The Western Indian Ocean African Diaspora and #BlackLivesMatter: Situating Siddi,Sheedi,and Ceylon African Struggles and Politics

Abstract

This article is based on a content analysis of eight digital news reports published between June 2020 and March 2021 that link anti-Blackness in South Asia to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter following George Floyd’s murder and the heightened global attention to issues of anti-Black racism against African Americans. In this study, I ask the following questions regarding these news reports: (1) How do these accounts present Afrodiasporic communities in South Asia relative to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter? (2) What kind of impact does the use of #BlackLivesMatter to bring attention to South Asia’s racism have on Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon African communities? This paper contributes additional interpretive and analytical material to scholarship on racialization in South Asian societies, political intimacies between Afrodiasporic communities in geographically disparate parts of the world, and the need for cultural validity in journalistic accounts engendering #BlackLivesMatter to legitimate the connective tissue of this global Black political movement.

Keywords

Indian Ocean African diaspora Siddis Sheedis Ceylon Africans #BlackLivesMatter South Asia

Introduction

There is no doubt that the global response to George Floyd’s murder is seen as the straw that broke the camel’s back on the issue of police brutality against the African American community. The summer of 2020 is now seen as a time of racial reckoning in the United States. Floyd’s murder functions as a symbol for the unjustified reaches of antiblackness inherent to US law enforcement and society. During this period, this particular incident of police brutality mounted a global discussion of race relations and a defense of African American life as scholars, journalists, and lay people confronted questions of racism toward people of African descent. As a scholar of the western Indian Ocean African diaspora, I received numerous invitations to participate in roundtables, to comment on the relevance of Floyd’s murder to South Asian communities of African descent such as the Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans, and to discuss how race and racism are globally transmitted (and maintained) elements of our social reality. To date, the communities in my area of scholarship have been considered “understudied” and “lesser known” to the global community, and the perspectives of Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans rarely considered central to global Black politics.

The invocation of a Black man’s brutal murder for catapulting the issue of police brutality against the African American community to the global stage is disconcerting, at best. George Floyd’s death (and life) must necessarily count for more than raising awareness and bringing global attention to a longstanding issue that Black people have, indeed, been making noise about for decades. Summer 2020, during a pandemic, stands out as a time of racial reckoning and I include it here simply as the point of departure for how journalists and even scholars have come to identify Afrodiasporic people in South Asia as part of a wider and politically engaged diaspora. For the first time, some journalists analyzed issues facing these communities within a noticeably wider racial frame. In addition, the momentum gained following Floyd’s murder offers a window into how some other South Asian journalists have coopted #BlackLivesMatter toward anti-racist work that has little to do with Black folks in South Asia at all. To be clear, there has been considerable scholarly and journalistic discussion regarding South Asian Americans vis-à-vis #BlackLivesMatter and especially in the context of Kamala Harris’s racial identity and rise to vice presidential office. However, the present study investigates the relationship between South Asians of African descent located in South Asian societies and their linkages to #BlackLivesMatter. Ultimately, this paper contributes additional interpretive and analytical material to scholarship on racialization in South Asian societies, political intimacies between Afrodiasporic communities in geographically disparate parts of the world, and the need for cultural validity of journalistic accounts that legitimate the connective tissue of a global movement placing primacy on Black lives.

This article begins with some background information and context for who the Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans are. It then offers an overview of the scholarship in terms of #BlackLivesMatter and its effects overseas as well developments in discourse about race and racism in South Asian societies in the specific context of people of African descent. I situate my project at the intersection of these two bodies of scholarship and then describe the methodology employed in my study. I then thematically organize and discuss my findings, concluding with a discussion of the problems of erasure in the age of #BlackLivesMatter, the role of cultural validity in journalistic accounts, and the dangers of misappropriated Black political movements with an eye toward recommendations for future digital publications on these topics.

The analyses presented here are based on eight electronically accessible journalistic reports that consider the relationship between #BlackLivesMatter and South Asia. These news reports were all published online between June 2020 and March 2021, the authors of which are of South Asian descent. Using content analysis to evaluate these publications, I build on U.S. Black, Pan-African, and radical Black South Asian theorizations of racial solidarity to show how Afrodiasporic peoples in South Asia have long considered themselves part of a wide and global Black community, how Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans express a clear understanding of the workings of racialization in different parts of the world and its harm toward Black people writ large, and how these communities identify along racial lines with Africana communities globally.

Background: Who Are the Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans?

While knowledge about these communities is on the rise and scholarly accounts continue to proliferate, providing a brief overview here can prove helpful. Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans are Afrodiasporic communities located in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka respectively. These communities trace their African ancestry to the Indian Ocean slave trade through which enslaved Africans were brought to South Asian societies as laborers and soldiers in colonial armies. Some of these Afrodiasporic peoples trace their ancestry to those Africans who voluntarily moved during the same period (Ali et al., 2020). The slave trade in the Indian Ocean predates the Transatlantic slave trade and reaches as far back as 2500 BCE when ancient Babylonians, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and several Indian groups traded slaves on a smaller scale (Freamon, 2019). Under Arab control, however, trading in human cargo in the Indian Ocean dates to the 9th century (Ogot, 1974). Following the Muslim Arab and Swahili traders, various European colonial regimes were responsible for the enslavement and movement of Africans from eastern and southern Africa to various parts of Asia. This movement took place between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Today’s Siddi, Sheedi, and Ceylon African communities are the descendants of these enslaved Africans and have come to embrace their current South Asian locations as home. Many remain politically and culturally aware of global trends in Black politics, Africana icons, and the conditions of Black people around the world. Many also articulate a deep awareness of their own community’s heritage, cultural center, and the value of African contributions to civilization and humanity. In present day South Asia, African-descended people are, for the most part, marginalized and disenfranchised groups actively working to maintain and preserve their histories, cultures, and community identities while seeking formal recognition of their communities by the nation state.

