Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Blue-collar students

Most Indians studying abroad are not in the same class as Nehru

The disturbing reports of racist attacks in Australia bring home to one how the profile of the Indian student overseas has changed since Kipling wrote about a young Bengali training to be a barrister in London passing himself off as a minor prince. Someone I knew in England in the 1950s elevated her father to ‘Maharajah of Kuchnaipuram’ and flaunted a picture of Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial as “our place in the country”.

Such frauds were possible because the British assumed that only a rich aristocrat could afford to travel 5,000 miles to study. Those who went to read for the Bar or to university were upper middle class youths on a parental allowance who soon acquired English ways. Bengal’s belait-pherat (England-returned) sahibs were the secretly-envied butt of countless jokes.

No one was held in greater contempt than the BNGS (belait na giye sahib) who affected Anglicism without setting foot in England. Some even refused to acknowledge American-trained Indians as belait-pherat. Nor would they extend the term to people who went abroad only to attend conferences. Being belait-pherat was almost synonymous with membership of the London Majlis.

A Chinese play, The Peking Man, satirised foreign returned students who could not adjust to China’s social revolution. But the Chinese were more realistic in appreciating the value of foreign training. Deng Xiaoping’s message that China would be transformed when thousands of Chinese students abroad returned echoed the conclusion that Sun Yat Sen’s wife, Soong Ching Ling, reached in her paper, The Influence of Foreign Educated Students in China.

Lee Kuan Yew also acknowledged the great caste divide in all colonial societies between the ‘England-returned’ and those who were educated at home. Malayans (who then included Singaporeans) associated “intelligence and ability with an education in England”, he said, perhaps because “such an education makes possible a greater and more rapid acquisition of wealth”. The glamour of the metropole that enveloped ‘The Returned Student’, the title of a talk Lee gave on the phenomenon’s social, political and economic significance, counted more than money.

Returned students spearheaded national movements throughout Asia. Lee listed Nehru (Harrow and Cambridge), Burma’s Thakin Nu (also Cambridge), Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan (Oxford) and Indonesia’s Mohammed Hatta (University of Leyden). Even Ho Chi Minh saw the light in Paris.

It’s difficult to reconcile that concept of the overseas student with what one hears about the victims of race attacks in Australia. In fact, a friend in Sydney tells me they are blue-collar workers rather than students. He says that “teaching shops have sprung up like mushrooms” to cater to a demand created by massive advertising in India by Australian government departments and airlines.

“Each (teaching shop) is about the size of a shop in a mall”. Their primary task is to teach English to newly arrived young Indians of limited means whose parents have probably incurred huge debts to send them to better their chance in life in, let’s be frank, a developed white country.

To quote my friend’s e-mail, “These kids all live together in cramped accommodation and work at night in menial jobs or driving taxis. Result, they are exposed to the worst kind of elements in our already frustrated society.” At last count, there were some 200,000 Indian students in Australia. Many more ethnic Indians were born in Australia.

My friend blames this proliferation of shoddy teaching shops and the kind of Indians they attract for the problem. With a Sindhi immigrant’s son due to be Her Majesty’s next representative in Calcutta, the belait-pherat culture is dead.

My friend did a Yellow Pages search for places of ‘tertiary education’ in Sydney’s central business district and found no fewer than 54. “Imagine a city centre with 54 places for tertiary education? How good can they be?” Even some of the names seem suspect. “Yet, you look at the big universities, and you'll find Asian students are extremely well assimilated, do well at both scholastic and extra-curricular work, are leaders in the students’ unions, bag most of the academic prizes, and really enjoy their education”.

They may be the Nehrus and Thakin Nus of the future. It’s the others who are being attacked by unemployed young white hoodlums.

Tailpiece: While being interrogated by Immigration at Sydney airport because he didn’t have a visa, Auberon Waugh, the English writer, was asked if he had a criminal record. “I didn’t realise that was a qualification for entering Australia!” he replied. They jailed Waugh for two days, not, of course, for cheekiness.

sunandadr@yahoo.co.in