Punjabi Parmesan

and Sri Lankan Baguettes

May 12, 2023

Bonjour Global Jigsaw,

I just found out (thanks to my friend Meera Selva) that the winner of this year’s Best Baguette in Paris award has gone to Tharshan Selvarajah, a baker of Sri Lankan origin.

It put me in mind of the immigrant Punjabi dairy workers and agriculturalists in Italy, after whom I named my 2013 book, Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches From a Europe in Crisis.

(A review of the book by Amitav Ghosh)

****

Here is their story, as today’s Global Jigsaw offering:

The low-lying hills that punctuate the countryside of Latina in central Italy reverberated with the screams of Harbhajan Singh’s chainsaw. The 41-year-old Sikh attacked the trees that carpeted the hillside like a demon, cutting great bloodless gashes into the trunks. Originally from a village near Kapurthala in Punjab, Harbhajan had spent over 10 years felling trees in the Italian countryside for Trulli Vittorio, a timber company.

I’d scrambled through thick, thorny bramble on a bright day in late February 2012, to get to the clearing where Harbhajan and two other Punjabis were working. Wood chips sprayed high into the air as the trees lurched drunkenly. Other than his blue turban, Harbhajan wore no protective gear at all.

As a tree came down, I squealed and scampered away to safety. Harbhajan and his co-workers stood their ground, confident, smiling at my fear. Angelino, a short, stocky Italian who was the Punjabi workers’ overseer called a rest stop.

Harbhajan had been working from 7:00 in the morning. It was close to 4:00pm by then. Usually Saturday was a lighter day, with work finishing just past noon. But the economic situation was tough. The bosses needed their workers to put in a few more hours than stipulated in their contracts. Harbhajan didn’t get paid extra for the additional hours. “With the economy like this we’ve all got to work a bit harder. It’s normal. I don’t mind,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders.

Harbhajan was in the business for the long haul. “I’ve been here ten years and I’ll still be here for as long as I can work,” he told me in Punjabi accented Hindi. He’d been lucky. Not only had he secured a kosher Italian residence permit during one of the periodic legalisation initiatives Rome undertook every few years, but also had a permanent work contract with his company.

He was paid 65 euro for an eight-hour day (plus the occasional extra hours). “We’re cheaper than most other immigrants,” he boasted. Even the Romanians and Armenians wanted at least 80 euro for a day’s work. The illegals amongst the Indians often worked for as little as three or four euro an hour.

Harbhajan and several other Punjabi immigrants I met with over the course of three days, spoke of their work with pride. They claimed the Punjabis had transformed Latina, the Italian province just south of Rome that I was visiting.

“Italians don’t like to work too much,” said Sartaj Singh, a clean-shaven Sikh who’d been working alongside Harbhajan. “They keep going on holiday and make life difficult for the bosses.” He lowered his voice even though we were talking in Hindi and indicated Angelino, his overseer, with a quick sideways motion. “He never gets to work before 10:00 in the morning, even though we start at dawn.”

“Before we (Punjabis) got here, the fields were barren,” chipped in Harbhajan. There was no one to work in the fields. If there is agriculture in Latina today, it’s all because of us,” he beamed.

This was not an empty boast. Punjabi agricultural immigrants in Italy constitute the second largest Indian diaspora in Europe, after the U.K.[1] The official number stands at about 200,000, but given the high number of illegals, the real figure is much more, according to Marco Omizzolo, an Italian sociologist at the University of Florence, who studies the community.

Punjabi agricultural immigrants in Italy. Photo: Marco Omizzolo

In the Lazio region, an area that includes Latina and the city of Rome, government estimates put the number of Indians at some 14,500, but in regions like Lombardia in Italy’s North West this number rises to 46,372. The vast majority of the Indians in the country are Punjabi Sikhs who had immigrated over the last 20 years, and most of them work on vegetable and dairy farms.

Tucked away in the remote Italian countryside, their presence has gone largely unnoticed in Italian society and is only rarely reported in the media. But it is nonetheless said by those in the know that were the Indians to go on strike, the country’s production of cheeses like Parmesan and Grana Padano would shut down.[3]

“You know, Italians don’t like to work in the fields,” explained the First Secretary in charge of information at the Indian embassy in Rome expansively “Italy needed labour and since the late 1980s Indians have been providing it. It’s worked well because they (the Italians) see the Indians as reliable, enterprising and quite docile. They work hard and don’t demand things like some of these others…” the First Secretary left the rest of the sentence dangling complicitly between us.

Indeed, their “docility” and willingness to work hard while staying out of sight has meant that Italian authorities usually turn a blind eye to the illegal status of many of these workers.

The immigrants I spoke to over a three-day period in Latina were remarkably positive in their assessment of the Italian police. “They’re friendly and quite polite,” said Gurtej Singh, a hulking forty-year-old dressed in a white turban, spotless kurta pajama, and gold-rimmed dark glasses. “Not like in India where they treat you like dirt and want bribes for everything.”

