Books of Becoming: Memory Writing and Memory Sharing on 20th-Century Oshwal Jain Migration

Abstract

This article examines the narrative of migration that circulates among Oshwal Jains today. It does so by closely analyzing a varied corpus of memory-writing, including autobiographies, family histories, community histories, memoirs, and social media discussing the settlement of Oshwal Jains from British India in East Africa between 1890 and 1950, and their subsequent onward migration from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This article first presents a brief historical overview of South Asians in East Africa, and pieces together a picture of how and where Oshwal and non-Oshwal Jains featured within this colonial history. Operationalizing concepts from the field of memory studies, it then discusses which stories and memories are shared, and shows how they combine to form and sustain a community-affirming rags-to-riches narrative. Although the materials in the corpus can certainly help fill in some of the under-researched aspects of South Asian cultural history in East Africa, the narrative(s) of migration they present, with their telling tropes and silences, are indicative of dynamics and developments within the contemporary Oshwal Jain community. Therefore, by way of conclusion, the article interrogates the timing and intergenerational dynamics of the recent surge in memory sharing and memory writing by Oshwals settled around the globe.

1. Introduction

As the port of Mombasa appeared on the horizon, the passengers on the steamer felt a wave of joy. Everyone scrambled to gather their belongings, fold their mats, and ensure all clothes were neatly packed away in their case. […] Premchand was thrilled to see the port of Mombasa. At this port, where I am alighting today, my elder brothers arrived in Africa to farm the land. So many fellow Indians arrived in Africa through this port, and today, it is my turn. The port’s lighthouse came into view, with seagulls soaring above the calm seas.

(Desai 2000, p. 261)

The port of Mombasa speaks to the imagination of many. Almost all accounts of South Asians arriving there seem to convey a sense of wonder, a sense of recognition and appropriation, or a combination of both these sentiments. The sense of joy and wonder can well be understood in light of the long sea journey. For those arriving by the monsoon-dependent dhow, the journey took an average of six to eight weeks and was only conducted from November until early March. Later, when the less monsoon-dependent steam-powered vessels became the standard mode of transportation between India and the shores of East Africa, the journey still took around nine days. In either case, circumstances on board were challenging, especially for those not able to travel in the most luxurious classes. Food and water were simple and rationed, hygiene was poor, and passengers suffered from illness and seasickness. Hasmita Shah writes about her mother’s first sea journey: “Ba (mother) was seasick the whole time, spending virtually all the time lying down and trying to sleep as any motion would set her off again. She was not sure whether she would be able to make it safely to Mombasa” (H. Shah 2015, p. 40). In Bhagwanji Kachra Shah’s biography, we also read of the dangers at sea: “The steamer was rocked back and forth by waves like hills. Everyone’s stomach turned and they stood vomiting. […] They feared the steamer would sink into the depths and everyone would perish. Each prayed to their gods” (Mawani 1991, p. 23).2

The sea journey was thus a challenging but also transformative process for first-time travelers, and their sense of relief and excitement at the sight of land can well be understood. But the East African shores that slid into view seemed to many at once new and familiar. Indeed, they had been connected to South Asia by coastal trade as well as monsoon-driven ocean trade for millennia. Although most South Asian seafarers and traders only stayed in Africa for a few months to conduct their trade and wait for the turning of the seasonal monsoon winds that would enable a swift and easy journey back to South Asia in July each year, the island of Zanzibar boasted a more or less settled South Asian community of over 5000 by the mid-19th century, and smaller settlements were strategically dotted along the continental coast in places like Malindi and Mombasa (Ghai and Ghai 1983, p. 5). As the excerpt above indicates, most arrivals were aware of others, distant relations, community, or even family members, that had landed on these shores before them. Especially after the turn of the 20th century, they could be sure to find hospitality with kindred people already settled, whose language, customs, and food habits were at least recognizable to them.

This article deals with narratives of migration as they circulate within the memory community of Oshwal Jains.3 Oshwal (sometimes transcribed as Osvāl) is an originally Rajput caste (further subdivided into different clans or gotras) originating in the town of Osian, in the Marwar region of Rajasthan, and believed to have converted to Jainism in the 6th century BCE (Babb 1993, p. 9). Groups of Oshwals subsequently moved to Sindh (10th century CE), and the Kutch and Halar regions of Gujarat (16th and 17th centuries CE) (Dodhia 2005, p. iv). Members of the Oshwal community were very much part of the waves of migration from both Marwar and Gujarat to Mumbai, East Africa, and the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. The narratives this article examines are mostly non-fiction accounts pertaining to the experience of complex subsequent episodes of mobility and settlement of the Oshwal community in the 20th century. They belong to two broader categories of narratives, with which they share key themes and functions. First, they deal with 20th-century South Asian experiences of migration. In particular, work on Gujarati migration and diaspora centers on very similar themes and ideals (see Sarwal 2017; Mawani and Mukadam 2012). Second, they are narratives that serve a community identity-affirming function for the Oshwal community. In this category we also find community narratives such as the community’s origin and conversion stories (Babb 1993, pp. 9–11) and related monastic genealogies. Whereas these older narratives sought to develop the Oshwal identity as a convergence of Rajput royal origins and martial prowess on the one hand and ascetic insight and spiritual devotion to Jain monks on the other, the migration narratives translate this to the 21st-century context, with worldly attributes such as adaptability and business prowess converging with the ultimate upholding of Jain values and rituals. Although centuries apart, these narratives share a community-affirming function.