An Overview of the Literature

Extensive literature on #BlackLivesMatter explores a range of topics including the nuanced social position of heterogeneous Black lives (Ransby, 2018) the role of music in protest and as intervention (Orejuela et al., 2018), debates vis-à-vis “All Lives Matter” (Edgar & Johnson, 2018; West et al., 2021), the movement’s impact on US Black politics (Hooker, 2016; Taylor, 2016), the movement’s impact on law enforcement (Weissinger & Mack, 2018), respectability politics within #BlackLivesMatter (Bunyasi & Smith, 2019), sports (Hylton, 2020), the role of women in the movement (Watters, 2017), White communities and the movement (Luttrell, 2019), #BlackLivesMatter in academia (Bell et al., 2021), Black Lives Matter in schools (Jones & Hagopian, 2020), and the significance of the movement in health promotion (Leitch et al., 2021), among others.

There exist many publications that deal with #BlackLivesMatter within the United States that address its various dynamics, features, problems, politics, and possibilities. Nevertheless, scholarship addressing how this movement resonates outside the US remains rather scant. Much of this research looks to the movement as a template for other similar movements rather than one that can be globally forged toward achieving a very specific set of objectives for Black liberation. Literature reviewed in this study critically examines two bodies of scholarship: one on #BlackLivesMatter and its ripple effects outside the United States and another on issues of race and racism as it pertains to people of African descent in South Asia.

Scholarship on #BlackLivesMatter Outside the US

Looking at anti-Black racism in Latin America through a transnational rubric, Busey and Coleman-King (2020) offer a Black diaspora rescripting of critical race theory to address antiblack racism work in educational research. They call for a critical view of #BlackLivesMatter in Afro-Latin American contexts that acknowledges the long history of Afro-Latin American activism preceding the contemporary #BlackLivesMatter moment. These authors advocate for a truly transnational invocation of and approach to #BlackLivesMatter, that is, “capable of interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy that operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general” (Busey & Coleman-King, 2020, p. 4). This framing is also far more transnational and expansive by definition.

Considering the European context, Joseph-Salisbury et al. (2020) take up #BlackLivesMatter as a moment culminating in the visceral and widespread response to George Floyd’s murder. These authors contest notions of “post-racialism” through their analyses of high-profile incidents of “police racism” in the UK. They further consider what #BlackLivesMatter protests signal for the UK and its own forms of racism. Joseph-Salisbury et al. (2020) favor abolition and defunding as necessary solutions over police reform, aligning with the fundamental position taken by #BlackLivesMatter activists and organizers in the US.

Similar invocations of #BlackLivesMatter have occurred in other scenarios in Europe. In 2016, the banner of #BlackLivesMatter was used to bring attention to antiblack racism in the Brexit campaign during the UK-wide referendum in June that year. Discussing the debates over this geopolitical move, De Genova (2018) claims there exists an unresolved “racial crisis” as the region contemplates “European identity” and borders. De Genova (2018) argues that this condition is simply an outgrowth of Europe’s postcolonial identity and position in an increasingly global world. Discussing the analogous and overlapping “Migrant Lives Matter” campaign, De Genova (2018) claims,

a European border regime that systematically generates and multiplies the conditions of possibility for mass migrant deaths compels us to reckon with the brute fact that the lives of migrants and refugees, required to arrive on European soil by ‘irregular’ (illegalized) means, have been systematically exposed to lethal risks. (p. 1767)

This systematic violence is inflicted disproportionately upon migrants and refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa, thus prompting De Genova’s (2018) provocation of whether Black lives even matter in the UK.

In the South Pacific, Bond et al. (2020) explore the health disparities and medical racism found in Australia’s healthcare system in the case of indigenous communities. Black lives in this context include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The advent of #BlackLivesMatter energies, rhetoric, and organizing on Australian shores has exposed concerns over racialized health disparities in the lives of indigenous peoples from Black deaths in custody to “premature deaths of Indigenous peoples from supposed natural causes inside and outside of custody” (Bond et al., 2020, p. 248). These authors emphasize how the Australian government’s prompt response to the pandemic sits in sharp contrast to the promises lawmakers have made to implement measures that support and protect indigenous communities.

A common thread across this scholarship is the central idea that #BlackLivesMatter can function as a rallying cry or political blueprint for racial justice and social change outside the United States. This globalized marshaling also makes visible nuanced interpretations of activism to curtail antiblack racism in certain parts of the world like Latin America where such social movements predate #BlackLivesMatter. In any case, the US-born political movement is raising important and previously unprompted questions about political climates, seeking to hold governments and lawmakers accountable, and exploring the thrust for social change in other parts of the world fraught with similar racial issues.

