Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity)

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Globalization has brought about a new paradigm where socio-cultural, political, and economic landscapes get exposed to unexpected dynamics of challenges and change. It thus becomes a matter of both challenge and opportunity for the home and host countries. On the one hand, the economic changes over the past hundred years that includes close integration, opening of trade, ideas and information, have resulted in benefitting the industrially developed economies. On the other hand, for the developing economies, the challenges remain though of different level and kind. However, the changed circumstances globally also bring along opportunities for these states to help them overcome the challenges. The increased movement of people has resulted in the global development of new ideas, intercultural linkages, democratisation of global space etc. In this scenario , diaspora has emerged as an important player in the transnational sphere for both the home and host countries. The following are the Themes and Sub themes for the Conference. Diaspora and Transnationalism, Concepts of Migration and Diaspora (Critical appraisal of place of birth, duration), Transnationalism and Globalisation, Soft power diplomacy, foreign policy: lobbying with the host state governments, Dual Identity, Voting right of Diaspora, Diaspora Policies, Diaspora Engagement Policies: Legal, political, economic and socio-cultural, Emigration policy for the lesser skilled temporary migrant Submission of abstracts or requests for further information, email to: internationalconference@grfdt.com *GRFDT is trying its best to mobilise sponsorship to cover the cost of travel and accommodation of the partici-pants/delegates as much as possible. However, the forum cannot assure anyone at this point about it.

The attribution of magical or holy properties to objects is inherent in religious consciousness. Treating fetishes as “unreal” overlooks the importance of the object as a mediator of social value. Fetishism suggests switching the religious connection between God and people onto the connection between people and religious material symbols. Objectified religious beliefs result in fetishizing sacred spaces, be it a shrine or a temple. As commodification is the order of the day, the “thingness of the objectified” must be enhanced by “refetishising.” Such an attempt to “fetishize the fetish” is seen in M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song. It is actually the exposure of the secret of the eternal flame that makes Karsan finally doubt the idea of spiritual powers and shakes his faith in the high mysteries of Pirbaag. At this moment his Bapuji happens to be preaching how all is a lie, a maya. He explains to Karsan how the eternal flame keeps hope alive. People seem to lose their way without miracles and need a little help. The objectification of hope in the eternal flame is made problematic when the perpetual is put under scanner thereby shattering the diffused sense of sacred in an object.

How is Indian classical dance viewed abroad?

The place and impact of India’s dance traditions throughout the world is obviously a vast subject covering space and time. It has perhaps almost as many perspectives as there are artists and audiences. Recently I invited a dance scholar, a mid-career international performing artist and a former Indian ambassador to offer their thoughts and experiences as part of a seminar.

Ambassador Amarendra Khatua is an all-too-rare civil servant who brought significant knowledge and familiarity with arts and artists to his international postings as well director of ICCR. He shared that there are approximately 7,600 classical art schools outside India and 367,000 recognized classical Indian arts performers. Surprisingly, these are not just in the Indian Diaspora countries but all over the globe.

A question he raised is whether these arts, which are recognized and appreciated abroad, have entered the local lexicon of the arts internationally. Khatua also shared his personal view, after 38 years as a Foreign Service bureaucrat, that government should not function as a patron of the arts running institutions but should simply offer financial support. He also raised the question of the motivation and impact for India of taking our performing arts abroad. There are 32 million non-resident Indians persons of Indian origin abroad. We tell them they are ambassadors of India but are they ambassadors of our performing arts? Or are they opportunistic promoters of our performing arts during their conferences and festival events?

Bharatanatyam exponent Rama Vaidyanathan articulated the responsibility of representing Indian Sanskriti and connecting to both the Indian Diaspora and local nationals worldwide. I was happy to hear that she shared my experience that “it is the emotive power of Indian dance that really stirs the soul of the audience that connects to them and is different from their familiar dance forms rather than the general assumption that fast-paced rhythmic nritta”.

Dance scholar Arshiya  Sethi shared her research into the creative interactions, based on fact and imagination, of Western artists connecting to the Indian dance genres available to them in the early and mid-20th century. These included Ruth St Denis, Anna Pavlova, La Meri who promoted Ram Gopal, Jazz and film choreographer Jack Cole who trained under La Meri, and many more, creating a considerable tapestry of artistic and cultural influences and interactions as well as the downside of devadasis exhibited in fairs. 

