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p u b l i c at i o n s e r i e s

Edited Volumes 1

Gijsbert Oonk is Associate Professor in Non-Western History at the

Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
No concept is any good unless it can be questioned. No scholar
is any good if he or she follows fashion slavishly. By testing the
term diaspora almost to destruction the authors in this richly-researched collection have both revealed the limits of the concept and
taken it in new, creative directions.
Robin Cohen, Professorial Fellow, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford
Global Indian Diasporas Gijsbert Oonk (ed.)
Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory present new historical and anthropological research on South
Asian migrants world-wide. The authors share a strongly ambivalent
feeling towards the mainstream issues highlighted in the South
Asians in diaspora discourse, such as the emphasis on the migrants
relation to their homeland and the reproduction of Indian culture
abroad. Therefore, this book can be read as a first attempt to focus
on the limits of the diaspora concept, rather than on its possibilities
and range. From a comparative perspective with examples from
South Asian migrants in Suriname, Mauritius, East Africa, the UK,
Canada and the Netherlands this collection shows that in each of
these regions there are South Asian migrants who do not fit into the
Indian diaspora concept. Thus we attempt to stretch the concept beyond its current use by highlighting empirical cases, which raise the
question about the limits of the effectiveness of the diaspora as an
academic historical/sociological concept.
Global Indian Diasporas

Exploring Trajectories of
Migration and Theory
Edited by Gijsbert Oonk
isbn 978 90 5356 035 8

amsterdam university press
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amsterdam university press
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Publications Series
Series Editors
Max Sparreboom and Paul van der Velde
Editorial Board
Prasenjit Duara (University of Chicago) / Carol Gluck (Columbia University) /
Christophe Jaffrelot (Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales-Sciencespo) / Victor T. King (University of Hull) / Yuri Sadoi (Meijo University) / A.B.
Shamsul (Institute of Occidental Studies / Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) /
Henk Schulte Nordholt (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) / Wim Boot (Leiden University)
The IIAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The
aim of the Series is to promote Asia-Europe Studies. The Series includes comparative research on Europe and Asia and results from cooperation between European and Asian scholars. The International Institute for Asian Studies stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks
among Asia scholars worldwide.
The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre
based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its main objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national
and international cooperation in the field. The institute focuses on the humanities
and social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sciences.
IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing various parties together, working
as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as
providing information services, hosting academic organisations dealing with Asia
constructing international networks, and setting up international cooperative
projects and research programmes. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on
Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement
between Asia and Europe.
For further information, please visit www.iias.nl

Exploring Trajectories of
Migration and Theory
Edited by Gijsbert Oonk
Publications Series
Edited Volumes 1
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1
Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration

and Theory
Gijsbert Oonk
PART 1
2
CRITICAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Multanis and Shikarpuris: Indian Diasporas in Historical

Perspective
Scott Levi
31
We Lost our gift of Expression: Loss of the Mother

Tongue among Indians in East Africa, 1880-2000
Gijsbert Oonk
67
Contextualising Diasporic Identity: Implications of Time

and Space on Telugu Immigrants
Chandrashekhar Bhat and T.L.S. Bhaskar
89
Separated by the Partition? Muslims of British Indian

Descent in Mauritus and Suriname
Ellen Bal and Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff
119
A Chance Diaspora: British Gujarati Hindus

John Mattausch
149
PART 2
CRITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL

PERSPECTIVES
Contested Family Relations and Government Policy:

Linkages between Patel Migrants in Britain and India
Mario Rutten and Pravin J. Patel
167
Diaspora Revisited: Second-Generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims

of Gujarati Ancestry
Anjoom Amir Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani
195
Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora: Reception of Indian

Cinema among Hindustani Youth in the Netherlands
Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten
211
Contested Equality: Social Relations between Indian and

Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam
Brit Lynnebakke
235
Afterword: Stray Thoughts of a Historian on Indian or

South Asian Diaspora(s)
Claude Markovits
263
10
11
Bibliography
275
Contributors
291
Acknowledgements
It all started during a quick lunch at the History Department of the

Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Netherlands. A few months
after I returned from my fieldwork in East Africa, I talked with my colleague the IIAS Professor Henk Schulte Nordholt about my experiences in the field. We discussed how the growing interest in the concept of diaspora fostered new ideas and academic ventures in the
areas of migration and identity studies. Inspite of this apparent interest, we agreed that many scholars tended to focus on their own subject
areas and their own ethnic groups. Therefore, I proposed a rough idea
to set up a broad, comparative conference on diaspora. This conference
would not only include specialists on the South Asian diaspora, but experts on Chinese and African diaspora as well. The idea was that specialists in the field of the South Asian diasporas would be confronted
with ideas and concepts from other regions. In addition, they would
present their own findings to fellow specialists.
With the support of IIAS, the conference The South Asian Diasporas:
The Creation of Unfinished Identities in the Modern World was held
at the EUR in June 2005. Many but not all articles in this book
were written as a result of that conference. In line with the original
idea, I invited two outsiders to share their knowledge and opinions
with us. Kim Butler (Africanist at the University of New York) presented a keynote lecture Diaspora Kaleidoscope Or Colliding Diasporas? The Meta Diaspora Concept and the Mini-Diaspora Realities.
Here, she reminded us of the ambivalent relationship between a popular academic concept and day-to-day realities. In fact this ambivalence
became the centre of the discussion in the two-day conference. Leo
Douw (Universiteit van Amsterdam) also shared his knowledge of the
Chinese diaspora discourse. I am grateful to them both for their valuable inputs.
I would like to thank the following institutions which provided financial support: IIAS, the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research
(NWO), The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
(KNAW), the Trustfund and the Faculty of History and Arts of the
EUR, Furthermore I would like to thank Theresa Oostvogels (EUR),
Marloes Rozing (IIAS), Wieke Vink and Gaby van Beek (EUR students)
who made fantastic contributions at the organisational level which
made the conference run smoothly.
Gijsbert Oonk
History Department (FHKW)
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory

Gijsbert Oonk
Introduction
There are currently approximately 20,000,000 people of South Asian
origin living outside of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the majority in Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania.1 Although there are regional
variations in their adaptations, in many ways, they display a common
Indian identity.2 They may want their children to prosper in their
adopted countries, but at the same time they may prefer them to adopt
Indian family values, marry other Indians, and share their common
culture. In other words, many South Asians living overseas tend to reproduce their Indian culture, values, language, and religion as much
as possible.3 Moreover, many South Asian migrants are currently trying
to re-connect with their homeland, either through modern mass media, the Internet, or personal visits. These re-connections are often seen
as romantic rendezvous with the historical past and their original
roots.4
Within, academic Indian diaspora literature, the reproduction of
culture in an often-hostile environment and the relation to the homeland are key features of the diaspora concept.5 Nevertheless, in this collection, we emphasise a rather different approach. The authors, during
their fieldwork and archival research, realised that there were quite a
few overseas Indians who were not interested in re-connecting with
the homeland. They felt that the Indian Government was excluding
them from their historical roots, as in the case of many Muslim Indians after Partition and Indian Africans after their expulsion from
Uganda by Idi Amin. In the case of twice migrants like the Hindustanis in the Netherlands, we find that they may identify with both India
and Suriname. Moreover, it has been shown that in cases where Indians do reconnect with their ancestral villages, the relationship with
family members has grown ambivalent and is sometimes experienced
with noticeable discomfort. In other words, re-connection with ones
homeland is not self-evident. It happens or it doesnt. Though some of
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these finding are not new, they do shed some fresh light on the diaspora concept as a whole.
Thus the main aim of this collection is to gather sociological, anthropological, and historical perspectives on the Indian Diaspora. The papers published in this volume present new empirical research on
South Asian migrants world-wide. The authors share a strongly ambivalent feeling towards the mainstream issues highlighted in the
South Asians in diaspora discourse, such as the emphasis on the migrants relation to their homeland and the reproduction of Indian culture abroad. In this sense, this book can be read as a first attempt to focus on the limits of the diaspora concept, rather than on its possibilities and range. From a comparative perspective, with examples from
South Asian migrants in Suriname, Mauritius, East Africa, the UK,
and the Netherlands, this collection shows that in each of these regions
there are South Asian migrants who do not fit into the Indian diaspora
concept. Thus we attempt to stretch the concept beyond its current use
by highlighting empirical cases, which raise the question about the
limits of the effectiveness of the diaspora as an academic historical/sociological concept.
This introduction begins with an outline of four different migration
patterns from the South Asian continent, because the causes of migration vary, as do the length that migrants remain abroad. This will be
followed by a short historiography of studies on the overseas Indian
communities. Here, the transition from labelling South Asian migrants overseas Indian communities to South Asian diasporas is
highlighted. In the final section, the various articles and their perspectives are introduced.
Various Migrations, One Diaspora?

The South Asian migrants, or their ancestors, left the subcontinent as
part of various migration patterns. In general, four sometimes interweaving currents of South Asian migration are emphasised. Each of
these currents has had its own specific background, characteristics,
and conditions. Some of which caused variations in the way migrants
reproduced Indian culture abroad and/or how they were received by
the host societies. Moreover, these patterns differ in terms of age, numbers, and the historical contexts in which they emerge. In some areas,
like East Africa, South Asian communities have lived for six or more
generations, while in other areas, like the Gulf States they are recent
arrivals. In most areas, they comprise small minorities, although in
Mauritius and Fiji they are politically and economically dominant.
GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS
11
The first and eldest migration flow was that of traders who began
leaving the South Asian subcontinent in the earliest times and continue to do so until today in search of trade and business. Not surprisingly, Indian coastal communities had already developed all kinds of
profitable ties with East Asia, East Africa, and Central Asia in pre-colonial times. One of the key characteristics of this so called trade diaspora may be the fact that most of it consisted of temporary or circular migration. Sons were sent to search for trade elsewhere, but also to
eventually return. These traders acted as filters through which other
cultures were linked with their own. Frequently, they developed a more
cosmopolitan lifestyle due to their exposure to other cultures. Nevertheless, perhaps it is fair to say that it was only in the nineteenth century
that substantial permanent South Asian trading communities settled
abroad. In the literature, the emergence of long-distance trading connections including the circulation of capital the changing role of
women, and the notions of trust became important issues.6
The second important current was that of Indian Indentured labourers who left to replace the freed slaves in the nineteenth-century
plantation economies. Although most of them may have intended to
return to the sub-continent, in fact, many ended up staying to create
new homelands abroad. The main difference with the trade diaspora,
however, is the fact that much of this migration was forced and not
voluntary. The main focus, thus far, has been on the travel and working
conditions of the labourers, the nature of the contracts, and the number of returnees. Though recently, the interest in the reproductions of
Indian culture abroad has grown.7 In the same period, some Indians
migrated as clerks and teachers to serve colonial Governments overseas. They are mostly described as being part of the colonial expansion
system, where Indians contributed by collaborating with the British.8
The third current includes various migrations after the Second
World War. First, many Muslims migrated from India to East and West
Pakistan, while Hindus departed from Pakistan to migrate to India.
Hindus in Pakistan as well Muslims in India did not feel that the new
governments were able to protect their minority rights. Meanwhile,
many highly educated professionals left India to find jobs as teachers,
lawyers, and doctors in the Europe (especially the UK), the US and Canada. This has recently occurred again with the exodus of many IT professionals. Furthermore, numerous migrants have found work as construction workers or housekeepers in the Middle East since 1970s.
Here again, some of them may have been temporary migrants,
whereas others intentionally or unintentionally never returned. 9
Within this Post War period a fourth pattern also developed, that of
the twice migrants or second- (or third-) time migrants. They include
Indian indentured labourers in Suriname who eventually settled in the
12
GIJSBERT OONK
Netherlands or those who were expelled from East Africa and ended
up settling in the UK and Canada. They left their host countries for political rather than economic reasons. However, interestingly enough,
most of them never considered re-migrating to India. They may have
felt some cultural ties with the so-called motherland, but the economic, political, and family ties sent them elsewhere. This group was
highly diverse and consisted of traders, labourers, as well as professionals.10
Bringing these various migration patterns together under the unifying
label of Indian Diaspora is no easy task.11 The patterns vary regarding
the causes and consequences of migration, the numbers of migrants,
the periods of migration, the numbers of returnees, the manner in
which they were received by their host countries, whether or not circular migration was transformed into permanent settlement and family
reunion, and the questions of whether locally there was an emerging
2nd-, 3rd- and higher-generation of Indian migrants as opposed to intermarriages and cultural alliances with the local communities.12
Furthermore, there is a wide variety of religious, regional, and ethnic
backgrounds of the migrants. They are labelled Hindus, which, of
course, entails, a variety of castes, sub-castes and jatis. There is a great
variety of sects and beliefs among the South Asian Muslims (Sunnis,
Ismailis) as well and the other religious/ethnic groups such as the
Sikhs, Jains, Goans, among others. Moreover, there is also a broad variety of regional and language backgrounds: such as the Gujaratis (Hindus and Muslims) from northwestern India, Telugu migrants from the
South, Bhojpuri-speaking peoples from the north east and central India, and so on.
Generally speaking, then, this mosaic of Indian identities abroad is
presented as the mirror of India itself. India is diverse, and so too are
its migrants. It is acknowledged that Indian migrants abroad tend to
reproduce their own religions, family patterns, and cultures as much
as possible. At the same time, however, they adjust to local circumstances. Caste and language issues have to be negotiated in new environments. This is not a natural process, but one in which great efforts
need to be made sometimes in an effort to maintain ones own culture, but also with regard to the host society. In other words, these migrants differ in their cultural and religious backgrounds, in the causes
and durations of their migrations, and the extent to which they adapt
to local societies.
This collection discusses two basic problems concerning the Indian
diaspora. One is the prefix Indian. And the other is the term diaspora. The implication of the first is that there is a single India with
its people, who are somehow united under one flag. This is far from
13
obvious. India has been described as a nation and its fragments or an

invented nation.13 In this literature, the unity of India is a construction or, at best, referred to as unity in variety. This is even more the
case for South Asians abroad, who have had to experience various processes of integration and assimilation in very different host countries.
Moreover, Indians abroad do not so much identify with India as a nation but with the homeland, that is, the specific region where the migrants or their descendants come from. They often refer to themselves as Bengalis, Gujaratis, Telugus, or to their specific sub-castes,
such as Patels, Lohanas, and Cutchis. Inasmuch as they have created a
myth about their homeland, it appears that region and locality are
much more important in structuring the migrants identities than religion or nationality. Claude Markovits rightly asserts that migrants
from Gujarat, whether they were Hindus, Muslims or Jains, had more
in common with each other in their experience of migration than Gujarati Hindus had with Bhojupuri Hindus, or Gujarati Muslims with
Bojpuri Muslims.14 However, this is not the case for many South Asian
migrants in the Caribbean, or the twice migrants living in the UK and
the Netherlands. They are descendants of Indian indentured labourers
who migrated from India to the Caribbean, and from there to the UK
or the Netherlands. Most of todays descendants of these migrants are
barely aware of their regions of origin, be it Bihar, Bengal, or Uttar Pradesh. However, they continue to maintain, a vague notion of India.
Meanwhile, South Asians in the Caribbean, UK, East Africa and elsewhere are often referred to as Indians, while the region from which
they come does not play a role. This suggests that the prefix Indian
has a local meaning, but not so much in terms of self-identification,
but more as a label used by natives in the host nations. Many non-Indians, do not see India as fragmented, and the geographical masses of
the sub-continent somehow presupposes a cultural unity.
This idea of a South Asian subcontinent unity is nowadays reproduced in the vast and growing literature on the Indian diaspora,
which emphasises how and to what extent Indian culture was reproduced in the various host countries. Furthermore, the often ambivalent
relation of migrants abroad to their homeland is highlighted. In this
literature, the word India is often rightly substituted for South Asian
to refer in particular to the pre-independence migrants whose origins
lie in contemporary Pakistan or Bangladesh. Despite this, the Indian
Government has recently made a strong effort to reconnect to its Indian diaspora migrants. Here, the word Indian is again clearly intended to unify the migrants whose origins lie within the current borders of the Republic of India. This means that the prefix Indian has
been defined though not without problems as we will see in this collection by the Indian State. At the same time, we realise that these
14
GIJSBERT OONK
problems beg the question: how far can the construct of a comparative
Indian diaspora take us?
The second problem is the term diaspora. Despite the growing acceptance of the word as representing migrant groups beside those of
the Jewish diaspora, social scientists continue to disagree on two basic
questions regarding diapora studies. One is: What is a diaspora? What
are we studying? And the second: Who is a diaspora? In other words,
do all international migrant groups belong to a diaspora? Moreover,
should we consider a diaspora as a static and unchanging phenomena,
or is it constantly changing? And if so, how and in what direction, and
why? Moreover, from an academic point of view, the question is: What
do we gain by using the diaspora concept, however it may be defined?
Can we expect any new insights or is it just another buzzword? Obviously, the popularity of the term itself is related to the increasing relevance of representations of identity and culture in international politics.15 The diaspora debate over the past decade has experienced two extreme positions: One being that the term and concept refers to the
specific migration of Jews, which occurred under very unique historical
circumstances; while the other is that of a more universal application
to all cases of migration and settlement beyond the borders of native
nation-states, irrespective of the migration circumstances.
A diaspora refers to a particular kind of migration. Most scientists
agree that at least a few of the following characteristics are crucial to
describe a diaspora. (1) Dispersal from an original homeland to two or
more countries. The causes for the dispersal may vary from traumatic
experiences, as was the case with the Jews, or the African slaves, to the
search for work, or the pursuit of a trade or other ambitions. (2) There
must be a collective often idealised memory/myth of the homeland.
In some cases, there is a commitment to creating and/or maintaining
this homeland, as is the case with some Sikhs and their efforts to create an independent Kalisthan, or the Jews and their relation to Israel.
(3) A myth of returning to ones homeland (be it now or in the future,
temporary or permanent). This myth is grounded in a strong ethnic
consciousness of migrants abroad, which may have prevented them
from assimilating in the local society. (4) There is a sense of empathy
and solidarity with similar groups elsewhere in the world and/or with
events and groups in the homeland.16 Diaspora, then, is a contemporary term used to describe practically any population considered deterritorialised or transnational, whose cultural origins are said to have
arisen in a nation other than the one in which they currently reside,
and whose social, economic, and political networks cross nation-state
borders and, indeed, span the entire globe. According to Vertovec, for
instance, intellectuals and activists from within these populations in-
15
creasingly use this term, emphasising that the Diasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse.17
From Overseas Indian Communities to the South Asian Diasporas
The study of South Asian migrants overseas is not a new phenomenon.
In fact, the British Colonial Government itself was among the first to
systematically observe, count, and describe the number of Indian migrants, their religious backgrounds, working conditions, and so on, in
the British Colonial Empire. These reports, the correspondence and
the diaries are still the main sources of South Asian migration history.
This means that the migration is often seen by outsiders and not by
the migrants themselves. In addition, the themes studied were allied to
the knowledge of colonial officials and the desired information for the
colonial rulers in the centre of the empire, London. They included such
themes as numbers of migrants, questions related to travel permits,
settlement conditions, tax payments, trade licenses but also typical colonial obsessions such as sati, Indian sexuality, child marriage, arranged marriages, and religion.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word diaspora did not appear in these reports. The general denominator was overseas Indians
and this was also the phrase used by academics after Indian Independence in 1947. The first two comprehensive academic overviews on the
history of South Asians overseas were published in the early 1950s by
Kondapi (1951) and Cumpston (1953).18 Nevertheless, the interest in
the overseas Indians changed once the colonial empire had collapsed.
The most popular theme then became cultural persistence, the ability
of Indians to retain, reconstitute, and revitalise the many aspects of
their culture in an overseas setting. These studies dealt with the processes of acculturation, adaptation and, in the end, the perspective of a
plural society, which was first advocated by Furnivall (1948).19 Early
examples include regional studies by Palmer, Gillion, and Griffit.20 On
the macro level, neo-Marxists developed a centre-periphery model of
the global development of capitalism, which focussed on the changing
push and pull factors which determined the causes of South Asian migration. The emergence of unbalanced regional economic development
may have hampered, hindered, or promoted migration.21
It has been especially since the mid-1970s that historians, geographers, and anthropologists started producing research in the field of
what we now call the South Asian Diaspora. F.N. Ginwala, for example, introduced the notion of the Indian South Africans. The notion
of local space and the embedding of Indian culture was studied by S.
Shah and S. Winchester.22 However, it was, not an Asianist but rather
a world historian by the name of Phillip D. Curtin who proposed an
16
GIJSBERT OONK
important shift towards the construction of the South Asian Diaspora.

In his book Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge 1984), he
introduces the term trade diaspora, including that of the South Asian
trade diaspora. Moreover, he emphasises the relation of cross-cultural
traders to their hosts, with each other, and the way that they organised
cross-cultural trade.23
This growing interest eventually culminated in a unique international conference on South Asian Communities overseas. The conference and the proceedings transformed the rhetoric of South Asian migration and the history of Indians overseas. Note that the word diaspora was not used at this Oxford University conference until 1987.
The published proceedings (1991), however, do use the term diaspora.24 The book is edited by Steven Vertovec, who also used the term
diaspora in his introduction, which highlights the British interest in
the history of South Asia in general. It especially emphasised the contribution of Oxford University Press academics. There is no reference
to the concept of diaspora in its contemporary sense [see page 14].
None of the other papers use the word diaspora, either in the titles or
in the articles themselves.
It was in the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s that the
term diaspora became fashionable. Its connotations were no longer
monopolised by the Jewish diaspora. The question was raised whether
other groups of migrants could be labelled as a diaspora. Politicians
and representatives of overseas communities started using the term
diaspora. Africans, Armenians, and indeed Indians and Chinese migrants began to refer to themselves as being part of a diaspora. Moreover, the academic field began wondering how the word diaspora
could be useful in understanding migration, migrants, and the relation
between the motherland and the host societies. This was highlighted
in particular by the establishment of the Journal of Diaspora Studies in
1991.
The point of departure for the Journal of Diaspora Studies is well formulated by its general editor Khachig Tololyan, who notes that the concept has been related to a growing field of meanings, including processes of transnationalism, de-territorialisation, and cultural hybridity.
These meanings are opposed to more rooted forms of identifications
such as regions and nations. This implies a growing interest in the
discourse of rootedness, changing identities and the relation between
the local and the global. Some articles in the journal use broad checklists of factors that define the groups in diaspora, including the dispersal to two or more locations; collective mythology of ones homeland;
and alienation from the host nation, among others.25 These checklists
facilitated a debate that arose in the early 1990s on the question of
whether the Jewish diaspora was unique or whether it could be com-
17
plemented with an African, Chinese, Indian, Armenian, Greek, or indeed any other transnational migrant group.
This question obviously could only be answered by making a comparison between different ethnic diasporas. One of the outcomes was
that it might be fruitful not to compare these diasporas based on their
ethnic origin but based on the causes of migration such as being victimised (Jews, slaves) or looking for employment (indentured labour and
the migration of semiskilled workers).26 At the same time, by broadening the field of diaspora studies beyond the Jewish diaspora, the question, ultimately, is: What is the usefulness of a concept that can hardly
exclude transnational migrants? In other words, who in todays US
cannot be defined as being part of a diaspora according to the available
checklists and definitions? Indeed, contemporary studies include titles
related to the Irish diaspora, the Caribbean diaspora, and so on. In
other words, the question here is: What do we as social scientists gain
from the concept of diaspora? How does it help us if at all to better
understand particular aspects of migration?
A few years later (1995), Peter van de Veer edited his highly-praised
volume Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian
Diaspora. Van de Veer and other contributors questioned the radical
modernity of the experience of displacement, disjuncture, and diaspora. Migration has its own particular ambiguities, based on what
Van de Veer calls the dialectics of belonging and longing. Here, the
theme of belonging juxtaposes rootedness with uprootedness, and establishment with marginality. Longing, then, was related to the desire
for change and movement. In this volume, these topics were articulated in two interrelated areas of importance: nation and migration,
and nation and religion. The book presents the diverse forms and dynamics of the politics of space. Interestingly, however, none of the
contributors at that time questioned whether all South Asians
abroad are part of a diaspora. South Asian migrants abroad are presumed to be part of a diaspora by definition. The question is: by which
definition? The definition according to the researchers, in their desire
to be precise, or according to the subject themselves?
As the diaspora concept has matured, alternative definitions, different approaches, and new suggestions for more research are emerging.
Steven Vertovec (2000) proposes three meanings of Diaspora: as a social form; as a type of consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production.
The diaspora as a social form refers to the process of becoming scattered. It draws on the Jewish model, and it looks at how social ties
were cemented, at the process of maintaining a collective identity, at
the institutionalising networks, and at the social and economic strategies as a transnational group. In addition, it focuses on their political
orientations, their inability or unwillingness to be accepted by the
18
GIJSBERT OONK
host society. Especially now, where communication and transportation

are relatively easy and inexpensive, the diaspora as a social form may
be characterised as a triangular relationship between (a) the globally
dispersed, yet strongly transnational organised group (b) the territorial
states where groups reside, and (c) the Indian State or imagined homeland.
The diaspora as a type of consciousness emphasises the variety of experiences, a state of mind, and a sense of identity. This is described as
dual or paradoxical nature. This nature has various connotations. First,
it refers to the experience of discrimination and exclusion, and at the
same time, the positive identification with the highly-praised historical
heritage of the Indian civilisation. Second, the awareness of multi-locality, the notion of belonging here and there as well as sharing the same
roots and routes.27 The awareness of the ability to make a connection
here and there, making the bridge between the local and the global.
Third, double consciousness creates a triple consciousness, that is, the
awareness of the double consciousness and being able to use it instrumentally. In addition to the identification with the host society, and the
homeland, there is the identification with the locality, especially in the
discourse of multiculturality. Indians in Southall, London include the
awareness of being Southallian, emphasising their multi-racial character, within the discourse of the multi-cultural character of their local
environment. 28
The diaspora as a mode of cultural production emphasises the currents
of cultural objects, images, and meanings back and forth, and the way
these transcend, creolise, and change according to the wishes of the customers and artists. It refers to the production and reproduction of
transnational social and cultural phenomena. Here, the position of
youth in diaspora is highlighted They are socialised in cross-currents
of different cultural fields and form an interesting market for diasporic
cultural goods. Moreover, they are the ones who receive and transform
these new ideas and developments. Furthermore, it is clear that modern media are used to reformulate and translate the cultural traditions
of the Indian diaspora. The popularity of episodes from the Ramayanan or the Mahabharata among the migrants has led to new ideas regarding Indian culture. The Indian diaspora has also found its way
into the virtual existence of the Internet, with its numerous discussion
lists, find one another through school pictures sites and transnational
marriage agents.
The Indian Government itself has recently become a factor in the
diaspora debate. It generally tends to overestimate the importance of
Indian diasporic feelings. In its recently published Report of the High
Level Commission, it states that Since India achieved Independence,
overseas Indians have been returning to seek their roots and explore
19
new avenues and sectors for mutual beneficial interaction from investment to the transfer of economic skills and technology, to outright philanthropy and charitable work. This trend has become more marked in
the last decade, as the Indian economy has opened up, giving rise to a
new range of opportunities for emerging generations.29 But this is, in
fact, far from true and more the consequence of wishful thinking. The
main aim of the commission is to explore the possibilities of improving the relationship between India and Persons of Indian Origin [PIO]
and Non Resident Indians overseas [NRI]. This is, of course, the result of the Indian Governments disappointment felt in the role that
PIOs and NRIs have played until now. But it is not just the Indian Government that wants to re-connect with overseas Indians. The Bollywood fashion designers use the newly available cheap media techniques, one way or the other, to advertise their products to potential
buyers in the Indian Diaspora. Bollywood videos and music are sold
world-wide. And there are numerous Internet sites where Indians in
diaspora can share their views, discuss politics, and reunite with the
homeland, virtually. Indian fashions can be purchased not only in India, but also in the UK, Canada, and anywhere else with a sizeable Indian community.
The Indian Government and industrys re-connection with the Indian Diaspora has to be seen from an instrumental perspective. That
is, they choose what and who to re-connect with and they have their
own reasons for doing so. Thus, for political reasons, the Indian Government chooses not to focus on Indian (PIOs) Hindu and Muslims
who now reside in Bangladesh and Pakistan. They do not invite them
to invest in India or share dual citizenship. Moreover, some PIOs suggest that the Government focuses on the well-off PIOs, rather than the
poorer ones. However, the Government denies this. It is interesting to
note that the very existence of the Indian Government creates an actor
with regard to the notion of diaspora that barely exists in the diaspora
of Africans. Nevertheless, the fact that the Indian Government followed
the Chinese example of reconnection the diaspora may find some attention in western African nations in the near future. The question remains: Who is and who is not responding to these messages and why?
Especially, the more negative and ambivalent responses, which have
until now in particular been underestimated in the diaspora discourse,
will be highlighted in numerous contributions in this collection.
The issue of inclusion in or exclusion from the diaspora is even more
complex from a historical point of view. Historical sources are mostly
related to particular geographical areas. In general, they are more focused on the local migrants issues and than their social or cultural ties
to their homelands. Therefore, making it extremely difficult to deduce
20
GIJSBERT OONK
the social, economic, or cultural relations with the homeland. In short,

the question here is why and when do South Asian migrants overseas
consider themselves as part of a South Asian diaspora and what do they
gain from it in economic, sociological, or cultural terms? How should
researchers respond when they themselves do not feel comfortable
with the terms and definitions of the diaspora framework? Each article
in this collection formulates its own responses to these questions, and
together they present a continuum from essentialist views to modern
mosaics of impressions.
The Articles
The articles in this volume all deal with general issues related to the local identity of the Indian migrants, including their attitude towards
India. They emphasise that the identity of South Asians is neither an
unchanging, primordial identity, nor an infinitely flexible one that one
can paint, fill in, or reuse at will, depending on the circumstances. The
identity is constantly being negotiated in changing contexts. This assumption is true in South Asia as much as it is in the South Asian diasporas. The authors in the following articles all highlight and determine how this identity is negotiated in various parts of the world.
Therefore, they focus on regions populated by South Asians, their relation to their host countries and their homeland, as well as the length
of time they spend abroad.
People in diaspora are part of both a global history and a local history. Historians should emphasise the dynamic processes of changing
attitudes towards the homeland, the host country, and the diasporic
community itself. A historical and comparative approach may help us
to understand some of these dynamics. The first section of the book is
devoted to the historical perspectives of the Indian diaspora. Here we
deal with the problem of a concept that was not yet in use during the
period being researched. Scott Levi investigates the concept of diaspora
as an analytical tool by exploring the emergence of an Indian trading
diaspora during the course of the seventeenth century. He focuses on
the Indian merchant communities of Multanis and Shikarpuris who
dispersed across Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and
much of Russia. This article shows that the definition of diaspora as
used by Abner Cohen and others helped him to understand both the
emergence and the social organisation of the diaspora. Here, the term
diaspora implies that the Multani and Shikapuri communities maintained an identity with their homeland. Nevertheless, this homeland
was not India. Nor did the traders themselves identify themselves as
part of the Indian diaspora. The author applies the concept to empha-
21
sise particular aspects of migration; in this case, identification with the

traders geographical origins and their ambivalent relationship with
their host society. He concludes that the ability of both Hindu and
Muslim traders to maintain thriving communities in Central Asia may
be attributed to the fact that they were widely respected as large-scale
trans-regional traders, whose fortitude and commercial connections
were valuable resources for the local regions. However, he also cites
some exceptional cases that show that this relationship was not always
a harmonious one. Levi ultimately links this century-old trade diaspora
to the modern world and the Indian diasporas of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, including its association with the socio-economic
trauma which was provoked by the Partition.
In the second article, Gijsbert Oonk applies the perspective from below. Taking the agents viewpoint he argues that the first generation of
Hindu Lohanas of East Africa remained close with their home villages
in western India. They regularly went back for family visits, trade and
marriages. However, the process of settling in led to fewer and fewer
visits to the homeland as their economic and cultural orientations
shifted from India to East Africa. Oonk reveals how Lohanas in East
Africa initially promoted the reproduction of Gujarati language and
culture during the colonial period. Nevertheless, the second and third
generation of migrants lost their abilities to read, write, and speak Gujarati, despite the efforts of some Hindu organisations and the wishes
of the elderly members of the community. Moreover, they learned English instead of Swahili and this became an essential aspect of Indian education in East Africa. In other words, the second and third
generation Lohanas consciously chose not to reconnect with India , Indian languages and culture and developed a more Indian African
identity. Oonk, therefore, argues that the diaspora concept with its
strong emphasis on rootedness, homeland, reproduction of Indian culture abroad, cannot help us to understand the history of the Lohana
community in East Africa. This article reveals that the process of identifying with ones homeland is not without its struggles, and that it has
both local and global significance. While, Levi could not stress the process of self-identification due to the nature of the sources, Oonk shows
that the Hindu Lohanas in East Africa do not consider themselves as
part of the Indian diaspora, preferring instead to focus on a local
Asian-African culture. By taking the perspective of the migrants themselves, this article shows that the re-linking assumed by the concept of
diaspora and the Indian Government may have a strong instrumental
flavour.
Meanwhile, Chandrashekar Bhat and T.L.S. Bhaskar discuss some
theoretical implications of the diaspora concept. They present the idea
of an old and a new diaspora and how this affects the degree of inter-
22
GIJSBERT OONK
action with the motherland. Here, the Telegu language is seen as one
of the most important carriers of culture and identity and that Telugu
migrants find it much easier to replicate caste and regional identities
related to the original Andhra Pradesh, because of the emergence of
modern mass media and the Internet. They reveal that those who migrated in earlier generations may have identified more with their respective host countries. Furthermore, it shows a fruitful example of
how identity formation can be compared within the same group. In
this case, that of the Telugu migrants in the US, Mauritius, and Fiji.
The most critical contributions related to diaspora concepts are yet to
come. Ellen Bal and Kathinka Kerkhoffs article forcefully integrates
three diaspora perspectives. They utilise the diaspora concept as an
analytical tool not unlike how academics and the Indian Government
use it. Moreover, they highlight the importance of a perspective from
below, that is from the migrants themselves. They also emphasise a
comparative perspective by focussing on cases in Mauritius and Suriname. They emphasise the fact that Muslims are often excluded from
the Indian diaspora category. Muslims have identified themselves in
their own ways over time and geographical locations. South Asian
Muslims in Suriname have long desired an undivided homeland called
Hindustan, whereas in Mauritius, Muslims of British-Indian descent
prefer local inclusion as a separate ethnic community. The results of
this empirical research has stimulated their criticism of academics as
well as of the Indian State in the way they incorporate, or exclude,
Muslims in the Indian diaspora. This, again, shows the importance of
localised empirical research.
John Mattauschs contribution embraces the notion that the economic success of the Gujarati community in the UK is an accident rather
than something due to structural factors. He takes a long-term historical perspective in order to show that the recent economic success of
that community is just a very recent phenomena. This suggests that
success factors mentioned in the academic literature, like the role of
the extended family or the role of the community only become important in very specific socio-economic areas. He shows that the communitys twin trajectories diversely capitalist and traditionally Hindu
requires that we as social scientists consider the substantial analytical
role that chance plays in explaining how the parallel developments
occurred.
In the second section we focus on the sociological and anthropological research involving the Indian diaspora, which shares its perspective
from below. Mario Rutten and Pravin J. Patel introduce a two sited
approach as they integrate their research among Indian immigrants in
the UK with that of the Gujarat villages of origin. They highlight the
importance of the social environment of the migrants locality of origin
23
and the social environments of the localities to which they have migrated. These transnational family relations should neither be considered homogenous, nor as separate communities. They reveal that the
first-generation Patel community in London shows little interest in productive investments in India, but they do show some interest in providing some religious funding. They also highlight certain levels of ambivalence in London, in their mother country, and their home villages,
which the elderly people visit three months a year. Ultimately, they do
not feel at home in either London or India. This shows that the migration experience and the extent of local integration has an impact on an
migrants identity to the extent that the notion of home becomes ambivalent. Interestingly enough, the authors prefer to focus more on
transnational contacts than on the concept of diaspora. The strength of
this type of research is that it shows two sides of the same coin. The researchers studied their subjects in the UK and their families in India.
This is in strong contrast with the bulk of the empirical research,
which is usually based solely on the host country, which, in turn, is
due to the financial and social constraints of anthropological fieldwork.
Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawanis article explicitly compares the self definition [label chosen by an individual to express ones
identity] of second-generation Nizari Ismailis in both Toronto and London. They argue strongly against the dominant migrant discourse because they emphasize that second-generation migrants did not migrate
they were born in the host countries and have become part of a larger local identity more than of a Indian diasporic identity. They make
a strong argument for replacing dominant essentialist conceptions like
between two cultures and the half-way generation with a more structuralist view. By emphasising the hybrid character of the Ismaili identity, they simultaneously reveal a tendency to define themselves part of
Canada or the UK rather than as part of a diaspora. Mukadam and
Mawani do not deny the importance of a diasporic identity, but prefer
to highlight the self-emphasised national identity. This raises questions about what we omit from migrant identities, when we focus too
much on the diaspora as an organising method of research.
Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten take a different angle. They
reveal that while media are discussed in the diaspora literature, it is
usually under the assumption that transnational media help reconnect
diasporic communities to their home countries. However, the assumed
link between media from the home country and viewers identification
with that home country is problematic and must not be taken for
granted. Indian movies are very popular among Surinamese Hindustanis in the Netherlands. The audience, however, seems strikingly disinterested in the actual realities of the South Asian subcontinent itself.
24
GIJSBERT OONK
This article describes the reception of commercial Bombay cinema

among Hindustani youngsters in the Netherlands.
The last article by Brit Lynnebakke shows that in the case of Hindustanis in the Netherlands, the diasporic images of the homeland do not
fit the general positive connotations as suggested in the literature.
These twice migrants [arriving via Suriname] do not freely interact
with the direct migrants from India in the Netherlands. Meanwhile,
the direct migrants have managed to develop an image of the traditional Surinamese Hindus, because they have preserved the Indian
tradition even better than those in India. Suriname Hindus are offended by the fact that they are not considered reliable marriage partners because of their Surinamese and/or Bihari backgrounds. Lynnebakke focuses on why a pan-India identity has failed to emerge in the
Netherlands. Migrations trajectories as well as educational and class
differences seem to be the main reasons.
In contrast to the mainstream diaspora literature, the articles in this
book emphasise the ambivalent relations of the migrants with their Indian homeland. Their migration trajectories vary from region to region;
from circular migration to permanent settlement; from free migration
to forced migration. While some may visit India frequently, others have
settled permanently in their new host countries. Some may have created a cultural India abroad, while others may develop a more global
outlook. The Indian Government as well as the earlier Indian Colonial
officials, all responded differently to the various migration trajectories,
all of which makes it very difficult to unify the migration of South
Asians under a single concept of Indian diasporas. In his afterword
Claude Markovits emphasises that this in itself is not sufficient reason
to reject the concept out of hand. And he is right, of course. But instead of focusing on the possibilities of the concept, he shows how two
types of migrations (the migrations of traders and workers) may intermingle and create less analytical distinction as suggested by the diaspora literature. Therefore, this collection prefers to explore how we
can interpret these various trajectories. Grounded in fieldwork and archival research, these papers share a strong feeling for a history from
below with an eye for nuance and variation. The authors collectively argue that empirical, contextual, comparative, and historically well-defined research will refine our understanding of complex historical as
well as contemporary processes of migration.
Notes
1
Figures vary from 12,000,000 to 26,000,000 depending on whether or not they include Non-resident Indians (NRIs), mixed parentage and their offspring. In general,
25
these figures do not include the People of Indian Origin who now reside in Pakistan
and Bangladesh. Many statistics also exclude the number of Indians settled in Sri
Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal.
2 The limits of the use of the word Indian and the fact that this process of adaptation
is not a natural process will be discussed further in this introduction.
3 Recent examples include, G. Oonk, The changing culture of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa, Contemporary South Asia (13) 1, 2004, 7-23. In this article, the
process of cultural adaptation of migrants towards a new environment is described in
terms of a process of stretching and closing preferences of identity from the migrants perspective. See also, K.E. Nayar, The Sikh Diaspora in Vancouver: Three Generations amid Tradition, Modernity, and Multiculturalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. M. Gosine and D. Narine (eds.) Sojourners to Settlers: Indian Migrants
in the Caribbean and the Americas, New York: Windsor Press 1999.
4 G. Sheffer, Diaspora Politics : At Home Abroad, Cambridge 2003; W. Saffran, Diasporas in Modern Societies, Diaspora 1 (1) 1991, 83-99; W. Safran, Comparing Diasporas: A Review Essay, Diaspora 8 (3) 1998, 255-92.
5 R. Cohen, Global Diasporas, London 1997, 26. Safran, ibid. 1998.
6 S. Dale, Indian Merchants and the Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1994; C. Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750-1947.
Traders of Sindh from Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2000; S. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade 1550-1900, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill 2002; D.W. Rudner, Caste and Imperialism in Colonial India: The Nattukotai Chetiars, Berkeley: University of California Press1994; B. Sue-White, Turbans
and Traders: Hong Kongs Indian Communities. Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press1994.
7 M. Carter, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Diaspora, London: Athens Press
2002. K.O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and
British Guiana, 1875-1917. London: James Currey 1994.; D. Northop, Indentured Labour in the age of Imperialism 1843-1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1995. H. Tinker, A New System of Slavery: the Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 18301920, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1974.
8 Bosma, U. and G. Oonk, Bombay-Batavia. Parsi and Indo-European variations in
mediating 1800-1947, in N. Randeraad (ed.), Mediators between State and Society in
Comparative Perspective. Hilversum Verloren 1998, 17-40. H. Tinker, Indians in
South East Asia: Imperial auxiliaries, in C. Clarke, C. Peach, S. Vertovec, South
Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1990.
9 M.I. Abella, Asian migrant and contract workers in the Middle East, in R. Cohen
(ed.), the Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1995, 418-423. K. Gardner, Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995.
10 P. Bhachu, Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. London: Tavistock
Publication 1985. M. Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians.
London: Athlone Press 1975. R.S. Gowricharn, De duurzaamheid van het transnationalisme, in Migrantenstudies 2004, 252-268. C. Choeni and K. Sh. Adhin, (eds.), Van
Brits Indisch Immigrant via Suriname tot Burger van Nederland. Den Haag: Sampreshan 2003.
11 See, e.g., Varma, Sushma J., and Radhika Seshan (eds.). Fractured Identity: The Indian
Diaspora in Canada. New Delhi: Rawat Publication. 2005. Judith M Brown, Global
South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora, Cambridge University Press 2006.
26
GIJSBERT OONK
12 K. E. Nayer, The Sikh Diaspora in Vancouver: Three Generations amid Tradition, Modernity, and Multiculturalism. London: University of Toronto Press, 2004; C. Choeni and
K. Sh. Adhin, (eds), Van Brits Indisch Immigrant via Suriname tot Burger van Nederland. Den Haag: Sampreshan 2003.
13 Partha Chatterjee, The Nations and its fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial histories,
Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993. G. Aloysius, Nationalism without a nation
in India: New Delhi, Oxford University Press 1997.
14 C. Markovits, The Global World, 6.
15 Kim D. Butler, Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse, Diaspora 10 (2) 2001, 189219. R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An introduction, Seattle: University of Washington
Press 1997; W. Safran, Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return, Diasporas (1) 1 1991, 83-99. S. Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora. Comparative Patterns. Routledge: London 2000.
16 Cohen, Global Diasporas, 26.
17 James Clifford Diasporas, Cultural Anthropology, (9) 3 1994, 311.
18 I. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories. London: Oxford University Press
1953. C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas 1838-1949. Bombay: Oxford University Press 1951.
19 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. New York: Cambridge University Press 1948. This literature related to
India is well summarised in R.K. Jain, Indian communities abroad. Themes and Literature. Delhi Manohar 1993.
20 K.L. Gillion, Fijis Indian Immigrants. Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1962. J.A.
G. Griffith, Coloured Immigrants in Britain. London: Oxford University Press 1960;
M. Palmer, The History of Indians in Natal. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1957.
21 G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press 1967. I. Wallerstein, The Rise and Future Demise of World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analyses. In Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, 1974: 387-415; S. Amin, Unequal development. London Monthly Development
Press 1976.
22 F.N. Ginwala, Class. Consciousness and Control: Indian South Africans, 19601946. D.Phil., Oxford University 1974; S. Shah, Aspects of the Geographic Analysis
of Asian Immigrants in London, D.Phil thesis, Oxford University 1980; S. Winchester Social Activity and Spatial Structure, D.Phil thesis Oxford University, 1981.
23 Phillip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 1984. His most important predecessor may be Abner Cohen, Customs
and Politics in Urban Africa: A study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns. Los Angeles:
University of California Press 1969. He expanded on this in his Cultural strategies
in the organization of trading diasporas, in Claude Meillassoux (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, pp. 26681. London: Oxford
University Press 1971. See also Scott Levis article of in this book.
24 The proceedings have been published: S. Vertovec, Oxford University Papers on India.
Aspects of the South Asian Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991.
25 Kim D. Butler, Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse, Diaspora 10 (2) 2001, 189219. R. Cohen, Global Diasporas : An introduction, Seatle WA, University of Washington Press 1997; W. Safran, Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and
return, Diasporas (1) 1 1991, 83-99; S. Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns, London: Routledge 2000.
26 Cohen, Global Diasporas.
27 P. Gilroy, There Aint no Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. London: Verso, 1987.
27
28 William Safran also emphasises that Diaspora consciousness is a particular kind of

awareness said to be generated among contemporary transnational communities.
(Safran 1991).
29 The Indian High Level Commission, Report on the Indian Diaspora. See also: Lal, Indias Missed Opportunity, London: Ashgate 2001.
PART 1
CRITICAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
2 Multanis and Shikarpuris

Indian Diasporas in Historical Perspective
Scott Levi
Defining Merchant Diaspora

In recent years, the term diaspora has been more frequently used to
characterise peoples existing away from their homelands. Khachig Tololyan, editor of the journal Diaspora, asserts that the term that once
described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas
community, [and] ethnic community (Tololyan 1991: 4).1 Others have
even more broadly defined diaspora as that segment of a people living
outside the homeland (Connor 1986: 16). Expanding the definition to
include virtually any group of people living beyond the boundary of its
perceived homeland has enhanced the terms utility for the emerging
discipline of Transnational Studies by facilitating comparative studies
and providing new topics of inquiry and a model for understanding
such phenomena. However, the rather amorphous and potentially confusing nature of the terms contemporary usage risks diminishing its
effectiveness, motivating a narrower definition for the present discussion.
The etymology of the word diaspora can be traced to the Greek diaspora, derived from the combination of dia, meaning over, and speiro,
to sow, as in scattering or planting. The term was probably first used
in the third century B.C.E. by Greek-speaking Jews in reference to their
exile from the holy land and dispersion among the Gentiles in the sixth
century B.C.E.2 In this context, the term refers to a situation in which
a number of communities sharing a common national, religious, or
ethnic identity exist apart from a common homeland. The term also
implies that, over time, the communities maintain their distinctive
identity, despite their existence as a distinct minority living in a host
society. A diaspora community therefore avoids assimilation, and may
employ any of a number of techniques to do so. These include: continued identification or interaction with its unique homeland; use of a
specific language; identification with a socio-religious system other
32
SCOTT LEVI
than that of the host society; the maintenance of a residence in a communal settlement separate from the host society; economic specialisation; and the pursuit of bilateral relations with similar, geographically
dispersed diaspora communities.
In our present discussion, the use of the term diaspora implies that
the Multani-Shikarpuri communities maintained an identification with
their homeland, an internal cohesiveness as exclusive communities,
and continued to be perceived by members of the diaspora and the
host society as a cultural other. This follows Abner Cohens use of the
term as:
distinct as a type of social grouping in its culture and structure.
Its members are culturally distinct from both their society of origin and from the societies among which they live. Its organization combines stability of structure but allows a high degree of
mobility of personnel. It has an informal political organization
of its own which takes care of stability of order within the one
community, and the co-ordination of the activities of its various
member communities in their perpetual struggle against external pressure. It tends to be autonomous in its judicial organization. Its members form a moral community which constrains
the behaviour of the individual and ensures a large measure of
conformity with common values and principles. It also has its
own institutions of general welfare and social security. In short,
a diaspora is a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially
dispersed, communities (A. Cohen 1971: 267).3
Multiple historical processes may motivate groups of people to leave
their homeland and form a diaspora. These can most generally be divided into the categories of provocation and attraction. Briefly, factors
which might provoke the formation of a diaspora include social, economic, or political coercion which motivate groups of people to leave
their homeland in search of improved opportunities elsewhere (victim
diasporas). Conversely, diasporas may also arise out of a groups attraction to a region promising greater recompense for their labour (labour
diasporas) or, as in the present case, where they may be in a position
to pursue lucrative commercial endeavours involving the mediation of
cross-cultural trade (merchant diasporas). The latter process requires
the individuals involved to relocate and regularly participate in the cultural arena of their host society. When their efforts prove successful,
other individuals may be attracted to similarly profitable locations and,
over time, form what has come to be known as a merchant diaspora: a
network of interrelated communities established in locations strategic
to their engagement in specific types of commerce and transregional
MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS
33
trade (Curtin 1984; Dobbin 1996). The early modern dispersion of Armenian merchant communities mediating cross-cultural trade across
much of Eurasia provides a classic example of a merchant diaspora
(Curtin 1984: 179-206; Herzig 1996: 305-22).
In practical application, at least to some degree, the dichotomy established above may prove to be a false one. That is to say, the motivation
of communities to live a collective expatriate existence can sometimes
be ascribed to more than just one factor. For example, the migrations
of Armenian merchant communities are commonly attributed to commercial incentives stemming from the convenient location of their
Transcaucasian homeland, situated on overland trade routes connecting Russia and Iran (and the commercial markets to the east of Iran)
with Anatolia, Syria and the Levant (Herzig 1996: 311). Armenians capitalised on their geography by actively participating in transregional
trade and establishing merchant diaspora communities in numerous
distant markets (Curtin 1984: 185-6). Yet Armenian migrations were
also known to have been motivated by factors of socio-political provocation, such as the Safavids sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century resettlement of a large number of Armenians from their home in the Armenian town of Julfa to a dedicated suburb of Isfahan, named New Julfa (McCabe 1999: 35-66). Furthermore, it is not unknown for diaspora
networks that formed in response to factors of provocation to capitalise
on their spatial dispersion by initiating long-distance, cross-cultural
commerce between pre-existing communities (Wink 1987).
Merchant diasporas tend to differ from other types of diasporas in
several important respects. Most notably, they are characterised by a
higher degree of mobility, a greater amount of communication between
communities, and a higher degree of interaction with the indigenous
population. Unlike other diaspora categories, merchant diasporas may
even be peopled by a rotating, gender-specific (generally male) population. A useful list of topics of inquiry relevant to the study of modern
merchant diasporas is provided by Abner Cohen:
What are the criteria of distinctiveness and of recruitment? How
is the demographic adjustment between the sexes and the ages
achieved? What mechanisms for communication between the
members of one community and between one community and
another within the same diaspora are employed? How, when denied resort to the regular exercise of organized physical coercion, is authority organized? What kinds of power are mobilized
to support this authority? What is the nature of the relationship
of trust between the various types of businessmen operating in
them? How is credit made possible and how is it regulated?
What are the procedures underlying decision-making in com-
34
SCOTT LEVI
munal affairs? What are the characteristics of the articulating

ideologies employed and what are the mechanisms by which
these ideologies are kept alive? How do structure and culture affect one another in the historical development of these diasporas? (A. Cohen 1971: 268.)
Thus, one can appreciate that a study of even a contemporary merchant diaspora is a difficult, complex endeavour. How is one to conduct
a thorough analysis of a pre-modern merchant diaspora? The effort necessarily requires a nearly impossible wealth and variety of information
unlikely to be found in archives or to have survived the centuries. Considering the secretive attitude pre-modern merchants held toward their
commercial transactions, especially those merchants rather vulnerably
dispersed in diaspora communities, much of the information about individuals commercial activities and the communities social operations
was either never recorded or was intentionally destroyed after it lost its
immediate usefulness.4
Without a comprehensive source of information providing insight
into the activities of a single Indian diaspora community at a specific
time, one must instead take a broader approach and extrapolate from
information regarding related communities scattered throughout diverse sources. Although inadequate for a sociological analyses of a single diaspora community, this methodology embraces the sources temporal and spatial inconsistencies and improves our ability to investigate
the development of the diaspora and its transformation over the longue
duree. It is our contention that, in the context of the Indian diaspora
communities discussed here, this approach is a useful one for gaining
insight into the dynamics of this diaspora as it changed over the centuries.
Multan and the Multanis

The identification of the majority part of the Indian merchant diaspora
population as Multanis reflects their connection to the north-western
Indian region of Multan and its capital of the same name. Multan is today a dry and dusty, though prosperous, industrial town in the southern Punjab region of Pakistan. During the medieval and early modern
eras, however, the term Multan (or Multanistan) referred to a flourishing province situated between the Punjab (to the north) and Sind
(to the south). As early as the eighth century B.C.E., the city of Multan
was an important commercial centre on Indias north-western frontier
and, in the centuries that followed, it was an attractive target for a
number of invaders of India, among the more famous of whom were
35
Darius I in the sixth century B.C.E. and Alexander the Great in the
fourth century B.C.E. Prior to the Arab conquest of Sind in the eighth
century C.E., the city of Multan was known by the designation Mulastana, or the Indianised Mulastanapura. In the beginning of the eighth
century, Muhammad ibn Qasim captured the city in the name of the
Umayyad Caliph Abu al-Abbas al-Walid I ibn Abd al-Malik, renamed it
Multan, and ushered in an era of Muslim control that lasted uninterruptedly for over a millennium (Durrani 1991: 1-9; Dasti 1998: 1-16).
Historical accounts attribute Multans early prosperity to monetary offerings to the citys celebrated Temple of the Sun God, which is reputed to have drawn pilgrims from throughout India. In the years that
followed the Arab invasions, however, Multan grew both as a commercial and cultural centre, and the patronage of its wealthy Muslim rulers
attracted migrants from throughout the Islamic world. Many of these
individuals settled permanently in Multan and even today their tombs
exist as a monument to the history of Islam in north-western India.
In the medieval era, Multan prospered as an important outpost for
the caravan traders who traversed Afghanistan, entering and leaving
the subcontinent through the Khyber Pass (travelling through Kabul),
the Gumal Pass (travelling through Ghazni, south of Kabul), and either
the Bolan or Sanghar Passes (both of which connected Indian cities
with Qandahar, the most important commercial centre in southern Afghanistan). Despite their seasonal and potentially dangerous nature,
these trade routes enabled caravan traffic between a number of Indias
north-western urban centres and distant markets in Central Asia, Iran
and beyond. The city of Multan historically benefited from its strategic
location near these mountain passes and the confluence of the Ravi
and Chenab rivers (the rivers have more recently changed courses and
currently join some forty kilometres north of the city). For many centuries, this facilitated the movement of goods down the Indus to the Arabian Sea ports of Lahori Bandar and Thatta. Furthermore, Multan was
also an important agricultural centre, renowned in the early modern
era as today for its cotton production and textile industry.5
Following his visit to Multan in 915, the Arab geographer Masudi reported that Multan played a central role in Indias overland trade with
other regions of the Muslim world, including Khurasan, Zabulistan (an
eastern region of modern Afghanistan which includes the city of Ghazna, the celebrated capital of the Ghaznavids) and Sijistan (also known
as Sistan, a region in southwestern Afghanistan bordering Iran). This
is confirmed by other medieval Arab geographers, including Istakhri,
ibn Hawqal, Maqdisi and the famous Central Asian astronomer and
traveller, al-Biruni.6 By the thirteenth century, merchants and merchant communities associated with that region had become widely
known as Multanis and, as these merchants directed their commercial
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enterprises north-westward in later centuries, the Multanis became increasingly associated with their commercial activities outside of the
subcontinent. Thus, according to Irfan Habib, the eighteenth-century
lexicon Bahar-i Ajam defines the term Multani as the general name
for a Hindu in Central Asia and Persia because the Indians who lived
in those regions originated in Multan (Habib 1964: 406-7).
The significance of Multan and the Multanis grew dramatically under the dominance of the Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate (1206-1555).
Multanis are first mentioned in association with large-scale merchantmoneylending in the historical work of the Indian author Zia al-Din
Barani who, in the early fourteenth century, identified them as important financiers and transregional commercial agents for the Delhi Sultanate. Barani mentioned the Multanis in conjunction with sudagars
(large-scale merchants), although he distinguishes between the two,
and he elsewhere refers to the Multanis propensity toward moneylending, mentioning them in relation to sahs (large-scale Hindu moneylenders) (Zia ud-Din Barani 1860-62: 120, 164, 310-11). According to Barani, in an effort both to lower and standardise the price at which textiles
were sold in the Sultanate, the Delhi Sultan Ala al-Din Khalji (reigned
1296-1316) issued a farman (mandate) that required Multanis and sudagars to sell their textiles at fixed prices (the sultani rate). Toward this
end, Ala al-Din advanced wealthy Multanis two million tanga (the currency in circulation at the time) from the treasury to subsidise their
commerce in textiles throughout the Sultanate.7 Especially considering
the Khaljis Turko-Afghan origins, it is not unreasonable to conclude
that, even in the fourteenth century, commercial ventures took many
Multanis to the markets of Central Asia. This is likely to have increased
during the reign of the fourteenth-century Central Asian conqueror
Amir Timur, who purposefully diverted many Inner Asian caravan
routes through Samarqand.
The Multani firms enjoyed the patronage of the Delhi Sultanate nobility, and as the firms prospered they placed larger numbers of agents
at strategic locations in urban and rural markets across north India.
Some agents were stationed in villages, where they advanced loans to
farmers in exchange for a portion of the harvest. Other agents functioned as brokers, purchasing the remainder of the harvest for cash,
loaning raw cotton to weavers in exchange for finished bolts of cloth,
and moving the agricultural surplus and finished commodities from
the countryside to urban or regional markets. Still other Multani agents
operated as large-scale transregional traders in the subcontinents major commercial centres. The Delhi Sultans valued the Multanis as an
important source of tax income, a convenient reserve of capital in
times of need, important wholesalers of agricultural goods and textiles,
and, perhaps most importantly, as village moneylenders and dedicated
37
operators of a rural credit system. Arguably the Multanis greatest service to the nobility was their extension of a monetised economy into
the Indian countryside, which greatly facilitated the Delhi Sultans efforts to collect taxes in cash rather than kind.
The patronage of the Delhi Sultans was clearly a significant factor in
the rise of the Multani firms, but even more important was the increasing circulation of precious metals in the Indian economy. Scholars
have long observed that South Asia lacks significant reserves of gold
and silver in its soil, and that pre-modern Indias greatest wealth was
its agricultural production. Since antiquity, the gold and silver that was
minted into Indian coinage and circulated throughout the subcontinent
was largely imported from abroad, exchanged in port cities and frontier
towns for caravan-loads of spices, cotton textiles, dyes and other agricultural goods. During the medieval and early modern eras, several historical processes conspired to advance Indias monetisation, and the
prosperity of the Multani firms along with it. One of these was the deliberate effort of the Delhi Sultans, continued under the Mughals, to
encourage a general increase in trade across the north-west frontier.
Other factors contributed to this process as well, but the most important were the Spanish conquests in the New World and the almost single-minded fervour with which the Conquistadors seized the rich gold
and silver reserves of the former Aztec and Incan Empires, melted
down that which was in use, and established an elaborate network of
mining settlements to extract more. Scholarship suggests that the average silver exports from the New World to Spain in the years 1565-1685
should be estimated at between 25,000 and 35,000 tons per year: an
impressive sum which is argued to have doubled in the years 1685-1810
(Tignor 2002: 102-4). As ships loaded with specie sailed both east and
west from the New World, much of this wealth circulated around the
globe and gradually found its way into the Indian Ocean. Or, in the
words of the seventeenth-century French traveller to India, Francois
Bernier, it should not escape notice that gold and silver, after circulating in every other quarter of the globe, come at length to be swallowed
up, lost in some measure, in Hindoustan (Bernier 1891: 202). The injection of this wealth into the Indian Ocean economy had a profound
effect on Indian society: one which scholars have only begun to explore.
Clearly, then, the emergence and development of the Indian merchant diaspora in Central Asia in the years following the establishment
of the Mughal Empire and the Bukharan Khanate is a product of the
conjunction of several historical processes. These include: increasingly
active Eurasian commercial markets, the advancement of Indian commercialists economic influence both inside and outside of the subcontinent, and a general intensification of Indo-Central Asian cultural and
38
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commercial contacts. The most notable result of this intensification

was the growth and development in Central Asia of the Indian merchant diaspora itself. Thus, sixteenth-century sources mention Indian
communities settled in the urban centres of Bukhara, Samarqand and
Tashkent, as well as in certain cities in Iran. But, as the number of Indians willing to invest their time, effort and capital in commercial ventures throughout the diaspora increased, Multani communities
emerged in dozens of urban centres and villages across much of Eurasia.
It is important to reiterate that, although Indian merchants from
Multan are likely to have frequented commercial centres in Central
Asia already in the thirteenth century, available evidence suggests that
they had begun to establish diaspora communities there only in the
second half of the sixteenth century. Multanis are first identified as
having settled and owned property in Bukhara in legal records dating
to 1559 and 1561, nearly contemporary with Anthony Jenkinsons 1558
report of merchants regularly coming to Bukhara from throughout
north India and staying there for periods of two to three years (Ivanov
1954: 109-10, 122-3, 247-8; Jenkinson 1886, I: 87). Some twenty-five
years later, in 1584, merchants from Multan were included among
those unfortunate Central Asia-bound caravanners who lost their goods
in a warehouse fire in Peshawar (Nizamutdinov 1969: 47). Shortly
thereafter, in 1589-90, several Multanis are mentioned in the Majmuai Wathaiq (Collection of Judicial Decrees), the register of a qad (Islamic judge) in Samarqand, in reference to their commercial activities in
that city.8 The Multanis importance continued to grow, and seventeenth-century sources mention an astounding number of Multanis
(among other Indian merchant groups) living in communities outside
of India. In 1623, the Russian merchant F.A. Kotov referred to all of
the Indian merchants in Isfahan, the capital of Safavid Iran, as Multanis (Kemp 1959: 36-7), as did Raphael du Mans some four decades later (du Mans: 180-81). In the 1660s, Jean Chardin reported that the total number of Multani Indians residing in the Safavid Shahs territory
was in excess of 20,000 (Chardin 1686: 100). In 1684-85 Englebert
Kaempfer estimated the population of Multanis in Isfahan alone to be
10,000 (Kaempfer 1977: 204; Dale 1994: 57). At that time, Central
Asia was home to an estimated 8000 Indian diaspora merchants and,
although contemporary estimations are lacking, it seems reasonable to
suggest that a similar number of Indians are likely to have worked in
urban and rural markets of Afghanistan. The total number of Indian
merchants involved in trade and moneylending ventures throughout
this diaspora was likely to have been in excess of 35,000.
Indian merchants had already spread northward from Iran into the
Caucasus and neighbouring Russia by the beginning of the seven-
39
teenth century. , Here they established a rather significant diaspora

node in Astrakhan, the Caspian Sea port on the mouth of the Volga
and a Russian possession since 1556. From the arrival in Astrakhan of
the first Indian merchants, they are documented as having maintained
regular trade relations with other Indian communities in Daghestan
(in the north-eastern Caucasus), Shirwan (in south-eastern Transcaucasia, modern Azerbaijan) and numerous cities on the southern coast of
the Caspian Sea (Dale 1994: 87-8). Although the earliest record of Indian merchants in Astrakhan identified specifically as Multanis belongs to the 1670s (Antonova, Goldberg and Lavrentsova 1958: 185),
this should be attributed more to the infrequency of references to the
Indian merchants region of origin or caste affiliation in seventeenthcentury Russian records than to any uniqueness in the ethnic composition of the Astrakhan community. Based on information from the 1747
Russian census of Astrakhans Indian dvor (literally a courtyard,
although in form and function this structure resembled a standard caravanserai, especially following its reconstruction as a stone building in
1673), Dale demonstrates that nearly all of the Indian merchants in Astrakhan at that time came from the city of Multan or from villages in
its vicinity (Dale 1994: 54; Antonova and Goldberg 1965: 265-9). This
continued to be the case until the turn of the century, even as the Astrakhan Indian community was dwindling in numbers. This is supported by the observations of Peter Pallas, who begins his 1794 account
of Hindu religious practices in Astrakhan with the statement that, during my stay at Astrakhan, I attended with pleasure at the idolatrous
worship of those Indian merchants of Multanistan (Pallas 1802-3, I:
254). Three years later, Count Ivan Potocki noted that the Indian dvor
was home to some sixty-seven individuals, identified as being for the
most part from Multan andsubjects of the Afghan ruler.9
Caste and Identity in the Diaspora

The designation Multani identifies the geographical origin of the
greater part of this early modern Indian diaspora, but says nothing of
the diasporas ethnic composition in terms of the Indian merchants
caste or even religious identity. This has been the source of some confusion in previous efforts to explain the ethnic complexities of these Indian diaspora communities. Because of the presence of Muslim Multanis in early references to the Indian communities in Central Asia, Muzaffar Alam has suggested that, during the Indian diasporas early
stages of development in Central Asia, it was common for Hindu merchants to abandon their Indian identity, forgo Hinduism for Islam,
marry into the local community, and permanently settle in Central Asia
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(Alam 1994: 219). Contrary to this notion, further analysis suggests

that both Hindu and Muslim merchants from Multan province were
identified as Multanis regardless of their religious or caste identity.
Barani in the fourteenth century had already noted, that the chief qad
of Sultan Ala al-Din Khalji, a man identified as Hamid al-Din, was the
son of a Multani moneylender (Zia ud-Din Barani 1860-62: 298, 353).
Although sources disclose individual cases of conversion, these were
the exception rather than the rule. Hindu merchants living in the diaspora are known to have gone to great lengths to keep their compatriots from renouncing their ancestral religion.
Available information suggests a significant Muslim Multani presence in sixteenth-century Central Asia. In fact, the earliest available accounts of Multanis in Central Asia are in reference to two individuals
with the decidedly Muslim names of Maulana Omar Multani ibn Maulana Abd al-Wahab Multani and Baba Multani ibn Ali, both of whom
are identified in relation to their ownership of immovable property in
Bukhara (Ivanov 1965: 109-10, 122-3, 247-8). Some thirty years later,
the aforementioned judicial records illuminate the activities of a number of Muslim Multanis engaged in financing textile production in Samarqand.10 The leader of this organisation was an individual identified
as Janab Darya Khan Multani ibn Janab Sheikh Saadi Multani. Darya
Khan is mentioned in eight entries in the Majmua-i Wathaiq, seven of
which directly relate to his involvement in the textile industry, and his
business associates almost exclusively include people who shared his
Indo-Islamic, possibly Afghan, heritage. Examples include Ustad Rajab
Kazar Multani ibn Ustad Hussain Multani, Mankui Kazar Multani, Ustad Gujar Multani ibn Khwaja Yaqub, and Mullah Hussain ibn Paina
Multani (Majmua-i Wathaiq: 182b, 187b, 189a-b).11 Other entries in
the same source refer to individuals identified as Allahdad ibn Jahan
Shah Multani and Khwaja Ibrahim Multani ibn Abd Allah Multani
(Majmua-i Wathaiq: 2a-b, 192a).12 References to Muslim Multanis are
not restricted to the Indian diaspora communities in Central Asia. In
1617 Pietro Della Valle reported that a portion of the Multani population of Isfahan was Muslim, an observation repeated by the Russian
merchant Fedot Kotov in 1623 and Adam Olearius in 1637.13
A significant number of these Muslim Multanis were most likely
Indo-Afghan merchants belonging to the largely nomadic tribe known
as the Lohani (Lohana, Luharni).14 It should be noted that there is
some confusion regarding the Lohani ethnicity. While some authors refer to the Lohani as a Muslim Afghan Powinda tribe, others recognise
the designation as a reference to a sedentary Hindu merchant caste, or
conglomeration of castes, of Sind engaged in Indo-Central Asian commerce.15 Some insight into this issue can be found in the Chachnamah,
a source which purports to be a Persian translation of an eighth-cen-
41
tury Arabic manuscript detailing the Arab conquests of Sind under

