Building bridges, wearing a bindi

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This article was published 27/07/2019 (2283 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Uma Parameswaran thinks about how the immigrant experience changed her, she thinks first of roots. Of letting them stretch down into the earth, drawing sustenance, giving permanence to the life that unfurls over the surface.

That’s what an immigrant has to do, she muses. That’s what she had to do when she came to Canada.

“You can’t always be in this kind of in-between world,” she says. “You have to choose.”

Trace her story then, down to the root, all the way back to Sept. 23, 1966. She remembers when she and her husband landed in Winnipeg from India. A professor from the University of Manitoba picked them up at the airport that day and drove them to a downtown hotel.

They didn’t know what to expect from this new place. Parameswaran’s husband, a mathematician, had been offered professorships in Winnipeg and Edmonton; they decided on the former in part, she says, because they saw how the city sat so close to the American border, and figured it would be the warmer of the two options.

Sitting in that downtown hotel, they weren’t sure what to do. So they opened a phone book and flipped through its pages, looking for people with Indian names. They found one: a Rev. P.K. Raman, which was curious, because Raman was a common Hindu name, so they picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Of course,” Raman answered, “come right over”; he was having guests for dinner. Soon, they were mingling with other immigrants from India at Raman’s Langside Street home. Within hours of arriving in Canada, they’d made their first friends.

It was an introduction made possible by the closeness of the era. At the time, Parameswaran recalls, Winnipeg’s Indo-Canadian community was small. There were about 50 people here, most of them students, and though they came from across India, they found a deep bond in their shared immigrant experience.

They rented halls to mark India’s Independence Day. They gathered in apartments to celebrate Diwali, the famous festival of lights. They began to build Indo-Canadian cultural organizations that exist to this day. And for decades, Parameswaran, now 81, was one of the driving figures of that movement.

Now, after 53 years of putting down roots in Manitoba, the retired University of Winnipeg English professor is preparing to bid Canada adieu. In August, she will pack up and move to Austin, Texas, to join her daughter Raji.

What she leaves behind is a lifetime of drawing her two homelands together, through work and writing and advocacy. And she leaves behind an Indo-Canadian community much changed from that first tiny, close-knit group; today, more than 37,000 Winnipeggers are of South Asian descent.

Parameswaran grew up in Jabalpur, near the very heart of the country. Education hummed through her early life: her father was a physicist and there are two Nobel Prize laureates in her family. Her grandmother translated Ibsen plays in the 1920s, and feminism “came easily to the family,” she says with a chuckle.

She became immersed in the literary world. She earned her master’s in journalism and took a job teaching English at a girls school in Nagpur. In 1963, she won a Fulbright scholarship to do a master’s in creative writing at Indiana University, following her older sister’s footsteps to an American education.

On a boat between the two countries, she met another Fulbright scholar, Mangalam Ramaswamy Parameswaran. The couple married in the U.S. in 1964 and soon returned to India, where they lived one year before moving to Canada.

In Winnipeg, Parameswaran threw herself into building the growing Indo-Canadian community. She volunteered at the nascent Hindu Society of Manitoba, and MCed an art and fashion show designed to show Winnipeggers the diversity of India’s sartorial traditions.

Her list of pioneering accomplishments is long. In 1978, she and six other mothers launched what would become the first Bharata Natyam classical dance course in Winnipeg; after weeks of lessons in the basement of Parameswaran’s Fort Richmond home, their daughters performed at a Canada Day celebration at Assiniboine Park.

As the years turned, she helped found the Immigrant Women’s Association of Manitoba, and spoke at national gatherings. At the University of Winnipeg, she fought to launch the first course studying women’s literature, and literature of ethnic minorities.

It was not easy to blaze these trails. The 1970s were a time of significant change in Canada, where virulent racism clashed against federal multiculturalism initiatives; today, Parameswaran remembers racist taunts of “Paki, go home.”

“The same thing happened then as now,” she says. “Pakistanis, Muslims, Hindus, everybody is in the same pot, as it were. The racism against one community spreads to another community. It’s terrible. What’s happening is terrible.

“But multiculturalism, I think, brought people together. To say that we are here, and we are Canadian, but we are also Indo-Canadian…. Asserting a cultural identity, but as far as a political loyalty went, it was for Canada. That sense that we are Canadians, but we are Greek-Canadians or Indo-Canadians.”

Parameswaran found her own voice in that effort, her own way of tangling roots. She wore saris and a traditional bindi to work at the U of W, and spoke at conferences on the Indo-Canadian experience. In her teaching, she held space for diasporic voices and championed the work of diverse women.

In 1978, she began hosting a regular show on local cable television that centred on the Indo-Canadian experience; it ran until 1995. Each week, she delved into a wide range of topics. She interviewed lawyers about immigrant rights, gave presentations on Indian architecture, hosted music groups visiting from India.

“It was to say that we come from this place that has a big culture,“ she says. “It was essentially to help our children realize that India is a great country, and my students have told me how it made them proud to be from India.”

She was also a prolific writer. She wrote plays and poems; her first fiction collection, 1997’s award-winning What Was Always Hers, delved into the lives of South Asian Canadian women; her 2002 novella Mangoes on the Maple Tree centred on an immigrant family during Winnipeg’s 1997 Flood of the Century.

With these efforts and more, Parameswaran blazed a trail for South Asian women in Manitoba. Now, she is on the verge of closing that chapter. She is glad to be moving closer to her daughter, she says. But for 53 years, she put down roots here, and those will remain.

“I’ll miss the endless skies,” she says. “The skyline is just a beautiful thing. And themes of prairie gold.”

For those interested in some of Parameswaran’s memories of the early Indo-Canadian experience in Manitoba, she has collected some into a blog, indocanadiansinmanitoba.blogspot.com.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca