Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development 2020045950, 9780367371272, 9780429352768, 9780367724450

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“From cultural shifts to the impacts of remittances for places of origin, this volume covers a wide range of key topics in the study of diasporas and development in Asia. Moving between detailed case-studies and large-scale analyses, it offers a rich and expansive perspective on Asian societies and diasporas.” —Nazli Kibria, Professor of Sociology, Boston University, USA “This important volume brings together expert analysis of the complex relationship between diasporas and development in Asia. The diverse chapters address key issues including investment and remittances, philanthropy, socio-cultural change, legal rights, knowledge transfer as well as international and regional politics. Drawing on different theoretical traditions and historical perspectives, the contributions together provide an essential overview of a key process of change in Asia and beyond that will shape the 21st century.” —Christopher McDowell, Assistant Vice President (International), City, University of London, UK “Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development is an impressive collection of thought-provoking essays that are both transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. This carefully crafted volume highlights the multi-layered complexities of Asian diaspora networks and affiliations. A timely intervention in the field of diaspora studies.” —Brinda J. Mehta, Germaine Thompson Professor of French & ­Francophone Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Mills College, USA

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ASIAN DIASPORA AND DEVELOPMENT

This handbook offers an analysis of Asian diaspora and development, and explores the role that immigrants living within diasporic and transnational communities play in the development of their host countries and their homeland. Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary scholars from across the world, the handbook is divided into the following sections: • • • • •

Development Potential of Asian Diasporas Diaspora, Homeland, and Development Gender, Generation, and Identities Soft Power, Mobilization, and Development Media, Culture, and Representations.

Presenting cutting-edge research on several dimensions of diaspora and development, ­Rou­tledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development provides a platform for further discussion in the fields of migration studies, diaspora studies, transnational studies, race relations, ethnic studies, gender studies, globalization, Asian studies, and research methods. Ajaya K. Sahoo is an Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for the Study of I­ ndian ­Diaspora, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications include the Rou­tledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism (2019), the Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2017), Indian Transnationalism Online (2014), Diaspora and Identity (2014), and Transnational Migrations (2009), all published by Routledge. He is also the Editor of the Journal of South Asian Diaspora (Taylor & Francis/Routledge).

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ASIAN DIASPORA AND DEVELOPMENT

Edited by Ajaya K. Sahoo

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Ajaya K. Sahoo; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ajaya K. Sahoo to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sahoo, Ajaya Kumar, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of Asian diaspora and development / edited by Ajaya K. Sahoo. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045950 | ISBN 9780367371272 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429352768 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Asian diaspora. | Asians—Migrations. | Asians—Foreign countries. | Transnationalism. | Globalization. | Asia—Emigration and immigration. Classification: LCC JV8490 .R65 2021 | DDC 338.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045950 ISBN: 978-0-367-37127-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-72445-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35276-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of figures xi List of tables xii List of contributors xiii Acknowledgements xix List of acronyms xx Introduction: Asian diaspora and development 1 Ajaya K. Sahoo PART I

Development potential of Asian diasporas 15 1 Making sense of the past: the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and transgenerational histories 17 Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen 2 The skilled South Asian diaspora in the OECD 30 Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai 3 Informal finance and the success of diasporic Chinese businesses in Central America 51 Josephine Smart and Alan Smart 4 The history and present state of Korean diasporas 65 In-Jin Yoon

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Contents

5 Family formation and parenting practices among new Chinese immigrants in Singapore 79 Wang Jun and Min Zhou PART II

Diaspora, homeland, and development 93 6 Diaspora, development, and the reshaping of homelands in an evolving world 95 Pablo S. Bose 7 Manipur’s diaspora in the United States: mapping cultural and development ties with homeland 107 Ajailiu Niumai 8 Remittance owners’ financial capabilities: can these bridge diaspora and development? 122 Jeremaiah M. Opiniano 9 A structural perspective on international migration from rural Punjab and its impact on local labour effort 136 Shuchi Kapuria 10 ‘Mirroring the other’: refugee, homeland, identity and diaspora 147 Anindita Ghoshal PART III

Gender, generation and identities 159 11 It’s Caramel Princess Time! Reading contemporary South Asian femininity through the celebritization of Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra 161 Mythili Rajiva 12 The digital divide among Malaysian Indian women: comparative communal narratives 174 Shanthini Pillai and Pramela Krish 13 Financial dependence of Indian parent migrants in Australia: a context for elder abuse 186 Supriya Singh

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Contents

14 Mapping South Asian queer studies 199 Sri Craven 15 Private and communal kitchens as spaces for rethinking gender, identity, and citizenship: towards a transnational theory of servitude and service 213 Anita Anantharam PART IV

Soft power, mobilization and development 223 16 Diasporas as the holy grail of development 225 Latha Varadarajan 17 Education, diaspora and development: the Overseas Indian knowledge networks in the transforming world 237 Sridhar Bhagavatula 18 Diaspora diplomacy: weapon of mass dispersion 253 Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III and Ador Revelar Torneo 19 Diaspora politics: reconfiguring homelands 268 Ishan Ashutosh 20 Religion, development and politics: a critical appraisal of their relationship with reference to South Asian diaspora 278 Pratap Kumar Penumala 21 From ‘political to social’ role: the shifting strategy of Indonesian diaspora movement on development 288 Bilal Dewansyah PART V

Media, culture and representations 301 22 Digital media and East Asian diaspora 303 Youna Kim 23 Food in the South Asian diaspora 315 Parama Roy

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Contents

24 Concerto for Solo Piano: rethinking diaspora music with Azerbaijani women musicians in the United States 334 Anna Oldfield 25 Dancing out of time and place: memory and choreography in the South Asian diaspora in Continental Europe 346 Sandra Chatterjee 26 Performing arts, diaspora and identity: the case of Theyyam performances in the Indian diaspora 359 Surabhi K. and Ajaya K. Sahoo 27 The legacy of the diaspora: memory and homeland-in-memory in the diasporic Vietnamese literature in Germany 369 Tran Tinh Vy Index 381

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FIGURES

2.1 17.1 17.2 18.1

Personal remittances as a share of GDP, selected years (%) Transnationality Network Model University-linked knowledge network model Cash remittances in 2019 (in US$ 1,000)

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40 246 248 256

TABLES

2.1 Total migrant stock at mid-year by origin, 1990–2019 32 2.2 Top ten destination countries for the South Asian diaspora, 2019 32 2.3 Number of South Asian emigrants (thousands) and share by educational attainment (%) in selected OECD countries, 2010–2011 35 2.4 Persons naturalized and obtaining law permanent resident status in the USA by region/country of birth and selected characteristics, fiscal year 2018 38 2.5 Stock of foreign-trained doctors in select OECD countries by country of origin, 2015 39 2.6 Remittance inflows from different sources, 2017 (millions of US$) 40 4.1 The state of overseas Koreans, 2019 66 8.1 Research respondents of RICART 127 8.2 Financial literacy, financial inclusion and financial functionings of remittance owners from five Philippine rural hometowns 128 8.3 Migrant saving, investing and entrepreneurship given rural hometowns’ investment conditions (A joint display) 130 9.1 Sectoral distribution of rural workers (UPSS), 15–59 years, 1993–1994, 2004–2005, 2007–2008, and 2011–2012 139 9.2 Labour participation for males, 15–59 years-regression analysis 141 9.3 Labour participation for females, 15–59 years-regression analysis 142 9.4 Males and females (15–59 years) out of labour force by activity and household migration status 143 17.1 FDI equity inflows of top ten countries from April 2020 to June 2019 238 1 8.1 Top ten destinations in 2013 255

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CONTRIBUTORS

Anita Anantharam is a tenured Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and ­Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida. Her research interests are in the fields of gender studies, transnational politics, and social justice movements, particularly around issues of food and sustainability. Her MBA training highlights her commitment to women and leadership training. She has won awards for her teaching and research from USAID-MEAS, J. William Fulbright, and the US Department of Education. She holds a BA from C ­ olumbia University; a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley; and an MBA from the Hough Graduate School of Business. She can be reached at [email protected]. Dr Ishan Ashutosh is Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University-­Bloomington. As a critical human geographer, Dr Ashutosh’s work encompasses the study of migration, the politics of race and ethnicity from an international and comparative perspective, and urban studies. His research examines the multiple and contested representations of South Asia through projects situated at the intersection of migration and area studies. Dr Ashutosh’s work has been published in Progress in Human Geography, Geography Compass, Environment and Planning C: Space and Politics, Journal of Historical Geography, South Asian Diaspora, Diaspora, and Geopolitics. He can be reached at [email protected]. Neha Vinod Betai is an Academic Associate in the Economics and Social Sciences Area at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. She completed her master’s degree in Applied Economics in 2017 from the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. Her interests lie in the fields of international economics, trade, and population studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. Sridhar Bhagavatula  is currently associated with the Indian School of Business, India, working from its Hyderabad campus on public policy and government relations. Previously he handled policy matters at the Confederation of Indian Industry for a decade. He also worked with the erstwhile Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, and Society for Educational and Economic Development, among others, at various levels in a research capacity. He was awarded a Doctorate from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for his work on “Education, Migration xiii

Contributors

and Transnationality.” He has several publications to his credit pertaining to education and migration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Pablo S. Bose is a migration and urban studies scholar. Born in India and raised in Canada, he is interested in the ways in which people and landscapes shape one another. He has a BA in English and History, an MA in Communications, and a PhD in Environmental Studies. He is an Associate Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography and Director of the Global and Regional Studies Program at the University of Vermont. Currently his three main research projects are on refugee resettlement in North America and Europe, on environmentally induced displacement, and on cities of the Global South. His recent books include Refugees in New Destinations and Small Cities: Resettlement in Vermont (2020) and Urbanization in India: Global Indians in the Remaking of Kolkata (Routledge, 2015). He can be reached at [email protected]. Rupa Chanda  is the RBI Chair Professor of Economics at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore. She has worked as an Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and briefly served as Head, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) Subregional Office for South and South-West Asia in New Delhi in 2018. Dr Chanda received her PhD in Economics from Columbia University and her bachelor’s from Harvard University. Her research interests concern the World Trade Organization (WTO), international trade in services, regional integration, and migration. She has undertaken research and consulting assignments for international and Indian organizations, and has published books, journal articles, book chapters, and reports. She is active professionally as a research guide, reviewer, and member of expert committees. She can be reached at [email protected]. Sandra Chatterjee teaches, researches, performs, and organizes projects at the intersection of theory and dance/artistic practice, focussing on gender, postcolonial, and migration studies. Currently, she is part of the research team of the The Austrian Science Fund -funded project Border Dancing across Time (P 31958-G) at the University of Salzburg. She also works as an independent choreographer and is a founding member of the Post Natyam Collective. Currently she is establishing CHAKKARs – Moving Interventions, an initiative for intersectional anti-racist, post-migrant, and postcolonial approaches to and through dance grounded in Munich, together with Sarah Bergh. She can be reached at www.sandrachatterjee.net. Sri Craven is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Her research and teaching engage transnationalism and globalization from the perspective of postcolonial and decoloniality studies, and with gender and sexuality as primary optics. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in international global and gender studies journals. She can be reached at [email protected]. Bilal Dewansyah  is a Lektor (Assistant Professor) in law at Constitutional Department, Faculty of Law, Universitas Padjadjaran (Unpad), Indonesia. Currently, he is a contract PhD candidate at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden Law School, Leiden University, with funding from Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education( LPDP) scholarship, an Indonesian endowment fund for education. He has research interest in the field of citizenship and migration, especially from a socio-legal perspective, with special emphasis on diaspora and refugee issues. His recent work on diaspora published in Diaspora Studies, Vol. 12, issue 1, xiv

Contributors

2019, entitled “Indonesian Diaspora movement and citizenship law reform: towards ‘semidual citizenship’.” He can be reached at [email protected]. Anindita Ghoshal  is an Associate Professor of history in Diamond Harbour Women’s University, Kolkata, India. Her area of research includes Partition and refugees’ studies, with special emphasis on eastern/ north-eastern India and Bangladesh. Currently, she works as a co-investigator on a research project under the aegis of School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures at Manchester University, UK, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (2018–2021). She has been awarded many grants and prizes. In addition to numerous publications, she has presented papers in seminar and conferences in India and abroad. Her first book is titled Refugee, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India (Routledge 2020), and her edited volume is the forthcoming Revisiting Partition: Contestation, Narratives and Memories (2021). She can be reached at [email protected]. Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III  (PhD) is Mayor George Christopher Professor of Public and Urban Affairs and Chair, Department of Public Administration and Executive Master of Public Administration Program, Ageno School of Business, Golden Gate University (San Francisco, California). For close to a decade, Dr Gonzalez served as San Francisco Commissioner for Immigrant Rights. He can be reached at [email protected]. Wang Jun is a PhD candidate in sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her doctoral dissertation research examines new Chinese immigrant’s parenting on children’s education. She can be reached at [email protected]. Shuchi Kapuria is Director (Research) of Gender Studies Unit at the Institute of Development and Communication (IDC), Chandigarh. She holds a PhD in economics from Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For her thesis she worked on the political economy of international migration, concentrating on migration from rural Punjab. She has worked in various research institutes in Delhi on policy relevant issues, like child labour, unorganized labour, urban governance, and management of international migration. She has recently been appointed as a member of the Task group on Governance Policy (including IT Application) for Essential and Non-essential Sector by the Government of Haryana. She can be reached at [email protected]. Youna Kim  is Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France, which she joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she had taught since 2004, after completing her PhD at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge), Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge), Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters (2011, Routledge), Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (2012), The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (2013, ­Routledge), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society (2016, Routledge), Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media (2017, Routledge), and South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea (2019, Routledge). She can be reached at [email protected]/[email protected]. Pramela Krish  (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, the National University of Malaysia. She has researched and published works on online learning and teacher professional development. Her research interests include xv

Contributors

technology-based language learning and the impact of new media in society. She has been involved in community participatory programmes with disenfranchised youth and women of the Malaysian Indian community. She can be reached at [email protected]. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen is an Associate Professor in History at Monash University. An Oxford graduate, she held four fellowships in 2005–2015, including two prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowships and a 2011 Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford. She is the author of four books, including 2010 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2009) and South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After (2016). Her latest grant is an ARC Discovery Project on the refugee legacy for second-generation Vietnamese in Australia. She can be reached at [email protected]. Ajailiu Niumai is Professor and Head, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, University of Hyderabad, India. In 2019, she became a member of the Managing Committee of Indian Sociological Society (ISS), where she will be serving until 2024, and she was Convenor of RC-04 Migration & Diaspora Studies, ISS from 2016 to 2019. Her specialization includes gender, Indian diaspora, North East studies, NGOs and development. The Collaborative Arts and Research Translation for Humane Advancement, USA, awarded her the “First Fellow” grant in 2006. The UGC awarded her with Raman Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the USA (2013–2014), and she worked on Indian Diaspora Philanthropy at the University of Iowa, USA. She can be reached at [email protected]. Anna Oldfield holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began working with women bards in Azerbaijan in 2003. Since then she has continued to research and publish on oral epic, bardic singing, and literature in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the Uighur diaspora. Oldfield is active in cultural exchange initiatives, including with the British Library, Smithsonian Folkways, the Freer Gallery, and the San Francisco World Music Festival. Her research has been supported by Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. Oldfield is an Associate Professor of World Literature at Coastal Carolina University. She can be reached at [email protected]. Jeremaiah M. Opiniano is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Santo ­Tomas, Philippines, and a doctoral candidate (Geography) at the University of Adelaide in ­Australia. He can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]. Pratap Kumar Penumala  is Emeritus Professor of Hinduism and Comparative Religions in the School of Religion Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In addition to several scholarly essays and articles his publications include Hinduism and The Diaspora: A South African Narrative (2013). His edited volumes include Religious Pluralism and the Diaspora (2006), Contemporary Hinduism (Acumen/Routledge, 2013), Classical and Contemporary Issues in Indian Philosophy and Religion [Festschrift in honour of Prof. T.S. Rukmani] (2013), Indian Diaspora: Socio-cultural and Religious Worlds (2015), and Contemporary Issues in the Indian Diaspora of South Africa (2016). He can be reached at [email protected]. Shanthini Pillai (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, the National University of Malaysia. Her research interests are anchored primarily in xvi

Contributors

cultural studies with particular reference to diaspora and transnationalism, ethnic diversity, and religious mobilities, especially in the context of global South Asian communities. She has headed a number of research projects on transnationalism and cultural identity; held research fellowships at the University of Queensland, Australia and the Asia Research Institute, Singapore; and published widely in the areas of her expertise, including in Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images of the Indian Diaspora of Malaysia (2007). She can be reached at [email protected]. Mythili Rajiva is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada). Her areas of research include South Asian diaspora, racialized girlhood, trauma studies, sexual violence, and feminist media studies. She has published in journals such as Television and New Media, Feminist Media Studies, Girlhood Studies, and The Canadian Review of Sociology. She can be reached at Mythili.Rajiva@ uottawa.ca. Parama Roy is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (1998) and Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (2010), and Co-Editor of States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (2009). Her current book project is titled Empire, Violence, and the Nonhuman. She can be reached at [email protected]. Ajaya K. Sahoo is an Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora, University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include migration, diaspora, and transnationalism. He has co-edited Routledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism (2019), Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (2018), Indian Transnationalism Online (2014), Transnational Migrations (Routledge, 2009), and Tracing an Indian Diaspora (2008). He is the Editor of the journal South Asian Diaspora (Routledge). He can be reached at [email protected]. Supriya Singh is a writer and a sociologist of money. Her current project is The Violence of Money, which tells the stories of Anglo-Celtic and Indian women in Australia who have suffered economic abuse. Her previous books include Money, Migration and Family: India to Australia (2016), Globalization and Money: A Global South Perspective (2013), The Girls Ate Last (2013), and Marriage Money: The Social Shaping of Money in Marriage and Banking (1997). She retired in 2019 as Professor, Sociology of Communications at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Melbourne. She can be reached at [email protected]. Alan Smart is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology & Archeology at the University of Calgary, Canada. Smart is an urban anthropologist who has been conducting research in Hong Kong since 1982 and in Guangdong since 1987 as well as research in Canada since 2001. His research and teaching interests include political economy, housing, urban anthropology, anthropology of law, transnationalism, borders, and zoonotic diseases. He is the author of The Shek Kip Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (2006) and Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong (1992), co-author of Posthumanism (2017), and Co-Editor of Petty Capitalists and Globalization (2005). He can be reached at [email protected]. Josephine Smart is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology & Archeology at the University of Calgary. Her research and teaching interests are economic anthropology, xvii

Contributors

food production and zoonotic diseases, social and economic development in post-1978 China, Chinese international migration, immigrant entrepreneurs, and the international mobility of capital and labour. She is co-author of Posthumanism (2017), author of The Politic Economy of Street Hawking in Hong Kong (1989), and Co-Editor of Petty Capitalists and Globalization (2005) and Plural Globalities in Multiple Localities: New World Borders (2001). She can be reached at [email protected]. Surabhi K. is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora, University of Hyderabad, India. She works on the areas of religion, diaspora, and performance. She can be reached at [email protected]. Ador Revelar Torneo  (PhD) is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Jesse M. Robredo Institute of Governance at De La Salle University in ­Manila, Philippines. He is a development and governance practitioner, and one of the leading contributors in the fields of migration studies and public administration in the ­Philippines. He can be reached at [email protected]. Latha Varadarajan is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Security and Conflict Resolution Program at San Diego State University. Her research is situated at the intersection of international relations theory, international law, and international security, and focusses particularly on the historical and contemporary significance of transnationalism and imperialism in global politics. She is the author of The Domestic Abroad: Diasporas in International Relations (2010) and Imperialism Past and Present (with Emanuele Saccarelli) (2015). She can be reached at [email protected]. Tran Tinh Vy is a lecturer at Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and the University of Hamburg, Germany. She holds a PhD at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her dissertation focusses on the issues of memory and identity in the works of Vietnamese authors living in Germany. Majoring in Vietnamese diaspora literature, memory studies, and postcolonial studies, she published her recent research in Diaspora Studies and books published by Hamburg: Publikationen der Hamburger Vietnamistik. She can be reached at [email protected]. In-Jin Yoon is Professor in the Department of Sociology, Korea University, and the Director of the Korea University Press. His research interests include social psychology, Korean diaspora, international migration, and multiculturalism. He is the author of On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America (1997), Korean Diaspora (2004), North Korean Migrants (2009), and International Migration and Multiculturalism in Northeast Asia (2014). He served as the president of the Association for North Korean Migrants Studies and the Association for the Studies of Koreans Abroad, and the vice president of the Korean International Migration Studies Association. He can be reached at [email protected]. Min Zhou (PhD) is Professor of sociology and Asian American studies, Walter and S­ hirley Wang Endowed Chair in US-China Relations and Communications, and the Director of Asia Pacific Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her main areas of research are in migration and development, race and ethnicity, children of immigrants, ­Chinese diasporas, and the sociology of Asia and Asian America. She can be reached at [email protected]. xviii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all the authors for their insightful contributions to this handbook. I deeply appreciate the scholarly effort and work that has gone into this project. I especially thank the authors for their patience and swift responses to the editorial queries. At Routledge, I sincerely thank Dorothea Schaefter, Senior Editor, Asian Studies, for her very insightful and constructive suggestions at various stages during the preparation of this handbook, and her editorial assistant Alexandra de Brauw for all the support and cooperation that made this handbook possible. Editing this Handbook amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, when working from home is a new normal, led to an altogether different experience. I express my gratitude to my family, especially my better half Sasmita, for standing beside me at all times and my little mischievous son Arnav for his patience while I work and not allowing me to realize the experience of lockdown. Ajaya K. Sahoo Hyderabad

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ACRONYMS

AABEAT AAPI ABVA BJP CALD CALERI CDU CID CPA D-AG DDI D-EG DPR GDP GDR GEP GERD G-INK GOPIO HLC HSSS I-AG IASA IDBC IDF IDF-OI IDN IDNU IDRF I-EG ILO

American Association of Bangladeshi Engineers and Architect American Association of Physicians from India AIDS Bedhbhav Virodhi Andolan Bharatiya Janata Party Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Campaign for Lesbian Rights Christian Democratic Union Congress of Indonesian Diaspora Comprehensive Plan of Action Domestic Academic Gate Diaspora Direct Investment Domestic Employment Gate Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Gross Domestic Product German Democratic Republic Gifted Education Programme Gross Expenditure on R&D Global-Indian Network of Knowledge Global Organization of People of Indian Origin High Level Committee Hindu Swayam Sewak Sangh International Academic Gate Indonesian American Society of Academics Indonesian Diaspora Business Council Indonesian Diaspora Foundation Indian Diaspora Foundation for Overseas Indians Indonesian Diaspora Network Indonesian Diaspora Network United India Development and Relief Fund International Employment Gate International Labour Organization xx

Acronyms

IMF IPR KENs KFPF KIP LPR LTTE MCMC MOIA MPI NAMA NKN NMGCS NPS NRIs NRKs NRNA OCI ODP OECD OIFC PBD PBK PBSA PIO PRD PSLE RICART RSS SAHI SEED SEZ SLMDAUK SLWAUK SRV SSNs TCDC TCS TFWP TiE TOKTEN TRQN UNCTD UNISTAR USINPAC VHP WHC WHO

International Monetary Fund Intellectual Property Rights Knowledge Exchange Networks Knowledge Flow Production Function Know India Programme Lawful Permanent Residents Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs Migration Policy Institute North American Manipur Association National Knowledge Networks National Music and Global Culture Society National Pension Scheme Non-Resident Indians Non-Resident Keralites Non-Resident Nepali Association Overseas Citizenship of India Orderly Departure Program The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre Pravasi Bharatiya Divas Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Awards People of Indian Origin Pearl River Delta Primary School Leave Examination Remittance Investment Climate Analysis in Rural Hometowns Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Students Against Hindutva Ideology Special Secretariat for Empowerment of Indian Entrepreneurs Special Economic Zones Sri Lanka Medical and Dental Association in the UK Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK Socialist Republic of Vietnam Social Media Sites Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries Tata Consultancy Services Temporary Foreign Worker Program The Indus Entrepreneurs Transfer of Knowledge and Technology through Expatriate Nationals Temporary Return of Qualified Nationals United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations International Short-Term Advisory Resources United States-India Political Action Committee Vishva Hindu Parishad World Hindu Council World Health Organization xxi

INTRODUCTION Asian diaspora and development Ajaya K. Sahoo

When the project of this handbook started in mid-2019 the transnational migration was at its peak. The transnational migrants and the diasporic communities have had the strongest networks with their community members around the world including the homeland through various means of communication. The migrants’ contribution to the hostland and the homeland was also reached to an unmatchable parallel in terms of their remittances, investments, knowledge transfers besides their vibrant socio-economic-cultural-political participation. However, a sudden jolt to all these spheres of activities in the migration and diaspora ­w itnessed – which was almost unimaginable – by the time this project was nearing to an end in mid-2020. The most devastating effect of the global pandemic COVID-19 was observed in the areas of migration in general and transnational migration in particular. Globalization has overturned to new localization as the demand for work opportunities confined to the locals (e.g., the suspension of H1-B, L-1, and J-1 employment-based visas by the United States under the leadership of the President Donald Trump as part of a series of policies towards immigration restrictions), deterritorialization transformed to reterritorialization as a result of mass return migration (e.g., the Vande Bharat evacuation mission under the leadership of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in repatriating tens and thousands of Indians from around the world, mostly vulnerable groups, such as the migrant workers, senior citizens, students, etc.), the flow of remittances reduced considerably due to the loss of job opportunities (e.g., the economic downturn in the Persian Gulf countries as a result of government lockdown and the new foreign policies which impacted millions of immigrant workers), international vacations became staycations (e.g., the visit of family members for holidaying abroad came to a screeching halt), and last but not the least the socio-cultural activities of immigrants and diasporic communities became halted due to the global lockdown and implementation of new policies of social and/or physical distancing. The list of adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic goes on and on that is incomparable with the pre-pandemic world. Such a drastic change in the international migration and diaspora which had a severe impact on the development agenda of the homeland (country of origin) and the hostland (country of destination) needs serious critical inquiry. Though in this volume some chapters attempted to highlight the effect of the pandemic on migration, diaspora, and development, the authors could not study this completely because, by that time all the chapters were submitted in their final versions, and due to the new normal of working from home, giving additional time to 1

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rewrite already-written chapters was almost impossible, except for normal revisions. Hence the readers must understand this fact and read the volume in the framework of globalization, diaspora, and transnationalism and not from the post-COVID-19 perspective.

Dimensions of diaspora Globalization associated with development in faster and cheaper transportation technology coincided with conducive immigration policies of various nation-states made it possible for migrants to move across in a transnational space. Apart from facilitating flexible human mobility another positive impact of this development was the homeland and diaspora connection and accessibility. The more the technological advancements the greater the diaspora’s access to the homeland which was observed in the transnational studies that emerged at the end of the last century and continuing. Diasporans are now no way confined to any particular country; rather they are part and parcel of both the countries of origin and destination simultaneously (Sahoo and Sheffer, 2014, p. 3). The concept of “diaspora” today applies not only to almost all types of immigrant communities in the world (Tölölyan, 1991) but also used to refer to varied migrant groups within a nation-state, and hence not confined to the classical immigrant groups, such as the Jews, the Armenians, and the Greeks (Reis, 2004). As Vertovec (1997, p. 277) rightly mentioned that the concept diaspora …used to describe practically any population that is considered ‘deterritorialized’ or ‘transnational’ – that is, which has originated in a land other than that in which it currently resides and whose social, economic and political networks across the borders of nation-states or indeed span the globe. Many diasporas today have become matured enough so much so that they influence the hostland and the homeland as the case of Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Korean, Filipinos, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi diasporas show in this volume (see Parts I, II, and IV). The gendered and cultural representations of the diaspora also received widespread transnational attention and popularity as highlighted in the case of South Asian, East Asian, Vietnamese, and Azerbaijani diasporas in this volume (see Parts III and V). It is based on the strong or weak socio-cultural, political, and economic networks and the situational ­h istory of their emigration that the diasporas are established and labelled. For example, ­A rmstrong (1976) talks about two types of diasporas – “mobilized diasporas” and “proletarian d­ iasporas” – based on their social adaptation in the host country. While negotiating life and culture in the host society many diasporic groups have developed vibrant interaction with the homeland, others lacked complete access to resources especially modern technology thereby had limited interaction with the homeland, this is being studied under the old and new diasporas (see, for instance, in the case of the Indian diaspora, Mishra 2007; in the case of the Chinese diaspora, Zhou, 2017). However, there is another group emerging within the new diaspora, mostly the diasporic youth groups who have a strong interaction – both online and offline – with the hostland and the homeland in myriad ways (see, for instance, Dwyer, 2000; Kim, 2011; Sahoo and Shome, 2020). Since the onset of globalization, one can observe a phenomenal dynamism among the diasporic communities by bringing not only the homeland closer but also the members of their community dispersed around the world together and thereby paved the way for the emergence of transnationalism. Being one of the earliest scholars to study this phenomenon, Peggy Levitt (2001, p. 14) rightly argues that “the impact of transnational migration differs from, but must 2

Introduction

be understood within the context of, the heightened globalization in which it is embedded”. A very useful perspective on transnationalism was developed by Basch et al. (2008, p. 263), who define it as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement”. Transnationalism not only implies migration of people across the borders of one or more nations but also refers to the deterritorialization of population along with their material and non-material cultural commodities. For instance, Portes et al. (1999, p. 220) argue that “in other areas of human activity, transnationalism involves individuals, their networks of social relations, their communities, and broader institutionalized structures such as local and national governments”. The sustained transnational network which makes up the building blocks for transnationalism has significant socio-economic, cultural, and political impacts on the migrants, the host society, and the homeland. For instance, one can talk of remittances and investments that flow between transnational migrants to their families back home or the vibrant socio-cultural networks with the homeland. This sustained transnationalization of migrant ties is currently on a steep increase (see, for instance, Basch et al., 2005; Bauböck and Faist, 2010; Khagram and Levitt, 2008; Knott and McLoughlin, 2013; Pries, 2008; Sahoo and Purkayastha, 2019; Quayson and Daswani, 2013; Vertovec, 2009; Vertovec and Cohen, 1999). Further, the global economy, along with international business operations, transnational entrepreneurial activities, and acceptance of dual nationality by several hostland governments, offers opportunities for the promotion of transnational interactions (Sahoo, 2012). From the perspective of development, like the economic impacts of diasporic and transnational migrations to the origin and destination countries, the social, cultural, and political impacts are considerable which this volume tries to address.

Asian diaspora in context The Asian region plays an important role in the global map of diaspora. The region not only constitutes the largest diasporic population in the world but also has the most diverse diasporas in terms of their historical trajectories of emigration, geographical spread, economic and political strength, socio-cultural diversity including race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, language, cuisine, social habits, music and arts, and nationality. The Asians in the diaspora have come a long way in adapting to the multicultural and multi-­ ethnic societies and hence it is obvious that the majority of origin countries today turn to their diasporas when they aim for any development project. Studies have shown that Asian diasporas not only play an important role in the economic development of the homeland but also significantly influence the homeland politics, regional conflicts, insurgency movements, terrorism, and/or post-conflict resolutions and reconstruction projects (see, for instance, Adamson, 2020; Byman et al., 2001; Fair, 2005; Han, 2019; Hwang, 2018; Missbach, 2011; Pande, 2017). The multiplicity of Asian diasporic cultures and traditions is so much that it is difficult to accommodate in a handbook like this. Nevertheless, the chapters touch upon several important areas of research in the Asian diaspora written exclusively for this volume by leading scholars from across the world coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to sociology, history, anthropology, economics, political science, media studies, gender studies, cultural and literary studies. The volume is broadly divided into five major parts, including Asian diasporas’ development potentials; connection and contribution to the homeland; dimensions of gender and generational identities; soft power and mobilization; and media, culture, and representation. Some chapters in each part can be 3

Ajaya K. Sahoo

read simultaneously with other part’s theme as they overlap. The categorization of chapters under each of these five themes, hence, was only an attempt to see that they can be threaded with a particular theme, but they need not exclusively fulfil that purpose. For example, Parts I and II have a very thin line of demarcation as they deal with diaspora’s potential role in homeland and hostland. Similarly, Parts III and V deal with the portrayal of women in media and other diasporic cultural spaces, while Parts II and IV discuss the diasporic mobilization for homeland development and domestic politics.

Development potentials of Asian diasporas Historically, diasporic migration differs from other types of migrations in the sense that in most cases it was forced and not voluntary. Today the diasporic communities have achieved great success in almost all professions in their adopted land as a result of their persistence ­effort. In some countries, they became so powerful that they even influence the hostland politics besides leaving a footprint of their homeland culture. One important characteristic of the diasporic success is that they do not stop, even after achieving the highest echelon of the society; rather they continuously strive to excel further and help the second and further generations to socialize. The first part of the volume focuses on the strength and success of the Asian diasporas. Nguyen (Chapter 1) and Yoon (Chapter 4) discuss the struggles, traumas, and successes of Vietnamese and Korean diasporic journey; Chanda and Betai (­Chapter 2) show how the skilled South Asian diaspora is a valuable strength to the host and the homeland; and Smart and Smart (Chapter 3), and Jun and Zhou (Chapter 5) examine two different dimensions of Chinese diasporic integration in Central America and Singapore. The growth and success of Vietnamese in the diaspora have received the attention of academicians and policymakers very recently compared to the already available literature on the history of their dispersion, especially the boat people following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen presents the success story of the Vietnamese refugees in Australia, especially focusing on the second and subsequent generations. Vietnamese in Australia, being the home for the largest refugee community, have undergone a significant transition from their status of being a refugee community with widespread exposure to trauma to that of a diasporic community with the highest success rate in every major field of profession. Using the oral history method and drawing narratives from two successful second-generation Vietnamese, she examines how the Vietnamese overcome the challenges of connecting with the first-generation and transgenerational histories while engaging in various volunteering and counselling activities that enable personal growth. Among the global diasporas today, the South Asian diaspora constitute the largest diaspora population and have the distinction of most successful and influential diasporas. Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai discuss the strength of the skilled South Asian diaspora in the OECD countries and how they play a significant role in building the diaspora-homeland relation through the use of soft power besides their involvement in various homeland development projects. Recognizing the potential contribution of diasporas many South Asian homeland governments have initiated programmes to woo the diaspora and facilitate ­mutual linkages. The chapter makes a detailed examination of not only the multi-dimensional understanding of the South Asian diaspora’s strength in the OECD countries but also their contribution to the homelands, such as trade, investment, technology, knowledge transfer, reconstruction, development efforts, and philanthropy. They suggest that given South Asia’s growing geopolitical significance, the governments need to strategically leverage their skilled diaspora, which has not been systematically harnessed till now. 4

Introduction

The history of the emigration and growth of Chinese diaspora across the world is mostly attributed to their hard work and business acumen and ethics. Josephine Smart and Alan Smart focus on the growth of the Chinese diaspora’s business success in Central ­A merica with a special focus on Panama and Belize. In Central America, as in other countries around the world wherever there is a successful Chinese diaspora, a common phenomenon is ­observed in family-run businesses that involve the whole extended family, from children to grandparent(s) and other relatives. This strategy, however, as the authors argue, is not linear but context-specific and varies across cultural, class, gender, and geographical divides. The chapter shows that the credit for Chinese business and entrepreneurial success goes to two different types of strategies adopted by the Chinese, i.e., on the one hand, the Chinese have the strongest network and connections through kinship and social relations, on the other hand, they have the most trusted financing system called “informal finance” or “credit system” which is “mediated through networks rooted in regional, dialectal and social affinity”. In comparison to the classical and established diasporas, such as the Jews, Greeks, and Italians, though the Korean diaspora is of recent origin, they can be considered a “contemporary diaspora” as they have a broad spectrum of experiences surrounding immigration and settlement abroad. In-Jin Yoon offers the history, growth, and present situation of the Korean diaspora from a sociological point of view. According to him, the history of the Korean diaspora can be divided into five periods, i.e., from the 1860s to the 1910s, from 1910 to 1945, from 1945 to 1962, from 1962 to 1990, and from 1990s till date. Each of these periods has unique immigration histories and the struggle for diaspora formation. After giving an overview of the Korean diaspora in different countries, he analyses how the Koreans in the contemporary context of globalization not only adapt to the different host societies but also became tech-savvy and maintained transnational lives besides socializing the younger generations. The success of Chinese immigrants in the diaspora lies in their family structure, which consists of, in most cases, a quasi-extended family having full-time working parents, young children, and grandparents. Wang Jun and Min Zhou discuss one of the important resettlement issues of new Chinese immigrants’ parents in Singapore, i.e., their children’s education. Based on the data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observations with the new Chinese immigrant community in Singapore they show how these new immigrants face the challenges of resettlement issues and simultaneously emphasize their children’s education by making them competitive with Singapore’s education system. Since most of these new immigrants to Singapore are on temporary working visas they face the challenge of family formation and citizenship issues despite the Singapore government adopted a policy to support immigrant integration. Another issue is the cultural setting, especially the language barrier for new immigrants – though the majority of these immigrants are fluent in English and Chinese, their cultural expression and behavioural ways distinguish them from the natives and create a problem for integration. However, despite these challenges, the new Chinese immigrants prefer to come to Singapore, as the authors argue, because their children can obtain high standard and quality education; in order to achieve that the parents make systematic strategies at three levels, i.e., school, home, and the community.

Diaspora, homeland, and development Considering the power and strength of the diasporas in the world, several homeland governments have initiated constructive efforts to leverage their diasporas to contribute directly or be part of the various development projects of the homeland. There is a proliferation of 5

Ajaya K. Sahoo

literature available that deals with how diasporas involve in the development projects of the homeland or initiate various entrepreneurship programmes after their return. But it is not always that the diasporic involvement in homeland projects yields positive results, as Bose (Chapter 6), Kapuria (Chapter 9), and Ghoshal (Chapter 10) show how the diasporic involvement impacted urbanization and over-crowdedness, on the rural labour market, and on the refugee communities in search of their ethnonational identity. However, if channelized, the diasporic contribution, especially their socio-cultural and economic contribution, can be used more productively as illustrated by Niumai (Chapter 7) and Opiniano (Chapter 8). Overall, the chapters in this part examine various challenges and opportunities as a result of diasporic engagement with the homeland. Pablo Bose explores various dynamics of diasporic involvement with the homeland and its positive and negative consequences such as development and displacement. He argues that these transnational relations and networks not only strengthen the kinship ties and socio-cultural and political organizations in the homeland but also helps money, materials, and moral support to flow across continents. Taking the case of Kerala and West Bengal in India as sites of strong diasporic involvement, he examines how Indian diaspora connected with India through diverse transnational practices. The state of Kerala has the distinction of having the largest number of immigrants in the Persian Gulf; the state has received the highest remittances, which can be seen in how it has transformed in the real estate business, new home constructions, financial savings, establishing of new business networks and ventures, etc. Kolkata is another case where one can observe the highest urbanization and development. However, Bose argues that this diasporic involvement and development in homeland had various negative consequences such as financial dependence on remittances, overcrowdedness of urban areas, poverty, and pollution as a result of urban growth. Unlike the historically established Indian diasporic groups such as the Punjabis, Gujaratis, or Telugus, the people from Manipur state in the diaspora is of recent origin. However, their population growth over the years combining with unique ethnic and cultural identity makes them a distinct diasporic community that has established institutions and associations to connect them transnationally. Ajailiu Niumai studies this emerging Indian diasporic community from the North-East of India in the US. She argues that, though the community is small in number, they are involved in various professions, ranging from IT engineers, architects, professors, scientists, nurses, and doctors to business administrators and entrepreneurs, and hence they could well be considered a model sub-minority ethnic community in the US. They are one of the most vibrant communities as they contribute significantly to the homeland and the hostland despite several challenges. Through in-depth interviews and personal observations of their socio-cultural, economic, and political activities in the US, she illustrates how this community has maintained the cultural and development ties with the homeland. Being the distinction of having one of the largest immigrant workforces in the world, Filipino’s contribution to the homeland and hostland is noteworthy. Jeremaiah M. Opiniano examines how migrant remittances are used strategically for more productive purposes like investment and entrepreneurship apart from the family level uses of remittances in the rural hometowns of the Philippines. To understand the connection between diaspora and development and especially the productive usage of remittances, Opiniano analyses the data from a multi-year mixed-method project on rural hometown investing in the Philippines by adopting the financial capabilities perspective that covers three major elements, such as financial literacy, financial inclusion, and financial functioning. She argues that, if the financial capabilities of the overseas migrants and the diaspora are empowered economically, it can bring drastic changes in remittances. 6

Introduction

Migration from the state of Punjab in India has been greatly facilitated by their transnational network and kinship ties and shaped by various immigration policies of the host countries. Today Punjabis have the distinction of being the most successful diasporic communities in the world. Though several studies have been conducted on various aspects of Punjabi/ Sikh diaspora including the economic impact of diasporic remittances, the international migration trend, and its impact on the rural households and local labour market have not been given much attention. Shuchi Kapuria investigates how the culture of transnational migration had impacted the rural society and especially the local youth in Punjab. Collecting the data from four villages of the Doaba region and using the instrumental variable tool, she argues that the over-dependence on migration for better opportunity and non-availability of desired work leads the migrant household to absent from the labour market. This scenario if continues, as Kapuria cautioned, might lead to illegal channels of migration as major destination countries in the developed world have changed their immigration policies due to the changing global environment such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. One of the largest population displacements in the history of South Asia is the partition of India. It has created not only the distinct ethnonational diasporic communities but also the greatest socio-cultural disjuncture in the life of millions of refugees. Through an interdisciplinary lens and discussing different dynamics of the caste/class categories of migrant groups and their traumatic memories, Anindita Ghoshal examines the issues of identity of Hindu and Muslim Bengali refugees in India and Bangladesh. Though imagining and reimagining the original homeland and longing to return to it constitute one of the important preconditions of the diaspora, she questions this in the case of the refugees who are considered as “outsider” in their own homeland and survive as an “imagined community”.

Gender, generation, and identities As more and more people move across the border, gender became an important component in international migration. The drastic change in gender composition in international migration, a departure from the earlier patterns of migrations, occurred owing to several factors such as the change in immigration policies, demand for gender-specific global ­labour force besides the changing role of women under globalization and transnationalization. From the systematic use of new technologies to that of success in mainstream media and popular culture besides their active participation in the familial and communal spaces, the Asian ­d iasporic women and queers have created their unique identities. The chapters included in this part deal with the issues of gender and identity and the challenges associated with it. Rajiva (Chapter 11) and Pillai and Krish (Chapter 12) focus on the representation of South Asian women in popular mainstream media and the digital world. While Craven (Chapter 14) and Anantharam (Chapter 15) discuss the sexual and gender identities in the context of citizenship and identity politics, Singh (Chapter 13) examines the challenges and coping patterns of elderly parents in the diaspora. Significant changes have taken place in international migration after globalization. ­Compared to the indentured period of the 19th and 20th centuries, where women were insignificant in terms of gender ratio as well as the traumatic trajectories of their journey and resettlement, the post-colonial period not only witnessed the steady rise of women in international migration but also became the successful immigrants in the host countries. Through an intersectional feminist approach, Mythili Rajiva studies two contemporary South Asian celebrities – Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra – in the American popular culture at a time of racist violence experienced by all black and brown bodies in America. The success 7

Ajaya K. Sahoo

of the two South Asian celebrities and their respective shows, The Mindy Project and Quantico, had received critical reviews as well as mainstream popularity. Despite the fact that the two shows differ in terms of their political message there are similarities in gendered and racialized lines. According to Rajiva, underneath the story of successful South Asian women in the US, there lies continued stigmatization of racialized Others which is evident in both literary texts and popular cultures. Similar to the success of South Asian women in diasporic popular culture, Shanthini Pillai and Pramela Krish explore the participation of women in digital platforms with the case study of Indian women entrepreneurs in Malaysia. They argue that this participation of women in the digital world is a result of several government initiatives specifically after the creation of a Special Secretariat for Empowerment of Indian Entrepreneurs in the Prime Minister’s Department in 2012. Though the growth of ICT and the internet has helped further the rise of women entrepreneurs in Malaysia, it is not equally represented across society. With the use of in-depth interviews and informal discussions through several workshops on digital access, connectivity, and empowerment of women in Malaysia, they argue that there is a gulf between the social classes in digital access. The two groups they took for sample in the study were middle-class women who were educated and economically privileged enough to be involved in small-scale entrepreneurship on social media sites, and the underprivileged women with low literacy and low economic status who were on the outskirts of prospective development. They conclude that the gulf between the two groups in accessing digital connectivity can be bridged with community growth enabling projects that could reach the people. Globalization associated with the revolution in transportation and communication technology has made the transnational migration a reality. This has not only created an opportunity for every member of the family to interact with each other while staying far away but also made members of the family, especially the elderly parents, to travel long distances overcoming several challenges. In the Asian context in general and the Indian context in particular, living together in a joint family having two or more generations is an age-old tradition that continues even today. This provided both the younger and older generations with several advantages, such as giving and receiving family care, dealing with loneliness, and ageing well. Drawing literature on family studies and sociology of money and using the grounded theory approach, Supriya Singh explores how the parents while migrating to Australia to live with their children and grandchildren end up joining an upside-down joint family. According to her, among the several criteria for the migration and social life in the diaspora, money plays an important role in keeping the relationship between children and parents alive. Based on the data collected through in-depth interviews among several parent migrants who had migrated to be with their children in Australia she studies how these ­elderly Indians changed the way they deal with money as they age. Sri Craven outlines major research developments in the field of queer studies in the South Asian diaspora. She traces the historical development of the field since the 1970s when it was connected with various women’s movements in the US to that of the HIV/AIDS and queer rights campaign of the late 1980s, the latter being closely connected with South Asian queer studies. She argues that the queer movement organized around issues of sexual rights and protections was the result of two significant reports – AIDS Bedhbhav Virodhi Andolan report and the Campaign for Lesbian Rights report – that emerged as a result of coalitions of individuals and organizations that engages “queer sexualities from the perspective of women’s rights, non-biological understanding of gender rights, as well as lesbian and gay subjectivities”. After discussing two broad research clusters of South Asian queer studies that 8

Introduction

organized around readings of representation, and HIV/AIDS and queer rights activism, she calls for South Asian queer studies to be part of South Asian postcolonial studies. Anita Anatharam deals with the question of gender, class, identity, and citizenship issues in the diaspora. Basing her study on the novel The Book of Salt where the central c­ haracter – a gay Vietnamese domestic servant – struggles to find love, acceptance, and a home in the diaspora, she argues for an alternative space for the expression of personal and political rights. The communal kitchen – an alternative space against the private kitchen which is an exploitative space – according to her not only provides a public space for the articulation of personal and political rights but also creates a space for the community building for new immigrants. With the example of The Slow Food Café in Bastille (Paris, France), ­A natharam shows how this communal kitchen is democratically organized, cooking, served food, managed profits, and provides a platform for the members to come together and exchange the diverse culture  and  values without any discrimination. She suggests a new transnational theory of servitude and service which according to her will serve “as a potential new site for the i­nvestigation of gender, class, and political rights”.

Soft power, mobilization, and development It is the diaspora’s affluence in the host country that influences homeland politics, development, and above all international relations. The chapters in this part examine how diasporic mobilization had a serious impact in the homeland especially in terms of remittances and foreign direct investments, knowledge transfers, long-distance nationalism, and diasporic engagements. They show that the diaspora and homeland relations are not always reciprocal but sometimes precarious, which had serious implications; hence, effective planning and policies are necessary for healthy international relations. While Varadarajan (Chapter 16), Bhagavatula (Chapter 17), and Ashutosh (Chapter 19) critically evaluate the diaspora and homeland engagements in South Asia from an international relations perspective, Pratap Kumar (Chapter 20) looks at religion and its connection with development and politics in the South Asian diaspora. Similarly, Gonzalez III and Torneo (Chapter 18), and Dewansyah (Chapter 21) highlight how the involvement of diasporic organizations and systematic ­mobilization led to the effective utilization of diasporic remittances in the homeland with case studies of the Philippines and Indonesia. Latha Varadarajan critically examines the diaspora’s role in homeland development in the neoliberal context. Taking the example of the Indian diaspora, she shows how the Indian government, especially the BJP government, in the last few decades tried to harness the ­potential of Indian diaspora for India’s development by encouraging the diaspora to involve in the homeland through various attractive schemes and programmes. However, she argues that despite diaspora’s involvement in economic transformation, India remains far from a hospitable destination for Foreign Direct Investment due to several structural, institutional, and bureaucratic constraints which is why she metaphorically calls the diaspora as the “holy grail of development”. The situation is going to be further complicated in the current scenario of the global coronavirus pandemic as already observed by the World Bank in terms of the flow of remittances to the homeland and reverse migration. Hence, to encourage the Indian diaspora and channel them into the Diaspora Direct Investment, an alternative to the traditional Foreign Direct Investment, Varadarajan calls for an extension of rational economic planning that includes “less government regulation, greater labour flexibility, and adaptability”. Over the last two decades, the Indian diaspora’s engagement with the homeland has strengthened manifold. These linkages and networks were mutual in the sense that, in order 9

Ajaya K. Sahoo

to attract the diaspora’s role in homeland development, the Government of India has initiated several schemes which the diaspora acknowledged in the form of remittances, Foreign Direct Investment, philanthropy, and so on. Although these mutual relations and exchanges are limited to the more or less economic prosperity of the home country, Shridhar Bhagava­ tula looks at another dimension where the skilled Indian diaspora can be better engaged with the homeland, i.e., through diaspora knowledge network. According to him, the diaspora knowledge network can play an important role in accelerating the development process of the homeland, and in the Indian context, although the government had taken several measures (such as TOKTEN and G-INK) to systematically organize the diaspora knowledge network, there are still several lacunas that hinder its smooth functioning. Hence he suggests the transnationality network model that could fill the required gaps. It is through this model “that the diaspora knowledge network needs to be part of a larger system and must cover the entire value chain, which can happen through the university-linked knowledge network”. Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III and Ador Revelar Torneo discuss the relative growth and significance of Filipino diaspora’s role in international politics using soft power diplomacy which they call it the “Weapon of Mass Dispersion”. They argue that the Philippine diaspora diplomacy is quite different from traditional diaspora diplomacy as it is “people-propelled rather than product- or propaganda-driven”. They highlighted, on the one hand, how Filipinos in the diaspora have contributed to the homeland in the form of remittances that are used either for household consumption and a better standard of living or for entrepreneurship, healthcare, education, and infrastructure development, and, on the other hand, how they serve as the ambassadors of Filipino culture and tradition. The diasporic Filipinos can be found across major cities in the world and through their unique effort, they contribute to the Filipinization of global cities. The Filipinization process mainly takes place in three different ways such as through religious Filipinization, occupational Filipinization, and associational Filipinization, and Gonzalez and Torneo argue that this facilitates the transnational integration, adaptive spirit, and intergenerational cohesion. The diaspora’s involvement with the homeland is noteworthy especially in the spheres of economy and politics and more so in the neo-liberal world. Ishan Ashutosh examines the multi-directional connections forged by diaspora politics with the case study of the South Asian diaspora. He argues that there are three prominent ways through which diaspora politics can be observed such as through long-distance nationalism, strategies adopted by various emigrant states, and rethinking homeland as a site of origin and return. Drawing several cases and avenues of connection of South Asian diaspora with the homeland such as long-distance nationalism and the adoption of homeland government’s various strategies to harness the diaspora, he argues that to forge diasporic connections and new solidarities one has to look beyond a singular site of origin and consider diaspora’s dynamics of dispersal, settlement, and transformation. Historically, religion has been associated with the concept of development. Being the core element of culture it has impacted every aspect of human life. However, in the post-colonial context, the role of religion in development has been undermined as a result of its association with many socio-religious and political events. Pratap Kumar Penumala critically examines the relationship between religion, development, and politics in the context of the South Asian diaspora. Religion is an intrinsic part of the South Asian cultural tradition and this has been extended to the diaspora as a result of transnational migration. In the South Asian ­d iasporic context, he argues that the association of religion with the economic development of the homeland or shaping the identities of immigrants in the West has to be questioned. According to him one of the counterintuitive to the religious practices and belief systems 10

Introduction

is the collapse of the extended family system in the context of the diasporic societies underpinned by socio-economic development. Another impediment to the growing role of religion in the diaspora is the role of “religious transnationalism”, especially referring to the divisive role of religion in the context of South Asian Hindus and Muslims. Hence he cautioned that, since religion is “enmeshed in state politics, religious institutions can be ­interference to progress, modernity, and development”. Bilal Dewansyah explores how Indonesian diaspora is engaged pro-actively in various homeland development projects. Taking the example of Indonesian Diaspora Network, a formal overseas Indonesian organization, he highlighted two significant issues, i.e., how the organization made a significant influence on the homeland on the one hand and how it is divided on the grounds of political ideology over dual citizenship vs. anti-dual citizenship on the other hand. In contrast to the dual citizenship that brought the Indonesian diaspora to the limelight, though the Indonesian diaspora shifted its agenda to support the development programmes of the homeland government for the specific community especially to support socio-economic development, however, as Dewansyah argues, this role was limited to the philanthropic practices because there were differences in vision, strategy, and imagination.

Media, culture, and representations The development of global media and communication technologies had far-reaching consequences especially for the diasporic communities as it reinforced the diaspora and homeland relations and networks by creating the “diasporic public spheres” (Appadurai, 1996). As the current digital media allows the diasporic communities to access and imagine the h ­ omeland in an unprecedented way, the socio-cultural and political mobilizations became truly transnational (the grand ceremony of the foundation laying of Ram Temple in Ayodhya by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its wide circulation through digital and electronic media across the Indian diaspora as displayed in large digital billboards on Broadway, New York for instance). The chapters included in this part deal with the identity construction of Asians in the diaspora through media, culture, and literature. While Kim (Chapter 22), ­Oldfield ­(Chapter 24), and Chatterjee (Chapter 25) explore how Asian women in the diaspora negotiate their identity through media consumption, musical performances, and classical dances of the homeland, Roy (Chapter 23) focuses on the importance of South Asian culinary traditions in the diaspora. Similarly, while Surabhi and Sahoo (Chapter 25) deal with religious transnationalism and Indian folk art performances, Tinh Vy (Chapter 26) explores immigrant memories of the homeland through diasporic literary writings. One of the important characteristics of globalization is the advancement of travel and communication technologies that leads to increased transnational migration and the formation of digital diasporas (Brinkerhoff, 2009; Everett, 2009). This not only allows transnational migrants to access the homeland easily but also allows them to create a unique and complex identity that needs to be understood. Coincided with globalization, many East Asian countries witnessed rapid economic growth including the growth of Western educational institutions that led to a significant rise in international migration of young women for higher education and experience better life and work opportunities overseas. Youna Kim discusses the phenomena of transnational migration and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in the everyday life of Asian women in the diaspora. This new generation of women she calls the “markers of contemporary mobile transnationals”. Through ethnographic data collected from several young East Asian women – Korean, Japanese, and Chinese women – in the UK she examines how digital media and mediated networks facilitated 11

Ajaya K. Sahoo

women’s transnational movements. Media technologies provide useful resources in shaping the diasporic experience and identities. As Kim persuasively argues that since the ubiquitous media flows from the homeland to the diaspora have now greater access through the Internet it creates “national space and identification within the transnational field, changing the dynamics of diasporic identity”. Food and food practices constitute an important marker of immigrant identity in the ­d iaspora and this has been an integral part of South Asian culture as well. Parama Roy mapped the culinary traditions and dietary practices of South Asians in the diaspora. Through the examples of new forms of cooking and eating styles in the old diasporas such as the Caribbean, East and South Africa, and South-East Asia to that of the growth and success of several South Asian restaurants in the new diasporas, such as North America, the UK, and Australia, she examines how South Asian cuisines, especially curries and their use of spices, became the symbol of authenticity and identity in the diaspora. Anna Oldfield studies how the music of the homeland in the diasporic context plays an important role in identity formation and intercultural negotiation. Through the ­ethnographic study of selected Azerbaijan women musicians in the US and drawing t­ heoretical frameworks from ethnomusicology, Azerbaijani studies, and post-Soviet studies, she examines how these women musicians create meaningful shared experiences between performers and audiences through their live performances. The live performances allow the musicians to better ­negotiate the relationship between home and host culture besides giving a powerful agency to the women. The Azerbaijani musical diaspora in the US is one of the most sophisticated musical traditions as the musicians are trained in various musical cultures that include folk music, classical music, and Western music. Oldfield argues that the success of the A ­ zerbaijani music in creating a unique musical identity – Azerbaijaniness – in the ­multicultural society of America lies in the history of Azerbaijan where the women grew up in the context of Russian colonization and involvement in the Soviet Union, the multinational empires with a dominant culture. Since music has the power to bridge intercultural ­communication, the ethnic diversity and English language hardly created any barrier for the Azerbaijanis in the US. Sandra Chatterjee focuses on the performance of Indian classical dances mainly K ­ uchipudi and Bharatanatyam in the diaspora. Through an autoetnographic analysis, she explores how the Indian classical dance is epitomized as a contemporary international dance which is “foreign, mysterious, exotic” in continental Europe and differs from its representation as an emancipatory practice with “discourses of diasporic nostalgia and exoticism” in other parts of the world especially in South Asian diasporas in the USA and the UK where South Asians have a strong foothold. Indian classical dance has a unique aesthetic flavour that connects the performer with the audience and vice versa. However, as Chatterjee is concerned, the dance performance loses its aesthetics in some parts of the diaspora when it is looked upon as a mere Indian “temple dance” or “Bollywood dance”. Using the notions of time, memory, history, and archive, she examines various challenges associated with the performance of Indian classical dances in the diaspora which she aptly titled “dancing out of place and out of time”. With transnational migration, the religious traditions that were transported to the new places adopted strategies to re-create it by including new elements. Surabhi K and Ajaya Sahoo focus on the Theyyam performances, one of the important folk art performances of Kerala state in India, which have received popularity in the Indian diaspora in recent times. The folk arts tell us about its village culture, agricultural life, and the folk community itself. Though Theyyam has been performing in the diaspora on various events it is added with 12

Introduction

new elements and diluted hence leading to new varieties of performances that are different from the homeland. They demonstrate how this local religious ritual art form of Kerala is transported to the diaspora and creates a specific cultural and localized identity among the Malayalis in the Indian diaspora. Keeping the memories alive and connecting to the homeland through various ways is the central feature of diasporic communities. The theme of home and homeland memories is best represented in the writings of several literary scholars. Studying the Vietnamese diasporic literature in Germany, Tran Tinh Vy examines how these scholars depict the trauma of crossing the borders and reproduce the homeland in their writings. The Vietnamese have been migrating to various parts of the world under different periods of history. It is one of the regions in South-East Asia that witnessed not only the high levels of international migration but also the most traumatic history of displacements which is represented in many of the diasporic literary writings. Through the lens of diaspora studies and memory studies she shows how the Vietnamese diasporic writers in Germany connect to the nostalgic homeland “Vietnam”. To sum up, the volume tried to show the potentials of Asian diasporas in the world, their struggle for survival as distinct minority communities in the hostland, their negotiation of ethnic identities, and above all their transnational engagement with the homeland and the hostland through various development programmes. However, the continuation of such vibrant diasporic and transnational engagement in the post-pandemic world is seriously questioned given the pressure for immigrant communities to disappear either through total assimilation or forced return migration to their homelands. Of course one can also anticipate that this pandemic challenge might open up new opportunities for stronger international relations and greater diasporic and transnational engagements.

References Adamson, F. B. (2020). Non-state Authoritarianism and Diaspora Politics. Global Networks, 20 (1), 150–169. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Armstrong, J. A. (1976). Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas. American Political Science Review, 70 (2), 393–408. Basch, L., Schiller, N. G. and Blanc, C. S. (Eds.). (2005). Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, ­Postcolonial Predicaments, and the Deterritorialized Nation States. London: Routledge. Basch, L., Schiller, N. G. and Blanc, C. S. (2008). Transnational Projects: A New Perspective and ­Theoretical Premises. In S. Khagram and P. Levitt (Eds.), The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (pp. 261–271). London: Routledge. Bauböck, R. and Faist, T. (Eds.). (2010). Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories, and Method. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brinkerhoff, J. M. (2009). Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Byman, D., Chalk, P., Hoffman, B., Rosenau, W. and Brannan, D. (2001). Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Dwyer, C. (2000). Negotiating Diasporic Identities: Young British South Asian Muslim Women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4), 475–486. Everett, A. (2009). Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. New York: State University of New York Press. Fair, C. C. (2005). Diaspora Involvement in Insurgencies: Insights from the Khalistan and Tamil Eelam Movements. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 11 (1), 125–156. Han, E. (2019). Bifurcated Homeland and Diaspora Politics in China and Taiwan towards the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (4), 577–594.

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Ajaya K. Sahoo Hwang, J. C. (2018). Pathways into Terrorism: Understanding Entry into and Support for Terrorism in Asia. Terrorism and Political Violence, 30 (6), 883–889. Khagram, S. and Levitt, P. (Eds.). (2008). The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2011). Transnational Migration, Media, and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters. London: Routledge. Knott, K. and McLoughlin, S. (Eds.). (2013). Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, and Identities. London: Zed Books. Levitt, P. (2001). The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mishra, V. (2007). The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London: Routledge. Missbach, A. (2011). Separatist Conflict in Indonesia: The Long-distance Politics of the Acehnese Diaspora. London: Routledge. Pande, A. (2017). Role of Diasporas in Homeland Conflicts, Conflict Resolution, and Post-war Reconstruction: The Case of Tamil Diaspora and Sri Lanka. South Asian Diaspora, 9 (1), 51–66. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E. and Landolt, P. (1999). The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–237. Pries, L. (Ed.). (2008). Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-link of Organizations. London: Routledge. Quayson, A. and Daswani, G. (Eds.). (2013). A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. London: Wiley. Reis, M. (2004). Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on “Classical” and “Contemporary” Diaspora. International Migration, 42 (2), 41–60. Sahoo, A. K. (2012). Globalization, Diaspora, and Transnationalism: Challenges and Opportunities for Indian Diaspora. In Michelle Hale Williams (Ed.), The Multicultural Dilemma: Migration, Ethnic Politics, and State Intermediation (pp. 30–46). London: Routledge. Sahoo, A. K. and Purkayastha, B. (Eds.). (2019). Routledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism. London: Routledge. Sahoo, A. K. and Sheffer, G. (2014). Introduction: Issues of Identity in the South Asian Diaspora. In A.  K. Sahoo and G. Sheffer (Eds.), Diaspora and Identity: Perspectives on South Asian Diaspora (pp. 1–11). London: Routledge. Sahoo, A. K. and Shome, A. (2020). Diaspora and Transnationalism: The Changing Contours of Ethnonational Identity of Indian Diaspora. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 19 (3), 383–402. Tölölyan, K. (1991). The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1 (1), 3–7. Vertovec, S. 1997. Three Meanings of “Diaspora,” Exemplified among South Asian Religions. Diaspora, 6 (3), 277–299. Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. London: Routledge. Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (Eds.). (1999). Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Zhou, M. (Ed.). (2017). Contemporary Chinese Diasporas. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

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PART I

Development potential of Asian diasporas

1 MAKING SENSE OF THE PAST The Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and transgenerational histories Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

There were three notable second generation Vietnamese achievers in Australia in 2013: ­medical doctor Jenny Tran won the Australia-at-large Rhodes Scholarship to study global health at Oxford University; pianist Hoang Pham won the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Award; and Midshipman Nam Nguyen was the Australian Defence Force A ­ cademy’s top graduate, winning the Commander in Chief Medal and the Megan Ann Pelly Perpetual Memorial Award (see Victorian Government Health Information, 2013; Dow, 2014; Vu, 2014). All three are the children of refugees, and were shaped by their family background. Their parents formed part of the mass exodus from Vietnam that followed the communist takeover of South Vietnam and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Tran’s parents were boat refugees who left Vietnam separately and reached Malaysia and Thailand before her father arrived in Australia in 1975 and her mother in 1977; Pham’s musician father escaped from Vietnam by boat with his wife and baby son in 1985 before reaching Indonesia and resettling in Australia; and Nguyen’s father fled his country by boat before arriving in Malaysia in 1983 and Australia the following year, and sponsoring his girlfriend from Vietnam to Australia in 1990. While the second generation of Vietnamese in Australia includes high achievers as noted above, it also comprises those who suffered from disrupted education and broken families. The divide between notable achievement on the one hand and problems with adaptation on the other hand is a distinguishing feature of the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. Drawing on an oral history project conducted in Australia,1 this chapter will focus on the narratives of second generation Vietnamese and the ways in which they have dealt with difficulties in transgenerational communication and attendant gaps in transgenerational histories. As noted by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, a primary aim of oral history ‘has been the empowerment of individuals or social groups through the process of remembering and reinterpreting the past, with an emphasis on the value of process as much as historical product’ (Perks and Thomson, 2016, p. xiv). The life narratives explored here illustrate different approaches to the challenges of uncovering family histories, dealing with underlying trauma, and coming to terms with heritage. The first case study involves a young woman who was born in 1994 and turned to volunteering in Australia and internationally while the second case study is that of a young man who majored in psychology and became a counsellor for first and second generation Vietnamese. I argue that these strategies not only provide a means of filling in the gaps and silences in their family histories and their knowledge of the 17

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

first generation’s experiences but also constitute a means of understanding their own lives as well as those of their parents’ generation. By choosing to take on life paths that involve altruistic activities in the first case, and meaning-making in the second, these second generation Vietnamese have formulated a way to connect with the first generation, shed light on transgenerational histories, and help themselves while they help others.

The Vietnamese diaspora The Vietnamese diaspora that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War was one of the largest and most visible mass migrations of the late 20th century. More than two million Vietnamese left their homeland over two decades. The Vietnamese exodus was driven by widespread state repression in postwar communist Vietnam, including the internment of one million people in reeducation camps (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2000, p. 82), the forced de-urbanization and displacement of another million people to New Economic Zones in rural areas, the execution of 65,000 citizens (Desbarats, 1990, pp. 60–63), restriction of free speech, movement, and religion, and discrimination ­directed against three specific groups in society: all those associated with the former South Vietnamese government, ethnic Chinese, and Amerasians (Desbarats, 1990, pp. 47–66; Hitchcox, 1990, pp. 36–68; Valverde, 1992, pp. 144–161). Postwar Vietnam was therefore marked by internment without trial, forced displacement, forced labour, and the marginalization of significant segments of the population on political and ethnic grounds. Social and familial networks in the former south were ruptured as family members disappeared into the reeducation camp system, the New Economic Zones, or as escapees. By 1979, more than 700,000 Vietnamese had fled their country (Robinson, 1998, p. 50). The plight of the boat people received e­ xtensive exposure in the late 1970s and 1980s, with estimates of refugee deaths at sea ranging from 100,000 to more than one million ­(Hitchcox, 1990, pp. 11, 85; Robinson, 1998, p. 59). The scale of this diaspora was unprecedented in Vietnamese history, as was the international response, which involved two major conferences convened by the United Nations in Geneva in 1979 and 1989 to deal with the Indochinese refugee crisis, the implementation of the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) and the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), and the resettlement of Vietnamese in 50 countries worldwide (Robinson, 1998, p. 127). The closure of the last Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong in 2000 put an end to, after a quarter of a century, ‘one of the longest-running migration and refugee resettlement programs in the modern era’ (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, 2005). The main countries of resettlement were the United States of America, Australia, Canada, and France, with Vietnamese communities established in countries as diverse as Norway and Israel.

The Vietnamese community in Australia In Australia, the Vietnamese community grew from 1,000 people in 1975 to 277,400 in 2016 or 1.2% of the Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). The Vietnamese community is the largest refugee community in Australia. There were three major waves of arrivals: the first was a small group of 539 well-educated Vietnamese who were admitted in 1975–1976 (McMurray, 1999, p. 1); the second consisted mostly of ethnic Chinese escaping from Vietnam after the closure of private businesses in 1978 and the border war between China and Vietnam with arrivals peaking at 12,915 in 1979–1980 (Thomas, 1997, p. 275); and the third was a mixed group of small traders, rural and urban workers, and the unemployed, with numbers peaking at 13,248 in 1990–1991 (Viviani, 1996, p. 104). ­Vietnamese refugees formed the ‘first and most difficult test case’ of the abolition of the White Australia 18

Making sense of the past

policy (Viviani, 1996, p. 1), with a high profile in the media and public discourse (Thomas, 1997, p. 275). While few were admitted in the immediate postwar years, Australia, under the leadership of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, responded to international pressure and reacted generously to the Indochinese refugee crisis of 1978–1979 by accepting the highest number of refugees per head of population of all nations (Mackie, 1997, p. 28). A total of 150,000 Vietnamese had resettled in Australia by 1996 (McMurray, 1999, p. 3). Migration from Vietnam since the mid-1990s has largely been under the Family Reunion Program. While the Vietnamese have in the main resettled successfully in Australia, the community remains polarized between high rates of education and achievement on the one hand, and over-representation in low-skilled employment and in prison on the other hand. The educational attendance rate of Vietnamese aged 20–24, for example, is nearly twice the national average at 48.2% (Hugo et al., 2011, p. 144); however, the Vietnamese imprisonment rate is a third higher than the national average at 397.3 prisoners per 100,000 adult population (­Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). The lives of first generation Vietnamese have been shaped by their first-hand experience of war, trauma, and forced migration (Nguyen, 2005, 2009, 2016). They had to rebuild lives in a vastly different country and culture while mourning lost homes and homeland. The Vietnamese community in Australia is now at a crucial juncture: it is in the process of transitioning from a refugee community with widespread exposure to trauma to a second generation community.

The second generation Until recently, second generation Vietnamese in Australia were too young to be the subject of research. In 1996, 92% of second generation Vietnamese were aged 0–14 years with nearly half aged 0–4 years (Khoo, McDonald, Giorgas and Birrell, 2002, p. 11). Second generation Vietnamese are now in higher education or the workforce, with the majority aged 24–38 years. The relationship between second generation Vietnamese and their parents, and the ­second generation’s perceptions of the first generation’s history and culture are complicated by ­refugee histories and the trauma experienced by many members of the first generation. Histories of the Vietnamese diaspora, like those of post-Holocaust generations, are often fragmented and incomplete (Nguyen, 2009, p. 5). The reverberations for the second generation in terms of the impact of secondary trauma, ‘postmemories’ (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2003, p. 85), damaged lives, and damaged relationships need to be fully explored. What memories and stories have been passed on in families? What about the silences (Wajnryb, 2001), broken histories, and broken lives? What does it mean to grow up as the child of refugees and to be a young Vietnamese in Australia in the 21st century? A 2012 report on the Vietnamese community in Australia reveals that while there is Vietnamese linguistic fluency among the younger generation and attachment to family and extended family, there is a low level of attachment to Vietnam, travel to or business connections with Vietnam – largely because of the negative experience of the parents (Ben-Moshe and Pyke, 2012, pp. 7–8). Hence, while there is a strong attachment to Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese values, the Vietnamese family, and the Vietnamese language, this attachment is detached from the current Vietnamese communist government (Ben-Moshe and Pyke, 2012, pp. 7–8 and p. 64). The political divide between the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and Vietnam is distinctive and differentiates the Vietnamese community from other migrant communities in Australia that have retained political ties with the homeland. I will now focus on the oral histories of two second generation Vietnamese in order to illustrate the ways in which members of this generation have handled transgenerational relationships and histories. 19

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

‘They will not speak about their history’: Cathy Nguyen’s narrative Cathy Nguyen (Nguyen, 2019, interview, 12 November) was born in Melbourne in 1994. She identifies herself as ‘Australian Vietnamese’ (Nguyen, 2019). An economics major at the University of Melbourne, she worked in a range of areas including policy, was a research assistant at Harvard University, and volunteered for global youth organization AIESEC where she rose to become chapter president. Her father’s family is Catholic and came from Hanoi. They formed part of the mass migration of one million people from communist North Vietnam to republican South Vietnam following the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954. Her mother’s family is Buddhist and came from Saigon. A major difference between the two families is that her father’s entire family emigrated overseas to Europe, North America, and Australia after 1975 while most of her mother’s relatives still live in Vietnam. Nguyen’s knowledge of her family history is fragmented. As she notes throughout her narrative, ‘I only learn snippets of their reality and their stories… They don’t tell me in full detail’ (Nguyen, 2019). Her paternal family’s link with Australia predates the fall of Saigon in that her aunt was a Colombo Plan student from Vietnam, and so was already in Australia when South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. Nguyen knows some aspects of the family history on her father’s side. She states that her paternal grandfather was a commander and was imprisoned by the communists for ten years in North Vietnam, and adds, ‘My grandma slowly escaped. Each of my uncles was born in a different city, going further down south to Saigon’ (Nguyen, 2019). She is unclear about the circumstances under which her parents left Vietnam after 1975 and when they arrived in Australia, and has few details of their resettlement experiences. She states that her father and his relatives were sponsored by her aunt and all came to Australia ‘on a boat’ (Nguyen, 2019). Her father may have arrived in Australia in the early 1980s and her mother in the late 1980s. She explains these gaps in her understanding of her family history in the following way: I don’t know much – because I don’t think we were told much… Sorry, I’m not good with the history… My dad’s family never speak about their history. You don’t touch that topic. (Nguyen, 2019) She states that she grew up with two different religions and languages in Australia: I was brought up Catholic but I still went to the [Buddhist] temple. My dad’s family are strict Catholics, I went to a Catholic school, and I had a happy time in the church. I guess Buddhism is like an extension of my understanding of my mum. When I go to the temple, it helps me to understand my mum and my aunty and what they believe in – that peace and serenity. I’m happy that I was brought up in both. English was my first language. My aunty [her father’s sister who was a Colombo Plan student] was adopted by a British couple, and she only speaks English. She was trying her best to assimilate into Australian society. She forced my cousins and me to not speak Vietnamese. She said we could only speak English in her household. I only learnt Vietnamese when my mother sponsored her sister from Vietnam to come live with her in the 2000s. She could only speak Vietnamese so we had to speak to her in Vietnamese. (Nguyen, 2019) 20

Making sense of the past

Nguyen posits that this non-use of the Vietnamese language on her father’s side of the family is linked in some way to trauma and the silenced family history from North Vietnam: I was perplexed trying to understand their cultural relationship with their mother tongue and their home country. The mystery is still unraveling for me to this day but from observations from my cousins, I think that they don’t speak Vietnamese because they want to forget what they experienced in Vietnam and the trauma they went through in their country. They will not speak about their history until they’re ready. Or until we’re ready. I don’t want to open up a wound that is not required just yet. I feel it’s quite rude insisting on it and asking them for a history that they don’t want to open up on. What’s happened in the past is past. I think trauma is – I don’t know the definition but it’s having those memories of… the experience they had during the war or growing up that still inhibit their ability to process emotions or information or open up. They’re very closed. I think trauma does play a role there. (Nguyen, 2019) Vietnamese culture was made more accessible to Nguyen through friendships with students from other Vietnamese refugee families, and once at university, she turned to volunteering: I volunteered to be part of this global youth organization called AIESEC that initially started in Europe after World War II ended. It started at the same time as the United Nations. Young people joined from all around Europe and their goal was to never have another world war. The idea gradually expanded to parts of Asia and then Australia as well. I felt connected to this organisation’s purpose because I am the child of people who felt the impact of global war. I wanted to see where I could find opportunities to contribute to global peace, and to ensure that the experiences of the previous generation are not felt in the next generation. This organisation sends people abroad to volunteer. I was fortunate to be part of it. I gradually took up leadership roles, and became manager for marketing, international operations. In my first year, I was sent to five different conferences in China, Philippines, Malaysia and the USA, where I got to meet people in an international environment, and learn more about how young people wanted to drive change in their own country. Through AIESEC, I was able to connect with people from Vietnam. The Vietnam chapter only opened up around ten years ago, maybe earlier, around 2005. (Nguyen, 2019) Nguyen’s engagement with the Vietnam chapter of AIESEC contrasts markedly with earlier trips to Vietnam with her mother when she was a child. She remembers hating the experience, and refusing to eat Vietnamese food. Nguyen left AIESEC after three and a half years. In her final year, she was part of the national leadership team but gave up volunteering as it was no longer financially viable for her. Friends of hers were able to continue with volunteering because they had savings and parents who could support them. Nguyen was not in that position, and works in university administration while studying for a bachelor’s degree. She speaks of the problems facing the multi-ethnic communities in the western suburbs of Melbourne in which she grew up as well as her mother’s addiction to gambling. Her 21

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

mother was so heavily addicted that she would leave her two daughters aged under five alone at home while she went gambling. Nguyen reflects on insights gained as she matured into adulthood: Say you come from a country like Sudan or from Vietnam, where there isn’t a strong rule of law or respect for the law. People who come here have their challenges, and you have issues with drugs and crime. People are still trying to develop their values and educating themselves, trying to better themselves. Back then, I thought those problems were associated with Vietnamese culture but I now think that it’s just people who don’t have good English skills and are trying to build a life for themselves. When I was growing up, I resented my mum because in a way she failed to do what a mother is meant to do. But I’ve matured and I understand that it’s hard when all you know in your family is what you know… No one talks about the mental issues and challenges associated with Asian culture and gambling and how that impacts people’s childhoods and the second generation. I think our generation is trying to figure out why this behaviour exists, and how we can overcome it. (Nguyen, 2019) Nguyen’s words situate her mother’s addiction against a background of mental health issues facing first generation Vietnamese, and amidst wider problems of acculturation among refugee communities in Australia. She interweaves her individual struggle to understand her mother’s behaviour with broader second generation concerns regarding transferred trauma in the Vietnamese diaspora.

A ‘spiritual wound’: Tien Truong’s narrative Tien Truong (Truong, 2019, interview, 6 November) was born in Melbourne in 1990. He majored in psychology at RMIT University, is concerned with mental health in the Vietnamese community, and works as a counsellor in a large multiservice organization, the Australian Vietnamese Women’s Association. He comes from a Buddhist family in South Vietnam. He relates that two of his maternal uncles served in the South Vietnamese armed forces, and that one died during the war while the other was an officer in charge of propaganda and was interned in a prison camp after the war. After his release, the family put together enough money to enable him to escape overseas, and he was the first to resettle in Australia. Truong thinks that this was in 1980. Like Nguyen, he does not know exactly when his parents arrived in Australia although he states that they did so ‘on a boat’ (Truong, 2019) and it may have been in 1985 or 1986. He initially states that his uncle sponsored the entire family to Australia but later amends it to ‘only two or three aunts’ (Truong, 2019). While he is unclear about several matters such as when his parents actually left Vietnam and how long they spent in refugee camps, he does provide striking details of his mother’s boat journey: Her boat ran out of fuel – I think the trip was only meant to take ten days – but she was stuck out there for nearly a month. The engine broke down. They had to ration out the water. She was telling me how there were a few aunties and uncles who started getting delirious because they were dying of thirst. One of her sisters was lying on the boat and begging for water, for hours on end. Because my mum was worried about her sister, she climbed the side of the boat and went around to the captain’s cabin and begged for water. There was this rusty can that had some old water in it – the water was brown from 22

Making sense of the past

the rust – they gave her a cup and she brought it back to her family. She said that water tasted like the best water she’d ever had. When I was younger, I had a very vague understanding of their experience. I knew they were refugees. But I didn’t know how much of an impact that experience would’ve had on them – until I joined a program called the Dual Identity Leadership Program. It went into a lot more depth into what their experience was like. It made me really understand the magnitude of the sacrifice they made. (Truong, 2019) Truong notes that his father is now ‘61 or 62 years old’ (Truong, 2019) and that he had been drafted into the army in Vietnam although he was unclear for which conflict. If his father had been born in 1957 or 1958, he would have either been a young draftee in the closing days of the Vietnam War or been in the right age group to be drafted into the army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for the war against Democratic Kampuchea that began in 1978. Of his parents’ reasons for leaving Vietnam, Truong states: My dad decided he had had enough and wanted to flee. He just wanted to escape the communist regime. My mum was a teacher in Vietnam and she told me her work wasn’t valued. I’m not sure if she was just reeducated or that they actually didn’t let her teach anymore. She just said that life was a lot harder after the war. She’s a few years older than my dad. She’s 67 or 68 now. (Truong, 2019) Truong highlights the close family ties that continued well after resettlement, with adult brothers and sisters choosing to stay within a two-block area so that their children could be close to each other. Tuong grew up in a Vietnamese environment and notes that he is ‘still really tight’ (Truong, 2019) with his cousins. He underlines the importance of the Vietnamese language in his family: My parents wanted us to keep the language so they made us speak only Vietnamese with them. I remember that when I was in prep, I had a really thick Vietnamese accent when I talked. My teacher would keep correcting me. It was because my mum taught me my English. I sounded like I was from Vietnam. I was still getting corrected in Grade 1. (Truong, 2019) Truong insists that his parents did not put undue pressure on him to perform well academically. As for his work as a counsellor, he reflects on his mother’s influence: ‘My mum is Buddhist so she always instilled those values in me of helping others or having compassion for others. I wanted to do something in the health field – namely, counselling. It’s not something that many Vietnamese would pursue’ (Truong, 2019). His path to a career in counselling was not straightforward. His initial studies were in occupational therapy but his liaison work for a mental healthcare provider led him to study psychology at RMIT University so that he could do ‘frontline work’ (Truong, 2019) counselling vulnerable members of the Vietnamese community. He explains: There’s a lot of underlying trauma – people trying to escape from the trauma. It’s just learning the different modalities, but usually the issues are very similar. Part of my 23

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

work is public education, reducing stigma around accessing mental health services. I think there’s a massive barrier for Vietnamese people being willing to access services. It comes with a lot of shame or embarrassment because they can’t handle these issues by themselves. Because accessing services comes with the acknowledgement that they have a problem. People would rather keep it to themselves. I feel when people access the services, they’re at the end of their rope. They’ve had a lifetime of trauma, and of responses to trauma. Their behaviours are ingrained. Decades of the same behaviour, the same reactions to events. So, helping people through that is a very slow process. The term I use is tom thuong tinh thanh. It means ‘spiritual wound.’ (Truong, 2019) Truong highlights the role of trauma in transgenerational interactions, referring not only to the first and second generations in Australia but also to earlier generations in Vietnam. He links difficulties in communication and understanding between the generations in Australia to problems experienced by the first generation in their interactions with their own parents in Vietnam: I think there would be a high number of people who experience PTSD. A lot of people have anxiety. My mum has high anxiety and I’m sure the war experience made it a lot worse. For me personally, it has a lot more impact because when you’re a kid you don’t have the rational mind to process and integrate those emotional wounds or trauma. So it stays with you, and it’s easy to interpret other things as dangerous – it gives you a different lens of the world, you see it as dangerous, and you’re constantly in danger. In terms of trauma, what age it happens to you is really important, and the level of resilience you have… If they are willing to open up about it then I try to delve deeper into it. Sometimes they don’t see that connection between themselves and their own parents in Vietnam… Framing it that way can help people be a lot more open about their own behaviour, and understand that ‘this stems from something that happened to me.’ I try to explain that it’s about understanding and healing that part of you. As a kid, you want that unconditional love, you want that parent to be there for you, but when your parent wasn’t there for you, then it’s up to you to be that person. You have to be that unconditionally loving person. (Truong, 2019) So far, Truong has counselled mostly members of the first generation even though the age difference can be an impediment to counselling. He would like to counsel more members of the second generation. Regarding his own identity, Truong notes: Overall, I do feel like I’m an Aussie.2 But, especially after doing the Dual Identity Leadership Program, I started seeing myself more as Vietnamese Australian. I see the importance of keeping that part of your identity, especially because your parents had such a rich cultural history, and to not validate that is a disservice to them. I feel like I can connect a lot more to my parents now, learning about history, and even asking about history. I don’t feel enough second generation Vietnamese care about their Vietnamese identity, and it’s kind of sad. (Truong, 2019) 24

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For Truong, a deeper understanding of the ‘spiritual wounds’ experienced by the first generation led to an affirmation of his Vietnamese Australian identity and the ability to claim and further investigate his Vietnamese family history and heritage.