Muhammad ibn Qasim, written in 1216-17 by Ali ibn Muhammad
Kufi, originally a resident of Kufa, in Iraq, but subsequently a resident
of Uch, located roughly one hundred kilometres south of Multan (Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg 1979). This source refers to what appears to
have been a rather sizeable confederation of unsettled tribes in northwestern India known as the Luhana (Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg
1979: 36-7; 170-71). It remains unclear how sizeable the confederation
was at that time, although, according to Richard Burton, in the midnineteenth century the Lohani of Sind included at least fifty sub-groups
(Burton 1851: 315; Markovits 2000: 46-9). While the subject certainly
merits further investigation, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Lohani underwent a process of bifurcation since the eighth-century Arab
conquests. That is to say, over the centuries, some of the Lohani subgroups in Sind settled, adopted a commercial economy, and maintained a version of their ancestral religion, while others continued their
pastoral economy and eventually became associated with Islam.
Despite this kind of conjecture, it is clear that the Lohani Powindas
(a term referring to Afghan nomadic communities involved in mediatory commerce) had, by the sixteenth century, already been participating in Indias north-western transregional trade for centuries by incorporating commercial ventures and the transportation of bulk commodities in their annual migrations between north India and Central Asia.
In the nineteenth century, the British traveller G.T. Vigne reported that,
according to Lohani tradition, they had been active in the transit trade
between Hindustan and Kabul since the Ghaznavids granted them the
territory of Deraband in the eleventh century and that, since the time
of Babur, Lohani caravans had been engaged in the transportation of
various commodities between Bukhara, the major Afghan commercial
centres, and Hyderabad, Calcutta, Benaras, Delhi, Jypore, and the
other large cities of India (Vigne 1982: 54, 68-70). Following a raid on
a group of Afghan traders crossing the routes between India and Central Asia, Babur himself refers to the recently deceased Khwaja Khizr
Lohani as a well-known and respected Afghan merchant, and it is
likely that many of the 10,000 to 20,000 Indian merchants mentioned
by Babur as annually travelling to Kabul were Lohani Powindas (Zahir
al-Din Muhammad Babur 1989: 202, 235; Dale 1994: 62-5). The identification of the leader of the above-mentioned Indian commercial organisation in Samarqand by the title Darya Khan further suggests that
at least some of the Muslim Multanis in Central Asia were Lohani.
This designation appears in reference to Afghan Lohani in historic literature dating at least as far back as the fifteenth-century Darya Khan
Luharni (Lohani), an important official in the Afghan Lodi Sultanate
(Dale 1994: 62-4). Centuries later, during a visit to Multan in the
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1830s, Mohan Lal, the Kashmiri-born British intelligence agent and

companion of the British explorer and agent Alexander Burnes, came
across a merchant involved in Indias north-western transregional trade
also identified as Darya Khan Lohani. Mohan Lal reported that Lohani
and Shikarpuri merchants (the latter identity will be discussed below)
dominated the mediatory trade between Bukhara and Multan and that,
were it not for these merchants, Multan would not become the rival of
the markets of Hindusthan, the Panjab, and Khorasan (Mohan Lal
1971: 391-6). Focusing his attention on Afghanistan, Alexander Burnes
also recognised that the Lohani dominated the movement of goods in
and out of Indias north-west frontier. According to Burnes:
the merchants, who carry on the trade from India to Cabool, are
principally Lohanee Afghans, whose country lies westward of
the river, between Dera Ismael Khan and Cabool; and they now
make an annual journey to and from these places, bringing with
them the productions of Afghanistan, and taking back those of
India and Europe. Being a pastoral race, they are their own carriers; and being brave, they require no protection but their own
arms Lohanees pass into India, and even to Calcutta and Bombay (Burnes 1843: 284-5).
Indo-Afghan Powinda tribesmen clearly played an important role in
Indo-Central Asian transregional trade, although this was generally
limited to the buying, selling and transportation of goods (Montgomery
1862: 43). In 1751, for example, a Tatar from Astrakhan visited Khiva,
Bukhara and Balkh and reported that Afghan Powindas were active in
transporting bulk goods to these areas from as far away as Calcutta
(Shamansurova 1966: 111-2). However, neither Lohani Afghans, nor
any other Muslim group, comprised an ethnic component of primary
importance in the diaspora. The overwhelming majority of the diaspora
was comprised of Hindu merchants who belonged to any of a number
of mercantile-oriented castes engaged in transregional trade, brokering
or moneylending, and who, in some accounts, are collectively referred
to as Banias (or Banians), a designation derived from the Sanskrit
word vanija, a merchant, or vanijya, meaning trade (Ibbetson 1916:
242; Russell 1969, II: 112).
Although in some nineteenth-century literature the term Bania refers to a specific caste affiliation, in earlier literature it is more generally used to refer to individuals, or groups of individuals, whose economic activities focused on commerce.16 Bania communities operated
trading networks from several commercial centres throughout Gujarat,
Sind, Punjab, Rajasthan and the Indus basin, but Multan was the primary focal point in their north-western trade. Thus, in the 1660s, the
43
French traveller and geographer Jean de Thevenot observed that,

although the political elite and the majority of the population of Multan were Muslims, it contains a great many Banians also, for Multan
is their chief rendezvous for trading into Persia, where they do what
the Jews do in other places; but they are far more cunning, for nothing
escapes them, and they let slip no occasion of getting the penny, how
small soever it be (Sen 1949: 77). In 1676, Tavernier similarly reported
that Multan is the place from whence all the Banians migrate who
come to trade in Persia, where they follow the same occupation as the
Jewsand they surpass them in their usury (Tavernier 1995, I: 74).17
As noted by Dale, at this early date, Europeans were still ill-informed
about the complexities of the Indian social system and their widespread use of the occupational term Bania to refer to the members of
the Indian diaspora suggests little more than that the individuals in
question were probably non-Muslim Indian merchants.
Thevenot provides a rare exception to this rule in his careful observation that at Multan there is another sort of gentiles whom they call Catry. That town is properly their country and from thence they spread all
over the Indies (Sen 1949: 78). Here, Thevenot is referring to the Hindu Khatri caste, long considered to be among the most important merchant communities of early modern India. Because of the Khatris increasingly important role in Indias transregional trade under the
Mughal Empire, partly a result of Mughal patronage, it seems reasonable to suggest that many of the Multanis and Banias referred to in the
historical sources can more specifically be categorised as Khatris.18
Dale locates Khatris in Astrakhan during the late seventeenth century
and, in the 1830s, the British imperial proconsul and past governor of
Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, was informed that Khatris were still
highly involved in north-west Indias transregional commerce and that
they maintained communities throughout Afghanistan and as far away
as Astrakhan (Elphinstone 1839, I: 413-4; Dale 1994: 58-9). In the early
twentieth century, the economic historian L.C. Jain noted that the Aroras, a sub-caste of the Khatris, were known to control the finance of
much of the commerce of India with central Asia, Afghanistan and Tibet (Jain 1929: 32). The British ethnographer Ibbetson likewise observed that the Arora-Khatris were centred in Multan and Derajat and
were involved in business throughout Afghanistan and Central Asia
(Ibbetson 1916: 250-52). George Campbells mid-nineteenth-century
Ethnology of India provides an even more impressive image of the Khatris role in the diaspora:
besides monopolising the trade of the Punjab and the greater
part of Afghanistan, and doing a good deal beyond those limits,
they [Khatris] are in the Punjab the chief civil administrators,
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and have almost all literate work in their hands Even under
Mahomedan rulers in the west they have risen to high administrative posts No village can get on without the Khatri who
keeps the accounts, does the banking business, and buys and
sells the grain. They seem, too, to get on with the people better
than most traders and usurers of this kind I do not know the
exact limits of Khatri occupation to the West, but certainly in all
Eastern Afghanistan they seem to be just as much a part of the
established community as they are in the Punjab. They find
their way far into Central Asia They are the only Hindus
known in Central Asia. In the Punjab they are so numerous that
they cannot all be rich and mercantile; and many of them hold
land, cultivate, take service, and follow various avocations (cited
in Russell 1969, III: 458-9).19
It is clear that Khatris were an important element in the ethnic composition of the diaspora. Regardless of Campbells claim, however, Khatris
were not the only Hindu community to establish themselves in Central
Asia. Despite their participation in occupations similar to those of the
Bania communities, Khatris were considered to be Kshatriyas, the second-highest varna in the Indian social hierarchy, below only the Brahmans. Banias, however, were generally associated with either the
Vaishya (merchant) class, the third-highest position, or with communities affiliated with the commercially oriented Jain or Sikh religions.
Based on research in the Russian colonial archives and the Office of
the Bukharan Khushbegi, the Russian historian G.L. Dmitriev suggests
that the majority of the Indians present in Central Asia in the colonial
period were Bhatias, a merchant caste associated with Sind, especially
the area around Multan, since the seventh century (Dmitriev 1972:
235).20 In the nineteenth century, many Bhatia caste members were located in the north-west frontier town of Dera Ismail Khan and were
known to have travelled to Kabul, Bukhara and even as far as Arabia
(Russell 1969, I: 350). Their centralisation in Dera Ismail Khan is most
certainly related to that citys position as the renowned winter headquarters of Powinda nomads and its convenient location on the west
bank of the Indus river, approximately 100 kilometres north-west of
Multan, near the Gumal Pass. Also known to have been active in IndoCentral Asian commerce are Muslim Khojas and members of the
mixed Hindu-Muslim trading caste from Gujarat, the Bohras (Levi
2002: 111). The Bohra communities in the Punjab, those most likely to
be involved in Indo-Central Asian commerce in the early modern and
colonial eras, were predominantly, if not entirely, Hindu. Another Muslim commercial caste engaged in Indo-Central Asian commerce were
the Parachas, a name derived from the word parcha, Persian for cloth,
45
the principal commodity in which they traded. According to Ibbetson,

in the nineteenth century, Paracha communities inhabited the area
around the north-western town of Rawalpindi, and there were also
large communities further to the north-west in Atak (Attock) and Peshawar, from where they conducted an extensive trade with the cities
of Central Asia, chiefly in cloth, silk, indigo, and tea (Ibbetson 1916:
252-4). Nineteenth-century Russian archival documents record that Indian merchants in Central Asia originated from throughout north-western India, including Multan, Shikarpur, Peshawar, Lahore, Haripur,
Ludhiana, Amritsar, and the urban centres of Kashmir, as well as from
the more distant cities of Delhi, Allahabad, and Bombay (Dmitriev
1972: 234).21
Whereas Banias and Khatris were both commonly identified as Multanis because of their commercial centralisation in that city, another
component of the Indian diaspora was identified as Marwari. This
designation indicates these merchants relationship to the urban centres of Marwar and, considering the predominance of Jain merchants
in that region, suggests that many of the Marwari merchants are likely
to have been adherents to the Jain religion.22 The Marwaris were probably active in the diaspora from the late seventeenth century, prior to
which Marwari family firms seem to have restricted their commercial
interests to domestic markets. They began to appear in Astrakhan only
from the early eighteenth century, and probably arrived in Central Asia
at roughly the same time. It is interesting that the classic paradigm of
the Indian family firm, the Jagatseth (World Banker) house, originated
in Marwar and operated under the direction of the acknowledged leader of the Jain Oswal caste. This firm was founded in the second half
of the seventeenth century and, following its move to Bengal (first to
Murshidabad and then to Dhaka), rose to commercial prominence at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, roughly at the same time that
an individual identified as Marwar Baraev (Great Marwari), appears
in archival documents from Astrakhan.23 This individual was most certainly the leader of the Jain merchants in that diaspora community at
the time, a conclusion equally applicable to another individual similarly
identified as Marwari Baraev who lived in Khojand, near the Farghana
Valley, some 150 years later.24
Marwaris in Astrakhan are known to have participated in diverse
commercial activities, focusing especially on moneylending ventures
and long-distance trade. As was common among all of the Indian merchants in Astrakhan, much of their transregional trade was conducted
by means of commenda partnerships (various types of trade agreements
between partners supplying capital investment and labour) and other
arrangements with their colleagues, Marwaris and others.25 Their partners were most commonly located in a number of Iranian cities dot-
46
SCOTT LEVI
ting the shores of the Caspian Sea, situated on the trade routes connecting Astrakhan with Bandar Abbas (also referred to in historical
sources as Gombroon). The presence of Marwaris in Iran is further
suggested by George Forsters late eighteenth-century statement that,
in the Iranian town Tarshish (Turshiz/Kashmar, located some 300 kilometres south-west of Meshed), he came across approximately one hundred families of Indian merchants identified as being from Multan and
Jaisalmer, the latter of which was an important Marwari Jain outpost in
western Rajasthan (Forster 1970, II: 186). Devendra Kaushiks research
into nineteenth-century Russian colonial documents confirms the presence of a significant number of Marwari merchants in the Indian diaspora communities in Central Asia. Thus, in addition to Hindus and
Muslims, the Indian diaspora in Central Asia probably also included
Jain communities, although it must be acknowledged that this is to
some degree conjectural as the Marwari merchants religion is not specifically mentioned in Kaushiks sources (Kaushik 1985: 31).
The presence in the diaspora of adherents to another Indian religion,
Sikhism, is less surprising considering that a significant percentage of
the Sikh community has roots in the Khatri caste and, like the Khatris,
the Sikh tradition places a great emphasis on commerce. The participation of Sikh communities in Indo-Central Asian trade was facilitated
by the location of the Sikh capital at Amritsar, a Punjabi city situated
some thirty kilometres east of Lahore on trade routes leading through
the Khyber Pass to Central Asia.
It is difficult to definitively establish for how long each of these communities was involved in the Indian diaspora in Central Asia, but Khatris and Banias, especially of the Bhatia, Bohra and Lohani castes, are
known to have emerged as important merchant communities prior to
the seventeenth century and probably participated in the diaspora from
its inception.26 The Marwari Oswals (almost certainly adherents to the
Jain religion) seem to have achieved great commercial prosperity during the seventeenth century and to have spread throughout the diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Sharma 1984: 186-7;
Dale 1994: 60). References to Sikhs do not appear in the sources until
the nineteenth century. During the early modern and colonial periods,
agents of these various communities dispersed throughout the subcontinent and beyond, establishing an impressive trade and moneylending
network that extended across Afghanistan, Central Asia, and eventually
reached even beyond the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa to the Caribbean islands in the west, and to Southeast Asia and China in the east
(Ray 1984: 252-4).
47
Modus Operandi and Relations with Host Societies

By the time the diaspora emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, the
Multani firms had a well-developed system to enlist agents and prepare
them to be dispatched to work in distant locations. Agents were exclusively male, and they underwent rigorous training that encompassed
complex accounting techniques, mathematical formulas for computing
various types of interest, moneylending procedures, instructions for issuing and cashing hundis (bills of exchange), secret codes for recording
commercial transactions, a variety of issues related to their own legal
traditions and those of other legal systems, and a lengthy period of apprenticeship. This system of training is not in and of itself unique in
Indian business history, but the operation of the Indian diaspora differed from earlier practices in some important ways.27
Prior to being dispatched into the diaspora, the Multani agents were
loaned a certain amount of capital, generally in the form of a commodity for export. The commodity most often advanced seems to have been
cotton textiles produced in abundance in India and one of Indias largest export commodities since antiquity. Furthermore, because of the
Multani agents long-established role as creditors to cotton farmers and
weavers, to whom they advanced raw cotton in exchange for a portion
of the finished cloth, cotton textiles were available to the Multanis in
large quantities at below-market prices. Perhaps for this reason,
whereas most observations of the Multanis focus on their moneylending activities, they are also not infrequently referred to as textile traders. In the 1660s, Raphael du Mans described the totality of Multani
merchants in Isfahan as cloth merchants (bazzaze) and, already in
1558, Anthony Jenkinson observed that Indian merchants in Bukhara
were also traders in textiles (du Mans 1890: 180-81; Jenkinson 1886, I:
87-8).
Jenkinsons account is the earliest concrete citation of the Indian diaspora merchants in Central Asia, and it provides some insight into the
Indians commercial operation. It is interesting, although somewhat
misleading, that Jenkinson described Bukharan trade at that time as
beggerly and poore because he was astonished that it took the Indian
merchants who came there two to three years to sell their merchandise
before returning home, and they refused to bargain with him for his
English wool.
The Indians doe bring fine whites, which the Tartars [Turks] doe
roll about their heads, and all other kinds of whites, which serve
for apparell made of cotton wooll and crasko, but golde, silver,
pretious stones, and spices they bring none ... I offered to barter
with Marchants of those Countreis, which came from the furth-
48
SCOTT LEVI
est parts of Indiato give them carseis [kersey, an English woolen cloth] for their commodities, but they would not barter for
such commoditie as cloth (Jenkinson 1886, I: 87-8).
At first glance, Jenkinsons disappointment in the Bukharan market
seems to suggest that Bukharas commercial climate was impoverished
and devoid of opportunity. Reconsidering Jenkinsons conclusions in
the context of the Indian diaspora merchants commercial techniques,
it is apparent that the Indians he encountered were already operating
in accordance with the standard diaspora model that was to become so
familiar in later years.
The first order of business for Indian agents travelling to locations
in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran was to arrange for their commodities to be transported by Afghan Powindas, or otherwise by caravan, across the inhospitable intermediary lands. This was an arduous
journey and also an expensive one as, in addition to standard transportation expenses, they would be required to pay customs duties at each
political boundary. After several months of travel the caravan would arrive at its destination and Indian agents would take up residence in a
caravanserai, commonly one owned and operated by their firm and
placed under the direction of their firms senior representative. This individual known in Central Asia as the aqsaqal and in Iran as the kalantar was responsible for supervising the local Indian community
and mediating their relationship with the host state. At this point, the
Indians would begin selling their merchandise. However, considering
that every caravan that brought Indian merchants to distant markets
also brought hundreds or even thousands of camel loads of cotton
textiles, the Indians would have been inclined to sell only a small percentage of the total. The rest would be hoarded for sale over an extended period of time in order to keep the market from saturating and
driving down the price of their merchandise, and, by extension, the value of their capital wealth.
Thus, rather than demonstrating the destitute nature of the Bukharan market at the time of his visit, Jenkinsons inability to purchase Indian cloth at a discounted price seems more likely to have represented
the Bukharan markets saturation with Indian textiles and the Indians
efforts to keep the price of their merchandise as high as possible.
Furthermore, whereas Jenkinson was shocked that the Indians he encountered commonly spent two to three years in Bukhara before returning home, later observers report that it was typical for Indian merchants to spend several years working in the diaspora before returning
home. Calculations of available information place the Indians average
tenure abroad at between six and seven years, although some indivi-
49
duals are known to have stayed in particularly lucrative posts for several decades (Dale 1994: 105; Levi 2002: 141).
The Indian communities were therefore almost exclusively comprised of a rotating population of men. While these men were living in
distant communities in control of considerable amounts of the firms
capital, the firm directors back in Multan were responsible for watching over the agents families. This arrangement served the dual purpose of reassuring the agents of their families well being in their absence, while simultaneously ensuring that the agents themselves remained loyal and conducted themselves responsibly. Should an agent
prove untrustworthy by absconding with the firms capital, his reputation and credit would be ruined, and his family would be held responsible for any resulting losses. Archival records suggest that such
situations only rarely occurred. In any event, during their extended periods abroad, the Indian agents generally lived a monastic lifestyle as
they actively participated in numerous commercial ventures, only one
facet of which was the sale of their merchandise.
As the Multani merchants gradually sold off their textiles, they did
not allow the cash they earned to remain idle as they prepared for their
return to India. Rather, they were trained to put their capital to work
by reinvesting it in other, very profitable commercial activities, most
commonly in reasonably secure, interest-earning moneylending ventures. The Multanis in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran specialised
in several types of loans, divisible into short-term cash loans, on the
one hand, and agricultural loans, on the other. Because many farmers
depended on credit to get their crops planted, agricultural loans constituted an especially important and very lucrative venture for the Multanis. Prior to the planting season, even those Indians who resided in cities across the diaspora are known to have ventured into the countryside where they advanced loans to farmers, in cash or in kind, with the
cumulative principal and interest collected at harvest time (it was a
common arrangement for the Indian to receive one-half of the harvest).
Although the risk involved in agricultural loans was greater than that
of a loan against collateral, it is easy to understand why the Indian
moneylenders were attracted to rural markets: the interest earned was
correspondingly higher and the term of an agricultural loan was usually six months or less, depending on the length of the growing season.
To the Indians, this meant that the capital retrieved was available for
other investments the rest of the year.
The Indian diaspora merchants therefore operated at a critical juncture between urban and rural markets, serving their host societies by
providing investment capital to facilitate agricultural production even
when local peoples could not afford the initial investment in seeds for
planting or other necessary materials. It is deceptively tempting to attri-
50
SCOTT LEVI
bute the Indians success in these markets to the prohibition of riba

(collecting interest from loans) in Islamic law. Muslim merchants
across the Islamic world devised numerous techniques to circumvent
this restriction; they were quite capable of providing credit for profit,
and they regularly did so. Instead, the Indians dominance of the
moneylending trade should be attributed to their access to their firms
vast reserves of capital wealth and their training, which emphasised
moneylending for profit.
It is also important to note that, in addition to the Indians role as
rural credit agents, they commonly purchased the remainder of the
harvest for cash and arranged for its sale in urban markets. In this capacity, the Indians served their hosts by extending a monetised economy into the countryside, facilitating the collection of taxes in cash.
They also served their host societies by importing necessary goods, purchasing and arranging for the export of local production, and supplying
a considerable tax income for the treasury. The combination of these
factors at least partly explains the motivation of Muslim administrators
to protect the Indian merchants and ensure that they could conduct
their business in a safe, predictable and reasonably agreeable social climate.
In some locations Indian merchants congregated in urban neighbourhoods, but the vast majority of references are to Hindu merchants
living in specifically Indian caravanserais. These structures conformed
to the standard architectural styles of the region and era, and the exteriors gave no indication of the inhabitants cultural and religious uniqueness. The interior of the caravanserais, however, represented a
Hindu microcosm within their Islamic host societies. Indian merchants were, of course, the primary residents of the Indian caravanserais, but the caravanserais are also known to have housed Indian cooks,
barbers, jewellers, tailors, servants and retail shops where the Indians
purchased many of the goods necessary for their day-to-day lives, including religious paraphernalia, from other Indians. Furthermore,
within these caravanserais, Indians were exempt from many legal restrictions that applied to the general Muslim populace. For example,
visitors to the Indian caravanserais of Bukhara commonly noted that,
whereas alcohol and tobacco were prohibited in that religiously conservative city, inside of their caravanserais, Indians smoked and drank alcohol freely (Likoshin 1896).
Hindus were generally permitted to celebrate their religious festivals,
even in Central Asias rather conservative religious climate. For example, several nineteenth-century sources describe the Hindus celebrations of Diwali, a festival in honour of the goddess Lakshmi, and another celebration that appears to have been Holi, a festival celebrating
the approach of spring. According to one Russian observer of a Diwali
51
celebration in Tashkent in 1895, the Hindus celebrated this holiday by

abstaining from drinking alcohol, maintaining a strictly vegetarian diet
of ceremonial Indian cuisine, illuminating the caravanserai with hundreds of petroleum lamps, and enlisting musicians, singers and dancers to perform devotional songs. This same visitor returned the following year for the celebration of the festival of Holi, which he referred to
as a festival with alcohol. This affair drew large numbers of indigenous spectators to the roof of the caravanserai, some of whom reportedly
even joined the celebration (Likoshin 1896).
The celebration of these festivals was not restricted to Russian colonial Central Asia. In Bukhara as well, the Muslim population had a tradition of allowing, and even participating in, Hindu religious celebrations. For example, prior to the commencement of some festival activities in Bukhara, farmers are reported to have brought their cows to
Indian caravanserais so that the Hindus could sprinkle them with dry
red dye and pray near them. In return, the Indians fed the cows cottonseed, an unusual delicacy for the animals (Dmitriev 1972: 242). Diwali
was also documented as having been celebrated in an Indian caravanserai in Bukhara, where the holiday was popularly referred to as Id-i
Charaghan (Festival of Lights) (Dmitriev 1972: 242).
Because of the limited number of years individual Indian merchants
generally spent abroad, there are only a few accounts of Indians who
died while in the diaspora. On occasion, however, this did happen and
it invariably produced a source of potential conflict: the Hindu tradition
of cremating the dead. While cremation ceremonies were common in
India, Muslims in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran commonly considered it to be abhorrent. Still, Hindus placed a great spiritual importance on this tradition and whenever a comrade died, the survivors
went to great lengths to acquire permission from the relevant administration to conduct a ritual cremation. Permission was necessary largely
in order to secure military protection for the duration of the ceremony,
thereby discouraging any local troublemakers from disturbing the funeral pyre. Following cremation, the ashes of the deceased were collected and returned to India.
Throughout the diaspora, it was common practice for the Multani
firm directors to send Brahmans to supervise religious ceremonies and
service the other religious needs of their agents. This was achieved by
contracting individual Brahmans to live in a specific diaspora community for a stipulated period of time, following which they were replaced
by other recruits. While the directors of the family firm ensured the financial security of the Brahmans families back in India, the Brahmans
themselves were dependent upon the Indian merchants for their livelihood; there is no indication that they, at any time, participated in commercial activities.
52
SCOTT LEVI
Although the Indians enjoyed great cultural autonomy within the

confines of their caravanserais, Hindus (and other non-Muslim minorities) were required to obey certain social restrictions. Hindus were generally forbidden to own Muslim slaves and to ride on horseback in
towns, and they commonly had to dress in a distinctive manner so that
they could easily be distinguished from Muslims. For example, Hindus
in nineteenth-century Bukhara were required to wear short, tight-fitting, single-coloured (usually black) chapans (a long, flowing outer
robe) with minimal pattern and, whereas the fashion was to fasten
ones chapan with a sash, Hindus and Jews were only allowed to tie
their clothes with a hemp rope, probably to ensure that they did not
carry concealed weapons in their sashes. Hindus were also instructed
to wear distinctive square hats, tight shalwar (pants), leather shoes, and
even a distinctive hair style so that they could be easily distinguished
from Muslim men who, at that time, generally shaved their entire
head.28 Alexander Burnes observed:
They are not permitted to build temples, nor set up idols, nor
walk in procession: they do not ride within the walls of the city,
and must wear a peculiar dress. They pay the jizyu, or poll-tax,
which varies from four to eight rupees a year; but this they only
render in common with others, not Mahommedans. They must
never abuse or ill-use a Mahommedan. When the king passes
their quarter of the city, they must draw up, and wish him
health and prosperity; when on horseback outside the city, they
must dismount if they meet his majesty or the Cazee. They are
not permitted to purchase female slaves, as an infidel would defile a believer; nor do any of them bring their families beyond
the Oxus. For these sacrifices the Hindoos in Bokhara live unmolested, and, in all trials and suits, have equal justice with the
Mahommedans. I could hear of no forcible instance of conversion to Islam, though three or four individuals had changed
their creed in as many years. The deportment of these people is
most sober and orderly;one would imagine that the tribe had
renounced laughter, if he judged by the gravity of their countenances. They themselves, however, speak highly of their privileges, and are satisfied at the celerity with which they can realise
money, though it be at the sacrifice of their prejudices (Burnes
1834, I: 285-6).
In only a few locations across the diaspora were Hindus allowed to
construct free-standing temples. In Central Asia, as in most diaspora
locations, Hindus dedicated rooms in their caravanserais to function as
religious libraries and places of worship. These rooms were generally
53
equipped with a small altar surrounded by stone figures or, in later

years, portrait images of Hindu deities. The temple room of a rather
old Hindu caravanserai in Tashkent reportedly housed an icon of Kali
that had at some point in time been brought from Banaras, although
the Indians who lived in that caravanserai in the late nineteenth century could not say when (Dmitriev 1972: 240).
Available sources indicate that Hindu communities in Iran were, occasionally, allowed to build temples outside of their caravanserais. At
the end of the seventeenth century, John Fryer recorded the existence
of two temples in the village of Naoband, a short distance north-east of
Bandar Abbas, where the large number of Hindus living in that busy
port city celebrated their festivals (Fryer 1912, II: 336-7). There are also
numerous accounts of a remarkable Hindu temple in Baku (in modern
Azerbaijan), an important commercial centre on the Russo-Iranian
trade routes traversing both the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian
Sea (Forster 1970, II: 256-9, 262; Keppel 1827: 291-4). This temple, situated some twenty-five kilometres to the north-east of the city, was located in the vicinity of a wealth of liquid petroleum deposits, or
naphtha, the flammable gases from which were incorporated into the
Hindus religious rituals. The temple was properly known by the Sanskrit name jvala mukhi (flame-mouthed), one of the less-common
names of the Hindu goddess Durga. In addition to servicing the needs
of the local Multani merchants, the jvala mukhi temple of Baku attracted pilgrims from across India.
From Multan to Shikarpur

During the late eighteenth century, the popular identification of the
majority of the Indian diaspora merchants changed from Multani to
Shikarpuri. It has been suggested that the designations Multani and
Shikarpuri referred to Indian merchants who operated two distinct
merchant diaspora networks (Markovits 2000: 29-30, 37-8, 60-69). A
contrary thesis, put forth here, argues that the merchants referred to
by the designations in question were of the same extraction. The
change in terminology was precipitated not by the emergence of one
diaspora over the ashes of another, but by a combination of factors
which contributed to the decline of Multan as the financial capital of
north-west India and the corresponding rise of Shikarpur as, for reasons to be detailed below, many of the Multani firms relocated their
centres of operation to that city.
It was observed above that Multan (Mulastana) was an important
frontier commercial centre already during the ancient period, and this
importance increased under Delhi Sultanate and Mughal patronage.
54
SCOTT LEVI
That the province of Multan was regularly granted to Delhi Sultanate

and Mughal heirs apparent is indicative its political, strategic and economic stature (Dasti 1998).29 During the Mughal era, Multan was also
a mint town and an important centre of agricultural production and
manufacturing. Cotton textiles enjoyed an especially prominent position among the regions products; the outlying towns and villages supplied the Multani commercial houses with finished materials that were
destined to be exported to any of a number of distant markets.
Even during the Mughal era, however, Multans prosperity was occasionally threatened. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the
commercial advantage of Multan was diminished by the silting and
shifting of the Indus, a development which denied merchants access to
the important riverine routes of commerce customarily used to transport merchandise from Multan to the Arabian Sea ports of Thatta and
Lahori Bandar (Tavernier 1712: 62; Singh 1991: 187-91). The citys importance as a frontier-trading centre was also somewhat challenged
during the periods when the Mughals occupied Qandahar, a coveted
military outpost and the most important commercial centre on the
Indo-Iranian caravan routes. Qandahar, however, suffered from a
chronically turbulent political climate. Throughout the Mughal era,
Qandahar was the object of a nearly perpetual contest between the
Mughals and the Safavids, and this resulted in the city being placed
under siege some fifteen times and changing hands on a dozen separate occasions. Thus, even during the Mughals extended periods of occupation of Qandahar (such as 1595-1622 and 1638-49), Indian family
firms chose to keep their central offices in the more predictable markets of Multan.
Multan continued to function as north-west Indias primary commercial centre throughout most of the eighteenth century, remaining largely unaffected even by Nadir Shahs 1739 invasion of the Mughal Empire and sack of Delhi. However, as the Mughals weakened and lost
their ability to maintain control of their territories, the protracted process of Mughal decentralisation sent the city into a century-long period
of crisis. Between 1749 and 1849 Multan suffered from a series of Afghan, Maratha, Sikh and finally British invasions and occupations, reducing it from a position among the greatest early modern international money markets and commercial centres to a regional trading
town (Khan 1983: 111-66).
As the commercial climate in Multan worsened during these invasions, many Multani financial houses chose to relocate to Shikarpur, a
smaller city in the neighbouring province of Sind. Of paramount importance to this decision was Shikarpurs location in Durrani Afghan
territory and the need of the Multani financial houses to maintain their
close relationship with the Durrani ruling elite and Afghan Powinda
55
nomads, the primary carriers of bulk commodities from India to Central Asia and eastern Iran.30 Compared to Multan, Shikarpur was a
young urban centre of minor importance (it was founded in ca. 1616
as a hunting retreat). The merchant households, however, found the citys location agreeable as it was situated south-west of Multan, near the
Indus river, and therefore offered access to the Indian Ocean ports as
well as a convenient proximity to the Bolan Pass route to Qandahar,
the first capital of Durrani Afghanistan, from where caravan traffic
could continue westward to Iran or northward to Central Asia. Furthermore, the region was heavily populated by the Lohani, some of whom
participated in this trade as sedentary commercialists operating financial houses while others carried on commerce as transporters of bulk
commodities between India and Central Asia. The decision of the Multanis to move to Shikarpur was greatly encouraged by the achievements and patronage of the Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani dynasty (reigned 1747-73), who, by 1768, had assumed control over much of north-west India and extended his
northern border as far as the Amu Darya. Multanis had been active in
Afghan territory for centuries, and following their move to Shikarpur
their commercial interests appear to have increased markedly. Shikarpuri merchants were nearly ubiquitous in urban and rural Afghanistan, and they are even reported to have played a dominant role in the
financial administration of Durrani Afghanistan.
Noting his impressions of north-west India during his travels in the
1820s and 1830s, Charles Masson reported that Shikarpur was a very
wealthy city and that its principal citizens were Hindu bankers and
moneylenders who maintained close commercial connections with
their agents, dispersed throughout Iran and Central Asia. Summarising the Multani firms migration to Shikarpur, Masson suggested that:
as the city [Shikarpur] is not understood to be one of great antiquity, it is possible that the influx of Hindus to it is not of very
distant date, and that it was occasioned by the fluctuations of political power. As the existence of some great centre of monetary
transactions, in this part of the world, was always indispensable
for the facilities of the commerce carried on in it, it is not unlikely, looking at the facts within our knowledge connected with
the condition of the adjacent country during the last two centuries, that Multan preceded Shikarpur as the great money mart,
and that from it the Hindus removed, converting the insignificant village of the chace [hinterland] into a city of the first rate
and consequence (Masson 1844, I: 353).
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SCOTT LEVI
Masson goes on to refer to Shikarpur as the great money-mart of Central Asia and, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, sources
repeatedly refer to Shikarpuri merchants as the dominant agents in the
Indian diaspora (Masson 1844, I: 354, 360). In 1831, Alexander Burnes
observed that Shikarpuris even had agents in Multan, and he reported
meeting in that city forty Shroffs, (money changers) chiefly natives of
Shikarpoor (Burnes 1834, III: 111).
In an effort to distinguish the Shikarpuris of his study from the earlier Multani merchants, Markovits endeavours to cast doubt upon Massons assertion that the two designations were at different times applied
to individuals of the same extraction. Instead, he suggests that the Multani network had largely atrophied by the second half of the eighteenth
century, when the Shikarpuri diaspora emerged sui generis in response
to developments in Durrani Afghanistan.31 However, there seems to be
no compelling reason to contest the conclusion advanced by Masson
that the position of Shikarpur as the great money mart of that time
was a product of the migrations of Multani merchants who, during the
late eighteenth century, relocated their firms to Shikarpur in order to
benefit from a more stable political environment and take advantage of
new opportunities under Durrani patronage. In terms of the decline of
the Multani network, while it is certainly the case, as observed by Markovits, that the Multani communities in Iran underwent a period of decline in the eighteenth century, it should also be stressed that this was
largely due to the draconian and predatory policies of Nadir Shah, discussed below. There is no available evidence suggesting any disruption
in the continuity of the Multani communities in eighteenth-century
Central Asia. Furthermore, there is no clear ethnic distinction between
the Shikarpuris and Multanis. Markovits recognises that the term Shikarpuri was applied to merchants who came to Shikarpur from many
different regions (he fittingly describes the city as a kind of late-eighteenth-century Bania melting pot). As noted above, the designation
Multani also was not a static ethnonym. Both of these terms referred
to a diverse, dynamic conglomeration of merchant communities that
incorporated Khatris, as well as Bhatias, Bohras Lohanis and various
other castes associated with the designation Bania. Considering the
available evidence, it seems more convincing that the vast majority of
the Indian merchants attracted to Shikarpur came from Multan, either
directly or via their posts in the diaspora.32
It should also be noted that, while many Multanis migrated to Shikarpur in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those
Multanis whose commercial interests in the diaspora would not have
benefited by relocating to Shikarpur and associating with the Durrani
administration stayed in Multan. This explains why, as considerable
numbers of merchants identified as Shikarpuris took advantage of
57
commercial opportunities in locations in and adjacent to Durrani territory in Afghanistan, far eastern Iran and Central Asia, reports of Multanis conducting commercial operations focused outside of the Durrani sphere of influence, primarily in western Iran, the Caucasus and
Russia, continued well into the nineteenth century. Considering this,
Markovits concludes that the Multani network in nineteenth-century
Russia was apparently distinct from the Shikarpuri network operating
in the Central Asian khanates (Markovits 2000: 62). The degree to
which this was actually the case is open to question. It should not be
overlooked, for example, that while Alexander Burnes was in the office
of an Indian firm in Kabul in the 1830s, he was offered the opportunity
to purchase bills of exchange (hundis) cashable at branch offices in
Nizhny Novgorod, Astrakhan and Bukhara (Burnes 1834, I: 169-70).
Thus, while diaspora communities in various locations differed considerably in terms of their commercial specialisations and the social conditions in which they lived, there is insufficient evidence to support
any argument for a qualitative dichotomy in the Shikarpuri-Multani
merchant diaspora; it existed as a singular phenomenon.
It is generally agreed upon that Shikarpur emerged as the financial
capital of north-western India during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Still, first-hand accounts report that Multan, Lahore, Amritsar, and other large cities continued to function as the premier centres for the transportation of commodities from north-west India. Masson observed that, Multan is said to have decreased in trade
since it fell into the hands of the Sikhs, yet its bazaars continued well
and reasonably supplied with articles of traffic and consumption. There
are still numerous bankers, and manufacturers of silk and cotton
goods, and[Multan] has an extensive foreign trade with the regions
west of the Indus (Masson 1844, I: 395). The trade of Multan did indeed undergo a decline following the Sikh conquest, but this recession
was temporary and Multan quickly reclaimed its role as a commercial
centre, although without the distinction of being the north-western
centre of Indias great family firms.33 Mohan Lal confirms this, reporting that Shikarpur cannot rival Bahawalpur, Multan, and Dera Ghazi
Khan in commerce, but it is inhabited by a race of people who conduct
a prosperous trade in Afghanistan, Turkistan, Khorasan, and part of
Persia. It has no manufacture of any description, but derives its distinction solely from its situation in the midst of the commercial routes
(Mohan Lal 1971: 411). Relating his impressions of Shikarpur, Mohan
Lal described a commercial climate so tense and competitive that he
was unable to find an informant willing to provide him with details on
the nature of the commerce in that city. Still, his visit to Shikarpurs
bazaar evoked a marvel unsurpassed in this experienced travellers numerous accounts of Indian, Afghan and Central Asian markets:
58
SCOTT LEVI
I feasted my eyes with the beauty of the bazaar at Shikarpur.

After passing through lanes closely peopled, I stepped into the
large bazaar, and found it full. There was no shop in which I
did not observe half a dozen Khatri merchants, who appeared to
me to have no time to speak to the purchasers. Such was the
briskness of trade going on in the bazaar It occurred to me
that the reason why Shikarpur surpasses Amritsar in wealth is,
that its inhabitants, who are for the most part Khatris, have
spread themselves in almost all the regions of Central Asia,
whence they return loaded with gains to their families at Shikarpur. There is not so much commerce carried on at Shikarpur, I
believe, as in Multan and Amritsar, but you will see all the shopkeepers writing Hoondees, or bills of exchange, which you can
take in the name of their agents at Bombay, Sindh, the Panjab,
Khorasan, Afghanistan, part of Persia, and Russia (Mohan Lal
1971: 438).
This account is corroborated by the observation of Alexander Burnes
that Shikarpurs importance to the trade of the Indusdoes not result
from any superiority in its home manufactures, but from its extensive
money transactions, which establish a commercial connection between
it and many remote marts (Burnes 1843: 54).
Challenges, Decline and Adaptation

The second quarter of the eighteenth century was arguably the most
traumatic period in the history of the Multani diaspora. Iran had occupied a central position in the Multanis diaspora commerce from the
beginning, but the Indian merchant communities in Iran suffered severely during the 1722 Ghilzai Afghan invasion of Isfahan and occupation of much of Iran. According to the chronicle of one Armenian observer, the invading Afghan forces decimated the Hindu community of
Isfahan. The Afghans reportedly demanded 25,000 tomans (a considerable sum) from the Hindus as their indemnity but, because the Hindus capital was engaged in investments, they were able to raise only
20,000 on such short notice. The Afghans responded violently and,
fearing for their lives, many Hindus fled to safer places or returned
home, while others are reported as having been so distraught at their
financial ruin that they drank poison or simply died of grief. According
to one Armenian observer:
Only a few Indians were left in the town; these people had advanced money to the Muhammadans against promissory notes
59
(sanad) and jewels, gold, silver and house ornaments (zinat).

Mahmud took all these valuables from them without payment,
not even regarding them as forming part of their indemnity.
The shops of those Multanis who had died or had fled were consequently closed, but Mahmud had them opened and seized all
their contents (Gilanentz 1959: 36).
Anti-Hindu activities continued in the wake of the Afghans ejection
from Iran by Nadir Shah Afshar (reigned 1736-47). Information regarding Nadir Shahs specific policies toward the Indian merchant communities is scant, although reports from the Indian communities of later
years suggest that Nadir Shah used their unprotected status (by Islamic
law, Hindus, unlike Jews or Christians, were not considered dhimmis,
people of the book, and were therefore not required to be protected)
as a pretence for confiscating much of their wealth and property. This
traumatic experience remained in the Hindus collective memory even
as late as 1824, when the community of Indian merchants in Baku reported to George Keppel that, although they had no complaints about
their treatment in Iran at that time, Nadir Shah treated their predecessors with great cruelty; impaling them, and putting them to several
kinds of tortures (Keppel 1827: 294).
Prosperity returned to Indian merchants in Iran in the decades following Nadir Shahs assassination in 1747. The founder of the Zand dynasty, Muhammad Karim Khan (reigned 1751-79), effectively seized
power in southern Iran and reinstated a policy of tolerance toward foreign merchant communities, especially notable in the encouragement
of British commercial activity in the Persian Gulf port of Bushahr and
in the return of significant numbers of Indian merchants to Iranian
markets. Government-sponsored anti-Hindu activity in Iran had long
since come to an end by 1802, when Edward Waring reported that, in
Bushahr, the Hindoos live unmolested by the Persians, and are neither
insulted nor oppressed by the government (Waring 1807: 3-4). The
Hindus welcomed return to Iranian markets was likewise observed by
George Forster who, in the late eighteenth century, encountered some
one hundred Indian families living in their own private quarter in the
eastern Iranian town of Tarshish, where they conducted business without molestation or insult (Forster 1970, II: 186). Forster also observed
significant Hindu merchant communities in the Iranian towns of
Meshed, Yazd, Kashan and Qazvin, and he reported that, although
there were a number of Indian communities active in Iranian towns
on the shores of the Caspian Sea, there were larger Indian communities in the numerous Iranian ports on the Persian Gulf engaged in
maritime commerce. Indian firms, especially Shikarpuris and Sikhs,
continued to send agents to Iran throughout the nineteenth and twen-
60
SCOTT LEVI
tieth centuries, and they exhibited an impressive ability to adapt to

changing circumstances by taking advantage of their position as British
subject and engaging in a wide variety of commercial activities.
The Indian diaspora communities in Central Asia also suffered a disruption in their commercial activities, although not until the late nineteenth century, and without reprieve or return. This was largely a result
of Russian colonial expansion into sedentary Central Asia, which began
in 1865 with the conquest of Tashkent, soon to be the colonial capital
of Russian Turkestan. Already in April 1866, the Russian colonial administration turned its attention to the several thousand Indian merchants in its territory. Whereas their Muslim predecessors had viewed
the Indian moneylenders as a necessary, even desirable contribution to
society, the Russian colonial administration viewed the Indians as an
undesirable threat whose usurious activities were contrary to the best
interests of the Russian colonial population.
Considering the Great Game political rivalry between Russia and
Great Britain in the nineteenth century, one might expect to find the
Russian colonial authorities troubled by the presence of several thousand Indian merchants British subjects and potential spies widely
dispersed throughout Russian colonial territories. The British did, in
fact, enlist some Indians as spies, and on occasion some of these spies
are known to have posed as merchants in order to gain entry to Russian Turkestan. But, at least in terms of the policies he directed toward
the Indian merchant communities in his newly acquired territory, the
Governor General of Russian Turkestan, Konstantin von Kaufman, was
not overly concerned with British espionage. Russian archival records
indicate that Kaufman even rejected numerous proposals advanced by
his subordinates suggesting that the Russians evict the Indians from
their territory.34
To be sure, Kaufman did consider the Indians moneylending activities to be exploitative and he was particularly concerned with the Indians ownership of an increasing amount of agricultural land farmland that had been used as collateral for loans that had defaulted. Thus,
for Kaufman, the threat of a British invasion of Central Asia must have
seemed much less pressing than the Indians moneylending operations, which, one plot of land at a time, were effectively transferring
ownership over large portions of Russian colonial territory into Indian
hands! Still, Kaufman was sensitive to the Indians contribution to the
Central Asian economy in their role as transregional traders, and he recognised that their rural credit interests were crucial to the well being
of his subjects. The abrupt removal of the Indians from Central Asia
was therefore not desirable: to do so without first establishing institutions that could take their place would wreak havoc upon his regions
61
agrarian economy and ultimately lead to economic collapse and famine.

Rather than evict the Indians, in 1877, Kaufman published a circular
that outlined a series of policies strategically designed to undermine
the Indians moneylending operations.35 The most important of these
was prohibiting the Indians from foreclosing on loans that had been
made using agricultural property as collateral. The publication of this
circular sent shock waves through the Indian communities: Central
Asian farmers refused to repay even the principle on their debts, and
the Russian administration refused to respond to the Indians complaints. It is conceivable that the Indians might have been able to adapt
to the restrictions imposed upon them and shift their emphasis to urban moneylending and long distance trade. But the Indians long-term
commercial prospects in Central Asia were terminated by Kaufmans
concomitant implementation of a state-sponsored Russian colonial
banking system, rapidly expanded throughout the region. This measure effectively ended the Indians ability to continue in their unique
role as Central Asias premier financiers and removed Indian moneylenders from their intermediary position between agricultural producers and the market. Ultimately, Kaufmans policies brought about the
Indians rapid withdrawal from Central Asia in favour of emerging opportunities elsewhere.
Conclusion
For millennia there has been a regular movement of people and commodities between India and the lands to the north and west. This grew
considerably after the eleventh-century Ghaznavid invasions of India
and their establishment of the first in a series of Turko-Afghan dynasties that ruled in north India for over seven centuries. Throughout this
period, Multan functioned as north-western Indias premier commercial centre for international trade and, in the years that followed, the
economic opportunities offered by this frontier town fostered the development of a number of great merchant family firms, the agents of
which were collectively identified in historical literature as Multanis.
These heavily capitalised, caste-based family firms enjoyed several centuries of economic prosperity during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal
eras, one result of which was the extension of the Multanis commercial activities beyond the boundaries of the subcontinent. By the middle
of the sixteenth century, they had established diaspora communities in
a number of locations in Central Asia and Iran and, within just one
century, the population of Multanis living abroad grew to number in
the tens of thousands.
62
SCOTT LEVI
At first glance, the ability of Indian merchants to maintain thriving

communities in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran appears to be a
historical aberration, as they represent a significant Hindu population
in Muslim states: individuals technically unprotected by Islamic law.
However, with only a few notable exceptions, residents of the Indian
diaspora communities enjoyed the steadfast protection of their Muslim
hosts. This can be attributed to several important factors. Most obviously, the Indian merchants were widely respected as large-scale
transregional traders whose fortitude, technical knowledge, and commercial connections were valuable resources for the state. They supplied their host societies with necessary commodities and a commercial outlet for their own products, and they provided an important
source of tax income for the state treasury. But more important than
their transregional trade was the Indians penchant for interest-oriented moneylending ventures, including the operation of elaborate
rural credit systems. This promoted the expansion of their host states
agricultural tax bases and, by extending a monetised economy into the
countryside, also facilitated the states collection of tax revenues in
cash. In this way, Indians in the diaspora served as a bond that connected the economies of their host societies with the vast resources of
Indias agrarian economy, which they expertly employed as an engine
for investment in foreign markets.
In an effort to illuminate the numerous caste and religious identities
of the groups that comprised the diaspora, the discussion above has deconstructed such vague terms as Multani, Shikarpuri and Bania as
used by early modern authors. It has also been argued that the Indian
diaspora exhibited a remarkable historical continuity for nearly four
centuries. Variations in political and economic climates prompted the
Indians to extend their diaspora in search of new commercial opportunities, and to evacuate problem regions and re-establish themselves
elsewhere when necessary. Still, whether they were designated Multani or Shikarpuri, the Indian merchants involved in diaspora commerce were a part of a unique, unified entity.
In the 1870s, Konstantin von Kaufman, the Governor General of
Russian colonial Central Asia, implemented a series of revolutionary
policies that strategically targeted the Indian merchants in his territory,
undermined their business interests, and, by the end of the nineteenth
century, effectively brought an end to the Indian communities in Central Asia. In Afghanistan, Indians maintained an active commercial
presence right up to 1947. In Iran, notwithstanding the disruptions of
the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Indian commercial activities have continued on into the twenty-first century. Indeed, the celebrated Indian Hinduja family, operators of one of the wealthiest com-
63
mercial firms in the world, began as a modest Shikarpuri firm in early

twentieth-century Iran.
In the end, the socio-political trauma associated with Partition provoked the mass migration of the Shikarpuri-Multani firms from Pakistan, largely to Bombay. From this new centre, the Indian firms directed their attention away from Afghanistan and Central Asia in favour
of emerging commercial opportunities literally across the globe. By the
beginning of the twenty-first century, large numbers of ShikarpuriMultani merchants had established a vast network of communities that
stretched from Hong Kong, Manila, and Singapore in the east across
much of Africa and Europe to the Caribbean islands, Central America, Canada, and the United States in the west.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
For further discussion, see Tololyan 1996.

R. Cohen 1997: ix; Wink 1987: 351; Tololyan 1996: 11.
For further discussion, see Safran 1991: 83-4.
A remarkable exception to this rule can be found in S.D. Goiteins study of the social
and economic operation of a medieval Jewish merchant diaspora communities operating out of Fustat, modern Cairo. Goiten 1967-88.
See Map 4B in Habib 1986.
Wink 1990: 166-89; Durrani 1991: 11-2; Dasti 1990: 247-8.
Zia ud-Din Barani 1860-62: 310-12. See also Raychaudhuri and Habib 1984: 85; Jain
1929: 10; Dasti 1990: 249; Jackson 1999: 245-9.
English translations of these documents can be found in Levi 2002: 267-9.
Cited in Druhe 1970: 95.
For discussion of these records, see Mukminova 1985: 61-8; Gopal 1992: 11-3; Dale
1994: 63-4, 75-6; Levi 2002: 101-2, 267-9.
Based on his patronym, the cloth-printer identified as Lahori Chitgar ibn Lalu was
most likely a Hindu. Gujar was the name of a predominantly pastoral Panjabi tribe
subject to a policy of sedentarisation by emperor Akbar in the late sixteenth century.
Singh 1991: 112, 132, 259, 265, 29.
Alam also suggests that Multanis had to take legal recourse in the local qad. In addition to establishing an Indo-Muslim commercial presence in the muhallas (neighborhoods) of sixteenth-century Central Asia, however, the preponderance of references to
Muslim Indians in Central Asian legal records seems to suggest that, unlike their
non-Muslim counterparts, Muslim Indians in Central Asia were expected to conduct
their business within the parameters allowed by the sharat as interpreted by the local legal administration. The social distinction between non-Muslim Indians on one
hand, and Muslims on the other, should not be interpreted to suggest that these communities did not interrelate. For example, commercialists such as Darya Khan are
known to have employed non-Muslim Indian artisans, such as Lahori Chitgar ibn
Lalu. See also the case of the Muslim Indian Hamid who had partnerships with two
Hindus, Ardas and Banda Minkab, in Astrakhan and Moscow. Antonova 1958: 241-8.
Della Valle 1972: 39; Kemp 1959: 36; Olearius 1667: 299.
Durrani 1990: 103; Wink 1990: 166-9; Wink 1997: 115-9; Dale 1994: 62-4.
64
SCOTT LEVI
15 See especially Markovits 2000: 46-7, 251-2. See also Russell 1969, II: 441-2; Burton
1851: 310-17; Pandey 1992: 129-30; Ray 1984: 244.
16 In the Central Provinces alone, Russell identified twenty sub-castes of Banias, both
Hindu and Jain, the most important being Agarwala, Oswal and Parwar. Despite Russells identification of the Banias as a distinct caste, he acknowledges the possibility
that it is merely an occupational term applied to a number of distinct castes. (Russell 1969, II: 111-61). According to Ibbetson, the word Banya is generally used for
shop-keeper all over the Panjab, not excepting even the frontier where Kirar is the
more usual term; and it is just possible that in some cases other mercantile castes
have been included in this figure It is sometimes said that Banya is no true caste at
all, but merely an occupation term equivalent to shop-keeper, and that the great divisions of the Banyas, the Aggarwals, Oswals, and the like, really occupy the position
of castes; and this is in a sense true. Ibbetson 1916: 242-3. Timberg also argues that
it was much more likely that, based on their similar occupations, the term was applied to a variety of castes, the members of which, over time, acknowledged a common identity as Banias despite their various endogamous caste affiliations. Timberg
1978: 148-60.
17 For the original citation, see Tavernier 1712, I: 62. This is echoed in Della Valle 1972:
39.
18 Muzaffar Alam observes that the extraordinary strong Khatri participation in this
trade, it should be noted, seems to have coincided with the rise and growth of Mughal power in India. Alam 1994: 211.
19 This is confirmed by Elphinstone who reported that, in Afghanistan, Hindus are often employed about the court in offices connected with money or accounts; the duty
of steward and treasurer about every great man, is exercised either by a Hindoo or a
Persian. There have even been Hindoo governors of provinces, and at this moment
the great government of Peshawer has been put into the hands of a person of that religion. Elphinstone 1839, I: 414-5.
20 Ibbetson reported that, in the nineteenth century, the Bhatias were numerous in Sind
and Gujarat, but that their region of origin appears to have been Bhatner, Jaisalmer
and Rajputana. Wink also notes that, there was a close connection between the Bhatts or Bhats of Mada (modern Jaisalmer district) and the Caulukyas of Gujarat in the
mid-twelfth century. In an effort to locat the Bhatia homeland, Anthony OBrien establishes the presence of the Bhatia as a community in or adjacent to Sindh from
the 7th century onwards. This is supported by a reference in the Chachnamah to the
king of Batiah in eighth-century Sind. According to Ibbetson, they were distinctly below the Khatris in social status but, like the Khatris, the Bhatia had a long tradition
of maintaining widely dispersed commercial communities to the northwest. Ibbetson
1916: 250; Wink 1997: 231-2; OBrien 1996: 30-58; Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg 1979:
43.
21 Ludhiana, east of Amritsar, was the Khatris primary centre of activity in nineteenthcentury Punjab. Ibbetson 1916: 248.
22 Russell 1969, III: 456-63; Dale 1994: 58; Sharma 1984: 185-207. Sharma notes that
the term Marwari dates back to the establishment of Marwari business houses outside Rajasthan, particularly in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, since the time of Akbar and
Shahjahan. It has been argued by Max Weber that, due to the strict restrictions of
their faith, Jain merchants commercial activities focused on banking and moneylending and they rarely ventured far from their home. Dale, however, locates members of
the Marwari Jain Oswal caste in seventeenth-century Astrakhan. Furthermore, Sharma and L. C. Jain both note that business ventures did, in fact, frequently take Jain
merchants to distant markets. Thus, although L.C. Jain notes that the designation
Marwari could refer to either Jains or Hindus, specifically Vaishnavites, at least
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
65
some of the Marwaris who constituted a minority of the population of the Indian
merchant diaspora were most certainly adherents to the Jain religion. Sharma 1984:
185-6; Weber 1992: 200; Jain 1929: 29-30; Dale 1994: 58-60.
Antonova 1965: 56-7, 61-2, 65-7, 82-4, 113-4, 114-5, 128-33, 135. See also Gopal 1988:
7-8; Dale 1994: 59-60.
Although Marwaris were likely to have been present in Central Asia long before then,
the earliest documents available specifically referring to Marwaris in Central Asia
date to the nineteenth century. Levi 2002: 109-10.
It should be noted that the term commenda refers to such business partnerships as
practiced in medieval Europe. Murat C
izakca, principally drawing on materials from
the Ottoman archives, has demonstrated that medieval European merchants learned
such techniques from their Muslim counterparts, who generally referred to the partnership system as mudaraba, from the word mudarib (Turk.), meaning an agent
(Ar., mudaraba). C
izakca 1996: 4-62; Udovitch 1970: 170-248; Udovitch 1979: 25574.
As noted above, the Bhatias were established in Sind even prior to the thirteenth century, when many of them converted to Islam under Firuz Shah Tughluq. Wink 1997:
231-2. According to Russell, however, in the nineteenth century, those Bhatia merchants whose commercial interests led them abroad were exclusively Hindu. Russell
1969, I: 350. Markovits suggests that the term Lohana was actually used as a sort of
general designation for all merchants of Sind, except Khatris and Bhatias. Markovits
2000: 251.
The discussion below summarizes a number of conclusions advanced in Levi 2002.
Sadr al-Din Aini 1959: 73-5; Mohan Lal 1971: 101; Olufsen 1911: 296-7; Dmitriev
1972: 239.
The tradition of granting Multan to the heir apparent was common among the Delhi
Sultans and Mughal emperors alike. In addition to its commercial value, these rulers
attached a great strategic value to the province in terms of protecting their territory
in India from foreign invasions.
For further discussion, see Levi forthcoming.
In his own words, Markovits suggests that Shikarpur was the centre of a financial
network which developed in the second half of the eighteenth century in direct relation to the rise of the Durrani Empire. He apparently contradicts this by elsewhere
stating that Hindu merchants who lived in dispersed colonies in the Islamic lands of
Central Asia who had been known as Multanisgradually became known as Shikarpuris. Markovits 2000: 29-30, 60-62.
Jains mutual identification of these merchants as Shikarpuri Multanis further suggests that the former is derived from the latter. Jain 1929: 33.
The re-emergence of the designation Multani among Indians in Bukhara at the end
of the nineteenth century suggests that some of the Shikarpuri firms may have
moved their central offices back to Multan. See Olufsen 1911: 297; Curzon 1889: 172.
Alam has uncovered a few Multani financial houses that maintained their identification with that city even after having moved the center of their commercial activity to
Shikarpur. Alam 1994: 223-4. See also Ray 1984: 253-5.
The discussion between Kaufman and his subordinates can be found in the Central
State Historical Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, fond I-1, opis 11, delo 39. See
Levi 2002: 250-58.
Central State Historical Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, fond I-1, opis 11, delo
39: 16-17b.
3 We Lost our Gift of Expression

Loss of the Mother Tongue among South Asians in East
Africa, 1880-2000
Gijsbert Oonk
Introduction1
Contact between Asians, Africans, and Europeans in East Africa has a
long history and was largely influenced by the economics and politics
of colonisation and the emergence of nation-states.2 This long-standing
relationship resulted in a particular East African Asian culture in
which Gujarati (Indian), Swahili (East African) and European cultures
were adapted, transformed, and re-invented. The migration of Asians
from one continent to another, where they became a minority, resulted
in the development of various strategies of adaptation, with the group
adopting new socio-cultural values while maintaining some of their original values. Despite the information we have on the number of migrants, their religious backgrounds and their reasons for migration, we
know very little about the cultural baggage of these migrants and even
less about how and why this changed after their migration.3 This cultural change was not a natural, harmonious process; rather there were
many conflicts, which required painful decisions to be made.
One such decision was the exchange of the Gujarati language in favour of the Swahili and English languages. The first generation of Gujaratis in East Africa knew how to read, write, and speak Gujarati,
whereas the third-generation migrants may speak Gujarati with their
parents but prefer to use English among themselves and they also do
not know how to read or write Gujarati. This exchange of Gujarati in
favour of English was the result of individual and community-based decisions. It should not be seen as a simplified process of a minority
community adapting to globalisation, or westernisation by instrumentally choosing the more global language, the language of the business
elite. On the contrary, as we will see, the colonial state promoted English and German education in a period when the Gujaratis successfully
supported and sponsored their own Indian schools, using Gujarati as
the vernacular language. The Germans in Tanganyika and the British
68
GIJSBERT OONK
in Uganda and Kenya were not able to implement their education systems because Gujaratis refused to support the interests of colonial
states. They followed their own cultural and economical agenda. Interestingly, the Gujaratis themselves promoted the English language
when the independent East African nations started to promote Swahili,
the vernacular East African language. This was the consequence of intended and unintended Government policies and the realisation by Gujaratis that their future did not lay in India but in Africa and the West.
This struggle over the teaching language is one of the most important variables of ethnic identity. Together with religion, food and dress
habits, and a shared history [real or imagined], language is among the
key variables of most definitions and descriptions of ethnicity. The
maintenance of aspects of Indian culture(s), in the form of the reproduction of language, is seen as a key element in many definitions of
diaspora.4 In the books introduction, I have shown that there is a tendency to unify the South Asian diaspora in the diaspora debate. In
this article, I emphasise that migrants make their own adaptations to
local circumstances. The consequence may well be that they do not
identify with their ancestors culture back home. It is therefore intriguing to see how the shift in identity and the choice of language occurred among the Gujarati businessmen of East Africa. The choice of
the teaching language was instrumentally made. The Indian/Gujarati
community had an active and successful lobby in this matter.
In this article, I use the image of three generations of Hindu Lohanas in Tanzania:5 (1) the pioneers (born 1880-1920), who decided to
settle with their families in East Africa; (2) the Asian East Africans
(born 1920-1960), who made East Africa their home; and (3) the internationalists (born 1960-2000), whose roots are as Asian East Africans, but who are economically oriented towards the west and culturally towards both west and east. This typology reflects the change in
identity from one oriented towards the Gujarat region to an international orientation. The Lohanas lost a part of their primary Gujarati
identity and gained an international identity. This change was, however, not welcomed by all of the communitys members. Some expressed their concern about the loss of the gift of expression.
In this article, I focus solely on Hindu Lohana families.6 The research was based on the history of twenty Hindu Lohana families who
have lived in East Africa for three or more generations.7 The results of
this research are particularly accurate for Dar es Salaam and the Coastal Region, where most of the interviews were conducted.8 Wherever relevant, I discuss the variation among and within the various families
and relate these families to the more ideal type of family.9 Furthermore, archival material has been added, especially data related to the
educational and language policies of the German [in German Tanganyi-
WE LOST
OUR GIFT OF EXPRESSION
69
ka] and British colonial governments. In general, the development of

Indian education in East Africa is a much-neglected area of research.
At best, it is hinted at in general histories on Asians in East Africa.
Moreover, the use of sometimes very valuable German sources in the
Tanganyika National Archives (TNA) is rare because of the language
problems faced by many English- and/or Swahili-speaking scholars.
This article is the first attempt to fill this gap.
I also argue that there is a need to study language adaptation as a local bottom-up process; local, in the sense of a well-defined geographical and historical area and bottom-up in the sense that we choose to
take the perspective of the agent, the one who accepts, refuses or
mixes new language opportunities. By pursuing this perspective, we
may gather a view of how the range of choices is defined by the actors
of change themselves. This may provide us with insights into the economic and cultural agendas of individuals as well as groups in a fastchanging economic and cultural environment.
My argumentation is divided into five sections. First, we introduce the
general migration history of South Asians in East Africa. Here the
main focus will be on the absence of Hindu women in East Africa. The
second section looks at the life histories of early Lohana migrants who
settled in East Africa between 1880 and 1920. Here, the main aim is to
show the emphasis on their knowledge of reading and writing Gujarati. The third section highlights the second-generation Lohanas efforts
to establish Indian Schools that would teach Indian languages. The
fourth section coincides with a dramatic shift in the colonial history of
East Africa, when the East African colonies became the independent
countries of Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. These countries no longer
subsidised Indian schools, so this option was no longer available. Hindu Lohanas opted for English-language education, and the third generation eventually forgot how to read and write Gujarati. In the fifth
and final section, I emphasise the consequences of these findings in
relation to the discourses around the diaspora concept.
Migration and Settlement of South Asians in East Africa

In the nineteenth century, trade between South Asia and East Africa
was constrained by the rhythm of the monsoons. From November to
March, the famous, beautiful dhows sailed from West India to East Africa and between April and October, they made the return journey. The
trade in cotton textiles, ivory, and spices was profitable but dangerous.
Many traders did not return home safely. Rough seas, pirates, and various diseases took the lives of many traders and early adventurers.
70
GIJSBERT OONK
It was only in the late nineteenth century that some South Asian traders started to settle in Zanzibar and on the East African coast. These
early South Asian settlers are nowadays seen as the pioneers of many
South Asian family business houses in East Africa, such as that of
Nanji Damordas, who at the age of ten, accompanied by his father,
came to look after some business in Zanzibar. Most of these early migrants were asked to join the flourishing family businesses or to assist
in the businesses of community members. Initially, they travelled back
and forth to India, but slowly they settled in East Africa and invited
their brothers and sisters, wives, and children to join them.
The general migration history of Asian East Africans is well documented. Long before East Africa was discovered by Europeans, Zanzibar and the East African coast were well-known trading destinations
for Arabs and South Asians. Trading relations were strengthened with
the establishment of the British Empire in East Africa. In the period
between 1880 and 1920, the number of South Asians in East Africa
grew from about 6,000 to 54,000. These included Hindus (among
them well-known business communities like Patels, Lohanas, and
Shahs), Muslims (especially Ithnasheries, Bohras, Ismailis), Sikhs,
Goans, and others.10
The various Asian business communities that arrived in the late
nineteenth century developed far more intimate social and economic
relationships with each other than they did in India. These linkages resulted in new business habits, marriage policies and forms of capital
accumulation. Their shared knowledge of the Gujarati language and
their minority status (never more than 2 per cent of the total population in East Africa, somewhat higher in the main trading ports) in a
new society played an important role in this process. Despite the development of intimate social economic links, inter-caste marriages and
marriages between Hindus and Muslims were still uncommon.11
The Muslims settled earlier with their families than Hindus owing
to the Hindu taboo on travel overseas.12 Upper-caste Hindu men considered Africa to be alien and unsafe for women, and believed that
women would be better off if they stayed behind in their own extended
households in India. Owing to economic and social uncertainty in East
Africa, Hindu women often remained behind in India to look after
their parents-in-law, children and property, and to take care of their
childrens education.13 The unmarried Hindu men generally went back
to India to marry, and their wives stayed behind from the outset, with
the men making frequent trips back and forth. In other cases, the women came to the East African coast for a few years, returning to India
to give birth, where they then generally remained for the next 10 to 20
years, until their children finished their educations.14
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The sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Bargash, must have been aware of

this, as he encouraged Hindus to bring their wives to Zanzibar. He
sent his private vessel to welcome the first Hindu woman to Zanzibar
and gave her a reward of Shillings 250/-. Moreover, he promised to
turn Zanzibars Old Fort into a residence for the wives of merchants
and offered to equip it with water pipes fitted with silver taps to ensure
that Hindu women need never appear in public.15 Around the same
time, the Hindu community in Gujarat revolted successfully against
Brahmin priests and religious customs which were cramping their
mercantile activities and making commerce overseas difficult.16 All
these activities paved the way for Hindu migrants and settlers in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A new (in fact, very old)
world was there to be discovered.
The First Generation: Reading, Writing, and Speaking Gujarati

The first generation of Hindu Lohanas in East Africa were born between 1880 and 1920 in Gujarat, western India. Most of them received
at least their primary educations in their homeland. They were able to
read, write, and speak Gujarati and some had a little knowledge of English when they arrived in East Africa. Others travelled as young boys
with their fathers and received some primary education in East Africa.
An example is Sunderjibhai Damordas, a ninety-nine year old Hindu
Lohana.17 The migration history of Sunderjibhai follows the familiar
pattern of his community to East Africa.18 In 1916, at the age of ten,
he arrived in Zanzibar together with his father, Nanjibhai Damordar.
They were asked to look after the shop of a relative, Kesawji Dewanji,
whose sons didnt want to settle in East Africa and returned to India.19
Formal and informal education played an important role in the lives
of the pioneers. Most respondents recalled their primary and secondary
schools. As might be expected, some received part of their education in
India, whereas others were educated in East Africa exclusively. Sunderjibhai recalls that he had just finished King Readers II when he left
school in Mombassa, i.e., his English was very poor at that time. However, he already knew how to read and write Gujarati, having learned it
in Gujarat.
The Christian missionaries in East Africa had little interest in South
Asians. Nevertheless, they could not afford to let them remain uneducated. They were middlemen between the economy of the West and
the Swahili farmers. They therefore took a great interest in educating
their children and started their own schools from the moment Gujaratis settled in East Africa.20 During the colonial period, Sunderji and
most other South Asians in East Africa went to so-called Indian
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schools, where they were taught to read and write their own languages. Though many schools were intended for certain communities
or founded by religious institutions, others served a wide range of students of various backgrounds.21 Most of my respondents remembered
that they had attended Indian schools where Hindus and Muslims sat
together. Many of these schools were (partly) financed by the prosperous South Asian business community and colonial governments. The
colonial governments welcomed such initiatives by South Asians
wholeheartedly.
One may here record a tribute of appreciation to the voluntary
efforts that the Indian community have made throughout the
Territory to provide some form of education, however poor, for
its children. It is a tribute to their sense of responsibility towards
the rising generation. In India people are well accustomed to
the principle of providing at their own cost some kind of education for their children.22
However, the colonial governments wanted the South Asian communities to be taught in English and/or Swahili (in Kenya and Uganda) or
German and/or Swahili (in German East Africa, DOA). In the first
place, those who could read, write, and speak the language of the ruler
might find a job in the colonial civil service. Secondly, the governments
wanted to control native trade and produce, especially the account
books of South Asian traders, in order to levy taxes and to avoid illegal
Indian competition.
It is difficult to judge the accusations of irregularities and illegal
business practices, because most of the evidence comes from colonial
officials who, generally, supported European interests. For example,
It is the opinion of the Europeans entrusted with Indian business relations that 30 per cent of the Indians of Kilwa and Mohorro become bankrupt as soon as accounting becomes obligatory (). They always receive new credit from their fellow believers. Scarcely a month passes when Indians do not come forth to
declare themselves bankrupt in one or other city of our colony.
They gladly pay 200 rupees of the establishment tax.23
Whether this is true or not, these accusations played a major role in
the development of colonial policies towards the use of Gujarati account books and the teaching of Gujarati, English, and German in primary and secondary schools.
Thus, in 1906, the German colonial government tried to force South
Asians to do their accounting in either German or Swahili (in Latin
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script, and not in Gujarati or Arabic script).24 This was not backed with
any initiative to encourage Swahili or German education for Indians.
On the contrary, Indian education was deliberately hindered at first:
The Indians who, by their high intelligence and endeavour, get the
most out of education without being useful to the Government will be
held back and segregated.25 Nevertheless, government education for
Indians was introduced after 1912, when the Germans claimed that accounting done in Gujarati made it difficult to levy the profit tax and led
to fraudulent bankruptcy claims. They admitted that the big Indian
firms were not the targets of the legislation as their books were very
well kept, even by European standards.26 The main aim was to challenge the big mob of retailers, and Blutsauger [cheats or bloodsuckers, G.O.], i.e., the small shop owners and so called duka wallas.27
However, it was soon realised that it would be impossible to force
the old men, the Indian family patrons, to learn German or any other
European language in a short period of time. The Germans proposed
that the South Asians should demand that the young men in their
firms learn a European language. The reasoning was twofold. Firstly,
the young men would eventually be able to present their accounting in
German or English and secondly, after one generation the language
problem would be solved. Nevertheless, the Germans themselves were
unable to provide the necessary funding for this education. In addition,
they realised that the compulsory learning of European languages
might lead to the migration of South Asian businessmen to Mombassa
or Nairobi, where learning a European language was not yet an issue.
Meanwhile, the new Indian Association had taken up the language
matter. The secretary of the Indian Association reminded the British
Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, that,
my Association has also taken the trouble of making enquiries
in Uganda regarding the matter and we are informed that even
there it is permissible to keep such books in Gujarati amongst
other languages.28
In Kenya and Uganda it had since the early 1920s been accepted that
the account books of Indians could be kept in English, Gujarati, or
Urdu.29 The British Colonial Government hired South Asians to check
the account books of South Asian firms. Except for a minor debate concerning the expenses of these colonial clerks, the language problem
never came up. The Indian Association successfully made its point and
the proposed language legislation in Tanganyika was never passed and
the Tanganyika colonial government appointed South Asian accountants to check the Gujarati books. However, even this was effectively
challenged by the South Asians because they didnt want their books to
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be open to outsiders, because of the importance of company secrets.