Scholarship on Race and Racism in the Experiences of Africana Communities in South Asia

The importance of charting the historical contextualization and intermingling of race and caste systems within colonial regimes in South Asian societies to identify how race works in these social contexts in the present day has been documented (Jayawardene, 2013, 2016). The most recent scholarship on race and racism in the South Asian context and regarding Afrodiasporic peoples in these societies comes in the form of three publications. One is a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture vol. 11, no. 4 entitled “Narrating Africa in South Asia.” The second is an anthology with the title, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism Against Africans and Siddhis in India edited by Ibrahima Diallo and the third, a three-volume work edited by Omar H. Ali, Kenneth X. Robbins, Beheroze Shroff, and Jazmin Graves entitled Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora. All of these were published in 2020.

In the special issue of South Asian History and Culture, nine articles address various issues of race and racialization across Siddi, Sheedi, and Ceylon African communities and “explore the narrative acts by and on African communities in South Asia” (Kooria, 2020, p. 352). The authors of these articles are leading scholarly voices on these communities and focus strictly on the narratives of Siddi, Sheedi, and Ceylon African peoples. While Kooria (2020) acknowledges the racially motivated mob violence on people of African descent in South Asia—those besides the Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans, such as present day continental African immigrants to the region—these narratives continue to remain on the margins of the articles in this special issue. Nevertheless, it remains significant that these authors appear to be collectively engaging questions of race in the lives and thought of South Asia’s Africana communities.

The special issue includes articles addressing narratives of the past that prescribe present-day thought and behaviors (Cohen, 2020; de Silva Jayasuriya, 2020). It also includes ethnographic narratives that show how central the past is to the community as “sources of power, veneration, spirituality, fear, discrimination, and deception” (Kooria, 2020, p. 357). Other narratives speak to current forms of transregional and trans-local networks and their intricacies (Almeida & Obeng, 2020; Khader, 2020; Péquignot, 2020). Mahmood Kooria, editor of the special issue, states the following:

As I write, the situation [referring to #BLM protests] the situation has been orchestrated by the raging protests after the brutal murder by police officers of an African-American man, George Floyd. Demonstrators all over the world are campaigning for an end to institutionalized racism, a shift in resources to healthcare, educational opportunities, and social services, while concrete proposals to decolonize universities and curricula are gaining ground. (Kooria, 2020, p. 352)

Thus, confirming that this special issue emerged as part of a response to the widespread #BlackLivesMatter protests in and outside the United States in the summer of 2020. It may also signal how scholars—and journalists alike, as I show below—have capitalized on the global momentum and rallying cry that George Floyd’s murder sparked to bring attention to issues in their own—and to some degree, unrelated—areas of priority.

Ibrahima Diallo’s (2020) edited volume takes a more decisive and radical approach to racial harm specifically. While this text’s focus is limited to India, Diallo (2020) is unabashed about the placement of caste and race in a single conversation. He is clear in his statement, “This book explores racial prejudice, discrimination and racism toward sub-Saharan Africans and Siddhis in India” (Diallo, 2020, p. 3). More specifically, Diallo (2020) explains the main thrust of the text as an investigation into the “ways in which the caste system has contributed to the racialisation of Blackness in Indian society” and his use of “Blackness,” by and large, relates to Africana subjectivity (Diallo, 2020, p. 3).

The volume by Ali et al. (2020) explores “the complex ways in which Africans and people of African descent have experienced life and navigated their societies in South Asia” (p. 14). The authors in this volume seek also to connect how African Americans and West Africans have engaged South Asia “musically, politically, and otherwise” (p. 14). This volume recognizes commonalities across various Afrodiasporic experiences and, by default, the globalized processes that facilitate movement and stratification, while rejecting an “essentialism of experiences” in the diaspora (p.14). What is most valuable in this volume are the cultural and political connections that challenge geographic boundaries and lend themselves to a deeper understanding of the circulation of ideas and practices.

My study is situated at the intersection of these streams of intellectual thought. I analyze a set of eight electronic journalistic reports published following George Floyd’s murder and raise the following questions: (1) How do these accounts present Afrodiasporic communities in South Asia relative to the concerns of #BlackLivesMatter? (2) What kind of impact does the use of #BlackLivesMatter to bring attention to Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans have on the histories of these communities and their identification with larger Pan-African political issues?

Method

The method used in this study is content analysis, a non-reactive data collection tool. It is used to systematically analyze both hidden and visible content in textual material (McDougal, 2017). This method is most used to evaluate textual content in print materials and mass media articles (McDougal, 2017). Key to this method of data collection is determining the presence of themes, concepts, words, and sentences in a text to then discern patterns, biases, and any deeper meanings not obvious to the surface (McDougal, 2012). Location Theory which facilitates the evaluation of a text in terms of language, attitude, and direction informs my approach to this study and method of data collection (Asante, 2003).

Locating a text requires critical examination of an author’s language, attitude, and direction (Asante, 2003). These elements are the “signposts” of an author’s approach to a subject. One of my approaches to locating these digital publications was to pay attention to the author’s language: how they handled the use and availability of pejorative terms and disparaging framings. Another approach was in the consideration of the author’s attitude—their predisposition to respond in a certain way and/or their appraisal of an idea, value, object, or person. The final approach was to examine the author’s direction. In other words, I aimed to identify the author’s tendency or inclination regarding their objective with their respective publication.

In the present study, both open and latent coding were performed toward identifying and interpreting context and meaning beyond what is revealed in the mere presence of physical words alone (McDougal, 2012). Drawing upon Location Theory, the coding criteria included the following: (1) the title of the article; (2) the publication date; (3) the publisher or platform where the article is published; 94) the author’s explanation of race and racism in the specific South Asian geography (i.e., India, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan); (5) the author’s operationalization of Africana communities, and their agency and political activity; (6) the ways in which the author uses #BlackLivesMatter in the article; (7) and any recommendations the author makes. These seven dimensions allowed me to evaluate each of the eight reports and make meaningful interpretations about how South Asian journalists have presented the swiftly globalized issue of police brutality against people of African descent that culminated in George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The main questions answered for each article analyzed were:

What is the title of the article?

When was the article published?

Where is the article published?

How does the author explain and contextualize race and racism in the South Asian context they refer to?

How does the author describe Africana agency and political activity within the South Asian society they currently call home?

In what ways does the author invoke #BlackLivesMatter in the article?

What recommendations or calls to action does the author make?

Findings

There are several central themes that emerge across all these articles including the increased attention to Africana populations in South Asia, the racialized and caste-based social contexts of South Asian societies, and the complicity of South Asians in general when it comes to antiblackness in their South Asian homes. What follows is a discussion of three major themes illustrating common threads across these digital publications. The first is racism and antiblackness in South Asia which underscores how journalists present these phenomena in the South Asian contexts they examine. This dimension of my findings also points to the specific ways in which authors explain both the origin and present-day existence of racism and antiblackness in South Asia. The second theme is that of #BlackLivesMatter in relationship to South Asia and South Asians. This emerged as a major dimension of my analyses as journalists sought to establish a foundation for why this Black political movement has reverberated so widely across South Asian communities both in the diaspora and at home. The third and final theme involves the authors’ prescriptions for continued action. This is a key dimension of the study as many authors sought to go further than simply identify a problem among South Asians expressing solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter; many found it essential that South Asians maintain consistency and authenticity in their support for this movement beyond a hashtag or a black square on social media.

Racism and Antiblackness in South Asia

A key theme in my analyses is how the author discusses racism and antiblackness in South Asia. All the authors are quick to place racism and antiblackness within the social landscape of South Asian society. Some even aptly trace present-day racist and antiblack attitudes and thoughts to colonial rule and expansion. Others also make important linkages between racist and casteist ideologies and practices.

Citing several examples of “bigotry” including the incident of an “African woman being stripped and paraded in public,” the editorial board of the Telegraph India who authored this piece published online on March 18th, 2021, underscore how “the Indian variant of racism” is entangled with “casteism, ethnicity, and the colonial experience.” These authors state, “What makes racism in this country unique and complicated is its indisputable link with casteism, ethnicity as well as the colonial experience.” They add, “The burden of colonialism has also aggravated the bias.” This is significant in terms of the author’s choice of language and indications of their attitude toward racialization as a phenomenon located within coloniality.

In “Black Lives Matter in India (Siddi Community): Meet the Siddis, India’s Lost African Tribe,” published in the Indian Law Portal on August 6th, 2020, Anushtha Anupriya writes about the lack of common knowledge about the Siddis and their experiences. This author states, “They are living in total anonymity in India for centuries. They are our very own country’s harboured tribe of African descent.” The claim that Siddis remain anonymous in India alongside the notion that the general Indian public lacks knowledge about them can be contested on the simple basis that outright racial violence toward Siddis is occurring across India and has been for many years. In addition, any kind of isolation among Siddis can also be interpreted as a form of self-preservation and community protection to thwart racial attacks (Obeng, 2007).

Another form of ignorance among South Asians can be seen in Anupriya’s (2020) use of problematic verbiage to describe the Siddis including terms like “tribals” which, from an Africana Studies perspective, is a pejorative designation that signals backwardness and inferiority. This is akin to Pilapitiya (2020) who describes Ceylon Africans using their formal and yet extremely problematic identifier, “Kaffir,” absent a discussion of the racialized qualities of the term/slur itself in “Actually, Anti-Blackness has Everything to do with us” published in Groundviews on June 9th, 2020. In both cases, the authors’ language and attitude toward Siddis and Ceylon Africans are evident of a troubling conceptual framework for interpreting Africana communities and phenomena.

Many authors in my analyses are decisive about some South Asians’ and South Asian Americans’ inauthentic shows of solidarity. Anupriya (2020) does not hold back from criticizing wider Indian society for its hypocrisy in simultaneously speaking out in support of #BlackLivesMatter in response to George Floyd’s murder while also remaining silent and/or ignorant of the home-grown antiblack racism toward Siddis. Likewise, Pilapitiya (2020) asserts, “regardless of where you are Sri Lankan in the world—be it a member of the diaspora, or a resident at home—Sri Lankans are complicit in systems of anti-Blackness.” In “Circling Black to Black Squares: The Negligence of Anti-Blackness & Systemic Injustice in India,” in Feminism in India on June 5, 2020, Tasneem Mewa attempts a nuanced discussion of the intersections and parallels between casteism and antiblackness. She states,

Discourse centered around othering, especially during the pre-colonial era, was exacerbated by colonial powers weaponization of eugenics and race-science. As a system that distinguished between pure and polluted persons, the caste system fit well within the mould of institutionalised hierarchies.

