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Tracking Diaspora Karen Isaksen Leonard

It is a journey that began in April 1962 when three American exchange students got down from the train at the Nampally Station and spent the muggy night at the Nampally Serai. “We were three stupid girls who didn’t want to spend 8 annas for the use of fan. It was so sultry that we moved the charpoys out,” laughs Karen.

That muggy night turned to day and the days have turned to years but Karen’s love for the city and its people has not ended.

As children play cricket near the outer wall of the complex, Karen moves around talking to people and trying to get a permission for clicking what looks like a serai to her trained eye but now is a lawn where wedding diners stand and sup their buffet.

If she has written about Kayasths as a community and their role in the nobility powerplay of Hyderabad in an earlier era, then her latest is Locating Home: India’s Hyderabadis Abroad that will be launched by Prince Muffakam Jah on January 11.

“The book traces the Hyderabadi Diaspora and their cultural identities as they have settled down or are settling down in various countries like Pakistan, US, UK, UAE, Canada and Australia,” says Karen who is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

More Hyderabadi than American, she tells the watchman at the apartment complex in Banjara Hills with non-working lift; “iski marammat jaldi karaye,” and in the unlikely scenario if she is to ask for directions it would be in perfect Urdu. So perfect, that the average Hyderabadi is unlikely to understand it. “The centre has disappeared... The old Hyderabad is completely gone. What is there to return to for the Diaspora. The Andhras have taken over the culture,” says Karen. Not surprisingly, she has been invited to deliver a lecture at the Osmania University today.

Back to her current book which is likely to stir paeans of nostalgia in the older generation, it has information gleaned from 450 Hyderabadis spread across the world collected over 10 years. It is not a world, but a small bit of Hyderabad they have taken with them, sometimes they guard it, sometimes they discard it. “The non-mulkis left Hyderabad for Pakistan thinking they will become equal citizens there and they even changed the Urdu they spoke, but, the Punjabis labelled them Mohajirs,” says Karen about the Hyderabadis in Pakistan who are now reportedly emigrating to Canada where their lot is better.

If in Sydney, Hyderabadis have a cricket team called Deccan Blues, that identifies their roots “the old-world Hyderabadi is likely to say adab arj, is likely to be polite, serve you good food, pick you and drop you back. In Chicago, one family drove 45 km to pick me up and drop me back,” says Karen disheartened by the children’s bad manners.

If the books have an academic rigour, it is her personal charm that opens the doors in the notoriously reclusive Hyderabadi. On an earlier occasion when she reached the Sitarambagh temple with Alka Patel, Karen waited outside as Alka went in. A young boy asked her why she was standing outside and not going in. “Because I am a foreigner,” she said. It was Karen’s turn to clap when the little boy said “all are equal before God.”

But she didn’t enter the temple. Perhaps it is this respect for tradition that opens so many doors for Karen. Incidentally, it is the collaborative work of Alka and Karen that has brought her here: Building New Identities in the Diaspora: The Banking and Mercantile Communities of Hyderabad.

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