And What About 1963?

Other than the death of my grandfather, I ask why 1963 is the year of choice for coming to the UK? Why then and why not 5 years later (and how long is a piece of string, etc) or 5 years earlier? What was the imperative? No earlier than 1963 may be due to an external limitation such as how and when the UK was actually allowing migrants from that region to apply for entry. The only imperative I can think of for not waiting any longer is the obvious economic one. But were they really that poor? From listening to my mother and her peers, I wouldn't have thought so. They had their own land, and subsisted comfortably on that.

My father was the 2nd eldest sibling out of 3 girls and 4 boys. Another child, I believe died before any of them were born (this needs verification). His older sister, I've never met - she died in the early 1980s. The number of siblings is not very unusual and just one infant death is almost a miracle compared to the mortality rates for the period. He was born in some year between the late 1920s and the early 1930s and although his passport indicates January 1932, this is just a date of convenience for official purposes.

But I keep asking myself why would a man of my father's age, with a young family and a comfortable subsistence - and all those siblings - want to migrate to the UK?

The answer is simple. Freedom. I hadn't thought about it because my worldview is so Europeanised and is cemented in only really knowing about what happened after 1971, that I forget that from 1947 onwards, the moment of East Pakistan's inception, the people of Bangladesh were subject to great political and military upheaval. In fact, my mother recalls how her father's village was under Marshall Law by the Pakistani Army for a period in her teens.

Looking into the documented history, you would understand very well why many men decided that life might just be better under the British than under the rule of Pakistan. For example, no sooner had Pakistan become independent of India, did it decide the Urdu would be the de facto language of people in East Pakistan (what is now Bangladesh). Bangla as a language was no longer to be used in officialdom, taught in schools, spoken in offices. This explains my parent's ability to speak relatively fluently to our Urdu neighbours and my friend's as I was growing up.

Bangla did not become a state language of what was termed the state of Pakistan until 1956 after much protests and a highly provocative Language Movement in 1952 which is still commemmorated today.

In 1958 however East Pakistan came under Marshall Law. This was the catalyst for many men of my father's generation. They were not fighters, they were farmers and fisherman and all they wanted to do was continue living a normal life. So, it seems to me that they weren't all just economic migrants, they were slowly fleeing a country they didn't see as their own any more. It turns out that Ministry of Labour Vouchers were issued under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 and 1969, so there would not have been an opportunity to migrate any earlier than 1963 considering the application process.

It will be interesting to see exactly how many East Pakistani men, in particular, were among that first wave in 1962 and 1963 and whether the numbers grew in subsequent years. Were they clambouring for vouchers like they were precious morsels of rice? Were they so hungry for a new life away from the occupiers that they would have gone to the other side of the world, to a cold, wet, colourless place where they would have to toil in manual jobs just to send back two or three pounds once in a while? Was it really going to be that much better?