Mewa (2020) appropriately underscores that both casteism and antiblackness are deeply rooted in India’s history and that it would be naïve and egregious to believe it was limited to the past.

The placement of caste and race alongside each other and apprehended through the frame of coloniality is a major development in journalistic accounts of race and racism in the South Asian context. As such, the articles in this study make a profound impact on journalism on this topic. An accurate analysis of coloniality and its role in racialization across the world is key to our understanding of present-day issues of racism whether in the US or in South Asia. What is needed to advance this further is a complex and nuanced interpretation of Black political activity in relationship to South Asia.

#BlackLivesMatter and South Asia/ns

Another major theme in my analyses is how South Asians have engaged with the US movement #BlackLivesMatter since May of 2020. Many of the articles pointed to both continental and diasporic South Asians showing support for #BlackLivesMatter through social media actions. Some highlighted more vocal and physical stands South Asian Americans have taken, even at the risk of personal violence and other dangers. Several authors also highlighted the inadequacies of some of these acts.

“In the dark: racism in India,” published online in the Telegraph India on March 18^th, 2021 looks to #BlackLivesMatter as the type of mass political mobilization needed to address India’s problems of racism. Two racially charged incidents with reference to Blackness/Africanness are cited in this article. One involves the brutalization of an African woman in Bangalore and another describes how two teachers in Bengal were reprimanded for using a textbook wherein the illustration of a Black man was accompanied by the word “ugly.” I would not consider these two incidents comparable because the first is an exemplar of brutal racial violence while the second illustrates an appropriate response to the use of racist teaching materials. The authors, however, suggest these and other incidents directed at people of African descent form a “list of related transgressions [that] is despairingly long.”

The article “Black Lives Matter in India (Siddi Community): Meet the Siddis, India’s Lost African Tribe” draws attention to the conditions facing Siddi communities in India. The author offers an overview of Siddi history and culture and goes on to discuss their current conditions under the rubric of Black lives mattering in India as well. Anupriya (2020) describes these mundane experiences of racism and discrimination as resulting from the Black and African “physical appearance” of Siddis. The words “Lost African Tribe” in this headline highlights this author’s disposition toward Africana communities in South Asia and their reliance on common racist and deficit-based frames of reference regarding this community.

In the article entitled “400-Year-old African Diaspora Fights for Acceptance in India,” published online on January 11, 2021, Asna Arif connects #BlackLivesMatter and the political momentum gained after George Floyd’s murder to the brutalization of two Siddi men in Veraval, Gujarat on June 3rd, 2020. A video of this mob attack on Siddis Samir Majgul (21) and Mustaq Bhalaya (20) and a third individual from the Laghumati community went viral and once again opened public discussion about India’s antiblack racism (Dixit, 2020). The attack was unprovoked and all three were tied up and beaten while crowds chanted, “Thrash them so hard, they bleed!” (Arif, 2021). This incident is one example of the countless accounts of racial violence toward people of African descent in India.

Arif’s analyses brings this Veraval incident into conversations about Black life across South Asia. She considers the experiences of racial violence in the Siddi community alongside those experienced by continental African students pursuing higher education in India. In fact, she quotes the perspective and opinions of one such continental African student at Pune University whose experiences of antiblackness are consistent with media portrayals of this problem elsewhere in India. Furthermore, Arif interviews two scholars of the Indian Ocean African diaspora who weigh in on the causation of this differential treatment and contemplate solutions. Hers is one of the few news reports that considers race and racism central to the plight and treatment of Siddis and other people of African descent in India. This author’s conclusions confirm what scholars have already underscored: the fact of blackness—of being a person of African descent—contributing greatly to the racialized schema in India’s public consciousness that demands situating Africanness and Blackness within a racialized frame of racially scornful stereotypes. This racial frame is evident in the incidents described in the Telegraph India article discussed above.

Arif further links India’s racist attitudes and tendencies to regional trends such as those found in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Her work also highlights recent gains in political representation for such communities through individuals like Sheedi MPA in Pakistan, Tanzeela Qambrani who has been extremely vocal in denouncing discrimination against Sheedis in Pakistan as well as police brutality against African Americans in the US.

In “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan’s Sheedi Community Too,” published online on August 14, 2020 at World Economic Forum, authors Zahra Bhaiwala, Neekta Hamidi, and Sikander Bizenjo situate the Pakistani Sheedi community’s plight and experiences of antiblackness within the umbrella of the US-borne #BlackLivesMatter movement. Bhaiwala et al. (2020) begin by describing who the Sheedis are, pointing out that “Pakistan has the largest African immigrant population” in South Asia, and calling on all non-Black South Asians to acknowledge the workings of antiblack racism in their own societies and how they have stood to benefit from it. The label of “African immigrant population” is problematic here because it erases the traumatic histories associated with the majority of Sheedis who trace their ancestry to enslaved Africans brought to the region through the Indian Ocean slave trade. In addition, this framing erases centuries (and, therefore, several generations) of Africans dwelling in Pakistan whose national and cultural identity is rendered Pakistani and not merely that of an immigrant. However, these authors’ attention to the racialized dynamics of Sheedi identities, living conditions, and social status in present-day Pakistan is meaningful. For example, just like the Indian and Sri Lankan contexts, in Pakistan, too, the very term “Sheedi” has been turned into a racial slur and Bhaiwala et al. (2020) explain how it is used to bully and stymie Sheedi social advancement.