Transgenerational understanding While the narratives of Nguyen and Truong encompass family histories of trauma and loss involving the refugee experience, they also relate stories of agency and connectedness. Their accounts reveal problems in transgenerational communication between the first and second generations of Vietnamese in the diaspora, and associated silences and lacunae in transgenerational histories. Both Nguyen and Truong, however, have authored coherent and meaningful life stories. Their decisions to engage in volunteering in the case of Nguyen, and counselling in the case of Truong, evince their capacity to construct frameworks that enable personal growth as well as a greater understanding of the travails of their parents’ generation. Although there are clear distinctions between the narratives, three central themes emerge. First, the fault lines in transgenerational communication have resulted in fragmented family histories, postmemories, and incomplete information on migration trajectories from Vietnam to Australia. In Nguyen’s case, her father’s family were Catholic northerners who were refugees from communism twice, the first time after partition in 1954, and the second time after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. This family history is underlain by trauma and largely shrouded in silence. The situation of Nguyen’s mother’s family differs considerably from that of her father’s. Nguyen notes that her mother escaped from Vietnam with one of her cousins by boat but that the rest of the family were hesitant to leave Vietnam and remained in Saigon. A degree of trauma, however, is also implicit in her mother’s family history, and manifested in her mother’s gambling addiction in Australia. In Truong’s case, a maternal uncle who was a war veteran and former camp prisoner was the first to leave ­Vietnam and resettle in Australia. While his uncle was able to sponsor a few family members, Truong provides an extraordinarily vivid account of how his mother and several other relatives nearly died of thirst when their refugee boat ran out of fuel and water. Truong’s father was also a boat person. Trauma is implicit in the family history prior to migration. Truong’s father was a young conscript either in South Vietnam in 1975 or in the army of the postwar communist government. As for his mother, it seems that she was among the thousands of South Vietnamese teachers who were sent to reeducation by the postwar authorities after the fall of Saigon in 1975 (Nguyen, 1983, p. 190). While this history is not clear from Truong’s account, he understood that both parents wanted to escape from the communist regime. For Nguyen and Truong, these gleanings of their family histories constitute ‘postmemories’ that do not add up to ‘a complete or linear tale’ (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2003, p. 85). Both are nonetheless cognizant of the magnitude of their parents’ decision to leave Vietnam as refugees and reconstruct lives overseas. Nguyen and Truong also have an imperfect understanding of their families’ migration from Vietnam, stating that they came to Australia ‘on a boat’ (Nguyen, 2019; Truong, 2019) and had been sponsored. There are two issues here. First, the vast majority of Vietnamese refugees arrived in Australia not by boat but by plane.3 Refugees escaped from Vietnam by boat and reached camps in Southeast Asia or Hong Kong where they spent lengths of time varying from a few months to a few years before they were accepted for resettlement and flown to a second asylum country such as Australia. Second, the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) was in operation from 1979 to 1997, and it did provide an avenue for Vietnamese who had resettled overseas to sponsor family members over from Vietnam. There were significant 25

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problems, however, in the first eight years of the programme’s implementation with only 125,000 people leaving under the ODP in 1979–1987 (Kumin, 2008, p. 105), a number that represented a fraction of those who fled from Vietnam by boat. Whether Nguyen’s and Truong’s family members were sponsored to Australia from Southeast Asian refugee camps or directly from Vietnam under the ODP, they would have arrived by plane; however, this distinction is unclear in the two narratives. The second theme is biculturality, which in this case involves familiarity with two languages, Vietnamese and English; engagement with heritage and Australian cultures; and multi-household upbringing. While these might have posed challenges, they have also proved to be assets in terms of identity formation in multicultural Australia. Bicultural identities entail ‘finding a place and a personal identity in both heritage and Australian cultures’ (Brooker and Lawrence, 2012, p. 67). Nguyen and Truong acknowledge their bicultural identities as Vietnamese Australians and evince their appreciation for growing up with two languages, although their individual experiences vary considerably. Nguyen refers to herself as ‘Australian Vietnamese’ (Nguyen, 2019) and notes that English was her first language. She refused to engage with the Vietnamese language or Vietnamese culture as a child, and only learnt to speak Vietnamese when an aunt from the maternal side moved to Australia in the 2000s. She clarifies that her spoken Vietnamese is ‘conversational’ (Nguyen, 2019) and that she would like to further develop her language skills. Truong, for his part, states that he does ‘feel like an Aussie’ (Truong, 2019),4 but he also highlights the positive impact of the Dual Identity Leadership Program that he attended in Melbourne.5 It led him to identify himself as ‘Vietnamese Australian’ (Truong, 2019) and to lay claim to his Vietnamese cultural heritage. Bilingualism and attendant insights into Vietnamese culture and the Vietnamese diasporic experience proved enriching for both Nguyen and Truong. Both refer to multi-household upbringing, a feature that not only harks back to multi-­ generational households in Vietnam but also reflects the experience of many refugee families post-migration. Nguyen was brought up by two very different aunts: a paternal one from a strict Catholic family who had worked hard to assimilate into Australian society before 1975 and insisted that her niece speak only English at home, and a maternal aunt who later provided an avenue to Vietnamese language and culture as well as Buddhism. It is clear, however, that both aunts have an important role to play in her life, particularly in light of her mother’s absences from the family home due to gambling addiction. Truong, for his part, narrates that siblings from the first generation shared a communal home as adults before eventually buying houses and moving out when they had families of their own. Even then, they chose to stay within a two-block radius so that their children could grow up together. Truong acknowledges this closeness with his cousins – a closeness that has lasted into adulthood. He remembers that he even thought that the western suburb of Melbourne in which he lived was mostly Vietnamese, and that he was surprised to later find out that ‘only 15 or 20 percent’ (Truong, 2019) of the community were Vietnamese. Considering the fact that the Vietnamese make up just over 1% of the Australian population, 15% of Vietnamese in one suburb is well above average. The experience of multi-household upbringing provided Nguyen with an avenue to the Australian and Vietnamese facets of her identity and Truong with strong connections to his Vietnamese family and his heritage culture as a Vietnamese Australian. The third theme is that of underlying trauma. Both Nguyen and Truong acknowledge this aspect of their family histories as well as the impact of secondary trauma on their own generation. While Nguyen refers to problems with drugs and crime in refugee communities, and specifically to her mother’s gambling addiction, Truong reflects on Vietnamese cultural resistance to mental health issues and counselling. Each sought a different path 26

Making sense of the past

in order to respond to the significant challenges in transgenerational communication and understanding. Nguyen’s engagement with global youth organization AIESEC as a university student and with the Vietnamese chapter of AIESEC enabled her to gain a greater appreciation of the country and culture her parents originated from. As noted by Andrew Rothwell and Brandon Charleston, the benefits of international volunteering include personal transformation, self-discovery, cross-cultural competence, and authentic leadership (2013, pp. 159–162). The insights Nguyen gained through growing up with two religions and languages, added to the personal growth developed through her volunteering activities with AIESEC, have given her a greater understanding of the difficulties faced by her parents’ generation as Vietnamese refugees in Australia. The positive impacts of volunteering, including civic consciousness, connectivity, and engagement (Carlton, 2015, p. 343), are implicit in Nguyen’s account. While she may not be able to articulate the precise nature of the first generation’s experiences, namely war, postwar state repression, and forced migration, she does identify that trauma plays a significant role in that past. With maturity came a greater understanding of the problems facing vulnerable members of refugee communities overseas, including her own mother’s struggles with addiction. She is cognizant of the gaps in her understanding of her family history. The paternal side is associated with the dominant religion that she was brought up in – Catholicism – but also with a ruptured relationship with their history and roots in northern Vietnam. Her mother’s family enabled an insight into Buddhism and an association with Buddhist temples in Melbourne as well as the absorption of Vietnamese ­language and culture but the forced migration of two family members in the 1980s left wounds that have yet to be fully articulated. Nguyen’s volunteering allowed her to formulate a more constructive interpretation of the problems that her family confronted as members of the Vietnamese diaspora. While Nguyen turned to volunteering, Truong engaged with counselling and therapy. His work prioritises storytelling and meaning-making, in this way enabling Vietnamese clients to ‘make meaning of their lives by exploring their past and present narratives’ and to re-author more positive life stories (Abkhezr and McMahon, 2017, p. 104). Truong notes that although he does not have a master’s degree in psychology, he is fortunate that there was a need for a bilingual counsellor in a large community organization and that he has been able to provide counselling to first and second generation Vietnamese. Truong relates the positive influence of Buddhism, referring to his grandmother’s charitable endeavours, and his mother encouraging him to do what he is most passionate about rather than pushing him into a prestigious career. His reflections on trauma within the Vietnamese community as a ‘spiritual wound’ (Truong, 2019) encompass transgenerational interactions as he deals not only with problems between the generations and a lack of understanding on both sides but also the fact that many of the first generation’s challenges with communication have their origins in their own upbringing in Vietnam as well as the enduring effects of war, hardship, and cultural mores. Vietnamese cultural resistance to counselling provides an added challenge. Vietnamese culture privileges indirect expression, reluctance to confront problems directly, and reliance on inner strength (Nguyen and Bowles, 2008, p. 44). The emphasis on keeping personal problems private and on saving face (Nguyen and Bowles, 2008, p. 45) provides an explanation for the stigma and shame that Truong confronts in his work on mental health and counselling in the Vietnamese community. He states that it is difficult for him to get the first generation to confide in him, as he is a member of the second generation, but that he makes significant efforts to engage in a dialogue with them. These insights provide him with a greater comprehension of the need for compassion and healing on both sides. 27

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

While Nguyen’s and Truong’s narratives reveal an incomplete grasp of their family histories and substantive challenges in transgenerational communication, they also illustrate the significant efforts that both have made to gain insights into Vietnamese diasporic histories and to make sense of the past. Their trajectories acknowledge the trauma underlying the lives of many first and second generation Vietnamese in Australia but also delineate the positive steps taken to counter its damaging effects. Their life stories ascribe constructive meaning to the present, and posit possibilities for dynamic change and interaction between the generations.

Notes 1 These oral histories form part of a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) on the refugee legacy for second generation Vietnamese in Australia (2018–2021). One of the project’s key outcomes is the establishment of an oral history collection at the National Library of Australia. Oral history interviews are face-to-face and require the use of specialized National Library recording equipment. Interviews had to be put on hold in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. 2 ‘Aussie’ is the colloquial term for ‘Australian.’ 3 Only a small number of Vietnamese refugees – approximately 2,000 – were able to reach Australia directly by boat in 1976–1981 (Bureau of Immigration and Population Research, 1994, p. 1). 4 Truong’s use of ‘feel like’ rather than ‘am’ indicates a circumscribed articulation of Australian identity (see Nunn, 2017, p. 222). 5 The Dual Identity Leadership Program began in Melbourne in 2014 as an initiative of the ­Vietnamese Community in Australia – Victorian Chapter.

References Abkhezr, P. and McMahon, M. (2017). Narrative Career Counselling for People with Refugee Backgrounds. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling, 39(2), 99–111. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017). Census Reveals a Fast Changing, Culturally Diverse Nation [online]. Available from: www.abs.gov.au [Accessed 4 May 2018]. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018). 4517.0 – Prisoners in Australia, 2018 [online]. Available from: www.abs.gov.au [Accessed 18 June 2020]. Ben-Moshe, D. and Pyke, J. (2012). The Vietnamese Diaspora in Australia: Current and Potential Links with the Homeland. Report of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project. Deakin University: Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation. Brooker A. and Lawrence J. A. (2012). Educational and Cultural Challenges in Bicultural Adult ­Immigrant and Refugee Students in Australia. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(1), 66–88. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research (1994). Community Profiles 1991 Census Viet Nam Born. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Carlton, S. (2015). Connecting, Belonging: Volunteering, Wellbeing and Leadership among Refugee Youth. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 13, 342–349. Desbarats, J. (1990). Human Rights: Two Steps Forward, One Step Backward? In Q.T. Thai (Ed.), Vietnam Today: Assessing the New Trends (pp. 47–66). New York: Crane Russak. Dow, S. (2014). From Refugee Boat to Concert Star, Hoang Pham’s Life has Lessons for All [online]. Available from: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/from-refugee-boat-to-concert-star-­ hoang-phams-life-has-lessons-for-all-20140427-37bzb.html [Accessed 16 December 2015]. Hirsch, M. and Spitzer, L. (2003). ‘We Would Never Have Come without You’: Generations of ­Nostalgia. In K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (Eds.), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (pp. 79–95). London: Routledge. Hitchcox, L. (1990). Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps. Oxford: Macmillan in association with St Antony’s College. Hugo, G.J., Vas Dev, S., Wall, J., Young, M., Sharma, V. and Parker, K. (2011). Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants (revised final report). ­Australia: Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

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Making sense of the past Khoo, S-E., McDonald, P., Giorgas, D. and Birrell, B. (2002). Second Generation Australians. Report for the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. Kumin, J. (2008). Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Intervention? Refugee Survey Quarterly, 27(1), 104–117. Mackie, J. (1997). The Politics of Asian Immigration. In J.E. Coughlan and D.J. McNamara (Eds.), Asians in Australia: Patterns of Migration and Settlement (pp. 10–48). South Melbourne: Macmillan Education Australia. McMurray, C. (1999). Community Profiles 1996 Census: Viet Nam Born. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Nguyen, C. (2019). Interviewed by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, 12 November, Richmond, VA. National Library of Australia ORAL TRC 7190/6. Nguyen, N.H.C. (2005). Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives. Altona: Common Ground Publishing. Nguyen, N.H.C. (2009). Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Nguyen, N.H.C. (2016). South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Nguyen, T. and Bowles, R. (2008). Counselling Vietnamese Refugee Survivors of Trauma: Points of Entry for Developing Trust and Rapport. Australian Social Work, 51(2), 41–47. Nguyen, V.C. (1983). Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Nunn, C. (2017). Negotiating National (Non)belongings: Vietnamese Australians in Ethno/­ multicultural Australia. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 24(2), 216–235. Perks, R., and Thomson, A. (2016). Introduction to the Third Edition. In R. Perks and A. Thomson (Eds.), The Oral History Reader: Third Edition (pp. xiii–xx). London: Routledge. Robinson, W.C. (1998). Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response. London: Zed Books. Rothwell, A., and Charleston, B. (2013). International Volunteering: Employability, Leadership and More. Education and Training, 55(2), 159–173. Thomas, M. (1997). The Vietnamese in Australia. In J.E. Coughlan and D.J. McNamara (Eds.), Asians in Australia: Patterns of Migration and Settlement (pp. 274–295). South Melbourne: Macmillan ­Education Australia. Truong, T. (2019). Interviewed by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, 6 November, Richmond, Victoria, Australia. National Library of Australia ORAL TRC 7190/5. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2000). The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (2005). This Month in Immigration History July 1979 [online]. Formerly available from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service online [Accessed 5 August 2005]. Valverde, K-L.C. (1992). From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amerasian Experience. In M.P.P. Root (Ed.), Racially Mixed People in America (pp. 144–161). Newbury Park: Sage Publications. Victorian Government Health Information (2013). A Best from the West [online]. Available from Health Victoria online [Accessed 4 December 2015]. Viviani, N. (1996). The Indochinese in Australia 1975–1995: From Burnt Boats to Barbecues. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Vu, B. (2014). Prestigious Medal for Australian Defence Force Academy Graduate Nam Nguyen [online]. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-25/an-viet-australian-defence-force-graduate-­ feature/5218584 [Accessed 25 February 2014]. Wajnryb, R. (2001). The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

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2 THE SKILLED SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE OECD Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai

Introduction Diaspora communities, though physically distant from their homelands, remain connected to their origins in many ways. They provide a critical link between home and host societies through their networks and individual contributions. This link involves the transfer and sharing of financial, social, intellectual, commercial, and political capital and resources through many different channels. The patterns of engagement and impact on home and host societies vary as diaspora communities differ greatly in their origins, settlement, geographic dispersion, occupations, skill sets, ethnic identities, history, and degree of connectedness with the homeland. Increasingly, governments, international agencies, and industry associations are recognizing the potential role of diaspora communities as development actors and thus the need to understand their characteristics and tap them through targeted strategies. South Asia has a large diaspora population that can potentially contribute to poverty reduction and capacity-building efforts in the countries of this region. According to the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in 2019, South Asia had a global migrant stock of over 40 million. Of this, the Indian diaspora was estimated at 17.5 million, followed by Bangladesh at 7.8 million, Pakistan at 6.3 million, Nepal at 2.3 million, and Sri Lanka at 1.8 million (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 2019). This diaspora is widely dispersed across geographies, some of the main destinations being the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Commonwealth countries. It comprises a mix of skills and occupations, and is diverse in terms of its history and origins, ranging from diaspora communities which are centuries old and those which are only the first generation. With the growing geopolitical importance of the South Asian region, its diaspora has become important in shaping economic and political ties between countries of origin and countries of residence and has served as a catalyst for development in many ways. It has provided Balance of Payments support through remittances and investments, facilitated technology and knowledge transfer in fields such as science, IT, and medicine, made philanthropic contributions to their source communities, and also influenced public opinion about their home countries through the popular media, politics, and cultural channels. Many South Asian diaspora associations and networks have emerged around the world which have helped 30

The skilled South Asian diaspora

promote relations between their homeland and countries of residence. Recognizing these contributions, increasingly, governments in South Asia have undertaken targeted initiatives to facilitate diaspora linkages. This chapter discusses the broad characteristics of the South Asian diaspora and their impact on source countries. The discussion focuses on six of the eight South Asian countries, namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,1 and on one specific segment of this diaspora community, namely, the skilled South Asian diaspora residing in OECD countries. This narrowed scope permits a multi-dimensional understanding of the South Asian diaspora’s contribution to their home countries beyond that of remittances to aspects such as trade, investment, technology and knowledge transfer, reconstruction and development efforts, and philanthropy. It also enables coverage of a mix of both old and relatively young South Asian diaspora communities that are settled in the OECD countries. The Gulf countries, which are also important host markets, are excluded as South Asian expatriates in the Gulf region are not long-term permanent residents and cannot acquire citizenship whereas the OECD countries provide permanent residence and nationality, making these host countries better aligned with a discussion on diaspora contributions to and engagement with home countries. An important caveat to be mentioned upfront, however, is the asymmetry in information available for the six selected South Asian countries which enables more discussion for some countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) compared to others (Nepal and Afghanistan). “Profile of the South Asian diaspora”, following this introduction, provides the geographic, skill, and occupational characteristics of the South Asian diaspora worldwide and specifically in their OECD countries of residence. “Diaspora contribution and engagement with the homeland” discusses the channels through which this diaspora contributes to their source countries, including evidence on contributions made in specific sectors, the role of diaspora associations, and government policies. “Key insights and future directions” concludes by summarizing the key insights and highlights possibilities for further engagement.

Profile of the South Asian diaspora The South Asian diaspora, estimated at over 40 million in 2019, is spread across the world. While there are differences in this geographic dispersion across the South Asian countries, there are also several commonalities. A large number is present in the Middle East and Gulf region, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This region alone accounts for 30–40% of the South Asian diaspora for most South Asian countries. Another important host region is South Asia itself. India is host to the diaspora from other South Asian countries, such as Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Mauritius are also host to the South Asian diaspora, particularly the Indian diaspora. In addition to the Gulf region, South and South East Asia, the OECD countries, including the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and several Scandinavian countries are home to the South Asian diaspora. Table 2.1 provides the migrant stock for all eight South Asian countries for the 1990–2019 period. Since 1990, the overseas population of most South Asian countries has increased, in some cases more than doubling over the last 30 years. A notable exception is Afghanistan, which saw its migrant stock shrink over this period due to the repatriation, spontaneous return, and deportation of earlier conflict-induced migrants from Pakistan and Iran (Majidi et al., 2017). Of the eight South Asian countries, India has the largest overseas community, followed by Bangladesh and Pakistan. The diaspora communities of Maldives and Bhutan are 31

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai Table 2.1   Total migrant stock at mid-year by origin, 1990–2019 Country of origin Year

Afghanistan

Bangladesh

Bhutan

India

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2019

6,823,350 3,716,077 4,606,374 3,898,656 5,055,805 4,977,010 5,120,756

5,451,831 5,425,050 5,442,722 5,786,866 6,750,115 7,307,527 7,835,152

28,465 6,623,177 117,971 7,157,482 120,187 7,932,405 118,031 9,597,951 86,154 13,229,275 47,982 15,930,200 49,216 17,510,931

Maldives Nepal

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

2,193 1,688 1,217 1,771 2,746 2,935 3,053

3,343,328 3,345,394 3,401,303 3,902,648 4,992,279 5,910,360 6,303,286

885,951 925,755 981,294 1,137,286 1,410,887 1,498,852 1,775,768

748,060 856,036 977,405 1,138,625 1,434,586 2,013,843 2,285,364

Source: United Nations. International Migrant Stock 2019 (accessed 09-03-2020). Table 2.2  T  op ten destination countries for the South Asian diaspora, 2019 Afghanistan 1 Iran (45%)

Bangladesh

Bhutan

India

Maldives

Nepal

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

India (40%)

Nepal (56%)

UAE (20%)

Sri Lanka (46%)

Malaysia (25%)

Australia (16%)

USA (15%)

Australia (21%)

India (23%)

Saudi Arabia (23%) India (17%)

Saudi Arabia (29%) UK (9%)

India (13%)

UK (13%)

UAE (16%)

Qatar (9%)

UK (10%) USA (6%) Kuwait (5%) Oman (4%)

India (8%) Canada (8%) Australia (8%) UAE (7%)

Qatar (4%) Canada (3%) Italy (2%)

Italy (5%) USA (3%) France (3%)

2 Pakistan (31%)

Saudi Arabia (16%) 3 Saudi Arabia UAE (9%) (14%) 4 Germany (4%) 5 USA (2%) 6 Australia (1%) 7 Canada (1%) 8 UK (1%) 9 Sweden (1%) 10 Netherlands (1%)

Malaysia (5%) Kuwait (5%) Oman (4%) Qatar (3%)

Canada (9%) Denmark (1%) Norway (1%) UK (1%)

Saudi Arabia (14%) Pakistan (9%) Oman (8%) Kuwait (6%) UK (5%)

Saudi Arabia (22%) India Qatar (6%) (11%) South USA Africa (3%) (5%) Switzerland Australia (3%) (3%) Russian Bangladesh Federation (2%) (2%) Seychelles UK (2%) (1%) Italy (1%) UAE (1%)

UK (3%) USA (3%) Italy (1%)

Netherlands (1%) Belgium (1%) Sri Lanka (~0%)

Canada (4%) Qatar (4%) Australia Egypt (3%) (1%)

Kuwait (1%)

Source: United Nations. International Migrant Stock 2019 (accessed 9 March 2020).

small, despite some increase over the 1990–2019 period as these are primarily migrant-­ receiving countries, with outflows from Maldives generally pertaining to higher education (to c­ ountries like Australia) or business purposes. Table 2.2 shows the distribution of the diaspora population by host country. Three important features emerge. First, all countries, barring Bhutan and Maldives, have a large 32

The skilled South Asian diaspora

chunk of their diaspora in the Gulf region. It is estimated that nearly half of the Sri Lanka diaspora lives in this region. Similarly, the Gulf countries account for the largest part of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi diaspora. However, these are temporary migrants who return to their home countries due to the absence of citizenship or permanent residency rights in the Gulf countries (Chand, 2013). A second feature is the significant amount of intra-regional migration, particularly among bordering countries, with India and Pakistan acting as major hosts for migrants from other South Asian countries. Afghanistan has over 31% of its total migrant stock living in ­Pakistan, 40% of Bangladeshis living abroad are in India, and Nepal is an important destination for Bhutanese migrants. Intra-regional migration is driven by low wages and lack of employment opportunities in home countries, ethnic commonalties on both sides, and better ­socio-economic indicators in the neighboring country (Sharma et al., 2015). A third feature is the importance of the English-speaking OECD countries – the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia – as host nations for the South Asian diaspora. Other OECD countries also feature, including Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian nations. Germany is a popular destination for migrants and refugees from Afghanistan. Many Afghans migrated to Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s during the 1979 Soviet invasion, later in the early 1990s during the rise of Taliban fundamentalism and in the last decade following the deterioration in living conditions in Pakistan and Iran. The Sri Lankan diaspora has a large presence in Italy which is a preferred and accessible destination for irregular migrants due to its generous amnesty policies. Nepal has seen increased migration to the USA in recent years due to the latter’s lottery system which aimed at increasing the representation of minority and under-represented nationalities (Nath, 2010). Note that India and Pakistan have diaspora communities spread far more widely than reflected above. The Indian diaspora is present in East Africa, South Africa, Mauritius, ­Nigeria, Fiji, Trinidad, and the South East Asian countries of Malaysia and Singapore due to the movement of indentured labor from the country during colonial rule. Overall, there is a mix of developed and developing countries across which the South Asian diaspora is dispersed. This reflects the varied forces – economic, political, colonial, and social – which have over time shaped this diaspora stock and its dispersion. These driving forces are also reflected in the South Asian diaspora that is present in the OECD countries.

South Asian diaspora in the OECD According to official OECD statistics, the size of the South Asian diaspora was over 6.4 million in 2011–2012, an increase of close to three million people compared to 2001–2002. Over half were from India. The size of the diaspora in OECD countries from each source country grew considerably during the ten-year period. In 2011–2012, the emigrant population stood at 394,000 for Afghanistan, at 533,000 for Bangladesh, at 3.6 million for India, at 153,000 for Nepal, at 1.2 million for Pakistan, and at 579,000 for Sri Lanka. Nepal saw its diaspora increase by over six times while that of Afghanistan more than doubled between 2001–2002 and 2011–2012. The diaspora from the remaining countries increased by 80%. The main host markets within the OECD are the English-speaking countries but several non-English speaking countries are also important. The background, history, and factors shaping this diaspora as well as its composition in terms of countries of origin and type of diaspora community differ across the different OECD host countries. The UK, for example, is host to a large number of Indians and Pakistanis 33

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai

who migrated to that country to assist in post-World War I reconstruction and address labor shortages in the UK’s textile and steel industries as well as those who migrated following the independence of both countries in 1947. According to the 2011 UK National Census, 4.9% of its population had roots in South Asia, of which 2.3% were British Indian, 1.9 were British Pakistani, and 0.7 were British Bangladeshi. However, the South Asian diaspora in Australia, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries is more recent, reflecting changes in immigration and asylum policies. In recent years, emigration from some South Asian countries to the Asian OECD nations has increased. In 2016, South Korea was the main OECD destination for Sri Lankan migrants (followed by Japan), while Japan was the main OECD destination for Nepali migrants (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2018).

Educational profile of the diaspora An overview of South Asian immigrants in OECD countries indicates that a significant proportion is highly educated. India accounts for the majority of educated South Asian migrants, with about 63% of all Indian migrants in 2011–2012 having high levels of education, while Afghanistan had the lowest proportion of highly educated people at 23%. For all countries, except Afghanistan, at least one-third of the South Asian diaspora residing in the OECD is highly educated. The disparity also holds when we consider the change in the proportion of highly educated people in OECD countries between 2001–2002 and 2011–2012. While Afghanistan saw an increase of only 2.5%, the increase was close to 10% for India and Bangladesh, followed by Sri Lanka and Pakistan with increases of 7% each, and Nepal with 4%. This discrepancy exists because most migration from Afghanistan, especially since the 2000s, has been related to political persecution and asylum seekers. Further, a comparison of the proportion of highly educated South Asian migrants in only OECD countries with that in OECD and select non-OECD countries in 2011–2012 shows that the two are quite comparable, ranging between 0.5% and 4% for all countries except Nepal. The share of highly educated Nepali migrants in OECD countries is much higher (almost 8%) compared to that in OECD cum select non-OECD countries. The distribution of the highly educated South Asian diaspora is, however, not uniform among the OECD countries. Table 2.3 shows that the proportion of highly educated ­d iaspora from South Asia countries in the English-speaking OECD countries is generally higher than in other OECD hosts such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries. E ­ xcept ­A fghanistan, more than 40% of the South Asian diaspora in the USA was highly educated. This share was as high as 75% for the Indian diaspora in the USA. In Australia and Canada, the proportion of highly educated migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh was over 60%, ­reflecting movement that has been spurred by immigration schemes favoring skilled persons. In ­contrast, in ­Germany and Scandinavia, where the diaspora has been driven by ­refugee- and ­a sylum-related schemes, the proportion of highly educated emigrants from source c­ ountries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka is much lower. In general, the South Asian diaspora tends to be more educated than the population in OECD host countries. Seventy-nine percent of the Indian diaspora and 63% of the Sri Lankan diaspora over the age of 25 had at least a Bachelor’s degree, compared to 31% of the general US population. Forty-four percent of the Indian diaspora over the age of 25 had a Master’s degree or higher compared to 11% of the US population (Migration Policy Institute

34

The skilled South Asian diaspora Table 2.3  Number of South Asian emigrants (thousands) and share by educational attainment (%) in selected OECD countries, 2010–2011 Country of origin

Destination country

Total emigrants (in 2000s)

Percentage of highly educated emigrants

Afghanistan

Germany USA UK Canada Netherlands Australia Turkey Sweden Denmark Norway Canada UK Australia Italy USA Germany France Switzerland Netherlands New Zealand USA UK Malaysia Australia Thailand Japan Canada Israel Belgium Denmark USA UK Canada Australia Italy New Zealand Thailand Germany France Malaysia

96.3 57.5 55.3 40.1 29.8 25.7 19.6 12.6 9.3 8.6 130.2 123.5 80.1 57.4 41.2 41 36.8 17.9 9.5 8.7 49.5 46.3 29.3 23 10.5 7.7 6.8 5.4 2.7 1.4 1686 684.8 542.5 271.3 94.2 62.8 51 49.3 42.8 36.1

16.3 37.2 22.9 31.8 26 13.7 9.6 14.8 13.9 11.1 40.5 46.9 52.9 4.4 56.4 6.3 12.4 9.3 16.6 47.7 48 38.7 1.3 61.7 24.8 19.4 61.4 15.4 10.4 16.2 74.9 53.5 54.5 65.5 9.4 53.4 37.4 45.7 26.3 17.7

Sri Lanka

Nepal

India

(Continued)

35

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai Country of origin

Destination country

Pakistan

UK USA Canada Italy Germany Greece Spain Australia France Malaysia UK USA Italy Malaysia Canada Australia South Africa Greece Mauritius Spain

Bangladesh

Total emigrants (in 2000s) 476.5 286.5 141 50.2 39.3 31.9 31.7 26.4 17.5 17 206.2 147.1 63.9 56.7 42.3 25.7 19.9 10 7.6 6.3

Percentage of highly educated emigrants 35.2 52.4 59.6 6.8 10.6 2.4 8.5 56.9 14.9 14.8 30 48.4 13.7 1.6 66.8 70.1 5.8 5 0.1 14.1

Source:  OECD (2015a). Connecting with Emigrants: A Global Profile of Diasporas, 2015.

[MPI], 2014). Among the Bangladeshi diaspora over the age of 25, 25% had a Master’s degree or higher. One exception is the Afghan diaspora, whose tertiary education levels are equal to those of the US population. These differences in educational profile across source countries reflect the different circumstances and factors which have contributed to emigration from this region to OECD countries (Daxner and Silvia-Lucretia, 2017).

Occupational profile and labor market outcomes The significance of skilled migration from South Asia to OECD countries is also reflected in the numbers on visa issuances for South Asian migrants and by their occupational profiles. An analysis of visa categories for the UK shows that India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka feature among the top 20 source countries for visa applicants. In the case of the Skilled Work visa, i.e., Tier 2 visa, Indians account for the most applications and issuances while Pakistan features at number 7 and Sri Lanka at number 19. In the case of student visas, India ranks second only to China, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh rank at number 8 and 19, respectively (United Kingdom Home Office, 2019). In 2019, South Asians accounted for almost a quarter of all high-value (Tier 1) visas, such as the exceptional talent and entrepreneur visas issued. Admissions data for foreign workers in Canada show that a large number of South Asian workers (especially Indians) have received permits under skilled worker mobility programs. In 2019, South Asian countries accounted for over 30% of all visas allotted under the ­International Mobility Program (IMP) and for 12% of all visas under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). Indians secured the highest number of visas (88,890) under the 36

The skilled South Asian diaspora

IMP and ranked second for the number of visas (12,020) under the TFWP (Government of Canada – Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Temporary Residents, 2017–2019). In the USA, in 2017, South Asians dominated the highly skilled visa categories of H1B and L1, reflecting the preponderance of skilled occupations among this community in that country. India alone accounted for over 50% of special H1B visa admissions in 2017 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2017). Evidence on South Asians obtaining citizenship by naturalization or permanent residency, provided in Table 2.4, shows the dominance of management and professional occupations. Over 25% of migrants from all countries, except Bangladesh, who obtained US citizenship in 2017, were involved in Management, professional and ­related occupations, and service occupations. For Nepal and India, the share of such migrants was as high as 33%. Evidence on the occupational distribution of the South Asian diaspora across all countries dating back to the early and mid-2000s confirms the long-standing predominance of skilled occupations among the South Asian diaspora. Occupations in science and technology, management, teaching, and various professions account for a significant proportion of employment for this community in OECD countries (OECD, 2012). One sector where the South Asian diaspora features importantly in the OECD is healthcare. In 2011, India was the main source country for foreign doctors (almost 15%) in the OECD and ranked second as a source for nurses (OECD, 2019). In 2015, South Asians accounted for 28% of all foreign-trained doctors in the USA. In the UK, India alone accounted for one-third of all foreign trained doctors and South Asia as a region accounted for almost half of all foreign trained doctors. According tothe International Organisation Migration report on Sri Lankathe), Sri Lanka had the highest expatriation rate for doctors and the third-highest rate of nurse expatriation to the OECD countries, with 4,668 doctors and 2,032 nurses in the OECD region in 2006 (International Organization for Migration, 2009). Table 2.5 presents the large stock of doctors trained in South Asia and working in OECD countries. These skill and occupational characteristics are also reflected in the earnings of the South Asian diaspora in the OECD. This community, especially those of Indian origin, tends to fare better than the general population in the OECD countries. For instance, in 2014, Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis had median household incomes of $89,000, $60,000, and $54,000, respectively, compared to $50,000 for the general US population (MPI, 2014). In 2019, in the UK, Indian origin households accounted for 42% of all households, earning more than £1,000 per week compared to 27% for the general population (United Kingdom Ethnicity Facts and Figures, 2019). Similarly, the South Asian diaspora generally performs better than the general population in the host countries in terms of employment and unemployment rates, although there is heterogeneity in this regard, depending on the nature of the diaspora and the host country policies. It is worth noting, however, that although the South Asian diaspora community in the OECD is relatively more educated than the general population, other than India, all other South Asian countries have at least one-third of their highly educated immigrants working in jobs below their skill level (OECD, 2015a). In the case of Nepal, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, more than half the highly educated immigrant population works in lower skill level jobs. Hence, the South Asian diaspora is not necessarily employed in jobs commensurate to their skill and education levels. Overall, a review of the occupational, employment, and educational characteristics of the South Asian diaspora in OECD countries highlights not only the significance of skills, certain sectors, and occupations but also the heterogeneity in geographic orientation, driving 37

38

256 133 113 D 18 138 D 372 114 46 34 178 529

Management, professional, and related occupations Service occupations Sales and office occupations Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations Construction, extraction, maintenance, and repair occupations Production, transportation, and material moving occupations Military No occupation/not working outside home Homemakers Students or children Retirees Unemployed Unknown

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2018. D, Data withheld to limit disclosure. –, Represents zero.

N

  447 278 366 10 71 273 – 8,795 2,198 6,141 D D 2,695

P.R.

Afghanistan

 

1,362 826 639 6 63 675 10 1,842 567 279 102 894 2,374

N 851 72 809 157 D 51 D 11,922 4,258 3,924 17 3,723 1,845

P.R.

Bangladesh

17,247 2,308 3,519 62 225 1,926 156 7,205 2,125 881 744 3,455 19,546

N

N

N

1,634 179 722 100 D 138 D 9,465 3,049 4,228 55 2,133 3,540

P.R.

Pakistan

1,637 2,409 469 608 535 747 136 13 D 71 329 701 D 7 5,967 2,521 909 923 3,712 276 33 132 1,313 1,190 2,859 3,337

P.R.

Nepal

12,881 1,386 500 536 2,476 425 1,681 D 63 D 478 410 6 75 27,959 642 10,642 100 10,003 221 640 7 6,674 314 13,777 1,822

P.R.

India

421 102 106 D 9 74 D 217 62 39 18 98 546

N

370 44 68 D D 31 – 543 159 257 9 118 531

P.R.

Sri Lanka

Table 2.4  Persons naturalized and obtaining law permanent resident status in the USA by region/country of birth and selected characteristics, fiscal year 2018

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai

The skilled South Asian diaspora Table 2.5   Stock of foreign-trained doctors in select OECD countries by country of origin, 2015 Afghanistan Australia Canada France Germany New Zealand UK USA

Bangladesh

India

Nepal

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

World

– 5 14

… 122 3

4,821 2,018 10

– 7

… – 4

1,467 237 –

27,008 22,881 23,207

136 0 45 132

5 47 500 1,436

282 480 15,119 46,137

32 5 178 794

43 72 4,980 12,125

20 135 1,225 501

34,850 6,407 45,732 213,485

Source: OECD. Health Statistics, 2015b. 1.  Represents zero 2.  … Represents data not available

factors, and background of this diaspora across the South Asian source countries. The following discussion examines the evidence on their contributions to their home countries.

Diaspora contribution and engagement with the homeland The discourse on skilled migration has moved from a predominant focus on brain drain and related losses in tax revenues, productivity, and human capital to a perspective that recognizes the many channels through which skilled emigration can bring benefits to sending countries. The narrative has shifted to that of potential brain gain due to the endogenous increase in human capital investment as well as brain circulation and network effects that result from knowledge diffusion, trade, and investment flows (see Mountford, 1997; Stark et al., 1998; Meyer and Brown, 1999). This altered perspective has in turn spurred policies that enable return and circular migration and facilitate such spillovers from the expatriate population. In this context, diaspora networks play an important role as they provide a bridge between the home and source countries. The skilled South Asian diaspora in the OECD countries is no exception in this respect.

Economic contributions The skilled South Asian diaspora in the OECD countries has directly contributed to the economies of their home countries through the well-established channels of remittances, savings, investments, and trade flows. It has also contributed indirectly through knowledge and technology transfer, often facilitated by professional as well as diaspora associations.

Remittances Remittances are an important source of external financial flows in the South Asian countries. According to World Bank (2019), remittances in South Asia grew by 12% to reach US$ 131 billion in 2018, higher than the 6% growth in 2017. In 2018, India received the largest amount of remittances in the world at US$ 78.6 billion, while Pakistan, with US$ 21 b­ illion, and Bangladesh, with US$ 15.5 billion, respectively, ranked seventh and ninth globally. I­ ndividually, for all countries in this region, remittances form a significant part of their GDP. In Nepal and Sri Lanka remittances contributed to over 28% and 8% of GDP, respectively, in 2018 (Figure 2.1). 39

Bangladesh

India

Nepal

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

2000

2010

7.92

6.74 2.90

5.68

4.15

7.27

5.47

3.19

2.39

1.45

2.75

2.03

3.69

7.07

9.41

21.65

Afghanistan

28.56

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai

2018

Figure 2.1  Personal remittances as a share of GDP, selected years (%) Table 2.6   Remittance inflows from different sources, 2017 (millions of US$) Country name

Afghanistan Bangladesh India Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka All South Asia (inclusive of Bhutan and Maldives)

World

OECD

410 13,469 68,968 6,947 19,665 7,190 116,693

Rest of the world

US$ (in millions)

Share of world

US$ (in millions)

Share of world

53 1,384 23,281 709 4,945 2,768 33,145

13 10 34 10 25 38 28

356 12,086 45,687 6,238 14,720 4,422 83,548

87 90 66 90 75 62 72

Source: World Bank. Bilateral Remittance Matrix, 2017.

Although the main source of remittances to South Asia is the Gulf region, the OECD’s contribution is not insignificant, accounting for 28% of the region’s remittance inflows from the world in 2017. Table 2.6 presents the remittance flows from the world and from the OECD countries to individual South Asian countries. There is considerable non-uniformity across the South Asian countries. In the case of ­Bangladesh and Nepal, the OECD’s share was only 10%, while for Sri Lanka and India, it was as much as 38% and 35%, respectively, in 2017. These differences reflect the geographic distribution of South Asian emigrants. When remittances are considered on a per migrant ­basis, the flows from OECD countries to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are higher than those from the GCC countries (Chanda, 2017). This indicates that the diaspora in the developed ­countries is relatively more skilled and remits more per capita to their home countries. Recognizing the importance of remittances, the South Asian countries have taken measures to improve the process of transferring remittances, reduce costs, and leverage diaspora savings. For instance, the Pakistan Remittance Initiative (PRI) – a joint structure by State Bank of Pakistan, Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis, and Ministry of Finance – was established in 2009 to facilitate easy transfer of money from all over the world to Pakistan and to incentivize banks 40

The skilled South Asian diaspora

and other intermediaries to encourage people to use the banking system. According to some estimates, with the introduction of PRI, the remittances flow in the country increased by over 150%. India’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs, too, in partnership with Unit Trust of India developed an integrated, electronic remittance system to make it easier for its diaspora to send money back home (Chanda, 2017). Similarly, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have introduced savings accounts with tax incentives and special interest rates for overseas citizens. The Bangladesh Bank has created schemes specifically targeted at investors and non-resident Bangladeshis (NRBs), including the Non-resident Taka account, the non-resident foreign currency deposit account, and the resident foreign currency deposit account, which offer incentives through tax benefits, high returns, and ease of repatriation of dividends and profits.

Investments The South Asian diaspora has also contributed to the region’s Balance of Payments through debt instruments such as diaspora bonds issued by the governments and private entities. Their contributions have provided a cushion during periods of crises and also provided much needed long-term financing for infrastructure and public investments (Asian Development Bank Institute, OECD, and ILO, 2018). Between 1991 and 2000, the Government of India issued diaspora bonds on three different occasions, first in 1991 with the India Development Bond following its Balance of Payments crisis, then in 1998 with the Resurgent India Bonds after the imposition of sanctions following nuclear tests, and again in 2000, with the India Millennium Deposits. All three issues had a five-year maturity and were in multiple currencies (USD, GBP, DM, EUR) (Ketkar and Ratha, 2009). The three bonds collectively raised over $10 billion from the ­Indian diaspora, especially the Indian diaspora community in the OECD countries. Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have made similar use of diaspora bonds. Bangladesh has launched bonds to attract foreign exchange from the diaspora, including the Wage Earner Development Bond, the Dollar Premium Bond, and the US Dollar Investment Bond. Convertibility and tax benefit features have induced the skilled overseas Bangladeshi population to invest in these bonds. Although the exact value of these investments by source country is not available, according to one International Organization for Migration (IOM) study, the Bangladeshi diaspora in the USA and the UK accounted for some 14% and 5% of these investments, respectively (Chanda, 2008). The South Asian diaspora has also contributed to their home countries through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Over the 1991–2001 period, FDI by non-resident Indians (NRIs) accounted for around 9% of FDI inflows and 27% of total FDI approvals in India, though ­ epartment breakdown by source countries is not readily available (Government of India, D for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, various years). There are examples of FDI by the Afghan diaspora, including Tolo TV, Baghlan Sugar factory, Hyatt Regency ­hotel, ­A fghanistan International Bank, and the Intercontinental Hotel (Carment and Calleja, 2017). The Indian diaspora in developed countries has invested in startups and provided venture capital funding in the country’s IT-BPO industry. Diaspora Pakistanis in the USA and UK have helped set up commercial banks and textile companies. In certain sectors such as healthcare, South Asian diaspora FDI, especially from OECD countries, has been particularly important. Indian doctors working in OECD countries have helped set up large corporate and super-specialty hospitals in India. The Apollo Group of hospitals set up by Dr. Pratap Reddy, a doctor who had worked in the USA, was India’s first corporate chain of hospitals. Non-resident and returning Indian doctors have partnered 41

Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai

with local doctors to set up healthcare establishments and have invested in diagnostics, medical devices, and telemedicine facilities. A well-known overseas Pakistani and President and CEO along with a group of overseas Pakistani physicians has established medical facilities in Islamabad, transferring modern technology with the help of talented, qualified Pakistani physicians, surgeons, and technicians from the USA. This hospital provides state-of-the-art services and technology and has proved to be very profitable. Recognizing the importance of the diaspora in FDI inflows, governments in South Asia have relaxed FDI norms for their diaspora community and have provided special benefits in the form of tax exemptions, easier repatriation norms, automatic approvals, and domestic investment status to take advantage of this community. For instance, Bangladesh has liberalized FDI norms for NRBs by allowing them up to 100% ownership in almost all industrial sectors and has eased repatriation norms. Pakistan has facilitated diaspora investments by providing investment opportunities in sectors such as IT, telecommunications, real estate, health, and education. It has given automatic approval for non-resident investments in some sectors, tax relief and benefits, and exemption from minimum capital requirements to incentivize FDI from overseas Pakistanis. The Indian government has set up investment facilitation cells overseas to attract diaspora investments. Some Indian State Governments have pro-actively offered their diaspora communities with benefits to increase investments. Diaspora organizations have played an important role in facilitating these investments and related spinoff benefits in the home countries. Bangladeshi diaspora organizations such as TechBangla and the American Association of Bangladeshi Engineers and Architect (AABEAT) have worked with organizations in Bangladesh to enable FDI and knowledge and technology transfer. Pakistani diaspora organizations, such as the British Pak Foundation, the American Pak Foundation, the Organization for Pakistani Entrepreneurs, and APPNA, whose members consist of Pakistani CEOs, senior executives, and professionals, have facilitated technology transfer and licensing arrangements between diaspora-owned or -managed firms abroad and Pakistani companies.

Trade and business ties The South Asian diaspora community has also acted as a link that has generated demand for new goods and services in the host countries and thus facilitated trade, business ties, and tourism between home and host nations This is evident in sectors such as food and beverages, textiles, gem and jewelry, handicrafts, services, and entertainment. The Indian diaspora has played a key role in promoting the country’s IT-BPO industry and increasing exports of IT/IT-enabled services by creating a favorable image for Indians and Indian services in their destination countries. The Indian diaspora community has also been influential in establishing India’s dominance in the diamond trade in Belgium and in the gold, gems, and jewelry trade in Dubai. The Indian beverage Kingfisher beer has gained significant market share in the UK, North America, Europe, and the Middle East where there is a large Indian diaspora (Nurse, 2016). South Asian cuisine, especially from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, has become popular in Britain. As a result, British supermarkets are flush with ingredients required for such cooking. In the case of Bangladesh, AABEAT has promoted trade ties between the USA and Bangladesh by establishing a Bangladeshi ICT business center, a shared office, in Silicon Valley that offers the services of numerous Bangladeshi firms. Credit for the growth in Bangladeshi textile exports in the developed countries is in part due to its diaspora. Box 2.1 highlights the case of the India diaspora and its contribution to FDI, knowledge and technology transfer in India’s IT-BPO industry. 42

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Box 2.1  The IT-BPO industry: case of the Indian diaspora The contribution of the Indian diaspora in establishing a booming IT-BPO sector in its home country is very well known and documented. Indian engineers, many of whom migrated to the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, were, by the 1990s, either working in managerial positions in big and medium-sized IT firms or had established their own start-ups in India. According to the 2001 High Level Committee’s report on the Indian diaspora, over 300,000 people working in the IT sector in the USA were of Indian origin. Around 15% of the start-ups in the IT sector are estimated to have been established by PIOs (Chanda, 2017). These professionals and entrepreneurs established a good reputation for Indians in the industry. They influenced MNCs to hire Indians and to set up subsidiaries and offshore development centers in India. Saxenian (2002) found that it was senior managers of Indian origin who were among the first to outsource services to India. Several of the major US MNCs, such as GE, IBM, Microsoft, CISCO, and HP, set up R&D centers in India and expanded their operations during the 1990s, largely due to their trust in Indian professionals, many of whom were working for them in the USA. The growth of the IT industry in India due to these MNCs as well as home-grown start-ups also induced the return migration of highly skilled professionals from the USA. The Indian diaspora contributed to the brain gain in other intangible ways. They helped cultivate a spirit of entrepreneurship among Indian engineers. They helped build trust in Indian institutions, and enabled professional networking, transfer of knowledge, and innovation. Associations of Indian professionals in the USA, such as the Silicon Valley Indian Professionals and the Indus Entrepreneur, were instrumental in nurturing and supporting entrepreneurs by providing guidance and connecting Indian businesses to those in the USA. Similar Indian IT diaspora associations which existed in countries like the UK helped build a successful network between their home and countries of residence. NRI entrepreneurs cum venture capitalists have also influenced policy-making. They assisted Securities and Exchange Board of India in drafting a white paper for the venture capital industry in India (Chanda, 2017). The group Indian Venture Capital Association in Bangalore, consisting of diaspora members, was a driving force behind the development of Bangalore as the Silicon Valley of India.

The various examples of economic engagement by the South Asian diaspora investment, particularly through investment, trade, business relations, and entrepreneurship, highlight how this community has remained effectively and productively connected to their home countries. In addition to individual enterprise, social and professional networks which have fostered exchange of ideas, innovation, and technologies have been instrumental to this process.

Social, political, philanthropic contributions The South Asian diaspora has helped in the process of socio-economic reforms and reconstruction efforts in their home countries. This has been done through foundations and charitable organizations that have provided philanthropic contributions regularly or whenever the need has arisen, such as times of crises and natural disasters. 43

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Education, health, and rural development The South Asian diaspora has been actively engaged with the education sector in their home countries to help improve its quality and infrastructure. Afghan nationals who were a part of the IOM’s Temporary Return of Qualified Nationals (TRQN) program have helped improve the syllabus and upgrade teaching technology in Afghanistan (see Box 2.2). Indian professionals in the Silicon Valley have made large donations for educational projects and the establishment of educational institutions. They have also been involved in the introduction of specialized programs at distinguished institutes like the Indian Institute of Technology. American India Foundation, through its Digital Equalizer Program, has raised funds for the provision of computers and Internet connections to over 100 schools in India. PIOs and NRIs often visit India to be a part of Teach for India, a sister organization of Teach for America. The Pakistani diaspora has been involved in the improvement of educational facilities in Pakistan. The American Pakistan Foundation in collaboration with USAID has helped bring about improvements in basic and higher education as well as technical and vocational training. The Bangladeshi diaspora has been active in building educational facilities in their home country. A prominent example is that of Prof. Omar Rahman, who, after teaching in Harvard for 25 years, returned to Bangladesh and established the Independent University. Other organizations such as the North American Bangladeshi Islamic Community and the American Institute of Bangladeshi studies engage in development projects and research work in different fields, including education. AABEAT and TechBangla have been involved in conducting educational projects, facilitating knowledge and technology transfer, and promoting research in the field of IT. Sri Lankan diaspora associations are involved in improving literacy levels back home. The Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK (SLWAUK), an organization that was formed in 1949, has been working to improve the literacy levels of young girls and women in Sri Lanka, as well as Sri Lankan women residing in the UK. Additionally, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in North America has been instrumental in setting up an IT training venture, Vannitech in Kilinochchi district with the objective of harnessing diaspora knowledge and resources. Likewise, there are over hundred Nepalese organizations all over the world that coordinate to bring about a change in Nepalese education along with promoting social and economic development (Mishra, 2011). The Help Nepal Network, a charitable organization, which was established simultaneously in the UK and Nepal in 1991, has collected funds from Nepalis (and other concerned people) all over the world to build schools and establish electronic libraries in rural areas. Their aim is to have at least one e-library per district. They have also been involved in building toilets, conducting health camps, putting up shelters for children in conflict zones, and organizing fund-raising events to help family members of those people who have died in conflict. Medical professionals from South Asia’s diaspora community have been involved in improving the state of medical education as well as healthcare facilities in their home countries. Indian healthcare professionals have helped bring in the latest equipment and technology to India, thus improving the quality of healthcare. Associations such as the American Association of Physicians from India (AAPI), the Association of Asian Indians in Ophthalmology, and the Association of Indian Neurologists have been instrumental in transfer of knowledge and skills through research and training collaborations. These organizations also engage in charitable activities and offer free services in parts of India. The AAPI has set up clinics in rural Andhra Pradesh and provides basic facilities to villagers. It has plans to adopt more backward villages in partnership with State Governments (Patnaik, 2020). Other South Asian countries have similarly benefitted from their medical diaspora in the OECD countries. The American-Nepal Medical Foundation, the Afghan Medical 44

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Professionals Association of America (n.d.), the Sri Lanka Medical and Dental Association in the UK (SLMDAUK), the Association of Pakistani Physicians and Surgeons in the UK, and the Bangladesh Medical Association of North America engage with their respective countries in ways similar to the AAPI in India. They help in upgrading medical infrastructure and healthcare facilities and improving medical education in their home countries. Some of them also provide free healthcare facilities, such as vaccines and immunizations, while others are involved in setting up state-of-the-art hospitals. The South Asian skilled diaspora in the developed countries has also engaged with rural development efforts in their home countries. This includes activities such as installing facilities for provision of clean drinking water, setting up schools and libraries, establishing free health care centers, generating employment, and developing infrastructure. The AAPI is one of the many organizations that is involved in providing access to clean water in parts of rural India. The Pakistani diaspora through the Human Development Foundation of North America and the American Pakistan Foundation has been engaged in rural development efforts in Pakistan to promote literacy, particularly female literacy, and infrastructure investments. An excellent example of the social contributions made by expatriates is the provision of portable water in villages by a Bangladeshi professional, Prof. Abul Hussam (2010), who was working at George Mason University. He invented a cost-effective SONO water filter that could remove arsenic from groundwater making it safe for drinking, thus addressing a major problem in rural Bangladesh where people were relying heavily on groundwater with high levels of arsenic concentration, resulting in arsenic toxicity. Prof. Hussam also donated a large part of the $1 million he received on winning the Grainger Challenge Prize in 2007 to a local NGO in Bangladesh that could further disseminate the use of the filter.

Box 2.2  Rebuilding key sectors: case of the Afghan diaspora Afghanistan, being a war-torn country, has witnessed a large decline in its skilled population as educated people have chosen to migrate and seek asylum in Europe and North America. Even though the country has entered a phase of reconstruction, it still finds it difficult to retain its educated population. Under the IOM’s TRQN project, Afghan professionals in developed countries have been sharing their knowledge and expertise through temporary assignments aimed at promoting the development of the healthcare, education, and infrastructure sectors in Afghanistan. A ­ fghan health professionals trained in the Netherlands have carried out short-term training programs for doctors as well as medical students based in Afghanistan. They have taught them new techniques and the use of different instruments in healthcare delivery. In the education s­ector, Afghan professionals in the Netherlands have helped in updating outdated curricula and introducing new technologies and pedagogies. Teachers have been taught to use computers and the Internet. The expatriate professionals have focused on transfer of soft skills such as ­professionalism, management, and documentation. Afghan professionals overseas have helped in reconstruction efforts, rebuilding infrastructure that was destroyed during the conflict years (Siegel & Kuschminder, 2012). Under a similar program known as Return of Qualified Afghans launched by the IOM in the USA, college educated professionals of Afghan origin scattered all over the world have been brought back to Afghanistan for a period of up to one year. These professionals have helped in rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan across the fields of law, medicine, economics, agriculture, and technology.

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Reconstruction efforts post-war and natural disasters The South Asian diaspora from war- and conflict-ridden countries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka has also aided in the reconstruction of their homeland. Organizations like Serendip Children’s Home, Assist Resettlement, and Renaissance founded by the Sri Lankan diaspora, especially the younger generation, have focused on providing relief for victims of violence. In Afghanistan, associations such as the Society of Afghan Engineers (SAE) and Afghans4Tomorrow (n.d.) working in the USA and over 100 organizations, like KUFA e.V., VAF e.V., working in Germany have similarly been engaged in post-war reconstruction efforts. They have helped in the reconstruction of war-ravaged areas in Afghanistan and have helped stranded refugees with basic health care and means of return to Afghanistan. Many members of the diaspora have also been politically involved in rebuilding Afghanistan. Several members of Afghanistan’s governments have been returnee migrant professionals. For instance, Ashraf Ghani, who served as Afghanistan’s Finance minister in the early 2000s, and later become the president in 2014, had lived in the USA for over two decades. The Governor of Afghanistan’s Central Bank in 2004, Anwar Ulhaq Ahady, had been a Professor in Providence College. The South Asian diaspora has also rushed to the aid of their native countries during times of natural disasters. The examples are plenty. The Pakistani diaspora helped raise money after the earthquake in 2005 and during droughts in the Thar region. Indian Americans responded to the earthquake in Gujarat by setting up the American India Foundation, raising money for those affected. The Indian diaspora has also provided financial and other contributions during national emergencies such as cyclones in Orissa, earthquakes in Gujarat and Maharashtra, the tsunami in Tamil Nadu, and more recently the devastating floods in Kerala. The Non-Resident Nepali Association (NRNA) is said to have raised $314 million from various associations and individual donors in the wake of the earthquake in 2015 ­(Shivakoti, 2019). The Sri Lankan diaspora became active in the aftermath of the tsunami, with the Tamilian diaspora providing aid to affected regions in the North of the country.

Soft power and political contributions A less acknowledged and discussed role played by the skilled South Asian diaspora is the influence it has had on host governments through its soft power to shape relations with their home countries. They have used lobbying as well as protests to force their resident countries to act in ways which in their view would be beneficial to their countries of origin.2 An example of this is the protests organized by members of the Sri Lankan diaspora in cities across the world, including London, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, asking governments against the atrocities committed against the Tamilians in Sri Lanka during the civil war in that country to force their host governments to step up against these human rights violations and help bring about peace in the country (Dev & Kumar, 2009; French Arrest 200 Protesters in Paris Tamil Demonstration on Sri Lanka, 2009; Thousands of Tamils Protest in Berlin, 2009; Thousands Protest Tamils Killing, 2009) . Another such example is that of the Nepalese anti-monarchists residing in the USA. Although not formally established, Nepalese lobbying activity may have been the reason for why the then king of Nepal, King Gyanendra, was not invited by President Bush to the opening event of the 60th General Assembly of United Nations in 2005 (Sijapati, .n.d.). One of the most prominent examples of lobbying to bring about a favorable outcome for the home country is the involvement of the Indian diaspora in the signing of the US-India 46

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Civil Nuclear Agreement which aimed at establishing a strategic partnership between the USA and India. Although the Bush administration wanted to go ahead with the agreement, there was opposition from the US Congress as India had not signed the Nonproliferation Treaty. Lobbying by Indian Americans helped the Bush government put pressure on the US Congress to approve the deal (Mistry, 2013). Organizations such as AAPI, the US-India Business Council, and other professional associations came together to engage in large-scale lobbying (by hiring firms specialized in this activity). This intense effort by the Indian diaspora community helped influence the US foreign policy stance toward India and facilitated the signing of the Civil Nuclear Agreement between the two countries.

Key insights and future directions The skilled South Asian diaspora has provided an important bridge between their host countries and their homeland. They have contributed tangibly through investment, trade, savings, and development efforts as well as intangibly through their knowledge, skills, access to technology, reputation, and influence on public and political opinion. The numerous examples of the associated benefits across different sectors highlight the significance of this community as a strategic asset for the region. Although there are instances where the diaspora may have played a destabilizing role, due to their association with political groups and entities associated with conflict, for the most part, this group has played a positive role in their home countries. These benefits have been largely driven by a mix of individual as well as organizational initiatives. Diaspora organizations, both cross-cutting and sector-specific, have played a critical role in all the countries. In addition, policies of individual governments in the region to promote diaspora linkages and mobilize diaspora resources have also been important. However, there still remains much more scope to harness the South Asian diaspora. This is because individual government initiatives have been largely limited to the economic channel, to mobilizing savings and investments and often in response to economic crises and BoP compulsions. These initiatives have not been comprehensive or long term in their outlook. Pro-active, long-term government initiatives that are aligned with domestic programs are needed to engage the diaspora in development efforts, technology and knowledge transfer programs, and nation-building. To date, the diaspora’s contributions in these areas have been largely driven by efforts of individuals or specific organizations and tend to be sporadic in nature. A good reflection of this point is the fact that diaspora participation in FDI remains relatively low compared to their participation in remittances, despite liberalization of FDI norms for non-residents. This suggests that the engagement remains stronger at the individual level rather than the economy-wide level as FDI participation requires far more institutional and ease of doing business-related support from home governments. Thus, going forward, if the South Asian governments wish to harness their diaspora skills and resources more effectively, they must create institutional linkages that persist beyond individual or specific organizational initiatives. This will require establishment of institutional mechanisms such as overseas cells which regularly engage with the diaspora, keep them informed, facilitate their participation, and go beyond financial mobilization. It will mean tying up with universities and research institutions overseas for academic collaborations on a long-term basis and ensuring associated linkages with investment, technology transfer, business, academic exchange, and domestic development efforts. This will also require integrating sector-specific investment and developmental contributions by the diaspora into national and subnational development programs to maximize benefit. Finally, given South Asia’s 47

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growing geopolitical significance, governments in the region will need to strategically leverage their skilled diaspora, especially in countries where members of this community have attained positions of political influence, for building political good will and shaping public opinion in the host nations. This soft power has not been systematically harnessed till now, but may well be the most important way in future given its resultant benefits in all other spheres including trade, investment, aid, technology collaboration, and p­ eople-to-people relations.

Notes 1 It excludes Bhutan and Maldives which have very small diaspora populations and for which very limited information is available. 2 There are also instances of funding of political activities by the South Asian diaspora.

References Afghan Medical Professionals Association of America. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ampaa.org/ index.html [accessed on 12 May 2020]. Afghans4Tomorrow. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.afghans4tomorrow.org/ [accessed on 12 May 2020]. Asian Development Bank Institute, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and International Labour Organization. (2018). Labor Migration in Asia: Increasing the Development Impact of Migration through Finance and Technology (2018). Retrieved from: https://www.adb.org/sites/­ default/files/publication/410791/adbi-labor-migration-asia.pdf [accessed on 15 April 2020]. Carment, D., & Calleja, R. (2017). Diasporas and Fragile States – Beyond Remittances Assessing the Theoretical and Policy Linkages. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(8), 1270–1288. Chand, M. (2013). A Catalyst for Globalization and Knowledge Flows: The South Asian Diaspora. In S. Khilji and C. Rowley (eds.) Globalisation, Change and Learning in South Asia (pp. 39–61). Oxford: Chandos Publishing. Chanda, R. (2008). The Skilled South Asian Diaspora and Its Role in Source Economies. Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) Working Paper No.34, National University of Singapore. Retrieved from http://www.isasnus.org/events/workingpapers/33.pdf [accessed on 24 June 2020]. Chanda, R. (2017). Brains, Capital, Charity, Soft Power: The Skilled South Asian Diaspora in Developed Countries. In S.I. Rajan (eds.) South Asia Migration Report 2017 (pp. 77–119). New York: Routledge Press. Daxner, M., & Silvia-Lucretia, N. (2017). Mapping of and Report on the Afghan Diaspora in Germany. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusam-menarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Retrieved from https:// www.cimonline.de/static/media/cim2018-en-diaspora-afghanistan.pdf [accessed on 19 May 2020]. Dev, G., & Kumar, R. (2009, February 5). India: Statewide Protest in Tamil Nadu against the War in Sri Lanka. World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved from https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/ indi-f05.html. French Arrest 200 Protesters in Paris Tamil Demonstration on Sri Lanka. (2009, April 21). The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/5191085/ French-arrest-200-protesters-in-Paris-Tamil-demonstration-on-Sri-Lanka.html. Government of Canada – Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Temporary Residents. Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP) Work Permit Holders (2017–2019). Retrieved from https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/360024f2-17e9-4558-­bfc13616485d65b9 [accessed on 13 June 2020]. Government of India, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Fact Sheets on FDI, 1991–2002. Help Nepal Network. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://helpnepal.net/ [accessed on 10 May 2020]. Hussam, A. (2010). An Invention with a Social Cause: Bangladeshi Scientist Develops Water Filter to Fight the Arsenic Menace. Retrieved from https://www.wipo.int/ipadvantage/en/details.jsp?id=2629 [accessed on 12 June 2020].

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Rupa Chanda and Neha Vinod Betai Thousands of Tamils Protest in Berlin. (2009, April 25). Expatica. Retrieved from https://www.­ expatica.com/de/uncategorized/thousands-of-tamils-protest-in-berlin-93319/ [accessed on 8 April 2020]. Thousands Protest Tamils’ Killing. (2009, March 17). Arab News. Retrieved from https://www.­ arabnews.com/node/322125 [accessed on 13 June 2020]. United Kingdom Ethnicity Facts and Figures. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.ethnicity-facts-­ figures.service.gov.uk/ [accessed on 11 May 2020]. United Kingdom Home Office. (2019). Entry Clearance Visa Applications and Outcomes. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/managed-migration-datasets [accessed on 24 May 2020]. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Population Division. (2019). International Migrant Stock 2019. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/­ migration/data/estimates2/estimates19.asp [accessed on 2 June 2020]. U.S. Government Department of Homeland Security. (2017). Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2017. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017 [accessed on 10 May 2020]. World Bank. (n.d.). Bilateral Remittance Matrix, 2017. Retrieved from: https://www.worldbank. org/en/topic/migrationremittancesdiasporaissues/brief/migration-remittances-data [accessed on 10 April 2020]. World Bank. (n.d.). World Development Indicators, 2019. Retrieved from: http://data.worldbank.org/ products/wdi [accessed on 12 April 2020]. World Bank. (2019, April 8). Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/ 2019/04/08/record-high-remittances-sent-globally-in-2018.

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3 INFORMAL FINANCE AND THE SUCCESS OF DIASPORIC CHINESE BUSINESSES IN CENTRAL AMERICA Josephine Smart and Alan Smart Introduction China’s trade connections with Central Asia, South Asia and South-East Asia have existed for millennia along the overland and maritime silk roads. The Chinese people migrated to these far-flung destinations for one reason or another in various periods (Huang, 2003). In particular, the outflow of Chinese (mainly from Fujian and Chaozhou regions along the south-eastern coast) to South-East Asia from the 14th century was well documented in ­Chinese history (Sinn, 2013, p. 47). The expanded scale of Chinese migration to the A ­ mericas, the Caribbean, Africa and Australasia from the mid-19th century set the stage for a Chinese diaspora that is truly global. The number of people of Chinese heritage who reside outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today is estimated to total 40–50 million or higher and grows every year.1 The geographical distribution in 2020 indicates an estimated 34.2 million overseas ­Chinese in Asia, followed by nearly 10 million in the Americas, 2.25 million in Europe and 1.1 million in Africa.2 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review comprehensively Chinese international migration, well documented in publications both scholarly and popular (Pan, 1999; Kuhn, 2008). This body of literature is predominantly in English and focused on Chinese immigrants and geographically located in a single country or a region. This approach to the Chinese diaspora covers a broad canvas within which are insights and information about globalization, labour and capital mobility, cultural change, racism and ethnic relations, transmigration, transnationalism, identity politics and more. Publications are geographically uneven. Chinese in East Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan), North America (USA and Canada), South-East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia) and Australia-New Zealand are well covered; this is less so with studies of Chinese in Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Regions like Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Polar Regions and the Middle East are the least studied to date. Since the 1980s, the central government of the PRC has initiated overseas Chinese studies in various universities, and this has supported a sharp increase in the number of publications on overseas Chinese in the Chinese language. In particular, the Jinan University (founded in 1906) in the city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) of Guangdong province was singled out by President Xi Jinping during a visit in 2018 to be the premiere centre of overseas PRD Chinese studies. The library at Jinan University currently houses the largest 51

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archival collection of PRD overseas Chinese material (in Chinese). It is home to the Overseas ­Chinese Research Institute created in 2006 to support research and publication on overseas Chinese worldwide. This chapter on Chinese diaspora begins with a brief introduction of Chinese out-­ migration since the 19th century to provide context for the expanding global dispersal of Chinese today. The main section of this chapter focuses on post-1978 Chinese migration to Central America and the ambivalent local perceptions regarding these new immigrants’ ­ability to become business owners soon after their arrival. A key question raised by l­ocal stakeholders was the source of start-up capital in Chinese businesses and whether it is evidence of shady capital markets involving Chinese criminal syndicates. Drawing from ­ethnographic data collected in Belize (2013) and Panama (2015), and the literature on ­Chinese business ­fi nance past and current, we suggest that Chinese migrants in Central America and elsewhere are able to achieve rapid economic mobility in the form of business ownership due to their ability to tap into various forms of informal finances and other resources mediated through networks rooted in regional, dialectal and social affinity.

The global dispersal of Chinese in the 19th century The 1850s gold rush in California (USA) and western Canada set off a major outflow of ­Chinese from the PRD that was “transoceanic, and free and voluntary” (Sinn, 2013, p. 47). The first group of 300 Chinese “gold seekers” arriving in California in 1849 were followed by 450 in 1850 and 2,700 in 1851, peaking in 1852 at 30,000 (Sinn, 2013, p. 1, 3). It is important to emphasize that the early Chinese immigrants in California and Canada were not the poorest despite the common erroneous perception that all Chinese immigrants were poor, illiterate peasants driven out of their country by poverty and hardship. The gold seekers and independent entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants were people with the economic means to cover their passage and subsistence, and for some their business ambition in a ­foreign land (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 75). By 1868, a total 106,800 Chinese migrants arrived in C ­ alifornia, nearly all of them from the PRD (Sinn, 2013, p. 49). ­ merica In parallel with this independent stream of Chinese economic migration to North A and elsewhere was a larger-scale labour migration orchestrated by foreign and Chinese shipping merchants in their effort to recruit cheap Chinese workers for various agricultural, mining and construction employments in European colonies worldwide (Sinn, 2013). The conditions of work and life in these overseas locations were harsh, and typically the pay was low. Mortality rates were 10% or higher during the weeks of travel by sea to reach the site of employment, and subsequent mortality rates within the first few years after arrival were 50% or even higher in some locations (Wu, 1982; Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 97). Not only were ­Chinese workers under-informed about the hardship inherent in their overseas employment; they were also victims of indentured labour contracts which did not allow early termination of the 8–15 years contract term or the freedom to seek other forms of employment that offered better working conditions and/or pay. These indentured workers were the “coolies” (manual labour) who were treated no better than slaves. It is now understood that the “working conditions in some of the receiving countries – particularly Cuba, Demarera (in British Guiana), and Peru – were so brutal that recruiting agents were able to obtain the men only through kidnapping, decoying, and other forms of deception” (Stewart, 1970; Sinn, 2013, p. 50). Between 1840 and 1870, various British, Dutch, French and Portuguese colonies in Latin America received an estimated 340,000 Chinese immigrants, most of whom were indentured labours destined for the mines, guano islands, farms and construction projects. 52

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Jamaica recruited 680 Chinese through a company in Hong Kong to service the sugar and banana farms in 1884 (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 103). Cuba received an estimated 140,000 indentured Chinese workers from the PRD between 1847 and 1874 who arrived on ships that sailed from the ports in Macau, Guangzhou and Hong Kong (Yan, 2013, pp. 17, 28). The journey from China to Cuba took over four weeks. More than 17,000 Chinese died during transit (roughly a 12% mortality rate). These indentured Chinese workers were sent to plantations and construction projects where harsh conditions of work and routine mistreatments led to a high mortality rate of over 50% before the end of the labour contract (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 97, 102; Yan, 2013, p. 50). The main causes of death were disease (especially dysentery), suicide and injury inflicted by supervisors at the sugar plantations (Yan, 2013, p. 50). In one account, a Chinese migrant from Shunde in the PRD described a cohort of 45 workers who were brought to Cuba on an eight-year indentured contract. At the end of the contract, only 26 workers from the original cohort were still alive. The mortality rate in this group was over 40% (Yan, 2013, p. 50). In Mexico, 1,800 Chinese workers were deployed in various construction projects in Merida in 1891, about half of which died soon after arrival (Mei and ­ anama ­Canal project and railway construction employed 40,000 Zhang, 2001, p. 98). The P Chinese workers in the 1850s; nearly 20,000 (50%) died due to overwork and disease and were buried in mass graves. The Panama railway was nicknamed “The Railway of Death”, and the Panama Canal was known among the Chinese as “The Death Canal” (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 99). High demand for Chinese workers worldwide throughout the 18th century and early 19th century was driven partly by economics and partly by the reputation of Chinese as hardworking and compliant workers. Chinese indentured labourers were cheap by comparison to the cost of keeping African slaves in locations where slavery was still in practice, and racist norms made them much cheaper than European workers. On the National Pacific Railway project in the USA, Chinese workers were hired for US$ 30 a month, with the workers responsible for their own subsistence (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 84). In contrast, ­Europeans workers were paid US$ 35 per month, and the construction company provided their meals. It was similar in Canada during the Pacific Railway construction period in the 1880s. Nearly 20,000 Chinese workers were employed at half the wage of white workers; many thousands died on the job without proper documentation (Mei and Zhang, 2001, pp. 93–94). The dialectal and regional affinity of the Chinese immigrants in Hawaii shows a pattern common to diasporic Chinese communities worldwide, with the exception of Europe which received predominantly Chinese from the Zhejiang region during the First World War ­period as a result of the labour recruitment of 230,000 Chinese by France, Russia and Great Britain (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 141; Chu, 2016, p. 30). There were an estimated 46,000 Chinese in the Republic of Hawaii before the territory was annexed to the USA in 1898 (Glick, 1980, p. x). They were predominantly Cantonese-speaking migrants from the PRD in areas near the cities of Guangzhou (previously known as Canton), Macao and Hong Kong; Zhongshan dialectal groups from several counties; Xiyi dialectal groups from the counties of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping and Xinhui in western PRD; and the Sanyi dialectal groups from the counties of Punyu, Shunde and Nanhai south of Guangzhou (Char, 1975, p. 16). As previously noted, South-East Asia received many Chinese immigrants from Fujian and Chaozhou regions with their distinctive dialects, including Kejia (also known as Hakka). The Kejia-speaking people are geographically dispersed within China, many Kejia communities in the Guangdong province supplied migrants to South-East Asia from the 14th century and other parts of the world from the mid-19th century. These dialectal and 53

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regional affinity markers are important conduits for informal finances in overseas Chinese communities past and present – a key source to finance business start-up, among other purposes. Despite thin attention to Chinese immigrants in Africa, one of the earliest documented destinations for Chinese migrants associated with labour recruitment colonial interests in the 19th century were 132 indentured Chinese workers shipped to the French colony of Senegal in 1783. Between 1860 and 1930s, an estimated 100,000 Chinese were brought to Africa; the largest recipient country was South Africa which employed nearly 64,000 Chinese in gold and diamond mining between 1904 and 1910 (Mei and Zhang, 2001, pp. 138–139). The post-1978 waves of Chinese immigration to Africa under the various rubrics of bilateral aid/development/trade agreements between China and African nations contributed to the current estimated population of over one million Chinese in the African continent. International mobility of Chinese migrants grew and contracted over the decades under the influence of geopolitical conditions. The Chinese Exclusion Acts in the USA (1882–1943) and Canada (1923–1947) slowed the flow of Chinese. The Great Depression in the 1930s caused many overseas Chinese to return to China. The anti-Chinese policy in Indonesia in 1960 forced many Chinese to sell their business and leave the country. The Sino-India war of 1962 caused many Chinese families to leave India under pressure of anti-Chinese sentiments. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 provoked a major outflow of Hong Kong Chinese worldwide throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The 1978 economic reforms in China created conditions that supported a new wave of economic migration among Chinese in the PRD and Zhejiang who have ties to overseas Chinese worldwide. The 1989 Tiananmen incident created an open opportunity for many overseas PRC students to become permanent residents in the country where they studied, marking a new chapter of Chinese international migration that involves Chinese who are not from the traditional supply sources in the PRD and Zhejiang. Family reunification was and remains today a major reason for Chinese out-migration. The steady demand for Chinese workers worldwide brings many contract workers (skilled and semi-skilled) to diverse countries, many of whom eventually become permanent residents and bring their family from China. Increasingly more Chinese immigrants have been selected for educational achievements, work/business experience and wealth to become permanent residents in various countries since the 1960s. These highly qualified “designer immigrants” are now the dominant type of new arrivals by number in countries like Canada and Australia. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that overseas Chinese can be found in almost all countries around the world. The city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province claims a population of 700,000 overseas compatriots in 131 countries today, most of whom are concentrated in France, Spain, Italy and other European countries (Chu, 2016, pp. 27, 62). The Wuyi regions of the PRD include 288 square kilometres (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 3), and it claims more than two million people of affinity overseas, 75–80% of whom are residents in various countries in the Americas, with the USA being the top country, followed by Canada, ­Venezuela, and Brazil (Mei and Zhang, 2001, pp. 73–74). There are now 125 or more World Clan Associations organized by dialectal, surname/kinship or regional affiliations among overseas Chinese. These associations meet regularly so that members from diverse countries can network in person to enhance business exchange and collaboration (Lin, 2018, p. 195). Some of them, such as the Tian Fu Association, Tianjin Club and Shanxi Association based in Singapore, are indicative of “a general trend of the organisation of activities moving from Southeast Asia and southern provinces of China towards the northern part of China since the late 1990s” (Lin, 2018, pp. 19–20). 54

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Chinese in Central America – Panama and Belize Chinese immigration to the Caribbean, Central and Latin America occurred in three major periods (Lai, 2010): first, the early colonial period (pre-19th century) during which C ­ hinese/ Asian migrants arrived on ships servicing the Manila-Acapulco trade route; second, the targeted recruitment of more than seven million indentured Chinese workers to various ­European colonies around the globe throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; and the latest wave is a “renewed” immigration of Chinese from the PRC after 1978 (Lai, 2010, pp. 2–3). The post-1980 PRC Chinese immigration to Central America is a relatively new subject matter of scholarly research (Lai and Tan, 2010). The UNHCR website3 estimates there are about 150,000 Chinese in Panama (2009 ­ hinese ­figures), the largest Chinese community in Central America. The first documented C immigration to Panama was tied to the canal and railway construction projects during the1850s (Cohen, 1971; Lazarus, 2011). Belize brought in Chinese workers for the sugar plantations even earlier but these workers did not stay to establish any permanent settlement. In general, the Chinese presence in Central America was scattered and small scale until the 1990s, the exception being Panama. In Belize, there is no official documentation of citizens and temporary workers by ethnic background; thus, there is no official figure on the total number of Chinese in the country. The legacy of the PRD region as source of immigrants helps to explain the strong presence of Cantonese-speaking Chinese entrepreneurs in small business in Panama and Belize today. The city of Colón, Panama is a stronghold of people from Enping, a city of half a million people in the south-western part of the PRD. It counts another half million people of Enping origin scattered around the world today, some of whom were among the first waves of Chinese immigrants to the Caribbean, the Americas, Papua New Guinea and Australia, beginning in the early 1880s (Wu, 1982). Hakka-speaking immigrants from the Hua Du district in Guangzhou city dominate the grocery and pharmacy outlets in Bocas del Toro, Panama. The significantly larger Chinese community in Panama City is a diverse mix of Chinese from Enping, Hua Du, Zhongshan, Hong Kong/Macau and Taiwan. Many Chinese in Panama are multi-generation local citizens, while many others are recent immigrants, and still others are temporary residents on work permits. As early as the 1880s and 1890s, there were reports of distinct but “effective business practices” by Chinese traders in Central America and Caribbean: stocking up on Creole ­staples (salt fish, beef, pork, etc.), offering lower prices, extending credit to small wage earners and selling provision in small amounts (Hu-DeHart, 2010, p. 74). A 1907 census in Cuba identified 4,729 Chinese as day labourers, 2,059 Chinese as merchants and 1,644 as domestic workers, and another 3,000 or more Chinese in various forms of petty businesses as bakers, laundrymen, barbers, landscapers, tailors, house painters, brick makers, blacksmiths, carpenters and restaurateurs (Yan, 2013, pp. 95–96). The Chinese engagement in petty businesses was a common phenomenon in most of the host societies in the history of the 19th-century Chinese diaspora (Char, 1975; Glick, 1980; Mei and Zhang, 2001; Liu, 2005; Hu-Dehart, 2010; Sinn, 2013; Yan, 2013; Lai and Tan, 2010; Chu, 2016; Li, 2017). The economic success of the ubiquitous “Chinese shops” in the retail trade in the ­Caribbean was attributed partly to their cultural competency in communication and meeting local consumer needs, often with the help of a wife or concubine of local origin (Hu-­Dehart, 2010, p. 80), and partly to the strength of the Chinese capacity for vertical integration by occupying the retail, wholesale and import/export sectors which greatly enhanced their control over the supply and pricing of commodities. The Chinese shops outcompeted their 55

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local counterparts with lower prices, and selling large volumes so that sales made up for reduced profit margins. This kind of Chinese operation was known as “farthing trade” in Jamaica (Hu-Dehart, 2010, p. 77). In Panama today, we heard one person call it “penny business”. The largely Hakka-speaking Chinese in Jamaica in the 19th and early 20th centuries engaged in “creolization or acculturation soon after their arrival, out of necessity, if not inclination” by taking local women as wives or concubines, learning the local language(s) and adopting local names (Hu-Dehart, 2010, p. 80). This process at least partially localized Chinese businesses, and contributed to their success. Localization was originally used to describe the process through which imported products were modified in their content, form of utilization or purpose which resulted in the successful acceptance by local consumers. The use of cognac at Chinese banquets in Hong Kong; the mixing of cognac with tea or soda drinks by Chinese consumers; and the innovative creation of chop suey, egg rolls and ginger beef in Canadian Chinese cuisine are examples of localization (Smart, 1999, 2004, 2005). In a broader sense, localization can be conceptualized as a constructive process of modification in an effort to support a working compromise between two or more different cultural realities. A Chinese business in a non-Chinese country must address the consumer needs and normative modes of business conduct that are expected and meaningful in local contexts, while retaining background cultural competency and practices that enhance economic success. A variety of localization practices in Chinese retail outlets in Belize and Panama today were observed during our fieldwork. Examples include the use of Spanish as a working language with customers, the stocking of locally in-demand products, supported by highly competitive prices, and convenient location of shops. Fish and fresh meat are sourced from local producers and are sold in cuts according to local usage. Fresh fish are sold unprocessed. The Chinese grocery stores (known locally as m\s or mini-super) in both Panama and Belize cater to the poor and rich, tourists and locals, urban and rural. They come in different sizes, selling basic grocery items both fresh and canned, alcohol, fresh meat, cooked food and sundries, and a variety of imported products. Some include an in-house pharmacy ­d ivision with a qualified pharmacist on-site, and electronic goods are often sold in the larger operations. Typically there is only one public entrance guarded by a check-out counter behind which is a person of Chinese descent who deals with money and transactions in fluent Spanish. In the bigger stores, there may be two or more check-out counters. Following a long-standing practice in Chinese business, handling of cash is mostly a task for the owner, a family member or a trusted relative. Local employees stock shelves, work at the meat counter, do general cleaning and other tasks. While Chinese owners/operators have working or higher proficiency in Spanish, we saw no sign that local staff use Chinese at work. In Panama, as in Belize, the m\s are mostly family-run businesses involving husband, wife and children, siblings, sometimes grandparent(s) and other relatives. The Chinese owners/ operators often live in quarters behind or above their business. It is not unusual to see owners and staff having their meals on site between transactions. Children are present throughout the day. When living quarters are attached to the business premise, it is common to provide on-site accommodation for Chinese employees. Local employees do not receive on-site accommodation as part of their employment terms. In both Belize and Panama, the grocery retail sector is dominated by Chinese ownership, so much so that they are known as “Chinos” in Panama and “Chinesse” in Belize. These labels carry two meanings: first, they refer to the business, in this case specifically the m\s operated by Chinese; second, they point to the Chinese as a category of people different from the locals. The Chinese presence in the grocery retail sector in Panama expanded 56

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significantly after the 1990s, through the purchase of locally owned businesses and the creation of new ones. Similarly, the Chinese dominance in grocery retail in Belize began 15–20 years ago, correlated with the introduction of the “going out” policy by China in 2000 to encourage Chinese nationals to invest overseas (Nyíri, 2010). By creating new institutional support in the forms of preferred loans, state assistance in technology and skill training, and liberalized policy on export of fund to invest overseas and emigration, the Chinese state intends the “going out” policy to boost Chinese direct investments in global markets. This has encouraged an increasing outflow of Chinese immigrants and capital (Smart, 2012; A. Smart and Smart, 2012). The reach of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurship and investments in Central America goes beyond the grocery sector to include hotels and hostels, electronic goods and services, restaurants, laundry, other retails such as the fiesta sector (party supplies and gifts) and department stores, and wholesale. While there are observable concentrations of Chinese businesses in specific neighbourhoods such as the new Chinatown in El Dorado in Panama City, by and large Chinese businesses are indistinguishable from local businesses by location, scale and (often) name. Some business names explicitly identify Chinese ownership, such as the three-generation fruit and produce outlet Chinese Garden in the Canal Zone, m\s Yu Yie in Chepo and m\s Jamie Yau in Almirante. They are exceptions. Most Chinese businesses bear names in Spanish that are either inherited from past owners (e.g. m\s ­A rturo #2 in Panama City, Neuvo Café Nacional in Colón) or indicative of its geographical location/affiliation (e.g. m\s Bocas, m\s Isla Zapatilla), or a product of the owners’ creativity and sentiment (e.g. m\s Tony’s in Bocas Del Toro, Restaurante Jumbo in Panama City, Super 888 in Almirante). Chinese businesses in both Panama and Belize cater primarily to the local populations, and not to co-ethnics whose numbers are well below the necessary critical mass to sustain any one business outside the ethnic enclaves in major urban centres. This is particularly true in Belize which until recently had little Chinese immigration (Hu-DeHart, 2010, p. 69). What do local people think of the Chinese dominance in some sectors of their economy? A senior Belizean government minister and a local businessman in San Ignacio (Belize) both offered a similar reaction (summarized by the authors below) which echoes comments in Panama by local citizens: The Chinese are very hard working and they are always there during the opening hours as listed. In contrast, the Belizean store owners are only there whenever they are there, you cannot rely on them for regular working hours and services. Yes, there is some ambivalence about the Chinese displacing the local small business owners. They buy up existing outlets, and they open new ones which are bigger and better stocked. At the beginning they offer the best prices to outcompete the local store owners. When they control the whole sector, they then begin to raise prices. By then, you have no choice. They are very smart business people. The ambivalence about Chinese businesses is often accompanied by a hint of suspicion about Chinese mafia connections. A handful of people in Belize and Panama express this suspicion in strikingly similar discourses (paraphrased and summarized by the authors): They hardly spoke any Spanish when they first arrived but they all built their grocery stores with the same layout. How is that possible? They work long hours and make good money. But they live like paupers. Where did they spend their money? The money goes to the mafia. There are well dressed Chinese who come regularly to collect cash from the shop keepers. It is the Chinese mafia. 57

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For the local people who are unaware of the extensive co-ethnic and family resources that support the set-up of a new Chinese run grocery outlet, the seemingly miraculous and rapid success of the Chinese business is indeed a mystery. The Chinese mafia connection is a familiar notion in local government and media discourses in the context of real and imagined crimes in illegal immigration, labour exploitation and drug trafficking (Siu, 2005).

Informal finances and business start-up financialization – kinship and networks Business creation and finance are often conceptualized today in specific colours under the rubric of market economy and fully developed capitalist logic. For many, the idea of “informal” finances points to practices in the grey world of the underground or shadow economy that exude a strong hint of illegality, and they are distinguished from the main stream/formal capital market structure by labels such as “fringe banking”, “back-alley banking” and “curb finance” (Tsai, 2002, 2004; Carter and Skiba, 2012). But if we take a step back to remind ourselves that business start-up and finance pre-existed the rise of capitalism, then we must accept the reality that the so-called “informal” finances are cross-cultural age-old practices mediated through social and cultural principles which persist in spite of the pervasive reality of “formal” finances underwritten by institutions, such as banks; lending companies; and (supra) governmental agencies, like the IMF and others (see Firth and Yamey, 1964; ­Willmott, 1972; Tsai, 2002, pp. 291–295). In her work on Chinese merchants, Hill Gates points out that the financing of petty businesses throughout the history of China relied heavily on interpersonal loans, rotating credit associations, as well as “the transfer of brideprice and dowry, pawnshops, money lending, gambling, protection rackets run by gangs, and other mechanisms large and small” (Gates, 1996, p. 32). All these forms continue today in varying degrees. Informal finance as it is known in the literature includes many forms that operate outside the structure of kinship and networks, some of which can be exploitative and coercive, backed by violence and criminal acts. In this chapter, we let the voices of the Chinese ­m igrants direct our focus, which is to articulate the forms of informal finances they know of and utilize, and which turns out to be heavily anchored in kinship and networks. The outstanding research by Kellee Tsai points to “uncertain and risky circumstances” as a powerful root cause of the proliferation of informal finances in post-reform PRC in the forms of personal loan, trade credit, private bank, rotating credit association and others (Tsai, 2002, p. 4). A common uncertainty factor is the tremendous barrier to qualify for a (formal) bank loan for PRC entrepreneurs who are engaged in small businesses and for consumers who do not have the kind of asset or employment security required as collateral. Similar barriers, exaggerated by the consequences of downward mobility commonly associated with migration, are also documented among overseas Chinese. In Australia, David Ip (1991) reported that PRC immigrants borrowed up to 90% of business capital from their network at home and/or in Australia. One PRC immigrant he interviewed in Brisbane explained this tendency to seek finances outside the formal lending structure as follows: It is about trust and credibility in your network. It is not like a bank. We couldn’t get a bank loan because we come with nothing. We had some savings along the way but we had no assets. The banks just aren’t interested in you when you have no collateral. Our network is our capital. (Ip, 1991, p. 156) 58

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The use of personal loans by overseas Chinese to cover travel, medical and subsistence costs, business capital, remittance and other expenses is well documented (see Sinn, 2013; Li, 2015). In one account, a Mr Li in Cuba recorded a total of US$ 440.7 he lent to 57 borrowers whom he called “brothers” during one year in the early 1920s (Li, 2015, p. 37). These borrowers were kin and non-kin from the same region (tongxiang) where Mr Li came from in the PRD. Ancestral, linguistic and regional affinity are important loci of identity among overseas Chinese, and many mutual aid associations and interpersonal credit/loan/partnership relationships were/are fostered within these kin-based and regional/linguistic networks. A Chinese immigrant from Kaiping by the name Chang Yitang landed in Los Angeles in 1900 with a substantial sum in personal saving. Tapping into the Xiyi community in California, he formed a partnership with eight other people from the same region in a Chinese herbal shop business with a US$ 1,000 per partner business start-up input (Liu, 2005, p. 34). He subsequently became quite well off from his business venture in the USA, an achievement that might not have been possible if he was to start up a much smaller business on his own. Among the Hakka-speaking Chinese immigrants in Calcutta, business partnerships in leather tanning with a kin or a non-kin from the same linguistic or regional background were common (Oxfeld, 1993, pp. 130–131). In forming a business partnership, economic resources, networks and technical/management knowledge are pooled to give the business a competitive edge over smaller counterparts by scale and reach. A Hakka-speaking Chinese immigrant in Panama from Hua Du who left the PRD in 1980 mentioned the hardship imposed by foreign exchange restrictions in effect at the time. The maximum he was allowed to leave the country with was US$ 150. In his own words, “if you do not know anybody” in Panama, you could not get ahead. He was fortunate that he has relatives in Panama and is part of the expanding Hakka-speaking community from Hua Du in Panama. He found work, married and had many children; he started his own business, and, now in his 70s, he practices circular migration between Hua Du and Panama where he has a residence in both locations. He mentioned the rotating credit system (hui in Chinese) as being instrumental as a source of capital for business or big-ticket item purchases. Not everybody can join a rotating credit system: you need to “know somebody”, which means you have to be a member of a kin or other network that is linked to a rotating credit system. Rotating credit system is known widely around the globe (see Topley, 1964, pp. 177–178; Tsai, 2002, pp. 291–295). It is not specifically a Chinese phenomenon; each society and culture has its own history and there are variations in terms and conditions by location and temporal period. Among the Chinese immigrants in southern Alberta in Canada in the early 1900s, the rotating credit system was known as a form of capital pooling: Whoever wanted to borrow would gather, and they’d write down on a slip what rate of interest they would pay, the highest bidder would… get the pool. If someone needed money, he’d start up the pool and would bid heavily. (Dawson, 1991, pp. 102–103) The organizer of a rotating credit system is known as the “head” or chairperson, s/he recruits members from his/her network which is usually regional and/or linguistically based among immigrants, and more likely to be kin-based among indigenous residents in the same locality. Members are usually known to one another personally. Strangers (i.e. persons outside the community or group) are only admitted into the rotating credit system if they have a guarantor from within the group or community. Members are selected for their reliability (kekao) and trustworthiness (laoshi) which are key personal attributes to ensure the feasibility 59

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and viability of a rotating credit system (Oxfeld, 1993, pp. 130–131). In the New Territories in Hong Kong in the 1960s, such rotating credit systems were described by Marjorie Topley (1964, p. 178) as follows: …members make fixed monthly payments, and each member on one occasion gets the use of the total collected. The association thus exists for as many months as there are members … When a member defaults on his monthly contributions, the amount is customarily borne by the head of the association (or) by the other members, or by his guarantor… Depending on the size of the monthly contribution and the total number of members in a rotating credit system, the amount collected at each meeting can be substantial. The pooled contributions can be used to finance a business start-up, a funeral, a child’s wedding expenses, the purchase of a property or a child’s education. It can even create a platform for major economic change for an overseas Chinese community, as evidenced by what happened in Great Britain in the 1900s among Chinese immigrants from the Xiyi region in the PRD. The Xiyi Association at the time organized a monthly hui (monthly credit system) that was opened to members only. Participants paid one £ per share and there was no limit to the number of shares per member. There was a monthly competition for the collected pool, the person who offered the highest interest was the winner. This monthly contribution enabled the rapid expansion of the laundry sector throughout Great Britain which eventually became a near monopoly by Chinese immigrants from the Xiyi region (Mei and Zhang, 2001, p. 188). The most common form of informal finance is probably the personal loan between two individuals. Very often, the first line of credit extension is sought from family members or a relative within one’s extended kin network. In Calcutta, it is common for Chinese women to underwrite a son’s business venture with her income from the illicit liquor production and retail business (Oxfeld, 1993, p. 131). Sometimes a small loan in cash or kind can be obtained from employers or contacts, but a loan of substantial amount usually involves lenders who have a close relationship with the borrower. This “close” relationship may take the form of deep sentiments and commitment such as that between parents and child, siblings and even friends. It may also involve people who do not share deep emotional or social ties, but the borrower is known to the lender in sufficient detail to mitigate the risk of a loan default. The details of a person’s family background, employment and credit history, and interpersonal conduct are part of his/her “interactive performance” that a lender can use to gauge a borrower’s trustworthiness, honesty and credibility. This assessment is driven by mitigation of the risk that the loan may not be repaid in full. Our ethnographic data reveal a form of business finance in Panama that involves an integrated business succession strategy and deferred buy-out scheme between two parties. It is not clear how common this particular type of business finance is in Panama and other Central American countries. However, given the existence of similar schemes among the Chinese restaurant businesses in Canada, we are inclined to consider it more common than usually thought. One of the cases in our database involved a couple from the PRD who had worked in Panama for many years before they were invited by the husband’s patrilineal cousin to consider a buy-out offer of this cousin’s supermarket in Bocas del Toro. This cousin and his wife had over the years expanded their supermarket business into a substantial size with several Chinese and local employees. They were ready for retirement. Instead of a one-time lump sum, it was agreed that the future owners would work in the supermarket as co-owners to learn the management know-how and supply contacts, and their wages and 60

Chinese businesses in Central America

share of business profit would go towards the purchase of the supermarket over a period of several years. Another case involved a young man from Enping who came to Colón on a temporary visa to work in his uncle’s restaurant. After marrying a local Chinese woman who is a Panama citizen, he offered to buy out his uncle, who was ready for retirement. His wife’s Panama citizen status made it possible to obtain an official business licence transfer since only residents with local citizenship are eligible for a business licence. The total purchasing cost of his uncle’s restaurant was paid by instalment. A third case involved a couple from Hua Du who came to Panama City with a healthy personal saving of over US$ 10,000 in the early 1990s. The husband’s younger brother inherited a grocery store from their father in Panama City several years earlier but lost the business to gambling debts. Soon after arrival, the older brother bought a grocery store from a fellow Hua Du compatriot with a 50% down payment and the rest to be paid in instalment. The total purchasing price was US$ 20,000. The younger brother and his wife helped out with the store management. The younger brother’s business know-how was crucial to keep the business going, and the regional affinity with the previous store owner was a crucial connection that enabled the newly arrived Hua Du immigrants to purchase the business with only a 50% down payment.

Risk, trust, interactive performance and informal finance – concluding remarks It is easy to accept the apparent simplicity that network and connections through kinship and social relations are the key to the economic success of overseas Chinese migrants. Having networks that can offer financial assistance when needed is indeed a valuable asset that facilitates business success in any location at any time. But it would be misleading to suggest that every individual can access informal finances through their network. The social connection is a necessary but insufficient condition to establish a financial relationship of credit extension. In other words, just because you are related to a person through kinship, or know someone from school or work or in the neighbourhood, it does not mean your relative or friend will automatically offer you a loan when asked. When a credit loan comes without the safeguard of an enforceable legal contract, it is natural for the lender to seek evidence that the borrower is the type of person who is highly likely to repay the loan in full. This is a good and necessary risk mitigation tactic, and one can learn a lot about a person from information exchange with people who are part of the same network(s). The networks provide a necessary platform to connect a person to other people who may be potential credit lenders, the same networks also act as a reservoir of information and an information highway that can produce a reasonable picture of a person’s conduct. Whether a person will be admitted into a rotating credit association or be granted a personal loan/deferred credit is conditional upon risk mitigation, a process that draws on knowledge about a person’s integrity and credibility as indicated by his/her history of interactive performances. A person’s interactive performance over his/her life time is a body of cumulative evidence which speaks of the person’s credibility, integrity, reliability and trustworthiness. These interactive performances are the day-to-day social interactions and outcomes between a person and other actors in his/her social world – how a person treats his/her parents and siblings, and whether s/he repays debts in full, treats his employees and friends with fairness and kindness, keeps promises and so on. This concept of interactive performance is not new even though the use of this label may be; the ideas behind this concept and relevant field observations in support of this concept can be gleaned in the work of several anthropologists who worked in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the post-Second World War decades. The following excerpts from publications by Robert Silin 61

Josephine Smart and Alan Smart

and Donald de Glopper are of particular relevance to our conceptual thinking about interactive performance in the context of business relations and informal finance: …The solidarities that bind non-kinsmen and kinsmen, while they may originate in prescriptive loyalties, are maintained on the basis of successful interaction in business. The essential distinction is not between kin and non-kin, between those who continually validate their relationship and those who do not…. Merchants enter into business relationships only with people they consider reliable, regardless of their kinship ties. (Silin, 1972, pp. 351–352) Hsin-yung refers to an individual’s or a firm’s reputation, reliability, credit rating. It is the most important thing in business … (it) is predicate on performance in business… Nobody has good hsin-yung just because his surname is Lin or Chen. (De Glopper, 1972, p. 304) In closing, we caution readers to avoid exoticizing the economic success of Chinese immigrants within a circular framework of cultural determinism. The overseas Chinese immigrants are not privileged to become business owners just because they happen to be Chinese. Our research on Chinese entrepreneurship in multiple countries for nearly four decades has shown that the use of network resources to secure business financialization and knowledge transfer is not a particular Chinese endeavour; rather, it is a common optimization strategy which takes on many forms that are context specific and appropriate for different groups of people across cultural, class, gender and geographical divides. New Chinese immigrants show a strong tendency to turn to their dialectal, regional and ethnic networks for financial assistance and knowledge exchange but their success is always conditional on their history of interactive performances. And behind every successful business, much more is required than just money.

Notes 1 https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Overseas_Chinese; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Overseas_Chinese 2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/632850/chinese-nationals-number-overseas-by-continent/ 3 The UN Refugee Agency http://www.refworld.org/docid/49749ccf28.html

References Carter, S., and Skiba, P. M. (2012). Pawnshops, Behavioral Economics, ad Self-Regulation. Review of Banking and Financial Law, 32(1): 193–220. Char, T. Y. (Ed.) (1975). The Sandal Wood Mountains – Readings and Stories of the Early Chinese in Hawaii. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. Chu, H. B. (2016). Wenzhou Haiwaiyimen yu Huaxiang Cishangongyi [Wenzhou Overseas Immigrants and Charities in Their Hometowns]. Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Publishing Company. Cohen, L. (1971). The Chinese of the Panama Railroad: Preliminary Notes on the Migrants of 1854 Who “Failed”. Ethnohistory, 18(4): 209–320. Dawson, J. B. (1991). Moon Cakes in Gold Mountain – From China to the Canadian Plains. Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises Ltd. De Glopper, D. B. (1972). Doing Business in Lukang. In W. E. Willmott (Ed.), Economic Organization in Chinese Society (pp. 297–326). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Firth, R., and Yamey, B. S. (Eds.) (1964). Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies – Studies from Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, and Middle America. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company.

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Chinese businesses in Central America Gates, H. (1996). China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Glick, C. (1980). Sojourners and Settlers – Chinese Migrants in Hawaii. Honolulu: Hawaii Chinese History Center and the University Press of Hawaii. Hu-DeHart, E. (2010). Indispensable Enemy or Convenient Scapegoat? A Critical Examination of Sinaphobia in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1870s to 1930s. In W. L. Lai and C. B. Tang (Eds.), Chinese in Latin American and the Caribbean (pp. 65–102). Leiden: Brill Academic Press. Huang, Q. C. (Ed.) (2003). Guangdong Haishang Sichouzhilu Shi [The Maritime Silk Road in Guangdong’s History]. Guangzhou: Guangdong Economic Publishing House. Ip, D. (1991). Networks as Capital: PRC Immigrants in Brisbane. In Yen-enTseng, Chilla Bulbeck, Lan-Hung Nora Chiang, and Jung-Chung Hsu (Eds.), Asian Migration: Pacific Rim Dynamics (pp. 149–164). Taipei: IGAS, National Taiwan University. Kuhn, P. (2008). Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lai, W. L. (2010). Introduction. In W. L. Lai and C. B. Tan (Eds.), Chinese in Latin American and the Caribbean (pp. 1–3). Leiden: Brill Academic Press. Lai, W. L., and Tan, C. B. (Eds.) (2010). Chinese in Latin American and the Caribbean. Leiden: Brill Academic Press. Lazarus, L. (2011). China-Taiwan and the Battle for Panama. Global Conversation, December 1. ­Retrieved from http://www.globalconversation.org/2011/12/01/china-taiwan-and-battle-panama Li, C. L. (2017). Haiwai Wenzhou Yanjiu Pingxi [Research Publications on Wenzhou Outside of China]. Xiamen: Xiamen University Press. Li, P. D. (2015). Guba Huaqiao Yinxin: Li Yunhong Xongzu Jiashu [Yin Xin of Overseas Chinese in Cuba: Family Letters of Li Yunhong Clan]. Guangzhou: Jinan University Press. Lin, C. T. (2018). Between Transnational Network and the State: The Globalization of Diasporic Chinese ­Voluntary Associations (Doctoral dissertation). Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Liu, H. M. (2005). Transnational History of a Chinese Family – Immigrant Letters, Family Business and Reverse Migration. New York: Rutgers University Press. Mei, W. J., and Zhang, G. X. (Eds.) (2001). Wuyi Huajiao Huaren Shi [A History of Wuyi Overseas ­Chinese]. Guangzhou: Guangdong Higher Education Publishing Ltd. Nyíri, P. (2010). Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Oxfeld, E. (1993). Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong – Family and Enterprises in an Overseas Chinese Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pan, L. (Ed.) (1999). Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. Richmond, VA: Curzon Press. Silin, R. H. (1972). Marketing and Credit in a Hong Kong Wholesale Market. In W. E. Willmott (Ed.), Economic Organization in Chinese Society (pp. 327–352). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sinn, E. (2013). Pacific Crossing – California Gold, Chinese Migration and the Making of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Siu, L. (2005). Memories of a Future: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Smart, A., and Smart, J. (2012). Hong Kong petty Capitalists Investing in China: Risk Tolerance, Uncertain Investment Environments, Success and Failure. In G. Mathews, G. L. Ribeiro, and C. A. Vega (Eds.), Globalization from Below: The World’s Other Economy (pp. 103–119). New York: Routledge. Smart, J. (1999). The “Hongkongization” of Chinese Immigrant Cuisine in Canada. IIAS, 19:30. Leiden: University of Leiden. Smart, J. (2004). Globalization and Modernity – A Case Study of Cognac Consumption in Hong Kong. Anthropologica, 46(2):149–159. Smart, J. (2005). Cognac, Beer, Red Wine or Soft Drinks? Hong Kong Identity and Wedding ­Banquets. In Thomas Wilson (Ed.), Drinking Culture: Alcohol and the Expression of Identity, Class and Nation (pp. 107–128). Oxford: Berg. Smart, J. (2012). Dancing with the Dragon – Canadian Investment in China and Chinese Investment in Canada. Invited policy paper written for the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary. Refereed. Published 6 September 2012. Stewart, W. (1970). Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolies in Peru 1849–1876. ­Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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Josephine Smart and Alan Smart Topley, M. (1964). Capital, Saving and Credit among Indigenous Rice Farmers and Immigrant Vegetable Farmers in Hong Kong’s New Territories. In R. Firth and B. S. Yamey (Eds.), Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies – Studies from Asia, Oceania, The Caribbean, and Middle America (pp. 157–186). Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company. Tsai, K. S. (2002). Back-Alley Banking – Private Entrepreneurs in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tsai, K. S. (2004). Imperfect Substitutes: The Local Political Economy of Informal Finance and ­M icrofinance in Rural China and India. World Development, 32(9): 1487–1507. Willmott, W. E. (Ed.) (1972). Economic Organization in Chinese Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford ­University Press. Wu, David Y. H. (1982). The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: 1880–1980. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Yan, Y. (2013). Rongru yu Zhuli: Guaqiao Huaren za Guba [Integration and Alienation: The Overseas ­Chinese in Cuba]. Guangzhou: Jinan University Press.

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4 THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF KOREAN DIASPORAS1 In-Jin Yoon

Introduction Diaspora, referring to mass dispersions of a population, is a term most notably used to mean the expulsion of Jews from Israel when they were taken to Babylon as captives after the fall of the ancient Jewish Kingdom and, in particular, the dispersion of Jews to places around the world after the Roman Empire’s destruction of Jerusalem. As time passed, this term came to refer to immigrants from various backgrounds and properties and fell into more popular use. Largescale emigration of the Korean people began as early as the mid-19th century when they left for Manchuria and the Maritime Province. Their emigration and settlement satisfy the required conditions to be called a Korean diaspora in terms of its history. Stalin’s deportation of ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Union to Central Asia demonstrates a typical aspect of a diaspora. Korean immigration to Central America, North America, Europe, and Oceania after the 1960s, however, was not forced but somewhat voluntary so it is hard to define it as such. The situation has been one in which any type of diaspora has been grasped from an ultranationalist point of view. And yet, overseas Korean nationals are living as objects of ­discrimination and exclusion, unappreciated as social members of the countries in which they reside, even now. Conservative right-wing Japanese people’s anti-Korea demonstrations and their hate speeches against the Korean people are a showcase of the reality of members of the minority Korean diaspora who cannot help but live eternally as strangers or aliens in J­apan even though they are fourth- or fifth-generation ethnic Koreans in Japan. North K ­ orean defectors who had risked their lives to come to South Korea for freedom found themselves as the second-class citizens in their new homeland, and about 10% of them decided to immigrate to Western countries claiming they are refugees. The overseas North Korean refugees are a new addition to Korean diaspora. Diaspora in this chapter is used as a concept to encompass multifarious facets of historical experiences of Korean people’s immigration to and settlement in foreign nations and to ­expound their correlations. Thus, the Korean diaspora is defined as “the dispersion of Korean people or people of the same roots or ancestry living around the world after leaving their motherland.” 1 Earlier

version of this chapter was presented at the international conference on “Korean Diaspora – Beyond Dispersion” organized by the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea, 5 October 2018. 65

In-Jin Yoon Table 4.1  T  he state of overseas Koreans, 2019 Region

Northeast Asia Japan China Subtotal South Asia and   Pacific North America United States Canada Subtotal Central and   South America Europe Africa Middle East Total

Year

% in 2019

Rate of increase 2011–2019 (%)

2011

2013

2015

2017

2019

913,097 2,704,994 3,618,091 453,420

893,129 2,573,928 3,467,057 485,836

855,725 2,585,993 3,441,718 510,633

818,626 2,548,030 3,366,656 557,791

824,977 2,461,386 3,286,363 592,441

11.02 32.85 43.86 7.91

2,075,590 231,492 2,307,082 112,980

2,091,432 205,993 2,297,425 111,156

2,238,989 224,054 2,463,043 105,243

2,492,252 240,942 2,733,194 106,794

2,546,982 241,750 2,788,732 103,617

33.99 22.7 3.23 4.4 37.21 20.9 1.38 −8.3

656,707 11,072 16,302

615,847 10,548 25,048

627,089 11,583 25,563

630,693 10,853 24,707

687,059 10,877 24,498

9.17 4.6 0.15 −1.8 0.33 50.3

7,175,654

7,012,917

7,184,872

7,430,688

7,493,587

100

−9.7 −9.0 −9.2 30.7

4.4

Source: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2019 State of Overseas Koreans.

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ 2019 statistics, the Korean diaspora with over 150-year history of emigration and settlement consists of 7,493,587 people in 193 countries around the world. This number of Korean overseas nationals reaches roughly 10% of the total population of South and North Korea. In terms of region, Korean immigrants and descendants have dispersed far and wide including 3,286,732 people in Northeast Asia, 592,441 people in Southern Asia and the Pacific region, 2,788,732 people in North America, 103,617 people in Central and South America, 687,059 people in Europe, 10,877 people in Africa, and 24,498 people in the Middle East. This population is focused on countries such as the United States (2,546,982 people), China (2,461,386 people), Japan (824,977 people), Canada (241,750 people), Uzbekistan (177,270 people), Vietnam (172,684 people), Russia (169,933 people), Australia (167,331 people), Kazakhstan (109,923 people), and the Philippines (85,125 people) (see Table 4.1). The above population figures show that the population of Korean compatriots in the Middle East, Southern Asia and the Pacific, and North America grew remarkably while the population in Northeast Asia, Central and South America, Europe, and Africa fell. Population growth in Southern Asia and the Pacific, especially that in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, is particularly remarkable. There are less Korean permanent residents as well as compatriots with citizenship whereas there is a plurality of long-term stayers and students in these countries. This has resulted from an increase in Korean compatriots who emigrated to Southern Asia in the early 1990s for the purpose of doing business, looking for a job, visiting, or studying. Ethnic Koreans in this region display a new settlement model referred to as “a community of sedentary long-term sojourners” in which Korean people reside in 66

History & present state of Korean diasporas

a country while extending their temporary visas on account of the policies of some nations that do not allow free immigration. Another notable trend is the increase in aged Korean compatriots. If the departure point of modern Korean immigration was the early 1960s, the first generation of Korean compatriots who immigrated in their 20s or 30s would currently be in their 70s or 80s. Overseas Korean society cannot be out of sync with the aging tendency just as Korea is becoming one of the world’s fastest super-aging societies, surpassing typical aging societies. Ethnic Korean societies in South America, North America, Europe, and Oceania grew as the result of overseas immigration after the 1970s, but these societies seem to have reached a plateau in the 2000s. This could be on account of overseas immigration being reduced after the 1980s and a higher number of overseas Koreans returning to their motherland beginning in the early 1990s. Concepts which were considered significant in the growing period of ethnic Korean societies, i.e., adaptation, settlement, and ethnic identity, seem less important. Overseas Korean societies are currently undergoing a transition defined as the “end of a growth model.” As the inflow of new immigrants is halted and second- and third-­ generation Korean immigrants are gradually integrated into mainstream society, issues in the nations they reside such as those pertaining to intermarriage, multicultural families, multiracial identity, and main streaming have become more important. Overseas Korean societies whose populations stop growing and whose members have entered into mainstream society advance in a completely different direction.

History of the Korean diaspora The dispersion of overseas Koreans has a relatively shorter history than that of other groups such as Jews, Chinese, Greeks, and Italians but has so broad a spectrum of experiences surrounding immigration and settlement that Koreans can be found everywhere around the world. The history of Korean immigration is largely divided into three types: the old immigration from the mid-19th century to the early 1960s, the new immigration from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, the return migration from the early 1990s to the present. More specifically, it can be divided into five periods as follows. The first period ranges from the 1860s to 1910 (the year when Japan formally annexed Korea). In this period, peasants and workers emigrated to China, Russia, Hawaii, Mexico, and Cuba to avoid famine, poverty, and oppression from the ruling class. People suffered from living-related hardships due to a recurring drought while undergoing severe social disorders in the late 19th century when Western powers were jostling one another for advantages in the land of Joseon. In addition, a food shortage was escalating quickly as Japan plundered rice and grains from Joseon. Koreans who moved to Manchuria in China and the Maritime Province in Russia in the late Joseon period were economically drifting people who lived an unstable life in terms of status and had to reclaim agricultural land. Their immigration was initially economical to ameliorate the hardships of life, but the immigration of independent activists was a political move for the independence of their country. As a result, the Maritime Province was a Korean independence movement hub at the time. The first large group of Korean immigrants arrived at a sugar plantation in Hawaii in 1903. Japan later prohibited Koreans from immigrating to Hawaii to protect the Japanese workers there in 1905. From January 1903 to August 1905, 7,291 Korean immigrants, mostly bachelors in their 20s, arrived in Hawaii. Approximately 1,000 Korean women moved to Hawaii to marry them in 1924 and formed families via photographic marriages (Yoon, 2003). The first large group of Korean immigrants to Central and South America arrived at a henequen 67

In-Jin Yoon

farm in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico in 1905 as indentured servants, roughly 300 of whom would later immigrate to Cuba in 1921 (K. Lee, 2007). Even though these Korean immigrants and their descendants maintained very small communities, they rapidly assimilated into local societies and cultures as their connections to their homeland were severed. The second period is the Japanese colonial era (1910–1945) during which both farmers and workers who had been deprived of their means of production immigrated to Manchuria, China and Japan. In addition, political refugees and independence activists moved to China, Russia, and America to continue their independence movement. Japan carried out a mass immigration of Korean people for the purpose of developing Manchuria, which they later used as an opportunity to launch the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and establish ­Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China in 1932. With this, the total population of Koreans in the region increased to roughly 500,000 people in the late 1930s, of which approximately 250,000 Koreans are known to have arrived through mass migration (Kwon, 1996). Japan experienced an economic boom during World War I, leading Koreans to move to Japan to be workers. As a result, the population of Koreans in Japan numbered almost 300,000 by the end of the 1920s. A large number of Koreans were taken to mines or battlefields with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the Pacific War in 1941. The number of Korean residents in Japan had rapidly increased due to this series of upheavals and was around 2.3 million people as of August 1945 when Japan was defeated by the United States. Afterward, a vast number of Koreans permanently returned to their motherland and the population rapidly decreased to 598,507 people in 1947 (Lee, 1996). Koreans drafted into the Japanese military by force in the latter half of the period of Japanese colonial rule between 1939 and 1945 moved to South Sakhalin, a Japanese territory at the time. These Koreans and some of their descendants permanently returned to Korea in the 1990s. Some Koreans had voluntarily immigrated to Sakhalin to engage in agriculture as early as the 1860s but the number was no more than 67 according to a census conducted by the Russian government in 1897 (Cho, 2009). As Korean peasants began immigrating to ­Sakhalin during the Japanese colonial era, the population continued to grow. Later, Koreans in the Maritime Province and about 1,000 Koreans in North Sakhalin were deported to Central Asia on account of Stalin’s deportation policy of Korean people in the former Soviet Union in 1937. Since then, Koreans have only resided in South Sakhalin. Japan moved ­Koreans to Sakhalin under the National Mobilization Act stipulated in 1938 and forced them to work in nearly 30 mines, log yards, and airport construction sites as well as on roads and railways. The number of forcibly drafted Koreans is estimated at 60,000–150,000 people (Cho, 2009). When the former Soviet Union occupied South Sakhalin in August 1945 after declaring war against Japan, Koreans were expected to return to their homeland, but the S­ oviet Union has forbidden about 43,000 Korean people with Japanese nationality from leaving Sakhalin. They were deprived of their Japanese nationality by the Soviet government following Japan’s defeat and were left to acquire Russian citizenship. Koreans in Sakhalin were unable to return to Korea for over 30 years after the war. Thankfully, the first generation of Korean immigrants in this region were able to go back home by 1990 when the Soviet government finally allowed them to visit their homeland and return for good beginning in 1988. The third period ranges from 1945 to 1962, the year when the Korean government first formulated its immigration policy. The scale of Korean overseas compatriots was temporarily reduced during this period on account of Koreans residing in China and Japan coming back to Korea following the country’s liberation from Japanese rule. The number of individuals who returned home immediately after Korea’s liberation is estimated at 700,000 people, 40% of the total population of Koreans residing in China at the time. Official figures 68

History & present state of Korean diasporas

released by the Japanese government suggest that 1.04 million Koreans returned to Korea between August 1945 and 1950; however, the actual number is estimated to be higher as this statistical data does not include the number of Koreans who returned at their own expense (Yoon, 2003). Some Koreans continued to move overseas during this period. War orphans created by the Korean War, women who married U.S. soldiers, and children of mixed parentage immigrated to the United States and Canada. A considerable number of students who went to the United States to study settled in the nation regardless of whether they obtained a degree. Like Korean women who married American soldiers, these Koreans paved the path for a series of immigration. When the U.S. government opened its doors wide for immigrants in 1965, they went on to invite their families to join them (Yoon, 2003). Korean society in Japan has been divided into two groups under the Cold War system: the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chochongryeon, for short) and the ­Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan, for short). North Korea has implemented aggressive overseas North Korean policies, which include North Koreans in Japan. North Korea intended to accept Koreans in Japan to secure a labor force to restore the nation after the war while Japan wanted to repatriate them to North Korea. The project of repatriating Koreans in Japan to North Korea was launched on account of the two governments’ shared interests. As a result, 93,000 Koreans living in Japan were repatriated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984. These Koreans migrated to North Korea under the belief that it was a paradise. In actuality, most of them were punished as impure elements and put into political prisoner camps where they lived out a miserable existence until they died (Oh, 2010). The fourth period ranges from 1962 to 1990 when South Korea and the Soviet Union entered into diplomatic relations. Since then, immigration has been carried out with the goal of settlement. Most Korean immigrants and their descendants, save for those in China, Japan, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, immigrated during this period. The Korean government began to carry out collective immigration or contracted immigration to South America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America in 1962. The objectives of its immigration policy during this period were to lower demographic pressure by sending its surplus population to foreign countries and to acquire foreign currencies which would be sent back home by overseas Koreans. The first round of collective immigration was the agricultural immigration of 103 peasants to Brazil in 1963. Afterward, Koreans were sent to Central and South American countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia under the pretext of reclaiming agricultural land. However, most immigrants immediately moved to big cities and engaged in commerce as they had no agricultural experience and reclaiming wastelands was much too difficult (Son, 2007). Also in 1963, miners and nurses were sent to West Germany as contract migrants: 5,323 miners in total were sent until 1977, including 247 workers who were first sent in 1963; 10,032 nurses in total were dispatched until 1976, including 128 nurses who were first dispatched in 1966 (Korea-Europe Society, 2003). Immigration to the United States and Canada began in earnest when an immigration law which had favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe was revised in the mid-1960s. White-collar workers and highly educated middle-class Koreans were most active in their attempts to immigrate to the United States and Canada (Yoon, 2003). ­Approximately 35,000 Koreans immigrated to the United States every year between 1985 and 1987 and, consequently, Korea had become one of the top three countries with immigrants following Mexico and the Philippines. Immigration to the United States began to decrease after the Seoul Olympics in 1988 while the number of those returning to Korea began to increase. 69

In-Jin Yoon

After being revised in 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of the United States served as an opportunity to pave a path for sedentary family immigration whereas the ­Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975 served as an impetus for technicians to be dispatched to Vietnam. A ­ fter the war, these Korean technical experts migrated to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia, forging the foundation for Korean societies in those regions. From 1965 when the battles were particularly intense to 1973 when a peace treaty between the United States and Vietnam was signed, Korea dispatched 312,853 soldiers in total and roughly 2,000 technicians for military aid. These technical personnel belonged to ­Korean companies like Hanjin, Hyundai, and Samhwan and American firms like Vinnell and PA&E. They received personal economic gains while they dedicated themselves to Korea’s economic growth through their paramilitary economic practices. Immediately after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the 1973 oil crisis pulled not only Korea but also Western countries into an economic crisis. Based on its experience of sending mine workers and nurses to West Germany, the Korean government dispatched workers to the Middle East’s construction markets in order to solve the unemployment problem. In 1985 when increased demands for construction marked a climactic point, 120,245 workers were working in construction sites in the Middle East. After the construction boom was dampened, these Korean workers migrated to other nations to seek new jobs. The immigration of Koreans to Australia gained a new turning point with the migration of Koreans who had worked as contract workers in Germany, Vietnam, and the Middle East between the 1960s and the 1980s. Koreans also began to immigrate to Australia in search of job opportunities derived from the mine development boom. As many as 500 technicians dispatched to Vietnam and discharged soldiers migrated to Australia on a heroic scale. They entered Australia with short-term tourist visas and stayed and worked there illegally. They later acquired permanent residence following the Australian government’s decree of amnesty and invited their families whom they had left behind in Korea to join them. This move drew out Koreans staying in Iran and South American nations such as Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay as well as the miners and nurses in West Germany to Australia. Illegal immigrants were able to settle down legally after the Australian government announced a second decree of amnesty in June 1980. With these Koreans reuniting with their families, Korean society in Australia began to grow in earnest. However, new Korean immigrants who were entering Australia by way of an investment immigration campaign launched in 1986 were different from pre-existing members of Korean society in terms of character. They immigrated with capital and had a high standard of social and economic life. Differences between the old and new immigrants in terms of their background and method of immigration and the process of settlement became a cause of confrontation and conflict, creating a rift between the two groups. The starting point of the fifth period was the reintegration of Korean compatriots in the former Soviet Union and China through the establishment of diplomatic ties between South Korea and the Soviet Union in 1990 and South Korea and China in 1992. Korean compatriots in the communist bloc were deemed unimportant under the Cold War system but began to be included in statistical data after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the ­Soviet Union and China. According to the current status of overseas Korean compatriots (as of 2017) by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the number of overseas Koreans rapidly increased from 2.32 million people in 1991 to 5.54 million in 1995. During this period in particular, more ethnic Koreans living in China entered Korea to find jobs, get married, study, or visit, resulting in an increase in their influence. 70

History & present state of Korean diasporas

At the end of the 1990s, Koreans in their 30s who had lost their jobs and were worried about job insecurity due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis began to look toward immigration to solve their problems. In 1999, 5,267 people immigrated to find a job, a number which had increased to 8,369 by 2000 (Yoon, 2013). These Koreans were mostly in their 30s and lived stable lives as highly educated individuals with professional backgrounds. Given how ­Canada has enacted an immigration policy that gives preference to highly educated professional workers, the country has become a new destination for Korean immigration in lieu of the United States. The large populations of Korean societies in English-speaking countries including ­Canada were in part Korean students who went overseas for study at an early age and students for language courses in the late 1990s. In particular, Canada accepted many students when it carried out the visa exemption agreement with Korea in 1994. The United States also carried out a visa exemption program for Korean students in 2008 so students for language courses went to the United States instead of Canada. As these students stayed for a short period of time, they are usually not considered overseas Koreans and have no sympathy with other Korean compatriots. Although they have little contact with Korean compatriots, they are the main customers of Korean shops, boarding houses, and language training institutes with their economic power that is by no means negligible. And, some of those students are included as new members of Korean society after gaining permanent residence through employment and marriage.

The current state of Korean diaspora As reviewed above, each period of Korean immigration depends on different factors in both Korea and the nations to which they have immigrated. Korean immigrants in each period differ greatly in terms of their motivation to immigrate, their background, and human resources. With this, overseas Koreans in each region throughout the world have been incorporated into the societies of the countries where they have taken up residence and the social aspects they face have been quite different.

Koreans in China Koreans in China (referred to as Joseonjok in South Korea and Chaoxianzu in China) have been undergoing problems such as unemployment and poverty caused by their alienation in the process of China’s economic growth, a decrease in population, and a decline in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture due to population movement and a falling birth rate (Han and Kwon, 1993; Jung, 2009; Kim and Huh, 2001). Population decreases in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture have resulted in several crises such as a brain drain, a decline in the standard of national education, and Koreans becoming part of Han society due to an increase in Han residents in the region. However, Joseonjok who move to large cities like Beijing, Shenyang, Shanghai, and Qingdao manage to adapt themselves to the capitalistic economic environment while engaging in urban-type occupations such as commerce, sales, service, and production work. They have forged a loose urban community through their voluntarily organized associations and racial press media (Yoon, 2003). Thus, agricultural Korean communities in Northeast China, or Dongbei, have been deconstructed and weakened while urban Korean communities have been enlivened. Old-time Joseonjok and Korean newcomers are forming Korean societies in Beijing’s Wangjing, Shenyang’s Xita Street, and Qingdao’s Chengyang District. 71

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Koreans in the Commonwealth of Independent States Ethnic Koreans (called Koryeoins or Koryeo-saram) in the Commonwealth of Independent States including Central Asia have faced a series of problems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They suffer from serious economic difficulties that have arisen from the deconstruction of the Soviet Union in 1989, discrimination resulting from nationalism following the independence of Central Asian states in 1991, the loss of their own native language, and the extinction of national culture. Koreans who have migrated to the Maritime Province and Volgograd undergo hardships in terms of occupation, housing, income, and education (Yoon, 2003). The biggest problems Koryeoins currently face are in regard to education and migrant labor (Sung, 2018). Koryeoins had managed to advance to professional work that requires high education under the former Soviet Union system, but free education was dissolved and public education collapsed as the government’s investment into education reduced sharply after the independence of Central Asian states. The next generation of highly uneducated Koryeoins will be facing a bleak future in an environment of education and employment policies that give preference to local citizens. More and more Koryeoins living primarily in Uzbekistan are immigrating to South Korea to overcome such problems. However, they face difficulties in regard to settling in Korea because their legal status is unstable and their visa sojourn period is limited. They also have trouble escaping from complications that arise due to issues with language, child education, and family dispersion.

Koreans in Japan Koreans in Japan face problems such as discrimination in the workplace, public service, and political participation; rapid assimilation into Japanese society and culture due to an increasing rate of marriage to Japanese citizens; and the weakening of national education (Han, 2002). The number of first- and second-generation Koreans has gradually declined and more third- and fourth-generation Koreans have assimilated into Japanese society by acquiring Japanese citizenship or being born in the country, as is the case with fourth-generation Koreans. Korean society in Japan consists of mainly next-generation Koreans who are less associated with and connected to their motherland. Contrary to this, Koreans who came to Japan after the Korean government’s liberalization of overseas trips in 1989 are called “newcomers.” They breathe vitality into Korean society in Japan with occupations, lifestyles, and identities that are different from those of the older generations of immigrants. Koreans in Japan are still restricted by how they can join Japanese mainstream society: they are not yet guaranteed fundamental human rights like suffrage due to Japanese society’s rightward shift in the 2000s and chauvinism. Their political power cannot help but be limited until the situation is improved by granting permanent expat residents the right to vote. In addition, expulsion agitations and hate speeches by a Japanese chauvinist group continue to seriously threaten Korean immigrants’ life, safety, and right to pursue happiness.

Koreans in the United States Koreans in the United States live in relatively more affluent, liberal surroundings compared to Koreans in other regions. They are seen as having overcome the matter of basic survival to some extent and no longer face racial discrimination in the arena of laws and institutions. Instead, pending issues in Korean society in the United States are apropos of racial identity, exogamy, conflicts between generations, and political participation (Hurh, 1998). 72

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The relationship between Koreans and Black Americans has improved since the 1992 Los Angeles riots but there are still differences in perceptions between the two groups 28 years after the uprising. Koreans do not tend to find themselves in constant, infinite relationships with Black Americans and the two groups only make contact with one another when necessary. Experts warn of a second riot, seeing the current situation as a state of truce. Korean employers are also facing trouble with Latin employees regarding the employment of illegal immigrants, low wages, excessive working hours, and human rights violations, which might ignite new racial conflicts. The trend of change in Korean society in the United States is also due to exogamy referring to marriage outside a racial or social group. According to the United States Census of 2010, 280,000 Koreans, about 17% of 1.7 million Korean people in the United States, had a multiracial background. As 54% of Korean Americans born in the United States marry people of other races, not Koreans, the population of Koreans with a multiracial background will increase continuously (Min and Kim, 2009). Another noticeable trend is aging. As mentioned above, the first-generation Korean immigrants who trailblazed immigration in the early 1970s are now in their 70s or 80s. The number of senior citizen-aged Koreans reported in the United States Census of 2010 was 9%. This figure rapidly increased from 5% in 1990 (Min and Kim, 2009). The aging index of South Korea is 14% as of 2018 and Korean Americans are also predicted to increase in the same direction of their homeland. If newcomers to America decrease and old-timers steadily increase, Korean society in the United States will integrate into mainstream American society, stopping its growth. This prospect will be the same for other Korean societies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as European and Central and South American nations.

Koreans in Canada Because the immigration and settlement of Koreans in Canada has a shorter history than that of America, it can be said to have been in an early stage. Issues pertaining to Korean immigration are still unemployment and discrimination in the labor market. Korean people who recently immigrate to Canada are mostly highly educated professional white-collar workers in their 30s or 40s. As Canadian employers usually require on-site work experience, they seek a conversion to self-employment or technical work, unable to find a job in their major fields. A multitude of primary, middle, and high school students stay for the purpose of overseas study but a considerable number of students have troubles adjusting to society due to an academic slump, emotional instability, and poor education in the family.

Koreans in Central and South America There is a big generation gap in Korean immigration to Central and South America. Descendants of early immigrants to Mexico in the early 20th century have assimilated with local society and culture so it is difficult to find their identity as Korean people while Koreans who immigrated as agricultural workers in the early 1960s and by family invitation and for investment in the 1980s have a distinct identity and pride as Korean people. With this, there is no practical exchange between descendants of early immigrants and latter immigrants and Korean society in Mexico is led primarily by the latter immigrants ( J. Lee, 2007). Korean people in Central and South America including Mexico have laid an economic base mainly through the garment business and paid attention to their children’s education but they have a weak will to settle in those nations. This is mainly because such Central and South American 73

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countries are politically and economically insecure. This has been pointed out as one of the critical problems in Korean societies in those nations. Other problems include too much competition among Korean people as they engage in only a limited type of business and anti-Korean sentiment caused by Korean merchants’ violation of local laws. The fashion business, especially women’s clothing, through which many Koreans living in Brazil and Argentina have laid their economic foundation, has been in a serious crisis ­owing to economic difficulty South American nations have undergone since 2013. In addition, both Bolivians and Chinese illegal immigrants pardoned after the mid-1990s have emerged as strong contenders against Korean garment businessmen in the field of women’s clothing. The economic situation of Korean people has worsened with this as young Korean people cannot get jobs. Additionally, an increased number of Korean people re-immigrate to North America or return to Korea for good (Choi, 2018).

Koreans in Europe Korean people’s immigration to Europe has a relatively shorter history than that of Asia and America and has fewer immigrants. And, there are more short-term residents. Korean immigration to Europe varies by period: adopted orphans after the Korean War, mine workers and female nurses to West Germany, student immigration and resident employee work immigration. The most important groups of immigrants are the miners and nurses to West Germany, students, and resident employees. Korean immigrants to Germany, ­Switzerland, and Austria are mostly those with a background as miners and nurses while Korean immigrants in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain are mostly students and sojourning employees at branches of Korean trading firms. Germany had the largest Korean population up to the 1980s, but the UK has been the center of Korean immigration since the 1990s. Unlike American countries, European nations have not accepted the immigrants actively so Korean societies in Europe will not see any tremendous growth. However, tourists, students, and sojourning employees and their families will increase since trade will be invigorated by the Free Trade Agreement settled between South Korea and the EU. Thus, Korean societies will attain a gradual growth from some of those Koreans who will settle in these regions.

Koreans in Australia and New Zealand Korean society in Australia experienced severe conflicts between old-comers and newcomers. The old-comers had entered with a tourist visa between the 1960s and the 1980s and stayed in the country illegally but were later pardoned by the Australian government. The newcomers, on the other hand, had entered the country under a form of investment or business immigration beginning in 1986. Like Koreans in America, a large number of ­Koreans in Australia are self-employed. They suffer from low earnings as their customers are mostly Korean compatriots and they engage in limited types of business. Given how their ­tourist-related businesses are heavily dependent on Korean tourists, they are vulnerable and sensitive to business fluctuations in Korea. Korean society in New Zealand has a shorter history and smaller population than that in Australia. The number of Koreans who re-immigrated to Australia, America, and Canada is increasing as they have not been able to get a break from the long period of economic depression due to little domestic demand. Korean society is undergoing difficulty as many Koreans re-immigrate to Australia for their children’s college education. 74

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Evolution of Korean diaspora As mentioned above, the Korean diaspora, which began in the middle of the 19th century, has been changing or evolving in direction, membership, and pattern for over 150 years. First, in terms of direction, the Korean diaspora was an “out-migration” from the mid-19th century to the end of the 1980s, going abroad from the Korean Peninsula. Then, from the late 1980s, the return of overseas Koreans, foreign workers, marriage immigrants, and international students transformed South Korea into an immigrant-receiving country. From now on, the Korean diaspora will become two-way migration going in and out of Korea. Second, in relation to the members, the Korean diaspora was the migration of Koreans at the beginning, but Korean diaspora’s leading role changed from Koreans to non-Korean immigrants to Korea from the early 1990s. As of January, 2020, foreign residents exceeded 2.4 million people, accounting for 5% of the South Korean population. The multicultural family formed through international marriages between Koreans and foreigners passed one million in 2018, and the cumulative number of naturalized foreigners was over 200,000. As South Korea has transformed itself from a mono-ethnic and mono-cultural society to a multi-ethnic and multicultural one, the Korean diaspora has become a concept that refers to what Koreans experience while living abroad and what immigrants experience while living in Korea. Third, in the aspect of form, in the early stages, the Korean diaspora took the form of “ethnic dispersal,” involuntarily immigrating due to tragic experiences in the home country. The next step was to form a “network” between overseas Koreans residing in countries around the world formed by onward migration from the home country to intermediate countries and to the destination countries. At this stage, concepts such as “Korean ethnic network community” and “global Korean network” were proposed by scholars and policy makers to utilize the network between overseas Koreans and their home country for mutual benefits and prosperity. As the next step, Yoon (2019) applies the concept of platform to ­Korean diaspora. As a platform, Korean diaspora produces a win-win ecosystem where overseas Koreans around the world and Koreans in the home country interact and exchange with each other on the basis of global Korean networks and create new opportunities and values. The development of transportation and information and the rise of Korea as a global leader facilitate this kind of platform industry. The best example of this would be the World Korean Business Convention where Korean entrepreneurs around the world participate to locate buyers and sellers and make business transactions expanding economic activities. It started in 2002 and it has continued to grow in the number of participants and business transactions. Therefore, Korean diaspora has evolved from ethnic dispersal to network and to the platform as the time and space of Korean diaspora has continued to expand over 150 years.

Onward migration and multilateral coethnic relationships The migration of Koreans has not been unilinear nor strictly based on permanent settlement in their first host country. Overseas Koreans have instead continued migrating for better ­opportunities, and have repeatedly settled in many countries. Links between overseas ­Korean communities have been strengthened through this onward migration. A good example of this pattern is the Latin American case. Although collective immigration to Latin American countries (planned by the Korean government in the 1960s) was originally carried out for the purpose of cultivating local farmlands, Korean immigrants immediately remigrated to big cities, such as São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Asuncion. After engaging in 75

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peddling occupations, called vende (“vendor,” in English) in big cities, some migrants developed apparel businesses that became their bread-and-butter jobs (Son, 2007). When political and economic situations in Latin American countries became unstable, a large number of Koreans remigrated to the United States and Canada. Based on their job experience in apparel businesses in Latin America, they were able to run garment manufacturing firms in major U.S. cities. The “Java Market” in Los Angeles is the most successful Korean fashion district in the United States (Yoon, 2017). We can also find this type of onward migration elsewhere. Both miners and nurses dispatched to West Germany in the early 1960s re-immigrated to America, Canada, Australia, and Britain and played a decisive role in laying the economic and cultural foundation for Korean communities. They have revitalized overseas Korean communities through their success as entrepreneurs, scholars, and pastors, overcoming early hardships with their strong ability to maintain a livelihood and solidarity with other Koreans. Also, both soldiers and technicians sent to the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973 re-immigrated to the Middle East, Southeast Asian nations, and Australia after the end of the war and laid the foundation for Korean communities in those countries. Due to onward migration of overseas Koreans with different migration periods and backgrounds, transnational networks were formed between the home country, transit countries, and the host countries, and the overseas Korean community has developed complex symbiotic relationships between old comers and newcomers. Since the 1990s, the migration of Korean Chinese, Koreans from the Commonwealth of Independent States, North Korean defectors, and Korean nationals has accelerated, and Koreans from different nationalities coexist in overseas Korean communities to form multilateral co-ethnic relations. Even if they are the same Korean in ethnicity, they are no longer considered a single homogeneous ethnic group due to differences in national origin, life experience, and legal status. Their concept of ethnic identity and their adaptation and social integration patterns also show significant differences. This phenomenon became apparent in the 2000s, and it has become difficult to explain with the conventional concept of ethnicity, which categorizes people on the basis of presumed similarities in common language, ancestry, history, culture, and identity. We need to pay attention to the presence of multiple sub-groups in overseas Korean communities according to country of origin and nationality and the formation of multilateral relationships within the same ethnic group.

Summary and conclusion The Korean diaspora, formed in different regions and in different periods and later by successive rounds of immigration, has resulted in the creation of supranational networks among their motherland, the countries they have traveled through, and the nations in which they finally reside, even though it was not intended. Overseas Koreans of our time have lived more dynamically with flexible, multiple identities in a supranational space where time and space remain condensed thanks to the development of transportation, information, and communication. The second and later generations of overseas Koreans were brought up on the economic basis the first generation had laid with their blood, sweat, and tears and its members have either grown into the main pillars of the nations in which they reside. In most countries, the successive generations of Koreans have achieved at least the middle-class positions with high levels of education. However, as the mainstreaming of the next generation of ­Koreans ­progresses, their ethnic culture and identity weakens, and instead the assimilation to 76

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mainstream culture accelerates. Interracial or interethnic marriage is quite common among the later generations; the children of mixed heritages tend to adopt the culture and identity of the dominant ethnic group of the host society. However, new conditions have emerged since the late 20th century that could slow this general trend. Due to globalization and informatization, overseas Koreans have crossed the barriers of time and space, living transnational lives. And their identities have become flexible and multiple in forms that are not limited to either the home country or the country of residence. As mentioned above, the migration, economic life, and family life of Korean Chinese are taking place in Northeast Asia as a transnational space, and Korean Americans born and raised in the United States are working in multinational companies that have entered Korea. Therefore, the transnational network between the home country and the country of residence can evoke the desire among the younger generation of overseas Koreans to strengthen their ties with the home country and to utilize their networks with their home country for their career development. It is difficult to predict the future course of Korean diaspora because there are countervailing forces at work. Mainstreaming of overseas Koreans will weaken Korean ethnic identity and networks with the home country while transnationalism will strengthen ethnic ties and solidarity. Also, the rising standard of living in the home country will reduce people’s motivation to immigrate while the current bleak situation of Korea’s young people may encourage them to follow the footstep of their predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, it is certain that the future Korean diaspora will become more complex in terms of direction, form, and members. Also, it will continue to affect significantly people in both the home country and the host country, and there will be people who actively utilize it for their career development. In a sense, in the 21st century, we need to change our common perception of diaspora as being ethnic dispersal, homelessness, and disconnectedness to network, development, cooperation, multiculture, and creativity. The study of diaspora also needs to uncover and expand its positive aspects by revealing its contributions to human civilizations and developing plans and strategies of utilizing diaspora for sustainable development of the world.

Bibliography Cho, J.S. (2009). Housing history of Sakhalin returnees in Ansan Gohyangmaeul. Journal of the Korean Housing Association, 20(4), 103–112. Choi, K.J. (2018). Korean society in Brazil, its problem and prospect. In I.J. Yoon (Ed.), The Present Situation of Korean Overseas Societies and Policy Tasks (ch. 7). Seongnam: Book Korea. Han, K.K. (2002). History and present status of national dispersion and migration: Japan. In Research Institute for National Integration (Ed.), New Concept and Strategy for National Integration (pp. 91–149). Chuncheon: Hallym University Press. Han, S.B. & T.H. Kwon. (1993). Joseonjok in Yanbian, China: Social Structure and Transformation. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Hurh, W.M. (1998). The Korean Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Jung, S.C. (2009). Joseonjok in China and Their Future. Seoul: New Humanity. Kim, K.I. Kang-il & M.C. Huh. (2001). Joseonjok in China: Cultural Predominance of Society and Its Development Strategy. Yanbian: Yanbian People’s Press. Korea-Europe Society. (2003). History of Korean People in Europe – Mainly in France and Germany. Overseas Koreans Foundation Research Paper. Seoul: Dahae Publishing. Kwon, T.H. (1996). Korean People in the World. Seoul: Board of National Unification. Lee, J.D. (2007). History of Korean immigration to Mexico and its present status. In National Institute of Korean History (Eds.), History of the Korean People in Central and South America (pp. 175–213). Gwacheon: National Institute of Korean History.

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In-Jin Yoon Lee, J.K. (2007). Korean people’s early immigration to Mexico and its Korean society. In National Institute of Korean History (Eds.), History of the Korean People in Central and South America (pp. 19–57). Gwacheon: National Institute of Korean History. Lee, M.W. (1996). Korean People in the World – Japan. Seoul: Ministry of Unification. Min, P.G. & C. Kim. (2009). Patterns of intermarriages and in-marriages among native-born Asian Americans. International Migration Review, 43, 447–470. Oh, I.H. (2010). The matter of repatriating Koreans in Japan to North Korea. In National Institute of Korean History (Eds.), History of the Korean People in Japan (pp. 42–81). Gwacheon: National Institute of Korean History. Son, J.S. (2007). Agricultural migration of Koreans to South America in the 1960s. In National Institute of Korean History (Eds.), Korean Experience in Latin America (pp. 138–155). Gwacheon: ­National Institute of Korean History. Sung, D.K. (2018). The present situation and problem of Uzbekistan Goryeoin: Focusing on education and migrant labor. In I.J. Yoon (Eds.), The Current Status of Overseas Korean Compatriots and Policy Tasks (ch. 4). Seongnam: Book Korea. Yoon, I.J. (2003). Korean Diaspora. Seoul: Korea University Press. Yoon, I.J. (2013). The History of Korean People’s Migration to the World. Paju: Nanam. Yoon, I.J. (2017). Onward migration of overseas Koreans and pluralization of the overseas Korean community. In I.J. Yoon & Y.H. Jeong (Eds.), The Korean Diaspora: The Sourcebook (pp. 3–22). Seongnam: Academy of Korean Studies Press.

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5 FAMILY FORMATION AND PARENTING PRACTICES AMONG NEW CHINESE IMMIGRANTS IN SINGAPORE Wang Jun and Min Zhou “New” Chinese immigrants, or xinyimin (新移民 in Mandarin), generally refer to emigrants from Mainland China to different parts of the globe after China implemented its economic reform and open-door policy in late 1978 (Zhou, 2017). New Chinese immigration to ­Singapore is a contemporary phenomenon emerging after Singapore and China normalized diplomatic relations in 1990. Unlike their earlier coethnics migrating to Singapore, the newcomers from Mainland China are predominately young with a balanced sex ratio. Most of them are highly educated, English proficient, and well integrated into the middle class of the host society as scientists, engineers, educators, professionals, and entrepreneurs. As they strive to get resettled and move ahead in the labor market, many have formed families and raise children. A typical xinyimin family is made up of two full-time working parents and one to two young children with the occasional presence of transnational grandparent(s). One of the most urgent resettlement issues that concerns young Chinese immigrant parents is their children’s education. In this chapter, we offer a descriptive analysis of family formation and parenting practices among xinyimin based on data collected from face-to-face interviews, video interviews through social media platform, and numerous hours of participant observations in the new Chinese immigrant community in Singapore between June 2017 and December 2019. We first provide a historical overview of Chinese immigration to Singapore as impacted by societal transformations in both Singapore and China. We then describe the unique opportunities and challenges have created for new Chinese immigrants as they seek to start families. Third, we zoom in on examining our central question: how have young xinyimin parents responded to and coped with resettlement challenges and navigated Singapore’s competitive education system to ensure their children’s academic success? We conclude by discussing some of the unintended consequences of overbearing parenting and highlighting important implications for understanding immigrant education.

Chinese immigration to Singapore Singapore is a city-state located at the heart of the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia, but geopolitically East Asia, whose civilization is arguably traceable to ancient China (Kwok, 1999). It is both a Chinese-majority society and a multiethnic society, comprised of 74.4 79

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Chinese, 13.4% Malay, 9% Indian, and 3.2% others in 2019 (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). The country was part of the British Straits Settlements between 1826 and 1963, gained independence from the British in 1963 as a part of Malaysia but was later separated from Malaysia to become an independent republic in 1965. As a nation of immigrants, Singapore has sustained a long history of migration.

Chinese immigration in historical perspective The history of Chinese migration to South East Asia in general, and to Singapore in particular, is long and complex. Dating back in the 13th century long before Western colonists set foot on the region, Chinese trader and merchants from Fujian and Guangdong provinces of South China had already established a significant presence in Southeast Asia through maritime trade and created overseas Chinese communities to accommodate diasporic living and facilitate circular migration (Unger, 1944). In the 19th and 20th centuries, massive migration from South China to Southeast Asia became especially intensive, partly pulled by the labor demand for agricultural and industrial development in new Western colonies and partly pushed by natural disasters, famines, and sustained domestic rebellions, riots, and repression (Ee, 1961; Wang, 1991). Social networks built by Chinese traders and merchants and connections to diasporic communities facilitated the migration of Chinese laborers. According to historical record, an increasing number of Chinese emigrants, with a hope for survival and economic betterment, took the voyages heading for Singapore and South East Asian locations during 19th century, though some were aware of the potential risks of hardships and even death (Ee, 1961). In 1819, Stamford Raffles founded Singapore as an entrepôt and a regional hub for British colonial interests in investment, trade, and industrial development (Wong, 1978). The British colony’s laissez-faire economy and unrestricted immigration policy supported the recruitment of cheap labor and further sped up emigration from China (Tan, 2007). As a result, Chinese immigrants arrived in Singapore in continuous large numbers either from the Straits area in the region or directly from migrant hometowns in South China. It was estimated that the number of Chinese immigrants in Singapore increased from about 3,000 in 1820 to 50,000 in 1860, where the Chinese constituted a majority (61%) of the then population. Singapore’s first census, undertaken in 1871, showed that Chinese were the largest ethnic group at 58% (Warren, 2003). At the turn of the 20th century, Chinese population more than tripled (164,000 in 1901), making up the absolute majority at 72%, and the proportion has stayed at over 70% ever since. By the end of World War II, the Chinese population grew to 730,000, accounting for 78% of the total population (Ee, 1961). But from the end of World War II to 1990, immigration from mainland China ebbed to a trickle. The earlier population of Chinese immigrants in Singapore had a highly skewed sex ratio. For example, the 1826 figures recorded a total population of 13,750, with 5,747 Chinese males and only 341 Chinese females (Wright and Cartwright, 1908). However, the decrease of sex ratio over time was remarkable, from five (males) to one (female) in 1891, to 2:1 in 1921, and further to 1:1 in 1947. The declining sex ratio attested to the significance of female migration to Singapore and implied family formation and natural birth. Moreover, most of the earlier Chinese immigrants hailed from rural areas of Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan provinces. Except for a small merchant class, most were poor and uneducated peasants. They occupied low-end jobs as indentured laborers and servants, shopkeepers, restaurant workers, fishermen, porters, and longshoremen (Lai and Mak, 1992). 80

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Post-1990 Chinese immigration New Chinese immigration to Singapore is part of the global phenomenon that has emerged since China’s open door in the late 1970s. However, there were few emigrants from Mainland China to the Singapore in the 1980s. After Singapore and China normalized diplomatic relations in 1990, Chinese immigration surged as driven by economic reform in China and Singapore’s immigration policy that favored and recruited skilled Chinese of mainland origin. In terms of context of exit, the Chinese government removed institutional obstacles, allowing Chinese citizens to reunite with relatives overseas. The government also relaxed its policies on studying and training overseas and proactively sponsored the exchange of students and scholars, many of whom later became international migrants. For example, about 2.25 million students were sent abroad between 1978 and 2011, and more than half obtained employment and immigrant visas upon completion of their studies (Zhou and Liu, forthcoming).1 In terms of context of reception, Singapore has been a preferred destination for new Chinese immigrants for its economic prosperity, political stability, cultural affinity, and geographical proximity to Mainland China. The city-state has been founded on British parliamentary democracy but has featured an East and West blended culture, where meritocracy serves as social norm for talent selection, leadership appointment, and labor recruitment, in economy and society (Quah, 2010). The government also adopted a multiculturalism policy to ensure racial harmony based on its “founding races” of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others, or the CMIO model, and nurture a cohesive Singaporean national identity (Yeoh, 2004). However, native-born ethnic Chinese constitute the core of the mainstream society and exert critical power and influence on political, social, and economic decisions (Zhou and Liu, 2016). After independence in 1965, the Singapore government adopted liberal economic policies to promote trade and foreign investment, with a focus on developing the manufacturing industry to resolve the then high unemployment. The government also relaxed its immigration policy in 1968 to attract foreign workers to meet the labor demand for development supplement the manpower. Within only three decades, Singapore not only solved the urgent issue of survival but also achieved modernization and industrialization. However, since the late 1980s, Singapore has confronted with two main challenges: the rapidly declining fertility rate, especially in the racial majority group, and the urgent need to enhance its economic competitiveness in the global economy. The total fertility rate decreased from 2.62 in the 1970s to 1.57 in the 1990s (and further to 1.2 in 2009 and 1.14 in 2018), which is extremely below the natural population replacement level of 2.1 (Sun, 2012). The rapid decline in the ethnic Chinese population as a proportion of the total population and the urgent need to import highly skilled labor to meet the city-state’s aspiration to be competitive in the global economy propelled the government to adopt a liberalized immigration policy in the late 1980s. A direct and visible outcome of this liberalized immigration policy is the rapid influx of new Chinese immigrants into Singapore, especially in the years from 1990 to 2010 (Saw, 2012). New Chinese immigrants arguably share similar cultural heritage and tradition, language, values and norms, and behavioral patterns with the core group (Zhou and Wang, 2019). However, they display distinct demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, which make them fundamentally different from earlier Chinese immigrants and native-born Chinese Singaporeans. First and foremost, xinyimin are mostly fluent bilingual in Mandarin and English and bicultural. They are well educated and highly skilled; many have attained advanced 81

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degree beyond a bachelor’s degree. They include professionals working in universities, high tech industries, health and finance sectors; investors and entrepreneurs; and students, some of whom came to Singapore to study on Singapore government scholarships, who decided to stay after attaining their indented goal of study.2 Research shows that highly skilled immigrants with at least a university degree in Singapore are above 75% and the majority is ­Chinese of mainland origin. Xinyimin are better educated, have more “portable skills,” and have higher incomes than native Singaporeans. They are overrepresented in higher education and research and development, and a large percentage of this group is also alumni members of the best universities in Singapore. These new Chinese immigrants are socially organized based on their professional and business fields and alma maters in China (Liu, 2014). New immigrants are also much younger than the general host population and have a balanced sex ratio. Furthermore, xinyimin hail from all over China rather than solely from the traditional migrant hometowns (qiaoxiang, 侨乡) in South China. Last but not least, xinyimin are more inclined to resettle in Singapore, making home in their host country rather than returning to China, even though many have numerous opportunities to practice transnationalism to capitalize on economic opportunities in China (Zhou and Liu, forthcoming). In the 1990s, new Chinese immigrants were favorably received in the host society. While the arrival of xinyimin reverted the declining demographic trend and replenished the ethnic Chinese population, a sizeable, highly visible, and socioeconomically mobile newcomer group, along with the establishment of the xinyimin community, has caused social backlash among native Singaporeans, Chinese Singaporeans in particular (Liu, 2014). Natives voiced their discontent and resentment toward xinyimin and even organized protest rallies in public, viewing xinyimin as unfair economic competitors, taking professional jobs and university seats from natives, and a cultural threat to dilute the cohesiveness of the “multicultural” society (Yeoh and Lin, 2013; Liu, 2014). Given Singapore’s socio-political circumstance, xinyimin are relatively weak in collectively resisting the backlash because they are an extremely heterogeneous group lacking a well-organized ethnic community with vested interests (Liu, 2014). Favorable reception has turned to be hostile since 2013 as the government has adopted a series of new measures to restrict immigration in response to populist discontent (Yeoh and Lam, 2016; Zhan and Zhou, 2019). Xinyimin’s lack of political power in making claims to their rights alienates them and prevents them from taking deeper roots in the Singapore society. Many of them take advantage of the ease of internet communication and convenience of travel to rekindle ties with sending communities. While temporal or spatial connections with China present new challenges for immigrant integration, one urgent concern at the present moment that many xinyimin share among themselves is childrearing in Singapore, particularly children’s education.

Forming and starting families: challenges and opportunities Singapore’s immigration policy deliberately selected young talents, favor those of Chinese descent, including international students. Over the course of one to two decades, those arriving in Singapore in the 1990s and at the turn of the 21st century have started to form families and have children, despite significant delays in both marriage and children birth compared to the native population. The majority of xiyimin families are transitioning from couple-only families to nuclear families with children. For example, the earlier cohort of post-1990 Chinese immigrants arrived in Singapore in the early 1990s, whose children have already transitioned into adulthood and the labor market. Data from our own study shows that, as of 2018, the new millennium cohort, those arriving in Singapore in the 2000s, 82

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constituted the majority of xinyimin, mostly in their 30s and 40s at prime working age. Most got married in their late 20s to early 30s. Both marital partners in xinyimin families are salaried professionals pursuing their own career development, and have generally achieved higher socioeconomic status and are economically more successful than those in native families. Because of career demand, they also delayed having children. At the time of our study, many xinyimin families were made up of two full-time working parents and one to two young children with the occasional presence of transnational grandparent(s). It should be pointed out that families with grandparents present are quasi-extended families, where the parents of xinyimin often joined the family on visitor visas (either short term or long term) to provide childcare. In some other cases, xinyimin send their infants and toddlers back to China to be cared for by grandparents, which takes the form of a split extended household (Zhou and Wang, 2019). Quite a number of our interviewees were from quasi-extended families, where their parents held long-term or short-term visas to care for grandchildren. In the case where parents were ineligible for long-term visa application, xiyimin had to send their infant children back to China to be cared by grandparents there. Ray Zhang was a 29-year-old Permanent Resident (PR). He was a father of two young children, three years and four months old, respectively. Zhang said, When my first daughter was born, I held a student visa and was not able to apply for a long-term visit pass for my parents, not to mention my in-laws. One year after giving birth to our first daughter, my wife returned to work, and we had to send our baby back to China and seek our parents’ help with childcare. Currently, we are still not eligible for applying for our parents’ long-term visit. So older daughter has to be in her grandparents’ care in China. We have missed her most important stage of development from year 1 to 3. We are now considering to bring her back and hire a live-in helper.

Immigrant status as a constraining factor Immigrant status is a critical factor influencing family formation. Citizenship or PR status enables new Chinese immigrant families to settle down in Singapore. For those xinyimin on temporary work visas, the prospect for resettlement is uncertain and contingent upon employers (Zhan and Zhou, 2019).3 Although there is flexibility to practice transnational living or remigrate to a third country, having one family member holding non-immigrant visas or even PR status would make the whole family’s resettlement uncertain. In fact, a visible proportion of the new Chinese immigrant families is in mixed immigrant and citizenship statuses. As Singapore’s immigration policy is tightened up, making it difficult for temporary visa holders to obtain PR and for PR to get naturalized and match more stringent criteria for family reunification, many xinyimin find themselves in a situation of increased uncertainty, which compels them to postpone marriage and childbearing. Despite immigration restriction, nonetheless, the Singapore government has also adopted a policy to support immigrant integration (Zhan et al., 2020). New Chinese immigrants, especially those who are highly educated and skilled, hold professional occupations, and have established middle-class status, and most importantly, PR or citizenship statuses are generally able to make relatively rapid psychological adjustment to the host society, and most cope well with multiple demands in the process of adaptation. They also tend to develop an informed and balanced view of their host society and strive to find ways to surmount barriers to integration. Through formation of families, new Chinese immigrants are adapting to 83

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new norms of socialization and interaction with natives and institutions in the host society. Children’s education becomes the single most important area of concern in their process of integration. Mr. Lin, 49, was a PR holder and did transnational business with China. Lin had two children, a daughter in first year of secondary school and a son in grade two of primary school. He said, We first-generation immigrant are pioneers. We sacrifice our best time or even better life and business chance to migrate and settle down here. Our primary goal is to make sure that our children obtain quality education here and beyond … it is definitely difficult for our generation to integrate into the local society … but our children’s education and our expectation for them to thrive through education make us willingly to use the best resources and efforts to settle down and adapt here.

Language and socio-cultural setting Singapore features a unique East and West hybrid cultural setting. As a multiracial nation-state decolonized from Britain, Singapore’s government, legal structures and social systems are highly Westernized and basically modeled after the British parliamentary democracy. Four main languages—English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil—are officially recognized and used. Although Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are widely used in respective racial and ethnic communities, English is the official language that functions to bridge the city-nation’s multiracial and multiethnic groups and connect the country to the globe. It is used as the main medium of communication in politics, public administration, finance, and business, and as the medium of instruction in education (Chew, 2017). The dominance of English presents a significant language barrier not only to foreigners but also to natives who are not proficient in the language. Most of the xinyimin migrated to Singapore either after they completed their polytechnic or college education in Singapore or elsewhere in Western countries, especially English-speaking countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. They are familiar with Western culture, language, and way of thinking. Most are fluent English-Chinese bilingual. However, the languages that they speak, as well as their cultural expression and behavioral ways, distinguish them from natives. They speak English with a Chinese accent and Mandarin with little rural accent, and their beliefs and behavioral patterns are based more on Chinese standards than Western standards. As Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew once remarked, [A]lthough we are Chinese and speak Mandarin, we are different in our work methods and mental make-up. We are westernized in our system and working style. We do not depend on ‘guanxi’ or relationships. Our standards and attitudes to the rule of law are completely different. (Straits Times, August 14, 2009) Such cultural distinctions often create problems of integration for xinyimin, who are presumably similar to members of the core cultural group of Singaporean society but are socially categorized as the “other.” In our participant observations on everyday life in hawker centers (food courts), markets, and community events, we noticed visible co-ethnic tension and subtle prejudice from native Chinese Singaporeans toward xinyimin, which may have arisen from two main reasons. First, the Singapore state was vehemently anti-communist and deliberately distanced itself from communist China during both countries’ early years of nation-building 84

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(China in the 1950s and 1960s and Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s). ­Intertwined with a colonial legacy, native Chinese Singaporeans developed a superiority complex. They shared a distorted perception of China and Chinese people as impoverished, backward, and uncivilized. Those who were English-educated disdained the ­Chinese-speaking world in and out of Singapore. A young and highly educated native Chinese Singaporean man was not shy about expressing his feelings in an interview. He told us that when a xinyimin asked him for directions in Chinese, he would answer straightly, “sorry, I don’t speak Chinese, and this is Singapore.” Second, the rapid increase in Chinese immigration to Singapore during the decades of the 1990s and 2000s has generated severe social backlash. Many Chinese Singaporeans felt particularly threatened by xinyimin because they looked like them yet did not match old perceptions. Xinyimin fared much better in the job market than natives because they possess stronger human, social, and financial capital, and they were from a rising China. Natives felt overwhelmed by the continuous xiyimin influx, considered newcomers stealing their jobs away, and exerted burden on the city-state’s public resources, especially housing, healthcare, education, and transportation. A deeper concern was that the integration of xinyimin would dilute Singaporean’s national identity (Yeoh and Lin, 2013). In fact, in response to immigration backlash, the Singapore government has reformed its immigration policy in recent years to make it more stringent for foreigners to obtain work visas, for work visas holders to apply for PR, and for permanent residents to become naturalized. Meanwhile, the government has also implemented a series of policies to differentiate migrants further from natives in terms of rights and entitlements, including access to public education resources (Zhan et al., 2020). Although there are various policy initiatives to promote immigrant integration, bridge social differences, and ease native-immigrant tensions, social boundaries between xinyimin and Chinese Singaporeans remain rigid, if not insurmountable. In this dynamic socio-cultural setting, xinyimin must make greater effort to maintain their professional jobs and secure their incomes to overcome their disadvantaged immigrant status. For young parents, they must invest more than their native counterparts on children’s education.

Structural opportunities in education Despite challenges, Singapore’s institutional structure, especially the education system, presents unique opportunities for meeting xinyimin aspirations. For many xinyimin, immigration to Singapore oftentimes is not only for their own career pursuit, but also for their children to obtain high standard and quality education. As such, education is at the center of family life among xinyimin. Unlike China’s education system which is highly competitive, selecting only a small percentage of students for first-rate primary, middle, and high schools, and universities, Singapore’s education system is internationally recognized as competitive but with relatively equal access and opportunity (Siu, 1992). The governing elites of Singapore strongly believe the principal of meritocracy and frequently justify that more educational resources should be provided to those with natural talent and strong motivation (Tan, 2007). The education system is built upon the principal of meritocracy that emphasizes on the recognition and maximization of individual students’ talent and ability and provides all students with merit-based opportunities. Academic performance and outcomes, measured mainly by examinations, are rewarded in the job market. The system entails a series of high-stake examinations and tracking mechanisms, such as Gifted Education Programme (GEP) and Primary School Leave Examination (PSLE), are designed to screen and select the 85

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seemingly best students, through which students with diverse test results were channeled to different tracks and provided with differentiated education resources. For example, the social studies curricula for students in the three main tracks—the elite Integrated Programme, the mainstream Express and Normal Academic tracks, and the vocational Normal Technical track—differ significantly in terms of their curricular goals, content, skills, and values with important implications for chances of getting into good universities and future job prospects (Ho, 2012). As a result, the system also creates educational arm race for competing the superior educational resources, while engendering tremendous social anxieties among both native and immigrant parents (Gee, 2012). This meritocracy-based education system clearly resonates with middle-class Chinese immigrants who not only seize the opportunities offered by the system, but also are willing to invest their best effort and resources in children’s schooling. These parents understand that success at school may be facilitated by the equal opportunity, but that families need to put in additional resources—money, time, and effort. This is because xinyimin, even those who are of middle-class backgrounds, are constrained by various policies barriers and a lack of social resources and support in the host society. In order to ensure their children’s academic success, xinyimin parents proactively engage in intensive parenting, just like what middle-class parents do in China and many Chinese diasporic communities around the world. Research has shown that children of immigrants in Singapore, of which mainland Chinese immigrant is a main group, have achieved significantly higher level of education than their native-born peers (Cheng, 2017).

Intensive parenting: strategies and practices A Confucian cultural tradition that values education interacts with a set of structural conditions in Singapore, which has led new Chinese immigrants to engage in intensive parenting. Resourceful in human and financial capital, xinyimin have been able to develop effective strategies and practices to address structural challenges and capture opportunities for promoting their children’s learning. The following section elaborates on the strategies and practices that xinyimin parents engage in school, at home, and in the community.

Parenting strategies and practices in school Research has shown that parental involvement in school contributed to children’s better performance and higher academic outcomes (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997; Henderson and Mapp, 2002). Chinese immigrant parents generally value schools’ role in a child’s cognitive, academic, and socio-emotional development (Bankston and Zhou, 2002). For xinyimin in Singapore, first, they show great respect to schools and teachers (Siu and Feldman, 1996), though they do not see themselves as partners of the school system. They are also willing to engage with school and teachers to participate in school-based activities. They respect school’s rules and guidelines and value teachers’ comments and evaluation on children, but they only take the initiative to contact school and teacher when their child has a real problem. For example, we found that xinyimin parents emphasized that children should complete what school require them to do. However, we also found that only a few parents communicated with their children’s teachers regularly. Second, xinyimin parents tend to support and cooperate with teachers and school. They are responsive and cooperative in “joining a Parent-Teacher Association,” “volunteering at school,” and “attending class events.” Some of our parent interviewees also specified that they volunteered to help on school events, such 86

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as festival celebrations, field trips, and recycling activity, and were supportive and responsive to school calls for donations of money, old books, and time. Third, xinyimin parents see a clear-cut division of responsibility and work between schools and parents. They tend to take a more pragmatic approach and restrict their involvement in school insofar as they see it relevant for children’s education or making their children look good. Regarding the involvement in school’s governance and parent committee work, most parents would like to remain “distant assistants” because they believed that leadership, administration, and management should rest with the school.

Parenting on the home front Families are at the heart of responsibilities and decision-making in deploying resources. Education is central to the Chinese immigrant family. Chinese immigrants strongly believe in parents’ significant role in children’s academic achievement or school success (Chao, 1996). Besides putting an exceptionally high value on education, these immigrant parents provide children with various forms of extra resources and support (Markose and Simpson, 2016). They also tend to directly engage in children’s learning at home, which was one of the most important factors that contributes to children’s school success (Louie, 2001). Research specifically suggests that Chinese immigrant parents tend to use skill-based educational approaches, and formal teaching method, such as assigning extra workbooks at home and doing homework together with children (Li, 2006). Specifically, xinyimin parents in Singapore adopt five main strategies with related practices at home. First, xinyimin parents prioritize children’s school choice, in particular primary school, among other education-related issues. Given that primary schooling in Singapore’s education system determines children’s tracking outcome and future university enrolment, xinyimin parents make every possible effort to get their children into reputable primary schools. For example, they bought housing in expensive neighborhoods where good public schools are located; they applied for volunteer vacancy in either a targeted school or a neighborhood organization, or both, to earn a better chance for their child’s primary school application. Second, xinyimin parents put great emphasis on children’s reading. Reading competency in the English language is particularly highly valued in Singapore. Almost all parent interviewees stressed the importance of English language as a medium of instruction and instrumental role in school learning. They fully understand their own deficiency in the English language (e.g., accented and weak in reading and writing) and its associated disadvantages in career and life chance as immigrants, and they thus stress that their children’s English and reading and writing competency need to be continually improved. They often have a good understanding about different levels of reading lists, reading materials, private tuition contents about reading, and various online reading resources. They tend to boast on their collection of books and what they are doing to promote children’s reading. For example, they read for children and accompany children’s reading especially when children were young. They also guide children to do intensive reading, often by reading a certain book themselves first and then teaching their children. Third, xinyimin parents also invest heavily on private tuition and various after-school academic and enrichment programs with an aim to provide children with extra tutoring that will give children’s learning a head start, a pattern similarly practiced in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States by Chinese immigrant parents (Louie, 2001; Zhou and Kim, 2006). In the meantime, they pay as much time and attention as possible with their good human and cultural capital to children’s learning at home, which not only 87

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enhance the effects of private tuition, but stretch children’s learning to a higher level. We also observed that a certain number of parents were critical of supplementary education. They believed that children’ competitive advantage lied not in whether they received supplementary or additional tutoring, but in the nature and quality of the tutoring. Quite some parents who have cultivated high achieving children did not follow the “mainstream gateway,” i.e., hiring private tuition. Rather, they relied on their own cultural and human capital to guide and teach children. These parents were generally more rational, knew more clearly about what children needed the most, helped children plan time more efficiently, and facilitated children with more of their “spare” time, through which children were actually encouraged to learn by themselves and develop their own interests and potential competency. Fourth, xinyimin parents generally invest on children’s extracurricular activities and develop skills in the areas of musical instrument, sports, and arts. They believe that such extracurricular activities enrich their children’s development. While holding high expectations and standards for their children academic achievement, they want their children to be versatile and well-rounded, and thus highly committed to investing in their children’s non-formal curriculum. However, our observations and interviews showed that in many cases the development of children’s non-academic skills only stayed with parent’s good intention and plan. In practice, only a small number of children were able to strike a balance between rigorous academic work and extracurricular activities. Fifth, xinyimin parents tend to organize and structure children’s time schedule to make the flow of various programs smooth in order to complete multiple academic and non-­ academic tasks. We found that most xinyimin families have either a detailed timetable or at least a daily routine to structure children’s time and keep everything in progress accordingly. This well-structured timetable, often made visible at home, such as on children’s learning space, and to all members of the family, testified parental involvement. For both school and after-school education, parents were willing to spend a lot of time to supervise and teach children. Our interviews also showed that almost all participants actively involved themselves in children’s learning, ranging from less than half hour to more than three hours daily, to help their children with homework and extra academic work in math and reading at home.

Education-relevant engagement in the community Researcher has contended that achievement is best understood in the environmental contexts of children’s everyday lives, which include the home and community settings (Clark, 1990; Zhou and Kim, 2006). Parents not only create a conducive learning environment at home, but also find available resources outside the home, and they do so by actively engaging in the community. In our study, we look at community as both the xinyimin ethnic community and non-profit or for-profit institutions in the host society. The xinyimin ethnic community is composed of highly educated and skilled, financially affluent, transnationally flexible, and well-informed individuals. We found that the ethnic was a significant source of social and cultural capital that supported xinyimin parents with needed information about children’s education and learning. For example, xinyimin relied on more informal resources from the coethnic network of their xinyimin community than on public resources. Because of the differential fairness policy, immigrants were not offered equal access to public resources (Zhan et al., 2020). But xinyimin can draw on both tangible and intangible resources by interacting with one another to help resolve urgent issues associated with employment, housing, education, health and mental health. In the process, they develop a sense of community and belonging from their families, friends, and college alumni. In our study, we found that the 88

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xinyimin community was made up of interconnected formal and informal networks, such as place-based associations, business and professional associations, alumni associations based on their alma maters in China. Our interviewees reported that they ­f requently communicated and shared education-related information, strategies, and practices through these networks with their professional colleagues, alumni, and classmates who were young parents. We also found that xinyimin’s sharing of education-related issues happened both face-to-face in organizational settings and online. Virtual social networks via new media platforms such as WeChat became an important site in which immigrant parents interact with their coethnic  peers in China and other Chinese diasporic communities to exchange education relevant information and parenting strategies. In addition, xinyimin’s coethnic networks are often extended beyond Singapore, which provide these parents and children with needed educational resources, such as the latest learning system and method, value-added learning directions and areas, textbooks and teaching materials, and newly developed online education system. In Singapore, xinyimin parents also tap on publicly available resources, such as private tutoring and afterschool programs run by non-profit organizations. Singapore is known as a tuition nation with a well-developed, sophisticated, and prosperous shadow education industry, which has functioned effectively to help students boost their grades so they can keep up with their peers and get into top-tier schools. This shadow education is open to the public, and can meet the urgent needs of anxious parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Private tuitions in Singapore range from more affordable learning centers located in residential neighborhoods to sizable nationally “branded” tutoring companies with branches located across the city-state. According to the government’s statistics on household expenditure from October 2017 to September 2018, Singapore families spent a total of SG$ 1.4 billion on tuition, which was substantially increased from SG$ 650 million in 2002/03 (Cheng, 2019; The Straits Times, 2019). Ninety percent of all families (1.2 million families) sent their children to afterschool tutoring in Singapore, including about 40% of preschoolers and 80% of primary school students (Wise, 2016). While both native and xinyimin parents rely heavily on private tuition to boost children’s academic achievements, xinyimin parents, mostly of middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds, invest more heavily on expensive branded and upscale private tuitions than native parents. In Singapore, non-profit organizations, such as the Residents’ Committee in residential neighborhoods, and government agencies, such as the People’s Association and the Ministry of Education, also provide various affordable education programs for citizens and PRs. Eligible xinyimin parents tend to tap on these government-subsidized resources to supplement their children’s schooling and enrichment. Our interviewees reported that they are all aware of these resources and have registered their children in some of the programs, such as phonics and math courses, arts (drawing), and sports (taekwondo, badminton), offered by nonprofits.

Conclusion In this chapter, we described the family formation of new Chinese immigrants, xinyimin, in Singapore and addressed how xinyimin parents promote children’s educational achievement in Singapore’s unique context of reception. We described the cultural, institutional, and social challenges that xinyimin parents faced in raising children’s education, focusing on examining how xinyimin cope with these challenges with our empirical research findings. We find that while xinyimin share similar cultural values and views on education and hold similar expectations of children’s educational achievement to Chinese Singaporean parents, 89

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they are more anxious about outcomes and future career prospects and thus more likely to adopt intense parenting strategies and practices than their Singaporean counterparts. We also find that, while Chinese way of parenting is severely contested in the processes of migration and adaptation, the success in promoting children’s educational excellence involves not only the right set of culturally specific strategies but also tangible support from familial or ethnic social networks and host-society institutions. Intensive parenting among xinyimin in Singapore can yield unintended consequences. For the parents, their high educational expectation of children requires substantial investment of material resources, time, and energy. Singapore’s competitive education system, which is well regarded by xinyimin, adds a heavy burden on these dual-career families. Moreover, getting childcare support from their own parents in the quasi-extended family setting in and out of Singapore changes family dynamics, adding yet another layer of stress to young xinyimin parents. Thus, many xinyimin parents become increasingly anxious and even depressed because they constantly feel overloaded and fear about their children being out-competed. For the children, many are exhausted by their overcommitted after-school schedules and have little time and opportunity to develop a sense of self or do what their hearts desire. In the long run, children may become dependent individuals lacking creativity and resilience in meeting real-life challenges. There are far-reaching implications too beyond the immigrant family. Intensive parenting among xiyimin affects native Singaporean parents who are ambivalent about the competitive education system—highly critical of the system while going along with it so as not to let their children lag behind. As xinyimin parents are predominant of highly educated and professional background, their parenting practices have caused resentment among native parents, which serve to deepen the native-migrant divide in the broad context of nativist backlash against new Chinese immigrants in Singapore. Whether negative impacts of intensive parenting can be alleviated through policy intervention requires further studies.

Notes 1 See http://edu.china.com.cn/2012-10/31/content_26954835.htm, accessed on March 20, 2020. According to the data of Chinese Ministry of Education, as of 2018, the total of Chinese studying or undertaking research abroad reached 5.85 million, and 3.65 million had returned to China: http://www.xinhuanet.com/2019-03/27/c_1124291948.htm. 2 The government proactively recruited “foreign talents” and incorporated them into the citizenry by grant permanent residency status and naturalization. The government also implemented a policy to promote Chinese immigration by offering Chinese high school and college students full scholarships to study in Singapore’s polytechnic colleges and universities. One of the main strings attached to the scholarships was that scholarship awardees be required to work in Singapore for a minimum of six years upon graduation. This policy was proved effective (Yang, 2014). 3 In Singapore, there are a number of visa categories for foreign workers. An employment pass (EP) is granted to those who hold a professional job and earn at least 3,600 Singapore dollars (SG$ henceforth) a month, while an S-pass is granted to those who hold a technical job and earn at least SG$ 2,200 a month. Both EP and S-pass are attached to job status (Zhan and Zhou, 2019).

References Bankston III, C. L., & Zhou, M. (2002). Social Capital as Process: The Meanings and Problems of a Theoretical Metaphor. Sociological Inquiry, 72(2), 285–317. Brown, P. (1990). The ‘Third Wave’: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(1), 65–86.

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Wang Jun and Min Zhou Wise, A. (2016). Behind the World’s Best Students Is a Soul-Crushing, Billion-Dollar Private ­Education Industry. December 12. Available from Internet: https://qz.com/860356/pisa-­ singapores-competitive-private-tuitionsystem-helps-students-ace-the-worlds-biggest-educationtest [accessed on 13 April 2020]. Wright, A., & Cartwright, H. A. (Eds.) (1908). Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya: Its ­History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources. London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company Limited. Yang, P. (2014). Privilege, Prejudice, Predicament: “PRC Scholars” in Singapore—An Overview. Frontiers of Education in China, 9(3), 350–376. Yeoh, B. S. (2004). Cosmopolitanism and Its Exclusions in Singapore. Urban Studies, 41(12), 2431–2445. Yeoh, B. S., & Lam, T. (2016). Immigration and Its (Dis) Contents: The Challenges of Highly Skilled Migration in Globalizing Singapore. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(5–6), 637–658. Yeoh, B. S., & Lin, W. (2013). Chinese Migration to Singapore: Discourses and Discontents in a ­Globalizing Nation-State. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 22(1), 31–54. Zhan, S., Huang, L., & Zhou, M. (2020). Differential Fairness: Native-Migrant Tensions and Policy Response in Singapore. Working paper. School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Zhan, S., & Zhou, M. (2019). Precarious Talent: Highly Skilled Chinese and Indian Immigrants in Singapore. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Available from Internet: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.20 19.1648847 [accessed on 20 March 2020]. Zhou, M. (Ed.) (2017). Contemporary Chinese Diasporas. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhou, M., & Kim, S. S. (2006). Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 76(1), 1–29. Zhou, M., & Liu, H. (2016). Homeland Engagement and Host-Society Integration: A Comparative Study of New Chinese Immigrants in the United States and Singapore. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 57, 30–52. Zhou, M., & Liu, H. (forthcoming). Diasporic Development and Socioeconomic Integration: New Chinese Migrants in a Globalized World. In C. Takenaka & K. Um (Eds.), Globalization and Civil Society in East Asian Space. London & New York: Routledge. Zhou, M., & Wang, J. (2019). Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Children’s Education: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Immigrant Parenting in the United States and Singapore. Genealogy, 3(20): 1–19.

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PART II

Diaspora, homeland, and development

6 DIASPORA, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE RESHAPING OF HOMELANDS IN AN EVOLVING WORLD Pablo S. Bose I have spent a large part of the last three decades studying overseas communities and their varied relationships with former, ancestral, or even imagined homelands. I have long been interested in how diasporas transform – and, in turn, are transformed – by this set of interactions. I am not alone in my fascination – while diasporas are as old as migration ­itself – nation-states, international institutions, and community organizations (among others) have long been interested if not invested in understanding the behavior and transnational practices of diasporas. Such concern was especially apparent by the late 1990s and into the first decades of the new millennium for two reasons in particular. The first has been the role of informal exchanges – which comprise the vast majority of economic and cultural transactions between diasporas and homelands – in financing criminal enterprises and terrorist networks. The ­second – which forms the basis of this chapter – is the role of diasporas in the re-­development of economies and regions within homelands. My own work has focused on India and on the ways in which diasporas have helped to reshape homelands at the scale of the city. In this chapter I will explore the dynamics of diasporas, development, and displacements with reference to India in three sections. In the first I explore the concept of diaspora and the ways in which overseas communities remain connected to homelands through diverse transnational practices, with specific reference to the Indian context. In the second I look at complex issues and negative consequences – including economic vulnerabilities and political and ideological reshaping of homelands that may be caused by such connections. I illustrate such complexities through two case studies. In the third section, I examine the historical reliance of the southern Indian state of Kerala on remittances for development. In the fourth section I analyze the case of urbanization in the metropolis of Kolkata as being driven by diaspora-led or -targeted developments.

Diasporas, development, and transnational ties The composition, roles, and practices of diasporas are increasingly important topics across the world today, not only for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars of migration but for politicians, community leaders, civic officials, and many others besides. While the world remains primarily one in which staying in place is the norm – in 2020, for example, an estimated less than 5% of the global population lives outside their country 95

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of origin, whether voluntarily or otherwise (IOM, 2020) – the numbers of people who live in a new country or are the descendants of those who emigrated at an earlier point is large and growing. Contrary to earlier assumptions regarding immigrant assimilation and ­incorporation – that differences based on heritage would be subsumed under the dominant national identity of the new country in successive generations – the ethnic identities of immigrant groups have remained stubbornly “persistent” as Portes and Rumbaut (2014) suggest in their long-term study of immigration in the United States today. Diasporas are diverse and multifaceted entities, encompassing affiliations at various scales – national, subnational, regional, urban – as well as other forms of identity including religion and race. They confound tidy notions of linear migration, nationalism, borders, and citizenship, exhibiting as they do attachments to distant lands, different cultures, or distinct identities. The concept of diaspora has at its core the idea of dispersal, whether voluntary or coerced. While the earliest uses of the term were in reference to the colonization efforts of Greek city-states, diaspora has come to be predominantly associated with Jewish exile from the Middle East, the transatlantic slave trade of Africans, and the forced displacement of Armenians and Palestinians due to genocide and the loss of a homeland (Cohen, 1997). It is that sense of loss and yearning for a return to an ancestral or perhaps imagined home that is often a central part of the identity of many groups who find themselves living “abroad”. Terms such as transnational, émigré, immigrant, and expatriate have also been used synonymously, despite the fact that they may describe very different forms of movement ­(Grossman, 2019). My own use of the term “diaspora” in this chapter recognizes that while there are often very different reasons for leaving, communities that might be identified as diasporic in nature share some common and identifiable traits. In particular, they express a belief in an original homeland – whether an imaginary, ancestral, or a more contemporary one – from which they have been exiled or from which they have left voluntarily and to which they often wish to return or at least remain connected to. Regardless of the reasons for leaving, these communities retain a distinct identity – expressed through the retention of language and cultural traditions including food, literature, and music, social structures of family and kinship, and an ongoing political concern for their homeland – while living in a new home. In many ways the existence of diasporas undermines the assimilationist view of immigration and acculturation processes in multicultural societies of the Global North. Other scholars suggest that the transnational practices of diasporas challenge traditional understandings of citizenship itself (Yanasmayan and Kasli, 2019). The existence of diasporas also suggests that “persistent ethnicity” remains a key feature for those who migrate to the United States, Canada, Australia, and similar countries (Portes and Rumbaut, 2014). Far from stripping away the baggage and background of their places of origin, the migration process and immersion into a new dominant culture can simultaneously reinforce roots in an old home and the forging of ties to a new one. Hall (1994, p. 396) suggests that the diasporic experience should be understood as “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” while Gilroy (2000, p. 23) argues that the idea of diaspora “disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness”. For such scholars the concept of diaspora can be a starting rather than an end-point, a node of intersection between physical, cultural, and economic spaces. I follow Mavroudi’s (2007) lead in using diaspora in this chapter as a way of moving beyond the dichotomy between bounded and unbounded definitions of transnational identity.

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A key part of that unbounding is the idea that diasporas themselves help to expand the idea of the nation through their continued engagement with their homeland. Such engagements are not new, but the fact these both persist and are a topic of interest among scholars, policymakers, and community members is a result of multiple factors. These include geopolitical and security concerns, questions of identity in multicultural societies and the related integration of immigrants into new host communities, and the economic impact of remittances (Gamlen, 2019; Molodikova et al., 2018; Nurse, 2019). The possibility that diasporas might help to build or rebuild their home countries has spawned a flurry of activity by international institutions, national governments, and local authorities alike to try and capture this potential (Baser, 2018; Murthy, 2017). In this context diasporas are increasingly viewed in the international community as well as by national governments as important contributors to their homeland economies. The fact that remittances – money sent back by workers to their home countries – rank second only to oil exports globally and far outpace both foreign direct investment and aid to developing countries makes it clear why the migration-development nexus has become such an integral growth strategy in many places (Preibisch et al., 2016). A growing body of literature over the past two decades has noted the growth of remittances in both absolute terms and as relative to the receiving countries’ Gross Domestic Product (Bettin et al., 2017; Leblang, 2017; Ratha, 2016). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they were one of the largest flows of money in the world, reaching an estimated $529 billion in 2018 going to low- and middle-income countries alone (World Bank, 2019). Closed borders, travel bans, visa restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and a global economy in recession have sharply curtailed such numbers and exposed the vulnerabilities of remittance-based economies to such shocks. Until the onset of the pandemic however, remittances were on the increase, with the two world regions that currently see the largest interchange of workers and remittances being Latin America/United States and Persian Gulf/South Asia. Remittances have become an economic necessity for many nations, often far outstripping traditional sources of financial flow to many less-developed countries, such as foreign aid (Das and Sethi, 2019). Unlike foreign aid, remittances are also not “tied” to the self-interest of donor nations or to the loan conditionalities of multinational institutions such as the IMF. Yet remittances are hardly a new phenomenon. One could argue that diasporas have always played a significant role in “developing” their homelands, whether ancestral or putative. Social networks, kinship ties, and ongoing cultural and political affiliations with organizations and individuals “back home” have kept money, materials, and moral support flowing across continents, oceans, and even time. Those who have left home have often tried to send resources to assist their families in maintaining their lives or in building newer and better ones. Whether helping a parent to improve a house or purchase a larger plot of land, sending money to build a village hospital or a neighborhood school, or enabling distant relatives to live a more affluent lifestyle relative to their neighbors, diasporic capital has a long history beyond the nation-state itself. Some scholars, however, have questioned the long-term viability of such strategies, given the vulnerability of migrant income to external pressures – natural disasters, economic downturns, and political conflicts, to name but a few (Fix et al., 2009). Others have suggested that the scramble for diasporic resources by various actors leaves the actual nature of development and the roles played by diasporas relatively under-scrutinized (Raghuram, 2009). The questions we must thus ask is: what kinds of development do diasporas make possible, and what are their effects – both intentional and unintended?

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The negative consequences of diaspora-involvement The cases discussed later in this chapter illustrate two ways in which diasporic involvement in development – understood as a multifaceted set of activities and engagements – may have both direct and indirect effects and lead to different kinds of vulnerabilities and displacements. I use the notion of displacement in a similarly varied way in which I use development. Displacement may mean a direct loss of access to homes, livelihoods, or traditional ­land-use – as the building of a dam or railroad might engender – or it may be a policy or program that ends up causing similar effects. Understanding the impacts of diasporic involvement thus requires a sophisticated and complex lens. Studies of migration and transnationalism have long suggested that contemporary immigrants maintain transnational connections to their countries of origin and beyond. There are many reasons for keeping such connections active. In some cases migration may be ­temporary – for example in cases of seasonal (or cyclical) labor and short-term contracts. Migrants may have relatives, property, and/or business ties in their homeland, or they may have an ongoing interest in the politics of their place of origin. Those who leave may also express a desire to return, whether soon or in the future. For these and many other reasons transnational engagements are the rule rather than the exception of diasporic involvements in former homelands. Basch et al. (2005, p. 6) describe migrant transnationalism as “the process by which transmigrants, through their daily activities, forge and sustain multi-stranded social, economic, and political relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, and through which they create transnational social fields that cross national borders”. These daily activities, however, are not only about connections between “sending” and “receiving” countries – as many scholars have noted, migration is far more complex than the linear narrative we are familiar with. Instead we see that diasporas imagine themselves and their links to various places through a diverse set of practices, including literary and artistic productions. It is in a wide assortment of cultural texts that we see clearly an expression of longing, of connections, of visions of long-remembered homes, traditions, habits, and patterns. One need only turn to the wealth of fiction, poetry, films, music, dance, and festivals that mark diasporic life to see evidence of this fact. The importance of collectivities can be judged from the evidence of diasporic identities in cultural, hometown, and mutual aid associations founded by émigrés, as well as in religious charities, professional and trade groups, political organizations, sports clubs, and a range of other formations. The focus of this chapter is not, however, on transnational practices in the diaspora but rather on the ways in which diasporas reach back to their origins and migrants remain active in their former homes. Examples of such activities are not necessarily distinct from one another but can overlap in form and purpose. For example, providing in-kind assistance can have political motivations, remittances may be used specifically for investment purposes, and philanthropy is a highly political form of investment. The latter itself may be one of the most prominent forms of diasporic involvement in the world today, as seen through the mobilization of overseas communities following natural disasters and civil strife in former homelands and the establishment of numerous charitable foundations and gift-giving enterprises by diasporic individuals. Beyond such seemingly altruistic connections diasporas have long been entangled in ideological projects to reshape, resurrect, defend, or even enlarge homelands, ancestral or putative. Nationalist struggles and sectarian strife have lengthy histories of overseas assistance from departed sons and daughters. Fundraising for the Irish Republican cause in ­Boston, political support for early 20th century Indian nationalism among the Ghadr Party 98

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in California, Palestinian and Jewish demonstrations on behalf of respective positions in Middle East conflicts, or Tamil and Sikh agitation in Canada for separatist movements in South Asia are but a few examples. This involvement can take the form of moral support and encouragement, it can manifest itself through material assistance in money and materials, and it can even take the form of physical presence in armed struggles, as in the case of Canadians of Serbian and Croatian origin who took part in the civil war in the Balkans (Satzewich and Wong, 2003). Another example more directly related to the idea of identity assertion and development as a political project is the case of the strong support demonstrated by large segments of overseas Indian communities for the Hindu right that has dominated much of Indian politics since the 1990s. One of the myriad entities that comprise the Sangh Parivar, or “family” of organizations that collectively espouse the ideology of Hindutva – an aggressive form of right-wing Hindu nationalism – is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu Council). The VHP plays an important role alongside the official political wing of the Hindutva movement, which is the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, the “cultural” organ known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), trade unions, professional associations, and women’s organizations, among many others. Active in fundraising and nationalist calls directed at raising patriotic fervor especially among Indians living abroad or diasporic Indian communities, the VHP has been tremendously successful at fundraising for the Hindutva cause in places ranging from the United Kingdom to the United States to Australia. For example, during and after the 2002 pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, VHP officials abroad were also particularly active in their defense of the violence and sought to minimize evidence that state authorities were complicit in the murders and brutalization of the Muslim community in Gujarat. More recently overseas Indians (so-called NRIs or Non-Resident Indians) have solidified as significant sources of financial and moral support for the Modi regime and Hindu right politics in general (Anderson and Longkumer, 2018; Thobani, 2019). One of the key pillars of the long-distance nationalism expressed by such NRI groups is the belief in the developmental prowess and agenda of the Modi government. In some Indian regions where the Hindutva movement has been historically strong (such as Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra), the VHP’s success in recruiting overseas support has had far-reaching consequences. Corbridge and Simpson (2006) describe, for example, the ways in which the diaspora has aided Hindutva groups to reshape Gujarat – especially after earthquakes and communal riots – increasingly along religious and caste lines. Some argue that the Gujarati diaspora in the United States in particular has an important enough influence – or at least resources – that many local politicians will make fundraising trips to places like Gujarat to fund their campaigns (Agarwala, 2015). Controversy has simmered over the activities and intentions of the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), a US-based, tax-exempt fundraising initiative meant to concentrate “providing resources to accelerate development” (India Development and Relief Fund, 2020). To its supporters, the IDRF is an invaluable source of funds and psychological aid for development efforts in education, housing, and sanitation (among others) as well as in reconstruction and rehabilitation needs following natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods or health outbreaks like COVID-19. But critics of the IDRF have pointed out that the bulk of the funds raised have gone to RSS-affiliated organizations and have been directed at promulgating Hindutva beliefs under the guise of relief and development activities, especially in marginalized and tribal areas. Dismayed by the clear linkages between diasporic-fundraising and the growth of right-wing politics in India, critics of the IDRF launched a very public and successful “Campaign to Stop Funding Hate” to highlight these problematic connections (Mathur, 2013). More recently, as pointed out 99

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previously, the Modi regime’s electoral campaigns and subsequent government have received significant support from NRIs (Times of India, 2014; Venugopal, 2017). Thus attempts to reshape – or support for ideological reshaping – of homelands may be one way in which diasporic involvement may result in displacements within those countries of origin. But another issue may be economic vulnerability. Some scholars have suggested that even the apparently positive effects like remittances have their downsides. Amuedo-­ Dorantes and Pozo (2004), for example, suggest that workers’ remittances in fact have a negative impact on receiving countries’ economies in the form of a real exchange rate appreciation, artificially inflating the value of domestic currencies and decreasing productive capacities. Moreover, Bailey (2013) reminds us that remittances are subject to “external” political and economic contexts beyond migration and development alone. He examines the effects of the global recession of 2007–2008 on migration and remittance patterns in Europe and notes the intersection between discourses on neoliberalism, labor, securitization, and sovereignty that constrain, discipline, and regulate migrant behavior and patterns of movement. Dependence upon remittances and other forms of diasporic capital to provide a stable economic support appears to be fraught with risk. Far from insulating economies against “external shocks”, there is mounting evidence, including the Indian case discussed below, that in some situations diasporic capital flows can indeed exacerbate crisis situations. Finally, as many scholars point out, a focus on diasporas and development often leaves out the complexity and diversity between different forms of migration patterns and migrant groups themselves. Diener (2008), for example, reminds us of the number of groups who claim diasporic identities in Central Asia not based on the nation-state but on pre-existing, tribal, or non-state histories. To whom and to which land do they owe allegiance? Rubinov (2014), in his study of the impact of remittances on development in Kyrgyzstan – one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world – suggests that, far from leading to the types of macroeconomic change envisioned by multilateral institutions and national governments, money sent by Kyrgyz workers in Russia back home is primarily used to supplement daily household needs and to finance festivals, elaborate marriages, and other cultural rituals.

Development and the homeland – Kerala and the remittance economy Kerala is one of the best-known examples of the ways that expatriates can help to economically revitalize their homeland. A densely populated state in the south-western part of India with a high literacy rate and low population growth, Kerala is a persuasive example of both the potential and the pitfalls of reliance on diasporic capital to sustain a local economy. The state has a long history of labor migration and has a strong reputation for achieving many human development goals, including high levels of education, health, and civic engagement, as well as urbanization. Many communities in Kerala have had considerable experience of both sending emigrants abroad and experiencing the effects of return migration (or maintaining transnational ties) first hand. At the same time, Kerala has found itself at different moments vulnerable to the effects of global trends, such as political conflicts and economic downturns. It is an excellent illustration through which we may see how diasporas and re-development in the homeland may be linked, how this process has changed over time, and to predict what some of its changing circumstances might mean for other regions that adopt similar strategies. The flow of migrants out of Kerala broadly follows the patterns outlined in the previous section’s discussion of Indian diasporas. In its modern history, post-Independence Kerala has seen many Keralites emigrate to other parts of India as well as to regional neighbors, such as 100

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Singapore and Malaysia, primarily for semi-skilled work. Between 1960 and 1975 a number of professionals began to join these out-migrants, including a growing number of nurses. A wave of mass migrations began in 1975 to the Persian Gulf (and to a lesser extent to North America and Europe) from South Asia in general and from Kerala in particular. Following the interruption of the First Gulf War, labor migration from Kerala resumed in at least three distinct streams – semi- and unskilled labor to the Persian Gulf, professionals (including ­engineers, doctors, IT experts, and academics) to various parts of the world, and family-­ related chain migration to places previously settled via outmigration. While many other South Asian migrant communities exist in the Persian Gulf, Non-­ Resident Keralites (NRKs) represent one of the most significant, with one out of every four Indians in the region hailing from Kerala. Over two million people from Kerala work in the region, particularly in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, ­Kuwait, and Oman. The migrants work in a variety of occupations ranging from construction to high-skill professional services. These migrants are “guest workers”, who are expected to return to Kerala after the completion of their contracts, which typically last two to five years. Unlike countries such as the United States and Canada, the Gulf countries offer little scope either for family migration and unification or for permanent residency and citizenship. Some studies suggest that remittance-related migration has been the single most dynamic factor in Kerala’s post-Independence development and that it has contributed more to poverty alleviation than any other factor, including agrarian reforms, trade union activities, and social welfare legislation (Zachariah and Irudayarajan, 2008). Migration to the Gulf – while deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic – continues to see nearly three million Keralites overseas, with the majority in the Gulf. The proportion of Kerala households with an NRK each in them has remained more or less at the same level as in 2007; in 2003, it had been 25.8% (Zachariah and Irudayarajan, 2008). The background of the emigrants is affected by religion – a larger proportion of Muslim households see emigration compared to Hindu and Christian ones. NRKs, like many other South Asian migrant communities in the Gulf, maintain close contacts with family in India, including frequent home visits. They also remain knowledgeable about political developments and socio-economic changes in the subcontinent and have been active in providing not only remittances but also financial assistance during natural disasters and political upheaval. In Kerala, remittances are often popularly called “Gulf Money” and have been described by the state government as “the most dynamic contribution to the economy of the State”, while labor migrants are described as “very high contributors” to that economy. Indeed, Kerala is highly dependent on remittances to help support a much more affluent lifestyle than many other Indian states – the total remittances sent home by foreign workers was in 2011 some four times the state’s entire domestic product (­Zachariah and ­Irudayarajan, 2012). Other forms of economic impact of NRKs include financial savings, real estate and business investments, and new home construction, in addition to creating business networks and developing financial expertise (Zachariah and Irudayarajan, 2008). It is little wonder, therefore, that the Kerala government at the state level has established a ministry for NRKs and invested in upgraded international airports in cities such as Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi. In Kerala, the political impact of labor migrants overseas has been felt also in party politics but more crucially in regional development as a whole. Indeed, the so-called “Kerala model of development” – focused on achieving high levels of growth in quality-of-life indicators (such as literacy, infant mortality rates, and civic engagement) and addressing issues of land reform – has been considerably dependent on the influx of remittances over the past half-century. These 101

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inflows have also kept unemployment relatively low within the state and decreased poverty while augmenting the industrialization and consumer culture of Kerala (Pani and Jafar, 2010; Singh, 2011). However, Kerala’s heavy reliance on remittances makes it vulnerable to economic and political shocks that could lead to job cuts and resulting losses of revenues. The vulnerability of Kerala’s economy to such shocks has been documented. In 1990, Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, and soon after, the First Gulf War broke out. Thousands of guest workers based in Kuwait, including those from Kerala, fled the country and returned home. This unexpected influx of returning migrants was a dual problem for Kerala, which was suddenly deprived of remittances from its citizens in Kuwait and also had to take care of the returnees, who did not know if and when they would be able to return to their jobs in the Gulf country. The first Gulf War ended in 1991 and many of the migrants returned to the Gulf countries, but during the period of the war, the Kerala economy was adversely affected. In 2008, the global economic recession accelerated the pace of the return migration from labor receiving countries. Migrant flows to these countries have fallen since the beginning of the global financial crisis, which also affected the Gulf region unfavorably. Abandonment of large-scale construction and infrastructural projects and the economic crisis in the oil industry have pushed low paid migrant workers, particularly those in the Gulf countries, to return to India temporarily or permanently. The unskilled migrants themselves are vulnerable to unscrupulous middlemen who promise them good jobs in the Middle East in exchange of large fees but sometimes do not deliver on the promise. Some employers in the Gulf countries are also known not to pay the migrant worker the wages that they are owed. As employers of low-skilled workers usually hold on to the migrants’ passports until they return to their home country, this also places the migrant laborer in a vulnerable position. Economists predict that, as the Middle Eastern labor market gets saturated, the flows of labor migrants from Kerala and hence remittances will decline, and the state’s economy will suffer. Although optimists argue that the Gulf has survived past crises like the Iraq-Kuwait War and that the migration of labor from Kerala has kept up, a remittance-based economy may be unsustainable for Kerala in the long run. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the halt to the global economy and of remittances returning to places like Kerala are a stark reminder of these vulnerabilities and frailties. Kerala thus epitomizes the changing modalities of diasporic transnationalism that has brought radical changes in theorizing diasporas. Much more than Gujarat, the other I­ ndian state that has adopted and pursued migrant Gujaratis as economic and – increasingly – ­political partners, Kerala continues to depend on its diasporic population as the fulcrum of its economic policy and everyday reality. The diaspora no longer consists of remittance senders alone but comprises active decision-makers in their homeland, as much economically as politically and culturally. Diasporic action and the forces that drive it are thus essential subjects of scholarly analysis and interpretation leading to understanding the relationship between diasporas and their homelands, actual or imagined as the case may be. That relationship comes to a focus in the economic impact of diasporas on their home countries, one that is a sum of both diasporic initiatives and government invitations. As noted in the discussion above and illustrated particularly by the role of migrants in Kerala, the transnationality of diasporas introduces a fluidity bordering on imponderability in the calculus of the interaction between diasporas and homeland governments. While economics by itself cannot capture the range of that interaction, and certainly not its quality or the values that both underlie it and are generated by it, the economic contribution of diasporas to their homelands does form a measurable groundwork for understanding how, whether, and to what extent diasporas intervene in the development of their homelands. 102

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Remaking the city – Kolkata The final example, which helps to illustrate the complex nature of diasporas and what their involvements with former homelands might suggest regarding our changing understanding of what nation and nationalism might mean in the present age, is that of contemporary urban development within India. As I have argued in other work (Bose, 2014, 2015), the role of the diaspora in catalyzing, justifying, and promoting a transformed urban landscape in the Global South is a complex and multifaceted one. For urban planners and politicians, an émigré community and its desire to return to its roots can symbolize the metropolis’ place in the network of global cities, an increasingly ubiquitous aspiration. For diasporas the ability to return home – through physical, economic, political, or cultural presence – is an important element of realizing a transnational and often cosmopolitan identity. For local communities, some of whom have themselves become displaced from lands and livelihoods through these processes of change, questions of citizenship, nationalism, and belonging come to the fore. There are many sites across the world in which one can witness these processes, what some have termed a form of global gentrification through which people and place are being fundamentally restructured (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005). Any number of “global cities” – from Istanbul to Tegucigalpa, from Dubai to Manila, from Mexico City to Toronto and many other sites in between – are thus tied together by long histories of empire, migration, economy, and culture. In Indian cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, or ­Cochin – places from which people have for many years made journeys both long and short overseas – the return of the diaspora has been a topic of both public discourse and political action as municipal and state governments as well as federal authorities attempt to entice (primarily wealthy) diasporas back “home” to invest in businesses, lend political support, and purchase real estate (Searle, 2013). Even a city like Kolkata – long an icon of postcolonial ­urban decay and characterized by overcrowding, poverty, pollution, and stagnation – has been remade in recent years precisely by exploiting the narrative of the Non-Resident Indian (or diasporic Indian) as an engine for urban growth and renewal. Over the past two decades, even as the city and the region undergo tremendous political changes, shifting from a democratically elected Marxist leadership to one aligned with the Hindu right, the focus for urban planners and politicians has remained on the idea of remaking Kolkata’s spaces for diasporic elites. Unlike Kerala, neither the city nor the state of West Bengal has long histories as emigrant-producing places, nor are they dependent on monies sent from overseas. And yet governments at all levels but especially within the city have begun to vigorously recruit the Bengali-Kolkatan diaspora for developmental purposes, promoting the pull of sentimental attachments to the soil (Varrel, 2012). As with other migrant flows and their connections to former homes much of this has occurred informally, such as the sending of money home, the building of a house, support for a local charity or initiative. Increasingly, however, real estate developers and returning migrants have begun to influence the reshaping of neighborhoods and regions more purposefully, especially in ways that simulate the experiences – whether long term or short term – of being abroad (Roy, 2011). While the story of ethnic enclaves built in destination countries by immigrants is well known, what has become more evident in recent years that reverse migration can often have the same effect in sending countries. In this sense it is not only that Little India is created by expatriates in Dubai but equally that returning migrants may purchase a home in Little Dubai in Delhi, built to remind them of their time in the Middle East (Vora, 2011). 103

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In a similar vein, the site of the most significant real estate developments in Kolkata of the past few decades is awash in buildings that conjure the diasporic Indian in lifestyle, vocation, and physical presence. These are the eastern fringes, the only direction in which the city can expand, home to a large expanse of wetlands and a series of satellite townships reclaimed from them. By the late 1990s this area had also begun to attract the IT industry as it ­reoriented more purposefully to India – not only to primary sites such as G ­ urgaon, Bangalore, and ­Hyderabad, but also to secondary ones, including Kolkata (Dey et al., 2013). Although local environmental protests led to the declaration of protected status for the wetlands, this has done little to stem its attractiveness to developers. Within a few years apartment ­complexes – many of them public-private partnerships and many others illegal – sprung up throughout the area, especially along a highway that skirts the eastern edges of Kolkata and leads from middle-class residential neighborhoods in South to the airport in the north east (Bose, 2015). Boasting names such as Oasis, Bengal Silver Spring, Ideal City, The Empire, Hiland Park, and Technopolis, these projects bring high-rise towers of up to 30 floors onto an urban landscape with few buildings higher than 10 stories (Bose, 2007). Some – such as Rosedale Gardens, a venture led by non-resident Indians from New Jersey, and Kolkata West International City on the opposite side of town and built with capital and expertise from Indian émigrés in Indonesia – have direct involvement and leadership by diaspora Indians (Bose, 2013). Most, however, are domestic enterprises, built in many cases as partnerships between municipal and state agencies and local developers. A rash of multiplexes, shopping malls, golf courses, private schools, medical facilities, amusement parks, and gated green spaces and waterways have burgeoned alongside the new residences. The marketing of such developments is in many ways not unlike what one might find for any condominium tower from Toronto to Berlin to Singapore (King, 2004), offering an elite existence replete with all the amenities deemed necessary for the cosmopolitan life. What sets the Kolkata housing developments apart is the importance of the figure of diaspora in the selling of these buildings, not only to potential inhabitants but also to local politicians, investors, and elites. These housing developments have been a great success, often selling out their units long before ground has been broken, and ensuring yet more to come. In 2004 there were some 40 projects marketed toward the diaspora or with their assumed lifestyles in mind, most in the design stage. By 2007 many of these were under construction, with a further 40 planned; by 2012 the number had risen to 120, by 2018 there were 180, many now no longer on the periphery but rather in the heart of the city itself. While many have proved to be controversial in their environmental and social impacts, local activists have found them hard to challenge, for to call them into question is to call into question both the diasporic Indian and the good they are purported to embody. Yet the question remains in this as with the example of Kerala described above – what kinds of changes are diasporic individuals helping to create in their former homelands? Such issues become especially relevant in the age of pandemic.

References Agarwala, R. (2015). Tapping the Indian diaspora for development. In Portes, A. and ­Fernandez-Kelly, P. (eds). The state and the grassroots: immigrant transnational organizations in four continents (pp. 84–110). New York: Berghahn Books. Amuedo-Dorantes, C. and S. Pozo. (2004). Workers’ remittances and the real exchange rate: a paradox of gifts. World Development, 32(8), 1407–1417.

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Diaspora, development, and reshaping Anderson, E. and A. Longkumer. (2018). ‘Neo-Hindutva’: evolving forms, spaces and expressions of Hindu nationalism. Contemporary South Asia, 26(4), 371–377. Atkinson, R. and G. Bridge (eds.). (2005). Gentrification in a global context: the new urban colonialism. London: Routledge. Bailey, A. J. (2013). Migration, recession and an emerging transnational biopolitics across Europe. Geoforum, 44, 202–210 Basch, L., Schiller, N. G. and C. Szanton-Blanc. (2005). Nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments and deterritorialized nation-states. London: Routledge. Baser, B. (2018). Homeland calling: Kurdish diaspora and state-building in the Kurdistan region of Iraq in the post-saddam era. Middle East Critique, 27(1), 77–94. Bettin, G., Presbitero, A. F. and N. L. Spatafora. (2017). Remittances and vulnerability in developing countries. The World Bank Economic Review, 31(1), 1–23. Bose, P. S. (2007). Dreaming of diasporas: urban developments and transnational identities in contemporary Kolkata. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 17, 111–130. Bose, P. S. (2013). Bourgeois environmentalism, leftist development and neoliberal urbanism in the City of Joy. In Samara, T., He, S. and Chen, G. (eds.), Locating right to the city in the Global South (pp. 127–151). New York: Routledge. Bose, P. S. (2014). Living the way the world does: global Indians and the reshaping of Kolkata. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 391–400. Bose, P. S. (2015). Urban development in India: global Indians in the remaking of Kolkata. London: Routledge. Cohen, R. (1997). Global diasporas: an introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Corbridge, S. and E. Simpson. (2006). Militant cartographies and traumatic spaces: Ayodhya, Bhuj and the contested spaces of Hindutva. In Raju, S., Kumar, M. S. and Corbridge, S. (eds.), Colonial and post-colonial geographies of India (pp. 70–84). New Delhi: Sage. Das, A. and N. Sethi. (2019). Effect of foreign direct investment, remittances, and foreign aid on economic growth: evidence from two emerging South Asian economies. Journal of Public Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2043 Dey, I., Samaddar, R. and S. K. Sen. (2013). Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the dystopia of urban imagination. New Delhi: Routledge. Diener, A. (2008). Diasporic and transnational practices in Central Asia. Geography Compass, 2(3), 956–978. Fix, M., Papademetriou, D. G., Batalova, J., Terrazas, A., Yi-Ying Lin, S. and M. Mittelstadt. (2009). Migration and the global recession. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute. Gamlen, A. (2019). Human geopolitics: states, emigrants, and the rise of diaspora institutions. London: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000). Against race: imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grossman, J. (2019). Toward a definition of diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 42(8), 1263–1282. Hall, S. (1994). Cultural identity and diaspora. In Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (eds.), Colonial discourse and postcolonial theory: a reader (pp. 392–403). New York: Columbia University Press. India Development and Relief Fund. (2020). Our work. Available from http://www.idrf.org/ our-projects/focus-areas/ IOM. (2020). World migration report 2020. Geneva: United Nations International Organization for Migration. King, A. (2004). Spaces of global culture: architecture, urbanism, identity. London: Routledge. Leblang, D. (2017). Harnessing the diaspora: dual citizenship, migrant return remittances. Comparative Political Studies, 50(1), 75–101. Mathur, C. (2013). The Indian state, the diasporic Hindu Right and the ‘desire named development’. In Brennan, L. (ed.), Enacting globalization: multidisciplinary perspectives on international integration (pp. 13–19). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mavroudi, E. (2007). Diaspora as process: (de)constructing boundaries. Geography Compass, 1(3), 467–479. Molodikova, I. N., Lyalina, A. V. and L. L. Emelyanova. (2018). Contacts with diasporas and diaspora organisations as a key to a successful migrant integration policy in the EU. Baltic Region, 10(3), 58–79. Murthy, C. S. H. N. (2017). Telugu diaspora as soft power: mapping media, cultural ties and political economy with homeland. Diaspora Studies, 10(1), 97–115.

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Pablo S. Bose Nurse, K. (2019). Migration, diasporas, remittances and the sustainable development goals in least developed countries. Journal of Globalization and Development, 9(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/ jgd-2019-0006 Pani, N. and K. Jafar. (2010). Mass education-led growth and non-agrarian villages: long-term results of the Kerala model. Oxford Development Studies, 38(1), 25–42. Portes, A. and R. Rumbaut. (2014). Immigrant America: a portrait updated and expanded. 4th edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Preibisch, K., Dodd, W. and Y. Su. (2016). Pursuing the capabilities approach within the migration– development nexus. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(13), 2111–2127. Raghuram, P. (2009). Which migration, what development? Unsettling the edifice of migration and development. Population, Space and Place, 15(2), 103–117. Ratha, D. (2016). Migration and remittances factbook 2016. 3rd edition. Geneva: World Bank. Roy, A. (2011). The blockade of the world-class city: dialectical images of Indian urbanism. In Roy, A. and Ong, A. (eds.), Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global change (pp. 259–278). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Rubinov, I. (2014). Migrant assemblages: building postsocialist households with Kyrgyz remittances. Anthropological Quarterly, 87(1), 183–216. Satzewich, V. and L. Wong. (2003). Immigration, ethnicity and race: the transformation of transnationalism, localism and identities. In Clement, W. and Vosko, L. (eds.), Changing Canada: political economy as transformation (pp. 364–384). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Searle, L. G. (2013). Constructing prestige and elaborating the ‘professional’: elite residential complexes in the National Capital Region, India. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 47(2), 271–302. Singh, P. (2011). We-ness and welfare: a longitudinal analysis of social development in Kerala, India. World Development, 39(2), 282–293. Thobani, S. (2019). Alt-Right with the Hindu-right: long-distance nationalism and the perfection of Hindutva. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(5), 745–762. Times of India. (2014). US-based NRIs land in India to campaign for Modi. Available from http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/US-based-NRIs-land-in-India-to-campaignfor-Modi/articleshow/33818982.cms Varrel, A. (2012). NRIs in the city. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 6(2012), Online http:// samaj.revues.org/3425. Venugopal, V. (2017). Gujarati NRIs fly in to boost BJP’s poll fortunes. The Economic Times, December 09, 2017. Available from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/­ gujarati-nris-fly-in-to-boost-bjps-poll-fortunes/articleshow/61991368.cms Vora, N. (2011). From golden frontier to global city: shifting forms of belonging, ‘freedom,’ and governance among Indian businessmen in Dubai. American Anthropologist, 113(2), 306–318. World Bank. (2019). Record high remittances sent globally in 2018. Available from https://www.­worldbank. org/en/news/press-release/2019/04/08/record-high-remittances-sent-globally-in-2018 Yanasmayan, Z. and Z. Kaşlı. (2019). Reading diasporic engagements through the lens of citizenship: Turkey as a test case. Political Geography, 70, 24–33. Zachariah, K. C. and S. R. Irudayarajan. (2008). A decade of Kerala’s gulf connection: migration monitoring study. Thiruvananthapuram: Center for Development Studies. Zachariah, K. C. and S. R. Irudayarajan. (2012). Kerala migration survey report 2011. Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies.

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7 MANIPUR’S DIASPORA IN THE UNITED STATES Mapping cultural and development ties with homeland Ajailiu Niumai Introduction Manipur’s American diaspora has never been studied from sociological perspectives and there is no scholarly work available about them. However, there are studies on Manipur’s diaspora especially from Myanmar, Tripura and Assam since early 2000 onward. A socio-cultural study of the Manipur’s American diaspora has escaped long-term careful academic attention. This chapter focuses on how Manipur’s American diaspora maintains their ethnic identity, traditional values and customs in the host country. In what ways do they preserve cultural ties with their homeland? What are their major challenges? Why are they giving back to the homeland when many of them are facing financial instability in their host country after the economic recession in 2007–2009 after the bursting of the United States (USA) housing bubble and the global financial crisis and coronavirus recession in 2020? Their intervention in sending financial aid through family, kinship, and NGOs and their sense of responsibility to help people in their homeland during natural catastrophes, like flood, or support the road construction or support during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals their moral and emotional ties. Some of them are Information Technology (IT) engineers, architects, professors, scientists, entrepreneurs, business administrators, nurses, doctors and the like with H-1B visa and students with J-1 visa, their spouses (mostly wives) with J-2 visa and thus, they retain their identity as Indian. Majority of them are green card holders, who are the Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and they can stay and work in the USA. Almost all the younger generations are American citizens since they were born and brought up in the USA. I would like to highlight the categories of diaspora and their brief historical background. The emigrant Indians aka People of Indian Origin (PIOs) are referred as the ‘Old diaspora’ and they are citizens of a foreign country but trace their origin to India. The foreign nationals whose spouses are Indians were categorized as the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) and they could work in the Republic of India. The Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) are the Indian citizens who reside abroad for more than 180 days during the preceding financial year (The Economics Times, 01 February 2020). Most of them are known as the ‘New diaspora’ and ‘successful knowledge diaspora’. There are several scholarships, which affirm that the migration of the Indian American diaspora, especially Punjabi diaspora (Lal, 1999), is generally traced to more than 100 years. 107

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Comparatively, Manipur’s diaspora from Northeast India to the USA is much newer, tracing to the late 1960s onward. Kadekar et al. (2009, p. 1) confirm that since the 1970s, the term ‘diaspora’ is increasingly used to denote almost every group living far away from its ancestral or former homeland. Unlike the mainstream Indian diaspora1 who emigrated abroad during the colonial period as slaves, convicts and contract laborers under the indenture system kangani system, and free or passage emigrants as traders, clerks, bureaucrats and professionals to the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies (Hegde and Sahoo, 2018), the skilled professionals and students from Manipur migrated to the USA in the mid-20th Century. And, they comprise the ‘New diaspora’. The majority of them are concentrated in New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Philadelphia, North Carolina, Washington DC and California. It is crucial to identify the nature and magnitude of migration of Manipur’s American diaspora including the complexity of their ideas of culture, tradition and identity between the Manipuri aka Meitei and hill tribes.

Waves of migration2 The past six decades have witnessed the gradual magnitude of migration of Manipur’s ­A merican diaspora. The first wave of migration took place during the 1960s and 1970s, which comprises of a handful of students and skilled individuals. Some of the immigrants have returned to their homeland after completing their studies. One of the first migrants to the USA from Manipur was Dr. Aryo A. Shishak, belonging to a Tangkhul Naga tribe from the Ukhrul district. Dr. Shishak’s niece said: My uncle migrated to USA in 1969 after completing his MD internal medicine from Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi. He got into residency in the US in general surgery. He received his MS from New York Medical Schools and practiced as a physician in Port Jervis, New York and Milford, Pennsylvania for 26 years and passed away in 2017 at the age of 78 years in Milford. His wife, daughter and son live in the US. My uncle was the pioneer of Naga American Foundation (NAF) and everyone warmly called him as Uncle Aryo and misses him greatly today. He hosted the first Naga annual meet at his residence in 1989 and served as the President of NAF from 2003 to 2007. (Personal interview with Shishak’s niece) During the second wave of migration in the 1980s and 1990s, it is estimated that a few dozen people from Manipur migrated to the USA. Just like the new wave of mainstream Indian IT professionals who migrated in the USA during the 1990s under temporary visa status (H-1B) due to rapid growth of software industry (Kapur et al., 2004), engineers, architects, doctors, scientists, nurses, hotel management professionals, entrepreneurs, students, teachers and Christian theologians from Manipur migrated to the USA during the same period. Some individuals migrated to the USA because their spouses were Americans. M. Nabaghana Shyam Singha, a classical Manipuri dancer and teacher, said: I married an American dancer Christel Stevens, my disciple and dance partner in 1982 and we migrated to the USA in 1983 and had two children but we are divorced. My older daughter and son travelled to Manipur to get trained in Manipuri classical dance and Thang Ta. Thang Ta is a martial Art of sword and the spear, which is performed in festivals. I got re-married to another woman with whom I had a daughter but divorced again. Finally, I am married to a Meitei classical dancer from Manipur and we live in Frederick, Maryland. (Personal interview with Singha) 108

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As a response to the gradual increase in population, a few people formed the ethnic and cultural organization known as North America Manipuri Association (NAMA) in 1991 in Brooklyn, New York without any political ties or agenda. Usually, NAMA celebrates its annual convention on 4th July every year to promote their cultural heritage, introduce new members and evolve new strategies. Tracing the historical trajectory of NAMA, Singha said: Drita Sinha, late Jupiter Yambem (who was killed in 9/11 terror attack at the World Trade Centre in 2001), Jupiter’s wife Nancy Yambem and myself along with my first wife Christel Stevens established the North America Manipuri Association (NAMA). Drita and Jupiter arrived in the US prior to me. The Kachari Meiteis (Assam), ­Bangladeshi Meiteis and Bishnupriya Meiteis from Manipur were also included in the first NAMA Convention, which was held in New York with late R. K. Binodini Devi, a Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi awardee from a royal family of Manipur as the Chief Guest in 1992. Around two dozen of people attended the event. I was the President of NAMA for two years. After five years, a few leaders formed North America Manipur Association (NAMA), in which the term Manipuri was replaced with Manipur. I heard that the Meitei diaspora from Bangladesh felt alienated and formed their Association since the nomenclature Manipuri was changed into Manipur. Currently, I am 81 years old and, I continue to attend NAMA Annual Convention and occasionally teach dance to the NAMA team since I love Manipur’s culture. (Personal interview with Singha) In the early 1990s, NAMA members used to communicate to each other through postal service but they started to use technology gradually. Lilly Sharma from Texas said: The annual convention of NAMA is like a re-union of friends and relatives where we get to meet most of the diaspora from Manipur. In fact, NAMA characterizes the concept of little Manipur as most of us come together once a year. It is a space for us to celebrate our culture, tradition and identity. (Personal interview with Sharma) Almost all the Meitei people in the USA follow Hindu Vaishnavism but some practice an indigenous and animistic religion known as Sanamahism, where the followers worship their ancestors. The Bishnupriya Meiteis from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Tripura and Assam used the Bengali script and speak their own language, which is influenced by Meiteilon (Manipuri). NAMA attempts to be inclusive by encouraging every ethnic community, especially the tribes from Manipur to join with contributions in their annual event. The Mizo tribes, Kuki tribes and Naga tribes, who are mostly Christians, have their own organizations and Christian fellowships and not actively involved in NAMA, just like the Meitei diaspora from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Tripura and Assam. The third wave of migration took place from the early 2000s onward, when Manipuri population increased to more than 100 people. In 2016, they were about 300 people but increased to around 1,000 people in 2020. Singha said: It is incredible that, there have been plenty of new born babies among the Manipur’s diasporic families in the past few years, which attributed to the improved population. (Personal interview with Singha) 109

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During the 29th NAMA Annual Convention held on 4th July 2020 through the webinar, Raj Chingakham, an Architect in Chicago and President of NAMA, said, ‘twenty-seven (27) babies were born in 2019–2020 in the US, and they are the future generation of Manipur’s American diaspora’. Sociologically, future generations are their social and cultural capital. They attempt to trace their roots, besides giving the younger generation an understanding of their homeland and upholding the traditional and cultural heritage through songs, dance, religious rituals, food and the like. In their annual events, they often invite artists from their homeland to perform and interact with the diaspora in the USA. NAMA attempts to keep their heritage alive in their homeland by promoting their indigenous Kang3 game, which is almost extinct. They do not focus on Polo, which is an indigenous game in Manipur and has become global. They attempt to uplift the educational experiences of the students and skill professionals, and are partnering with a reputed organization in Manipur. Raj Chingakham said: We plan to convert NAMA into non-profit organisation and register under the Federal Government of USA. We envision to focus on substantial projects related to sustainable development in Manipur and plan to collaborate with Manipur Royal Riders’ Club (Bikers), and help vulnerable and excluded sections of society in Manipur. We support the marginalized children in two orphanage homes and old aged people. We also help each other in USA and plan to launch a helpline in 2020 especially for medical consultancy and emergency. (Personal interview with Chingakham) NAMA has people with good leadership skills and is open to ideas and new strategies of ­doing things. Due to an initiative at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in 2011, New Delhi, the Manipur State Government invited the Manipur’s American diaspora to put forth the Knowledge Initiative in their homeland. Accordingly, they placed an idea of Knowledge Exchange Networks (KENs), where they proposed to engage in the socio-economic development of Manipur. They have been providing consultancy services and encouraging local entrepreneurs to start their business in Manipur.4 They narrate the process of migration to the USA in electronic media such as Impact TV on Manipuri Diaspora Speaks in order to provide real-life experiences of migration to the people in their homeland and to inspire and challenge the youth.

Demarcate the contours of the term ‘Manipuri’ aka ‘Meitei’ and tribal identity The term ‘Manipuri’ is a contested terminology. In an interview conducted in April 2020, a middle-aged couple alleged that they are not ‘Manipuri’ aka ‘Meitei’ but belongs to a ‘tribe’ from Manipur. Their statement echoes the sentiment of other tribal individuals who are native of Manipur and attempt to specify and demarcate with certain meticulousness about the contours of the ‘tribal’ versus the ‘Manipuri’ aka ‘Meitei’. The politics and culture of ‘difference and identity’ have been shaped in part by conflicts over the issues of ethnicity (Assayag and Bénéï, 2003, p. 17) and the question of dominant castes versus subjugated tribes in Manipur. It is interesting that despite their ethnic differences, they often represented Manipur across space and time in certain annual events like India Day Parade in New York. Therefore, to clarify the confusion between the Meitei and tribe, I used the term Manipur’s America diaspora in this study to be inclusive of all the ethnic communities from Manipur. Manipur is a multi-ethnic state and has been divided into two main regions, viz., the valley and the hills. Caste and tribe population (the former are people in the valley, and 110

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the latter mostly inhabits the hill districts) ethnically divide Manipur. As per the Census of ­India 2011, the Meitei people constitute 53% of the total population in Manipur, followed by Naga tribes at 24% and Zomi-Kuki tribes at 16%. Meiteilon (language) is the lingua franca in Manipur. The Manipuri people are known as ‘Meitei’, who are dominant inhabitants in the valley. Usually, the term ‘Manipuri’ is synonymous to the Pangal (Muslim), who speaks Meiteilon. The hill tribal people speak their different dialects. Unlike the Indian caste system, they have three hierarchical systems, viz., Brahmin, Kshatriya and Scheduled Castes (Lois, Yaithabi and the like). As per the Census of India 2011, 86% of the Meitei people follow Hinduism, particularly Vaishnavism, and 14% are followers of Sanamahi religion (an indigenous religion whose supreme God is known as Pakhangba). Manipur’s King P ­ amheiba, who Sanskritized his name as Garibniwas, introduced the Hindu sect Vaishnavism into M ­ anipur ­ engali Hindu misas the state religion during the 18th century, under the influence of the B sionary Shantidas Goswami. Most of the Manipuris follow both Hindu and Sanamahi religious practices. The hills districts are inhabited by 33 tribes, such as the Kuki/Zomi, Anal, Chothe, Kom, Chiru, Hmar, Liangmei, Zeme, Rongmei, Npuimei, Mao, Maring, Moyon, Monsang, Paite, Tangkhul, Vaiphei and the like. Majority of these tribes were converted into Christianity although a few tribes practice their forefather’s indigenous religion. The emergence of ethnic consciousness and aspirations has led to internal conflicts within the state. Majority of Manipur’s ethnic communities in the USA are passionate to preserve their own ethnic identities since they carry a little baggage of their ethnic consciousness from their homeland. C. Wright Mills’s (1959) sociological imagination of society is significant in this study since my attempt is to understand how individuals from Manipur’s ethnic groups manage to shift their perspective away from themselves and look at the issues more broadly surrounding them, bringing in context to individual action change in the modern world. The ethnic groups were in internal political turmoil in their homeland. Mills believed in the power of the sociological imagination to connect personal dilemmas to public issues.

Methodology This study used qualitative method via zoom, email, video call and personal observations from March to June 2020. The snowball sampling method was particularly useful in this study as when one interview was finished, the researcher requested that the respondent introduce her to any friends who would be interested in answering the same questions. In this process, the first respondent automatically introduced a bit of the topic to the second respondent that made it easier for the researcher to interview the second respondent. It also helped to establish rapport promptly. The selected respondents reside in Tulsa, Cincinnati, California, Texas, Boston, Burlington, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, Des Moines, Chicago and Kansas City. This study involves certain sociological aspects like – what are the reflections of the selected respondents, why did they migrate to the USA, what are their occupation and challenges, their vision and aspirations to develop their homeland. The generalization emerges out of the responses from online fieldwork and personal observations. The respondents described their journey of migration and experiences of assimilation in the American society including the techno-savvy ways of connecting to their families in their homeland. The units of analysis in this study are 15 people (11 women and 4 men) only and they represented the voices of their community in the USA. This study seeks to argue that the judicious responses can establish in mapping the cultural and development ties with their homeland as they disclose the overall sentiments of their people. 111

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The American dream People migrate to the USA since they perceived it as the land of opportunity, abundance and freedom. And, the USA has welcomed immigrants with open arms earlier although there are restrictions to migrate after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The idea of America was associated with the metaphor of the melting pot where all people who wanted to be part of the American dream realized their ambitions by working hard and prospering and assimilating into the American society by ‘melting’ their identities and becoming American. Thus, a uniform American identity emerged that was not inclusive and then the ‘melting pot’ model was replaced by the ‘salad bowl model’ where all ethnic groups and peoples of different orientations became American without losing their identities or melting but became a part of a whole. This concept suggests that the integration of different cultures combine like a salad in contrast to the traditional notion of a cultural melting pot. The ‘salad bowl model’ seems to be applicable in the context of various ethnic groups from Manipur. Shunghring Hrangbung, who belonged to the Anal tribe from Chandel district, ­Manipur, said: I am a nurse in St. Luke’s hospital of Kansas City and came from a poor socio-economic background. Initially, I worked in the business process outsourcing (BPO) call centre in Bengaluru and managed to gain experience and confidence. I migrated to the USA in August 2007 after clearing TOEFL and GREs to do my masters degree majoring in Christian education. Then, I switched over to nursing and I got a job in the hospital to work in the emergency ward. I believed in hard work to become successful. (Personal interview with Hranbung) Similarly, Achun Kamei said: I came from a poor family. My father was bed ridden and mother has no resources to provide education for my siblings and me although they wished to send us to school. When I was nine years old, a Jesuit priest and his family from Karnataka adopted me and provided me education. I was serious in studies. I graduated from St. Agnes College, Mangalore and completed nursing degree from St. Martha’s Nursing School, Bengaluru. Nursing was not my first choice but I believed that God has a plan and purpose for me. In the mid-2000s, the US was in short supply of healthcare workers and nurses. Hence, they were hiring nurses from all over the world and were given green card for those who came to work in the US. God gave me an opportunity as I cleared English and CGFNS exams and I migrated to the US in 2005. Till today, my profession is a registered nurse in New York City and I became a US citizen in 2011. (Personal interview with Kamei) Both Achun and Shunghring’s stories reveal that America is a country of opportunity where even people from poor economic backgrounds could excel and succeed through hard work. To reinforce their identity, culture and tradition, some Manipur’s American diaspora launched online live shows, podcasts and YouTube channels and conduct weekly/monthly shows in which they discuss cuisines, dance, culture, literature, social concerns, current events of their homeland and global issues. For instance, Kebola Wahengbam from 112

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Cincinnati started her YouTube channel on Manipuri traditional cuisine cum cooking and gardening shows. Kebola is one of the first Manipuri women YouTuber and she has thousands of followers. Sometimes, she showcases her Manipuri’s traditional attires and dances. In her YouTube show, Kebola said: I love people of Kangleipak 5 and wish everyone to work hard and become successful. We need to compete in this globalized world. The contemporary youth should learn to eat healthy food, plant trees and grow their own food. Kebola does not only express her love for her people and homeland but reflects her fond memory and nostalgia of her childhood in her Leikai (colony) and desires to visit her homeland frequently. Robert King Merton (1938) argues that Americans were socialized into believing in the American dream, and that dream of success and material wealth is possible if they work hard because the society was a meritocracy. Kebola’s expression affirms Merton’s concept of the ‘American dream’ to own a white picket fence house in Beverly Hills, expensive cars, comfortable lifestyles and the like.

Globalization, glocalization, cultural ties and identity Assayag and Bénéï (2003, p. 4) argue, ‘the migratory trend is intricately connected to the multifaceted process called “globalisation” which encompasses geographical, economic, political, technological and cultural dimensions’. We live in an extremely globalized world, where the world is flatter than ever as pointed out by Thomas L. Friedman (2005). Friedman recounts his trip to Bengaluru in India, when he realized that globalization has changed core economic concepts. For him, flattening is a product of the convergence of the personal computer with fiber optic cable with the rise of workflow software. I am not sure if globalization will continue to thrive like before as the debate on glocalization, which is a combination of globalization, and glocalization is emerging at the forefront of academic discourse. Sociologist Roland Robertson in the Harvard Business Review coined the term ‘glocalisation’ in 1980, and it refers to describe a product or service that is developed and distributed globally but is also adjusted to accommodate the user and consumer in a local market. For instance, M ­ cDonald’s beef burger in the global market gives way to McAloo Tikki vegetarian burger or Maharaja Chicken burger in India. Similarly, soibum (fermented bamboo shoots), hawaizar aka akhuni (axone or fermented soya), ngari (fermented fish), oaksha akangba (smoked pork), mustard leaves and the like in various Asian stores in the USA and online shops give way to satisfy the Manipur’s American diaspora. Achun Kamei said: I am a good cook and often make authentic ethnic cuisines. I buy food items like mustard leaves, mushrooms, dry fish and the like from Asian stores. (Personal interview with Kamei) Waribam Bhalindra, software engineer from Illinois, echoes the same feeling as: Our traditional food habits are very much similar to South Asian countries like Korea, Thailand, China and the like. We have varieties of Asian groceries available. Since multicultural and multi-ethnic cuisines are available in various restaurants, we don’t miss traditional cuisines. (Personal interview with Bhalindra) 113

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For the diaspora, food forms an indispensable part of mapping cultural ties with their homeland and asserts their cultural identity. A majority of women alleged that cooking authentic dishes is an expression of nostalgia for their homeland and consider it a way of preserving their cultural identity. Shanti Thokchom voiced nostalgia of her indigenous food as: Manipur cuisines are one of the healthiest in the world. I cook authentic dishes and often use traditional spices, soibum (bamboo shoots) and ngari (fermented fish) and hawaizar (fermented soya beans). (Personal interview with Thokchom) Dolly Kikon’s (2015) anthropological study of hawaizar aka akhuni (fermented soya beans) highlights the diversities of food, ways of cooking and feasting among the Naga tribes, in which she argues that eating fermented food is an integral part of their culture and history. The method of preparation, preservation and taste of hawaizar/akhuni varies from culture to culture in Northeast India. The diaspora’s cravings for ethnic food help the Asian restaurants, entrepreneurs and Asian grocery stores to garner the trust of the Indian people and strengthen their food business. In a nutshell, glocalization helps in connecting with the local Indian consumers on an emotional level and also leverage its global position. Culture helps them to have a sense of belonging, understand their identities, communities and other people, which slowly develops from one’s birth and is molded by norms, values, attitudes and traditions of their homeland as well as the host country. Zygmunt Bauman (2011) argues that identity formation is never fixed, never final, veering between the pole of freedom and that of security. It is an intertwining of continuity and discontinuity that may now hold society together. Margaret Mead (1935) asserts that culture and identity are closely intertwined since the former defines a person’s identity. Cultural identity helps them in making decisions and upholds certain behaviors. Lily Sharma said: Even though I spent less time in Manipur during my childhood, my memories, taste of food and emotional attachment is all tied to Manipur. I always tried to remind my children and second-generation diaspora, who are not born in Manipur about my ties with homeland by sharing my childhood stories, how I grew up and how I spent my time. I feel sad that they will never feel so attached to Manipur like we do. (Personal interview with Sharma) It is significant for the diaspora to have a strong sense of identity although they may have dual identities and cultures such as ‘Meitei American or Naga American or Kuki American or Indian American’ or combination of more than two identities. They have a sense of national identity that belongs to India and the USA. For instance, Ridhi Chingakham played a flute of the Indian national anthem, followed by the American national anthem during the NAMA Annual Webinar Convention on 4th July 2020, which was followed by songs and dance performed by artists from homeland as well as the diaspora. This reveals their sense of patriotism and loyalty to both the homeland and the host country. Language reinforces the cultural identity of the diaspora in a new territory. If language is lost, the culture will also disappear in due course of time. Sometimes, they are compelled to learn a new language in their host country. Achun Kamei said: Initially, it took a few months for me to learn American English language and the accent since I came from a small village in Manipur. Americans speak fast with deep accent. 114

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I live with a mixed racial community where there people from Mexico, Jamaica, Philippines, India, Russia and Africa. I speak my Rongmei dialect with my family through whatsapp video call, Facetime and zoom. I also speak Meiteilon (Manipuri language) with my fellow Manipur diaspora in the US. (Personal interview with Kamei) Similarly, Kumari Daimai Miller, who belonged to a Liangmai Naga tribe from Dothan, Alabama, said: I teach the Liangmai Naga dialect to my son and daughter although we don’t speak at home. I used to dress them up in my traditional attire for special occasions and tell them about my childhood, family, kinship and the like so that they would know my roots and culture. (Personal interview with Miller) K.L. Sharma and T.K. Oommen (2000, p. 17) examined the cultural assimilation of language in a new land, where they said, there is a close association between language and territory. When groups migrate and settle in new linguistic region they may have to learn the language of the new habitat, whereas they need not change their religion and, of course, they cannot change their race. Achun Kamei and Kumari Daimei Miller’s statements affirmed this assertion. Manipur’s American diaspora attempts to preserve their cultural identities of their homeland. Khamba (anonymous), a software engineer from Burlington, said, We celebrate cultural festivals to maintain and retain our identity and roots. (Personal interview with Khamba) To strengthen their cultural ties with homeland, the diaspora used to come together for traditional festivals, marriage ceremonies or religious rituals like swasti puja, or just get together for any purposes; they also cook their traditional dishes and feast together. Sonia, an IT professional from Baltimore, Maryland, said: We have around twelve Manipuri families in Washington DC area. We celebrate many traditional festivals together such as Ningol chakouba, yaosang, kang, Christmas, cheiraoba and the like. We started marup 6 among the women from Manipur and we often have potluck. (Personal interview with Sonia) Ruati Buongpui from Texas, who is from a Hmar tribe from Manipur, said: Everyday, I prefer to eat rice with Hmar tribal cuisines. I grow vegetables like Anphui (bitter leaves), chillis and the like in my pots. In Houston, we have few families from Manipur, and we always celebrate traditional festivals like Ningol chakouba in friend’s home but we usually host Christmas dinner at our house. Whenever we gather for festivals, we wear our respective tribal attires and cook food with fermented fish, bamboo shoots, pork in Naga style and the like. 115

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The above narratives reveal that they can preserve the cultural heritage of their homeland completely.

Giving back to homeland The bond between the diaspora and the homeland depends not only on the government policies but on the cultural and development ties. The question arises whether the diaspora and the people of their homeland belong to each other, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 has brought the studies of migration, diaspora and giving back to center stage. The purpose of giving back is much closer to the heart of the new successful and knowledge diaspora; they desire to uplift their people in their homeland during crises, and they would like to see some visible change happen similar to what they observe in their host country. The French Sociologist Marcel Mauss, in his work ‘The Gift’ (2002), argued that the theory of the gift is a theory of human solidarity. He did his ethnographic fieldwork among the various tribes in Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean. For him, the gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction. Each gift is a part of a system of reciprocity in which the honors of the giver and the recipient are engaged. The cycling gift system is the society. Mauss argues that in the things exchanged during the Potlatch, a power is present that forces gifts to be passed around, to be given and returned. All these things are always spiritual in origin and of a spiritual nature. Potlatch is a ceremonial feast where people display their property and wealth and gifts to affirm or reaffirm their status and prestige. It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound with the object given that causes the gift to have a power, which compels the recipient to reciprocate. His theory points out that gifts are inalienable, and they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid. For Mauss, the free gift that is not returned is a contradiction because it cannot create social ties. He believed that gifts are never truly free; rather, human history is full of examples of gifts bringing about reciprocal exchange. A gift economy or gift culture is a mode of exchange where valuables are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. This contrasts with a barter economy or a market economy, where goods and services are primarily explicitly exchanged for value received. His critiques argue that his theory of gift does not apply between the beggar and the passerby giver or donor and receiver since it is a free gift without knowing each other or any expectations in return. The receivers do not have any obligation to return the gift. Majority of givers may not have any expectations in return but they have a sense of satisfaction in sharing their wealth and some of them accomplish their spiritual journey through giving, and a few others give because giving is vogue and associated with prestige and status. In the context of spiritual aspects, giving free gifts to the Buddhist monks and Jain renouncers are good examples. The Buddhist and Jain celibate renouncers live an ascetic life of spiritual purification in search of salvation or moksha. They practice ahimsa (non-violence) and strict diet where they don’t involve in any violence against microscopic organism. Jains don’t eat even carrots, garlic and onions, whose roots are grown inside the earth, and they are compelled not to cook and, hence, depend on food donations from others within the Jain community. Free food is associated with moral and non-material qualities of gifting. Marshall Sahlins (1972) observes that culture is the driving force behind human behavior and development. For him, generalized reciprocity is gift giving without the expectation of an immediate return. Some of the podcasts and online talk shows like FindingMyVoices.com include narratives of people of Manipur from all walks of life. It builds awareness, gives inspiration; debates about their identity; attempts to trace their origin or roots; focuses on literature,

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theater, music and academics; and provides a connection for the Manipur’s diaspora from around the globe and within Manipur itself. Most of these talk shows are in English since the second-generation or third-generation diaspora may not be comfortable with Meiteilon (Manipuri language) or their local tribal mother tongues. Moreover, these talk shows attract people of other cultures from around the globe. A question arises whether a few thoughtful and committed individuals of Manipur origin can change their homeland. Margaret Mead (1901–1978) asserts that each of us can help to change the society if we gather together as a small group with a vision. Mead’s idea is applicable in understanding the contributions of Manipur’s diaspora in the USA. Sahadev Waikhom, a software engineer from Des Moines, Iowa, said: Financially, I helped many poor and needy students in Manipur under my father and mother’s name. Only a few people know about it as I don’t want others to know the people whom I helped. (Personal interview with Waikhom) Giving is not necessarily about cash but the sharing of skills, knowledge and time. To Americans, time is money. I found that the purpose of giving back to their homeland, especially during this pandemic, is that they desire to uplift their own people, and they would like to lower death rates due to COVID-19. Their intervention to send financial aid through online transactions to their respective state/city/town/village reveals their sense of responsibility to help and also their genuine intention to protect their people from COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it reveals their basic moral and emotional ties with their homeland. Their inspirations to give back are a combination of traditional concerns of family, kinship, castes and spiritual sentiments, and the idea of doing something good for their family members, migrant workers, poor and needy (Niumai, 2011). The amount of donation may be small or huge but giving is a reflection of their desire to intervene in times of crisis like COVID-19. Many of them give through their ethnic associations and NGOs. A few individuals raised funds through their skills like paintings, tailoring and made videos to spread awareness about COVID-19 in ethnic dialects and launched it online to connect with the homeland. Some of them give back even to their host country during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Meitei woman Venus Senjam used her skill of stitching and made hundreds of facemasks at her residence and donated it to the healthcare and community centers like Shattuck hospital, Billerica Food Care, Franklin senior Center, Beth Israel hospital, Hockomock Area YMCA, Franklin, New Jersey State, Adult Care Center, New York State, friends, family and other communities. The following case studies show how they are concerned not only about the homeland but also the hostland. I am making facemasks at home since there is a great need for personal protective equipment like facemasks due to the covid-19 pandemic. My first priority is to help medical personnel, but when I have capacity I make for others as well. These nurses then distribute the masks to other team members as needed. All the facemasks have gone to US hospitals and Indian immigrants living in US. Since many of my friends are from Manipur originally, a large portion of masks and surgical hats went to Manipur’s diaspora living in the US. I am concerned about India but more concerned about US, because US has 1/3rd of worldwide covid-19 cases, which makes US the most affected country. (Personal interview with Ruati Buongpui from Texas)

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I am more concerned about COVID – 19 pandemic back home in Manipur, India. I feel deeply concerned about my aged parents, siblings and friends who live there. Also, that is the place I have grown up. However, I give funds to homeland through NAMA. I am the Treasurer of NAMA and in mid June 2020, we donated Rs.1,87,150/- to the Chief Minister’s COVID-19 Relief Fund and also to two orphan children homes in Manipur. (Personal Interview with Lily Sharma from Texas [originally from Manipur]) I made some amateur short video clips in order to spread awareness about COVID-19 in Kuki dialect and shared it in facebook. I always encourage the young people to work hard and look forward to a better life and a great future but that needs hard work. (Personal interview with Shanti Thokchom, a nurse from Tulsa, Oklahoma [originally from Manipur]) I give back to homeland by organizing personality development workshop and sessions, a platform to think differently offering different perspectives through my talk show FindingTheVoices.com, carry out fund raisers by using my art - oil paintings for palliative care and education of Kanggui hope children of Kangpokpi in Manipur and other projects like gratitude project of Manipur, and book-club in times of Covid-19 pandemic. I also give back to the US through my skills in innovating in the healthcare industry with emerging products, and by being a speaker to motivate through sharing about my career and experiences. (Personal interview with Monica Ingudam, a software engineer from Washington DC [originally from Manipur]) The above cases reveal that the amount of donation may be small or huge, but giving is a reflection of their desire to intervene in times of crisis and for the betterment of their people. Many of them give through NAMA but a few individuals raised funds through painting and other innovative strategies and give back for a cause in their homeland. The diaspora does not give funds alone, but it also provides ideas, skills and knowledge for developmental activities. Few of them have launched online YouTube channels and websites to connect with not only other diaspora from Manipur but to facilitate youth from Manipur to come to North America for studies or to work. And, whenever they visit Manipur (once a year or once in two or three years), some of them tend to visit their alma mater, NGOs whom they connected to, and individuals whom they have supported financially and share skills.

Challenges There are numerous challenges as immigrants that they encounter in their everyday lives. Khamba shared his challenges and struggles as an immigrant in the USA and said: Sending my one year old baby to daycare was a bit of a challenge and leaving my kid to someone unknown for the entire day was a big decision. I took some time to adjust it. Driving a car on the right in the US was challenging initially so does following traffic rules and learning new traffic signs. This was never the case in India (In India, the only signal respected is red light and this also only in the metros). Unlike India, work place is different, everyone comes on time and leaves on time, there is no hierarchy and all responsibilities are discussed openly and transparently. (Personal Interview with Khamba) 118

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Peraly Sam Meyer, a nurse at Medical City Denton in Texas, echoes in a similar vein: When I first moved to Dallas, Texas, I hardly know how to drive a car and there was no public transportation. I was compelled to learn the art of driving from my late American husband. (Personal interview with Meyer) Similarly, Sonia said: We are in a state of raising our children in the host country. We don’t know what is stored in our future here. But we definitely want our children to have a good future. I do miss my homeland but sometimes, when I went home for vacation, it feels like Manipur has progressed so much. It is not the old Manipur we knew. With the Internet everything is global. I saw several children speak English like an American due to the availability of YouTube channels. (Personal interview with Sonia) Monica Ingudam expressed: I knew driving prior to my arrival in US in 2004 but adapting to driving here with the right hand driving, changing lanes while driving at a fast speed was an experience. Besides, a volatile job market led me to being laid off twice and career choice of taking breaks in between to balance family life when my kids were born and the struggle of jumping multiple hoops compromising on roles/salary to get back in the career track to the role I want was a challenge. The other challenge includes not having close family support especially during the early years of my children and the long distance relationship and connection with my family where I couldn’t truly be open on what I was going through as I didn’t want to bother them with my struggles. Missing my father’s funeral was very difficult for me. (Personal interview with Ingudam) Shanti Thokchom, a nursing assistant in a nursing home for the elderly in Tulsa, Okhlahoma, narrated her journey of migration, tussles and the process of cultural assimilation in the USA. Shanti said: I migrated to the US in April 1999. I am a trained nurse from Jorhat Christian Medical Center, Assam. Prior to my arrival in the US, I used to take care of the babies of some of the ultra rich business families in Mumbai and I loved my job. One particular family was looking for a trustworthy person to take care of their baby girl Jahnvi Arora, as both parents were doctors in New York, doing their internships. The baby’s grandmother took care of the baby for four months after the baby was born and she had to return back to India. Their family’s friend recommended my name to care for their baby and I agreed to travel with them to New York City. That’s how I travelled to the US as their personal assistant. The baby’s father picked me up from the airport and he was very relieved to know they had a trustworthy person to care for their precious daughter. After completing their internship, we moved to Manchester city, Connecticut for their medical practice. They were nice and thoughtful and allowed me to attend church, which I was missing very much, and have some time for myself. I met my American husband in the church. I never thought I would ever get married. We got married in 2000 by a justice 119

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peace of league, as I had no family in the US. We made a huge cultural adjustment especially food habits. I like rice whereas he likes potatoes and meat. I had a tough time adjusting in my husband’s neighborhood since majority of the people were Hispanic and I could not speak Spanish. I missed home so much during those days. After few months, I got permission to work and I started working at a daycare. And, my son Raj was born in 2001 but I became lonely and depressed. However, I could overcome it slowly as motherhood kept me busy. We moved to Oklahoma in 2003 as some Kuki tribal families in Tulsa suggested us and I also wished to be closer to my community folks and for lower cost of living. Unfortunately, my husband died in an accident in 2008. Today, I live with my son Raj and work among the high-risk elderly people during this COVID-19 pandemic without sufficient masks and gloves. Life is always a challenge. (Personal interview with Thokchom) Immigrant nurses earn much less than the doctors though they are in high demand in the USA especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. When they are paid less, they have to work in two or three places. And, if they worked among the elderly people who have low immunity, the nurses are at high risk of being affected by COVID-19. The question is how many of the diaspora could afford to sustain themselves and their families during this COVID-19 pandemic since many people are suffering from salary cuts and some have lost their job. A major problem is the challenge of monitoring funds by the diaspora during this current pandemic since Manipuris cannot travel and meet personally with those whom they support. Almost every women giver is keen to make sure that her money goes to the beneficiary directly in India. Women tend to give in smaller amounts regularly whereas men give more but prefer to make a single payment.

Conclusion Manipur’s American diaspora is almost like the old Indian diaspora since many of them are settling down, purchasing houses and cars, concentrating on their children’s education, adjusting to life without an extended family member, assimilating with the new culture of their host country and the like. They attempt to give world-class opportunities such as education, music, sports and the like which they never had, in their homeland to their younger generations. The increasing number of migration and challenges faced by Manipur’s American diaspora need to be addressed constructively to bring about an inclusive society and a model sub-­m inority ethnic community in the USA. We may lay the groundwork for the next generations of inclusive society by respecting and supporting each ethnic group, expanding economic opportunity and promoting entrepreneurship to strive in the years to come. But, the Meiteis and tribal groups need to accept each other and celebrate their differences by upholding the spirit of ‘unity in diversity’. The false ideas of ‘pollution and purity’ and essentialism create stereotypes that need to be abolished with enabling ideas of ethnicity. An example would be a group of Kukis speaking both Thadou dialect and Meiteilon show diverse identities and all these identities are co-created and contextual and not foisted from above.

Notes 1 ‘Mainstream Indian diaspora’ refers to those who were originally from mainland India. 2 All the respondents were agreed and permission were taken to use their full name in this chapter except one respondent, whose name was used anonymous for identity purpose.

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Manipur’s diaspora in the United States 3 ‘Kang’ is an indigenous and ancient indoor game of Manipur, which is played in a court by both men and women. Usually, the game comprises of seven players on each sides indicating seven days of the week. The duration of the game is four and half-hours with an interval of five minutes. Kang is a flat instrument, 5 ½ inches to 6 inches in length and 3½ to 3¾ inches in breadth. It should be made of lac and have a fixed face. The Meiteis aka Manipuris believed that their deity Panthoibi goddess played the Kang game. Kang game is almost extinct today. 4 http://e-paolive.net/download/education/2012/09/KEN-Presentation_MU_201209.pdf 5 ‘Kangleipak’ or ‘Meiteileipak’ (land of Meitei people) is an indigenous and historical terminology of Manipur. It is alleged that the term ‘Manipur’ came into existence during the 18th century during the reign of King Gharib Niwas. He burned down the ancient literatures and scriptures of Kangleipak under the royal decree and introduced a Hindu denomination known as Vaishnavism as the state religion and sanskritised the name of the state as Manipur under the influenced of Bengali Guru Shantidas Goswami. He also imposed the people of Manipur to use Bengali script. Today, the schools in Manipur replaced the Bengali script by Meitei Mayek (Manipuri script). 6 Marup (friendship in Meiteilon/Manipuri language) is an informal traditional credit institution aka chit fund among the women.

References Assayag, J. and Bénéï, V. (Ed.) (2003). At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bauman, Z. (2011). Migration and Identities in the Globalized World. Journal of Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37 (4), 425–435. Census of India (2011). 2011 Census Data. https://censusindia.gov.in/2011-common/censusdata2011. html [Retrieved on 3rd March 2020]. Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Strauß and Giroux. Hegde, R. and Sahoo, A. K. (2018). Introduction. In R. Hegde and A. K. Sahoo (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge. Kadekar, L. N., Sahoo, A. K. and Bhattacharya, G. (Eds.) (2009). The Indian Diaspora: Historical and Contemporary Context. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Kapur, D., Mehta, S. A. and Dutt, R. M. (2004). Indian Diaspora Philanthropy. In P. F. Geithner, P. D. Johnson, and L. C. Chen (Eds.), Diaspora Philanthropy and Equitable Development in China and India (pp.177–213). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kikon, D. (2015). Fermenting Modernity: Putting Akhuni on the Nation’s Table in India. South Asia: Journal of Asian Studies, 38 (2), 320–335. Lal, V. (1999). Establishing Roots, Engendering Awareness: A Political History of Asian Indians in the United States. In L. Prasad (Ed.), Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience. Philadelphia, PA: Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies. Mauss, M. (2002). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchanges in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge [The English edition was first published in 1954]. Mead, M. (1901–1978). https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/margaret-mead [Retrieved on 3 June 2020]. Mead, M. (1935). Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow & Co. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social Structure and Anomie. American Sociological Review, 3 (5), 672–682. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Niumai, A. (2011). Indian Diaspora Philanthropy: A Sociological Perspective. Man in India: An ­International Journal of Anthropology, 91 (1), 93–114. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. Chicago, IL: Aldine Atherton Inc. Sharma, K. L. and Oommen, T. K. (2000). Nation and National Identity in South Asia. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. The Economics Times (01 February 2020). Non-TaxPaying NRIs to be Taxed in India: FM. https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/non-taxpaying-nris-to-be-taxed-in-­ india-fm/articleshow/73848795.cms?from=mdr [Retrieved on 16 July 2020].

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8 REMITTANCE OWNERS’ FINANCIAL CAPABILITIES Can these bridge diaspora and development? Jeremaiah M. Opiniano Introduction International remittances have long been regarded as a major source of development ­fi nance, especially in developing countries. These dollar incomes to all countries reached a record-high US$ 714 billion in 2019; about US$ 554 billion of that total went to lowand middle-income countries (World Bank, 2020). These figures also coincided with the ­estimates of the world’s international migrants, currently at 272 million (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2019). For developing countries receiving these, foreign remittances are economic lifelines; these monies are even higher than foreign direct investments, foreign portfolio investments and official development aid (World Bank, 2020). These privately owned remittances represent the hard work and familial sacrifices of ­international migrants, as well as the economic empowerment that these migrants have maximized in host countries (Bagasao, 2008). Since the international development community had begun recognizing international migrants as this modern world’s development ­actors early in the new millennium (World Bank, 2003), origin and destination countries have launched and sustained various diaspora- or remittances-for-development programs. These programs have harnessed remittances either as philanthropic donations, as development savings deposits, or as investible funds for enterprises (Rispens-Noel and Opiniano, 2015). However, luring foreign remittances for productive or developmental purposes is more than just encouraging its owners—migrants abroad and their families at home—to do so. A more contextual form of encouragement must be accounted for: it is cognitive in nature. We speak here of financial capabilities, being referred to as “a person’s ability and opportunity to act about money and finance in ways that contribute to financial functioning” (Birkenmaier and Huang, 2014; Sherraden and Ansong, 2016). The concept speaks also of the ability to use one’s abilities on finance given prevailing socio-economic conditions (World Bank, 2015). If overseas remittances act as a bridge between international migration and development (Hertlein and Vadean, 2006), financial knowledge, access and actions—the three elements of the concept of financial capabilities (Sherraden and Ansong, 2016)—are important ­channels for overseas migrants and their families to productively use their remittance incomes. 122

Remittance owners’ financial capabilities

­ nalyses of the financial capabilities of overseas remittance owners (not just their financial A literacy) surprisingly remain an under-researched area in migration research—slow to keep pace with numerous programmatic and policy efforts worldwide. This paper seeks to find out how do the financial capabilities of remittance owners contribute to the productive usage of their dollar incomes. Multiple-year surveys of overseas remitters and their households from rural municipalities in the Philippines hope to illustrate their financial capabilities vis-à-vis using these incomes to more productive purposes. Studies have documented the numerous family-level uses of remittances, from daily needs to debt repayments to savings, investments and entrepreneurship (e.g., OECD, 2017). From a financial capabilities perspective, what is the logical connection between migrants’ financial literacy and their availment of savings accounts (financial inclusion) and using remittances productively (financial functionings)?

Financial capabilities, remittances and development Definition. Social work scholars Margaret Sherraden, Julie Birkenmaier and colleagues floated the concept of financial capabilities as an expansion to the popular concept financial literacy. Financial capabilities speak of a person’s ability and opportunity to act about money and finance in ways that contribute to financial functioning (Birkenmaier and Huang, 2014; Sherraden and Ansong, 2016). A related definition of financial capabilities comes from the World Bank: The internal capacity to act in one’s best financial interest, given socio-economic (and) environmental conditions. It therefore encompasses the knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviors of consumers with regard to managing their resources and understanding, selecting and making use of financial services that fit their needs. (World Bank, 2015: 3) Financial capabilities cover three dimensions: financial literacy (knowledge, skills and attitudes), financial inclusion (access to formal and appropriate financial products and services) and financial functionings (actions on finance, options of financial behaviors) (Birkenmaier and Huang, 2014; Sherraden and Ansong, 2016). Of course, the concept of financial capabilities emanates from being financially literate; financial education programs thus come to the fore in terms of equipping individuals with the financial knowledge and skills to make sound financial decisions, better handle financial resources and realize financial goals (Orozco, 2008). Financial capabilities and overseas remittances. Improved financial capabilities (beginning with financial literacy or knowledge) may yield positive effects unto remittance households, eventually seeing these households make better financial decisions and functionings or actions. From a policy standpoint, financial literacy interventions have a real potential to change the financial behaviors of remittance-earning households (Seshan and Yang, 2014) and allot more amounts for saving even with the same level of remittances (Doi et al., 2012). However, there is concern that limited or low levels of financial knowledge by remittance owners will provide barriers to using remittances productively. Prior to giving some 6,503 remittance owners from Moldova financial education interventions, Orozco’s (2008) survey found that their knowledge base is limited, that only a few do budgeting and financial planning. Similar observations were seen in migrant participants, prior to their joining of 123

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financial education programs, in Nepal and Sri Lanka (Rosenberg et al., 2017), South Korea ( Jang et al., 2019a, 2019b) and Australia (Russell et al., 2019). Economists have then tested if financial literacy interventions will improve their financial access and (more importantly) remittance owners’ financial functionings or actions. Results of these randomized experiments have largely yielded varied impacts unto remittance owners, and with certain nuances. Interestingly, aspired positive impacts of financial literacy interventions in these randomized control trials (RCTs) are not automatic. Testing around 400 Indonesian migrant workers, Doi et al. (2012) found that financial literacy training yielded positive impacts on knowledge about money, and on financial practices such as having more savings and diminishing the amount of loans. A major key factor to such results, says authors, is providing these financial literacy interventions at “teachable moments”: large effects can come out depending on who are trained—be it the migrant, the one left behind or both (Doi et al., 2012). For their part, Gibson et al. (2014) wanted to find out if Pacific Islander, East and South Asian migrants in New Zealand and Australia, will improve their choice of remittance channels when they are given financial literacy training. The financial literacy training had changed respondents’ knowledge of remittance channels and made them compare the transfer fees of remittance companies. However, authors ­observed a modest effect: migrants have switched to more expensive or less-transparent remittance channels, and their amounts and frequencies of sending remittances did not change. Seshan and Yang (2014) had 232 married Indian migrant workers in Qatar and their wives in India participate in a savings-focused financial literacy workshop. The workshop that was provided unto the treatment group saw respondents make joint financial decisions and savings goals. At endline, some 13-to-17 months after the workshops, Seshan and Yang (2014) found some changes in participants’ financial practices, though there were no significant impacts on Indian workers’ remittances or savings levels. Policy and behavioral relevance. Nevertheless, financial literacy remains a pertinent intervention to improve migrant remitters’ financial practices (i.e., financial inclusion and financial functionings). Nepalese and Sri Lankan migrant households (N = 2,044) who absorbed knowledge from a Dutch development agency’s financial literacy information package saw an increase in their financial knowledge (Rosenberg et al., 2017). This is not to mention rising numbers of respondents, after their participation, who self-reported they are now recording finances, making family budgets, setting financial goals, augmenting savings and venturing into entrepreneurial activities (Rosenberg et al., 2017). Given a leading bank’s financial education program, most of the surveyed newly arrived migrants to Australia (N  =  365) have excess monies left, have savings that can cover unexpected expenditures (without needing to borrow) and have developed savings habits (Russell et al., 2019). A survey of former Indonesian overseas migrant workers (N = 548) found that their financial literacy positively contributed to financial planning (result being statistically significant). ­However, respondents’ knowledge on three concepts on finance—interest rates, inflation and risk d­ iversification—provided differing effects on financial decisions and financial ­planning (Brahmana and Brahmana, 2016). These previous studies underscore the ripeness of overseas migration and remittances as a theme for financial capabilities research. Future financial capabilities studies related to overseas remittances await more answers in the context that makers and doers of financial decisions are countries apart, even if connected by technology. At the same time, remittance incomes are higher than incomes in the home country—thus providing an impetus that remittances bring immense development potentials at family, community and even national levels. These exponential incomes may also trigger changes in financial habits. 124

Remittance owners’ financial capabilities

Methods This paper will cite financial capabilities-related survey results coming from a multi-year mixed methods research project done in five rural municipalities in the Philippines. The project employed a mixed methods tool called the Remittance Investment Climate Analysis in Rural Hometowns (RICART). This tool sought to determine not just the readiness of rural municipalities’ economic competitiveness conditions to receive dollar remittances by townmates abroad as hometown investments. RICART also analyzes the financial capabilities of overseas migrants and their families vis-à-vis their usage of remittances in their rural hometowns. Thus, the rural household and its residents are the conjoint units of analysis (Ang and Opiniano, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). RICART had its pilot implementation in 2011–2012, covering the municipalities of Magarao in Camarines Sur province (southeastern part of Luzon island) and Maribojoc in Bohol province (central Philippines). RICART was also implemented in Pandi in Bulacan province in the year 2012–2013 (some 39 km northeast from the Philippine capital Manila), and Guiguinto, also in Bulacan province (some 33 km northwest of Manila) in the year 2014–2015. These RICART rounds were courtesy of modest funding support from international donors. The largest conduct of RICART in terms of survey respondents was done in 2018–2019 in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte province (450 km northwest of Manila) as part of the author’s ongoing doctoral research (Geography). Areas were chosen given their proximity and remoteness to the municipalities’ nearest cities in their respective provinces. Magarao, Guiguinto and San Nicolas are beside cities while Maribojoc and Pandi are remote. As per prevailing Philippine income classifications of local government units (by income, land area and population size), Guiguinto is first class; San Nicolas and Pandi are second class; Maribojoc is fourth class; and Magarao is fifth class. A market survey (quantitative) and the rapid rural appraisal (RRA) method (qualitative) were implemented in these RICART rounds. These RICART studies employed the convergent mixed methods design (Creamer, 2018) that saw the survey and the RRA data gathering methods—key informant interviews, focus group discussions and documentary analysis— conducted simultaneously. The RICART surveys in Magarao, Maribojoc, Pandi and Guiguinto covered both overseas migrants and migrant households; a comparison survey group, non-migrant households, was included in Pandi, Guiguinto and San Nicolas. Meanwhile, only migrant and non-­ migrant households were surveyed in San Nicolas. All survey respondents must be physically present in the rural hometowns, including overseas migrants, during the months-long surveys (see Table 8.1). Given also the absence of reliable local databases on the number of overseas migrants, and of household listings of the towns’ overseas migrant family members, quota and referral sampling techniques were employed. Enumerators visited the villages (barangay in Filipino) of the said municipalities to recruit respondents. During the early conduct of RICART, ­Filipinos in rural areas were victims of financial scammers and of a spate of rural bank closures. These were cited as reasons for the refusals during recruitment, which is why a limitation of this paper is the small samples collected in some of the municipalities. All municipalities carried the same survey questions: demographic and migration profiles, remittance behaviors, incomes and expenditures, and financial capabilities that cover financial literacy, financial access (i.e., saving remittances and ownership of savings accounts) and financial functionings (i.e., investments made and enterprises owned within and outside the rural hometowns). Similar surveys allow the comparability of survey results over time. Given 125

Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

also the non-probability sampling techniques employed, generalizability of survey results is up to the level of the respondents. This paper will also present salient RRA findings. These salient findings will cover the conduciveness of rural hometowns for investment and entrepreneurship. These will help contextualize survey results in terms of respondents who save, invest and run enterprises in these rural hometowns. The survey results and some RRA findings will then be analyzed through mixed methods integration, with the help of a joint display table (Creswell, 2015; Creamer, 2018) that puts quantitative and qualitative data together. The individual RICART studies, while all employed convergent mixed methods designs, had differing approaches as to giving priority to either quantitative or qualitative methods, or giving them equal priority (refer to Table 8.1).

Results This segment will present the salient survey results (see Table 8.2) covering the three elements of the concept of financial capabilities (Birkenmaier and Huang, 2014; Sherraden and Ansong, 2016). Top answers to these specific questions will be presented here. Financial literacy. Respondents here were asked questions such as: (a) self-reported levels of knowledge and skills and about money and finance; (b) necessity of receiving assistance about money; (c) leading source of information about finance; (d) objective questions about three basic concepts on finance: interest rates, inflation and loans; and (e) keeping financial records. These salient questions will give us the connection between what they claim to know about money and how do they practice their claimed knowledge and skills. In terms of the level of knowledge and skills about money, three of four municipalities had majority of their overseas remitter-respondents answer “satisfactory,” while one municipality (Guiguinto) had majority of the same respondent group answer “good.” As to migrant household respondents, majority of them answered “no knowledge” in Magarao, “satisfactory” in Maribojoc and San Nicolas, and “good” in Pandi and Guiguinto. The related question here is if respondents need assistance in handling money. Majority of all r­ espondent-groups from all municipalities answered “no.” Except for the remitters group in Guiguinto, all other respondent-groups in the five rural hometowns mostly learned about money and finance through themselves/self-experiences. Majority of remitters in Guiguinto (69%) learned about finance from the media (broadcast, print, Internet). The Philippines, at the time of the surveys, does not mandate all elementary and secondary schools to have subjects or courses on basic finance. This implies that Filipinos learn about money mostly through people’s experiences with families, with groups and through life-cycle changes. Three objective questions tested respondents’ knowledge about interest rates, inflation and loans. Across respondent groups, a majority of remitters in Magarao (82%) answered the question about interest rates correctly, while migrant families in San Nicolas (24%) had the lowest number of respondents to correctly answer the question about interest rates. For inflation, the highest respondent-group that answered correctly were the migrant families from San Nicolas (74%) and the lowest are the remitters from Magarao (27%). Finally, for loans, the highest group whose respondents answered the loans question correctly are the remitters in Magarao (77%) and lowest are the migrant families from Guiguinto (51%). Knowledge of these three basic concepts was tested to see if residents were able to apply finance in their daily lives (e.g., comparing cost of goods, borrowing money, determining the financial product with the best return on investment). 126

127

22

47

40

36

NA

Rd. 1: 2011–2012

Rd. 1: 2011–2012

Rd. 2: 2012–2013

Rd. 3: 2014–2015

Rd. 4: 2018–2019

RICART round, year Remitters

222

120

79

96

62

Migrant families

252

73

69

NA

NA

474

229

188

143

84

Non-migrant families Total

Quantitative: market survey (respondents = N)

• Officials from the local government (6), a rural bank (1), a cooperative (1) and a people’s organization (1) • Migrant and non-migrant entrepreneurs (1 apiece) • Officials from the local government local officials (4), a cooperative (1), microfinance institution (1) and a people’s organization (1) • Migrant and non-migrant entrepreneurs (1 apiece) • Officials from the local government (8), rural banks (2) and cooperatives (3). • Migrant (6) and non-migrant entrepreneurs (4) • Migrant donor organizations based overseas (2) • Officials from the local government (11), a rural bank (1), a thrift bank (1), cooperatives (4) and an overseas workers family circle group (1). • Migrant household heads (14) • Officials and/or members from the local government (13), provincial personnel of national government agencies (8), rural banks (2), cooperatives (10), microfinance institutions (4), farmers’ groups (45-plus) and overseas workers hometown family group (2), and a hometown association abroad (2) • Migrant household heads coming from the surveys (25), and overseas migrants (7)

Qualitative: rapid rural appraisal respondents (key informant interviews, focus groups = N)

QUAN + QUAL

QUAN + QUAL

QUAN + qual

QUAL + quan

QUAL + quan

Mixed methods design in terms of priority1 given actual fieldwork (adopting Creswell, 2015 and Creamer, 2018)

Legend: QUAN/quan—quantitative | QUAL/qual—qualitative | NA—not applicable 1 Letters in capital show that the research design is prioritized or is driven—whether one over the other (QUAN or QUAL) or equally (Creswell, 2015; Creamer, 2018).

Magarao, Camarines Sur 565 overseas migrants, or 2.33% of 24,274 population (2010) Maribojoc, Bohol 760 overseas migrants, or 3.71% of 20,491 population (2010) Pandi, Bulacan 2,182 overseas migrants, or 3.27% of 66,650 population (2010) Guiguinto, Bulacan 3,959 overseas migrants, or 4.37% of 90,507 population (2010) San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte 7,938 overseas migrants, or 21.61% of 36,736 population (2015)

Rural hometown

Table 8.1  Research respondents of  RICART

Remittance owners’ financial capabilities

Satisfactory (41%)

MF

R

128

No (46%) Oneself (75%) 73 45 45 55%

75 15 40

No (81%) Oneself (79%)

62 60 58 48%

65 48 31

36 42

49

60%

63 41 54

No (65%) Oneself (82%)

Good (42%)

MF

30 33

44

56%

78 69 53

No (36%) Media (69%)

Good (31%)

R

43 40

26

48%

63 51 51

No (38%) Oneself (67%)

Good (48%)

MF

Guiguinto, Bulacan (2014–2015) 3

Sources: Surveys using the Remittance Investment Climate Analysis in Rural Hometowns (RICART) mixed methods tool. Legend: R—Remitters; MF—Migrant families. 1 Ang and Opiniano, 2016a [Magarao only—small samples]; 2Ang and Opiniano, 2016b; 3Ang and Opiniano, 2016c; 4The University of Adelaide (2021-forthcoming)

Satisfactory (43%)

R

Satisfactory (52%)

MF

Pandi, Bulacan Maribojoc, Bohol (2011–2012)1 (2012–2013) 2

No Satisfactory knowledge (55%) (41%) Need assistance in handling No No No money? (top answer) (59%) (79%) (85%) Leading source of information about Oneself Oneself Oneself money and finance (top answer) (82%) (77%) (75%) Those who got right answers on the principles of three basic concepts in finance • Interest rates (%) 82 61 68 • Inflation (%) 27 34 66 77 71 53 • Loans (%) Keeping financial records? 46% 48% 51% • [Top answer] “No, we don’t keep financial records of everything, but we know in general how much money is received and spent during a month” Savers, investors and entrepreneurs in the rural hometown 54 77 96 • Savers (with savings accounts) (%) • Investors (%) 54 33 40 • Entrepreneurs (%) 45 55 20

Level of knowledge and skills about money (top answer)

R

Magarao, Camarines Sur (2011–2012)1

Table 8.2  Financial literacy, financial inclusion and financial functionings of remittance owners from five Philippine rural hometowns

68 63

30

58%

24 74 62

No (46%) Oneself (63%)

Satisfactory (56%)

MF

San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte (2018–2019)4

Jeremaiah M. Opiniano

Remittance owners’ financial capabilities

Another important financial literacy question was asked, “Do you keep records of your ­ nances?” In all five municipalities, across respondent-groups, the majority of respondents— fi at least 46% of them—answered, “No, we don’t keep financial records of everything, but we know in general how much money is received and spent during a month.” This means that while majority of them claim they do not need assistance about money and finance, this basic practice in financial management is not judiciously practiced. Such survey results provided contradictions to the majority of remitters of Pandi and the majority remitters and migrant families of Guiguinto: these respondent-groups from Bulacan province claim to have “good” levels of knowledge and skills about money. On the overall, the top answers of respondents to these important financial literacy questions reveal contradictions as to their self-reported levels of financial proficiency. Financial inclusion. To cover this second element of the financial capabilities concept, respondents were asked if they own savings accounts at financial institutions in their rural hometowns. The “savings accounts” cover those deposit accounts by banks (commercial, thrift and rural banks), the “capital build-up” of CBU accounts of members of cooperatives and the “mandatory savings” accounts of borrowers in microfinance institutions. Among remitter-respondents covering four municipalities, 96% of them in Maribojoc had savings accounts while Guiguinto’s remitters only had 44% of them with these savings accounts. Meanwhile, among migrant families spanning all five towns, the highest migrant household savers are from Magarao (77%) while the lowest are from Guiguinto (26%). It is to note that Magarao is the poorest municipality in the RICART sites while Guiguinto is the richest. As well, Guiguinto and San Nicolas had the most number of financial institutions within their jurisdictions. The result for Maribojoc’s remitters comes as a surprise since its homegrown rural bank was closed in 2009 (a year before RICART fieldwork). Magarao also has less than five deposit-keeping institutions, including its homegrown rural bank. ATM machines are also aplenty in the richest towns, Guiguinto and San Nicolas. Financial functionings. The heart of the RICART project is to determine if remittance owners invest and do business in their rural birthplaces. Given that overseas migrants’ families still reside in these hometowns, the natural resource is to use their dollar remittance incomes locally for daily needs and for productive purposes (Ang and Opiniano, 2016a). The specific, hometown-directed financial functionings or actions to be presented here are investing and opening and running enterprises. Among remitter-respondents, the highest hometown investors are from Magarao (96%) and the lowest are from Pandi (only 15%). And among migrant household respondents, the highest hometown investors are those from San Nicolas (68%) and the lowest are those from Magarao (33%). In terms of migrant hometown entrepreneurship, the highest are the remitters from ­Magarao (45%) and the migrant families from San Nicolas (63%). The lowest migrant hometown entrepreneurs are the remitters and migrant families of Maribojoc (20 and 31%, respectively).

Mixed methods analysis The salient survey results shown in the preceding section gave us indications on the financial capabilities of overseas remittance owners. However, since this paper is banked on the conjoint analysis of both rural residents and their rural municipality, this section will juxtapose some of these survey results with qualitative findings from the rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methods conducted. Doing this mixed methods data integration as an analytical exercise will be through presenting a joint display table (Table 8.3) (Creamer, 2018). This data display will 129

760 545

565 404

Maribojoc (2011)

1,487

2,182

Pandi (2013)

161 215 695 • Permanent migrants/ immigrants 24,274 (2010) 20,491 (2010) 66,650 (2010) • Municipality’s population • Share of migrants to 2.33 3.71 3.27 municipal population (%) At least 34 At least 38 At least 52 • Countries of destination Investment climate and governance profile [source: rapid rural appraisal] • Income classification by Fifth Fourth Second average annual income (>P15 M but P25 M but P45 M but 4 acre Age at the time of survey Number of children (59 years Ref. category = non-SC Whether SC Ref. category = no education Up to primary educated Middle educated Sec and sr. sec educated Tertiary educated Cons 0.83 Observations 920 R-squared 0.020 First-stage regression F-test Wald test of exogeneity Amemiya-Lee-Newey minimum chi-square statistic

−4.50

14.78

Coef.

Z

IV Probit P>|z| Coef.

Model with controls 0.000

P>|z|

Model with instruments

−0.51 −4.42 0.000 −0.99

−3.70 0.000

0.28 0.44 0.77 0.06 0.19

1.89 2.59 2.96 9.92 4.17

0.059 0.010 0.003 0.000 0.000

0.32 0.47 0.90 0.06 0.19

2.17 0.030 2.58 0.010 2.79 0.005 11.90 0.000 3.74 0.000

0.04

0.81 0.420

0.00

−0.02 0.984

0.24

1.99 0.047

0.31

2.33 0.020

0.49

3.72 0.000

0.49

3.83 0.000

−0.68 −0.53 −0.52 −0.18 0.000 −1.12 920 0.28

F (14, 904) = 21.33; p-val. = 0.000 χ2(1) = 4.06; p-val. = 0.04 χ2(1)= 0.12; p-val.= 0.73

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Z

−2.08 −1.72 −1.68 −0.46 −2.77

0.038 0.086 0.093 0.646 0.006

−0.65 −0.46 −0.47 −0.19 −0.91 920 0.25

−2.20 −1.61 −1.72 −0.53 −2.41

0.028 0.108 0.085 0.594 0.016

Shuchi Kapuria

Among household-level characteristics, the probability of participation is higher for SC males than for non-SC males. The presence of a member above the age of 59 and the number of children increase the probability of labour participation of working-age male members, implying that the presence of dependents in the household increases the probability of labour market participation. Operational land-holding of the household has a positive impact on labour supply compared to households that do not operate land. To take care of the potential endogeneity IV-Probit is applied to the data. Results from the first-stage regression, as given in the bottom panel of Table 9.2, show that F statistics is above 10, with a p-value of less than 0.05; thus, our instruments are relevant. The Wald test of exogeneity under the null hypothesis shows endogeneity. Further, over-identification restriction also holds. Labour market participation of female working-age members of the household and the impact of belonging to a migrant household are given in Table 9.3. Table 9.3  Labour p articipation for females, 15–59 years-regression analysis Female participation

Probit Coef.

Z

Probit P>|z| Coef.

Baseline Model Whether belongs to migrant Household Ref. category = landless Operated land up to 1 acre Operated land 1–4 acre Operated land>4 acres

−0.25 −2.95

P>|z| Coef.

Model with controls

Z

P>|z|

Model with instruments

0.003 −0.38 −3.96 0.000 −0.61 −2.29 0.022

0.41 3.53 0.000 0.43 3.56 0 −0.17 −0.97 0.331 −0.15 −0.9 0.368 −1.20 −2.27 0.023 −1.17 −2.67 0.008

Age at the time of survey 0.05 Number of working-age male 0.00 in the household Ref. category = married/widowed Whether unmarried 0.31 Ref. category = non-SC Whether SC 0.50 Ref. category = no education Up to primary educated 0.08 Middle educated −0.12 Sec and sr. sec educated −0.23 Tertiary educated 0.00 Cons −0.58 −10.63 0.000 −2.56 Observations 1096 1096 R-squared 0.07 0.19 First-stage regression F-test Wald test of exogeneity Amemiya-Lee-Newey minimum chi-square statistic

Z

IV Probit

8.36 0.000 0.05 8.25 0.000 −0.06 0.952 −0.03 −0.6 0.547

2.02 0.044

0.32

2.09 0.037

4.51 0.000

0.51

4.7

0.57 −0.71 −1.52 −0.01 −8.24

F (13, 1082) = 25.16; p-val.= 0.000 χ2(1)=0.84; p-val.=0.34 χ2(1)= 0.14; p-val.= 0.71

142

0.000

0.572 0.09 0.57 0.57 0.475 −0.1 −0.63 0.529 0.128 −0.22 −1.38 0.168 0.991 0.02 0.1 0.922 0.000 −2.49 −7.52 0.000 1096 0.23

International migration from rural Punjab

Results from probit regression with instruments show the absence of endogeneity; therefore, ordinary probit regression is used instead of IV regression. Belonging to a migrant household decreases the probability of labour market participation of female members of the household. Age has a positive impact and unmarried female members have a higher probability of labour participation than married women for whom burden of domestic duties and childcare is much higher. The education level of female members does not have a significant impact on their labour participation. The probability of labour market participation is significantly higher for SC females than for non-SC females and for females from marginal farmer households compared to landless households. For households operating more than one acre, the probability of female participation declines, and it is significantly low for households operating more than four acres. This is because, with an increase in household’s economic status, female labour supply declines. Females in surveyed villages were engaged in livestock rearing, especially among marginal farmer households. Medium and large farmer households employ hired labour for their farm activities, which also takes care of their livestock and hence female participation is low. Thus, belonging to a migrant household has a negative impact on the probability of participation of left-behind members of migrant households in the local economy compared to non-migrant households. The lower participation does not necessarily imply higher leisure consumption. It can also be due to greater domestic work or due to higher enrolment in education. Involvement in education may in fact be treated as a positive impact of international migration since it increases human capital formation among members of migrant households.

Reasons for absence from the labour market A significantly higher percentage of male members among non-migrant households than migrant households were pursuing education. For females, though, there is a difference in activity status between migrant and non-migrant households, this difference is not significant. Besides, there were young males and to a lesser extent females who did not desire to seek employment in the local labour market (given as Others in Table 9.4). Table 9.4  Males and females (15–59 years) out of labour force by activity and household migration status Activity/household status

Migrant

Male Education 54.2 Pensioner 13.6 Others 32.3 Chi-square p-val.=0.040 Female Education 19.1 Domestic work 76.3 Others 4.6 Chi-square p-val.=0.201

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Non-migrant 71.5 10.8 17.7

24.2 71.1 4.7

Shuchi Kapuria

Non-availability of work of the desired nature as well as expectation of better opportunities abroad has resulted in their absence from the labour market. Their percentage was higher among migrant households than non-migrant households. With members of the household working abroad and possible income effect of remittances, a higher percentage of youth from migrant households could afford to stay outside the labour force. A small percentage of young unmarried girls were keen to work in foreign labour markets as opposed to local labour market. They did not report themselves as engaged in domestic duties but as those looking for opportunities to migrate. Migration from the sampled villages is dominated by males. Females from the villages do not migrate independently but only as part of family migration. Interestingly, these young girls do not necessarily want to emigrate after marriage and were exploring options to migrate for work on their own. Their aspiration is guided by both higher wages in the foreign labour markets and better social and cultural norms regarding women’s work.

Conclusion International migration from Punjab cannot be understood only through individual- or household-level determinants without acknowledging the context in which these decisions are taken. Taken together, the structural context and individual actions provide explanation for the nature and direction of migration from the region. Capitalism and international migration are intertwined due to the inner workings of the capitalist system. The drive for surplus accumulation leads to incorporation of newer regions into its periphery. Punjab was incorporated through colonisation and the introduction of land rights, commercialisation of agriculture, and development of infrastructure; though these connected it to the global economy, they also created conditions for and facilitated international migration from the region. The nature of capitalist growth in Punjab since then has constantly created conditions where labour has increasingly become vulnerable. Over the years, agriculture ­sector ­employment has shrunk and manufacturing sector has been unable to create enough ­employment to absorb labour that moved out of agriculture. Informalisation and casualisation of labour has increased and these jobs do not meet the aspirations of youth. In the absence of state action, rural households address this situation through international migration, using their long-established networks. Informal moneylenders and unscrupulous agents often facilitate migration for those without networks, or without skills and eligibility to migrate legally. International migration has become so entrenched in the rural society that local youth show little desire to engage in casual labour jobs or petty self-employment locally. This over-dependence on international migration is unsustainable, since immigration policies and changing global environment affect international migration of rural youth. Over the years, immigration policies of the developed countries, which are also the traditional countries of destination for Punjabi migrants, have become more selective of skills and occupations, pushing rural youth towards opting illegal channels of migration. Finally, to exploit the development potential of international migration and remittances, the state needs to revisit its policies to create suitable environment for investment—at the same time balancing these in a way that does not have an adverse impact on income, employment, and welfare of its people.

Notes 1 Sikhs are the largest religious community in the state with about 63% of the state’s population being Sikh, and their share in the rural population is even higher at 72%.

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International migration from rural Punjab 2 Data collection of the nature and magnitude of Kerala is missing in the state of Punjab. K ­ erala ­M igration Surveys are conducted at regular intervals, since 1998, to study various aspects of ­m igration from Kerala and assess magnitude and impact of international migration. Through these surveys various aspects of migration and its impact on state GDP; quality of life; demographic changes; issue of ‘Gulf wives’, i.e., wives of Gulf migrants left behind, etc., have been studied. 3 The rise of industrial capitalism in Britain displaced a large number of its pre-capitalist producers from land and other material sources of production. However, not all dispossessed could find employment in the factories. About 50 million people are estimated to have migrated from Europe to the ‘new world’ between 1870 and 1914—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina (Nayyar, 2002, p. 145). 4 Big landlords came to exist in western Punjab, where the land grants in the canal colonies were large, and in central districts of Punjab, peasant proprietors dominated the scene along with a large number of tenants (Mukherjee, 1980). A large number of peasants lost the possession of their land and migrated from Central Punjab to canal colonies to work as agricultural labourers (Bhattacharya, 1985). 5 During the field survey, village elders often complained of the young ones being ‘idle’ and their increasing drug abuse and alcoholism. 6 To test the relevance of the instruments, F-statistic from the Craigg-Donald test is reported. The validity of the instruments is tested by the Amemiya-Lee-Newey minimum chi-square test under the null hypothesis that the used group of instruments is valid, i.e., they are uncorrelated with the error term in the structural equation. A rejection of the hypothesis implies that at least one instrument is correlated with the error term.

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Shuchi Kapuria Kim, N. (2007). The Impact of Remittances on Labour Supply: The Case of Jamaica. Policy Research Working Paper Series 4120, The World Bank. Mansuri, G. (2006). Migration, School Attainment and Child Labour: Evidence from Rural Pakistan. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3945, Washington, DC: The World Bank. McKenzie, D. and Rapoport, H. (2006). Can Migration Reduce Educational Attainment? Evidence from Mexico. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3952, Washington, DC: The World Bank. McLeod, W. H. (1986). Punjabis in New Zealand: A History of Punjabi Migration, 1890–1940. Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University. Mendola, M. and Carletto, G. (2009). International Migration and Gender Differentials in the Home Labour Market: Evidence from Albania. Policy Research Working Paper Series 4900, The World Bank. Mukherjee, M. (1980). Some Aspects of Agrarian Structure of Punjab 1925-47. Economic and Political Weekly, 15(26), A-46–58. Mukherjee, M. (1985). Commercialisation and Agrarian Change in Pre-Independence Punjab. In K. N. Raj, N. Bhattacharya, S. Guha and S. Padhi (Eds.), Essays on the Commercialisation of Indian Agriculture (pp. 51–104). Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nayyar, D. (2002). Cross-border Movements of People. In D. Nayyar (Ed.), Governing Globalisation: Issues and Institutions (pp. 144–173). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sidhu, H. S. (2002). Crisis in Agrarian Economy in Punjab: Some Urgent Steps. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(30), 3132–3138. Singh, G. and Singh, S. (2007). Diaspora Philanthropy in Action: An Evaluation of Modernisation in Punjab Villages. Journal of Punjab Studies, 14(2), 225–248. Singh, I. (1989). Reverse Tenancy in Punjab Agriculture: Impact of Technological Change. Economic and Political Weekly, 24(25), A86–A92. Singh, L. (1999). Productivity, Competitiveness, and Export Growth in a Less Developed Economy: A Study of Indian Punjab. In P. Singh and S. S. Thandi (Eds.), Punjabi Identity in a Global Context (pp. 301–312). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Singh, L. (2010). Post-Reform Economic Development in Punjab: An Introductory Note, Third Status Report. Recommendations of the Punjab Governance Reforms Commission, pp. 11–17. Singh, L., Singh, I. and Ghuman, R. S. (2007). Changing Character of Rural Economy and Migrant Labour in Punjab. MPRA Paper No. 6420, available at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6420/ on 10 December, 2009. Singh, M. (2000). Crisis in Punjab Agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly, 35(22), 1889–1892. Singh, M. (2012). Institutional and Policy Aspects of Punjab Agriculture: A Smallholder Perspective. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(4), 51–57. Singh, P. (1997). Political Economy of Punjab- an Insider’s Account. New Delhi: MD Publications. Sood, A. (2010). Shadow-boxing in Punjab on Government Finances. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(24), 22–25. Verma, A. B. (2002). The Making of Little Punjab in Canada-Patterns of Immigration. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

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10 ‘MIRRORING THE OTHER’ Refugee, homeland, identity and diaspora Anindita Ghoshal

The creation of two separate ‘swapno bhumi’ (promised lands) for the Hindus and Muslims of the undivided territory of united India was an essential imagery behind the Partition of 1947. This particular idea indeed became a driving force to make a long-drawn cultivated utopia into reality for both the then majority and minority communities. To get a better deal from the departing British Raj, the leaders of Congress, Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha were instrumental in guiding their communities in the nationalist struggle to achieve independence (Tunzelmann, 2007, pp. 160–164). The dream of staying in one’s ‘own land’, meant for either the Hindus or Muslims, influenced the masses. It led to a real Partition and the creation of two nation-states in the map of South Asia which, at the end, compelled both the minority communities in India and Pakistan to leave their respective ‘homelands’ (Partition Proceedings, 1949, pp. 182–184). It led to the gigantic migration of at least 15 million people and, thus, it remained as one of the largest human displacements in the history of South Asia. As planned in pre-Partition days, two major Indian states, Punjab and Bengal, got divided. In the case of Bengal, the initial process was confusing as the leaders and masses were under the impression that Partition and migration of communities would be a temporary affair (Islam, 2012, pp. 24–27). In reality, the upper-class/caste Hindu Bengali migrants apparently banked upon their financial capital when migrating to the other side of the notional borderlands. The upper-middle-class and middle-class Hindus were confident about their cultural capital and their power of education, while the lower strata expected their Hindu brethren in India would be welcoming them with open arms. Likewise, the Muslim migrants perceived Pakistan as a ‘Land of Eternal Eid’, as the picture that had been shown to them by their Muslim League leaders in pre-Partition days (Ferdous, 2015, pp. 25–44). While the upper-class, upper-middle-class Bengali Muslims migrating from the three bordering states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura were keen to get respectable positions in Pakistan, the lower class was eager to get ownership of a piece of land. There were huge numbers of non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to East Bengal (the land renamed as ‘East Pakistan’ from the year 1956, after the Constitution of Pakistan was in force). They (popularly termed as Muhajir or Muhajireens) initially planned to settle down in Western Pakistan, but they had to opt for the ‘nearer Pakistan’ for practical reasons. They accepted it as the ‘will of Allah’ though the Eastern wing was culturally different for them (Dutta, 2012, p. 15). Before Partition, the 147

Anindita Ghoshal

native Muslims of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) thought of the ownership of lands in which they would be free from exploitation by the Hindu elites, zamindars, jotedars (rich peasants), police, and other educated and professional classes. Since the Hindus generally enjoyed the political-economic power as a social category in East Bengal, the Muslims were desperate to get away from the Hindu elite dominance. But when the actual division happened, the land, assets or people started getting divided; all the other diverse categories, domiciles and migrating masses suddenly found themselves stranded on the wrong side of the border. They realized that the land to which they had migrated was not at all like the place they had dreamt of. A feeling of insecurity and otherness prevailed within both the Hindu and Muslim refugees who travelled to and from the Bengal borderlands right from the beginning.1 They had to prepare themselves for a tooth and nail war for their survival and, sometimes, for their mere existence. The struggle against their ‘otherness’ and marginality in the migrated land had been often created by the state systems, ruling political parties, provincial policies, regional politics or local undercurrents which continued to be the same even after 73 years of Partition. The second- and third-generation descendants of the refugee families turned out to be a distinct diasporic community on both sides of the borderlands. The changing of terms in defining them legally and altering policies relating to them made these communities vulnerable over the decades in East and North-East India and Bangladesh (erstwhile East Bengal/Pakistan). With this background, this chapter attempts to enquire into the process by which the Partition of 1947 has persisted as a watershed in the life and living of the ­second- and third-generation of the refugee families on both sides of the Bengal borderlands. By consulting primary, secondary and oral sources and following a comparative/interpretative method of social science research, this chapter tries to locate how the Hindu Bengali refugees could negotiate with the policies of the Central and State Governments of India. It aims to focus on why the Muslim Bengali refugees were compelled to face discriminations from the domicile Muslims and the West Pakistani rulers based in Karachi, and how the Muslim non-Bengali refugees who turned out to be luckier in East Pakistan because of their linguistic affinity to the ruling class became ‘stateless’ after the Liberation War of 1971. This chapter targets to portray the ways in which the ‘homeland’ became a part of the psyche and imagination of the refugees-turned-diaspora communities in East/North-East India and Bangladesh. The idea of a ‘common loss’ became evident within their efforts behind the ‘common recovery’ of a ‘golden past’.

Migration: from homeland and after Prior to the Partition, promises were made by the leaders assuring protection and a warm welcome to people if they decided to migrate to the other country. But, the process of decolonization had become synonymous with the course of defining a new-born nation-state with another brand-new socio-political agency, named the refugees. While dealing with issues of nation-building, the Indian state was trying to shape discourses of secularism, caste and religious identities, ideas about majority-minority relations and trans-border migrations. At the ground level, looking at the volume of problems regarding Partition-displaced refugees and the problem of their resettlement, the Government of India assigned the Centre to work on it and to make policies. But the Centre was a hypothetical power block which designed policies and requested the concerned states to share some burden. They suggested to the refugee-absorbent state governments how to work for the relief and permanent rehabilitation of the refugees. While taking up the responsibility, the states, in return, demanded 148

‘Mirroring the other’

financial support from the Centre and modified the basic policy ideas as per the regional variation and local needs. From 1948 onwards, the Congress government in the Centre as well as in most of the states tried hard to discourage migration on the Bengal side. Nehru had constantly tried to convey the impression that the overall situation in East Bengal was improving when it was actually deteriorating. The following letter of Nehru to Liaquat Ali Khan dated 3 March 1948 showed this attitude in clear terms. He wrote, It is hardly possible for the non-Muslims there to carry on their vocations. They are being squeezed out… We have tried our utmost to prevent them from migrating and in fact we have even avoided giving any publicity to this. (Chakravarty, 2011, p. 193) The Nehru-Liaquat Agreement (Delhi Pact of 1950) was signed in this background. It was the first major step taken to check the flow of the migrants. The basic idea was to create such conditions in both the countries where the minorities would not feel insecure and think of migrating to the other country. And it was hoped that those who had come would go back to their country of origin.2 Interestingly, the migrants became the critics of the Pact and they started commenting on the failure in building confidence among the minorities. For example, the Mymensingh Convention of East Bengal Hindus passed a resolution by pointing out, The Convention regrets to note that in spite of the Nehru-Liaquat Agreement to rehabilitate the returned migrants to their original homes, most of the migrants, on return, are getting no help from the authorities and are living in pitiable and deplorable conditions, without any shelter, without any means of subsistence. Their own houses are under occupation of Muslim refugees from India and the arable lands of these evacuees have been distributed to them. The efforts of the members of the District Minority Board and the Minority Commission have so far been fruitless and the indifferent attitude of the Government is causing immense hardship to the returned people.3 An Enquiry Commission was set up by Government of India ‘to enquire into the exodus of the minorities of East Pakistan into India’, when the purpose was ‘to determine the causes of the influx of the refugees’ (udbastu agomonr karon nirdharon kora), though real experiences of the minorities in both the Bengals had not been documented, nor was the report of the Commission ever published. Migration was the only option left for the minorities to escape from any minor incident of assault or huge riot situations. Shamsur Rahman, a renowned poet of Bangladesh, expressed in his memoir how the East Pakistan Government was absolutely aloof, and ignored incidences of riots and regular atrocities on the minorities. They neither did take any major strong step to stop the riots and persecution nor did they try to stop the minorities when they were leaving the country permanently in waves (Rahman, 2004, p. 159). Apart from the apparent insecurities derived from communal incidents, the psychological fear of living in a declared Muslim state affected the educated and politically empowered professional Hindus in such ways that they started treating every single incident with suspicion. In the available literary sources like novels, short stories and memoirs, the contestant insecurity of the minorities or their fear of becoming the target of the ‘other’ community as a part of identity politics has been portrayed well. Manik Bondhyopadhyay showed the actual situation in the pre-Partition days in his short story Sthane O Sthane; how Narahari, the central character, was compelled to come to his in-laws’ house to take his wife back in time 149

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of riot so that after Partition they would be together or could move into a place as a family. Prabodh Kumar Sanyal in his novel Hasubanu has shown the change in layers of identities in the time of the Calcutta riot of 1946. The author portrays how a local riot changed the entire dimension of human lives. Hasnu, the protagonist of Hasubanu, responded to the question ‘why the mutual respect between two communities suddenly went in vain’ by pointing out crude practical facts like how the leaders misguided the Muslim peasants when negotiating for Pakistan. Rumours spread by the press played an important role in spreading communal feeling and occurrences of violence in Bengal.4 Nurjahan Bose remembers, in her memoir, how a group of people used to wait in the steamer ghat of Khulna with swords and other weapons for daily newspapers from India during the riot of 1964. For them, it became a daily routine to attack and assault Hindus after they finished reading newspapers, as a revenge for their Muslim brethren who were suffering in India (Bose, 2011, p. 30).

Hindu refugees: the myth and reality In East Bengal, the Hindu elite families were the holders of vast land estates and they felt like ‘second-class citizens’ in their homeland under the Pakistani leadership. The India-­Pakistan passport emerged in 1952 as a new kind of document that shifted its role from being a ‘travel document’ to ‘means of controlling movements’. Some of the families had taken the decision to migrate almost overnight, especially those who were directly or indirectly hit by any one of the communal uprisings. But for the rest of the families, the decision of migration was deliberated slowly and in waves and within the circle of the family (Guha Thakurta, 2003, p. 99). They decided to migrate in search of safety and security, but more importantly to a land where they could live with honour. The migratory routes opted by the refugee families were different, as per convenience along the dissection of Radcliffe’s fateful line. The popular route was availing a train from Goalando to Sealdah, crossing the Padma River by steamers prior to boarding another train (Umor, 2014, p. 119). The migrants from Dhaka preferred to come down to Khulna to avail a train to Sealdah. Refugees from Pubna chose to cross the border at Ranaghat. Kusthia was comparatively nearer to Darshana; hence, immigrants entered through Gede. The Hindu and Buddhist residents of Chittagong often availed steamer route up till Goalanda and took a train to reach West Bengal. People from Barishal relied more upon the Barishal Express to reach Bongaon by crossing Benapole. The uprooted populace from north Bengal or Sylhet felt comfortable to migrate and settle down in Assam, Tripura or Shillong (Bandyapadhyay, 2001, p. 24). Both the Hindu and Muslim peasants of pre-Partition East Bengal were under the impression that they would be able to occupy the lands that had been owned by the Hindu zamindars. But in reality, they even lost jobs of daily labourers and were not in a position to earn after the Hindu elites left (Sanyal, 1413, pp. 95–99). After Partition, getting a piece of land became difficult in all the refugee-absorbent states, while land price suddenly escalated after the declaration of the Radcliffe Line. According to Nilanjana Chatterjee, because of the fear of ‘physical annihilation, political powerlessness, social and economic deterioration, and loss of identity’ they decided to migrate (Chatterjee, 1990, p. 72). Even the upper-middle-class/middle-class refugees did not construct new houses after migration. They either bought old houses or arranged for a basa-bari (decent rented house). Some of them managed to get ‘relief ’ from the government and at least a roof after their migration, but the rest of the batches had to stay in a makeshift arrangement in the urban or mofussil areas, which led to a sort of visual change of the capital Calcutta and its suburbs (Roy, 2012). The real refugees were entering the city through rails, the station 150

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and platforms became the shelter for these hapless people.5 The Centre instructed the State Government to arrange immediate relief measures for the refugees. The West Bengal Government was neither capable nor prepared to treat them with necessary supports. The first step was to send the refugees to government relief camps where too many people were housed together in structures that were built for temporary purposes in different types of camps.6 The decaying bamboo hutments with old metal roofs left by military authorities served as reception centres. Even jute godowns and aluminium pavement huts for storing grains were converted into Permanent Liability camps. There were transit and colony camps in places like Ultadanga, Kasipur, Ghusuri and Babughat (Dutta, 1984, p. 14). As M. N. Saha observed, these camps were devoid of basic facilities like medical assistance, proper sanitary conditions and water supply.7 The migrants were pushed out of their homes and continued to exist as the unwelcomed populace in their adopted homeland. The policies of the Centre for the eastern states were ad hoc and visibly different from those for the west. The relief and rehabilitation policies changed as the situation altered. The Centre divided the phases and classified the refugees into categories. To obtain rehabilitation benefits from the state, a migrant had to first prove him or his family members as a displaced person, migrant, evacuee or refugee and produce documents like migration certificate, citizenship certificate or any relevant paper for procuring a job through the option system. Preference in the job and opting for the country were not meant for everyone. It became a challenge who would get a chance and on what ground. There was another rule which instructed that if the refugee families failed to collect legal documents, refugee registration certificate, border slip or border ration slip, a certified copy of National Census Register (NCR) might be used as an evidence of migration. But the essential step for that was to determine ‘their status as displaced persons on the basis of circumstantial evidences’.8 The State tried hard to deny the refugee right in the new territory by defining them as illegal aliens/ migrants, infiltrators, Pakistani minorities and fugitives in government documents. Because of these difficulties in proving identities at diverse levels and for limited space or facilities of the government-aided camps, the refugees were forced to look for land for settlements in the fallow or marshy waste-lands.9 Despite selecting waste or fallow lands, the move towards making settlement in these areas was seen as illegal by the government, and the term jobordakhal (forceful occupation of land) came to be associated with the squatter’s colonies. The wave of migration continued up till the late 1960s that ultimately made the government to acknowledge these squatter colonies as refugee settlements (Chatterji, 2008, p. 260). Making of colonies and establishing townships in the name of the freedom fighters in suburban areas became a culture (Bandyapadhyay, 2004, pp. 52–53). Manas Ray, who grew up in the refugee colony in Netaji Nagar, has pointed out the incongruousness of the cowsheds in these temporal colonies that reminded them of their agrarian roots (Ray, 2002, p. 120).

East Bengal/Pakistan: Muslim refugees The nation-building project in Pakistan was premised on the foundation of an ‘Islamic State’, by an ‘Islamic Government’, which would be based on an ‘Islamic Constitution’ through the ‘Islamic ideology’, where language and culture were not considered important in the overall conceptualization of the state. Pakistan, a new nation-state, imagined to comprise a western region consisting of parts of Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province, Karachi, Frontier Regions and Baluchistan, when an eastern region corresponding to the more than 2,000 km far-away East Bengal/Pakistan. It was like an unforeseen but fatal fact was the emergence of differences went far beyond the question of religious identity.10 The Muslim League leaders 151

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did not address differences in value system and morals, food habits, the practice of culture, the problem of various identities or questions of mother tongue between the artificially united communities. It had an obvious impact on the classification and categorization of the refugees and on the policy-making part relating to them. The West Pakistanis were in the higher posts of the administration. After Partition, both the dominions officially had termed the Muslim refugees as ‘Muslim returnees’ for keeping parity in policy-making processes. But, East Pakistan became the hinterland of the Urdu-speaking West Pakistani dominance and the Centre based in Karachi was seen more sincere towards the non-Bengali Muslim refugees (Oldenburg, 1985, p. 716). After crossing the newly demarcated international border, refugees having different mother tongues did not receive equal treatment. The politics of connection to one culture or one’s ‘otherness’ played vital roles to the authorities (Roy, 2015, pp. 22–23). Policies and opportunities were meant to be officially the same for both Bengali and non-Bengali refugees in East Bengal, yet the West Pakistani officials had received the Bengalis with some notion of disapproval.11 The ideological and socio-cultural contradiction between the Western and Eastern wings did not affect linguistic issues only; it had reflected in the relief and rehabilitation policies towards them too (Ziring, 1992, pp. 6–7). The administration was prompt to provide immediate relief measures and later viable rehabilitation to the Urdu- and Hindi-speaking non-Bengali Biharis. A discriminatory attitude was visible in the nature of distributing requisitioned and acquisitioned houses, evacuee properties to the refugees.12 Similarly, for the Bengali provincial officers, the issue of ‘linguistic resemblance’ became the only ‘positive bond’ to understand the crisis of the Bengali refugees.13 In some of the areas in which the refugees were apparently sheltered and later permanently rehabilitated, the host communities turned tremendously hostile to those settlements, as they did not want to share their lands and resources.14 In some other areas, they were unwelcome due to their separate cultural identities. The refugee resettlement led to the spatial reorganization of the existing cities, urban centres, mofussil towns and suburban areas (Chatterji, 2013, pp. 279–280). The Bengali refugees from Calcutta, other small cities and district towns of different Indian states often targeted Dhaka to settle down, obtain similar jobs or some other professional opportunities. Their aim was to allocate spaces for pursuing a quality life. But in comparison to the then Calcutta, Dacca in the late 1940s was like any other mofussil town of West Bengal. In the context of the urban faculties, the then Dacca was not even a growing city. When the refugees arrived in the Eastern wing, the land was suffering from inflation and acute shortages of basic goods. Cut off from Calcutta made it ‘desperately poor, ­water-logged, economically dependent on the unreliable jute crop and physically distanced from the Pakistani capital one thousand miles away’ (Khan, 2007, p. 189). Sirajul Islam Choudhury described in his autobiography how getting a ration card was a huge task in Dacca after they migrated there as ‘optees’, rationing system was not regular (Choudhury, 2012, p. 15). Anisuzzaman mentioned in his memoir that the basic urban facilities were not available when they decided to settle down in Dacca. He stated that electricity or running water facilities were irregular; even bread and butter was not available, and general public transports like bus and tram did not start operating as city services (Anisuzzaman, 2003, pp. 109–111). Within such a chaotic situation, both the Bengali and non-Bengali refugees arrived in East Bengal. The popular route to East Bengal was first a train journey from Sealdah to Goalando. After crossing the Padma River by steamers, again they had to board another train to reach Dhaka (Umor, 2014, p. 119). The people from Murshidabad crossed the Padma River and settled down in Rajshahi. Dinajpur got divided into two portions and refugees settled down on another side. It happened in the case of refugees from Assam and 152

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Tripura. Comilla and Sylhet experienced a huge in- and out-migration from the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, Cachar and the Princely State of Tripura. The non-Bengali Muslim refugees migrated from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh via Calcutta to reach East Bengal/Pakistan. When most of the Bengali Muslim refugees migrated to East Pakistan out of compulsion, some tried to check out their luck to see if they could manage to get job opportunities and respectable living in that land. Others were expecting a superior status in that agrarian society. Yet, the domiciles generally treated them as others, outsiders and encroachers from another land.15 The refugees were largely of four categories. The first category was optees or government employees. The Provincial Government of East Bengal/Pakistan extended hands to meet their basic demands and requirements.16 The second category consisted of the educated Muslim middle class. They contributed to culture, introduced new food habits and clothing styles in East Pakistan, earned respect and helped the society fill up vacuums in professions that had been created by the mass migration of the educated Hindus (Roy, 2015, pp. 22–23). The third category was the actual refugee, comprising of uprooted peasants and working classes, who moved from district towns and villages in East and North-East India with hopes of a better future; some migrated out of fear of persecution. Some opted for mofussil towns or a relative’s place to settle down with neighbours from India, because of similarities in their living style, food habit and accent of language. The fourth category consisted of the Urdu- or Hindi-speaking muhajirs (Bihari Muslim refugees). They accepted this destination for distance or convenience. West Pakistan was their dreamland, but it was too far off. After the population exchange programme, the compatible ratio of domiciles and refugees left no other opportunity for further accommodation of the uprooted Bihari community in West Pakistan. Though their positions were fluctuating amidst the state-­ Centre relationships and politics of provincialism in Pakistan (Yong and Kudaisya, 2000, pp. 235–237). With further colonization initiatives, the Centre recruited the Biharis as loyal agents of the West Pakistanis.17

Muslim refugees: homecoming and settling down The spatial dimension of Dhaka too had changed after its emergence as the ‘second capital’ of Pakistan. Partition facilitated greater urbanization of Dhaka by diverse types of migrations. The comfortable ratio between the incoming and outgoing refugees in the Eastern wing did not create a hue and cry immediately after the Partition. From 1948 onwards, the Provincial Government had to initiate planning schemes, passing of acts or ordinances. The process of offering relief and rehabilitation measures to refugees started comparatively late in East Bengal. Yet, contemporary press reports stated that Dhaka was ‘overflowing with refugees’ (Ghosh, 2008, p. 17). Pabna and Kusthia were flooded with refugees. They were ‘bare-footed, behaving like beggars’.18 In May 1950, Dhaka airport looked ‘more like a third-class platform and less like an airport’, though ‘many refugees were still roughing it out in railway wagons, in station platforms and refugee camps’ (Ghosh, 2008, p. 17). The Pakistan Observer wrote, A large number of miserable human beings … the innocent victims of communal madness and still living in sub-human conditions … can no longer be allowed to wander from place to place like homeless nomads without food, clothing and shelter and above all, a purpose in life.19 There was a pressing need to make arrangements for the expansion of accommodations. Camps were established in Dhaka and its outskirts to relieve congestion. Initially, about a 153

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dozen refugee camps and a few colonies were established near Mirpur with cheap housing (Talbot and Singh, 2009, p. 118). Refugees were in a tremendous rush to understand the length and breadth of the city and nature of its urban facilities. Their intention was to grab big and beautiful houses left by the Hindus.20 Better-off refugees were directed to private dwellings; they managed with help of friends and relatives, and social organizations or political parties. Sirajul Islam Choudhury described how they got a shelter first in Rajshahi, then shifted to Dhaka. They had taken shelter in a relative’s home in Azimpur, later they moved to Najirabazar. They got a small flat in a colony made for government servants, which was too small to accommodate even the family members (Choudhury, 2012, p. 14). In municipality areas of Dhaka and Narayanganj, the percentage engaged in employment was better than that of the other mofussil towns. The Provincial Government had to undertake construction works and planning for the smooth running of the administration. The government employees needed solutions on a permanent basis.21 The concerned departments were confused about the amount of financial assistance that was to be offered to the refugees, as they were not sure about the repaying capacity of refugees. Moreover, patterns of allotting amount for beneficiaries of refugees did not follow a homogeneous form, for all zones or areas. The issue of employment became a vital concern for providing them with monetary support. The situation was so intense that finding homes and getting employment for refugees became difficult. The Hindu returnees were struggling at the same time to recover their properties under the clauses of the Delhi Pact of 1950. They were penniless and in a miserable condition.22 Thus, two contradictions were visible in determining refugee protection, care, rehabilitation and distribution of properties that emerged in the psyche of policy-makers and officials in Pakistan.23 First, how to provide initial shelter to the refugees and what procedures were to be ideal for offering vacant houses left by the Hindus to ensure permanent rehabilitation? Second, how to treat the returnee evacuees and endow them with their own properties and social security? The need for accommodating refugees and administrative staff created demands for requisition of properties. Processes of providing rehabilitation came out as contradictory. The government started passing laws in the Legislative Assembly for the acquisition and requisition of properties. The Census of Un-Rehabilitated Displaced Persons conducted surveys to understand the number of refugees rehabilitated in Dhaka, Narayanganj, Khulna, Chittagong, Chandraghona and Kaptai in 1959–1960. The report stated that the rehabilitation work was not impressive.24 The riot of 1964 urged for the need for ‘more expenditure’ for surplus population. The fretful authorities stated that the solution should be ‘of a permanent nature, does not obviously lie in temporary charity’.25 The policy of acquisition was connected with the designs of rehabilitation.26 Some refugee families were desperate to get hold of an accommodation to settle down. They compelled the authorities in encroaching lands, houses and properties.27 They tried to use personal influences too. Abu Rushd described in a short story, ‘Har’, how an elite Begum Sahiba manages to capture a huge Manjil (house) in Dhaka with the favour of a requisition officer whose minor sons were actively involved in the Calcutta riot (Haq, 2010, p. 89). In mofussil towns, the outgoing Hindus used to leave their houses at late night without informing friends, neighbours and relatives. The upcoming refugees used to grab the abandoned houses only at night. The administration had to keep watchful eyes in cases of vacant houses for acquisition or requisition (Walliullah, 2005, p. 66). In most cases, refugees could not retain those houses. They had to vacate them as per requisition rule and government allotted it to other families for permanent rehabilitation. Selina Hossain depicted trail of such unfortunate incidences of a refugee in her novel Sonali Dumur, who lost his vite (home) and turned into a rickshaw puller (Hossain, 2012, p. 221). 154

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The other category, the Bihari refugee, was like aliens in East Bengal to the local B ­ engali Muslims from the beginning of their arrival in this land. Uprooted by a series of riots in Bihar, they preferred to opt for permanent citizenship in a new country, as they would be ‘Citizens, not aliens’ (Ghosh, 2008, p. 25). Mujibur Rahman wrote in his memoir, they could feel in pre-Partition riot days that East Bengal would be the destination for refugees from West Bengal, Assam and Bihar (Rahman, 2013, p. 82). Haripada Dutta in his novel Mohajer depicted that after facing all adversities, the Bihari refugees consoled themselves by the idea that the Urdu-speaking ruling class would build houses, business opportunities and jute industries for them (Dutta, 2012, p. 30). By the end of 1947, they reached Rajshahi, ­Dinajpur, Bogra, Khulna and demanded rehabilitation from district authorities (Ghosh, 2013, p. 17). Total 75,000 railway employees with their families migrated from West Bengal and Bihar in 1949.28 They made their way to Parbatipur and other railway colonies of Rajshahi division.29 Some were skilled labourers, small traders and mechanics. The sense of acquaintance triumphed over the bonding in one’s mother tongue and the administration was in favour of them. Especially, after the Language movement of 1952, they started trusting the muhajirs more. The Centre established colonies exclusively for them in Mirpur and Mohammadpur. They were offered good jobs in jute and garment mills owned by the West Pakistani businessmen with a better wage structure (Latif, 1997, pp. 20–21). By the 1960s, they settled down in Chittagong, Saidpur, Rangpur and other parts of East Pakistan.

Recreation of identities: collective imagination Partition had created ‘refugee domains’ both in the East/North-East India and in the then East Pakistan. Though the journey of the partitioned states and its inhabitants began with crisis on the religious front, it gradually touched every aspect of the life of both the domiciles and refugees. The refugees had to adopt the local language, culture and food habits of those states. They tried hard to create a new identity by accepting essences of their culture and making an address in their lands of migration. Yet they remained ‘tragic victims’ of Partition. They became a factor of political mobilization, but the political parties often used them as vote banks, and the refugees were treated as masses who could easily be dispensed with. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 had never been implemented on many refugee groups. Some were denied the privilege of getting citizenship and other rights because of the opposition from the domiciles. Even the groups who had got citizenship and other legal documents lived on as ‘others’ in the socio-cultural and political milieu of the states they chose or were compelled to resettle. The official definitions of ‘refugees’ changed time and again in government files. The pre-Partition religious categories were replaced by universal language of legislation, by using terms like ‘displaced persons’ and ‘evacuees’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s.30 The broader coverage of the term started denoting as ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘illegal migrants’ from the 1960s (Samaddar, 1999, Introduction). In the 1970s, they were referred to as ‘infiltrators’, ‘Pakistani minorities’ or ‘fugitives’ in official terms (Chakravarty, 2011, p. 134). Their identity altered with regional variations and its connotations were transformed in local languages. In Bengali, two words, udbastu and sharanarthi, denote a Hindu ‘refugee’. The term udbastu (uprooted from home or the homeland) or bastuhara (one who has lost his homeland) had deeper meanings, reflecting the violence involved in the process of uprooting and a strong sense of attachment with their lost homeland (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 322). The words sharanarthi (someone who seeks refuge and protection) and chhinnomul (uprooted from the homeland) had an emotional connotation of having been severed from their roots (­ Zamindar, 2008, p. 8). However, bangaal (an unsophisticated east Bengali) is the 155

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most popular term to specify the identity of a refugee (Bhattacharya, 2014, pp. 31–32). Amar Mitra described in Banhanshir Desh how the old residents of the traditional paras (locality) in Calcutta and its suburbs viewed the refugees as aschorjyo manus (strange people). This had brought derogatory social status to the community as a whole and increased their image as an inferior species, uncouth and alien to the common West Bengali psyche. Ajoy Gupta, a refugee himself, tried to show how the word ‘buddhu’ (stupid) was synonymous with the term ‘bangaal’. In his school days, the word became his identity (Gupta, 2007, p. 63). In Assam, Bengali refugees were first referred to as bhogonia (someone who was forced to flee from their place of origin), which soon changed to bohiragato (outsider), when the Bengali settlers were seen both as an economic threat and as a political challenge (Bhowmick, 1964, p. 1; Dutta, 2012, p. 219). Finally, their identity turned out as bideshi (foreigners) who hailed from Bongal Desh after 1971. The key essence was that they were seen as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘impure’, who did not match in the traditional Assamese society.31 In Tripura, the refugees were termed wansa. It means ‘son of Bengalis’, which had a derogatory connotation.32 Apart from the term Muhajir, there was another word—panahgirs (seekers of refuge)—in Urdu newspapers, which was used to describe the Muslim refugees in Pakistan (Zamindar, 2008, pp. 8–10). In Bangladesh, the refugees were simply termed ghoti (West Bengali), and refu or rifu, an abbreviation of the term refugees, which had a derogatory essence (Morshed, 2008, p. 20). All the categorization and classification of the refugees shows that the land to which they had migrated could never become their own. So they chose to survive in an apparently romantic utopian world as an ‘imagined community’, who got uprooted in a course of making a nation, became a part of so-called nationalist struggle (Anderson, 2006, p. 3). Their ‘otherness’ remained as an essential identity both for them and for the native people of that migrated state. East Bengal, as a territory, carried out their memories of disjuncture and accommodation, hatred and harmony, even at a personal level. The West Bengalis kept on wondering how the East Bengalis ate things like sak-pata (herbs and weeds), or fruits and roots whichever they could collect from open fields and ponds in the wilderness, the stuff that did not sell in the market, and the well-settled people of West Bengal usually could not imagine eating. Moreover, the way the refugee families agreed to do odd jobs in their struggle for existence had further degraded their social status as a desperate category in search of livelihood.33 Yet, they retained a culture of hybridity by maintaining their cooking styles or traditions of festivals in their lands of relocation, which turned out as ‘Bengali chauvinism’ in Assam and bangaal culture in West Bengal. These layers of identity crises were still present in the minds of the second and third generations of the refugee families. There are some cases in both the Bengals where the refugees became uprooted twice. And their post-memory was more traumatic and extremely troublesome, even legally. They never could escape from their tag of an ‘outsider’ with their family identity, even when they could establish themselves well with a prestigious job profile in social life. In Bangladesh, the non-Bengali refugees became the direct victim of Partition. The Bengali refugees got benefitted with the ideology of Bengali nationalism during the Liberation War of 1971. But the Biharis sided openly with the West Pakistanis, and some joined in auxiliary forces like Razakars and Al Shams of the Pakistan authorities. They faced worst experiences in the policy-making front after the Liberation War (Chatterji, 2013, pp. 280–281). Millions of ruptured homes, truncated families and their experiences of common sufferings and loss became instrumental in designing their existence and nature of survival. Even after the alteration of the geo-cultural sphere, the respective homelands of the refugee families continued to remain as their lived experience with the stories for generations. With their recreation of multi-layered identities, the lost world of those diaspora families also remained as a lived world for even today’s generation. 156

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Notes 1 File No. RH (C)-5(2)/50 I, RHC Branch, National Archives of India (henceforth NAI). 2 ‘The Nehru-Liaquat Ali Khan Agreement’ dated 8 April 1950. File No. P (PIV) 125 (62)/65, MEA-Pak-II, P IV, NAI. 3 S. P. Mukherjee Papers, Subject Sl. No. 31, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (henceforth NMML). 4 Ganabani, 30 September 1926. 5 B. C. Roy Papers, Printed Material, File No. 12, NMML. 6 File No. 2 (2)/63-Rahab-II, Rehabilitation Dept., NAI. 7 M. N. Saha Papers, VII Instalments, Subject File No. 6, NMML. 8 West Bengal Legislative Assembly Debates (henceforth WBLAD), 28 September 1955, p. 267. 9 WBLAD, Thirteenth Session, Vol. XXX, No. 2, 1961, p. 32. 10 L/PO/6/123, ff. 90–99: 1947, IOR. 11 Interview with Maleka Begum in Kolkata, India, 24 August 2017. 12 Azad, 20 July 1949. 13 Interview with Sirajul Islam in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 16 July 2012. 14 ‘East Bengal Province’, Home-Police, B Proceedings, Bundle No. 102, June 1951, National ­A rchives of Bangladesh (hereafter NAB). 15 Interview with Selina Hossain in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 26 December 2014. 16 Doinik Ittefaq, 16 June 1969. 17 Interview with Khalid Hussain (a Bihari Muslim himself ) in Geneva Camp, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 22 December 2015. 18 Dhaka Prakash, 16 January 1949. 19 The Pakistan Observer, 12 May 1964. 20 The Indian and Pakistan Year Book and Who’s Who: A Statistical and Historical Annual of India and Pakistan, vol. XXXVII, Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta: The Times of India Group, 1951, p. 687. 21 East Pakistan Provincial Assembly Proceedings, Ninth Session, vol. 9, Dhaka: East Pakistan Government Press, 1952, p. 300. 22 Dhaka-Prakash, 13 August 1950. 23 File No. L/52/661-13/202, BL Branch, 1952, NAI. 24 Census of Un-Rehabilitated Displaced Persons in Dacca and Narayanganj, Department of Works, ­Housing and Settlement (Housing and Settlement), Government of East Pakistan, Dacca, 1959, p. v. 25 The Pakistan Observer, 12 May 1964. 26 Department-Land Revenue, Branch-Requisition, B Proceedings, Bundle no. 11, November 1963–February 1964, NAB. 27 Department-Land Revenue, Branch-Requisition, B Proceedings, Bundle no. 5, August 1954, NAB. 28 Department-Political, B Proceedings, List no. 118, Bundle no. 48, May–July 1949, NAB. 29 The Pakistan Observer, 23 June 1950. 30 File No. 2/25/56-IC section, NAI. 31 Interview with Samujjal Bhattacharyya (Chief Advisor of AASU) in Guwahati, Assam, 20 ­December 2012. 32 Interview with Paramartha Dutta, in Agartala, Tripura, 2 March 2013. 33 Interview with Ashoke Mukhopadhyay in Kolkata, India, 15 June 2010.

References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anisuzzaman. (2003). Kal Nirabadhi. Dhaka: Sahitya Prakash. Bandyapadhyay, M. (Ed.). (2004). Bhed- Bibhed. vol. 1. Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing. Bandyapadhyay, S. (2001). Deshbhag: Smriti ar Swotta. Kolkata: Progressive Publishers. Bhattacharya, S. (2014). Purono Kolkatae Bangal. Arek Rokom, 6 (2), 18–32. Bhowmick, D. (1964). An Open Letter to Jawaharlal Nehru. Silchar: Published by the Author. Bose, N. (2011). Agunmukhar Meye. Dhaka: Sahitya Prakash. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition. In Mushirul Hasan (Ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and Partition of India (pp. 319–337). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Anindita Ghoshal Chakravarty, P. (2011). Post Partition Refugee Rehabilitation in India with Special Reference to Bengal, 1947–1971. University of Delhi: Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Chatterjee, N. (1990). The East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival. In Sukanta Chaudhuri (Ed.), Calcutta: The Living City, Vol. II (pp. 70–77). Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Chatterji, J. (2008). The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Chatterji, J. (2013). Dispositions and Destinations: Refugee Agency and Mobility Capital in the ­Bengal Diaspora, 1947–2007. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55(2), 273–304. Choudhury, S. I. (2012). Dui Jatrar Ak Jatri. Dhaka: Pearl Publications. Dutta, H. (2012). Mohajer. Dhaka: Bhumika. Dutta, K. (1984). Madhyamgram-Nabarrackpore Punarbason 0 Haripada Biswas. Calcutta: Jigyasa. Dutta, N. (2012). Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity. New Delhi: Sage. Ferdous, S. (2015). Surgery in Rush and Affected Lives: Make-believe Stories in Understanding ­H istory. The Journal of Social Studies, 146, 25–44. Ghosh, P. (2008). Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent. New Delhi: Routledge. Ghosh, P. S. (2013). Refugees and Migrants in South Asia: Nature and Implications. NMML Occasional Paper. History and Society, No. 10, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Guha Thakurta, M. (2003). ‘Uprooted and Divided’. In J. Bagchi and S. Dasgupta (Eds.), The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India (pp. 98–112). Kolkata: Stree. Gupta, A. (2007). Udbritter Itibritta. Kolkata: Ababhash. Haq, M. (2010). Kalo Borof. Dhaka: Sahitya Prakash. Hossain, S. (2012). Sonali Dumur. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers. Khan, Y. (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin. Latif, M. A. (1997). Handloom Industry of Bangladesh: 1947–90. Dhaka: University Press Ltd. Morshed, M. S. (2008). Bhag. Dhaka: Banglaprakash. Oldenburg, P. (1985). A Place Insufficiently Imagined: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971. The Journal of Asian Studies, 44(4), 711–733. Partition Proceedings. 1949 (6 vols.). New Delhi: Government of India Press. Rahman, S. (2004). Kaler Dhuloe Lekha. Dhaka: Anya Prakash. Rahman, S. M. (2013). Asamapta Atmajiboni. Dhaka: UPL. Ray, M. (2002). Growing Up Refugee. History Workshop Journal, 53(1), 149–179. Roy, H. (2012). Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Roy, R. (Ed.). (2015). Paschim theke Purbobanga: Deshbodoler Smriti. Kolkata: Gangchil. Samaddar, R. (Ed.). (1999). The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. New Delhi: Sage. Sanyal, P. K. (1413). Prabodh Kumar Sanyal Shatabarshiki Sankalan. Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh Publishers. Talbot, I. and Singh, G. (2009). The Partition of India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Tunzelmann, A. V. (2007). Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. London: Pocket Books. Umor, B. (2014). Amar Jibon, 1931–1950. Dhaka: Jatiya Sahitya Prakash. Walliullah, S. (2005). Syed Walliullah Galposamagra. Dhaka: Pratik. Yong, T. T. and Kudaisya, G. (2000). The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge. Zamindar, V. F. Y. (2008). The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New Delhi: Penguin. Ziring, L. (1992). Bangladesh from Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

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PART III

Gender, generation and identities

11 IT’S CARAMEL PRINCESS TIME! READING CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FEMININITY THROUGH THE CELEBRITIZATION OF MINDY KALING AND PRIYANKA CHOPRA Mythili Rajiva Introduction Popular media has become a central part of pedagogical and political meaning-making in a highly mediated world (Khanna and Harris, 2015, p. 39). What can the rise of celebrities such as Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra in American popular culture tell us about contemporary South Asian diasporic femininities? How do we understand these femininities in relation to macro-level political trends, such as Donald Trump’s election, white nationalism’s mainstreaming in the West and global Islamophobia? How can examining the ways that the South Asian female body is constituted in popular American media texts illuminate both the continuities and ruptures of orientalist and neo-colonial discourses that “work to fix women’s bodies into categories of race, gender and sexuality” (Durham, 2001, p. 202)? My main argument is that Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra, both in their televisual roles and in their real-life identities, resurrect the Macaulaian spectre of colonial complicity in contemporary American race relations. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, I draw on South Asian diasporic studies to examine how these two celebrities can be read as metonymic for the anxieties of a community who faced blatant and often violent racism throughout the 20th century, and is now experiencing a renewal of post Trump racism directed at Others. Methodologically, I theorize how the textual and paratextual representations in Kaling and Chopra’s respective shows and lives (The Mindy Project and Quantico) offer an interesting point of entry into what it means, in the current political context, to be a brown woman in a position of economic and cultural power. What kinds of gendered performances of racial passing are required to subordinate to white supremacist logics? I focus on the following three points: (1) white passing through the construction of the ideal diasporic subject as middle class, Hindu and Americanized; identity markers that work to disavow the Muslim body, the poor or lower caste body and the immigrant body; (2) the 161

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hegemony of white masculine desire, which invokes the history of colonial sexual relations between white men and South Asian women; and (3) the orientalist positioning of South Asian femininity as impossibly beautiful, a sleight of hand that negates the very object that it speaks into existence, by reminding dominant culture that brown women, except when read as exotic and beautiful, cannot be either objects or subjects of mainstream heteronormative desire. Caramel Princess Time is, thus, a chimera. It perpetuates an attachment to phantasmatic forms of belonging that are in direct conflict with racial realities through what Lauren Berlant (2011) has famously described as a condition of cruel optimism.

Framework of analysis and methodology I take a feminist intersectional approach that draws on South Asian diasporic scholarship and, in particular, diasporic cultural studies. According to Becker (2018, p. 11), popular culture texts, even those widely derided as commercial and without substance, are important as “artifacts through which one can glimpse a society’s ideologies.” However, the objects that media scholars privilege also tell us a great deal about the persistence of particular relations of power within the academy. The now well-established field of media and cultural studies, and its sub-fields have not been particularly attentive to pop culture products that are non-­ American, non-Western or even racialized American. For example, feminist cultural studies work has been taken to task for what Berridge describes as “a relentless focus” on white female characters, which renders a great deal of television studies work “unable to say anything useful about difference” (Berridge, 2013, p. 483). These types of invisibilities perpetuate a token engagement with racialization, as if it were purely incidental rather than embedded in the very fabric of American culture (Morrison, 1992). Furthermore, cultural studies work that does examine racialized American contexts usually engages with the dominant discourses of white/black or white/Latinx tensions. South Asian diasporic populations are, once again, invisibilized, as if their existence cannot be understood through popular culture because they are fundamentally “irreconcilable with American-ness” (Thangaraj, 2012, p. 989). I attempt to address this absence by focussing on TMP and Quantico in the context of diasporic cultural studies work; here, I am particularly indebted to Vanita Reddy’s illuminating scholarship on South Asian diasporic beauty (2016), which uses affect theory to untangle the complex set of particular affective attachments that diasporic femininity creates. Methodologically, I use media studies concepts of the textual and paratextual to focus on the texts of The Mindy Project (TMP) and Quantico, as well as the celebrity bodies/lifestyles of Kaling and Chopra; and the ways they get read by mainstream media. While textual analysis requires paying close attention to “how ideologies operate within media texts” (Becker, 2018, p. 12), the paratextual (Gray, 2018, p. 213) is the context that frames the text, such as reviews, ads, journalistic commentary and, I would add, celebrities’ private lives (Rajiva and Patrick, 2019). Finally, while I do examine moments of subversion in both Kaling’s and Chopra’s star and televisual texts, my main concern is to unpack the narrative devices that smuggle in an assimilationist ethos, one that maintains rather than challenges white supremacy in an America increasingly dominated by publicly acceptable forms of racism.

The Mindy Project Vera Mindy Chokalingam is a South Asian-American comedienne, actress and show writer, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of affluent Hindu parents (her late mother was a gynaecologist, and her father is an architect). She got her start as a show 162

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writer and sometime actor on the cult favourite The Office, playing a vain, shallow character named Kelly Kapoor. But her big break happened when she developed and starred in The Mindy Project, which ran on Fox and then Hulu for a combined six seasons between 2012 and 2017. Despite being headlined by a young, relatively unknown South Asian woman, the show garnered both critical reviews and mainstream popularity. It centred around the life of Dr Mindy Lahiri, a New York gynaecologist working in private practice, with a penchant for expensive clothes and handsome men. Mindy, while not conforming to either white or South Asian heteronormative beauty ideals – being short, dark-skinned and “chubby” – seemed to resonate with female viewers across a racialized and ethnicized spectrum. Since TMP’s end, Kaling has appeared in several films, and produced a recent show loosely based on her own adolescence. She is a well-known Hollywood figure; she has also written two humorous memoirs of growing up South Asian American: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011), and Why not Me? (2015), which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. TMP has its subversive elements, but it has been taken to task on a number of related issues: for one, Kaling is the star, but her ensemble cast has very few women and only one woman of colour – black actress Xosha Roquemore who, stereotypically, plays Tamra, the witty and woke receptionist. The actors who take up great space on the show are all white men. Second, critical commentary has pointed to how all of Dr Mindy’s romantic relationships have been with white men, rather than men of colour (Nelson, 2019; Prem, 2020). In this neo-liberal landscape, Dr Mindy’s racialized body is disappeared in substance, and race politics are either brushed aside, or referenced humorously (see, for example, Season Two, Episode Two “Mindy Lahiri is a Racist”). This follows a similar trajectory in the paratextual context, where Mindy Kaling’s racialized status dissolves in her American girl performance. For example, in the above-mentioned memoirs, Kaling describes experiencing racism only once, from an African schoolmate and recent migrant; an anecdote that negates itself, if one has any basic understanding of the power relations that distinguish racism from bigotry. White racism is, thus, absented almost entirely from both the textual and paratextual contours of The Mindy Project.

Quantico Priyanka Chopra is a homeland product, born and raised (except for a couple of high school years in the USA) in India, to affluent Hindu parents (her parents were both physicians with the Indian army). She jumped into the spotlight in 2000, when she won the Miss World pageant and went on to become a huge Bollywood star with a world-wide following. In 2015, she became the first South Asian ever to headline a primetime American television drama. She also became the first South Asian to win the People’s Choice Award for favourite actress in a new series. In 2019, Chopra married American boy band star Nick Jonas in a lavish, “dual culture” wedding. She has successfully integrated into white American star culture, and, like Kaling, she is regularly spotlighted in pop culture magazines and websites. Quantico (2015–2018) is very different from TMP: first, it is an action/drama; second, although Chopra is the star, it functions more as an ensemble show; and third, in its first season, not only were the female characters more racially and religiously diverse (a black woman was Quantico’s director, and two Muslim sisters were being trained as FBI agents), but the show’s main premise pushed back on Islamophobic narratives by highlighting the complexities of Muslim identity, and even making an embittered white man the villain. To that extent, Quantico departs significantly from TMP in its political message. However, 163

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closer scrutiny suggests that there are intriguing similarities between the two shows along gendered, racialized lines.

Macaulay’s return: white passing performances on The Mindy Project and Quantico Both texts are undeniably iconoclastic in their centring of South Asian femininity in traditionally white televisual spaces. As Durham points out, South Asian women’s bodies are normally “displaced in the American mass media” by white women, who often appropriate the cultural symbols of South Asian femininity in order to exoticize their own “American” beauty (2001, p. 210). Nevertheless, troubling sub-texts still anchor the shows. First, their narratives perpetuate the model minority myth, which requires both a breaking of solidarity with other racialized communities (Thangaraj, 2012), and a deep denial of unacceptable differences within the diaspora. As Thangaraj notes, “with the conflation of Muslim, terrorist, Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian American, the racial formation ‘Muslim looking’ denies full citizenship by associating these communities with terrorism” (p. 991; also see Rajiva and Khoday, 2014). Thus, the American South Asian diaspora has to disavow its religious differences (and its Muslim members), in order to preserve its model minority identity (Thangaraj, 2012; Kavuri Bauer, 2018). TMP is steeped in this disavowal; it is not a coincidence that Dr Mindy is an upper-­ middle-class, Hindu, second-generation doctor. For instance, in the series pilot, after reluctantly agreeing to take on a Muslim patient without insurance, Dr Mindy says to her white, female receptionists, “Why are you sending me non-English speaking, pregnant immigrants with no health insurance, with, literally, like, Burkas and stuff?” (Season One, Episode One, “Pilot”). It is hard to read this as anything other than the lead character distinguishing herself from Muslims, illegal immigrants and all those who fall under the banner of non-American. The humorous portrayal of a painful stereotype dismisses the persecution of illegal migrants through ICE even under Obama, and positions Dr Mindy as the model diasporic citizen: American-born, Hindu, educated, English-speaking, affluent and “liberated.” Mindy Lahiri’s glib construction offers her the opportunity to share a moment of white supremacist solidarity with her co-workers, and perpetuates Islamophobic discourses; all in good fun, of course. Furthermore, as Reddy (2016, p. 16) points out, the narrative of South Asians as hardworking, smart, successful and upwardly mobile glosses over internal class differences and their attendant stereotypes (also see Rajiva, 2013). In Dr Mindy’s world, South Asianness is always narrated as being closer to white, middle- and upper-middle-class norms than to working-class norms, through what Kavuri-Bauer calls “celebratory trajectories and anodyne representations of achievement and assimilation” (2018, p. 47). Mindy Lahiri, despite her brownness, is really just like every other middle-class princess: she loves expensive clothes and shoes, is a huge rom-com fan, has wacky romances and struggles with her weight and appearance. Thus, her performance appears to be for two distinct audiences: a diasporic audience relieved to see someone like her on television and wanting to believe that this is who the diaspora is, in its racial, class and religious heart; and a white audience who needs to be reassured that not all brown bodies are dangerous, terrorist, a drain on the social system or even very exotic. Here, the sub-text of Mindy’s performance is that she is just like you or me. This performance returns us to the original scene of white passing for South Asian bodies: British colonialism’s project of both violent and subtle assimilation, exemplified by Macaulay’s infamous minute on Indian education, which described the imperial need to create a class of Brown Englishmen as administrators and middle men (see Rajiva, 2010). 164

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Performances of white passing are, thus, a time-honoured tradition for South Asians, and long before Donald Trump came to power, this primal scene of internalized racism played itself out in Kaling’s storylines and performance. Mindy Lahiri reassures South Asian diasporic viewers (including Hindus, Sikhs and Christians) that they are not doomed to be eternal Others who will never belong, except if they are Muslim, working class or even first generation. While the last marker is subtle, it is still an important disowning of migrant bodies and lives: Dr Mindy’s parents rarely make an appearance in her life, and, unlike many real-life South Asian diasporic parents, they seem to have no trouble with her living on her own and having pre-marital sex with any number of white men (see Dhariwal and Connolly, 2013). This fantasy landscape denies the cultural realities of generational tensions within the diaspora around dating and pre-marital sex (Rajiva, 2009, 2010). It also disappears the first-generation body, ultimately unassimilable because of its accent, cultural norms, food, etc. The migrant South Asian, thus, is not a subject that can be recuperated in this white supremacist American dream, but the second generation can be brought into the fold, as long as it performs belonging appropriately. Quantico partakes of different assimilationist logics than TMP, but they are equally problematic. American-born Alex Parrish is half-white and half-South Asian (with a Hindu mother), but she has an accent after spending some of her teenage years in India. When Alex is accused of terrorism and has to go on the run, the mainstream media dubs her “Terror Babe” and “Jihadi Jane” (Season One, Episode Five “Found”). At one point, she even says, “They framed the brown girl…in this country, I’m an easy person to blame” (Season One, Episode Five “Found”). Here, Quantico admirably addresses racism and Islamophobia head-on. Also, as previously mentioned, the first season has a black woman, Miranda, as the head of Quantico, and Nimah and Raina are two Muslim sisters training to work for the FBI. However, while the dominant storyline reminds viewers that there are good people of colour out there, it also still asserts the presence of dangerous (Muslim and black) Others in America. And when the truth finally emerges, Alex’s shift from villain to hero is only facilitated by her passionate commitment to America and her willingness to die for a country she loves, a country that so clearly does not love her back: “I love this country. And I want to protect it. That’s why I became an FBI agent in the first place.” (Season One, Episode Five, “Found”) Furthermore, Quantico’s subsequent seasons stop speaking back at all to anti-black racism and, instead, actively take up the politics of denial and blame in their story arcs. In season two, the main villain in the first half of the season is revealed to be a young black woman whom Alex has to take down. This is hard to overlook as a metaphor for a “divide and conquer” strategy that has seen South Asians communities become conservative in their politics, veering far closer to white middle-class Americans, and refusing to build ties with other racialized communities (Thangaraj, 2012; Kavuri Bauer, 2018). In addition, in season three (which takes place after Trump’s election), white supremacy is represented as, literally, white supremacy. Now white Americans are only racist if they belong to the band of “deplorables” with their guns, swastika tattoos and extreme ideologies. The shift towards criticizing extreme forms of racism, thus, comes at the cost of unpacking America’s general attitude towards racialized Others. Again, like TMP, there appear to be two audiences in mind: one re-living anxieties over belonging and another returned to a state of self-complacency. Quantico tells diasporic viewers that if you love America, you will be fine. However, Quantico’s white middle-class, 165

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liberal viewers, challenged to re-think their worldview in season one, now get to distinguish themselves from Trump’s base by pointing the finger at the “real” racists. Part of what makes both TMP and Quantico so troubling is what Berlant describes as the work that some fantasies do to sustain hope or optimism against “the attritions of ordinary violent history” (2011, p. 45). According to her, optimism is cruel when it creates a double bind, where individuals and communities are bound to fantasies of belonging that actually “block the satisfactions they offer” and are bound to the promise of hope that these fantasies represent (p. 51). On both shows, the impossible fantasy being held out is that of whiteness and belonging. These texts suggest that racialized people have choices about belonging and this volitional aspect of being able to disappear into the landscape of white supremacy makes it a form of cruel optimism. Like Macaulay’s children, the second and third generation are sold a false bill of goods. In a similar fashion to Jews, the possibility of an ever-provisional whiteness is dangled, which offers some protection again the violence of both everyday and structural racism. South Asians can become white people in drag, but the devil’s bargain is to turn away from building alliances with other racialized communities in America. Finally, the colonial phantoms haunting these texts are a reminder that the Indian (and often Hindu) elite played a crucial role in the maintenance of a colonial order that devastated the lives of many South Asians who weren’t economically, religiously or culturally privileged, and they were richly rewarded for that. Without wanting to minimize the self-hatred and internalized racism of which Nandy (1992) and others have written, it cannot be denied that the “mimic men” of British imperialism were active agents of empire in the denigration of diverse Indian religious, cultural and linguistic spaces; thus, they acted as their own midwives to the violent erasure that heralded the birth of Macaulay’s children. Shows such as TMP and Quantico risk offering different but equally dangerous cultural lessons – this time to Macaulay’s grandchildren and great grandchildren – about how to sell out their own people as well as other racialized bodies, in order to shore up an always precarious form of belonging that excludes all but a narrow minority within the diaspora.

White masculinity and the saviour complex As previously mentioned, both texts are heavily informed by white, heteronormative desire, exemplified by both Dr Mindy and Alex’s exclusive involvement with white men. Despite both shows being launched during the era of the first black president in America, men of colour were completely absented from the many romantic relationships engaged in by both heroines. Even with the election of Trump, who blatantly marshalled the grievances of white masculinity towards racialized Others, there was no visible change in either show’s treatment of “interracial” romance. For instance, despite black men’s token insertion on TMP as romantic possibilities for Dr Mindy, they seem to function solely as props for her ambivalent performance of racialized femininity. In one episode, Dr Mindy and her white co-workers, who are out “clubbing,” have the following conversation: MINDY: “It’s a scientific fact that black guys love Indian girls.” SHAUNA: “Keep your racism voice down!”

(Season One, Episode Three “In the Club”) Later in the same episode, after she’s been invited to the VIP area to hang out with famous NBA players, Dr Mindy remarks, “I told you black guys love me!” Yet the only person she 166

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ends up hooking up with that night (and having a relationship with afterwards) is the players’ white lawyer. Thus, the casual insertion of race and “interracial” desire in these exchanges belies the fact that, while black men may love her, Mindy Lahiri herself does not seem to love black men, even famous ones. These types of moments function as a kind of misdirection for viewers, where we are told that Dr Mindy is open to different types of men, and it is purely coincidental then, that over six seasons, she never has a romantic or sexual relationship with a black man (or any racialized man for that matter, including South Asian). Quantico follows essentially the same script: through three seasons, Alex becomes sexually involved only with white men, despite the fact that, unlike TMP, at least one man of colour plays a central role (African American actor Blair Underwood on seasons two and three). Romance not centred around white masculinity is never a real possibility, a gesture that also seems to negate the possibility of solidarity between South Asian and black communities (see, for example, Haidarali, 2012). This mirrors contemporary America’s racial realities where, as Thangaraj points out, “South Asian Americans affirm their racialization as ethnic subjects with a racial distance from the corporeality of Blackness” (2012, p. 1001). As such, on TMP and Quantico, it appears as if only white men can access South Asian women, a sub-text rooted in a larger, more painful history than just people’s personal preferences. The history of British colonialism in India, as elsewhere, illustrates the ways that gender, race and sexuality intertwined to create sexual taboos. The liaisons between British men and South Asian women, commonplace enough to create permanent Anglo-Indian communities, were very much about colonial power over the gendered bodies of the Other (Rajiva, 2010). While historically, South Asian men were legally and culturally forbidden from becoming romantically involved with white women, on both the sub-continent, as well as in early diasporic contexts, British men in Colonial India were constructed as “saviours” who could rescue brown women from their backward cultures and patriarchal male relatives. As I have written elsewhere, contemporary filmic and televisual representations of these relationships continue to position white men as exit strategies for young second-­generation women seeking to leave the culturally repressive and even deadly folds of diasporic family/ community (Rajiva, 2010; also see Rajiva and Khoday, 2014). Without dismissing the very real instances of family exile or even violence, this Eurocentric narrative shores up a dominant understanding of white masculinity as benevolent and even heroic in its relationship to helpless and passive South Asian femininity. The sub-textual reinforcement of this colonial narrative, thus, also creates the conditions for a re-exoticizing of South Asian femininity. Despite the work that TMP and Quantico do to Americanize diasporic womanhood, they end up reifying racialized femininity as erotically different, along the lines of what bell hooks describes as the tendency of dominant white culture to consume the acceptable Other (2014). One way in which “eating the Other” functions is through the romance plot (hooks, 2014; also see Reddy, 2016, p. 57). But the dalliance with difference does not translate into full-blown respect for other cultures or racialized bodies. It is often simply a form of sexual tourism, before returning “home” to the safety of whiteness. For instance, on TMP, Dr Mindy’s numerous relationships never quite work out, and, too often for it to be a coincidence, the white men who leave her or whom she leaves end up choosing white women as her replacement. This abandonment is underpinned by Dr Mindy’s regularly expressed desire to be the ideal woman, read as white: “Okay, I know that my ID says I’m 5’10 with blond hair, 110 pounds with crystal-blue eyes. My philosophy is that an ID should be aspirational” (Season 2, Episode 14, “The Desert”). Thus, even the radical centring of South Asian femininity that TMP represents is undercut constantly by the phantom presence of hegemonic white femininity, ultimately, the only real femininity to be desired. 167

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The return to hegemonic white femininity after interracial desire has run its course is made even more explicit on Quantico in the great romance between Alex and Ryan Booth, a fellow FBI agent, which carries on over two seasons. In season three, fans are shocked to discover that the narrative three-year lapse has seen Ryan fall in love with, and marry, Alex’s best friend: blonde, wealthy, all-American beauty queen Shelby Wyatt. Chopra herself, in an interview, describes her surprise at this “plot twist”: Entertainment Weekly: How did you react when you read that in the script? Priyanka Chopra: Well, it was horrible…I was mind-blown…She’s super-chill about it and she’s like, “It doesn’t matter,” because somewhere, she understands that she wronged him… now that he’s found happiness with her best friend, it’s on her to accept that, so she can’t in any world hold it against Shelby or Ryan. They found each other in their grief, which she created. So it’s such a complicated, mature way of dealing with it. (Li, 2018) Chopra, already an international star compared to the unknown actress who plays Shelby, graciously addresses this strange narrative detour by lauding her character’s maturity. But how often do white, Western filmic or televisual heroines lose their romantic partner to their best friend and still remain friends with the latter? How often are they actually replaced, narratively, by another woman? In other words, does Shelby’s supplanting of Alex in the romance plot reflect what Durham (2001) argues is white femininity’s continual displacement of South Asian femininity in American pop culture? Quantico explicitly narrates this defection/betrayal as Alex’s own fault for disappearing for three years; after Ryan tries to kiss Alex, she (along with other characters) is actually angry on Shelby’s behalf for his behaviour. At one point, Alex says to Ryan, “Don’t make me a part of hurting her” (Season Three, Episode Three “Hell’s Gate”). A visibly upset Shelby (who has found out about the kiss) says to Ryan, without irony, “It’s always the ones closest to you holding the knife” (Season Three, Episode Four “Spy Games”). Shelby’s disturbing myopia about who has stabbed whom in the back needs to be read through a larger history of white women positioning themselves as victims of women of colour, a dynamic that has dogged even feminist spaces for decades (Morrison, 1992; Ortega, 2006; McIntosh, 2018). Per McIntosh, when white women deliberately villainize women of colour in work, friendship or community spaces, they are engaging in “racist bullying masked as innocent ignorance” (2018, p. 100). She argues that their taking up of the victim role in relation to women of colour only re-centres white supremacy and reaffirms the savage Otherness of racialized women (p. 100). Shelby, as a white woman, never once acknowledges that her act of betrayal (i.e. becoming involved with her best friend’s ex-boyfriend) may have created the conditions for this event; only she is allowed to occupy victim status. How should both a white audience and a diasporic interpret a storyline in which a white woman not only marries her best friend’s former partner but also sees herself as the wronged party who must be reassured that the lover she took is faithful? SHELBY: “Ryan told me what happened at the hospital. You kissed my husband?” ALEX: “He kissed me. And it was not returned.”

(Season Three, Episode Five “The Blood of Romeo”) Perhaps even more disturbing than Shelby’s unselfconscious performance of white female victimhood is Alex’s willing subordination as a woman of colour. She never once names 168

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Shelby’s actions as a betrayal and continues to remain her best friend because “I know things are so different…but you and I, that’s never gonna change” (Season Three, Episode Three “Hell’s Gate”). The bizarre resolution of this friendship storyline simply ends up reaffirming what Durham identifies as a pattern where the “the non-white ‘exotic’ is a backdrop and a foil, a contrivance that reaffirms the elements of ideal whiteness and marks the distance between White and other” (2001, p. 211). It also reintroduces white women’s hegemony on a show that had previously constructed a brown woman as the empowered centre (see Pafford and Matusitz, 2017, p. 283). Alex moves from being the dominant subject of action and desire to a cast-off object, one whose replacement by the “real” object/subject of white masculine desire – a white woman – reads as nothing short of inevitable.

The (impossible) time of the Caramel Princess The title of this chapter was inspired by season three, episode six of TMP, entitled “Caramel Princess Time,” where Tamra, the black receptionist, reminds Dr Mindy that “When you’re as cute as we are, people wait for you.” I return to this theme in the final section to ask a number of questions that I think are important: what exactly is Caramel Princess Time? What is its modality? Who does it include and exclude? Is it emerging time? Present time? Future anterior time? On the face of it, Kaling and Chopra would appear to be ambassadors of this time, part of a growing ascendancy of South Asian femininity in the USA that has been slowly taking root over three decades. Their rise was preceded by the emergence of other South Asian women in various political, artistic and celebrity spheres: Jhumpa Lahiri, Padma Lakshmi, 1990s Miss Universe and Miss World, Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen, 2014 Miss America Nina Davaluri (Reddy, 2016). It has been followed, more recently, by the successes of actress/model, Jameela Jamil, and political figures Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard. While feminists know that an “add women and stir” approach is not the best strategy for inclusion, it is not a small thing to see more diverse representation in American popular and even political culture. Furthermore, Kaling does represent an important divergence from hegemonic understandings of acceptable South Asian femininity, in both her dark complexion and what might be considered her body size, which falls outside the norm of thinness for both white and diasporic women. Moreover, both Dr Mindy and Alex Parrish perform unashamed sexual desire, thus breaking out of dominant Western stereotypes that position South Asian girls as “victims who are controlled by arranged marriage discourses and by ‘traditional and backward’ South Asian family and patriarchy” ( Jha, 2018, p. 72). Perhaps, after all, it is Caramel Princess Time. Nevertheless, before we break out the party hats, it should be pointed out that while Kaling’s aesthetic positioning on TMP is a refreshing change, all the others mentioned conform to dominant notions of South Asian beauty, which offer what Reddy (2016, p. 79) calls a form of “diasporic sexual capital” to some racialized subjects. They are all considered normatively attractive: thin, relatively light-skinned and either unthreateningly exotic or so whitened that they pass. There is a particular danger in valorizing normative beauty as an essential characteristic of South Asian femininity; not only does this exclude queer, trans and gender fluid diasporic bodies, but even within heteronormative spaces, ordinary diasporic women are effectively told that to succeed or belong they must have socio-economic status, political power or extraordinary beauty. Beauty, following Reddy, becomes a fetishized form of citizenship or “an assemblage, a state of endless becoming that can guarantee at best only a passing form of citizenship” (p. 61). This racial passing through beauty also necessarily comes at the expense of those South Asians whose bodies are figured differently: the veiled 169

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woman as victim of barbaric patriarchy, the brown man as terrorist, the queer and/or trans body, and even the “plain Jane” who cannot actually be complacent about her plainness if she wants to belong (p. 62). Reddy’s point is well-taken; if beauty is racialized, then plainness is a luxury that some of us cannot afford. As I have written elsewhere, South Asian girls and women who fall outside the discourse of eroticized Other are often constructed as what Hey calls “failed subjects” (2009, p. 15). They potentially experience more discrimination, more harassment, more racial violence and sometimes even death (see Rajiva and Batacharya, 2010). Notwithstanding TMP’s fantasy landscape of upper middle-class Manhattan privilege, in the real world, Caramel Princess Time for the average South Asian American girl/ woman is yet another exhortation to a cruel attachment; a desperate clinging to a phantasmatic object that defers questions “about the cruelty of the now in favour of a technology of patience that allows for a concept of the later” (Berlant, 2011, p. 28). Outside unusual beauty, there is no such thing currently as Caramel Princess Time, but wait for it, it will come. Many diasporic subjects remain in thrall to this endlessly deferred belonging that gets dangled in front of them in the name of American assimilation. In actuality, the time of the Caramel Princess may be frozen rather than emerging, a time promised to come. For example, in the 1990s, Aishwarya Rai is described even by American celebrities as the most beautiful woman in the world, almost in tones of disbelief. World renowned writers such as homeland product Arundhati Roy and New York writer Jhumpa Lahiri are similarly described, as a “booker prize glamour girl” and “as beautiful as any movie star” (Reddy, 2016, p. 95). Fast forward 25 years, and both Priyanka Chopra and Jameela Jamil are also described in otherworldly terms. In 2015, Jenna Mullins from E online described Chopra as “the most ridiculously beautiful specimen on planet earth…what kind of mythical creature looks like this?” (Mullins, 2015), while Elle writer Carina Chocano, in a 2018 interview, calls Jamil “disconcertingly lovely…her beauty does kind of jump out at you. I mean, people stare” (Chocano, 2018). What is the sub-text here, and how is it akin to the narratives about Black men’s hyper-sexuality and physical endowments? As Durham points out, racism’s ambivalence plays out through a simultaneous affect of erotic desire and racist contempt (2001, p. 206). Racialized subjects are intimately acquainted with the twists and turns of white supremacist thinking; we understand dog-whistling. So what work is the mythical beauty of South Asian women doing in a white supremacist imaginary? How does South Asian femininity remain an impossible subject/object of desire in either the so-called post-racial era of Obama or the hyper-racialized era of Donald Trump? Again, if the shadow undergirding the exotic and beautiful South Asian girl or woman is the ugly, dirty, smelly, migrant (and sometimes second generation) woman, who cannot possibly be the object of desire for white masculinity, then white supremacist discourse betrays itself in its constant fetishizing of beautiful South Asian women. What other work is this trope of impossible beauty doing? Does the enduring cliché of the South Asian woman’s “provocative and alluring” hyper-femininity (Haidarali, 2012, p. 56) operate as a sustaining fantasy of white, male domination? Do our “backward” cultures in the form of patriarchal brothers, fathers and husbands offer a rescue fantasy that is becoming more and more remote for middle-class, heteronormative white men in the age of popular feminism? Is this another “divide and conquer” strategy, where South Asian women are silently compared to black women, the latter falling short because of their inability to perform a certain kind of whiteness? Haidarali (2012) in her fascinating discussion of W.E.B. De Bois’s novel Dark Princess (about a romance between an African American man and a South Asian woman) points to his narration of Kautalya as delicate, hyper-feminine and frail, in contrast with black women and “the differential history of experience between the privileged 170

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Indian princess and the oppressed African-American working-class woman” (p. 53). Does an elitist and orientalist discourse that constructs all beautiful South Asian women as princesses also act as a counterpoint to black women’s history of slavery and oppression? Like bi-racial women, is our lighter skin and straight hair used symbolically as a rebuke to darker skinned women with textured hair, in black communities? As Reddy points out, the global export of wigs made from Indian hair is now a multi-billion dollar industry (2016, p. 35). Who is buying this hair and to what end? Finally, how should we read Caramel Princess Time through the real time of violent, and sometimes deadly, American racism? How do we understand the narrative of the otherworldly beauty of South Asian women in the context of practices, such as “the dotbusters,” a group of young, mainly white men who went around New Jersey in the early 1990s, attacking (and even killing) South Asian men because their women were “dotheads” (Reddy, 2016)? Both the texts and paratextual narratives of Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra work to deny this painful paradox at the heart of white supremacist thinking. Ostensibly, Chopra’s sole encounters with racism are a brief year or two in an American high school, with popular white girls who mocked her as “brownie” and “curry.” Kaling, as previously mentioned, only experiences what she calls “racism” from a newly arrived African schoolmate. To lean in to the idea of Caramel Princess Time, thus, essentially demands an absencing of either everyday racism or its more structural manifestations. Can one really be a princess, after all, if one is being yelled at to “go home,” beaten up or discriminated against in the workplace? An essential part of the temporality of Caramel Princess Time requires a denial of the racist violence experienced by black and brown bodies in America: the long history of violence against South Asians; the unremitting police violence towards black men and women; the rounding up and deporting of brown Latinx bodies, some of them children; the Muslim ban, which has direct implications for diasporic communities; the murders of Hindu South Asian men in the USA, like engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla, mistaken for a Muslim terrorist in Kansas (2016), and killed while simply going about his business (Kavauri-Bauer, 2019, p. 46). What is a Caramel Princess to do with these rather uncomfortable examples of national unbelonging? Go shopping?

Conclusion In this chapter, I drew upon South Asian diasporic research and, specifically, cultural ­studies-informed work to unpack the celebritization of Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra in order to explore how American popular culture often shores up problematic assimilationalist ideals. For example, underneath the storyline of successful South Asian women, the continued stigmatization of racialized Others plays out through textual and para-textual elements in The Mindy Project and Quantico. In the political landscapes of both an ostensibly post-racial Obama presidency and a hyper-racist Trump presidency, the South Asian American diaspora still finds itself trying to negotiate a form of conditional racial belonging, through the archetype of the model minority. Rather than fostering solidarities among marginalized communities both within and outside the diaspora, many of its members continue to choose what Kavuri-Bauer calls “a nonthreatening, unified and consumable identity… overwhelmingly Hindu, largely Indian, and primarily educated and upper class” (2018, pp. 49–50). ­U ltimately, however, clinging to a neo-Macaulian version of white passing that excludes certain members and refuses to build ties with other marginalized communities will not protect South Asian bodies from being targets of either violent, structural or everyday racism. The diaspora has learnt that historical lesson of cruel optimism before. Sadly, it appears that we will have to learn it again and, always, it seems, the hard way. 171

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References Becker, R. (2018). Ideology. In Kackman, M. and Kearney, M. C. (Eds.), The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice (pp. 9–22). New York: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berridge, S. (2013). Teen Heroine TV: Narrative Complexity and Sexual Violence in Female-Fronted Teen Drama Series. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11 (4), 477–496. Chocano, C. (2018). Jameela Jamil Is in a Much Better Place Now. Elle, September 18. https://www. elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a23289305/jameela-jamil-the-good-place/ Dhariwal, A. and Connolly, J. (2013). Romantic Experiences of Homeland and Diaspora South Asian Youth Westernizing Processes of Media and Friends. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 23 (1), 45–56. Durham, M. (2001). Displaced Persons: Symbols of South Asian Femininity and the Returned Gaze in U.S. Media Culture. Communication Theory, 11 (2), 201–217. Gray, J. (2018). Intertexts and Paratexts. In Kackman, M. and Kearney, M. C. (Eds.), The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice (pp. 207–218). New York: Routledge. Haidarali, L. S. (2012). Browning the Dark Princess: Asian Indian Embodiment of ‘New Negro Womanhood’. Journal of American Ethnic History, 32 (1), 24–69. Hey, V. (2009). The Girl in the Mirror: The Psychic Economy of Class in the Discourse of Girlhood Studies. Girlhood Studies, 2 (2), 10–32. Hooks, B. (2014). Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance. In Hooks, B. (Ed.), Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 21–41). New York: Routledge. Jha, M. (2018). British South Asian Women’s Feminist Aesthetics in ‘Bombay1cinema talk’. South Asian Popular Culture, 16 (1), 71–87. Kaling, M., Klein, H., Burditt, J., Warburton, M., Grandy, C., Spiller, M., Wigfield, T., Cawley, T., Novak, B. J. (pilot), McDougall, C. (pilot) (Executive Producers), The Mindy Project. Kaling International, 3 Arts Entertainment, Universal Television. Kavuri-Bauer, S. (2018). The Parallax View: The Art of Envisioning the South Asian American Diaspora. South Asian Diaspora, 10 (1), 45–63. Khanna, N. and Harris, C. (2015). Discovering Race in a “Post-Racial” World: Teaching Race through Primetime Television. Teaching Sociology, 43 (1), 39–45. Li, S. (2018). Quantico Star Priyanka Chopra on the Twist that Left her ‘Mind-Blown’. Entertainment Weekly. April 26, https://ew.com/tv/2018/04/26/quantico-priyanka-chopra. McIntosh, D. M. D. (2018). From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas: (Re)locating the Performances of White Femininity. In McIntosh, D., Moon, D. and Nakayama, T. (Eds.), Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness (pp. 94–116) New York: Routledge. Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Mullins, J. (2015). Can We Talk about How Quantico’s Priyanka Chopra Is the Most Beautiful ­Human on Earth? Entertainment Online. October 12, https://www.eonline.com/fr/news/700248/ can-we-talk-how-quantico-s-priyanka-chopra-is-the-most-beautiful-human-on-earth. Nandy, A (1983). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford ­University Press. Nelson, R. (2019). Mindy Kaling Didn’t Sign Up To Be a Role Model: But Her Fans Won’t Have it Any Other Way. Elle. October 9, https://www.elle.com/culture/a29340748/mindy-kaling-interview2019/. Ortega, M. (2006). Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Colour. Hypatia, 21 (3), 56–74. Pafford, A. and Matusitz, J. (2017). ABC’s Quantico: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Female ­Superiority and Racial Stereotypes. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 12 (3), 273–288. Prem. (2020). All Eyes on Mindy’s Never Have I Ever. Lainey Gossip. May 4, https://www.­laineygossip. com/mindy-kalings-never-have-i-ever-gets-off-to-rough-start-but-takes-on-new-life-after-­ episode-three/66166. Gordon, M., Sertner, R., Pepper, N., Safran, J., Seitzman, M. (Executive Producers) (September 2015–August 2018). Quantico. Burbank, CA: ABC Studios. Rajiva, M. (2009). South Asian Canadian Girls’ Strategies of Racialized Belonging in Adolescence. Girlhood Studies, 2 (2), 76–95.

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12 THE DIGITAL DIVIDE AMONG MALAYSIAN INDIAN WOMEN Comparative communal narratives Shanthini Pillai and Pramela Krish Introduction The roots of development among Malaysian Indian women can be traced to the 19th century imperial projects of capitalist expansion that brought the Indian diaspora to Malayan shores. As Gina Koczberski notes the historical context of development is tied to colonial capitalist enterprises that changed the traditional models of societies the world over (Koczberski, 1998, p. 398). As Western colonial capitalists raced towards securing footholds in far-flung continents, purportedly to improve the material welfare of those communities but predominantly coveting material resources for their development (Said, [1978] 2003, p. 109), the recruitment of labour for these projects set into motion a sub-plot of personal economic development. This was especially with reference to indentured labour, as opposed to slavery which had an entirely different, more sinister narrative. Most of the people who migrated under the indentured system of labour were “pushed to leave their families and friends by economic misery, discrimination, and famine at home and pulled to new locations overseas by hopes of better conditions and opportunities” (Northrup, 1995, p. 7). The Indian migrants that embarked for Malayan shores were no different, lured by “promises of prospects and opportunities” (Sandhu, 1969, p. 65). While the early years saw predominantly male migrants arriving to partake in the vast development projects of the 19th-century Western colonial capitalism in Malaya, there were records of Indian women being part of this flow, even if merely a ripple. In the early years, women made up 20% of the total migration (Sandhu, 1969, p. 82) and 30% in the 1920s (Kaur, 2006, p. 446); the majority were involved in what was called “unskilled labour” on plantations, road and railroad projects, though many were tappers, working alongside their male counterparts on the rubber plantations (Lee, 1989, pp. 322–324). Centuries into the future, the narrative of diaspora and development has taken many bends in the river of progress, and contemporary Malaysian Indian women stand in what has become an increasingly digitised world. Yet any engagement with the issue of Malaysian Indian women has to take cognisance of difference, in context and a situation. We have to consider the economic and attendant class divisions that have remained in place even as progress and development has propelled the community forward. As Chandra Talpande Mohanty rightly avers: 174

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Practices that characterize women’s status and roles vary according to class. Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion, and other ideological institutions and frameworks. They are not “women”—a coherent group—solely based on a particular economic system or policy. Such reductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the specifics of daily existence and the complexities of political interests that women of different social classes and cultures represent and mobilize. (Mohanty, 2003, p. 30) As much as the digital world surrounds Malaysian Indian women of today, the interactions with its super corridors are contingent on access and opportunities as afforded by daily existence and its attendant complexities. Here, the latter is especially compounded by economic backgrounds, which can either propel one towards limitless possibilities or constrain the other at the periphery. In recent years, Malaysia has undoubtedly seen an increase in bandwidth, with more data service providers offering competitive data plans. The global online index report for 2019 placed Malaysia in the advanced category of internet connectivity with 67.1% Online Service Index score (GSMA, 2019, p. 41), whereas the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) reported that there were “2.7 million fixed broadband subscriptions and 36.8 million mobile broadband subscriptions or a ratio of 1:14” in 2018 (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, 2019, p.44). Apart from such connectivity, Malaysian consumers are also provided with the option of a variety of digital devices and inevitably. This global connectivity has contributed to the growth of women entrepreneurs in Malaysia, and women have been successful in using the internet and ICT to network (Pramela and Norizan, 2019). With such possibilities, it would be worthwhile to investigate how such digital transformations have taken place in Malaysia, with its increasing level of digital use among Malaysian Indian women. Manuel Castells has argued that: On-line communities have become a fundamental dimension of everyday life that keeps growing everywhere, including China and developing countries, and their growth has only been slowed by the limitations of bandwidth and income. With the prospects of expanding infrastructure and declining prices of communication, it is not a prediction but an observation to say that online communities are fast developing not as a virtual world, but as real virtuality integrated with other forms of interaction in an increasingly hybridized everyday life. (Castells, 2011, p. xxix) The modes of everyday interaction have indeed become increasingly hybrid. Domestic settings are no more purely homebound as the internet can virtually transform and transport one across multiple boundaries, broadening the very concept of a room of one’s own (Pillai, 2016, p. 552). Malaysian Indian women from the middle-class sector, with access to higher income, are certainly privy to better bandwidth. National statistics on the Gender gap index in the Malaysian context may record increased scores for the participation of women in many sectors, as evinced from Malaysia’s Gender Gap index of 0.711 in the year 2018 (Malaysian Statistics Department, 2019), but such data is often homogenous. Malaysian women and the nuances of their everyday existence are lost in translation. As Castell has reminded us above, there are limits of connectivity based on access and privilege. Many Malaysian women may 175

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have leapt across the gender divide, yet a large number are still left behind, in the apertures that exist between social classes. Nuances of ethnic contexts and class divisions are often left outside the fold. Much akin to Spivak’s call for female intellectuals to plot the history of the gendered subaltern doubly effaced from discourses of progress and privilege (Spivak, 1988, p. 297), this paper is an attempt to similarly plot the story of women from the marginalised sectors of the community as much as success stories from the middle class are traced.

Digital platforms, economic development and the Malaysian Indian woman The discussion that follows presents the findings of a small-scale exploratory and descriptive study of Malaysian Indian women’s participation in digital platforms. The primary aim of the study was to gather comparative narratives of digital access, connectivity and economic empowerment for Malaysian Indian women from an intra-communal perspective. We were interested in two groups, mainly middle-class women who were educated and economically privileged enough to be involved in small-scale entrepreneurship on Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and underprivileged Bottom 40% (or B40) women with low literacy and from low economic status who were on the outskirts of prospective development. Our primary consideration was the issue of digital connectivity and economic development on a personal level. The study was led by several objectives. The first was to identify how Malaysian Indian women used social network sites to aid in their personal economic development. The second was to determine how such participation on these digital platforms transformed and transgressed traditional communal boundaries of business participation by Malaysian Indian women. Third, we were interested in finding out where underprivileged Malaysian Indian women stood on this stage of economic self-development. Finally, we wanted to find out what possible sustainable efforts could breach this intra-communal digital divide. To accomplish these objectives, the methodology of the study was specifically designed to enable understanding of background information, behaviours, attitudes and goals of the two groups. Narratives were recorded during workshop and training sessions. Both informal discussions and in-depth interviews were supplemented with observation data. All workshops were conducted at the National University of Malaysia. We began with data from the first workshop session which saw a participation of a selection of Malaysian Indian women entrepreneurs successfully conducting retail on social media sites. A group of Malaysian Indian women from mid- to low-level income interested in setting up retail on social media sites as well as other mutually interested participants from young Malaysian Indian women were also invited. The main speakers were five Malaysian Indian entrepreneurs who were invited to present personal narratives of their experience conducting their retail online. While the session was mainly conducted in English, Tamil was also used whenever possible to benefit those who were not so proficient in English. All invited entrepreneurs were engaged in the retail of material products that were associated with India, being mainly textile and garments, costume jewellery, beauty products, soft furnishing and household products. The advent of the digital world has made such connections more readily accessible, effectively spurring reinventions of older paradigms of connection between the diaspora and its ancestral homeland, especially through ever-increasing “dynamics of globalization and digitization” (Sankaran and Pillai, 2011, pp. 277, 279). As these Malaysian Indian female entrepreneurs used their Indian cultural connections for some level of economic profit, engagements with India were also consequently transformed from its traditional properties of cultural lineage and spear-headed instead towards more utilitarian platforms. 176

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Preliminary information gathered from the five invited entrepreneurs revealed that they were all educated at the tertiary level, with four possessing postgraduate degrees. One of them was a homemaker but had previously been employed. They were all thus economically self-sufficient. As the session commenced, each entrepreneur was asked to introduce the digital platform they were using to conduct their online retail and to present their narratives of their experience, specifically prospects for some form of economic empowerment and the attendant challenges involved. As each narrative unfolded, four specific thematic threads emerged that we subsequently found to be aligned with aspects of empowerment as put forth by Marc Zimmerman (1995), which reveal “an integration of perceptions of personal control, a proactive approach to life, and a critical understanding of the sociopolitical environment” (p. 581). To contextualise it to the subject matter at hand, we adapted Zimmerman’s approach to these four aspects, specifically (a) mastery over issues and goals, (b) proactive approaches, (c) family support and (d) mutual support from the community. We choose to present three narratives from this session. For anonymity, the entrepreneurs are addressed respectively as E1 for the first woman entrepreneur, E2 for the second and E3 for the third. E1 began by sharing her knowledge of online business to the other participants. Of the participants, she had the most experience as an online entrepreneur, having been involved in the platform since 2010. She tells us that before she moved to online retail, she and her husband were involved in distributing Bollywood movies, purchasing distribution rights from the Bollywood movie industry and subsequently redistributing it locally in Malaysia. Thereafter, she set up a beauty parlour utilising Indian beauty products. In 2010, she decided to move to the digital platform. She had prior knowledge of online retail, procured during her degree programmes, having majored in “business management information system” which entailed using the internet in conducting retail. She then applied the knowledge gained from her studies to set up her online retail. She subsequently relates how her online retail progressed, with the diversification of products being the main focus. This led to a formation of different web pages dedicated to specific products online: “I started this with Bombay ­Boutique, then it went to be Bombay Craft, and then Bombay Blinks, then lastly, Bombay bridal.” The reference to Bombay in all of her retail pages is a clear indication of the utilisation of diasporic links with India. Additionally, we are told that her husband was an Indian national, and his extended family in India played an important role in assisting E1 to obtain merchandise easily: “my husband is from Bombay, so my husband’s sisters are all in Bombay, so I get home credit, […] they send me things, in two weeks, I send them money.” As E1 presented the progress of her online retail, her narrative revealed a strong sense of self-assuredness in business acumen. This could be tied mainly to her educational background that would have helped create critical retail management awareness. She set up not one but four online pages, dedicated to different products. Additionally, she presented perspicacious marketing skills in terms of influencing or manipulating customer perception when she related her strategy of pairing outfits to be sold, rather than selling them individually, for a greater profit margin. In the narrative that was thus presented, E1 showed a concerted emphasis on profit margins and was skilful in market manipulation for business growth and development. This was further accentuated by her skilful deployment of the advertising features on the SNS: I don’t know if you notice there’s one thing called boost post. Just use that for time being, until you manage to learn about the ad. So, that’s where my revenues are coming from. […] it will narrow down, and it will target the exact market you are doing. It’s not like when you put on a magazine; you don’t know where it’s reaching. But on a Facebook ad, it will reach each market you are doing. That’s the power of Facebook ads. 177

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E1 was thus acutely aware of the finer details of online advertising and dexterous enough to set it to her advantage. These were all significant aspects of the successful handling of economic enterprises. At the time of the writing of this paper, E1 had progressed to a shopping website of her own and is thus fully empowered as part of Malaysia’s e-commerce, with a global distribution network of her products. Her narrative was thus the epitome of personal control as she placed herself at the centre of her experience, and carefully detailed marketing strategies she adopted to secure sales and ensure financial profit. E1 was thus completely empowered before she even began her retail journey on the online platform. E2 reflected a more personal journey towards business awareness. E2 had been a working professional until she had her first child, and her introduction to her path towards the online retail reveals the empowering transformation of her domestic space: I have been working all my life till the day that I had my first child and right after that I stopped work and life just turned upside down. You know, sitting at home morning until night and you know, whining, crying baby, I mean of course. First few months were fine, you know, excitement and everything, new child and everything. But then, I told myself, there was something I needed to do. You know, I could not just sit at home, stare at the walls and my husband travels a lot. Then I decided that you know, why not start an online business and I have always had this thing for fashion. Her first moments were filled with anxiety about the probability of a failed business venture, as she continues, “At first, I was a bit afraid because you know what if I have to fork out so much of money and suddenly things don’t work out. What will I do with all these suits and this and that.” She did, however, eventually find a solution that enabled her to assume control over her circumstances: “So I thought okay, first I will just stick to unstitched materials because, you know, it fits everyone. If I want to get ready-made stuff then I’m going to be stuck.” E2’s preliminary inroads into the world of online retail showed her ability to engage critically with her situation and strategise for some level of success to her business. This is important in understanding the journey towards empowerment as it presents her ability to look beyond personal anxiety to embrace some level of control over her environment, enabling her to manage her fears and rise above them. Once she entered the digital domain, she began to work towards achieving some level of financial profit. I did do some advertising on Facebook and the response was very good. And, what I did was, they were not overpriced because, of course, I needed to make some money, so I did put in my cost, I did put in my shipping, you know, and it was still, you know, below the market price that you get over here. She thus revealed critical market awareness, possessed enough knowledge of advertising strategies and was equally cognisant of profit margins—all necessary skills to ensure a viable business venture. Lietsala and Sirkkunen (2008, pp. 18–19) have stressed that digital platforms can become highly enabling tools in terms of the transformation of the user to the producer but also the generation of participatory economic activity through community engagement and interaction. This was a significant feature of E2’s experience. She recounted how her relatives in India and Pakistan were instrumental in placing and obtaining her orders in bulk. Furthermore, they assured her of their commitment to buying her products: they told me, you know what, why you don’t just do it. Even if it doesn’t work out, we will buy everything from you, trust me, it will all go. So, I was like, okay, fine. Worse 178

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come to worst, I have all of you, all of you just have to buy 2–3 pieces from me and all these pieces will be gone. Thus E2’s initial fear of failing dissipated as confidence in a level of success emerged to the forefront, mainly through the extended family support. Similar to E1, transnational or diasporic links played an instrumental role for E3 as well, propelled by digital networks that brought families otherwise separated by national affiliation and regional habitation into a seamless corridor of dialogue, engagement and mutual empowerment. The encouragement that she receives from the women in her family influences the commercial approach that E2 subsequently adopts, invested with the seeds of feminist solidarity, of the “mutually accountable and equitable relationships among different communities of women” (Mohanty, 2003). As her business grew, E2 was approached by a group of women interested in conducting online retail: I’m probably quite in a comfortable zone right now that I have decided that since my online business is thriving, I’m getting these few people, my clients, few of them to take stuff from me and start their own Facebook business as in they can upload stuff. […] my main concern was I had to be there for my kids. I’m not going to let go my entire day sitting in front of a laptop, answering people’s questions and you know, selling stuff, you know, I had to spend all my time with my kids because I have got two now. So, I thought the only way I could do this keeps the business running, but at the same time like branch out and network … now I have got about 5–6 websites that are, sorry not websites, Facebook accounts that are selling stuff which is from me and I’m fine about it because these clients come and buy in bulk from me, and they do the selling. From someone who was initially afraid of the online retail venture, E2’s transformation was twofold. She not only empowered herself through her online enterprise, overcoming her fears of success, but consequently made an impact on other like-minded women in an egalitarian way. They were not seen as competitors who could potentially deflect her profit but rather part of a collaborative online retail community, accentuating Mohanty’s reference to equitable relations formed in feminist solidarity. The epitome of such solidarity is seen in the act of mutual communal advertising as E2 relates that she would share the pages of other women involved in various Indian based products such as traditional sweets and other delicacies and they would, in turn, share her page. Online retail thus benefitted from womanist camaraderie which helped towards achieving the result of visibility in sales and marketing. The third entrepreneur, E3, began her online business as a means to fill her time. E3 drew on her Indian cultural heritage but unlike the other two entrepreneurs who focused on Indian textile and garments, she chose quilling, a form of paper art filigree to create her products, which were mainly centred on South Asian cultural motifs. E3 was already employed in a town in the North of Peninsular Malaysia but would travel to be with her husband during the weekends. She relates that she was mostly on her own during the weekdays and felt that she needed something to help her fill in the empty spaces: my weekdays were too free, I was too free. To be precise, 8-5, after 5 I don’t know what to do at times. So, I thought of giving my husband a gift. A gift, which I made it myself because since small I like to make things by myself for my parents, anyone, so I started looking for ideas and I came across a quilled Ganesha. 179

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Soon after she had created the product, she decided to test her prospects of retail online and began by sharing a picture of the quilled Ganesha on her Facebook page. The returns were immediate as she received an order for 40 pieces of the same. She ventured on to create greeting cards and other paper-based products with various quilled designs featuring various deities of the Hindu Pantheon as well as of the Buddha. Like E1, E3 revealed strategic utilisation of online advertising features. Boost posts effectively increased her sales as it rendered her more visible: “I started with the minimum one first, whether it’s effective or not but true enough it was very very effective. Within a day, within that 7 days of advertising, I think my likes increased to 200.” At the time of her presentation at the workshop, she had obtained close to 1,000 likes. However, she also availed herself to the tagging mechanism as an added advertising strategy, targeting strategic individuals to further boost sales. She relates her act of tagging a public personality who had an existing fan base from the Malaysian Indian community: he is my publicity icon now. So, I always tag him, because he got a lot of followers. I always tag him in whatever things I do and I will get extra like on the same day when I tag him. By choosing this tactic, E3 revealed her ingenuity in skilfully manoeuvring the channels of online retail marketing, a crucial factor in reaching a wider customer base. Ultimately, in all the three narratives presented, each entrepreneur revealed a proactive business approach and found ways to project their aspirations, to which end social media retail proved to be a valuable avenue. The tone with which they conveyed their experiences and the attendant expressions were predominantly framed by the discourse of agency, of empowerment in and across different life domains, as they crossed the boundaries of work, family and community. These women were notably proactive in achieving their goals, a factor that was largely due to the critical awareness of the online retail environment. As such, they were deft in engaging the digital platform for their economic advancement and consequently personal empowerment, especially within the domestic realm. However, all of the above has been made possible mainly due to their position as part of the more substantially comfortable middle-class section of the Malaysian Indian community. As scholars have argued, empowerment in the feminist context is usually seen against the binary between the constraining domains of power and its resistance, between being denied choice and exercising it and ultimately between being on the margins and in the centre of social practises (Collins, 2002; Kabeer, 1999). What would narratives be from women who are not as empowered, given their location on the margins of the stage of social privilege and power? As noted at the outset, a number of the participants of the workshop were from this latter group, from families with mid- to low-income backgrounds. Having listened to the speakers, they requested for a training workshop to be conducted for women like themselves who needed some guidance on how to set up retail enterprises on social media. Heeding this call, we subsequently conducted a skills training workshop aimed at engaging underprivileged Malaysian Indian women from semi-urban areas in the state of Selangor, in collaboration with a local Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Rashtra Enterprise. A total of 20 participants were invited and this included some of the women who had attended the first workshop held with the entrepreneurs. As the majority of these women were found to have little or no basic Information Communication Technology (ICT) skills, the workshop in question focused mainly on creating ICT awareness among them. The workshop was conducted at a multimedia lab in the Centre for Research in Language and Linguistics of the National University of Malaysia to provide 180

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adequate facilities to ensure a smooth training session for the participants. The language used was mainly Tamil and basic computer skills were taught to the participants as most of them were illiterate with ICT skills. We were supported by Malaysian Indian student volunteers from the National University of Malaysia as well as university alumni who assisted the participants with personal coaching of the ICT skills presented by the trainers. Besides, one of the entrepreneurs from the previous workshop, E3, was invited to speak to the participants in one of the training sessions as she was the one most fluent in the Tamil language. We conducted face-to-face interviews with the participants at the end of the workshop and subsequently transcribed the data. In the ensuing discussion, we share selected views that we gathered from the data transcribed, with a focus on the barriers and opportunities of digital access as conveyed from the perspective of the participants of this second workshop. For purposes of anonymity, the names of the participants are withheld and referred to respectively as P1, P2, P3 and so forth. The first four participants in the ensuing discussion had attended our first workshop. The remaining individuals were selected with the assistance of our collaborator. P1 had been involved in a home-based enterprise for almost 20 years, making and selling the traditional Indian savoury delicacy, murukku. Her main support all these years has been her husband who helps purchase the ingredients needed, is involved in the process of frying the murukku, packs the products with her and delivers them to customers through a door-todoor delivery method. Orders for her murukku are mainly received via phone calls and text messages. She did not formally advertised her products, relying more on recommendations from her existing customers. In this way, P1 received communal support in terms of informal advertising. She also informed us that she had used information about labelling, pricing and packaging that she had learnt from the first workshop on strategies to improve her sales. Additionally, she said she had been intrigued by the prospects offered by the SNSs as shared by the entrepreneurs and had asked a relative to help her set up a Facebook account for advertising her products. She found that sales picked up after this venture online, especially during festive periods. She has since also received her son’s help to improve her business by preparing proper labels and pricing for her. However, she does not handle the account herself and relies on her husband to do so. She depends on the internet and Wi-Fi data plan to receive WhatsApp messages. P2, who, like P1, had attended the first workshop, told us that before she attended the first workshop, she had been aware of SNSs but had been afraid of using them. After having listened to the experiences shared by the Entrepreneurs, she said she was more confident to take a different approach to her business, something she never felt when attending other workshops on business skills training. Her first thought after attending the first workshop was “When I go back today I want to upload my cookies and go about business via FB.” She thus started a home-based enterprise, via Facebook, of festival biscuits on a small-scale production, mainly during Deepavali. Even today she receives orders for her festive biscuits via FB and WhatsApp. In time though, she found that her locally based circle of customers constantly asked for lower prices, forcing her to run at a loss. As a consequence, she became quite reluctant to continue with the biscuit enterprise and turned to childmind as an alternative source of income. At the time of the writing of this chapter, we found out that she started making frozen “spring rolls.” Since she just started this, she is considering selling them to her known customers. P2 works single-handedly and is a self-determined person who constantly thinks of ways to bring in extra income for the family. P3 has a secretarial diploma. She told us that she had previously been working in a company which unfortunately ceased operations. Soon after she was employed as a preschool 181

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teacher. This job too was short-lived as she encountered transportation problems. She tells us that for a while, she depended on her husband’s income. However, due to economic problems his business too slowed down. She then began to look for courses that would help her start a small business enterprise, which led her to our first workshop. Feeling motivated by the experience shared by the entrepreneurs, she expressed her desire to recycle pre-owned footwear such as sandals by redesigning them with Indian material. She told us she would add sequins and trim the borders from her old sarees to be attached to her merchandise, to “make them pretty and new.” However, she emphasised that she has been working on this project “without my husband’s knowledge” as he was not in favour of her starting a business. P3’s situation thus was very different from P1 who had the full support of her husband. P4 was also motivated by her experience at the first workshop and attempted a home-based small enterprise to sell door gifts, sourced from door gifts collected at various community events. She bought several door gifts as samples. However, she expected husband’s and children’s support, who, sadly, as she relayed, were not keen to help. Thus though she was motivated, the initial support from her family would have benefitted her business venture considerably. The rest of the participants appeared to be situated even deeper in the inner recesses of the digital divide. Like the previous four, these women have involved in home-based business initiatives such as flower garlands, food and Indian sweets, tailoring. However, a majority came from big families and faced problems settling utility bills such as water and electricity usage, and felt that it would be too much of an extra burden to have an additional bill for internet services specifically. Ninety percent of them owned mobile phones but not all had smartphones as they find it difficult to use. Those who did have mobile data subscribed to a minimum data package, thus limiting internet usage. No one from this group owned a personal computer. Most had not completed secondary education and felt apprehensive about the online platforms as they felt they needed to be literate in English. Those who had completed secondary schooling felt that conducting an online business would be difficult and more appropriate for those who had the capital. They revealed that they did not have additional income from their spouses and some were single parents struggling to make ends meet. Participant 5 said that although she had a smartphone, she only ever used it to make and receive calls. She told us she was happy to learn that her smartphone had other uses such as email and social network sites. By the end of the workshop, she had registered for an email and a Facebook account. Participant 6 brought her daughter-in-law along for the workshop as she felt that the latter would benefit more from the workshop, being younger. She did, however, say that the workshop did help her see how conducting an online business could potentially add more to her family income in the future. Participant 7 brought three of her sisters along to attend with the hope to bring back knowledge that could help their family. So this family had four participants and were keen to empower themselves with the knowledge to start an online business venture. They had many questions in mind before the workshop. Participant 7 said that she and her sisters would go home happy as they had more knowledge and ideas to start a family business. Participant 8 wanted to make a difference in her life. She could only speak Malay and Tamil but was able to pick up the digital material fast during the workshop. Participant 9 was actually on the phone with her children advising them to study and revise for the exam. This also shows that despite family commitment, she was willing to spend several hours at the workshop. Participant 10 had brought photos to show her flower and garland business which she operates on a small scale in her house. When viewed as a whole, it became obvious the voices that are presented in this second half of the discussion on underprivileged women and digital access drive home the reality of multiple divisions. They point to not only the gulf between social classes but also the chasms 182

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that can grow inside underprivileged domains with uneven economic standing and lack of social support, especially from family members. Yet at the same time, these latter narratives hold also the seeds of promise. The women who attended the second workshop were not inhibited and had a positive approach throughout the workshops. They were enthusiastic, attentive and contributed their ideas during the training. They may have lacked formal education, yet they were educated in the sustainability of economic progress for the younger generation, focused on a stable and regular income. The question remains whether or not they would persevere and sustain the small business ideas after gaining knowledge and courage to start from the workshop.

Conclusion The discussion is not meant to underplay government-assisted projects that have been in effect. Malaysia has put into motion several programmes to raise entrepreneurial awareness among the Malaysian Indian community. The year 2012 saw the creation of the Special Secretariat for Empowerment of Indian Entrepreneurs (SEED) in the Prime Minister’s Department. Among the projects that SEED has initiated to achieve its objective of raising entrepreneurship involvement among the Malaysian Indian community is the SEED Start-Up Nation programme to assist B40 groups to supplement income levels through start-up ­m icro-businesses. In 2018, this Secretariat was subsequently replaced by the Malaysia Indian Transformation Unit, commonly known by the acronym MITRA. However, it is interesting to note that the very first applicant and consequent successful recipient of the SEED Start-Up nation fund, one of the many projects initiated under SEED, as relayed by the CEO of SEED, was an Indian woman from the underprivileged sector of the community who had appealed for funds to set up a food business to supplement her family’s income. As she had to care for her ill husband, there was a dire need for the business to be situated within reach of her family home. Her story garnered attention primarily after its promotion on social media by a social activist of the community (Kumararajah, 2016, p. 516) and it was this that led to her successfully obtaining the first SEED Start-Up grant. The plight of the first SEED Start-Up Nation recipient points to two fundamental issues pertinent to this paper. First, the appeal of the Indian woman may not have garnered the attention it had secured had it been circulated merely via an offline platform. Second, being a primary caregiver, there was a need for close proximity of the business enterprise to the family home. The desire to work from home or as near as possible to the home is often a factor of consideration for women, more so from the disenfranchised sector. However, there are key obstacles, such as lack of financial resources for childcare as well as other matters, such as that which the recipient of the first SEED Start-Up fund faced. Similar threads can be seen in the glimpses provided in our discussion of the narratives from the underprivileged group of women above. It is our view that as much as ­government-funded projects are necessary and crucial, underprivileged women need also to be engaged in community growth enabler projects. Female solidarity, such as that experienced in the first workshop between the two groups of women as well as within the lives of the entrepreneurs, was undoubtedly a crucial element of growth and development. We are not advocating a gigantic giant leap across the digital divide. We are aware of the limitations that girdle the lives of these women. Rather, we feel that women-centred NGOs, such as the one we collaborated with and others like WOW (Women of Will), can play a crucial role in helping to identify groups of women who are interested in setting up home-based or cottage industries. Steps can be taken by women of the community for women of the community. 183

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Incentives to enable participation in programmes to sharpen their business and skills are crucial, as is guidance on well as to distinguishing products that could be marketed. Traditional Indian delicacies are a dwindling skill, with increased urbanisation and fast-paced lives. Yet these skills are often alive and thriving among underprivileged women, not as distanced from tradition. A bridge could be connected between the two worlds through community growth enabling projects. These could take the form of reliable agents or retailers who can buy their products to be sold, with a focus on growth enabling rather than profit. The point we wish to make is that, ultimately, narrowing the digital divide isn’t about improving access to places, but to people. One needs to measure how people’s lives in underserved and unserved areas can improve through community guided access to digital platforms, opening doors to enable them to reach the bridge of the divide.

Acknowledgements Data gathered for this paper was supported by the National University of Malaysia, Grant number DPP-2014-FSSK/3, “Female empowerment via Social Networking Sites: A Case Study of young Malaysian Indian Woman entrepreneurs.”

References Castells, Manuel. (2011). The rise of the network society: The information age: Economy, society, and culture (Vol. 1). London: John Wiley & Sons. Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. London: Routledge. GSMA. (2019). Connected society: The state of mobile internet connectivity. Retrieved from https://www. gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GSMA-State-of-Mobile-­ Internet-Connectivity-Report-2019.pdf. Kabeer, Naila. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women’s empowerment. Development and Change, 30 (3), 435–464. Kaur, Amarjit. (2006). Indian labour, labour standards, and workers’ health in Burma and Malaya, 1900–1940. Modern Asian Studies, 40 (2), 425–475. Koczberski, Gina. (1998). Women in development: A critical analysis. Third World Quarterly, 19 (3), 395–409. Kumararajah, A. T. (2016). SEED and the Indian Community: The government’s role in economic empowerment initiatives. In D. Jayasooria and K. S. Nathan (Eds.), Contemporary Malaysian Indians: History, issues, challenges and prospects. Bangi: Institute of Ethnic Studies UKM (KITA). Lee, S. M. (1989). Female immigrants and labor in colonial Malaya: 1860–1947. International Migration Review, 23 (2), 309–331. Lietsala, Katri, and Sirkkunen, Esa. (2008). Social media: Introduction to the tools and processes of participatory economy. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. (2019). Connectivity key to digital transformation: Industry performance report 2018. Retrieved from https://www.mcmc.gov.my/skmmgovmy/ media/General/pdf/Industry-Performance-Report_2018_compressed.pdf. Malaysian Statistics Department. (2019, 25 November). Statistics on women empowerment in selected domains, Malaysia, 2019 [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.dosm.gov.my/v1/ index.php?r=column/cthemeByCat&cat=444&bul_id=U2UvVllQQlJsbzkwclQrdVlnMzJTdz09&menu_id=L0pheU43NWJwRWVSZklWdzQ4TlhUUT09. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Northrup, David. (1995). Indentured labor in the age of imperialism, 1834–1922. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Pillai, Shanthini. (2016). Malaysian Indian women entrepreneurs: Borderless economic empowerment through social networking sites. In D. Jayasooria and K. S. Nathan (Eds.), Contemporary Malaysian

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13 FINANCIAL DEPENDENCE OF INDIAN PARENT MIGRANTS IN AUSTRALIA A context for elder abuse Supriya Singh Introduction I focus on money in the ‘upside-down joint family’ among Indian parents who migrate to live with their children (usually their sons) in Australia. I build on the literature around migrants in the context of ageing, migration and the circulation of transnational care. Remittances have been at the centre of the study of money, family and migration. There is some study of parent migrants in Europe and the United States. There is little study however about money relationships when parents migrate to live with their children. There is even less study of migration, money tensions and elder abuse. To explore the money and family relationships of parent migrants, I also draw on the literature on family studies and the sociology of money. Bridging these literatures enriches the study of migration, money and family.

Ageing, migration and transnational care The literature on ageing and transnational care initially focused on how migrant children ensured care of their ‘left behind’ parents in the source country through money, communication and care-giving. Loretta Baldassar and her colleagues have been influential in showing how migrants continue to enact family over distance. Virtual communication and the use of polymedia have made this care-giving more frequent and extensive (see B ­ aldassar, 2001, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2016; Baldassar, Baldock, & W ­ ilding, 2007; B ­ aldassar, Nedelcu, Merla, & Wilding, 2016; Baldassar & Wilding, 2014; Nedelcu & Wyss, 2016). Though the early focus was on how migrants cared for left-behind parents, migration literature is replete with parents or other extended kin looking after grandchildren and providing emotional support to the migrants. This is particularly true of migration from Latin America and Asia leading to global care chains (see Boccagni, 2015; Ehrenreich & ­Hochschild, 2002; Gamburd, 1998; Olwig, 2011; Parreň as, 2006; Parreň as, 2005; Ryan, 2004; Smith, 2006; Yeates, 2005, 2009). The circulation of care framework complimented the notion of global care chains. It further cemented the insight that care flows two ways between the migrant and 186

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left-behind members of the left-behind family (see B ­ aldassar & Merla, 2014; ­B onizzoni & Boccagni, 2014; Horn, 2017; J. Kalavar, Zarit, & Ferraccio, 2015; Merla & ­B aldassar, 2016). There is also research on the care provided by the mobile part of the ‘zero generation’, that is older parents who migrated to join their first-generation migrant children. This work to date has primarily dealt with migrants to Europe and the United States. This ‘zero generation’ of migrants or parent migrants differed in their migrant experience from migrants who had aged in their country of destination or those who had migrated after retirement seeking a more desirable lifestyle. The literature deals with intergenerational care, tensions and loneliness as parents deal with grandparenting, a new culture, language and life in their children’s homes (King, Cela, Fokkema, & Vullnetari, 2014; King, Lulle, Sampaio, & V ­ ullnetari, 2017; King, Vullnetari, Lulle, & Cela, 2016; Nedelcu, 2017; Ramos & Martins, 2019; Treas & Mazumdar, 2002; Zickgraf, 2017).

Money, migration and family There is an extensive literature about remittances as a currency of care in transnational families. The literature on money and migration however has not dealt with money relationships when parents migrate to join their children. Where the parent migrants have always been dependent on the children’s remittances, the dependence remains the same with migration. But there is little written about middle-income parents who migrate after funding the migration of their children, particularly through international education. The money migrants send home can at times be up to 90% of the left-behind family’s budget. Money is also sent to sustain relationships and fulfil moral obligations to family and other kin. It is this combination of financial need and morality that has made international remittances one of the largest international flow of funds. Select references include Akuei (2005), Carling (2014), Lindley (2009), Ratha (2014), Singh (2016) and Wong (2006). In the Global South, that is, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the ­M iddle East, money is a medium of gift and care. Money belongs to the family rather than the couple. Money flows two ways across generations – from grandparents and parents to adult children and from children to parents, grandparents and extended kin. It is this belief in the morality of family money that middle-income parents leave themselves vulnerable while helping their children in a ‘timely’ manner, particularly for international education. ­Children deny themselves to send money home to show filial duty and care. So remittances, like other forms of transnational care, also circulate (Singh, 2013; Singh & Cabraal, 2014; Singh & Gatina, 2015).

The upside-down joint family Indian parents migrate to Australia because living in a joint family is their way – and that of the migrant children – of ‘doing family’, of giving and receiving care, dealing with aloneness and of ageing well. However, parent migrants join an upside-down version of the joint family as they live in their children’s home, rather than the children in the parents’ home. It is uncharted territory as to what money is joint across generations and what money is separate. Indian parent migrants in Australia are a recent phenomenon. Between the 1970s and the mid-1990s, parents migrated to join their children in Australia only when care arrangements failed for the parents in the source country. However, the migration of recent migrants was a family decision for the child’s welfare and ultimately for family well-being. 187

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Recent migrants who mainly come from regional cities, towns and urban villages have most often been part of patrilineal joint families in India. When the children gain permanent residence, they choose their first home with a view that their parents would join them in Australia (Singh, 2016). The patrilineal joint family comprises three or four generations of the family living ­together – parents, married sons, grandchildren and even great grandchildren. Though there is a diversity of family forms in India, the patrilineal Hindu joint family in India is the Indian family celebrated in popular culture. Most persons in India spend some part of their lives in a patrilineal joint family household (Uberoi, 2004). In India, the joint family is formed when the son gets married, brings his wife home and has children. The family most often have a common kitchen, and at least some aspects of joint family money. When parents think of old age, they aspire to live with their sons and grandchildren. The India Human Development Survey (2004–2005) found that 89% of older persons, 60 years and over, live in multi-generational households (Samanta, Chen, & Vanneman, 2015). A more recent 2018 survey covering 5,014 older persons across 23 cities puts co-residence at 85% (HelpAge India, 2018). There is discussion of changing social norms and the process of the deinstitutionalisation of the joint family (Cherlin, 2004). ‘Pay and stay’ old age homes are directed at urban ­m iddle-income older persons who are escaping abuse or prefer independent living. However, institutional aged care is taken up by less than 1% of India’s older persons ( J. M. Kalavar, Jamuna, & Ejaz, 2013). Migration to Australia however turns the Indian three-generation patrilineal family upside down. Instead of married sons remaining with their parents in a home most often owned by the father, parents join a household established by the son (most often) in a home he and his wife own. This also happens in India, particularly if one parent is left alone at the death of a spouse and/or if the children have migrated away for work within India. But it is the exception rather than the rule. HelpAge India’s 2018 survey found that 69% of the elderly have a house in their own name, and another 7% have a house in the spouse’s name (HelpAge India, 2018).

Elder abuse in India and Australia Elder abuse happens across cultures, in India and in Australia. Children are often the main abusers. Elder abuse can be emotional, economic and financial, physical and sexual. In traditional societies where older persons are respected and revered, elder abuse may be greater because the government does not complement family-based care with benefits, institutional support and services (Peterson & Ralston, 2017). Elder abuse is also prevalent in Australia though at a lower rate. It is difficult to be certain about this because older persons do not like to talk about it and so under report it. In India, the moral obligation of a son to look after his parents is written in religious texts and law. The Supreme Court made clear in a 2016 judgement, it was ‘a pious obligation of the son to maintain the parents’ (Tripathi, 2016). The duty of children and heirs to look after their parents is legislated in India in The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2007). Despite this, the level of elder abuse in India is estimated to range between 14 and 50% (Chokkanathan & Lee, 2005; HelpAge India, 2015, 2018). This compares with a cross-country study where the prevalence of elder abuse in 2017 was at 15.7% (World Health Organization (WHO), 2018). Some issues of care for the elderly within the Indian family relate to the increased longevity of older people with accompanying chronic ailments in their later years, the increased 188

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likelihood the daughter-in-law will be in paid work and that the children feel a greater sense of autonomy. The prevalence of elder abuse in Australia is estimated at between 2 and 10%, though this is likely to be an under-estimate. The abusers, as in India, are more likely to be the children. Financial abuse in Australia involves taking over the management and control of the older person’s money and assets, particularly when the older person is unable to take care of her or his ­finances because of disability and/or ill health (Kaspiew, Carson, & Rhoades, 2016; Zannettino, Bagshaw, Wendt, & Adams, 2015). Issues of language and cultural notions of family ownership of money and property are also pertinent in elder abuse in the culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria; Kaspiew et al., 2016).

Studying parent migrants The study of parent migrants was part of a wider project on ‘Money, Gender and Ageing’. This project was conducted with Associate Professor Marg Liddell of RMIT University and Dr Jasvinder Sidhu of Federation University of Australia. Rachna Bowman of South East Community Links also contributed. In this project we studied how older Anglo-Celtic and Indian men and women in Australia changed the way they dealt with money as they aged. This project, in turn, developed from an earlier project on ‘Money, Gender and Family Violence’. This paper draws from four conversation circles and interviews covering 38 older Indians in Australia. Of the 38 older Indians, 25 were parent migrants who had migrated to be with their child/children in Australia. Of the 25 parent migrants, 19 are married and 6 are widowed. A large proportion of the parent migrants (20 of 25) are young-old in their 60s. All except one live with the children (usually the son). The one couple who live independently stay in a house owned by one of their two sons. Fifteen of the 25 have received their citizenship, Permanent Residence (PR) or have applied for PR. Another two are actively considering applying for PR once their children achieve the required PR status. For the remaining eight, some do not fulfil the visa conditions that half or more than half their children live in Australia. Farming and property interests together with the care of their parents also serve to keep them back in India. It is important to note that the research was conducted between April 2018 and February 2019 before Australia closed its international borders due to COVID-19. It was in the context of easy and affordable international travel. It remains to be studied how international border closures because of COVID-19 will influence the choice of parents and children to migrate. These border closures signal it can no longer be taken for granted that flexible coming and going across countries will always be possible. Conversation circles are conversations with six to ten people who know each other and trust the researcher/s. The conversation is over food and drink. It is initially structured, later leading to open discussion. Conversation circles borrow from Indigenous ‘yarning circles’ in that the emphasis is on trusted conversation (Demosthenous, Robertson, Cabraal, & Singh, 2006). In that sense they are also like Hugh Mackay’s ‘“unfocused” group discussion technique’ (Mackay, 2012). In conversation circles, however, the researcher/s participate and the conversation is initially structured. The study used a grounded theory approach, moving between data and theory. We used NVivo to help make transparent the movement between data and theory. Negative cases were identified and new questions emerged. The original thrust of the project was on the cultural context of elder abuse by understanding the way money and gender changed with ageing in different ways across cultures. We analysed the data through broad coding, methodological 189

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and theoretical memos, and matrices around successful or unsuccessful m ­ igration as parents. Emerging theories were tested through text searches and going back to the broad codes for more on-coding.

Worrying about financial dependence Living with the children and grandchildren is the desirable way of growing old in India. As Sarah Lamb (Lamb, 2013) says, discussions about ‘the proper site and nature of elder care’ speak ‘profoundly not only to ageing per se but also to the very nature of Indian morality, society, modernity and nationhood’ (p. 67). These decisions are also at the centre of notions of aloneness and togetherness, isolation and connectedness. These beliefs make Indian parents leave their homes, extended families and country to join their children in Australia. However, parents join an upside-down joint family. There is no template of how to manage money across borders, generations, currency exchange rates and migration regimes. It is uncharted territory as to what money is joint across generations and what money is separate in the upside-down joint family. They are also migrating to a country where the law states money and property belong to the couple unless otherwise documented. The morality of being good parents continues to be to give money in a timely fashion to their adult children, particularly to their son/s. Some parent migrants are confident their children too will be caring. It helps when they work out transparent ways of the regular flow of money. Other parents worry about not having their own money. For some the prospect of financial dependence is making them rethink their migration plans.

‘Whatever we have is for the children’ Parents’ moral obligation to give is matched by the belief that money belongs to the family and their son/s will look after their needs. In this study, all but one parent who has PR/­ citizenship sold all the property they could in India before migrating to Australia. Parents want to stay with their children bearing gifts, rather than come empty-handed. If possible, they want to pay for the Contributory Parent visa (Subclass 864). It costs from AUD$ 47,755 for one parent (Department of Home Affairs, 2020). Parent migrants in the conversation circles put the cost closer to AUD$ 128,000 for both parents. This can be more than the cost of a three-bedroom apartment in a metropolitan or regional city in India. Joginder, 65–70 years old, got his permanent residence in 2017. He says in a matter of fact tone, ‘We have lived our lives. Whatever we have is for the children. We can’t take it with us’. He however still has to liquidate his share of the joint family business. Ashish and Firoz, both 60–65 years old, from a regional city in North India sold all their property in India before migrating as business migrants to join their two children in Australia in 2011. Ashish says, ‘I sold up everything in India when I came here so that I don’t have my feet in two boats’. He said their relatives told them to have something in reserve, buy a flat in India ‘in case something happens’. Firoz echoes Ashish. The relatives said: …there is nobody as stupid as you. We say we trust in God. …. We gave everything to the children. We gave some to the daughter and gave to the son and started our business. Now, the whole family is living well. All are involved in the business.

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Later it emerges they gave two-thirds to the son and one-third to the daughter. Ashish kept some money aside for tax obligations in India and spending when they visit India to meet relatives and enjoy themselves. Harleen, 61, who got her PR in 2013, is even more forthright. She says, ‘We sold two plots and paid for the PR. We sold one house and handed it all to the eldest son’. She adds, ‘Everybody told us to be careful. But we closed our eyes and put the money in his lap. All of it. …. He does everything. …. He has taken the father’s role’. Chetan, a widower in his early 70s, lives with his son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons. He still has a small flat in a regional city, but he gave the rest of his money to his son. He says, ‘I gave everything to my son…In India, the tradition is that the son inherits all’. Chetan’s son was then able to buy a house. He later clarifies he has also kept INR 50,000 a month that he gets as a pension. He uses that money to give his two daughters 10 gm of gold a year.

Reciprocity and transparency of money Some parents are relaxed about the children spending money on them. Inder, 71–75, came with his wife on a PR to Australia in 2015 to live with their only son. He too sold his property in India. He says, ‘We fulfilled our duty to look after and educate the children…. Now my son looks after everything and is responsible for everything. We have no problems’. Fakir, 60–65 who is visiting, says he and his wife helped their children with their education and gave them money so that they could settle. ‘Now the children earn and spend on us. Our pensions go into our accounts in India. We spend that in India. The children are looking after us well’. In three of the 25 cases, there is transparency about money in the family. Harleen who is already a PR and Ganesh who is thinking of applying – the son/s transfer a set amount every month to the mother and father’s account. Harleen says she checks on the 7th of every month and the money is there. For Ganesh and his wife, $200 comes into their individual accounts on the 2nd of every month. Bindu, 58, and her husband have applied for PR. They have told their son their preferred way of staying in Australia is in a house next to his. Ganesh, 60–65, has a history of transparency about money with his sons. He says when their two sons were working and living with them in India, they fixed that each gave them INR 15,000 a month and did what they wanted with the rest of their money. Ganesh and his wife borrowed money to fund the youngest son to study in Australia. The son paid it off and is now an Australian citizen. The older son was married and later he and his family also moved to Australia. Ganesh and his wife have been on an extended visit for the last five months, planning to apply for PR once the older son also gets PR. Chetan says while on the visit, ‘I told the children “You give each of us $200 a month whether we spend it or not”. We wanted to avoid having to ask the children for $10 here or $10 there’. Ganesh and his wife also brought some money with them from India. He says they spend that on the children. When they go back to India and apply for PR, they will work out what to do with their property and how much to give to the children, while leaving enough for themselves. He adds, after all, the ‘property is also for the children’. Ashish and Firoz have also achieved transparency of money. As business migrants they invested jointly with their son and daughter-in-law in their business and home.

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Chetan is also comfortable with the way money works for him. He says, People say you have become dependent on your children. I say I have no such problem. … I can go back to India and live separately. … But I do not think there is such a situation. I am very happy with my children. We have a joint account between me, my son and daughter-in-law. I have an add-on card. …Sometimes, I also withdraw money from my account in India. But for others, an uncertain future beckons.

An uncertain future Migration beckons with the promise of being a joint family again. But selling up property and businesses is worrying. Some who are still in their 60s worry about not being able to work and that they will be waiting for the PR. With the PR, parents get Medicare benefits, the right to study and work full time in Australia but no age or disability pension entitlements for ten years (Department of Home Affairs, 2020). They do not know whether they will find suitable work afterwards. Coming from prosperity to an uncertain financial future is making a few waver about their intentions to migrate. Gita 60–65 years old and her husband decided the year before to apply for PR. Their two daughters are settled and their son is studying in Australia. With all their children in Australia they asked themselves, ‘What will we do in India?’ Now they are wavering. At present they live with their unmarried daughter. Though they bring money with them from India, the children look after all their expenses. Gita wants to live with her son, but it may take him five years to become financially independent. Though she has had a happy experience of living in a joint family, she also worries whether their son would be comfortable living with them. Gita and her husband are hesitant about giving up a business they have built up over 15 years. In India they are well settled with three or four properties. In Australia will they have enough to live independently? Chandana, 60–65, also says her husband is worried about migrating even though they have already applied for their PR. When they visit, they stay with their son who looks after all their expenses. They bring money from India. They have also helped their son buy a house and car. But now they are getting worried that the PR is very expensive. She says, ‘My husband says sometimes, “I don’t want it. In India after so much difficulty I got property. How can I sell it immediately? Then we will be empty”’.

The children are taking over Most parents bring money with them when they come for a visit or migrate. They gift money from their property sales to help their children with the mortgage/business. After taking into account the currency exchange rate in recent years of approximately INR 50 to an Australian dollar and the cost of the visa, there usually is not much left over. Even though they have gifted substantial sums of money, they find it difficult to accept money from their children. Not being able to find suitable work in Australia also adds to their sense of financial dependence.

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Joginder 66–70 years and his wife are becoming uncomfortable about the balance shifting between giving and receiving. Joginder says all these years they have been the ones who have been giving. But now that Joginder and his wife have migrated, the son has paid AUD$ 128,000 for the visas. He is the one who takes care of the expenditure. He pays for the car and the petrol. The son gives his parents spending money. Joginder says, ‘Sometimes he gives us on his own. Sometimes we ask him’. He adds, ‘Now I feel shy. Previously I did not when I just came for a visit’. Joginder’s property in India is joint with his brother. He takes some money from the business and puts it into his son’s account. They haven’t yet come to the point of dividing the business. When they do, he hopes to give at least an equal share to his daughter in India. But all that is in the future. At present Joginder feels his son is carrying more of the load. ‘We are only looking after the grandchildren. After that I am sitting idle at home. No work at all’. He has discussed his discomfort with his wife. Both think it will be good if he can find employment in his field of agriculture and technology. But he is finding that difficult. His son thinks there is no need for Joginder to work. But Joginder wants to remain busy and feel he is contributing. Ena, 60 years plus, migrated with her husband in 2013 to live with their two sons. She and her husband feel they are losing control over money. They have not yet dealt with their property in India and most of their money is still in India. She says, ‘Now the children are taking over’. She clarifies she is saying it in a positive sense. Their sons take care of everything. They stay on their own in their second son’s house. He pays the bills. They have some money in their own accounts for their day-to-day expenses, but the larger expenses, like travel to India, are taken care of by one of the sons. Ena says, ‘We don’t even know who does it’. Some of their money from their previous visit is in the sons’ accounts. Ena says, Even though our money is in their accounts, we sometimes feel embarrassed to say “Give some money from our funds.” We feel really embarrassed to talk of the money matter that way because they are really good. She says this time when they transfer money, they will put it in their own account. ‘It is not a big issue. They keep giving us money. It is not a problem. But we would like to do it independently in the future’. Indu, 62, feels uncertain about PR because her husband is finding it difficult to stay without work. Her younger daughter in Australia argues strongly for Indu and her husband, 63, to come live with them. Their daughter worries they are alone and will need care as they get older. Indu does not want to leave her eldest daughter in India, though she cannot depend on her for care as her daughter lives with her husband’s joint family. Indu says that her husband ‘cannot just sit here. His weight is also going up….He is going back on his own (in two days). I will stay here for another month. He doesn’t feel good here’. Enu, 60, a widow with two sons in Australia, moved in 2011. She has nothing but praise for her sons and daughters-in-law. Used to running her husband’s family’s factory in India, she finds it difficult to sit at home doing nothing. She is reduced to tears recounting her frustration while her sons tell her she has worked enough and now it is time for her to rest and enjoy herself.

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Financial dependence and tensions of multigenerational living border on abuse Parent migrants repeat how good their children are to them, how they are happy being together. Nineteen of the 25 parent migrants say this or a version of it. All of them, even the ones who do not say it, report considerable filial care. In seven instances however, there is ambivalence about living in an upside-down joint family. None of the parent migrants studied have been made homeless because of a breakdown of relationships. None of them has also faced the breakup of the child’s marriage, as did one of the participants in an earlier study of migration and money. Under the community division of property in Australia the couple’s house and business are divided between the husband and the wife. Parents’ undocumented contributions without accompanying equity means parents’ financial contributions towards the house deposit and the mortgage are not taken into account. In this study, difficulties of intergenerational living and lack of access to their own money combine to make two women wish they had remained in India. Their choices to stay or return are limited. Harsh, over 70 years old, is finding it difficult to live with her sons and daughters-in-law. She and her husband migrated to live with their two sons in 1996. They live with one son or the other. She did not say how they dealt with their property and money when they moved to Australia. Having migrated in 1996, they get the old age pension and give their sons some of it for their expenses. Money is not the problem for neither side asks the other about money. But Harsh says in the conversation circle, ‘You know there is a bit of difficulty when you live with your sons’. Later, she refers to problems with her daughters-in-law, saying they are thinking of getting a house on their own. Her choice is to accept emotional abuse or financial vulnerability. Devi, 85, a widow, migrated to Australia in 2001. She is more open about her troubles. She lives with her daughter, her only child who lives in Australia. The other daughter is overseas. After Devi’s husband died, her daughter in Melbourne said, ‘You must come, you must come. You must not stay alone’. Devi sold her property in India and gave all the money to her daughters. Her daughter in Australia did not want it so she put it in her grandchildren’s accounts. Devi’s pension goes into her daughter’s account. Devi does not feel she can ask about her pension money for her daughter looks after all her needs. Devi says, ‘Life is good… My daughter is doing everything for me’. However, as the conversation begins to flow, Devi says, ‘Sometimes I feel I should have been alone in India’. She reveals an unpleasant relationship with her son-in-law, saying he is ‘nasty’ and ‘unpleasant’ but concluding, ‘There is no solution. I keep quiet. I have to change myself ’. After the conversation circle, Devi reveals her relationship with her son-in-law has broken down, leaving her staying in a room in the house, remembering her daughter ‘is doing everything for me’.

Conclusion: parent migrants, financial dependence and elder abuse Parents migrate from India to live with their children – usually the son – in Australia in order to be a family again. They sell their property in India to pay for the expenses of migration and give the rest mainly to their son. They see these moves as part of the morality of family relationships. 194

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It is important for parents to feel they have helped their children when they need the money most for building a house or business. Money and property will go to the children in the end. For most in the study, the morality of money and family has worked. Parents have fulfilled their responsibilities and their children are filial and respectful. However, control and choices related to money have shifted. It worries some parents. This would have happened to some extent in India with age. But some parent migrants feel in their 60s, they are still in their productive years. The uncertainties of migration and living in an upside-down joint family are making some reconsider their choice to migrate. A few parents have given away their money, but intergenerational living is not working out as hoped. They are left with few or no choices. The two parents in the study who find themselves in such a place are not reporting it as elder abuse. But this is not where they hoped to be. This study shows the importance of parents and children talking of their worries about financial dependence, migration and intergenerational living before migrating. This conversation can be difficult for questions about money can be seen as questioning the child’s filial responsibility. Having some money of their own is a source of comfort for parents. Where parents have openly said how they would like everyday money flow to them, they no longer have to put their hands out. One set of parents has said they would like intimacy at some distance and would like to live in a house next to the son’s rather than in their son’s house. This is not always possible given the expenses of migration, currency exchange rates, migration policy settings and the high cost of housing in Australia. Others are reconsidering their choices to leave their home, country, work and selling all their properties. They then have to work out how to ‘do family’ across borders. Policy makers at present try to ensure parent migrants do not become an impost on taxpayers, through visa fees and bonds paid by the sponsoring children. More information needs to be directed at the parents at the time of application for extended visas as well as applications for permanent residence to ensure that older persons know their banking options in Australia. They also need to know how much money they would need as discretionary expenditure over the 10 years before they become eligible for age and disability pensions. Parent migrants also need to understand that money has different cultural and legal meanings across borders. In India money belongs to the family. When parents put their money without documentation in the son’s house, they think they are bolstering their collective assets. In Australia the marital home and business belong jointly to the married couple. If the son’s marriage dissolves, the house the parents have helped build will be divided between the son and the daughter-in-law, without taking the parents into account. Only one couple in the study organised their property and money taking into account the cultural differences of money in India and Australia. They were parent migrants but also were business migrants who had to have a certain level of investment in their own name. They put the house and business in the joint names of the parents, their son and daughterin-law. This enabled them to give in a timely manner while ensuring they have meaningful occupation, live in a house that is jointly owned and are spending money that does not belong to the son alone. Parent migrants at present gift their money with blind faith. They expect their sons and daughters-in-law will behave morally. For many this faith has been justified. But migrating with eyes wide open can combine the morality of money and respect for oneself. It can prevent social and financial dependence which can be fertile ground for elder abuse. 195

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A context for elder abuse HelpAge India. (2015). 73% of Indian youth admit that elder abuse exists [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.helpageindia.org/elder-abuse.html. HelpAge India. (2018). Elder abuse in India – 2018: changing cultural ethos & impact of technology. Retrieved from https://www.helpageindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ELDER-ABUSE-­ININDIA-2018-A-HelpAge-India-report.pdf. Horn, V. (2017). Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication as modes of care circulation: insights from the Peruvian ‘zero generation’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(2), 303–320. Kalavar, J., Zarit, S., & Ferraccio, B. (2015). Transnational support of Asian Indian elderly in India: examining patterns of exchanges. Care Management Journals, 16(3), 141–149. Kalavar, J. M., Jamuna, D., & Ejaz, F. K. (2013). Elder abuse in India: extrapolating from the experiences of seniors in India’s “Pay and Stay” homes. Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect, 25(1), 3–18. Kaspiew, R., Carson, R., & Rhoades, H. (2016). Elder abuse: understanding issues, frameworks and responses. Retrieved from Melbourne: https://aifs.gov.au/publications/elder-abuse/export. King, R., Cela, E., Fokkema, T., & Vullnetari, J. (2014). The migration and well-being of the zero generation: transgenerational care, grandparenting, and loneliness amongst Albanian older people. Population, Space and Place, 20(8), 728–738. King, R., Lulle, A., Sampaio, D., & Vullnetari, J. (2017). Unpacking the ageing–migration nexus and challenging the vulnerability trope. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(2), 182–198. King, R., Vullnetari, J., Lulle, A., & Cela, E. (2016). Contrasts in ageing and agency in family migratory contexts: a comparison of Albanian and Latvian older migrants. In M. Kilkey & E. ­Palenga-Möllenbeck (Eds.), Family life in an age of migration and mobility: global perspectives through the life course (pp. 261–286). eBook: Palgrave Macmillan. Lamb, S. (2013). In/dependence, intergenerational uncertainty, and the ambivalent state: perceptions of old age security in India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36(1), 65–78. Lindley, A. (2009). The early-morning phonecall: remittances from a refugee diaspora perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35(8), 1315–1334. Mackay, H. (2012). The ‘unfocused’ group discussion technique. Australasian Journal of Market & Social Research, 20(2), 47–58. Merla, L., & Baldassar, L. (2016). Response: special review symposium, transnational families, migration and the circulation of care. Papers: Revista de Sociologia, 101(2), 275–284. Nedelcu, M. (2017). Transnational grandparenting in the digital age: mediated co-presence and childcare in the case of Romanian migrants in Switzerland and Canada. European Journal of Ageing, 14(4), 375– 383. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/1963176950? accountid=13552&rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo. Nedelcu, M., & Wyss, M. (2016). ‘Doing family’ through ICT-mediated ordinary co-presence: transnational communication practices of Romanian migrants in Switzerland. Global Networks, 16(2), 202–218. doi:10.1111/glob.12110. Olwig, K. F. (2011). Migration and care – intimately related aspects of Caribbean family and kinship. Belgium: Catholic University of Louvain. Parreňas, R. S. (2006). Caring for the Filipino family: how gender differentiates the economic causes of labour migration. In A. Agrawal (Ed.), Migrant women and work (Vol. 4, pp. 95–115). New Delhi: Sage Publications. Parreň as, R. S. (2005). Children of global migration: transnational families and gendered woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Peterson, L., & Ralston, M. (2017). Valued elders or societal burden: cross-national attitudes toward older adults. International Sociology, 32(6), 731–754. doi:10.1177/0268580917726943. Ramos, A. Carolina, & Martins, H. R. (2019). First-generation migrants become grandparents: how migration backgrounds affect intergenerational relationships. Global Networks, 20(2), 325–342. doi:10.1111/glob.12261. Ratha, D. (2014). The hidden force in global economics: sending money home. In TED Talks. Rio De Janeiro: TED Talks. Ryan, L. (2004). Family Matters: (E)migration, familial networks and Irish women in Britain. The Sociological Review, 52(3), 351–370. Retrieved from http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/sore accessed 4 August 2005. Samanta, T., Chen, F., & Vanneman, R. (2015). Living arrangements and health of older adults in India. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 70(6), 937–947. doi:10.1093/geronb/gbu164.

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14 MAPPING SOUTH ASIAN QUEER STUDIES Sri Craven

This chapter identifies and describes the major research and key arguments in the field of South Asian queer studies.1 Its goal is to elicit the historical development of the field, starting with locating the term “queer South Asia”/“South Asian queer,” and clarifying “queer” as a critical explanatory model for understanding culture. Until the late 2000s, India leads scholarly focus on queerness, undoubtedly generated by the spread of HIV/AIDS since the late 1980s, and by queer visibility projects facilitated by liberalization in the 1990s. Emergent since the late 2000s, scholarship about Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka shows distinct similarities to dominant research paradigms of the field, especially as it relates to explanations of homophobia, erasure, and the histories of genders and sexualities beyond the heterosexual binary system.

Queer South Asian, South Asian queer: Emergence Diaspora The use of queer South Asia/South Asian queer can be traced to the “the 1970s and early 1980s” in the U.S. when South Asian diasporics who identified as lesbian or gay “connected through larger movements: the women’s movement; Asian American or people of colour spaces; gay spaces” (Nagarajan, 2014, p. 1). Scholar activists like Indian American Urvashi Vaid (1996, 2012) raised critical questions about how the non-white immigrant queer experience alters the political strategies and cultures of white queer communities. As early as the 1980s, Indian-Canadian-British writer Suniti Namjoshi explores postcolonial queer female subjectivity in the context of diaspora, and by the 1990s, other writers and filmmakers make the first forays into representation of South Asian queer from North America and the United Kingdom. Immigration through refugee and asylum processes, in addition to the usual channels of labor and education, increased queer presence in various non-white diaspora. Academic readings of queer cultures produce the idea of “queer diaspora” as contending with racism, and racist and diasporic homophobia (Manalansan, 1995; Eng, 1997; Gopinath, 1997; Eng and Hom, 1998). Scholars analyze and theorize queerness within im/migration and diaspora formation to explain sexual categories as a construction of imperialism, and, therefore, the unviability of identity politics (Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, 2000; Luibhéid 199

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and Cantú, 2005; G. Reddy, 2005; Manalansan, 2006). Gayatri Gopinath (1997). They introduce the concept of “queer diaspora” as a scholarly method that, in recalling home as the space of contradictions and violences, displacement and exile rather than belonging, reads South Asian representation as challenging rather than working through heteronormative ideologies. Jasbir Puar (1998), however, cautions that queer diaspora tends toward a variation of cultural nationalism because it flattens historical differences among westward bound queer communities. Further, Puar argues that queer diaspora works within the troubling parameters of a modernity based on visibility as defined by Western cultures. These early theorizations inaugurate the field, generating readings and re-readings of representational texts to explain culture, aesthetics, and sexual politics.

HIV/AIDS and queer rights activism HIV/AIDS and queer rights through the 1990s in the regional context drives queer research in the region. The limitations of Western sexual identity frameworks in HIV/AIDS prevention and intervention programs funded by Western health and humanitarian institutions served as the starting point. State apparatuses that criminalize sodomy, and the cultural terrain that stigmatizes third genders, cis-women sex workers, and homosexual sex or sex outside marriage and procreation were the initial issues that produced public conversations about sexuality as subjectivity and identity in scholarly and non-scholarly realms. The late 1980s/ early 1990s campaigns to address HIV/AIDS led to the first major document of this period, the AIDS Bedhbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) report (1991), which initiated conversations about homosexuality, and sought to end anti-sodomy laws. The attacks on Indian Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire, screened in India in 1998, produced the second major document, the Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI) report (1999), which centralizes lesbian rights. Both ABVA and CALERI were the result of coalitions of individuals and organizations that work on engaging queer sexualities from the perspective of women’s rights, non-biological understanding of gender rights, as well as lesbian and gay subjectivities. All these actions collectively coalesced into the queer movement organized around issues of sexual rights and protections, and became grounds for scholarly studies of queerness.

Sources, methods, theories Currently, South Asian queer studies encompasses two broad research clusters organized around readings of representation, and of HIV/AIDS and queer rights activism. The first takes its cue from cultural studies arguments (via Derrida) that everything is a text, and that analysis will open up how texts work and what they might say. Following this, scholars read literary and non-literary texts, affect, and social interactions to reveal heterosexuality as an aspect of nationalist ideology, and the presence of queerness despite heteronormative cultural imperatives. The second leads with queer sexualities as a fact as the spread of HIV shows, and aims to end state and cultural practices that criminalize and/or render vulnerable certain groups through heteronormativity. Both types of research draw on methods and theories from multiple disciplines, which begin in queer literary criticism, and queer theory’s critiques of identity, identity politics, and rights discourses in Western queer studies. Like others globally, South Asian queer studies, too, shows that sexual practices and meanings are influenced by indigenous political, social, and economic contexts, and transnational histories of contact. Like with other global studies, the field emerges out of transnationally inflected intellectual, institutional, and publishing contexts vis-à-vis scholars’ training, and/or research agendas and methods. 200

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Major Research Areas, and Themes Representation Research Cluster The earliest recorded public evidence of queerness and its relationship to nationalism in South Asian culture resides in the terrain of the literary. The first event that scholars record is the case of Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s lesbian-themed short story “Lihaaf ” (translation: “The Quilt”), published in 1942, which was tried for obscenity by the colonial British government (Patel, 2004). In the introduction to the collected works of Hindi writer Pandey Bechan Sharma (known as “Ugra” or provocateur), Ruth Vanita (2009) notes in her translation of Sharma’s short stories that Sharma’s queer male themed short story, “Chocolate” (1924), underwent a similar trial before Chughtai’s. Literature as the site of queer visibility for South Asians in the U.S. began with the publication of the anthology, A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Experience (1996). Comprising scholarly essays, creative non-fiction, and creative writing in mixed forms, genres, and styles, this anthology became a model for similar ones published in India under the rubrics of “lesbian,” “gay,” or “queer” to address nationalist homophobia and queer erasure. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s polemical edited volume, Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), comprises literary and non-literary writings about queerness spanning “over 2000 years of Indian [sic] literature” to provide evidence of homoeroticism in culture, contrary to cultural (and) nationalist assertions that homosexuality is a “western” import. Film became another viable source for queer representation in diaspora, and in India. The celebratory and regulatory rhetoric attached to Indian Canadian U.S. filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s lesbian-themed film, Fire (1996), illustrated, of course, that film is the paradoxical site for publicizing and regulating female same-sex desire (Kapur, 2000; Patel, 2001; Gairola, 2002; Marsh and Brasted, 2002; Gopinath, 2005). And, as digital technologies and social media proliferated, and queer movements gained momentum and states aligned with queer rights agendas, other avenues such as pride parades, marriage, advertising, and dating gained traction for representing queerness. Scholarly studies of representation proceed on the idea that representations code queerness covertly or overtly, and that this can be uncovered using new research methods and from theoretical positions drawn from different disciplines. Such readings revise existing critical paradigms grounded in the same heterosexism that undergirds culture. Gopinath inaugurates the use of “queer diaspora” as a heuristic device, which enables this process of reading queerness in cultural texts in her analysis of Sri Lankan novelist Shyam Selvadurai’s novel, Funny Boy (1994), and Mehta’s film, Fire (1996). Rosemary Marangoly George’s (2000) reading of India’s Malayalam language writer Kamala Das’s literary representations of lesbianism similarly advocates for diasporic scholarly practice as expanding postcolonial feminist literary criticism’s confinement of female sexuality within heterosexual ideology. In advancing readings that reveal queerness in texts, scholars aim to show heterosexuality as structured by ideologies that the presence of queerness effectively challenges. Drawing on postcolonial theorizations of the relationship between nation and gender, Gopinath shows these ideologies to be the result of anti- and postcolonial nationalisms that shape the nation as heterosexual through the idea of home. For Gopinath, male performances of femininity in Funny Boy, and female performances of same-sex desire in Fire both work against the masculinist, androcentric logic that makes home the space of cis-gendered women’s femininity (p. 484). Moreover, Selvadurai’s locating of queer male adolescence “back home” in Sri Lanka, and Mehta’s locating of female queerness in the upper caste, middle class, Hindu 201

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domestic family effectively position “home” as national/domestic space outside of heterosexuality (p. 485). In George’s (2000) reading, lesbian representations in Das’s autobiography and poetry work as sites of pleasure and agency, not instances to be dismissed as artistic failure (p. 733), or resistance to patriarchal sexual violence alone (pp. 735–736) as feminist scholars from India and the West tend to read. This reading signals what Gopinath calls the power of queer female desires to disrupt patriarchal nationalism, which relies on associating and circumscribing women within the home and/as heterosexuality (pp. 471–473). These styles of reading, which use “diaspora” as an anchoring weight to explore queerness in texts, reveal nationalist thinking and not nature as normalizing heterosexuality and enforcing heteronormativity by linking gender, home, and culture. Readings of queer representation, however, also theorize nationalism’s troubling presence in diaspora. Puar’s (1998) reading of the South Asian American anthology of mixed literary forms, A Lotus of Another Color (1996), argues that queer visibility projects engaged from the diaspora can reiterate cultural nationalism “through transnationalist paths” (p. 406). Puar shows that several entries in the anthology posit “coming out” in the west as a desirable and progressive stance for South Asian queer life, but do not consider the social privileges related to class that facilitate westward migration. For Puar, queer diaspora also represents complicity with the “modern regime of sexuality” (p. 410) in presenting diaspora as progressive alternative to regressive indigeneity. In a related vein, Jaspal Kaur Singh (2005) reads representations of postcolonial homophobia in Mehta’s Fire (1996), Indian Canadian filmmaker Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn (2002), and Indian-Trinidadian-Canadian novelist Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) as exemplifying diasporic artists’ participation in locating postcolonial diaspora as “modern” and progressive to Western cultures (p. 149). Singh reads this as the effect of the racism faced by “the diaspora of late capitalism” and “Euro interpellated elites” to whom these texts are pitched (pp. 157–158). A nationalist logic is at work in the idea of progressiveness, which aligns diaspora and the West in/by casting postcolonial culture as homophobic. However, queer diasporic representations undoubtedly contest colonial and postcolonial erasures of queer life, while also challenging western identity frameworks. Harveen S. Mann (1997) reads Indian Canadian British lesbian writer Suniti Namjoshi’s poetry and prose as spaces where the poet-writer negotiates her own life as diasporic Indian lesbian caught between “the asphyxiating national-space” and the impingements of “gender, sexuality, race, and religion” (p. 111) in the diaspora. Moreover, Namjoshi’s re-deployments of autobiography make and claim a space for lesbians in Indian culture without recourse to reductive sexual identity politics alone (Craven, 2017). And, Namojshi’s use of anthropomorphism and animal imagery writes the lesbian into Indian literary culture by placing her within the oral and written literatures of India/South Asia, not Western queer literary frameworks (Dasgupta, 2001). Gopinath (2005) reads the queer romance between a Pakistani immigrant and a working-class white man in the British film, My Beautiful Launderette (1985), as staging colonialism’s legacy of playing race against class interests and building political solidarities across those divides. Debanuj Dasgupta and Rohit Dasgupta (2018) read diasporic queer representations as uneven in their relationship to whiteness and modernity. They argue that while the British film, Touch of Pink (2004), feeds the idea of Muslim homophobia through the queer protagonist’s retreat to white working-class spaces, the queer artist Kabir’s photomontages of queer Muslim women interrupt both immigrant homophobia, and the racist constructions of Muslims and Muslim homophobia. In all these instances, queer serves to illuminate the white colonial nationalist thinking—whether of diasporics, or of white cultures—that frames non-white postcolonial cultures as “backward.” The irony that coloniality once viewed the colonized’s sexuality as base and degraded reveals nationalism’s 202

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contingent ideological construction across historical time, and serves as a template for reading critically postcolonial nationalisms as well. Important as queer representations are to the project of exposing heterosexuality as a fiction entrenched by nationalist thinking, they, too, are subject to the same ideological weight that structures heterosexuality in texts. That is, they can become (false) models for how one must live, especially in the context of identity formulations and politics as Puar’s critique of “coming out” and visibility points to. However, often “geared toward the general population” (George et al., 2002, p. 8), representations made by anthologies, in particular, offer compelling instances of disengaging queer life from queer identity politics. Sridevi Nair (2011) notes in the case of Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (1999) that while the work responds to the political contingency of needing to counter right-wing attacks on lesbianism following the screening of Fire, its multiplicity of voices, and the structuring device of anonymity forestall identity and visibility. Moreover, as Sukthankar notes in her introduction to the Facing, not all the contributors are knowable as lesbian, or even women, nor to all contributors voice the desire to live in same-sex relationships (pp. xvii–xxiii), which interrogates rather than solidifies the term “lesbian” signaled by the title. Because literature escapes scrutiny more easily than other cultural forms by fact of audience reach alone—beyond considerations of obfuscation and concealment by/of authors and of characters, themes, and so on—it has been used effectively to produce a variety of ways of representing queerness, especially female queerness, and in indigenous rather than diasporic contexts. Chughtai’s canonical ending of “Lihaaf, or The Quilt” (1942) is a widely noted case in point, where the young narrator does not name what it is she saw happen between two adult women when the quilt was lifted (Patel, 2004; Gopinath, 2005). Vanita (2001, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2010; Vanita and Kidwai, 2000) leads the studies of indigenous literatures, with her work on ancient and medieval Hindu texts, and postcolonial texts. Scholars read other styles of writing from India to show the use of familiar literary tropes to represent queerness. These include female friendships in women’s scholarly and non-scholarly writing (Sukthankar, 1999; Bacchetta, 2002), and in regional language literary traditions by women and men (Mokkil, 2009); same-sex marital and sexual unions (Vanita, 2004); cross-dressing (Penrose, 2001; Vanita and Kidwai, 2001); sex change (Thadani, 1996); and re-birth (Vanita and Kidwai, 2001). Literature is, thus, clearly a key site for queer representation because of the possibilities of representation that resist scrutiny, and yet proliferate queer sexualities in heteronormative culture. Scholars read queer representations made through new technologies and media with concerns that these newer modes of queer presence focused narrowly on queer visibility and rights to the exclusion of other social concerns might challenge heteronormativity, but do so in ways that are troubling reassertions of nationalist ideologies. Oshir Sircar (2017) reads the caste and consumerist class framings of queer advertisements in India as “reinforce[ing] some of the very foundations that form the base of the idea of the New India, particularly that of privatization of liberation” and the consolidation of caste and class hierarchies in the move from “heteronormativity to ‘homonormativity’” (p. 10). The state’s strategic investment in queer liberation that Sircar raises is explained by Rahul Rao’s (2015) theory of “homocapitalism,” or the participation of and benefit derived by queers from dominant groups in the new capitalist economy, which is anti-equity (p. 41). Much like queer visibility, queer rights campaigns, too, reveal the use of problematic aspects of nationalism. Sayan Bhattacharya (2019) analyzes the discourse and rhetoric of key figures in the queer movement who are tied to right-wing Hindu nationalism (pp. 4–5, 14–15) to show that the idea of “citizenship,” based on class, caste, and religious domination, are troubling ways to engage queer liberation. And, 203

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finally, sites of visibility for queers offered by the rhetorical and cultural structure of “pride” reveals the traces of imperialism and racism that structures queer liberation in South Asia as Moon Charania (2017) notes. Reading the U.S. state’s support of queer liberation in Pakistan, Charania shows that the rhetoric of liberation recuperates the Pakistani Muslim queer man as a non-threatening figure in opposition to the Muslim male as “terrorist,” because the queer man is seen as aligning with U.S. culture and Western values (p. 56). The rhetoric of “queer as national subject” so instrumental as a response to nationalist homophobia is cause for concern when it works from within the terms of dominant cultures, whether western or indigenous.

HIV/AIDS and queer rights activisms research cluster HIV/AIDS provides the most material evidence for the existence of queerness in culture at a time when nationalist ideologies ensure that heterosexuality is the only available discourse of sexuality. In exploring and arguing that indigenous understandings and meanings of sexual practices, behaviors, and subjectivities run counter to sexual identity models used by transnational Western institutions that engage in prevention work in South Asia, scholars elicit queerness in culture, and argue against identity frameworks as the model through which to understand queerness. Studies argue that men who have sex with men view homosexual sex as “masti” (play), and temporary “release” in a culture of sexual repression and gender segregation (Khan, 2001, pp. 102–111), and not as the basis of a “common social identity” (Asthana and Oostvogels, 2001, p. 718). As a result, these men often do not, nor can be encouraged to participate in HIV/AIDS prevention strategies (Asthana and Oostvogels, 2001; Khan, 2001). Gayatri Reddy (2005) shows that hijras, whose presence in the sex work industry makes them especially vulnerable to infection, are often missed by prevention programs because hijras are viewed as gender, not sexual categories. Scholars also critique the collation of various sexual and gender groups under identity rubrics in HIV/AIDS prevention work (Tellis, 2003, 2012; Cohen, 2005), raising concerns that welfare programs circumscribe genders and sexualities in their turn, much like heteronormative patriarchal nationalism. In its eliciting of queer sexualities, HIV/AIDS scholarship illuminates the complex relationship between the state, culture, and queer sexualities. The colonially inherited law across South Asia that criminalizes sodomy, and, therefore, directly impacts queer life is a central object of inquiry. Human Rights Watch (2002) notes that the sodomy law, deriving from the British legal section 377, “was a colonial attempt to set standards of behaviour, both to reform the colonised and to protect the colonisers against moral lapses” (pp. 86–87). The law reveals especially the limits of “democracy” as a concept when applied to states that claim such status. In India, the law reflects dominant religious, caste-, and class-driven conceptions of morality that proscribe certain sexual practices, and drive queer sexuality into the terrain of “crime” (Gupta, 2006; Sharma, 2008; Misra, 2009). Thus, citizens’ sexual preferences and behaviors are state-regulated, and can become the basis for unequal treatment among citizens (Baudh, 2006; Gupta, 2006; Sharma, 2008). In postcolonial Sri Lanka, the law reveals the importance of heterosexual constructions to the reproductive economy of ethnic nationalism (Tambiah, 2004). The cases of Nepal and Bhutan show a more tricky history with the law. Scholars suggest that Nepal, never colonized by the British, adopted the anti-sodomy law due to influence rather than inheritance (Kapur, 2013, p. 122; Knight, 2014, p. 138). Sonam Chuki (2019) notes that in Bhutan, the legal framework criminalizing queer sexualities came into being only in 2004, when the state moved from being a monarchy to a constitutional democracy (pp. 1–4). These two cases show that state’s regulation of sexuality exists in a matrix of regional political influences, not just cultural histories. This is 204

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especially clear in the cases Pakistan (Baudh, 2013, pp. 299–300; Qureishi, 2018, pp. 95–96) and Bangladesh (Hossain, 2017, p. 1423) where there is no evidence that anti-sodomy law is actually applied to prosecute people. That these states are religious states suggests the salience of cultural histories and practices over (colonial) statehood in understanding sexuality. Providing further evidence for this is Katherine Pratt Ewing’s (2011) observation based on her ethnographic study conducted in the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan, which shows that discussions of same-sex desires and interactions as routine among women and men living in a middle-class Lahori neighborhood. Queerness’ relationship to the state shows the continuous mutual shaping of one by the other in paradoxical ways. Puar’s (2007) theorization of “homonationalism” or the state’s “recognition and incorporation of some, though not all or most, homosexual subjects” (pp. 3–4) made in the context of the U.S. sees state support of queer rights as a mechanism to annex queers into nationalist projects of military and group domination. The Indian state’s support of queer rights agendas moves along several related neoliberal aims, including but not limited to its campaigns to secure Western investments in the form of capital (Rao, 2015), or HIV/AIDS-­related funding (Kole, 2007; Bhattacharya, 2019). Kyle Knight (2014) documents the Nepalese state’s tactical uses of queer tourism (pp. 158–159) run by queer groups such as the Pink Triangle Company, whose founder, Sunil Babu Pant, is the first openly gay politician elected official in Asia (p. 119). Yet, as Knight and others note, Nepal remains heteronormative and homophobic in key instances, such as attitudes toward non-normative genders and sexualities (Wilson, Pant, Comfort, and Ekstrand, 2011; Knight, 2015). Jyoti Puri (2016) argues that the conflicting legal verdicts regarding repealing the sodomy law in India respond to the state’s differing support of queerness to suit its neoliberal agendas and efface its violence against queer and other marginalized communities. Queerness undoubtedly re-shapes meanings and strategies of political organizing by/as oppressed or marginalized groups. Activist campaigns fighting HIV/AIDS in South Asia provide ongoing opportunities to investigate what Sumit Baudh (2006) terms the right to sexual autonomy (RSA) as a radical liberatory framework. While the two major reports related to queer rights centralize homosexuality (ABVA, 1991) and lesbian life (CALERI, 1999), the publicizing of queer sexualities eventually produces several questions about other historical entrenched social differences—chiefly, caste in India and Nepal, and ethnicity, class, language, gender across the region. Critical considerations of these differences produce examples of political engagements through which we might apprehend queer South Asia as a political form(ul)ation distinct from other globally situated ones. Several studies attest to the caste and class differences that render queer rights as the domain of a select middle and upper transnationally connected English-speaking group in India (Tellis, 2003; Gupta, 2005; PUCL-K, 2006; Khubchandani, 2016; Roy, 2016; Dutta, 2019), Bangladesh (Hossain, 2017), and Pakistan (Charania, 2017). However, in Nepal, as Stacy Pigg (2001) notes, English does serve to arbitrate HIV/AIDS work both due to its history in naming the disease (pp. 491–492), and the distance it creates in relation to discussing sex, for “to name many of these acts and desires in Nepali would be to transgress, unequivocally, all bounds of taste” (p. 521). Queer activism that focuses on queer visibility and rights through the discourses of capitalism and consumer culture shows the troubling tendency to reiterate aspects of nationalist ideologies of caste and class (Sircar, 2017) as well as dominant economic interests (Rao, 2015). And, as the debates about gender/sexual “authenticity” within third gender communities shows, the neoliberal framework of aid organizations that base resource allocation on uncritical notions of sexual identity and orientation, or gender expression are detrimental 205

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to queer organizing and a radical vision of liberation. (Cohen, 2005; Khanna, 2009; Dutta, 2012; Khubchandani, 2016; Bhattacharya, 2019). Gender operates as a key vector of consideration of queerness and queer rights. Across South Asia, androcentric and male-driven patriarchal cultures limit queer presence and women’s sexuality, while facilitating greater opportunities in general for male sexual activity. The androcentric nature of sexual desire is evident in the prevalence of sex between men. However, sex between men is covert, and studies show frequent invocations by these men of gendered concepts of “active” and “passive” as signs of sexual orientation, and the related stigmatization of gay male sexuality (Asthana and Oostvogels, 2001; Khan, 2001; Banik, 2008). In different South Asian nations, queer liberationist agendas that focus on sexuality do not capture the particular experience of violence and ostracism faced by third genders, whose gender variance institutes a hypervisibility of queer sexuality against those who perform gender normatively if so desired (Narrain, 2004; PUCL-K, 2006; Khan, 2014; Aurangzaib, Doneys, and Doane, 2017; Loh, 2017; Aziz and Azhar, 2019). Humaira Jami and Anila Kamal’s (2015) ethnography of university students in Pakistan shows a similar theme. The students tend to view hijras as objects of sympathy when understood as gender variant beings whose biology is divinely ordained, but as objects of ostracism when viewed as sexual actors whose desires and relationships fall outside the bounds of heterosexuality. As always in South Asia, the issue of women complicates liberatory politics organized around other identities or issues. On the one hand, as the more limited scholarship on women shows, are issues of the invisibility of women’s same-sex desires, relationships, and subjectivities. Rural and poor women who live with women in India, and gender nonconforming lesbians in Sri Lanka show a refusal to reveal publicly the sexual nature of their relationship (Sharma, 2005). Maya Sharma (2005) reads women’s silences about sexualities as a means of survival in India’s misogynistic patriarchal culture, in tandem with similar arguments made by/in the anthology Facing the Mirror (1999). Ashwini Tambiah (2004) documents the case of the Press Council in Sri Lanka implicitly supporting violence against lesbians in its statements that lesbianism is “illegal, immoral, sadistic, salacious and against Sri Lankan culture, and therefore deserved to be condemned” (p. 84). The fear of misogynist violence and the invisibility resulting from silences around sexuality erase lesbians from the national imaginary in India (Sukthankar, 1999; Dave, 2012). On the other, Jayanti Kuru-Utumpala’s (2013) study of Sri Lankan women’s reiteration of dominant gender, and Sharma’s ethnography (2005) in India complicate performances of female masculinity as not just about safety, but, rather, the reiteration of heteropatriarchal models of gender that require rethinking about resistant subjectivity. Political engagements from the perspective of differences other than sexuality show that queer liberation in South Asia resides alongside, and, sometimes, outside of but never exclusively within sexuality. This provides a compelling case for understanding sexuality relationally—a critical quest shared by feminist and queer scholars globally. For instance, the Indian sociologist Pushpesh Kumar (2014) highlights the work of the National Federation of Dalit Women in India that, in foregrounding the material conditions of hijras and ­working-class lesbians in its caste-centered political activism, posits sexual liberation as requiring more than the reading down of the anti-sodomy law, or of identity politics (p. 9). Kareem Khubchandani’s (2019) interview and analysis of the Hyderabad-based queer activist and documentary filmmaker, Moses Tulasi, argues that Tulasi’s caste-centered documentary about Hyderabad’s first queer pride, and his sexual invective on online queer dating forums challenge the persistence of caste hierarchies in India’s queer movement and queer communities (pp. 3–10). Paola Bacchetta (1999) documents the case of women who identify as 206

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lesbian but forego lesbian identity politics in the 1980s in New Delhi, and argues that this strategy effectively de-­naturalizes heterosexuality by refusing to parse out homosexuality. Again, the case of third genders provides illuminating accounts of how to expand the limits of sexual identity as the basis for politicizing sexuality’s centrality to the very meaning of culture. In Pakistan, Faris Khan (2016) shows that “gender and sex sub-categories” unite under the umbrella term “khwaja siras” utilize rather than challenge cultural and religious norms to achieve political aims as a strategy to prevent undue scrutiny. Moreover, khwaja siras resist to the gender verification test required by the state to become eligible for protections under “transgender rights,” thereby effectively preventing the state from imposing meanings of gender and sexuality (Khan, 2019). In India, hijra communities resist the state’s attempts to confine/render transgender rights through biological determinism, and, instead, emphasize community rather than medical understandings of gender (Bhattacharya, 2019). Morever, reports Sayan Bhattacharya, hijras interrogate the lack of workplace harassment included in the bill (pp. 13–14). Together with Khan’s (2016) reading of Pakistan’s khawaja siras’ resistance to giving up ­income-generating practices such as dancing, begging, and sex work (p. 156) in embracing the state’s “transgender” liberation agendas, South Asian third genders indicate that a political awareness of gender (as labor) provides grounds for a radical politics of sexual liberation. Such extra-sexual strategies exist alongside other political campaigns such as CALERI’s, and the breaking away of lesbian movement from the mainstream feminist movement (­Thadani, 1996; Bacchetta, 2002; Sukthankar, 1999; Vanita, 2005b, 2007), that advocate for an explicitly named sexual identity politics. Naisargi Dave (2012) situates lesbian activism in India as ethical practice because it simultaneously interrogates social norms, and its own strategies and epistemologies. Niharika Banerjea’s (2019) autoethnographic essay argues that queer and non-queer feminists’ experiences of patriarchal social and professional spaces in New Delhi can “(re)activate alliances” between these feminists “to strategically counter violent heteropatriarchal regimes in contemporary urban India” (p. 92). Sukthankar (1999) offers the explicitness of lesbian identity in the title of the anthology Facing the Mirror as an answer to “the question [which] is not whether to relinquish the safety of silence, but how to negotiate an alternative” (p. xviii). Whether in terms of overt identity and gender performances and politics, or of covert and invisible lives, lesbian politics as it has unfolded in South Asia works to counter extreme misogynistic sexism that disavows all women’s lives. These different forms of politicization also show that the conceptual and political work of “queer” liberation needs continuous reassessment through the gender-as-women optic that feminists have worked on for decades in the region’s activist and intellectual histories.

Conclusion: considerations for the field In writing about the field, first, it is obvious that much of the theorizing comes from India. But, does this suggest that research in other nation-states is challenging on account of geopolitics? Or is it that those regions have cultural models of engaging queerness that do not wish to work through the registers of visibility and publicity that India’s neoliberal transnational capitalist model has facilitated and even encouraged, and that scholarship itself has also capitalized on (Tellis, 2012; Sircar, 2017)? The answers to these questions undoubtedly require great self-reflexivity on the part of the field in addressing the limits of queer as hermeneutics or diaspora on the one hand, and the quotidian struggles of life in the Anthropocene in the global South in general on the other. Second, the “difference” of South Asia queer studies certainly resides in the specific historical and cultural records and meanings associated with sexual practices and gender and sexual subjectivities, but its methods and approaches indicate distinct 207

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continuities with Western feminist and queer studies. Since the late 1980s, feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies in the west have critiqued identity as vulnerable to homogenization and state cooptation, and Western queer literary criticism has provided models of recovery or analysis of queerness in representation.2 As such, it seems more appropriate to see South Asian queer studies as one in a constellation of globally located scholarship on the body influenced by and inflecting one another. Third, the antagonistic positioning of queer against postcolonial in initial theorizing stems from the latter’s inattention to heterosexuality as the site of gendered constructions of nation. Yet both fields are invested in studying nationalism and identity. Queer studies focuses on new forms of nationalism in relation to two issues dominating this current period: first, cultural nationalism that decries queerness as Western in a general response against Western influences and, second, state nationalism that annexes queer into its global modernity projects. Might postcolonial and queer studies not have similar political interests in their common recognition of how nationalism works and is deployed strategically, and, if so, is there a way South Asian queer studies might work not as a separate field of inquiry, but as part of South Asian postcolonial studies? This is especially relevant in the context of the many scholars who call for salient and entrenched historical differences rather than sexuality as entry points into studying queerness (Kumar, 2014; Horton, 2018) in order to de-colonize queer studies’ privileging of the male and the dominant ethnic, religious, and caste body. Such an epistemological move has institutional implications. How scholars are trained and hired, and departments are set up and funded can change productively to (re)situate intellectual inquiry away from the parsing out of interests, as “gender and sexuality,” and instead attend to the goal of explaining sexuality as but one in a constellation of discourses about the body that is used to materialize and naturalize culture, society, and, indeed, history and the ‘normal.’

Notes 1 A note on terminology: this essay uses queer studies and South Asian queer studies interchangeably, unless signaled otherwise. The “west” is used to signal Anglophone contexts, or, sometimes, as the context clarifies, to the (imperialist) global North in general. Same-sex and queer appear as scholars use them when discussing scholarship, and otherwise interchangeably. The terms lesbian or gay or homosexual appear as scholarship uses them, and otherwise to signify acceptable academic discourse. Despite its theoretical interrogation, “third genders” is used as a descriptor in contexts where it includes disparate groups such as hijras (India and Pakistan), a number of other linguistically specific groups in India, khwaja siras (Pakistan), and metis (Nepal) united under the recently increasingly used term “transgender” or “trans.” The differentiation into specific groups (e.g., trans, hijra, khwaja sira) occurs in cases where scholars use them so. All indigenous terms in regional languages are italicized, except when quoting directly from scholarly texts or titles that do not use italics. 2 The list of such studies is well known and feels redundant to include here.

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15 PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL KITCHENS AS SPACES FOR RETHINKING GENDER, IDENTITY, AND CITIZENSHIP Towards a transnational theory of servitude and service Anita Anantharam Introduction I sniffed the envelope before opening it. It smelled of a faraway city, pungent with anticipation for rain. If my Mesdames had not been in the room, I would have tasted it with my tongue. I was certain to find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea. (Truong, 2003, p. 5) This is narrated by Binh—the central narrator of The Book of Salt—upon receiving a letter from his brother begging him to return to his family home in Vietnam. The Book of Salt (Truong, 2003) is set in Paris between the wars—1920 to 1934—and it explores the lives of three people inextricably tied by “kitchen, sweat, tears, and the sea”: Binh is the personal chef and resident cook in the kitchen of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein; his identity is forged through sweating in the kitchen six days a week in their salon-apartment, 27 rue de Fleurus; his tearful departure from native Vietnam marks the beginning of a series of disappointments and betrayals by loved ones; he finally finds himself making the all-too-familiar transcontinental journey from colony to metropole, setting sail on the ship Niobe to leave Saigon for Marseilles to eventually settle in Paris. The circumstances governing Binh’s arrival in Paris are not wholly different than those of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. While the life of “the Steins,” as the couple is referred to by the concierge of 27 Rue de Fleurus, traces the same leitmotifs—of kitchen, sweat, tears, and the sea—as Binh’s, their position as Americans and as wealthy employers supplant any solidarity between Binh, Stein, and Toklas, which might be underscored by their gay/lesbian identities. In Paris of the 1920s, “Stein and Toklas are not queer allies for Binh, they are employers who, more often than not, are revealed for their racist and classist biases as much as for their gender, sexual orientation, or artistic productions” (Cohler, 2008, p. 28). In other 213

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words, the structures of feelings—of kitchen, sweat, tears, and the sea—imply a different set of meanings for Stein and Toklas than for Binh—not only because he is the servant, and they are the master, but precisely because their queer, liberal, humanist lifestyle, and their status as poster children in the history of American modernism in Paris, relies and thrives on the public consumption of and the private exploitation of racial minorities like Paul Robeson and “Thin Binh.” As David Eng suggests of the novel as a whole, Through the course of Truong’s novel, the eloquence of Bình’s queer desires comes to entangle and reconfigure the domains of both history and fiction by drawing insistent attention to who and what must be forgotten so that the high modernism exemplified by Stein and Toklas might come to be affirmed. (Eng, 2008, p. 1481) Confined to life in the kitchen of 27 rue de Fleurus, Binh has little room for self-­actualization, personal freedom, and political expression—the very reasons for which he was compelled to leave colonial Vietnam. While the metropole promised these things, Binh finds himself increasingly alone—haunted by memories of his father whom he left behind in Saigon—and stripped of dignity in the debased gazes he receives from the French men and women he passes on the streets and in the markets of Montparnasse. In the kitchen of Stein and Toklas, he remains invisible and in servitude. What other alternatives could someone like Binh have? Using The Book of Salt as a point of departure for thinking through gender, class, identity, and citizenship, this essay will provide examples of how communal kitchens in contradistinction to the model of the private cook might provide a more nuanced approach to address questions of domesticity, servitude, and service. The first half of this paper will explore Truong’s characterization of Binh’s life in Paris as a domestic servant to the famous Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and the second half will provide an alternate and emerging model of citizenship and community-building—that of the communal kitchen—for rethinking gender, class, and political expression. The arguments put forth in this essay gesture towards a transnational theory of servitude and service in which I hope to show that feminists and food activities might turn to this space as a potential new site for investigation of gender, class, and political rights. I argue that communal kitchens provide a public space for the articulation of political and personal rights and thus might be useful spaces for ­community-building for new migrants—whereas the model of the domestic servant—­ currently the occupational ghetto for new immigrants, more often than not—is a constraining and exploitative space for the expression of personal and political rights. Communal kitchens are becoming increasingly popular for the performance of political expression not only in the context of migration but also for the articulation of gender empowerment and women’s rights as mothers and activists. While the bulk of this essay will focus on The Book of Salt, the concluding remarks will explore briefly the implications and possible venues for self-­actualization that such a model opens up.

Part I: experience revisited—“a gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen” The titular Book of Salt is a made-up manuscript that Binh steals from Gertrude Stein’s locked cupboard at the request of his clandestine lover Marcus Lattimore. Since Binh cannot read English, he depends on Lattimore to translate and explicate its meaning for him—in ­exchange, Lattimore offers to take Binh to a photography studio and have their picture taken 214

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together—a sort of commemorative acknowledgement of their love. When Lattimore reads the stolen manuscript, he tells Binh that the work is actually about him. Binh responds with shocked anger: Gertrude Stein has “stolen” his life, his craft of cooking, for personal profit in the name of art. After the initial shock wears off, naturally, he becomes angry: I did not give you my permission, Madame, to treat me in this way. I am here to feed you, not to serve your fodder. I demand more money for such services, Madame. You pay me only for my time. My story, Madame, is mine. I alone am qualified to tell it, to embellish, or to withhold. (Truong, 2003, p. 215) Binh reflects—but because Lattimore assures him that Stein’s characterization of Binh in her titular manuscript is quite moving, he decides to let the issue go; but the betrayal springboards his political consciousness. “A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen” (Truong, 2003, p. 215) he notes: Stein sees Binh’s life and his stories as hers to write. In order for the privileged few to have a “room of their own with time and money to write” countless others will need to sacrifice their time and resources. But Binh is not without a self-serving agenda: he uses the strong social network that Stein and Toklas have created among the artists and writers of the avant garde movement in Paris, to find lovers and part-time weekend employment. Even though he is allowed to socialize during their grand parties, he does not dare to see himself as an equal to the Steins—or for that matter to anyone of Gertrude Stein’s friends. Marked racial and social hierarchies do exist within the Stein household—in spite of their feminist and cultured sensibilities. The Book of Salt writes those hierarchies through Binh’s experience. At the centre of the creative world in 1920s Paris, Binh’s “autobiography” is altogether different than the one Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas: and these books together tell a complicated story about “modernist Paris’ relationship to the colonial subjects and alternative modernities on whom it depended” (Eng, quoted in Coffman, 2014). In his own retelling (The Book of Salt) Binh sees himself as a placeholder: They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes. And I am but one within a long line of others. The Algerian orphaned by famine, the Moroccan violated by his uncle, the Madagascan driven out of his village because his shriveled left hand was a sign of his mother’s misdeeds, these are the wounded trophies who have preceded me. (Truong, 2003, p. 19) In the spirit of pan-African and Asian unity, Binh tries to relate his experiences of solitude and servitude with the countless and nameless others who have preceded him in the kitchens of the French masters. They all have the common language of food and service—because none of them have yet fully acquired French. As Binh himself notes, “language is a house with a host of doors, and I am often uninvited and without the keys” (Truong, 2003, p. 155). He continues: Every kitchen is a familiar story that I can embellish with saffron, cardamom, bay laurel, and lavender. In their heat and their steam, I allow myself to believe that it is the sheer 215

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speed of my hands, the flawless measurement of my eyes, the science of my tongue, that is rewarded. During these restorative intervals, I am no longer the mute who begs at this city’s steps. Three times a day, I orchestrate, and they sit with slackened jaws, silenced. Mouths preoccupied with the taste of foods so familiar and yet with every bite even the most parochial of palates detects redolent notes of something they have no words to describe. (Truong, 2003, p. 19) His momentary triumph is quickly squelched when Alice Toklas asks him for the secret ingredient is in his omelettes. Binh is irritated—why try to extort a secret he wonders—when practice over the years, the repeated action of making omelettes for hundreds of days will make anyone an expert omelette-maker. Over the years in Paris as the domestic servant and cook to Stein and Toklas, Binh’s spirit is defeated. He can no longer imagine an alternate universe and reality for himself. The scholar-prince that Binh once imagined himself to be seemed a distant memory. As an aside, there are several hints in the novel that perhaps Binh is actually Ho-Chi Minh (who also came to Paris working in the galley of a commercial vessel). Clearly Ho-Chi Minh did not work for Gertrude Stein but the life he lead in Paris is mirrored in Binh’s story. Binh’s story is not unlike the story of many who migrate from colony to metropole for a better life. They carry with them a “loss” and mourn for an imagined past that they cannot have: Everyday when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man, anonymous, and, at a passing glance, a student, a gardener, a poet, a chef, a prince, a porter, a doctor, a scholar. But in Vietnam, I tell myself, I was above all just a man. (Truong, 2003, p. 152) In Paris he would remain an outsider, trapped within the four walls of the domestic kitchen— giving up on his dreams while making it possible for many others to pursue theirs. Who would speak for him? Who would describe his condition? He too has a problem with no name. Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was written in 1963—a canonical text in gender studies—gave tremendous momentum to the second-wave feminist movement. It was a wake-up call to middle-class, white, educated women to re-evaluate their condition as homemakers and family caretakers. Regardless of how many women were told that their role in the home put them at the “very centre” of the “great issues of their day” with an “infinitely deeper and more intimate responsibility” than their husbands, Freidan argued that women’s feelings of worthlessness were the result of their entrapment within the domestic economy. As a class, these women were increasingly disenchanted with their home life and all that it represented; moreover, because they were denied the opportunity to pursue their livelihoods in a manner that made them confident and happy, their malaise was not a result of medical condition as much as it was a social problem (Friedan, 2001, p. 113). Feminist scholars have written extensively about the politics of housework, which is often invisible work, done by a class of people who have little to no claim to citizenship and sovereignty. Friedan argued that the 1950s educated, white housewives had been sold 216

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a story—about domesticity and marriage, which they neither challenged nor seriously reflected upon. This compulsory domesticity told women that they were responsible to care for, nurture, and prepare tasty casseroles for their family: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning … Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this All?’ (Friedan, 2001, p. 44) More recently, due largely in part to the global flows of capital, feminists have begun to pay attention, once more, to issues of domesticity and kitchen politics. Several blogs, op-ed pieces, and cover stories in the pages of the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker have taken up the issue of “mommy-wars”—between working women and stay-at-home moms, the opt-out revolution—educated women who leave the workforce to stay home to care for kith and kin, the politics of cooking, and desperate domesticity. Even American popular culture is on board with shows like desperate housewives, the real housewives of Orange County, army wives, etc. As a whole, while we have come a long way in advancing and consolidating women’s rights, we clearly have a long way to go to achieve gender parity. If the agenda of the women’s movement in the past century has been to get women out of the kitchen, arguments about putting women back in it—because of either personal choice or forced economic downturns—make feminists in the 21st century wary to re-enter the kitchen space lest women be confined to it in perpetuity. If the power of food which has saturated popular culture in recent years—Julie and Julia (the 2009 box-office hit movie starring Meryl Streep) and popular reality TV shows like “Top Chef ” and “Iron Chef ”—is any indication of where the American imaginary lies these days, it is imperative that studies of food and the politics of cooking garner more serious consideration from feminists. Michel Pollan’s essay “Out of the Kitchen and Onto the Couch” (2009) in the NY Times Magazine suggests that the rise in popularity of reality-based TV cooking competitions and the increasing numbers of American tuning in to watch these shows are less an indicator of our salubriousness as a people (or culture) and more a pedagogy of consumption. In Pollan’s words, What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia [Child] took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves.…) (Pollan, NY Times Magazine online, 2009) In one sense, landing a syndicated TV show in contemporary US culture becomes a means to transcend one’s class status; in The Book of Salt, Binh’s success in the private kitchen of Stein and Toklas (and, later, in Marcus Lattimore’s) further reinforces his class status as a domestic servant. As Pollan continues on the subject of class, 217

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Surely it’s no accident that so many Food Network stars have themselves found a way to transcend barriers of social class in the kitchen—beginning with Emeril Lagasse, the working-class guy from Fall River, Mass., who, though he may not be able to sound the “r” in “garlic,” can still cook like a dream. […] The glamour of food has made it something of a class leveler in America, a fact that many of these shows implicitly celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to the masses, paradoxical as that might sound. (Pollan, NY Times Magazine online, 2009) While this may have worked for Emeril Lagasse, our “Thin Binh” in The Book of Salt struggled to break the glass ceiling because of his inability to communicate in French. Yet both Julie Powell (from the hit movie) and Julia Child (who needs no explanatory footnote) shattered the glass ceiling and transformed the lives of millions without the gift of language. Feminist sociologists Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hoschchild, for example, have traced the effects of globalization and immigration in the lives of women who increasingly are migrating not for “family reunification” purposes but rather to work in the “care sector” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2004, p. 20). The service industry (in particular nannies and domestic servants) has begun to “encompass,” according to economist Nancy Folbre, “20 percent of all American jobs” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2004, p. 20). The “ethnic composition” of the workers in the “care sector” has never been constant. As Ehrenreich suggests in her article, “Maid to Order”: But the composition of the household workforce is hardly fixed and has changed with the different life chances of the different ethnic groups. Today the color of the hand that pushes the sponge varies from region to region … but the shifting ethnic composition of the workforce tells another story: this is a kind of work that many have been trapped in—by racism, imperfect English skills, immigration status, or lack of education—but few have happily chosen (Ehrenreich, 2000, pp. 63–64) In The Book of Salt, both class and racial hierarchies undergird Binh’s relationship to his employers Stein and Toklas despite the fact that his employers are feminists. Thus, in subtle and explicit ways, race and class dynamics inflect the field of domestic servitude in which Binh lives and works. Rather than liberate, Binh’s identity as a Vietnamese transplant, his homosexuality, and his class status as a domestic servant in the private kitchen of Stein and Toklas are fetters of his imprisonment.

Part II: “Is culinary tourism slow? Service at La Commune” In contradistinction to the model of domestic servitude outlined above in The Book of Salt, I will now provide an alternate example of service that perhaps facilitates a rethinking of the arguments put forth in the previous section on gender, class, race, and citizenship. Communal kitchens and community garden spaces have recently garnered much attention from feminists and community activists as possible sites for the articulation of anti-globalization politics and for the expression of political sovereignty. Monika Salzbrunn’s essay “The Feast as Marginal Politics: Carnival as a Mode of Expression in Migration” is a wonderful example of the kind of recent work that is engaging questions of migration with transnational food politics. In the previous section of this essay I 218

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illustrated that without formal citizenship and without access to the French language Binh’s life foreclosed opportunities that might have been available for other intellectual and political exiles. Salzbrunn’s study of immigrant participation in Carnivals in Paris during 2008 documents the need that migrants have for self-other identification. In her words, “We groups need symbolic manifestations in order to acknowledge their existence. Celebrations and rituals that are part of a one-year lifecycle can be seen as an object for analyzing collective representations” (Salzbrunn, 2008, p. 151). She goes on to argue that, in fact, “carnivals can offer a mode of expression for people who are excluded from official positions as decision makers” (Salzbrunn, 2008, p. 151). The Slow Food Café in Bastille (Paris, France) is one such space where women and migrants can come together for mutual recognition of personal and political rights as women, as mothers, as farmers, as activists, and as community members. Slow Food Bastille is a non-profit community organization in the Bastille; it is an organization with roughly 100 members—all of whom volunteer the time and efforts to the maintenance of the community space/café. They have one paid employee who works Tuesday through Saturday and oversees the day-to-day operation of the café. The organization’s membership seems to be equally distributed between the genders, yet all of the members in charge of Slow Food Bastille seem to women. When I lived in Paris between December 2009 and August 2010, I volunteered at the La Commune once a week and spent the better part of days observing life at the café. The activities, cooking responsibilities, and meeting for the café are determined by group consensus once a month. At the planning meeting, members of the community suggest ideas for group dinners, community lectures, films, and workshops. The final schedule seems to be determined democratically among those who are present at the planning meetings. The activities at The Slow Food Café can be categorized, roughly, into four main types: themed-food night, Cinemaligre (documentary film series), consciousness-raising lectures and discussions, and ateliers followed by a light supper. All of the financial profits the café makes during the day and at mealtime are recycled back into the upkeep of the café and the purchase of ingredients for communal meals. More than just a community kitchen, Slow Food Bastille serves as a meeting place where members of the Bastille area can congregate freely and without discrimination, where exchange of culture and values takes place, and where local knowledge and epistemologies are validated. The demographics of the area around Marche d’Aligre have changed considerably in the past several years to include recent migrants from the Middle East (maghreb) and South Asia, and several of the events at Slow Food Bastille have involved cooking workshops on Palestinian food, Moroccan food, and Indian/Sri Lankan food activism. The numerous themed-food nights that the Café hosted remain a pivotal event for cultural exchange. Moreover, since women tend to be involved in the kitchen more than men (this is true even in public, communal kitchens), they also provide opportunities for new immigrants to informally share information on childcare, nutrition, education, and family planning. Each Wednesday members of the community have cooking workshops for children in the morning, along with opportunities for children to gain life lessons on nutrition, cultural tolerance, and diversity. La Commune was started after the Second World War as a way to revitalize a depressed community and to bring new commerce and community to the Bastille neighbourhood. The changing demographics of the neighbourhood from the 1980s to the 2000s present an interesting case study for new instantiations of identity politics and citizenship. Moreover, the Café has become a central location through which new identities are performed and embraced, understood and exchanged. 219

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In the United States Alice Waters has started a similar movement called The Edible Schoolyard Project, transforming local school cafeterias into learning zones where children learn about the environment and food politics through direct interaction with nature. This, in turn, brings us right back to the issue with which this paper opened: the new feminist dilemma—referred to by Peggy Orenstein, of the NY Times Magazine (3/11/2010), as “the femivore’s dilemma”—is a call to action for women to reclaim the kitchen as a feminist space. In Orenstein’s words, femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious everyone has become about the source of their food—it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. (Orenstein, 2010) The new-found joy of cooking in the United States today is an interesting phenomenon because the feminist movement has rejected cooking on the basis that it is one of the primary examples of patriarchal oppression in the household. It is ironic that the very year of Freidan’s hallmark publication, Julia Child’s The French Cook went on the air. Julia Child never referred to her viewers as housewives—a word she detested—and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read The Feminine Mystique that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent women’s attention. Second-wave feminists were often ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir (1989) wrote in The Second Sex that though cooking could be oppressive, it could also be a form of revelation and creation; and a women [could] find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone [could] do it: one must have the gift. (Quoted in Pollan, 2009) In conclusion, the essay sketches the possible emancipatory space of the kitchen for rethinking gender, identity, and citizenship. I have argued that communal kitchens offer, perhaps, a more fluid space where new identities through migration can be performed and understood. I suggest that this model is preferable to one of the domestic kitchen where a silent, often invisible domestic servant toils alone in the kitchen with little scope for self-actualization and freedom. Unless the femivores can scale up their activities, women who chose this way of life might end up cooped up by the very chicken cages that they thought would liberate them. This essay sketches the contours of the debate on kitchens and domesticity and points to places where feminist work on transnational food politics can be beneficial.

References Coffman, C. (2014). The Migrating Look: Visual Economies of Queer Desire in ‘The Book of Salt.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 56 (2), 148–180. Cohler, D. (2008). Teaching Transnationally: Queer Studies and Imperialist Legacies in Monique Troung’s The Book of Salt. Radical Teacher, 82, 25–30. De Beauvoir, S. (1989). The Second Sex. Translated by H.M. Parshley. New York: Vintage.

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Private and communal kitchens Ehrenreich, B. (2000). Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women’s Work. Harper’s Magazine, April 2000, 59–70. Ehrenreich, B. and A. R. Hochschild. (2004). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Eng, D. (2008). The End(s) of Race. PMLA, 123 (5), 1479–1493. Friedan, B. (2001). The Feminine Mystique. New York: WW Norton. Orenstein, P. (2010). The Femivore’s Dilemma. NY Times, March 11, 2010. Pollan, M. (2009). Out of the Kitchen, and Onto the Couch. NY Times, July 29, 2009. Salzbrunn, M. (2008). The Feast as Marginal Politics: Carnival as a Mode of Expression in Migration. In Alexander Henn and Klaus-Peter Koepping (Eds.), Rituals in an Unstable World: Contingency, Hybridity, Embodiment (pp. 151–170). New York: Peter Lang. Truong, M. (2003). The Book of Salt. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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PART IV

Soft power, mobilization and development

16 DIASPORAS AS THE HOLY GRAIL OF DEVELOPMENT Latha Varadarajan

Introduction On September 22, 2019, a crowd of nearly 50,000 cheered raucously as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the stage at the NSG stadium in Houston, Texas. For a man who had once been denied a visa to the United States because of his role in the 2002 Gujarat massacre, the “Howdy Modi” event marked a triumph that seemed to have been a few years in the making. However, Modi made it point to insist that the rally was not about him. Rather, it was about India and the Indian-Americans who, as he had noted in a different context, had shown him the “kind of love [that] has not been given to any Indian leader ever” (Tolan, 2014).1 Speaking under a banner that proclaimed “Shared Dreams, Bright Futures,” Modi declared that while “Indians were known for their patience,” he was “impatient to take the country to new heights.” The “buzzword in India today was development,” and the people in audience were “an important part of it,” despite being “far from [their] homeland” (The White House, 2019). While the “Howdy Modi” rally drew immense coverage for reasons ranging from the sheer number of the gathered audience and seemingly limitless funds that the BJP could count on from its overseas supporters to the disturbing camaraderie between the Indian Prime Minister and his American counterpart, Donald Trump, there was one aspect that hardly raised any eyebrows. And that was the fact that the leader of the “world’s biggest democracy” was making a pitch to expatriate Indians, asking them to invest in “India’s growth story” by promising new investment opportunities, a more benign bureaucracy, and generally favorable business climes. The reasons for this are not hard to understand. For one, Modi was the leader of a party that has consistently cultivated deep roots among overseas Indian communities. But, perhaps even more importantly, he was merely the latest among a long line of Indian politicians, who since the early 1990s had reiterated the notion of the diasporic “Global Indian” as a vital resource for a resurgent India, and put into place a series of measures that would attract diaspora investment. These measures have not been peculiar to the Indian state. A large number of countries – in Asia, in Africa, in the former Soviet Republics and the eastern bloc, in Latin America – have all attempted their own versions of the “global nation” strategy and have in fact been actively encouraged by international institutions including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to do so. It is these developments that bring us to the question animating this chapter: why is it 225

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that diasporas have become such an attractive prospect for governments and international institutions alike at this historical juncture? At a cursory level, the answer to that question appears to be self-evident. As policy memos from national and international agencies reiterate, a large number of countries have a growing emigrant population and these populations are responsible for the very significant flow of remittances across borders. In addition to this fact, there are conjectures about the strength of the emigrants’ national affiliations, and their ability to become an essential part of longterm economic transformations. The underlying assumption of these conjectures, based in part on a specific understanding of the much-vaunted role of the Chinese diaspora in the exponential economic growth of the PRC, is the notion that emigrants, having familial ties to the homeland, would naturally have a greater stake in its development. For these reasons, the growing attention paid to the notion of “Diaspora Direct Investment” (DDI) as an alternative to the traditional Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is but an extension of rational economic planning. However, as I have argued, these reasons are not the only – or for that matter – the primary ones why diasporas have increasingly become the “newly valorized” subjects of the nation-state (Ong, 1999; Varadarajan, 2010, 2015). Discussions of the role of diasporas in the development agendas of nation-states are fundamentally premised on the claim that the ongoing structural transformation of the global and national economies along neoliberal lines is not only beneficial to all, but also the only way forward. As such, even though such discussions are wrapped in the rhetoric of national confidence or the desire of migrants to give back to their homeland or the notion of economic growth, the main pay-off remains furthering an agenda of deregulation and privatization. To make this argument, I begin by providing a brief overview of the timing and the ways in which the diasporic subject – the “Overseas Indian”/“Person of Indian ­Origin”/“Non-Resident Indian” – has been inserted into the Indian state’s narrative about its resurgence. I then situate this development within the broader context of the clamor surrounding the economic role of diasporas world-wide. I show that while this might be framed within domestic and international policy discourse in terms of transforming the potential of remittances into direct investment, the role of diasporas is actually far more critical for ruling elites. The siren song of “DDI” remains as strong as ever mainly because diasporas serve a far more useful function – that of helping the ruling class reiterate notions of jingoistic nationalism, and justify the on-going systematic neoliberal restructuring of the economy in the name of development, even in the face of extreme and growing levels of inequality.

Celebrating a return On January 9, 2003 the Indian government hosted the first-ever Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), a celebration that was meant to highlight “the pride of the motherland” in the successes of “her children abroad,” who at that point numbered over 20 million. The date of the celebrations carried quite a bit of symbolic heft. It was on January 9, 1915 that Mahatma Gandhi – “the most famous Non-Resident Indian (NRI)” – returned to India after 21 years in South Africa. As various government representatives claimed, by choosing that particular day to host the event, the Indian nation-state was acknowledging the immense contribution of people of Indian origin in the creation of modern India. Welcoming the 2,000 delegates to the three-day celebration, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared that the gathering was actually a homecoming of the children of Mother India who, despite adopting the citizenship of other countries, had not lost their “common identity” – their Indian-ness. Indians abroad, he claimed, had reached “the pinnacle in so 226

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many diverse fields of human endeavor” because of “their dedication to their chosen professions” and willingness to overcome “trials and tribulations.” This, in turn, could be traced to the “indomitable spirit” that characterized India and Indian-ness (Vajpayee, 2003). The question of what constituted “India” and “Indian-ness” dominated the discussions surrounding the PBD celebrations. To mark this momentous occasion, the popular national weekly India Today published a special issue commemorating “The Global Indian,” who was “Doing Us Proud.” In his editorial, the well-known journalist Aroon Purie claimed that one did not need the Indian government to tell the world that there was a 20 million strong Indian diaspora. Through a “quiet, gradual, but relentless” migration, Indians had carried out what he called “a reverse colonization.” Despite arriving in places such as Fiji as indentured labor during the colonial period, Indians had overcome insurmountable odds and “today, their children are presidents, prime ministers, senators, tycoons and Nobel prize winners.” Echoing a theme that framed the Pravasi Bharatiya celebrations, Purie declared: Persons of Indian Origin are impossible to typecast…They come in all shapes and sizes, fit all descriptions. What links the astronaut on our cover with the Punjabi sheep farmers in New Zealand?2 What connects white-collar techies in Silicon Valley to the Indians who seem to have a monopoly on 24-hours stores in Britain – or the Patels who so dominate the US motel industry that motels are often referred to as “Potels”? It is the will to succeed. In other words, what made them “Indians” was the “indomitable will” – the spirit of enterprise that was intrinsic to India. Wherever they went, regardless of the passport they carried, it was this spirit that characterized all Indians. For, as Purie concluded quite seriously, “you can take an Indian out of India, but you cannot take India out of an Indian.” The linking of the “spirit of India,” first with an entrepreneurial attitude, and then with the Indian diaspora at large, while very much in the air in the early part of the 21st century was, however, a relatively new phenomenon in Indian politics. In the immediate aftermath of independence, the Indian nation-state had not only distanced itself from its overseas population, but also clearly indicated that any form of dual citizenship would not be considered. This was a policy that had more or less remained in place for over four decades. It was only in August 2000 that the Indian government had even established a “High-level Committee on the Indian diaspora” (HLC) tasked with recommending a “broad but flexible policy framework” to facilitate the involvement of the diaspora in India’s development while making it possible for India to be more receptive to their needs. The fact that this move had been made by a BJP-led government was not accidental. Perhaps more than any of the other national parties, the BJP, with its commitment to the right-wing hindutva ideology, had systematically cultivated links with Indian communities across borders. Organizations such as the “Vishva Hindu Parishad” (VHP) and its various affiliated groups had built support for the BJP, even as it rose to power within Indian domestic politics. This supposedly “organic” connection was reiterated and reaffirmed in the immediate aftermath of 1998 nuclear tests, when the BJP-led government declared that the threatened economic sanctions from the P-5 would be offset by the commitment of Indians abroad, who would stand by a “Resurgent India.” The claim seemed to be given some credence by the fact that the “Resurgent India” bonds issued by the government were immediately over-subscribed, bringing in a much needed $4.5 billion into the state treasury.3 Many, in fact, declared that the establishment of the HLC was but a long-delayed acknowledgment of these already-existing links. 227

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Notwithstanding the veracity of the some of the afore-mentioned claims, it would be a mistake to fixate on the hindutva angle to truly comprehend the logic underlying the transformation of the Indian state’s relationship with its diaspora.4 While the specific institutional changes heralded by the establishment of the HLC or the celebration of the PBD could be connected to the BJP government, the process that led up to that point had deeper roots and reflected a boarder, multi-party consensus. In fact, the “Non-Resident Indian” and the relationship of this subject to the Indian state had been the source of much debate within the Indian Parliament, as well in public discourse through the 1980s, finding its peak around the early-1990s. As Mishra (2016) notes, it was the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government, which established the first Special Coordination Division to engage with the diaspora in the Ministry of External Affairs 15 years prior to the HLC. The same government also collaborated with various diaspora groups, throwing its support behind the creation of the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO), which held its first meeting in 1989. And of course, it was the Congress-led government of P.V. Narasimha Rao that officially introduced a fundamental restructuring of the Indian economy along neoliberal lines in 1991, while simultaneously speeding up the process of formalizing the Indian state’s relationship with its diaspora. All of this is to merely make a simple – but generally skimmed over – point that the valorization of the Indian diaspora as the embodiment of the best of “Indian-ness” can be traced not so much to the rise of the BJP, but rather the moment when Indian-ness itself needed to be redefined. I will return to the question of what necessitated this redefinition later on in the chapter. For now, it suffices to note that over the last two decades of the 20th century, there emerged a multi-party consensus among the Indian elite that this new notion of “Indian-ness” – a spirit of entrepreneurship, of competitiveness, of innovation, all understood in terms of neoliberal tenets – required a new subject, the “Global Indian.” This consensus has continued to prevail into the first two decades of the 21st century. Over the past two decades, successive Indian governments have continued the tradition of celebrating Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, while building a network of institutional arrangements that have further formalized the relationship between the Indian state and the groups that have been constituted as its diaspora. These have included the establishment of the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, the adoption of limited dual nationality through the “Overseas Citizen of India” scheme, a series of measures under the umbrella of the “Overseas Indian Facilitation Center” to further the involvement of the diaspora in the Indian economy, the creation of the Indian Development Foundation of Overseas Indians (IDF-OI) to further diaspora involvement in philanthropy, to name just a few (Mishra, 2016). What makes these moves striking is that they are far from being peculiar to India, and in fact have been actively encouraged by International Financial Institutions (IFI) as an important policy orientation that states across board need to adopt. As to why, the answer appears to lie in certain visible trends in global politics.

The promise of returns According to the United Nations, as of 2019, over 271.6 million people live outside of their countries of origin (International Migrant Stock, 2020). A distinct proportion of this group consists of migrants who have in the past several decades moved from what has been categorized as the “Third World” to the “First.” While the nature of the migrants (for instance, whether they are blue-collar or white-collar laborers) and the conditions of their migration (very broadly, whether it is considered legal or illegal, and if the former, the constraints on their travel visas, etc.) vary across different contexts, they do share a crucial trait. For the 228

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most part, these migrants have come to constitute diasporic communities that have retained close links to their homeland, communities which tend to reinforce these links through a constant and growing stream of remittances. As estimated by the World Bank, in 2018, the amount of remittances that flowed to developing countries amounted to US$ 529 ­billion, an increase of 9.6% from the previous year. Among the largest recipients of officially recorded remittances were countries like India (US$ 79 billion), China (US$ 67 billion), Mexico (US$ 36 ­billion) and the Philippines (US$ 34 billion), followed by others like ­Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ukraine (World Bank, 2019). But perhaps smaller and lower-income countries provide a starker picture when it comes to understanding the significance of remittances. For Haiti, it was estimated that in 2019, remittances would amount to 34% of the GDP, for countries like Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Nepal, it amounted to around 30%. Given these kinds of numbers, it is not surprising that international financial institutions as well as the governments of the recipient states have become quite invested in facilitating the flow of remittances. The World Bank has determined that migrants pay an average of 7.9% of the total amount of money being sent home as transaction costs on both ends. Consequently, it has been pushing for states to adopt measures that would reduce this cost to around 5%, saving migrants around US$ 16 billion per year. While this policy is yet to be adopted, receiving states, on their part, have engaged in a concerted effort to streamline the process of transferring funds across borders. However, this is merely one part of the story. There is another critical statistic pertaining to diaspora remittances – even when based solely on the recorded government data, remittances account for nearly three times the official development assistance (a measure of the international flow of aid) provided to developing countries. In this context, it is not surprising that policymakers at both national and global levels have greater ambitions in highlighting the importance of diasporas than the mere pursuit of increased remittance flows. What they seek are ways to channel the economic resources of diasporas into direct investments in national economies, whether it is in the private sector or in some version of the public sector. In other words, the mantra these days is not so much remittances per se, as much as it is Diaspora Direct Investment (DDI). The arguments supporting the conscious, intensified drive for DDI are at one level quite familiar (see, for instance, Debass and Ardovino, 2009). Supporters argue that this form of investment can spur growth across sectors and in different ways. These investments, it is claimed, serve to increase capital stock and provide greater liquidity to developing economies, even as they improve domestic capacity to carry out essential research and development. In addition, diaspora-led multinational firms entering the market provide new technology to local businesses and customers. In doing so, they can improve the supply chain and reduce the overall costs of the multinational’s own overseas operations. The overall effect, therefore, is said to be an improvement in the efficiency and productivity of the business operations, increased profitability and improvement in the welfare of the consumers. As even a cursory perusal of the justifications outlined above should make evident, the arguments in favor of DDI are almost exactly the same as those made about the critical importance of FDI in general. However, what is noteworthy is that these arguments are contingent on presenting DDI as a better alternative to FDI. Unlike the latter, it is argued that DDI is driven by those who have social, and in fact familial, connections to the particular country they are investing in and, thus, have a better sense of the various political and cultural nuances of doing business across borders. Their return to the country of origin in the guise of investors adds to the general human capital, while reversing the “brain drain” trends of earlier decades. Because they are dealing with co-nationals of a sort, diaspora investors, it 229

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is argued, are even more likely than foreign investors to enable the spillover of technological know-how to domestic firms. Such investors are said to have a greater stake in the timely and efficient completion of specific projects as well as the overall welfare of the general population, in part due to a sense of national pride and duty to the homeland. Furthermore, unlike with FDI, where most profits tend to eventually flow out of the country, DDI is said to promote “capital recycling,” with a significant portion actually staying on in the developing country. To put it crudely, the fact that the investment comes from sources that might be regarded as “native” (or at least formerly “native”) as against “foreign” makes DDI seem more reliable, flexible and also more directly linked to the prospect of economic growth. These arguments, supporters of DDI claim, are not merely abstract assertions given that they have already been proven to be true in specific national contexts. In particular, the Chinese case is constantly highlighted as the exemplar of how DDI can be attracted and used to spur economic growth. The story of China’s emergence as a major world economic power has now taken on almost mythic proportions among politicians and policymakers proposing economic reforms. A critical part of this tale pertains to how the country transformed itself from a land shunning FDI to becoming one of the world’s foremost destinations for investors. The numbers tell their own story in this regard. In 1980, China attracted a mere US$ 596 million in FDI. By 2019, this number had grown to a record-breaking US$ 136.7 billion (Reuters, 2020). What is even more striking is that a significant portion of that investment – well over 50% as calculated over the past three decades – came from overseas Chinese, particularly those living in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Pacific Rim. As FDI analysts have noted, some of these numbers are a bit dubious, given the “round-tripping” – i.e., a noticeable trend of investors from mainland China re-directing their capital through neighboring countries in order to benefit from the special FDI/DDI incentives. However, that fact is not allowed to mar the main story. China’s ability to attract DDI, it is argued, set it on the path of becoming the world’s second-largest economy, and therefore it only makes sense to assume that the policies it followed would be a workable blueprint for countries that possess a substantial diaspora. Following this logic, the World Bank, for instance, has formally established a special task force that helps clients develop and institute “innovative financial instruments,” such as diaspora bonds aimed at leveraging “migration and remittances for national development purposes.” The ultimate promise of such instruments is, of course, the replication of the Chinese growth story across borders. It is these developments that form the context of diaspora policies being touted as a critical link that help economic reforms mutate into economic growth in varying national contexts. India is no exception to the rule.

The logic of the quest In many ways, India is the country that is most comparable to China in terms of the strength and relative economic power of the diaspora. The government established HLC (2001) estimated the global Indian diaspora population at roughly 20 million, around 1.9% of the total Indian population at the time. The similar figure for the Chinese, calculated by Global Commission on International Migration (2005), was between 30 and 40 million – ­approximately 2.9% of the Chinese population. As mentioned earlier, the Indian diaspora today is the source of the largest flow of remittances in the world, followed closely by the Chinese diaspora. There are indeed many differences between the Indian and Chinese diasporas (even before one gets to the distinctions within the groups themselves), including the history of 230

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emigration, their geographical locations and professional profiles. But, the one that concerns Indian policymakers the most is the difference pertaining to levels of investment. India has not been as successful in attracting the same levels of FDI as China (Brown, 2017). While that is considered a problem in itself, what is even more problematic from the policymaking perspective is that in contrast to the Chinese diaspora, the Indian diaspora’s contribution to the total investment flowing into the country is estimated at less than 5%. It is this issue – the question of why India has failed to attract DDI at levels comparable to China – that has formed the crux of deliberations among those studying the Indian state’s changing relationship to diaspora, be it academics or policymakers. To a large extent, these studies and policy briefs stick to a common narrative structure. Many of them begin with a quick sketch of the history of Indian emigration, pointing to the significance of the colonial era in the creation of specific pockets of the diaspora in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, before moving to a discussion of the ­post-independence migration. This migration, which became more marked by the mid-1970s, was primarily toward the West, but followed two distinct trajectories. One, focused on West Asia, comprised of the migration of primarily blue-collar workers to the oilrich economies of the Gulf countries. The other, directed toward the countries of ­Western ­Europe and North America (particularly the Unites States), consisted of the migration of highly skilled white-collar workers and their families. Unlike the migrants of the colonial era, these migrants, whose very existence led to the creation of the legal-juridical category of the Non-Resident Indian, retained close ties to their homeland, becoming a reliable source of remittances, transforming both familial fortunes and, in certain cases, even local economies (particularly in Kerala). By the early part of the new millennium, one particular group within this new Indian diaspora – trained IT professionals who had already played a critical role in shaping the American Silicon Valley – was willing to redirect their expertise and financial resources to India. The support they were offered by the various Indian governments during this period allowed the members of the Indian diaspora to help shape the country into a powerhouse in the field of information technology. Unfortunately, however, this success has not been replicated across other sectors, where the involvement of the diaspora has been virtually non-existent. The reason for the lack of DDI across sectors, it is then asserted, is the absence of real structural transformation of the Indian economy. This then becomes the basis of the policy prescriptions that follow. For all the claims made over the past two decades and a half about economic transformation, India, it is argued, remains far from a hospitable destination for direct investment. This state of affairs is considered to be quite tragic given the profile of the over 20 million strong Indian diaspora: its considerable wealth (with some reports estimating it at over US$ 1 trillion and its annual income at US$ 400 billion), technical skill and expertise. India’s failure to capitalize on this “accomplished group” and its effort to “lure them or their capital back” is presented then as a strategic blunder, a “missed opportunity” (see, for instance, Kapur, 2010; Singh, 2012; Mohan, 2017; Lall, 2019). It was after all the strong commitment by the Chinese Communist Party to follow through and provide favorable conditions for investment, particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sectors, which provided the impetus for China’s phenomenal economic growth. The Indian state, given its sizeable, wealthy and skilled diaspora, has the same kind of raw material available. All it needs are the right structural incentives, particularly less government regulation, greater labor flexibility and adaptability. These measures would help ensure that economic resources as well as technical and business know-how of the hugely successful Indian diaspora are channeled into DDI, and into the replication of the China growth story. 231

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The narrative outlined in the preceding paragraphs is noteworthy in part because versions of this (with minor variations about the historical specificities of particular migrations) can be found in analyses of diaspora policies across national contexts, and those commissioned by various international organizations. What is more significant is that it reveals how the focus on DDI serves to further a very specific political-economic agenda. The starting point of any analysis of the economic potential represented by migrants is of course the diasporas themselves. But, with a few quick sleights of hand, diasporas in general tend to become those who have the ability to invest in sectors such as industry, technology or finance (by definition, a much narrower stratum of entrepreneurs), and the barrier to the realization of their potential becomes the insufficient embrace of neoliberal restructuring. Historically speaking, this is not a novel move in the annals of Indian politics. There is a common myth that Indian economy was only freed from its archaic socialist leanings by the much-needed economic reforms of 1991. Even without going to the question of how “socialist” the Indian economy ever was, it is important to correct this misapprehension. The structural reforming of the Indian economy had begun much earlier than 1991, even though there had been attempts to give it a different gloss. Indira Gandhi’s government, which had embarked on this program in the early-1980s, tried to pretend that the economic restructuring was part of unilateral domestic initiative, unconnected to the major IMF-loan that it had received. There was even a new term coined for the set of policy initiatives that the Indian government put forth – “Homegrown conditionalities” – which strangely enough coincided with the kind of deregulation otherwise insisted upon by the IMF. It was under the aegis of this restructuring that the figure of the NRI investor first strode into political center stage. Mrs. Gandhi’s NRI Portfolio Scheme, introduced in 1982, allowed for portfolio investment in Indian companies by “non-residents of Indian nationality or origin,” or companies that were owned by such non-residents to the extent of at least 60%. The scheme soon ran into rough weather with one particular case involving the UK-based Swraj Paul becoming a cause célèbre. The legal battle between Paul and two major Indian companies (DCM and Escorts Ltd) involving claims of a hostile takeover was a protracted affair that quickly devolved into a referendum of sorts about the nature of the Indian economy as well as the dubious figure of the diaspora investor. It ended with a temporary setback for both Paul, and those pushing for deregulation. The changing nature of the global capitalist economy as it moved from the Keynesian phase to the neoliberal phase resulted in the realignment of social forces among the ruling class across board. Without going into the details of the political struggles that ensued, it should be noted that in India this realignment saw the weakening of the old storied industrial faction of the bourgeoisie that had long roots in the nationalist movement, and the gradual emergence of a new faction which embraced the “sunrise industries” and favored privatization. The main implication of these changes was that within the span of a decade since the attempts by Mrs. Gandhi’s government, neoliberal economic restructuring was not only back, but presented as the only way forward. And to provide the “homegrown” gloss, with it returned the figure of the successful NRI, the “global Indian” who was only waiting for these reforms to reinvest in the motherland. The debates surrounding the introduction of neoliberal reforms in the Indian Parliament, and in public discourse were all framed in these terms. As I have shown elsewhere, the economic restructuring which was initially seen as a sign of weakness – of the Indian Finance Minister Manmohan Singh going to the IMF with a begging bowl – was ­re-packaged as a choice of a nation-state that had finally come of age (Varadarajan, 2010). Far from exposing an inability to refuse the demands of IFIs, by opening the economy the Indian state 232

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was declaring its willingness and ability to compete on the global stage. This willingness, the ruling elites argued, came not so much from some misplaced confidence, but from the certainty that those animated by the “spirit of India” had already proven their ability to hold their and succeed beyond their wildest dreams on the global stage. These were the “Non-Resident Indians,” the “Persons of Indian Origin” – the “global Indian,” who like India herself, had “come of age.” This representation of the “global Indian” was quite different from the way in which “NRIs” had figured in past narratives about the role of India on the international stage. The exhortations of the Nehruvian governments to overseas Indians to be ­“non-exploitative” were followed by decades of what has been described at best as “benign neglect” and at moments, actual excoriation of the actions of diaspora as being ­“self-interested.” By the 1990s, all of that changed, and only continued down the path through the first years of the 21st century. The rehabilitation of Swraj Paul, once reviled in the Indian parliament for representing the rapacious foreign investor, is a perfect illustration of this trajectory. Already much fêted by the Indian government, Paul shared center stage with then Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj at the regional Pravasi Bharatiya Divas organized in London in 2014 (PTI, 2014). Inaugurating the event, Mrs. Swaraj, who was also responsible for the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, told her audience that “now is the time to come to India,” since there were “immense opportunities” waiting for them, especially in the fields of “manufacturing, infrastructure development, education, health…science and technology, research and innovation.” To facilitate this participation, her government was committed to providing “efficiency, accountability, speedy decision making…and [a] favourable business environment.” Should the members of the hugely successful overseas Indian community experience any difficulty or bureaucratic red tape in their efforts to return to their homeland and participate in “India’s growth story,” all they needed to do was to let the minister know and she would solve their problems. Speaking after the minister, Paul used his own experiences to claim that expatriates have wanted to give back to India since the 1980s, but had been prevented from doing so because of “some members of the establishment, some politicians and local business community.” To encourage the diaspora to invest in the country, Paul concluded, India needed to remove the “barriers” to “expat engagement” and simplify its rules. In other words, to reinforce the commitment of the diaspora to India’s development, what was needed was a greater commitment to deregulation.

Conclusion The idea that migrant populations around the world might be interested in investing in their homeland, and shaping its future, is in and of itself not a preposterous proposition. In a historical sense, and certainly in the Indian case, populations abroad have been an intrinsic part of political struggles waged in their homeland. What is problematic, however, is the attempt to harness and direct this investment in the service of a particular understanding of economic growth. The returns sought by the investors, whether diasporic or foreign, are premised on the guaranteed existence of certain conditions. Euphemistically termed “flexibility” or “adaptability” what these conditions actually mean are low wages and removal of any existing protection for workers – such as can be found in the Special Economic Zones (SEZ). The idea behind an SEZ is of course to create a small enclosed territory within a country where a different set of regulations (land, labor, tariffs) apply in order to attract businesses that would supposedly not consider opening operations under other conditions. Under the SEZ law passed by the Indian parliament in 2005, for instance, the benefits offered 233

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to potential investors include a five-year holiday on profit taxes, exemption from import and export duties, and fewer licensing requirements (Topno, 2005). Furthermore, investors are also given the leeway to treat the land harnessed for the SEZ as a property deal, since by law only 50% of that land needs to be used for industrial activity. While the deal might be tempting for investors, it is important to note that the territories targeted as potential SEZs are not unoccupied lands. To establish such zones requires the displacement of the people who live and labor on the land, and in most cases the process is far from peaceful or just. In the long run, the growth it promotes thus remains far from equitable. In fact, if one looks closely, the Chinese story should serve more as a cautionary tale than as a model. China, the country that is touted as the model for DDI, ranks among the most unequal societies in the world today. Recent reports indicate that the Gini Coefficient (zero representing absolute equality and one representing absolute inequality) for China was has shown a distinct upward trend during the decades of reform, standing now at a high of 0.46 – a level that is higher than even the United States (World Population Review, 2020). According to reports from Peking University a few years ago, a third of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of 1% of its population, with the poorest quarter of citizens owning about 1% of the total wealth. It is this kind of “growth” that is presented as the prize that can be won with the participation of diaspora investors (Kaiman, 2014). This, I would argue, is more than enough reason why one should subject the quest for diasporas as the holy grail that will somehow help states attain a pinnacle of development in the global capitalist economy, to greater critical scrutiny. There is, moreover, another development that further complicates and vitally affects the future prospects of development understood broadly. The coronavirus pandemic that was unleashed in early-2020 has already left a trail of devastation in its wake, and its long-term effects on the global economy are yet to be understood. As of now, it is clear that these effects will include a sharp decline in both FDI and remittances. The UN trade and development body (UNCTAD) recently revised its forecasts about the effects of COVID-19 on global FDI flows from a conservative −5 to −15% drop, to an unprecedented −30 to −40% contraction (Chiffelle and Vanham, 2020). As economists have noted, such a contraction would be unprecedented in modern history, and if the past were to be any measure for comparison, this will be exacerbated by the protectionist measures that states will be likely to adopt. While the FDI forecast should be cause enough for concern for proponents of neoliberal economic restructuring, the implications of the on-going pandemic for migration and remittances pattern make the situation even murkier. The World Bank predicts a decline of over 20% in the flow of remittances in the coming year (World Bank, 2020). This decline, the sharpest in recent history, would be the natural result of the fact that migrant workers – already an extremely vulnerable population – would be hard-hit, given the economic depression in host countries. This trend will undoubtedly further exacerbate the economic situation in countries, where remittances constitute a substantial proportion of the GDP. It will also have a serious impact on the daily lives of millions of citizens in countries such as India, which have been the recipients of the largest net amount of remittances over the past few years. Beyond the decline in the inflow of remittances, there is also the very real possibility of reverse migration. Emigrants, no longer able to count on jobs in the host countries, might be forced to return home. These unplanned-for returns will undoubtedly place greater stress on public health systems and welfare nets, many of which have virtually been dismantled in the preceding decades under the mantra of privatization, at a time when the economies of the home countries are reeling from the effects of the pandemic. There is a very real fear that the economic depression will see a new wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, 234

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of insular nationalism, of hardening borders that will put diasporic populations, particularly ­working-class migrants, at great risk. However, this crisis could be an opportunity to re-consider what kinds of investments might be needed for genuine development projects as well the nature and role of nationalism, as well as the state in a globalized world.

Notes 1 While the biggest, the rally in Houston was not Modi’s first rodeo in the United States, so to speak. In 2014, a packed crowd of over 19,000 greeted the Indian Prime Minister at a gathering in New York’s Madison Square Garden, marking his triumphant entry into the United States after the visa ban episode. In the years between the two events, the Indian Prime Minister continued wooing the diaspora across the world, packing venues in the UK, Australia, France, Portugal and the Netherlands as part of a concerted effort to woo the diaspora or at least the part of the Indian diaspora settled in the developed world. 2 The cover of the magazine featured the now-deceased US astronaut of Indian origin, Kalpana Chawla. 3 The success of the “Resurgent India” bonds was presented as a clear symbol of the commitment of overseas Indians to the Indian nation-state as it finally proved itself worthy of their regard. BJP spokesperson S. Gurumurthy, for instance, declared: The sound of the bomb revived Indian civilization, which has been in intensive care unit for centuries…. [The nuclear tests] made [overseas Indians] shed their shame in associating with India, which to them was a failed civilization… After that, the NRIs, who used to abuse India, began admiring India. From then on gradually national self-confidence grew. Leaving aside the absurdity of the claim that anything, let alone a “failed civilization,” could be revived by nuclear states, this apparently unironic statement fails to mention one important fact that might have had something to do with the rush of subscriptions. The bonds had an unusually high return rate of 8.5%. 4 Challagalla (2018), for instance, tries to make the case that unlike the BJP, the “Indian National Congress tends to dissociate from the diaspora and views them as largely burdensome.” And that, this view is evident when one considers the fact that the Congress-led Indian government turned a “blind eye” to the plight of the diaspora that was expelled from Burma (1964) and Uganda (1972). This argument, as I have shown elsewhere, while correct in terms of broader contours of state policy, not only overlooks a few important empirical details, but also completely misses the logic of transformation undergirding the Indian state’s relationship to its diaspora. See Varadarajan (2010) for a more detailed analysis of this claim.

References Brown, R. (2017, February 2). What Can India and China Learn from Each Other About Diaspora Policy? The Diplomat. Retrieved from https://thediplomat.com/ Challagalla, S. (2018). The Diaspora and India’s Growth Story. Observer Research Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.orfonline.org/ Chiffelle, C.R. and Vanham, C. (2020, April 24). Foreign Investment Is Drying up Thanks to COVID-19, But there May be a Silver Lining. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https:// www.weforum.org/ Debass, T. and Ardovino, M. (2009). Diaspora Direct Investment: The Untapped Resource for Development. United States Agency for International Development (USAID). High Level Committee (HLC). (2001). Report on the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs. India Today (International). Special Issue, January 13 2003. International Migrant Stock (2020). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/ estimates19.asp. Kaiman, J. (2014, July 28). China Gets Richer But More Unequal. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/.

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Latha Varadarajan Kapur, D. (2010). Diaspora, Development, and Democracy: The Domestic Impact of International Migration from India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lall, M.C. (2019). India’s Missed Opportunity: India’s Relationship with Non-Resident Indians. London: Routledge Revivals. Mishra, A.K. (2016). Diaspora, Development and the Indian State. The Round Table, 105 (6), 701–721. Mohan, S. (2017, April 19). Diaspora and Development. The Statesman. Retrieved from https://www. thestatesman.com/. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Press Trust of India (2014, October 17). It Is Time to Come to India, Sushma Swaraj Tells Indian ­Diaspora in UK. The Indian Express. Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/. Reuters (2020, January 21). China Says Its Foreign Direct Investments Increased by 5.8% in 2019. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/. Singh, A.D. (2012). Working with the Diaspora for Development – Policy Perspectives from India, CARIM-India RR 2012/25, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, San Domenico di Fiesole (FI): European University Institute. Tolan, C. (2014, September 30). In Major New York Speech, Modi Woos Indian Diaspora. Gotham Gazette. Retrieved from https://www.gothamgazette.com/. Topno, A. (2005, July 8). What Is Special Economic Zone? The Economic Times. Retrieved from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/. Vajpayee, A.B. (2003, January 9). Inaugural Speech at Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas. Retrieved from http:// www.indiaday.org/pbd1/pbd_PM.asp. Varadarajan, L. (2010). The Domestic Abroad: Diasporas in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Varadarajan, L. (2015, January). Diaspora Direct Investment and the ‘Growth Story.’ Himál: South Asian, 27(4), 52–67. The White House (2019, September 22). Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Modi of India at “Howdy Modi: Shared Dreams, Bright Futures” Event. Retrieved from https://www. whitehouse.gov/. World Bank Press Release (2019, April 8). Record High Remittances Sent Globally in 2018. Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/. World Bank Press Release (2020, April 22). World Bank Predicts Sharpest Decline of Remittances in Recent History. Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/. World Population Review (2020). Gini Coefficient by Country. Retrieved from https://worldpopulationreview.com/.

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17 EDUCATION, DIASPORA AND DEVELOPMENT The Overseas Indian knowledge networks in the transforming world Sridhar Bhagavatula Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Indian diaspora is being treated as an integral part of India’s growth story, quite contrary to its earlier positioning.1 The shift was more like a move from ‘core-periphery’ relations to a ‘core-principal’ one. Over last two decades, a series of institutional arrangements in the home country kick started, which facilitated a stronger connection with its diaspora – the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) scheme, National Pension Scheme (NPS) for Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), Know India Programme (KIP), Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra (PBK), Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), Indian Diaspora Foundation for Overseas Indians (IDF-OI), Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award (PBSA) and Pratishthit Pravasi, among many others.2 Strengthening relations with the diaspora did help India’s global diplomatic agenda, stronger economic linkages and a somewhat successful network among and across the Indians for exploring overseas employment. All these measures supported and helped immensely in India’s economic growth story and brought it to the position of becoming the fifth-largest economy in the world. The diaspora contributed to this process in multiple ways – remittances, FDI, philanthropy and many more.

The value add of Indian diaspora India is blessed with a 32 million strong diaspora (out of which 58% are holding foreign passport) spread across as many as 180 countries.3 It is more than a decade that India is on top of receiving remittances from its diaspora to the volume of US$ 83.13 billion as in 2019.4 India gets most of its remittances (around 55%) from the Gulf region and around 23% from the USA. India received US$ 51 billion in 2019 as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows and improved its position from 12th in 2018 to 9th in 2019. Though due to the current 2020 pandemic the FDI is predicted to fall, it is assumed that in the long run the diasporic investments will be normalized because India offers immense scope in technology-led areas needing analytical thinking, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, system analysis and blockchain-based, among others (see World Economic Report, 2018). These skill sets will continue to attract money and manpower in the post-pandemic period. 237

Sridhar Bhagavatula Table 17.1  F DI equity inflows of top ten countries from April 2020 to June 2019 Top ten countries

Amount of FDI flows (US$ in million)

% with inflows

Mauritius Singapore Japan Netherlands UK USA Germany Cyprus France UAE

139144.99 88336.99 30745.54 28708.19 27084.33 27010.66 11871.19 9927.42 6765.94 6755.16

31.89 20.24 7.05 6.58 6.21 6.19 2.72 2.28 1.55 1.55

Source: DIPP (2019). Quarterly Fact Sheet, Fact Sheet on FDI from April 2000 to June, 2019, pp. 4–9 https://dipp.gov.in/sites/default/files/FDI_Factsheet_4 September2019.pdf accessed on 26 July 2020

India also receives a good volume of financial resources from overseas Indians for charity and donations. The OECD reports that India is the largest recipient of international philanthropic flows (US$ 1.8 billion domestic spending between 2013 and 2017), which proves that the global interest in India’s social and economic development is high, the major stakeholder being the Indian diaspora.5 The India Philanthropy Report 2019 points out that there is a sharp decline in foreign funding between 2014 and 2018 primarily due to government crackdown on NGOs for violating FCRA norms.6 Also, the World Giving Report7 ranks India as low as 82nd among the 128 surveyed countries (Table 17.1). Though the remittances, FDI and philanthropic contributions are connected at some level and added immense value to India’s growth story, the relations are not all about money leading to the economic prosperity of the home country. It is also political, cultural and transnational. Many Indians play a critical role in host country politics and help to strengthen diplomatic ties with these countries. They also come together culturally and share a unique sense of diasporic Indian identity. The increasing transnational engagement of Indian diaspora with India made the Government of India come up with a series of diplomatic establishments and institutional processes to address various types of concerns that the global Indians face, especially focussing on unskilled and semi-skilled Indians working abroad – the Indian Community Welfare Fund, the MADAD portal, e-Migrate System, Pravasi Bharatiya Sahayata Kendra, Helplines, and shelter homes, among others. Data shows that the number of grievances is increasing, and the percentage of resolved cases is falling. The ‘unstarred’ Question No. 1697 in Lok Sabha responds to the question on Indians facing problems in foreign countries. The response to the question states that in 2016, 11,359 grievances were registered, out of which 92.6% were resolved. Subsequently, the percentage of grievances addressed fell to 78%, though the number of grievances increased over a period. This is probably because the current legal provisions are not so adequate to deal with migrant issues. The skilled and highly skilled Indian emigrants, who emigrate through ECNR passport, mostly report problems related to consular services, marriage issues for women and student-related concerns. In a way, it is a good sign to know that the diaspora can see its home country as an entity that could handhold during crises and calamities. The segment of the diaspora which is of importance to the current theme is the highly skilled Indians working abroad; overseas Indian entrepreneurs; and, most importantly, the 238

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migrating students. Most of the students often prefer to explore opportunities abroad after their preferred education and delay the decision of returning home. Hence the decision to return is directly related to the extent of desired opportunities overseas for studying Indian students. Talking about the future trends in higher education, a QS survey points out that 47.7% of the surveyed STEM field students want to study abroad, though half of them changed their decision due to COVID-19 safety reasons (Indian Student Mobility Report, 2020). As a policy, India encourages (or at least doesn’t discourage) the Indian students studying abroad to pick up jobs from the international market, which would mean that it is in the ‘brain gain’ school of thought. The brain gain school essentially believes that the Indian diaspora is successful in adding required value (both economic and transnational) above the ‘brain drain’ and hence dominates in the country’s policymaking. However, some scholars fear the return of ‘brain drain’ in the post-COVID-19 scenario, which would seek policy revision (Khadria, 2020).8 Presuming that India still holds the ‘Vintage-point’9 of young professionals from STEM fields, especially in the areas of health and deep technologies, it could have a better deal in the New Normal.10 It is often realized that the extent of activities happening from both sides has phenomenally increased over the last two decades, especially on the diaspora’s economic engagement with the home country and the latter taking a keen interest in resolving Indian diaspora’s grievances. However, generating value adds concerns not only wealth creation and distribution but also, more importantly, knowledge creation and sharing, where the highly skilled Indian emigrants could play an important role. Some studies opine that the remittances tend to reduce with the increase in the level of skill migrations (Ratha, 2003; Rapoport and ­ Docquier, 2005), and hence there have to be other ways of engaging the skilled Indian diaspora, one of which is through diaspora knowledge network. Unfortunately, knowledge networks are not well documented and lack systematic arrangements. We do have structured diasporic networks that help in strengthening Indian diasporic socio-cultural requirements but lacking on networks that could strengthen the sharing of knowledge and subsequent gains that both the parties could derive. It is presumed that the knowledge networks could be at its best if both the destination and source countries are knowledge-based economies. The equations may not be optimal if one of the economies is not knowledge based. India is a service-driven economy and human resources are an integral part of its development story. India has a stock of 12.24 million population in the age group of 18–22 years, out of which only 28.06% (Gross Enrolment Ratio [GER]) are enrolled into the higher education system.11 In the existing knowledge-driven developed economies the enrolment ratio in tertiary or higher education tends to be high. In Australia the Gross Enrolment Ratio in tertiary education is 113.14% (in 2017); in the USA it is 88.17%; in Canada, it is 68.92%, and in the UK it is 60% in the year 2018. On average, the knowledge-driven developed countries have an average of 75% of GER in tertiary education. In India, the percentage is below the world average of 38.04.12 The advantage with India is its huge base of educated diaspora emigrated from India to different countries across the world. Since 1965 a good number of Indians migrated to developed countries like the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia, and became an integral part of the destination country’s knowledge economy. Seventy-four percent of US-born Indians in the USA are graduates and above. The percentage is equally the same for foreign-born (mostly Indian born) Indians in the USA, which is 72% in 2015.13 The educational attainment among Indians in the UK is also among the highest. Sixty-two percent of Indians have passed GCSE, and 92% among them went on for higher A-level studies in 2019.14 The educational attainment of Indians in Australia is also among the highest. Eight out of 239

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ten Australians (79.3%) who were born in India held a non-school qualification.15 Canada too has a good percentage of Indians with higher educational qualification, especially who were part of post-60s immigration to Canada. Apart from migrating for work, migrating to other countries for higher studies is an important phenomenon of globalization. Student migrations from India are yet another important category through which brain drain is often reported as these students complete advanced studies abroad and delay their plans to return. As of 24 June 2019, around 1.1 million Indian students travelled abroad for higher education purposes.16 To make it a zero-sum equation, it is important to have a mechanism where the value-add know-how and knowledge are made applicable to the source country and probably the best way we could think of is to institutionalize knowledge networks, with due considerations of the existing intellectual property rights regime. To strengthen absorptive capabilities in the receiving countries, the source countries must make a sincere accelerated attempt to move towards the knowledge economy. Expenditure on R&D is a critical aspect of the move towards the knowledge economy. In India, the R&D expenditure is estimated to be $2,323.92 billion PPP in 2018–2019. Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) is mainly driven by the Government sector comprising of Central Government 45.4%, State Governments 6.4%, higher education 6.8% and public sector industry 4.6% with private sector industry contributing 36.8% during 2017–2018.17 Government spending on R&D is one of the highest among the major countries in the world. Considering the fact that the globe is moving towards knowledge economies, and will take an accelerated pace due to the 2020 pandemic, there is indeed a need for a systematic way of engaging the knowledge diaspora for implanting multiple growth engines in India which would drive the country towards a knowledge economy in an accelerated pace. It is believed that the diaspora knowledge networks could play an important role in accelerating the development process of the source country.

Knowledge networks involving the diaspora The knowledge networks are at the core of the relationship between education, diaspora and development. The theoretical frameworks of diaspora knowledge networks are still largely in its infancy. However, the existing limited literature on diaspora knowledge networks has strong elements of Social Network Theory (Kadushin, 2012) and Actor-Network Theory (Simandan, 2017). Importantly, there is also the use of the Brain Mobility approach to examine knowledge transfer processes. These theories help us understand diaspora networks from transnational multidisciplinary frameworks. With a simple understanding of networks as a set of relationships (Kadushin, 2012), we will look into the possibility of creating knowledge-based transnational sets of relationships. With the advent of technology and rapid communication channels, the network has become a common phenomenon in the current age, especially when contemporary science is highly transnationalized (Delicado, 2007). Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have integrated global perceptions on critical matters of relationships. The knowledge transfer, circulation and creation have emerged to be an essential aspect of the networks, which is more systematically known as knowledge networks. Mayer and Wattiaux (2006) argued that diaspora knowledge networks are those networks, which are either established by migrants to link various global locations for reciprocal purposes or established by home country institutions for greater diasporic linkages. These networks may be seen as a subset of various international knowledge networks that existed mostly in the 240

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science and technology area, and that gained momentum through the rapid expansion of advanced telecommunication and knowledge societies (Mayer and Wattiaux, 2006). At the core of the diaspora knowledge network are the highly skilled expatriates, mainly originating from developing countries, who have come together to coordinate and interact with the countries of origin for mutual aid, information sharing, investments and business. The high-skilled migrants in the developed countries, who originated from the developing countries, started making connections with their homeland and also among themselves. They are being called by different scholars differently – intellectual diaspora networks (Brown, 2002), scientific diasporas (Barre et al., 2003), technological diasporas (Connan, 2004), knowledge networks abroad (Kuznetsov, 2005) and more acceptedly diaspora knowledge networks (Turner, 2005). Diaspora knowledge networks, to some extent, changed the way one would look at high-skilled migration from developing to developed countries. It contributed its due share in taking the discussions from brain drain to brain gain by converting the loss of human resources into assets through networks (Meyer, 2001). To be classified as diaspora networks, Mayer (1999) identified at least four aspects to be fulfilled – first, members must be mostly nationals of a particular country living and working or studying abroad; second, members must be highly skilled, active in a number of professional fields, specifically conducting scientific research; third, the networks must have as their primary purpose the economic and social development of the country of origin; and fourth, a degree of connection between the network members in the home and the host country must be established. The cross-border diaspora networks among skilled emigrants promote access to v­ alueadded knowledge and foster innovation by encouraging trade, investments and the recirculation of information back to the sending countries (Agrawal et al., 2011; Kerr, 2008). ­Student/scholarly networks, local associations of skilled expatriates, short-term consultancies by high-skilled expatriates in their country of origins and other unestablished intellectual/scientific diaspora networks are a few examples of such networks (Meyer and Brown, 1999). Sociological studies, such as Meyer (2001), suggest that such informal networks are crucial in turning brain drain into brain gain. Nevertheless, Agrawal et al. (2011) did not find a strong case for the Indian diaspora of inventors in the USA and the transfer of their knowledge back to their homeland. The Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is often seen as one of the major hurdles to a successful knowledge network. It is important to come out of this wrong perception.

Knowledge transfer through knowledge network: analyzing IPR issues The role of patents in creating incentives for innovators to innovate (by conferring monopoly rights over ideas (by way of excluding others from use) in exchange for disclosure is well known. However, patents also help in facilitating knowledge flows (as opposed to knowledge creation) by way of disclosure and trade facilitation. The role of patents in promoting disclosure is visible and a feature of all significant patenting systems. The most significant shift in perspective on knowledge flows over the past 20 years has been in the emphasis on the role of social rather than geographic distance as a determinant of knowledge flow patterns. While spatial agglomeration remains a central topic among both scholars and policymakers, researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of social relationships and networks as the primary mechanism underlying this phenomenon. Since the diaspora is perhaps the most potent force to establish social relationships between high-income and lower-income nations, its members necessarily play an important role in shaping the flow of knowledge between these regions. 241

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A stable global IPR regime with a growing absorptive capacity in the sending country will importantly strengthen the micro-foundations (i.e., the individual costs and benefits that influence knowledge flow patterns). Such micro-foundations will strengthen trade and business relations involving the sending countries, receiving countries and the diaspora as the key stakeholders. However, at the same time, it is felt that it is important to see knowledge flow from the perspective of the global public good, which would create a strong ­m acro-foundations (access to basic knowledge for all, access to knowledge through transnational channels that strengthen individual’s capabilities, access to new knowledge that addresses the future jobs, among others) (Agarwal, 2017). Agarwal (2017) introduces a model ‘Knowledge Flow Production Function’ (KFPF), which talks about establishing a relationship between two or more partners across the borders, connected structurally to form what he calls an optimal innovator diaspora. He focussed on knowledge production in India. The important thing here is that the productivity of the partner residing in India depends on their access to knowledge, which, in turn, depends on his/her relationships with the overseas partners and the productivity of their innovations. He allows connectivity to be affected by co-location and co-nationality and also for the possibility that innovators are more productive abroad because of better incentive structures and resources. Though brain drain reduces the chances of domestic knowledge networks, it could increase total knowledge access if the diasporic linkages and productivity gains are large enough. The goal of KFPF is to identify the size of the diaspora that maximizes access to knowledge of India-residing innovators. Agarwal’s structure gives good insights into the functioning of knowledge networks involving diaspora. However, on the one hand, most of the source countries tend to have a weak adaptive capability, and, on the other hand, the diaspora often does not enjoy their full length of rights to perform their cross-border aspirations.

Indian diaspora knowledge networks Did the Indian governance ever reach to its knowledge diaspora to establish a knowledge network? Yes indeed. With constant emigration since 1965, many of the diasporas reached to top management positions, especially in the IT companies in the USA. Some of these business leaders mentored Indian programmers and invited them to enhance the quality and performance standards of their companies’ outsourced operations in India – a move that, in turn, helped upgrade these programmers’ skills (Kapur, 2001). As more Indian diaspora members in the USA became entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and top executives in US companies, they began playing a much more active role in promoting and supporting the growth of India’s IT industry. The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is a good example that originated in Silicon Valley in the USA. The organization now offers these and other networking opportunities to 15,000 members and 3,000 charter members in 61 chapters in 14 countries.18 It is a fact that the growth of the IT industry in India, especially in the cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad, happened with involvement from the Indian diaspora, especially the people of Indian origin in the USA. To establish a network in an institutionalized way, the source country must have mechanisms of reception of diasporic knowledge. In this regard, India did initiate multiple measures to get the network organized. Two of the prominent examples considered here were ­U NDP’s Transfer of Knowledge and Technology through Expatriate Nationals ­( TOKTEN)19 and Global-Indian Network of Knowledge (G-INK). 242

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TOKTEN Some of the tasks that TOKTEN in India worked towards were to: design and development of syllabus and supply of course material; development of new products/processes; demonstration of new laboratory procedures/techniques; solving the specific problems in R&D projects; training of researchers in new techniques and technologies; transfer of laboratory procedures and protocols; besides many others. Later on more fields were added into the list. The range and diversity of expertise, which was made available through TOKTEN and other global collaborative initiatives like UNISTAR (United Nations International Short-Term Advisory Resources) and TCDC (Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries) programmes, was ideally suited to satisfy the range and diversity of needs and requirements within the country like India, with its complex institutional framework for implementation of these programmes. The Government of India through the nodal agency of CSIR integrated the global initiatives, which have similar objectives – TOKTEN, UNISTAR and TCDC. Soon it was realized that CSIR could successfully implement this new integrated programme by synergizing the three streams under one single umbrella. Thus, instead of providing isolated individual consultancy missions as in the TOKTEN programme in the past, efforts were made to identify well-defined problems, and address them in an integrated manner through the series of consultancy missions and using effectively all the streams provided by the GOI-UNDP Umbrella programme, depending on the necessity. TOKTEN was an impressive initiative, which tried to integrate the highly experienced and knowledgeable scientific community among the Indian diaspora. This happened especially when India’s Diaspora Policy was of disengagement. However, the initiative could never take off and become sustainable. Some of the major aspects which it could not address successfully were its dependency on UNDP funding and the fact that it did not make any efforts to make it sustainable; its linkage with local industry could not be established, though the emphasis was given. The R&D collaborations were on larger global issues and not industry-specific; emphasis was on how to transfer existing knowledge, and no attempt was made to create a network through which new knowledge would be created through collaborative efforts.

Global-INK G-INK was institutionalized to benefit from the knowledge and skills of the Indian diaspora, delivered through an electronic format. The erstwhile Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA), in partnership with CII’s erstwhile Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre (OIFC) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), developed the Global-INK framework. Global-INK is an online web portal, which was institutionalized as the next generation of knowledge management, collaboration and business solutions platform that would cater to different focus areas connecting knowledge experts and knowledge seekers. The Global-INK was set up in October 2012, especially touching upon the sectors of environment, healthcare, innovation and S&T. The network did work in the initial years, especially in the healthcare sector. The Global-INK was initiated as a platform to convert ideas and research outputs into action and also to facilitate research collaborations, especially for innovations in science and technology. The objective was to shape the future of India’s knowledge economy. Global-INK initiative worked as a bridge between the industry’s research requirements and the talented Indian diaspora. Few other knowledge networks are/ 243

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were operational – BRICS University Networks, National Knowledge Networks (NKN), and Climate Change Knowledge Network in Indian Agriculture, among others. The institutional process of knowledge networks in India so far could not enter into a sustainability phase. Both TOKTEN and Global-INK had a good start but could not get into the next level. TOKTEN depended on funding from UNDP since its inception and never made any attempts to stabilize the initiative and take it to the next level. One of the major limitations of the TOKTEN initiative was its poor linkages with the local industry, which the study considers a critical link. The industry is faced with the massive requirement of the latest technologies and workforce for cementing their position in the global competitive market. The network of scientists through TOKTEN did help in establishing linkages between scientists and scientific institutions towards research in areas of public interest. However, industrial research requirements were not taken up. The umbrella approach of the Government of India to integrate TOKTEN, UNISTETR and TCDC was initially welcomed but later on became complex due to a mismatch between the perceived outcomes of the integrated organizations. The Global-INK did create a platform for the industry to get linked with professional diaspora which could enhance innovation and lead to industrial development. However, it too failed to take-off as it could not cover the entire gamut of the spectrum.20 Its linkages with the institutes, and research-oriented universities were missing. The next and final section will attempt to fill this critical gap. The other knowledge network initiatives have fallen short of the defined objectives either due to their poor connection with the industry or due to lack of vision to expand their scope of work.

Theoretical framework for diaspora knowledge networks So far, we have seen that, with its huge value-added overseas Indians, India’s brain drain worries are overthrown by the prospects of brain gain, though it is still not possible to quantify the equations. The remittances, FDI and philanthropy play its critical role in this case but what we are missing is to have a mechanism through which the value-added knowledge of the involved diaspora could come to great use in the source country. In this context, the diaspora knowledge networks are explored in great detail by understanding how it functions and what are the major challenges. It is seen that intellectual property rights could benefit the process rather than playing a negatively interfering role. The advent of technology did help strengthen the cause of a stronger diasporic knowledge network, but the persistent efforts by the Indian Government could not yield sustainable results, though there were some momentary initial successes. To take the discussions to the next level, we need to look into the theoretical space in which it could function desirably. In the current phase of globalization, the world is moving towards exponential ­technology-led growth. The information, communications, transportation and even ideas are transcending borders. One of the important implications of these global cross-border developments is that the good-life 21 aspirations of the individual are being revisited in comparison with those of others. Any democratic nation-state has to respect the rationally derived good-life aspirations and accordingly offer the individual the required freedom and opportunities to meet their aspirations. In many situations, these aspirations often transcend sovereign nation-state. For example, the migrants and the diaspora often aspire to stay connected to their home country to play their part in the country’s development process. However, the sovereignty of a nation-state is not equipped to implement policies beyond their territorial jurisdiction where the diaspora interests are present. 244

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As migrants operate in a space that does not fall within the jurisdiction of the source country, there is a need for a transnational approach that facilitates the good-life aspirations of these migrants. For an individual to perform better in the transnational roles, she must have individual freedom that matches her good-life aspirations. In this context, it is observed that there is a need for an appropriate framework to suitably capture the developments across national borders, which is called here as transnational content,22 and duly support the good-life aspirations of the people, which is considered here as part of the democratic intent.23 In other words, it is the democratic intent of the nation-state to capture the transnational content to provide good-life opportunities to its overseas people as well as to integrate them in the development process of the source country. Knowledge, with its global public goods characteristics, must be seen as an important transnational content with democratic intent. An important limitation to this process is that the methods in the social sciences take nation-state and its society as the context of the study and look into global developments from a comparative perspective. Theorists consider such a phenomenon as methodological nationalism24 and the objective of the approach taken here is to analyze scenarios beyond this phenomenon. In this context, Bhagavatula (2018) sees transnationality 25 to occupy the space which is beyond methodological nationalism. It is in the sphere of transnationality that the full potential of the knowledge networks could be actualized. With such a theoretical understanding, it is further proposed to develop a Transnationality Network Model, which could fill the required gaps and remove the overlaps.

