Preface To 'Punjabis In New Zealand' By W.H.McLeod

WHEN I was a small boy living near the country town of Feilding in New Zealand I used to buy ice-creams and sweets from a confectioner called Mr Groombridge. I little realised that this oft-repeated experience was providing my first link with the Punjab. It was, to be sure, a distant link but the sweets were nevertheless good and they were good because Mr Groombridge had been well taught. He had in fact been taught the confectioner's art by Phuman Singh Gill, a Jat from near Moga. Phuman Singh was one of the first two Punjabis whom we can identify in New Zealand.

My next contact occurred in 1958 while I was travelling to India. A fellow-passenger on the Iberia was Mr Gurbachan Singh Basi, a dairy farmer from the Waikato district, who was visiting his home in the Punjab. Although we were ourselves heading for the Punjab the distinctive nature of the Punjabi identity still eluded me. Indians were merely Indians. Like most other New Zealanders I was unaware of any significant difference between a Punjabi and a Gujarati.

After nine years. in the Punjab, however, I was well aware of the differences and following our return to New Zealand in 1971 I began looking for Punjabis at the first opportunity. There were none to be found in Dunedin and there seemed to be none anywhere in the South Island. It was obvious that the hunt would have to be conducted in the North Island and it was to the North Island we went for our summer holiday in January 1972. We had booked accommodation in a Waihi motel and for several days the weather ensured that the beach would have to come first. On the first rainy day (January 12th) we drove over to Te Aroha (having heard that there were Punjabi families on farms in the neighbourhood) looking at the names on rural mail-boxes. In a surprisingly short time we had our first success. Plainly painted on a mail­box was the name Singh. We drove up to the house.

It was, predictably, a dairy farm and the farmer turned out to be a young man called Harprem Singh Sandhu from Jaja Kalan in Phillaur tahsil. He had been in the country only ten years, having come out to marry the daughter of a Punjabi family already established in New Zealand. All this, however, emerged later. It was his wife Harjeet whom I met first and it took me some time to explain my rather unusual mission. There had been an earthquake the night before and Harjeet, having reported a cracked chimney to their insurance company, under­standably took me to be the company's assessor. Eventually all was made clear and we were soon on our way to meet her father ; and other members of his large family. Her father, Surain Singh of Sultanpur, lived nearby on the farm which he had inherited from his uncle (Gajja Singh of Sultanpur) and had since passed on to his son Harbail Singh.

Once the initial contact had been made the task was easy. The old-established Punjabi community in New Zealand forms a close-knit network and finding one member meant that most of the others could be quickly traced. Later in the day we were despatched to Whitikahu (north-east of Hamilton) where we met Phuman Singh Ark of Malpur village and Balwant Singh Nagra of Jabowa. We also renewed our shipboard acquaintance with Gurbachan Singh Basi of Bundala,

At this stage there was no intention of initiating a study of the Punjabi community in New Zealand. Homesickness for the Punjab was the only reason for the mail-box hunt. After returning to Dunedin, however, I began to reflect on the situation which I had so briefly encountered. The New Zealand government had imposed effective immigration restrictions in 1920 and although there were still some survivors from the pre- 1921 period their number was small and dwindling. (There were actually nineteen survivors, twelve of them in New Zealand and seven in India. At least eleven of them have since died).