Several older informants readily explained to me that they kept their
business records in Gujarati even though they were able to read and
write in English; the main reason was to keep them secret, and not necessarily to avoid paying taxes either. Interestingly, complaints by South
Asians regarding tax rates were written in English in Kenya and Uganda, and in Swahili and German Tanganyika. In everyday practice, language did not seem to be a problem.30
In my view, the South Asian businessmen used the language argument instrumentally in order to minimise colonial government interference. Tax avoidance and the misuse of trading licenses were just a
small part of this. More importantly, I assume, was the desire to keep
the social distance between the legislators and the traders at a level
that would allow them to outplay the legislators. Most of my informants in Dar es Salaam do not hesitate to state that they made fair
deals with the South Asian clerks regarding taxes without ever showing any of their accounting books. At the same time, raising taxes and
checking accounting books was only an excuse by the colonial government to defend the interests of European firms in the area. This seems
to have been the major reason behind proposed legislation, particularly
during the German colonial period in Tanganyika.
This is not to say that language is unimportant and merely a condition for understanding, exchange, and collaboration or competition. On
the contrary, language is also an important part of primary identity.
Members of the first generation, even those who read, write, and speak
English fluently, still regard Gujarati as their mother tongue. It is an
important part of their cultural background. This is reflected in the fact
that I saw various Gujarati newspapers and magazines in the houses
of these first generation people, including special womens magazines.
Most first-generation Gujaratis in East Africa would have read Gujarati
with more ease than English and thus they subscribed to magazines
published in Gujarat.
The preference for Gujarati was also reflected in the fact that whenever a will had to be drawn up, it was written in Gujarati. I also came
across English and German translations of wills in the colonial records
that were originally written in Gujarati. The will of the well-known
South Asian trader Sewji Hadji of Bagamoyo has its own entry in the
Archives. It has been translated into German and English as well.31
This evidently shows that there was a clear preference for Gujarati in
personal correspondence.
In short, and as expected, the first generation of Hindu Lohana Gujarati businessmen could already read, write, and speak Gujarati when
they arrived in East Africa. They kept their business records in Gujarati, except for a few larger firms, which kept them in English. The first-
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generation South Asians started to build educational institutions where

the vernacular language would be Gujarati. Nevertheless, this was challenged in the following period by the colonial rulers who succeeded in
making English the most important subject in the curriculum.
The Second Generation: Speaking and Reading Gujarati

The second-generation Hindu Lohanas in East Africa were born in East
Africa in the period between 1920 and 1960. Manilal Sunderji Damordar is the third son of Sunderjibhai. He speaks fluent Gujarati, is able
to read Gujarati but has difficulties in writing it. He was born in Dar
es Salaam and had his primary and secondary educations there. He
went to London in the 1960s to study for his university degree in commerce. He is fluent in English. Most of this generation learned to read
and write Gujarati and English in the colonys Indian schools.
As the British could not provide the education they wished to in the
territories, they were happy with South Asian initiatives to build
schools throughout the country. In general, the level of Indian education was sufficient and could easily bear comparison with most missionary schools. However, the colonial government was unhappy with
the fact that in most Indian schools, the vernacular language remained
Gujarat, while English was only treated as a subject. While the government was willing to promote the education of Indians in the colony,
one important condition was that the vernacular language be English
as well. In the words of R. Smith, the Director of Education in Dar es
Salaam,
The medium of elementary education is the language of the
country, but as the Indian Communities wish to maintain their
identity by continuing to encourage the use of Gujarati for commercial purposes I warned them that it is not improbable that
Government will decide to assist only in schools where English
is taught.32
In 1925, the Colonial Government was still arguing that the Gujarati
language was mainly used for commercial purposes among South
Asian traders and that the government therefore should not support
Indian education unconditionally. Nevertheless, this reasoning lost out
in favour of a new argument. The Colonial Government started to emphasise that their main interest was the development of the country,
especially the Africans. Therefore, the education of Indians was not at
the top of their agendas. Nevertheless, they were willing to support
other groups as well. A remarkable conflict of interests between the co-
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lonial government and the South Asian settlers emerged. The colonial
government demanded that education to be either in English or Swahili (or even in German, in German Tanganyika), whereas the settlers
again opted for their own language. This conflict of interests was particularly intense during periods when there was a shortage of funds on
both sides.
The Indian Educational Society represented the various sections of
the Asian community in East Africa. They used every argument they
could think of to convince the colonial government to support more
Indian schools. This is clear when we look at the example of the Indian Public School in Dar es Salaam in the period 1925-1940. The Indian Educational Society, for example, pointed out that Dar es Salaam
had an Indian public school in 1917. It was closed during the First
World War and re-opened in 1921 as the Lok Tilak Memorial Indian
School. As the number of pupils (boys and girls) grew faster than its
ability to fund them, the Indian Educational Society organised a meeting at which the South Asian business community pledged Shillings
14,000, or about 10 per cent of the total operating costs for one year.
The Society also asked the British Government to provide a substantial
grant arguing that Indians were your loyal subjects and taxpayers and
are entitled to such concessions.33 At this point, they were also referring to the Indian contribution, both physical and financial, during the
First World War.
However, before this request could be granted, the British colonial
officials had to develop their own educational priorities, conditions for
funding, and legislation. The following topics and questions appeared
in formal and informal correspondence: (1) whether special education
for Indians was desirable at all. Were not large numbers of South
Asians returning to India anyway? In other words, African tax money
should not be wasted on temporary migrants; (2) legislation that accounting should be kept in Roman alphabet with Arabic numbers in
other words, not in Gujarati; (3) whether the quality of the buildings,
educational materials, and the teachers were adequate, and (4) whether
the colonial government should support education in the Gujarati language and, if so, up to what level?34
The Lok Tilak Memorial School was lucky until the early 1930s to receive some ad-hoc funding from the government. The grants never
amounted to more than fifty per cent of the total operating costs, however. The main source of income came from the parents of the children
and generous contributions from the South Asian business community. This period of financial uncertainty would not end until a definite
education policy was developed in 1937.35
It was only during the period 1929-1937 that the foundations for a
colonial education system for South Asians in East Africa were laid. In
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1929, a grant-in-aid code was promulgated which provided for the payment of staff grants, block grants and average attendance and capital
grants for buildings and maintenance. A primary school syllabus in
Gujarati (and Urdu) was also prescribed and schools were under the
control of the Board of Indian Education.36 In addition, a separate tax
for non-native education was raised among Indians, which provided a
little more than 20 per cent of the total government expenditure on Indian education.37
On the question of language, the general feeling among colonial officials was well formulated by the General Governor of Tanganyika, Donald Cameron, in a confidential letter to L.C.N.C. Amery (Member of
the British Parliament):
I am in favor of grants-in-aid being made to Indian schools under a grant-code when it is prepared, but only in respect of education imparted in English. The teaching of Gujarati to Indian
children is not to the general benefit of Tanganyika and for that
reason I consider that assistance to it from public funds is not
justified.38
The Indian Association and the Indian Educational Society were well
aware of the position of the Colonial Office. Both realised that the provision of instruction in the English language would improve their
chances of obtaining a subsidy for the Indian schools. Therefore, they
began writing applications for grants in which they guaranteed English
education from standards four or five onwards. After the 1930s, it was
finally agreed that teaching in Indian public schools would be in Gujarati (or Urdu in Muslim schools) up to the fourth standard, with English thereafter.39 This means that South Asians were first taught Gujarati and received English only after the fourth year.
Nevertheless, teaching in Gujarati was an important issue for the
Gujarati community. The language became an instrumental symbol for
Gujarati culture in the case of the Kitui Indian School in Moshi. This
school was so small that the Education Officer opted for amalgamation
with the Arab School. The South Asians were furious and argued fiercely that the:
Kitui Indian School is a Gujarati Primary School, running up to
standard V. Its main language is Gujarati and all the subjects is
being taught in Gujarati. The Indian Community is not willing at all to enrol Arab boys in their Gujarati Primary School
and is also unwilling to have a combined school for there is a
vast difference in Indians and Arabs culture and behaviour.40
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From the correspondence it is not clear what is meant by the vast difference in South Asian and Arab culture, though some hints are made
elsewhere that the differences are related to the unwillingness of South
Asians to have combined classes (South Asians and Arabs), especially
with regard to South Asian girls.41
Gujarati language and culture played an important role for these second generation South Asians. The generation of Manilal Sunderji Damordar, those born and educated in East Africa, learned basic reading
and writing in Gujarati, which at that time was still considered
their mother tongue. This is confirmed by some figures, however sketchy, from the 1931 census report, which stated that more than one-fifth
of the Tanganyika South Asians were able to speak English, whereas
more than 75 per cent stated that they could not (the remaining 5 per
cent did not answer the question on language). Furthermore, the report
stated that about half of the South Asian population was able to read
and write Gujarati, whereas only 5 per cent could read and write English.42 However, competency in the English language grew rapidly in
the years to come.
From the 1950s onwards, many parents in the upper strata of the Lohana business community were unhappy with the quality of education
in the colony, especially at higher levels.43 Thus they began sending
their sons and daughters to India and those who could afford it to
the UK. Most of them were still British subjects, so admission into
British universities was relatively easy.44 Unfortunately, we do not have
any figures about the numbers of Hindu Lohanas who obtained university degrees abroad. However, more than half of my male informants
of this generation, like Manilal Sunderji Damordar, had at least two
years of higher education in the UK [32 out of 59] and thus developed
some fluency in the writing and speaking of English.45
In 2000, although Manilal Sunderji Damordar spoke and read
Gujarati, he had difficulty with writing it. He did not show the same
interest in Gujarati newspapers as his father had. He had not subscribed to any of the Gujarati newspapers or magazines. His English
was fluent and he kept his business correspondence in English. Sometimes, however, when he wrote his father, he made an effort to formulate at least a few sentences in Gujarati. With other Gujarati businessmen of his generation he spoke Gujarati, sometimes mixing in a few
English words. At home, he spoke Gujarati with his wife and children;
and while his wife would respond in Gujarati, his children usually
responded in English.
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The struggle for the hegemony of language is work in progress for the East
African Currency Board. The languages of business were English, Arabic, and
Gujarati, but not Swahili.
The Third Generation: Speaking Gujarati

Third-generation Hindu Lohanas were raised in East Africa in the period 1960-2000. One day, I was invited to a Gujarati dinner at the Damordar house. There I noticed that Gujarati was being spoken. Manilal
Sunderji Damordar spoke Gujarati with his wife and his son, Jivraj
(22 years old) and daughter Shrutti (20 years). They responded to their
father in Gujarati; however, Jivraj and Shrutti spoke English with each
other and immediately admitted that they could neither read nor write
Gujarati. Jivraj even admitted that he was unable to follow Gujarati lectures at the temple. His mother was especially concerned about this.46
Jivraj and Shrutti were born after the independence of the East African nations (Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika in 1961-1962). By this
time, there were no longer any Indian schools that could provide the
basic knowledge required for writing and reading Gujarati. In Kenya
and Uganda, they would have been taught in English; while in Tanzania, Swahili became the language used in schools. Interestingly, the
South Asian business community did not attempt to provide their community with language classes. They must have realised that their economic outlook was international and not South Asian. This was a
consequence of their economic re-orientation towards the UK and the
West in general, and the political events of the early 1960s (independence) and early 1970s (expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin).47 These
events made them realise that the English language had become a ne-
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cessity. However, some religious institutions advocated separate religious classes. In this context, most Hindu Lohanas chose to send their
children to schools in which English was the chief language or if they
could afford it to the International School in Dar es Salaam.
Jivraj and Shrutti attended the International School in Dar es Salaam. Their English was perfect and their pronunciation was almost
Oxford English, without the typical Indian accent. Both of them admitted that they only ever spoke Gujarati at home with their parents,
grandparents, or other elderly relations. Sometimes they used it as a
secret language on school playgrounds when they did not want others
to overhear what they were talking about. For them, knowledge of Gujarati was not an important part of their identity, although they did
state that they felt Indian. This feeling of being Indian was reflected
in their food and dress habits, but not in their language use. It is interesting to note that a part of this Indianness was related to the Hindi
language, because both of them liked to listen to Hindi Music and
watch Hindi movies, which they could actually barely understand.48
After interviewing them several times, we started corresponding via
e-mail. They were studying in the UK and I was interested in their
choice of food and their dress habits while they were abroad. During
this correspondence, they began thinking more about their identities
and background. One day, I asked them about their dress habits in the
UK, Shrutti wrote:
Turning to Indian wear ... i [sic] do wear a simple salwaar (dont
know how to spell it!!! how shameful! [italics mine]) around the
house. I find it comfortable and easy to wash and wear. The only
time i [sic] would wear Indian out of the house in uk [sic] is
when there is a special Indian occasion or ball (which is about
once-twice a year).49
Some interviews with various parents revealed a concern for the
shrinking knowledge of Gujarati among third-generation South Asians.
This was especially true for families who attended lectures at Hindu
temples. Lectures were often in Hindi or Gujarati, but the active knowledge of these languages among the third- (but often also second-) generation Asians is so poor that they have difficulty in understanding
them. Therefore, some of the local Brahmins have requested their
guest lecturers from India to use English.
This has led to an interesting debate within the Lohana community
on whether lecturing in English in the Hindu Temple should be encouraged or not. For some, the teaching of religion in Gujarati is an essential part of the culture and teaching in English should be discouraged. This is a more strongly held view among some of the visiting
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Hindu priests from Gujarat (supporters of the BJP [Hindu Nationalist

Party in India]) and the Hindi Belt. They have emphasised their language by refusing to lecture in English. There seems to be no debate
on the question of whether lecturing should be in Hindi or Gujarati.
The question is whether it should be done in an Indian language or
not.50
Many members of the Lohana community in East Africa realise that
knowledge of Gujarati is fading. Therefore, they encourage Gujarati
language lessons on temple premises. Some (grand)parents try to teach
their (grand)children Gujarati by introducing private tutors and extra
language lessons. Nevertheless, I did not come across a single person
of this generation who was born and/or lived in East Africa who could
read and write in Gujarati. The knowledge of Gujarati is fading fast
and is being replaced by English.
Jivraj notes that:
My parents are proud of us when we know all the religious
functions, despite the fact that we went to the International
School. So we stayed in touch with our culture. They feel sorry
that we are not able to read and write our language anymore.
Because it would enable us to attend more lectures from the
Gurus from India
Although the community may be divided on which language should be
used to teach the religion, there is agreement that the Hindu faith
plays an important role in the community. Even those who did not visit
the temples or lectures agreed that their sons and daughters should
marry a Hindu, for cultural and religious reasons. In the end, it is difficult for outsiders to understand our ways as one informant put it. In
other words, there is a division between those who support religious
teaching in English and those who would like to see religion taught in
Gujarati. At the same time, both sides agree that English is the most
important language in current business affairs and for career opportunities. Therefore, they agree that English should be the language used
in school. Despite of all this, however, Gujarati is still considered the
mother tongue by this third generation, and it plays an important role
in the construction of identity. The question remains how many more
generations it will take before this language is lost and English is accepted as the mother tongue.
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Conclusion
In this study, I have investigated the loss of the ability to read, write,
and speak Gujarati among the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa and the increased importance of English among the various generations. The first generation of Hindu Lohanas in East Africa still speaks,
writes, and reads Gujarati fluently; the second generation speaks and
reads Gujarati ,while the third generation may speak Gujarati at home
with the (grand)parents, they are unable to read or write it. This youngest generation has developed a preference for English. This development occurred despite massive state intervention. Colonial officials
needed the Asians to read and write in English in order to present
their accounting books. The Hindu Lohanas successfully refused to do
so. Nevertheless, the Lohanas developed the habit of reading and writing English just prior to the independence of the East African nations,
in the period when not English, but Swahili was being promoted. This
shows that the Gujaratis have had control over their identity creation.
This identity creation was not a desire to hold onto tradition and
maintain the traditional language, nor was it part of the assimilation
into the local i.e., Swahili culture. These Hindu Lohana businessmen chose to become international and opted for the English language. Despite the concerns of elderly members of the community, Gujarati was replaced by English. One Hindu religious leader suggested
that we may have lost our gift of expression, but many businessmen
would reply but we gained a more international outlook.
This shows that the South Asian Lohanas in East Africa have toyed
with three language options: Gujarati, Swahili, and English. Notwithstanding the current emphasis in the mainstream diaspora literature,
the outcome of the interplay of three languages is that they opted for
the international outlook. Contrary to what is suggested in the literature, it has not been a linear change from Gujarati to English, it has
to be viewed as a process. This process has not yet been completed
the knowledge of a particular language is subject to change again;
either in the direction of Gujarati, as Brahim Priests continue to do
their utmost to teach in Gujurati or Hindi in the Hindu temples of Dar
es Salaam.
Previously, I have described the development of an Asian African
identity among Hindu Lohanas in East Africa, which was based on
changing food and drinking habits in particular.51 The conclusions of
that article are confirmed here. After three generations, the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa has developed a unique, self-determined combination of Swahili, European, and South Asian elements.
This community does not identify with the Indian diaspora nor with
the culture of their ancestors in India.52 Their home is Africa and their
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outlook is international. In other words, the diaspora concept, with its

emphasis on rootedness, the homeland, the reproduction of Indian
culture abroad, cannot help us to understand the history of the Lohana
community in East Africa. Therefore, I again emphasise there is a
further need to study these communities from a local bottom-up
angle.
Notes
1
The research was made possible by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement
of Tropical Research (WOTRO) in collaboration with the History Department of the
Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In addition, the Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus
Universiteit Rotterdam and the History Department of the same university made
available the necessary funds for attendance at the AAS conference in March 2003.2
In this article, we use the terms South Asians and Indians synonymously. It would
be more correct to use South Asians throughout, because South Asia was split into
India and West and East Pakistan in 1947. Nevertheless, colonial sources refer to India and Indians, and many South Asians in East Africa refer to themselves as Indians, or recall that they went to Indian schools.
By far the best account for the cultural baggage of Asians in East Africa is: C. Salvadori, Through open Doors: A view of Asian Cultures in Kenya, Nairobi 1983. However,
this otherwise excellent book presents a rather static vision of the Asian Cultures in
East Africa. See also R.G. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890-1980. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993; R. Gregory, Quest for Equality:
Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900-1967.
See, for the importance of the Telugu language for Telugu migrants, the article by
Chandrashekar Bhat in this book. A view similar to this article may be found in the
article by Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani in this book. Kim D. Butler, Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse, Diaspora 10 (2) 2001, 189-219. R. Cohen, Global Diasporas: An introduction, Seattle: University of Washington Press 1997; J. Clifford, Diasporas, Cultural Anthropology, (9) 3 1994, 302-338; W. Safran, Diasporas in
modern societies: myths of homeland and return, Diasporas (1) 1 1991, 83-99. S. Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns, London: Routledge 2000.
The literature on this subject includes, Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A
History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890-1939, Oxford: Clarendon Press
1971; M. Mamdani, From citizen to refugee: Uganda Asians come to Britain. R.R. Ramchandani, Uganda Asians: The end of an Enterprise, Bombay: Bombay United Asians
Publications 1976. H. Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth 1920-1950. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press 1976; H. Tinker, The Banyan Tree. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Hindu Lohanas in East Africa come from the rural districts of Cutch and Kathiawar
(Gujarat, western India). They were traditionally laborers, masons, husbandmen,
shopkeepers, and traders. Their history is related to that of one of the Kshatria (warrior) castes, which in ancient times was called Lavan. The plural form of this was Lavanam and, over a period of time, it changed first to Lavana and finally to Lohana. In
the nineteenth century, many turned to weaving and textile trading. Those in Kathiawar were especially well established as maritime traders and many were doing business in Oman. When the Sultan of Oman moved his headquarters from Musquat to
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Zanzibar (1832), Lohana traders quickly followed him and set up shops there. From
there, they spread to the mainland from 1885 onwards.
These families include more than 200 people, of whom 78 were interviewed. Information on occupation, knowledge of languages and, for example, nationality is available for almost all of the family members. Seven or eight key informants were interviewed three, four, or more times. In addition, informal meetings, dinner parties and
celebrations of holidays were attended by the researcher.
Indians in Zanzibar may follow a different pattern, as the Swahili language is more
accepted among Indians there, especially among Ithnasheries and Khojas. Moreover,
my interviews with members of Indian Muslim communities, especially the Ithnasheries, revealed that they speak more Swahili, even at home, than their Hindu counterparts. The lower class Indians in Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam also developed a preference for Swahili. These results are not included here.
The focus on (Lohana) Hindus is a consequence of my personal network of Asian
businessmen. Nevertheless, they form the majority of Hindus in East Africa. See Robert G. Gregory, Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900-1967, New Delhi
1993, p. 13. In 1995, it was estimated that there were 3,000 Lohana Hindus among a
total of 10,000 Hindus in Tanzania. Some of the other Hindu communities include
Bhatias, Patels, Vanias, Brahmins and others. None of these other Hindu jatis numbered more than 800 people. Furthermore, the number of South Asian Muslims was
estimated at 26,000 in 1995. See C. Voigt-Graf, Asian Communities in Tanzania: A
Journey Through Past and Present Times, Hamburg 1998, p. 53.
R. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa; R. Gregory, Quest for Equality..
Literature on this subject includes, Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa; M.
Mamdani, From citizen to refugee: Uganda Asians come to Britain. R.R. Ramchandani,
Uganda Asians. H. Tinker, Separate and Unequal. India and the Indians in the British
Commonwealth 1920 - 1950. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press 1976; H. Tinker, The Banyan Tree. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
According to the 1887 census, there were 4866 Muslims and 1022 Hindus/Jains in
Zanzibar.
Diverging concepts of purity and impurity made it rare for Hindu merchants to bring
their wives, while Muslim merchants generally travelled with their families, especially to Muslim lands. Little is known about the Hindu taboo on travelling over sea.
There is evidence that Hindus have been crossing the seas without compunction for
many centuries, but the kind of ritual penance they had to undergo upon their return
is not generally known. In some communities, such as Gujarati Vanias of Porbandar
during Gandhis time, we know that these rituals took place, but we lack information
on other communities. One hypothesis which seems plausible, however, is that the
generalised taboo on voyages by women represented a kind of substitution. The fact
that the woman of the household did not travel overseas seems to have been sufficient to ensure the continuing purity of the household. However, questions remain
about what happened when Hindus decided to take their wives and children to East
Africa. Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947. Traders of
Sind from Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge University Press 2000, pp27. See, for the
fact that the burden of maintaining religious and caste purity fell largely on Hindu
women, R. Nagar, Communal Discourses, Marriage, and the Politics of Gendered Social Boundaries Among South Asian Immigrants in Tanzania, Gender, Place and Culture 1998 5 (2), 7-34.
The interrelation between social ties and business is clearly evident from various family histories. The eminent Mohammedan general importer and export merchant
firm of the Karimjis was established in Zanzibar in the early 1800s. The founding
father of the Karimji family was Jivanji Buddhaboy. He had three sons: Pirbhoy Jivan-
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17
18
19
20
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jee; Karimji Jivanji and Esmailji Jivanji. They carried on their fathers business under
the name of Pirbhai Jivanji until 1861. By then, the brothers had gone their separate
ways. Karimji Jivanji started his own business, while the other two brothers worked
jointly. Karimji Jivanji was followed by Alibhai Karimji Jivanji. In the late 1800s, he
went to India to attend the marriage of his only son, Alibhai. As he had left the family business and because of the considerable sum he had to pay for the marriage,
he invested in buying goods in India to bring back to Zanzibar to trade. The sailing
ship in which he was returning to Zanzibar after the marriage of his son encountered a storm and the entire cargo had to be jettisoned. Mr. Karimji Jivanji thus
landed on the shores of Zanzibar with his investments lost, no capital of his own
and debts to pay. Source: family archive.
Contemporary sources on the position (and absence) of Hindu Women in East Africa
include: Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City Island and Coast vol. 1 London 1872, pp. 32935; F.B. Pearce, Zanzibar: The Island Metropolis of Eastern Africa, (Frank Cass 1967)
1920, 257. See also: M. Honey, A History of Indian Merchant Capital, unpublished
Ph.D. thesis, Dar es Salaam 1982, p. 74.
A. Sheriff, The Rise of a Commercial Empire, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London 1971,
p. 354.
The names of the informants have been changed for reasons of privacy.
The migration history of Asian East Africans is well documented. In general, it is
suggested that there is a long history of trading relations between East Africa and
South Asia. Long before East Africa was discovered by Europeans, Zanzibar, Mombassa, and Kilwa were well-known trading ports for Arabs and South Asians. These
trading relations were strengthened during the establishment of the British Empire
in East Africa. A number of Indian indentured laborers supplemented the trading
diaspora. In the period between 1880 and 1920, the number of South Asians in East
Africa grew from about 6,000 to 54,000. These included Hindus (among them wellknown business communities like Patels, Lohanas, and Shahs), Muslims, Sikhs,
Goans, and others. R. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa; R. Gregory, Quest for
Equality.
We know little about the families who returned to India. If we assume that their reasons for returning were business failure, bad management or the like, we can also
assume that this may be the reason why the stories of those who settled in East Africa are (mainly) success stories. Another explanation of their return may be the fact
that religious taboos made them unhappy and uncertain in East Africa.
See, for example, Director of Education to Honourable Chief Secretary, 16th March
1925, Tanzanian National Archives (hereafter TNA), AB 1032, p. 4: Throughout the
Territory, wherever there is an Indian community of any size, Indian parents have taken steps to provide that their children shall, at least, be taught to read and write in
Gujarati, and at big centres like Dar es Salaam, Tanga and Tabora and elsewhere English is also taught, and girls as well as boys rightly, attend these schools. In 1886,
John Kirk welcomed the initiative of Tharia Topan to open a school in Zanzibar: The
educational standard of the rising Indian community here is undoubtedly far below
the educational standard and business capacity of their fathers who came from Kutch
a knowledge of English is essential if the rising generation is to hold its own in
keen competition with English, Americans, French and Germans. So great, therefore,
would be the benefit to be derived from good schools in Zanzibar for the rapidly increasing British Indian population ()Kirk to Secretary of State, Zanzibar, May 1,
1886 FO 84/1773 PRO London. Regarding Zanzibar, we discovered from the Foreign
Office archives that the leaders of the various Indian communities had for some time
been concerned by the absence of any educational facilities for their children, and at
a meeting convened by Euan-Smith in the previous July [1890] they had agreed to fi-
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25
26
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28
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31
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GIJSBERT OONK
nance a school which they decided to place under the management of a committee
elected from members of all Indian communities, both Muslim and Hindu. A sum
of 50,000 Rupees was subscribed at this meeting, and other donations quickly followed. When the school opened, two hundred pupils were enrolled with a staff of teachers recruited in India. Gujarati and English were to be the languages taught. FO
84, Euan-Smith to Salisbury, 30 July 1890; FO 84 ibid. 1 January 1891.
The Ismailis, in particular the followers of the Aga Khan, were quick to build their
communal-based Ismaili schools, which were nevertheless also accessible to other Indians.
Ibid.
Memorandum Kilwa, 19 May 1903, TNA G 1/29/II. Translation mine.
At that time, Governor Von Goetzen was even attacked for trying to make Swahili
the national language and was instead urged to make German the national language,
Die Post 23 Aug. 1913.
Dar es Salaam report cited in G. Hornsby, German Educational Achievement in East
Africa, in Tanganyika Notes and Records (62) 1964, p. 86.
German customs inspector to Government, 22 April 1906 TNA G 1/29/II. Translation mine.
Ibid. 13 May 1906, TNA G 1/29/II. In Kenya, the Fire Insurance Company requested
that the Government require that accounting and books be kept in English or Swahili
[and not Arabic or Gujarati] in order to be able to check the claims. Kenyan National
Archives [hereafter, KNA], AG 30/53, pp. 3-6.
The Indian Association to Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam, 5 April 1933, TNA
11.660 p. 244.
Amendment to trading licenses 1923 TNA 7092/I.
TNA G3-52. In the Zanzibar archives, we came across examples of books which were
kept in Gujarati and English. Zanzibar Archives HC 2/49, trustee report 1902.
The German Records section of the TNA contains several German as well as English
translations of wills. See G3 35, where we find the names of Karim Ladha, Remtulla
Meralji and Dayal Trikamdas; the most famous person had his own entry under G3
38. This was Sewji Hadji, who left a huge portion of his possessions to the Germans
in order to build a hospital and a home for lepers.
R. Smith, Director of Education in Dar es Salaam, 24 March 1925, TNA, AB 1032, p.
14.
The Indian Educational Society to the Chief Secretary in Dar es Salaam 12 March
1925, TNA AB 1032, 9.
Educational Office, Dar es Salaam, various correspondence 1925-1930, TNA AB 1032.
Educational Office, ibid.
It is interesting to note that, in Mauritius, Hindi was promoted. This is despite the
fact that the majority of Indians in Mauritius spoke Bojupari and not Hindi.
See the Annual Reports of the Educational Department, Indian Section, 1933-1959.
Cameron to Amery, confidential letter, 15 October 1925, TNA AB 1032, p. 54.
In some regions, Gujarati was the vernacular language until the fifth or sixth standards. The German colonial history was too short (until 1919) and too scattered for
the Germans to develop a common overall colonial education strategy. See, for the
formal position on English as the medium of education, Annual Report of the Education Department 1930, TNA 11718.
KNA DC KT 2/6/1, p. 78. Underlined in original.
KNA, DC KT, 2/6/1/, p. 130. This may also refer to the notion of purity, the burden
of which was laid on Indian (Hindu) women. See FN 12.
Report on the Non-Native Census 1931, pp. 50-51.
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43 Report of the Special Committee on Indian Education, 1951, Dar es Salaam; Report
of the Committee on the Integration of Education, 1959, Dar es Salaam.
44 Several authors reveal that, in Britain, Gujaratis from East Africa (who arrived in the
1960s and early 1970s) were more educated than those who had migrated directly
from Gujarat. This may be attributed to their class background and their access to
better education. See T. Van der Avoird, Determining Language Vitality: The Language
use of Hindu communities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Tilburg 2001,
p39.
45 A.Y. Lodhi, Oriental Influences in Swahili: A Study in Language and Cultural Contacts,
Goteborg 2000, mentions Kassams (1971) unique survey of language among the
Asians of Dar es Salaam in 1970 which showed that the languages used at home included: Cutchi 52 percent, Gujarati 14.5 percent, Swahili 7.3 percent, and English 26
percent. Note that Cutchi was much more popular than Gujarati. However, Cutchi is
solely a spoken language. Moreover, those who speak Cutchi are also able to speak
Gujarati, which is in general considered to be a more sophisticated language.
Thirteen per cent of the Asians claimed that they spoke Swahili at home. Nevertheless, it is not clear which communities were meant here. Most likely they were Ithnaserius and Bohras (Muslim communities). Another small survey in Uganda in 1954
showed that 92 per cent of the traders who had applied for a traders license spoke
Gujerati or Cutchi as their first language. H.S. Morris, The Indians in Uganda, London 1968, p. 19.
46 The mother is generally seen as the gatekeeper of the community language at home.
The inter-generational language shift in favour of the dominant language is also described in Van der Avoird, Determining Language Vitality, pp. 229-231.
47 See, G. Oonk, After shaking his hand start counting your fingers, Itinerario XXVIII
(3) 2004, 70-88.
48 Similarly, third-generation Hindus in the Netherlands like and watch Hindi movies,
but have established a preference for the Dutch language. Avoird, Determining language, p. 162.
49 Personal e-mail correspondence October 2002.
50 The leaders of the Ithnaseri community have dealt with this since the 1960s. They
tried to introduce a religious instruction book in Gujarati with Roman script: Elements of Islamic Studies. In 1988, they agreed to use an English religious instruction
book. Because of the steady migration of Ithnasheries to the West they feel that there
has been an uncontrolled Anglicisation of the community, in a environment where
there is strong anti-Muslim sentiment. In Dar es Salaam, some of the community
members emphasised that in losing the language, Ithnasheries would lose their umbilical cord with their roots. See also: R. Nagar, Making and Breaking Boundaries: Identity Politics Among South Asians in Post-Colonial Dar es Salaam, unpublished Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1995, pp. 280-285.
51 G. Oonk, The Changing Culture of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa,
Contemporary South Asia 13 (1) 2004, 7-23.
52 G. Oonk, After Shaking his Hand Start Counting Your Fingers. Trust and Images in
Indian Business Networks, East Africa 1900-2000, Itinerario XXVIII (3) 2004, 7088.
4 Contextualising Diasporic Identity

Implications of Time and Space on Telugu Immigrants
Chandrashekhar Bhat and T.L.S.Bhaskar
Introduction
Any diasporic community is uniquely situated owing to its multi-polarity, defined by the continuity/discontinuity of the cultural baggage
from the place of origin, the dynamics of the host society and the influence of the motherland or ancestral land. This uniqueness is carried
further by temporal and spatial dimensions besides the location of the
emigrants in the society of their origin. Some sections of a society are
more prone to emigration than others and the causes and consequence
of such emigration have their implication for the diaspora formed. For
instance, the Indian diaspora is not a homogeneous entity without diversity, though there is an overriding common identity as Indians despite the differences on account of regions from which they have migrated, when they migrated, where they have migrated to, including
the socio-cultural and demographic environment in the receiving society. More often than not, these differences become significant at
some stage or the other in the process of settlement and identity formation. A close look at the formation of Indian diasporas, since the
mass emigration of indentured labour during the early nineteenth century to the emigration of highly skilled software engineers during the
last decade of the twentieth century reveals that there is greater fractured Indian diasporic identity (Verma, and Sheshan: 2003) than has
been thus far imagined.
Indian society is distinctively known for its diversity and the Indian
immigrants worldwide are no exception to such practices of differentiation on the basis of religion, region, language, and caste. Such differentiation is of course less pronounced in the case of fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of Indian indentured labour employed in European sugar cane plantations of the Caribbean, Africa, South Pacific
and Southeast Asia. Long ship journeys that the indenture labour had
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to undertake to arrive in plantation colonies gave rise to bonds of

brotherhood, commonly called jahaji bhai. Despite the continuities in
religious and regional identities, they exhibit a certain homogeneity
that is conspicuously absent from among the later emigrants especially
after Indias Independence.
Towards a Concept of an Old and New Diaspora

Indian diaspora today comprises broadly of four streams following the
diverse situations under which they emigrated. The first stream includes
third- to fifth-generation descendants of the early emigrants during the
mid-nineteenth century, to the British and European colonies in Africa,
Southeast Asia, Fiji, and the Caribbean as plantation labour and railway workers under the indenture system. As Clarke et al. (1990) points
out, under this system some 1.5 million persons migrated to the above
destinations. Robin Cohen (1997) has classified them as labour diaspora. Many of them lost contact with their motherland including
their mother tongue. They may be called old diaspora for lack of a better term.
In the course of their long journeys by ship to distant destinations,
the unknown co-passengers became jahaji bhai (literally meaning
ship brother, an assumed brotherly affinity due to travelling together)
and this bond continued thereafter among their descendants till this
very day. The Indian diaspora communities that were established during the colonial era were isolated from one another and the plantation
owners under the new system of slavery called the indentured labour
(Tinker 1973) totally denied the indentured labourers employed by
them any access even to their own kith and kin employed by other
planters, let alone any access to the then existing means of transportation and communication to engage with the motherland. A significant
outcome of the ship brotherhood was reflected in the gradual erosion
of caste boundaries, almost forging towards a two-fold division of the
Hindu community into Pundits (Brahmin priests, strictly following the
tradition of vegetarianism and teetotalism) and the rest, including the
Chamars (the untouchable castes) during life in the plantation barracks. However, the caste distinctions gradually reappeared in the
course of their settlement in rural Trinidad, which, according to Vertovec (1992), are quite pervasive.
The second stream consists of professionally trained and skilled emigrants to the developed countries of the West since the mid-twentieth
century till this day. They continue to maintain their religious and caste
practices through the vibrant interaction with places of their origin.
Since they have been away from India for some five decades now and
CONTEXTUALISING DIASPORIC IDENTITY
91
as the process of immigration continues, they are referred here as new

diaspora.
Any analysis of Indian diaspora cannot ignore the distinction between the old and the new Indian diaspora. Not only do they vary in
the contexts of their emigration and destinations but also in terms of
their socio-economic background and the degree of interaction with
the motherland. They have undergone migration experiences so varied
that their cultural practices in the host environment reflected greater
differences than similarities, representing almost two very distinct diaspora communities bearing the common noun Indian. These differences are strikingly apparent between the descendants of the indentured and the new Indian immigrants, when they meet in a place like
New York or London. With a view to bringing such a distinction between these two streams of Indian immigrants to the fore, the concept
of old and new Indian diaspora has been employed in the diasporic discourse (Bhat 1998, 2003; Jain 2004). While the new diaspora has retained a close relationship with family, locality, caste, region, and religion in India, the majority of the old diaspora has lost contact with the
motherland, including the familiarity with the mother tongue.
The consequences of the two streams of emigrations described above
are strikingly diverse, not merely due to the distinct temporal contexts
in which they have occurred but also the attributes of the population
that emigrated and their destinations. While it is poverty and despair
that compelled emigration under conditions of indenture to work in
British and other European colonies, the emigration of predominantly
urban middle class, English-educated professionals and highly skilled
personnel to the industrially developed countries of the West has been
occurring to avail the emerging employment opportunities following
World War II. The social position of the two streams of emigrants from
India too has been widely varied; the indenture labour largely came
from deprived sections among the lower castes whereas the professionally trained and skilled emigrants belonged not only to the upper
classes but also to the upper castes.
The post-colonial emigrants not only enjoyed the advantage of being
professionally trained, middle class, Anglophone Indians, but also
earned adequate income that could facilitate visits and frequent communication with the place of their origin. The recent advancement in
technologies of travel, transport, communication, information, and the
Internet has contributed immensely to the growth of transnational networks and virtual communities. A few hours of air travel, compared to
the month-long ship journeys of the colonial era, has facilitated the
new emigrants to maintain close ties with their places of origin. There
is a revival of the local at the global context, with the shrinking of
space and time.
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The migrant labour force, semi-skilled and unskilled, which emigrated to the countries of West Asia and the Gulf following the oil
boom during the nineteen sixties and seventies form the third stream.
Many of them left their families behind in India and remitted savings
towards family maintenance and investments. They form the majority
of the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) or the expatriate Indians and most
of them hail from the states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh in particular. They are denied any citizenship rights in the countries where they
work and, therefore, cannot permanently be deterritorialised from the
motherland. They cannot be called a diaspora since they are denied
membership in the host society. At best they are a transitory diaspora.
The migration of software engineers and information technicians
over the past two decades may be considered as the fourth wave, the IT
wave as it is popularly called, and has its own distinctive features.
Most of the emigrants are young graduates from leading institutes of
engineering and technology, whose expertise is in great demand in the
US, Europe, and other developed countries. Though they are drawn
from all over the country, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have a major share in the export of computer professionals. Unlike the earlier
waves of emigration, the software professionals often move to multiple
destinations, operating across several nation-states in a transnational
space.
Despite certain similarities, each stream of emigrants varies from
the other in so far as the socio-economic and educational background
from which they emigrated from India and also their location in the
host societies.
Telugu Diaspora: A Brief History

Telugu is a South Indian language spoken by approximately 60 million
people residing predominantly in the present state of Andhra Pradesh
and the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Following
the linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, Andhra Pradesh
has not only emerged as the largest state in South India but Telugu
has also become the second large language next to only Hindi. A considerable number of Telugu-speaking people in particular emigrated
from the east coast of Southern India during the colonial period (1830s
to 1920s) to destinations such as Fiji, Malaysia, Mauritius, Singapore,
and South Africa. After Indias independence, a significant number of
urban middle-class Telugus, professionally trained and skilled, emigrated to developed countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany,
New Zealand, the UK and the US.
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Today, Telugus form the largest South Indian community to have

emigrated to different parts of the world, if the decedents of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants and the post-Independence emigrants, including the software professionals to the Americas
and Europe are taken together.
The emigration of Telugus from different parts of South India has
occurred in basically three phases:
the colonial emigration as indenture and kangani labour to the British and French colonies during the nineteenth and early part of
twentieth century,
the emigration of professionals such as doctors, engineers, scientists, and students to the developed countries such as US, UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently,
the software professionals to Europe and especially the US and
Canada.
There are several push and pull factors that were responsible for the
emigration of Telugus during the colonial period. Firstly, the Zamindari system introduced by the British rule worsened the plight of the
poor peasants because of high taxes; secondly, frequent famines and
the lack of any irrigation facilities caused untold misery among the
peasants (Rao 1983). Furthermore, natural calamities like famines and
floods, shrinking of the cottage and handicraft industries owing to the
introduction of European factory products, and the lack of employment
opportunities were instrumental in pushing many Telugus to emigrate.
There were also opportunities for employment in plantation labour in
the British and French colonies that pulled many Telugus to immigrate
to countries such as Fiji, Malaya, Burma, Natal (South Africa) and
Mauritius in order to escape starvation and death.
Presently, Telugus are found on almost every continent. They form a
considerable segment of the population of some of countries such as
Fiji, Mauritius, Myanmar, South Africa, Europe, US and United Arab
Emirates. They have also immigrated to Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, but their presence in these countries is almost negligible.
Old Telugu Diaspora
Telugus form the third largest regional and linguistic diaspora to emigrate from India as indentured or kangani labour during the colonial
era, next only to the Bhojpuri and Tamil diasporas. They were recruited
mostly to replace the emancipated African slaves in the sugarcane
plantations of Mauritius, Fiji and South Africa, and the rubber plantations in Malaysia. Though they were also taken to Burma in large numbers, there is little data available on the Telugu presence today owing to
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their forced assimilation into Burmese society (Phyu 2001). The earliest Telugu emigration may be traced to their journey via the ship the
Ganges to Mauritius in 1836. The next important emigration destination was Natal in South Africa in 1860. The first Telugus arrived on
the vessel Elbe in Fijis Nakulau Depot in 1903 along with other South
Indians as indentured labourers (Bal Govinda 1981: 184). The Telugu
immigrants in Fiji had striven to preserve their language and culture.
Language is one of the distinctive features that separated Telugus from
Tamils and other Indian communities. However, Telugus were so closely associated with the Tamils during the course of their settlement in
Fiji, South Africa, and Malaysia that they followed the fairs and festivals of the numerically predominant Tamils, retaining their identities
through Telugu names and festivals. The birth of the Andhra Sanghamu in Fiji in 1941 provided much needed forum for articulating the
problems faced by Telugu labourers on the island besides the promotion of Telugu language and culture.
Telugu emigration to Natal, South Africa happened from 1860 until
1911 as part of the indenture system of the Madras Presidency. The indentured labourers worked on the sugar and tea plantations, collieries,
railways, wattle plantations, etc. Apart from a few Naidoos and Reddies
(the agricultural castes), the Telugu immigrants in South Africa included farm labourers from the lower castes, including the untouchables. There were also some free passage migrants such as clerical
staff, teachers, komatis (Traders), kamsala (Blacksmiths) and kumara
(Potters), many of whom lost their identities in course of their settlement.
Until the formation of the Andhra Maha Sabha of South Africa
(AMSSA) in 1931, there was little attempt made to unify Telugus on a
sub-ethnic or linguistic basis. Currently, the Sabha has more than 30
branches, and promotes the teaching of Telugu at school and undergraduate levels. For instance, the University of Durban, Westville offers
courses in the Telugu language and teaching.
Telugus formed part of the kangani labour1 that migrated along with
Tamilians and Malayalees to the Malay Peninsula. The main centre for
their recruitment during those days were located at Vizagapatnam and
Nagapatnam. The contract in the kangani form of labour recruitment
was for three years, compared to five years in the indentured system.
Most of the labourers worked on rubber plantations, oil palm cultivation and in the coconut fields. There were also a few Telugus who
worked on road construction, drainage, sanitation, the electricity board
and the railways. Most of the Telugus who migrated to Malaysia as kangani labour during the colonial period were from the coastal regions of
Srikakulam, Vizianagaram and Visakhapatnam and a few others from
East Godavari and Chittor regions. Most of the kangani emigrants
95
came from castes such as Gavara, Kapu (sometimes called as Telaga)

and Velama (the richer section among them are called Velama dora).
The rest were from chakali (washer man), mangali (barber) and other
functionary castes.
Telugus in Malaysia were a less visible group until the early 1900s
due to the substantial presence and predominance of the Tamil population. The planters had paid almost no attention to the Telugus as a distinct group among the Indian coolies. But the birth of the Malaysia Andhra Sanghamu in 1955 provided the Telugus a forum for redressing
the problems faced by Telugus in Malaysia other than the fostering of
their culture. Apart from organising cultural activities, the association
has persuaded its members to learn and speak Telugu at home and
community gatherings.
New Telugu Diaspora
Immigration of Telugus to various destinations in developed countries,
following Indias independence constitutes the new Telugu diaspora.
Unlike the colonial migration, the bulk of them are professionally
trained, English educated, urban middle classes from upper castes.
Some of the immigrants initially arrived in their host countries for the
purpose of higher education and then continued to stay on securing
employment while the others immigrated to the host countries directly
to join the expanding job market in manufacturing and service sectors.
The stream of new Telugu diaspora comprised of educated youth
from the important cities of Andhra Pradesh, such as Hyderabad, Vijayawada and Visakapattanam, besides a few from the well to do farming families of West and East Godavari region. Countries like the US,
United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have significant
presence of this new Telugu diaspora.
The most recent trend since the 1990s is the wave of emigration of
software professionals, especially to the US, following the demand for
professionally skilled personnel in the high growth area of computer
and information technology industry. It will not be an exaggeration to
mention here that every young Telugu pursuing undergraduate education, especially in engineering and other technical fields, dreams of
destination US for higher studies or employment.
Telugu Diaspora in Mauritius and United States

For a detailed analysis of the Old and New Telugu Diasporas, Telugus in
two locations are selected with the view to illustrate the similarities and
differences following the diverse migration experiences. Telugus in
Mauritius are the earliest to immigrate in large numbers during the co-
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lonial period and had remained with least interaction with the motherland for more than a century and a half. They form a significant section of old Telugu diaspora. Though they have lost touch with their
mother tongue, they have carefully preserved the Telugu culture and
identity. Compared to the Telugus in Mauritius, Telugus in the US represent a large cluster of the new Telugu diaspora, a vibrant community
pursuing very close interaction with their kith and kin in Andhra Pradesh.
Telugu Diaspora in Mauritius
Telugus migrated to Mauritius as part of indentured labour during the
nineteenth century. It is believed that the first batch of Telugus who arrived in Mauritius was from the Coringa (Koringa) on board ship
Ganges in the year 1836 from areas surrounding Vizianagaram. During the period 1837-1880s nearly 20,000 Telugus have migrated to
Mauritius as indentured labour (coolie) to work on the sugar plantations. Most of them hailed from the areas of Ganjam, Vizag, and Rajamundry.
From the data available through various records, most of the Telugus
in Mauritius were originally from the places like Bimli or Bimlipatam
(Bheemunipatnam), Vizagapatam (Visakhapatnam), Thoonee (Tuni),
Uncole (Ongole), Oopada (Uppada), Alleepuram (Alleepuram), Nabobpettah (Nawabpeta), Ganzam (Ganjam), Vizianagaram (Vizianagaram),
Alamunda (Alamanda), Cocanada (Kakinada), Berhampur, Chicacole
(Srikakulam), Rajahmundry, Guntur, Masulipatnam, Nellore, Cuddapah, Anantapur, Chittor and Hyderabad (the current names are given
in brackets).
Presently Telugu population in Mauritius is claimed to be more than
60,000 (discussion with Sanjeeva Appadoo, Telugu teacher from Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius) and have become a visible part of
Mauritian society. According to the Mauritius Census Publication of
1990, there were 21,027(2.05% of the Mauritius total population of
1,022,456). They have a considerable population in Quatre Bornes, St.
Pierre, Riviere Du Rempart, Chemin Grenier, Flacq, Mahebourg, Casis
(Port Louis), LEscaillier, Goodlands, and Tayak.
According to the early Mauritian census records, maintained by the
Colonial Offices in India and Mauritius, Telugus formed a part the two
broader categories of Indian immigrants, namely Indo-Mauritians and
Other Indians. The category of Indo-Mauritians referred to the persons
of Indian origin born in Mauritius, belonging to the second or later
generation of Indian immigrants while the category of other Indians
referred to the first generation Indian immigrants born outside Mauritius. It was only in the 1961 census (published in 1962), that the Indo-
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Mauritian category was further classified into Hindoos, Tamils, Telugus

and Marathis on the basis of their sub-ethnic identities with the view
to ascertain the magnitude of culturally exclusive groups among the Indians in Mauritius. By 1960s, Mauritius had already emerged as multilingual and multicultural society, with a demand for state support from
diverse ethnic groups to promote their ancestral languages and cultures. Thus, the Telugus were enumerated separately, for the first time,
as a distinct group, on the basis of linguistic, cultural and religious criteria.
The census data on Telugus and their religious affiliation during the
past five decades, from 1962 to 2001, reveals some of the changes that
they have undergone over the years. From the statistical data it may be
observed that Mauritian Hindu society experienced a religious sectarian
shift when the followers of Arya Samaj gradually chose Sanatana Dharma (Bhaskar 2003: 91). During this process the Telugus as well as the
other regional groups formed on the basis of their ancestral languages,
such as Hindoos (the descendants of Bihari and other North Indian
people speaking Hindi), Tamils (the descendants of Tamil speaking
people from South India) and Marathis (the descendants of Marathi
speaking people from Bombay Presidency), employed ancestral language as the basis for cultural and religious differentiation. For instance, today Mauritius has Telugu temples, Tamil Temples and Hindoo Temples to promote respectively Telugu religion and festivals, Tamil religion and festivals, and Hindoo religion and festivals. The
descendants of Indian Muslim immigrants in Mauritius consider Urdu
as their ancestral language as well as current language, though their
ancestors spoke Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi or Gujarathi.
Telugu Identity
As mentioned earlier, Indian diaspora in Mauritius comprises of the
descendants early immigrants from at least five linguistic regions, if
not more, and continue to nurture their distinct identities and regional
cultures over the years. In some respects, they resemble Indian castes,
especially in terms of endogamy and exclusive ritual practises,
although free from commensal restrictions and a ritual hierarchy based
on pure and impure. These identities have economic and political
implications in the representative democracy of Mauritius, which promotes multi-culturalism as a state policy. Language and religion are
the most tangible markers of cultural identity in Mauritius today according to Hookoomsing (2003a:169) and Linguistic Groups based on
the ancestral language of their forefathers have assumed great significance in political and cultural identity. The Mauritian Government considers all ancestral languages as national heritage and bestows equal
rights to all these languages.
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The Telugu people are proud of their cultural heritage and consider the Telugu language, temples, and festivals as significant
constituents of Mauritian Telugu identity. The cultural practices,
traditions, festivals, and language of the Mauritian Telugus have
their roots in the traditional customs and folk culture of the rural Andhra region.
Telugu Language
Mauritian Telugus consider Telugu as their ancestral language and
hence worthy of veneration. They speak French Creole at home and use
it as a common medium of communication with the members of their
own Telugu community as well as others they encounter in their daily
lives.
While Telugus share many aspects of culture and tradition with the
followers of Sanatana Dharma (Vedic Hindu Dharma), Telugu language is considered as the distinctive feature that makes the Telugu
community unique from other people of Indian origin in Mauritius.
Telugus in Mauritius believe that their ancestors spoke Telugu and observed Telugu culture, which differentiated them from the rest of the
Indian communities in Mauritius. There have been concerted efforts
by various Telugu organisations, both cultural and religious, to promote their language as it forms one of the significant indices of Telugu
identity on the island. Ancestral language, culture and religion reinforce each other in Mauritius society to provide distinct identities to
linguistic groups that play a significant role in socio-economic and political contexts. Resources for articulating these identities are generated
by respective groups, that supplement the state support these groups
receive for promoting their linguistic cultural heritage.
From the very beginning, Telugus have tried to promote and protect
their mother tongue. For instance, during the initial days of their settlement in Mauritius, Telugus taught their children through writing on
palm leaves or beach sand, apart from the oral teaching through folk
songs, bhajana (devotional songs) and theatre performances (naatakam). It is believed that the labourers gathered in the evening and sang
songs in praise of the God, like Ramadasu keertana and Nrusimha satakam, overcoming the strain of the days hard work on the plantation. It
was a particular drama called Ramaleelalu in the areas of the Vale and
Mapou that inspired plantation labour to take pride in the Telugu language and culture.
Telugus have always worked on the plantations along side Tamils
and Hindi-speaking labourers. Apart from the influence of these languages, French was decreed the lingua franca for all Mauritians. Telugus as well the others gradually gave up speaking their mother tongues
in favour of French and Creole.
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In the 1880s, the institution of baithkas began to strengthen the Hindu religion in opposition to the dominance of Christianity. Indians began to gather and participate singing bhajans, folksongs, prayers, etc.,
displaying unity in times of adversity. During that time, Bhojpuri was
the lingua franca for Indians. But in later years, Telugus and Tamils
felt the need to have their own festivals such as the Ammoru Panduga,
and Cavadi. The arrival of the Arya Samaj on the island created a split
in the Hindu community dividing them into Sanatanists and the Arya
Samajists. According to Rao (1983: 36), this had shaken the faith of
many Hindus for whom idol worship was the greatest symbol of their
religious identity and further Arya Samaj introduced Hindi (khari boli)
as the language of discourse. This estranged the Telugu people from
Baithkas, giving rise to the formation of Mauritius Andhra Maha Sabha
(MAMS) in 1946 with following objectives: a) to strengthen the Telugu
solidarity and distinct identity; b) to popularise Telugu teaching; c) to
organise Telugu festivals; and d) to construct temples for Telugu gods
like Narasimha, Anjanai Swami (Hanuman), etc. MAMS made all-out
efforts to promote the Telugu language by building Telugu vernacular
schools, training teachers, etc.2 Two prominent persons who strove to
promote the use of Telugu language on the island were Pandit Ramamurthi and Pandit Gunnayya Ottoo.
The teaching of oriental languages was officially recognised as early
as 1925 and the then Mauritian Government gave due importance to
the teaching of these languages at the school level (Murugaiyan 2003:
191). The teaching of Telugu has seen many changes over the years
since independence because both governmental agencies and non-government organisations were actively involved in the promotion of the
Telugu language. Use of Telugu in the public sphere is almost nonexistent except for a few people who speak the language on special occasions like during festivals, in temples, during programmes, etc. In general, it is spoken with some difficulty. The teaching of Telugu was formally initiated in the schools on 1 August 1958. Later on, the existing
Hindi syllabus was translated into Telugu (written in English/French
script).
Almost all branches of the MAMS now runs evening schools to
teach Telugu with active co-operation from the Telugu Teachers Association (TTA). The teaching ends with MAMS conducting Annual Telugu Language Examinations (ATLE) for standard I to V. Students learn
Telugu at three different levels primary, secondary and tertiary.
MAMS also conducts exams for students at the first two levels. Apart
from MAMS, the Telugu Cultural Centre Trust has recently started promoting the language on the island.
Efforts are also being made by other organisations such as Telugu
temples, Mauritian Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), Mauritian Col-
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lege of Air (MCA), Ministry of Education and Scientific Research

(MESR) and the Drama Section of the Ministry of Arts and Culture
(MAC) to promote the Telugu language. The above-mentioned institutions and departments have been effective in encouraging children and
adults to learn and speak Telugu.
Telugu Temples
Telugu temples play a very significant role in the promotion of Telugu
identity. All Telugu temples in Mauritius have regular Friday Telugu
bhajan. Photocopies of the songs (written in Roman script) are distributed to the devotees to facilitate singing. The Pravachanam (in Telugu
language) follows the Bhajan by the local Aacharya (purohit). A local bilingual expert subsequently translates the contents into Creole for easy
comprehension of the devotees. They are mostly attended by elderly
men and women, children, and a few women from the neighbourhood.
On some of the festival days or special occasions, like somebodys
birthday or wedding anniversary, the entire Telugu community will assemble at the temples for the celebration and a festive meal.
According to Appadoo (1990), there are some 80 Telugu temples on
the island, and most of them are located in villages. These temples are
often registered with the Mauritius Andhra Maha Sabha (MAMS)
which is also involved in the construction of temples, mostly the Vishnu Mandirams, Venkateshwara temples, Ram mandirams and a few
Krishna mandirams. The two earliest temples that deserve mention are
the Simhadri Appanah Mandiram in Beau Vallon in the south and the
Vishnu Mandiram in St. Pierre. A large portion of Telugus are devotees
of Puttaparthi Sri Satya Sai Baba in Andhra Pradesh and Ganapathi Sachidananda Swamy (a Telugu ascetic) in Mysore.
It is interesting to note that many Mauritian Telugus still opt for a
local acharya for family related puja or occasion (pujas occur at home,
at birth- and death-related rites, etc). They think the local acharya can
communicate better in Creole, which allows them to better understand
the essence of the puja. The acharya from India sometimes learns
Creole and communicates in broken Creole with the devotees. Weekly
visits to the temple is compulsory to emphasise the fact that they are a
close-knit community and consider the temple as a platform for the
promotion of culture and solidarity.
Telugu Festivals
Celebration of festivals formed a part of the cultural life of the Mauritian Telugus. They celebrate festivals like Simhadri Appanna Puja,
Rama Bhajanamu, Ammoru Panduga, Sankranti, Deepawali, Ugadi,
Sri Narasimha Jayanti (Kollala Pandaga), Govinda Puja (Sri Venkateshwara Puja vratam), and Andhra Avatarana Dinotsavam (Andhra Forma-
101
tion Day). According to Appadoo (1994: 252), the Telugus being mainly
vaishnavities perform Rama bhajanamu and Simhadri Appanna pooja.
Although there is a mixture of local customs, the original Telugu culture are preserved and passed on with care. One can observe the distinct Telugu culture in celebration festivals such as Ugadi3 and Rama
bhajanamu.
The wedding ceremony is a very special event and weddings are generally arranged during the weekends, especially on Sundays, to allow
friends and relatives to attend the celebration. Weddings are usually
celebrated for four days beginning with pasupu and ending with enaalu.
The pasupu is celebrated on Friday and the actual marriage which lasts
for an hour or little more, takes place on Sunday. But, with the passage
of time, people became too busy with their professions, as a result,
there have been changes in terms of celebrating the wedding.
Telugu Broadcasting
Though very few Mauritian Telugus understand Telugu, recently acquired, they have institutionalised the broadcasting of Telugu programs
for an hour every evening. The older generation of Telugus consider it
an important event of the day, which allows them to take the images of
the motherland into their drawing rooms. They also have a weekly telecast of Telugu films and other events of interest to the Telugus.
Markers of Mauritian Telugu Identity
What makes the Mauritian Telugus so distinctive from other overseas
Telugu communities is their consistent commitment towards protecting Telugu culture over the generations, despite their integration into
the westernised Mauritian society with Creole as the lingua franca. Two
centuries, beginning with the suppressive regime of indenture and
kangani employment in isolated barracks, away from their ancestral
land and culture have not alienated them from their attachment and
devotion towards their Telugu origins and they have religiously
guarded their Telugu identity to this day. Needless to emphasise that
Mauritian Telugus feel privileged to observe the Telugu traditions, festivals and fairs with utmost dedication. They take pride in maintaining
the Telugu culture over the generations, despite the significant loss of
Telugu language, arranged marriages (cross-cousin or uncle-niece),
and joint families that continue to be essentials of Telugu identity in
Andhra Pradesh.
It is worthy to note that the Telugus, despite being demographically
lesser in number compared to both the dominant Bhojpuri Hindispeaking community and the Tamils, who have enjoyed special favoured treatment from the French owing to their colonial past, have
continued to passionately preserve their distinctive identity. The Tamils,
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for instance, celebrate Tamil New Year Pongal, Bharadhiyar Centenary

and several other festivals unique to Tamil culture and Tamil religion
to preserve and promote Tamil identity (Murugaayan 2003: 197). The
common experiences of migration, during the ships journey, life in
plantation barracks and coercion by the colonial rulers led to homogenisation, to a certain degree, in the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean,
Fiji and the French territories. But the Indo-Mauritians have maintained their linguistic and regional boundaries, if not the languages,
owing to their substantial presence to retain such diversity.
Telugu Diaspora in the United States

The emergence of a Telugu diaspora in the US is a post-independence
phenomenon. Many Telugus have migrated to the US initially as postdoctoral fellows and scientists utilising various scholarships. In more
recent years, they migrated as professionals such as engineers, doctors, and software engineers.
Apart from changes in the educational system, the post-1960 period
witnessed advancements in science, technological applications, communication and print media, which facilitated the educational system
in terms of providing the infrastructure. The secondary and higher
education systems were made available in all major towns and cities of
Andhra Pradesh. Many of these educational institutions began to introduce courses that offered better employment opportunities. On the
other hand, the parents and students began to take note of professions
that were in great demand such as engineering and medicine. The parents are increasingly prepared, even at prohibitive costs to send their
children to professional colleges and get them trained. Therefore,
many students opted to pursue these courses of study. The liberalisation of the Indian economy after 1990 further provided impetus by
opening up of overseas opportunities. During this period it was observed that, many Telugus utilised the available opportunities in the
west, and migrated as students, scientists, engineers, doctors and software professionals and made the US their homeland.
The present day Telugu population in the US can be categorised as
follows:
People who have entered the US as professionals;
Students who are pursuing higher education, and;
Families of the immigrant professionals.
Apart from merely keeping in touch with families, the Telugu immigrants in US have always maintained consistent cultural and economic
links to their land of origin. Most of the early immigrants were depen-
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dent upon telephones and land mail, while present-day immigrants are
able to communicate via communication technologies such as Internet,
e-mail, messengers and Webcams.
Telugu Identity in the United States
For any Indian or person of South Asian origin, cultural identity forms
the core of socio-economic, political and religious life whether they are
located in India or in the diaspora elsewhere. Articulation of cultural
identity is essentially political in nature and varies with context, from
religious or regional to linguistic or caste. Telugu identity in the US
not only expresses the ideology of Telugu language but also of Telugu
region (the state of Andhra Pradesh) and Telugu culture. When in Andhra Pradesh the Telugu identity is dormant, as it is commonly shared
by all except the immigrants, such identity assumes significance in all
other parts of India where Telugus form a minority. It is more so in
the overseas context where Telugu identity offers comfort, security, support and, above all, the feeling of a home away from the homeland.
Thus, the Telugu identity has political implications in their immigrant
context in the US besides providing for the economic and cultural
needs of the Telugu community. Resources are pooled by the Telugus
themselves through membership, donations, and other forms fund rising to promote the interest of Telugus and towards maintaining Telugu
culture and identity in the US.
The Telugu language is considered as the most significant marker of
Telugu identity, along with its distinctive traditional practices and festivals. Many of the Telugus in the US believe that they are more Telugu
culturally than those back home in Andhra Pradesh. They strive to pass
on their language and culture to the successive generations in the US.
Besides the language, its movies, literature, radio and its associations
provide essential inputs helping to make Telugus feel at home in the
US.
Telugu Language
Language is considered the most important carrier of culture and identity. In contrast to the situation in the old diaspora, there are no government or private schools in the US that teach Telugu language.
Teaching the language in the diaspora is done by establishing Telugu
schools. Many Telugu associations have started weekend schools for
the second- and third-generation Telugus who were born in the US.
The classes are usually conducted at an association building, a temple,
or a school whose space is used for conducting weekend classes. Sometimes, summer schools are established to teach the language during
holidays at the primary or secondary level. At the initiative of Professor
Velcheru Narayana Rao, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has
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been offering a course on Telugu for nearly a decade. Of late, because

of the efforts of Professor Rao, the Telugu Association of North America and the Detroit Telugu Association, the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor has also commenced teaching Telugu as part of its South
Asian Studies programme.
Many families that have settled permanently in the US have sponsored parents to join them under the preference system that fosters family reunions, because parents and grandparents play an important
role in teaching language and tradition to children at home. In fact,
some of Telugus have even sent their children to their parents in India,
to train them in the Telugu language, culture, and classical dance and
music performances. These visits not only familiarise the new generation with the knowledge of language and culture but also help motivate
them to appreciate their Telugu heritage.
The second generation immigrants are currently in a dilemma as
they are being pressured by their parents to learn Telugu, which in
their view is not useful living in the US.
Telugu Movies
Telugu movies have thus far played an invaluable role in the Telugu
diaspora in the early years of Telugu emigration to the US. The early
immigrants in the 1950s and the 1960s had to strive hard to get the
movies to the US. Those Telugus who were successful in obtaining
them were approached by Telugus in other states in the US, to rent the
movie, and then send it back. It is important to note that the Telugus
in the US initially came together to see Telugu movies. As Telugus began to meet more regularly, the ideas of establishing Telugu associations took shape with a view to promoting Telugu culture and identity.
Some Telugu movie producers have shown interest in making movies
depicting the Telugu way of life in the US. For example, Padamati
Sandhyaragam, America Abbayi, America Alludu, Paradesi, Atu America
Itu India, and Doller Dreams deal with diasporic themes familiar to Telugus. Apart from showing the benefits of being in an advanced nation,
these movies also raised certain issues that Telugus encounter in their
daily lives, such as the initial culture shock, the adjustment to the
American lifestyle and the Telugu relationship with white Americans.
Over the years, the marketing of Telugu movies in the US has increased by leaps and bounds. The emerging networks between local
Telugu film producers and American film distributors have accelerated
this process. Local film distributors in Andhra Pradesh often distribute
the films with the help of American representatives. The business has
encouraged the entry of non-resident Telugus into the Telugu movie industry via collaborations with local producers on a partnership basis or
helping them establish their offices. One of the prominent characteris-
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tics in the process has been the establishment of many Telugu websites, which focus on the movie business.4 Telugu movies from the
1960s and the 1970s have always been a source of true Teluguness for
people in the diaspora. These movies have not only emphasised and
highlighted social issues of inter-caste and inter-religious marriages (i.
e., Malleswari, Shankarabharanam and Missamma) but have also reflected Telugu pride (Alluri Sitarama Raju, who fought against British
rulers). In general, these movies, which are often referred to as Pata
Cinemalu, have become just as popular as more recent movies. Contemporary Telugu movies are very much in demand in the US and it is
a very lucrative business in the diaspora to market the films of, for instance, megastar Chirangivi (Shankardada MBBS) and superstars like
Nagarjuna (Annamauiah, Sri Ramadasu), Venkatesh (Sankranthi), Balakrishna (son of the renowned film star turned politician N.T. Rama
Rao; Veerabhadrudu), Sridevi (Kshanam Kshanam) and Jayaprada (Siri
Siri Muvva).
Telugu Literature
The First Telugu Literary Symposium of America (America Telugu Sahiti Sadassu) was organised on May 23-24, 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia by
the Vanguri Foundation of America, Inc. The Symposium was the first
of its kind in North America. Panel discussions included subjects such
as the literary aspects of Telugu, sweeya kavitha ganam,5 short stories,
discussions on teaching Telugu in North America, presentations on
computer technologies related to the development of Telugu language
and communications. Subsequent Telugu Literary symposiums were
held in Chicago and Detroit. They were funded by the Vanguri Foundation and the local Telugu literary bodies associated with the local Telugu associations organised the event (Detroit Literary Club of the Detroit
Telugu Association).
Apart from the nation-wide Sadassu (membership) as described
above, almost all Telugu associations in the US have their literary
bodies encouraging the literary expressions from the diasporic Telugus.
There are also independent organisations such as the Telugu Fine Arts
Society in New York that have been actively promoting Telugu literary
interests in US Literary magazines like Rachana (www.rachana.net),
webzines like www.sahiti.org, www.eemata.org, www.eevaram.org and
other popular literary sites like www.kaburlu.com, which have been
publishing diasporic Telugu literature.
Silicon Andhra (www.siliconandhra.com) is an upcoming literary
body, which is associated with many cultural and literary programmes
that promote the Telugu Identity, culture, literature, and traditions. It
conducts the annual Andhra Cultural Festival in California.
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Telugu Radio
The first Telugu radio broadcast in the US, Ganasudha, was established
by the Telugu Association of North Texas (TANTEX) on 23 September
1998. Ganasudha is the only Telugu Radio Programme that has been
effectively broadcast by a group of volunteers led by the main hosts Ramam Devaraju and Padma Devaraju and others like Prasad Thotakura,
Nageswara Rao Chintapanta, and Santha Puligandla. Sheer interest in
the promotion of Tellugu language and culture and his obsession with
film music, encouraged Ramam Devaraju to establish this weekly programme. It is broadcast from Dallas, Texas every Sunday from 10:00
a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on 11:50 AM. Its programmes include:
Interviews with Telugu cinema actors and noted Telugu singers
such as S.P. Balasubramanyam
Five minutes of news in Telugu covering the events in Andhra Pradesh and India
Telugu movie songs dominate the programme and a combination
of old and new songs are broadcast. The songs are the best collection of Telugu songs imaginable
Games, quizzes and contests such as the following:
L Anthyakshari: Live game played by listeners is presented the second Sunday of every month.
L Cheppukondi Chooddaam: Another live game involves playing a
small musical bit by the host. Listeners must then identify the
song and sing the song. Presented the fourth Sunday of every
month.
L Quizzes and Contests: Every broadcast includes some contests
where listeners have to identify the movie name, lyrics, writer,
producer, etc. The winner receives a prize from a local sponsor.
L Special programs such as those that celebrate the festivals of Depaavali, Dasara, Sankranthi.
Telugu Associations
Telugu associations in the US basically originated as cultural organisations with a view to preserving and promoting their ethnic minority
culture and passing it on to subsequent generations. There are certain
aspects of culture, which conflict with the dominant host culture that
cannot be easily inculcated among those born and brought up in the
US. But the pursuit of cultural preservation continues with various
kinds of activities organised by Telugu associations. Over the years,
many Telugu associations have sprung up in response to increased
numbers of Telugus residing in the US. The majority of these are the
contemporary software migrants. The associations have also expanded
their activities beyond socio-cultural programs to developing links with
the homeland in terms of emerging political and economic networks.
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Telugu associations are all non-profit organisations that aim to bring

the Telugu-speaking population a common platform. These cultural
bodies are often associated with the following major activities:
Bringing Telugus from the region6 or state together on a common
platform
Promoting the language (among the relevant generations) and preserving Telugu identity (which is expressed in various ways such as
the celebrating of festivals in local Hindu temples, the organising
of literary activities, etc.)
Offering financial support to various individuals or associations involved in the promotion of Telugu identity (this is evident in how
many Telugu associations have established their own foundations
in this regard, such as the Telugu Association of North America
(TANA) Foundation, and the American Telugu Association (ATA)
Foundation
Encouraging second-generations socio- cultural programmes
Facilitating political and economic networks with the homeland. In
some cases, the association can act as a mediator between the diaspora and the homeland.
The Telugu Association of Greater Chicago was established in 1971,
which led to the emergence of many other Telugu associations. By the
mid-1980s, almost every state in the US had some Telugu associations
at the regional and local levels. While some of them sought affiliation
with TANA and ATA, others maintained their own identities and agendas. Literary Foundations like Vanguri Foundation, and Vishnubhotla
Foundation are also involved in the promotion of literary interests.
Meanwhile, each Telugu association also has its own literary wing,
which encourages activities related to Telugu poetry, literature, story
writing, etc. These literary bodies have organised many nation-wide
Telugu literary symposiums with funding coming from said the aforementioned foundations.
There has been an obvious increase in the activities of Telugu associations, especially those pertaining to homeland, following the recent
developments in transport and communication technologies. Telugus
are able to keep in contact with people back home more rapidly than
ever before via e-mail, the Internet, video, and Telugu TV channels.
Most of the Telugu associations in the US generate a sense of home
away from home and offer support, especially to newcomers, helping
them cope with their alien environment. However, some of these associations have become platforms for Telugus segregation and division
based on caste, region, or religion. For instance, the Telugu Association
of North America (TANA) is dominated by members of the Kamma
caste. To counter this trend, Reddy caste members found it necessary
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to found a separate association called the American Telugu Association

