Table Of ContentNation and Migration
SOUTH ASIA SEMINAR SERIES
A listing of the books in this series appears at the back of this volume
Nation and
Migration
The Politics of Space in the
South Asian Diaspora
Edited by Peter van der Veer
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nation and migration: the politics of space in the South Asian
diaspora / edited by Peter van der Veer,
p. cm. — (South Asia seminar series)
Papers presented at the 47th Annual South Asia Seminar held at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1991/1992.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3259-3 (cloth). — ISBN 0-8122-1537-0 (paper)
ι. South Asians — Foreign countries. 2. South Asia—Emigration and
immigration. 3. South Asia—Politics and government. I. Veer,
Peter van der. II. South Asia Seminar (47th: 1991 : University of
Pennsylvania). ΙΠ. Series.
DS339.4.N37 1995
909'.04914—dc20 94-28888
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Diasporic Imagination
Peter van der Veer ι
ι. A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed
Realities
Verne A. Dusenbery 17
2. Bhakti and Postcolonial Politics: Hindu Missions to Fiji
John D. Kelly 43
3. Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor
Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana,
1836-1885
Madhavi Kale 73
4. Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and
Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad
Aisha Khan 93
5. Hindus in Trinidad and Britain: Ethnic Religion,
Reification, and the Politics of Public Space
Steven Vertovec 132
6. New York City's Muslim World Day Parade
Susan Slyomovics 157
7. Indian Immigrants in Queens, New York City: Patterns of
Spatial Concentration and Distribution, 1965-1990
Madhulika S. Khandelwal 178
Acknowledgments
This book is the outcome of the 47th Annual South Asia Seminar, held at
the University of Pennsylvania during the academic year 1991-92. All the
essays in this volume were originally presented at that seminar. I want to
thank Karen Vorkapich for her management of the lecturers' travel arrange-
ments and Richard Cohen and the successive chairmen of the South Asia
Regional Studies Center, Arjun Appadurai and David Ludden, for their
steady support. Editing a volume of essays is never an easy task, but my
departure from Penn in the summer of 1992 definitely made it more
complicated. Without Victoria Farmer's superb handling of diasporic com-
munications the manuscript would never have been prepared for publica-
tion. I am very grateful for her efficiency and thoroughness. Finally, I would
like to thank Patricia Smith of the University of Pennsylvania Press for her
calm support of the project.
Peter van der Veer
Introduction: The Diasporic Imagination
In a recent study of the South Asian diaspora, Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and
Steven Vertovec (1990: ι) observe that the number and proportion of
people of South Asian descent living outside South Asia—some 8 million
worldwide (compared to the 1 billion residents of South Asia) — is small in
relation to other migrant populations, such as the Chinese (22 million
worldwide; 1 billion in China), the Jews (11 million worldwide; 3.5
million in Israel), the Africans (300 million worldwide; 540 million in
Africa), and the Europeans (350 million worldwide; 700 million in Eu-
rope) . Nevertheless, the complexity and diversity of the South Asian dias-
pora offer important insights for the understanding of international migra-
tion processes. Overseas South Asian communities have different historical
trajectories because they have developed in widely divergent historical
contexts in many parts of the world. It is the fragmented nature of these
contexts and experiences that complicates the use of "the South Asian
diaspora" as a transparent category.
The complexities and contradictions of the South Asian diasporic
experience enable us to approach a politics of space which evolves in
shifting historical contexts. International migration is clearly one of the
most important political issues in today's world. The European Commu-
nity's attempt to remove its internal borders has made its external borders
with the rest of the world even more significant. Processes of globalization
create new bounded entities which entertain complex relations with older
constructions of territoriality. Some nations are seen to be closer—both
spatially and racially—than others, so that, for example, German immi-
grants in Britain, despite the history of warfare between Britain and Ger-
many, can be regarded as part of a relatively unproblematic "internal"
migration within the European Community, whereas immigrants from
India—though coming from a country once part of the British empire—
are regarded as a threat to the political stability of Britain. The English
language is in this context not enough to signify the unity of the British,
since the immigrants from the former colonies usually speak perfect En-
2 Peter van der Veer
glish. Race and culture or religion appear to have displaced language as
markers of unity in the politics of space in the European Community.
