Tag: indian diaspora

  • Dr Vinay Lal’s Concepts of the Indian Diaspora

    Dr. Vinay Lal, an Indian born US settled Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) has published articles on the aspects of diaspora and about the migrants of India. He has created an official website where he portrays the cultures, religions, landscape and so on about India, dedicating a special page for Indian diaspora. He explains: “The origins of the modern Indian diaspora lie mainly in the subjugation of India by the British and its incorporation into the British empire. Indians were taken over as indentured labor to far-flung parts of the empire in the nineteenth-century, a circumstance to which the modern Indian populations of Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Surinam, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and other places attest in their own peculiar ways. Over two million Indian men fought on behalf of the empire in numerous wars, including the Boer War and the two World Wars, and some remained behind to claim the land on which they had fought as their own. As if in emulation of their ancestors, many Gujarati traders once again left for East Africa in large numbers in the early part of the twentieth century. (sscnet.ucla.edu)

    Lal says that the dispersal of Indian labours and professionals took a great rise in number during the period of post-World War II including many other South Asians who helped in the reconstruction of the war-torn countries, especially the European countries. The 13 unskilled labours from South Asia changed the physical landscape of the Middle East and the Indian professionals on the other hand marked their presence in countries like Unite States, Canada and Australia. (sscnet.ucla.edu) He, further in his essay, explains how several immigrants of US (where he speaks of US settled Indians) who had an intention to settle back in India had returned to US in a few years time by blaming the discomforting conditions prevailing in India. He answers the question that he puts forth, ― “who and what is an Indian?” (sscnet.ucla.edu) and explains the prevailing positions of Hindus where women at some point are degraded for following their tradition with ―’vermillion’. “The Indian woman in her ‘native dress’, with the vermillion dot on her forehead, is easily seen as an embodiment of sheer otherness, and so she has been perceived by the so-called “dot-busters”, a gang of white teenagers operating in New Jersey who have already been responsible for several violent crimes against Indians.” (sscnet.ucla.edu).

    In the countries like North America and the U.K., the traditional costumes of Indians have been in public scrutiny and discussion according to him where Sikhs insisted the government to exempt them from wearing helmets while riding bicycles and motorcycles to wear helmets, since they cannot be worn over turbans, and that their religious faith requires them to wear turbans. (sscnet.ucla.edu). The corner shop according to Lal, is now mainly in the hands of Indians. (sscnet.ucla.edu). He poses the questions like, ―”What do the English think of that’, but also: ‘If the English landscape has been so altered, what is English about England’? The diaspora, in short, affects the center as well.” (sscnet.ucla.edu)

    He further employs the subject of cinema by bringing in Bollywood. He says that all Indians maintain some sort of link to their motherland through Hindi films; a phenomenon according to him which is unique to the Indian diaspora,

    “… what Hollywood is to Western Europe, the Bombay Hollywood (“Bollywood”) is to the Middle East and East Africa. The modesty, not to mention Puritanism, of the Hindi film is said to explain its appeal to the Islamic world; and though we may well contest that interpretation, it is worthy of note that Hindi films found in grocery and video stores across the U.S. often carry subtitles in Arabic, one language which is indubitably not spoken by any Indian community in the U.S.!” (sscnet.ucla.edu)

    He delves into the concept of two sorts of otherness in Indians. The newspapers published by Indian communities carrying a section of matrimonial ads through which the Indians, ―locate one another, they pose difficult questions about ‘otherness’, both the ‘otherness’ of Indians in relation to ‘Americans’ and the internal ‘otherness’ of certain Indians in relation to other Indians.” (sscnet.ucla.edu)

  • The Three Waves of The Indian Diaspora

    The Indian Diaspora: Historical and Contemporary Context (2009) edited by Laxmi Narayan Kadekar, Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Gauri Bhattachariya have made a statistical research on the percentage, reasons, and different aspects of diaspora in India. The book focuses on the international migration and has divided the book into parts containing various essays namely: old Indian diaspora and new Indian diaspora, with supporting essays on both parts. The introduction of the book states that the broad usage of ― “diaspora” (1) became common since the 1970s. As the editor of the journal Diaspora, Khachig Tololyan, commenting on the name of his publication says, ―”We use diaspora‘ provisionally to indicate our belief that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (4).

