_The Indian Diaspora - Past, Present, And Future_ by Ashok Rao _ TiE Global

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"The Indian Diaspora - Past, Present, and Future" by AshokRao

Release Date: 01/14/2013

When I was as ked to write this article on the topic The Indian Diaspora Past,

Present and Future, I wondered what could I write, that you the reader, already did

not already know. After all the Indian Diaspora particularly in the US, is well educated,

well read and well i nformed. But I channeled Sir Richard Branson and his m otto, and

decided, SCREW IT! Lets do it, and dived into researching this fascinating

phenomenon.

Our diasporas Past and Present have been thoroughly documented and analyzed;

and our Future? Well our Future is a n area where we have so many prognosticators and s o many expert opinions. Its like

going to the m ovies; everyone has an opinion, a nd everyone is a critic. Once I started researching the his tory of our diaspora,

I realized that there was a lot I did not know, and I would think it is probably the same for mo st of you readers. Our view of our

diaspora very much depends on ones own personal pers pective, ones socio economic s tatus, and ones hos t country in

other words, ones own s omewhat blinkered view of our diaspora.

How ma ny of us even know what the word diaspora actually means, and what is its source? Very sim ply put, the source of

any Diaspora is MIGRATION.

Let us consider the act of Migration for a m oment. Migration, a fundame ntally essential ingredient o f Global Social change, is

a phenomenon that has been taking place for thousands of years and continues all over the world. It happens when pe ople

can no longer sustain thems elves within their own milieu s. They migrate to places where resources are more eas ily

available. In earlier periods people m igrated from one place to another in s earch of food, shelter, and safety from

persecution. Today, people tend to m igrate in search of better career opportunities and better quality of life.

Migrants not only take with them their skills and expertise to their new locales, but als o their culture, living s tyles and

collective m emories . Over the ages , this has been a common thread irrespective of nationality or ethnicity, whether it is

Jewish, Irish, Italian, Polish, British, German, Chines e, or Indian. Over the pas t 2 m illennia, three broad patterns of m igration

have occurred:

(a) Ancient and Medieval m igration to colonial powers

(b) Migration to the industrial nations immediately after World War II, and

(c) Recent migration to developed countries for better career opportunities and better living condition, where the Internet,

affordable airfare, and cheap communications help to maintain close ties with ones homeland for people migrating to these

countries.

The phenomenon that is hum an migration is best captured by the term we have all come to know as Diaspora. The term

Diaspora i s derived from the Greek words dia, which mean s through, and kpeiro which means , to scatter. Literally

Diaspora means scattering or dispersion. It was originally used for the dispersi on of Jews after their exile from Babylon in

the 6th Century BC, and later to refer to all the Jewis h people s cattered in exile outside Pales tine. Today it has com e to

describe any group of people who are dispers ed or scattered away from their hom e country with a dis tinct collective memory

and a myth of return.

There is no ambiguity about the term Dias pora, when it is used in relation to the Jewish people. But once it is applied to other

religious or ethnic groups, it becomes difficult to make a clear distinction between what is a Migration and what is a

Diaspora; or between what is a Minority and what is a D iaspora. For instance, we do not use the term British Diaspora

when discuss ing the presence o f even recent descendants of British peo ple in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada

or the United States. They are s imply Aussies , Kiwis, South Africans, Canadians or Americans, even though they meet most

of the requirements of a diaspora. Nor is the term applied to the many German colonies establish ed in central and Eastern

Europe, or in several Latin American countries. These colonies, in both Chile and Argentina for ins tance, continue to retain

their Germanic identity normally a key-defining feature of a Dias pora. But there is no reference to a German Diaspora in

our lexicon. They are typically referred to as a minority of superiority.

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A Dias pora is also characterized by the role played by a collective memory. This col lective mem ory retains the his torical facts

that precipitated the dispersion or scattering, as well as the cultural heritage of the homeland, and is often religious in nature.

The Indian diaspora fulfills all the conditions required of a Dias pora. Let us examine those requirements in detail:

1. We maintain our Family Traditions of origin, but also are gradually subject to social, cultural and political integration into

the host nation.

2. We are acutely aware of our Indian (and regional) origins , but dont go much further than a sympathetic curiosity about

them. However, our personal identity is si gnificantly affected by that awareness.