Gurtej Singh had arrived in Italy in 2001 but had waited nine years before getting legal documentation. He’d been caught and let off by the police more than a few times in the intervening years.

Gurtej told me about the fraught overland journey he had made from Punjab to Europe after paying an “agent” in India three lakh rupees (4,500 euro). The agent had convinced Gurtej and seven others from his village that the trip would be a cinch. They’d be taken from Delhi to Moscow by plane, before being whisked off straight to Germany in a taxi, they were assured.

The reality proved starkly different. The first leg of the trip was indeed by plane to Moscow, but once in Russia they were kept isolated in a windowless room for over a week with little food and no information. Eventually they were joined by small groups of illegals from Vietnam, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

They were then taken on foot through the Ukraine and Czech Republic. “Madam, it was winter and there was so much snow, sometimes till our knees,” Gurtej recalled, his voice flat and eyes invisible behind his dark glasses. “There was a man in our group who got frostbite and he collapsed. He couldn’t walk anymore. The agent just left him there to die.”

Leave a comment

Gurtej and several in his group were arrested near Prague after being abandoned to fend for themselves on a winter’s night in a “house” without a roof, somewhere deep in the countryside. “The agent just took off and said he’d come back for us the next day. But we realized if we stayed we’d die in the cold so we began to walk, even though it was dark and we didn’t know where we were going.”

A few hours later their group was arrested and held in a detention centre for around a month. They were eventually issued permits that allowed for short, unsupervised trips into town. On one of these outings their agent showed up again and spirited them away. Gurtej eventually reached Germany, his intended destination in Europe, two-and-a-half months after he’d left Punjab.

In Germany there were jobs available in the horticulture sector but prospective employers asked him to shave his beard and take off his turban. “They thought I looked like a terrorist. But for me, my religion is everything,” said Gurtej, “and I refused.” “Then I heard in Italy they were less strict about these things, so I came here instead.”

We were standing outside a gurudwara or Sikh temple near the seaside town of Sabaudia. The building that housed the gurudwara had been a warehouse for stocking agricultural produce and despite the obvious care that had gone into maintaining it, retained a makeshift air. Outside, the yard was little more than an unpaved dirt track.

Motorbikes, bicycles, and a few cars crowded the yard. I reckoned 400-odd devotees had come in that morning from the surrounding farms for the Sunday prayers. Gurtej said the numbers could swell to 800. In all there were 35 gurudwaras in Italy, including some of the largest outside of India. But the one in Sabaudia was unimposing.

It had been inaugurated only a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 9, 2001. When neighbours heard the gathered Sikhs shouting out “Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal,” the traditional jaikara or “shout of exaltation” Sikhs use to express religious joy, they called the police, convinced that they were ‘terrorists’ celebrating the attacks.

Give a gift subscription

“We’ve had a tough time since then, trying to explain to people we are not terrorists,” said Gurtej, “and they mostly get it now.” But it wasn’t uncommon for workers returning home on bikes after a ten-hour shift in the fields to be pelted with lemons and stones by Italian kids.

Why, I’d asked? “Because we look different,” replied Gurtej remarkably serenely. “They don’t really understand what they are doing.” How do you put up with that kind of humiliation, I persisted? Harbhajan joined in. “The money is better and it’s not like life is without humiliations back in India. At least here we don’t have to deal with the kind of corruption we face back home.”

When I told friends in Brussels this story they laughed out aloud. They’d never imagined anyone would look at Italy as a paragon of upright living.

At the gurudwara that morning the granthi was reciting prayers. “Pain is the remedy,” he crooned. “The joy of mammon is the disease.” The irony of the sentiment was lost on the gathered congregation. They sat, men on one side, women on the other, heads covered, eyes closed in remembrance, or perhaps simply exhaustion, and rocked gently back and forth.

***

What was evident as I traveled around the continent was what a jumbled world immigration had created. In Spain the Chinese are now the new Gypsies, having replaced the shawl-wrapped, gold-toothed, babe-clasping mamas as the chief street-corner flower sellers. In Rome, Bangladeshis have gradually taken over as the most ubiquitous corner store operators. In London I found myself eating at a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant where all the waiters were immigrants from Eastern Europe.

What does it mean to be European in this world? There is no easy or immediate answer to this deceptively straightforward question. After all, even the single term “immigration” is formidably complex. It includes within its fold multiple and potentially contradictory identities, aspirations and behaviours. Immigrants could be economic or political, seasonal or permanent, of European or non-European origin, legal or illegal, highly educated or lacking in skills. Immigrants include Indian diamond merchants in Antwerp and Punjabi agricultural labour in Latina; Polish plumbers in Munich and American multinational executives in Brussels; Jamaican taxi drivers in London and Bangladeshi geothermal engineers in Norway.

***

Hope you enjoyed this. Thoughts? Please share them and also this post. And, do subscribe :-)

Pallavi

The Global Jigsaw

Discussion about this post