ABSTRACT

Fractured, ‘scattered, damaged’ (after Salman Rushdie) disaggregates of races criss-crossing the globe in large numbers rupture the imagined homogeneity of nations. Diasporas are such ‘disaggregates’ of races for whom the space of habitation is always linked to the space of absence, the imaginary homeland that has been left behind. This article theorizes the state of the nine million strong Indian diaspora by looking at it as two interlinked but historically separated diasporas: the old Indian diaspora of ‘exclusivism’ and the new Indian diaspora of ‘border’. The diaspora of exclusivism grew out of the demands of nineteenthcentury classic capitalism when labour had to be moved from one part of the empire to plantations in the colonies. The new diaspora of border is very much a feature of late modern capital and is characterized by the movement of people from the former colonies to the metropolitan centres of Empire, the New World and the ex-settler colonies. Although current diasporic theory sees diasporas, with considerable romantic exaggeration one suspects, as the exemplary condition of late modernity and/or as cultural formations whose own discontinuous and fractured histories context the hitherto unproblematic and largely linear histories of nation states, any serious examination of the two Indian archives (the old and the new) indicates that diasporas are complex formations linked on the one hand to the politics of the nation-state and on the other to their imaginary homelands. The paper uses the texts of Naipaul and Kureishi in particular to examine how these two Indian diasporas constitute what the paper calls the ‘diasporic imaginary’, a term used to refer to an ethnic community in a nation-state that defines itself, for whatever reason, as a group that lives in displacement.