3. We take an active interest in the general fate of India, and in im portant events in India.

4. We perpetuate signi ficant aspects of our Indian culture like language, tradition and religion: i.e.

1. Most of us speak Hindi, as well as our mother tongues like Telugu, Gujarati, etc.

2. We maintain our Tradition for Weddings, Upananyanams, Cremations etc.

3. And we maintain our religions like Hinduism , Sikhism , Islam , and other India based religions.

5. We maintain regular communications with our family and friends in India.

6. We send remittances back home on a regular basis . India is number one in the world with over $55 billion in annual

remittances. China is s econd with $50 billion. And lastly,

7. We attempt to influence our hos t country governments to pursue policies favorable to India, such as the intense lobbying

by the Indian diaspora in the US to get a recalcitrant US Senate to approve the Nuclear Treaty.

Let us a take a quick look at the Historical Evolution of the Indian Diaspora which numbers around 30 mill ion. It is worthwhile

and mos t instructive.

The history of migration from India goes back at least two thousand years. The first migrantion from what is modern day India

was around the time of Kanishka, around the 1s t century AD. They were the Romani people, now known al l around the world

as "Gypsies", from what today is the Indian s tate of Rajasthan. They emigrated from India towards the northwest and

eventually settled in Eastern Europe.

Another major migration from the Indian subcontinent was to South Eas t Asia, starting around 500 AD. The Cholas , a great

naval power, conquered what is today Indonesia and Malaysia and dominated the so-called Indianized kingdoms of

Southeast Asia. The influence o f Indian culture is still s trongly felt in South East Asia, for example with the royal Brahmins

kings of Thailand, the archeological wonders of the Angkor Kingdoms of Cam bodia, and in Indonesia, especially in Central

Sumatra and Bali.

However, in all these early migrations, it is not reasonable or even acceptable to apply the label of Indian Dias pora to

the descendants of those emigrants who left India several centuries ago. Intermixture with the local population over the

centuries has been so great as to elim inate all traces of such Indian identity, and they are no longer considered PIOs

(People of Indian Origin).

However, over the pas t 2 centuries, India has achieved, arguably the world's m ost diverse and com plex migration histories,

forming the Modern Indian Diaspora. Spread across a ll 6 continents and 125 countries, it is es timated to number around 30

million. The characteristics of this di versified group, varies to an as tonishing degree yet we are all part of the same Indian

diaspora. It varies to such an extent that we define 3 s ubsets of our diaspora:

1. the Old Diaspora

2. the New Diaspora

3. and the Gulf Diaspora.

There is one cons istent theme to all 3 of them. They were, and are, all created by a labor migration uns killed labor s tartingtwo centuries ago, and hig hly skilled labor post the mid 19 60s. The first wave of todays Indian Dias pora is what we call the

Old Diaspora, and beg an during the early 19th century and continued until the end of the British Raj.

Britain abolished of s lavery in 1833 and this act was followed by other colonial powers like France, the Netherlands, and

Portugal. Their colonies now urgently needed m anpower to work the sugar and rubber plantations that were once worked by

African s laves. To meet this demand, the British estab lished the system of Indentured labor Migration from the Indian

subcontinent.

In 1834, Britain first began exporting bonded Indian labor to Mauritius. The Dutch and French, replicated the British system,

and also exported Indian workers to their colonies. In just a decade, this s mall-scale migration became a mas s movement

to provide cheap labor to British and other European colonies. Con ditions of abs olute poverty in many parts of India, and the

prospect of gaining wealth overseas , motivated people to sell thems elves, and become bonded laborers. Conditions of

these journeys were extremely difficult and the mortality was high o n British, Dutch and French boats from the sub -continent


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to these colonies ; not much b etter than the s laver boats that brought black Africans to the plantations of the Southern United

States.

Workers for plantations in Mauritius, Suriname, Trinidad and Fiji were m ainly recruited from the p resent-day states of Bihar

and UP. In Guyana and East Africa, laborers originated primarily from Punjab and Gujarat. Given the proximity of Tamil Nadu

to French poss ess ions in India li ke Pondicherry, the workers in m ost French colonies, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and

La Reunion were Tamils . All these m igrants were almos t all males . This brutal indenture system las ted until World War I.

In response to severe criticism , Britain abolis hed the indenture system in 1916. By that time, more than 1.5 m illion Indians

had been s hipped to colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. During roughly the same pe riod, another form of labor

migration was taking place. Tapping the labor surplus of South India, mostly in what is today the modern Indian state of

Tamil Nadu, the Colonial boss es of tea, coffee, and rubber plantations in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Burma authorized Indian

headmen, to recruit entire families and ship them to plantations. About 5 million Indians, mos tly poor Tamils, migrated to

these 3 countries, till the system was abolished just prior to World War II.