In Mewa’s (2020) article, “Circling Black to Black Squares: The Negligence of Anti-Blackness & Systemic Injustice in India,” the author notes how quickly people across the world rose in support of the demands of #BlackLivesMatter following George Floyd’s death through acts of “sharing, liking and re-posting information in solidarity, particularly in India.” Mewa adds “There is no denying that remaining silent on an issue of this magnitude is itself a form of violence.” Raising concern about the debates on appropriate ways to show support, Mewa highlights the most “convenient way to show solidarity” was in the form of a black square on social media accounts through the social media campaign, “#BlackOutTuesday.” This is what many Indians did.

Referring specifically to the Indian context, this author states, “. . .most of the frustration came from people staying radio silent on issues close to home and taking an explicit stand against racial injustice in the US.” Mewa continues, denoting Indians’ palpable silence on incidents of racial violence in India itself: “Rather than inspiring confidence, the contradictory nature of their posts show that they are not willing to acknowledge the existence of racial injustices and violence happening right in front of them.” She is firm in her criticism of Indians’ inauthentic and selective support of some racial justice campaigns while others that are closer to home should evoke just as much outrage do not.

An important part of Tasneem Mewa’s article is the framework of a dalit feminist perspective. Specifically,

this standpoint acknowledges the necessity for the perience and knowledge of dalit women to ist alongside the skills and resources of other groups who take it upon themselves to educate each other about the histories, social relations, and realities of marginalized groups.

This perspective is central to the author’s advocacy for South Asians to adopt a more informed, nuanced, and radical stance that critically weighs ongoing casteism, colorism, racism, and gender-based violence against the histories, social relations, and realities of marginalized South Asian populations. While the present study does not propose a dalit feminist standpoint itself, this framework is one that prioritizes marginalized voices in ways that other journalists in this study do not.

While highlighting the merits of such a perspective alongside instances of antiblackness in all its forms, Mewa (2020) reveals that “the subjugation of, and the violence committed against black bodies is intrinsic to South Asian history and predates the colonial era.” This author also dedicates a section of their article entitled “The Histories and Stories of Black Folks in India” to highlight frequent cannibalism charges and targeted mob attacks on people of African descent in India. However, these “histories” and “stories” are limited to experiences of oppression and neither include narratives that inform or elevate Siddi contributions to India’s history, culture, and society nor do they underscore Siddi agency.

Writing for The Wire, in “Seeing India Through the Black Lives Matter Protests,” published online on June 9, 2020, Divya Cherian aims to look “at India in the mirror of American protests [which] makes clear that India too needs urgently to address its glaring problems of systemic discrimination and police brutality.” She goes on to outline the events leading up to the summer of 2020 and highlights how the pandemic and its consequent health disparities and economic burdens compounded the global response to George Floyd’s murder. Cherian further acknowledges South Asian American community responses which range from unequivocal and outspoken support for #BlackLivesMatter—and for some South Asians, even at the risk of grave retaliation—to their steadfast support for Trump. Cherian exposes this paradox further, adding, “Many in the community, even if they despise Donald Trump and champion racial justice, would be deeply upset by their child marrying a black person.”

Like other articles analyzed in this study, Cherian also criticizes South Asian Americans for turning a blind eye to issues of racial harm and persecution on home turf. She adds that many fail to “challenge the Islamaphobic and casteist attitudes rampant in their families and communities.” As other South Asian journalists have pointed out, Cherian emphasizes the inconsistency of South Asian Americans neglecting to see the irony in their passionate support for #BlackLivesMatter in the US while remaining willfully indifferent to the various forms of discrimination in India itself.

Cherian brings attention to India’s police violence against lower caste communities and Muslims but overlooks the same state-sanctioned violence toward African immigrants and Siddis. In fact, in an article discussing #BlackLivesMatter in the US and calling for South Asian Americans to pay attention to similar issues of police brutality and racism in their ancestral home, Cherian makes the glaring error of not addressing antiblackness toward people of African descent in India! Thus, the call to “see India through the Black Lives Matter protests” in this article appears to be a rallying call to South Asian Americans to only speak out against very specific home-grown injustices where the #BlackLivesMatter symbol is simply that, an emblem and momentum from which to fuel another movement. It does not suggest a faithful engagement with antiblack politics toward the betterment of Black people everywhere.

The examples above illustrate how South Asian journalists invoke #BlackLivesMatter toward various ends. For some, there is a genuine investment in global Black political activity while for others, the objective is to use this movement as a springboard for more general anti-racist activism in South Asian societies. For yet some others, this moment in time is significant for advancing criticism of South Asian complicity in antiblackness and the corresponding duplicity in terms of racial justice campaigns. Several authors did more than offer reproach. It is worthwhile noting that there is an argument to be made that general knowledge of Siddi communities may be limited to some journalists and substantive sources on these communities and their thought and lives may be inaccessible to others. Still, it is a fair expectation that journalism—in professional or citizen form—is, at least, well-researched. Moreover, in this highly digitized electronic world, the internet archives are bursting at the seams with documentary, musical, artistic, and publicly available scholarly as well as popular sources on South Asians of African descent that leaves us with few excuses to explain the lack of knowledge about such communities.

