I am privileged to be one of the only two recipients of the hard copy of this work that we have become so familiar with now. It is a magnificent print edition, though the pages, alas, are not numbered. Kersi wrote about the practical aspects of producing it in his Msg # 52787 of 21 April 2013 and followed it up by another posting, Msg # 52866 of 28 April 2013, in which he provided the link to its online version at Ode to Indian Dukawala March 2013 THE final revision with graphics& Appendix.docx
So first of all congratulations to Kersi for recording and telling this tale, which forms the backbone really of our collective history. It is a form of poetry in kaleidoscopic motion, as it were. His starting point is the building of the Mombasa-Kisumu railway (though of course there was already a significant Indian settlement in Zanzibar and the coastal parts of East Africa before that). While most of the workers who had come to work on the construction project left to return to India when it was completed, others saw an opportunity to open up the interior and so ventured out there, “(b)raving malaria black water sleeping sickness” and “many and unknown ills”, fevers and diseases, “(u)ndeterred by lions leopards and snakes … hyenas owls bats and other nightly beasts”. And so they spread far and wide into the wildest and deepest corners of the region, through hostile territory and facing umpteen dangers, to set up a string of shops (`dukas`, which as we know was a coarsened abbreviation of `dukaan`) here and there: “A small mabati duka a shop in the front, (w)ith a couple of tiny rooms in the back” which became their “wilderness abode”!
And so continues Kersi, with his highly imaginative depiction of the arrival of the shopkeeper as a specie, and how he negotiated all the odds stacked against him to serve a need, to create a trading environment, to survive and to prosper. The book as well as its online version is full of graphics and catching pictorial images which illustrate the progress and salient features of the duka phenomenon: the rural setting, the minutiae of the various mundane merchandise and other products sold, the natives toiling the soil and performing other routine tasks, their colourful costumes and the sight of many everyday objects – the panga and the birkia, the kerosene lamp, the three star match box, the bottle of the Amrutanjan balm (with whose suppliers in South India my father`s family had a close business connection and who looked after us there on our first visit to India in 1968!), the `lorry` or truck traversing the rough landscape, stretching into the modern era of the ubiquitous `Tusker` beer and its skyscraper home – all so familiar to most of us who come from there.
The dukawalas did not just sell things to the consuming public, for “from the locals … Many needy things he required …Milk honey skins and hides”, and “he regularly acquired .. Makka the charcoal to cook with, Mswaki the acacia tooth brush stick” and “Many other local produce and products”. Also “In his duka too the locals he employed Sukuma sukuma push push, Haraka haraka hurry hurry, His employees to work he spurred on”! His was a two-way trade that benefited the locals as much as himself. This however did not endear him to everyone as the following extracts from the text testify :
“Not long after the mzungu P C and the D C …. rolled in, Indian contractors built their bomas offices, And bungalows …. Followed by the farmers and settlers white … Their early farmhouses and homes, Farm sheds and barns they all also built”;
“But the wazungu white farmers, Their families and friends, As well as their bibis the wives, And all the bwanas and the officers, Of government the serikali and the white businessmen, For reasons not very sure, but known to them only, Disliked derided and mistreated, The dukawala most unfairly” even though of course they all depended on the generous credit and other largesse of the dukawala!
There is lots more in Kersi`s narrative which lends credibility and weight to any number of academic studies and other literature on the subject of East African Asians who are now belatedly, at times even grudgingly, recognised as having played a pivotal role in the development of the region as a whole. It captures their transformation from pioneering first generation migrants at the beginning of the 20th century to their 21st century successful descendants superbly in this extraordinary publication.
So our plaudits and grateful thanks to Kersi for his dogged effort and perseverance.
RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2013
Surrey, England