Before discussing the narratives about East Africa as shared in the memory community of Oshwal Jain “twice-migrants” that are at the heart of this article, the following section will provide a brief overview of the historical backdrop against which these should be read. As will be shown, while archival sources and academic secondary literature is available on the development and experiences of the broader South Asian community in East Africa, specific sources and documentation about the smaller communities that formed part of the patchwork of this East African South Asian community are limited.

2. Historical Backdrop

2.1. South Asians in and Beyond East Africa

Although there had been trade and concomitant (mostly circular) migration before, it was between the end of the 19th century and the mid-1960s that people of Indian origin arrived to settle more permanently and in larger numbers in what had by then become European—mostly British—East Africa. These migrants undertook the at times costly and perilous sea journey for often intricately intertwined reasons. Some push factors were the frequent droughts in the northwest of India, which only added to the poverty and lack of opportunity many experienced in the rural areas and villages (Jain 2011, p. 87). These circumstances had first resulted in a wave of migration towards regional towns and big cities in India, especially Mumbai. Conversely, diverse business and trade opportunities served as pull factors. A significant part of these were generated by European, and especially British Imperial, expansion in Africa.

For some of those who arrived on the East African shores at the turn of the 20th century, settlement was but a next chapter in a longer history of circular trade across the Indian Ocean. Some 32,0004 others were recruited as indentured laborers, to work on the construction and the daily running of the Uganda railway. However, the majority of South Asians who settled in East Africa were not indentured, nor were they descendants in a line of traders that came and went as the monsoon winds propelled them in pre-colonial times. Most were “free” migrants5 from Gujarat and Punjab, who came to eke out a living by setting up small-scale businesses, including the typical small general stores that earned them the name dukawalla—Hindustani for “shopkeeper”. Often, new arrivals found a position as clerks or shop assistants in a duka established by a family or community member, with the hopes of eventually starting up their own businesses. In later years, some diversification did occur, with more South Asians finding employment in industry, lower- to mid-tier government jobs, and liberal professions.

Together with different South Asian Muslim communities, such as the Khojas, Ismailis, and Bohras, as well as Sikhs, Hindus, Parsis, and Goans, Jains from the western Indian peninsula thus came to East Africa in search of opportunity and betterment. Although some of the early Jain settlers worked for the Uganda railway in some technical capacity, they were all “free” rather than indentured migrants.

Table 1. Demography of South Asians and Jains in East Africa.7.

	Kenya		Tanganyika		Zanzibar		Uganda
	South Asian	Jain	South Asian	Jain	South Asian	Jain	South Asian	Jain
1915	11, 787						3651
1931	43,623	1800	20,898	200			14,150
1948	97,687	6000	46,254	800			35,215	400
1963	176,613	25,000		950		850 fam.		5300
1969	139,037		88,567				74,308
1979	89,185						4000	0

shows how the proportion and growth of the Jain community runs more or less parallel to the demographic fluctuation in the whole South Asian community in East Africa, showing a slow rise from the turn of the 20th century until the 1930s,6 followed by a period of stagnation caused by the Great Depression and the Second World War. From the second half of the 1940s, the community grew exponentially until the mid-1960s, both due to a new influx of migration from India and due to population growth within the local community.

As the last line in the table indicates, the fortunes of the South Asian communities in East Africa changed from the second half of the 1960s. The lucrative middlemen status the South Asian community held within the colonial economy of East Africa was no longer tenable after independence. Even though many members of the South Asian community sympathized with the struggle for independence of the African population, they quickly found their position in the newly independent nations being questioned. The Zanzibar revolution in 1964 and its aftermath of racial violence prompted a first rupture, with a large part of the South Asian population fleeing to the mainland or leaving for India. Soon after, various Africanization policies sought to redress the economic balance, with measures such as nationalizations of property and limitation of business licenses for non-nationals having a severe impact on the lives of the South Asian population. The expulsion of South Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 was the final stage of this development. The often hurried and in some instances forced resettlement triggered by attempts at Africanization by the newly independent African nations resulted in the temporary or permanent splitting up of families, with many having to start and build up a business or professional life from scratch. The mass departure of South Asians from East Africa (to India, the UK, North America, and elsewhere) continued until well into the 1970s. Since the mid-1990s, the South Asian population in these East African nations has seen a steady rise, this time due mainly to a new wave of influx of expat professionals from India.

2.2. Locating Jains and Jainism in East Africa

Most of the scholarship on South Asians in East Africa focuses on their unique position in the development of the colonial project, or the difficult position they found themselves in once the African nations had won their independence.8 Because of their focus, a fine-grained analysis of the religious and cultural makeup of the South Asian community is usually not included. Similarly, the colonial administration dealt with “Asians” as one bloc for most legislation, only on occasion differentiating between Muslims, Hindus, and Goans (Aiyar 2015). Many accounts confirm that the South Asian communities in East Africa did mingle and support one another across those religious and caste divides, which would perhaps have hampered collaborative action in India. Although this was certainly true when it came to early business and trade (see, for example, Curtin 1984), politics (see, for example, Aiyar 2015), and neighborly support, socio-religious practices, including temple worship, religious education, and marriages, remained very much a segregated affair. Whereas the rough categorization of “Asian” is thus perhaps sufficient to understand the community’s role in the colonial economy and politics, a closer look at the patchwork of different, smaller communities that together made the Asian community is needed if we are to gain an insight into the experience and social lives of individual South Asians.