Authors’ Recommendations

While some of the content in these articles have troubling implications, many authors concluded their treatises with a charge of sustainable and genuine coalition-building. The critiques they leveled against South Asian complicity, hypocrisy, and ignorance are balanced by their mobilization of continued solidarity work in a range of acts. In the article “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan’s Sheedi Community Too,” most notably, the authors make an urgent appeal to the Pakistani immigrant community in the US, stating: “The Pakistani diaspora in the US must acknowledge that Black people fought for the very civil rights that allow Pakistani-American communities to exist. After all, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed most Pakistanis currently living in the US into the country in the first place, by eliminating restrictive immigration quotas and allowing family-based immigration.” The subtext of invoking immigration legislation passed in 1965 lies in the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a landmark civil rights and labor law—which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and effectively opened US borders to previously restricted immigrant groups.

Bhaiwala et al. (2020) attempt to stir action and support among Pakistani immigrants in the US for antiblackness efforts at home because of their successes on the coattails of African American civil rights gains. They stress: “As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to grow globally, it is critical for us to support it an acknowledge the contributions of Black Americans that enabled Pakistani and South Asian success in the US.” The form of solidarity put forth here is not rooted in shared experience but based on how African American civil rights gains have shaped the conditions of possibility for South Asian immigrants in the United States.

Mewa (2020) recommends Indians and other South Asians go beyond passive acts of social media-driven solidarity. In a subsection of her article entitled “Roll up your sleeves,” she calls for South Asians to “get down in the ground and start digging up the roots of injustice.” Her position is that there must be a more conscious and authentic effort at solidarity work from Indians speaking out against police brutality in the US. She adds, “we must take it upon ourselves to understand the gravity of [antiblackness and injustice in the US] and see it wherever it exists.” Drawing upon dalit feminism, Tasneem Mewa (2020) urges,

this means visibilising histories and continuities of anti-blackness, casteism and systemic injustice in India so that we transform the system rather than succumb to it. Visibilising involves reversing negligence and avoiding tendencies to generalize contexts or groups of people, as both are forms of erasure.

To “visibilize” Africana people in India, this author highlights how formal historical accounts, educational settings, and popular culture have been responsible for the erasure of Siddi history and contributions.

Similarly, Pilapitiya (2020) is helpful in laying out a set of “simple steps” Sri Lankans can take to address antiblackness and mitigate their complicity. She states,

We can reject and dismantle the Model Minority Myth. We can take collective steps to preserve and celebrate our own Kaffir peoples. We can consciously work to correct colorism in our societies—call out the people around you who reinforce colorist standards, report damaging media that promotes whiteness as beauty. We can support local and small businesses, Black artists and musicians, and attempt to reclaim some economic leveraging that has been compromised by the economic monopoly of the West.

While the acknowledgement of the global and intertwined nature of white supremacy, coloniality, and racialization is a huge achievement on its own, these authors’ urgent appeals to South Asians demonstrate a keen awareness of and desire to tear down this global oppressive circuitry. The prescriptive stances taken up in these articles are indicative of the authors’ objectives of going beyond criticism, prompting genuine coalition-building, and dismantling oppressive structures for the betterment of all of humanity. This action-oriented prescriptive approach to journalism also finds compatibility with the spirit of Africana Studies in its emphasis on solution-oriented research.

Conclusion

In an age when the world has turned its gaze on gratuitous state-sanctioned violence against African Americans and risen in defense of Black life, scholarly attention to the global circulation of racialization is quickly expanding. Thus, the colonial context as the point of departure for matters of race in South Asian societies remains highly relevant. The articles in my analyses here highlight several key points. First, they appropriately place race and racialization in South Asia within the rubric of coloniality. This is significant because, for a time, this linkage has been disavowed as having any consequence on the basis that South Asian societies are absent of White people. Second, these articles either invoke #BlackLivesMatter to bring attention to the racial harm toward continental Africans and South Asians of African descent or see it as a template for what South Asians can do to address racism in their own countries on a broad scale. There is utility in both forms of solidarity work. For Africana Studies, and Africana people, the key concern is authentic and culturally located allyship. Third, these articles offer guidance and direction on how South Asians can sustain their solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter without being complicit in antiblackness, examining their own internalized racism, working to understand how oppression operates alongside global flows, and engaging in reflexive and critical dialogue about how to effect social change. Nevertheless, together these articles make significant omissions in the narratives about South Asians of African descent.

While marginalization, disenfranchisement, and racial violence are characteristic of Africana communities in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka today, these are not the only dimensions of Siddi, Sheedi, and Ceylon African histories and contemporary lived experiences. Any discussion of #BlackLivesMatter relative to South Asia in the present must engender Black-Asian relationships that predate this movement and moment in time. To provide broad context, political solidarities based on the shared experiences of racial harm have long existed among Afrodiasporic communities across the world. For example, the mid-1940s correspondence between influential Dalit leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and W.E.B. DuBois illustrate partnership, inspiration, and support in how the former sought to follow the latter’s approach to taking issues of homegrown racial strife to a world stage (Ambedkar, 1946). Later, in the 1960s and 70s during the Black Power era, the Black Panther Party in the United States inspired freedom struggles in places like India (Dalit Panthers) and Australia (Black Panther Party of Australia), well outside the commonly demarcated “Black world.” Where Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans are concerned, similar political solidarities prevail though they are less well-known.