(ATA) to protect and promote their sentiments and political affiliations
with Andhra Pradesh. Although ATA is identified with the Reddy caste
and TANA with the Kamma caste, both have often accommodated
members from other castes and regions. Being the dominant castes,
both castes play a significant role in the politics of Andhra Pradesh.
This has also led to the establishment of extensive caste networks between the diaspora and their places of origin. These networks have a
considerable impact on Andhra Pradesh politics through party funding
and electioneering. Some of the green card holders from the US have
even succeeded in becoming members of Indian Parliament and the
Andhra Pradesh Legislature by running for office in elections.
Maintenance of Telugu identity and participation in Telugu associations have provided the Telugus with opportunities to seek mutual support and advancement in practically every sphere of life including
housing, education, employment, healthcare and the promotion of Telugu culture.
Transnational Networks
Transnational networks among the Telugus may be examined from the
aspect of their involvement in socio-cultural, economic, and political
spheres among Telugu community members dispersed in a number of
countries. Of course, these networks depend on the communitys density and distance, which are central to individual and group interactions.
But the major stakes concerning the transnational networks or physical
links between Telugus, involve economic, political, religion, as well as
social and cultural factors.
Socio-cultural Networks
Advancements in transport and communication technologies and the
process of globalisation have had a profound impact on the socio-cultural networks of Telugus in the contemporary world. In the past, kinship and community networks were maintained via remittances, letters, and occasional visits to the homeland whereas today, these networks have been further strengthened with the development of instant
communication networks and faster transport. Today, it is not surprising to find in the US one member, if not more, of each family among
the people of coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh, enhancing the intensity of networks among the Telugus in the US and Andhra Pradesh.
The basis for formation of any family is marriage, and in Andhra,
the preference is given for marriages between cross-cousins, i.e., between ego and his mothers brothers daughter. Such a marriage be-
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tween cross-cousins is popularly known as Menarikamu. Close kin

networks reinforced by these kinds of marriages have also facilitated
the chain-migration of relatives to foreign destinations. One of the major concerns of all parents in the diaspora is finding a suitable spouse
from ones own caste if no suitable match is available among the preferred relatives. Today matrimonial advertisements on the Internet
have made it easier to search for suitable brides or grooms on the basis
of caste.
Culturally, Andhra Pradesh has a distinctive tradition, which is easily
identifiable from other major Indian cultural strands. Some of the cultural symbols of Andhra Pradesh include the Kuchipudi dance, Pochampally handlooms, and Kalamkari paintings, all of which are still maintained by the Telugus. The Kuchipudi dance, known for its grace and
charm, is performed at almost every gathering and festivity in the Telugu diaspora. Some of the important Kuchipudi dance dramas that are
performed transnationally, including the Srinivasa Kalyanam, Rukmini
Kalyanam, Sakuntalam Bhamakalpam, Hara Vilasam, and Ardhanareeswaram which were preserved by such renowned performers as Dr.
Vempati Chinna Satyam, Sobha Natarajan, Shantala Shivalingappa,
Lakshmi Narayana Shastri, and Chinta Krishna Murti among others.
Similarly, the Perini Thandavam, is a male dance that is popular among
the Telugu diaspora.
Festivals serves as another cultural basis for the transnational networks. The major Telugu festivals includes Ugadi (Telugu New Years
day), Makar Sankranti, Dasara, Diwali, Siva-Ratri, and Ganesh
Chaturthi. These are celebrated not only in Andhra Pradesh but also
among the Telugus in the diaspora. These festivals are celebrated in
both individual homes and outside collectively, which helps bring all of
the Telugus together. Visiting cultural guests like Sai Baba, Ganapati
Sachidananda Swami, classical dancers and other performing artists,
film stars, singers as well as the visiting elite from Andhra Pradesh
offer yet another form of transnational cultural network among the
Telugus.
Economic Networks
Although the initial links between Telugus and Telugu diasporas appear to be personal and family networks, there are certain economic
implications as well. A considerable amount of expenditure is now
spent on emigrant education and travel, which includes gifts and other
favours. Eventually, these obligations lead to regular remittances to the
parents or other relatives back home. As the migration flow increases,
the financial networks between the homeland, diaspora community
and host society also become more intense. These economic transactions are both personalised and institutionalised in, for example, ex-
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port-import businesses that deal in cultural products and consumer

goods.
There are several two-way economic transactions articulated between
the homeland and the diaspora. First, there are the non-entrepreneurial channels of economic links, in the sense that, Telugus visit their
places of origin with bags full of novelties and valuable items not readily available on the Indian market, that are offered as gifts to relatives
and friends or sold for profit. This flow peaks during the festival and
holiday seasons such as the Ugadi, Navaratri, Dasahra, Diwali and New
Years Day. Second, the entrepreneurial channel links the homeland
and the diaspora in a more formal manner. Several Telugus abroad
send a significant portion of their savings back home in the form of remittances in order to invest in real estate, industrial establishments,
small businesses, educational institutions, and/or to contribute to welfare organisations such as charities, old age homes, famine and flood
victim relief, etc. Corporate hospitals such as the Apollo Hospitals,
Medwin Hospitals, C.D.R. Hospitals and L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in
Andhra Pradesh have contributed to the healthcare sector via the NRI
Telugus.
Religious Networks
Andhra Pradesh is not only the home of several important religions but
also the origin of several religious and sectarian movements. From Hinduism to Islam and from Buddhism, Jainism to the sectarian and cultic movements of more recent times such as Araya Samaj, Divya Jnana
Samaj, Radha-Saomi Satsang, Meher Baba and Sai Baba, it reveals certain basic underlying facts regarding the faith and social structure
which have persisted over time despite various ups and downs. These
Telugu religious faiths and spiritual movements which are observed
both in Andhra Pradesh (motherland) and in the diaspora indeed
forms the basis for strengthening the links between the Telugu diaspora and the motherland, on the one hand, while constituting an important Telugu identity marker in the diaspora, on the other.
One of several important channels that articulate these Telugu religious links entails pilgrimages to the birthplaces of spiritual teachers
or gurus (i.e., Puttaparthi, the birthplace of Sri Sathya Sai Baba) and
important cultic temples (Shri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, the
wealthiest temple in India and second wealthiest in the world after the
Vatican is visited by thousands of pilgrims from around the world annually). This kind of personal pilgrimage has two important consequences. On the one hand, it strengthens the link between Telugus
and the Telugu diaspora through religion, and on the other, it provides
a better environment for regional development. For instance, Sri
Sathya Sai Babas organisations spread over 137 countries world-wide
111
in over one thousand centres not only promote the spiritual needs of
the people but also the practical needs of society in general such as
providing higher education and water, specialised medical care and so
on to the masses.
Caste and Association Networks
While language and religion bind Telugus in both India and in the diaspora, caste and sub-caste identities provide them an additional forum
for closer interaction. Telugus are divided into several caste groups; the
most important being the Brahmin, Komati, Reddy, Kamma, Kapu,
Naidu, Mala, Madiga, Yeraka, and Yanadi. If we look at Telugu migration history, most of the post-colonial migrants are drawn from the
upper classes and castes, where as the migrants during the colonial
period generally belonged to the lower caste groups. These caste differences have made their presence known in the various socio-economic
and political interactions among the Telugus in the diaspora. For example, Telugus are divided along the lines of caste in the US, where the
Kamma caste dominates the Telugu Association of North America
(TANA) and the Reddy caste dominates the American Telugu Association (ATA).
One of the important channels of articulation of common interest
among the migrants is their ethnic associations. The Telugus have
formed their associations in order to maintain their cultural identity
and to promote their socio-economic and political interests in the host
country. They have also maintained close networks with community
members in the place of their origin. Through their active participation
in the activities of the association, Telugus in the diaspora strive to preserve their cultural heritage. The associations further serve two basic
functions; i) raising funds for specific purposes especially during times
of crisis, and ii) as a means of reinforcing the community networks by
bringing together people who are dispersed throughout the world.
The associations also organise conferences and observe festivals to
essentially cater to the Telugu community located in different parts of
the world. Almost all of the associations abroad are formed on the basis of caste, religious, regional, and/or pan-Telugu identities in one way
or another. There are local as well as global associations based on Telugu identity. While the local associations play a crucial role in preserving
Telugu culture in a local context, the global associations provide a forum for Telugu participation world-wide. The local associations cater to
a particular diasporic community and operate in the country of settlement, whereas the global associations are transnational in nature, cutting across the national boundaries.
Differences between the local and the transnational associations
can be illustrated with the example of the Telugu Association of North
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Texas (TANTEX) and the World Telugu Federation (WTF) in terms of

their objectives and the nature of their activities.
The mains of objectives of TANTEX are:
1. to maintain, preserve and perpetuate the cultural heritage of the
Telugu-speaking people of North Texas;
2. to assist and promote cultural, educational, social and community
affairs of the Telugu-speaking people in North Texas, and;
3. to foster understanding between the Telugu-speaking people and
others in the community.
Whereas the objectives of WTF are:
1. to organise periodical Telugu literary, educational and cultural conferences and seminars throughout the world and;
2. to promote understanding of the Telugu language, literature, arts,
culture, music, dance, and drama, particularly among Telugu children world-wide.
Networking between these associations facilitates the relations between
the Telugu diaspora and the home country. From the motherlands perspective, when we look at the diasporic Telugus (or Non-Resident Telugus), we have to look at both their contribution to the motherland and
the motherlands contribution to the expatriate Telugus. It is true that
expatriate Telugus play an important role in the all-round development
of Andhra Pradesh. The former Chief Minister of the State, Sri Chandra Babu Naidu has tried to involve the Telugu diaspora in the developmental schemes of Andhra Pradesh. The diaspora has made valuable
contributions not only in the fields of science and technology but also
in industry, healthcare, quality educational institutions such as the Indian School of Business (ISB) and the International Institute of Information technology (IIIT), as well as various other gainful ventures. For
instance, Naandi, a trust formed by the Telugu diaspora and the Andhra Pradesh government, calls for increased involvement by the Telugu diaspora in the development of Andhra Pradesh.
Political Networks
Besides their networks through associations, Telugus have also maintained close networks with the homeland on a political level as well.
Their networks are discernible through their participation in the political life of Andhra Pradesh, by mobilising support for specific political
parties. Furthermore, whenever prominent members of the Telugu diaspora visit their places of origin, the Telugu political elite and administrators make a special effort in welcoming them. This has resulted in a
further development of networks and links between the diaspora and
113
the homeland. There are several instances where collaborative projects

that include joint ventures were initiated for the benefit of Telugus in
general.
Today, the Telugus have emerged as a distinctive transnational community, bringing the local and global together. This is manifested in
the socio-economic, cultural, and political networks between Telugu
communities, their homeland, and their kith and kin world-wide. During the last two decades, these contacts have been further facilitated
through the encouragement and intervention of the Andhra Pradesh
government in various political as well as economic matters. It is obvious that, although the Telugus are separated by great distances, they
remain linked to one another through ties of kinship, shared resources,
and cultural exchanges. They preserve and recreate their culture in
new homes across the globe.
Virtual Networks
Of late, the Telugu diaspora especially the new Telugu diaspora has
been very active on the Internet in terms of emerging e-groups. People
with similar interests form an e-group online and share their views
with the rest of the members in the group. As mentioned earlier, The
Internet is providing a constructive platform for the Telugu diaspora,
to interact, not only among themselves and with other migrants in
other parts of the world, but also with the Telugus back home. It is this
interaction between the Telugu diaspora and the Telugus that has given
rise to a virtual community7 of Telugus.
The presence of the Telugu diaspora online is seen in terms of Telugu association web pages as well as personal, literary, media, and popular entertainment web pages. Many of these websites have discussion
forums, thread messages, list forums, and Usenet8 groups. Some of
the sites even provide free e-mail addresses and space for personal
homepages. Many Telugus in the diaspora are kept informed of developments back in the motherland via these sites from politics to popular music. All of these websites act as global and online platforms
where the participating members exchange and express their views on
various issues concerning not only the Telugu culture and life but also
politics, economics, entertainment etc.
Physical interaction is slowly being replaced by virtual interaction
online and a visible shift towards online interaction is noticed in the
networks between the Telugu diaspora and the Telugus elsewhere, with
the latest CMC advancements such as web cams, video and tele-conferencing. Presently, most Telugu associations have their own websites informing the public of their activities. Though they focus on a particular
group in the Diaspora, the pages are open to anyone who visits the site.
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Telugu websites vary: there are general, political, economic, literary,

matrimonial and other sites as well.
There are also developments such as a kind of sub-nationalism
among the Telugu diaspora based on regional sentiments that are facilitated by Internet communications. But the virtual communities and
the interactions have both internal and external constraints. Factors
such as reliability, security, infrastructure, and government policy act
as controls and constraints, which finally determine the nature and
magnitude of emerging networks within the diaspora.
Contextualising Identity
The latter half of the twentieth century saw the world-wide rise of ethnicity issues based on race, religion, region, language, caste, or tribe.
The Indian subcontinent experienced ethnic revivals and mobilisations
based on religion, region, language and caste identities in particular
that facilitated the usurping of political, economic and social interests.
In Mauritius, there has been a trend toward a complex game of ethnopolitics (Hookoomsing 2003b: 19) and an ethnic evolution from Indian to separate Hindu and Muslim identities, with a further perspective of a potential Hindu fragmentation to make room for a Tamil entity . evoking a familiar reality of perpetuating the religious and provincial divisions inherited from the subcontinent. It is not just the
Hindi-speaking Hindoos and Tamils but the Telugus and Marathis
have also secured their own territories in the ethno-politics of Mauritius. The state offers support for the teaching, propagation and celebration of these ancestral languages among the People of Indian Origin in
Mauritius. The Mauritian state thus lends legitimacy and official approval to communities and identities based on the notion of ancestral
languages (Esenlohr 2002: 103).
Telugus in Malaysia experience a different situation from those in
Mauritius, says Sanjeeva Appadoo, a Telugu teacher at the Mahatma
Gandhi Institute in Mauritius. In Malaysia they speak Telugu at home
while in Mauritius they have been facing the trauma of dwindling use
of the mother tongue. Although the Telugus in Mauritius speak Creole
or French at home as a consequence of the loss of the mother tongue
over a century ago, Telugu is still everything to them their religion,
culture, and way of life. They worship Telugu in the form of a mother
goddess and address her by Telugu thalli (meaning Telugu mother).
Telugu thalli idols have found their way into the altar of Telugu homes
where she is worshipped along with other deities. In fact, some of
them keep the soil (mother earth) collected from their places of origin
as a sacred representation of the Telugu thalli in the altar. Mauritian
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Telugus consider themselves Telugu bhaktas (devotees of Telugu goddess), because Telugu is worthy of worship. Telugu is not just a language, its an entire way of life.
The above-mentioned conceptualisation of Telugu as their religion
is also reflected in the perception of the other Ancestral Language
groups such as Hindi-speaking Hindoos, Tamil-speaking Tamils and
Marathi-speaking Marathis. Though most of the People of Indian Origin are Hindus, the various ancestral language groups have built their
own temples; those who spoke Hindi and Telugu maintained Hindoo
and Telugu religions and temples. Similarly, the Tamil- and Marathispeaking communities maintain Tamil and Marathi religions and
temples. Thus the Hindu religion, as practised by most of the Indian
immigrants in Mauritius, was gradually appropriated by different ancestral language groups into Hindoo, Tamil and Telugu religions during the processes of their immigration. Thus, Telugu for the Telugu
community in Mauritius is not just the ancestral language but represents a very distinct culture and religion to which all Telugus belong
and a primordial ethnic identity they can articulate in the socio-economic and political arena.
This means that the migration and immigration experiences of the
Telugu-speaking people from the erstwhile British state of Madras have
led to the formation of endogamous caste-like structures, based on the
assumed linguistic identity (they believe that they are descendants of
the Telugu-speaking immigrants from Andhra Desha (Telugu Country),
an assumed abode of people pursuing Telugu culture and language). It
is primarily a linguistic identity that has been transformed into a cultural and more significantly a religious identity in the context of
Mauritius. Similar kinds of migration and immigration experiences are
reflected in the formation of Marathis, the descendants of the Marathispeaking indentured or kangani labourers from the former British province of Bombay, as well as Tamils and Hindoos.
Mauritius has seen the emergence of unique caste-like structures
over the past century and a half from the regional clusters of linguistic
identities. They have also assumed a unique religious dimension, fragmenting the pan-Indian religious ideology of Hinduism, despite the
fact that all of these newly emerging groups have similar deities in
their temples.
Eisenlohr (2004:81) argues that the ideologies of ancestral languages
in Mauritius are involved in the processes of group identification, by
projecting notions of Hindu community through a particular regime of
temporalization. In Mauritius, the meaning of Hinduness is associated with ancestral time, combining the ideas of language with ritual performance, evoking an ancestral homeland in India. It is a matter of common knowledge and practice that Hindi is officially recog-
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nised as the ancestral language of Hindoos in Mauritius, though Hindi

is never used in everyday life and remains fairly unknown to the very
people claiming it as their ancestral language.
The experience of the Telugus in the US is very different from those
in Mauritius. Temporally, the bulk of Telugu migration to the US occurred after Indias Independence, especially since the 1950s. Most of
these immigrants hailed from well-educated, urban, upper- or middleclass and caste backgrounds. Besides promoting unique cultural practices, Telugu identity offers the immigrants especially those from Andhra Pradesh a significant community base, which allows them to
feel at home in the alien environment of the host society. For instance,
several Telugu associations located in different states offer employment
or educational support to the newly arrived Telugus in an unfamiliar
environment.
The new Telugu diaspora in the US experienced the smallest challenge to their identity because they continued to maintain close ties
with the people and places of their origin. They pursued maintenance
of Telugu identity, especially its promotion among the younger generations with the help of various associations, though there is no threat of
its being assimilated or forced to follow socio-cultural practices other
than their own. In fact, Telugus are presently in a position to replicate
their caste and regional identities and networks with their counterparts
in Andhra Pradesh, using advanced transport and communication
technologies. Moreover, the Telugus have moved to a country, which is
already advanced compared to Mauritius where the immigrants had to
help develop the country where they began at the lowest rungs in society. Unlike Mauritius, Telugu identity in the US has a limited role in
the identity politics of the host society or in the sharing of power with
other immigrants of Indian origin.
Following the formation of the World Telugu Federation, people
from Andhra Pradesh, the old and new Telugu diaspora world-wide participated in various conventions organised periodically in different venues where the Telugus have had a considerable presence, both in India and the diasporic countries. These conventions also provide opportunities to promote collaboration involving trade, commerce, industry,
and other avenues of business. The Andhra Pradesh government has,
since the 1990s, initiated several programs (through the Andhra Pradesh Non-Resident Industrial Corporation) to involve Telugu diaspora
as a partner in the overall development of the state. Today, Telugus in
India and in the diaspora, both old and new, have established close socio-economic, political, and cultural links that span the globe and transcend the borders of nation-states for their mutual advancement.
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Notes
1
2
3
5
6
7
In the kangani system, the recruitment of labourers was generally carried out by a
known person from the same village who was already employed on the same plantation as a kangani or overseer.
MAMS presently has 84 branches across the island and actively promotes the Telugu
culture and identity.
Ugadi, often spelt as Ougadi signifies the onset of the new Telugu year. During this
festival, special food like pacchadi, toranalu, muggu (or alipona) are prepared. The pacchadi tastes sweet, sour, salty, bitter and hot symbolising an individuals life as a combination of all kinds of emotions. According to Appadoo (1990), the festival includes
a Samouhika (group) puja, panchanga sravanam, a gathering at the beach and watching a Telugu movie on TV.
The prominent ones are www.telugcinema.com and www.idlebrian.com although
there are other websites such as www.southindianmusic.com, www.raaga.com, www.
tharangani.com, www.ragalahari.com etc which market Telugu movies and audio to
the diaspora Telugus.
Recitation of original poetic works by the Telugus in the US.
The Tri-State Telugu Association (1984) represents three American states Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin (www.telugu.org).
Rheingold defines virtual community as social aggregations that emerge from the net
when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient
human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace (www.rheingold.com/vc/book/)
Rheingold defines a Usenet as a way of passing information and communication
around a network as a distributed resource with no central control manifested in the
rapid growth of the anarchic global conversation (www.rheingold.com/vc/book/).
5 Separated by the Partition?

Muslims of British Indian Descent in Mauritius and
Suriname
Ellen Bal and Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff
Introduction
If we were to start this introduction by stating that India is the ancestral home of those who call themselves Hindus, we would expect our
audience to concur without ado. If we added, however, that India is
also the ancestral home of many Muslims, people would probably look
up and ask: you mean Pakistan? And surely our audience would gasp
if we were to convince them that Pakistan is the ancestral home of
Hindus. Clearly, the 1947 partition of British India (hereafter the Partition) has had an impact on the way scholars look at the Indian diaspora. As a result, many studies on the Indian diaspora become analyses of the Hindu diaspora (Vertovec 2000) with Muslims sometimes
even delegated to Pakistan (Khan 1995: 96). Others prefer to speak of
Indian diasporas and yet others, having failed to accommodate the
Muslims within the Indian diaspora, have proposed abandoning the
term and speak instead of the South Asian Diaspora (Van der Veer
1995; Clarke et al. 1990). In other words, scholars do not automatically
include so-called overseas Muslims even if (offspring of) pre-Partition
migrants as part and parcel of the Indian diaspora. Religion does
seem to divide.
In this article, we analyse the relation between religion, identity formation, and place, which will explain the causes for such above-mentioned, anticipated bewilderment. We not only argue that the Partition
along religious lines has made it difficult for scholars since 1947 to
link Hindus to Pakistan and Muslims to India, but we also address
more fundamental questions concerning communities, ethnicity, religion and homeland. Such questions have gained all the more relevance
since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, which seriously induced
processes of stereotyping and articulating Muslim identities all over
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the world. The loyalties of Muslims towards their countries of residence, especially of Muslim immigrants, are addressed with suspicion,
and the question has been raised whether true Muslims do not consider themselves first and foremost members of a transnational Muslim community or a de-centred Muslim diaspora.
Our focus is on indentured labourers and their descendants in Suriname and Mauritius. We ask how Muslims among them have related
to their land of origin, presently known as India. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, approximately 1.5 million people
emigrated under the indenture system from British India to several
European colonies in various parts of the world. Despite the dire conditions under which they worked, the large majority of migrants opted to
stay on. These indentured labourers did not constitute separate, unified
and homogenous groups, nor were they the only migrants. Here, we
dismiss the a priori arguments that: 1) there is a natural relation between these indentured labourers and their homeland and 2) that since
this homeland was divided on religious grounds, (descendants of)
these labourers were divided along religious lines as well, with Hindus
identifying with India as their land of origin and Muslims therefore rejecting it. Instead, we question the nature of the relation between the
(offspring of) indentured workers and their homeland, religious affiliations and community identities, and look at the consequences of religion for the diasporic nature of these British Indian migrants and their
descendants, while focusing on the Muslim members.
Defining Diaspora
The Indian Diaspora, was defined in 2002 by the Government of India (GoI), as a generic term to describe the people who migrated from
territories that are currently within the borders of the Republic of India. It also refers to their descendants. Furthermore, the GoI added
that all these people, residing in distant lands, have retained their
emotional, cultural and spiritual links with the country of their origin.1
This official definition therefore does not, formally, exclude any (religious) group of Indian origin from membership of the Indian diaspora. Yet, at the same time, it also signifies a narrow view of diaspora
that scholars have debated, expanded, and reworked over a long period
of time. Central to these debates is the connection between the migrants, their descendants, and their homeland. Related to this is the
fundamental question of whether all those migrants, or their ancestors,
want or should be called the Indian diaspora.
Some scholars, in line with the GoI definition, have shown the relevance of an imaginary Indian homeland (that is partly invented), even
SEPARATED BY THE PARTITION?
121
at times when there was no relationship between the migrants or their

descendants and the present-day Indian nation (e.g., Appadurai 1996:
49). Others, however, have questioned the importance of a real or symbolic homeland for diasporas and prefer to emphasise transnational
connections linking diasporas(Clifford 1994: 306). However, most
scholars feel that it is hard to speak about diaspora without implicating
the concept of either a physical or psychic homeland (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 11). Yet, they have convincingly shown that the homeland
can be de-centred, multi-centred and/or deterritorialised and they urge
us to move away from the theology of origin/return and towards the
de-centring of the homeland, and its incorporation as one of the sites
in a diaspora.
Others propose treating the diaspora not as a bounded entity but to
speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices and so
on (Brubaker 2005: 13). Rather than starting from the premise that a
bounded entity called diaspora exists, these scholars call for studies
into its genesis, and the degree and form of support for a diasporic
project among members of its putative constituency (ibid). In line with
this we should ask questions such as which, why and when people
started identifying as an Indian diaspora, and/or when they stopped
doing so.
Vertovec (2000a: 1) rightly argues that while over the last ten years
there has been a proliferation of literature and a mushrooming of interest among academics and among members of ethnic minority groups
surrounding the notion of diaspora, [s]urprisingly, religion has been
the focus of relatively little attention within this growing field. He
therefore sets out to analyse the religious aspects of diasporic experience, which, he feels, can give us insights into general patterns of religious transformation(2000a: 8). We share Vertovecs interest in the
study of the connection between religion and diaspora but we have a
slightly different approach. We agree that [D]iasporas arise from some
form of migration, but not all migration involves diasporic consciousness(ibid.: 12), yet deviate from his thoughts when he connects his
concept of diaspora with religion and argues that it is possible to talk
of a Hindu diaspora, especially because, no matter where in the world
they live most Hindus tend to sacralise India and therefore have a special kind of relationship to a spiritual homeland (ibid.: 10).
We feel that such an analysis overlooks religious (Hindu) communities that consider their religion universal and thus do not attribute a
central role to India, and more importantly, we fear that such an approach equates the Indian with the Hindu diaspora and tends to exclude other religious communities from this Indian diaspora. Therefore, we propose that like Hindus, Indian migrants identifying as nonHindus and in particular as Muslims, should be studied in a fashion si-
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ELLEN BAL
milar to that of Hindu migrants from India. This would allow for the
inclusion of Muslims with Indian ancestors in the diaspora (as these
Muslims might also have a special kind of relationship to India, spiritually or otherwise) or exclusion of Hindus or others, if they wish to.
In this article, we therefore proceed along from new insights and examine the political, social, and cultural struggles, which have encouraged certain people to identify themselves as a diaspora and others to
exclude themselves. In this way we are careful not to homogenise diasporic identifications or experiences and are sensitive to the influences
of local experiences with the understanding that the local is always already permeated by the trans-local, including the happenings in the
homeland. We also investigate the nature of the diaspora (and its relation with the homeland) and analyse the role of religion in the processes of diasporic community construction.
Muslims from Indian Origin Compared
Today the number of the Indian diaspora is estimated at over 20 million, including the so-called old diaspora(especially those who left under the indenture system). The latter, also referred to as People of Indian Origin or PIOs, are believed to have continued nurturing close socio-cultural links with their so-called motherland ever since their
departure (Bhat, in this volume, Narayan and Sahoo 2003). The Indian
origin of these people is taken as the primary indicator that they are
part of the Indian diaspora. Whether or not PIOs actually identify as
members of the diaspora is not taken into consideration (see also Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003).
In this article we compare Muslims in Mauritius and Suriname and
the kind of communities they constitute. We ask whether or not they
can be defined as a diaspora. In order to accomplish these tasks, we
had to analyse the historical struggles of these Muslims in both Suriname and Mauritius, which have until the present day led to a
bounded diasporic group of Hindustanis in Suriname, comprised of
Muslims and Hindus, while in Mauritius they gave birth to a distinct
ethnic group with religion as its qualifying factor. Therefore, while Suriname and Mauritius are similar in many ways, this different outcome
regarding Muslim notions of belonging makes these countries interesting case studies for comparison. Both countries are proud of and
known for their heterogeneous populations and the relatively peaceful
co-existence among its various ethnic groups. Both nations have large
populations of PIOs, i.e., people whose ancestors can historically be
traced to the South Asian region and to the place that now comprises
the Indian Republic. The other major population segment in both societies is of African descent. Yet, whereas in Suriname PIOs currently
although some more heartily than others identify themselves as a
123
separate ethnic group comprised of both Hindus and Muslims, Muslims in Mauritius have grouped themselves as a separate ethnic community. By juxtaposing these two cases, we show that we, as scholars,
should not a priori, exclude or include Muslims in the Indian diaspora. We should instead detail the local and historical case studies
that show that the effects of the partition of the Indian Subcontinent
on populations that left the region before 1947 are varied and forbid a
simple exclusion of Muslims in the analysis of the Indian diaspora, or
their delegation to a Pakistani, South Asian, Arab diaspora, or a transnational Muslim diaspora without a homeland.
Mauritius and its People of (British) Indian Origin

Until the Dutch arrived in the seventeenth century and named the island after its Prince Maurits van Nassau, Mauritius had no human population at all. The French succeeded the Dutch and the British (who
had followed the Dutch). During these various periods of rule there
was influx of settlers, soldiers, traders, convicts, workers, and slaves (cf.
Carter 1995). The British, who ruled from 1810 to 1968, retained the
French civil code but abolished the African slave trade and in order to
satisfy the demand of plantation owners for cheap labour, they organised the migration of workers from the British colony of India. Along
with these contract workers, Chinese and Indian traders and businessmen also settled in the colony. Mauritius2 now has a population of approximately 1.2 million people3, and it is like Suriname still characterised by ethnic, religious, racial, and linguistic groups living in relative harmonious separatism with each other.4
In 1952, the population of Mauritius was officially categorised into
three groups: the General Population, which included whites, coloureds and Creoles, the Indo-Mauritians and the Sino-Mauritians (Nave
2001: 98). The category of Indo-Mauritians included all Hindus and
Muslims who had come from British India as indentured labourers,
as well as so-called free passengers. The number of indentured labourers was always much higher than the free migrants, and since
many of them had arrived from the port of Calcutta they were received
as Calcuttyas (see also Carter 2000). Most of them originated from the
populous districts of Bihar and the eastern United Provinces (U.P.),
though a small minority came from South India and the Bombay Presidency. Along with them, free traders from Gujarat arrived (Allen
2001). Muslims formed a conspicuous minority among these immigrants.5
In 1834, the governments of Mauritius and British India agreed
upon the importation of indentured labourers, although between 1834
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and 1838 immigration remained largely a private affair (Jha 1987: 137).
Later on, the whole enterprise became state regulated and officially the
system was abolished in 1924. During this period, which thus comprised ninety years, over 450,000 men and women were brought in as
indentured labourers from British India. Although around one third returned, the majority decided to stay in Mauritius after the expiry of
their contracts. They were given land a bonus from the British Government and special loans to help them get started as farmers in
their own right. Thus, from the 1890s onwards, the former indentured
workers gradually became small farmers and, subsequently, citizens of
Mauritius (Ramdin 2001: 3).
These Calcuttyas did not constitute a homogeneous group. First of
all, there were those who identified themselves as Muslims and those
who called themselves Hindus. Among the Hindus, internal variety
based on regional, linguistic, religious, class and caste differences existed. There were those who spoke Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi at home and Hindus were divided between those who had started
calling themselves Arya Samajees and those who opposed them, identifying instead with the Sanatan Dharma. A similar variety was discernible among the Muslims. Nevertheless, a common culture developed
among them that included practices such as the celebration of Muharam and Holi. Hindus and Muslims on the plantations also shared food
habits, dress codes and used mehendi during weddings. Also important
was the darga (tomb of a saint, pir) where both Hindus and Muslims
went to offer prayers to gain boons from Allah and returned for
thanksgiving using incense, money, and garlands. A Mauritian Bhojpuri (Gambhir 1986) developed with Arab, Pharsi, tribal, Sanskrit,
French, Chinese, Portuguese, English, French and even Turkish vocabulary and later matured into a Bhojpurised Creole which became the
lingua franca of Muslims as well as Hindus.
Till the 1960s, these various groups of Muslims and Hindus were officially grouped together in the category of Indo-Mauritians. In 1962,
however, this category was subdivided into Hindus and Muslims and
hence the Mauritian population was officially divided into four main
categories. Scholars, though referring to the change, have never given
much thought to this division of the Indo-Mauritian category. In fact,
they seem to take it for granted, as a rather natural and logic decision
reflecting territorial realities. Many scholars refer to the impact of the
1947 division of British India and conclude that it was the strained
conditions associated with the setting up of Pakistan that drove a
wedge between Muslims and Hindus in Mauritius (Dinan 1986: 22;
see also Biltoo 2001). We do not deny that this present dichotomization within the Indo-Mauritians (Hollup 1996: 299) may have been
influenced by the Partition, but feel that this wedge between Muslims
125
and Hindus needs much more attention because, till the late 1940s at
least, Indo-Mauritians seem to have been much more united by their
common ancestry than divided by religion. We have therefore analysed
the period from around 1910 onwards in order to explain why in 1962
certain Muslims claimed a separate identity based on religion rather
than region of origin6 and we conclude that the split in the IndoMauritian community on the basis of religion was the result of the interaction between local processes in Mauritius and the 1947 partition
of British India, perceived as a process with no clear beginning or
end.7
Hinduisation as Indianisation among Hindu Indo-Mauritians
By the time Mauritius became an independent dominion in 1968, Hindus dominated the government and they have done so ever since.8
They in fact have been able to retain political control since 1948 when
adult suffrage was introduced. In circa 1910, however, Manilall Doctor
was sent from India to Mauritius by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, after
having visited the island for three weeks in 1901, wanted to inspire the
so-called downtrodden Indians. Manilall, an Indian barrister-at-law,
came to Mauritius to defend these Indians in the courts, and ended up
founding the Arya Samaj, to bring social justice and human progress
among the Hindus [emphasis ours] (Ramdin 2001: 7). He was concerned with the fate of Hinduism in Mauritius and wanted to check
mass conversions of Hindus to Christianity in Mauritius(Ramdin
2001: 7). At the same time, the Arya Samaj wanted to purify orthodox
Hinduism by reviving Vedic and Sanskritic Hinduism and did so by
launching aggressive campaigns against superstition and practices
such as ojhai, jhad-phunk and exorcism, some of which were also common among Muslim Indo-Mauritians (Bahadur 2000: 137). It also favoured (female) education and fought for the uplifting of the illiterate
masses. The ensuing discussions between the two groups resulted in
the division of these Hindus into the Arya Samajees and the Sanatans with both groups building new temples and educational institutions.
Although there were fundamental differences in the religious outlook of the two groups, the general focus on education stimulated the
growth of an articulated middle class, which started participating in
trade unions and political activities. Moreover, both the Arya Samajees
and Sanatans invited missionaries from (British) India to come over to
Mauritius and they went to India for further studies and religious education. In tough competition with in particular the Franco-Mauritian
population in the political field, this newly educated Hindu middleclass emphasised the need for a united Hindu front. They propagated
a unifying Indian consciousness fuelled by reformist Indo-Mauritian
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leaders who were in close touch with India (Mulloo 2004: 112-113), and
during the 1930s, a kind of Indian nationalism developed among this
elite. This nationalism was initially based on collaboration and compromise, both with the colonial power and with the Franco-Mauritian
bourgeoisie, which controlled the Mauritian economy and society
(Hookoomsing 2003: 21). Among these educated Hindus, English,
French, and in particular the standardised form of Hindi (khadi boli),
which by that time had developed in India, were presented as the cultured languages of Hindus. Moreover, while this Hindu elite faced efforts of an ethno-linguistic purification among the French-speaking
population in Mauritius, they started rallying for Hindi to promote the
Hindu cause in Mauritius (Eisenlohr 2000: 13). This was made possible by identifying standard Hindi as the language of our ancestors
regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the Hindu population,
like the Muslims among them, were illiterate Mauritian-Bhojpuri
speakers (e.g., Eisenlohr 2002:2). The low status of Bhojpuri, which
lacked standardisation and a recognised literary tradition, made it unattractive to the Hindu organisations in their efforts to gain supremacy
over the French-speaking elites in the British colony (Eisenlohr 2002:
6). Furthermore, this Hindi-speaking Hindu elite started evoking the
idea(l) of Chota Bharat during the 1920s in reaction to the old established Franco-Mauritian colonial elites view of Mauritius as a Little
France (Hookoomsing 2003: 18). A process was initiated that is described by scholars such as Benedict (1961: 141) as the sanskritisation
of Hinduism in Mauritius, which made the symbol of India the symbol of a new uniform Hinduism in Mauritius.
These educated Hindus thus preferred pure Hindi as an ancestral
language over Bhojpuri, which was called a junglee (backward) language (Boodhoo 1999: 39). Efforts were also made to do away with
Pharsi (Persian) words, that had been part of the Bhojpuri spoken tradition and many aspects of the common Bhojpuri culture were denounced by Hindus who urged others to discover the real Indian culture. Interestingly, in this process Bhojpuri, which had been the spoken language of both Muslim and Hindu Indo-Mauritians, became
represented as Hindu property (Eisenlohr 2002: 13). This resulted in
a transformation of the social relations between Hindus and Muslims
in Mauritius and seriously influenced the basis on which Muslims
started to assert their claims of political authority in Mauritius (Eisenlohr 2000: 15).
Islamisation as De-Indianisation among Muslim Indo-Mauritians
The seed of Islam was sown by a group of Indian merchants who
started coming to the island from 1758 onwards and did a thriving
business there (e.g., Emrith 1994; Jumeer 1999). African slaves might
127
also have been Muslims, yet as original names had been exchanged for
Christian names, it is difficult to present figures. The bulk of Muslims
came to India as indentured labourers and were identified, along with
Hindus, as Calcuttyas (Jahangeer-Chojoo 2000: 119). Moreover, another
group of British Indian Muslims came to Mauritius from the Surat
and Kutch regions of Gujarat as well as from Bombay. Their number
greatly increased after World War I but never surpassed that of the Calcuttyas and they remained a small, though elite, minority in Mauritius.
Clearly, during the nineteenth- and early twentieth century, these Muslims did not constitute a homogeneous group, although the vast majority was Sunni,9 which in Mauritius was considered as orthodox. Class
differences among Muslims were significant and there was a huge gap
between the economic position of most Muslims and the small but economically powerful and socially influential group of Muslim traders.
These Gujarati-speaking Muslim traders were again divided into two
principal groups, the Kutchi Memons and the Sunni Surtis, plus a
small number of Shias.10 These Muslim migrants came with a certain
amount of capital and were not bounded by any contract. They were
concentrated in the capital and engaged almost exclusively in commerce. They were also known as white Muslims because of their fair
complexion (Boodhoo 1999: 2). They established firms and stores and
became the leading dealers in foodstuffs and textiles. At a certain time,
they also became the owners of sugar estates and factories. Although
today there are many Muslims who own large sugar plantations, none
of them are involved in owning or managing a sugar factory (Emrith
1994:37-38). Nevertheless, the importing of grains, jute bags, and textiles became more or less their monopoly. They also invested in the
university education of Muslim students in Mauritius and abroad. By
the end of the 1911 century, these white Muslims had emerged as major
economic agents. For them, the most important factor that enhanced
the trade between British India and Mauritius was no doubt the Coolie
Trade or the organised migration of indentured labourers from India.
The need for the transport, clothing and food for these labourers gave
an impetus to commercial transactions with India. These Muslims
were, in fact, more active than the colonial government. Through Indian middlemen or commercial houses they supplied the immigration
stream (Carter 1995: 53) and used the empty returning ships for the exporting of sugar and other national and international products. They
truly were an Indian trade diaspora.12
These Muslim Indo-Mauritians started functioning as the Indian
elite on the island even before the arrival of the Arya Samaj missionaries in Mauritius and the subsequent birth of an educated Hindu elite.
They visited India at regular intervals, they tried to find spouses in the
villages of Gujarat and a number of them maintained two homes, one
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in Mauritius and one in British India. They played important roles in

both the religious and educational fields. For example, they maintained
the Jummah Mosque, one of the most important religious centres in
Port Louis. They were very much in touch with (British) India and
when Mohandas K. Gandhi made a brief stop in Mauritius on his way
from South Africa to India in the beginning of the twentieth century,
he was welcomed and celebrated by these Muslims in the name of all
Indo-Mauritians. However, a process described by Benedict (1961: 142)
as the sunnification of Islam started among them that would, ironically, pull Muslims away from India.
Among these elite Muslims, as it was among Hindus, there was an
intense power struggle and they experienced feelings of humiliation
under the dominance of the Franco-Mauritians. Consequently, these
Muslims emphasised the importance of a Muslim identity through Islamic revivalism. Local (read Bhojpuri) and sectarian practices were denounced in favour of a uniform orthodox practice. This, for instance,
united into a strong movement against the celebration of Muharram,
known in Mauritius as the Yamse or the fete des Ghouns (Jumeer 1999:
112). Religious leaders like the mullas also increasingly denounced unIslamic practices such as prayers for pirs and the dispensing of attention and cures through prayers and taviz (amulets) (Jahnageer-Chojoo
2002: 121). They also propagated the de-hinduization of Muslim marriage celebrations (Benedict 1961: 142). Although this kind of islamisation certainly divided the Indo-Mauritians on the basis of religion, the
religious reform did not necessarily urge them to distance themselves
from India. In fact, missionaries from British India such as those related to the Tablighi Jamaat (International Brotherhood of Muslims),
were invited to Mauritius, to further the sunnification of Islam in
Mauritius (Benedict 1965: 39).13
Furthermore, even though standard Hindi and Urdu were in fact
two forms of the same language while Urdu uses a form of Arabic
script and draws heavily from Persian and Arabic for its formal literary
vocabulary and standard Hindi is written in the devanagari alphabet,
turning to Sanskrit for learned and elegant words- the elite Muslims
increasingly preferred Urdu over Bhojpuri as their ancestral language.
Consequently, language, like religion, no longer functioned as a marker of ethnic unity among the Muslim and Hindu Indo-Mauritians.
These processes, which indeed divided the Indo-Mauritians into two
separate communities with different religious-linguistic identities, were
also reflected in politics. The first proposal for a new constitution was
made in 1946 and elections on a limited electoral roll were held in
1948 and 1953, with some Muslims demanding different electoral rolls
(Singh 2005: 66). By the time elections came around in 1959, the
Indo-Mauritians were divided into two parties: the Independent For-
129
ward Bloc (IFB) and the Mauritius Committee of Action (MCA). Muslims had furthermore formed the Comite dAction Muselan (CAM).
Sookdeo Bissoondoyal had established a party supported by rural Hindus, the Independent Forward Bloc (IFB), which wanted the revival of
Indian culture and values. Muslims increasingly began voting for nonHindu parties, favouring the Creole struggle against Hindu hegemony. However, there were Hindus who did vote for Muslim candidates and Muslims who voted for Hindu candidates (Dubey 1997: 5859).
After the partition of British India in 1947, peoples relation to the
idealised ancestral motherland (British India) as well as to post-partition India also changed. Hindus emphasised their Hindu/Indian backgrounds even more (Nave 2001: 98) while a number of Muslims began
referring to Pakistan as their homeland (Sharma 1986: 9).14 Increased
communal rivalry between Hindi-speaking Hindus and Creoles also
drove away the Muslims who feared the peril of Hindu majority (Dubey 1997: 64). Thus, by the early 1960s, politics had become completely communalised even though the Muslim vote at that time was still
divided (Dubey 1997: 66). By that time, not all Muslims were voting
against Hindus or for the CAM, but the pro-Indian approach of certain Hindu leaders was certainly not adhered to either. This process
culminated in 1962, when a group of Muslims reacted strongly
against the Governments decision to group Muslims together with
Hindus under the common ethnic denomination of Indo-Mauritians
for the population census (Emrith 1994: 119).
Calcuttya Muslims between Re-Diasporisation and De-Diasporisation
In 1931, almost one hundred years after the first indentured labourers
arrived in Mauritius, the Muslim population was 50,592 out of a total
Indo-Mauritian population of 268,649. The bulk of these Muslims
were (the descendants of) these indentured labourers known as the
Calcuttyas. It is not clear whether the educated elite actually helped
these Calcuttyas in their economic development. Some Muslims even
argue that the tendency of Gujaratis to favour family and group members has in fact hindered the progress of Calcuttyas, especially in the
commercial sector (Jahangeer-Chojoo 2000: 127). Nevertheless, these
white Muslims financed the building of several mosques and madrassas (schools) and greatly stimulated the birth of an educated elite
among the Calcuttyas who became wedged in between these processes
of re-diasporisation among Hindus and de-diasporisation among Muslims.
A review of the socio-economic and religious-cultural development
of these Calcuttyas in the period from 1860 to 1904 shows an increase
in the mosques they managed (with the financial assistance of Gujarati
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Muslim social organisations). Later on, when the Hindu elite started
gaining political power, there was an increased emphasis on orthodoxy
and concern with non-Islamic practices among the educated Calcuttyas
as well. This affected local religious practices, as seen in changes in
dress styles, for instance, with the indentured labourers abandoning
the traditional clothing whenever they began to climb up the class ladder. Moreover, sometimes purdah would be introduced among Calcuttya Muslim women (Jahangeer-Chojoo 2002: 116). There was also a
gradual disappearance of the Muharram festival among these Muslims
in Port Louis and a decline of the Indian way of celebrating Ramadan
(Hollup 1996). Muslims also participated less in Hindu festivals such
as the Holi celebrations, in which they had previously played djal
(small cymbals).
Nevertheless, for many Calcuttyas, mostly Sunni Hanafees, some Indian traditions remained unchanged, such as the (Sufi) ritual of offering incense, money, and lengths of cloth to famous pirs. The HinduMuslim divide of the Indian subcontinent was therefore not fully replicated in Mauritius (cf. Hookoomsing 2003: 16). Moreover, communal
violence in Mauritius was more common between Hindus and (Christian) Creoles than between Hindus and Muslims. However, when during the 1948 Mauritius elections no Muslim candidates were elected,
they decided that the future demanded a separate platform for Muslims and a strategy of political and economic alliances (Hookoomsing
2003: 19). Moreover, the small group of Muslim merchants and traders
began favouring the use of Urdu and Arabic over Gujarati and merged
with many of these Muslim coolies who had dropped Bhojpuri for
Urdu and Arabic as common languages of Islamic reference (Hookoomsing 2003: 17). Subsequently, as in post-partition India and
among the Calcuttya Muslims as well, linguistic and regional features
started functioning as markers of social and class distinction.
Muslims represent 17 per cent of the current Mauritian population,
among which the descendants of indentured labourers form the largest
group (Rajah-Carrim 2003).15 Our interviews with these Calcuttya Muslims indeed confirm that they do no longer share a common (Bhojpuri)
culture with the Hindu Calcuttyas in Mauritius.16 However, these Calcuttya Muslims are not at the same level as the Muslim Gujaratis, even
though some of them felt that these richer and better-educated fellow
Muslims had helped them (Carroll 2000: 37). Others felt discriminated
against in the public sector and subsequently set up small businesses
themselves and have become quite successful (Carroll and Carroll
2000: 14).17 In the countryside, the Calcuttyas are either self-employed
workers, traders, or banyans (middlemen) in the fishing trade. In the
urban areas they are employed as skilled workers or self-employed
technicians (Mehta 2004: 194) and only very few of them are doctors,
131
barristers, or engineers.18 There is thus uneven inclusion of these Calcuttyas into the rest of the Muslim population, or rather the other way
around, and economic differences between the groups have remained.
Among Hindus, Hindi replaced Bhojpuri as the Ancestral Language
(AL) and the Language currently spoken at home (CL), but Gujarati
Muslims still support Urdu as their AL. However, we found that the
Calcuttya Muslims seem to have abandoned the idea of ancestral language altogether (Edun 2003: 167-171). Moreover, our interviews with
Hindu and Muslim Calcuttyas also demonstrate that the (re-) discovery
of a homeland among many Hindu Indo-Mauritians aided by the
Government of India19 and the subsequent reactivated social, economic, cultural, religious and educational ties with present-day India has
motivated these Muslims not only to abandon a common Indo-Mauritian identity (Hookoomsingh 2003: 17) but also to abandon (British-)
India as their homeland. Indeed, some of them seem to have replaced
this homeland for Pakistan or the Arab world.20 Or they were influenced by more recent voices of fundamentalism (Hollup 1996) and
post-September 11 global world changes, and now support the idea of
belonging to the ummah either as a safety valve in an increasingly
tense local political environment21 or as a tool to locally get material
and political gains (Jahangeer-Chojoo 2002: 124-125).22
However, we feel that, in general, these Muslim Calcuttyas no longer
constitute a diaspora. Clearly a process of de-diasporisation has set in
among them, away from Hindu Calcuttyas and their India, which has
in fact been replaced by Mauritius as the homeland. In their cultural
and research centres they now study the contributions of Muslim IndoMauritians to the development of Mauritius as they try to create a kind
of Mauritian Islam. Questions about roots or origins do not seem to
play a role. However, the possibility of the creation of new groups remains open and these (other diasporic) identities lie dormant and can
be reactivated at any time, depending on the interaction between local
and global circumstances in Mauritius (cf. Jahangeer-Chojoo 2002: 117118).
Muslim Indentured Labourers in Suriname

Suriname offers another textbook example of a so-called poly-ethnic or
plural society. Notwithstanding significant co-operation and identity
formation along non-ethnic lines, the articulation of ethnic identities
has left its mark on the organisation of Surinamese society. Ever since
the Dutch arrived in 1667, ethnic (typically referred to as racial) distinctions have marked interpersonal relations, initially between the colonial
planters and slaves of African descent, but since the abolition of slavery
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in 1863 and the subsequent importing of labour from other colonies

also with people of Asian descent (from British India, Dutch Indies,
China). Today Suriname also has immigrants from British Guyana,
Haiti, Brazil, as well as new migrants from China. The two dominant
communities, however, are the Afro-Surinamese, also known as Creoles,
and the People of Indian origin or PIOs, in Suriname commonly
known as Hindustanis. Notwithstanding ethnic differentiation or even
antagonism, the country has never witnessed inter-ethnic violence in
any way comparable to countries like neighbouring British Guyana.
Approximately half of all of the Hindustanis, some 160,000 people,
are currently living in the Netherlands. The others have remained in
Suriname. Here we concentrate on the Surinamese Hindustanis, in
particular, the Muslims amongst them.
Preliminary figures from the last population census in Suriname
(Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek 2004) show that the country now
has 487,024 inhabitants, of whom almost seventy per cent reside in
the capital Paramaribo and its bordering district Wanica. The report,
however, makes no reference to either religion or ethnicity. In 1991,
Hindustanis formed the largest community (37.0 per cent), followed by
the Afro-Surinamese (31.3 per cent), the Javanese (14.2 per cent), the
Maroons or inland Creoles (8.5 per cent), Amerindians (3.1 per cent)
and 1.7 per cent other (Brinkerhoff and Jacob 1994: 637-638).
In this last section, we will analyse the process of community construction, identity politics and the construction of notions of belonging
among the Surinamese Hindustanis, with a particular focus on Muslim Hindustanis. Although the Hindustanis by no means constitute a
homogeneous community they are comprised of Hindus, Muslims,
and Christians of various denominations and their history has been
marked by occasional periods of conflict and estrangement, until the
present day there has been no ethnic bifurcation akin to the Mauritian
case. Here we will try to explain why in Suriname, unlike in Mauritius,
religious differences have not led to the construction of distinct ethnoreligious communities and a process of diasporisation among Hindus
and of de-diasporisation among Muslims, but instead resulted in the
formation of one Hindustani diasporic community.
British Indian migration to Suriname was mostly restricted to labourers who left under the indenture system and whose arrival was
closely connected to the prohibition of African slavery in 1863. In
search of alternative labour on the plantations, the Dutch signed a convention with the British government in 1870 that allowed them to contract Indian labour. Between 1873 and 1917, approximately 34,000 British Indian contract workers migrated to the Dutch colony. Their early
history shows much resemblance to the indentured workers in Mauritius. Historical sources (e.g., Grierson 1883) demonstrate that they too
133
came mostly from the Bhojpuri area of British India, now covering the
western part of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. Upon their arrival in
Suriname, they started working on various plantations under 5-year
contracts. And although they could make use of a free passage to return to Calcutta after the completion of their contracts, by 1915, only
an estimated one third had made use of this opportunity (Ramdin
2000:152).
These British Indians in Suriname were similar to the indentured
workers in Mauritius in that they constituted a varied lot with differences based on language, religion, regional background, class, gender
and so forth. Here too they were initially referred to as Calcuttyas (Kalkattiyas) or Calcutta-soema (negro-English for human), as well as
coolies, British Indians, and Hindustanis (named after the region that
the Muslim rulers had designed as Hindustan).23 The first generation
of migrants came with dissimilar ambitions and personal histories,
and they were variously equipped physically as well as mentally, to face
the long journey and the new circumstances in which they had to live
and work (cf. Vertovec 2000: 48-49). Furthermore, men and women
had enlisted as singles, and family migration was rare. These migrants
gave various reasons for migrating. Often it was a combination of poverty, personal and localised difficulties, coupled with a spirit of enterprise that brought people to one of the depots.
Most migrants stated that they were Hindu, often from the so-called
depressed classes. Brahmins made up only 5 per cent, though according to the census of India of 1931, they constituted 11 per cent of the
Hindu population in the United Provinces. The percentage of Muslims
among the British Indian migrants was approximately 17.5 per cent
while the percentage of Muslims in the U.P. was approximately 12 per
cent at the time of migration (ibid.: 112). Thus the proportion of Muslims among the emigrants was relatively large.24 Neither Muslims nor
Hindus constituted homogeneous categories of believers. The widely
heterogeneous caste composition of the Hindus also accounted for religious heterogeneity. However, out of such profusion common forms
were forged (Vertovec 2000: 46-47). Similarly, Muslims were a heterogeneous collection of believers and sects. They comprised saiyads,
sheikhs, pathans, mughals, julahas, fakirs, ghosis and hajams. Most Muslims were from the Sunni Hanafi mazhab. They celebrated the Eids as
well as Muharram and Milad-un Nabi, and they were also influenced by
the Shia and Sufis of North India (Chickrie 2002: 385).
While Hindi has typically become associated with Hindus and Urdu
with Muslims in Mauritius, and, for that matter, in India itself; in Suriname a lingua franca now known as Sarnami or Sarnami-Hindustani
developed, based largely on Bhojpuri and Avadhi, and blended with
non-Indian languages (e.g., Vertovec 2000: 48). Despite the fact that
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both Hindi and Urdu were taught in local schools for Hindustani children (the so-called koelie schools), madrassas, etc., and both Hindi and
Urdu have always been considered higher languages, which were used
as religious languages, neither one of them developed into a first language, or a language spoken at home (CL).25
Notwithstanding the initial heterogeneity of the British Indians in
Suriname, it was already evident that during their stay in the depots in
Calcutta or the long journey which lasted for months, some singles
became couples, friends became brothers,26 and many friendships
and marriages (including inter-religious ones) were long lasting. And
while some considered themselves transients and not settlers, subsequent generations came to realise that they were in a position of no return and abandoned the idea of going back to India. Suriname had become their country of permanent abode and a process of community
building had begun. By 1947, when India was divided into India and
Pakistan, the British Indian contract labourers had evolved as a distinct
ethnic and linguistic community whose members identified themselves as Hindustanis.
Muslim in Suriname
Scholars have argued that the history of Islam and Muslims in the Caribbean can be traced to long before the voyages of Columbus in the fifteenth century.27 They provide evidence that many of the slaves who
were transported from West Africa to work in the Caribbean were in
fact Muslims. Yet these scholars also agree that all these Muslim
groups have submerged almost without trace. With the arrival of Muslim East Indians (as they were called in English) in Guyana, Trinidad,
Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada and
Suriname, Islam (or rather various Islamic syncretised traditions) was,
however, reintroduced in the Caribbean. In Suriname today, Muslims
of various ethnic backgrounds make up approximately twenty per cent
of the total population. Unlike the Hindus (who now constitute 27 per
cent of the population and who are generally of Indian descent), the
Muslims are comprised of people from various (diasporic) backgrounds
(including Javanese who came under a similar indenture system from
the Indonesian Archipelago between 1890 and 1940, and also a growing number of Afro-Surinamese Muslims). Most Muslims in Suriname, however, are of Indian descent. Every one of the sixty-four boats
that brought indentured labourers to Suriname also included some
who identified themselves as Muslims. According to the personal database of these indentured labourers, the first boat, the Lalla Rukha,
counted at least 35 Muslims among the 410 people who had embarked
(De Klerk 1998 (1953): 48-49).28 All in all, an estimated one fifth of all
135
British Indian indentured labourers were Muslim (e.g., Karsten 1930;

De Klerk 1963: 61; Ramsoedh and Bloemberg 2001: 123-165).
Unity among Muslims in Suriname during certain periods and in
particular fields like the foundation of the countrys first political
party, the Muslim Party29 never led to the construction of a separate
Surinamese Muslim diaspora without homeland(s), or an ethnic Muslim community rooted in Suriname. Muslims of Indian descent and
those from Java rarely developed common Islamic programmes and institutions and the history of religious institutionalisation is based on
intra-ethnic rather than inter-ethnic religious co-operation. They never
set themselves apart from other Surinamese people as one single community.
Some scholars have argued that the Hindustani competition with
Creoles for scarce socio-economic and political resources produced a
strong tendency, within the Hindustani group to neglect the internal
socio-religious differences and to stress the fact that Hindustanis were
a group originating in India, having a common history and therefore a
common identity (Brinkerhoff and Jacob 1994: 636-662). Although
we agree with the argument that animosity toward the Creoles possibly
led to a lack of communication regarding internal differences, we
would also argue that religion was a significant symbol system of identification, demarcation and support (Bauman 1999), without causing a
permanent breach between Hindus and Muslim Hindustanis. We believe that it was precisely the localised (British Indian or South Asian)
culture of Islam that these Muslim Hindustanis highlighted and linked
them to countries of origin different from those of the other Muslims.30 Moreover, they were united by Urdu (as their religious language), which separated them from the Javanese Muslims and from
those who were more influenced by the process of arabization (Chickrie (2001 and 2002: 381-399).31 Hence, Hindustani Muslims in Suriname preferred links with Lahore and did not seem to have much interest in pilgrimages to Mekka (Karsten 1930: 20). This orientation
continued after 1947, when India was partitioned and Lahore became
part of Pakistan. Rather than resenting the Indianisation of Muslim
cultural practices, the Hindustani Muslims in Suriname sought its preservation and invited maulanas from India and Pakistan for this purpose.
Though language and religious South Asian affinities therefore united these Hindustanis, the Muslims, like their Hindu counterparts
(who, similar to Mauritian Hindus, became divided into Arya Samajees
and Sanatans), were affected by internal fragmentation and institutionalisation. This process started soon after the contract labourers settled
as free immigrants in Suriname. They broke up into several organisations and are now divided over many mosques. The first and most pro-
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found division among the Muslims was between the Sunnis and Ahmadis. This separation goes back to the early twentieth century when
Surinamese Muslim leaders were looking for scholars from (British)
India to teach them about Islam. The Surinamese Islamic Association
(SIV) approached Himayal Ill Islam in India for assistance, and he encouraged them to contact Moulvi Ameer Ali of Trinidad. Ameer Ali
came to visit Suriname and preached the ideology of Ahmadiyyaism.32
Here, like in Trinidad, the introduction of the new ideology caused a
schism among the Muslims. Soon, the SIV came to be dominated by
the Ahmadiyya doctrine causing many Sunni Muslims to leave and
form several orthodox groups (Kassim 1999: 176-77).
Further fragmentation of the Hindustani Muslims in Suriname continued in the course of the twentieth century, although the real rupture
between the Sunnis and Ahmadis only occurred after World War II.
Many of our informants believe that the moulvis and maulanas from Pakistan, who then started arriving in Suriname, were primarily responsible for stirring up the differences between local Sunnis and Ahmadis.
This was particularly so after 1974, when the Ahmadis were officially
declared non-Muslims in Pakistan.33 These conflicts have remained unresolved until today.
The Boycott: Communal Conflicts in Suriname of the 1920s and 1930s
Unlike Mauritius, Suriname is situated at a considerable distance from
India. This has certainly had an impact on the minds of the migrants
and their descendants. Of those contract workers who stayed in Suriname, only a few were able or willing to maintain their contacts with
India. After the first generation of migrants passed away, most of the
contacts with relatives in British India were also discontinued. By
1916, when ships stopped bringing new migrants from India, British
Indian immigrants increasingly saw India as the land of their ancestors rather than as their own. Moreover, in 1927 these British Indian
aliens formally became recognised as Dutch subjects (onderdanen) in
colonial Suriname and the Netherlands also became the official
motherland for many of these Hindustanis.34 Nevertheless, the route
to India was not totally forgotten (cf. Rajasingham-Senanayake 2003).
For instance, their religious orientation with regard to British India
was maintained and Hindu as well as Muslim religious leaders from
India and other regions where British Indians had settled (e.g., Trinidad and neighbouring Guyana) visited Suriname on a regular basis.
Not only was their arrival intimately linked to religious fragmentation
amongst Hindus and Muslims, it also affected internal cohesion
amongst the Hindustanis. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Hindu-Muslim
relations deteriorated and Suriname witnessed a period of communal
antagonism, which is generally known as the Boycott (e.g., De Klerk
137
1998 [1953]: 197). Suriname was spared the bitter clashes between Hindus and Muslims that took place in India, but many Hindustanis
nevertheless recollect this period as a dark page in their history.
Although the movement was not very widespread, did not encompass
all of the members of the two religious groups, and the altercations
were mainly verbal, our elderly informants still remember how, from
1929 till at least 1943, in a number of places, Hindus started boycotting Muslims by cutting all socio-cultural and economic links that had
previously existed between the two communities. Most of our informants refer to a cow slaughter or sacrifice (kurbani) as the immediate
cause of the conflicts. While Muslims had always refrained from kurbani, since the late 1920s relations between Hindus and Muslims had become disturbed to the extent that some people no longer cared. Like in
India, here too holy cows had become central symbols of the HinduMuslim conflict.
The most extensive written account of the Boycott comes from the
hand of Munshi Rahman Khan, a Muslim indentured labourer with a
vast knowledge of the Ramayana and other Hindu scriptures (SinhaKerkhoff, Bal and Singh (eds.) 2005).35 Rahman Khan penned his
memoirs, producing a unique account of the British Indian migration
story. Rahman Khan thought that the introduction of the Arya Samaj
in Suriname (in 1929)36 was responsible for the social unrest. While
their initial quest for purification of Hinduism caused discord between the Samajees and Sanatans, tensions between them were ultimately resolved at the expense of Hindu-Muslim relations, when Hindus united under one banner and rallied around the cow, but which
completely alienated them from the Muslims.
While Rahman Khans version of the Boycott is clearly favourable to
the Muslim Hindustanis, other informants presented different accounts. The District Commissioner of the time for example held Muslims had not wanted to listen to him when he, one day before the
slaughtering, had tried his best to persuade them to refrain from
claughtering a cow. He had also pointed out that the parties should not
forget that they were one race.37
In 1943, more then ten years later, the Boycott officially came to an
end in a meeting between Hindus, Muslims and representatives of the
colonial government. Unlike in India, where Hindu-Muslim animosities have continued to impact Hindu-Muslim relations and politics, in
Suriname, Hindustanis were able to restore communal harmony.
Contextualising Hindu-Muslim Antagonism in Suriname38
Considering the similarities between the communal strife in India and
Suriname, it seems logical to link the happenings in the two countries
and to search for explicit interlinkages. However, all of our informants
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denied such translational connections and emphasised that local factors had been responsible for the Boycott. Hence, the two very different
outcomes in India and Suriname can only be understood by contextualising of the events.
During the period of indenture, a strong and common identity had
developed among the labourers who had migrated from British India;
an identity that united them but also set them apart from other migrant groups and the Dutch colonial rulers. As a community, the British Indians were looked down upon. Their religious views were portrayed as pagan by the dominant elites, and Christians were accorded a
higher status. British-Indian traditions, languages, culture, and religions were not perceived as part of the local Surinamese society and,
while in India caste and class had to a great extent been linked, in Suriname they were not institutionalised and the classification system was
often altered.
It was the abandonment of the indenture system in 1916 that led to
the end of the colonial politics of segregation and to the acceleration of
integration.39 And when, by 1927, the Hindustanis had officially
stopped being British-Indians and became Dutch citizens (Nederlandsche onderdanen), they needed to invent new identities to help
them to attain and maintain their legitimate place in Dutch-Suriname
vis-a`-vis other local migrant groups and Dutch colonial power.40 At the
same time, agriculture did not provide a secure basis, because it is so
labour intensive and so minimally profitable, to compete with Surinames other citizens; plus they had no formal education, making social
mobility almost impossible. The urge for a better social standing, to
belong to the intellectual elite, to acquire possessions and social respect, formed the basis for the breakthrough in Hindustani attempts to
emancipate themselves in our country (Ramsundersingh 1998: 93,
translated from Dutch). In the late-1920s Suriname, education, employment, and religion (and gender) seemed the primary directives for
the enhancement of the socio-economic status of Hindustanis.
This process of emancipation and becoming rooted in Suriname
caused the apparent harmony within the community to begin to crumble. By the end of the 1920s, relatively harmonious relations amongst
Hindustanis became increasingly disturbed. For example, the differences between the educated and uneducated caused great schisms,
and the peaceful cohabitation between the various religious groups began to erode. Some Hindus, who had previously disguised or changed
their ancestors caste identities, now claimed the respect they felt they
deserved because of their high-caste status. Meanwhile, other Hindus
contested the relevance of caste and felt that education should determine ones position. In this context, the so-called reformers who had
come from India to the Caribbean became quite successful in their ef-
139
forts to introduce new religious, socio-cultural outlooks, and lifestyles

to both Hindu and Muslim Hindustanis. Some chose religion as the
main source of identification and either rallied for or against the holy
cows imported from India.
In the end, however, Hindustanis united under the banner of a
shared ethnic identity vis-a`-vis other ethnic communities, and when in
1947 the British left India, independence was celebrated, although the
division of British India on religious lines was not welcomed, let alone
imitated. On the contrary, people seemed rather disappointed with
these developments in their Hindustan.41 Hence, peace returned in
the course of the 1940s, and in 1949, many Hindus and Muslims
formed a united political party, the VHP (United Hindustani Party) to
run for office. Notwithstanding the occasional friction, distrust and inter-religious tensions, ethnic identity has proved to be stronger (and
more instrumental) than religion until this very day. This is not to say
that the future might not bring different (diasporic) orientations and
identifications. Among Hindustanis in the Netherlands, for instance,
we see how religion does seem to play a different and more significant
role in the way Hindustanis construct identities and notions of belonging.
Hindustani Muslims: Part of a Hindustani Diaspora
The Indian indentured labourers left British India at a time when
neither nationalist nor communal (religious) identities had yet crystallised. They left when there was still not much of a national identity or
a common bond of unity and fellow feeling. People generally considered themselves Bengali, Sikh, Rajput, Maratha or Hindustani, but not
Indian (cf. Nag 2001: 47-54).We have contended that in Suriname most
Muslim and Hindu Hindustanis, no matter how fragmented and how
many conflicts they may engage in, give preference to ethnic unitiy
over religious division. This, however, does not say much about Muslims attitudes towards divided India and a newly established Pakistan.
Some scholars propose that Pakistan has replaced India as the point of
cultural and religious reference for the Muslim descendants of the emigrants.42
Our own research does not provide evidence that the two-nation
ideology has in any simple way been incorporated in Muslim Hindustani ideas of rootedness and their sense of belonging. Today, both Ahmadiyya and Sunni religious and cultural traditions can still only be
properly understood in relation to the local context, the traditions of
the colonial regime in British India, the history of Islam in South Asia,
and the influence of Christianity and transnational networks. In other
words, the religious loyalties of these Muslims are related to various
geographical spaces. They have neither merely exchanged (British) In-
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dia for Pakistan as their religious and cultural point of reference, nor
have they exchanged their old ethnic identifications for a new postmodern, or post-Westphalian (Sayyid: 2002) Muslim identity. At the
same time, they realise that they have lost their Hindustan homeland
as a result of the catastrophe known as Partition. Instead, they maintain a diasporic memory of Hindustan as the undivided homeland in
which Muslims and Hindus mostly shared cultural and even religious
traditions. For these reasons, we feel that these Muslims, along with
the Hindus, should be conceptualised as part of an Indian, or rather, a
Hindustani diaspora.
None of the Muslims we interviewed in Suriname had any desire to
return to the homeland, although, during an Indian Diaspora conference in Delhi in January 2003 where one of us was present, for example, people often expressed a keen interest in their (territorially defined) roots and some of them had even (tried to) find their ancestral
homes. These informants clearly did not identify with present-day India very much. One even stated that: Hindustanis have nothing to do
with India. This is all a creation of the media. Another noted: No, I
am not a member of the Indian family. I am Surinamese and not
proud of being part of the so-called Indian family. The majority of
Muslims do not consider present-day India or Pakistan as their homeland identifying themselves instead as Hindustani and recognising
Hindustan as their homeland. It is precisely because religion is seen
as a symbol of identification, demarcation, and support for both Hindu
and Muslim Hindustanis, that these two groups are tied together as a
diaspora united in their perception of the common homeland known
as Hindustan. At the same time, Muslim Hindustanis have been provided with a number of alternative homelands such as Pakistan and
other countries with whom they share the religious traditions that are
prevalent on the Indian subcontinent43 such as Trinidad, Guyana, the
United Kingdom, Mauritius and the Netherlands. These links to other
nation-territories other than India should, however, not be used as an
argument against inclusion of these Hindustani Muslims in the (Indian) diaspora, as their unanimity with other Hindustanis is found exactly in this belief of a common homeland. However, since Hindustan
no longer has a territorial base, these Hindustani Muslims have taken
it upon themselves, with the help of trans-local relations, to rebuild
their homeland in the country of residence with an Islam that is firmly
rooted in Hindustan.
141
Conclusions
Islam is Indias largest minority religion, with Muslims officially comprising 12.1 percent of the countrys population, or 128 million people
as of 2004. This is more than the number of Muslims in Pakistan.
Nevertheless, some find it difficult to think of these Muslims in India
as Indians. Similarly, when these Muslims leave the country, they are
often excluded from the Indian diaspora category. One has to wonder
about self-identification.
In this article, we have empirically shown that Muslims with ancestry in what is currently known as India, have identified in different
ways over time and geographical location. They do not necessarily become part of the Indian diaspora, the Asian diaspora, or the Pakistani or Muslim diaspora. Instead, as we have shown in the case of
Mauritius and Suriname, what we need is in-depth and historical case
studies that explain why in certain instances Muslims of British-Indian
descent feel part of a diaspora while in other cases, they do not identify
themselves with a diaspora at all.
Scholars among others seem to have been influenced by two historical processes that have caused them to jump to conclusions that are
not warranted when local conditions are thoroughly analysed. The
break-up of British India in 1947 and the incidents that took place before and after September 11, within and beyond various Muslim communities globally, have certainly had an impact on the discussions
about the Indian diaspora. We have shown that these two processes
during which Hindus became disconnected from Muslims and Muslims from the rest have encouraged scholars (and also non-Muslims)
to better see how Muslims define themselves. Nevertheless, the processes of labelling and self-identification of Muslims of British-Indian
descent did not lead to a uniform and static category of diaspora Muslims. They faced a variety of changing local and global challenges. In
Suriname they long for an undivided homeland called Hindustan
along with their fellow Hindus, while the Muslims of British-Indian
descent in Mauritius prefer local inclusion as a separate ethnic community. Thus, we do not deny the influence of the Partition and September 11 on diaspora formation and the role religion has begun to play
herein. However, we emphasise that this role has varied over time and
space and can only be properly understood when the interaction between the transnational and national is taken into account as reflected
in the localised and changing group identities of Muslims of British-Indian origin.
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Notes
1
2
3
4
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
http://www.indiandiaspora.nic.in (accessed on 5 June 2007).