    The Indian Diaspora (2009) has estimated that Indian diaspora is the third largest diaspora following the British and the Chinese. ―Recent population estimates suggest that the Indian diaspora has crossed the mark of 20 million, dispersed around the globe in more than 70 countries. Its population is above 10,000 in 48 countries and more than half a-million in 11 countries” (3) it also states that, ―”unprecedented emigration” (3) of indentured labourers, traders, professionals and employees of the British government to British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, America and Caribbean were witnessed in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Especially, ―”far- reaching emigration of Indian (mainly professionals)” (3) occurred during the post-World War II period. Such emigration of Indians has been categorised into four waves.

    The first wave consisted mostly of indentured labourers to the European colonies who filled the spaces left away by the African slaves who were emancipated by the law that banned the practice of slavery, who worked on the basis of contract for a period of five years. The survey states that around 1.5 million people migrated under the indentured system which was terminated in 1917 following the anti-indenture ship campaign led by Indian nationalists.

    The second wave of emigration occurred during the post-World War II period that took Indians to developed countries. “Phenomenal changes in the political and economic scenario of the receiving and sending countries led to their new wave of international migration.” (5). This wave led to a shift where the four English-speaking countries like 17 United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand removed the immigration restrictions in the 1960s, where Asians, mostly professionally trained and skilled were allowed to immigrate. The third wave emigration is also a post-World War II phenomenon that took a large scale of Indians to the West Asian countries. “There were only 14,000 Indians in the Gulf in 1948. By 1971, their population had risen to 40,000. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was large-scale immigration to the gulf due to the oil boom. The population of Indian workers which was 1,51,418 in 1975 rose to 5,99,500 in 1981, and to 11,50,000 in 1992. In 1990, there were about 1.4 million Indians in the West Asian countries. In 2001, according to the Ministry of External Affairs report there were 32, 82, 600 Indians in the gulf countries namely Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. Most of the Indians working in the Gulf are unskilled and semiskilled labourers.” (5)

    The last wave consisted of software engineers who chose western countries like USA, since the 1980‘s. They have been considered ―the cream of India, trained in her premier educational institutions such as IITs, IIMs and universities” (5). They have been having a close contact with India in terms of socio-economic interests; migration of these professionals to the developed countries especially after the 1960‘s has been designated by scholars as the period of ―brain drain’ (6) that created negative impacts on India. Yet, there has been a reverse situation in the last decades designated by the scholars as, ‘reverse migration’ (6), ‘brain circulation’ (6) or ‘brain gain’ (6) creating several positive impacts on India.

  • Diaspora Defined: From Ancient Roots to Modern Impacts

    Diaspora Defined: From Ancient Roots to Modern Impacts

    The word ‘diaspora’ explained by Fernando Galvan, a well known researcher and a Professor at University of Alcala, Spain in his essay “Metaphors of Diaspora: English Literature at the Turn of the Century” originates from the Greek verb “speirein” (to sow, to scatter) and the preposition “dia” (through), which in agricultural metaphor is associated to the signification of the act and aftermath of the “dispersion, of sowing or scattering seeds” (114). Sociologically, it was initially used in reference to the Greek settlers and colonisers in the Mediterranean, as stated by Marianne David and Javier Munoz-Basols in their introduction “Defining and Re-Defining Diaspora: An Unstable Concept” to the book Defining and Re-Defining Diaspora: From Theory to Reality. The Hebrews adopted the word ‘Diaspora’ politically and sociologically as a reference to their own people of exile after the Babylonian captivity in 587 BC. As well explained by David and Munoz-Basols, the term at the outset referred to diverse groups such as settlers, colonisers, victims, slaves, and others who suffered hardships in their homeland (place of primary domain) and chose to leave or were forced to leave resulting in trying to find a home away from home in search of a better life – a collective identity of their old country, homeland buried deep in their religion, language and tradition; this created a sense of separate identity from their host land resulting in the diasporic experience of the memory of the home lost (xi).

