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South Asian Heritage month: Hafsah’s story

Category: Race, Ethnicity & Heritage

Global Ethnic Majority

Hafsah

South Asian Heritage Month takes place annually between 18th July - 17th August, with this year's theme centred around "Journeys of Empire". DCMS have celebrated through a variety of events and blog posts to highlight the diverse experiences and heritage of South Asians. They kicked off the month with the first of their sessions to get to know colleagues who identify wholly or partly as South Asian, including representation from Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Maldivian colleagues.

They welcomed Jasvir Singh OBE, one of the co-founders of SAHM. During this session DCMS employees learnt about the inspiration behind the month, Jasvir’s activism within the South Asian community and South Asia’s contribution to British history. They were also joined by Dr Samir Puri as he discussed Britain’s imperial legacy and the impact this has had on South Asian heritage, more generally, and in the British context, in his capacity as an academic, author of The Great Imperial Hangover, former civil servant and adviser to Downing Street's Race Commission on how imperial legacies influence Britain.

One of the great things about South Asian Heritage Month is that DCMS employees have had the opportunity to learn about the diversity of migration histories from South Asian colleagues.

Hafsah, from DCMS’s Recruitment team, shares her family’s story.

My story begins in a city called Srinagar in Kashmir, the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. This is the ethnic origin of my family. Its borders are disputed, with India, Pakistan and China having ownership of different parts of the region. In the 1800s my family migrated from Srinagar to Lahore in the Punjab region because of a series of famines.

Map of Hafsah’s heritage

At the beginning of the 20th century, 32,000 indentured labourers, (mainly Muslims from the Punjab region of the subcontinent, which included my family), were recruited to construct the Kenya-Uganda railway. My great-grandfather worked on this railway. Sadly, 2,493 of these labourers died whilst the majority returned home on expiry of their contracts. This left 6,724 South Asians remaining in the East African Protectorate, the former British colony consisting of modern-day Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The development of trade and business opportunities after the railways completion attracted large numbers of Punjabis and Gujaratis from the subcontinent. During this time, my great-grandfather was working in the fingerprint department in the Kenyan government. By the late 1960s, over 300,000 South Asians were living in East Africa.

After Kenya’s independence in 1963, the introduction of Africanization policies meant that South Asians living in Kenya were given two years to accept Kenyan citizenship and give up their British passports or they would have to leave the country. My grandfather made the decision to retain his British citizenship, in prediction of poor circumstances if they remained in Kenya, and subsequently migrated to the UK in 1969 with his family. Some of my family also migrated to Canada during this time and have been settled there since. In fact, I was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to the UK when I was 2 years old.

I grew up with a strong Pakistani cultural presence in my life, particularly when it came to the food, clothing and language. However, most of the stories I would hear from my grandparents and my father would be about their childhood experiences in Nairobi, Kenya; whilst my mother would speak fondly of our birthplace of Canada.

Since developing a better understanding of my heritage, I proudly embrace all the cultural influences that have shaped me. South Asian Heritage Month is a platform to elevate the stories of families like mine who may not fit into a specific box, but are a wonderful blend of cultures and histories.

Are you interested in joining DCMS? Take a look at the current job opportunities here.

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