Mauritius, situated in the Indian Ocean, has been a republic since 1992, and is comprised of several dependencies: Rodrigues Island, the Agalega Islands and Cargados
Carajos Sholas. It also claims sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. However, we
only focus on the main island here.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/africa.htm (accessed on 5 June 2007).
http://infocountries.com/mauritius/10.htm. Tensions between ethnic groups (in
Mauritius known as communalism) are not absent, however, and are mainly between so-called North Indian Hindus and Christian Creoles (e.g., Carroll 2000).
About 17 per cent of the immigrant population who came to Mauritius under contract between 1830 and 1920 was Muslim. By 1846, there were already approximately
7,500 Muslims working on the sugar plantations (Dinan 1986: 22).
This section about Mauritius is based on existing scholarly work as well as on findings collected during a field trip by our research assistant, Alok Deo Singh, who visited Mauritius in September 2002 to collect archive material as well as secondary
sources. He also interviewed some 40 Hindu and Muslim Indo-Mauritians during
his stay. We also carried out fieldwork in Gujarat in January 2003 among the socalled Muslim Maurice-walas.
See also Bal and Sinha-Kerkhoff (2004) for similar approaches to the 1947 partition
of British India.
Since 1968, all of the Prime Ministers of Mauritius have been Hindus of Indian Origin: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam also known as the Father of the Nation (19681982), Sir Anerood Jugnauth (1982-1995 and 2000-2003) and Dr. Navin Ramgoolam
(1995-2000). In 2003, however, Prime Minster Jugnauth transferred power to Paul
Berenger, the first (non-Hindu) Franco-Mauritian Prime Minister since Mauritius independence.
Both Sunni Hanafis as well as Sunni Shafis who comprised 95% of the Mauritian
Muslims (Dinan 1986: 60).
Including the Cocknies, the Kodjas, the Bohras and the Aga Khanites. The latter
arrived in Mauritius much later from East Africa. There were also Ahmadis who
came to Mauritius in the 1910s through Sufi Ghulam Mahammad. They soon faced
opposition from the orthodox Sunni Muslims and many among the latter do not recognise Ahmadis as Muslims (Dinan 1986: 61-62).
Yet, during our fieldwork in Gujarat in 2003, we realised that many Gujarati Muslims in Mauritius still maintain ties with relatives in Gujarat and frequently travel
back and forth between the two nations. The so-called Maurice-walas who have
settled in Gujarat even speak Creole among themselves.
In 1958, the Islamic Circle religious group was established. They revived Tawheed
ideology, which preached against the imams from India who had introduced Indian
customs in Mauritius. They claimed that these customs had no place in Islam (Hollup 1996).
However, this changed during the 1970s when there was a growing attraction among
Muslims to the Arab (oil rich) world. Consequently, some Muslims even claimed
Arab ancestry and in the 1983 Census, when for the first time informants were allowed to include their language of choice, Arabic, which had until then not been on
the Census list, showed larger figures than Urdu as the ancestral language of the
Mauritian Muslims (Hookoomsingh 2003: 17).
In an effort to discourage ethnic communalism, however, the Central Statistics Office
of Mauritius, which conducts the national census, has not collected data on ethnicity
since 1983. The percentages reported by scholars seem to be based on estimates cited
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
143
in a number of sources (see also Hollop 1993; Carroll and Carroll 2000; Eriksen
2002).
Our interviews with Hindu Indo-Mauritians also confirm that most Hindus feel that
they share neither a common cultural background with Muslims nor an ancestral
homeland. These Hindus identify India as their ancestral homeland and they often
delegate Muslims to Pakistan. When we interviewed Anand, a journalist and historian from Port Louis, he noted that When Amartya Sen got the Nobel prize, it was a
matter of pride for us Indians in Mauritius. But one of my Muslim friends said that
even had he been from Pakistan that it would have still been of great pride for us. So
you can perceive the way Muslims think about India.
This article was obtained through HighBeam Research at http://www.highbeam.com
http://www.islamfortoday.com/mauritius.htm.
Since 1948, the Government of India (GoI) has assisted in the establishment of several cultural institutions in Mauritius such as the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, the Indira Gandhi Centre for Indian Culture and the Rajiv Gandhi Science Museum. The
GoI has also supported all kinds of cultural revivalist movements in Mauritius that
promote pride in Hindi and the cultural heritage of Hindus (cf. Dubey 2003: 132).
Moreover, Hindu fundamentalist parties and organisations in India also assist Hindus in Mauritius in their efforts to ensure that the Indian [read: Hindu] culture is
secure in Mauritius (cf. Dhanilal: 2003). Several Arabic countries have helped Muslim Indo-Mauritians retain their Islamic heritage and have promoted Arabic among
them.
There are several socio-cultural institutions in Mauritius that are supported by the
state and designed to foster a sense of belonging to a cultural heritage among Muslims and some of them have indeed tried to make Muslims feel closer to Pakistan (or
the Arab World).
That the political environment in Mauritius has changed of late, was evident during
a murder trial involving Cehl Fakeer Meeah, the leader of the local chapter of the
Mauritian Muslim party, Hezbullah, and three others for the 1996 murder of three
rival Muslim political activists. This shocked the Hindu-Christian duopoly in Mauritian politics and revealed the anger of Muslims in Mauritius who feel that since September 11 the GoM has been targeting Muslims and Islam and political parties such
as Hezbullah (www.Muslimmedia.com, 2002, internet edition of Crescent International, newsmagazine of the Islamic Movement, 16-31 October).
After the partition of 1947, British Hindustani became the common designation for
the so-called PIOs in Suriname (De Klerk 1998 [1953]: 43-54). It should be realised,
however, that what is considered India on present-day maps, is quite different from
pre-partition British-India. Moreover, while pre-independent India was geographically
larger, it was not a single entity politically but part of the larger British Empire, while
some 600 native states were quasi-independent.
The reasons could have been that many recruiters were Muslims and that Muslims,
unlike Hindus, faced no religious sanctions when they travelled overseas. Besides,
Muslims were not only over-represented in urban areas from where recruitment was
easier (De Klerk 1998 [1953]:112-113), they also faced severe hardships and a decrease
in status during that period. See, for instance, Robinson (1993) for further reading
on the socio-economic status decline among Muslims in the United Provinces.
People initially referred to Sarnami or Sarnami-Hindustani as Hindustani (not to be
confused with the Hindustani spoken in India), but in 1964, Jnan Adhin successfully
introduced the name Sarnami (referring to Sarnam as in Suriname), underlining the
local embedding of the language. Though widely spoken among Hindustanis, Sarnami has never acquired a status similar to that of Hindi or Urdu, even though at-
144
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
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tempts to introduce these languages (especially Hindi) were never really successful
(Marhe n.d.).
Known as ship brotherhood (jahazia bhai) and depot brotherhood (dipua bhai).
(Gautam 1995:. 3).
http://www.shef.ac.uk/usic/whatis/articles/carib.htm (downloaded on 21 October
2004):1-5.
The 35 people mentioned here were considered Muslim or Mussalman. There might
have been more Muslims, such as the Pathans and the Afghans who were, however,
not always categorised as Muslims by the Dutch administrators. See also http://www.
nationaalarchief.nl/Suriname/base_hindo/introductie.html and The Lalla Rookh:
Arrival of the First Hindustani Muslims to Suriname, posted on 19 May, 2002 and
available at: www.Guyana.org/features/LallaRukh.pdf.
www.Guyana.org/features/LallaRukh.pdf.
Ibid. So-called Javanese Muslims from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in Suriname are kejawen, following the syncretic practices and beliefs of Java, which incorporates old Javanese beliefs, including Hindu-Buddhist elements.
Karsten, for example, pointed out that these Muslims were more oriented towards
(British) India than towards Cairo or Mecca and quoted one of these Muslims as having said: We could have written to Kairo or Mekka as well but the problem is that
they publish in Arabic and never in Urdu or Persian. Besides, Urdu has also linked
them to the cultural-religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent (Karsten 1930:
20).
The Ahmadiyya movement was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889 as a reaction to the influence of Christian missionaries and the Hindu Arya Samaj reform
movement in northern British India. After the death of Ghulam Ahmad, the movement split into two: the Quadianis and the Lahoris. Among Hindustanis we find almost only the latter. See, for instance, Landman (1992: 24 and 195-230.
In Pakistan, the opposition against these Ahmadis has always been very strong and
in 1974, it even precipitated the Non-Muslim declaration in Pakistan, which declared
that the Ahmadis were non-Muslims and forbade them to perform Haj in Mecca.
Gouvernementsblad van Suriname (8 Augustus 1927, no. 60). See also Choenni
(2003).
The first full translation appeared in 2003 in Dutch (Hira).
Representatives of the Arya Samaj have been active in Suriname since 1912. The
Arya Samaj mainly wanted to reconstruct the Vedic traditions and strongly protested
the contemporary social practices in India such as the practice of widow burning
(sati), child marriages, the hierarchical caste system, womens oppression, idol-worship, and the social veneration of myths.
Report from the District Commissioner of the meeting between Hindus and Muslims in the public school in Livorno. Gouvernements-Secretaris Suriname, Immigratie en Kolonisatie, Landsarchief Suriname, no. N: 33/20.333, dated 19 April 1933.
For this section we have used, apart from archive material found in the National Archives in Delhi, the West Bengal State Archives (Kolkata) and the Archives in Paramaribo: Grierson (1883); McNeill (1915); Karsten (1930); Hajary (1937: 1-3); De Klerk
(1942: 97-117); De Klerk (1963); Malik (1993: 204-8); De Klerk (1998); Mitrasingh
and Harpal (eds.) (1998); Orna (1999: 120-24); Nandoe (2000: 235-43); Ramdin
(2000); Baumann (2001: 59-81); Gautam (2001); Ramsoedh and Bloemberg (2001).
De Klerk refers to the first decade of the twentieth century as the start of Hindustani
participation in civil society. In 1910 and 1911, the first two British (competing) associations, to represent the British Indians in Suriname, were founded. In 1910: De
Surinaamsche Immigranten-Vereeniging. In 1911: the Surinaamsche Britsch-Indiers-Bond:
Ikhtiyar aur Hak. See De Klerk (1998: 173-74).
145
38 Gautam writes that the implementation of the new law (1927) imposed Dutch citizenship on all newly born children and encouraged the assimilation of Indians in
Suriname (Gautam 1995: 15).
39 For example, in July 1947, a group of young Hindustani intellectuals wrote in their
monthly newsletter Vikaash the following about Indias independence and subsequent Partition: The moment has arrived Freedom that has taken many years of
furious fighting has finally been regained. It has already been determined that the remaining 15,000 British troops will have left Hindustan by 15 August. Energetic men
who have given everything for the good cause can now look back on what they have
reached for Hindustan. But alas! It could not be what they would have wanted so
much: their ideal of a United Hindustan has been destroyed, their hope has gone up
in smoke Yet! There is hope for the future! Especially the circumstance that Hindus
and Muslims are not strictly separated gives reason for hope. One expects that both
states will co-operate intimately, as they share so many interests (Liga van Hindostanis, Vikaash (Evolutie), vol. 12, no. 2, 14 July 1947. Translated from Dutch).
40 Van der Burg and Van der Veer, for example, wrote that: The distance between Muslims and Hindus that existed in India was brought to Suriname by the contract labourers and now exists in the Netherlands as well. Inter-religious marriages are rare
and participation in each others ceremonies is limited. (..) From that moment [of the
Partition] on, two cultural points of reference have existed: India for the Hindus and
Pakistan for the Muslims (1986: 23-36). Similarly, Vernooy and Van der Burg refer
to a 1955 Surinamese almanac in which the flag of Pakistan (green and white) is
called the official flag of the orthodox Muslim Organization, the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat-Hanafi (SMA) and that these Muslims are oriented towards Pakistan. This
SMA, which was founded in 1932, is still one of the largest Hindustani Sunni organisations (Vernooy and Van der Burg 1986: 47; Van der Burg and Van der Veer 1986:
23-36).
41 These trans-local links that help retain and rebuild cultural and religious beliefs and
practices from the homeland are not new. The Ahmadiyya link between British Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad was already established in July-August 1934, by Moulvi
Ameer Ali. Furthermore, the Ahmaddiya movement tended to maintain strong links
with its centre, Lahore (now in Pakistan). See Kassim (1999: 156-185). Kassim also
refers to an Inter-Colonial Muslim Conference in August 1950, during which delegates from Barbados, British Guyana, Dutch Guyana (Suriname)and the host territory, Trinidad, met to consider the educational, social, economic, moral, and religious
problems of Muslims in the Caribbean, with the aim of establishing a closer relationship and forging co-operation among the Muslim community of those territories
through a regional Muslim organisation (Ibid.: 177).
PART 2
CRITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL AND
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
6 A Chance Diaspora
British Gujarati Hindus
John Mattausch
Introduction
In a recently published article, the editor of this collection, Gijsbert
Oonk (2006), persuasively argued that there has been an unfortunate
tendency of sociologists, economists, and anthropologists to ignore
South Asian entrepreneurial failures in East Africa, to concentrate only
upon the successful, and then to infer from these successes commonly
held qualities such as hard work or superior business acumen that
are meant to explain the achievements of the South Asians and the
comparative poor performance of the Africans. Contesting this unfortunate analytical orthodoxy, Oonk argues that we need to understand the
success of South Asians, many of whom were Gujaratis, from a historical point of view, that the early South Asian migrants started with a
far more favourable socio-economic position than their African counterparts, and that we should recognise not all South Asians were successful, the less successful and the failed returning to India. That the
South Asian migrants started from a far more favourable socio-economic position, that they, unlike the vast majority of Africans, were
accustomed to a money economy and the concept of interest, that
many of them could read and write, was simply down to their good fortune, to coincidence, the coincidence of economic opportunities becoming open to South Asians pre-favoured with socio-economic capital.
This is but one example of how chance has knitted the pattern for four
centuries of British-Gujarati history, a history spanning three continents.
From the outset, when the East India Companys ship The Hector
dropped anchor at Swally Hole in August 1608, this mutual history
has been periodically swept up by the currents of chance, which carried
some Gujaratis along trade routes re-paved with colonialism to Africa
and then to Britain where they have now, in a remarkably short period,
built a notably prosperous, culturally strong community that exhibits
many of the chief features that are currently fashionable when labelling
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a diasporic social group. In this article, I try to extend the hand of

friendship to what the French sociologist, Professor Boudon (1986:
173) has called the very unwelcome guest, ubiquitous but studiously
concealed, ignored and even denied the right to exist by virtually everyone, an analytical welcome to chance as it has been manifested in contingency, coincidence, and character. I begin by surveying the progress
of British Gujarati Hindus, highlighting the diversity of their achievements and their parallel development as both successful capitalistic citizens and as members of the international Hindu community. I then
suggest that these twin trajectories are partly chance outcomes and
that understanding this uncharacteristic British ethnic community requires us to welcome chance back into the analytical fold. This analytical tack is not taken at the expense of recognising the salience of structural features of capitalist development, nor is it forgetful of those features of the British Gujarati Hindu community that have helped or
hindered their socio-economic progress: these structural considerations, which I will consider in this article, are of indubitable significance and have been routinely flagged up in the research literature. Instead, my chief concern in this article is to bring to the fore the chancy
elements in our mutual history that have been routinely overlooked
but which, as I will try to show, cannot and should not be simply swept
under the analytical carpet.
Dharma ane Dandho Duty and Work
If it would be right to label something as gratuitously symbolic, then
Britains first public Sanatan Sandesh (ecumenical) Hindu mandir (temple) in Leicester would surely qualify. Founded in 1970, before the arrival of the expelees from Uganda, the mandir caters primarily to the
British East Midlands citys Gujarati Hindu community and, in common with many another British mandir, is housed in a large, Victorian
former Christian church: just as they revived Leicesters inner-city
economy, so too have the migrants and refugees breathed new life back
into her deserted places of worship. Serving as a community centre as
well as a religious mandir, offering classes of religious instruction for
the citys Hindu children, support for the elderly and various other social services, it is a thriving resource for Hindus throughout the U.K.,
as well as for Leicesters own, overwhelmingly Gujarati, Hindu population. At Divali time, businessmen and shopkeepers attend to have their
yearly accounts blessed by Lakshmi, some of whom will have placed an
advertisement in the mandirs glossy Divali commemorative magazine.
Turn to the back of the magazine and you find a handy List of Advertisers, a list paying tribute to the now well-recognised commercial
achievements of this small British ethnic group which, in just three
decades, sometimes in the face of hostility, racism, as well as, for some,
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the trauma of expulsion from Uganda, now stands on an equal footing

with the wider community, and in some cases and in some areas, has
overtaken it.
What, I think, is striking about this list of advertisers, an oft-overlooked feature of the public face of British Gujaratis, is the wide variety
of businesses offering the magazines readers their Divali greetings. In
addition to the more specialised shops selling Gujarati vegetarian
foods, clothes, jewellery, wedding paraphernalia, and the cliched CTNs
(Confectioner-Tobacconist-Newsagent), there are also travel agents,
driving instructors, immigration consultants, camera shops, furniture
stores, tailors, carpet shops, accountants, pharmacists, opticians, vacuum cleaner salesmen, car showrooms, florists, etc. and this list of
advertisers is by no means fully representative. In the arts, in politics,
in the professions, Gujaratis are also to be found, often prominently.
From their restricted class location in East Africa, confined to what
Mahmood Mamdani had argued (1976: 108) was a narrow commercial
bourgeois niche, the African emigrants, refugees, the British-born generations and those arriving directly from India have in a short time occupied a huge diversity of largely middle-class or self-employed positions in modern Britain along with a wide spread of working-class
jobs.
Whatever else we can and cannot say with confidence about them,
we can at least be certain that the religious traditions of Gujarati Hindus have not impeded their progress and that Hinduism has proved
highly adaptable. A telling example of this adaptability came in the political stance taken by Asian women workers during the industrial disputes of the 1970s, at Thorn Lighting, Walkers and other Leicester factories, and most famously at the London Grunwick photo-processing
plant when Mrs. Jayabhen Desai became the spokeswoman for the predominantly East African Asian female workforce resisting the Companys racist discrimination, Dickensian work practices and exploitative
rates of pay (at that time the lowest in the industry, 28 per week compared to the national average of 72). As Avtar Brah argued (1987), the
simplistic stereotype of docile, submissive Asian women hidebound by
traditional Hindu patriarchy needed to be scrapped. Today, while British Asian women do not figure strongly in the annual British Asian
Rich List (of which, in 2005, some 10% have an African background),
nonetheless there are a small number of businesses headed by Gujarati
women,1 and they too have gained impressive educational qualifications with the diversity of their achievements mirroring that of their
menfolk.2 This diversity, the rapid successes, have come from a numerically and proportionately small community. Britains total Hindu
population, according to responses to the self-declared religious question in the 2001 Census, numbers some 559,000 of whom 41,248 live
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in Leicester, the English city with the highest proportion of ethnic

minorities, with Hindus, not all of whom are Gujarati, comprising
14.7% of Leicesters total population.3 Only 37% of British Hindus were
born in Britain, 39% in Asia (30% in India, 6% in Sri Lanka), 21% in
Africa. A further feature of British Hinduism, not usually noted by
commentators or researchers, is its overwhelmingly upper-caste composition; a feature distinguishing it from the Indian patterning of caste
groupings, a social composition that obscures the corollary of ascribed
disadvantage suffered by over 9.2 million Scheduled Castes and Tribes
in present-day Gujarat (Das 2000: 2). This, then is a comparatively
small British community dispersed throughout the country, most of
whom were not born in the UK: Leicesters Hindus are the countrys
third highest demographic concentration but nonetheless numerically,
at just over 40,000, still not a large group. If we follow Steven Vertovecs (1996: 78) proportionate national estimates of Britains Hindus,
then some 70% are Gujarati, just 391,300, of whom some 246,519
may be classified as East African Asian or African Asian, the latter
nomenclature used in the much-cited 4th PSI Survey. This reworked
PSI classification is something of a catch-all category:
Those who said that their families had originated in the South
Asian subcontinent were also asked whether their parents of
grandparents had lived in Africa for any length of time, or
whether they themselves had been born there (Madood1997: 15).
Respondents to the survey located in this broad category could for example include a person born in Britain with grandparents who had
lived for a couple of years in Malawi in the 1950s, someone born in
Uganda in the 1920s forced to flee Amins ogreish polity, or a woman
who had migrated from Bombay to Kenya to join her new husbands
family only to find that because of the worsening position of Asian teachers in Nairobi in the mid-1960s they were soon to leave for England.
Similarly, it is not clear what is meant by Gujarati given that some
British Gujaratis may not hold Indian citizenship, may never have visited the State, may not be fluent or even speak the language, nor know
little of the States history. For Gujarati Hindus, however, the ascribed
character of their religion does give them a traceable lineage and the
foundation for Gujarati self-identification a point which I will expand
upon later.
How are we to explain and gauge the rapid, diverse successes of Britains small Gujarati Hindu community? A key obstacle to answering
these questions is the absence of longitudinal research, a common failing of British social science, highlighted by Vaughan Robinson (1990
& 1993), and to which Valerie Marretts study (1989 and 1993) of 68
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153
Ugandan Asian refugee families, some 200 individuals who settled in

Leicester, interviewed throughout 1972-82, stands as a rare exception.
Despite the citys notorious efforts to dissuade the refugees from settling in the city, spearheaded by the local paper The Leicester Mercury (a
campaign critically scrutinised by Marrett), the Ugandan Asians have
thrived, a tribute, in Marretts judgement, to The outstanding characteristic of the Ugandan Asians since settling in the unwelcoming city,
their striving toward self-determination: the right to choose a life style
unrestricted by formal barriers to progress. (1993: 267) This striving
has been a family affair. Marrett outlines the main commercial trajectories, the diverse occupational and business routes taken by the refugee families but, nonetheless, exactly how much of their progress is by
way of re-establishing previous African successes and patterns, and
how much has been innovative, is difficult to judge in the absence of
detailed longitudinal research data stretching back to their positions in
Africa. Marrett notes (1993: 251) that:
The majority of the Ugandan Asians who came to Leicester were
previously in some form of commercial enterprise. Not all were
shopkeepers and there was a sizeable representation of civil servants, bank employees, teachers, accountants and blue-collar
employees, particularly mechanics and craftsmen.
Unfortunately, however, it is not possible to say with any precision just
what proportion of the citys refugees re-established businesses, how
many innovated, or how those who innovated fared compared to those
who re-established and, of course, not all of the refugees were Hindus, not all were Gujaratis, and those having this background also
came from other African countries.
Vaughan Robinsons own, retrospective analysis of national data illustrated East African Asians marching, in Vaughans words, into the
middle class in the 1970s and 1980s, although given the speed of their
advancement, perhaps galloping would be more accurate. In his earlier study, Robinson had:
argued that because of their backgrounds, their previous social position in East Africa, the absence of a myth of return, and
their experience of having been refugees, the East African
Asians in Britain would be far less encapsulated within their culture and community than their sub-continental counterparts
(1993: 236).
In this earlier study (1986) Robinson had reasoned that their willingness to compete with whites for scarce resources would make them
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more aware of racist exclusionary barriers and would emphasise for

them that, despite their economic achievements, they would still remain socially marginal to white society (1993: 236). While the East
African Asians economic advancement that Robinson traced in the Seventies and Eighties has continued, his hypotheses over racism and social marginality now seem less plausible. As East African Asians reskilled, re-qualified, as their children went to make their ways in
Thatchers, then Blairs, Britain, some may well have become sensitive
to racist exclusionary barriers, but there is no evidence I know of that
they found these barriers uniformly high or indeed uniform, nor that
they attributed racism to the whole of white society. By the 1990s,
such explanations, which identified racism as the chief cause of discrimination and disadvantage, were being supplanted by an emphasis
upon the interplay of opportunity structures and ethnic cultures. In
the opinion of Modood, Virdee and Metcalf (1995: 128):
While this is a theoretical advance, it does not take the idea of
interaction far enough. It still assumes that opportunity structures can be culturally neutral and can be defined independently of ethnic group norms and attitudes an assumption
challenged by our study.
If we focus upon one key aspect of British Asian economic prowess,4
on self-employment, then the findings of Modood, Metcalf, and Virdees study (1995), which included an inter-ethnic comparison of selfemployed British Asians, showed that while British Pakistanis were
drawn to self-employment to escape from poor employment prospects
and racism in the labour market, this was much less the case for African Asians, the majority of whom were motivated to pursue self-employment by the business orientation also shared by the Indians in
the studys sample. All three ethnic groups associated self-employment
with prestige, but not all three groups enjoyed the same advantages
when they started off in business. Just as Oonk noted that Gujaratis
moving to Africa had been favoured, by chance, with the capital and
skills that gave them an advantage over the Africans, so too African
Asians5 were better placed to succeed in Britain, having often arrived
as intact families with business experience, with no cultural proscription against their women working, and with variable but far better educational levels.6 That British Pakistanis and African Asians were in
markedly different positions when they arrived in Britain and when
they began to set-up businesses this was due to simple coincidence, to
chance. The arrival of single Pakistani men with limited labour-market
skills and education who went to work in the textile mills of northern
England and in the factories of the West Midlands would not necessa-
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155
rily have led down the road to their communitys current socio-economic woes. If Britains textile factories, along with her other manufacturing industries, had not gone into steep decline just a few years after
Pakistani men first clocked-on then these features of their community
may have counted for little, but of course as it actually turned out,
chance coincidence assured their lasting salience. It is not sufficient, as
Modood et al., argued merely to consider the interaction of culture and
opportunity structures; chance too must be included for just as Modood et al. argued that opportunity structures are not immune from
cultural influence, so too they are not immune from the influence of
chance.
One further omission in the research might be worth mentioning:
there is no sustained treatment, barely a mention, of the kindness and
help given by some white Britishers to the migrants from Kenya and
Tanzania, and more acutely to the refugees from Uganda. Most usually,
such support is referenced to the family of migrants/refugees already
living in this country before the new arrivals came or to the wider British South Asian community. It may be worth recalling the unremembered acts by members of other British ethnic communities, some
tangible, for example, the voluntary workers who manned the Uganda
Resettlement Boards stalls. The less tangible but perhaps equally important shows of political sympathy and decency, for instance, Edward
Heaths expulsion of Enoch Powell from the Conservative Party (Humphrey and Ward 1974: 35), and many other unrecorded instances, such
as the remarkable Englishwoman, Lenore Reynell, who responded to
the Uganda Asian Crisis by learning, on her own initiative and at her
own expense, Gujarati to a level of proficiency whereby she was able to
record audio tapes for blind Gujaratis, give Gujarati children lessons in
reading and writing their parents mother-tongue, could translate into
English Bhanubhen Kotechas autobiography, On The Threshold Of Africa and give unstinting help with the translation and preparation of
the manuscript for Balwant Naiks autobiographical novel Passage From
Uganda. Academics, more used to investigating racism and disadvantage, caught on the hop by an uncharacteristic ethnic immigrant community that succeeded rapidly, neglected to record these moments of
help and support and the positive effects they may have wrought. Just
as the adaptations made by Gujarati migrants have been diverse, so too
the responses of Britishers to the new arrivals were varied; in 1972
when the Uganda Asian refugees arrived, a year in which much else of
note also occurred, it is probable that most Britishers were simply indifferent, with only a tiny minority responding with either racist hostility or sympathetic kindness.
In so many ways, the progress of Gujarati Hindus in Britain mirrors
their history in the African countries. As I and others have noted (Mat-
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tausch 1998: 123; Twaddle 1990: 151), the Africa to which Gujaratis migrated was largely novel, new artificial countries recently forged by colonialism, with new commercial opportunities that the migrants successfully exploited, as had some of their forefathers back in Mughal
Gujarat. They may, as Tambs-Lyche argued (1975) have been spurred
on by a trading ethic, but there was no long-standing caste tradition
informing the migrants commercial enterprises: neither Lohanas nor
Patidars (the two chief castes) had any history as shopkeepers, ginnery
owners, civil servants, etc., any more than they had a tradition of working as doctors, dentists, engineers or accountants, the so-named Dead
Society, the professional occupations favoured by younger British Gujaratis. In Britain, as in Africa, they succeeded commercially by adapting to novel circumstances in diverse ways, evident, for example, in the
variety of Gujarati shops on Leicesters Melton and Belgrave Roads, a
wider variety than that found on other British Asian shopping streets
(Hardhill 1999: 9). In both of these very different, largely novel settings, the migrants not only succeeded in the secular, commercial field;
they were also equally successful in sustaining a religious identity.
Whereas the commercial successes were often innovative, and highly
diverse, in the religious sphere they were imitative and traditional, albeit with slight variances brought on by the exigencies of migration,
for example the absence of Brahmins and the importation of sampradya (guru-led sects) to Africa and then Britain. Which brings us to a
key feature of the internationalisation, the international expansion, of
Gujarati Hinduism as it emerged first in Africa and then in Britain, a
curious two-piece outfit, a vibrant diverse innovative adaptation to imperialistic, now contemporary capitalism, and then a return to a noncapitalistic Hinduistic domestic way of life, after work. Both dharma,
religious duty, and dandho, work. It has been customary to examine the
religious side to this duality with reference to ideas, values, feelings
and beliefs, or to its institutional establishment. But in this article I
would like, instead, to examine this twin trajectory in terms of sociological mechanisms of inheritance, how Gujarati Hindus sustain both
their secular capitalistic and religious identities. Cultural patterns, including innovations, count for nothing if they are not passed on; they
have, in Steven Vertovecs phrase, to be reproduced.7 In both secular
and religious dimensions of reproduction, marriage is central.
Every Saturday and Sunday, the latter popular with shopkeepers, seemingly without fail, the hall in Leicesters Sanatan Sandesh mandir is
booked for a wedding. In the hundreds of sister British mandira, as
well as in all sorts of other suitably large venues, British Hindu weddings are celebrated. These weddings are overwhelmingly between individuals from the same ethnic group, as are nearly all British marriages (98%). Data from the 2001 U.K. Census showed that of the pal-
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157
try 2% of inter-ethnic marriages, 219,000, then nearly all of them,

198,000, included a white person, and that people from South Asian
backgrounds were the least likely to be married to someone from a different ethnic group. Only 6% of British Indians, a category that includes Sikhs as well as Hindus, had married outside of their own ethnic group.8 For Hindus, marriages are inter-caste, rather than interethnic unions. Unfortunately, the topic of British Asian weddings has
pushed issues of arranged marriage to the foreground and it was concerns over the second generation, between-two-cultures, that have predominated with most research focusing upon young Asian women at
the expense of the mens experiences (a gender bias found in other
areas of research on British South Asians as well). Arranged marriages is often nowadays seen as an item drawn from an outdated academic stereotype, or a rather old-fashioned non-progressive practice,
but there is no gainsaying the importance of marriage in todays British Gujarati Hindu community, nor for that matter the centrality of
marriage and the preoccupation with nubile women in major Hindu
texts.9 These marriages are presented by some as a means of maintaining ethnic boundaries, and in the case of Britains Hindus they serve
to sub-divide this small community into discrete family networks.
Whether or not the incidence of British Hindu arranged marriages if
rising or falling is not known, but attitudinal findings from the 4th PSI
Survey suggests that British African Asians attitudes toward mixed
marriages are no different from those held by the wider community
and that, as the generations grow, fewer and fewer are having their
spouses chosen by their parents. However, in terms of their self-reported attitudes, the 4th PSI Survey actually shows that those whom
they classified as African Asian held views and opinions virtually indistinguishable from the rest of population, and certainly not sufficiently discrete to distinguish them as a separate ethnic group (Mattausch 2000). Moreover, what people say and do are often, as Nina
Hutnik (1991) revealed, very different. African Asians were decrying arranged marriages in the 1950s (Bharati 1970:49), and, in any case,
what is sociologically interesting about Hindu marriages is not the
anthropological minutiae of how they are arranged, but rather who they
are arranged between, how caste is perpetuated in modern British capitalistic society, how genes and property are passed on, how a caste
identity is bequeathed by parents to their children.
Although Leicesters Sanatan Sandesh mandir may lay claim to being
the first proper public ecumenical British Hindu temple, there are rivals for the title of the UKs first ever mandir, including one founded in
London in 1962; other early examples include the mandir founded by
Kenyan Asians in Coventry in 1967 (Tambs-Lyche 1975), and the Sai
Baba mandir founded in a private home in Golders Green, London in
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1969, still maintained by the same family, and in any case, every Hindu home has its own domestic shrine, maintained by the women of
the family. The hundreds of public mandira built in Britain in the last
thirty years are tangible tokens of permanent settlement10 reflecting
the wide, caste-steered, diversity of British Hinduism, predominantly
Gujarati and bearing the imprint of the African chapter. In Africa, Gujarati Hindus adopted the sampradaya which now enjoy strong support
in this country with their own dedicated mandira as outposts in the internationalisation of Hinduism. Marriage is within this internationalised community. One reason for the popularity of sampradaya in Africa was the simple absence of Brahmin priests, part of a larger problem
caused by the selective migration patterns with the two Lohana and Patidar castes predominating, thus not allowing authentic caste patterns
to be reproduced under African skies. As Steven Vertovec notes (2000:
92), in East Africa:
a caste system could no longer govern social, economic, ritual
or other relationships, caste identities among Gujaratis have continued to be of considerable importance with regard to status,
marriage, social networks and formal institutions.
It is this newly internationalised caste identity that is being reproduced
in British Hindu marriages, an identity which may, via the factious
Swaminarayan sampradayek, include poisonous Hinduvta elements as
rivalries, hatreds and fanaticisms originating in the sub-continent.
These are spread amongst the world-wide community (Dwyer 1994:
185-186; Mukta 2000) a disturbing aspect of British ethnic identity
also infecting other British South Asian communities.11
In order for Gujarati Hinduism to persist, to have been successfully
sustained in Africa and now in Britain, inessential practices, rituals,
and the like have been pragmatically abandoned in the light of changing circumstances, a shedding of inessential features illustrated by
Gijsbert Oonks study of Lohanas in East Africa (2004). Prohibitions
against meat eating, smoking, drinking alcohol, cultural prescriptions
over the roles of women, joint family set-ups (Morris 1970) and other
inessential customs and traditions, can all be sloughed off. Criteria of
spouse eligibility can be changed (Michaelson 1979; Oonk 2004),
young British Gujaratis can ignore their parents choices of spouse, but
nonetheless caste marriages, the mechanism of Hindu reproduction,
must be continued. Very soon after the topic of arranged marriages
had attracted attention from British social scientists there was a critical
backlash against the emerging between-two-cultures stereotype and in
this discursive context Catherine Ballard tried to seek some kind of order in the reality of [South Asian] marriage. Her 1978 paper, in addi-
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tion to reminding us that arranged marriages were not just an Indian

speciality, also explained the underlying rationale behind the traditional
Indian model, the inheritance of land, property, and ascribed occupational status achieved through the rules of exogamy and endogamy,
rules as they apply to the chief British Gujarati castes elaborated by Michaelson (1979) and myself (1993). Leaving aside the cultural niceties,
Hindu caste marriages are the means for distributing genes and property to future generations, with men staying put and inheriting property and women leaving their natal village to spread their genes.12 This
is the mechanism for reproducing babies with a ready-made ascribed
Hindu identity and property rights. The authority for the proper conduct of marriages and weddings is not merely religious, it is sited geographically back in India: to my knowledge, the Gujarati migrations
have not spawned any religious leaders or new sects and all religious
authority flows from India to the international caste communities, placing those in Britain and elsewhere outside India, on an inferior footing. Furthermore, the endogamous criteria of some British caste marriages ties Hindus to their ancestral villages back in India, geographical
identities written in religious fiction as each villages unique kuldevi.
Although Hindus have been living in Britain for some four centuries
(Visram 2002), it has only been in the last thirty or forty years that
they have settled in any number and could as a community adapt Hinduism to the British context. It is thus too soon, I feel, to discern many
real long-lasting trends or to make sweeping generalisations, especially
in view of the troubled passage from Africa, and the fact that currently
most British Hindus were not born in the UK (while British-born Hindus overwhelmingly describe themselves as British, 91%, this figure
falls to 69% for the community as a whole).13 One trend that is discernible is the, as I have noted in this article, twin trajectory of contemporary British Gujarati Hindu social life: on the one hand, the public,
innovative, highly varied, strikingly successful, capitalistic achievements; on the other hand and simultaneously, the less public, traditionally orientated non-innovative, equally impressive establishment of
the British branch of international Hinduism. It is these twin parallel
trajectories that I want to concentrate upon in the remainder of this article. I wish to suggest that these twin trajectories arose in historical
circumstances that were sometimes chance outcomes and that the diversity of public Gujarati Hindu practices signals the influence of
chance-given individual characters.
Part of the reason for the continuing superior authority of Indian
Hindu religious practices and spokesmen rests with the nature of
authority in Hinduism. Lacking the proper authority, Gujarati settlers
in Britain are in a poor position to diverge or innovate. Traditional
authority in Hinduism came from a time when Indian authors were a
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rarity, largely because books were scarce and most people illiterate.
Even today, the effective literacy rate for the State of Gujarat is only
69% (revised 2001 Indian Census) with wide differences between the
figures for men and women, urbanites and villagers, and with Scheduled Castes and Tribes lagging far behind the State average. In the recent past, nearly all Indians were illiterate, the 1901 Census for (undivided) India gives a dismally low 5.4% (crude) literacy rate whereas in
comparison, already by the seventeenth century a measure of literacy
was enjoyed by some 30% of the English population. The chief reason
for these long-standing comparative differences is the slow adoption of
the modern movable-type printing press in India; whereas Britain and
the rest of Europe had presses sited in most major cities fifty years
after Gutenbergs pioneering experiment, the first Indian-owned
presses in Gujarat were only established in the early nineteenth century. In 1996, I published an article examining the reasons behind the
sluggish adoption of printing technology by Gujaratis and its social implications. I had reasoned that, although all the technical, material and
craft prerequisites were present in Gujarat, the socio-religious milieu
was unfavourable. Consequently, the caste patterning of literacy, the
near universal illiteracy, and the high status of the elites languages persisted for centuries longer than they had in Europe where literacy rapidly grew, vernacular languages displaced Latin and the authority of
religious elites declined thanks to the millions of printed texts in circulation (some 20,000,000 by 1500). Further, the press promoted English nationalism, along the lines of Benedikt Andersons imagined
communities, it promoted democracy and it preserved new, innovative
knowledge. Moreover, as Gopal has noted (1969: 53), in Gujarat, illiterate craftsmen, confined to a lowly caste status, were obliged to rely
upon inherited and acquired skills which they jealously guarded, they
were unable to read about new techniques, and knowledge was routinely squandered rather than preserved. There had been one recorded
attempt to establish a printing press in seventeenth-century Mughal
Gujarat by the wealthy, enterprising Bhimjee Parekh, but his efforts
were dogged by ill luck. Parekh requested a competent caster of metal
type (the only technically demanding element of the modern press), be
sent at his expense by the East India Company from England, but
when the man arrived he was found to be incompetent and conditions
in Gujarat were worsening as Maratha raiders were ransacking and besieging Surat. There were no further recorded attempts to establish a
press in Gujarat, and given the turmoil attendant upon the collapse of
Mughal rule this is not so surprising.
Since publishing this 1996 article, I have come to reconsider the reasons I gave for the Gujaratis slow adoption of the press and I would
now place greater emphasis upon purely chance factors. As is well re-
A CHANCE DIASPORA
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cognised, the technical achievements of Gutenberg were modest, easily

copied, as evidenced by the rapid adoption of the technology throughout Western Europe. Bhimjee Parekh was just unlucky. That Mr. Hill,
the printer sent from England, was so unsatisfactory was just down to
chance, as was the coincidental timing of Parekhs efforts with the decline of Surat. If Parekh had been dealt a better hand by chance, then
perhaps the press would have spread as rapidly throughout Gujarat as
it had in Europe. If this had happened, then oral authority might well
have given way to the new textual authority that triumphed in England
thanks to the autonomous authority of textual knowledge that could be
corrected, printed in authoritative editions, and which existed autonomously and outlived it authors. In Gujarat, in contrast, authority remained personal, vested by tradition in individuals, in particular, held
by male Brahmins and other minority elite castes. Perhaps too, Hindus
would, like seventeenth-century Englishmen, have been able to interpret, question and challenge religious texts without relying upon literate Brahmins and then, rather than the reformist sects that emerged
in nineteenth-century India, there would instead have been the growth
of secular alternatives to religious philosophy. But, thanks to the bludgeonings of chance, none of these changes occurred, personal authority wrapped in religion persisted, and still today when British Gujarati
Hindus need guidance over how they should worship and conduct
themselves, they are obliged to seek answers from personal authorities
back in India. Predictably, this unlucky outcome has meant that Hinduism is a moribund religious culture with tradition, the unchanging
Dharma, holding sway (hence, the standard reply to inquisitive outsiders, Because thats how weve always done it). Furthermore, the perpetuation of personal authority may account for a feature of sampradaya: heterodoxical Hindu movements demand a guru with appropriate personal authority to lead them.
Printing technology is just one, albeit striking, example of the huge
technological advantages enjoyed by the British that, by the time they
rose to paramountcy in Gujarat, had become a technological chasm.
Clearly, the lack of gutsy rivers in Gujarat pre-empted factories powered by water wheels, the English predecessor to steam power; steam
engines were the next key technological step that had to be taken to retain a competitive edge. Steam engines, the force that powered the industrial revolution, had to be imported by Indians, by, for example, Gujarati mill-owners living on Bombay in the nineteenth century, some
50 years after Gujarat had been subsumed by the Bombay Presidency.
Similarly, steam trains, along with thousands of miles of rail and other
infrastructure, had to be shipped over, like giant childrens construction
sets, with obvious commercial benefits for the British. Although it is
far more technically difficult to build and copy than printing presses,
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JOHN MATTAUSCH
steam engine technology often advanced in incremental steps spurred

by contingent needs, first from the need to ventilate and keep dry the
increasingly deep shafts sunk to mine coal or tin in England (Newcomens Engine), through improved stationary engines (Watts), followed
by the development of engines to power trains, ships, and turbines.
That these contingent needs were felt in England, rather than in Gujarat, was simply down to chance. So too was the uneven geographical
distribution of indigo, opium, cotton, pepper and the like which lured
Europeans to India, rather than vice versa, as well as the lack of reliable
rivers in Gujarat which could have been dammed to drive waterwheels
(Mattausch 2003).
The distributions of plants, spices, and other resources, are examples
of contingency, of chance, as too is the instance of Bhimjees ill-luck in
paying for the unsatisfactory printer Mr. Hill to be sent from England,
and the coincidental intensification of Maratha raids on Surat which
stymied speculative ventures such as establishing newfangled printing
presses. Coincidental chance also played a hand in promoting migration from Gujarat to East Africa, in both the reasons for migration and
in the selection of which groups migrated. Plagues and famines besetting Gujarat from 1896 until 1911, the champianno, bringing cholera,
dysentery, mass starvation, and other horrors were the chance impetuses encouraging young men to migrate from one British colonial
territory, Gujarat, to another, East Africa, where the wholly coincidental
growth of trade and the opening up of the hinterlands by the railway
offered some hope of betterment (Mattausch 2003: 127). One caste
well-placed to exploit this chance opportunity was the Patel, the Lewa
Patidar, a prosperous, ambitious, upwardly mobile community. Owning
enviably fertile land under the eponymous patidari lineage system
brought the wealth necessary to fund migration, while the practice of
dividing land equally between sons weakened the position of families
over time while giving a further spur to the migration of younger heirs.
The Patels system of land inheritance also promoted hypergamous
marriages, female infanticide, and the formation of hierarchical marriage circles, gols, (Mattausch 2001: 62-64) that are nowadays studiously maintained in Britain and throughout this international caste
community which is known for its highly competitive intra-caste, status-conscious character. When the early migrants became established
in East Africa they brought brides over from their gols, and more Patel
men also migrated through permit lagna marriages, marriages arranged with suitable daughters of Africawala families which allowed
the boys to obtain travel permits (Patel and Rutten 1999/2000: 7).
Chance needs no passport and it accompanied the migrants and refugees to Britain. The stagnant, declining British economy of the
1970s coincidentally favoured the ambitions of Leicesters Ugandan
A CHANCE DIASPORA
163
Asian refugees. Facing a need for homes large enough to accommodate

their intact families, facing hostile, sometimes racist, landlords, and a
lack of suitable council housing, the refugees initially moved in with
relatives, often in the Highfields area, and then very quickly bought
into the then booming Leicester housing market, buying homes in the
run-down, hence cheaper Belgrave area of the city (Marrett 1989). Enterprising, Maretts self-determining, Patels found disused industrial
premises standing empty, a useful opportunity offered by the coincidental decline of traditional city companies and the general economic
slow-down, just as they also found abandoned churches suitable for
their mandira. Similarly, in the 1970s British small shopkeepers, struggling to keep going in the gloomy economic climate, meeting new
competition from supermarkets, were willing to sell their businesses,
their CTNs, their post offices, to enterprising Patels another coincidental stroke of good fortune exploited with astonishing vigour to the
point where by the 1990s, 67% of Londons CTNs were owned by British Asians, especially Patels (Lyons and West 1995).
Neither Hinduism nor social science recognises chance: these few
examples of coincidence and contingency that have had a role in the
history of British Gujaratis are, I hope, sufficient to convince sceptics
that chance is not an ignorable, nor an insignificant factor. If we do
not give chance its due then we may end up explaining outcomes in
terms of mysterious deities or equally mythical entities such as national character, the latter an explanatory candidate favoured by Raj
historians. There was, of course, no such thing as a, biological, British
character turning the map pink; but there is, I believe, such a thing as
an individuals character, which is inherited. By character I simply
mean the inherited differences of degree marking each person as a unique individual, in the Wittgensteinian sense as partly similar and
partly different from other people. A persons character is partly a
chance inheritance which, as evolutionary psychologists are keen to
emphasise, helps explain why you and your sibling, though both of
you share the same parentage, are nonetheless discrete individuals.
Sympathetic to Schopenhauer,14 I consider character to be what you
are, and thus not a possible cause of behaviour, precluding any notion
of determinism (you cannot sensibly be said to determine yourself).
Characteristics flavour how we do things, but they are not a cause or
motive. Analogously, characteristics are like the phenotypic expression
of a persons inherited genotype which gives them a certain height. Obviously, we are all of a certain height, we can only know our own
height by comparison with other peoples, what will most influence
our adult height is the environment in which we grow, but our potential height, and the rates at which we grow are genetically inherited
(your brother, fed the same food, will not grow at the same rate, nor
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JOHN MATTAUSCH
end up as tall or short as you). Examples of characteristics include your

sense of humour, tastes in music, patience, vanity all existing on a
range, just like a continuum of stature with most of us clustering
around the arithmetic mean average. Whether or not we come to recognise our own character, whether a characteristic is exercised, may
be down to chance; for example, being a gifted storyteller may be far
more appreciated if you happened to have been born into an oral culture.15
I am analytically comfortable with the notion that Gujarati Hindus,
just like everyone else, have individual characters. How characters become expressed is steered by the persons environment, which since
the arrival of capitalism has become an increasingly artificial, social environment, an environment which, like character, is open to chance influences. What is noteworthy about British Gujarati Hinduism is the
combination of the twin trajectories; both the maintenance of a traditional Hinduistic way of life alongside vibrant capitalistic roles. This
marriage of identities suggests that the classical sociological picture of
how societies change and how people come to think of themselves and
act is in need of a little revision.
Starting with the Scottish School, classical social theory of all persuasions embraced the notion that societies develop through historically
discernible stages, stages that became, in the nineteenth century, evolutionary progressions with positivism supplanting the metaphysical, capitalism supplanting feudalism, modernity supplanting ancien regimes,
and the orient supplanting the occidental. I have argued elsewhere
(Mattausch 2003) that societal evolution is logically impossible and that
rather than a history of one form of society supplanting a predecessor,
societal change is better seen as a process of accumulation. If this argument is correct, then instead of traditional Hinduism being replaced by
capitalism, we can expect Hinduism to be added to capitalism instead,
and vice versa, as the old imperialistic, racialist barriers become breached by increasing capitalistic internationalism (aka globalisation).
Thus, it is not the case that individual identities are simply transformed, rather, individuals may add further cultural dimensions in
much the same way as Roger Ballard analogously argued (1994: 30-33)
younger British South Asians can happily switch between cultures like
bilingualists can happily switch between two languages. Ballard developed this linguistic analogy to counter the presumption that younger
British South Asians would necessarily suffer from culture conflict,
arguing that the upcoming generation were better viewed as skilled
cultural navigators, with a sophisticated capacity to manoeuvre their
way to their own advantage both inside and outside the ethnic colony
(1994: 31). But perhaps an extension to his linguistic analogy suggests
that just as much as bilingual individuals do not translate from one
A CHANCE DIASPORA
165
language to another, so too British Gujarati Hindu cultural bilingualists are inured to possible conflicts between western capitalism and traditional Hinduism, hence facilitating the conjoining of two, at root, incompatible cultures.
The degree to which individuals are linguistically, or culturally, fluent is of course a reflection of their own characters and the circumstances in which they live, a reflection of sometimes chance-given opportunities. The twin trajectories of the communitys advancement,
both diversely capitalistic and traditionally Hinduistic, requires us as
social scientists to grant chance a decent analytical role in explaining
how the parallel developments occurred, how they may change in the
future and how they knit the communitys web of internationalised
castes. Admitting chance back into the analytical fold does not diminish the salience of well-known structural factors any more than it trivialises the struggles and achievements of British Gujaratis. Instead, recognising the roles played by chance allows for a more authentic explanation of the ways in which this community has fared in the course of
international capitalistic development, an historical process for which
the arrival of the East India Companys ship, The Hector, in Gujarat
sounded a starting pistol.
Notes
1
2
5
6
For a study and discussion of Gujarati female entrepreneurs in the male-dominated

Asian garment business, see: Irene Hardhill 1999.
See the Britains Leading South Asian Women listing compiled annually by the Website Redhotcurry Ltd for British Asian womens impressive achievements and striking
diversity.
Figures taken from the Governments National Statistics Online: www.statistics.gov.
uk. Just over half of British Hindus live in London, a further 22% live in the East
and West Midlands. It should be noted that only 92% completed the Censuss self-declared religious question, the wording of which What is your religion? may have
been appropriate for ascribed religions such as Hinduism, far less so for religions of
conversion and choice, such as Islam and Christianity. (This Census question was
worded differently in both the Scottish and Northern Ireland Censuses)
For a broad overview of established British Asian businesses and their disproportionately rapid growth, especially since the very late 1990s, see Dhaliwal and Adcroft
2005.
Modood, Virdee and Metcalfs 1995 study drew upon the samples for the 4th PSI Survey and employed the same worrisome categorisation of African Asians.
The absence of British Pakistani women from the paid labour force and this communitys very low educational levels are the chief reasons for their comparatively poor
economic standing, a weakness of the wider British Muslim community. For an excellent analysis of British Muslims founded upon the 2001 Census see Ceri and
Peach 2006.
Steven Vertovec discusses what he terms facets of reproduction, facets divided between cultural transmission between generations and institutionalisation and routi-
166
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
JOHN MATTAUSCH
nisation, in the most useful fourth chapter surveying the growth of Hinduism in
Britain of his book The Hindu Diaspora (2000).
All statistics are from the British Governments National Statistics Website.
For example, Draupadis shaming and redemption in the Mahabharatta; the kidnapping, rescue and marriage of Sita in the Ramyana; and the discussions of marriage
and the stories of unlawful abduction in the Srimad Bhagavata Purana, Book X.
The rapid construction of public places of worship by Hindus has also been matched
by the rest of the other British South Asian communities: in 1964, there were only
13 officially certified sites of worship for British South Asians, by 1998 there were
614 certified Muslim mosques the oldest, the Woking mosque, dating from the
1880s 109 Hindu temples, and 193 Sikh gurudwara. Today, there are at least 150
British mandira. For a discussion of Hindu temple building in the U.K., see R. Gale
and S. Naylor 2002.
As is usually the case, published but non-quantified discussions do not allow any reliable estimation of the influence of groups such as the VHP or the BJP, upon British
Hindus. My postgraduate supervisee Alex Deans unpublished research shows that
British Muslims also import so-called communal hatreds and that for the British Pakistani Muslim community, suppurating old bitternesses over Partition and Kashmir
fester away, informing young male Muslim/Sikh gang rivalries, some of which have
resulted in murders.
Two unreplicated studies by population geneticists illustrate the gendered patterning
of gene transmission in Hindu societies: Majmuder 1999 and Bramshad 1999.
Labour Force Survey, June 2003 to May 2004. The percentages are for all British Hindus, not just the majority British Gujarati component.
For Schopenhauers epigrammatic remarks on character see Essays and Aphorisms,
1970: 166-180. For the neglected importance and influences of Schopenhauer, see
Brian Magee 1997.
I have sketched some evidence from genetic science, particularly from Behaviour Genetics, for chance affecting behaviour in Mattausch 2003: 518-520. Chance and character are the topics of a book I am currently writing.
7 Contested Family Relations and Government

Policy
Links between Patel Migrants in Britain and India
Mario Rutten and Pravin J. Patel
This paper discusses the social links between Indian migrants in Britain and their family members in India. It is based on fieldwork among
members of the Patidar community in rural central Gujarat and
among their relatives in London. Members of this community have a
long history of national and international migration. Many of them migrated to East Africa in the early part of the 20th century and from
there to Britain (and the US) in the 1960s and 1970s.
The aim of this paper is to show the differences in perspective on
the social links from below between the Patidar migrants in London
and their relatives in Gujarat.1 Both the migrants in London and their
relatives in Gujarat acknowledge the notion of an Indian diaspora as a
significant category, but they frame and discuss this notion in very different and contradictory ways. The Patidar community in London is a
transnational community that maintains frequent long-distance family
links with their home region in India. There are, however, differences
within the community that are related to their patterns of migration.
The links between family members India and Britain are neither static
nor without problems. Over time, the orientation towards India has become more ambivalent. Moreover, there are differences of opinion between the Indian migrants in London and their relatives in Gujarat on
the nature of their relationship and on the type of help rendered.
Furthermore, the migrants in London challenge the government perspective on the diaspora concept. This paper thus shows the complex
process of appropriation of notions of the Indian diaspora among
those who describe themselves as members of that diaspora, and
among their relatives at home.
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Introduction
By the end of the twentieth century, about 2 million people of South
Asian origin were residing in Europe, the US and Canada. The majority of them, about 1.26 million, live in Britain (Jain 1993: 34-35). Geographically, the Indian migrants in Britain are concentrated in the urban counties of England, from Kent in the south east to Lancashire in
the north west. The largest number, about 36 per cent of the total Indian population, live in Greater London, while 22 per cent have settled
in the Midlands area (Ram 1989: 101-02). With regard to their region
of origin in India, the Gujarati and Punjabi communities are by far the
largest Indian communities in Britain (Jain 1993: 36).
Gujarat is one of the prosperous states of India. Being a coastal state
it has a long tradition of overseas trade. Gujarati business houses have
existed in Africa since the thirteenth century and Gujarati businessmen, particularly the Ismaili Muslims, have been bankers and moneylenders of high reputation (Dobbin 1996:109-30). Among the Hindus
of Gujarat, the members of the Patidar caste from central Gujarat have
emigrated to East Africa in large numbers since the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century.
The Patidar community is an upwardly mobile, middle-ranking peasant caste which can be found in several regions of Gujarat, but has its
main concentration in the Charotar tract of Kheda and Anand districts
in central Gujarat (Pocock 1972). With about fifteen to twenty per cent
of the district population, the Patidars form a substantial minority that
have been able to acquire economic, social, and political dominance
since the early part of the twentieth century, both at the regional and
state level (Hardiman 1981; Rutten 1995).
Participation of the Patidars from central Gujarat in the process of
migration abroad has a long history. From the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century onwards, family members of Patidar businessmen
had already started migrating to Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal,
Andhra Pradesh and other states of India, to trade in the locally produced biddy tobacco. This form of migration was mainly confined to
the upper stratum of the business community in central Gujarat. A
more spectacular form of migration, which was one of the first streams
of migration among the middle-class Patidars in central Gujarat, was
the migration to foreign countries, especially to East African countries
such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. This pattern of migration started
during the period of economic deterioration around the turn of the
century and accelerated during the 1920s and 1930s. Many Patidars
who had never travelled any further than Ahmedabad or Baroda began
to pick up the trade connection which had existed for two thousand
CONTESTED FAMILY RELATIONS AND GOVERNMENT POLICY
169
years between Gujarat and Africa (Pocock 1972: 63; Desai 1948: 18/141;
Tambs-Lyche 1980: 35-40).
This early migration abroad from the Charotar tract was closely related to the job opportunities offered by British colonial rule in East
Africa. During the first decades of the twentieth century especially,
many Patidars from middle-class and lower middle-class peasant backgrounds migrated as passage or free migrants to countries like Kenya,
Tanzania, and Uganda. Colonial rule and the completion of the East
African railways offered these educated middle-class Patidars white-collar clerical occupations, and initiated a new era of economic opportunities to be exploited by the members of this peasant caste who took
up a variety of commercial and professional activities. Most of these Patidar migrants went to East Africa on the basis of a work permit provided by fellow villagers who had gone earlier, or on the basis of a marriage with a Patidar girl or boy living in an East African country. These
marriages were known as permitian lagn (marriage arranged with a
view to get a permit to go to Africa), because the main purpose for the
Patidar family in the village was to provide one of their sons or daughters with an opportunity to migrate to East Africa. It was usually
through the help and support of their new family-in-law, along with
that of other relatives and fellow villagers, that these young migrants
who had never travelled beyond their own regional towns, were able to
settle down in their new environment.
The colonial period in the 1950s saw only a very small trickle of Patidars to Britain. From the mid-1960s onwards, however, the pattern of
migration of the Patidar households changed very quickly from East
Africa to Britain. As a result of radical Africanisation programmes in
these countries and the fear that immigration restrictions would soon
be implemented by the British government, many of these East African
Indians left for Britain in a relatively short time span. Between September 1967 and March 1968 alone, 12,000 South Asians from Kenya
entered Britain, while 29,000 Asians arrived in 1972 after being expelled from Uganda (Michaelson 1978/79: 351). Although a relatively
prosperous minority of these so-called twice migrants (Bhachu 1985)
had already begun to invest in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s
mainly through the purchase of houses where young relatives could
stay whilst studying (Michaelson 1978/79: 350) most of those who
migrated from Africa to Britain at the end of the 1960s, early 1970s,
arrived practically empty handed and were usually fully dependent on
friends and relatives (Tambs-Lyche 1980: 41).
As a result of these patterns of migration, the Patels constitute one
of the largest groups among the Gujarati Hindus in Britain. Not surprisingly Patel is one of the most popular Indian surnames abroad
along with the Singh surname. According to a conservative estimate
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& PRAVIN J.
PATEL
of the membership of associations of all the marriage circles in Britain,

there were about 30,000 Patels from central Gujarat living in Britain
in the early 1990s, of which 90 per cent reside in London (Lyon and
West 1995: 407).
The main part of the findings presented in this paper are based on
fieldwork conducted in 1998 among members of the Patidar community in rural central Gujarat and among their relatives in London in
1999, followed by subsequent visits since then. In order to study the
links between the Patidars of India and Britain we collected information through a survey from 313 households in six villages in central Gujarat who have relatives in Britain, out of which 157 were selected for
in-depth interviews. This was followed by a survey among 159 Patidar
households in Greater London, of which 80 were selected for in-depth
interviews. Members of the Patidar households in Greater London originated from these same six villages in central Gujarat.2 The reason for
selecting six different villages is related to the fact that the Patidars of
central Gujarat are not a homogenous group but an internally differentiated one with several hierarchically organised subgroups having a unique preoccupation with the competitive display of social status. In
their selection of marriage partners the Patidars confine themselves to
their own subdivision within a specific group of villages, based on an
extended hierarchical system of endogamous marriage circles (Pocock
1972; Hardiman 1981). These marriage circles (ekada or gol) have retained their social significance for the Patidars living in Britain, where
they have established associations which organise social and cultural
activities for its members (Lyon and West 1995: 407; Michaelson 197979: 355).
In order to have a fairly representative picture of the socio-economiccultural links among the Patidars in central Gujarat and their relatives
in Britain, we decided to select villages of both high ranking marriage
circles and medium-ranking marriage circles. For this purpose, we divided the villages of central Gujarat into two major strata which are recognised as socially significant: Mota Gam (big villages) and Nana
Gam (small villages). The six villages belonging to the marriage circle
known as Chha Gam (six villages) are considered Mota Gam, while almost all the other villages are generally known as Nana Gam. From
Mota Gam we selected two villages from the Chha Gam marriage circle. The big villages are actually rural towns compared to the smaller
villages. However, this distinction does not only reflect the difference
in size but also the social status. The Patidars of the big villages are
considered to be of the highest social status among all the hypergamously organised marriage circles of villages in central Gujarat (Pocock
1972; and Hardiman 1981).
171
Except for the Panch Gam (five villages) marriage circle, whose status is ambiguous, all the other marriage circles belong to the Nana
Gam category. From these marriage circles we selected four villages
from two medium-status marriage circles: Sattavis Gam (27 villages)
and Bavis Gam (22 villages).3
The selected stratified sample of villages within both Mota Gam and
Nana Gam marriage circles allows for comparison between Patidars
from high-status and medium-status villages. This difference between
high-status and medium-status villages is an important aspect within
the Patidar community with its strong sense of hierarchy and practice
of hypergamy. An important reason for selecting these three specific
marriage circles is that members of these circles make up the largest
share of the Central Gujarat Patidar migrants in Britain. Based on information provided by Lyon and West on the number of Patidars in
London, it turns out that seventy per cent of the 30,000 Patidars from
central Gujarat in London belong to the Chha Gam, Sattavis Gam, and
Bavis Gam marriage circles (1995: 406-07).
Within the Patel community in Britain, there are differences that are
related to their patterns of migration. First of all, there are those who
belong to so-called twice-migrant families. These Patels entered Britain
from East Africa, especially from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In our
sample of 159 households in Greater London they make up threefourths of the total number of household members who were not born
in Britain. This figure includes those who came to Britain after a temporary stay in India following their departure from East Africa. The remaining one-fourth of the household members consists of those who
migrated directly from India to Britain without having any previous
migration history.
In his overview of differentiation among the British Gujarati, Steven
Vertovec extensively discusses the difference between these East African Gujaratis and the Indian Gujarati. In general, he emphasises,
East African Gujarati are viewed as having a higher educational and
occupational background and being more wealthy and of higher status
compared to those who had directly migrated from India.
East Africans are usually associated with higher educational and
occupational backgrounds than Indians (Modood et al. 1997).
This trait has been subsequently equated with greater status and
wealth. The East African Asians supposed longer and deeper acquaintance with the English language and with urban, middleclass European (albeit colonial) lifestyles has connoted a better
preparation for successful living in Britain. Though it would be
difficult to prove the validity of all such traits, they remain com-
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MARIO RUTTEN
& PRAVIN J.
PATEL
mon stereotypes that determine much by way of attitudes and

social formations (Vertovec 2000: 90-91).
Our analysis of the migration history of the Patels from central Gujarat
points to the fact that there are also social differences among East African Gujarati in Britain that belong to the same caste group. Most of
the East African Patels settled in Britain came from Kenya and Uganda. There are slight social differences between those Patels who came
to Britain from Kenya and those who came from Uganda. One of the
reasons for this process of social differentiation within the Patidar community seems to be partly related to a difference in their patterns of
migration.
It appears that due to an earlier process of urbanisation and education, and a subsequent greater exposure to the outside world, the Patels
of the Mota Gam villages started emigrating to East Africa earlier than
their counterparts from the Nana Gam villages. Perhaps the fear of losing status by their inability to marry their daughters and sisters in
equal or higher status families within their own marriage circle, due to
a combination of higher dowries and an increasing scarcity of land,
may also have compelled them to look for better opportunities outside
India. As a result, most of those Patels who emigrated to East Africa at
an early stage originated from one of the Mota Gam villages that belong to the Chha Gam marriage circle. Since Mombassa was the port
or arrival in those days, the large majority of the Mota Gam Patels
settled down in Kenya.
After they had established themselves, these migrants started to encourage and help those relatives who were interested in migrating to
East Africa. This applied especially to those who were in need of assistants and other junior staff members to help them run their businesses. Due to the prevailing system of hypergamy among the Patidars
of central Gujarat, some of these relatives, particularly on the in-law
side of their family, originated from Nana Gam villages that belonged
to other marriage circles. As a result, an increasing number of Nana
Gam Patels started to emigrate to East Africa. Being latecomers and relatively less educated compared to the Mota Gam Patels, many of them
encountered difficulties in finding employment in Kenya. In search of
new opportunities, these Nana Gam Patels started moving further inland and settled down in large numbers in British protectorate Uganda.
Thus, it seems that the majority of Patels who settled down in Kenya
originated from the Mota Gam villages, while among those who settled
down in Uganda the proportion of Patels from Nana Gam villages is
higher. This difference in geographical pattern of migration reflects a
relatively invisible but nevertheless significant difference of status with-
173
in the Patidar community of central Gujarat. In general, the Patels that

belong to the Mota Gam villages are usually associated with higher status and greater wealth as compared to those who originate from the
Nana Gam villages. Therefore, most of those who came from Kenya to
Britain were relatively better-off and higher status Patels than many of
those who came from Uganda. Moreover, the Patels of the Mota Gam
villages who had migrated earlier to Kenya also had a stronger tradition
of retaining links back home than those who came later and settled in
Uganda due to various socio-historical reasons. This different tradition
of maintaining links back home in India seems to be reflected in these
two groups even in Britain.
Another reason for the social differentiation between those Patels in
Britain who came from Kenya and those who came from Uganda is in
the manner in which they migrated to Britain. Those Patels who migrated from East Africa to Britain came to Britain in two waves. Those
who came from Kenya arrived mainly in the mid- and late 1960s,
while those who were settled in Uganda entered Britain in the early
1970s. Those Patels who came from Kenya could usually plan their migration in advance. Due to the continuing Africanisation programs in
Kenya, they could anticipate their departure and were able to transfer
part of their wealth to Britain relatively easily. This was much less so
for those Patels who had settled in Uganda. Their departure from
Uganda was the result of a sudden and unexpected expulsion by Idi
Amin. Being forced to leave the country at very short notice, they arrived in Britain as political refugees with very little personal property
left over.
Social Links
Regardless of whether they migrated from East Africa or India, and
whether they belonged to the Mota Gam or Nana Gam villages, the
characteristic feature of the Patel community that we studied in London is that they remained attached to Indian culture and to their Gujarati background in terms of their social relations. Most of the older generation have retained their Patidar identity by organising themselves
on the basis of their village of origin and marriage-circle (gol). These
village-based associations and organisations of village circles in Britain
bring out directories giving details of all the Patidar family members
concerned. These directories are mostly used to help to arrange marriages. For this purpose, the associations also organise marriage-melas,
in which young boys and girls publicly introduce themselves and try to
find out suitable life-partners. Besides, the village associations and marriage-circle associations of Patidars in Britain organise meetings to
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celebrate Nav Ratri, Diwali and other important Indian festivals, and
have functions like dinner-and-dance parties, where they eat, drink,
and dance to Hindi songs till late into the night and early morning
hours on weekends. Moreover, many Patels participate in religious activities, for which the Swaminarayan temple in North London is often
a focal point (see also Williams 1984). Although most of the active
members in these associations belong to the older generations of Patidar migrants, many organisations also have youth committees in
which youngsters are involved and encouraged to organise and participate in various activities.
Along with organising social and religious events, members of the
Patidar community in London have started making organised efforts to
teach Gujarati to the younger generation. Children belonging to the
second and third generation of migrants are mostly able to understand
functional Gujarati, but they find it difficult to speak, and are often unable to read and write the Gujarati script. This problem, of course, is
not confined to the Patel community in Britain. The Gujarati community as a whole has become more conscious about teaching Gujarati to
their children. There are about 500 classes that teach Gujarati throughout the UK, often for two hours a week on Saturdays and Sundays. By
the end of the 1990s, about one thousand to fifteen hundred students
were taking Gujarati language examinations annually.
On the whole, village life in Gujarat still has a profound effect on
the first generation of Patidar migrants. They grew up in the villages
during their formative years, where they studied and spent their childhoods. Moreover, many of them grew up during the patriotic period of
the national independence movement, which made them even prouder
of their Indian culture and heritage. The social, religious and cultural
bonds with their home village and with other Patidar migrants from
the same region, when they first lived in East Africa and later on in
Britain, further cemented those ties with their villages of origin. Therefore, the social identity of the first generation of Patidar migrants is
deeply embedded in village life. Meanwhile, their ties with their places
of origin and with their relatives and friends in Gujarat are still quite
strong.
One of the indicators of social links between the Patidar migrants in
Britain and their relatives in the villages in Gujarat are the various
types of intense contacts that exist between the members of both
groups. Writing letters is still the major form of communication used
by households in Gujarat to contact relatives in Britain, although
phone calls are also an important way of keeping in touch. Because the
costs of long-distance telephone calls from India to Britain are high
they are usually kept very short and are often only made in emergency
situations or for very specific purposes. Patels in Britain make phone
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calls more often to their families in the village; some even call on a
weekly basis for a few minutes. These calls are used to exchange information about the well being of relatives on both sides.
Another important form of contact between the households in Gujarat and their family members in Britain are visits by relatives from Britain to their home villages. More than ninety per cent of the selected
313 households in the six villages have been visited by relatives in Britain in the period between 1993 and 1998. In total, 768 relatives visited
India which means an average of 2.7 relatives per household of which
a substantial number visited India more than once during this five-year
period. Most of these visits were of relatively long duration. Almost
fifty per cent of them stayed one to three months, while the visits of
nine per cent of British relatives lasted four to six months. About forty
per cent of the relatives who visited their home villages stayed in India
for less than a month.
In recent years, when many of the older migrants retired from active
employment, a movement from Britain back to India during winter
has emerged. Among the older generation of Patidar migrants in Britain, there are quite a few who could be called international commuters. These are Patidars from Britain who travel to India every winter
for stays of one to five months. In most cases, they live in Gujarat in
their own apartment or bungalow in one of the nearby towns or on the
outskirts of their home village. Some of them have actually for all practical purposes re-emigrated to India as they spend more time in their
country of origin than in Britain. Although most of these people did return to spend their retirement in India, some returned because they no
longer wanted to live with their families in Britain. Having returned to
their village of origin, some of them realised, however, that they are no
longer at home there either, as is shown in the following case study.4
Shamalbhai is 72 years old and since 1994 he lives again in the
village in which he was born in 1925. In 1953, at the age of 27,
Shamalbhai left his native village when he was already married.
He was invited to come to Tanzania by his fathers eldest brothers son whose family had been living there since the 1930s.
In 1956, Shamalbhai came back to his village to collect his wife
and three children. The highly unstable political situation
around 1963 made them decide to bring their children back to
Charotar and to leave them with Shamalbhais nearest relatives
in his native village where they could attend the local schools.
Although his wife stayed with their children for some months,
she again joined her husband in Tanzania in 1964. Together,
they lived and worked in Tanzania until 1973 with only one visit
to their children in Charotar in 1969.
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After their visit in 1973, his wife remained behind in the village,
while Shamalbhai returned again to Tanzania in 1974. From
there he applied and was allowed to enter the UK in 1979. Within one year after his arrival in London, Shamalbhai called his
wife and their three children to join him in Britain. But Shamalbhai and his family were only able to get unskilled work during the early period in Britain. I could only get a job in a factory, Shamalbhai mentioned to us. In Tanzania I had a big
shop with assistants and drove around in a Jaguar car, but I had
to leave almost all my property behind when I migrated to the
UK and had to start again from scratch.
I was not really happy in London. It was hard work that my
wife and I had to perform in those factories for very low pay, but
we did it for our children. By migrating to the UK, we wanted to
give them a better future, because they would not have these opportunities in India, being relatively low educated and without
much property in the village. After my retirement in 1990, however, my wife and I started to visit India very regularly. In fact,
we used to often stay several months per year in India. In 1994,
we even returned and took up permanent residence again in my
native village, because after my fathers brothers daughter had
left for the US, there was no one left in the village to take care
of my old father. We then built a new house on the outskirts of
the village and since then we live here the whole year around,
and only occasionally visit the UK.
Although at first, Shamalbhai returned to the village only because of his father, he visibly enjoys being part of the village life.
Every day he makes his rounds of the village and on various evenings one can meet him in the village square, talking to old
friends. On the other hand, however, he occupies a marginal position in his home village. Although I was born and brought up
here, even after four years of my permanent return, I still do not
feel that I am really part of village society. We participate in various activities, but somehow we have difficulties really mixing
with our relatives in the village and force ourselves to attend
their gatherings. But to be honest, we used to have the same
feeling when we were living in the UK, because I arrived there
at the age of 55 and only worked there for about ten years. After
Shamalbhai left the room for a short while, his wife also started
to express her views. Yes, we were also not at home in London,
but at least we had our children and grandchildren nearby. I
dont like it here at all and hardly leave our house. My whole life
I have been able to live and adjust in different countries. I have
lived in Charotar, in Tanzania and in London, but now that we
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are old, I sometimes feel that we no longer feel at home anywhere and therefore it is better keep to ourselves inside our own
house.
As is to be expected, there are less visits by Indian relatives to Britain
compared to the number of visits from Patidar migrants to India. However, members of more than twenty per cent of the selected households
visited Britain between 1993 and 1998. In total, 128 members visited
Britain in this five-years period, which comes to an average of 1.6 relatives per household. This clearly indicates that there are substantial
numbers of household members from the villages who have visited
Britain. These visits are often of a longer duration. Only eight per cent
of the household members who visited Britain stayed there for less
than a month. About 45 per cent of them stayed between one to three
months, while the visits of 33 per cent lasted four to six months, with
the remaining 14 per cent remaining in Britain for a period of more
than half a year.
The 313 households in the six selected villages with relatives in Britain have a total of 3,624 relatives in Britain, which is an average of 11.6
relatives per household. Although the selection of households in the
six villages was done on the basis of the existence of relatives in Britain, it turns out that 133 of the 157 selected families for in-depth interviews do not only have relatives in Britain, but also outside Britain. In
total, this comes to an extra 1,469 relatives with an average of 9.4 per
household. With the rigorous immigration restrictions imposed, emigration to Britain decreased rapidly from the late 1970s, early 1980s
onwards. Since then, the US and Canada have become the most popular destinations for Patidar migrants (Jain 1993; Helweg 1987/1990).
This is confirmed by the findings of our study. Almost 75 per cent of
the 1,469 relatives of the selected families in central Gujarat live in the
US, while almost 16 per cent live in East Africa.
One of the consequences of this widespread migration pattern of the
Patidar community is the emergence of a category of people that we
would describe as world citizens. They are usually older people who,
although they have a residence in one country, often travel between the
UK, India, the US, and East Africa throughout the year, staying in each
destination for a few months at a time. These people sometimes meet
each other in different countries where they exchange information
about relatives. There are even some cases of transnational holidays in
which Patidar relatives from different parts of the world come together
to spend their vacation by travelling to several countries.
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Mirror Image of a Family Relationship