She gave an historical panorama of the tapestry of these connections. “The transference of Indian dance overseas is a process that has been going on in phases for 140 years. A Nautch group that went in the 1880s to perform in exhibitions and fairs provided glimpses of spiritual elements draped in saris, though tinged with racist and sexist stereotypes.

Basically these were people who were fascinated by India. There are questions of representation, authenticity even today when we have reclaimed and researched so much that was not available earlier in the 20th century.

The 1960’s STEM visas for the USA brought highly skilled immigrants with wives trained in classical dance who found a few interested American students to teach. In the 1980’s USA visa policy changed which led to many Indians coming, trained dancers among them, and the rise of Indian dance schools everywhere with more Indian origin students as the number of American students reduced.”

Arshiya’s historical overview led to the conclusion that the visibility of Indian dance has improved considerably in the USA with an Indian dancer, Ranee Ramaswamy, in the National Endowment for the Arts which determines national funding and other dancers getting national, state and local funding.

Of course, this is a subject I have enjoyed observing over the decades since I was first exposed to India and Indian classical dance during the 1950’s as a child in multi-culturally vibrant Detroit, Michigan. The transmission of tradition here and abroad, along with its understanding and appreciation, is an evergreen subject I plunge into regularly. This was a few drops from this ocean.

During this period aapproximately 42,800 women and girls arrived in Trinidad - about 29% of the entire labouring population. By the end of indentureship in 1920, only 25% per cent of the total number of female labourers was repatriated to their homeland. The majority settled in Trinidad. The indentureship experience was different forIndian women in many ways.

This newspaper column from 2003 examines how Indians in Trinidad and Tobago are misled, guided by so many fears, the encouragement of feelings of victimhood, and smallness of vision. There is an important contribution for Indians to make to the building of this New World civilisation, which is still in its infancy and only half-made. What is needed is a vision, mission and leadership not griping about “discrimination”, but looking fearlessly to the future.

Second language learning involves affective factors such as interactions with the dominant linguistic and cultural group, and related problems of self-concept, identity, and self-esteem. Substantial attention has not been paid to these categories in the field of earlier studies of second language acquisition. In recent years however, there has been increasing research on the relationship between second language learning and the question of identity. The lives of immigrant women, particularly of ethnic minority, may be complicated not only by gendered and systematic inequalities but also cultural conflicts which makes them struggle to define and redefine their identity. It is important to raise awareness of perceptions of immigrant women learning and speaking the language of the host community as their experiences intersect with race, gender and class, and contribute to their identity formations. Drawing on the poststructuralist notion of identity as “multiple, changing, and a site o...

Drawing on recent interviews of Indian returnees from Burma, this article sheds light on a well-known yet understudied moment of Burma’s postcolonial history, the forced repatriation of Indian communities during the 1960s. The research has gathered first-hand narratives about the traumatic experiences shared by Indian repatriated families, from their much debated decision to leave Burma, to the perceived humiliation of departure and the dramatic (re)migration to India. The article builds on the scholarship on exile and nostalgia, which claims that repatriation processes often lead to a retrospective idealization by the returnees of what has been left behind. Interviews have indeed revealed how nostalgic memories of a “golden past” and a “paradise lost” in Burma have been shaped among the first generation of Indian repatriates ever since their resettlement in India. In contrast with the classic diaspora literature, which postulates that diasporic groups tend to idealize their homeland, Indians in Burma have tended to rather romanticize their Burmese host- land. They cherish the “golden days” they once lived in Burma, whilst expressing highly condescending feelings about their new Indian “homeland” where resettlement and re-integration to the Indian national space have proved harsher than expected.

This research questions the definition of “home” and “belonging” for the members of the “new” Indian diaspora in Romania, based on a qualitative research study. The issues of “home” and “country” are central in the diaspora research, being connected to the feeling of ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion’ (Cohen, 1997). As Arjun Appadurai argues, the “delocalization” and multiplication of spaces where the individual places himself / herself is a feature of modernity (1994), transnational communities existing simultaneously in two cultural spaces (Portes, 1996: 74-76). Given that individuals are creating interpersonal relationships inside their social networks, in connection to their activities (see Marinescu, V. 2009), the research focused on questioning what are the professional, social and personal trajectories of Indians living in Romania? What are their strategies of inclusion, inside and outside the Indian community? The “communication” dimension is included in this research as well, consi...

