SURGEON’S DIARY: The strange practices of Bantwa, my birthplace

Their womenfolk carried pitchers, containing fresh milk on their heads and delivered every morning to our doorstep. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGA

What you need to know:

  • There was a positive side to this intricate and well-knit society; there was no unemployment and for those who wanted to work there were ample opportunities.
  • In the place of work there was a “kith and kin” feeling and a strong ethnic bond. The ‘Big Three’ between them built schools, dispensaries, hospitals, mosques and even orphanages.

To give readers more details of the place I was born, Bantwa is a small town in Saurashtra, which like the Horn of Africa juts out from the western seaboard of India into the Arabian Sea.

It is 300 miles from Mumbai and its eternal claim to fame lies in the fact it is a few miles from Porbander, where Mahatma Gandhi was born. I have, therefore, good reason to bask in the reflected glory! Though it was a small town, Bantwa was strangely unique in some ways.

Like other towns of its size in India at the time, it had no electricity, no running water and no modern sanitary facilities. The roads were murram and during the long hot summers, the dust whirled off its windswept narrow streets.

The focus of the town was a stone gate, around which were a few shops. It was strictly a man’s world and menfolk gathered around the gate every evening to socialise.

It was, however, the demography and the social structure which made Bantwa strangely unique, with a population of about 30,000, majority comprising Memons like me. We were descended from the Lohanas, a high class Hindu caste, which specialised in trade and commerce. We were converted to Islam by an itinerant Soofi, an Islamic evangelist when we lived in the province of Sindh in undivided India, from where we migrated to Saurastra.

As converts, we were initially called Momins which means believers, which, in time was distorted to Memon, for some reason. With the change of religion, though, the imprint in our genes changed from Rama to Allah, we retained the DNA of Lohanas and their business acumen for Memons formed a vital part of wholesale commodity business throughout the length and breadth of undivided India and neighbouring countries.

The Hindus formed a small minority among the residents of Bantwa and lived in a segregated part of the town. They confined themselves to specific occupations; they were goldsmiths, black-smiths, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, herbalists and accountants.

INTERACTION

Being strict vegetarians, they ran the local vegetarian market, far from where meat and beef were sold. Their womenfolk carried pitchers, containing fresh milk on their heads and delivered every morning to our doorstep. In short, the followers of the two religions in the town lived together side by side like an estranged couple. They lived a life isolated from each other and there was no interaction except a functional relationship.

There was no attempt for further interaction, let alone integration. Even at that early stage in my life, the situation irked me, growing up as a secular person who hated barriers of religion, colour, ethnicity and tribe. Of course the religious divide took its toll when, after the partition, Memons were attacked and had to flee to Pakistan, penniless overnight.

But it was the social structure of the Memon community in Bantwa which I found strange and unique. In economic terms, it was a feudal society. There were three families — Dada, Habib and Adam — who had their vast business empires spread in various parts of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, in neighbouring countries like Ceylon and Burma.

The ‘Big Three’ ran business empires and employed the total adult male Memon population of Bantwa, except for a few individual entrepreneurs who dared to fly their own banners. Their employees were dispatched to faraway places like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Gauhati and Shillong for 10 months in a year. It was a callous and inhuman system, which tore families apart for long periods.

During the 10-month stint, the employee would work, eat and sleep in the shop and, in return, he would earn a pittance and pass the last two months of the year with his wife and children in Bantwa. At the end of this ‘holiday’, he would report to the head-office in Bantwa, late at night — for some strange reason, the bosses worked late into the night — and be told the place of his next assignment to which he would travel the next day by train, third class, in an over-crowded compartment with his trunk and bedding.

CYCLE

Every time the head of the family departed, the wife found herself pregnant, a legacy of the husband’s two-month sojourn with her.

The system was foolproof and self-sustaining because the local school provided education up to secondary level and, as soon as a Memon boy reached that level, he was recruited to the bottom rung of the ladder and the cycle continued.

As for the girls, they were only given religious education and, as soon as they reached their menarche, they were put on the matrimonial market to provide brides for the school-leavers.

The three feudal families also owned most of the land and houses in Bantwa, which we the lesser mortals had to rent from them. Like miniature fiefdoms, the three families had carved the town into their territories on which they built housing estates.

There was a positive side to this intricate and well-knit society; there was no unemployment and for those who wanted to work there were ample opportunities. In the place of work there was a “kith and kin” feeling and a strong ethnic bond. The ‘Big Three’ between them built schools, dispensaries, hospitals, mosques and even orphanages.

Thus we attended schools, built by them for the community, obtained treatment at dispensaries and hospitals sponsored by them, worked for them till we dropped dead and finally we were buried in cemeteries built and maintained by them. It was a cobweb of roses and the system looked after its members from the womb to the tomb.

It was in this milieu that I was born and spent the first six years of my life. My father abhorred the inhumane system and at some stage attained a healthy separation from the community labyrinth and started a cashew nut factory in Mangalore in south India and, as a result, my sister and I attended a convent for three years there.