The above brief account indicates that members of the Patidar community in London frequently maintain long-distance family links with
their home region in India. Regular visits and frequent contacts keep
many of the Patidar migrants in London well-linked to the villages in
Gujarat and vice versa. However, these visits and contacts are not without their problems. The following examples will show in more detail
that there are sometimes differences of opinion between the Indian
migrants in London and their relatives in Gujarat on the nature of
their relationships and on the types of help rendered.
In many instances, the visits of the Patidar migrants to India and of
their Indian relatives to Britain are related to the marriages of one of
their family members in Britain or India, mostly with a marriage partner from the other country. During the visits of the Patidar migrants to
India, activities related to religion are also very common. Because of
the substantial donations they make to local temples, they are often given special treatment in terms of comfortable and prominent positions.
This emphasis on religion by the relatives from Britain, and the special
VIP treatment they receive in the temples in central Gujarat is viewed
by some local Patels with jealousy and ridiculed in private conversations.
In 1988, Mohanbhai retired from his clerical job in London,
while his wife Vimlaben retired in 1991. Since then, the two of
them have been visiting Gujarat every year during the winter
season for a period of two to three months. In 1994, they
bought their own apartment in the nearby city of Baroda.
During their stay in Gujarat, Mohanbhai and Vimlaben spend
most of their time in Baroda and from there they also make
trips to Charotar to visit friends and relatives in their native village. Alongside these social visits, they take the opportunity during their stay to visit temples in Gujarat and usually also make a
tour of a few days to other religious places in India. Mohanbhai
emphasises his religious nature, and indicates that he regularly
makes donations to local temples. Also, when I am in London,
he told us, I very often make visits to the temple. In London, I
am a member of the temple of Akshar Pursottam. Whenever we
stay in Gujarat, we make it a point of going to the big temple of
Akshar Pursottam in Gandhinagar.
During one of their trips to their native village, Mohanbhai and
Vimlaben showed some relatives the photographs of the Yagna
ritual in which they had participated in the village temple a few
weeks earlier. While showing the photographs, Vimlaben
pointed out several of her relatives and friends from the UK and
US. They were in fact easily recognisable, because Vimlaben
and the other women from the UK and US were in the first row
in the group photo, sitting in chairs with their plates on a table
in front of them, while the women from the village sat on the
floor behind them. Mohanbhai explained that Vimlaben and the
other women from the UK and US had been the honoured
guests at the Yagna ritual in the village temple. While explaining
this, he took a letter from his wallet that he showed to us and
his local relatives with some pride. It was a letter of recommendation from the Swaminarayan Mandir in London in which Mohanbhai is mentioned as a member of the Mandir in London
and was allowed to stay in any of their temples in Gujarat for
two days with a maximum group of 8 persons. In this letter,
the temples in Gujarat are requested to provide me with boarding and lodging, and to enable me to pray and to have conversations with the priests, Mohanbhai told us. About two years ago,
the Swaminarayan Mandir in London started to issue these letters in order to ensure that only genuine and honest people can
make use of the facilities of the temples in Gujarat. And because
of this letter, I will get special treatment during my stay in the
temple, Mohanbhai added. We will be given a clean private
room furnished with a table and a chair, and air conditioning if
available. They will prepare food that is not too spicy and give us
mineral water. This VIP treatment is usually given to every
NRI (Non-Resident Indian) who visits a temple in Gujarat, Mohanbhai told us before he and Vimlaben left the house to visit
some of Mohanbhais old school friends in the village.
Shortly after Mohanbhai and Vimlaben left, local relatives
started to make some critical remarks about the earlier discussions. One of Mohanbhais cousins brothers remarked: This
VIP treatment is given to the NRIs only because they donate in
pounds or dollars instead of Indian rupees. Many of them were
never very religious when they were in Africa or went to Britain.
But now that they are retired, they suddenly have a need for Indian culture and to rediscover religion. However, many of them
have already become too westernised. They are not even able to
sit cross-legged on the floor for a long time and their stomachs
can no longer stand our drinking water. The other relatives
agreed with him in their mild attempt to ridicule the NRIs emphasis on religion, but could at the same time also not hide
their jealousy regarding the special treatment the NRIs receive
in the local temples.
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Another characteristic feature of the behaviour of the Patel migrants in

London is the absence of productive investments in India. This lack of
enthusiasm regarding the maintaining of financial links and investments in Gujarat by the Patel migrants in London are part of lively discussions both in India and Britain. Among the Patel migrants in London there are those who emphasise that they consider the lukewarm
response accorded them by the Indian government in the early 1970s a
more shocking experience than their sudden and unexpected expulsion
from Uganda by Idi Amin. In those days, the Indian government did
not realise the importance of the Non-Resident Indians. Therefore,
many of those who settled in the UK, after being expelled from Uganda, ironically translate NRI, the much trumpeted term by the Indian
government, as Non-Required Indians, and their bitterness is also reflected in their lack of enthusiasm in maintaining links back home in
the form of investments in India.
It is partly due to these feelings that there are no strong developmental links between the villages in Charotar and the Patel community in
Britain, despite the size and frequency of monetary help and financial
transfers of the Patel relatives from Britain. Many Patels in the villages
express their negative views about the fact that migrants from Britain
do not contribute as much to the development of their home village as
they used to in the past. Although they seem to understand the economic problems faced by the Patels in Britain today, they strongly believe that they avoid their responsibilities by not contributing to the
welfare of their home villages.
Sureshbhais family belongs to one of the economically most
well-to-do families in the village. They own about 20 acres of
land and have a large cold storage building and a tile factory and
several other undertakings. Sureshbhais younger brother Mahendrabhai is a regional politician who is also quite active at the
local level. Among other things, he is the chairman of the educational board and secretary of the village co-operative bank.
On various occasions, Sureshbhai and Mahendrabhai criticised
the large-scale migrations of the Patel community to the UK
and US of members. Not one of our direct relatives has migrated abroad, Sureshbhai used to say with some pride. We are
happy to live here and are not like all those Patels who do will
anything to be able to go abroad. Mahendrabhai adds: And
when they leave, they forget all about their native place. In the
past few years, there has hardly been any financial support of
our village from the Patels who live in the UK. Until the 1960s,
Patels who migrated to East Africa from our village used to
make regular donations to the educational board and village pan-
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chayat. It was because of these donations that our village was

among the first in the area to have a high school. Since they migrated from East Africa to the UK, however, we have hardly received any donations from our fellow villagers abroad. Even
though they established a samaj from our village in London, this
has not resulted in substantial support for the development of
our village. We realise that it is expensive to live in London, but
compared to Gujarat, the Patels in Britain have hardly any social
obligations and therefore less expenses in this regard. I personally feel that Patels in the UK are only after money and obsessed
with saving as much money as they can. They hardly care about
their relatives back home, and seem to have become misers who
do not want to spend money on their social obligations.
When they are in the UK, they dont think about the welfare or
development of their native village, but when they visit their village, they start to emphasise that we are all part of the same village and samaj. They even expect us to treat them with the highest respect because they have come from abroad. But to be honest, I dont think the Patels in Britain from our village are part
of our community anymore, they have become strangers to us,
strangers who are no longer really concerned about the welfare
of their native village.
Family property issues in the village are also not without their problems. In several cases, relations between relatives in Britain and family members in the Gujarat village have become severely strained
due to property conflicts. Members of the households in the village often believe that they are entitled to the total amount of ancestral property, because they looked after the familys property and often after
their parents and other elder relatives in the village as well. The relatives in Britain, however, are sometimes of the opinion that they have a
right to an equal share of the familys property, which they then will
try to sell off.
Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the Patel community in India and Britain seem to be on the crossroads in every aspect
of life. On the one hand, the relationships are becoming more transnational and extending their links into different countries from India to
Britain and to the US. On the other hand, it is struggling to maintain
its traditional culture in Britain by reclaiming the younger generation
and by redefining its links with the relatives in the home region of central Gujarat. This continuing process of both closeness and antagonism
between the two sides of the transnational family, and the way in
which they interact and influence each other, is not a new phenomenon for most of the Patel migrants in London. This has been part of
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their daily existence as migrants who maintain intense and frequent

links with relatives in their home villages, especially for those who migrated to the UK from East Africa.
A man from overseas was not able to convert his success into
prestige in Gujerat without the local knowledge and cooperation
of people who had stayed behind.
The villages in Gujerat were sounding boards for gossip and anecdotes about emigrants in all parts of the world, and in East
Africa the strongest sanctions compelling a Patidar to regulate
his life according to the standards and values prevalent in his
home district were the opinions of other Patidars in India. Every
aeroplane flying to and from Bombay was loaded with gossip
and comment (Morris 1968: 96 and 99).
Government Policy
Ever since the beginning of the large-scale migrations of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent there has been governmental
ambivalence towards the Indians abroad. During the first period of indentured migration, there was little government control. As the number of Indians increased in the various colonies, problems arose with
regard to their rights and duties as inhabitants and citizens of the colonies in question. As a result, the Indian government gradually began
to pay more attention to what at that time was called the Indian problem abroad (Davis 1968: 103). With this large-scale settlement abroad
the issue was no longer simply one of regulating migration but of protecting an affiliated ethnic group. This matter has always been a very
delicate one in terms of international relations. It was even more complicated because of the ambivalent position of the Indian government
within the British Empire. The Indians, in contrast to the Negroes had
a nation that could plead their case. Yet their own government was European in ultimate control, and hence had divided sympathies as between the migrants and their European masters (Davis 1968: 103).
Although they were ambivalent, early government policy towards the
Indian populations abroad had a profound affect on future emigration
policy. After 1900, the indenture system became increasingly unpopular in India. Especially in view of the rising political awareness and
growing strength of the independence movement, the treatment of the
Indian indentured labourers abroad was considered an insult to the
newly emerging Indian nation. During those years, public opinion in
India therefore contributed to increasing the governments sensitivity
to the adverse treatment of Indians abroad. This sometimes resulted in
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specific regulations of the flow of migration with respect to particular

areas, while in the end it speeded up the tendency towards the abolition of the indenture system. Of course, it is a matter of speculation as
to whether this step came after the demand for indentured labour had
already subsided anyway, but the governments action was strongly
supported by Indian opinion (Davis 1968: 106).
After Independence, the Indian government continued its ambivalence towards the people of Indian origin abroad. During those years,
the bureaucracy dealing with foreign policy inside and outside of India
was strongly influenced by Nehrus belief that Indians abroad should
not look to India to solve their problems but should fully integrate into
the societies in their adopted countries. Therefore, for a long time Indian diplomats did not concern themselves with the diasporas woes.
Things, however, changed with the second and third generation Indians who were educated and had acquired greater economic muscle,
especially after the arrival in Britain of the people of Indian origin from
East and West Africa (Malik 1997: 136).
By the end of the 1970s, the Indian government increasingly felt the
need to develop a policy framework for forging closer ties with the Indian diaspora. This attention by the government for the Indian diaspora in part had to do with Indias need for more external funding to
deal with its economic problems. It also had to do with fact that the Indian diaspora had become wealthier over the years. In the 1980s, in
particular, soft loans and development aid to India by multilateral institutions declined considerably, forcing the government to turn to commercial borrowing at market interest rates with less favourable conditions. At the same time, there was a strong need for the renewal of Indian industry in order to increase the competitiveness of their exports
in a globalised world. These changes in industry and the restructuring
of the Indian economy required large inputs of capital, new technology
and machinery, something which increased the need for foreign investment and aid.
This period of financial problems coincided with a growing visibility
in economic terms of the Indian diaspora in the UK, US, Canada, and
the Gulf states. The Indian government increasingly began to notice
the achievements of their fellow countrymen in foreign countries, be it
in business, industry, science, technology or education. As a result, it
began to see the Non-Resident Indians as a potential resource for India. The aim was to turn the wealth of the Indian diaspora into future
financial and industrial investments. The Indian government was
therefore eager to quickly point out that the recent changes in the Indian economy also offered enormous opportunities for the Indian diaspora. It subsequently increased its efforts to attract expatriate scientists, technocrats, industrialists and businessmen of Indian origin who
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were working in western countries such as UK, US, Canada, or Australia. Whereas previously it tried to persuade Indians to return to India
for good, now the government wanted them to act as catalysts while
continuing to work abroad (Malik 1997: 122).
Over the past two decades, the Indian government has made efforts
to evolve a policy that would benefit the Indian diaspora as well as Indian society.5 For this, it developed a large number of special schemes
and fiscal incentives for NRIs. In 1979, the Malhotra Committee, appointed by Department of Economic Affairs, had already made various
recommendations to increase the level of NRI investment, several of
which were partially implemented after 1982. In the years thereafter, a
large number of new schemes were introduced that provided incentives
and concessions to those NRIs interested in making investments in
their home country.
A special cell for NRI investment was constituted in 1983 and a Joint
Secretary in the Ministry of Economic Affairs was designated as the
Commissioner for NRI investments. In the 1980s, several special
schemes were launched to attract NRI funds including: (a) various
deposit schemes like the Non-Resident (External) Rupee Accounts
NR(E)A scheme, the Foreign Currency (Non-Resident) Accounts
FCNRA scheme, the Non-Resident (Non-Repatriable) Rupee Deposit NR(NR)RD scheme and Foreign Currency (Ordinary Non-Repatriable) FCON Deposit scheme; (b) direct equity participation under
various schemes; and (c) portfolio investment. Many of these schemes
carried interests which were much higher than those available in the
countries where affluent NRSs lived. (Malik 1997: 123-126).
Ambivalent Responses
Notwithstanding the large number of incentives and concessions, there
was not a corresponding increase in direct foreign investments by
NRIs in India. Most of them preferred to invest their money in savings
accounts or in commercial projects such as housing schemes. This was
also the case among our sample of Patel families, as is shown by the
following statement by one of them.
Most of the investments in India by the Patels from London that
I know of come in only two forms. One, as NRI bank accounts
and two, as real estate. This is because when we go to India we
can use some of this money during our visits there, while we
are getting higher interest rates at the same time. Quite a few of
us have bought property in the form of flats or houses, mostly
in cities like Anand, Vidyanagar, Baroda, and Ahmedabad. These
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flats and houses are useful during our stay during the winter
season. I also have a flat in Baroda which gives me the opportunity to stay in Gujarat without being at the mercy of my relatives. The rising prices of real estate over the past few years have
also made it an attractive investment because the value of our
property has appreciated very fast over a relatively short period
of time. I have never invested in any form of business or industry and I only know of two people who have done so in the past.
Both stopped after a few years, one because of problems with
his local partners, the other because he got fed up with the Indian bureaucracy. Almost all Patels are only interested in making investments in the UK. Investments in London are more remunerative and more important for the future of our children
and grandchildren.
This lack of productive investment by NRIs is confirmed in K.N. Maliks study. He states that:
In the case of Gujaratis, the annual inflow was estimated at
49.3 million in the late 1970s. Most of the remittances went
into savings, maintenance, land, jewellery, consumer goods and
better lifestyle. Little investment was made in trade and business. Most NRIs have preferred to put their money in Foreign
Currency Non-Resident (FCNR) deposits rather than invest in
new projects (Malik 1997: 129).
It is often argued that this low level of total investment, especially of direct investment, has mainly been caused by the Indias restrictive foreign investment policies until 1992. Although the impact of government policies on NRI investment did indeed improve after the Indian
government embarked upon its economic reform programme in the
1990s, the reluctance or even unwillingness by Indians abroad to invest in their home region is also closely related to their view that other
changes are necessary in order to improve these conditions.
Despite various concessions and incentives given to NRIs like
tax exemptions in specific cases, easier norms for investment,
changes in the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) in favour of NRIs, permission to retain their property and accounts
abroad, NRIs are still awaiting further facilities and more openness of the economy, including full convertibility of the rupee.
An unfavourable response to their demands for dual citizenship,
and some other benefits and the existence of red tape and an
unsympathetic bureaucracy, have made them think that conge-
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nial conditions for NRI involvement in India do not exist as yet

(Malik 1997: 132).
During our conversations with first-generation Patels in London, they
regularly expressed negative views about Indian society. On many occasions, these migrants referred to bad experiences they had with the Indian government in the past, especially during their time in East Africa. One issue that came up several times in these discussions was the
money they lost in the Indian government defence bonds scheme in
1964.
During a discussion in the Barham Veterans Club on the lack of
interest in investments in India, Mohan Patel referred to the
Defence bonds scheme of 1964. According to him, the problems caused by this scheme are an example of the fact that for
a long time, Indian government policies have been contrary to
the best interests of the NRIs.
In 1964, the Indian government announced an investment
scheme called the Defence bonds scheme. Indians abroad could
buy these bonds with British pounds while the value of the
bonds was set in Indian rupees. The idea was that through these
bonds the Indian government would be able to raise funds for
their war efforts. These bonds could be sold as a kind of shares
to importers who would then be able to receive foreign exchange, enabling them to make quite some money within the
context of the so-called closed economy. In the first two weeks
after the scheme was announced, the value of the bonds doubled
and you could make quite some profits. You could not convert
them back into pounds, but if you kept them they also provided
you with interest.
Quite some Patels in Kenya invested in them. I also bought
some bonds, while my father-in-law invested all his pension
money in them. However, almost immediately after the closure
date, the Indian government devaluated the rupee by 50 per cent
and every one lost an enormous amount of money in terms of
British pounds. This is how my father-in-law lost most of his
pension as there was no opportunity to sell the bonds on the
market for profit. This example shows that we Indians abroad
have always been badly treated by the Indian government and
that we therefore no longer trust the Indian government. Because of that, we are not interested in investing in India, despite
the many schemes offered.
Although political instability and corruption are part of the reasons why the Patels do not invest in India, such past experiences
187
are also very important in understanding the present attitude

and behaviour of the older generation of Patels in London.
Another incident that the Patels in London often referred to was the
supposed indifference shown by the Indian authorities during the period of political problems in East Africa.
During one of our visits to Rameshbhai Patels home, he told us
about his experiences in Kenya in the 1950s. In those days, he
personally witnessed the arrival of Belgians who had to flee the
Congo without any of their possessions. Our childrens school
was closed for a week because it housed these Belgian refugees.
This experience of the Belgians made the Indian community in
East Africa realise that there is a potential danger for us as well
if we stay in these newly independent countries. We therefore
decided to approach the Indian government.
But when we approached the Indian government about what it
would do if things got out of hand in Kenya, their representatives in Nairobi did not take our questions seriously. They had
only come to Kenya to tell us cliched stories and to emphasise
that we had to stay in East Africa and contribute to the development of India by sending remittances and making investments
back home. They did not take the problems of us Indians in
East Africa seriously. They did not help us, but only came to
teach us and to tell us to stay in East Africa, but in fact they let
us down when we needed help from the Indian government at
the time when things went completely wrong in Kenya and later
in Uganda.
To be honest, nothing has really changed since then. Now the
representatives of the Indian government come to the UK and
tell us the same kinds of stories. They emphasise that Indians
in the UK should be proud of their Indian heritage and Indian
culture, but when it comes to really understanding our problems
and giving support to us, the Indian government does almost
nothing.
One of these more recent examples in which the NRIs felt to have been
let down by the Indian government is the issue of the dual nationality.
This issue brought emotional sentiments to the fore as dual nationality
was seen as the solution to many problems. Articles in newspapers
and on websites discussed the advantages of dual citizenship. While
migrants without Indian citizenship are restricted in the amount and
type of property they can buy in India, the expectation was that dual citizenship would enable businessmen to buy land and property rights
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and thereby expand their businesses in India. On the whole, once citizenship was offered to Indian migrants abroad, they were supposed to
be on a par with Indian citizens in terms of property and other legal
rights. Moreover, Indian migrants with a dual nationality would not
have to obtain a visa to enter India. Despite these advantages, doubts
were being expressed among the Indian migrants about the implications of this new system of dual nationality (Verma 2001). This was
also clearly shown during a seminar on Dual Nationality in London
in June 1999, in which various Patels participated, as is shown in the
following account from our fieldwork notes:
One of the issues raised during the seminar was the introduction of the PIO (People of Indian Origin) Card by the Indian
government in 1998. The Deputy High Commissioner present
at the seminar said that the PIO card is the closest approximation of dual nationality possible. The only difference is that PIO
cardholders are not allowed to vote in elections, are not allowed
to hold public office in India and cannot buy agricultural property. Other than that, PIO cardholders can enjoy the same benefits as other Indians (like access to education).
One of the main complaints from the NRI audience, many of
whom were Patels from Gujarat, was the cost of the PIO card,
which is $1,000 for 20 years per person. The Deputy High
Commissioner emphasised that the NRI should not think in
terms of costs, but should think in terms of its value.
Many of the elder Patels present indicated that they considered
it to be very important that they are both British citizens and Indians and that they should be recognised as such by the Indian
government. One of them stated: When we have a PIO card we
are not considered foreigners in India (by customs officials and
the stamps in our passports), but as Indians. Because of the
(emotional) value attached to a PIO card, we are therefore so disappointed that the Indian government charges $1,000 per person for these cards. We feel that the Indian government should
be proud and happy that we NRIs are also Indians and they
should therefore give the cards to us almost for free. We have
the feeling that the Indian government is trying to make money
off of these PIO cards and this adds to our negative opinions of
the Indian government, which is only after the NRIs money
and nothing else.
Although most of the stories narrated by the Patels in London concern
their negative experiences with the Indian government, there are also
several instances in which they emphasised the support the Indian
189
community received from the Indian government. One of these incidents relates to their problems in Uganda during the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
After one of our meetings in the Barham Veterans Club, in
which several Patels had expressed their negative views about
the Indian government, Sureshbhai Patel presented us with a
different view when we accompanied him. Sureshbhai emphasised that the Indian government had, in fact, helped the Ugandan Indians in the early 1970s: Indira Gandhi negotiated with
the British government and forced them to issue a stamp in the
passports of those who first went to India. This stamp would
give them the right to go to the UK whenever they wanted and
the British government promised that they would always accept
them. In that way, quite a few Indians were able to leave the problems in Uganda more quickly and return to India without the
danger of losing their right to emigrate to the UK. As they had
lost their jobs in Uganda, it was very difficult for them to live
there. Their savings were running out quickly, while they had to
wait for a long time to be allowed into the UK. Take my example. I only got permission after one-and-a-half years. To be able
to go back to India has helped many Patels, because life in India
was much cheaper than in Uganda.
According to this Patels view in London, the Indian government did
indirectly help Overseas Indians in Africa by forcing the British government to state that they would always be allowed into the UK. At the
same time, they could remain in India where life was much cheaper
and less dangerous than in East Africa. He also indicated that several
of his fellow Patels in London, who are in the forefront of expressing
negative views on India, were among the strongest supporters of India
at the time of their departure from East Africa.
You must have noticed that Harishbhai Patel was expressing
very negative views about the Indian government during our
meeting. You can hardly believe that now, but he had been a
staunch supporter of India in the 1960s in East Africa. When
the situation worsened in Kenya at the end of the 1960s and
many started to move to the UK, he told everyone that we
should not go the UK but return to India, because there were
many opportunities in India. He subsequently went to India, set
up a business, but went to the UK after a few years. In fact,
there were several others like him, who used to praise India, but
quickly followed the majority to the UK and are now among the
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ones who are the most vehemently negative about Indian society
and the Indian government.
These NRIs who are tempted to invest in productive activities in India
are often scared off by the many stories of bureaucracy and corruption,
which make up a substantial part of the conversations among the NRIs
in the UK. Many have stories, which can be considered hearsay that
then become reality and scare off those who are considering investing.
Some of them have told of concrete instances of corruption and mismanagement involving their own bank accounts. Their instructions to
the banks regarding their investment plans, they claim, are not properly processed and thus they feel frustrated. At certain meetings there
is even a kind of peer group pressure where one is only allowed to
speak negatively about India. Those who do otherwise are often
strongly ridiculed or contradicted.
Conclusion
Over the past few decades, social scientists have increasingly paid attention to the processes of globalisation and transnationalism (see,
for example, Bamyeh 1993 and Nederveen-Pieterse 1994). The rise of
diaspora studies is one manifestation of this heightened debate. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that offer detailed insight into
these processes. Empirical studies of international migrants sometimes referred to as the exemplary communities of the transnational
moment (Tololyan 1991: 5) provide an opportunity to contribute to a
deeper and concrete understanding of the various aspects and implications of the globalisation process.
Most of the earlier studies on international migration are characterised by a one-sided approach to the subject. They usually either focus on the effects of emigration for the home area or on the integration of the migrants in the host country. The research presented here
has taken as its point of departure both the social environment of the
locality of origin of the migrants and the social environment of the locality to which they have migrated. The focus has been on the changing social links between the migrants and their family members in
the home area. It has also taken into account the changes over time in
the governments perspective on these links. By combining these different perspectives, this research hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the existence of long-distance family relations and other
networks beyond the nation-state and thereby to a new conceptualisation of the transnational society in the making.
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With world-wide improvements in communications, the ongoing inter-actional relationship between the migrant and the home community has grown more efficient and more evident. In contrast to the exindentured populations, Patidar migrants nowadays have been able to
maintain extensive ties with India. Marriage arrangements, kinship
networks, property, remittances, and religious affiliations keep many
migrants well-linked to their places of origin. Contacts between earlier
migrants in East Africa and their home regions were often maintained
with the notion of the migrant possibly returning, as a result of which
the home community acted as the focal point within this relationship.
However, this does not mean that all of the parties involved form a
static and homogenous diaspora community. It is true that migrants in
London and their relatives in India do view themselves as part of one
and the same community. But at the same time, this transnational
community is subject to deconstruction as its members disagree on
the kinds of obligations they have towards each other. Relations are
burdened with expectations that are not met, resulting in many frictions. From the perspective of the Patidars in the Indian villages, first
of all, the NRIs have acquired a self-centred view over time. In the
past, the migrants in East Africa had greater stake in maintaining
strong ties with their relatives in India. According to many Patidar relatives in Gujarat, the migrants then thought that at some time in future
they might return to India to settle there permanently. However, the
subsequent migration from East Africa to Britain changed this orientation towards India. The local relatives seemed to think that earlier on,
migrants considered India as their motherland (matru bhumi) and a
permanent shelter to which they always return. After going to Britain,
they began acting as if India had become like their wifes village (sasru)
where they demand to be pampered and treated with extraordinary respect, and without reciprocity, as traditionally the Patidars have been
expecting from their wifes family side.6 According to some local relatives, the term NRI should therefore not only be read as Non-Resident
Indians but also as Non-Resident Idiots. From the perspective of the
Patidars in London, however, NRIs stands for Non-Required Indians.
The migrants are not required by their relatives, who have taken over
the agricultural land in the villages, but laugh at them behind their
backs. The migrants are also not required by the Indian nation-state,
that appeals to them with faint promises but has never treated them as
true Indians in the past. The first-generation Patidar migrants in Britain seems to have an ambivalent attitude towards their home region
and their relatives in the native villages. They are very much attached
to Indian culture and emotionally depend upon their social links with
their relatives and friends in Gujarat. They want to be respected by
their relatives, and at the same time, they criticise them on numerous
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occasions and are not always willing to accept the social obligations
that are part of these links, or only do so very hesitantly.
Apart from these two contradictory perspectives regarding the Indian
diaspora among migrants and their relatives in India, we have highlighted the governments perspective, which has also changed over
time. From a policy in the past of distance and ambivalence towards
the Indians abroad, the Indian government has more recently made
some efforts to develop a policy framework for forging closer ties with
the Indian diaspora. The migrants who are hailed by the Indian government in this new manner have not yet, however, responded in the
way that the government had hoped for. Instead, they look quite negatively on the Indian nation-state. They emphasise that the inclusion of
NRIs as true Indians is in fact hollow and hypocritical. Furthermore,
many say that the government has never helped them in the past,
which shows that it really doesnt care much about their fate and is actually not treating them as citizens of India at all.
To conclude, this article thus shows that notions of an Indian diaspora are in line with the views expressed by both migrants and their
relatives at home. Migrants in Britain and their relatives in Gujarat
should therefore not be viewed as separate communities but should be
considered in the same unit of analysis. At the same time, the findings
of our study also indicate that they are also not considered as a homogenous transnational community (cf. Baumann 1996: 23). Social links
keep many of the Patidar migrants in London well-linked to their Gujarat villages and have resulted in a two-way flow of people, capital, and
ideas. These links are reinforced by frequent personal visits, continuous communication, and also by regular transfers of money and/or
material goods. At the same time, however, these links between India
and Britain are not without their problems. Several of the cases presented here show that there are substantial differences of opinion between the Indian migrants in London and their relatives in Gujarat on
the nature of their relationships and on the types of help rendered.
Moreover, the view of the government on the notion of diaspora has
also been challenged. Therefore, this article shows the complex process
of appropriation of Indian diaspora notions among those who describe themselves as members of that diaspora and their relatives at
home.
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Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
We would like to thank Sanderien Verstappen for her comments on an earlier draft
of this paper.
This research was funded by the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD).
Viewing the differences in village size between the Mota Gam and Nana Gam villages, and in order to have a fairly evenly sized sample in both categories, we selected
two Mota Gam villages and four Nana Gam villages.
All the names in the case studies presented in this paper are pseudonyms in an attempt to preserve some measure of anonymity.
For a recent overview of Indias interface with its diaspora, see Sinha-Kerkhoff and
Bal 2003.
This feeling that has been expressed by our local informants in general, was articulated by Prof. Bhikhu Parekh at a public lecture delivered at the meeting of the Viswa
Gujarati Samaj held in Baroda on 2-4 January 1999.
8 Diaspora Revisited
Second-Generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims of Gujarati
Ancestry
Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani
Introduction
The term diaspora seems to have migrated in a manner similar to
those it intended to describe and beyond. It began as a way of describing the dispersal of Jews from their homeland (Connor: 1986; Vertovec: 2000) and has subsequently flourished as a way of describing the
relationship that individuals have with the so-called homeland (Gupta
and Ferguson: 1992). In searching the Internet one can find references
to English, Australian, Indian, and African diaspora amongst others.
The one factor that seems to be highlighted as a feature of all diasporas is the relationship with a homeland (original point of departure), real or imagined, as opposed to that of a hostland (site of arrival). We propose that the association assigned by academics among
others, may in fact simply be a relationship that these individuals have
with their ancestral heritage (ethnicity). This paper aims to question
the very nature of that link with a homeland as it applies to the second generation and beyond. Mukadam (2003: 96) questions the use of
terminology that is commonly used in discourse related to the second
and third generation and proposes that the term post-diaspora be used
to describe these individuals:
It appears that the word diaspora, like the word immigrant, is no
longer being used to refer to the first generation and continues to be
used when making reference to the second generation and beyond. If
the word diaspora refers to those whose cultural origins are in a different land, then how far back do these communities have to go before
they are recognised as belonging to the new homeland or will academics and others always refer to them in relation to a past with which
many, at best, have symbolic links?
In the introduction we have seen that there are five main features
which are needed in order to define expatriate minority communities
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or diasporas: (1) Dispersal of individuals, communities or their ancestors from an original centre to at least two further locations; (2) Maintenance of a myth in relation to their homeland; (3) Alienation in the
country to which they migrated; (4) Envisaging a return to their homeland at some future point in time and; (5) Dedicated to a relationship
with this homeland (Safran 1991).
Although these criteria are useful when characterising first-generation migrants, for second-generation individuals and beyond there is a
conflict of interest in labelling these individuals as members of a diaspora as it suggests loyalty to the land of their ancestors with which
many have tenuous links. At a time when the issue of Britishness has
taken centre stage it is imperative that the term diaspora be contested,
deconstructed, and reformulated so as to be meaningful and not just a
blanket term to be used ad infinitum. If these criteria are used to establish whether or not second-generation individuals born and brought up
in the West are members of a diaspora then, in our opinion, it is quite
clear that they do not share these features. In fact, we would posit that
by positioning them as members of a diasporic community academics
are in fact jeopardising their full integration into their only homeland,
the one in which they were born. Mukadam and Mawani (2006) have
proposed five defining characteristics of post-diasporic individuals:
1. Have not participated in any form of voluntary or forced migration
leading to permanent settlement outside country of birth
2. Consider country of birth as their homeland
3. Hold a conviction that they are full and equal citizens in their country of birth
4. Do not envisage migration to and permanent settlement in ancestral homeland
5. Show loyalty to and are active participants in their country of birth.
We will show through further discussion that the maintenance of aspects of Indian culture is in fact an appreciation of their rich heritage
which does not amount to a diasporic imagination, rather the formation of a new ethnicity that incorporates aspects of the culture of their
ancestors combined with that of the land in which they were born a
hybrid culture and identity that is their defining characteristic.
Patterns of Migration
Prior to their migration to East Africa, the majority of Ismailis1 in India, primarily residents of Gujarat, were landowners and farmers,
though a few were engaged in business, construction, and transportation. Deteriorating conditions in Gujarat in the late nineteenth century
led some of the Ismailis to seek work in mills or on the railroads. The
move of the capital of the Omani Sultanate from Muscat to Zanzibar
DIASPORA REVISITED
197
was followed by a significant increase in the number of Ismailis, alongside other Gujaratis, in Zanzibar from the 1840s to the 1870s. The Gujaratis were fundamental to the development of the Omani Sultanate.
In addition to providing assistance in the exportation of slaves and ivory from mainland Africa, they held prominent administrative positions (Melady and Melady 1976; Gregory 1993). The famine of 1876
saw a dramatic decline in conditions in Gujarat and more Ismailis began leaving India for more prosperous parts. The economic opportunity awaiting the migrants in East Africa inspired the slogan Bas Chalo
Afrika (Let us go to Africa) (Walji 1974). It is important to note, however, that not all Gujarati migrants went to East Africa, some moved to
bigger cities on the subcontinent, such as Pune, Mumbai or Karachi
(Gregory 1993).
Having resettled in new lands, the Ismailis, like other Gujaratis, continued to practice their traditional ways of dress, food, rituals and language. Apart from religious differentiation, which perhaps was not so
clearly visible, the Ismailis appeared to be like any other Gujarati community (Nanji 1974; Mohamed 1992). In order to distinguish them
from other Gujarati groups and allow them to integrate with the indigenous population, for economic, political and perhaps even social reasons Aga Khan III took significant steps in an attempt to modernise
the community (Williams 1988). The successful modernisation of this
community meant that the Ismailis evolved a culture which reflected
their Indian heritage, their British colonial experience, and their African environment. What evolved was a completely new culture, different
from their original Asian culture, which the immigrants had brought
with them from their homeland (Walji 1995: 11). An article in Africa
Today describes the Ismaili community in East Africa as one which
made this country their home and from the beginning had ceased
looking backwards to the country of their origin. Due to this outlook,
Ismailis had their marriages most of them in this country unlike
other Indian communities. They seldom went to India for marriages
(Africa Today 1959: 79). Even at this early stage, it is evident that the Ismaili community no longer looked to India as its homeland.
The decades after World War II, saw the end of British rule in East
Africa and the Gujaratis in East Africa encountered major disruptions
(Buchignani et al. 1985: Israel 1999). Africanisation and anti-Asian
riots disrupted the lives of the Gujaratis. Kassamali, a first-generation
Ismaili from Toronto, outlines his personal view relating to the situation in Tanzania after it gained independence in 1961:
After a couple of years in power [Julius] Nyerere [President of
Tanzania] thought that we have an obstacle and they are the
Asians. So he tried to frighten us. First, he took away all our
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properties. Number one blow. We didnt move an inch. Second

blow, he took away all our businesses. The Asians didnt move.
Very few, who had a lot of money, they thought, we better go to
a safer place. But the rest of the people remained there. And
Nyerere thought these people are not moving. So the third ...
tactic he applied was to arrest prominent people (Mawani 2006:
82).
It is said that Idi Amin, the President of Uganda, received a message
from God during a dream, at which point he was determined to make
Uganda a black mans country. In 1972, he expelled all South Asians
from Uganda, most of whom were third-generation descendants of
workers brought from India by the British colonial administration.
They were given 90 days to leave the country and were only allowed to
take what they could carry. This resulted in a mass exodus primarily to
Britain, Canada, and the United States. Soon after Amins decree, Aga
Khan IV contacted Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and
arranged for more than six thousand South Asians from Uganda,
mostly Ismailis, to be accepted as refugees by Canada (Israel, 1999).
Prime Minister Trudeau issued the following statement:
We are prepared to offer an honourable place in Canadian life to
those Ugandan Asians who come to Canada. Asian immigrants
have already added to the cultural richness and variety of our
country. And I am sure that those form Uganda will, by their
abilities and industry, make an equally important contribution to
Canadian society (Ismaili Canada 1994: 16).
For the second time in their history, the Ismaili community had left behind homes, businesses, and other possessions, this time in search of
safety, and were faced with the challenge of integrating into an alien
society and re-creating new homes.
Identity Construction in Contemporary Society

The relationship between history and identity formation is crucial in
bridging the past with the present, it is important both to our sense of
who we are and how we relate this history to our lives today. In contemporary Western societies there is a clear shift away from assimilation towards a more inclusive and representative view of a multicultural and plural civil society. The process of forming identities and defining oneself involves identifying what one is as well as what one is not;
it is an expression of similarities as well as differences. The construc-
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tion of identities is based on oppositions, primarily us and them

(Woodward 1997; Pilkington 2003), and while the issue of identity is a
fundamental concern of individuals during their lives, it becomes more
of a concern when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable
is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty (Mercer 1990:
43). Individuals lack one fixed identity; and instead, identities are multiple and constantly shifting. Specific aspects of an individuals identity
are salient in varying contexts and no one today is purely one thing.
Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more
than starting points (Said 1993: 407). An individuals identity is no
longer restricted to a particular communal identity, such as kinship,
community or class, but is based on a variety of sources, including
marital status, age, gender, linguistic patterns and eating habits, so
there is a greater proliferation of identities of the number of yous on
offer (Bocock 1992: 160). The post-structuralist notion of identity as
fluid and ever-changing allows individuals to select the identity that
suits their needs in a given context. For those from minority ethnic
communities dominant versions of history and culture and the forms
of identity that they encourage often function to exclude, silence,
stereotype or render invisible those who do not fit within hegemonic
narratives (Weedon 2004: 24). It is clear that there has been a shift in
relation to the terminology used to describe members of ethnic minority populations who have settled in the West. Several academics including Karim (1993), Parekh (2001), Modood (2005) and Mukadam and
Mawani (2006) have addressed this issue of ethnocultural terminology
and the way in which it needs to be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in order to be meaningful in todays socio-political contexts.
The source of the term ethnic can be traced back to the Greek word
ethnikos, an adjective used to describe people living together, a company, a body of men, or a band of comrades (Isajiw 1999: 413). The
word ethnikos described people who were not like us, specifically,
who were not Christian or Jewish but Gentile, pagan, or heathen (Isajiw 1999: 413). First used by the American sociologist David Riesman
in 1953, the term ethnic did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972 (Glazer and Moynihan 1975). The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term as
1. a. Of or relating to sizeable groups of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage. b. Being a member of a particular ethnic group.
c. Of, relating to, or distinctive of members of such a group: ethnic restaurants; ethnic art. 2. Relating to a people not Christian or
Jewish; heathen.
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In present-day parlance the term ethnicity purveys a sense of belonging to a particular group and sharing its conditions of existence (Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1992: 8).
Isajiw (1999) outlines four primary approaches to ethnicity. The primordial phenomenon approach is the oldest approach in sociology and
anthropology, which states that ethnicity is assigned at birth and is
fixed and permanent. In opposition to the primordial phenomenon approach, the epiphenomenon approach advocates that ethnicity emerges
out of an unequal economy and only refers to minority groups working
in marginal jobs on the periphery of the labour market. The situational
phenomenon approach, most popular between the mid-1970s and the
mid-1980s, acknowledges that the salience of ethnic identity varies depending on its relevance in a given context. In other words, individuals
may choose to be regarded as members of an ethnic group if they find
it to their advantage (Isajiw 1999: 414). The subjective phenomenon
approach, inspired by the work of Barth (1969) on ethnic group boundaries, considers ethnicity as a socio-psychological reality or a matter of
perception of us and them in contradistinction to something given,
which exists objectively (Isajiw 1999: 414). Barth (1969: 10, 15-6) clarifies that, ethnic distinctionsareoften the very foundations on which
embracing social systems are built [and that] ethnic groups only persist as significant units if they imply marked difference in behaviour,
i.e. persisting cultural differences. Another theory within the subjective
phenomenon approach is that of symbolic ethnicity as proposed by
Gans (1979), which suggests that ethnicity is a nostalgic allegiance to
the culture of the immigrant generation, or that of the old country; a
love for and a pride in a tradition that can be felt without having to be
incorporated in everyday behavior (Gans 1979: 9). A more contemporary theory within the subjective phenomenon approach is constructionism, in which ethnicity is something being negotiated and constructed
in everyday living (Isajiw 1999: 414).
While the term ethnicity is an abstract concept that incorporates
both the individual and the collective, ethnic group focuses on the collective phenomenon of ethnicity and ethnic identity concentrates on
ethnicity as experienced by the individual (Isajiw 1999). Both ethnic
group and ethnic identity comprise of objective and subjective elements. The objective dimensions are notable details such as familial affinity, ancestry and observable characteristics of the group and its
members. The subjective dimensions consist of attitudes, values, and
preconceptions whose meaning must be interpreted in the context of
communication (Isajiw 1999: 414). Yinger (1994: 3-4) provides a comprehensive definition of an ethnic group:
DIASPORA REVISITED
201
an ethnic group is a segment of a larger society whose members

are thought, by themselves or others, to have a common origin
and to share important segments of a common culture and
who, in addition, participate in shared activities in which the
common origin and culture are significant ingredients.
The definition of an ethnic group I have suggested has three ingredients: (1) The group is perceived by others in the society to be different
in some combination of the following traits: language, religion, race,
and ancestral homeland with its related culture; (2) the members also
perceive themselves as different, and (3) they participate in shared activities built around their (real or mythical) common origin and culture.
Fenton (2003: 23), in agreement with Yinger (1994), indicates that
while ethnic group refers to groups with a shared descent and culture
the phrase also denotes three additional aspects:
1. that the group is a kind of sub-set within a nation-state,
2. that the point of reference of difference is typically culture rather
than physical appearance, and
3. often that the group referred to is other (foreign, exotic, minority)
to some majority who are presumed not to be ethnic.
Mukadam (2003: 74-5) has summarised six primary aspects exhibited
by an ethnie (ethnic group or community) in varying degrees as outlined by Smith (1986):
1. A common proper name, to identify and express the essence of
the community;
2. A myth of common ancestry, a myth rather than a fact, a myth that
includes the idea of a common origin in time and place and that
gives an ethnie a sense of fictive kinship;
3. Shared historical memories, or better, shared memories of a common
past or pasts, including heroes, events, and their commemoration;
4. One or more elements of common culture, which need not be specified but normally include religion, customs, or language;
5. A link with a homeland, not necessarily its physical occupation by
the ethnie, only its symbolic attachment to the ancestral land, as
with diaspora peoples;
6. A sense of solidarity on the part of at least some sections of the ethnies population.
It appears that this fifth point, a link with the homeland, describing
an aspect exhibited by an ethnic group is used incorrectly, in our opinion, by advocates of the term diaspora. It would seem that individual
ethnic and/or religious groups have varying degrees of ties with the
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homeland and that each needs to be considered individually rather

than assuming this link and subsuming whole groups under banners
such as the South Asian Diaspora or East African Diaspora. Butler
(2001: 193) highlights the problematic nature of the term diaspora in
light of increased global migration of individuals and groups and the
risk of essentialising the term as an ethnic label rather than a framework of analysis. She does however state quite clearly that the construct of homeland is essential; it functions as the constituting basis of
collective diasporan identity (Butler 2001: 204). Does participation in
cultural activities that have links with an ancestral home but which
have evolved and hybridised in their new environment constitute a diasporic consciousness?
Contemporary Western societies are becoming increasingly multicultural and the question of a diasporic link features in one of the models
(C) offered by Yinger (1994: 5) who proposes four models that illustrate the manner in which ethnic groups can exist in multi-ethnic societies:
A. A society can be built out of formally equal ethnic groups.
B. A major national cultural group, separated from one or more ethnic
groups by a highly permeable boundary, can characterize a society.
C. One or more ethnic groups can be strongly oriented toward an outside mother society.
D. One or more ethnic groups can be imprisoned as disprivileged
minorities within the larger society.
It is important to recognise that these models are not mutually exclusive and a multi-ethnic society may consist of two or more models in
varying degrees. It is these distinctions between and among ethnic
groups that need to be understood more fully in order to analyse more
adequately the notion of diaspora. In addition, the layers present within a multi-ethnic society are not permanent, but are constantly changing and shifting as boundaries become more or less permeable;
equality among ethnic groups increases or decreases; orientation to
outside societies grows stronger or weaker (Yinger 1994: 5). Lall
(2001: 104) questions the identification that many first-generation Indians have with their homeland due to government policy and how
their identification with India is at best merely a symbolic one. This
statement leads one to infer that the twice-migrants may have even
weaker links and that for the second generation these links may be
questionable. By way of empirical research we will attempt to show
that second-generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims of Gujarati ancestry
born in either Britain or Canada are maintaining aspects of their Indian culture and have integrated into the mainstream societies in
which they reside.
DIASPORA REVISITED
203
Making History Post-Diasporic Identities

The constructionist approach to ethnic identity opens a space for newly
emerging and evolving hybrid and hyphenated identities, which no
longer locates individuals between two cultures (Anwar 1975), but allows them to self-identify as Indian, Canadian, or Indo-Canadian, as
circumstances necessitate (Cornell and Hartmann 1998). To describe
those, including herself, of Indian ancestry and British nationality Mukadam (2003) coined the term Indobrit. Mukadam (2004) explains
why she prefers to use the term Indobrit to identify herself and others
like her:
Second-generation Indians born and/or brought up in the U.K.
are products of the East and West and their lives combine both
with ease. There is no conflict in terms of their identity, they are
the fortunate ones who enjoy the best of both worlds as well as
multiple identities that are fluid and dialogic. Never again to be
defined as the halfway generation, between two cultures, immigrants or members of a diaspora. These individuals are the
post-diasporic generation, creating their own world in the only
homeland they have Britain.
Hybrid terms, like Indobrit, offer the second and subsequent generation a holistic identity that is inclusive and does not result in an
either/or misrepresentation of the very complex multiple identities
that they possess, yet situates them as belonging to the nation state
while maintaining aspects of their ancestral culture. Contrary to expectations, studies have shown that individuals are striving to maintain
their ethnic identities.2 Isajiw (1975: 132) outlines three patterns of the
process of maintenance of ethnic identity: (1) pattern of transplantation of the old culture, (2) the rebellion pattern, and (3) returning or
rediscovery pattern. The pattern of transplantation refers to the efforts
of primarily the first generation to replicate their ways of life prior to
their arrival in the new country. This is often done by establishing ethnic ghettos or only associating with others from similar cultural backgrounds. The process of replication is not simply a continuation of earlier customs and traditions, as the ways of the new society are sure to
infiltrate. Nevertheless, the transplantation pattern of ethnic identity
maintenance highlights the preservation of essential characteristics of
the groups cultural heritage. The rebellion pattern, often exhibited by
the second generation, occurs with growing involvement in the traditions and norms of the majority group. This often results in embarrassment and frustration with the customs of ones own cultural heritage,
which causes individuals to consciously reject the practices of their cul-
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ANJOOM MUKADAM
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tural heritage or to over-identify with the majority group. The returning

or rediscovery pattern, displayed by either first, second or subsequent
generations, involves those who have been socialised in the dominant
culture but whose identification with their ancestral culture has actually increased rather than decreased. This process of returning to ones
ancestral culture is not the act of revisiting some forgotten past; in fact
it is rediscovering aspects of that culture and bestowing it with new
meaning (Isajiw 1975).
An analysis of these patterns may distinguish transplantation as
that of dissociation, in which the individual maintains all aspects of
the ethnic minority culture and does not integrate any aspects of the
dominant culture; rebellion as assimilation, in which the individual
rejects all aspects of the ethnic minority culture and adopts all aspects
of the dominant culture; and returning/rediscovery as acculturation,
in which the individual maintains certain aspects of the ethnic minority culture and adopts certain aspects of the dominant culture. In addition, one can also determine that that while some members of a minority ethnic community may move through all three patterns, Isajiw
(1975) failed to recognise that others may never move on to the next
pattern and in fact may remain static in the first or second pattern.
Furthermore, the first generation is more likely to remain in the transplantation or dissociation pattern, with a few moving on to the rediscovery or acculturation pattern, and they may move back and forth depending on their personal circumstances. First-generation individuals
can in our opinion be regarded as members of a diaspora as they were
actual participants in the migratory process. The second generation,
having been born and/or brought up in the dominant society, can
move through all three patterns, in any direction at any given time
(Mukadam and Mawani 2005).
Based on the comment by Stephan and Stephan (2000: 544), If individuals can freely self-identify, their feelings regarding ethnicity will
not be denied, Mukadam (2003) and Mawani (2006) incorporated the
statement previously used by Phinney (1992) and Saeed et al. (1999),
In terms of ethnic group, I consider myself to be., into their questionnaires and then determined which strategy of self-categorisation
the second-generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims of Gujarati ancestry
born/brought up in London or Toronto have incorporated. Three possible choices exist:
1. Assimilative identification with the majority group, e.g., Canadian
or British;
2. Acculturative identifying oneself with the use of a hybrid or hyphenated term, e.g., Indo-Canadian or Indobrit;
3. Dissociative identification with the ethnic minority group, e.g., Indian or East African.
205
DIASPORA REVISITED
Table 1 illustrates the strategy employed by Mukadams (2003) London

respondents and Mawanis (2006) Toronto respondents. Not surprisingly, the results from both the London and Toronto sample are very similar where the majority (London - 59%; Toronto - 51%) selected an acculturative hybrid ethnic identity strategy. While 41 percent of the respondents in London selected the popular term British Asian, the
respondents in Toronto selected a variety of terms to describe their ethnic identity, which included variations of the terms Canadian, Indian
and East African.
Table 1 Ethnic Identity Formation of Nizari Ismailis of Gujarati Ancestry in London
and Toronto
Assimilation
(London = 10%)
(Toronto = 17%)
London British 10%
Toronto Canadian 17%
Acculturation
(London = 59%)
(Toronto = 51%)
Dissociation
(London = 31%)
(Toronto = 32%)
British Asian 41%

Indobrit 10%
British East African Asian 4%
British Indian 4%
Canadian Indian 24%
Canadian East African 7%
East African Canadian 7%
East African Canadian Indian 5%
East Indian Canadian 3%
Indo-Canadian 3%
Canadian African 3%
Indian 23%
African Asian 4%
Asian 4%
East African 12%
East African Indian 10%
East Indian 7%
Indian 3%
Source: Adapted from Mukadam and Mawani (2005).
Whilst second-generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims of Gujarati ancestry

are trying hard to maintain certain aspects of their ethnicity, namely,
language and religion, the harsh realities of life in an increasingly English dominated world, is that the home is almost the only place where
the second and third generation can speak their mother tongue (Hinsliff 2002). Nevertheless, our results indicate that the majority of our
respondents, regardless of gender, are choosing to predominantly
speak English at home. Interestingly, a significant number of individuals are code-mixing and this is particularly noticeable amongst the
Toronto male respondents, again an indication of increasing hybridity
(table 2).
206
Table 2
ANJOOM MUKADAM
&
SHARMINA MAWANI
Language Use at Home
London Females
London Males
Toronto Females
Toronto Males
English
Gujarati/Kacchi
Code-Mixing
English and
Gujarati/Kacchi
50%
62%
71%
65%
30%
15%
14%
0%
20%
23%
15%
35%
Source: Adapted from Mukadam (2003) and Mawani (2006).
Alongside language loss is the concept of language shift, the process

whereby a speech community, which traditionally uses language B, gradually stops using it and turns to language A (Grin, 1993:378). Language shift occurs when a language with a greater political power, privilege and social prestige comes to replace the range and functions of a
minority language. The inevitable result of this process is that speakers of the minority language shift over time to speaking the majority
language (May 2000: 366). A form of language shift is evident
amongst the Ismaili community in Canada in terms of the publication
of The Ismaili Canada magazine. The December 1976 issue of the magazine contained articles in both English and Gujarati. All issues after
this one were printed wholly in English. However, the March 2004 issue contained two versions of certain articles, one in English and the
other in French. The inclusion of French in the magazine may be a
symbolic reflection of the acknowledgement of both of the official languages of Canada by Ismaili institutions, as well as an attempt to fulfil
the linguistic requirements of the French-speaking Ismaili community,
who are mainly based in the province of Quebec. While language shift
in this case does not illustrate the total annihilation of Gujarati in the
Ismaili community, it does highlight the gradual loss of proficiency in
reading Gujarati, as well as an increase in English as the predominant
language of literature within the community.
Interviews with Mukadams (2003) respondents in London and Mawanis (2006) respondents in Toronto show how these individuals are
negotiating the many facets of their identity in order to situate themselves firmly as British/Canadian citizens whilst showing pride in their
ancestral culture. All of the respondents in London and Toronto used
the terms British and Canadian, respectively, in reference to their nationality.
Rashida (Female Respondent, London):
the term British is more open. The term British involves a
huge range of ethnic groupings. The term British is belonging
to a country, irrespective of your colour, or your identity, or your
DIASPORA REVISITED
207
cultural background Its a question of nationality.

Shafik (Male Respondent, London):
Its nice for me to be able to speak to my parents in what is their
mother tongue, its nice for them for me to be able to do that
its not essential. And I think the more time you spend in a new
environment the more you become acclimatised to it, the more
your own identity is diluted by the influence of that environment, society which is good because it means you are obviously
integrating
Culture as a Commodity
The meeting of cultures often results in the adaptation of certain aspects of one groups cultural elements by another. While at first glance
it may appear that it is the minority ethnic communities that are adapting aspects of the dominant culture, a more in-depth examination reveals that there is in fact a mutual exchange of cultural aspects. This is
the phenomenon that is often referred to as globalisation. Britain, Canada, and the United States have recently seen an increased popularity
in all things Indian and the year 2002 was dubbed an Indian Summer in Britain. There was an explosion of plays and films addressing
issues faced by second- and third-generation Indobrits, storefronts were
decorated in an array of exotica including bindi, chappal (open-toe sandals) and kurti (short kaftans) and Hindi found its way onto clothing,
handbags, and other accessories (Mukadam 2003). The fascination
with India and Bollywood quickly made its way westward to Canada
and the United States. While some events are a clear celebration of
South Asian culture, there are others which are honing in on the
South Asian market by incorporating South Asian themes to their advertising campaigns which, according to retail consultant Maureen Atkinson, is where the money is (Yelaja 2004). The popularity of Indian
culture and the subsequent increase in producing it as a commodity
has met with mixed feelings. Some, like Manjinder Sihota, a shopper
at Sears Canada, find the acceptance of Indian culture by the dominant
society to be a pleasant surprise, When you come up the escalator and
see all the saris, its like Wow, its really hip to be Indian (Yelaja
2004). Shvetna Dhingra, a third-year sociology and South Asian studies student at the University of Toronto, feels that the promotion of
Indian culture in the mainstream has helped her understand her own
ethnic identity: Until recently, I dont think I actually knew what it
meant to be South Asian. I always considered myself Canadian.Now
that I feel more connected to my roots, Im proud to be a South Asian
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living in Toronto (Haq 2004). Others, like S. Alladina, are sad that her
South Asian peers had to wait for Indian culture to be in vogue before
they felt proud of their cultural ancestry. Alladina also points out that
with the hype for all things Indian, the significance of the merchandise
is disregarded, thus reducing Indian culture to a mere commodity:
I resent the fact that as soon as some aspect of my culture became hot in the mainstream, my Indian peers who usually
ignore anything remotely Indian quite suddenly display a seemingly superficial interest in their culture. However, perhaps
this renaissance is needed in order for this[]generation to give
the South Asian part of their identity a chance to grow and flourish. We do after all have to deal with the pressures of fitting in
and not being typecast or singled out like an outcast. Yet I cant
help but feel a pang of remorse[]The downside to all of this popularity is that mainstream fails to adopt the cultural meaning
behind the products they market (Alladina 2004).
The trend towards all things Indian, from fashion to cuisine, has
blurred the distinction between private and public displays of ethnicity
amongst this generation. In recent years, there has been growing acceptance of plurality and diversity in Western contemporary societies
leading to greater openness amongst those from the majority culture
who now appreciate aspects of cultures other than their own. This in
turn has led second-generation individuals to comfortably exhibit aspects of their Indian culture publicly as opposed to it being confined to
the private domain.
Conclusion
We began this paper with an analysis of the term diaspora and the
ways in which it has been used and continues to be used in society. It
is the problematic nature of the term and the way in which it is conceptualised that needs to be redefined so that it can be used meaningfully. Clearly the fact that there are diasporic communities and diasporic studies is essential in understanding the continuing and more extensive movements of people in todays global society. However, as
stated in the introduction to this volume, it is clear that there are several communities, such as the Ismailis, who, upon migration, have had
little or no connection with their ancestral homeland. While the Ismailis reproduced aspects of their Gujarati culture, such as language, cuisine and dress, both in East Africa and the West, these aspects did not
remain static; rather they adapted elements of the local majority cul-
DIASPORA REVISITED
209
ture and sometimes merged the two together to create new hybrid
forms. These hybrid forms are continually evolving and new forms are
being produced by the second and subsequent generations. We posit
that for the Ismaili community the maintenance of various aspects of
Gujarati culture, in its multiple forms, is not the product of a diasporic
imagination. This is the case because our respondents do not have any
connection to their ancestral homeland in Gujarat, either through familial or religious ties. Many Gujaratis who have undertaken migration
continue to maintain their links with relatives and religious institutions in Gujarat, however, for our respondents these links are non-existent due to the migration of families to East Africa and then to the
West. Whilst many individuals of Gujarati ancestry in the West may
have religious leaders who reside in Gujarat, and for whom there is
therefore a sacred thread to this physical land, for the Ismailis this is
not the case as their spiritual leader, Aga Khan IV, resides in France.
In summation, second-generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims of Gujarati
ancestry have reconstructed the notion of what it means to be British
and Canadian. It is this aspect of these individuals identities that is often overlooked or omitted when constrained under the broad umbrella
of diaspora. For the majority, the inclusion of their nationality in their
ethnic self-identification, by the use of labels such as British Asian
and Canadian Indian, are indicators of their pride in their nationality
alongside committed participation in distinct cultural and religious
practices. These individuals are following in the footsteps of their ancestors by overcoming discrimination and integrating into mainstream
society they are the post-diasporic generation. Their journey, like that
of their ancestors, is clearly enriched by culture, one that is not fixed
and does not simply consist of customs that have been passed down
from one generation to the next in a preserved state. It is this ability to
maintain their cultural heritage whilst adapting to the local majority
culture that has been one of the strengths of the Ismaili community.
Ismailism has survived because it has always been fluid. Rigidity is
contrary to our way of life and outlook (Aga Khan III 1954: 185).
Notes
1
The Nizari Ismaili Muslims, otherwise known as the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims,
are a small minority within the global Shia Muslim faith who recognise His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV as their Imam (spiritual leader).
Modood, 1997a; Saeed, 1999; Giampapa, 2001; Mukadam, 2003.
Bollywood and the Indian diaspora
Reception of Indian cinema among Hindustani youth

in the Netherlands
Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten
Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora

Reception of Indian cinema among Hindustani youth in the Netherlands
... deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies,
art impresarios and travel agencies, who thrive on the need of
the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland
(Appadurai 1990: 11).
... transnational bonds no longer have to be cemented by migration or by exclusive territorial claims. In the age of cyberspace, a
diaspora can, to some degree, be held together or re-created
through the mind, through cultural artefacts and through a
shared imagination (Cohen 1996: 516).
When media are discussed in the diaspora literature, usually the assumption is that transnational media reconnect diasporic communities
to their home countries. Media feed the homesickness of first generation migrants (Karim 2003), who use movies and television serials to
educate their children about their country of origin (Gillespie 1995: 7895). Media invite viewers to identify transnationally (Mishra 2002: 250269), make migrants reconsider the boundaries of community (Morley
2000: 100-101) and may even guide them into long-distance politics
(Anderson 1998, Allessandrini 2001).
The assumed link between media from the home country and viewers identification with that home country is problematic and must not
be taken for granted. Indian diasporic communities in the Netherlands
have watched Indian films from Bombay since 1958, and have been
the initiators of a blossoming Bollywood scene in The Hague. This article describes how Hindustani youngsters appropriate Indian cinema
212
SANDERIEN VERSTAPPEN
& MARIO RUTTEN
in this specific context. Transnational meanings can be found if one is

determined to look for them, but these are not at all the most important aspects of Hindi cinema to the youngsters themselves. Their love
for Indian movies is completely detached from the actual locations and
people within India. The account that follows is based on four months
of fulltime fieldwork in The Hague by one of the authors.1
Bollywood
The Indian film industry has always targeted audiences around the
globe.2 Hindi films from Bombay (often referred to as Bollywood
films) have been popular in Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East and Sri
Lanka ever since the 1940s.3 Overseas Indians and their offspring in
the Caribbean and in Malaysia, for example, have always been an important target audience. In the second half of the twentieth century, a
growing number of Indians moved to Western countries, and so the export of Hindi films moved to Europe, the United States, Canada, and
Australia (Mishra 2002: 239-340). Since then, special efforts have been
made by Indian filmmakers to appeal to the Indian diaspora audiences
in the west. In order to compete with Hollywood, themes and story
lines were changed and efforts were made to adapt the cinematographic outlook of Hindi cinema.
Diasporic audiences in the west turned out to be a small but lucrative market for Hindi cinema. In Europe and America, a ticket to the
movie theatre was priced higher than in India, and was paid in desirable foreign valuta (Dwyer 2002: 178-179). At the same time, however,
the industry faced new problems in these western territories. The investments were high and the films had to be screened over a longer
period of time to cover the costs. The predominance of American cinema in the west meant that viewers had specific cinematographic expectations, expectations that were not always compatible to the genre characteristics of Indian cinema. Attempts to live up to the audiences expectations included dubbing Hindi films into English, the deletion of
song sequences and the export of uncensored versions. Some of the
three-hour films were even edited down to shorter versions that would
be more acceptable to an audience accustomed to Hollywood featurelength films (Dwyer 2002: 180, Allessandrini 2001: 327). Although
most of these experiments were seldom successful, they show that
filmmakers were eagerly taking up the challenge of reaching out to the
Indian diaspora in the west. This is also clear when we look at the content of Hindi films from that period, which was adapted considerably
to match diasporic tastes.
BOLLYWOOD AND THE INDIAN DIASPORA
213
Indian filmmakers had always made movies about Indian migrants.

