ABSTRACT
Writing in the mid-1980s, Professor Myron Weiner (1986) described the migration and temporary settlement of Indian workers in the Middle East as an ‘incipient’ diaspora. The description still appears to be relevant. Following Weiner (1986: 47), an ‘incipient’ diaspora can be defined as a relatively sizeable group of foreign workers in industrial or oil-producing economies who are ethnically distinct from the host population and who are ‘allowed to remain in their host country only to work’ but are not entitled to become citizens. As such they live in ‘a state of legal and political ambiguity, economic insecurity and as social outsiders’ (ibid.). Though these foreign workers are not ‘immigrants’ in the true sense of the term, a large proportion of them ‘continues to remain indefinitely in the host country’ (ibid.). The ‘incipiency’ of the diaspora obtains from the fact that naturalisation and citizenship laws in all the Persian Gulf Arab countries to which Indian migration has taken place are extremely stringent and it is almost impossible for the migrants to have permanent resident status. Often work contracts are time-bound and in any case most migrants desire to return home after a few years of stay. This migration is therefore transitory as well as circulatory in nature.
