British Indians in colonial India and Surinam: Transnational identification and estrangement (original) (raw)
Related papers
2007, British Indians in colonial India and Surinam: Transnational identification and estrangement
Focaal, 2006
The authors present a case study of Indian nationalists who drew from a discourse on 'exploited overseas Indian migrants' to serve their own political interests. At the same time, overseas British Indians, in this case in Surinam, advocated the continuation of transnational relations between (British) India and Surinam in order to strengthen the position of their community locally. Clearly, for some time, transnational identification served the (national) interests of both groups in the two different nations. Yet the authors also show that when such transnational 'solutions' did not serve any longer to solve local problems, estrangement between the two communities followed. Theoretically, this article constitutes a synthesis of approaches that connect identities to specific places and theories that have abandoned the study of geographically-based national societies. It demonstrates how the politics of place is dominant even within the field of transnational alliances.
New Political Science, 2005
Using the Indian-American community as a case study, this paper articulates the different theoretical and political spaces opened up by diasporic politics. While diasporas help disrupt the forceful hold of the nation-state on the global political imagination, there is nothing inherently politically progressive, subversive or liberatory about diasporic mobilizations. Indeed, the content of such mobilizations needs to be scrutinized carefully to show how such mobilizations can both reproduce the nation-state in deeply troubling ways as well as make possible progressive political mobilizations that can challenge vested dominant interests in both home and host states. The paper argues that the diasporic challenge to the nation-state framework calls for a reconceptualization of the concept of 'territory', and raises serious questions about the nature of 'citizenship and democracy' in an increasingly interconnected world. The author would like to thank Lisa Moore for her research assistance and Richard Ashford and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
"Transnational and Intranational Indian Diaspora Identities"
ABSTRACT The migration within the territorial limits of India have made critics to observe that to be a diasporic Indian its not mandatory that one has to take journey abroad .Through inter-state migration it is possible to create the sphere of Indian diaspora within India. K.Sachidanand calls this space the ‘diaspora within’ which is referred to as Intranational diasporic pattern which is the newly accepted identity to the Transnational migration. This Paper attempts to present the Diaspora dimensions of two Indian writers A.K.Ramanujan who emigrated from India to United States of America and Temsula Ao who migrated from Indian state of Nagaland to Meghalaya. Both the writers narrate the loss of their homeland due to migration and exhibit the resonances of the diasporic experience wherein the Transnational and Intranational identities are taken for study. In relation to the essay “Where Mirrors are Windows” of A.K.Ramanujan and the Short story “These Hills called Home: Stories from a War Zone” of Temsula Ao are taken for study . A.K.Ramanujan in his Essays have the Transnational Diaspora identity and Temsula Ao’s, in her short stories recaptures the pain following the struggle for self-determination launched by the Indian Union, present the Intranational Diaspora identity. This Paper will trace how these writers articulate diasporic experience of exile, loss, pain and create Indian Diaspora in America and Naga Diaspora in India.
‘Illusionary Homelands’ and In-Between Identities: Liminal Existence of the ‘Indian (Non)-Diaspora’
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
The influence of colonialism and the emergence of globalisation have gradually induced a mixed culture that neither can be attached to the innateness of the traditionalist attributes of the home country nor the foreignness of the Western idiosyncrasies. Though not directly clipped into the identity of a diaspora in spatial existence, the residents in the country also experience an equal or more departure in the context of perpetuating the traditional culture through their lifestyle. There arises an in-between state of existence – neither traditional nor foreign. This research article explores how the residents in India possess alienation in their cultural identities concerning the hybrid forms of lifestyle followed regularly, qualifying to be termed based on the regularity of lifestyle as the ‘Indian non-diaspora’. The argument about the liminal existence of the residents in India, similar to the Indian Diaspora, is substantiated with the help of various secondary sources that descr...
In anti-colonial, as well as in anti-imperial, struggle, a very thin line often separates wider nationalist claims from more limited – even parochial – dimensions. Different factors operate at different levels providing support and legitimization to the resistance movement(s), although sometimes pursuing partially antithetic aims. At grassroots, local grievances can play a key role in fuelling insurgencies, especially along the fringes or at the intersections of the main imperial structures; at the same time, some basic identitarian elements (such as religion, family, and group affiliation) can act as (not unambiguous) proxies for other – maybe ‘higher’ – form of political consciousness. The uprisings dotting north-west India in late nineteenth/early twentieth century provide a striking example of this kind of intermingling. Originally seen as occasional, religious-driven outbursts of violence, product of the ‘fanaticism’ and the ‘inherent savagery’ of the local tribes, they increasingly emerged as a major threat to the imperial order. The 1897/’98 the frontier-wide ‘Great Pathan revolt’ forced British authorities to set up a large-scale pacification efforts involving more than 40,000 men and having wide-range political consequences, with the establishment, in 1901, of the tribal areas as an autonomous political entity, separated from the so-called ‘settled districts’, within the framework of the newly established North West Frontier Province. The persistence of instability – and its worsening especially in times of crisis – accounts for the structural character of these uprisings. At the same time, the external influences affecting them, account for their relevance in the international field. The efforts that the Axis powers (and of Italy among them) carried out during World War II to support and fuel the rebellion of the Faqir of Ipi, in Waziristan, and to steer his action in a direction better fitting their wartime interests are only one example of the relationship existing among local conflict, imperial stability and international balance. Moving from these premises, the paper aims at analyzing – with reference to the tribal areas of present-day Afghan-Pakistani border and to the period of the British domination – the role that proto-national disgregative dynamic played, and the implications that they had on regional stability, with a special focus on the political and military aspects. Its aim is to underline how, in this context, the ‘multiple identities’ of the subjects involved operated, and how they interacted in shaping the complex net of ideological, political and material interests that – after the crisis and the dissolution of the Raj – still support the non assimilation of the FATA within the Pakistani state system.