The first documentary film made in India was Sir Wrangler Mr. R. P.
Paranjpye (1902), about a man from Maharashtra that had studied
math at Cambridge. A popular fiction film in 1921, Bilet Pherat (England Returned), was also about an Indian man returning after a long
stay in Britain. This returnee had strange habits and peculiar ideas
about romantic love, and became the object of joking and ridicule in
the movie.4 Purab aur Pachhim (East and West), a nationalist motion
picture made in 1970, showed Indians in London dancing and feasting
in a haze of booze and cigarettes. The youngsters in the film were thoroughly westernised and had totally forgotten their own history, even despised it. Luckily, one honest and honourable young Indian man
showed up, who taught the female star to love her country again.
When the film industry began becoming interested in the diaspora
as a target audience, the imagery changed. A new transnational optic
in Indian media was the result (Moorti 2002). The first film that did
not ridicule the diaspora, and instead tried to appeal to it, was Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The film anticipated the supposed desire
of the Indian diaspora to rediscover their homeland, and treated their
feelings of nostalgia and longing very seriously.5 In the opening scene,
we see a Punjabi migrant feeding the pigeons on Trafalgar Square,
murmuring and dreaming about his wish to return to my land, to my
Punjab. After having lived in England for 22 years, his wish comes
true when his daughter agrees to marry a Punjabi man. The return is
conceived with great splendour: The land green and fertile, music
echoes across the fields and females in colourful clothing sing: Come
home stranger, your country calls you back! In the meantime, the
daughter has fallen in love but not with the man that her father had
chosen for her. The object of her love is a young man who has grown
up in England, like her. This young diasporic hero turns out to be
equally true to his Indian roots. He proves this by refusing to elope
with his beloved until both her parents approve (Mishra 2002: 250258).
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) was very successful in India
and abroad. In an interview with Lata Khubchandani, director Yash
Chopra explains its tremendous success:
Its the story. It goes to the very roots of Indian culture. It highlights most importantly that we respect our elders. You just do
not run away or elope with the person you fall in love (sic); instead you take the parents consent and their blessings its like
Ill marry you only if your father gives your hand to me. ...
Thats what made DDLJ a cult film. It became more so overseas
because the characters in the film were ones based overseas who
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& MARIO RUTTEN
come to India to find their roots. ... I think the main reason [ for
its success] was the story and the fact that it helped people find
their roots.6
DDLJ was the first in a series of films that fore grounded the diaspora.
Other international box office hits with a diaspora dimension were
Pardes (1997) Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
(2001), Mujhse Dosti Karoge (2002) and Hum Tum (2004). Like DDLJ,
they show characters living in the west, or returning to India after a
long stay abroad. These cosmopolitan characters are rich and young,
consume themselves to death, are searching for romantic love, but are
at the same time very inclined to maintaining Indian family values and
Indian traditions.7
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (KKHH) is set in a high school in India. One
of the female students has just returned after having lived abroad for
years. When her classmates criticise her for having forgotten her Indian roots, she proves them wrong by singing a bhajan (Hindu song):
Om Jai Jagadish. The classmates are stupefied. Diasporic elements are
no longer the central theme of the story here, like in DDLJ, but have
been casually inserted into the love story. This is common procedure
nowadays: filmmakers invariably include at least one migrant character
even when the theme of migration is only of limited importance to the
main story line; for example in Yaadein (2001), Om Jai Jagdish (2002),
Devdas (2002), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2004) and many others.
This is also the case in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G), a movie
that introduces the theme of diaspora only after 1.5 hours of intense
drama. The second part of the film brings us to London, where Indians
drive around in expensive sport cars and own huge homes. Again, we
see that the migrants have not forgotten their roots: Its all about loving
your parents. Female star Kajol performs puja every day and expresses
her dislike for the English language and culture through grotesque
imitations of her white neighbours. When her son is about to perform
at school, she expects to hear the stiff and childish English song Do re
mi. To her astonishment, the boy starts to sing the Indian national anthem and all his white classmates sing along. In this moment of ultimate motherly joy, she bursts into tears and runs to embrace her son.
Bollywood, of course, shows us an Indian fantasy about the diaspora
(Mishra 2002: 266-269). In this fantasy, India is the centre of the
world and the diaspora is its periphery. India is endowed with all kinds
of desirable values such as purity, authenticity, and piety. The diaspora,
on the other hand, is rich and free but corrupted and self-centred.
These migrants can do everything that is forbidden in India, but still
they crave for their long-lost homeland and often make sacrifices to reconnect with it. And so they prove, over and over again, that they are
215
true to the authentic Indian morals represented in the films. Whether

they live in London, in Sydney or in Paris, they will ultimately keep the
Indian culture alive.
Bombays film industry is often referred to as the dream factory of
India in that it appeals to poor viewers because the glamorised arena
of cinema allows them for three hours to forget the harsh realities of
their underprivileged lives. Nowadays, we could also call the Indian
film industry a nostalgia factory. Having looked into the specific
dreams represented in successful films from the 1990s, we see that
nostalgia is a crucial theme. From the perspective of the filmmakers,
overseas Indian viewers have specific desires and needs; they crave a
sense of belonging and dream about being reconnected to their roots.
If Indian cinema wants to appeal to these people, it must fulfil these
wishes and help them reaffirm their Indian Identities. Director Mahesh Bhatt stated in an interview:
Hindi films have truly become a cross-border phenomenon.
Asians are asserting themselves these days. They are trying to
de-link from their own environment with a strong expression of
taste. This is being manifested through Hindi cinema. For a
long time they were completely preoccupied with making
money. Now they are satiated and have the buying power. Music
and films are what they are turning to. Films in the main allow
them a nostalgia trip, a vision of the India they left behind
(Bamzai 1999).
If Hindi films provide a nostalgia trip, do the intended viewers actually
embark on this trip? Do they indeed feel de-linked from their own environments, do they actually crave for a lost Bharat Mata, and do they use
films purposefully to make up for this loss? According to Yash Raj Productions, the Netherlands is the second largest national market (after
Great Britain) for Indian films in Europe.8 For decades now, it has
been the Hindustani community from Suriname that has been the
main audience for Hindi cinema here.
Dollywood
Surinamese Hindustanis in the Netherlands are so-called twice migrants: they are the descendants of indentured labourers from North
India, who came to work on the sugarcane and rice plantations in the
former Dutch colony of Suriname in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. About 34,000 British Indians were shipped to Suriname in the decades after the abolition of slavery; only one-third of
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them would eventually return to British India. The migrants came

from a poor region called Hindustan, nowadays referred to as Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh, and were thus called Hindustanis.9 They came
from various backgrounds, spoke different languages, and had varying
religious beliefs. On the plantations, a koine language developed that
was later given official recognition as one of the Surinamese languages:
Sarnami, sometimes referred to as Hindustani (Damsteegt 2002).
The labourers who remained in Suriname after their contracts expired were given a plot of land by the Dutch government, mostly in
one of the isolated provinces of Nickerie and Saramacca. Their farms
were able to profit from the decline of the Dutch plantations (Buddingh 1995: 255-261) and a top level of successful Hindustani rice
farmers developed. In the city, Hindustanis were active in transport
and business, and aimed for upward mobility through education (Hira
1998: 15-16).
Around the time of Surinames independence in 1975, large numbers of Surinamese migrated to the Netherlands. Job opportunities
were much better there, and many of Surinames inhabitants wished to
retain their Dutch passports. Hindustanis, the second largest ethnic
group in Suriname, also feared the independent country would be ruled by Creole (black) politicians, the largest ethnic group.
At the moment, 325,000 Surinamese live in the Netherlands.10 Of
this total, 160,000 are Hindustanis. The Hindustanis thus compromise one percent of the total Dutch population (Choenni and Adhin
2003: 8). They themselves often claim to be very well integrated into
Dutch society, as they speak Dutch better than many other immigrant
groups and do relatively well in terms of labour participation, education, and upward mobility. These statements are confirmed in some regards by recent research findings.11
Half of the Hindustanis are under 25 years old. Most of these youngsters are born and raised in the Netherlands (Choenni 2003: 170). Religiously, Hindustanis are divided: eighty percent are Hindu (Ramsoedh
2003: 108), fifteen percent are Muslim (Landman 1992: 204) and
about five percent are Christians; each of these religious groups has
several subgroups, paralleled by a wide range of differing religious organisations.
About half of the Hindustani population in the Netherlands lives in
or around The Hague, the administrative capital of the country. About
ten percent of The Hagues population is of Surinamese Hindustani
descent. Most of them live in the two downtown areas, the Schilderswijk
and Transvaal, where one can find many temples, mosques, and volunteer organisations that cater to the spiritual and worldly needs of the
Hindustani population. There are numerous import shops that sell products from India and Suriname; among them are at least ten specia-
217
lised Hindustani video rental stores. Every weekend, special events are
organised for the Hindustani audience: fashion shows, dance events,
music performances, live theatre, or movie screenings. Not surprisingly, the city has sometimes been referred to as the city of Hindustanis or even Dollywood (a combination of Den Haag and Bollywood).12
Indian cinema has always been a huge success among Hindustanis,
ever since its introduction in Suriname in the 1930s (Manuel 1998:
19). In the 1950s, an observer called it the principal expression of the
cultural life of Hindustanis in Suriname (De Klerk 1998: 215). At that
time, cinemas provided one of very few opportunities to go out. Farmers in the rural districts travelled large distances to the nearest movie
theatre; the outings provided a rare opportunity to meet relatives, exchange the latest news, and look for potential marriage partners (Bijmans 1996: 59-60).
When the first Hindustanis migrated to the Netherlands, Indian cinema moved with them. The first Indian movie shown here was Aan,
in 1958. It arrived in the Netherlands via Suriname: the celluloid film
was transported in boxes along with tropical fruits, vegetables, and
other homesick items to be sold to Hindustanis who had migrated to
the Netherlands (Bijmans 1996: 61-62).
The Dutch market grew rapidly in the 1970s as a result of the mass
migration of Surinamese Hindustanis to the Netherlands. The West-Indian Film Society and Roshni Film Society were founded. These companies had established trade connections with film entrepreneurs in England and were commercially successful. Beginning in 1972, films were
shown every Sunday in the four main Dutch cities The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. Smaller theatres also showed films on
an irregular basis. The Dutch government even established a travelling
movie theatre in 1975. The travelling theatre toured to the immigrant
centres in the Northern provinces from 1976 to 1982, screening Hindi
films in order to entertain new Surinamese immigrants (Bijmans
1996: 62-64).
These booming years of Hindi cinema in the Netherlands lasted until the beginning of the 1980s, even though overall cinema attendance
in the Netherlands went steeply down in that same period as a result
of the competition from television, video and other new forms of recreational entertainment.13 It was video that would eventually drive the
Hindustani crowds away from the theatres. The first official Hindustani video rental that opened in the Netherlands was Rams Videotheek, in
1974. Ahmed Video Centre, Roshan Video en Govindas Video followed
five years later. From 1986 to 1991, not one Hindi film was shown in
Dutch cinemas (Bijmans 1996: 78-80). Hindustanis had retreated into
their private spaces; watching films whenever, wherever, and with
whomever they liked.
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Roshan Video, a well known video store in The Hague

Photo: Sanderien Verstappen
Young Hindustanis that had grown up in the age of video had never
showed much interest in the Indian classics that their parents loved so
much. Even though many of them felt an affinity with Indian music,
most of them preferred to watch American movies. Compared to Hollywood, they found the three-hour long Hindi melodramas boring, and
cinematographically of poor quality.
Since 1998 however, a revival of Hindi cinema has occurred among
the younger generation. For many of them, it all started with the movie
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This film toured the Netherlands three times,
and each time, theatres were sold out to the last seat. The film generated sizeable profits for its distributor Ramsfilm and, moreover, it
marked a turning point in the market for Indian cinema in the Netherlands. For the first time in a long period, the young felt an affinity with
a Hindi film. Their enthusiasm for Hindi cinema has continued ever
since and so the younger generation of Surinamese Hindustanis became the driving force behind the re-emerging Bollywood scene in
The Hague, spending their pocket money on CDs and DVDs as well as
keeping up with the latest gossip on their favourite Bollywood stars
through magazines and cable television.
Since then, film screenings have been organised about once a month
in The Hague; these have been commonly sold out even though tickets
are relatively expensive. In 2004, mainstream Pathe movie theatres
started to distribute Hindi cinema on a daily basis, so screenings be-
219
came cheaper and more easily accessible. In the video rental stores,
fifty percent of the visitors are now under thirty years of age.14 Hindustani dance parties are also organised every weekend, sometimes in
huge party halls on the outskirts of the city; teenagers and tweens come
here to enjoy live performances and remixes of Bollywood songs, performed by local artists. A dozen movie dance schools teach young girls
how to dance to this music; clothing shops in the Hindustani neighbourhood of Transvaal sell the matching outfits. Bollywood ringtones,
Bollywood school organisers and Bollywood key holders are the appropriate gadgets available in both video rental stores and on the Internet.15
The revival of Indian cinema among Hindustani youth was partly a
result of substantive changes in the aforementioned film scenarios.
The young certainly noticed that the new love stories were more modern than before. But formal improvements in Hindi cinema were
equally important. Hindustanis in the Netherlands were happily surprised by the professional appearance of the newest films, which integrated the latest camera, lighting, and editing techniques and were
thus well-suited to compete with the Hollywood blockbusters.
Three other factors contributed to the Bollywood revival. First, the arrival of digital television, and consequently the timely availability of information among subscribers about upcoming films and stars, made
people talk more frequently about Hindi cinema and visit the video
stores more often. Secondly, DVD came along (in 2002). This new data
carrier was considered clean because it lacked the annoying snow
and other distortions that had typified Hindi cinema in the era of video, and moreover it brought English subtitling.
Subtitling clearly helped trigger young peoples interest, as many of
them no longer speak much Hindustani (Sarnami) and have even less
knowledge of proper Hindi. One young man, Rakesh (25), explained:
Ever since subtitling came along, I watch Hindustani films more
often. In the past, I did not like them at all, although I did feel
connected to some of the stars like Amitabh Bachchan. Now, we
have the films by Amitabh Bachchan on DVD. The other day I
sat with my parents to watch Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. We had
seen it before, but now for the first time it was subtitled. It was
a revelation! I watched my eyes out. What beautiful dialogues ...
and all of these years I had missed them! In the past, I used to
make up my own story in my head. I think I only understood
25 percent of the dialogue: I was happy to pick up any of the
words. And when they danced, you knew they were in love. But
now I understand why my parents cry, and I am myself deeply
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touched as well. When you know what they are saying, you have
to cry.
Another factor that gave a strong impetus to the Bollywood revival
among young people was the growing interest in Indian cinema in the
wider Dutch context. New initiatives since 1995 has attracted a broader
audience. The Royal Tropical Institute started the festival Cinema India, which generated serious reviews of Indian films for the first time
in Dutch newspaper history. In 2000, the annual Hindustani Film Festival came into existence, working together with established art houses
in various cities. Since 2001, the NPS (Dutch Broadcasting Foundation) has been programming Indian films on television several times a
year, mostly on Sunday afternoons during the winter months. In 2002,
Oscar nominee Lagaan toured the Dutch art house circuit and received
very enthusiastic reviews from prominent Dutch movie critics. In
2005, when Amsterdam hosted the IIFA (Indian International Film
Academy) Award Ceremony, the Indian Oscars, Indian cinema was
suddenly news across all mainstream Dutch television channels and
newspapers. Nowadays, regular movie theatres in The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam show Indian films on a daily basis and regular video rental stores have a limited stock of Indian (art) films available.
The increasing availability of Indian cinema in the Dutch context reflects a broader tendency in international popular culture. In the
1990s, trend watchers witnessed the breakthrough of Asian architects,
Asian designers, and Asian musicians. By 2001, India had become
cool on MTV as well. Superstars like Madonna and Janet Jackson exhibited oriental styles in their videos, prominent disc jockeys produced
club remixes of Bollywood soundtracks, and scenes from the colourful
urban India even popped up in television commercials (Hulsman
2001, Moorman 2001).
In the past, Indias culture was most commonly seen as age-old, traditional, and deeply spiritual. But nowadays, the attention is focussed
on Indias urban and popular culture. Indian clothing and jewellery are
no longer considered religious or traditional; on the contrary, they
have become perfectly suitable to wear to a dance party. Hindustani
youngsters who are fine-tuned to these changes in imagery, happily followed this trend. For example, a teenage girls who bought a salwar kamis several years ago for a wedding suddenly realised how hip it
was, and showed it off at school dances.
Hindustani youth can now watch Hindi films with pride, not having
to feel ashamed for watching low budget and kitsch musicals any
longer. They can talk about the latest films at school with non-Hindustani friends more easily than ever, and many do so with great enthusiasm.
221
Bollywood and India

Do the devoted film fans among Hindustani youth in The Hague correspond with the projected images of the diaspora audience we encounter in some of the literature? Do teenagers watch DVDs to learn
more about their ancestral homeland? Do they go to the video rental
store to reaffirm their Indian identities? What image do these movies
conjure up of India? In what sense do these create a relationship to the
homeland, a sense of roots or even long-distance nationalism16 among
the youth, who are indeed highly aware that their family histories lie
partly in India?
When asked openly about Indian cinema, Hindustani youths do not
mention India that often. When asked specifically about the relationship between the movies and India, many respondents replied concisely: What you see in the movies is not India. It is a world of
dreams. The setting is India, yes, but that is not of crucial importance
to the story. For any researchers immersed in the diaspora discourse,
like us, these kinds of responses can hardly be very satisfying. When
the interviewer pursued her point, however, asking, for example, what
the respondent had learned about India by watching Hindi films, some
of them got really annoyed. How could anyone believe that Bollywood
represents India truthfully? It is all fiction, of course. If I want to learn
something about India, Ill watch a documentary!
In the eyes of these youngsters, there are only a few Hindi films that
represent India accurately. A famous example is Lagaan: Once upon a
Time in India (2003). Lagaan was the first Indian movie to be officially
screened in the Dutch art-house circuit; a circuit that, according to one
respondent, is usually preserved for highly intellectual French and Italian movies. The educated elite among the Hindustanis took Lagaan
very seriously because it was nominated for an Oscar and because it
was received well in the Netherlands. In the Haags Filmhuis (The Hague Cinema House) for example, the audience for Lagaan consisted
mainly of white people.17 Lagaan was also taken seriously because, contrary to many other films, it is about India.
Lagaan takes place in a poor village in the northern Indian countryside during the age of British India. The villagers are upset because
this years harvest has been lost and the authorities have doubled the
tax (lagaan). When they plead for an exemption to their local lord, a
cruel British officer challenges them to join him in a game of cricket.
If the villagers win, they will be freed from taxation. But if they lose,
they will have to pay triple.
Some of the Hindustani students saw Lagaan in the art house and
were struck by its authenticity. The fact that it was spoken in Bojpuri,
a language that they found unintelligible and unpretentious, certainly
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added to the authentic flavour. On the way home, one of the girls
asked: Is this really how cricket got introduced into India? One of the
boys replied: Not exactly, but approximately. Said, a 19-year-old psychology student, made the following remarks about Lagaan:
I thought Lagaan was excellent. Lots of deep layers. It is all
about Indias caste system, Hindu-Muslim relations, interactions
between the British and the Indians ... and the integrity of it,
just a village like that. No flashy cars, no beautiful clothes ... this
is India, you know. Its just quite representative. I also bought
the music tape and then you usually get this extendable cover
showing pictures of beautiful clothes and all that ... here you
just see that cricket team. If you go to a village in India, youll
see the same. This is what people wear in a village in India.
Said thinks Lagaan is special and not standard Bollywood fare. He describes it in comparison to other Indian movies, in terms of what the
film does not show: no flashy cars, no fancy clothes. Contrary to most
other Hindi films, which show super-rich people living a shiny lifestyle
full of glitter and glamour, Lagaan shows poverty in the countryside.
Said thinks this is more like Indian reality, and thats why he likes this
film so much.
We must emphasise here that Said is a fanatic viewer of world cinema and art cinema, a characteristic he does not share with most of his
Hindustani peers. Said is very critical of Bollywood films. He calls
them commercial and standardised. Lagaan is his favourite precisely
because it is different. Although Saids taste is shared by some of the
highly educated among Hindustanis, Lagaan did not become a huge
hit.18 Most Hindustani youngsters saw Lagaan on DVD and thought it
was rather amusing but they did not feel a special connection to it,
nor did they feel inclined to watch it a second time. Unlike Said, they
do not care much for the reality of India.
Most Hindustani film fans have no notion of what daily life in South
Asia is like, and more importantly, they are not interested either. For
example, out of eleven respondents that had access to ZEE TV at home,
none watched the daily nine oclock Indian news. They preferred Dutch
news programs. One explanation given was that the Hindi vocabulary
used by the ZEE TV reporters is difficult to understand. But apart
from that, the social and political affairs in South Asia are never an issue of conversation among Hindustanis. This is true not only for the
youth but also for most of their parents. What happens there doesnt
affect me, one mother said. I dont need to know if they are tearing
down a temple, or if theyve attacked Pakistan. This lack of interest in
Indias social and political affairs partly explains why films about In-
223
dia, like Lagaan, are not that popular among the Hindustani youth in
The Hague. Gossiping about Indian film stars is standard behaviour
during social gatherings, but the daily affairs of the common man in
South Asia do not qualify as relevant.
India and Hindustani

It is clear from earlier research as well as ours that Hindustanis show
ambiguous attitudes towards India.19 On the one hand, Hindustanis
are highly aware that India is the country our ancestors came from,
and many have foregrounded this Indian background in public discourse. On the other hand, Hindustanis also identify themselves as a
separate category that has its own distinct language, history, and culture. When they compare themselves to the population of India, they
usually describe themselves as financially better off, better educated,
more modern, better suited to life in the west, and, in general, more
comfortable. Indians are poor, repress women, and face brutal caste
discrimination, while these aspects of Indian society are said to be absent in Hindustani culture in the Netherlands and Suriname.20
More than anything else, India is perceived as a poor country in the
Netherlands. The slums, the beggars, the crowded streets, the earthquakes, and the floods are shown on Dutch news programmes and in
Dutch newspapers on a regular basis, so anyone who lives in the Netherlands is accustomed to them. Hindustani children are also brought
up with the idea that their ancestors worked hard to free themselves
from poverty. Having come to Suriname with nothing but the clothes
on their backs, the ancestors worked everyday and saved every penny,
to give their children a better future. The idea that India is (still) poor
and Hindustanis are not (anymore), is thus a vivid point of reference
in any discussion about Hindustanis versus Indians.
The issue of female repression is similar. When asked to compare
themselves with Indians, some Hindustanis remarked that women are
treated worse in India than they are in the Netherlands. Spectacular
stories about the burnings of widows, rape, and violence against women popped up every now and then during the interviews. These stories served mainly to bring Indians into disrepute vis-a-vis Dutch Hindustanis. Girls as well as boys emphasised for example that: Women
in India are treated like slaves, especially in the villages ... here, a woman can more easily go her own way.
A third issue that is said to set Indian society apart from Hindustani
culture, is caste. According to Hindustani youth, the caste system is an
essential characteristic of Indian society. It is not, however, part of Hin-
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dustani culture in the Netherlands. This point was emphasised during

interviews, as well as in historical literature.
During the process of migration to Suriname, the power of the caste
system as an organising principle of society was lost (De Klerk 1998:
167). This started in the depot in Calcutta where the migrants waited
for months to board a ship that would bring them to Suriname. In the
harbour, it was impossible to maintain the prescribed purity regulations: high castes and low castes had to sleep side by side, stand in line
collectively to wait for their food, and they were cared for by servants of
varying social backgrounds. Keeping to your own kind was simply unworkable in those circumstances (Hira 2003: 128-131). Furthermore,
there was a shortage of women among the migrants, so the endogamous marriage rules were impossible to maintain (De Klerk 1998:
169-170).
The Hindustani youth interviewed had a very negative impression of
the caste system in India. They saw it primarily in terms of caste discrimination and seemed eager to announce that they themselves were beyond that. Considering caste, gender and money, many Hindustani
youth consider themselves as being more modern, more emancipated and more well-to-do than the India they visualise; an India that
is essentially rural and poor, backwards, and in some sense morally unjust. That image of India can hardly be derived from Hindi films however: Other sources such as documentaries, news reports on Dutch television, rumours and orally transmitted stories inform them about the
India they describe. In fact, most of the new movies actually contradict
the imagery of poverty as described. Although poverty and violence
against females used to be included in classical Hindi cinema, they are
generally ignored in contemporary Hindi cinema. The caste system is
barely evident in most movies: when it is portrayed, it is often in an
ambiguous or indirect way.
Hindustani youth are not surprised about this paradox at all. First of
all, poverty doesnt sell. Who wants to see a village where everybody
walks around in dirty clothes? one teenage boy said. Indians see that
all day long. Another boy said that in the Indian movies you can see
everything you wish for, all the things you aspire to: large house, cars,
a beautiful room, totally posh, luxurious tapestry, roses and moonshine
... what more do you want?
Secondly, although violence against females was a common theme
in the movies made in the 1980s, the tone has changed significantly.
However, viewers still notice elements that strike them as violent. This
was revealed, for example, during a lively discussion about a short but
remarkable scene in the popular film Devdas where a man slaps a woman in the face and gives her a scar, even though he loves her to
death. The group consensus was that this behaviour was strange and
225
ridiculous, but they also added that what you see in the movies is
only the tip of the iceberg. Female repression is in fact much worse in
India.21
Thirdly, caste is represented in contemporary Bombay blockbusters
but rarely in an explicit way. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham for example, caste is not mentioned at all as an obstacle to the intended marriage between Kajol and Shahrukh Khan: the girl simply doesnt fit in
with and wouldnt understand the boys family traditions and status.
In Devdas, caste differences between the two families is clear to the
viewer, but nevertheless is left unspoken. Instead, the boys father accuses the girl of indecent behaviour while his mother disdainfully ridicules the rude habits of the girls mother.
This rather implicit, ambiguous approach fits in very well with the
ambiguous attitude that Hindustani youth themselves feel towards the
caste system. Although most of the young claim that the caste system
is nonexistent in the Netherlands, many also noted that their own parents preferred that they marry within a family that befits us. Common
demands put forward by the parents are a certain amount of wealth
and education, light skin, and, in any case, marrying within the Hindustani community. Literature on the subject explains that specific elements of the caste system, such as the varna consciousness, remain vibrantly alive in some Hindu families (Mungra 1990: 116-119). If the
boys family claims to be from a Brahmanic background (even though
this claim may be disputed by others) they usually prefer the girl friend
to be of the same status (even though they may avoid speak openly
about such expectations in public).
The notions these youngsters have about Indian society are quite different. As they see it, caste discrimination is much harsher in India
than it is in the Netherlands, and it is much more explicit in real India
than in Bollywood movies, The Indian way of dealing with caste, as
deduced from the interviews, can only be seen in exceptional films like
Lagaan. In Lagaan, a casteless man is explicitly bullied by his fellow villagers; they initially refuse to play on a cricket team with a man from a
lower caste. The explicit treatment of caste here adds to the truly Indian flavour of that film, reaffirming its exceptional Indianness in comparison to most other Bollywood films that treat the subject indirectly
Having noted all this, it is hardly surprising that Hindustanis barely
mention Indian movies when describing the majority of commercial
Bollywood blockbusters; they prefer the phrase Hindustani movies.
Most viewers have not given it much thought, but it nevertheless
points out something significant: that for many Hindustanis these movies represent the Hindustani culture better than they represent their
projected ideas of Indian society.
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Hindustanis and Bollywood

When discussing their favourite Hindustani films, the fans enthusiastically describe the handsome actors, the enchanting music, the wonderful dances, and the hilarious comedy scenes. Some viewers specifically note the fashionable clothing; others play the songs over and over
to copy the dance steps. However, theres more to Bollywood: It is also
about the story.
Many respondents said they felt a thoroughly personal connection to
some of the movies. Even those who watched only few movies per year
claimed that their involvement was very strong. Their favourite films
were usually the ones they related to in a personal way. Compared to
American films, which they also liked to watch, they felt that Hindi
films come closer to who I am.
Avinash was born and raised in The Hague; he is the eldest son in a
family of three children. He is 26 years old, lives with his parents,
works fulltime at a ministry and is studying economics. Avinash sees
Indian video clips and film scenes daily; his family has a subscription
to the digital cable channel ZEE TV. About twice a month Avinash
watches an entire Hindi film with his friends, either in the movie theatre or at home.
When Avinash was asked what it means to have watched so many
Indian movies, he said they make him feel normal: Our traditions, the
norms and values we grow up with, and the experience of that ... what
you see in the films is the same. For example, Avinash explained that
his family has been very important to him all his life, and this special
bonding with his family made him feel quite abnormal within the
Dutch context. Whereas most Dutch youth spend limited amounts of
time with their grandparents and extended families, Avinash keeps in
close contact with many members of his rather large extended family
by going to birthday parties, the hospital when an aunt is ill, helping
an uncle out with his chores at home. Avinash has a close relationship
to some of his nieces, whom he calls didi (older sister), and he always
invites his brother along when he is going out.
Avinash and his best friend Gopi could talk for hours about the special type of caring experienced in their families, which they described as
typically Hindustani, and which they recognised in Hindustani movies.
Avinash: My parents were on holiday for two weeks. Everyone
phoned: arent you hungry, can I cook you something? Join us
for dinner! At other times, they might phone and say: Can you
help me in the house, I made pom especially because I know it
is your favourite ... You just feel that these people have you on
their minds all the time.
227
Gopi: When they know you like something, and they make it for
you and then call you up, they can get really angry if you dont
show up. It is a weird type of care, a very special type of care.
Very beautiful.
Avinash: It is very different in Dutch families.
Gopi: In Dutch families, you might find elderly women who
claim they have been forgotten that nobody comes to visit her.
We think you should care for the ones that gave birth to you.
When someone is in a nursing home, everyone comes by and
brings food.
Avinash: When I was in hospital, it was really busy everyday
with my parents, and all my family members, whoever. There
was this Dutch boy in the same ward. His parents would visit
him every now and then, maybe once a week! And when I took
driving lessons, my parents came outside to take a look at how I
it was doing. There was a Dutch girl in the car and she found
that odd. But I think its really great that they come and watch!
Gopi: When I took driving lessons, my parents asked if they
could come with me in the car! That was overdone, though. I
said: Well, no. This is something Im going to do on my own
... Sometimes I have to slow them down ...
Gopi: And all those things, all these special types of care, you
can see in the films. It is all really familiar.
Avinash: In the films, everything is more extreme. Its like: Ill
die so you can have my eyes ... very extreme ... All these things
are exaggerated in Hindustani movies.
Answering questions about their relation to Bollywood, Avinash and
Gopi talked at length about the joint family structure they described as
typically Hindustani. Interestingly, the joint family was not imported
straight from India. It has, in fact, a Surinamese history. The indentured labourers that came to Suriname came as isolated individuals
and had to build up new families in the course of the settling process.
On their new farms, the joint family structure proved instrumental:
the labour force of many family members became a key to agricultural
success. In the 1940s, the joint family had become the dominant form
of living in the Surinamese countryside (de Koning 1998: 155). Nowadays in Surinames cities and in the Netherlands, the family lives
spread out over several houses while maintaining the ideal of the joint
family (Choenni and Mathura 1998: 254).
Avinash and Gopi seem to cherish the joint family structure. They describe it as loving, caring, and sometimes annoyingly intrusive, comparing it to the tolerant but indifferent atmosphere in Dutch families.
Their familiarity with Dutch family life is derived partly from everyday
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interactions with non-Hindustani peers but also from popular Dutch

soap operas, which they watch several times a week. Having lived in the
Netherlands all their lives, they perceive themselves as different. Their
otherness is in some sense neutralised and even celebrated by Hindi cinema, which shows them the things we learned at home, the culture
we grew up with. It is very nice to notice that it wasnt all made up.
Sharita is a 26-year-old film fanatic who watches an Indian movie
every day. Her parents came from the agrarian district of Nickerie in
Suriname. Sharita is the youngest daughter in a large family of nine
children, and was just a baby when the family moved to The Hague.
She dropped out of school before getting a professional diploma; since
then, she has been temporarily employed in various low-paying occupations. Sharitas main problem in life is the difficult relationship she
has with her parents. She is very distressed because her parents think
she is the right age to marry and they try to talk her into getting married as soon as possible. Sharita currently has no partner and is in no
hurry to find one; she says she has no desire to get married at all.
Sharitas favourite movie is Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. It touched
her so deeply it made her cry. The hero in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
is pressured into marriage he doesnt want by his father; instead, he decides to marry the love of his life. As a consequence, his father throws
him out of the house. Sharita comments:
What you see in these movies, has also happened in my life. It
makes me think. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham is truly about reality. All those demands raised by parents. They want him to marry someone, but he loves another. I had to cry.
During what scene did you cry?
After the wedding, when he wants to say goodbye, but his father
refuses even to look at him anymore. I found that so sad ... and
it made me wonder, because it could happen to me as well.
What should I do? How should I deal with this?
Do you know anyone that was married off?
No. It doesnt happen here like you see in the movies. In the
past, in Suriname it did happen, but not anymore.
So whats so realistic about it then?
Well, the pressure. You have to marry. You know, my parents
want me to marry too. But I dont want to. I see it around me
everywhere. When a girl marries, her husband wants her to do
all kinds of things: stay at home, do the cooking ... When he
comes home, everything has to be ready for him. These days it
229
can be different, one day you might get home to a guy who is
serving you dinner ... But thats not what I see in my sisters
houses. They hardly have any time for themselves.
My parents have the same problem. My dads the worst. He
wants everything to be arranged for him, everything! Do this.
Do that. My mother starts cooking early in the morning and she
doesnt stop until three in the afternoon. I dont know what she
is cooking! This morning I wanted to sleep late, but my mom
woke me at seven. She wanted me to clean the house, vacuum,
dust, you know. I was dog-tired. After a couple of hours I went
back to bed. I dont understand why my mother stays with him.
He even told her to leave him once, but she didnt. She says marriage is forever.
Arranged marriages are rare among Dutch Hindustanis. However,
many parents do introduce their children to one or more suitable candidates, and they indirectly try to influence their childrens choice of
partner. Earlier research indicates that there is a certain amount of
pressure on any daughter to keep her virginity and get married. This
pressure becomes more intense when the girl seems to go in the
wrong direction, for example, when she is unable to find a suitable
candidate at a certain age (Lalmahomed 1992: 160 and 193-194; Mungra 1990: 92-103). This is certainly the case for Sharita.
Sharita feels loyal to her parents and tries hard to live up to their demands: getting home early, doing domestic chores, handing over part
of her income, babysitting her younger nieces, always keeping her mobile phone on when she is out of the house. On special occasions, she
may ask for her parents blessing by bowing down before them and
touching their feet. She feels obliged to her father and mother, who
raised her and still care for her, but cannot fulfil all their wishes. Marriage is not an option for Sharita. Instead she dreams of an independent future in her own house, with her own car and her own stable income, freed from all the family obligations she has to deal with in her
parents house.
It is precisely these tensions between personal desires and parental
loyalties that are dramatised so intensely in movies like Kuch Kuch
Hota Hai, Kabhi Khusie Kabhie Gham, or Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon.
Troubles between parents and children also occur in American movies
and Dutch soap operas, but they usually have a very different form.
American or English movies are less recognisable. Thats why I usually
find them boring, says Sharita. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham has had a
particular effect on her because it shows a son who fails to accommodate his fathers wishes and is subsequently banished. The son is or-
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& MARIO RUTTEN
dered to leave the family mansion and is no longer considered a family

member. Sharita fears the same thing might happen to her if she
keeps refusing to marry.
During the interviews with Hindustani youth, many of them emphasise the personal relationship they have with Hindi cinema, and usually illustrate this point by referring to their own social relations, within
their families and beyond. The stories differ widely though, depending
on their particular social position within their families. Avinash and
Gopi, who are both the eldest sons in small households, have evaluated
the Hindustani family structure much more positively than Sharita,
the youngest daughter in a large nuclear family.
Earlier studies have explained that an illusion of realism is a prerequisite to experiencing pleasure when viewing any type of audiovisual
entertainment. In her study Watching Dallas, Ien Ang discerns two
types of realism: empirical realism refers to visible or material resemblances between film and reality, while emotional realism refers to the
feelings that the characters undergo, just like viewers do in real life.
The type of realism described by Sharita, and by many other Hindustani girls and boys, does not quite match either of these types of realism. Although emotional and empirical resemblances are present, it is
the social reality that they point out over and over again. This social reality unfolds as the characters meet, greet, interconnect, and negotiate
relationships in the course of the stories. Bollywood films thus function as a mirror of social relationships within the Hindustani community in the Netherlands.
Hindustani movies are truly Hindustani in that sense. They are read
in contrast to other popular media, namely Dutch soaps and American
movies, which fail to accommodate the Hindustani social situations
and thereby emphasise the otherness of Hindustanis in the Dutch context. Contrary to expectations, Hindustanis do not watch these movies
because they want to de-link from their own environment. Instead, the
movies help them to live their lives in the Netherlands by making
them feel normal, and it is primarily within the Dutch context that we
must look to explain their affinity to Hindi cinema.
Conclusion
Diasporic studies have rightly emphasised the significance of transnational media among diasporic communities, but have had difficulty
grasping the varied and complicated meanings of the processes at
stake. We suggest that diaspora studies must be more cautious to avoid
implicit assumptions about the effects of transnational media. When
people spend their money and time on import products such as movies
231
from a certain country named India, Indianness is not necessarily an

important part of the bargain.
Aksoy and Robins (2003) made this point earlier in research they
did among Turkish television viewers in London. They concluded that
the diaspora perspective is in fact a faulty framework for media research, as it assumes too easily that media support the emergence of
transnational imagined communities. It usually does not ask if, but
how media support the emergence of transnational communities. However, transnational broadcasting is not about magically transporting
migrant viewers back to a distant homeland. It is about broadcasting
services being delivered to them in their new locations (Aksoy and Robins 2003: 102).
From the point of view of most of our respondents, the link between
India and Indian cinema is not the most interesting aspect of their
viewing experience. Indian movies add to the variety of genres available
to them, not because the films teach them about India, because most
of the movies dont, but because they mirror their own lives here in the
Netherlands. The pictures come close to who I am because they show
the things we learned at home. The stories that get bottled up when
we ask youth about their relationship to Hindi cinema thus emphasise
the resemblances between the social affairs in the movies and those
within the Hindustani community in the Netherlands. In the Dutch
context, Hindustani movies are truly Hindustani.
Comparing this conclusion to research on other audiences among
the Indian diaspora (Gillespie 1995, Hansen 2005, Brosius 2005, and
others) the apparent diversity in viewing experiences is striking. These
empirical studies, which were done on the brink of diaspora theory
and ethnographic audience research, provide an important contribution
to diaspora studies. They show that messages of belonging and nostalgia, which have increasingly spread through audio-visual media over
the last decades, are viewed and appropriated in highly diverse and
often unpredictable ways. Such processes of appropriation can never be
understood from the armchair: performing ethnographic research in
interaction with the viewers themselves is crucial,22 just as it is crucial
to analyse the findings within a broader framework of diaspora
theory.23
Notes
1
This fieldwork was performed by Sanderien Verstappen as part of her masters thesis
at the University of Amsterdam, which resulted in the book Jong in Dollywood. Hindostaanse jongeren en Indiase films (2005). Verstappen observed activities in six video
rental stores, in two dance schools, and at numerous cinema screenings; she also
232
4
5
6
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
& MARIO RUTTEN
joined Hindustani youth during their outings in the evenings and weekends. She
had informal conversations with about 80 youth, interviewed 42 who were between
16 and 29 years old, and also interviewed nine distributors and several other professionals in the Bollywood business. She also repeatedly performed couch observations in five households, watching television with family members in their living
rooms.
When we talk about Indian cinema or Hindi cinema here, we are referring to movies
produced in India. This article thus does not take into account movies made by filmmakers with an Indian background who live outside India; such as Mississippi Masala
(1991, directed by Mira Nair) or Bend it Like Beckham (2002, directed by Gurinder
Chadha). Indian movies are usually divided into three subcategories: commercial cinema, art cinema, and regional cinema. We only discuss commercial cinema from
Bombay, commonly refererred to as Bollywood films.
The phrase Bollywood has been objected to by Indian filmmakers who find the term
paternalistic, but Hindustani youth in the Netherlands use the nickname Bollywood
willingly and lovingly. In this article, we will follow Hindustani youth on this matter.
This film is not available in the Netherlands. Information is therefore derived from
the Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com (20 March 2004).
See, for a detailed analysis of the diaspora element in DDLJ, and in the film Pardes,
Uberoi (1998).
Lata Khubchandani (2001), DDLJ story goes to the roots of Indian culture Transcripts of
the interviews, Yash Chopra. Website rediff.com: http://www.rediff.com/broadband/
2001/feb/05trans.htm (2 September 2005).
Dwyer (2002: 179) refers to her own article Indian values and the diaspora, Yash
Chopras films of the 1990s, in: Parthiv Shah (ed.), Figures, facts, feeling. A Direct Diasporic Dialogue, pp. 74-82. Catalogue that accompanied a British Council Exhibition,
November 2000, West Coast Line.
Personal communication with Sammeer Shoekai (April 2002): he was a member of
the organisation of the Hindustani Film festival in 2002 and handled communication with the staff of Yash Raj Productions.
The label Hindustanis must not be confused with Indians, the label used in Suriname and the Netherlands to describe NRIs who have migrated directly from India.
In contrast to Indians, Hindustanis have no personal memory of the villages of origin in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, nor have they retained any personal relations in those
villages (Bal and Sinha, this book). There is very little interaction between the two
communities (Lynnebakke, this book).
Allochtonen in Nederland 2004. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), Voorburg
and Heerlen, 2004. www.cbs.nl.
Choenni 2003: 170-171; Van Noort 2001: 55; Van Niekerk 2000: 159-160 / 198-204.
Dollywood is officially the name of Dolly Partons Amusement Park in the United
States.
Cultuurbeleid in Nederland. Zoetermeer; Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschappen; 2002. http://www.minocw.nl/cultuurbeleid/nota6/index.html (12 November 2002).
Result of people count in two popular video rental stores in The Hague, carried out
by Sanderien Verstappen on two Saturdays from opening until closing time in January 2002.
Photographs by Sanderien Verstappen; flyers collected during fieldwork period in
2003.
The term long-distance nationalism was introduced by Benedict Anderson in the
Wertheim Lecture (1997) at the University of Amsterdam: Long-distance Nationalism. World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics.
233
17 According to an employee at the Haags Filmhuis.

18 Films that were a hit in the Netherlands at the dawn of the 21st century were Kuch
Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Kaho Na ... Pyaar Hai (2000), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
(2001), to a lesser extent Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002), Devdas (2002), Saathiya
(2002), Dil Ka Rishta (2003), and Chalte Chalte (2003) and more recently Koi Mil
Gaya (2004), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2004) and Hum Tum (2004).
19 Bloemberg 1995: 205; Klimmer 1999; Verstappen 2005.
20 This is the picture Verstappen deduced from 25 in-depth, taped interviews (varying
in duration from 1.5 to 3 hours) with Hindustani youth aged between 16 and 29
years.
21 This issue is quite complicated, however, as some girls claimed that Indian women
have more freedom than Hindustani girls. Sharita, for example, noticed that women
in India can walk on the streets with their bellies naked. If I tried that, my father
would lock me in the house.
22 This point is supported by anthropologists such as Baumann (1999: 150) and Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin (2002: 6).
23 This link to diaspora theory is sometimes lacking in media studies, for example in
the work of Straubhaar (1991/1997) and Burch (2002).
Films
Aan, directed by Mehboob Khan, 1952.
Bilet Pherat (England Returned), directed by N.C. Laharry, 1921.
Chalte Chalte, directed by Aziz Mirza, 2003.
Devdas, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002.
Dil Ka Rishta, directed by Naresh Malhotra, 2003.
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, directed by Aditya Chopra, 1995.
Hum Tum, directed by Kunal Kohli, 2004.
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, directed by Karan Johar, 2001.
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, directed by Rakesh Roshan, 2000.
Kal Ho Naa Ho, directed by Nikhil Advani, 2004.
Koi Mil ... Gaya, directed by Rakesh Roshan, 2003.
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, directed by Karan Johar, 1998.
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001.
Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, directed by Sooraj R. Barjatya, 2003.
Mujhse Dosti Karoge!, directed by Kunal Kohli, 2002.
Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, directed by Prakash Mehra, 1978.
Om Jai Jagadish, directed by Anupam Kher, 2002.
Pardes, directed by Subhash Ghai, 1997.
Purab aur Pachhim, directed by Manoj Kumar, 1970.
Saathiya, directed by Shaad Ali, 2002.
Sir Wrangler Mr. R. P. Paranjpye, directed by Harischchandra Sakharam Bhatavdekar, 1902.
Yaadein, directed by Subhash Ghai, 2001.
10
Contested Equality
Social Relations between Indian and

Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam
Brit Lynnebakke
I know a Surinamese Hindu woman who goes to India every

year but wants nothing to do with the Indian people here in the
Netherlands. Because she feels that they dont like her, that they
think that they are more than her She loves India But she
has no good things to say about the Indians who come here.
(Surinamese Hindu female, 55)
Introduction
In the academic debate on the Indian diaspora there is often an underlying assumption of a unified character of the diaspora in terms of religion, culture and imagined homeland. Nevertheless, religion, culture,
and the imagined homeland have different local meanings for migrants with different migration patterns. In the Netherlands, direct migrants from India do not freely interact with Surinamese Hindus the
descendants of Indian indentured labourers. The supposedly shared Indian background does not unify the migrants, on the contrary, it seems
to separate them.
This article attempts to explain why relations between Indian and
Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands are characterised by negative
images, prejudices, and little interaction. Some reasons have to do with
different migration histories, different educational levels, class and
caste differences. This raises questions related to the construction of
identity on the local level and the diaspora concept as a theoretical tool.
The broad questions that will be explored are as follows: First, how do
Indian and Surinamese Hindus view each other with reference to a
shared Indian background? Second, how does the religious identity of
being a Hindu impact on the contact between Indian and Surinamese
Hindus?
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BRIT LYNNEBAKKE
A situational perspective on identity is taken as a starting point. It is

assumed that all individuals have multiple identities including, for instance, cultural, religious, gender, class and regional identities, which
become relevant in different contexts. To an outsider, Indian and Surinamese Hindus seem to share some cultural and religious features.
The article will discuss whether the minority context with reference to
cultural and religious identities leads to unification. This will be explored by looking at common stereotypes each has of the other and
asking whether they interact or not. This is followed by a discussion of
the centrality of other identities and how these interact with religious
and cultural identities. Interaction between Indian and Surinamese
Hindus is defined as involved contact through mutual exchange, which
sometimes leads to friendships and closer connections, rather than the
mere presence of people from both groups in the same locations.
Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands have a history of twice migration (Bhachu 1984). The ethnic label Hindustani comprises 76 per
cent Hindus, 20 per cent Muslims and a small percentage of Christians. The forefathers of the Hindustanis living in the Netherlands today emigrated between 1873 and 1916 from India to the Dutch colony
of Suriname (Dutch Guiana until 1948) as contract labourers (Van der
Veer 1996). The background for their recruitment as indentured labourers to the plantations was the abolishment of slavery ten years earlier. Most of the emigrants came from Bhojpuri-speaking areas in todays Northern Indian states of Western Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh, at the time called Hindustan. By 1916, some 34,000 people had
migrated to Suriname. Two-thirds of them stayed and settled after their
five-year contract period was over (De Klerk 1953, Sinha-Kerkhoff and
Bal 2003, Van der Veer 1996).1 Most Surinamese Hindus immigrated
to the Netherlands when Suriname became independent in 1975 (Van
der Avoird 2001: 92).2 Today, 309,000 Surinamese live in the Netherlands (IMES statistics, figures from 2001). There are no official figures
for Hindustanis residing in the Netherlands, but various estimates suggest that the number is between 110,000 (Van Der Avoird 2002: 96)
and 150,000 (Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003: 3). It is again estimated
that the number of Surinamese Hindus is between 80,000 and
100,000 (Martin Baumann 1999: 62). The majority of Hindustanis
live in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague with the largest number (34,948) in The Hague. As of 2002, 18,570 Hindustanis were living in Amsterdam (Choenni 2003a).
Due to the substantial emphasis put on the religious identity of
being Hindu in this article, I will mainly use the term Surinamese
Hindu, following Martin Baumann (1999) and Van der Burg (1986,
1991), except when referring to the research of others where the term
Hindustani has been used.3
CONTESTED EQUALITY
237
There have to my knowledge been no social scientific studies

conducted on direct migrant Indians in the Netherlands. There are currently 13,713 Indian citizens living in the Netherlands today (CBS, referred to in Indiawijzer, reference b). It has been estimated that
whereas 83 per cent of the Hindus in the Netherlands in 2004 were
Surinamese, 11 per cent were from India, on the basis of citizenship
(CBS Statline, reference a). In 2004, there were an estimated 3,149
first- and second-generation Indian citizens living in Amsterdam, (CBS
Statline, reference b).
Contact between Indian and Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam
takes place within the context of Bollywood events, Sanatan Dharm4
temples, yoga classes, Indian music classes and events, and through
joint shop keeping. This article is based on 44 semi-structured recorded interviews with Indian and Surinamese Hindus, as well as informal conversations that took place during two months of preparatory
fieldwork at Hindustani cultural events and Sanatan Dharm temples5
in Amsterdam. The Sanatan Dharm temples were chosen as the main
interaction context both in the participant observation and the interviews in order to make it possible to explore both cultural identity and
religious identity as a basis for unification, and in what ways the two
identities are connected. However, I also interviewed people who had
experiences in other contexts where Indian and Surinamese Hindus interact or who knew many people from their own community; representatives of cultural organisations, journalists in Hindustani or Hindu
media, yoga teachers, teachers of Indian music and traders.
I formally interviewed 22 Surinamese Hindus, 21 Indian people
(mainly from northern India) all of whom were Hindus except for one
Muslim and one Sikh, and one Dutch Sanatan Dharm Hindu. Most of
the informants were between 40 and 60 years old and thus had experienced migration to the Netherlands.
The article is organised in five parts. Following this introduction, the
theoretical perspective will be presented. Subsequently, in the third section, I will discuss relations between Indian and Surinamese Hindus. I
will show that, whereas one the one hand, there are potentially unifying factors and common meeting places, on the other hand, there is little unity. On the contrary, they have negative stereotypes of each other
and little interaction. In the fourth section, I will suggest some possible
explanations for this dual relation. Finally, these explanations are considered with reference to the diaspora debate.
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BRIT LYNNEBAKKE
Diaspora and the Question of Hindu and Indian Identity in

Minority Contexts
Vertovec, in one context, defines diaspora as an imagined connection
between a post-migration (including refugee) population and a place of
origin and with people of similar cultural origins elsewhere (Vertovec
2000b: 12). In academic literature, Indo-Caribbean people are often included in the Indian diaspora category. This could be and has indeed
been questioned (see, e.g., Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003). Given that
Surinamese Hindus are part of an Indian diaspora, do many Surinamese Hindus experience an imagined connection with Indian Hindus
and vice versa?
Vertovec (1999) has distinguished three meanings of diaspora that
have been used in academic literature (see this books introduction),
where diasporic consciousness is one of them. There is a connection
between marginalisation and diasporic consciousness. Vertovec has stated, with reference to diasporic consciousness, that Its particularity is
variously described as being marked by a dual or paradoxical nature. It
is constituted negatively by experiences of discrimination and exclusion
and positively by identification with a historical heritage (such as Indian civilisation) or contemporary world cultural or political forces
such as Islam (1999: 8, emphasis original). Others (e.g., Kurien
2001) have argued that diasporic consciousness is strengthened rather
than automatically constituted by marginalisation.
One could argue that a diasporic consciousness was developed
among the British Indians in Suriname. The background for this consciousness was the original goal of a temporary sojourn in Suriname,
the continued arrival of new indentured immigrant labourers until
1916, and finally, the fact that the British Indians held a marginal position in Surinamese society where indentured labour was equated with
slave labour. For all these reasons, the British Indians made few attempts to assimilate into Surinamese society and instead a cultural orientation towards India through the reconstruction of pre-migration
traditions and customs from India developed. The Indian cultural orientation involved the original goal of a temporary sojourn in Suriname, the continued arrival of new indentured immigrant labourers
until 1916, and finally, the fact that the British Indians held a marginal
position in Surinamese society where indentured labour was equated
with slave labour (Speckmann 1967; Hoefte 1998).
Among Surinamese Hindus living in the Netherlands today, some
orient themselves towards India, but this is only one of several common orientations. A study by Choenni (2001, 2003c) on Surinamese
Hindu youth suggests various common cultural orientations: towards
India, the Netherlands and the West, or towards Suriname. Further-
CONTESTED EQUALITY
239
more, some of the informants in the study were oriented towards several of the three regions. This is not surprising from a perspective of
multiple identities and a view of culture as fluid and continually changing (e.g., G. Baumann 1999).
Heterogeneity of cultural orientations is especially salient when
speaking of twice migrants, but reflects a general challenge when theorising diaspora. When one uses the diaspora term as a noun, one
risks essentialisation and reification on the basis of only one criterion:
ancestral background from a certain place (Shukla 2001; Brubaker
2005). This way of conceptualising diaspora leads, according to Brubaker, to a misleading metaphysics of community (2005: 12). He has
proposed that in order to avoid these problems of groupism it is more
useful to conceptualise diaspora not in substantialist terms as a
bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim. as a category of practice. As a category of practice, diaspora is used to make
claims, articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilise energies, to appeal to loyalties (Brubaker 2005: 12). The concept of the diasporic stance is especially useful when speaking of twice migrants.
With these considerations in mind, it is now possible to return to
the question of possible identification between Indian and Surinamese
Hindus in the Dutch context.
Whereas India has a population of a billion people and its diversity
is similar to that of an entire continent, Lal states,
the question of the Indianness of Indians acquires a particular
poignancy overseas, as Indians abroad are presumed to shed
their regional, linguistic and ethnic identities in deference to the
more general identity of being an Indian. It is arguable that one
is more easily an Indian abroad than in India; the category of
Indian is not contested abroad as it is in India (Lal n.d., UCLA
website on the Indian diaspora).
Lals statement is tentative he neither states who has these presumptions nor what they are based upon, but from the perspective of being
cultural and ethnic minorities in new contexts of settlement, there is a
certain viability to the statement, which makes it an interesting starting
point for research. One could reason that the cultural minority situation in the country of settlement reduces the significance of distinctions that were important in the country of origin. In this context, similarities, for instance, in customs that had not previously been obvious
may become more salient. Hence, in this case, an all-Indian identity
may arise and the previously strong regional and other identities may
become less important. The process of an all-Indian unification can be
further fostered by the ascription of the majority population as well as
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BRIT LYNNEBAKKE
other minority groups in the country of settlement as Indians, whilst

these other groups ignore distinctions within the category. Within the
same line of reasoning, it is also possible that, in the minority situation, twice and direct migrants with a diasporic consciousness imagine themselves as related on the basis of a common Indian background.
A similar process can be imagined with reference to Hindu identity.
Even though Hinduism is extremely diversified in India,6 Hinduism
unifies differently in the diaspora. According to Vertovec, in virtually
every context outside India, Hinduism has emerged as a core feature of
ethnic consciousness and community mobilisation (even into political
spheres) among Indian migrants and their descendants (Vertovec
2000a: 18). Again, the contrast with other groups could make diversified traditions of twice and direct migrants seem similar, which could
furthermore be fostered by the ascription by others.7
There are additional reasons why Hindu identity could become unifying in the minority context. Firstly, Hindu identity can be argued to
be rooted in India. Vertovec argues for a notion of a Hindu diaspora
akin to that of a Jewish and Sikh diaspora because no matter where in
the world they live, most Hindus tend to sacralise India and therefore
have a special relation to the homeland (Vertovec 2000a: 3). Moreover,
most Hindus are Indian, with the obvious exception of Balinese and
Nepalese Hindus (Vertovec 2000a: 3). Rootedness of Hindu identity
varies for different Hindu movements. In the two largest Hindu movements of Suriname Hinduism, rootedness is more salient in the Sanatan Dharm movement than in the Arya Samaj reform movement. The
latter movement emphasises Hinduism as a universal religion that is
not tied to territory (Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003).8
The other reason is that religion has increased in importance as a social determinant in the Netherlands over the last twenty years (Van der
Burg 2004). In conclusion, it is therefore possible that a lack of resources due to the relatively low number of Indian migrants in the
Netherlands could have resulted in their uniting with Surinamese Hindus in religious practices (cf. Baumann 1999).
Most of the studies on people who belong to religious, cultural, and
ethnic minorities either discuss their relation to the country of origin
or how they relate to the country of settlement. As a reflection of this
focus, few studies have been conducted on relations between Indo-Caribbeans and direct migrant Indians. Exceptions include Sinha-Kerkhoff
and Bal (2003), who have researched relations between Indians and
Hindustanis in Suriname. Written in the context of the new PIO legislation, Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal emphasise that their informants do not
feel Indian in their national identity even though many feel connected
to India. Their informants instead felt Surinamese in their national
CONTESTED EQUALITY
241
identity and Hindustani in their cultural identity. In other national contexts, Manuel (1997) has described relations in the Caribbean and the
US, Seenarine (n.d.) in the US and Vertovec (2000a) has devoted a
whole chapter to the topic in the British context in the book The Hindu
Diaspora.
To study relations between people who have migrated from a nationstate at different times and for different purposes enables extended
knowledge on how the process of migration relates to views on tradition and to the way the country of origin and co-ethnics are imagined.
The way informants describe their own group and the other group can
shed new light on cultural continuity and discontinuity. One can also
elucidate how the context of settlement as well as the type and time of
migration has an impact on identity formations. With reference to the
academic debate on Indian diaspora, one can illustrate how these different identity formations lead to little contact and negative views on
each other. By extension, one can question whether the Indian diaspora is a useful concept to describe those who have emigrated from
India for a wide range of purposes in different centuries.
Relations between Indian and Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam9

Potentially Unifying Factors
At first glance, several factors seem to unite Indian and Surinamese
Hindus in the minority situation. Their religious beliefs are similar,
they share an interest in Bollywood films and Bollywood stars, and
have similar ideas about family values and gender roles.
In the diaspora, the Hindu temple takes on a new social and cultural
function and increases in importance compared to in India, where the
Hindu temple plays a less central role in religious practices than the religious buildings in, for example, Christianity and Islam (Vertovec
2000a; Baumann 1999; Choenni 2001). There are four Hindu temples
established by Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam and none established by Indian Hindus.10 Many Indian Hindus say that they were
surprised and happy to see the Hindu temples established by Surinamese Hindus. Both Indian and Surinamese Hindus tend to emphasise
the common nature of their religious beliefs, which is surprising considering the enormous variety of Hindu practices found in India. Most
Indian Hindus do not consider the religious practices of Indian and
Surinamese Hindus to be very different either.11
Many Surinamese Hindus express a strong interest in India and
have either enjoyed visiting or would like to visit India. For many, the
Hindu belief system plays an important role in the desire to visit India
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and many Surinamese Hindus who have been to India speak affectionately and enthusiastically of the holy places they visited.
Bollywood could also potentially play a unifying role for Indian and
Surinamese Hindus. Bollywood films are very popular among both
Surinamese and Indian Hindus. Indian Hindus appreciate that Hindustanis have made Bollywood accessible through numerous video rental stores in the Netherlands. Hindustanis have also arranged various
Bollywood events where, for instance, Bollywood stars make appearances in the Netherlands. These events are also attended by Indian
people. A few Indian and Surinamese Hindus I interviewed thought
that the interest in Bollywood could bring the groups together, or believed that the shared interest reflects cultural commonalities like a similar sense of humour, for instance (for an in-depth analysis of Hindustanis and Bollywood see Verstappen and Rutten, this book).
Various media has been established by Hindustanis in the Netherlands, the national Hindu broadcasting body OHM Organisatie Hindoe Media being the most well known. One of the informants, a representative of an Indian cultural organisation, indicated that Indian
people use the media established by Hindustanis in the Netherlands.
One time after she had been interviewed by the OHM, where mostly
Surinamese Hindus work, she had received many questions from Indian people.
To an outsider, there are also potential language links. In Suriname,
the British Indians developed a language called Sarnami Hindi, which
literally means Surinamese Hindi. The language draws on several Indian dialects as well as other languages such as Sranan Tongo and
Dutch (Van der Avoird 2001). Many informants said that it is possible
to communicate with the Sarnami Hindu and Hindi languages. Moreover, some Surinamese Hindus speak Hindi, and the popularity of
Hindi courses is currently increasing among Surinamese Hindus,
which could possibly provide an additional point of contact.
A value that is common in the self-perceptions of the respective
communities of Indian and Surinamese Hindus, is the emphasis put
on socio-economic status. In the interviews, it was striking how often
people from both groups commented on their own or the other national community being extremely concerned with social status based
on criteria of material wealth, occupation, or educational achievements.
In some instances, there are mutual benefits in the interactions for
both Indian and Surinamese Hindus. In addition to the shared Hindi
language and the fact that many Indians can understand Sarnami Hindi, the fact that due to colonial history Surinamese Hindus tend to
have a better knowledge of the Dutch language creates an additional
benefit for Indian Hindus in instances where the two groups cooperate
on projects in Dutch society. Also, first-generation Indian Hindus have
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243
their life experiences from India, which many Surinamese Hindus are
curious about. Occasionally, these mutual benefits lead to joint businesses like shop keeping, or the selling of food, jewellery or clothes. In
the case of food shops, they also trade similar goods because the food
has many of the same ingredients. Some Indian Hindus also stated
that joint businesses were attractive because of the cultural similarity.
Strained Neighbourly Relations
Despite the potentially unifying factors, there is, generally speaking, little contact between Indian and Surinamese Hindus. One Surinamese
Hindu described the contact or lack thereof in this way:
The Indian people here have their own restaurants; their businesses and they also mind their own business. Concerning
the Surinamese Hindus, one could maybe say that some of
them are a little bit negative towards Indians living here and in
India, the majority is indifferent and dont have anything to do
with them, and a small minority is very interested in them.
Others described relations as a marriage where the partners live apart
or as neighbours; we say hi and bye, they said.
Even the contexts that bring the groups together do not normally result in interactions. Close friendships and intermarriages are the exceptions. Previously, there were more intermarriages, most often between
Indian Hindu males and Surinamese Hindu women. However, many
of these marriages ended in divorce because the main purpose of the
marriage for many of the Indian men had been to obtain a Dutch passport. From the Indian point of view, the reasons for the divorces were
not only passport fraud, but also differences in gender role expectations. Many informants thought that Surinamese Hindu women were
less submissive and more independent than Indian Hindu women,
which tend to make marriages between an Indian Hindu male and a
Surinamese Hindu female more challenging than between an Indian
Hindu female and a Surinamese Hindu male. Because of the marriage
deceits, there is a general distrust of Indian people among Surinamese
Hindus today. This has, according to informants from both groups, not
only led to a decrease in intermarriage, but also close contact in general.
This same difference in gender roles has brought about a recent
trend of Surinamese Hindu males going to India to look for a marriage
partner.12 These men feel that Surinamese Hindu women have become
too independent and liberal since their migration to the Netherlands,
and that the traditional gender roles are impossible with a Surinamese
Hindu marriage partner. It is significant that they do not look for a di-
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rect migrant Indian female in the Netherlands; Indian people prefer to

marry Indians in India or direct migrant Indians, e.g., in the Netherlands, the UK, or Canada, rather than a Surinamese Hindu. The assumed hereditary background of Surinamese Hindus could partly explain the reason for this, as will be elaborated upon in section 4.3.
Surinamese Hindus/Hindustanis and Indian Hindus in the Netherlands normally organise separate cultural events. Indian Hindus show
little interest in neither Hindustani cultural events with old, traditional Indian elements, nor Hindustani parties where Indian elements
are combined with Caribbean influences. Efforts to arrange joint cultural initiatives have tended to fail. According to a Surinamese Hindu
journalist, the main reason for this is different educational levels. Conflicting views on the equality of the partners was another explanation,
he suggested, with reference to a specific joint initiative:
They cant co-operate because the Indian people want to dominate it. Because they have the money and the knowledge they
say. And the Hindustani people say we dont want you to play
the boss when more of our people are in attendance, because
there are more Hindustanis than Indians The Indian people
have the contacts in India, they also have the cultural contacts
here, in the Netherlands. So they have the best networks.
According to the informant, Indian direct migrants believe that they
should play the lead role in this joint initiative despite the fact that
Hindustanis significantly outnumber them in the Netherlands. The argument they give is that the financial resources and networks of direct
migrant Indians are stronger than those of Hindustanis. Another possible contributing factor to a tense dynamic could be different views on
who has the most representative image of India as a result of different
times of migration, a tension I will return to in section 4.1.
Few Indian Hindus attend the Sanatan Dharm temples established
by Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam. Some Indian Hindu informants
expressed a strong desire to have a temple run by Indian Hindus in
Amsterdam, because amongst other reasons they thought the Hindi and general knowledge levels of the priest were low. In a comparative European perspective, the desire for a separate temple is not surprising. Martin Baumann, in an article about Hinduism in Europe, has
stated that In general, one might say, if the number of Hindus living
in a city is large enough, a temple focusing on ones own religious and
cultural particularities is set up (1999: 68).13 On the other hand, the
fusion of Hindus from different backgrounds sometimes is the case
when there are few Hindus and few financial resources (Baumann
1999).
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245
In instances where both Indian and Surinamese Hindus are present

in the Sanatan Dharm temples, the national groups tend to stick together. Some Surinamese and Indian Hindus offer neutral explanations for this, which typically centre on language differences (Hindi
and English vs. Dutch and Sarnami Hindi), or a general sense of being
different due to different national backgrounds. More Indian Hindus
than Surinamese Hindus I interviewed tended to give these kinds of
neutral explanations. Surinamese Hindus active in the temples that I
interviewed explained the low degree of contact with a general sense of
sceptical or negative attitudes towards Indian Hindus, typical statements being they keep to themselves or we dont trust them.
The perceptions they have of each other typically range from indifference to negative views, with Indian Hindus being at least on the surface more positive about Surinamese Hindus than the other way
around. Indian Hindu informants tended to, at first, express that relations were cordial and to describe Surinamese Hindus in a positive
manner. Negative views were often expressed in a subtle manner, and
often only when I probed more. By contrast, Surinamese Hindus more
often than not had negative things to say about Indian Hindus as their
initial response to questions about relations between the two groups.
There are some stereotypical views that informants from both
groups shared. It is a common perception among Indian and Surinamese Hindus alike that Surinamese Hindus are more modern, more
Western or more Dutch than Indian Hindus. Here, the cultural influence from the Surinamese experience is emphasised. On the other
hand, when it comes to the practice of Indian and Hindu customs, Surinamese Hindus are typically seen as more traditional by people from
both groups in the sense that they are thought to retain and practice
old Indian and Hindu customs more vigorously.
To a large extent, however, self-images and images by people from
the other group tend to diverge. This is especially the case when it
comes to views on Surinamese Hindus relation to India and Indian
people. Many Indian Hindus tend to think that Surinamese Hindus
are uncritical about everything Indian. A young Indian Hindu male,
for instance, said that the Hindustanis are more Indian than the Indians and thought that
the Surinamese have an Indian dream, not an American dream.
Because they think that the Indian values are nice and they want
to go back to the Indian values. I told them (his colleagues):
Dont believe this dream because the realities are different there,
dont go there. Bombay is not Bollywood. India is not Bollywood.
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By extension, there is a prevalent notion among Indian Hindus that