The Jains who settled in East Africa between the turn of the 20th century and the 1960s came from Western India, mainly from the Kutch and Saurashtra regions of Gujarat and Maharashtra. Kutchi Jains were comparatively active in 19th-century oceanic trade. They settled in East Africa early on and were therefore specifically an important influence in Zanzibar. However, Halari Oshwals9 soon became the largest group in most of continental East Africa. Nearly all Oshwals were Jains, but not all Jains were Oshwals, as there were other Kutchi Jains as well as some Jains belonging to the Navnat group of castes. Additionally, different sectarian groups were present or developed as the community grew: sthānakvāsi as well as deravāsi śvetāmbara Jains, digambara Jains (a significant portion of these converted from śvetāmbara groups and are followers of Kanji Swami), and some followers of Srimad Rajchandra (Jain 2011, p. 89). This diversity led to a complex network of organizations and infrastructure: in some cases, we see a distinction between purely religious Jain or sthānakvāsi institutions and more socio-cultural Oshwal institutions, but in others there is a (partial) overlap, with temple rooms being installed in community halls, or religious classes being organized along Oshwal community lines. Especially when and where the Jain community was relatively small, or equally divided among different sects, a roughly non-sectarian approach to Jainism prevailed (and still prevails).

For the first pioneer settlers, religious practice was restricted to the personal sphere and limited by the sparse availability of resources of various kinds (experts, books, mūrtis, etc.). The arrival of women and subsequently children impacted social life within the South Asian community at large, as it enforced the need for educational and socio-religious structures. As the Jain community in a specific locality grew, some private ghar derāsars (litt. “house temples”, these are usually single-room shrines in a private residence or other building) were opened to the public (the now-defunct derāsar in Stone Town, opened in 1905, was likely the first one of this type in East Africa10). Additionally, community halls (mahajanwadi) to serve the larger groups (notably Oshwal and Navnat) were first rented and then bought or purpose-built (e.g., 1927 in Mombasa, 1933 in Thika, 1939 in Nairobi (Dodhia 2005, pp. 120–41)). Some of these community halls also have a temple room (e.g., Nairobi, Nakuru). Where the community was sufficiently large, halls were rented or bought to accommodate public derāsars (e.g., the Mombasa Shri Svetambar Sangh (est. 1922) purchased a building on Rogers Road, where a murti was installed in January 1924 (Dodhia 2005, pp. 187–88), and the Jain Sangh of Dar-es-Salam (est. 1930) rented a building for religious and social activities that had a portrait of Mahavir in 1940 (Champsee et al. 2015, p. 18)). As numbers rose further after the Second World War, the Jains, like other religious groups, built their infrastructure on a grander scale, with purpose-built derāsars (Dar-es-Salaam 1957), including some in traditional shikharbandi style (Mombasa 1963, Nairobi 1984, Kisumu 2023) being inaugurated. In addition to these community halls and derāsars, Oshwal Jains, like other South Asian communities,11 set up a range of social and educational organizations that exclusively or primarily catered to their own community. These included dispensaries, hospitals, maternity homes, schools and nurseries, boarding houses and hostels, guesthouses (dharamshālas), sports facilities, halls for large functions, charitable trusts, and libraries.12

Because of the difference in context and demography, the South Asian communities in East Africa developed differently from those in India. This does not mean that there was no contact or influence from India. Indeed, political and religious authority figures from India did visit the South Asian communities in East Africa (Sarojini Naidu in 1924, and especially relevant to the Jain communities Yati Hemchandra and Yati Phulchand in 1946–1947 (Dodhia 2005, p. 229)). Conversely, the Oshwal community continued the practice of “calling” relatives and neighbors, as well as brides, to join them in Africa (Zarwan 1977, p. 68), and contributed to disaster and poverty relief in the villages in India (Dodhia 2005, p. 139). Advances in communication, the postal service, and travel had a significant impact, and the initial scarcity of religious resources and contact was alleviated to an increasing extent from the 1950s onwards.

From the mid-1960s onwards, faced with insecurity and (threats of) violence, many Jains moved within and away from East Africa. The revolution in Zanzibar resulted in a surge in the Jain population in mainland Tanzania. Africanization policies in Kenya and Tanzania subsequently resulted in a sharp decline in numbers, even though these communities did not fold altogether (see Table 1). The number of Jains still in Uganda when Idi Amin expelled all South Asians in 1972 was small, with some already having left in the years before due to the shifting political climate. Of those who left East Africa between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, some went to various regions in India (very few to settle in their ancestral villages, but most to further their business in regional towns like Jamnagar and Ahmedabad, and the greater Mumbai area). Many, however, ended up operationalizing their British Overseas passport and former colonial subject status, and moving to the UK. After changes in North American migration policy, the US and Canada also welcomed East African Jain migrants from the end of the 1960s. Today, a significant majority of Jains in the UK have an “East African connection”, with themselves or their parents having been born and brought up in East Africa. In a place such as London, the way the Jain community was organized from the 1970s onwards was impacted by this wave of migration, with the Oshwal and Navnat identities very much present, a significant Kanji Swami following among Digambar Jains, and modes of social interaction as well as food preferences retaining an East African flavor. The specific qualities of “East Africanness” in Jainism in the UK today are felt especially keenly among newer arrivals who migrated to the UK from India.

3. Circulating Memories of East African Pasts

South Asians who left East Africa have much of their history in common, and with that, also many memories. Since 2000, a growing number of memoirs, exhibitions, and even works of fiction have been evidence of a specific engagement with this chapter in their migration history. From the pens of professional literary writers, M.G. Vassanji’s travelogue-meets-memoir And Home was Kariakoo (Vassanji 2014) deals explicitly with the emotional labor of returning to a former homeland and dealing with the past in the present. Kenyan legal expert and writer Pheroze Nowrozjee’s A Kenyan Journey (Nowrojee 2019) similarly combines his family history of settling in Kenya with a reflection on the present situation in the country. Neema Shah’s debut Kololo Hill (N. Shah 2021) is a fictionalization of a South Asian family’s flight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. In this same period, content regarding the East African past circulated within traditional print and audiovisual media as well as on social media. This content was based primarily on memories of Europeans and Asians who migrated away from East Africa between the 1960s and the 1980s. As 2022 was the 50-year anniversary of the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda, this too elicited different types of memory-sharing and remembrance activities, including exhibitions (e.g., Uprooted 50 years ago,13 Rebuilding Lives, 50 Years of Ugandan Asians in Leicester14), oral history projects (e.g., British Ugandan Asians at 5015), and academic projects (e.g., Migrant Memory and the Post-colonial Imagination16).

Oshwal Jains as Memory Community

The Oshwal Jain narratives pertaining to their complex migration trajectory to, within, and from East Africa thus exist in a wider universe of related and partially overlapping narratives, which have become more prolific as well as more publicly available in the past two decades. The importance of such narratives, with both its generic and its specific elements, can be productively explained by operationalizing concepts developed in the field of memory studies. “Collective memory”, as elaborated by Maurice Halbwachs, includes the knowledge, memories, facts, and narratives that are constructed and shared within a specific social group, or “memory community” (Halbwachs and Coser 1992). In fact, collective memory plays a crucial role in identity formation as, particularly in the modern period, “the self-reflexive cultivation of the past has played into the formation of imagined communities” (De Cesari and Rigney 2014, p. 1). The constructing and sharing of a common narrative not only provides a shared backstory, but also encapsulates and thus transfers certain core values. The memoirs, biographies, and histories that underpin this article are compounds of individual memories and archival research, to varying degrees. As we will see in the next section, they can provide a very useful addition to our understanding of the history of East African South Asians, Oshwals, and Jains and their globally dispersed descendants. However, these (hi)stories should not be read as mere factual renditions of the past. Rather, these narratives are a way of individual and community engagement with the past: informative, but also studded with values and purpose specific to the community within which they are produced and intended to be shared.

The corpus compiled for this article includes a variety of materials dealing with (the memory of) settlement of Oshwal Jains in East Africa, and their subsequent onward migration to the UK and elsewhere. It includes memoirs (Rajni Kant Shah’s Jeevan Yatra (R. K. Shah 2024), Madhusudhan Shah’s Madhu’s Memories (M. S. Shah 2022)); family histories, either transgenerational (Hasmita Shah’s Lest We forget (H. Shah 2015)) or focused on one ancestor (Rajnikant Shamji Shah’s Bapas Story (R. S. Shah 2011), Krishan Yogesh Shah’s Our Queen (K. Y. Shah 2015)); community histories (Rati Dodhia’s Rise and Glory—History of the Halari Visa Oshwals (Dodhia 2005), Keshavlal M. Shah’s Glimpses of Heritage (K. M. Shah 1999), Bhaichand Kachra Shah’s Know Thy Oshwal Roots (B. K. Shah 2021)); some older (auto)biographies (Paul Marett’s Meghji Pethraj Shah His Life and Achievements (Marett 1988),17 Mawani’s Bhagwanji Kachrabhai Shah nī Jīvan Yātrā (Mawani 1991), Desai’s Mānavtā nī Mahek—Shrī Premcand Vrajpāl Shāh Jīvancaritra (Desai 2000)); and a diverse group of other sources, including Bindu Shah’s recent film Threads That Tie Us (B. Shah 2024) and social media content (Oshwal Memory Project18 (°2016), Oshwal Heritage Group19 (°2015)). Both Facebook groups are used to circulate and elicit memories, and encourage people to write up their life stories and make family trees. In addition to the corpus presented above, complementary sources on the process of migration of Oshwal Jains to East Africa include John I. Zarwan’s PhD dissertation Indian Businessmen in Kenya During the 20th Century (Zarwan 1977), which deals with the Oshwal community’s hand in business, and Cynthia Salvadori’s Through Open Doors (Salvadori 1983) and the three-volume sourcebook We Came in Dhows (Salvadori 1996), which bundles together snippets of interviews with members from different South Asian communities in Kenya about their past, and thus engages directly with memory. When we read all of these materials together, a core narrative emerges, which will be discussed in the next section.