The word ‘diaspora’ etymologically pertains to Greek
language. Literally it is a compound of ‘dia’ means
‘across’ and ‘speiro’ means ‘scatter’. Therefore, the word
diaspora denotes the scattering of people en masse form
one place to other. It is the movement of the people being
away from their own country. There are various sorts of
diasporas in human history of the world. Almost every
country of the world has faced this movement of
population some way or other. Out of these some famous
diasporas are—Jewish Diaspora, African Diaspora,
Greek Diaspora, Italian Diaspora and Indian Diaspora.
There are various reasons behind the mass movement
of the people from one place to another. Some can be
counted as the result of colonialism, imperialism, and
quest of better livelihood. The leaving of the home
country was involuntarily or reluctantly and they had
desire to come back to their homeland. They had the
feeling of nostalgia and homesickness.

Divali arrived in Trinidad and Tobago 169 years ago with the immigration of Indian indentured labourers. Since then the number of individuals actively celebrating the festival has increased, the nature of the celebration has evolved and today Divali is not only a national holiday but also one of the biggest religious/cultural celebrations in our country. From 1845 to present day, this Hindu religious festival has undergone many changes; it has moved from the private domain to the public sphere, it has embraced Trinbagonians of various religious and ethnic groups and persons of all social standings. This article traces the changes in Divali from its arrival to the present day.

An English translation of a Tamil historical fiction novel with the same name written by Kamaladevi Aravindan.

Published by Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) (2020)

Available for sale at:
1) https://www.goguru.com.sg/sembawang
2) www.amazon.com.sg
3) www.amazon.com

And all major bookstores

As India adopted a ‘multi-pronged approach’ to mend the long-lost ties and engage with its diaspora during 1990s, the Indian diaspora emerged an important element in India’s economic, strategic and soft power pursuit. India’s enormous economic potential and its rising global stature also attracted the diaspora which has resulted in a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship between the two.  Nevertheless, Indian diaspora is an extremely diverse construct consisting of people who have migrated during the British colonialism to the present times. Regardless of all the concerted efforts New Delhi has taken, several sections and groups within the diverse rubrics of the Indian diaspora, such as, the Girmit/old diaspora continued to remain at the peripheries of the Indian diaspora policy. As India’s policy towards the diaspora is closely linked with its strategic interests and other policy priorities and the fact that these communities are law full citizens of the other countries, India is constrained from taking appropriate measures for the welfare of the Girmit/old diaspora.  Nevertheless, some strategic and out of the box thinking can help India in converging its interests with that of the Girmit diaspora and use their potential as an asset in a win-win gain for both. In this paper I seek to critically debate as to why India has not been able to create an asset out of its Girmit diaspora; what has been India’s prejudices and limitations in this regard; and what efforts India has made to bridge the gap over the years. The paper will also explore the prospects of engagement in the future that can result in win–win for both India and Girmit diaspora.

This Migrant Labor in the Gulf Summary Report details the research findings that were presented by the Migrant Labor in the Gulf working group participants during their meetings in Doha, Qatar. CIRS launched the initiative in 2008 and held a total of three meetings. The working group is composed of experts in the field of migrant labor who hail from a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. The working group is also composed of the CIRS research grant recipients: Andrew Gardner from the University of Puget Sound, Arland Thornton, Mansoor Moaddel, Dirgha Ghimirie, Linda Young-DeMarco, and Nathalie Williams from the University of Michigan, Susan Martin from Georgetown University, Mary Breeding from the World Bank, and David Mednicoff from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The edited volume, titled Migrant Labour in the Persian Gulf was published by Columbia University Press/Hurst in 2012.

This article examines music’s role in decolonising processes in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on postcolonial national identity politics with reference to the country’s two largest ethnic groups: those descended from enslaved Africans and those from indentured labourers from India. First, the article traces the nationalisation of Creole culture – defined in terms of African- European syncretism – from the 1950s onwards, and it describes the state’s use of music competitions and educational programmes to institutionalise Carnival, calypso, and steel pan, all associated largely with African Trinidadian culture. This impacted on Indian Trinidadians by excluding them from inscriptions of national identity. The article concludes with a discussion of Indian Trinidadian cultural resurgence, tassa competitions, and the growth of public pedagogy from the 1970s that established tassa as an icon of Indianness; and all illustrating how music was used in a complex decolonisation process (relating to colonial rule and the Creole mainstream).

This a brief pictorial history of Fiji which places Fiji's Indian indenture system (girmit) in perspective. It provides a timeline of key events with pictures of some key personalities and events. Some people have stated that this is the best short history of Fiji and girmit so far...

