re-establish
some kind of family life there, or to join what
they had started for themselves (after marriages
in the adopted country or in their own communities
wherever they find them). Then, there is always
a generation-gap between the emigrant parent/s
and the children, born in a land and exposed to
a culture different from their parent/s. For some
reason, author had very few “unsupervised”
interviews with the new generation. Not surprising
if the youngsters are no longer ‘pukka’
Hyderabadis!
The book is mostly anecdotal, largely based on
numerous self-revelatory biographical accounts,
and these accounts don’t often stray much
beyond the general outline I gave above (within
the confines of the immigration laws and conditions
in different countries).
The 18-page Index was incomplete and arbitrary,
not as helpful as it could otherwise have been,
in light of the multitude of names mentioned.
Within this vast, head-spinning list of mini-biographies
presented in this multi-site diasporic process,
if there were any cogent conclusions drawn, they
were not clear enough or stood out.
Those unfamiliar with Hyderabad may get some idea
of the City, its history and culture, the extent
of Hyderabadi diaspora and the immigration laws
they faced in different countries over the decades.
And, those familiar with Hyderabad would evaluate
what their compatriots had to say or do, as interpreted
by the author, and see how all that fits into
their reality from their vantage points. It’s
in this area, I suspect, significant differences
and controversies are most likely to erupt.
“LOCATING HOME: India ’s Hyderabadis
Abroad”
by Karen Isaksen Leonard, 2007, Stanford University
Press. 402 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-5442-2
