ABSTRACT
In the larger narrative of global migrations and diasporas I would want to situate a diaspora of which, in complex ways, I have been/ am a part. This is the Indian diaspora of around nine million about which not much of a theoretical nature has been written. In the lead essay in the foundation issue of the journal Diaspora, William Safran for instance devotes a mere twelve lines to the Indian diaspora and not unnaturally oversimplifies the characteristics of this diaspora.2 Unlike most other diasporas whose first movement out of the homeland can no longer be established with absolute precision, the Indian diaspora presents us with a case history that has been thoroughly documented. This is largely because the Indian diaspora began as part of British imperial movement of labour to the colonies. The end of slavery produced a massive demand for labour in the sugar plantations and Indian indentured labourers were brought to Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa. There were also movements of labour to East Africa, Sri Lanka and Malaya to work on the railways, tea and rubber plantations respectively. This narrative of diasporic movement is, however, not continuous or seamless as there is a radical break between the older diasporas of classic capitalism and the mid-to late twentieth-century diasporas of advanced capital to the metropolitan centres of the Empire, the New World and the former settler colonies. Since these are two interlinked but
historically separated diasporas, I would want to refer to them as the old (‘exclusive’) and the new (‘border’) Indian diasporas. Furthermore, I would want to argue that the old Indian diasporas were diasporas of exclusivism because they created relatively self-contained ‘little Indias’ in the colonies. The founding writer of the old Indian diaspora is, of course, V.S.Naipaul. The new diaspora of late capital (the diaspora of the border), on the other hand, shares characteristics with many other similar diasporas such as the Chicanos and the Koreans in the US. The new Indian diaspora is mediated in the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Meera Nair, Rohinton Mistry, M.S.Vassanji, Gurinder Chadha, Meera Syal and others. These writers/film-makers speak of a diaspora whose overriding characteristic is one of mobility.3 Where the diaspora of exclusivism transplanted Indian icons of spirituality to the new land-a holy Ganges here, a lingam or a coiled serpent there-the diaspora of the border kept in touch with India through family networks and marriage, generally supported by a state apparatus that encouraged family reunion. Diasporas of the border in these Western democracies are visible presences-‘we are seen, therefore we are’, says the Chicano novelist John Rechy4-whose corporealities carry marks of their hyphenated subjectivities. But elsewhere too, in Fiji or in Singapore, the state insists on diasporic identifications as its citizens, for demographic calculations and, in Fiji, for racialized electoral rolls, are always ethnic subjects. In Singapore the government prides itself on its CMIO (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other) model of ethnic taxonomy which valorizes and transcodes, along racially essentialist lines, the specificities of communal experience even as the nation-state struggles to establish the primacy of the transcendent Singaporean citizen. For these hyphenated bodies (in spite of the enlightened ethos of citizenry) an extreme form of double consciousness occurs whenever the views of the dominant community begin to coincide with the rhetoric of what Sartre once observed as the racist question about the presumed ultimate solution of diasporas: ‘What do we do with them now?’ For diasporas this question always remains a trace, a potentially lethal ‘solution’, around which their selves continue to be shaped. Before continuing with the archaeology of the Indian diaspora in some detail I would want to pause here to advance a general theory of the diasporic imaginary that could act as a theoretical template for the rest of this paper.