‘Duncan McDuie-Ra has not only written a thoroughly readable and well-researched ethnography on Northeast migrants in Delhi, in more general terms he has also produced an important contribution to what could be labelled ‘big city ethnographies’. Cities such as Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore not only feature prominently in a particular narrative on economic growth that infuses how the cities present themselves and how their inhabitants reflect on them, but they are coloured by the kind of diversity that is the result of large-scale internal migration. Understanding what all these people—not just north-easterners—are doing in the city in terms of work and lifestyle, and how they experience being in the city on the one hand and how they are part of the urban landscape in physical and mental terms on the other, is something that will hopefully be the focus of many other works of ethnography in the future. I have no doubt these will benefit greatly from McDuie-Ra’s insightful and carefully researched work.’ Dr. Michiel Baas. South Asia  37 (2), pp. 359-361.

This paper explores the life experiences, identities and trajectories of young Dubai-born Indians living in the Arab Gulf. It seeks to contribute to an emergent body of research on the formation of diasporic identities and forms of belonging among South Asians in the Gulf, which underscores the ways in which migrants articulate forms of cultural belonging in a context where they are denied the right to citizenship. Building on the notion of the‘educated person’, the paper argues that education constitutes an important, yet overlooked, basis for forms of cultural belonging in Dubai.

While the expansion of the London Underground coincided with that of the Indian Railways, an Indian psychogeography was quietly emerging in the marginal geographies of the Victorian imperial capital where Indian visitors, travellers, students and migrants gravitated. In their memoirs and chronicles, late-nineteenth-century travellers, Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah, Trailokyanath Mukharji, Fath Nawaz Jang, Behramji Malabari, G.P. Pillai, T.B. Pandian, among others, actively engaged with London’s railway spaces, where they found an access to architectural wonders and a platform for intracultural, transcultural and canonical mimicries to renegotiate their colonial subjectivity. New ways of seeing and recreating London’s railway spaces helped overcome colonial traumas and railway-led economic exploitation in the colony. While neighbourhoods around Baker Street, Bloomsbury and Belgravia assumed an Asiatic character, Indian memoirists learned to inhabit London in a typographical imagination, that this paper defines as Typogravia. Architectural, economic, artistic and literary consciousness overlapped in this typographical space to foreground an independent Indian aesthetic of travelling and selfhood, shaped around London’s railway spaces, which subtly but steadily drove India’s journey towards provincial autonomy.

This paper challenges the widely-accepted view that politics in Trinidad and Tobago is driven by ethnic rivalry between the country’s Africans and Indians, or ‘ethnic politics’. The paper demonstrates how this interpretation distorts the historical and sociological record. It forwards a subtler and more historically consistent understanding of the place of ethnicity in politics and society, which is more complex, more fluid, and looser than the popular model posits. Finally, a suggestion for moving beyond the ‘African-Indian rivalry’ hypothesis is forwarded, distinguishing ethnic mobilisation from ethnic politics, and understanding ethnic mobilisation as a by-product of insecurity in a ‘half-made society’.

This volume brings together researchers whose rich insights make for a comprehensive and upto-date account of Singapore's rich linguistic diversity. Applying a combination of empirical, theoretical, and descriptive approaches, the authors investigate not only official languages such as English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, but also minority languages such as the Chinese vernaculars and South Asian and Austronesian languages. The chapters in this volume trace the historical development, contemporary status, and functions of these languages, as well as potential scenarios for the future. Exploring the tension between language policies and linguistic realities in Singapore, these contributions capture the shifting educational, political, and societal priorities over time. Ritu Jain is a lecturer at the Language and Communication Centre at Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests lie in the areas of language policy and planning, and language and identity. In her work, she has examined the role of language education policy in the maintenance and promotion of minority and heritage languages, and the implications this has for language maintenance and shift. She is currently exploring the interplay of language and identity among the Indian language communities of Singapore.

This booklet takes you through streets where Addis Ababa's early history is most apparent in the architecture, in the central neighborhood of Piazza also known as Arada. Imposing or modest, sometimes dilapidated, residences and commercial buildings are reminiscent of the making of the urban fabric from the creation of Addis Ababa in the late 1880s to the Italian downtown re-de- sign in 1937-41. Born from the gebbi, the palace of Emperor Menelik II, the city grew quickly. The almost empty site in the 1910s saw several construction booms to accommodate nearly 100,000 inhabitants in 1935. Concrete structures, glass towers, and high-rise shopping centers are features of the city’s recent development. Before the 1940s, construction techniques involved mainly the use of stone, mud and lime, corrugated-iron sheets, wood, and bricks. Few residences had more than one story. What made early Addis Ababa “urban” and “modern” were the metal roofs, the adoption of the rectangular shape villa, and foreign architectural influences. These multiple influences created styles unique to the city of Addis Ababa.