A look at authorship and group membership first confirms Oshwal Jains to be a particularly international community, and thus also a particularly international memory community. For the purpose of this article, most of the selected materials were produced in the UK. However, it also features materials produced in Canada, India, the US, and Kenya. A closer look at the membership of the two social media groups included reveals an even wider geographical spread. A second feature worth noting regarding authorship is that none of the authors is a professional writer or historian. In fact, most are retired professionals and businesspeople. The style of most of the self-published and online materials is simple, with short, often anecdotal chapters and ample room for illustrations and pictures. Most of these pictures are of family members, or serve to illustrate elements of daily life in the villages in India or in East Africa that may not be familiar to younger generations (e.g., “cattle fodder in the background and in the foreground drying cow dung used for fuel” (R. S. Shah 2011, p. 92)). The inclusions of snippets of interviews (e.g., K. M. Shah 1999) and correspondence (R. S. Shah 2011, pp. 37–38) is also common, adding to the pervasive impression of these narratives as an assemblage or collage of somewhat fragmented memories.

4. A Tale of Rags to Riches

To varying degrees, all materials included in the corpus, i.e., individual biographies, family histories, and community histories, present an intergenerational rags-to-riches narrative, where through the hardship, hard work, and frugality of the older generations, the younger generations can come up and thrive. Most of the hardship and toil are located in the first half of the 20th century, in the villages in India, and in the yet-to-be-developed towns in East Africa. Even in the biographies and family histories where Africanization and re-settlement are presented as a second episode of rags to riches (e.g., H. Shah 2015), the storyline clearly starts from poverty and illiteracy in the villages in India and ends with cosmopolitan professional success in the 21st century.

4.1. Leaving Saurashtra—Of Poverty and Boredom

Although all community histories as well as some memoirs and biographies include reference to the earlier, pre-1880s migration history of the Oshwals (e.g., Dodhia 2005; K. M. Shah 1999; K. Y. Shah 2015; B. Shah 2024), the main starting point for almost all narratives is life in the villages (gaam) of Halar, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, somewhere between 1890 and 1945. Hasmita Shah writes about her father’s youth in India: “Kaka recounted in his journal how they would go begging for yoghurt and chaas, and if lucky get a little from a few houses, otherwise they were reduced to eating dry rotlo20 without the luxury of chaas. He often went to bed hungry” (H. Shah 2015, p. 23). This is one example of the many anecdotes illustrating, at times with some hyperbole, the poverty of life in the villages of Gujarat. The picture of children begging for food and going to bed hungry found in Hasmita Shah’s Lest We Forget conveys just how dire the situation was for some families. Rajni Kant Shah’s Jeevan Yatra reports on the 1940 famine and drought in the Halar region: “The wells dried up, there was famine in the whole of Halar and it was impossible to escape. People were starving and cattle were dying” (R. K. Shah 2024, pp. 10–11). In addition to food shortages, the poor quality and limited access to education is addressed in most narratives, as is the related dearth of professional opportunity. Although the situation in the villages is invariably described as deplorable, an undercurrent of nostalgia for the simplicity of a rural life is palpably present in some materials.

Early in the morning, the village would wake before the rays of the sun had reached over the horizon. The ringing of bells, the melodious sound of bhajans, and the dim light of lamps emanated from every house. Then the village came alive, bustling with activities like the milking of cows and buffaloes, churning buttermilk, and rolling bread. Before the golden rays of the sun had reached the village, the farmers would leave for the fields with their carts, by which time the village was filled with birdsong.

(Mawani 1991, p. 1).21

In the context of poverty and dearth of opportunity, many authors describe individual ambition and desire for adventure and enterprise as driving forces for migration. Keshavji Ramji, from the village of Kansumara, is said to have run away from home at the very beginning of the 20th century. His flight was driven by a dislike of farm work and a wish to engage in business. He became an important community leader to the Gujarati and Oshwal community in Nairobi (Dodhia 2005, p. 114; K. M. Shah 1999, p. 42; Salvadori 1996, vol. II, pp. 46–47). About Meghji Pethraj Shah, who left Dabasang for Mombasa in 1919, we read that he “began to have ambitions which would not be satisfied by a career of a village school master” (Marett 1988, p. 8). Similarly, we read how “Father’s eyes were shining. When the family dropped him off at the station, their faces were sad. But Bhagwanji’s heart was full of excitement to travel, so he did not feel such pangs of separation then” (Mawani 1991, p. 21). In this way, the poverty and hardship of the villages not only explain why migration was necessary, but also serve to highlight the innovative, frugal, yet driven mindset needed to be successful as a business pioneer pushing into the interior of East Africa.

4.2. An Africa of Pioneers, Business Prowess, and Success

After a journey that took weeks or even months, and includes episodes of adventure as well as hardship on the high seas, the harbor of Mombasa was the point of arrival for most Oshwals. Those arriving in Mombasa in the 1940s found an established community and guesthouses waiting for them when they disembarked at Mombasa (e.g., H. Shah 2015, p. 41), and could often rely on community hospitality wherever they travelled. This had been very different for the first Oshwals to arrive around the turn of the 20th century, often referred to as “the pioneers”, who had to rely on their own wits and a much more limited network of already-established South Asians. Incidentally, it was one of the early arrivals, Keshavji Ramji (arr. 1903), who was instrumental in fundraising for the foundation of a dharamshala in Mombasa, which opened in 1917/1918 (Dodhia 2005, p. 228). This guesthouse was the first Oshwal community infrastructure to be opened in continental East Africa.

Within the narratives at hand, stories about the lives of individual Jains mostly deal with the process of setting up and building a business. This often involved a complex series of odd retail jobs in the shops of family and community members in different locations across Kenya and East Africa (e.g., Salvadori 1996, vol. I, p. 152), before enough capital had been raised to build up a new business. These stories present a degree of daring and risk-taking that seem to glorify the pioneer spirit. Usually as an extension of pioneering business prowess, adventurous episodes are also included in many narratives, with man-eating lions (R. S. Shah 2011, p. 54), forbidden romance (R. K. Shah 2024), and travels through the wilderness (Mawani 1991, p. 27).

However, at the same time, a simple, service-oriented lifestyle is celebrated. In Marett’s abbreviated biography of Meghji Pethraj Shah, we read what can perhaps be regarded as a summary of the ideal Oshwal businessman.

“In all activities he was cautious, and he took every step, every business venture, after giving careful thought to it and the potential risks. What use are riches if they are not put to the service of others? If we amass wealth, and it our brothers and sisters in society remain immersed in the ocean of poverty and illiteracy, what use is our wealth?”

(Marett 1988, pp. 93–94)

4.3. The End of an Era: Africanization and Resettlement

As discussed in the introductory section, together with the other South Asian communities, the Oshwal community grew until the 1960s, when geopolitical shifts surrounding independence resulted in turmoil and conflict, and business and professional life were curtailed by attempts to Africanize the economy and society. Compared to the situation in the villages in Halar and the stories of setting up businesses, this period is not very elaborately discussed in the material at hand. Turmoil and fear during the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960) are mentioned briefly in some sources (e.g., K. Y. Shah 2015), and different effects of Africanization in Kenya are mentioned casually to explain onward migration to the UK (loss of jobs (R. K. Shah 2024, p. 302), loss of business licenses (H. Shah 2015, pp. 87–88)). The insecurity regarding obtaining travel and residence permits in this context is also often noted, as the more restrictive migration and nationality policies adopted in the UK in the 1960s22 made procedures less straightforward.

We began 1970 in the knowledge that we were now in Kenya on borrowed time, and as soon as we got our visa’s we would be leaving for England. […] We had British Overseas passports, and thus required visas. […] In the event, we ended up having to wait almost 2 years, during which time there was only the income from the letting of the shops.

(H. Shah 2015, p. 88)

Whereas (threats of) violence, fear, and difficulties are thus often glossed over or only mentioned in passing, more space is again allotted to the process of resettling and adapting to life in a new context. Whereas Oshwals had been sending their children to the UK for higher education since the 1930s, thus also accustoming them to life in the West, the UK could feel quite foreign to the older generations.

For the first time, she was living in a Western country, and with this change came the challenge of adapting to a new culture. Testament to her adaptability, she was (and still is) very accepting of different cultural values.

(K. Y. Shah 2015)

Those having to start again were faced with questions of housing, setting up a new business, and finding employment. Family and community networks were again activated to facilitate the process or resettlement. This also included the setting up of Oshwal and Jain institutions in the UK (Oshwal Association of the UK 1969/1972). Although stories hint at racism and toil, the emphasis is clearly on the eventual—often intergenerational—success of this second move.

The advancement of Oshwals in the U.K. has been remarkable. Today, we have a large number of professionals in fields such as law, medicine, accountancy, pharmacy, engineering, banking, economics, science, and commerce. The characteristics of hard work, thrift, honesty, prudence have served us well.

(K. M. Shah 1999, p. 37)

5. Core Values: Adaptability and Solidarity

As discussed, the narrative of rags to riches that emerges is anchored into the collective memory, and also establishes and promotes some core values of the community. The excerpt above identifies hard work, thrift, honesty, and prudence. Over the entire corpus, however, the two values that emerge most clearly are adaptability and solidarity. The corpus shares this emphasis with other migration narratives.

5.1. Adaptable Gujaratis

According to Mawani and Mukadam, the value of adaptability is ingrained into the broader Gujarati diaspora.

The Gujarati community, by its very nature of being a mercantile community, is a group for whom migration has always been a way of life. The idea of adapting and adopting, as well as discarding and recreating the various aspects of their identities have been key factors in their trajectory.

(Mawani and Mukadam 2012, p. xxii)

Although this may well be a broadly valid statement, it is important to remain aware of the layered history of both the Gujarati and the Oshwal diaspora, and therefore remain vigilant of differences in experience. For many Oshwal individuals, families, and entire villages, the concept of the move to East Africa was a fundamentally new thing, and not a conscious continuation of mercantile mobility. Even though many became cosmopolitans, they cannot be said to have been cosmopolitans in 19th- and early-20th-century Halar. In fact, although some ran small-scale shops, the main occupation seems to have been agriculture. Even when the history of previous migrations of the Oshwals is included in books and films, personal histories invariably begin from a stable rootedness in Halar. They begin where living memory starts, which is most often in “the villages”.23 Even with this caveat, adaptability is often given as one of the reasons for the success of individual Oshwals, as well as of the community.

