ABSTRACT
Since the start of the 2010s, important new works have been published in rapid succession that put Indians in East Africa at the centre of studies on nationalism, race, and community. They chart new geographies, scales, and discourses of belonging, all of which constitute diasporic consciousness It is to the interventions and new perspectives offered in these works that are discussed in this chapter. Jawaharlal Nehru urged over a million Indians living overseas at the time to consider their adopted hostlands their "home", making it clear that the diaspora belonged elsewhere. Arguing against conceptualizing the Indian diaspora as having a singular homeland, India, the chapter notes that Indians were tethered to two homelands across the Indian Ocean India and Kenya. Moving beyond the trope of the Indian in East Africa as an exploitative trader, the chapter has remaps South Asian diasporas as having multiple sites of belonging that were invoked in languages of claim making in political discourse.
