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*Migration Histories > South Asian > Origins
* The Roots of Emigration from Mirpur 
 
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Dusk at the Muslim shrine in Old Dudial. The town was submerged in the reservoir created by the Mangla Dam and emerges as the water recedes in the dry season.
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Dusk at the Muslim shrine in Old Dudial. The town was submerged in the reservoir created by the Mangla Dam and emerges as the water recedes in the dry season.
* Moving Here catalogue reference (BHU) HFH front cover
Mirpur District, part of Azad Kashmir in northern Pakistan, is a particularly significant source of immigration. Much of the best land in the District was flooded following the construction of the Mangla Dam in 1966, and many commentators have assumed that it was this which caused huge migration to Britain. However this was under way long before the dam was even thought of.

Lying at the point where the river Poonch flows into the river Jhelum, Mirpur was not only an ideal place for the construction of hydro-electric dam, but also for boat-building. Punjab's rivers offer a navigable passage to the sea, but timber was needed to build boats large enough to trade up and down the Indus waterways. This could only be found in the mountains in the north, from where massive cedar trees could be floated down the rivers to the plains.

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This watercolour of 1855 gives a vivid sense of the bustling streets of Lahore even before the arrival of the railway.
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This watercolour of 1855 gives a vivid sense of the bustling streets of Lahore even before the arrival of the railway.
* Moving Here catalogue reference (V&A) IS.52-1882
In South Asia, boat-building and seamanship have always been linked professions: those who built the boats went on to crew them. So it was that Mirpur District was not only a specialist centre for boat-building, but it also appears to have provided the crews for the boats which had for centuries traded up and down the rivers between Punjab and Lahori Bandar, its *entrepot on the Indian ocean.

This trade had prospered for centuries, but it met a swift end when the British not only gained control of Punjab, but built railways up from the coastal cities of Bombay and Karachi to Lahore and beyond. With their completion in the 1870s, goods could be transported much more swiftly and cheaply by rail than by river-boat.

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Indian sailors photographed during a safety drill on board the SS Viceroy of India in 1929.
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Indian sailors photographed during a safety drill on board the SS Viceroy of India in 1929.
* Moving Here catalogue reference (NMM) P85288
The river trade died virtually overnight, and so did all the boatmen's jobs. However, Britain's merchant fleet was switching from sail to steam, and there was one job on the steamships which European seamen were extremely reluctant to take: the task of stoking the boilers in the bowels of the engine-room. It was not only back-breaking, but hot and dangerous.

Seizing the opportunity, ex-boatmen from Mirpur and Chhach (a District similarly placed on the River Indus) soon gained a virtual monopoly as engine-room stokers on British ships sailing out of Bombay and Karachi.

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Creators: Dr. Roger Ballard

 
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