ABSTRACT
The Kathiawad Hindu Seva Samaj was established in 1943 by a group of leading Durban residents seeking to preserve traditional values associated with their ancestral region known today as Saurashtra. To achieve their goals, they deployed 'social capital', a term that refers to ethnic, personal, and group networking. In this way they ensured the continued existence of themselves as a community in a 'deterritorialized' world in which Kathiawad served as a cultural point of reference. Scholars have written widely about the dynamics surrounding political, social and labour movements that went into the making of newer concept of what it meant to be Indian in the 1940s and 1950s. Experience in all diasporas is marked by ambiguities as people with loyalties to their ancestral land endeavour to identify with their new homes; and simple binary oppositions do not adequately define the multiplicity of identities.
