The Idealization of a Lost Paradise: Narratives of Nostalgia and Traumatic Return Migration among Indian Repatriates from Burma since the 1960s

I have heard stories like this about Burma all my life. It is the paradise my family found, and then, like so many other Indian families, lost — suddenly, brutally, irretrievably.

(Kamdar 2000: 76)

American writer Mira Kamdar captured in her literary work a critical moment of Burma’s postcolonial history: the forced migration of Indian communities out of the country during the 1960s. Mrs. Kamdar’s paternal grandparents hailed from Gujarat, in western India. They had migrated to Akyab (now Sittwe) in Arakan State in the 1920s, and their business then prospered in Rangoon. But they hastily returned to Bombay in the midst of the growing Burmese militaristic nationalism of the 1960s. Familiar to any student of Burmese contemporary affairs, the repatriation of Indian populations from military-ruled Burma back to India has, however, seldom been researched by academia.

Romanticized recollections can be found in Amitav Ghosh’s acclaimed novel The Glass Palace as well as Mira Kamdar’s own book, Motiba’s Tattoos (Kamdar 2000; Ghosh 2002; Singh 2010). The scholarship on postcolonial Burma usually states that the establishment of General Ne Win’s revolutionary military government in 1962, and the subsequent implementation of an array of chauvinistic nationalization laws, drove scores of foreigners — Indians in particular — out of the country. Yet what really happened? How did the repatriation process take place? Most significantly, how is it now recalled by the Indian communities who have effectively been forced out? How did they construe their departure, how do they recollect their journeys out of Burma? And how do they now reflect on their erstwhile Burmese host-land?

Drawing on recent interviews of first-generation Indian returnees, this article aims to shed light not only on a much misinterpreted moment of Burma’s troubled postcolonial past, but also on the lenses through which the country has been remembered ever since by this specific community (hereafter the “Burmese Indians”). Fieldwork was carried out in eastern and northern India in October 2010, November 2011, and August 2012 in various “Burma Colonies” of India, as well as in Rangoon in November 2012. Several in-depth interviews were collected, as well as shorter — and often casual — discussions with Burmese Indian returnees (whose age ranged between their early forties into their late eighties), and some of their relatives who have decided to nonetheless remain in Burma after the 1960s. Primary sources, such as biographies and family memoirs published by members of the Indian diaspora in Burma have also been consulted. All offer a wide range of backgrounds and perceptions: from wealthy Gujarati and Chettiar families (Kamdar 1999, 2000; Mutiah 2000), to middle-class civil servants (Patel 1955; Singh 1993; Benegal 2009) and lower-class petty traders (Singh 2010: 52–7).

The narrative accounts thereafter chosen illustrate highly emotional subjectivities. Informants have recollected the trauma of their departure and return journeys back to India. They provide original insights on the quite misreported process of repatriation out of Burma during the 1960s, and, in fact much beyond until the late 1980s. Drawing on these firsthand insights, this article shows how the Indian repatriates have also shaped rosy memories and idyllic images of the “paradise” they lost when leaving Burma. This article also attempts to identify the reasons behind this process of idealization. Repatriation processes indeed often lead, over time, to a retrospective idealization of what has been left behind — including one’s youth — says the literature on exile and forced return migration. This has been a pattern increasingly observed among other repatriated communities worldwide. But interestingly in the case of the Indian returnees from Burma, the idealized world is not that of the “homeland” they or their forefathers originally came from (India), but that of the host-land they chose to settle in, or were born into (Burma). Whilst studies of diasporic subjectivities have been chiefly concerned with the transplanting of cultural identifiers of the homeland into the host-land, and the creation of nostalgic memories of the migrant’s homeland, this article rather underscores the opposite view...