Surinamese Hindus admire, respect, and are influenced by Indian people. An Indian Hindu female I interviewed, for instance, responded in
this way to my question about whether Indian Hindus influence Surinamese Hindus: Yes. There are no big difficulties. With us they are
easy. They listen to Indian people. In her view, hence, a lack of conflict
in her contact with Surinamese Hindus was interpreted as a reflection
of Surinamese Hindus supposed reverence for Indian Hindus.
Among Indian Hindus, there is a stereotype of Surinamese Hindus
as uneducated in a general sense and undeveloped in a cultural sense.
Sometimes these views coexist with an admiration for Surinamese
Hindus having kept ancient Indian customs. These Indian Hindus
tend to think that Surinamese Hindus can develop culturally by visiting
India and by getting to know Indian people.
Many Surinamese Hindu informants thought that Surinamese Hindus are influenced by Bollywood films,14 but hardly any thought that
Indian Hindus living in the Netherlands were influenced them. Few of
the Surinamese Hindu informants would agree with the idea that they
view Indian people with admiration; on the contrary, many consider Indian people arrogant and untrustworthy. A Surinamese Hindu female,
for instance, said: Some Indian people have an attitude. There is a
fighting for respect. Thus, in her view, Indian people demand a kind
of admiration from Surinamese Hindus that does not always match
reality.
More than an uncritical attitude, Surinamese Hindu views on Indian
Hindus are often dual. While most of the Surinamese Hindu informants offered negative statements about Indian people, at the same
time, some identified with them on a religious, cultural or ethnic basis.
When it comes to views on India, views were also dual. Many Surinamese Hindus expressed both negative and positive views about India.
Some were very positive and grateful for their experiences in holy
places, for instance, but usually also talked about what had shocked
them in India, such as the poverty or the way people treated each
other.15 Earlier research has also noted an ambivalent attitude towards
India among Hindustanis (e.g., Van der Burg 2004; Van der Veer
1996). Hence, India is not necessarily idealised despite a diasporic
stance towards India or an interest in India.
One area in which there was consensus between Indian and Surinamese Hindu informants, was the notion of whether Surinamese Hindus influence Indian Hindus in a cultural or religious sense. Almost
no one thought this was the case, and the few who did, referred to
close friendships or intermarriages. In short, potentially unifying factors normally do not lead to mutual exchange, influence, and interaction. Furthermore, there seems to be discrepancies regarding the ex-
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247
pected roles of Indian and Surinamese Hindus; Indian Hindus seem

to expect a kind of respect and admiration with which Surinamese
Hindus do not gladly respond.
Some Indian Hindu informants who had been in the Netherlands
for several decades, in the beginning experienced a lot of curiosity from
Surinamese Hindus. This curiosity had to put it mildly over time
decreased. The current prevalent sceptical attitudes among Surinamese
Hindus towards Indian Hindus indicates a shift in their attitudes. I argue that this shift is not only a result of marriage deceits but that it
also is due to negative encounters that are rooted in the equality of the
partners being contested.
Possible Explanations for Strained Relations

The reasons for the general lack of interaction between Indian and Surinamese Hindus is due to many factors.16 Obviously, many things have
changed both in India and in the cultural patterns of Surinamese Hindus in the 130 years that Surinamese Hindus have lived in Suriname
and the Netherlands. There is a profound difference in habitus due to
differences in national socialisations that can make the differences
hard to pinpoint. Several informants noted that they were very different
from each other but that they could not verbalise in what ways. In the
following section, I will discuss the different periods of migration, different educational levels, and the different imagined communities with
reference to the Indian background as possible explanations for the
low degree of interaction.
Different Periods of Migration
In the interviews, the topic that was explored in depth was the religious
customs of the Sanatan Dharm movement, whereas cultural customs
were discussed to a lesser degree. Surinamese Hindus are stereotypically seen as more religious and devotional than Indian Hindus. As
mentioned above, they are also seen as more traditional. When it
comes to Hindu customs, the experience from Suriname is not seen as
relevant.17
Both Indian and Surinamese Hindu informants often said that the
Hindu customs of Surinamese Hindus were longer and more elaborate
than what is normally observed in India.18 The vast majority of the informants from both groups thought that the customs were authentic;
the way they were practised in India 150 years ago.19
Even though the belief in continuity seems to be shared, the valorisation on continuity differs depending on ones individual religious approach as well as ones personal and national background. Comments
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from Indian Hindus ranged from they saved it, I really admire that,
to I always tell them that they are frozen in time. For some, this admiration for saving it coexisted with the view that Surinamese Hindus
should develop Indian culture or update their Hindu beliefs by visiting India. Many Indian Hindus, especially those with higher educations and with an urban Indian background, typically found the Sanatan Dharm movement dogmatic, superstitious and old-fashioned.
Furthermore, even if they did admire the traditionalism of Sanatan
Dharm Surinamese Hindus, many at the same time considered them
to be less knowledgeable of Hinduism. A few Indian Hindus did also
question authenticity, but what is most relevant for this discussion is
the fact that regardless of their views on authenticity, Indian Hindu informants tended to view India as the standard. For some, it is the standard for more updated practices and knowledge, for others, it is the
standard for authenticity. In the U.S. context, Seenarine has argued
that direct migrant Indians view Indo-Caribbeans in a parent-child
manner. After observing that Indo-Caribbeans are rarely included in
South Asian umbrella organisations, he states; Of course, there has always been religious linkages, however, it is always in the father/child
mode and the child never grows up (Seenarine n.d.: 6). Perhaps there
is also something to this observation in the Dutch context. In the parent-child views on relations, Surinamese Hindus can develop culturally
and religiously if they visit India and become acquainted with Indian
people.
Similarly to among Indian Hindus, opinions among Surinamese
Hindus on the assumed higher levels of traditionalism vary greatly.20
Some find the Sanatan Dharm movement overly ritualistic and dogmatic. Meanwhile, among Surinamese Hindus active in the Sanatan
Dharm movement it is common perspective to take pride in having
kept alive Hindu traditions better than Indians precisely because of
the separation from India.21 A board member of one of the other temples, for instance, stated:
our puja is according to the original Hindu system . We have
maintained it ten times better (than those in India). The problem is that they are born there, so they think that they know
better.
A Sanatan Dharm priest in another temple in Amsterdam said that the
temple regularly had visits from Surinamese priests in order to nourish
the ancient practice of Hinduism and feared that these practices
would die out if many Indian Hindus were to migrate to the Netherlands in the future. The tendency to valorise the practices in Suriname
Hinduism above the Hinduism practised in India is not free of ambiva-
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249
lence due to the status of India as a holy land, as has also been noted
in other research (Van der Veer 1996, Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003).
Nevertheless, in relations with Indian Hindus, the ambivalence seems
to have been toned down and the view that Surinamese Hindus are
superior due to a greater level of authenticity is emphasised. The problem, according to the board member, could due be to diverging views
on what is most valuable. Put simply; whereas Surinamese Hindus in
the movement think they have knowledge about ancient forms of Hinduism, Indian Hindus think they have access to true and more enlightened forms of Hinduism through their life experiences gained in
India. As a result, there are divergent views on who should learn from
whom. The different valorisations of practising ancient Indian and
Hindu customs are central to the tense relations between Indian and
Surinamese Hindus as they hinder communication both ways and lead
to contested views on who has the standard.
Whether the customs are authentic is an entirely different discussion. According to Sokefeld, there is a duality between change and continuity in the diaspora and The rhetoric of continuity obscures that actors constantly re-constitute and re-invent (or refuse to reconstitute) in
diverse manners what is imagined as simply continuing (Sokefeld
2000: 23, quoted in Vertovec 2000b: 17). Moreover, rituals tend to
deny change (Van der Veer, 1996).22 At the same time, increased traditionalism is a typical process of migration in the sense that some customs and images become frozen and symbolic of the cultural or ethnic group identity. The emotional importance of these symbols for
group identity often leads to disappointment when migrants and their
descendants visit the homeland that has undergone changes since
emigration. The images of India that are based on Surinamese Hindu
forefathers memories (modified or not) or the media or their visits to
India differ greatly from the images of India based on the life experience of direct migrant Indian Hindus. Within this perspective, it is not
surprising that an Indian Hindu female considered relations difficult
because when Indians are asked questions about India Indian people
cannot meet Surinamese Hindu expectations.
The Importance of Educational Levels
When Indian and Surinamese Hindus describe each other and the dynamics between the two groups, other identities than those related to a
common Indian background are often emphasised. In particular, identities that relate to occupational position and educational levels are seen
as more important than a shared interest in India and religious beliefs
that, at least in the Dutch context, seem similar.
According to a study by Van der Avoird, most Hindustanis have jobs
associated with [a] lower socio-economic status or are unemployed
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(2001: 97). Other research has concluded that the socio-economic position of Surinamese Hindus is lower than the position of the indigenous population and that the unemployment rate in 1990 was three
times higher than among the Dutch population (Berten 1992: quoted
in Van der Avoird, 2001: 97). At the same time, the Hindustani group
is advancing in its social mobility. Lately, more and more Hindustanis
have been successful on the job market or in creating their own employment in small enterprises, shops and businesses (Van der Avoird
2001). Hindustanis are often seen as a successful immigrant group in
Dutch society socio-economically speaking (Choenni 2003b; Van Niekerk 2002: 232).
Among the direct migrant Indians in the Netherlands, a large number of the recent migrants are highly skilled. The socio-economic background of direct migrant Indians in the Netherlands is, however, not
homogenous socio-economically speaking. In addition to the 15,000 registered Indians in the Netherlands23, there are estimated 3000 to
5000 irregular Indians in the Netherlands, most of whom come from
Punjab (Indiawijzer, reference a).24 According to some of the informants, there is an overlap of regional background and occupation sector among direct migrant Indians in the Netherlands.
When they speak about each other, a topic that is often brought to attention is the difference between Surinamese Hindus and the segment
of Indian Hindus who are highly educated. Indian and Surinamese
Hindus alike pointed out that there is a lack of meeting points due to
different socio-economic positions; they do not meet at work, they live
in different neighbourhoods and their children go to different schools,
and few highly educated Indian Hindus attend the Sanatan Dharm
temples. Furthermore, many of the informants emphasised that different educational levels also have led to different ways of thinking. Especially highly educated Indian Hindus with an Indian urban background emphasised this latter aspect. They dont have a common
base, one Indian Hindu working in IT commented.
It might be a reflection of the aforementioned valorisation of socioeconomic success that Surinamese Hindus tend to identify more with
those Indian people who have done well socio-economically than those
who have not. The Surinamese Hindu journalist quoted previously also
noted that, if its a lawyer or an architect they (Surinamese Hindus)
are proud to see that an Indian person is in such a high position. This
kind of identification is exemplified by a quote from a Surinamese
Hindu administrative employee:
Indian people are typically very hard working people. Here in
Holland I have noticed that they work very hard. They have
reached a good standard of living here in a short period of time.
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251
But Hindustanis are also hard working. Lets say there are
several races in Suriname. The whole Surinamese economy is in
Hindustani hands because they are also their roots are in India and so they are also hard-working people. The richest people
in Suriname are Hindustani.
Van Niekerk has noted similar identification processes in her research.
When explaining the socio-economic success of the Indo-Surinamese
in the Netherlands, her informants sometimes also referred to the success of East Indians elsewhere in the world (Van Niekerk 2002: 235).
Some of her informants gave religious or cultural explanations for the
success of East Indians, while others explained it in ethnic terms, the
Indo-Surinamese desire for progress as an inherited trait [is] in their
blood (Van Niekerk 2002: 235).
Parallel to the identification with Indian people who have reached a
high socio-economic status, there is often a dissociation from Indians
with a lower socio-economic status. Our Surinamese Hindu journalist
noted that Surinamese Hindus tend to look down upon the lower-educated Indian people, some of whom are illegal immigrants and work in
the market or run small shops. These Indians have acquired the nickname Indiaman among Surinamese Hindus, with its negative connotations of untrustworthiness in business matters as well as when they
marry Surinamese Hindus to obtain a Dutch passport. An example of
dissociation can be seen in the following quote by a Surinamese Hindu
who works in the banking sector. In general, she did not trust direct
migrant Indians, but also thought that it was easier to give better-educated Indian people a chance:
Some Indians one can invite home. If they study here in the
Netherlands one thinks that they are more open than someone
who looks like he has bad manners. With the Indians who have
bad manners, you always think how will they be? and doubt
whether they are good or not. But if an Indian studies here, one
will think OK, he has good manners and comes from a good
family.
Hence, one important reason for little interaction may simply be a result of the common social phenomenon that people have more contact
with persons of similar educational and occupational backgrounds. In
addition to lack of meeting points, there also comes along a kind of
cultural difference with different levels of education. According to Gellner (1983), an important feature of national socialisation is education,
what he calls a common exo-socialisation. Analogous to this, one
could argue that the chances of cultural similarity are greater between
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people with the same levels of education than between those with different levels regardless of cultural and national background. There
are some shared symbols and therefore shared culture because educational institutions are often international in their knowledge base.
However, I also argue that the emphasis on educational levels might
be of particular importance for Surinamese and Indian Hindus due to
strong community values regarding education and occupational status,
as noted in the section Potentially Uniting Factors.25
Different Imagined Communities: Region and Caste vs. All-Indian Identity
One can now return to Vertovecs definition of diaspora as an imagined connection between a post-migration (including refugee) population and a place of origin and with people of similar cultural origins
elsewhere (Vertovec 2000b: 12). In the following section, I will argue
that the imagined connection and hence identification is more common among Surinamese than Indian Hindus with a diasporic stance
and that this is because of the different contexts of settlement as well
as the socio-economic composition of the migrants.
Indian Hindus: They Were Indentured Labourers from Bihar
When Indian Hindus discuss the Indian background of Surinamese
Hindus, it is often in a way that dissociates them from Surinamese
Hindus. When I asked Indian Hindus why there was so little interaction, typical comments focussed on the fact that Surinamese Hindus
had been land workers in Suriname and that their forefathers were Biharis, had been land workers in India, and had chosen to become indentured labourers. Regional and caste identities seem to play a role in
these comments.
We think that they are working class because of the language they
speak, a 27-year-old Indian Hindu stated. Sarnami Hindi does not, as
previously suggested, unite Indian and Surinamese Hindus. On the
contrary, the language is a major characteristic in the development of
negative stereotypes that many Indian Hindus have of Surinamese
Hindus as uneducated and undeveloped. Among the languages that
Sarnami Hindi is influenced by, linguists believe that it shares the
most unique features with Bhojpuri (Van der Avoird 2001: 31), one of
the main languages of the Indian state of Bihar. According to the informants, Biharis are stereotypically seen as being rural, poor, and uneducated and are seen as labourers because many Biharis migrate to other
Indian states in that capacity. Being a labourer has lower class connotations for some and low caste for others (one informant explained that
his Punjabi colleagues thought Biharis were from the lower castes because most labourers in Punjab are Biharis). Bhojpuri is also considered to be grammatically somewhat unrefined by Indian Hindus. An
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253
Indian financial expatriate expressed the relationship between Sarnami

Hindi and Bihar in this way:
the language they speak is typically rural I would say. Its like
a villager who goes to the city and tries to speak the language
the Surinamese language is inspired by the language of Bihar,
which is not spoken in urban India So when a Surinamese
speaks Hindi it gives one the impression that it is someone
speaking with a disadvantage. And I guess that this aspect in
particular immediately gives one the feeling of look, he cant,
hes not up to it.
The Bihari language and the Bihari people are often the subject of
jokes in India and are also satirised by Bollywood characters (Sinha
2000). Various articles and essays in the Indian media and on Internet
discussion sites also portray Biharis as a stigmatised people because of
that states poverty, its tradition of labour emigrants, its caste wars and
it being the most undeveloped state in India.26
Direct migrant Indian Hindus consider the indentured labourer as
lower class. Many also see it as an indication of being from a lower
caste.27 When I asked Indian Hindus about the low degree of interaction, many were quick to point out that the Surinamese Hindu forefathers emigrated as indentured labourers and that they had been labourers and farmers in India and Suriname. These comments insinuate the lower castes in the Varna system (Encyclopaedia Britannica). For
instance, a young Indian Hindu male said;
They were indentured labourers, whereas the Indians who come
directly from India to the Netherlands are usually highly educated. The caste system is of no importance today, but my father
who is Brahmin only wants to associate with Brahmins from Tamil Nadu.
Current and present educational levels are closely connected in the argument, which is logical because caste in the sense of secular status
(as opposed to ritual status) is connected to occupation (Stevenson
1953).
Several informants considered low caste assumptions to be among
the reasons why there was so little intermarriage between Indian and
Surinamese Hindus.28 If this is the case, it is also possible that, consciously or unconsciously, their preferred acquaintances are often still
guided by caste notions. Furthermore, low caste views may also partly
explain why few Indian Hindus attend the temples run by Surinamese
Hindus, It may well be that the main reason for the desire of some In-
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dian Hindus for a separate temple has to do with the cultural and social function that religious buildings have in minority situations (cf.
Vertovec 2000a: 124); due to this function migrant religious buildings
are often organized according to country of origin. But an additional
explanation which is related to caste is also relevant to consider. Vertovec, in a discussion on caste inside and outside India, has stated that
In India, the caste system (with all its variations) revolves around individual membership through birth in hierarchically ranked, mutual interdependent, endogamous corporate groups often associated with given occupations, ritual duties and roles, modes of economic and behavioural transaction, essential attributes surrounding degrees of purity/
pollution, specific customs and traditions of worship. Outside of India, the
complex systems of interaction which comprise the living stuff of caste
are absent; caste identities are usually all that remains (Vertovec
2000a: 24, emphasis added). In the interviews, no informants from
either group thought that the Indian Hindu beliefs that Surinamese
Hindus are of lower castes explains the low temple attendance by Indian Hindus and the wish that some of them have for a separate temple. The topic of caste is sensitive and needs to be researched in greater
depth29 before conclusions can be made. Within a theoretical perspective, however, it is viable that caste does play a role in the desire to have
a separate temple. Ritual and tradition emphasise continuity (e.g., Van
der Veer 1996) and because direct migrant Indians have had life experience from India, it would be surprising if caste identities were irrelevant regarding the specific customs and traditions of worship that
are currently preferred.
Regional and caste connotations are of importance in and of themselves for Indian Hindus living in the Netherlands. This was shown in
the quote where an Indian Hindu expressed that to speak the Sarnami
Hindi signals to speak with a disadvantage. To speak of an Indian
community in the Netherlands is an abstraction (to a greater degree
than to speak of a Hindustani community) because direct migrant Indians are divided into various communities where region of origin and
not common Indian background is one of the main common denominators.30 Caste and region, however, has a particular explanatory dynamic when Indian Hindus are talking about Surinamese Hindus. Because of the indentured labourer background and the assumed Bihari
and low caste heritage, many Indian Hindus think that Surinamese
Hindus have an uneducated and undeveloped background. The emphasis on an assumed uneducated background is combined with current educational levels in their description of Surinamese Hindus. The
stereotypes involving low development levels is further fuelled by the
view that Surinamese Hindus did not develop Indian culture but that it
instead was kept frozen in time. Sometimes the assumed structural
CONTESTED EQUALITY
255
background is used to explain experiences of cultural incompatibility.

For instance, an Indian Hindu who thought that Surinamese Hindus
on average were old-fashioned and unenlightened, explained this as largely being a consequence of migrating from India at different times;
their cultural experiences and images of India therefore differed. But
she also explained what she called backwardness of Surinamese Hindus with their hereditary background from India;
I would say that they come from a lower class, not that they are
born into poor families but that they all come from lower classes
They did not have much money, not much education they
were backward people. Maybe not all of them, there are always exceptions, but generally speaking this was the case. I
think they were part of the working class, who used to work
there as labourers, and they emigrated to make money. These
people are normally not very educated, they come from poor families. And of course these are the children, so the blood is the
same.
However, this informant also stressed that the younger generation is
different; in the sense that she thought that they were more openminded and knowledgeable. She also stated that There are some very
good people who have studied a lot, gone to university, been to India,
know many Indian people. When they see the everyday-life [of Indians], their mentality changes. Hence, in these instances it seems that
the same blood no longer matters; through education, contact with Indians and visits to India, Surinamese Hindus can become cultivated
and the hereditary background is no longer an issue for this informant.
Surinamese Hindus: All-Indian Identity and All-Hindu Identity
In the introduction, I discussed the heterogeneity of cultural orientations among Surinamese Hindus. With this in mind, it would be misleading to assume that most Surinamese Hindus are oriented towards
India even though the previous section described a tendency of situational identification with Indian Hindus who have done well socio-economically. However, what I do want to draw attention to is that among
those Surinamese Hindus who take a diasporic stance towards India,
there seems to be a contradiction between their imagined community
(Anderson 1983) and the imagined communities of most of the Indian
Hindus. More of the Surinamese Hindus than the Indian Hindus that
I interviewed stressed unity and identification with the other group on
the basis of culture, religion, or ethnicity. Some thought that Indian
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Hindus did not accordingly identify with them. For instance, a 59-yearold Surinamese Hindu administrative employee said:
Surinamese Hindus feel that they are equal and if they discover
that the other group (Indians) feels that they are better, then
they are a bit disappointed. Because they feel the that the [two
groups] are equal: they are Indian, we are Indian, we have lived
abroad for a few centuries but we maintain our Hindu customs
and suchlike.
A Surinamese Hindu lawyer in her forties who was active in the Sanatan Dharm also emphasised Hinduism as a binding point:
There is a big difference between Indian and Surinamese Hindus. They see us as foreign.
- But you dont see them as foreign?
No, we dont see them as foreign. The goddess in the Ramayana
is from there. But Indian people are reserved towards us.
The particular identity processes that took place in Suriname can explain this contradiction. In Suriname, as well as other locations where
indentured labourers migrated to, the caste system gradually disintegrated. The process had already started during emigration on the ships
and continued under the structure of indentured labour (Van der Veer
and Vertovec 1991).31 It has been argued that, parallel to the dissolution
of the caste system, an exclusionary Indian caste of Hindustanis developed in Suriname that was closed by endogamy and in other ways to
the rest of Surinamese society (Speckmann 1967; Hoefte 1998). Speckmann argues that feelings of self-worth based on birth shifted from a
caste proper to an ethnic group as a whole (1967: 212). The fact that
as many as 80 per cent of the indentured labourers came from the
same region in India may have made negotiations of the all-Indian
identity smoother. In addition, most Surinamese Hindus gradually lost
contact with their relatives in India (Van der Veer 1996). Furthermore,
Indian commercial mass culture arrived in the Caribbean in approximately 1930 and emphasised a pan-Indian tradition over a regional
Bhojpuri identity. Meanwhile, contact with Bhojpuris in Fiji, Mauritius
and South Africa was almost non-existent (Manuel 1997). The all-Indian unification was further fostered by the aforementioned fact that
the Indian indentured labourers had a marginal position in Suriname.
Indentured labour was associated with slavery and the religious practices were looked down upon (Hoefte 1998; Van der Veer and Vertovec
CONTESTED EQUALITY
257
1991). There was, in fact, a small group of Sindhi32 business people

who settled in Surinam but did not join the Hindustanis in the all-Indian identity (Ellen Bal, personal communication 15 June 2005). The
notion of a connection between socio-economic marginalisation and
unification, as well as the importance of socio-economic identities discussed in the previous section, may explain why.
The all-Indian identity was manifested by the merging of various
cultural customs and the development of Sarnami Hindi (Hoefte
1998). Hinduism also became a symbol of group identity for the indentured labourers. According to Van der Veer and Vertovec (1991), a result of the disintegration of the caste system as well as the Brahmanisation process in Caribbean Hinduism was that Hinduism became
ethnisised. The link between ethnicity and Hinduism was further
strengthened by the fact that because most Hindustanis were Hindus,
the Hindu Brahmanical organisations also developed into movements
that politically represented the communal interests of the Indians. In
Jayawardenas account, the institutionalisation of Brahmanical Hinduism and the unification of Hinduism can be connected to a consciousness of being Indians in a multi-ethnic society, where only this dimension of their social personality was significant and all [the] finer distinctions of caste, ritual, and belief were unappreciated and ignored (1968:
444). The all-Indian and all-Hindu identities thus became intertwined.
One sees this interconnectedness of Hindu and Indian identities in the
quotes by the two Surinamese Hindu informants above.
In the introduction, I referred to the research of Sinha-Kerkhoff and
Bal whose informants felt they were Surinamese in their national identity and Hindustani in their cultural identity. The Surinamese Hindu
informants in this research also stressed that they were Surinamese or
Dutch in their national identity. However, the situational identification
with Indian Hindus who have done well socio-economically, the general identification that some Surinamese Hindus have with Indian Hindus and the theory about an all-Indian endogamous caste, sheds light
on the ethnic dimension of the Hindustani identity.
Conclusion
In summary, this article first of all showed how different times of migration have led to strained relations between Indian and Surinamese
Hindus due to their varying images of India and the contested views
they have on where the standard for Hindu customs should be. Therefore the Indian and Hindu backgrounds often diverge rather than unify
Indian and Surinamese Hindus. Secondly, the importance of educational levels and class identities was discussed. We here saw that class
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identities often override religious and cultural identities in importance

because of the limited interaction contexts and different ways of thinking. For Surinamese Hindus, we also saw how class identities interact
with ethnic and cultural identities in that they situationally identify
with Indian Hindus. Thirdly, a discrepancy in the imagined communities of Indian and Surinamese Hindus with reference to the Indian
and Hindu background has been suggested. Furthermore, the Indian
and Hindu backgrounds tend to separate rather than unify Indian and
Surinamese Hindus.
Contrary to Lals statement,33 an all-Indian identity process does not
seem to have taken place for Indian Hindus in the Netherlands. Socioeconomic, caste and regional identities appear to be of greater importance than similar cultural origins, possibly making internal divisions
among direct migrant Indian Hindus in the Netherlands just as strong
as the division between Indian and Surinamese Hindus. It is likely that
the overlap between occupational and regional backgrounds among Indian Hindus strengthens the importance of regional identity.
While the regional composition of the migrants and the amount of
time that has passed since emigration might make Lals statement
more likely, the context of settlement may prove to be at least as important in deciding whether an all-Indian identity that transcends all other
distinctions becomes important in minority contexts. Is it beneficial to
unite around cultural and religious identities in the minority context?
Marginalisation for socio-economic or religious reasons seems to be
important, as does the socio-economic composition of the settlers. The
Surinamese Hindu forefathers had a similar societal position because
all were indentured labourers. The marginalisation for socio-economic
and religious reasons contributed to their uniting politically and socially around an all-Indian identity. In contrast, there is a socio-economic heterogeneity of direct migrant Indian Hindus in the Netherlands. Moreover, direct migrant Indians in the Netherlands may be a
minority, but not a particularly stigmatised or marginalised minority in
that the majority have a high socio-economic position. They do not experience religious stigmatisation either, on the contrary, Hindu religion
and India have attained a certain level of popularity in the Netherlands
as in many other Western nations today (Van der Avoird 2001: 37; cf.
also Seenarine n.d.).
Vertovec has stated in his article regarding the British context that
Indo-Caribbeans are regularly identified as Asians by most whites
and similarly subjected to racial discrimination they are often simultaneously excluded (or at best regarded as a low-status, adjunct group)
on social and cultural grounds by most other Asians. This, in turn,
leads to many Indo-Caribbeans reciprocally dissociating themselves
from subcontinental Indians (Vertovec 2000a: 110). One could argue
CONTESTED EQUALITY
259
that similar processes take place in the Dutch context. As mentioned

earlier, Indian Hindu informants who had been in the Netherlands for
several decades said that they experienced great curiosity from Surinamese Hindus in the beginning. Even if Indian Hindus initially offer
more positive statements regarding their relations with Surinamese
Hindus, negative stereotypes are strong and prevalent. One important
reason for the Surinamese Hindu dissociation has to do with marriage
deceits. Surinamese Hindus may also dissociate due to contested equality, as seen in the quote: Surinamese Hindus feel that they are equal
and if they discover that the other group (Indians) feels that they are
better, then they are a bit disappointed. Because they feel that the [two
groups] are equal: Equality is also contested because of the various
imagined communities. It is also contested because of the different
views regarding the standard of Indian and Hindu customs. With these
aspects in mind, it is not surprising that joint initiatives have tended to
be of a strained character.
A final comment should be made about the diaspora concept. The
research results about Indian Hindu views are in favour of Brubakers
critique of the diaspora concept. In one sense, the caste, class, and regional differences that would have separated these two groups and the
Indian people themselves in the Indian context are reproduced in the
Dutch context. When using the diaspora concept as an analytical tool,
therefore, it is essential to not overestimate the centrality of ancestral
and biological national background as a basis for self-understanding,
self-categorisation, and group formation.
Acknowledgements
This article is a shorter modified version of an MA Thesis in Migration
and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Thanks to Mario
Rutten and Ellen Bal for supervision on the thesis and advice before
writing the article. Also thanks to Gijsbert Oonk for feedback and suggestions on the shorter version.
Notes
1
For a more elaborate overview of migration and settlement in Surinam, see, for example. Hoefte 1998; Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003 or Van der Veer 1996 in English
and De Klerk 1953 and the book Hindostanen. Van Brits-Indische emigranten via Suriname tot burgers van Nederland Choenni and Adhin (eds.) 2003.
One-third of the Surinamese population emigrated to the Netherlands in the 1970s
(Van der Avoird, 2001:101). At the time of Surinames independence, the Netherlands
tried to limit immigration to the Netherlands by allowing free movement between
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Suriname and the Netherlands between 1975-1980. The unintended result two
large emigrations of Surinamese to the Netherlands at the beginning and the end of
the five-year period migration however, was partly due to insecurity about the economic and political stability in Suriname, (Van Amersfoort and Penninx, 1998).
3 The term is not used in the sense of citizenship because Surinamese Hindus have
been Dutch citizens since 1927 (Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003), but as a notion that
signifies the distinct experience of Hinduism through generations in Suriname (see,
e.g., Van der Burg 2004 or Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991 for an overview of Hinduism in Suriname and the Caribbean).
4 In this context, Sanatan Dharm is the term used to denote the largest institutionalised movement in Suriname Hinduism.
5 The research took place between November 2004 and February 2005. In the fieldwork, the nature of Surinamese Hindus connection to their Indian background and
the Indian people (common stereotype and settings for contact) was explored
through informal conversations and participant observation. In the interviews, the
questions were made open and general to ensure as many individual perspectives as
possible and to avoid putting words into peoples mouths. The first twelve interviews
were exploratory, and, together with the informal conversations during the fieldwork,
formed the basis of a checklist that was used in the following interviews. As my own
knowledge accumulated, new sub-topics were included in order to confirm or discount common opinions. The sub-questions thus became more specific over time
even though the interviews always started with the same general questions, which often led the informants to introducing other topics on the checklist. At the end of the
interviews, I raised the topics on the checklist that had not been discussed.
6 For a discussion of heterogeneity of Hindu beliefs and practices in India and an examination of the concept of Hinduism as a construction that suggests a unitary phenomenon that does not reflect reality, see Vertovec 2000a, pp 7-13.
7 An example of the influence of ascription is that the term Hindu originally derives
from the term Persians used in the first millennium AD to designate generally the
people of India (that is, of the region of the river Indus, after which the term derives) (Vertovec 2000a: 9).
8 This was one of the main reasons why the Sanatan Dharm was chosen for the research. Moreover, the movement is institutionally strong in Amsterdam there are
four Sanatan Dharm temples but no Arya Samaj temples in the city and both Indian
and Surinamese Hindus informants thus tended to refer to the movement when
speaking of Suriname Hinduism. These reasons, among other theoretical considerations, took precedence over the fact that the Sanatan Dharm movement does not
have a hegemonic status among Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands today (Van
der Burg 2004; Baumann 1999).
9 When relevant, the term Hindustani will be used in this section.
10 A differentiation should possibly be made between North Indian and South Indian
in the Netherlands; according to a South Indian informant, many South Indians do
not go to the Surinamese Hindu temples because the practices were similar to those
used in Northern Indian temples. Most of the informants in the study were North
Indian, which may somewhat account for this finding.
11 Another new trend that could be an interesting topic for further research is marriages between so-called second-generation Indian Hindus and Surinamese Hindus.
12 In The US, by contrast, most Hindu temples are ecumenical to some degree (Williams 1992: 228-257, quoted in Baumann 1999: 70).
13 An interest in Bollywood films does not necessarily indicate an interest in India. Verstappen and Rutten (this book) have discussed the way their Hindustani informants
associate Bollywood films with anything but India; India merely serves as a back-
CONTESTED EQUALITY
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
261
ground and Indian reality is seen as far removed from the glamorous world that is
often depicted in Bollywood films.
Some said thank God I was not born there after talking about their good and bad experiences in India, even though they felt a strong connection because of Hinduism
or because of their forefathers. Similar views have been noted in the research of
Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal, who state that Some informants explicitly expressed their
gratefulness to their forefathers, whose migration saved them from poverty (SinhaKerkhoff and Bal 2003: 16).
Some reasons for the low degree of interaction that will not, due to space limitation,
be discussed in the article include notions of cultural purity and different gender role
ideologies. The latter is especially central in images of each other and seems to a
large degree to account for the distance held by Indian Hindus. Even though there
are many similarities in the gender discourse (that typically centre on the purity of
the girls and whether or not they are allowed to go to discothe`ques), both Indian and
Surinamese Hindus tend to think that Surinamese Hindu women are more independent and more liberal sexually. The frequency of which this was discussed in the interviews indicated that differences in gender role patterns strongly divide Surinamese
and Indian Hindus.
On the other hand, concerning cultural customs, two views of Surinamese customs
coexist among Indian Hindus: on the one hand, a view that the Surinamese experience has led to cultural impurity, on the other hand, a view of Surinamese Hindus
as being more traditional than Indian Hindus.
The longer rituals reflect the congregational form of worship that developed in Suriname (cf. Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991).
Several Surinamese Hindu informants thought that Surinamese Hindus are internally divided in the Netherlands with half of them active in the Sanatan Dharm and
the other half not.
This view on Suriname Hinduism as has been previously noted in other research
(Van der Veer 1996; Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal 2003; Vertovec 2000a). Similarly, in studies on music, Manuel (1997) has found that due to the assumed greater authenticity of Indian music practices in the Caribbean, Indo-Caribbeans tend to evaluate
their own practices above those found in India.
In the case of Suriname Hinduism, according to Van der Veer and Vertovec (1991),
there has been a process of homogenisation of Hinduism in almost all of the foreign
colonies where Indian labour migrants emigrated. Hinduism in the Caribbean was
the result of a merging of the lowest common denominators (Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991: 4) of beliefs from Hindus of different castes and geographical and linguistic backgrounds.
Counting first- and second-generation Indians, including those who have become
Dutch citizens.
The Indiawijzer website is written by Wahid Saleh who was secretary of the Netherlands-India Association for fifteen years and who has an extensive network of Indian
people in the Netherlands.
Van Niekerk (2002) explains the importance of education among Indo-Surinamese
with the history of East Indians in Suriname and the specific economic niche they
occupied (in Surinam) (Van Niekerk 2002:235). Another possibility which takes
into consideration that this value also is strong among Indian Hindus is that caste
consciousness has remained among Surinamese Hindus on the level of status evaluation in occupation, wealth and education (see Jayawardena 1968; Speckmann 1967
and Seenarine n.d.).
Patna Daily 2005; Shubhrangshu 2003; Bhartiya n.d.; Srinivasan 2003; Asian Age
2003.
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25 The British Indian indentured labourers who migrated to Suriname had different social and caste backgrounds (Hoefte 1998; de Klerk 1953; Van der Veer and Vertovec
1991; Speckmann 1968). It is not possible to fully know the caste origins because the
registers rely on self-reporting where some may have reported a higher caste; others
may have reported a lower caste (because the labour recruiters assumed that low
caste migrants would be more experienced farmers and labourers) than what was actually the case (Hoefte 1998). This being said, according to the various records and
accounts, the caste and social background of the indentured labourers varied. In
Hoeftes words: the quite complete data show that the migrants represented an
average sample of the population, without an extraordinarily high number coming
from low castes (Hoefte 1998: 37). In the British colonial authority records, for example, which used some very broad (and, according to Van der Veer and Vertovec,
somewhat superficial) caste classifications, only 31.4 % of the indentured labourers
were from the lower castes (Van der veer and Vertovec 1991).
26 Other reasons that informants gave for the low degree of intermarriage were different educational levels, language differences, skin colour (Biharis have darker skin,
some Indian informants stated), and differences in gender role ideologies.
27 With long-term fieldwork rather than interviews being a preferable approach.
28 Again, caste identities would need to be researched more extensively before conclusions on whether it is one of the main common denominators can be made.
29 The reasons for the disintegration were mainly that the rules of endogamy and work
could not be maintained during the plantation period (Van der Burg 1993). Moreover,
most of the indentured labourers migrated individually from different locations in
India and it was not possible to create common categories based on the vast variety
of demographics, roles, networks, attributes, categories, and views surrounding caste
(Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991: 4). Furthermore, there was no need for the colonial
authorities to maintain caste constructions, as had been the case in British India
(Van der Veer and Vertovec 1991).
30 Wikipedia.org states: Sindhi refers to an ethnic group of people originating in Sindh
which is part of present-day Pakistan. Many Sindhis live in Pakistan but many Sindhis emigrated to India when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947. The language
of these people is also known as Sindhi.
31 Indians abroad are presumed to shed their regional, linguistic, and ethnic identities
in deference to the more general identity of being Indian (Lal n.d., UCLA website on
Indian diaspora http://www.sscent.ucla.edu/southasia/Diaspora/reflect.html)
11
Afterword
Stray Thoughts of an Historian on Indian or South Asian

Diaspora(s)
Claude Markovits
This volume adopts a cautiously critical stance vis-a`-vis the framework

of diaspora as applied to the Indian case. It does so through the use of
different approaches, and, although the various authors do not necessarily agree on all points, the overall effect achieved is impressive, and refreshingly original. The only justification for this afterword is to offer
a slightly decalee view coming from an historian who has worked exclusively on one aspect of the South Asian diaspora, the dispersal of
South Asian traders, a fairly specialised area of research, and someone
who feels no particular loyalty, institutional or affective, to the diaspora
framework. Here I shall try to reframe some of the questions regarding
diaspora in a more historical mode, by trying to look both at empirical facts and perceptions as they evolved over time. I am not going to
consider the instrumental uses of the term Indian diaspora. It is
clear that the Government of India, for its part, has good reasons to
promote that notion, in the hope of economic and political gains, and
nobody is going to begrudge them the right to do so. Similarly, diaspora studies have become a recognised sub-field within the broader
field of South Asian studies, providing research grants and jobs
aplenty, and it would be foolish to object to that. Last but not least, people of South Asian origin all over the world often feel that thinking of
themselves as members of an overarching Indian or South Asian
diaspora brings them benefits, both emotional and material, which are
worth fighting for, and it would be churlish to deny them those benefits, however imaginary they might appear to be.
In discussing the genealogy of the diaspora approach, which became dominant in the 1980s and 1990s, and replaced, as mentioned
by Gijsbert Oonk in his very thorough introduction to this book, an earlier focus on Overseas Indians, I do not have a broad survey of the
existing literature in mind, stressing its fortes and weaknesses, an exercise for which I do not feel qualified. As Oonk himself mentioned, one
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can find plenty of empirical cases, which do not fit within the diaspora framework, but this, to my mind, is not a sufficient reason to
reject it out of hand, as the same could be probably said of any similarly broad notion. Rather, I propose starting with a brief excursus into
what some would call the prehistory of diaspora. Oonks introduction
mentioned the various streams that went into the making of what became later known as the Indian or South Asian diaspora (I shall
come back later to that important distinction). I shall here focus on
two of them. Firstly, the stream of merchant circulations from the subcontinent which started in the medieval period and continues to this
day, and secondly the much more time-bound export of indentured labour which spanned the 1830-1916 period. On prior examination, it
would seem that those two streams have very little in common and that
bracketing them under the all-encompassing label of Indian or South
Asian diaspora can be done only at the cost of ignoring the vast spatial
and temporal disjunctures between them. Gijsbert Oonk in his text,
has mentioned some of these disjunctures. However, taking a closer
look, one also finds certain commonalities. Firstly, it is not certain that
merchant circulation and indentured migration can be contrasted in
terms of free versus forced migration. The idea of indentured labour
migration as forced migration owes a lot to the pioneering work of
Hugh Tinker1, who rightly stressed certain similarities between slavery
and indenture, but was perhaps insufficiently aware of some of the differences. While indenture undoubtedly implied an element of coercion
and a deliberate withdrawal of information as to the real conditions of
labour in the sugar colonies, it was nevertheless contractual in a way
slavery could never be, and, more importantly, held a promise of return
(although mostly unfulfilled), which was of course absent in slavery.
On the other hand, it is not certain that merchant circulation was as
free as it is made out to be. Merchant networks that I have studied,
such as those which originated in the two medium-scale towns of Shikarpur and Hyderabad in Sind2, consisted of different types of operators. The dominant ones were so-called capitalists who generally remained based in Sind and were content with advancing finance to
working partners who did the actual travelling. The latter could be
considered free, except that they accumulated debts vis-a`-vis their capitalist employers that they could often repay only through further travel
in their service. But, more importantly, there emerged, especially in
Hyderabad, a class of salaried employees, either shop assistants, or servants, who travelled on contracts which were in many ways modelled
on indenture contracts. This was true in particular of the contracts of
servants, who were menial labourers providing domestic services to
the partners of the merchant firms. Their wages were very low, they
had to live in very unhygienic and cramped quarters in the shops
AFTERWORD
265
(somewhat similar to the plantation lines in which indentured sugar

plantation workers crowded), and their earnings were retained by the
firms, which were supposed to transmit them to their families, but
probably did not always do so. Although these contracts, prior to the
Emigration Act of 1922, which introduced regulations covering all aspects of emigration from India, were purely private and not underwritten by the state, they were not widely dissimilar to indenture contracts,
in creating a category of labour which was at best semi-free.
But there were other points at which so-called passenger migration
(thus called because the migrants paid their own passage on ordinary
ships, in contrast to the indentured labourers, who travelled on specially chartered ships) intersected with indentured migration. Most of
the examples concern Africa. The best-known case is that of the indentured labourers recruited in rural Gujarat and Punjab (two areas of recruitment not traditionally known for that kind of labour, which came
mostly either from the Bhojpur area of Bihar and the Eastern United
Provinces, or from Tamilnadu), amongst the Patels and Ramgharia
Sikhs, to build the Uganda railway in the early twentieth century. A
few thousand out of a total of 40,000 (many of whom died on the job)
stayed behind in East Africa, at the expiration of their contracts, and
formed the backbone of the class of small traders or dukawallas, which
dominated trade in the interior of East Africa3. These dukawallas received their goods, both British and Indian, largely via the Indian commercial firms created in the ports by passenger migrants, mostly Gujaratis belonging to the trading classes. Thus there emerged a kind of
unified Indian commercial network mixing arrivals from two very different streams. The second case is that of South Africa, particularly Natal, where indentured labour started arriving in around 1860 and preceded commercial migration by two decades. This is where the passenger migrants, subjected to increasing residential restrictions by the
colonial authorities, responded by specialising partly in the import and
sale of goods destined for the indentured labourers. In the case of
South Africa, there was an intermediate category between, on the one
hand, the few rich Arab (i.e., Gujarati Muslim) traders of Durban,
and, on the other hand, the mass of indentured coolies, mostly Tamilian and Telinga (the latter are covered in Chandrasekhar Bhatts article); they were the peddlers, small traders of various origins, who
earned a precarious living by peddling manufactured goods in the African locations of the Transvaal in particular. They assumed particular
importance at the time of Gandhis first satyagraha launched in Johannesburg in 1906, when they provided the future Mahatma with a kind
of mass base which allowed him to challenge the authorities in a new
way, different from the petitions which had been his favourite mode of
intervention when he was acting as a spokesman for the merchant elite
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of Durban4. South Africa is of course a special case, as it saw the early

emergence of a kind of unified Indian political community around
Gandhis leadership. The case of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius
is different: There, Indian traders arrived with the Bombay army in
1810 at the time of the islands capture from the French, and the first
indentured labourers were brought in 1834, following the abolition of
slavery. But the Indian traders there also tended to increasingly specialise in the selling of goods to the labourers. The emergence of a political community was a much later development, dating from the 1950s.
I have gone into this small historical digression to show how two
streams of migration which had completely different trajectories could
partly mesh within the context of the creation of an imperial economy
in which Indian traders became junior partners of British imperial capitalism, and of an imperial political system in which, through the
struggle for civil and political rights in India and in other regions of
the Empire, close links could be forged across the Indian Ocean. This
is also meant to underline the importance of historical context to the
study of diaspora, which cannot be carried out in isolation from broader trends in world economic and political history, a point which Scott
Levi also stresses in his paper on Indian traders in Central Asia. A similar blurring of boundaries can be shown to have existed in some
Asian countries, where Indian immigration did not take the form of indenture, but was organised through the system known as kangani, i.e.,
mostly in Ceylon, Malaya, and Burma. Some of the kangani migrants
branched out into small-scale trade, while some passenger Indians,
like those Oriyas and Telingas who came each year to lower Burma for
the rice harvest, were in fact agricultural labourers.
Could it be said that people of South Asian origin dispersed around
the world on the eve of World War II, already formed a kind of diaspora, even if the term was not in use at the time ? The answer is in
the affirmative if diaspora is not used as an equivalent of transnational community, but is seen in relation to both Empire and nation.
Most people of Indian origin outside of India in 1939 lived in countries
of the British Empire, the most significant exceptions being Dutch
Guiana, and the French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Reunion. The British imperial authorities saw them as imperial subjects,
entitled to some basic rights (which of course did not include political
rights), but even this was often not accepted by local British settlers in
settler colonies where the Indians were treated as foreigners and discriminated against. In spite of the fact that, during the inter-war period,
British India had evolved into a kind of semi-autonomous appendage
of imperial Britain, following its own foreign policy and that New Delhi, often under pressure from nationalist opinion in India, sometimes
intervened in support of the interests of Indian communities outside
AFTERWORD
267
India. In contrast to this British view of overseas Indians as imperial

subjects in need of protection, Indian nationalists thought of them as
dispersed fragments of a great Indian nation-in-the making who had
their role to play in the struggle for freedom. Money was collected from
amongst these overseas Indian communities to support nationalist activities in India, and Indian nationalist opinion was mobilised in support of the specific grievances of particular overseas Indian groups,
such as the clove traders of Zanzibar, when they faced difficulties in
the late 1930s. While there was some talk of Indian culture and of its
universal reach, with Rabindranath Tagore in particular acting as its
self-proclaimed messenger to the outside world, the Bengali poet did
not target specific Indian audiences in the course of his travels to the
West and East. Religion, more than an Indian culture which remained
largely undefined, was often seen as the major link between these dispersed communities and the Motherland. Hindu preachers, both Arya
Samajists and Sanatanists as well as Sikh priests, and Muslim mullahs often visited these communities, and, in a reverse movement, pilgrims from as far away as Fiji or Guyana travelled to Benares, Amritsar, and other holy places in India. Obviously, before the era of mass
air travel, these movements were on a relatively modest scale, but they
occurred nevertheless. So, if the notion of diaspora did not exist, some
of its underpinnings were already there. British and Indian nationalist
views of the Indian overseas communities, although contrasted, were
not incompatible: some Indians found it possible to be at the same
time loyal imperial British subjects and patriotic overseas Indians. During World War II, however, for some, a choice had to be made between
two loyalties: when Subhas Bose created his government in exile and
his Indian National Army, he tried to enlist the support of existing Indian communities in the various countries under Japanese occupation
where they were present. He had some success in mobilising the Indian population of Malaya in particular, and traders in various places
joined his movement in significant numbers.5 For two years (1942-44)
Indian nationalism was more in evidence outside India than inside,
where it was severely repressed by the British. This was the real moment of glory of Overseas India , although it was never much celebrated later because of the Congresss ambivalent appraisal of Bose and
his movement. In the post-1947 phase, major changes occurred both
in migration flows and in relations with the homeland, but it took several decades before the interpretive framework changed in its turn. A
brief summary of the main changes is in order at this point.
One major change, of course, has been directly linked to the independence and partition of India. With the birth of the two independent
and mutually hostile states of India and Pakistan, the relationship of
expatriate Indians to the homeland underwent a transformation.
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CLAUDE MARKOVITS
Firstly, for the ex-imperial subjects, there arose the question of political
allegiance to one nation-state: if Hindus and Sikhs naturally tended to
swear allegiance to India, the overseas South Asian Muslims had a
more difficult choice to make: while the majority chose Pakistan, a
small minority opted for India and others, such as the Ismailis, tried to
remain uncommitted. In spite of the incipient split created by the partition of the subcontinent, South Asians tried to maintain a united
front in the complicated politics of decolonisation of the post-war period. This was the case in East Africa, and particularly in Kenya, where
Indians were in a delicate position, torn between loyalty to a colonial
regime which had allowed them a degree of economic prosperity, and
anti-colonial feelings which pointed towards an alliance with African
nationalism. The fact that the Mau-Mau targeted Indians as enemies
and killed a few did not help. It was at this time that the Government
of India, under Nehru, took the line that Indians had to forge an alliance with Africans, and could not count on India to defend their (relative) privileges after independence. This led many Asians in East Africa
to opt for the alternative option of getting British passports, resulting
ultimately in their migration to Britain. These twice migrants, mentioned by Oonk in his introduction as one sub-category of the Indian
diaspora, pose an important question: Is Indianness, which they often
claim, compatible with a deliberate rejection of political allegiance to
India (of course, it must not be forgotten that India did not welcome
them and the few who had opted for Indian nationality after the East
African nations gained their independence had great difficulties actually relocating there). I tend to think that this group is a rare case of a
really transnational population, devoid of strong national-political
loyalties, whose inclusion into the Great Indian Diaspora fold is somewhat spurious. The Hindustani twice-migrants from Suriname now
living in the Netherlands represent a specific case within this category,
and Brit Lynnebakke, in her very informative paper, shows how delicate
their relations are with the direct migrants from India in the Netherlands.
I now come to the two major recent migration streams: on the one
hand; the massive movement of workers, clerks and nurses from India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh to the Gulf countries, which is mostly temporary, and rarely results in settlement, and on the other hand, the migration of professionals, overwhelmingly from India, in particular IT
specialists, to the countries of the First World, primarily, of course, the
US, but also Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. Although
the latter includes an element of circulation, since some of these professionals tend to go back to India after a few years, it is clear that the
majority are bound to establish their permanent residence in these
countries of destination. While this new wave of migration has not
AFTERWORD
269
completely obliterated older streams, and in particular Sikhs of a rural

background continue to emigrate in large numbers to Canada, and in
smaller numbers to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Italy and the US,
it has become clearly dominant in regard to First World countries.
Does it make any sense to bracket these two groups under an overarching category of Indian or South Asian diaspora? It is clear that sociologically it does not, because while the former belongs overwhelmingly
to the working class and the lower-middle class, the latter is mostly
upper-middle class. Besides, the former is made up mostly of sojourners while the latter consists mostly of potential settlers. Their categorisation under the umbrella of the Great Indian Diaspora seems mostly
a device, encouraged, of course, by the Government of India, to increase the numbers and show that the Indian diaspora is almost as
large as the Chinese one. Another problem is that, while the upper
middle-class migrants to the First World have produced an abundant
literature of their own, and have attracted a lot of attention from scholars, mostly based in the US and the UK some of whom even belong
to that group we know much less about the Gulf migrants: They do
not as a rule write their own experiences, and scholars who have studied them have mostly focused on factual questions, such as migration
streams and remittances, rather than on their self-perceptions and
their relationship to the homeland.
We are therefore faced with a kind of paradox: the more fragmented
and diverse the actual Indian or South Asian diaspora tends to become,
encompassing experiences and trajectories which appear largely incommensurable to each other, the more inclusive the discourse about diaspora tends to become, either because of a kind of nationalist appropriation or because it becomes enclosed within a more general discourse of globalisation. Nationalism and globalisation of course do not
represent two polar opposites, but, on the contrary, as shown by Arjun
Appadurai6 and others, two sides of the same coin. In the face of such
confusion, the temptation naturally arises to deconstruct the notion of
Indian diaspora itself and some of the papers in the collection attempt
to do it in their own way. The strategy used by them is to break that
diaspora into some of its components, taking advantage of its enormous ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity . But the question then
becomes what is the most appropriate category to choose for this exercise. Happily, the collection tends to avoid the pitfall of going for the
more obvious, such as the overall religious categories of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, etc. Steven Vertovecs attempt to define a Hindu diaspora7,
which I always found slightly spurious, and in danger of fitting (even
inadvertently) within some kind of Hindutva agenda, is fortunately not
echoed here. The Sikh diaspora, a notion that W.H. McLeod had criticised long ago on sane grounds8, also does not appear in these pages.
270
CLAUDE MARKOVITS
It is true that Muslims make their appearance in one article, but in a

way which is sufficiently qualified to avoid ambiguities. On the other
hand, the following, more discrete categories do appear: Telugus, British Gujarati Hindus, Patels, Multanis and Shikarpuris, Nizari Ismaili
Muslims of Gujarati ancestry. I do not intend to discuss them in detail
here, but their simple enumeration points to a problem of a conceptual
nature: they are absolutely heterogeneous, and do not amount to a classificatory system, but are simply a list. While such a list helps in mapping the empirical terrain, one will have to move beyond it if the ultimate aim is to offer some coherent counterpoint to Indian diaspora.
To illustrate some of the difficulties involved in such a project, I shall
offer a brief case study of one specific diaspora from South Asia, the
so-called Sindhi diaspora, with which I am familiar. Firstly, it has to be
noted that Sindhi diaspora generally refers to the dispersion of Sindhi
Hindus (I shall come back to the tricky question of their religious
identity), a phenomenon that has a long history, and ignores the much
smaller dispersion of Sindhi Muslims, which is a more recent trend.
The present-day Sindhi diaspora outside India (leaving aside the question of the dispersion of Hindu refugees from Sind within India, which
is also after all a form of diaspora) is probably less than 200,000strong9, thus accounting for approximately 1% of the total Indian diaspora as measured by the slightly dubious Government of India calculations. In terms of regional diasporas, it certainly pales into insignificance in comparison with the big battalions of the Gujarati, Bhojpuri,
Punjabi, Tamilian, Telugu and Kashmiri (Mirpuri) diasporas, which account for the bulk of South Asians outside the subcontinent. This may
be one of the reasons why the diaspora literature studiously ignores
this stream, which is, however, remarkable in at least two ways: it is
the most widely dispersed of all the South Asian diasporas, with a
world presence unmatched by any other, including in regions such as
Latin America and Western Africa, which never attracted Indian migrants in significant numbers, and, in terms of wealth, it is probably
second only to the Gujarati diaspora (which itself is of course extremely
diverse). Prior to the rise of the Marwari transnational steel magnate
Lakhsmi Mittal, the richest Indian business family outside India was
the Hinduja family, a family of Shikarpuri (Sindhi) origin, which made
its fortune in Iran in the 1920-1979 period before enlarging its operations to many other parts of the world. And, apart from the Hindujas,
other Sindhi businessmen are amongst the richest of business magnates of South Asian origin outside the subcontinent10.
The history of this diaspora falls into three distinct phases. The first
one covers the period between the fifteenth century and 1860. During
that period, Bhatia traders from the main Sind port of Thatta established an important colony in Muscat, which prospered till the mid-
AFTERWORD
271
eighteenth century, and played an important role in the maritime trade

between Western India and the Arabian Peninsula. Offshoots of it were
established in the eighteenth century in Bahrain and other Gulf ports,
while in Muscat itself, in relation to the decline of Thatta as a port
(due to ecological factors, such as silting), Thatta Bhatias tended to give
way to Kutchi Bhatias, originating from the region of Kutch, a border
area between Gujarat and Sind. While the Thatta network was in decline by the mid-eighteenth century, Shikarpur, a town in Upper Sind,
became the centre of a powerful financial and commercial network oriented towards Central Asia, a development which is covered in Scott
Levis article. By the 1870s, that network faced difficulties owing to the
Russian conquest of Central Asia, which affected the multi-secular
trading links between Northern India and Central Asia. Nevertheless, it
somewhat survived till the time of the Russian Revolution, which led
to its disappearance from large parts of Central Asia. However, it continued to operate in Afghanistan, Iran, and Chinese Sinkiang, while
Shikarpuri moneylenders expelled from Soviet Central Asia relocated
to Bombay, Southern India, Ceylon and Burma, where they emerged as
an important community of informal or indigenous bankers in the
1920s and 1930s. But, from the 1860s onwards, a new Sindhi trading
network had developed in the second largest town of the province, Hyderabad, which was directly connected with Bombay. Hyderabadi traders, known as Sindworkies, specialised in the sale of silk and curios,
using Bombay as a springboard to the following of maritime routes to
the four corners of the earth, setting up shop in the main ports and becoming a significant force in the international textile trade in the interwar period. At the time of the partition of the subcontinent, there were
probably some ten to fifteen thousand Sindhi traders and moneylenders, mostly Hyderabadis, dispersed across the world in small colonies
of merchants that benefited from British consular protection. The largest concentrations, never more than one or two hundred-strong, were
in Panama, Teneriffe, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Port-Said, Colombo, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Surabaya, Manila, and Kobe. With partition, despite
the fact that Sind was not affected by violence on a scale comparable to
what happened in the Punjab, there was a massive exodus of Sindhi
Hindus towards India: They went mostly to Rajasthan, Gujarat and
Bombay, but, from there, fanned out across the whole subcontinent, establishing significant colonies in northern and central India. Gradually,
those among them who had kin outside India, especially amongst the
Sindworkie community, tended to join them abroad: From the late
1940s to the 1960s, there was a significant influx of Sindhi traders
into Hong-Kong (where they were estimated to be around 15,000 in
196611), Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Canary Islands, Nigeria, etc. By the 1960s, a new stream developed, amongst profes-
272
CLAUDE MARKOVITS
sionals, that belonged to the Amil community (a scribal community

somewhat similar to the Kayasths of Northern India), who went mostly
to the US, Canada, Britain, and, more recently, Australia.
This Sindhi diaspora has certainly followed a rather unusual historical trajectory, but nowadays it tends to think of itself as part of the
Great Indian Diaspora, a claim which is sometimes, but not always,
accepted by other members of that diaspora. On the other hand, it is
probably the most transnational of all the sub-diasporas, not only because of its very wide dispersion across the world, but also because, to
promote its wide-ranging business interests, it tends to follow strategies regarding nationality which are very complex. A typical Sindhi
transnational business family will include people with many different
locations and many different passports. There is generally one branch
in Bombay, which is the hub of that diaspora, but the rest can be residents of many different countries, whose nationalities they might take,
while often retaining their Indian nationality (in spite of the non-recognition of dual nationality by the Indian Government). Although they
profess strong attachment to some overarching Indian culture, Sindhis
can be in very diverse cultural situations. The linguistic situation,
which attracted Oonks attention in his paper on East Africa, varies
widely amongst Sindhi communities. The Sindhi language is undoubtedly losing ground to English as the most ordinary medium of communication, while also Hindi has its place, as well as the languages of
the various places where Sindhis have been residing. Thus Sindhi merchants in Singapore often speak Malay and Chinese, while those in
Manila speak Tagalog and those in the Canary Islands are fluent in
Spanish. Multilingualism is of course a trait of all dispersed merchant
groups, but it is not without its effect on patterns of identity formation
in a diaspora which is still dominated by commercial elements. The
question of identity also arises in the context of religion. Sindhi Hindus, in pre-partition days, were overwhelmingly Nanakpanthis, belonging to the so-called Sahajdhari (i.e., non-Khalsa) Sikhs, but they often
had close relations with Khalsa Sikhs. In some places, like Manila or
Singapore, which had both Punjabi and Sindhi communities, the first
gurdwaras were established there thanks to donations from rich Sindhi
merchants, although Punjabis managed them. But Sindhis often
prayed there, as well as in Hindu temples. The tragic events of 1984,
leading to the assassination of Mrs Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and to a spate of anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, led to an estrangement between Sindhis and Khalsa Sikhs. It was noted that, in many
places, Sindhis ceased going to gurdwaras to pray, and often built their
own temples. However, it has recently been reported that Sindhis have
again found their way to the gurdwaras, and that they have financed
the building of some in Europe. Another specific trait of the religious
AFTERWORD
273
identity of Hindus in pre-Partition Sind was that many were murids of

the Sufi pirs, who were very respected in Sind by Muslims and Hindus
alike. After Partition, attachment to the pirs clashed with the resentment vis-a`-vis Muslims felt by many following their expulsion from
their native province, and this contributed to a religious identity crisis
amongst Sindhis.
Given these complexities, what is gained in analysing the Sindhi diaspora within the broader framework of the Indian diaspora? If we use
the three meanings of diaspora identified by Steven Vertovec and mentioned in Oonks introduction, we can see that as a social form, the diaspora is decidedly Sindhi, in the sense that the actual networks binding together its members do not crucially interact with India at the economic or political level. On the other hand, as a type of consciousness,
it is ambiguous: Sindhi identity vies with Indian identity (often equated
with Hindu identity) in complex and changing ways. It is probably in
its meaning as mode of cultural production that the diaspora is most
Indian, in the sense that Sindhiyat, in spite of half-baked efforts at
promoting it, offers little in terms of cultural resources, and raises the
delicate question of the relationship of the Sindhi Hindu diaspora to
the Sindhi culture as it evolves in Pakistan. Regarding the heuristic
gains of using an Indian diaspora framework to account for the Sindhi
diaspora, we cannot therefore come to a clear-cut conclusion. The few
authors who have written on the Sindhi diaspora, such as MarkAnthony Falzon12 have chosen to privilege the Sindhi angle over the
Indian one, but their approach has not raised many echoes, given the
continuing power of the Indian diaspora narrative.
In this afterword, I have been echoing some of the doubts vis-a`-vis
the Indian diaspora framework voiced by many authors in the collection, and attempting to reframe them within a more historical approach to the problem, but I am not in a position to suggest a satisfactory alternative framework. This is perhaps as well with an afterword;
otherwise, it would become a foreword.
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Contributors
Ellen Bal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. She received her Ph.D. at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. A revised and updated version is forthcoming under the title They ask if we eat frogs:
Garo Ethnicity in Bangladesh (Singapore: ISEAS, 2007). Between 2001
and 2005, she was involved in a project involving the Indian diaspora
in Suriname and the Netherlands, and their relation to motherland
India. She worked closely with Dr. Kathinka Sinha, with whom she coauthored Eternal Call of the Ganga: Reconnecting with People of Indian Origin in Surinam. In: Economic and Political Weekly (2003), vol.
XXXVIII, no. 38, September 20-26: 4008-4022.
T.L.S. Bhaskar is a partner at the Byrraju Foundation, Hyderabad
where he heads the Voice of Participants module. He is currently engaged in a project on Diaspora Philanthropy by Overseas Telugus. He
has published in both the fields of social development and diaspora
studies. His recent publications include: Sustainable Rural Transformation: Experiences of the Byrraju Foundation in Harsh Bhargava and
Deepak Kumar (eds.), NGOs: Role and Accountability, an Introduction,
223-248. Hyderabad: ICFAI University Press (2006); An Introduction
on Emigration of Telugus: A Working Paper, Hyderabad: Diaspora
Foundation (2007).
Chandrashekhar Bhat is Professor at the Department of Sociology and
the Director of the Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora at the University of Hyderabad. He is currently engaged in a UGC Major Research Project on Diaspora, Religion and Transnational Networks. His
recent publications include: Continuity and Change in the Perception
of Indianness: Issues of Identity among Indians at Home and in the
Diaspora, in Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn (ed.), Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and its Diaspora(s), 243-250. Berlin: LIT Verlag
(2006); Transnational Networks of Indian Diasporic Communities:
The Case of Telugu Diaspora (with Ajaya Sahoo), in Man in India,
2005, 85 (1&2), 61-80; India and the Indian Diaspora: Linkages and
292
CONTRIBUTORS
Expectations, in Ajay Dubey (ed.) Indian Diaspora: Global Identity. Delhi: Kalinga Publications (2003), 11-22.
Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff resides in Ranchi (Jharkhand, India) and is a
Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Development Research Institute
(ADRI) in Patna (Bihar, India). In 1995, Sinha-Kerkhoff received her
Ph.D. degree (cum laude) from the Centre of Asian Studies (CASA),
University of Amsterdam with Save Ourselves and the Girls! Girls in
Calcutta under the Raj (Rotterdam: Extravert 1995). At present she is
also affiliated to the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in
Amsterdam and involved in the project A Diaspora Coming Home?
Overseas Indians re-establishing links with India supported by WOTRO (the Netherlands) (September 2001 to September 2005, parttime). Selected publication with Dr. Ellen Bal: Eternal Call of the
Ganga: Reconnecting with People of Indian Origin in Surinam. In:
Economic and Political Weekly (2003), vol. XXXVIII, no. 38, September
20-26: 4008-4022.
Scott Levi is Assistant Professor of Central Asian history in the History
Department of the University of Louisville. He is the author of The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900 (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 2002), and the editor of India and Central Asia: Commerce and
Culture, 1500-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Brit Lynnebakke has an MA in Migration and Ethnic Studies (Hons)
from the University of Amsterdam. She now works as a freelance journalist in Oslo specialising in migration and multicultural issues. The
main topics she covers as a journalist are transnationalism, the relationship between migration and development, the immigration discourse in mainstream media and the development of more accurate
multicultural reporting.
Claude Markovits is Directeur de Recherche (Senior Research Fellow),
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Authored The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara
to Panama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000.
John Mattausch is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He
has published on the history and sociology of Britishers and Gujaratis
in Gujarat, East Africa and contemporary Britain. His recent publications include: A Case of Mistaken Identity: Why British East African
Asians are not an ethnic community, South Asia Research 20(2)
2000, 171-182; Chance and Societal Change The Sociological Review
CONTRIBUTORS
293
vol. 51 (4) 2003, 505-527; We Are Family: the changing British Gujarati
community in: A. Mukadam and S. Mawani (eds.) Gujaratis in the
West: Evolving Identities in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Scholars
Press, forthcoming 2008. His book on Chance, Character and Change
will be published by Transaction in the Spring of 2008.
Sharmina Mawani received her doctorate from the Department of the
Study of Religions at SOAS, University of London in 2006. Her thesis,
The Construction of Identities Amongst Young Adult Nizari Ismaili Muslims in Toronto and Mumbai, investigated the role of language in the
transmission of religious knowledge through the ginans (devotional
songs) amongst young Nizari Ismailis of Gujarati ancestry in Canada
and India. She is particularly interested in the manner in which traditional religious practices are evolving in contemporary Western society.
Sharmina is currently co-editing a volume on Gujaratis in the West.
Anjoom Amir Mukadam is currently a Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London and working on a project that looks at the needs of
heritage language students from Gujarati, Turkish, Polish, and Latvian
backgrounds. She received her doctorate in Socio-linguistics from the
University of Reading in December 2003. Her thesis was entitled Gujarati Speakers in London: Age, Gender and Religion in the Construction of
Identity. At present, her research interests lie in the inter-disciplinary
areas of ethno-religious and linguistic identities of second-generation
individuals in London.
Gijsbert Oonk is Associate Professor of Non-Western History, in the
History Department at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has published material on the history of the cotton textile industry in West India and on the Indian diaspora in East Africa. His recent publications
include: The Changing Culture of the Hindu Lohana Community in
East Africa, Contemporary Asian Studies, 13(1) 2004, 7-23; After Shaking his hand, start counting your fingers. Trust and Images in Indian
Business networks, East Africa 1900-2000, Itinerario, 2004 18(3), 7088; South Asians in East Africa (1880-1920): With a Particular Focus
on Zanzibar. Towards a historical explanation of economic success of a
Middlemen minority. Journal of African and Asian Studies, 2006 (1),
57-89.
Pravin J. Patel is a sociologist. He did his post-doctoral research at Columbia University, New York. He has won several awards and honours
including a Fulbright Fellowship (US), Charles Wallace Fellowship
(UK), Visiting Professorship at Charles Gordon University, U.K., and
University Grants Commissions Visiting Professorships/Fellowships at
294
CONTRIBUTORS
various Universities in India. His publications include Industrial Sociology in India (with N.R. Sheth), Sociology of Robert K. Merton (in Gujarati) and a number of research papers. He is on the editorial boards of
several academic journals including the British Sociological Societys
Work, Employment and Society. He was Professor of Sociology and
Dean, Faculty of Arts, at M.S. University of Baroda, and Vice Chancellor of Sardar Patel University, Gujarat, India.
Mario Rutten is Professor of Comparative Sociology of Asia at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. He
has extensive research experience in rural entrepreneurship and labour
relations in India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and on Indian migrants in
Europe. His book publications include Farms and Factories (OUP
1995), Small Business Entrepreneurs in Asia and Europe (co-edited, Sage
1997), Development and Deprivation in Gujarat (co-edited, Sage 2002),
Rural Capitalists in Asia (Routledge Curzon, 2003), Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia (co-edited, ISEAS-IIAS 2004), Labour and Capitalist Transformation in Asia (Special Issue of The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, co-edited 2004), and Leuke Vakantie Gehad? Verhalen over Antropologisch Veldwerk (Aksant 2007).
Sanderien Verstappen is Junior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her masters
thesis in anthropology received an award from the University of Amsterdam. Her book Jong in Dollywood; Hindostaanse jongeren en Indiase
films (2005), on the reception of Hindi cinema among Surinamese
Hindustanis, was based on ethnographic research in The Hague. Sanderien Verstappen is a specialist in visual anthropology and made three
documentary films; e.g. Take Away Ritual (2002), made in co-operation
with Koen Alefs, on backpackers and locals in the village of Pushkar
(Northern India).

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p u b l i c at i o n s e r i e s

Gijsbert Oonk is Associate Professor in Non-Western History at the

Global Indian Diasporas Gijsbert Oonk (ed.)

Global Indian Diasporas

isbn 978 90 5356 035 8

amsterdam university press

Global Indian Diasporas

Global Indian Diasporas

Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht

978 90 5356 035 8

IIAS / Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration

CRITICAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Multanis and Shikarpuris: Indian Diasporas in Historical

We Lost our gift of Expression: Loss of the Mother

Contextualising Diasporic Identity: Implications of Time

Separated by the Partition? Muslims of British Indian

A Chance Diaspora: British Gujarati Hindus

CRITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL

Contested Family Relations and Government Policy:

Diaspora Revisited: Second-Generation Nizari Ismaili Muslims

Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora: Reception of Indian

Contested Equality: Social Relations between Indian and

Afterword: Stray Thoughts of a Historian on Indian or

It all started during a quick lunch at the History Department of the

Global Indian Diasporas

Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory

Various Migrations, One Diaspora?

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

obvious. India has been described as a nation and its fragments or an

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

important shift towards the construction of the South Asian Diaspora.

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

host society. Especially now, where communication and transportation

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

the social, economic, or cultural relations with the homeland. In short,

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

sise particular aspects of migration; in this case, identification with the

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

This article describes the reception of commercial Bombay cinema

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

GLOBAL INDIAN DIASPORAS

28 William Safran also emphasises that Diaspora consciousness is a particular kind of

2 Multanis and Shikarpuris

Defining Merchant Diaspora

MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS

munal affairs? What are the characteristics of the articulating

Multan and the Multanis

MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS

MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS

commercial contacts. The most notable result of this intensification

MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS

teenth century. , Here they established a rather significant diaspora

Caste and Identity in the Diaspora

(Alam 1994: 219). Contrary to this notion, further analysis suggests

MULTANIS AND SHIKARPURIS

tury Arabic manuscript detailing the Arab conquests of Sind under

1830s, Mohan Lal, the Kashmiri-born British intelligence agent and