Immigration is a major political theme in the United States as well,
despite a global ideology stressing that this is a settler's society. Everyone is
either a migrant or a self-conscious descendant of a migrant; even White
Anglo-Saxon Protestants who belong to a firmly established elite have their
story of the Mayflower. To be an immigrant in the United States seems,
therefore, a typical situation. In addition, spatial and social mobility are
seen as connected and positively valued in the United States. Nevertheless,
some ambiguities exist. First is the patent hostility toward recent immi-
grants—and most of the South Asians are recent arrivals. Despite the fact
that the United States is an "immigrant country," there is a strong sense of
the nation and of national boundaries which have to be protected against
diseases (such as communism and AIDS) brought in by immigrants, a
sense best expressed by that huge, impenetrable bureaucracy, the Immigra-
tion and Naturalization Service. Second, while a strong sense of a single
American nation and its historic mission exists, one finds also the preserva-
tion of firm ethnic boundaries and a continuing interest of ethnic groups in
their roots. The search for "Africa" among African Americans is one of the
most fascinating examples of this interest in origins elsewhere. In the South
Asian case, especially given the construction of "Asian" as a category (in-
cluding Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and
so on), there is a fascination with a similarly elusive "Asia" in ethnic politics.
Third is a continuing involvement of these immigrant groups in the affairs
of the countries of origin. This is most obvious in the Jewish and Irish
lobbies in the United States, but it is also present among South Asian
immigrants.
These ambiguities can, of course, be found in other regions besides the
United States and Western Europe. They derive from the contradictions
between the notion of discrete territoriality in the discourse of nationalism
and the transgressive fact of migration. International migration and trans-
national flows of information and goods are, as these terms themselves
indicate, intimately connected to the discourse of nationalism. Let us look,
initially, more closely at the first term in the title of this volume: nation.
Nationalism is neither a very old nor a very recent phenomenon in
world history. By and large, its ideological roots were in the American and
French revolutions of the eighteenth century, after which it spread over the
world in the nineteenth century. Contrary to what is often thought, na-
tionalism is perhaps less an isolated European invention than the product of
Introduction 3
European colonial expansion. Influential analyses of nationalism by Ernest
Gellner (1983 ) and Eric Hobsbawm ( 1991 ) present it squarely in terms of
the modernization of Europe. Although Benedict Anderson ( 1991 ) shares
this general perspective, he points out how important the desire for inde-
pendence from the mother country in the American settler societies was for
the development of the idea of the nation. One should not forget that the
American Revolution preceded the French Revolution. More important,
however, would be to realize that colonialism and nationalism go hand in
hand in both the colonizing and the colonized countries of the world. The
colonial project produced reified national cultures both in the colonies and
"at home" (cf. Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993). The scholarly dis-
courses that informed the colonial and later the national project were
developed not only in the Western metropolis, but also in the colonies. It
was in colonized Bengal at the end of the eighteenth century that Sir
William Jones brought Johann Gottfried Herder's notion that everyone
belonged to a nation and that the nation was a linguistic community a
significant step further by developing a comparative philology. Again, the
idea of a territorially bounded national community arises in the same period
that witnesses the growing interdependence of societies in the world-
system. It is fruitful therefore to see that connections between colonialism
and nationalism are important not only in the colonized societies but also in
the colonizing societies.
The nation is a modern construction that became salient in South Asia
in the second part of the nineteenth century, or more or less the same period
as in many parts of Europe. Migration, however, is definitely an old phe-
nomenon. There is often a tendency to see displacement, disjuncture, and
diaspora as something new in human experience, or, at least, to see its speed
and scale adding up to something that is not even modern, but postmodern
(see, e.g., Gupta and Ferguson 1992). I have some hesitations about
emphasizing a Great Transformation from modernity to postmodernity,
because it resembles so much the rhetoric of the earlier one from tradition
to modernity. The discourse of modernity emphasizes the "boundedness"
of the traditional community and compares it to the individual freedom of
movement in modern society. To a point the discourse of postmodernity
does the same by celebrating marginality, hybridity, and syncretism and by
rejecting notions of pure origins and identities (see, e.g., Bhabha 1990).
This discursive opposition of traditional restrictions and modern indi-
vidual freedom is expressed well in V S. Naipaul's great novelé House far
Mr. Biswas, describing the struggle of an individual to escape from the
