Panel No. 25

Panel Title: South Asian Diaspora Studies

Convenor: Frank J. Korom, Departments of Religion and Anthropology, Boston University, USA

    Friday 9 July, 13–18

Panel Abstract: South Asian diaspora studies have grown remarkably as a sub-field within Indology over the past twenty years. This panel proposes to step back, take a look, and see where we have gone and where we still need to go to expand and refine this sub-field. For example, what geographical, linguistic, or ethnic regions/groups deserve more attention or have been missed altogether? Which groups have received the most attention and why? Moreover, how might we further refine our theoretical toolbox for analyzing South Asian communities living outside of South Asia. These are some of the questions that this panel proposes to answer by exploring historical and contemporary examples of South Asians in a world of diaspora and transnational movement.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

Paper Giver 1: Mohammad Mohiyuddin Mohammadd Sulaiman, Dept. for Strategic and Security Studies, National University Malaysia

Paper 1 Title: Forced Repatriation of Indians by the Burmese Revolutionary Council in the 1960s

Paper Abstract: It was the colonial British who brought Indian indentured laborers to work in the Irrawady Delta. Along with Indian laborers, the Chettayer caste, who lent money on interest, exploited the agricultural situation by confiscating Burmese land from those who could not return loans. In 1938, almost 80 percent of Burmese rice farms were in the hands of Chettayars, which prompted a Burmese revolt against Indians led by Saya San in 1938. Indian-Burmese riots, which were unfortunately transformed into Muslims- Buddhist riots had caused enormous dissatisfaction among the natives. The Burmese assumed the reason they remained poor was due to Indians being rich. It was the general perception of the Burmese that they were not successful in business because Indians monopolized it. What is more, the British favors rendered upon Indians had sowed further hatred towards Indians.
In 1962, General Ne Win abolished the Constitution and adopted a new policy called the “Burmese way to socialism,” which, according to many, paved the “Burmese way to isolation.” He nationalized all foreign firms, banks, and businesses owned by non-Burmese or Indian migrants. Hundreds of thousands of Indian businessmen and migrants were forced to repatriate to mainland India. Not a penny or any fortune made on Burma’s soil could be brought along with them.
In this paper, the reason that prompted the Sino-Burmese General Ne Win to take such a drastic decision against Indians is discussed along with the impact that the Burmese had to endure in a dilapidated economy after the massive forced repatriation of Indian businessmen and migrant labors. The reason why the Indian regime of the day was not keen to look into the disastrous plight of her citizens is also examined. The paper investigates the difficulties and challenges faced by the contemporary community of Indians residing in Burma.

Paper Giver 2: Deborah Sutton, Department of History, Lancaster University, UK

Paper 2 Title: “All Races Must Work for the African:” Race, Identity and Citizenship between South Asia and East Africa, 1948 – 1963

Paper Abstract: This paper addresses identities on the periphery of late colonial rule and post-colonial nationalism, specifically, the population of South Asian origin in East Africa whose identities were caught between an emergent nationalism in East Africa and newly realized nationhood in India during the 1950s. The 1948 British Nationality Act and the actual and imminent independence of former British colonies in South Asia and East Africa created four potential citizenship units for the population of South Asian origin in East Africa: British, Indian, Pakistani or Kenyan. Ironically, the legislative enactment of inclusion came to be punctuated and, eventually characterized, by the trope of exclusion of the East African Asians by African nationalists, the British immigration authorities and the Indian state. By the early 1960s, political and civic representation of the Indians of East Africa had become a defensive identity politics wholly reactive to variously defined transgressions of either Indian or African post-colonial nationalisms. Existing accounts have relied on specificity and contingency to explain the vilification of South Asians in East Africa. I'd like to suggest that there are far more significant and resonant ways to think about the discourses of nation, citizenship and race in the 1950s that accumulated around the ‘Asian problem’ in East Africa by broaching conceptual issues of liberal rhetoric and authoritarian practices of post-colonial citizenship.
This paper explores the relationship constructed between the Government of India and the population of South Asian origin between the 1948 Act and the independence of Kenya in 1963. In India, Nehru acted as both warden and proxy of the Indians in East Africa, freely recognizing them as citizens in name. Yet legalizing and formally assigning that citizenship, beyond the inclusion implied by the constitution, was increasingly tempered by the charge that these particular citizens had been ‘trained up’ in racist subjectship by British colonial government. Discussions about and between the Kenya Indian Congress and the Government of India pivoted on two axis: the idea—which slipped between cultural and racial specificities—of the African as apprentice to the realized Indian state and citizen and the reinvention of India’s freedom struggle as the apotheosis of anti-colonial resistance. South Asian political representatives in East Africa were deemed to have breached both their special responsibility to the less developed African and 'correct' anti-colonial resistance in their acceptance of communal electoral rolls and multi-racial government in 1954. These accusations were leveled at specific, and monitored, political representatives who became surrogates for the entire South Asian population. The actions of the East African Indian National Congress (later renamed the Kenya Indian Congress) became a liability to Nehru’s anti-imperial intervention in East Africa and furnished doubts over the competence of East African Indians to become secular, Indian citizens. Discussions within the Government of India created an implacable tangle of citizenship criteria—defined variously by culture, religion, politics and nativity - that bound the East African Asians into certain delinquency.

