IndiaStar Review of Books
No More Watno Dur
by Sadhu Binning
IndiaStar Review of Books
"No More Watno Dur establishes Sadhu Binning as
one of the leading poets of the Indian
diaspora now writing in English."-- C.J.S. Wallia
No More Watno Dur
by Sadhu Binning
Toronto: TSAR Publications, 1995
120 pages $10.95Reviewed by C.J.S. Wallia
No more Watno Dur is a collection of poems in Punjabi along with English translations by Sadhu Binning, who teaches Punjabi at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. ("Watno Dur" in Punjabi means "far from the homeland.") Nearly all of the poems are about Indian immigrants in North America and are dedicated to the memory of the passengers of "Komagatu Maru," a ship with 376 Indian immigrants, which, in 1914 in Vancouver harbor, was forced to turn around and take them back to Calcutta. Upon disembarkation in Calcutta, the British colonial police shot dead 26 of the passengers and seriously wounded many more.
The poems in No more Watno Dur, particularly their references to "Komagatu Maru," perhaps can be best appreciated in the context of the history of Indian immigration to North America, which begins in 1903.
II.
The earliest Indian immigrants were mostly Sikh ex-soldiers and farmers from the Punjab who settled in British Columbia, where they had to face severe racial discrimination. They applied for Canadian citizenship, which was granted, but then rescinded in 1907. Some early immigrants moved to California's Sutter and San Joaquin counties, where racial discrimination later became even worse. The Indian immigrants felt that the major reason they were regarded as inferior in North America was India's colonial status under the British. To fight for India's independence, the immigrants founded the Ghadr party. The party, headquartered in San Francisco, elected Sirdar Sohan Singh Bhakna as the founding president and Lala Hardayal as secretary. Among the several hundred Ghadrites who returned to India was Sirdar Kartar Singh Sarabha, a young University of California engineering student at Berkeley. He along with 45 others was hanged in Lahore by the British colonial government in 1917, which also sent hundreds to the nightmarish prison in Kala Pani (Andaman Islands). In 1923, the U.S. government, by a decision of the Supreme Court, denaturalized all of the naturalized citizens from India on the ground that, although they were Caucasians, they were not white.
Here are two examples of the kind of discrimination the early Indian immigrants and visitors encountered. Sirdar Dalip Singh Saund completed his Ph.D.degree in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley in 1927 and found a job to teach in the Los Angles school district. But, even before he could step into his first class, the job offer was withdrawn by the school board because they decided that the students would be too upset to be taught by a brown-skinned person. So much for the brown civilization that invented the numeral system 1, 2, 3, etc. (misnamed as the "arabic" numerals by the Europeans -- a fact acknowledged by Arab historians themselves), the decimal system, and many of the founding concepts of geometry and algebra. Frustrated from following his profession, Dalip Singh Saund turned to farming and, decades later, became the first Asian-American to be elected to the U.S. Congress. In 1929, the prodigious poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, was treated in such humiliating manner by the U.S. immigration authorities in Los Angeles that he promptly cancelled his lecture tour and returned to India. The Immigration and Naturalization officers had demanded proofs from the brown-skinned poet that he could read and write and that he possessed sufficient funds on hand to guarantee that he would not become a public charge in the U.S. The tall, aristocratic, seventy-year-old Tagore, long locks and white beard flowing, commented: "Jesus could not get into America because, first of all, he would not have the necessary money, and secondly, he would be an Asiatic."
Indian immigration to the U.S. came to a complete halt in 1924 with the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act, resuming only in 1946, when the Luce-Celler bill allowed a token immigration of 100 people from India. This bill was passed by the persistent lobbying of Sirdar J.J. Singh over a period of twenty years. J.J. Singh's indefatigable one-man lobby finally pressed on the American recognition of their hypocrisy of having just fought Hitlerian racism in Europe while practising racial discrimination in their own immigration policies.
The U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 opened the doors for the first time for sizeable numbers of Indians immigrants. In 1967, Canada introduced the "point system" for approving immigration applications. The criterion now was to be outstanding professional qualifications. Many of the new arrivals came with advanced degrees in the sciences -- the most prominent of this group are Sirdar Narinder Singh Kapany, D.Sc., the father of fiber optics; Hargobind Khorana, Ph.D., the Nobel-prize winning geneticist; and Deepak Chopra, M.D., star east-west physician on American TV. Many have done well: according to the 1990 U.S. Census, Indo-Americans have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group. After settling down, these professionals typically sponsored the applications of their relatives to come over, some of whom lacked college education and now make up the lower economic classes of Indian immigrants.
This lower economic class is the narrative persona of Sadhu Binning's poems in No More Watno Dur.
III.
The Komagatu Maru incident of 1914 was a particularly poignant event in this history and has been the subject of two outstanding plays: Sharon Pollock's, in English, first produced in 1976; and Ajmer Singh Rode's, in Punjabi, first produced in 1984.
The two opening poem in Sadhu Binning's
No More Watno Dur are about the
Komagatu Maru:
The Heart-Breaking Incident
at the same shore of the ocean
where once stood Komagatu Maru
and went back
without kissing the shore sand
shrieking like a hungry elephant
facing the guns
now sitting amidst
the driftwood, the gravel, the sand
I wonder how they witnessed
the scene
and listened to
the voices of our grandfathers
I try to enjoy the music of the waves
but only the angry Punjabi voices
from the Maru reach my ears
I ask the waling stones
about the heartbreaking incident
they laugh
turn their faces and walk away
----------
and the follow-up poem
Welcome
I often speak
to the grass
the trees
and the river
they never tell me
I wasn't welcome
I've heard the wind
chatting with leaves
not once a note of hatred
the rain and the snow
touch me on my shoulders
as many other friends do
the birds come every morning
and sing outside my window
welcoming me into a new place
a new day
why weren't they consulted
when the decision was made
to send my Komagatu Maru away.
Most of the 29 poems in No More Watno Dur present the inner experiences of an Indian immigrant in Canada who has to take up backbreaking jobs such as picking strawberries, dish washing, and delivering packages.
The following two poems reflect the narrator's changing relationship to his adopted country and the oneness he experiences after immersing his father's ashes in a Canadian river.
River Relations
At the foot of the towering glaciers
into the icy waters of the river
when I dropped the ashes of my father
the persistent memory of
Ganga Yamuna and Sutluj
was forcefully quelled inside
Now whenever I remember my father
It is the Squamish river I think about
one rupturing relationship
giving birth to a new one
The strangeness of the place melted
a personal image now flows in memory
perhaps that's what my father meant
by relations of rivers to men
----------
and Sadhu Binning's deeply connecting, transformative title poem:
No More Watnu Dur
letters that I wrote
to my family
to my friends
in the last one century
were all written
from a foreign land
to the motherland
but the letter that I just wrote
about the news of my father's death
is written
from my country to another country
I wrote:
My father left his home a long time ago
he lived with the dream of
one day returning to his fields
to spend the last of his days in peace
now along with his body
all his dreams are melted into this land
I have dropped his ashes
in icy river water
he has become part of this soil
No More Watno Dur establishes Sadhu Binning as one of the leading poets of the Indian diaspora now writing in English.