Around that same tim e, in addition to low-skilled workers , merchants and traders from Gujara t & Sindh s ettled in British

colonies i n the Middle East, and South & East African. For example, Gujarati and Sindhi merchants becam e sh op owners in

East Africa, and traders from Kerala and Tamil Nadu were involved in the retail trade, and in m oney lending, to poor Indian

peasants in Burma, Ceylon and Malaya. By the time of Second World War the Indian Dias pora was approximately 6 million ;

out of this over 1 million Indians were in Burma. At that time there were only 6,000 Indians i n United States.

Today this Old Diaspora constitutes 60% of our Indian dias pora, or approximately 18 million PIOs, and is primarily a pre

WW II phenomenon. The New Diaspora on the other hand, consists of migrants who left India in large numbers from the mid

60s onwards primarily to developed countries like the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe. Around 1900, there

were less than a thousand Indians in both the UK and the United States. By World War II, the number had grown to around

6,000 in each country.

In Britain mos tly unskilled workers for low wages.

In the US mostly Sikhs who worked in agriculture in California.

Many factors contributed to this de minim is trickle of migrants from India to these developed countries. Draconian legis lation

in the United States had banned imm igration to the US from all but a handful of Western European countries. The Johnson

Reed Act of 1924, probably the mos t overtly racist imm igration law in the world at the time, served to limit the annual num ber

of imm igrants to the US from any country to 2% of the num ber of people from that country who were al ready living in the US

dating back to 1890. The law was aimed at s topping Eastern Europeans Jews who h ad migrated in large num bers to the US

since after 1890, to escape persecution in Europe. That is why the Act chose 1890 as its m easurem ent date. It also had the

collateral effect of prohibiting the entry of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians to the US. According to the U.S.

Department of State at the time, the p urpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American hom ogeneity.

Similarly at the turn of the century, in Canada, als o part of the British Empi re at that time, there were about 100 Indians. This

number ros e to 5,000 by 1907, before a res trictive new law s topped any further imm igration. This law required that whoever

landed in Canada for the purposes of imm igrating into Canada, make a continuous journey from the country of one's

citizenship. It stopped Indian im migration in i ts tracks, since no s teamships traveled directly from India to Canada. One m ust

admit it was very clever sleight of hand, since its g oal was to stop imm igration into Canada from all but a few Western

European countries.

The landscape began to change after Indian independence. Unskilled, and some s killed workers, mostly male Punjabi

Sikhs, migrated from India to the United Kingdom. This was due to Britain's pos twar demand for low-skilled labor, Indias

postcolonial ties, and the UK's Comm onwealth imm igration policy, which allowed any citizen of a Commonwealth country to

live, work, vote, and hold public office in the United Kingdom . Many settled in London as well as industrial cities l ike Leicester

and Birmingham . At the time (from 1947 till 1962), Indian nationals, as Comm onwealth citizens, had an unrestricted right to

enter the United Kingdom.

In 1962 and again later in 1968 the British Comm onwealth Immigration Acts rescinded these rights for Indians. However 20

years later, when the UK was faced with a shortage of highly skilled labor, the UK reversed itse lf, and Indian migration to the

UK picked up considerably. Additionally, the anti-Indian discrimination in African countries like Kenya and Uganda in the m id

sixties onwards , also resulted in a large-scale Secondary Migration of PIOs to the UK. Of the current Indian diaspora in the

UK, one-fifth is as a result of this secondary migration from an East African country or South Africa.

The dividing line for Indian immigration to the United States, and resultant sign ificant Diaspora formation is the year 1965. It

was in 1 965 that President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress pass ed the historic Hart-Celler Act. This legis lation

terminated the racist 1924 Johnson-Reed act, abolished national-origins quotas and m ade it possibl e for high-skilled

imm igrants, including Indians, to gain legal, permanent residence in the United States, and bring their family members as

well.

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As in the United States, s igni ficant imm igration o f Indians to Canada was triggered by new im migration leg is lation that

opened the door to highly skilled imm igrants. In 1968, Canada introduced its points system, which ass igns value to

qualifications rather than a person's ethnic or national background. As a res ult, Indian imm igration to Canada boomed.

The 1990s s oftware boom and rising economy in the US attracted Indians by the boatload. The US Immigration Act of 1990,

effective from 1995, facilitated this process further by introducing the H-1B tem porary worker program, allowing US

busines ses to hire foreigners with a minim um of a bachelor's degree in "specialty occupations" including doctors, scientists,

engineers, and IT specialis ts. Indian citizens are far and away the top recipients of H-1B visas each year. As a result the

Indian diaspora in the US is highly skilled. The US Census Bureau es timates that 75% percent of all ethnic Indians working

in the US hold at least a bachelor's degree, and 69% percent work in managem ent and professional occupations.

US, UK and Canadian census data from 2010 estimates that the Indian diaspora grew to 3 m illion in the US, 1.5 million in

the UK, and 1 milli on in Canad a; a twentyfold increase in half a century. Today, we are the fourth largest imm igrant group in

the United States after the Mexicans, Filipinos, and Ch inese.

Also, since the 1990s , Australia and New Zealand have become important destination countries for Indians, s ince both

countries look to attract English-speaking, highl y qualified professionals , often to supply their IT industries. The Indian

diaspora in Australia num bers 400,000, almo st 2 percent of their total population.

The most recent development of the Indian Diaspora is the so Gulf Diaspora. The 1970s oil bo om in the Middle East ended

up triggering significant migration from India to the Persian Gulf. An increasing num ber of semi and unskilled workers,

primarily from South India, have worked in the gulf countries o n temporary schemes in the oil indu stry and in services and

construction. With modern air transportation, this was on a contractual basis rather than permanent as in the 19th century.

These Gulf countries have a common policy of not naturalizing non-Arabs, even if they are born there, thereby relegating our

diaspora in those countries to a kind of second class status. At one time the fastest growing segm ent of our Diaspora, the

Gulf Diaspora has now stabilized at around 5 million.

The common thread between all the three groups of the Indian dias pora is that they are labor migrants. The m ore recent

migration of skilled and highly skilled labor went to the developed countries like the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New

Zealand and formed a part of new Indian Diaspora. The lower skilled, sem i-skilled and un-s killed labor went to the Gulf

region.

So what is the future for our diaspora? Well the ans wer is not that simple and could m ore accurately be answered by it

depends. It depends on a variety of factors, some within our control but mos t not. While ethnic Indians a re a sm all but

wealthy minority in the US, UK, and the countries of the new diaspora, they constitute 40 percent of the population in Fiji,

Trinidad, Guyana, Reunion and Suriname, and 70 pe rcent of Mauritius all old diaspora countries.

The new Indian diaspora, especially in the United States, is highly organized with many regional and pan-Indian cultural,

professional, religio us, and charity organizations. In recent years, Indians ha ve dem onstrated their increasing political

influence with the election of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, NY Attorney General

Preet Bharara, and the formation of the India Caucus in both the Congres s a nd the Senate. Other countries have seen even

more Indians elected to ma jor public office. In Canad a, currently, there are nine MPs of Indian-origin in that country's

parliament the Canadian Hous e of Common s. In the UK, a record number of 8 Indian candidates including two wom en

have been elected to the British Parliamen t; and 8 Members of the House of Lords are People of Indian Origin.

The success of Indian Entrepreneurs, CEOs, Scientists, Academics , Media personali ties, Filmmakers a nd IT profess ionals

in the US has created trust in India's intellectual abilities abroad. It has been a major factor in branding India as a s ource of

well-educated and hard-working profess ionals. Rem ember it was n ot more than 20 years ago wh en India was not cool.

There was no India Shining or Incredible India, but rather India was viewed as a poverty-ridden country of snake charmers

and elephants but no m ore. This new India brand explains the increased interest in recruiting Indian graduates and

professionals in several countries. It also contributes to the willingnes s of US and other companies to collaborate with, and

outsource to, Indian companies. Ethnic Indians, particularly in new diaspora countries, have become known for their

economic, professional , academic, scientific and artistic successes and generally peaceful integration. However, the vast

majorities of our 30 m illion dias pora including those on tempo rary contracts that make up the Gulf Diaspora, face

discrimina tion, have limited rights, and can only look forward to less secure futures.

Lets face it; we are a people who differ in ethnicity, skin color and religion from the m ajority populations of m ost of our hos t

countries. Despite the general acceptance of us ethnic Indians, and the increasing coolness of being Indian, we remain

potential targets of xenophobia and hate ins pired violence. Incidents of ethnic tensions exist all across our diasp ora; as for

instance in old diaspo ra countries like,

Malaysia, where despite s ome po litical representation, Indians faces discrim ination, exacerbated by religious tensions

between the predominantly Muslim Malays (Bhumip utras) and the predominantly Hindu Indians.

In Fiji, where ethnic Indians comprise over 40% of the population, anti-Indian resentment resul ted in an ethnic Fijian

coup dtat in 2000, wh ich removed the dem ocratically elected Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry from office. This coup


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was wholeheartedly supported by the Methodist Church of Fiji, which likened Indians to the evil citizens of Sodom and

Gomorrah.

And in Trinidad, where the Speaker of the House , Occah Seapual, an Indian woman, was un seated by the People 's

National Movement (PNM), the black party which had held power for most of the recent history of Trinidad. They did it by

promulgating a s tate of emergency in the dead of night, placed her under hou se arres t and eventually removed her as

Speaker of the House.

This discrim ination persis ts not just in countries like Malaysia, Fiji and Trinidad but also in the new diaspora countries like

the UK and Germany, where skinhead Brits and Germans have violently clashed with people from South Asia, and in

Australia where attacks on Indian students have happened at an alarming rate. Even in the US, a country where Indians have

made im mens e strides in all fields , we are not imm une from hate crimes , like the Dot-buster gangs of New Jersey, or the

massacre of worshipers at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin.

Wherever Indians are able to establis h themsel ves, they became indispens able as the principal arteries of trade,

shopkeepers to the nation, and so unfortunately open thems elves to the charge that they have done so by illicit activities; by

marginalizing the local p opulation; and with no other thought than of enhancing their own interests and prosperity. We have

become victims of our own success.

Having noted all of this, our diaspora should be a source of pride to all Indians, insi de and outside of India. In spite of the fact

that Indians migrants ha ve lived in conditions of appalling poverty in many places of the world where they were first taken as

indentured labor many years ag o, a number of rem arkable transformations have taken place over the pas t generations.

Through thrift, dogged perseverance, hard work and m ost im portantly by a withdrawal into our ones own culture, in which

they found forces of sus tenance, these Indians s uccessfully labored to give their children and grand-children better

economic futures. These descendants, in time cam e to capture the trade, commerce and busin ess leadership of their new

homelands . This was just as true in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, as it was i n Trinidad, Mauritius, Suriname and Burma,

notwithstanding the resentment and discrimination of the local populace and political establishments.

If Indians appe ar to have done well for themsel ves within the economic domain of these old diaspora countries, our

affluence in new diaspora countries like the United States is even more pronounced, as is our presence within top

professions . Taking the US as a who le, though our share of the population in the US is less than 1%, Indians account for

well over 5% of the scientists , engineers, and software specialis ts; and almos t 10% of all the doctors. No group, not whites,

not the Chinese, nor the Jewish people, has a hig her median household income than Indians, which is alm ost double that of

the overall average of the United States.

Indeed, when India the nation, was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy 20 years ago, the flood of such success stories

coming from our dias pora, helped to lay the groundwork for the abolition of Indias sens eless licensing res trictions on

capacity creation, product diversification, and import competition. The very effective lobbying of the Indian Government by our

diaspora eventually triggered our liberal reforms and set us on the path to becoming an economic jugge rnaut a so called

BRIC country. Who can forget the clarion call of Des h Bachao, DOT Hatao from a couple of Indian stalwarts from California,

that became the catalyst for our telephone system i n India going from Worst to First in the world.

Indias recent transformation is analogous in som e ways to what happened to Japan during the Meiji Res toration in Japan

150 years ago. Emperor Meiji ended the Shogunate, and forced change in Japan from being a closed feudal society to a

market driven economy. Japans transformation was accomplished through major ini tiatives ena bled by gifted Japanese

who were sent abroad by the Emperor to bring back ideas that were adapted to Japans culture and needs . In Indias cas e,

our diaspora h as s erved a s imilar function, though unlike Japan, not because of our go vernment, but in spite of it.

Our diaspora has also contributed to Indias as cendency in the world, by its achievements in a variety of fields of

entrepreneurship, business, academia, science, arts and culture, in all the countries we have migrated to. Experts predict

that India will overtake China as the mos t populous country in the world by 2050. Our population will be young and thus highly

mobile. Given the conundrum of a n expanding midd le class i n India, juxtaposed agains t the continuing abject poverty of over

half a billion Indians, m igration patterns will accelerate. Notwithstanding discrimination, xenophobia and exclusion in many

countries, our diaspora added over 10 million to its num bers in the las t decade alone. The migration of highly skilled

professionals ; the continuing export of labor; and illegal im migration to new dias pora countries; are likely to add to those

numbers.

As I look back at our diasporas past, and try to look forward to its future, I am reminded o f Omar Khayyams fam ous poem

from his signature work Rubaiyat, and I think it best articulates my observations:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ

Moves on: nor a ll thy Piety nor Wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

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