India Festival 2010

India Festival 2010
THE INDIAN DIASPORA
“Who are they?”
The Indian Diaspora today constitutes an
important, and in some respects, unique strength
in global culture. The origins of the modern Indian
Diaspora lie primarily in the subjugation of India
by the British Raj and its incorporation into the
British Empire. Many Indians were lured and taken
over as indentured labor, just another fancy word
for slavery, to far-flung parts of the British Empire
in the nineteenth-century, a circumstance to which
the modern Indian populations of Fiji, Mauritius,
Guyana, Trinidad, Surinam, Malaysia, South Africa,
Sri Lanka, and other places attest in their own
peculiar ways.
Over two million Indians were relocated
throughout the world as indentured laborers from
the 1830’s until 1917. They mostly came from parts
of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chennai, and Gujarat, just
to name a few. When the laborers’ obligations were
fulfilled, many remained behind to claim the land
they were promised on which they had farmed as
their own, although many did not have the chance
to return to their homes either due to illness, lack of
money or the opportunity because the British refused
to bring them back. Many of the laborers saw this as
their fate and tried their best to make a life for their
families. Currently, there is over 25 million People of
Indian Origin (PIO’s) living outside of India in over
100 countries.
As if in emulation of their ancestors, many
Gujarati traders once again left for East Africa in
large sums in the early part of the twentieth century
developing communities where the settled especially
in Kenya and Uganda . In the post-World War II,
the spreading of Indian labor and professionals has
been a nearly a world-wide phenomenon. Mostly
Indians and other South Asians provided the man
power that helped in the reconstruction of war-torn
Europe, particularly the United Kingdom and the
Netherlands. In recent years, unskilled laborers from
India have been the main force in the transformation
of the physical landscape of much of the Middle East.
In the meantime, in countries such as the United
States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, Indians
today have made their presence undoubtedly felt
in the professional arena in ways of engineering,
medicine, research, business, finance and technology.
Who and what is an Indian today? How are we
to characterize the Indian diasporas community as
‘Indian’ given that it is constituted of such diverse
elements as South Asians, Muslims, Canadian
Sikhs, Punjabi Mexican Californians, Gujarati East
Africans now settled in the U.S. by way of England,
South African Hindus, Indo Guyanese and Indo
Trinidadians and so forth? In the United States, at
least, the Indian community has been given a place
of considerable privilege, and many Indians could
preserve their ‘Indianness’ and being ‘American’ BUT
it was not until the last 15 years that we have seen the
wide spread acceptance of Indians and the impact we
have made in the United States and Canada.
Indians in America unlike most other Indian
communities across the world, still maintain some
sort of link with the motherland since many of the
residents in the US are first or second generation
who immigrated as students and professionals. Many
continue their link with the motherland through
the most unlikely process of bonding, the Hindi
feature film, a phenomenon unique to the Indian
Diaspora: what Hollywood is to the Western Europe,
“Bollywood” is to the Indian Diaspora in the Middle
East, East Africa, and the Caribbean. The modesty of
the family values, the Hindi film is said to explain its
appeal to the world; and though we may well contest
that interpretation, it is worthy of note that Hindi
www.gujaratisamaj.org 62 GUJARATI SAMAJ OF TAMPA BAY