“Despite having next to no contact with her family back home, and knowing very few people in her new surroundings, Ba was very quick to adapt and had in no time made Thika her home. This ability to adapt to new and unfamiliar surroundings would filter down through the generations”.

(K. Y. Shah 2015)

5.2. Solidarity for Success

The second value that is emphasized is that of solidarity, both within the Oshwal community and beyond it.

It was fun growing up in the Bazaar for there was a lot of harmony those days. We Indians all lived together. There were few Indians, so we all helped each other. It was only later, when the numbers got many that each community made its own hall and kept apart from others. There was no competition between the traders. In the evenings, all the shopkeepers would gather at Alladina Visram’s.24

This excerpt is taken from an interview with Kerajbhai P. Anandji from the small town of Kericho, roughly between Kisumu and Nakuru, in the interior of Kenya. It clearly distinguishes between two levels of solidarity: the broader South Asian and the more restricted Jain. Later in the same interview, he relates that religious spaces would be shared, Ismaili Muslims would donate to Hindu Brahmins, and on big occasions like weddings, all would participate in the same ceremonies and eat together regardless of differences in creed (K. M. Shah 1999, p. 42). Although most narratives confirm that a general feeling of harmony and good relations across the South Asian communities persisted, the establishment of separate institutions was both a product of and a motor for solidarity within the community.

That is the beauty of our Oshwal community: our cooperation. By that cooperation the community was built up, and in turn, our community was able to build up the country. Our people were very poor at first, but it was by each person giving a little money, something just very little, that we built our community places, our temples, social halls, and schools. It was also how we educated our children.

(K. M. Shah 1999, p. 43, from Salvadori 1996, vol. II, p. 47)

The setting up of the Oshwal Education and Relief Board in Nairobi in 1941 is often given as an example of the power of community solidarity, and it contributed to the rapid transition from largely uneducated or informally educated rural peasants and small-scale traders to highly educated cosmopolitan professionals and business leaders.

5.3. Gendered Narratives of Strength and Frugality

Women were rare among the first waves of migrants. Sources are at odds regarding the first Oshwal women to arrive in East Africa.25 Mostly, male pioneers spent some years building their business and traveled back to India to marry only after this. Especially if women married very young, they would stay behind in India for years before joining their husbands in Africa. This means the active personae in narratives on early migration are almost invariably male, as are the ideals and values presented. However, as contemporary authors tend to have an interest in the female perspectives too, we do find some reflections upon the lives of women in the background of the male-centered narratives. Although many had not had any access to formal education of any kind, women often seem to have matched their male counterparts when it came to adaptability and integration into their new circumstances, all while carrying the full responsibility of the running of the household and the care for children and dependent family members. In addition to this, many wives assisted their husbands in their shops, while others generated extra income by sewing.

Within a short period, Ba educated herself about business and she learnt everything methodically and with interest. She helped my father run the shop. She would prepare different kinds of lentils for sale. She would sort, clean, and remove any pebbles from the grain, and pack and seal paper bags of different produce. She would also grind different types of flour to be sold in the shop.

(R. S. Shah 2011, p. 66)

The values emerging from stories of women in East Africa partly overlap with those emerging from the pervasive male narratives. Solidarity and adaptability are central, but the sense of pioneering adventure, risk-taking, and business prowess found in male narratives is replaced by values such as strength of spirit and resourcefulness in homemaking. The ideals of simplicity and service to the community that emerge from male narratives are translated to frugality and care for the family.

5.4. Meaningful Silence and Trauma

The rags-to-riches narrative may well be roughly accurate for many families. However, it has an effect on the way difficult and less successful episodes are presented. First, it restricts the importance that can be allotted to negative experiences throughout the narrative—the earlier in the narrative, the more space there is for difficulties, negative experiences, and failure. This skewing towards the positive, especially when relating relatively recent events, can be a conscious narrative strategy, but it is of course also a trauma response (Haria 2014). Hasmita Shah hints at this when imagining her parents’ reaction to the family’s hardships during Africanization and the difficult relocation to the UK.

If I had asked them what they felt, they would be nonchalant, smile, and say nothing; either they cannot remember or, accepting their situation and suppressing their emotions, had moved on.

(H. Shah 2015, p. 98)

Although family histories and memoirs do present hardship and episodes of failure, such negative experiences and hardship are widely reframed as sacrifice to ensure the eventual positive outcome, either within the same generation or for the next generations. For example, Rati Dodhia’s community history of the Halari Visa Oshwals is dedicated to the memory of his and his wife’s parents, “Who were part of the group of early pioneers who sacrificed so much for their families and community” (Dodhia 2005, p. i). This reframing makes space for hardship and difficulty within the narrative without breaking the rags-to-riches teleology. However, the rags-to-riches trope also leads to the absence of certain stories and events. Some hopefuls did not succeed in establishing themselves in East Africa, and struggled back and forth. Some fled and returned to India as penniless refugees. Episodes of depression, violence, racism, and separation are seldom more than hinted at, unless they can be fitted into a triumph-over-adversity mold.

