The Untold Migration To Gujarat

Their stories will go unheard, filed somewhere in the banal footnotes of history. Unwritten, untold, undocumented, notes Binu Alex.

A lot of Malayalis landed in Gujarat before India even had its independence.

Then, for the next twenty or thirty years, they just kept coming. Looking for work, looking for a foothold, looking for anything.

Gujarat officially became a state only in 1960, when Bombay State split. But everyone from Kerala already knew exactly which region they meant, decades before the map caught up.

My wife's maternal grandfather was one of them. He came looking for a job.

Back then the city was, if you remember your textbooks, the Manchester of India. Textiles ran the place. They needed labour, they needed administrators, and Malayalis fit both slots rather nicely.

One man brought the next. That's how these things always work.

My mother-in-law is in her eighties now. I'm talking about her father, a man I never met, whose whole life I'm trying to piece together from scraps.

Times were not gentle. Nobody spoke the language. The locals laughed, not unkindly, but they laughed.

For years, every South Indian was simply a Madrasi. Gujarat only worked out that the South had different states quite recently, somewhere around the time Kerala's tourism ads started showing up on television.

If you didn't speak the local language, you were a Madrasi. Simple as that.

Revenge, as it always does, arrived late. Decades later, Hindi-speaking labourers started arriving in Kerala looking for work.

And Malayalis, with great consistency, call them Bengalis. We never really learn.

So much so, we speak Hindi at home. Here in Kerala. Which means we too could be called Bengalis, despite not knowing a single word of that language.

But back then, they simply kept their heads down. They ran around, found honest work, and stayed alive.

The journey itself was a small marathon. Changing trains, sleeping on filthy platforms, going home once a year on borrowed money just to see the family for a week.

Most men never got proper leave from the office. So the trick was simple.

'FATHER SERIOUS. COME IMMEDIATELY.' A telegram, in caps, arranged by a friend back in Kerala, would land at the office.

The father, of course, was perfectly fine. The telegram was just there to wake up an employer who wasn't in a hurry to grant leave.

Eventually employers caught on to the trick. So the excuse shifted to a sister's wedding. There is always a sister getting married, somewhere, always.

They travelled with a tin box. The classic tharaka petti.

Life Inside The Tin Box

Inside was every rupee they owned, protected by a padlock a mild cough could pop open. Today we need facial recognition and two-factor authentication and a captcha just to open your own e-mail, but back then, a light tap was enough to break into a man's entire savings.

Picture five or ten men crammed into one small room.

They woke up, hunted for work, worked all day, came home exhausted, and slept. Rinse, repeat, for years.

They funded their sisters' weddings from that room. They kept entire families back home afloat, one modest salary at a time.

Today's kids wouldn't survive a week in that setup. They need personal space and noise-cancelling headphones just to get through a family dinner.

I doubt they think much about how their grandfathers lived. But someone has to write it down anyway.

I wanted these stories on paper. I looked everywhere. There was nothing.

Four years ago, I started something I called Project Fifties. The idea was simple: Find the people who arrived before Independence, or just after, and record their struggles before they were gone for good.

I wanted to turn it into a video documentary. So I recorded myself first, a kind of pitch, to show people what I was trying to do.

I approached a few. I recorded their comments too.

But most of them weren't nearly as articulate on camera as they were over a drink or two. The memories that flowed so easily at home dried up the moment I hit record.

They tried hard to remember while the camera rolled. Mostly what I got back was blank stares.

I was a one-man crew, doing this for no obvious reason except that I thought someone should. I was doing it for whoever comes after me.

A year in, I moved to Kerala. And with that, the whole project quietly sank.

Stories Fading With Time

My first mistake was waiting twenty years to even begin. I should have started the moment the idea came to me.

But there was no time, no budget, no help. Then Covid came. Then the years simply slipped by, the way years do when you're not watching.

Half these men are gone now. The ones still around don't have the breath left for long conversations.

When I asked the survivors about those early days, most just looked at me. They couldn't quite see the point of digging up a past they'd spent a lifetime trying to leave behind.

So their stories will go unheard, filed somewhere in the banal footnotes of history. Unwritten, untold, undocumented.

We Indians have never been great at documenting ourselves. That's precisely why the British and the Portuguese ended up doing it for us.

Everything before their arrival survives only as oral memory, half-remembered and slowly fading.

And our own people, the ones who quietly built lives on Gujarat's shores, will likely stay exactly where they've always been: On the sidelines of a history nobody thought to write down in time.

Some journeys only exist because someone, somewhere, still remembers to ask about the tin box.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff