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. Although there are regional variations in their adaptations, in many ways, they display a common ‘Indian’ identity. 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. 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’.

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. 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 one's homeland is not self-evident. It happens or it doesn’t. Though some of 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.