Indian Diaspora in Transnational Contexts: Introduction

Abstract

The Indian diaspora has grown apace in the past three decades to comprise more than 20 million people spread over all continents. Although that figure is small compared to the more than a billion inhabitants in the homeland, it has reached a critical mass in various host countries. It has developed institutions, orientations and patterns of living specific to the institutional structures and socio-political contexts of the different hostlands. These patterns have been marked not only by the influences of the hostland culture but also by relations with the homeland. All the papers in this issue show two things: that the consciousness of homeland is never completely missing, and that the transnational context is part and parcel of diaspora and, indeed, implicit in its very definition. In other words, those who argue, like Gilroy, that diaspora is merely ''where it's at'', are wrong; but so are those, like Glick-Schiller, who substitute diaspora with transnational relations.This special issue is of interest because it studies the Indian diaspora from the ground up. Several of the papers are based on personal interviews in selected American cities. They explore problems encountered in attempts at negotiating an identity that is a balance of ''Americanness'' and ''Indianness''. In so doing, the papers address themselves to questions frequently posed in connection with diasporas worldwide: how are diasporas formed? How do their members relate to their hostland, and how do they resolve the tension between the need to adjust to their new surroundings and the need to preserve their cultural identities? What roles do

Transnational Family Money: Remittances, Gifts and Inheritance

“…All the women in our sample, where both parents have died, ceded their rights to ancestral property in favour of their brothers. The pattern is consistent with claims that women in the Indian diaspora remain conservative in matters relating to the family (Safran et al 2008).…”

Communal networks and gender: placing identities among South Asians in Kenya

“…The theoretical perspective which is taken up in this paper is based on recent conceptualisations of diaspora (Safran 1991, Cohen 1997, Vertovec 1997, Anthias 1998a, Werbner 2002, Safran et al 2008) as well as on boundary theory (Barth 1969), which has been extended by feminist scholars (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983, Nagar 1995, Pratt 1999, Denis 2001) to other differences. In addition, I promote to focus on the relation between identities and place (cf.…”

Bharatanatyam in New Zealand: A story of dance, diaspora and cultural change

“…Diaspora as a term has been in use from the 1980s mainly to define the Jewish diaspora later extending it to Armenian, Greek, African and Palestinian diasporic communities (Brubaker, 2005;Safran, Kumar Sahoo, & Lal, 2008). Vertovec (1997Vertovec ( , 2000 describes 'diaspora' as practically any population which is considered 'deterritorialised' or 'transnational'-that is, a population which has originated in a land other than that in which it currently resides, and whose social, economic and political networks cross the borders of nation-states or, indeed, span the globe.…”

“…Indians have a long history of migration to different parts of the world over time-pre-colonial migration, colonial migration that began in the 1830s to the British, French and Dutch colonies and post-colonial migration to industrially developed countries (Safran et al, 2008;Sahoo, 2006). With a population of more than 20 million spread over the globe, this reimagining of territoriality is done through an evocative call to feel the love and affection of mother India (Raghuram, 2008).…”