Abstract
Both these books share common concerns but work around very different assumptions and methodologies. What they have in common is a larger interest in the making and functioning of a Diaspora—in this case, the South Asian one—and in the understanding of difference that was as constitutive of diasporic imagination as common identities and invocations were. But this is precisely where the similarity ends, with Koshy and Radhakrishnan attempting a more theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of the modern—indeed, post colonial neo-diaspora and with Jayaram unravelling the diversities within the diaspora by looking at detailed and empirical studies. Each of these approaches has its relevance even if they do not establish the case for the efficacy of the very category of the diaspora as a useful heuristic unit. We know and are told how diasporas are different and diverse, and how notions of homes left behind are differently imagined, but what this understanding can do to unsettle assumptions about nationalism, cosmopolitanism and even global capital is never very clearly spelt out. This is especially so in Jayaram’s edited volume, where a very tentative attempt is made in the introduction to look at the idea of the diaspora conceptually and empirically by identifying its multiple skeins. It is not followed through and what we have instead is a short summing up of the various contributions that take up the history of the making of a diverse diaspora and how diversities play out in the manifestation of complex identity politics. While this is undoubtedly important, it falls short of questioning the very category of the diaspora and the way it has tended to be used and even deployed in what seems to be more a pragmatic engagement with the pressures of post national politics in an era of globalisation. Koshy and Radhakrishnan, on the other hand, attempt to do precisely this when they introduce the idea of a neo-diaspora and in the process, focus attention on ‘the constitutive role of the shifting forces of capitalism in determining the modes of migration from South Asia.
The essays that make up Jayaram’s volume look at a range of issues that include the implications of diversity within the Sikh/Punjabi diaspora for articulation of nationhood and identity; issues of assimilation and state policy in Malaysia; language issues in Mauritius and certain other specific case studies. Many of these offer valuable information and insights, some of which I will highlight. Ravindra Jain, for instance, makes the important point in his essay that it may help us to engage with the idea of process inherent in the continuous articulation of a diaspora group. This will enable a better appreciation of the tensions within it, the fluidities of its imagination and negotiation with the local situation at hand. Of course, the question that inevitably arises is how certain institutional practices around the Gurudwara impact the process that Jain refers to. This also raises issues of public policy, a feature that T. Marimuthu takes up in his study of Malaysia and suggests that there is a clear divergence between Malaysian national culture and Malaysian minority community culture. What does this really mean? Do we see this articulation as somehow connected with an essentialised understanding of Indianness? We do know from other writings that the hyphenated Malay–Tamil cultural experience was a creative and productive amalgamation of remembered practices and of local habits, and that there were frequent pleas to eschew the cringe complex of Malay Tamils vis-à-vis mainstream Tamil standards in language or music. In terms of education and language, we also need to recall how the choice of English as the language of opportunity and empowerment has prevailed among younger members of the Tamil speaking diaspora and how this gestures to a very different set of pressures.
The essays that look at the Indian experience in Mauritius foreground the importance of looking at non-British stations and to investigate whether and in what way the experience was different. Particularly interesting is Vinesh Hookoomsing’s work on Chota Bharat in Mauritius and the relative success of Creolisation over the assertions of Hindi and Hindutva. Two other essays on Indians in Mauritius and Reunion respectively offer more details of the experience of Indians and their practices. What could be useful is to see how debates on language and identity and essence can set up a conversation with debates on what constitutes ‘Frenchness’ in France, especially in the context of French immigrants from North Africa.
The volume also carries specific case studies—of Cochin Jews who are socially marginalised in Israel, and of Jains whose business acumen ensured their participation in extensive regimes of circulation. These essays are informative but lack an interpretive edge and do not, in any sense, help problematise the domain of diaspora analysis. This is in fact one of the major challenges that diaspora studies encounters: we are told of the differences in experience, in terms of class and community variations, of the cultural inheritance each group within the diaspora plugs into, the survival strategies that they adopt in the new lands of their residence but these do not translate into any significant theoretical framework for treating the diaspora as an analytical category. As a result, empirical work and ethnographies of contemporary cultural practices remain un-reflexive and self-indulgent narratives, barely engaging with more substantive issues of state policy on immigration and/or discourses on multi-culturalism and tolerance.
Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan’s book, on the other hand, is a different proposition. The introduction is lucid and sets out clearly and eloquently the usefulness of locating a neo-diaspora that speaks of a very different moment in its history, shaped by the forces of capitalism, colonialism and nationalism, making up the experience of global modernity. Each of these experiences produced serious economic and structural changes leading to voluntary and involuntary migrations, and also to debates on citizenship and what ought to constitute its basis and on a very different perception of the homeland and their positioning in relation to it. Some of the essays provide fascinating insights into the reluctance of the diasporic subjects to return ‘home’, rendering the relationship between home and diaspora fraught and less than idealised. A second question that the volume addresses is the importance of looking at the diaspora in order to revisit ideas of the community. Is the proliferation of diasporic communities the key to a new formation of the future or can they be? Do they spell the failure of nation states? While the volume does not offer immediate answers to the question, its contributions do engage with these issues. Equally significant is the attention some of the essays pay to gender and race in diasporic identities—Munasinghe’s essay, for instance, shows how Indians were excised from the hegemonic discourse on Creole identity. The volume also carries important contributions on film and the production of a globalised Indian identity.
Space prevents me from treating in detail the excellent individual contributions. The first section entitled ‘Social Networks, Cultural Practices and the Processes of Settlement’ has a piece on the historical roots of the Indian diaspora in Mauritius where Indian settlers did not conform to just being indentured labour and where elite formations played a number of significant social and economic roles which do not readily find adequate mention. This is not to discount the preponderantly labour dominated profile of the diaspora in the Indian Ocean. The experiences of indentured labour, their cultural and ritual practices that enabled them to enjoy leisure time and also to articulate a distinct set of subjective preferences are eloquently mapped out by Sudesh Misra’s piece on the tazia in Fiji. Misra argues convincingly that the tazia comprised an autonomous site that was pitted against the world of regulated plantation labour and that it was an aesthetic political practice. While the essay does not draw from comparative experiences of other diasporic labour groups within the British Empire, it may be useful to consider whether within this kind of de-territorialised community/class formation, cultural practices alone have radical potential.
The second section ‘Religion, Displacement and Belonging’ carries essays on Muslim recognition and Islamophobia in Britain, how the two discourses have fed into and off each other, on South Asian assertiveness in Britain and on migrant experience perspectives from Kerala. The ethnography undertaken by Osella on the experience of Kerala migrants is rich and underscores the ambiguity of the experience. The respondents talk about the ambivalence of the entire experience, about returning home, about raising children in what is seen as a safe zone helps problematise the idea of ‘diasporic longing’.
The following sections look at gendered cultural productions in Britain and the United States, and at diaspora histories that emphasise the need to move away from a national bind in understanding experiences of mobility and migration, random and sustained. Finally, there is a section that looks at diaspora politics and imaginaries, in war and in peace—on Tamil nationalism and Bollywood productions that offer us very starkly contrasting representations of the non-resident South Asian, exile in one and NRI in another.
The essays in all cohere well to produce what I consider to be a major intervention in the field of South Asian diaspora studies. They make a serious effort to go beyond the usual and conventional narratives of unproblematic long distance nationalism, of representing diasporic subjects as model minorities, and of locating their politics within a limited schema of identity assertions around language and religion. The fact that this volume looks at class, race and gender, and that it attempts to open up ways of thinking afresh about globalisation and to rework in more imaginative, but also in hardy pragmatic ways, the diaspora–homeland continuum, makes it a major contribution to an expanding and exciting field of research.