ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, the Social Science Research Council in New York commissioned the well-known Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh to write a piece on the cultural connections between India and its diasporic populations. Given that Ghosh himself occupies a privileged place within the diaspora and the fact that he was earlier trained as a social anthropologist at Oxford, the Council made a fine choice. Ghosh came up with a rather dramatic hypothesis that although we take it for granted that there is, and should be, an abiding relationship between India and its migrants, this relationship was historically both peculiar and anomalous (Ghosh 1989). He backed up this unusual proposition by arguing that the links between India and its modern diaspora were not those of language, politics, religion or economics.