    The anguish of displacement and the home lost is engraved deep in memory and idealised by nostalgia produces a dichotomy between the desire for the lost home and the pressure to live in the host land (xi); a dichotomy between forced expulsion and voluntary attraction which ends up in the search of both a home and a land, hence a homeland. The term hence has two specific distinctions namely ‘Diaspora’ with ‘D’ in the upper case denoting the exile of Jews and the ‘diaspora’ with ‘d’ in the lower case denoting  a cross-cultural displacement in general.

    The online dictionaryreference.com comes out with this meaning which is found in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 25). It explains that the definition of Diaspora often with an initial capital letter refers to the displacement of the Jews and also to the Jews living today outside of Israel. Diaspora also has been applied to similar experiences of other people who have been forced from their homelands; for example, to the trans-Atlantic passage of Africans under the slave trade of the seventeenth through nineteenth-centuries, which has been called the African Diaspora.  More recently, we find a scattering of the meaning of diaspora now being used to refer not only to a group of people, but also to some aspect of their culture, as in “the global diaspora of American style capitalism”. (dictionaryreference.com).

    The term was first created as a result of translating the Hebrew Bible, into Greek, where it was used to refer to the people who were dominant enough to conquer other lands into a large empire through emigration. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term was first recorded to be used in the English language in 1876 relating to national Protestant churches. Later, the term became more common in the mid twentieth-century where people from different countries became expatriates for various reasons which resulted in the study of diasporic studies in the academic field of sociology and literature.

    In a sense, the term means displacement of a certain group of people or a population separated from their land or territory with the displaced people for various reasons with the hope and desire to return to their homeland at some point. Writers write about the multiple homes that people form by moving to places and thereby obtaining some sort of attachment to each place. They create a mixed and nouveau cultural development that in due course varied with respect to culture, traditions, language and other factors.

    The above mentioned definitions of diaspora mostly involve the physical and geographical displacement of the people, signifying their crossing of their territories and borders, moving from one’s homeland to another. More than the aspects of physical migration and dislocation, the other sides of diaspora have to be taken into account while examining the cause and effects of diaspora as presented in novels. The recent studies explain the other major dimensions and ramifications of diaspora as historical, psychological and cultural aspects that fully explain the dislocated self as a result of crossing borders.

    Based on these cultural and geographical developments of the phenomenon, diaspora can be divided into three phases – the ancient and the medieval, the colonial and the post-colonial. The ancient and the medieval phase became the early period of migration over factors like trade and religion towards Greek and Mesopotamian civilisations. It even dates back to the Buddhist monks who had spread the religion and religious practices across Southeast Asia. Dr.TLS Bhaskar, former CAO of India Centre for Migration, Ministry of External Affairs, in his “Indian Diaspora” quotes from Tinker stating that the Cholas had organised expeditions in the eleventh century to vanquish the great Indonesian Empire of Sri Vijaya. The colonial period witnessed the majority of Indian migration between the 1830s and 1930s. The British rule had great impacts on Indian peasants leading to famine and an economically backward status thus resulting in mass migrations. The numerous “imperial diaspora” (GD 18), as Cohen calls them, had settled in the colonies of the Europeans thus creating a shortage of food supply to them by the influx of the natives. Hence they had to create plantations which needed labourers; but, it was the time when slavery (Africans) was banished. A “new system of slavery”, according to Tinker, was formed naming them the “indentured labourers” (a new name for an old trade) from India and other parts of Asia. The post-colonial phase brought about a different and a somewhat better economic status for the middle class people who had migrated to many countries like UK, USA, Canada, Australia as professional elites and other migrants to UAE and other Muslim countries as skilled labourers.

    Hence, the perplexity of defining diaspora has become more and more complicated in the present era along with the growth of technology and communications. As Asma Sayed in her introduction to her book Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures notes, “Technologies of travel – from the automobile to the airplane to the space rocket – combined with communication technologies have also transformed diasporic encounters, whether direct or virtual, and made them more intricate and complex than ever before” (ix).

    Sources:

    Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures

    “Metaphors of Diaspora: English Literature at the Turn of the Century” by Fernando Galvan

    Defining and Re-defining Diaspora: From Theory to Reality by Marianne David and Javier Munoz-Basols