Gijsbert Oonk, who worked extensively on Gujarati businesses in the Western Indian Ocean region, critiqued scholars working on the Gujarati diaspora for their tendency to focus exclusively on successful cases, and thus further render those who did not succeed voiceless and invisible (a.o. Oonk 2005). The materials presented here illustrate that stories of failure are likewise not often circulated. As an aspect of collective memory, the narrative of Oshwal migration should not be approached as a disengaged and factual account of history. It is a narrative that serves a purpose and has a complex and composite origin, and it is primarily being told by participants who are engaging with their shared past when it comes to facts, as well as hopes, dreams, ideologies, positive and negative experiences, and trauma.

6. Intergenerational Dynamics of Memory and Memory Production

The reason for the apparent proliferation of memory sharing and remembrance at the start of the 21st century seems to be twofold. This rush to remember comes at a time when the older generations that lived in East Africa as adults are dwindling fast. This means memories are in danger of being lost beyond retrieval. It also means the generation that is now in their 30s and 40s did not share the experience of settlement and life in East Africa nor the subsequent postcolonial migration. Any memories they or their children may have are inherited or intergenerational, and according to quite a few of the corpus’ authors and content producers, as well as interview respondents across generations, those inherited memories are often few and fragmentary. Why are these memories so important? The perceived need to strengthen the collective memory is founded precisely on the assumption indicated by De Cesari and Rigney (2014)—namely, that the self-reflexive cultivation of the shared past may strengthen the community in the present and future. The Oshwal community is perceived to be under strain. Although it existed before migration, in India, as one layer of a multilayered regional identity, Oshwal very much came to the fore and solidified as a group identity and prime network of solidarity in the East African environment, especially in Kenya. After the large-scale onward migration of the 1960s and 1970s, Oshwal organizations also emerged in the UK (1967/1968), the US (1986), and Canada (1994). However, for generations that grew up after the constitutive episodes of 20th-century migration, living in communities where a unified South Asian or Jain identity is (also) promoted, the distinctness of an Oshwal identity does not necessarily make sense. Intermarriage further complicates this.

The 2024 film Threads That Tie Us (B. Shah 2024) in many ways illustrates the intergenerational dynamics behind this rush to remember Oshwal pasts. The frame story presents young Oshwal Jains in Toronto who participate in Oshwal community events twice a year without really understanding what Oshwal is. Otherwise, we see them engaged in very typical pursuits for North American children, and enjoying seasonal delights such as skiing trips. The film’s exploration of Oshwal history is set in motion when the kids are asked to talk about their family history at school. The film presents the history of the Oshwals from their origins in Marwar, deals with the villages in the Halar region as they were at the turn of the 20th century as well as today, provides a narrative of settlement in East Africa, looks at the situation of the Oshwal community in Kenya today, and sketches an outline of the global network of Oshwal organizations that emerged after onward migration. Although the film is surprisingly critical about certain aspects of community practice and interrogates the need to hold on to Oshwal community identity, the narrative trope and core values that emerge are the ones discussed above. At the end of this, we catch up with the youngsters in Toronto, who, after learning the history and cultivating a pride in the solidarity, adaptability, and rise to success of their community, attend community events with a renewed sense of belonging.

What we see emerge in these memory sources and heritage engagements is a personal quest to find roots, relive and fixate memories, and cultivate a general nostalgia, but also a collective effort at building an enticing community narrative to anchor the community in the past to ensure its unity and continuation in the future. The different generations that together make up the memory community of East African Oshwals each play a specific role in the process of memory-making and circulation and exhibiting a specific attitude towards the East African pasts.

The oldest generations, who lived in East Africa as adults before the 1970s, are the main keepers of direct impressions and memories. However, they are not all very eager to share their experiences very widely, although they often do share them among themselves. Their children, who spent part of their youth in East Africa but came to adulthood in the UK or elsewhere, are now the motor behind many of the memory narratives—nostalgia and curiosity to hear the full story are pervasive for them. The younger generations are mostly on the receiving end. Specifically among the Oshwal community, a re-evaluation of the community’s past is clearly aimed at the younger generations. The older generations that lived in East Africa as adults are dwindling fast. This means memories are in danger of being lost beyond retrieval. It also means the younger generations did not share the experience of East Africa and the postcolonial twice migration. Any memories they may have are inherited or intergenerational, and according to quite a few of my respondents across the generations, few and fragmentary.

Even as trepidation regarding the loss of relevance of community identity for the younger generations drives much of the memory-sharing and remembrance projects, it is not easily predicted what the impact of this narrative will be in a generation or two. As the distance to the past grows and the community becomes increasingly diverse, other narratives may displace or supplement this one, either as an aspect of the same memory community, or of a different but partially overlapping one. At the London premier of Threads That Tie Us, which took place in the summer of 2024, quite a few questions from the audience centered on the trope of helping children learn about their roots. The anxiousness and tension behind these interjections were tangible. Some asked whether it would be such a bad thing if their children lost the sense of connection to the community that was central to their elders, while others cautioned that once a community is gone, it is nigh impossible to bring it back if, perhaps later in life, today’s children have need of its networks of solidarity and sense of belonging.

Meanwhile, if approached with due diligence and an awareness of the agendas and biases present in the background of these memory narratives, they do very much add to the patchy knowledge we have about the development of the Oshwal Jain community and about Jain socio-religious practice in East Africa during the 20th century. Thus, they allow us to fill out the picture of Jainism outside of South Asia and the experiences of the individuals and families involved.