Paper Giver 3: Igor Kotin, Department of Oriental Studies, St.Petersburg State University, Russian Federation

Paper 3 Title: South Asians in Russia: A New Element in the Multicultural Mosaic

Paper Abstract: The South Asian diaspora and particularly the Indian one became popular subject of research due to its economic importance, growing numbers of South Asians overseas, thanks to their visibility in such countries as Great Britain, Canada, USA, not to speak of Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. Many other countries like Australia and New Zealand are becoming aware of the growth of their populations of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Yet countries like Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus remain terra incognita for scholars of the South Asian diaspora. While the numbers for Belarus are negligent, this is not the case of Russia, where estimates of Indians only vary from 40,000 to 50,000 while the number of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are smaller but still significant.
Early Indian settlers to Russia were traders who founded an “Indian town” in Astrakhan in southern Russia. This “Indian town” is known to have existed in the 17th and 18th centuries. Later on Indian traders visited Moscow and St. Petersburg as well. Political opportunists of Indian origin also stayed in the capitals of the Russian Empire. In the 1920s Indian members of the Communist International also found refuge and sometimes their death in Soviet Russia. It was the post-Independence era and particularly post-Stalin era in Russia, however, that witnessed the growth of Indian students, particularly medical students in big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyev. Some of the ex-students managed to stay longer in the Soviet Union. They arranged marriages with local women but few got Soviet citizenship. It was the post-1990 liberalization period when Indian entrepreneurs found Russian soil good for their investments and work, while Bangladeshis found Russia with its anarchic internal life and porous borders suitable as the stepping stone for moving westwards. As for Pakistanis in Russia, they remain mostly students, particularly medical students. It is difficult to speak of cultural maturity of this young immigrant population of South Asian origin in Russia. Yet we can mention a VHP branch in Moscow and the Pakistani mosque at St. Petersburg Polytechnic as signs of the establishment of the ethnic minority, rather than simply communities of sojourners on Russian soil.

      Full paper to be downloaded (as a pdf-file)

Paper Giver 4: Girija Kaimal, Department of Education, Harvard University, USA

Paper 4 Title: In the Land of Milk and Honey: The Indo-American Diaspora and Media

Paper Abstract: Immigrants of Indian origin have had a unique place in American immigrant history. Beginning with the farm workers in California in the early twentieth century to the recent spate of high-tech skilled workers, Indian immigrants constitute over 2 million in number and span the spectrum from being one of the wealthiest ethnicities to having a sizably poor sub-group. In this paper I present an analysis of the dreams that lead Indians to the U.S. and how these aspirations, are depicted in the media (television and cinema). For the current generation that is born and raised in the U.S., these media depictions send implicit and sometimes damaging messages about the individual and his identity in society. I will use both depictions in the media as well as the choices made by diasporic Indians to understand how they negotiate the challenges of immigration and cultural distance.

      Full paper to be downloaded (as a pdf-file)

Paper Giver 5: Lindsey Harlan, Department of Religion, Connecticut College, USA

Paper 5 Title: Reversing the Gaze in America: Parody in Divali Performance at Connecticut College

Paper Abstract: Examining the celebration of the Hindu holiday Divali at Connecticut College, this essay argues that various songs, dances, and skits demonstrate “self-conscious self-translation” of students from diverse cultures and regions of South Asia. In performance students reverse the gaze of U.S. citizens and set the terms for multicultural edification while gently critiquing various South Asian and American cultural codes. Among the performances examined are a Bharat Natyam dance to the theme song from the film “Austin Powers” and a Bollywood spoof in which a demure Indian wife follows her husband to New York City and becomes a Hollywood star after being discovered by Steven Spielberg.

Paper Giver 6: Kirin Narayan, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin— Madison, USA

Paper 6 Title: Moving Stories: Family Folklore in the South Asian Diaspora

Paper Abstract: As Stuart Hall has observed, "identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (1994:394). Based on interviews with second-generation South Asian Americans, this paper argues that family stories--assorted narrative genres told about the family and within the family--are key sites for the transmission of a personal connection to the homeland and thus, the framing and reframing of a diasporic identity.