The Allocation and Relocation of Identities: Colonialism, Nationalism, Transnationalism
Mester, 1998
The titie of this paper brings to mind the image of national cultures and national identities; or as I propose, the "hybrid" and the "transnational" open up the negative space of the "national." "Hybrid cultures" and "transnational identities" become then part of the oppositional process of relocating cultures and identities in a conflictive dialogue with the colonial allocation of cultures and national allocation of identities. I am assuming that "identities" are not only constructions, but also dialogical constructions that are the same as those inscribed in power structures. The process also demands the uncoupling of cultures and territories that colonial and nation building ideologies so successfully put together. While colonialism allocated identities by distributing, over five centuries, homogeneous cultures across space first (e.g., the distantbarbarians), and in a time line later (e.g., the human scale from primitives to European during the 18* century, formalized
Alternation Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa
This work aims to explore and problematize India's discourses on its Diaspora policy vis-à-vis the reflections and experiences of actors on the ground. Historically, the Indian state has been known to project a founding and pioneering discourse on Diaspora closely connected and intertwined with its foreign policy. Nonetheless, in its international outlook just as India continues to change and evolve over time, so do its Diaspora discourses and practices as per the needs of its foreign policy. From being distantly neutral and adopting diplomatic routes of concern for Indian origin people abroad during its early post-Independence outlook, India's Diaspora policies have turned volte-face by shifting to the foreground of its global profiling in more recent times. Three important agents responsible for this role reversal are represented by the forces of globalisation, transnational geopolitics and Diasporization, acting in tandem with each other. Referring to these three as the, 'International Triad', (a term I employ as a heuristic tool), I undertake a qualitative analysis through review of literature, primary data including newspapers and ethnographic interviews conducted by me. It is clear that in its pro-active positioning and emerging Diaspora relations, India is no different from many other countries. Conversely, Indian Diasporas too have come a long way, emerging as not only key drivers in development efforts but also in strengthening bilateral ties between host and home nations as other diasporas do. No longer bereft of voice and rights, as much as in previous political contexts, the PIO and Diaspora communities stand on firmer ground while interacting with their home countries and ancestral homelands. However some vulnerabilities and status
A Xerox of India? Policies and politics of migration in an overseas colony
2012
Introducing Mini-India "The Andaman society is like a Xerox copy of India". With this metaphor, my local interlocutor did not intend to reduce the whole population of this group of islands in the Bay of Bengal to mere paper existence. He alluded to his own society, called 'Mini-India'. Most Andaman people refer to the icon of Mini-India when they represent their multi-ethnic, but nonetheless Indian, society. Such statement is not self-evident: the strategically important islands are located more than thousand kilometres away from the Indian subcontinent. Despite geographical vicinity to the SouthEast Asian countries of Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia, the territory of the Andamans belongs to India. 1 This is due to the islands' historical entanglement with the British Empire and the ensuing Indian nationstate. The present population came into being due to colonial and postcolonial settlement and social-engineering policies. 2 Resemblances of the contemporary Andaman society with larger representations of the Indian nation can, therefore, be regarded as manifestation of this very history. Andaman Indians hail from different regions, ethnic groups, castes and creeds of the Indian subcontinent. Some smaller sections have come from Burma, too. The term Mini-India serves to symbolically incorporate highly diverse migratory backgrounds "from Kashmir to Kanyakumari" into an encompassing model of nationalism. It indicates that the society represents a harmonious 'unity in diversity' due to the ideals of the secular nation-state; however, contrary to such obvious declarations of attachment and belonging to Bharat Mata, or Mother India, 'mainland' Indians, in general, have very limited knowledge about the territory. Few are aware that there are approximately five hundred thousand island inhabitants. This perception can be regarded as a result of two dominant forms of mass media representation. First, the islands are projected as space of Orientalist fantasy. Since pre-colonial times, travel accounts, among others from Marco Polo, have depicted them as tropical islands inhabited by 'savages'. 3 Continuous media coverage of the indigenous people has reiterated a persisting imaginary that the archipelago consists of large tracks of 'virgin' forest; within this tropical fantasy, the supposedly 'Noble Savages' function as 1 I am not going to focus on the southern Nicobar Islands, which, together with the Andamans, constitute a Union Territory of India that comprises more than three hundred islands. 2 A particular kind of regional 'shadow existence', marked by economic dependence from the centre and discoursive hegemony, have remained a salient feature in the islands since colonial times. Such form of governance has been informed by Indian overseas migrations from the larger British Empire, by discourses in the Indian nationstate, and by the transnational sphere, each highlighting an outsider's view on Andaman policies. 3 The Andaman hunter-gatherers migrated to the islands several thousand years ago. A large body of monographslike Radcliffe-Brown's anthropological classic "The Andaman Islanders" (1922), but also more recent works, e.g. by