While using the global attention to #BlackLivesMatter to draw attention to Afrodiasporic conditions in South Asia is a commendable act, one way in which this political engagement with a global movement for Black life could have been strengthened and made fuller is by including the historical Pan African activity among Siddis, Sheedis, and Ceylon Africans. This is how a culturally located narrative can be achieved even in journalistic accounts. All eight articles in this analysis neglected to include this history. Indeed, a couple of these reports reference Tanzeela Qambrani, the most influential contemporary Black political leader in South Asia, but Afrodiasporic communities in this part of the world have, for many years, seen themselves as part of a wider culturally and politically united African community even if their voices have not been heard across social media and news platforms.

While Africana communities in South Asia may not have mobilized large political campaigns that drew the attention of western media or were trending on social media, their smaller acts of resistance have included critical and sharp analyses of global Black politics and community building. Theorizing this type of Afrodiasporic exchange, Jacqueline Nassy Brown (1998) contends that the circulation of iconography, cultural productions, and even people and places constitute the diasporic resources that Afrodiasporic communities appropriate from Black America to meet their specific needs. Christel Temple’s (2020) recent work on Black cultural mythology frames such appropriations somewhat differently. She maintains that this type of iconicity and veneration works to sustain cultural memory-keeping across disparate diasporic spaces bringing geopolitically distinct Afrodiasporic peoples together in a more close-knit and intentional cultural and political way.

We see this type of iconicity among Siddis in their veneration of certain African figures. In 2015, when approximately 200 Siddis were arrested for “illegally” cutting down some trees, other Siddis of all religious backgrounds took to protest claiming that the forest was historically Siddis’ own land. Some carried banners featuring Mandela with a fist in the air (Pequignot, 2020). Describing the family dimensions of Siddis in Northern Karnataka, Obeng (2007) describes how one Siddi family named their son after Nelson Mandela. He goes on to explain how this family’s decision was consistent with another Siddi family who chose to name their son after Muhammad Ali (Obeng, 2007). In both cases, Obeng (2007) affirms that such naming decisions were intended to bring “their namesake’s greatness” to these families (p. 87). Camara (2004) explains how members of the Sidi Development Society in Karnataka learned of Nelson Mandela’s visit to India in 2001 but were too late to visit with him, so they wrote to his office in South Africa to enlighten him about the African presence in Karnataka. The Sidi Development Society were elated to receive a response from Mandela’s office (Camara, 2004).

Similarly, one digital publication in my analyses here—entitled “Siddi: India’s Forgotten Africans”—consists of a photo essay about Siddis in India. An image in this series features a framed picture of Nelson Mandela that hangs in a Siddi home in present day Talikumbri village in Karnataka—yet another example of the significance of a Black political leader and icon among South Asians of African descent. Barack Obama, just like Mandela holds a similar significance among Africana people in South Asia. When Obama was elected president in the US in 2008, Siddis in India and Ceylon Africans in Sri Lanka held celebrations (Calistus interview, 2016; Pequignot, 2020). During my fieldwork in 2016, Ceylon Africans consistently invoked Nelson Mandela, Usain Bolt, Bob Marley, and Barack Obama. Many Ceylon Africans referenced their community’s athletic skill and abilities in terms of being able to run like Usain Bolt (Calistus interview, 2016; Yvon interview, 2016; Elizabeth interview, 2016). But recognition and veneration of such Africana icons and leaders is not just a shallow celebration of Africana exceptionalism. Many South Asians of African descent approach these icons with a measure of thoughtful and critical evaluation. For instance, one of my interlocutors noted how Obama’s popularity in the Black community was on the decline due to his failure to adequately address police brutality in the Black community (Calistus interview, 2016).

Bringing these histories and political and cultural acts to the forefront is an important aspect of connecting #BlackLivesMatter in the US to South Asia’s Africana communities. While tying he incisive analyses of race and racism in South Asia to similar manifestations in the US is necessary, the fact that South Asia’s Africana communities remain largely peripheral to journalistic accounts about #BlackLivesMatter in South Asia is deeply discouraging. Journalists and reporters looking to make these connections must fundamentally prioritize Africana stories, voices, and concerns because Black life is what is at the heart of #BlackLivesMatter. As Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have stated, this movement is about returning value, respect, and dignity to the lives of people of African descent. It is both a direct response to antiblackness and “an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to. . .society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (www.backlivesmatter.com/herstory/). For George Floyd’s death and life to matter beyond a hashtag and a black square on social media, beyond a platform for raising awareness about other racial justice concerns, Black life outside the US must be given central placement in any kind of global call to action against antiblackness.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sureshi M. Jayawardene

Author Biography

Sureshi M. Jayawardene, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University. Her primary area of research is focused on Black geographies, Africanity, and self-definition among diasporic Africans in South Asia whose ancestors were brought to the region through the Indian Ocean slave trade. She is also affiliated with the Digital Humanities Center and Department of Women’s Studies at SDSU.

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