Excerpt:
Born into what they thought was a paradise of Africa, where an early generation had toiled as indentured labourers and small shopkeepers to make money, by the time she was born, the community had become a generally well off middle-class, between white rulers and black natives.
Unfortunately for them, the former handed over to the latter, and they were overlooked, as inconvenient detritus of imperial history, to be first harassed, then expelled by the new rulers, and finally, grudgingly, allowed in by the old ones.
It is history that we in India have often overlooked, perhaps partly from guilty consciences at not having done more for them then, along with some resentment for how most of them clearly never wanted to come back to the ‘home’ their forefathers fled. The fact that the East African Indians have done well for themselves – to the extent that, as Alibhai-Brown notes mordantly, that some are now thankful to those who expelled them – just adds to the friction. Apart from Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala there are few places where the expulsion of the East African Indians has been remembered.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5137490.cms?prtpage=1
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