The three tours proposed in the guide are an invitation to explore this rich heritage, the past and present urban fabric. Three "Focus" provide insights into the architecture's social history: "House Architecture", "The Influences of Trading Ports", and "Fanciful Roof Shapes".

The Khōjā of Tanzania, Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity attempts to reconstruct the development of Khōjā religious identity from their arrival to the Swahili coast in the late 18th century until the turn of the 21st century. This multidisciplinary study incorporates Gujarati, Kacchī, Swahili, and Arabic sources to examine the formation of an Afro-Asian Islamic identity (jamatī) from their initial Indic caste identity (jñāti) towards an emergent Near Eastern imaged Islamic nation (ummatī) through four disciplinary approaches: historiography, politics, linguistics, and ethnology. Over the past two centuries, rapid transitions and discontinuities have produced the profound tensions which have resulted from the willful amnesia of their pre-Islamic Indic civilizational past for an ideological and politicized ‘Islamic’ present. This study aims to document, theorize, and engage this theological transformation of modern Khōjā religious identities as expressed through dimensions of power, language, space, and the body.

In Lucia Krämer e Kai Merten (orgs.), Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter. Bielefeld: Columbia University Press|Transcript Verlag, 215-231.
This chapter focuses on the commercial dynamics of contemporary literary culture as they play out in recent South Asian fiction written in English by cosmopolitan authors. The focus of my analysis rests on literary texts which have emerged as sites where experiences, desires, transitions and anxieties related to the profound social and structural changes that are shaping the socioeconomic landscape of the world are drawn on and negotiated. The main argument of this chapter is that, even though these narratives of (dis)possession problematise cap-italism's logics of asymmetrical distribution of power and wealth, the high profile of their authors within the global circuits of production and reception of postcolonial texts is generated by the same logics. In fact, the ways these narratives are made to circulate within the global market at times counteract the expressed agenda of their authors. Altogether, I will approach recent South Asian fiction as a current central paradigm of postcolonial literature marketing, one that can be applied to other contexts. For instance, this paradigm resonates with the appropriation by British publishers of the process of canon-formation of postcolonial Anglophone African writing since the 1960s (cf. Davis 2013). Before elaborating on recent economic and social developments in South Asia and their repercussions in fiction contemporaneous with them, I will therefore develop a conceptual perspective on postcolonial literature marketing, mainly using ideas from the methodology of the 'new sociology of literature'.

Hinduism in Guyana consists of various traditions and subgroups such as the Sanatan, Madras, and Arya Samaj traditions. Influenced by various historical conditions and the dominant Christian influence, members of the so-called Sanatan tradition have sought to establish their practices as the 'Great' or Sankritic Hindu tradition, for example through sanskritisation processes. In this context, specific practices such as possession rites and animal sacrifices were defined as inappropriate and excluded from mainstream Hinduism in Guyana, creating orthodoxy. These 'inappropriate' practices were consolidated in what is today known as the Madras tradition or Kali-Mai Puja, a shaktistic tradition which continues to be marginalised and stigmatised in contemporary society. Highlighting how members of the various Hindu traditions seek to establish and legitimise their traditions, this article demonstrates that these traditions are constructed in relation to each other and that they are based on socio-cultural othering processes within the heterogeneous 'Indian' ethnic group in Guyana. Based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews, this anthropological contribution discusses that the Madras tradition is an 'invented' yet 'authentic' tradition and elaborates how various socio-political conditions have led to phases of its revitalisation.

This volume brings into focus a range of emergent issues related to women in the Indian diaspora. The conditions propelling women’s migration and their experiences during the process of migration and settlement have always been different and very specific to them. Standing ‘in-between’ the two worlds of origin and adoption, women tend to experience dialectic tensions between freedom and subjugation, but they often use this space to assert independence, and to redefine their roles and perceptions of self. The  central idea in this volume is to understand women’s agency in addressing and redressing the complex issues faced by them; in restructuring the cultural formats of patriarchy and gender relations; managing the emerging conflicts over what is to be transmitted to the following generations,; renegotiating their domestic roles and embracing new professional and educational successes; and adjusting to the institutional structures of the host state. The essays included in the volume discuss women in the Indian diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives involving social, economic, cultural, and political aspects. Such an effort privileges diasporic women’s experiences and perspectives in the academia and among policy makers.