Understanding the Indian Diaspora

 

Dr Rajesh Rai
South Asian Studies Programme
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
National University of Singapore

 

The study of diaspora – a term often used to describe “any population…which has originated in a land other than which it currently resides in, and whose social, economic, and political networks cross the border of nation-states” Vertovec (1997: 277) – has emerged as a key area of scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Underlying the interest in the study of diaspora is the continued, unrelenting, movement of people across national boundaries. The International Migration Report, published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs points out that the number of international migrants was almost 191 million in 2005, an increase of 14 million over the last five years. International migrants comprise about three percent of the world’s population, and in developed countries, approximately one in ten individuals is an immigrant (International Migration Report, 2006: 1). Although these figures are staggering, yet, because they exclude descendants of migrants born in the ‘host land’, they comprise only a fraction of global diasporic communities.

 

The Indian Diaspora

 

Indians constitute a substantial portion of contemporary international migrants. Taken together with descendants of earlier streams of migration, a conservative estimate of the global Indian diaspora is approximately 20 million (Brij Lal, 2006: 10). Although not the largest, it is acknowledged to be the most widely-dispersed diaspora. The former British colonies – Burma, the Caribbean, Malaysia, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa – where colonial-led capitalist enterprises encouraged the recruitment of Indian labour in the 19th and early 20th centuries – account for a major segment of this diaspora. Following the end of the Second World War, the movement of Indians has largely been focused on the developed world – the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the notable exception being the large number of transient Indian workers in the Gulf States.

 

In Singapore, the Indian diaspora is made up of both these streams. Formed initially out of the settlement of Indian labourers, merchants, administrators and imperial auxilliaries during the colonial period, the migration of professionals from the subcontinent over the last two decades has added substantially to the number of Indians in the island-city. Consequently, between 1980 and 2005, the Indian resident populace has more than doubled (from 154,600 to 309,300) and the Indian segment of the total population has grown from approximately 6.3 percent to 8.7 percent during the same period (Shantakumar, 2008: 571).

 

Singapore-based scholarship on the Indian Diaspora

 

Given that Indians form a key component of Singaporean society, there has been a long-standing interest in the study of the Indian diaspora. Even before the term ‘diaspora’ became a popular expression in academia, important foundational works on Indians in Malaya and Singapore had been published in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1990s, the desire to bring together research on Indians in the region was manifested in the production of the monumental Indian Communities in Southeast Asia, edited by K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani.

 

The publication of The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora in 2006 marked a further milestone. The volume, housed at the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, was the outcome of a Singapore-based initiative that sought to bring together the bourgeoning scholarship on the diaspora to produce a standard reference on the subject.

 

Investigating the Diaspora

 

The expansion in the scholarship of the diaspora in recent decades, however, is not simply a matter of surveying wider geographical frames, that is, local, regional and global. Rather, it is the disruption of essentialist notions of culture and identity bounded by the nation-state – ingrained in the multi-locale framework adopted in diasporic studies – which is possibly its most significant contribution to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. That is not to say that the nation-state no longer matters, but rather that this framework requires the student to foster a deeper appreciation of the need to delve into diverse histories, memories and origins that go into the shaping of migrant identities and accounting for temporal changes. At the same time, studies of the diaspora have also come to be transformed by the spread of information-communication technologies and hyper-mobility, as evident in the contemporary period. These have posed questions on notions of ‘rupture’ and ‘exile’ that have long underpinned works on the diaspora. It is precisely at sites where scholarship on the diaspora has come to intersect these transformations that one witnesses some of the most exciting developments in the field.

 

 

References

G. Shantakumar and P. Mukhopadhya (2008), ‘Demographics, Incomes and Developmental Issues amongst Indians in Singapore’, In K. Kesavapany. A. Mani, P. Ramasamy (eds.) Rising India and Indian Communities in East Asia, Singapore: ISEAS, pp.568-601.

Lal, Brij V., Peter Reeves, Rajesh Rai (eds.) (2006), The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora, Singapore: Editions Didier Millet.

S. Vertovec (1997), ‘Three Meanings of “Diaspora” Exemplified among South Asian Religions’, Diaspora, 6(3): 277-99.

Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2006), International Migration Report, 2005, New York: United Nations.