Finding George Floyd in Gujarat: A day in the life of the Siddi community

“We know that you Indians want to see us, the n*****, act like animals,” said Nazim Siddi, 30.

Nazim’s words, and his deliberate usage of a racial slur, lashed me like a whip.

I was attending a Goma performance on top of a secluded hillock behind the mazar of Baba Gohr in Ratanpur, located 30 km from Gujarat’s Bharuch. Goma comes from the Swahili word “damama”, meaning drums, and is a dance form that originated in the African bushes.

It came to India through Africans brought to the subcontinent as slaves across six centuries until the 1860s. The performers at Ratanpur are descendants of these slaves, now known as the Siddi community. Nazim was the leader of the troupe, and his comment came in response to my question as to why, after the performance, he and the others went into the nearby bushes to chew raw leaves.

Nazim’s comment, as an Indian dissociating his community from this Indian-ness, is testament to the marginalised condition of the Siddi community today.

Racism is as much a religion in India as is cricket. And the Siddi community of Gujarat reflects a contemporary form of slavery in democratic India. They prefer to stay together, since they face racial slurs outside. This is also why they don’t migrate to more prosperous states for better wages.

Once considered the smallest of Gujarat’s vulnerable tribal communities, the Siddis were notified as a nomadic tribe in the 2011 census. Since then, they live in fear of the government evicting them from their farmland.

In Ratanpur, the community of 100-odd Siddi families depend solely on the mazar of Baba Gohr for their sustenance. They no longer own any land, depending instead on the forests for its treasures, and run shops at the base of the hillock, selling tea, flowers, incense, religious relics, chadars, and other trinkets.

Baba Gohr is said to have migrated to Surat in the 14th century from Sudan. He made his fortune by trading in pearls. Late in his life, he became a Sufi peer and, renouncing everything, came to live in the seclusion of Ratanpur. Other Sudanese in Surat followed him – I could not find out whether this migration was a spiritual journey or an imposed exile on the African community in these parts.

Given how Indians love to associate Africa with “black magic”, the Baba’s mazar in the middle of nowhere earned a reputation for being able to “cure” people who have been “possessed” by spirits. I watched a teenage boy being chained to a pillar for three days straight so the Baba could drive away the spirit that had taken hold of him.

Even today, Ratanpur’s microeconomics is structured on this dubious reputation. The village does not have a primary school or a primary healthcare facility. Instead, it’s a haunted bastion of blind faith.

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In his book The African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands, Robert Collins estimated that about 5.5 million African slaves were brought eastward. Most of them landed in India. Records show that Gujarati traders in Zanzibar played a central role in slave trade during its bull period, from the late 18th century to the early 19th century.

Slaves brought to India were usually engaged in local kings’ armies, with some of them gathering political influence over time. After the East India Company imposed the Permanent Settlement in 1793 – first in Bengal and then the rest of India – all rulers lost their right to maintain an army, resulting in the Africans losing their jobs.

These Africans then began moving to the margins, as their assimilation into the greater society never happened. They looked “too African” in body and belief.

Marginalised in every sense, 35,000 Siddis in Gujarat came to live in small pockets near Bharuch and Jamnagar. Their presence is somewhat noticeable in 18 villages around Gir forest.

In Gir region, Jambur is the biggest Siddi village, located deep within the forest. Here, I met Imtiaz, 27, who came face to face with his first lion at the age of seven.

“O chandni ke raat tha. Hum sat saal ka the. O sher hum se ucha tha,” he said. It was a full moon night. I was seven. That lion was taller than me.

Imtiaz belongs to the present generation of Afro-Indians who were once employed in the army of the Nawab of Junagarh. The Nawab rehabilitated them to the wilderness of Gir, allotting them farming lands.

Seventy years later, Imtiaz and his fellow Siddis fear land-sharks more than lions and leopards. They have good reason: they are of African origin, they are Muslim, and they live in Gujarat. Imtiaz explained how unknown faces, accompanied by representatives from the police and government, often visit their fields to claim portions of their land, waving papers that the Siddis cannot make head or tail of.

Apart from farming their half-acre of land, Imtiaz and his brother sell toys at village fairs around the districts of Gir-Somnath and Junagarh. Their family of seven rarely earns more than Rs 10,000 a month.

His mother, Rubaiya Siddi, sat nearby, her face lit by the blood-red embers in the depth of her big oven. She showed me her field, where a group of women sat under the shade of a jackfruit tree, gossiping and singing. The black earth around them was prepared to farm. A number of sturdy sticks were kept ready to take on any encroacher.

Siddi society is essentially women-driven, and its women are formidable.

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In the village of Ankolvadi, located at Gir’s core, Siddi families live in conditions far more wretched. There’s no public school nearby, so their children walk eight km a day to attend classes. Their parents work as temporary labourers in Talala and Junagarh.

In Talala, Hossian Siddi, a spirited protector of the community’s interests, put it plainly: “Nikal dene se hum sab mar jayenge.” We will all die if evicted.

In the city of Jamnagar, the population of 3,000-odd Siddis are relatively well-off and educated. Their unofficial spokesperson, Rafiq Siddi, 60, took me to a gathering organised to felicitate two elderly Siddi couples who had just returned from Haj.

Looking around at those in attendance, I could not see a single non-Siddi face. There was a lot of laughter and hugging. Heaps of biryani were cooked and distributed, each plate shared by five or six people in true community spirit.

As I looked at the beaming faces of the four Hajjis, my mind took me back to a ship named Al-Jagir. It was 1333, and the ship had taken another Hajji, named Ibn Batuta, to Kathiawar. At the time, 50 Abyssinian men at arms had guarded him on his journey from attacks by pirates. It was a time when Baba Ghor had made Gujarat his home.

Sitting with the Siddi community today, I wondered whether Ibn Batuta’s Abyssinians had also made this their home.