Transnationality network model The proposed Transnationality Network model shows that when the ‘source’ country invests in higher education (by targeting universal secondary and higher education), it will have a repository of national knowledge workers. Most of them will get into D-EG (Domestic Employment Gate). A smaller percentage of them will enter D-AG (Domestic Academic Gate). A further small percentage suffers from involuntary unemployment, which happens due to skill mismatch. In such a scenario, they have to re-invest to enhance their skills and get back to the repository. Another set of the population explores international opportunities and crosses the borders through either I-EG (International Employment Gate) or I-AG (International Academic Gate) to form a repository called as, knowledge transnationality, which means ‘the degree of connectivity between migrants and non-migrants across the nation-state borders for knowledge circulation that involves both knowledge transfer and knowledge creation’ (Figure 17.1). The repository of knowledge transnationality gets involved with its domestic counterpart at three levels of networks such as social networks, institutional knowledge networks and entrepreneur knowledge networks. The repository of knowledge transnationality could become active either at the individual level or at the institutional level. Social networking is more informal in its structure, but over a period such networks could help in building institutional and entrepreneurial networks. The institutional and entrepreneurial knowledge networks carry developmental agenda to the home countries. When both the source and destination countries come together with partnerships, agreements and treaties that include provisioning some form of dual citizenship, the institutional and entrepreneurial knowledge networks become stronger. The source country benefits through various sources, like remittances, investment, philanthropy and knowledge. The host country benefits from the migrant’s capabilities in contributing to the local economy by way of production. They also get benefited by taxation and cultural artefacts. 245

Sridhar Bhagavatula TRANSNATIONALITY NETWORK MODEL

Treaties and Partnerships

Dual citizenship benefits

Remittances

Investments

Philanthropy

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Repository of the Knowledge Transnationality

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Taxation

Skill Enhancement

Domestic I-AG

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Educated Unemployed

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Social Networking

Productivity

Culture

Institutional Knowledge Networks

Destination Country

I-EG: International Employment Gate I-AG: International Academic Gate D-AG: Domestic Academic Gate D-EG: Domestic Employment Gate

Entrepreneurial Knowledge Networks

Figure 17.1  Transnationality Network Model

A way forward: university-linked diaspora knowledge network model The diaspora knowledge networks so far initiated were established on a demand-supply equation, where the demand was always from the source country and supply was always across multiple host countries. The vice versa was never on the agenda. The institutional process of a knowledge network, it is considered here, that it must have strong junctions at both the ends – in the host countries and the source country. Those junctions should have strong backward linkages that look into the aspects of both demand and supply. Etzkowitz and Leydesdroff (2000) proposed a triple-helix model,26 where industry, academia and the Government come together to strengthen the innovation process. Universities, in this context, have an immense potential to play a vital networking role. The changing orientation of universities in research as a consequence of budgetary constraints has led to arguments about the role of universities in the transformation of knowledge for wealth creation and economic development. These developments are confined not only in rich countries but are also evident in the developing world. Whatever roles the universities are expected to perform, they are not exempted from the need to reconfigure themselves in a changing economic landscape given tight budgetary resources, intense competition and higher expectations from society (Sarabati-Shahin and Thiruchelvam, 2013). The intensity of interactions between universities and other parties is critical for the performance of the economy. Here it is attempted to build a framework for a stronger relationship between Indian universities, industries and the Indian diaspora’s transnational aspirations. The study aspires to link the ecologies of academia with that of industry and policymakers through a Transnationality Network framework. It is essential to understand that the domains of academia and that of policymakers and that of the industry, respectively, operate through different approaches and any attempt to link this helix is going to be a herculean task. From the perspective of good-life, the ideas transcend the domains leading to constant modifications. It is opined that the linked-ecologies 246

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approach (Abbott, 2005, p. 248) could be tested to arrive at the transnationality network. This approach identifies a ‘process of constructing the relations between actors and locations that constitute and delimits both actors and locations’ (Stone, 2013). The concept of linked ecologies is concerned with locating actors in one profession relative to another and to account for their coalitions of competitive strategies. Stone (2013) uses the analogies of hinges27 and avatars28 to describe linked ecologies. Knowledge networks operate with a combination of both. Black and white distinctions set up between critical academic research institutions, and official centres of problem-solving policy research become less tenable propositions as network hinges are designed to link and layer the different ecologies (Stone, 2013, p. 257). It also helps to extend the scope of knowledge sharing. By making use of the triple-helix model and linked-ecologies approach, the study attempts to create a university-linked diaspora network model, called as ‘Transnationality Network Model’, where different ecologies meet to enhance development. Universities and research institutions must be an integral part of the network, where the end-users could be much further down the framework. To address the challenges and gaps in the existing diaspora knowledge network, it is proposed that the existing universities with strong backward and forward linkages across the world could lead the role of creating diaspora knowledge networks. There are at least six areas of intervention where the diaspora knowledge networks can succeed through universities as junctions. •

•

•

•

•

•

Skill development: India’s Make in India initiative will be successful only when its Skill India initiative takes off. As the production system becomes more and more technology, based and new skills come up, it is important to synchronize the grand initiatives of Make in India and Skill India. Skilling people based on industrial requirements and innovation ecosystem is critical. Unfortunately, the National Skill Development Council (NSDC) and its growing sector skill councils operate parallel to the universities and educational institutions. However, there is a need to establish linkages with global production techniques and skills, which can be routed through the knowledge networks involving the diaspora, with universities as the junction. Knowledge hub: Universities traditionally play the role of knowledge hub as centres of learning and creating new knowledge. The facilities in the universities must have access to the industry, and there should be a robust industry-institute interaction, which would ensure a smooth transition from student status to employed status. The knowledge networks will strengthen the cause of universities as knowledge hubs. Access to technology and the process of technological development: Capturing global developments in various sectors and multi-disciplinary sectors, and having access to new technologies through the diaspora knowledge network will contribute in the development process. Entrepreneurship development: Universities can also play an essential role in R&D support in entrepreneurship development through a system of mentoring the start-ups and smaller enterprises in research and development aspects. Innovation: The knowledge networks can be beneficial to facilitate collaborative research leading to innovation. The collaboration could be between universities and research institutions or between enterprises and highly skilled persons through universities. Patients: Intellectual property protection may influence knowledge flow patterns through incentives (the market for ideas) and disincentives (anti-commons). The role of patents29 in creating incentives for innovators to innovate by conferring monopoly 247

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rights over ideas (by way of excluding others from use) in exchange for disclosure is well known. Patents play an important role in facilitating knowledge flows as opposed to knowledge creation. However, patents enhance knowledge flows in two ways. First, they promote disclosure. Second, they facilitate trade. Universities must have access to patented knowledge which would strengthen the innovation ecosystem. With these six areas of intervention, the university-linked transnationality networks will have the required ingredients for a successful and sustainable take-off. There are many categories of people in the host countries as well as the source country who aspire to establish outcome-driven global linkages that would enhance their individual and organizational capabilities. Some of the categories are students, professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, knowledge seekers, business development, start-ups, product developers, and innovators. To meet the aspirations of these categories of people, a model suggested here would touch upon the value chain of the entire process. In this regard, the university-linked Transnationality Network Model is proposed (Figure 17.2). As per the proposed model, the host country and the source country need to register the aspiring candidates with contact details, educational charts, occupational profile, specific aspirations from the global knowledge network, besides other details. Specific tailor-made registration forms can be created for different categories of aspirants. The registered persons need to be categorized and channelized at a selected highly ranked university, both in the host and in the source countries, which will be the host country and source country University Junction, respectively. The universities, at both ends, must have a proven track record of backward linkages with robust policy connect, social connect and industry connect in their respective countries. There connects will bring the global network aspirants together to the University Junction. When the two universities connect through the network, it will create a repository of knowledge for the network, which will have both the knowledge providers and knowledge seekers. They interact through a meticulous process of categorization and channelization, where a platform is created for partnerships, joint ventures, collaborations, alliances, knowledge sharing, besides others. Such a linkage between the two University Junctions will have at least three major aspects: facilitation of a global industrial development network, University to University

HOST COUNTRY UNIVERSITY JUNCTION

Channelization

Categorization University to University Research & Development Network

Encouraging Cosmopolitanism through People to People Network

Channalization

Categorization

SOURCE COUNTRY UNIVERSITY JUNCTION

Social Connect

Policy Connect

Industry Connect

UNIVERSITY LINKED KNOWLEDGE NETWORK MODEL

Figure 17.2  University-linked knowledge network model

248

Repository of Knowledge for Network: Provides and Seekers

Host Country Diaspora Global Network Registration  Students  Professionals  Investors  Entrepreneurs Facilitation for Global  Information seekers Industrial  Business Development Development Network  Start-ups  Product Developers  Innovators  Others Source Country Citizens Global Network Registration

Knowledge Network Platform  Partnerships  Joint Ventures  Collaborations  Alliances  Knowledge Sharing

Education, diaspora and development

Research and Development Network and encouragement of cosmopolitanism through ­people-to-people network.

Conclusion It is shown that the diasporas have come to a position to influence their source country’s development. More and more people from the diasporic communities are coming forward to establish stronger linkages with the home countries. One of the essential interventions expected is about sharing the new and value-added knowledge that could have a positive impact on the economy through the diaspora knowledge network. Globally, many countries with a large expatriate population offered various schemes and institutional arrangements to facilitate diaspora’s developmental interventions, including knowledge networks. The Indian diaspora knowledge network enjoyed instant initial success, but could not take off to the next level. One of the critical reasons is the lack of a comprehensive approach to the issue. Either it develops linkages only between academic institutions, or it is done through the industry. However, it is essential to link the players through the ‘linked ecological model’ and enable the universities to be the prime junctions to support the diaspora knowledge networks through the transnationality network framework, which is proposed here. This falls within the theoretical framework of transnationality. Transnationality Network proposes that the diaspora knowledge network needs to be part of a larger system and must cover the entire value chain, which can happen through the university-linked knowledge network. This will indeed revisit the structure of the current global growth process and will take us a step ahead towards a knowledge economy.

Notes 1 Post-independence India adopted a civic, territorial nationalism and a secular, inclusive state, which has no role for the overseas Indians (see Lall, 2001). 2 For more details about these initiatives and many others visit: https://www.mea.gov.in/­d iasporaengagement.htm (accessed on 12 July 2020). 3 https://mea.gov.in/images/attach/NRIs-and-PIOs_1.pdf (accessed on 26 July 2020). 4 ht t p s://d a t a .wo r l d b a n k .o r g /i n d ic a t o r/ BX .T R F. P W K R .C D. D T ?e n d= 2 019& l o c a tions=IN&start=2009 (accessed on 17 July 2020). 5 http://www.oecd.org/development/philanthropy-centre/researchprojects/OECD_India_­ Private_Giving_2019.pdf (accessed on 14 July 2020). 6 https://www.bain.com/contentassets/069bf9cf144e4b8bbdda8a85386a5611/bain_brief_india_ philanthropy_report_2019.pdf (accessed on 24 July 2020). 7 https://scroll.in/article/943346/india-is-the-least-charitable-of-all-south-asian-countries-its-­ ehind-even-pakistan-and-nepal (accessed on 14 July 2020). 8 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/economy/stemming-brain-drain-in-covid-19-era-70873 (accessed on 18 July 2020). 9 Meaning vintage of knowledge. Derived from the argument that India has the advantage of ‘Age’, ‘Wage’ and ‘Vintage’ (Khadria, 2009). 10 The usage ‘New Normal’ is mostly used by many scholars referring to the Post-COVID-19 scenario. 11 Though India’s literacy rate was 74.37% in 2018, the rate is higher in the age group 15–24, which was 91.66% in the same year. However, 2.1 million population in this age group are still illiterate. Hence, it is an unfinished job and lot more needs to be invested to strengthen the base. 12 http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=142 (accessed on 23 July 2020). 13 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/chart/educational-attainment-of-indian-­population-in-theu-s/ (accessed on 23 July 2020). 14 https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/summaries/indian-ethnic-group (accessed on 23 July 2020).

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Sridhar Bhagavatula 15 Non-school qualification would mean higher education qualification in the Australian education statistics details. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016 ~Main%20Features~Educational%20Qualifications%20Data%20Summary%20~65 (accessed on 23 July 2020). 16 10,90,219 Indians went to different countries for higher studies in the year 2017–2018, as mentioned in the Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 1464, dated 01 July 2019. 17 https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/R%26D%20Statistics%20at%20a%20Glance%202019-20.pdf (accessed on 25 July 2020). 18 Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) https://tie.org/about/ (accessed on 02 October 2018). 19 UNDP’s TOKTEN was initiated in Turkey in 1977 and was adopted in India in 1980. This was initiated primarily to counter the effects of the brain drain in developing countries. 20 The Global INK’s website https://www.globalink.in, which had been vibrant earlier, does not exist any longer. 21 Good-life has been a subject of discussion, which has had a long legacy of philosophical discourses (see Rawls, 1971; Kymlicka, 1995; Sen, 1985; Nussbaum, 2011). 22 ‘Transnational Content’ is the content which includes the knowledge, information and scientific know-how that are existing and get created and its applicability could be explored across the borders. 23 The reference to ‘Democratic Intent’ in the chapter meant that it is within the interests of the citizens to explore transnational roles and that the nation-states must come together to respect the democratic intent of the people. 24 Peggy Levitt opined that ‘Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences, where it the countries are considered to be the natural units for comparative studies’ (Khagram and Levitt, 2008: 104). 25 Transnationality is anthropologically defined by Thomas Faist (2013) as ‘the degree of connection between migrants and non-migrants across nation-state borders’. 26 The Triple-Helix model of university-industry-government relations can be generalized from a neo-institutional model of networks of relations to a neo-evolutionary model of how three selection environments operate upon one another. 27 Hinges linking ecologies can be understood as ‘strategies that can operate within two different ecologies at the same time. Knowledge networks are one such strategy, namely that synchronic and diachronic patterns within and between ecologies, create possibilities for alliances between actors and locations across the borders of ecologies’ (Abbott, 2005, p. 255). 28 Stone mentions that ‘Avatars replicate the ideas and skills of one profession into a new ecology. One can invite academic avatars from economics and political science, geography and sociology into the professional ecology via conferences, networks, consultancy and collaborative research projects. Indeed, academic avatars inserted into professional ecologies sometimes are able to gain symbolic capital in those communities. It performs a symbolic as well as a functional role of providing theories, concepts and datasets for evidence-based policy’ (Stone, 2013, p. 243). 29 The specific role of patents in enhancing trade is perhaps best illustrated in Gans et al. (2007), where they estimate the effect of the patent allowance date on the timing of licensing activity.

References Abbott, A. (2005). Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions. Sociological Theory, 23 (3), 245–274. Agrawal, A. (2017). Diaspora Networks, Knowledge Flows and Brain Drain. Economic Research Working Paper, No. 15, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Agarwal, A., Kapur, D., & McHale, J. (2011). Brain Drain or Brain Bank? The Impact of Skilled Emigration on Poor-country Innovation. Journal of Urban Economics, 61 (1), 43–55. Barre, R., Hernandez, V., Meyer, J.-B., & Vincek, D. (Eds.). (2003). Diasporas Scientifiques. Working Paper. Institut de Recherche sur le Developpement, Paris. Bhagavatula, S. (2018). Education, Migration and Transnationality: A Study of Global Indian Citizens. Unpublished PhD. Thesis, Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Services, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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Education, diaspora and development Brown, M. (2002). Intellectual Diaspora Networks: Their Viability as a Response to Highly Skilled Emigration. In Fibbi, R. & Mayer, J.B. (Eds.), Introduction: le Lien plus que I’ essence”, Diasporas, Developments et mondialisations. Paris: IRD. Connan, C. (2004). Le codéveloppement. Paris: Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Unpublished in French). In UNESCO, 2006, Transnational Knowledge through Diaspora Networks, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 8 (1), Revised Edition 4. Delicado, A. (2007). Mobility and Development: The Influx of Scientists from Developing Countries to Portugal. Working Paper, Institute de Ciencias Sociais-Universidade de Lisboa. http://www.ics. ul.pt [accessed on May 2009]. Emigration Bill. (2019). Department of External Affairs. https://mea.gov.in/Images/amb1/­Emigration_ Bill_2019.pdf [accessed on 25 July 2020]. Etzkowitz, H., & Leydesdroff, L. (2000). The Dynamics of Innovation: From National System and “Mode2” to a Triple Helix of University-industry-government Relations. Research Policy, 29, 109–123. Faist, T., Fauser, M., & Reisenauer, E. (2013). Transnational Migration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gans, S.J., Hsu, H, D., & Stern, S. (2007). The Impact of Uncertain Intellectual Property Rights on the Market for Ideas: Evidence from Patent Grant Delays. NBER Working Paper, No. 13234, Issued in July 2007. Indian Students Mobility Report. (2018). http://mdotm.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/­IndianStudents-Mobility-Report-2018.pdf [accessed on 25 July 2020]. Kadushin, C. (2012). Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts and Findings. New York: Oxford University Press. Kapur, D. (2011). Diasporas and Technology Transfer. Journal of Human Development, 2 (2), 265–286. Kerr, W.R. (2008). Ethnic Scientific Communities and International Technology Diffusion. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 90 (3), 518–537. Khadria, B. (Ed.). (2009). India Migration Report 2009: Past, Present and the Future Outlook. New Delhi: International Migration and Diaspora Studies Project, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Khadria, B. (2020). STEMming Brain Drain in COVID-19 Era. Down-to-earth Blog. https://www. downtoearth.org.in/blog/economy/stemming-brain-drain-in-covid-19-era-70873 [accessed on 18 July 2020]. Khagram, S., & Levitt, P. (Eds.). (2008). The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. New York: Routledge. Kuznetsov, Y. (Ed.). (2005). Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills. Washington, DC: World Bank (WBI Development Studies). Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lall, Marie-Carine. (2001). India’s Missed Opportunity: India’s Relationship with the Non-Resident Indians. Aldershot: Ashgate. Meyer, J.-B. (2001). Network Approach versus Brain Drain: Lessons from the Diaspora. International Migration, 39 (5), 91–110. Meyer, J.B., & Brown, M. (1999). Scientific Diasporas: A New Approach to the Brain Drain. Discussion Paper No. 41. UNESCO Management of School Transformation Programme. Meyer, J.-B., & Wattiaux, J.-P. (2006). Diaspora Knowledge Networks: Vanishing Doubts and Increasing Evidence. International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 8 (1), 4–24. Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Massachusetts, MA: Harvard University Press. Rapoport, H., & Docquier, F. (2005). The Economics of Migrants’ Remittances. IZA, Working Paper, DP. No. 1531. Ratha, D. (2003). Workers’ Remittances: An Important and Stable Source of External Development Finance. In: World Bank (Ed.), Global Development and Finance: Striving for Stability in Development Finance (pp. 157–175). Washington, DC: World Bank. Rawls, J. (1971) (Ed. by Erin Kelly 2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sen, A.K. (1985). Commodities and Capabilities. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sharabati-Shanin, M.H.N., & Thiruchelvam, K. (2013). The Role of Diaspora in University-Industry Relationships in the Globalized Knowledge Economy: The Case of Palestine. Higher Education, 65, 613–629.

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18 DIASPORA DIPLOMACY Weapon of mass dispersion Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III and Ador Revelar Torneo

This chapter describes and analyzes the growth in the relative size and magnitude of ­Philippine-style diaspora diplomacy, or what we refer to as the Philippines’ “Weapon of Mass Dispersion” (WMD). It describes how international political affairs has evolved from one simply anchored on attracting trade, mutual cooperation, and security alliances to the way temporary and permanent human movements are contributing and influencing real-world and real-time people-to-people and even country-to-country relations in the case of the Philippines, which has one of the largest diasporas. It essentially illustrates the relative power of non-state actors in contemporary international politics. The global perception of the Philippines is heavily influenced by major television news networks. Watching news and social media coverage has been frustrating for domestic and international Filipino communities. The mainstream media, including BBC, CNN, and FOX, seem to downplay much of the good news and often play up the bad news: violent volcano eruptions, massive flooding, typhoons, overloaded ferries sinking, political scandals, terrorist bombings, al-Qaeda/ISIL cells, and insurgent kidnappings. The latter three eventually moved the U.S. State Department to issue strongly worded travel warnings to American citizens about the personal risk of doing business or tourism to the Philippines, especially in Mindanao. Countering this negative publicity is a daunting, often frustrating, task for Philippine government officials, especially those who work at diplomatic postings abroad. With the media and State Department warnings and advisories, who in their right mind would risk traveling to Manila or Cebu or Davao as an investor, not to mention as a tourist? Nevertheless, even with a strongly worded U.S. State Department travel warning, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and a 140-member delegation went on a goodwill and business mission to Manila, San Francisco’s sister city. All were U.S. citizens; more than half were Filipino Americans. Mayor Newsom chose to heed the credible advice of the Filipino American chair of the San Francisco-Manila Sister City Commission. The chair reassured the mayor that travel to the Philippines was safe, a view echoed by the FilAm (short for ­Filipino-American) community in San Francisco. Sister cities are a common form of public diplomacy. It is an agreement between government officials, business, and non-­ governmental actors from two cities, from two countries, to nurture cultural, sports, arts, and business dialogue and understanding. San Francisco has 19 sister cities. 253

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The mayor and his San Francisco-Manila Sister City delegation brought with them 180 wheelchairs for distribution to Manila’s physically challenged and a US$ 10,000 check for the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. There was little coordination with the U.S. Embassy in Manila or the State Department in Washington, DC. The San Francisco-Manila Sister City Commission communicated directly with the Philippine Departments of Tourism and Foreign Affairs, as well as the Manila Mayor’s Office. Many people-to-people trips have followed thereafter defying formal travel advisories and relying solely on the credibility of FilAm diaspora members’ hearts and minds.

Aggressive diplomacy for the developing states Why should diplomacy through diaspora be a concern for scholars and practitioners of international relations? The answer is simple: according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2019), the number of international migrants reached 272 million in 2019. Despite their large number and important role across the globe, mainstream theories of international relations have not adequately explained their role and influence in global ties, particularly in terms of their soft power influences (World Bank, 2015). Very few international relations textbooks analyze this phenomenon in depth. However, the refugee crisis in Europe, the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union because of perceived out-of-control cross-border movement, and the dysfunctional immigration situation of the United States have underscored the critical importance of migration to the study and practice of international politics. Textbooks must be revised! Moving away from realist and liberal norms which rely largely on the “official” and the “practical,” Mayor Gavin Newsom went for what he perceived to be as more real-time intelligence and security assessment from the San Francisco-Manila Sister City Committee. Ironically, international relations theory and practice continue to point to the supposed pragmatism of hard power—large military presence, high Gross National Product (GNPs), and so forth—which developing diaspora states, such as the Philippines, do not have. What the Philippines offers, however, is on-the-ground, culturally sensitive knowledge from its millions of citizens and surrogates in the diaspora which has power and influence as illustrated by the Newsom decision. What we are exposing, and consequently espousing, is not just conventional soft power diplomacy but a more aggressive international relations approach for developing states that have masses of nationals spread across the globe. The dominant America-centered soft power ideas that Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. promotes in his seminal work in this area, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, and many other scholars (Fraser, 2005; Karns, 2008; Kiehl, 2006; Matsuda, 2007; Rugh, 2005) seem to place them in their back burners. In this chapter, we would like to place them in front by analyzing the case of the contemporary Philippine migration phenomenon. In this chapter, we view and use the term “diaspora diplomacy” broadly as encompassing a form of public diplomacy (Tomiczek, 2011) and as a mode of soft power (Gonzalez, 2012). Consequently, members of the Philippine diaspora are considered as diaspora diplomats by virtue of their role as “quintessential diplomats, mediating between homeland and host communities and playing key brokering roles.” The examples presented in this chapter include examples of diplomacy “through diaspora” and “diplomacy by diaspora” (Ho & McConnell, 2019, p. 15).

WMD’s demographic and economic impacts Why is the Philippine diaspora important to the study of contemporary international relations and soft power diplomacy? Because, as alluded to earlier, it is one of the fastest-growing and 254

Diaspora diplomacy Table 18.1  Top ten destinations in 20131 Rank

Country

Number

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

United States of America Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Malaysia Canada Australia Italy United Kingdom Qatar Singapore

3,535,676 1,028,802 822,410 793,580 721,578 397,982 271,946 218,126 204,550 203,243

Source: Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO).

thus one of the most significant soft power movements in the world today. Since the 1970s, the Philippine diaspora nation has rapidly grown to more than ten million strong in 200 countries, territories, and ships. A quarter of a million seafarers, or one-quarter of the world’s total, are Filipinos plying the planet’s oceans and seas. Filipinos live, work, socialize, and worship in more than 10,000 cities. The aggregated diaspora population is twice the size of New Zealand’s and is equivalent to the total population of Switzerland. Table 18.1 is a listing of the top ten destinations for 2013 according to the Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO) in its last available statistics. Given the long historical ties, it is not surprising that the United States is the number one destination and has been for decades. The continued economic growth of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is driven by their oil-based economies is the reason for their second- and thirdplace ranking. Meanwhile, neighboring Malaysia is in fourth place due to a large number of temporary and irregular Muslim Filipinos in Sabah, many of whom consider Sabah to be part of the traditional homeland of their peoples, preceding the rise of modern-day state’s national borders and the relatively permeable border between Southern Philippines and Malaysia. In terms of regional breakdown, more than 40% of Filipino diaspora diplomats are in the Americas, mainly in the United States and Canada. One-quarter of them are in Western Asia while 16% are in East and South Asia. The Commission on Filipinos Overseas (2014, p. 22) categorizes overseas Filipinos as: Permanent migrants are overseas Filipinos whose stay abroad is not dependent on employment, a category which includes legal permanent immigrants, permanent residents abroad, those naturalized in their host country as well as those abroad who have reacquired Filipino citizenship (dual citizens). Temporary migrants are those whose stay overseas is employment-related and who are expected to return to the Philippines at the end of their work contracts. Although most temporary migrants are overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), they also include students, trainees, entrepreneurs, businessmen and their accompanying dependents, whose stay abroad is six months or more. Irregular migrants are those not properly documented, without valid residence or work permits, or who are overstaying in a foreign country. In 2013, more than half of the ten million-plus overseas Filipinos were permanent migrants while the rest were temporary and irregular migrants. 255

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Diaspora diplomacy’s economic impact on the Philippines is quite significant, year on year, month on month, is illustrated in Figure 18.1. Based on Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank) statistics, in 2019, Filipino diaspora diplomats sent back to the Philippines more than US$ 30.13 billion, which is more than Nepal’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and more than the national income of 86 developing economies based on International Monetary Fund’s 2019 Statistics. Forty-two percent of remittances in 2019 came from overseas Filipinos in the Americas followed by 22% from Asia and 20% from the Middle East. This trend has continued for decades. One notable recent change is the rising share of remittances from Asia, which has now overtaken those from the Middle East. Remittances accounted for 9.3% of the Philippines GDP and 7.8% of gross national income in 2019, boosting household earnings and consumption. Remittances provide a steady foreign exchange stream to compensate for the growing trade gap and to reduce the current account shortage. Overseas Filipino remittances contribute substantially to household consumption and better living standards. Its impact on consumer spending, housing, investments, entrepreneurship, health care, education, and infrastructure has been felt by almost every Philippine Africa 0%

Middle East 20%

Asia 22%

Europe 13%

Oceania 3% Americas 42%

Africa, 1,54,784, 0.51% Middle East, 59,72,042, 19.82%

Asia, 65,50,763, 21.74%

Europe, 39,79,375, 13.21%

Oceania, 7,87,553, 2.61%

Americas, 1,26,88,784, 42.11%

Figure 18.1  Cash remittances in 2019 (in US$ 1,000)

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city and barangay (village). Many Families have raised their living standards. Some have been lifted out of poverty. Women have become more empowered. Since 2015, overseas Filipinos shipped an estimated 1,500 containers of balikbayan boxes (care packages) a month, translating to around 18,000 containers a year, or at least 7.2 million boxes to the Philippines every year (Department of Finance, 2015). Lingkod sa Kapwa Pilipino (LINKAPIL) or Link for Philippine Development Program—an initiative by the CFO to cultivate and nurture giving directly to community development projects and programs—has documented their establishment of scholarship grants, donations of books, information technology (IT) equipment, school supplies and other educational materials, funding of livelihood, the conduct of medical missions and skills transfer projects, providing of medicines and medical supplies, the building of schools and water systems, and donation of relief goods in times of natural disasters and states of calamity (Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 2014, p. 56). The United States accounts for one-quarter of the migrant stock and half the total remittance and balikbayan box volumes. Because of their increasing numbers, Filipino American (FilAm) influence on the U.S. ballot box and public policies have gained considerable attention from political parties, individual candidates, and policymakers—locally, nationally, and internationally. The FilAm bloc’s existence in the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics began with a mere 160 respondents in 1910. But by the 2010 Census, Filipinos were counted at 3,416,840, a million more than in the 2000 Census. As of 2018, this number has risen to 4,089,570. The Filipino voting bloc in the United States will continue to surge into the future at a rate of 100,000 legal immigrants annually or one million every decade. They have lobbied hard in U.S. Congress and protested in front of Chinese consulates on the issue of China’s encroachment on Philippine-claimed islands in the South China Seas (Gonzalez, 2016). OFWs are present in all seven continents. Land-based Overseas Filipinos contributed an estimated 23.56 billion in remittances to the Philippines in 2019. From the high seas, seabased OFWs sent back to their families around US$ 6.54 billion in 2019 (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas n.d.). Their remittances have helped insulate the country from the global economic crisis, devastation from natural disasters, and have contributed to the surge in economic growth in the last years—one of the strongest in the Asia-Pacific. Diaspora diplomacy has also become another WMD, or Wealth from Mass Dispersion.

WMD’s governance and political impacts Prior to the mass dispersion of its nationals, the basic function of Philippine diplomacy was to promote the economic, political, cultural, and consular interests of the republic. Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), Foreign Service Staff Officers (FSSOs), and Foreign Service Staff Employees (FSSEs) comprised an elite corps that associated only with an elite Filipino expatriate community, the powerful local politicians, and the wealthy socialites in their country of posting. In our interviews, a number of FSOs stated that eating with Filipina domestic helpers at a park in Singapore or Hong Kong was not the reason why they joined the diplomatic corps. Some felt they had earned this elite diplomatic stature by virtue of a highly selective examination and interview process. When posted overseas, government diplomats received all the diplomatic courtesies, plenipotentiaries, and immunities accorded by the host country, and earned ten times more than their civil service counterparts in the Philippines. They traveled on diplomatic passports which automatically got visas and paid no taxes to the host government, based on reciprocity 257

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agreements and treaties. They were detached from the bulk of the diaspora except through routine consular work—passport renewals, repatriation requests, and visits to the jailed. But the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 (or Republic Act 8042) changed the nature of their ritzy, glitzy lifestyle. The catalyst for this law was a tragic event thousands of miles away. Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina domestic helper in Singapore, was hanged for the alleged double murder of a fellow Filipina care worker and the Singaporean child she was caring for. Doubts about Contemplacion’s culpability led to a serious diplomatic row between the Philippines and Singapore, two regional partners. There were allegations from the Filipino public that the government, particularly the highly paid, highly trained foreign service officials, did not do enough to defend and protect Contemplacion because she was “just a maid.” Contemplacion symbolized the plight of the millions of Filipino diaspora diplomats that needed better care, protection, and social safety nets. Prior to her hanging, the number of problematic cases had been accumulating in Singapore and other countries of destination. The Philippine Congress responded with long-overdue legislation benefitting the multitudes in the diaspora. From then on, a series of diaspora-friendly laws were enacted. In 1997, a Comprehensive Tax Reform Law was passed exempting the income earned by overseas Filipinos from Philippine taxation. Overseas Filipinos gained an elected representative in the Philippine Congress. Overseas absentee voting, retirement incentives, and dual citizenship laws were also enacted into law, formalizing a legal regime just for the Filipino global nation. In the 2016 Philippine Presidential elections, 432,706 overseas Filipinos participated in overseas voting. This is just a portion of the 1,376,067 overseas Filipinos who registered for the elections by availing the overseas absentee voting law. Despite the relatively low turnout arising partially due to opportunity costs and the inconvenience involved in absentee voting ( Jaca & Torneo, 2019), overseas Filipinos have demonstrated the potential to become an important bloc vote in 2016 and the future national elections, especially in tightly contested electoral races. Consequently, the Philippines has become the largest labor, faith, and cultural exporter among the ten Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states. Despite the various issues raised about the Philippine government’s policies and management of OFWs, the Philippines is often seen by other countries as a model country in migration governance (Scalabrini Migration Center, 2013). It has one of the most comprehensive sets of national policies and programs supporting overseas workers. It has one of the most active governments that directly intervene and negotiate with the government of other countries on behalf of its overseas nationals. On multiple instances, the Philippine national government has intervened on behalf of its nationals from negotiating the release of imprisoned OFWs in the Middle East, to negotiate better working conditions and minimum pay for Filipino domestic helpers in territories like Hong Kong. It has even employed a deployment ban as a leverage in one instance where it was concerned about the welfare and was not satisfied with a host countries response to the killing of one of its nationals. On more than one occasion, the expectations and demands of some overseas workers from other countries have been influenced by the policies and observed actions of the Philippine government for its nationals. In this sense, it has indirectly influenced how other migrant-sending countries govern migration.

Diaspora diplomacy, Philippine-style Unlike other soft power diplomacies, Philippine diaspora diplomacy is people-propelled rather than product- or propaganda-driven. It is the collective action of Filipinas and Filipinos emanating from Philippine towns and villages. There are globally recognizable Filipino 258

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personalities, such as boxer Manny Pacquiao, but Filipinos are also visible just by their sheer numbers in the public and private spaces and events at their countries of residence or destination. In South Korea, Filipina Jasmin Lee has become the face of migrant women and played a historic role as the first naturalized foreign-born non-ethnic Korean to serve as a member of the National Assembly (Yang, Lee & Torneo, 2012). During her term, she represented migrants and has been involved in crafting and promoting South Korea’s version of “multiculturalism” and related policies. Slowly, Filipino cultural influences are also becoming visible globally. In 2010, more than 30 dramas produced by Philippine media giant ABS-CBN have been exported and became popular in various countries, including China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, and in African countries, such as Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. The Philippines is considered a powerhouse in the international beauty pageant circuit. Filipino contestants, many of whom come from the diaspora community, compete under the Philippine flag or the flag of other countries. They frequently win or emerge as runner ups in all major pageants in the last ten years including the Miss World, Miss Universe, and Miss International, among others. Contestants of other countries go to the Philippines to train or hire Filipino trainers to prepare them for competition. Outside the Philippines, the national dish adobo, pancit, lumpia, and sisig are becoming part of the food lexicon. On the other end, the Filipino comfort food balut (steamed or boiled fertilized duck embryo) is a regular feature in many international shows and competitions like Fear Factor as an exotic food. The Philippine staple root crop ube (purple yam) has become a major hit in the United States appearing everywhere from pies to cookies, ice cream, boba tea, alcoholic beverages, and even $1,000 Cristal-infused and gold-leaf covered ube donuts, purportedly the most expensive donut in the world (Connelly, 2017). Following the earlier predictions of influential food icons Andrew Zimmern, the late Anthony Bourdain, and several outlets that Filipino food will be the “next big thing,” several publications, including New York Times, declared that Filipino food has finally found its place in the American mainstream (Mishan, 2018). Diaspora diplomacy enables the Philippines and other diaspora states to influence another country’s culture, politics, and economics overtly or covertly. Public policies and business models are amended or changed to acknowledge them and essentially their nation of origin. Dual citizenship allows dual loyalties, in effect, institutionalizing dual influence. Public policies enacted in the name of diaspora diplomacy allow the Philippines to be smart and aggressive without being hegemonic and arrogant. Realists write about the exercise of hard power such as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Diaspora diplomacy, however, is the launch of Weapons of Mass Dispersion and achieving a different form of MAD, Mutually Assured Diplomacy. The underlying drivers of diaspora diplomacy are the basic needs of home and family, as opposed to the national economy and security. For Filipino migrants, the structure of home and family are often large and complex. A typical household may include, aside from the basic family unit of spouses and children, siblings, in-laws, uncles, aunts, grandparents, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. It can also extend outward to friends, strangers, churches, charities, hometown associations, and other community organizations. Household income generation is based on this extended kinship structure; each family member of legal age is expected to contribute to household expenses, which may include education, medical expenses, and mortgage. Beyond the home, extra disposable income ends up helping in the rehabilitation or construction of schools, chapels, and roads in the Philippines. Many migrants meet their family 259

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obligations while at the same time contributing to the betterment of their homeland, especially their hometowns. Given these extended meanings of household and income, it is not surprising to see Filipino migrants consider their churches as part of their families. Many feel that they are being sent out to the world as church members who have a “calling” to spread the word of God, so they assume such roles as pastors, lay workers, bible readers, and choir singers, among others. Governments of developing countries with very limited budgets for bilateral relations are able to outsource some of their diplomatic functions to migrants who share their culture, politics, and economics with the societies where they live and work. Although the Philippines has close to 100 diplomatic missions, these missions do not begin to cover and serve the more than 2,000 cities globally where Filipinos reside. Thus, Filipino migrants have adapted the traditional governmental role of serving as ambassadors of Filipino culture and traditions. Through their many organizations, they assist in diplomacy by working independently or alongside efforts by the Philippine diplomatic corps. Since migrant workers use time outside of work and church to socialize and interact with the “locals” in their adopted countries, they contribute to the cultural sophistication and diversity of their locality through their religious events, musical groups, sports tournaments, and the like.

Filipinization of global cities The power of Philippine diaspora diplomacy comes from its capacity to influence, charm, persuade, and assert in order to solidify ties. It is not meant to dominate but is instead creating two-way, open, consensual, and respectful relations. In more than two and a half decades of living in the United States and visiting Filipino communities in four continents, we have observed and documented how this evolving “Filipinization” process facilitates transnational integration, adaptive spirit, and intergenerational cohesion. If Americanization is the output of U.S. public diplomacy internationally, then varying degrees of Filipinization results from Philippine diaspora diplomacy in global cities. We categorize Filipinization further into three types: (1) religious Filipinization or influences emanating from churches or places of worship, as well as spiritual energy, passion, action, and advocacy; (2) occupational Filipinization or influences associated with their work, labor, English proficiency, interpersonal communication skills, formal education, informal training as well as the sending care boxes or remitting money; and (3) associational Filipinization or influences that come from their participation and organization of public held ethnic and cultural shows, parades, Philippine independence day commemorations, and mass Sunday gatherings.

Religious Filipinization Globally, churches are the most visible space influenced by Philippine migrant soft power. Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and Independent churches see Christian migrants as church planters, missionaries, or tentmakers (from the fact that the apostle Paul supported himself by making tents while living and preaching). As OFWs or overseas Filipino immigrants (OFI), they spread the word of Jesus Christ and showcase their Christian faith where formal religious missions and professional missionaries have failed or are unable to go and work effectively. Geographically, Philippine migrants highlight Christianity in under-evangelized areas, referred to by Christian tentmaker ministries as the critical 10/40 corridor, covering Northwest Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. 260

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In 1991, 1998, and 2008, the International Social Survey Programme reported that Filipinos are the most religious people in the world. Where they came from, it is common to see worship, devotion, and prayer, in many forms, being displayed by leaders and citizens on the street, in offices, and at homes. Catholic mass services are held on the street, in the airport, in the office, at home, at the park, at the mall, and almost everywhere with no restrictions. They start events and meals, big or small, with a prayer or invocation. Sunday is a religious day of obligation for Filipino Catholics, Protestants, and Independent churches, with certain exceptions like the Seventh Day Adventists who are obligated to come to Saturday service. Religious Filipinization is manifested in their forming of churches, renewal of faith, the introduction of new religious traditions, spreading of inter-faith respect, praying and meditating in church or public spaces, among others. This could be witnessed and felt whether its Novena Church in Singapore, Saint Abraham’s in Tehran, Saint Remi in Brussels, San Agustin Church in Barcelona, Westminster Catholic Cathedral in London, Saint Patrick’s Church in San Francisco, Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi, Saint Ignatius Church in Tokyo, or Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, every Saturday and Sunday, Filipino migrants help fill the pews of Catholic services internationally. Churches are not limited to religious functions but also serve as an important social role as a venue for the Filipino community. In South Korea, Filipinos of all faiths congregate in and around the Catholic Church in the Hyehwa-dong area of Seoul every Sunday to attend church, meet compatriots, avail of services, send remittances, and purchase food and other items from home. A Sunday Filipino market has sprung up beside the church and become a cultural fixture and landmark in the area that has since been dubbed “Little Manila.” The Seoul City government has not only accommodated the Filipino community but the Mayor even asked local government officials to provide support by ensuring the banks are open during Sundays to allow them to easily remit money on their day-off, to provide space, and to provide medical among other services. It has also dismissed the attempt of the Jongno District Office in Seoul to stop the Sunday market (Garcia, 2013). The market is no longer just for the Filipino community; it is also visited by Korean locals curious to try out Philippine food, including buko (young coconuts) and even durian. With its more than 150,000 Filipino migrants, Saint Joseph’s in Hong Kong has three scheduled Tagalog masses every Sunday, and both English and Tagalog masses are packed. Just like entering a rock concert, there are very long lines to get in every Sunday and once inside its standing room only. Looking around for space, we found one inside a big altar alcove. Our gaze fell on the face of the San Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint. Catholic church leaders in Spain, the United States, and even Italy would be drooling to have this volume of response every Sunday. In Vienna, the Filipino Catholic Chaplaincy had masses, bible studies, and a conglomeration of inter-generational charismatic and devotional groups: Couples for Christ, Divine Mercy Devotees, El Shaddai, Followers of the Good Shepherd, Lay Ministers, Legion of Mary, Mary, Mother of Christ, Music Ministry, Sacristans, and a Youth Group. Migrant Filipino priests and nuns were also there for their faithful in the diaspora. Undoubtedly, the country’s second-largest church with more than two million members, the Iglesia ni Cristo is not too far behind in planting congregations and worship services overseas. They are spreading the teachings of an independent Philippine Christian church in an estimated 152 countries. It may be estimated that this church has around 420 congregations based in the United States and Canada alone. In Daly City, we attended a very well-attended standing room only service. Other Filipino evangelical groups are also making their presence felt in the cities we visited in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. From the Filipino International Christian Church in Orlando, Florida to Victory Christian Fellowship 261

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in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Spreading the word of God from a Filipino perspective has gone global with its many migrant faithful diplomats. Thus, Philippine migrants unconsciously become part of a global religious crusade, from Global South to Global North and from Christian states to non-Christian countries. Heralded by Popes as the “new apostles for the church,” Filipino migrants are helping spread the word of God through their participation in Catholic, Protestant, and Independent services and festivities at their new homelands. They weave their Filipino spiritual practices into these local faith communities from the introduction of familiar iconography to Filipino language services. In many churches all over the world, it is no longer unusual to meet ­Filipino-speaking clergy of various nationalities and ethnicities catering to the spiritual needs of Filipino migrants. This approach is a more peaceful and nonviolent way to integrate Philippine culture into mainstream communities.

Occupational Filipinization Given their skills, training, education, work ethic, and English comprehension, Philippine migrants have a high capacity to influence occupational practices, products, and services in many international cities. Generally, Filipino and Filipina migrants, as global workers, are valued for their respectful English communication skills, responsible, cheerful disposition, industriousness, ability to blend in and be a team player, creative abilities, easily trained or taught, as well as can-do and never-say-never attitudes, among others. Ironically, these are the same reasons why international investors are drawn to offshore, outsource, invest, and call centers in the Philippines. Many global companies go to the country to recruit since the Philippines produces more than hundreds of thousands of college graduates per year across a range of disciplines from arts to engineering. The number of Filipino higher education graduates in the academic year 2018–2019 reached almost 800,000. Around 233,194 graduated from business-related programs, while another 169,832 are from education science and teacher training, 87,083 are from engineering and technology fields, and 81,477 are from IT – related disciplines (Commission on Higher Education n.d.). The Philippines is also one of the few countries that can boast a rich pool of high-quality and hardworking English-speaking college graduates each year. Even those who possess high school diplomas or do not complete their college education have relatively good English proficiency and competitive skills and talents. These allow them to earn money and help both in the host country or new homeland social concerns as well as family and hometown needs. The remittances and their development impact are the most tangible evidence of their transnational influence. This comes as no surprise since the Philippines is one of the largest English-speaking nations in the world besides having a 92.6% UNESCO literacy rate. There are more English speakers in the Philippines than in the United Kingdom. The country has also become a major destination for tens of thousands of Asians who want to study and learn the English language at a more affordable price. Many Filipino teachers also teach the English language in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, South Korea, and Japan. Their influence in the education sector of these countries is such that we have encountered locals speak English with hints of a distinctly Philippine accent on multiple occasions. On two separate occasions, we have mistaken locals for fellow Filipinos. Those we approached explained that they learned English from Filipino teachers. Philippine universities, colleges, and technical institutes produce world-class doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, managers, technicians, scientists, accountants, lawyers, etc. In 262

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many countries, labor deficiencies at critical sea-based and land-based occupations are filled by skilled Filipino migrants: for instance, maritime crew on commercial and military vessels; domestic work in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Italy; health care and allied work in the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, and the United Kingdom; tourism and retail employment in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain as well as Spain, Italy, and Mexico; light manufacturing contracts in Taiwan and South Korea; garment industries work in Sri Lanka, China, India, and Bangladesh; as well as entertainment and hospitality gigs in Japan. Both developed and developing country economies benefit as illustrated by the succeeding cases from the United Kingdom and Bangladesh. The high-performing economies of Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Italy would not be possible without the double-income productivity from families. Filipino migrants in these countries provide the necessary childcare and household cleaning to allow both mothers and fathers to seek gainful employment. Longer life spans and aging populations have also created an urgent demand for hospital and home health care in the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Thus, the inflow of Filipino doctors, dentists, nurses, physical therapists, and other health-care professionals into the public and private health-care systems. In the United States, about 150,000 or around 4% of all nurses are Filipinos. In states like California, Filipinos comprise nearly 20% of all registered nurses (Macfarling, 2020). Around 21,000 Filipino nationals work for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) making them the third-largest group after Britons and Indians. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, their significant presence in the health-care sector has translated into a significantly larger toll among Filipino health-care workers. In April 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly wore a Philippines t-shirt after recovering from a serious bout with COVID-19 that nearly took his life. Some interpreted it as a gesture to recognize the services of Filipino health-care workers in the NHS (South China Morning Post Asia Desk, 2020). The health sectors of the United States, Germany, and Spain expressed a strong interest in directly recruiting and flying Filipino nurses from the Philippines to supplement health staff during the pandemic offering attractive packages and incentives. In the 1970s, Philippine construction workers on contract with multinational engineering companies helped build the infrastructure, from airports to malls in petroleum states, like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The succeeding wave of migrant workers is part of the sales personnel at the duty-free shops and food concessions in the airports as well as the marketing staff at the mega shopping malls, international hotels, and chain restaurants. After saving money in the Middle East some migrants move on to Western Europe and North America. Recently, more Filipino workers had been heading to Asian destinations, and their numbers have overtaken those of the Middle East, which had historically served as the second largest overseas destination of Filipinos after the United States. Filipino workers are also ubiquitous in the maritime sector. It is estimated that one-third of the world’s seafarers are from the Philippines. Filipino officers and engineers, deck and engine crew can be found on all kinds of fishing vessels, commercial cargo ships, tankers, cruise liners, and even U.S. military vessels. Filipino sailors are widely dispersed working for ships under different flags. It would not be an overstatement to claim that Filipino seafarers are major actors integral to the global maritime sector. Filipinos work as teachers in the United States, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. They are employed in the manufacturing, service, and entertainment industries in 263

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Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They also work as domestic helpers, customer service personnel, and management, technical, and professional staff in Singapore and Hong Kong. Increasingly, Filipino workers are making contributions as professional, technical, computer, health care, artistic, education, and scientific workers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Second- and third-generation Filipino migrants have also followed their parents into these high-paying occupations. Some Philippine migrants are also into business and investments at their new homelands and infuse influences via individual philanthropy or through their corporate social responsibility initiatives. Filipino entrepreneurs invest in health care and social assistance, professional and consulting services, as well as scientific and technical services.

Associational Filipinization When they are not in church or at work, most migrants from the Philippines influence global cities and societies through their establishment of new associations and vibrant gatherings. Their memberships in existing local non-governmental organizations, interest, and advocacy groups, and other civil society gatherings or celebrations transform their bonding social capital into bridging social capital or willingness to help others. In the Philippines and abroad, Filipinos and Filipinas are making waves as leaders in the global environmental movement. Greenpeace warrior Von Hernandez was awarded the 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Not to be outdone is Time Magazine’s 2003 Asian Woman heroine: actress Carminia “Chin-chin” Gutierrez, for her work on environmental causes. As well, journalist Maria Ressa was among the five recipients of the Four Freedoms Awards laureates in 2020 in recognition of her work that contributes to the human rights mentioned by US President Franklin Roosevelt: “freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” In some countries, the presence of Filipino associations is even more pervasive than ­Philippine consulates and embassies. There are more Ilocano hometown associations than diplomatic posts in the United States and Canada. Many Philippine towns and cities receive more remittance dollars from formers residents, their hometown associations, school alumni associations, than bilateral official development assistance (ODA) from donor agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), UK Department for International Development (DFID), or Japan International Cooperation Agency ( JICA). Filipino associations in the United States and Canada also give out more high school scholarships benefiting Filipino American, Filipino Canadian, and Philippine youth than the governments of the United States and Canada. In terms of pageants, the Cebuano, Ilocano, Kapampangan, Bicolano, Pangasinan, and Quezonian hometown associations in the United States organize more beauty contests than Donald Trump’s Miss America Organization. Titles at stake range from Miss and Mrs. Pangasinan International, Miss Philippines America, Mrs. Ilocandia, Miss Sampaguita, Little Miss Philippines, Miss Bicolandia, and Mrs. Philippines, among others. There are 24 Philippine overseas elementary and high schools scattered all over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, more than the American, British, Dutch, and other Western international schools combined. Filipinos in Saudi Arabia host one of the largest and tightly contested Philippine diaspora beauty pageants in the world, “The Miss United OFW Saudi Arabia.” The strong inclination toward beauty pageants contribute toward the emergence of the Philippines as an international pageant powerhouse. 264

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Filipino migrants socialize and civically engage around various types of geographic regions in the Philippines, from small areas such as their home cities or municipalities (e.g., ­Pasiguenans of Northern California and the Naga Metropolitan Society) to larger areas such as their home provinces or regions (e.g., the Aklan Association and Marinduque Association). Languages and dialects, of which the Philippines has more than a hundred, could also be the basis for the segregation of communities from one another. This is, therefore, the reason why there are so many Philippine home province and hometown (cities and municipalities) associations in global cities. Home province associations sub-divide into hometown associations. For instance, the home province association called Pangasinan International Charitable Foundation based in California is an umbrella organization for the following Pangasinan home towns associations: Balungao Association of America, Banians of the USA, Inc., Bonuan International, Dagupan Association of Stockton & Vicinity, Dagupenians Association of America, Inc., Dagupenos Charitable Foundation International, Inc., Federation of Dasol Associations of America, Laoac Association of Northern California, Mangaldan Association of Northern California, Rosales United Club, San Carlenians of Pangasinan, USA, United Binalonians, Urdaneta Association of America, Inc., and Villasinians of America, Inc. Home province and hometown associations organize dances, language and dialect classes, beauty pageants, raffle draws, bingo and bowling nights, sports festivals, picnics, and neighborhood cleanups, preserving cultural capital from the Philippines and adding them into whatever society and culture they settle in, temporarily or permanently. Their fundraisers benefit old and new home base, homeland, and international causes. Worldwide professional associations of Filipino migrants include organizations of nurses (e.g., Philippine Nurses Association), engineers and architects (e.g., Marianas Association of Filipino Engineers and Architects), teachers, doctors (e.g., Philippine Medical Association), lawyers (e.g., Philippine Lawyers Association), executives (e.g., Filipino Association Singapore), and public employees (e.g., Pacific Gas and Electric Filipino Employees Association). Educational and alumni associations in the United States represent high schools (e.g., Morong High School Alumni Association), universities (e.g., University of the Philippine Alumni Association), and combined regional schools and universities (e.g., Samahang Ilocano). We also found multitudes of Filipino culture, sports, history, performing, literary, as well as visual arts associations. There are also more than 10,000 active members of the Order of the Knights of Rizal globally. In the sprawling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where there are approximately one million Filipino migrant workers, no churches, masses, rituals, festivals are permitted. Nevertheless, there are around 200 Philippine associations registered with the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh and the consulate in Jeddah. The largest numbers are professional associations as well as sports and martial arts clubs. There are professional associations for computer technicians (e.g., Association of Computer Enthusiasts), engineers (e.g., Philippine Society of Mechanical Engineers—Jeddah Chapter), nurses (e.g., Filipino Nurses Society in Saudi Arabia), and even ex-soldiers (e.g., Philippine Guardians Brotherhood). Filipino associations do not only serve the Filipino community. In many instances, they impact the broader community in their host countries. For example, overseas Filipino labor associations and leaders have historically been influential in shaping the migrant labor movement and migration policies and discourse in countries and territories outside the Philippines. In the United States, Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong and his colleagues have been instrumental in the emergence of the migrant labor movement and major policy wins such as the institutionalization of minimum wages in the 1960s. Similarly, Filipino labor migrant 265

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associations were highly visible and participated in the Myeong-dong Church protests that rocked South Korea in the mid-1990s and which led to changes in its migrant labor policies. In South Korea and many countries and territories including Hong Kong, Filipino migrant labor associations also assist other nationalities in organizing and building the capacities of their own migrant associations.

Conclusion Over the past decades, the Filipino diaspora has increased the soft power of the Philippines. In the absence of military and trade influences, diaspora diplomacy is the country’s “Weapon of Mass Dispersion” or WMD. This influence is drawn from the millions of permanent, temporary, and irregular migrants in close to 200 countries, territories, and ships globally. Filipino diaspora diplomats far outnumber Philippine foreign service officers in formal diplomatic missions. Their demographic, economic, political, and governance impacts are significant for both their country of destination and their Philippine homeland. They Filipinize international cities, towns, provinces, and municipalities in three ways: religiously, occupationally, and associationally. Thus, Philippine policymakers, businesses, and civil societies should continue to formulate ways and means to cultivate their rich contributions. Social safety nets that protect their welfare, health, and old-age security should be reinforced on both fronts.

Note 1 This is the last statistics provided by the Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO). Since 2013, neither the CFO nor any government agency has released any updates on Stock Estimate of Filipinos Overseas pending the approval of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Board of the proposed framework on the counting of overseas Filipinos.

References Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (n.d.). Overseas Filipinos’ cash remittances, http://www.bsp.gov.ph/statistics/keystat/ofw2.htm. Commission on Filipinos Overseas. (2014). Compendium of statistics. Manila: CFO. Commission on Higher Education. (n.d.). Table 3. Higher education graduates by discipline group: AY 2010–11 to 2019–20. Higher Education Statistical Data, https://ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/Higher-Education-Graduates-by-Discipline-Group-AY-2010-11-to-2018-19.pdf. Connelly, L. (11 October 2017). The most expensive doughnut in the world is covered in 24-karat gold. CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/worlds-most-expensive-doughnut-is-coveredin-gold.html. Department of Finance. (2015). DOF-BOC clarifies way forward on Balikbayan boxes issue. Official Gazette, https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/2015/08/24/bureau-of-customs-clarifies-wayforward-on-balikbayan-boxes-issue/. Fraser, M. (2005). Weapons of mass distraction: soft power and American empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Garcia, C.R.A. (19 August 2013). Seoul mayor backs ‘Little Manila’ market. ABS-CBNnews.com, https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/08/19/13/seoul-mayor-backs-little-manila-market. Gonzalez, J. (2012). Diaspora diplomacy: Philippine migration and its soft power influences. Minneapolis, MN and Manila: Mill City Press and De La Salle University Publishing House. Gonzalez, J. (2016). Filipino American voting. In T. Baldino and K. Kreider (Eds.), Minority voting in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Ho, E.L. and McConnell, F. (2019). Conceptualizing ‘diaspora diplomacy’: territory and populations betwixt the domestic and foreign. Progress in Human Geography, 43(2), 235–255.

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Diaspora diplomacy Jaca, G.B. and Torneo, A.R. (2019). Explaining (non) participation in overseas voting: the case of overseas Filipino voters in Japan in the 2016 elections. Diaspora Studies, 1–30 https://doi.org/10.10 80/09739572.2019.1705695. Karns, M.P. (2008). Multilateralism matters even more. SAIS Review, 28(2), 3–15. Kiehl, W.P. (Ed.) (2006). America’s dialogue with the world. Washington, DC: Public Diplomacy Council. Macfarling, U.L. (April 28, 2020). Nursing ranks are filled with Filipino Americans. The pandemic is taking an outsized toll on them. Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/28/ coronavirus-taking-outsized-toll-on-filipino-american-nurses/. Matsuda, T. (2007). Soft power and its perils: U.S. cultural policy in early postwar Japan and permanent dependency. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mishan, L. (12 March 2018). Filipino food finds a place in the American mainstream. New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/dining/filipino-cooking.html. Nye, J.S. (2004). Soft power: the means to success in world politics. New York: Public Affairs. Rugh, W. (2005). American encounters with Arabs: the “soft power” of U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East. Westport, CT: Praeger. Scalabrini Migration Center. (2013). Country migration report: the Philippines international organization for migration. Makati City: Philippines https://www.iom.int/files/live/sites/iom/files/Country/docs/ CMReport-Philipines-2013.pdf. South China Morning Post Asia Desk. (21 May 2020). Coronavirus: did British PM Boris Johnson pay tribute to Philippine nurses working in UK with this T-shirt? South China Morning Post, https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3085508/coronavirus-did-british-pmboris-johnson-pay-tribute. Tomiczek, M. (2011). Diaspora diplomacy – about a new dimension of diplomacy, the example of a new emigration non-governmental organisation. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 2(2), 105–123. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2019). International migrant stock 2019. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs – Population Division: International Migration, https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimates19.asp. World Bank. (2015). Remittances growth to slow sharply in 2015, as Europe and Russia stay weak; pick up expected next year, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/04/13/remittances-growth-to-slow-sharply-in-2015-as-europe-and-russia-stay-weak-pick-up-expectednext-year (13 April 2015). Yang, S.B., Lee, Y. and Torneo, A.R. (2012). Political efficacy and political trust among marriage immigrants in South Korea. Philippine Political Science Journal, 33(2), 202–223.

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19 DIASPORA POLITICS Reconfiguring homelands Ishan Ashutosh

Introduction This chapter examines the multi-directional connections forged by diaspora politics. These connections consist of a politics that acts across sites and intercedes in political struggles that exceed a homeland-bound orientation. While the sheer expansiveness of the concept of diaspora has been the subject of critique (Brubaker, 2005), I find that its multiple and often contradictory political projects provide an important terrain for theorizing the relationship between space and political acts of solidarity, conflict, consensus, and dissent. I delineate diaspora politics along its three most prominent mobilities – long-distance nationalism, diaspora strategies of emigrant states, and as a politics that seeks to challenge the idea of an originary homeland. Based on the Greek words dia, “across,” and speirein, “to scatter,” diaspora referred to an identity crafted from the condition of exclusion and a memory of the homeland. The significance of the term’s ancient lineage, which originally referred to the exile of Jews as well as Greeks and Armenians from their respective homelands, is that diaspora expressed an imagined community just as central, and indeed in existence before, nation-state formations of the 18th and 19th centuries. As will be shown below, the main tension in diaspora politics is its critique and reproduction of the exclusions associated with the nation-state. In the case of long-distance nationalism, the homeland becomes the site filled with potential, but this vision relies on taking the form of national community. Second, and related to long-distance nationalism, are the “diaspora strategies” enacted by emigrant states as a form of ­extra-territorial power that exchange cultural recognition and various rights conferred by the state in exchange for remittances, diplomacy, and political lobbying. These politics are characterized by an ebb and flow, of fluidity and friction between diasporas and the homeland. Third are the diaspora politics that are oriented toward life outside the formal spaces of the homeland and that strive to expand the terrain of belonging. These include political projects geared toward integration as well as those combatting racism and inequality. It is this form of diaspora politics that has created new spaces of cross-national and cross-racial solidarity. In the sections below, I examine each one, in turn, and draw from the political movements and actions of South Asian diasporas.

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Long-distance nationalism: re-imagining the homeland Long-distance nationalism refers to the ways in which diasporas initiate and support political projects in the homeland. These politics seek to transform dispersal and the unhomeliness that characterizes diasporic subjectivity through claims of belonging that bind together diaspora and homeland spaces under the banner of a national community. Anderson’s (1992, 1998) theorization of long-distance nationalism extended his conception of the nation’s modular form which traced nationalism’s rise during the late-18th century, first in Europe and in the “creole nationalisms” of the Americas, before being transplanted to Asia and Africa (Anderson, 1983; Goswami, 2002). Anderson’s formulation of long-distance nationalism retained the emphasis on the nation’s mobility with diasporas acting as vehicles for homeland-bound nationalism. Long-distance nationalism, of course, expresses a diverse and conflicting range of politics; it is no less Janus-faced than the concept of the nation itself. But what all long-distance nationalisms seem to share, whether separatist or majoritarian, is that the homeland is an imperiled space requiring the diaspora to fulfill its national duty and come to the aid of the homeland from beyond its borders. Anderson (1992, p. 11) provides an illustration of long-distance nationalism by briefly turning to the example of a Sikh migrant whose political life relies on globalization’s prosaic forms, from the internet to phone calls. The circuits of electronic capitalism suture his home in suburban Toronto with his homeland, Khalistan. The struggle for an independent Sikh homeland in the diaspora was imagined through what Anderson called a “dream politics” envisioned from exile. Khalistan becomes the site whereby the Canadian state’s indifference, Sikh oppressions in India, and their marginalization in the sites of diasporic settlement can be reversed through diasporic memories of the homeland and visions of alternative futures. Furthermore, diaspora politics directed toward the homeland coalesces and creates a diaspora from histories of displacement. Yet this nationalism frames the homeland as a “phantom bedrock,” an illusory site of belonging that exists to negotiate an “embattled metropolitan identity.” Unlike 19th-century exiles who prioritized returning to the homeland, today’s émigrés and diasporic subjects “have no serious intention of going back to a home.” It is, therefore, a “politics without responsibility” in which political action is, ultimately, symptomatic of the distance that marks the disjuncture between diaspora and homeland (Anderson, 1992, p. 12). Long-distance nationalism’s (ir-)responsibility raises important questions about the effects of diaspora’s distance and difference in relation to the homeland, as well as on the political consequences of diasporic homeland-oriented political action. While for Anderson responsibility entails the final return to the homeland, long-distance nationalism, particularly when oppositional toward the state oppressing the homeland, illuminates the impossibility of physical return for the diaspora living in exile. Even where return remains possible, diasporic political projects targeting state exclusions underscore the fact that diaspora’s very existence, its dispersal and transnational connections, resists the state and serves as a reminder of its failures. While long-distance nationalism may avoid accountability for political actions toward the homeland, it simultaneously points to the failures of the nation-state and from the space of diaspora, demands accountability. Long-distance nationalism, then, enlarges the spaces of political action and responsibility by illuminating the limits of inclusion and exclusion in an international frame that encompasses the scattered sites of diasporic settlement and the homeland. I want to elaborate on the dimensions of accountability and the ways in which l­ongdistance nationalism radiates across multiple spaces through the case of Sri Lankan Tamil protests staged across the diaspora in 2008–2009. Through the vision of Tamil Eelam, the

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desired Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora battles against the Sri Lankan state’s majoritarian violence, with memorials and processions marking the watershed of the 1983 “Black July” pogroms against Tamils. Eelam was not a unitary vision, but rather represented a diverse and contested vision of the Tamil homeland. As the Sri Lankan Civil War entered its 25th year and with the Sri Lankan state closing in on LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran’s hideout that trapped thousands of civilians, the protests held across the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora advanced a multi-sited political strategy that intertwined the tensions between homeland-diaspora, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state, and between the sites of dispersal and settlement. They challenged the seeming indifference of the international community, and India’s role in fomenting the Civil War, and sought to place Eelam within the wider context of minority oppression and exclusions by the nation-state; as such, they placed questions of responsibility and accountability in a transnational frame (Ashutosh, 2013). Just as Eelam was not a unified vision, so too did the LTTE become the focus of internal dynamics within the diaspora. The goal of Eelam and the LTTE as the means toward its realization were the subject of community debates and conflict as they grappled with questions over how the diaspora is to best represent the plight of their co-nationals in the homeland (Amarasingam, 2015). As Thiranagama (2014, p. 275) has argued, the LTTE straddled the gap between the homeland and diaspora, offering a military defense for Tamils in the former and of cultural dignity in the latter. Their ability to craft together a Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora whose political projects support their actions requires long-distance nationalism to be analyzed not as a taken-for-granted formation within an already existing and univocal diaspora but rather “within specific histories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and active mobilizing structures.” In addition to protests and rallies, long-distance nationalism is produced through everyday practices. Food, dress, social gatherings, watching films, and listening to the radio reflect the embodied dimensions of long-distance nationalism (Faria, 2014). These practices not only consolidate a diaspora around a national imaginary; in the case of Pakistani radio programs in Houston, they became the space to launch a boycott against Indian businesses and films in the wake of the 1998 Pokhran-II nuclear tests (Afzal, 2015). Brian Keith Axel’s (2001) argument that Khalistan and the Sikh diaspora are mutually constituted through the circulation over images of state violence against Sikhs emphasizes the intimacies through which long-distance nationalism is articulated as it shapes both the homeland and the diaspora. The denied entry into Canada for the passengers aboard the Komagata Maru, the ship chartered by Gurdip Singh in 1914 as a challenge to Canadian immigration “Continuous Journey” regulations, is remembered through transnational memories that speak to the place of Sikhs in Canada ( Jakobsh and Walton-Roberts, 2016; Kaur, 2019), in anticolonial politics and anti-imperialist networks (Roy, 2018; Sohi, 2014), and that framed the struggle for Khalistan in the diaspora. Through long-distance nationalism, cultural organizations and practices become essential spaces for political debate, disagreement, and action. It is in these venues that long-distance nationalism enables a connection not just to the homeland but also across the spaces of settlement in the diaspora. Scholarship on long-distance nationalism has suggested that its articulation attempts to overcome exile, alienation, and distance from the homeland through a simultaneity of experience and engagement. As I have argued, long-distance nationalism also needs to be examined in terms of how its politics are shaped through diaspora’s dynamic geographies of dispersal and connection. Long-distance nationalism seeks to challenge and change the conditions of life well beyond the homeland and instead attempts to bridge 270

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the distance that also includes the multiple societies that diasporas are also a part of. In its multi-sited dimensions, long-distance nationalism, furthermore, enlarges the space of responsibility and points to the limits of rights and belonging that are secured by the nation-state.

Diaspora strategies: re-imagining the diaspora The closing decade of the 20th century witnessed a dramatic shift in how emigrant states engaged with their diaspora. These engagements have constructed new political spaces and subjects that attempt to align diaspora’s affiliative ties to the homeland onto the contours of the nation-state. Diasporas are transformed into vital economic and political resources for the emigrant state which now extends its transnational reach beyond its territory. The state’s extra-territorial power manifest through diaspora stands to overturn the salient feature of exile and separation from the homeland to one in which diasporas now function as state subjects that operate on its behalf. The deterritorialization of the nation-state through policies and practices that selectively integrate diasporas in many respects signals the death of diaspora (Basch et al., 1994). Diaspora politics, which challenged the exclusions of both colonial and postcolonial states through notions of belonging that privileged mobility and dislocation, are tamed by emigrant states’ strategies of anchoring and routing diaspora connections to projects of the nation-state. To fully appreciate the shift between emigrant states and diaspora, the Indian diaspora provides an exemplary case. First, let us consider Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1957 statement on the Indian diaspora. “We have left it to the Indians abroad whether they continue to remain Indian nationals or to adopt the nationality of whichever country they live in. It is entirely for them to decide” (cited in Varadarajan, 2010, p. 51). The Indian state’s laissez-faire approach to the diaspora is all the more striking given the important role of overseas Indians in fueling the anti-colonial movement, both in the homeland and within the broader contours of global radicalism (Amrith, 2011; Ramnath, 2011). Upon independence in 1947, the new nation-states of India and Pakistan were driven by territorial consolidation and the management of populations displaced by partition. Extending rights to those heterogeneous fragments that comprised the Indian diaspora – the descendants of indentured and kangani laborers, lascars, farmers, and students – cut against these imperatives. The political motivations that underwrote this decision lied in India’s desire to allay the concerns of the countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, with large Indian populations (Abraham, 2014). The transformation of the Indian diaspora from one in which their status as “abroad” underscored their distance from the homeland to one in which their distance now offers an extension of state power has its origins in the classification of the “non-resident Indian” in the 1973 Foreign Exchange and Regulation Act. This legal category allowed Indians living abroad to invest in property and businesses while outside the country (Rajagopal, 2004). The Indian diaspora’s importance as a financial resource to India became vital during India’s balance of payments crisis that became particularly acute after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War. With economic liberalization in 1991, the Indian state mobilized its diaspora as a financial resource, hoping to emulate China’s success in the 1980s (Abraham, 2014), as evidenced by the issuing of India Resurgent Bonds that facilitated diasporic investment following international sanctions after the 1998 nuclear tests. Then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s embrace of the Indian diaspora at Vighyan Bhavan in January 2002 was conditional on the diaspora’s active role in representing the Indian state. The function of the Indian diaspora, as Vajpayee explained in 2004, was to be 271

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India’s “earnest ambassador” in which their “unique position” granted them the stage upon which to “explain what India is, and what India can be, to the audiences in your countries” (Vajpayee, 2004). Not all members of the Indian diaspora were granted the status of ambassador. Rather, the Indian state’s diaspora strategy focuses on economically successful diasporic subjects, those that complement India’s economic liberalization and, as Itty Abraham (2014) has pointed out, reinforce India’s caste and class boundaries that those migrating prior to the 1960s did not offer. Today’s diaspora not only mirrors but, more accurately, further entrenches a vision of the national subject post-liberalization and designed for the Modi era. Modi made the link between professional segments of the diaspora and the new national subject perfectly clear in his speech delivered at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in September 2014. On such an auspicious occasion, I’ve had the chance to meet all of you, and for that I’m very privileged. That my countrymen who having settled here, thousands of miles away from India, have increased India’s honor and pride. Because there was a time when India was known as the land of snakes and snake charmers. If it wasn’t for you, if it wasn’t for India’s youth today, if it wasn’t for what you did in the IT sector, then perhaps even today, India would have been perceived as the land of snakes and snake charmers. (Modi, 2014) Beyond the appeals of state leaders, diaspora strategies also consist of the state’s promotion of particular notions of national culture as a means to strengthen the cultural ties that connect diasporas to the homeland. It is in this dimension that long-distance nationalism needs to be placed alongside state projects of diasporic incorporation. For instance, Christophe Jaffrelot and Ingrid Thewartha’s (2007) study of long-distance nationalism in the Hindu diaspora found that the Sangh Parivar played a foundational role in promoting Hindu nationalism overseas, a diaspora politics that would then be imported into India. Recent examinations of Hindutva’s rise in the Indian diaspora and in the Indian state have shed light on the ways in which political parties and cultural nationalist organizations seize on the transnational connections of the diaspora as a means to bolster their power (Lele, 2003). The Overseas Friends of the BJP, established in 1992 by then BJP President Lal Krishna Advani, a year that would culminate with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, hoped to counter negative media representations of Hindus in the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Sanjay Puri and modeled after Israel’s Political Action Committee, proclaims itself as the “voice of Indian-Americans” and helped to facilitate Narendra Modi’s meetings while on his visits to the United States. The presence of these organizations indicates not only a propinquity between the politics of India and the United States but the discourse that enables this new intimacy synthesizes neoliberal economic development, the conjunctures between Hindu and white nationalisms, and counterterrorism. Working alongside the rise of Indian ethnic lobbying whose transnational impacts have advanced the politics of Hindu nationalism in both India and the diaspora, the Indian state has also adopted strategies from other nation-states and diasporic groups. The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) conferences, held annually in India since 2003, extend the national community to, as Mani and Varadarajan (2005) argue, “middle-aged male business people” (p. 46). These events illuminate not only the Indian state’s desire for diasporic incorporation but also how it has crafted its policy along the lines of the Jewish diaspora, which served as a source of inspiration for Minister of External Affairs, Yashwant Sinha, at the inaugural PBD 272

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conference (Ashutosh, 2019; Chakravorty et al., 2016; Oza, 2006). In attempting to selectively integrate the Indian diaspora, the Indian government created a program for Indian diaspora youth from 18 to 26 years of age to (re-)discover India. Based on Israel’s birthright tours, the Indian government introduced the “Know India Programme” (Know India Programme, 2020) in 2006 and each year 25–40 diaspora youth participate. The program consists of three-week tours through India, with partnerships with state governments, universities, and non-governmental organizations. Beyond appeals to culture, diaspora strategies have also attempted to craft a new national subject out of the diaspora through various policies of extraterritorial citizenship (Ho, 2011). The Indian state’s Person of Indian Origin (PIO) scheme, introduced in 1999, granted visa-free travel to cardholders. Pakistan has likewise created a National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis and a Pakistani Origin Card. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have created ministries for their overseas populations. Since 2001, Bangladesh has a Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment that focuses on the labor conditions of Bangladeshi citizens working outside Bangladesh and has partnered with the International Organization of Migration to determine the range of strategies to engage their overseas population (Siddiqui, 2004). India created the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs in 2004, which was folded into the Ministry of External Affairs in 2016. Pakistan’s Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis was created in 2008, and in 2013 it affixed “Human Resource Development” to the Ministry’s title, indicative of the folding of diaspora into projects of national development in which the diaspora functions as a resource (Erdal, 2016). New state institutions designed as part of a multifarious strategy of diaspora outreach are instances of what Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj (2015) has dubbed “emigrant infrastructure” through which nation-states craft themselves as the homeland in which national belonging is exchanged for diasporic financial and political investment in the homeland state. Yet scholars have argued that the instrumentalization of diaspora in the name of development requires a more nuanced examination of how emigrant state’s engagement with their diaspora is lived and experienced. They reveal competing claims to inclusion and national belonging that reside within projects that seek to reduce diaspora’s distance from homeland states (Andrucki, 2017; Dickinson and Bailey, 2007; Erdal, 2016; Ho, Hickey, and Yeoh, 2015). While diaspora strategies dream of new state subjects adroitly gliding across global space, the realities are instead notable for the friction generated between diaspora and the homeland.

Diaspora politics beyond the homeland The final component of diaspora politics that I would like to briefly discuss consists of the both the mundane and spectacular forms of solidarity that bristle against the confines of the nation-state. These politics seek to enlarge the notion of home and to intervene in conceptions of belonging that do not reproduce the exclusionary logic of the national form, as with long-distance nationalism, nor to align diasporas’ orientation around the homeland onto emigrant state projects. I have called this strand of diaspora politics “diasporic urbanism” (Ashutosh, 2019) to stress the remaking of borders that emerges in processes of settlement and the fostering of transnational connections. These connections arise from the diasporic “homing desire” (Blunt, 2005; Brah, 1996), in which separation from the homeland entails a search for home, and the impossibility of return to a home lost in the very act of displacement. This process reorients belonging and identity beyond origins, and, as such, beyond a singular site of origins. 273

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Saidiya Hartman (2008, p. 42) builds on this conception of diaspora as a condition that cannot be rectified by return in her call to “lose your mother” – to reject the search for origins and instead embrace a politics that engages with the difference and disjuncture between diaspora and the homeland. This imperative grew out of the failures of diasporic returns made clear by the contradictory positioning of slavery between diaspora and homeland. Hartman eloquently captured the gulf between diaspora and homeland through the spatial metaphor of the bridge, the very infrastructure so often used as a metaphor in the contemporary state language of diaspora engagement. Yet for Hartman bridges served “as much a reminder of my separation as my connection.” More than potential paths of return, bridges paved the passages of dispersal out of which distinct spaces and diverse histories were created. Looking beyond the optic of return, Gilroy’s (1993, p. 28) influential theorization of the black Atlantic remains an important source for thinking about diaspora politics that are unable to be readily mapped onto the terrain of national community and state power. Applying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari’s concept of the rhizome, Gilroy re-situated diaspora to a relational space of expansive connections that spread through horizontal, multi-stranded networks. This network is characterized by an antiphony, an intricate pattern of call and response that resonated across the Caribbean, Europe, North America, and Africa. These conceptions of diaspora enact new forms of thinking about the organization of the world as a composite of nation-states. Rather, it demands to look at the connections forged across multiple spaces. Historically, diaspora formations have shown precisely this kind of internationalism in which the homeland serves as the recasting of the imaginative geographies of connection, relational space, and not a return, but rather an evolving set of departures and interactions. Bald’s (2013) account of the lost histories of South Asian America disrupts the homeland orientation of diaspora to instead illuminate the homeland as a site of departure, with dispersals enabling settlements that transgress the boundaries of race and ethnicity and instead point to the possibility of rethinking the basis of community and identity. Other scholars have exposed the politics hatched across maritime spaces (Amrith, 2011; Bose, 2009). Once the wellspring of anti-colonial activity, Indian Ocean diasporas continue to contest the territorial sanctity that lies at the center of the official nationalisms of South Asian nation-states. As I suggested at the start of this section, diaspora politics that dispute origins by forsaking roots for routes (Christou and Mavroudi, 2016) embark on an openended political project that is imbued with the potential to expand across struggles and sites. Anandi Ramamurthy has shown how the Asian Youth Movements of 1980s Britain combatted anti-Asian racism in Britain that necessarily entailed centering experiences of colonial domination that encompassed the former colonies and metropole (Ramamurthy, 2013). They also forged links with Empire’s enduring forms in Northern Ireland and Palestine. Today, this strand of diaspora politics may appear subordinated under the weight of national populisms, in which diaspora either repeats the very exclusionary logic of nationalism as its precondition of freedom (Cheah, 2003) or is but a mere appendage of the state. Yet even here diaspora politics that search for a notion of community and identity beyond the homeland are discernable. Modi’s current hegemonic status, projected to the Indian diaspora most recently from a stage at Houston’s NRG Stadium in September 2019, could not conceal the oppositional forging of political solidarities in the South Asian diaspora. Azaad Austin and Alliance for Justice and Accountability, coalitions advancing progressive politics in the South Asian diaspora, countered the festive atmosphere of the Trump-Modi rally by representing India’s minorities. Political groups such as Students Against Hindutva Ideology (SAHI) led a “Holi Against Hindutva” protest across university campuses in the United States. These politics initiated by the South Asian diaspora seek to provide the basis for 274

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alternative conceptions of identity and belonging in which the homeland becomes the site to expose and represent marginalized voices. Other political organizations, such as South Asians for Black Lives (Soundarajan, 2020), have shown solidarity with recent anti-racist protests launched in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by interrogating South Asian America’s role in the promotion of anti-black racism, while also unearthing the complex entanglements between African American and South Asian struggles for liberation in the United States (Prashad, 2001; Slate, 2019).

Conclusion This chapter examined diasporic politics along three main avenues of inquiry in order to emphasize the ways in which it enlarges the sites and goals of political action. First, ­long-distance nationalism’s homeland orientation needs to be located within the desire to chart alternative projects from the outside. They attempt to restore dignity lost in the process of dispersal and in the marginalization that frames everyday life in the sites of settlement. These political acts replace loss with belonging, one that speaks to conditions in the diaspora as much, if not more than, the dream of return to the homeland. Second, diaspora strategies of emigrant states that attempt to (re-)incorporate segments of the diaspora aim to produce new national subjects and extra-territorial forms of state power. Such strategies risk supplanting diasporic projects that push against the nation-state’s limits by attempting to subordinate diaspora voices within state-based conceptions of the national community. Third, there are a range of diaspora politics that aim to problematize the relationship to the homeland and, more broadly, of the notion of origins as the anchor of community and belonging. Each of these strands of diaspora politics reveals that diaspora’s dynamics of dispersal, settlement, and transformation offer multiple and contesting forms from which to forge connections and create new solidarities.

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20 RELIGION, DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICS A critical appraisal of their relationship with reference to South Asian diaspora Pratap Kumar Penumala Religion, development and politics It may be a truism to say that the relationship between religion, development and politics perhaps goes back to the origins of religion itself. But their complex relationship in the post-colonial context is worth a critical analysis. Some scholars of development tend to contextualize the mutual relationship in the context of the “resurgence” of religious practice in the last 100 years (Alkire, n.d.: p. 3). Others see the invaluable role that religion plays in the context of development. However, their concern is that despite the resurgence of religion post-9/11 development organizations do not seem to give the weight it deserves. They do also recognize the invariable fear of the beneficiaries in the third world of the Western political agenda and dominance. The conference of the Lutheran World Federation (2012) on religion and development was at pains to reflect whether religions put people or their own institutions at the centre of the development agenda (Mtata, 2012: pp. 15–16). Other scholars in theological studies tend to begin the discourse on religion and development by assuming the presence of religion among the majority of the population concerned, e.g., South Africa, and they, therefore, link it with spiritual development (Erasmus, 2005). Several scholars have criticized the neglect of religion in the discourse of development. Some have argued that if culture is an important factor impacting on development, then religion being a core element of culture and the fact that religion has impacted on all aspects of society, then it should be taken into account in development studies (Selinger, 2004; also see Hovland, 2008; Clarke, 2013). Others have argued that both development and religion are concerned with better life and the changing social and political environment, and, therefore, demand attention to religion (Deneulin and Rakodi, 2011). Feener and Philip (2018) point to the examples in Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. They, however, point to the need for religious authority to be transformed “to introduce new visions of accountable leadership that present potential challenges to traditional charismatic religious authority” (2018: p. 17). Yet others have criticized the new interest from development agencies in religion—that such interest in religion is premised on the assumption that religion is not part of the mainstream while development is ( Jones and Petersen, 2011). Countering such view, Deneulin 278

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and Masooda (2013) have argued that the relationship between religion and development is inherent and is derived directly from the core beliefs of religious practitioners and hence there is no separation between religion and development. Although they have focused on Abrahamic religions, they assume that their thesis would apply to all other religions. However, their argument does not seem to take into account the variable that not all religions do actively involve themselves in development activities, or to the same extent that some religions are involved, while some religions are distinctly absent from such worldly activities. In his well-argued study, Hasan (2017) makes the following key point: The three dominant religions—Christianity, Islam and Hinduism—in all their varieties are adhered to by some two thirds of the population of the Global South; if we add to this numbers influenced by Confucian ideas, over 80% follow the four ideologies covered in this book. But their impact on development varies, and our overarching conclusion is that for Islam and Hinduism, it is almost entirely negative; for Christianity, is a mixed picture though tending towards the negative with the proviso that aspects of Protestantism may have a positive influence1. Confucianism, by contrast, given its non-dogmatic, human-centred doctrines, can realise a constructive impact. (Hasan, 2017: p. 191) Additionally, there is no necessary correlation between the active presence of a particular religion in a community and the involvement of the same religion in development activities. For instance, in a study on religion and social transformation in South Africa, Erasmus suggested that, on the basis of the fact that religious institutional presence in the area of the research concerned, religion (in this case Christian religion) has “the potential to promote change” (Erasmus, 2005: p. 146). It is one thing to assume that a religion has the potential to promote change, but in reality the situation could be different in that other variables could impact on the ability of religion to play a vital role in development. Be that as it may, some have emphasized the resilience of religion in some societies such as Africa as a force in development theory (ter Haar and Stephen, 2006), while others have departed from the institutionalized approach to development even among the religious groups and focused on how religious individuals have used their personal faith as an inspiration to engage in development activities (e.g., Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, and Project for Human Promotion run by a Catholic priest among mountain tribal people in Tokombéré in northern Cameroon) (Tyndale, 2003: p. 23). Kaag and SaintLary (2011) pointed out the role of the religious elite in the African context participating actively in the development activities. Adekeye has argued that intellectual elite should place greater emphasis on social reform (2014). However, Danjibi and Abubakar (2009) have offered caution against the patronage politics in which religious leaders are often found to be involved. Moreover, Okeke (2016) has convincingly argued against the pitfalls in privileging elite in politics. He underlines that “the Nigerian political elites have been united in the philosophy of plundering the nation for personal enrichment, through access to state power” (2016: p. 60). An emphasis on Human Rights discourse has also become significant in the discourse on religion and development prompting some scholars to suggest that rights-based approach to development has often ignored the role played by religion and culture in shaping an understanding of Human Rights (Tomalin, 2006). Notwithstanding such overwhelming support for religion to be included in the discussions on development, some scholars do flag the possible negative influences that religion can impose on development while arguing for the 279

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inclusion of religion in the development discourse (Clarke, 2013: pp. 5–6). Clarke’s comprehensive volume shows not only the Abrahamic religions, but Hindu and Buddhist religions too could be greatly amenable to development agenda (see Clarke, 2013: pp. 31–50, 79–96 for discussions on Buddhist and Hindu religions). Alkire (n.d.) has cautioned about some of the negative factors that religions can bring to bear on development agenda—­religious leaders can obstruct the development work in the areas of abortion, HIV/AIDS as they see such programmes as promoting Western liberal secular values; religious extremism can stymie development work; rivalry between religious actors and international organizations; ­co-operation from the religious elite with the state can implicate them in corruption (Ibid., pp. 5–6). The serious lack of cooperation and peace among religious leaders themselves can be a major stumbling block in development. It is illuminating to note the comments made by the former president of Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings, in the context of the Muslim-Christian conflict in Ghana: Jerry John Rawlings asked the religious leaders whether they and their membership were themselves at peace with one another. He asked the religious leaders to go back and reconcile themselves and their followers who engaged in violent confrontations and then to come back to teach the political leaders about peace. Unless they did that, he argued, they had no moral authority to broker peace between politicians. (Mtata, 2012: pp. 165–166) This observation is reinforced by the case of Nigeria. Ogbonnaya emphasizes the ­Christian-Muslim conflict that underlies the ongoing ethnic conflicts and loss of life and property in Nigeria (2012: p. 13). These observations underscore the complex nature of the involvement of religion in development. Furthermore, religion-based development organizations have often been criticized for using their aid projects for missionizing ­( Hoffstaedter, 2011: p. 7). From the point of view of economists, however, they admit the need to understand the relationship between culture and economic behaviour. Economists have argued in favour of “political economy approach” (Gani and Jean-Philippe, 2014: p. 588). Gani and ­Jean-Philippe have argued that using religion as an instrument can be two-fold—­ deploying religion as part of nation-building and using it as a mechanism to limit the opposition and entrench authoritarianism (Gani and Jean-Philippe, 2014: pp. 619–620). Of interest for us here is one of their conclusions that in the context of development, examining the relationship between religion and politics points out that “religion has been much more instrumentalized by the state than the state has been instrumentalized by religion” (2014: p. 626). This should caution development experts and practitioners to the possibility of abuse of religion in dealing with development projects, especially under state supervision or auspices. As noted by White et al. (2010: p. 43) “people follow what religious leaders say, so if it is possible to influence religious leaders, it will influence the people”. This idea of religious leaders being manipulated by political authorities is widely acknowledged by scholars (Agbiji and Swart, 2015: p. 14). This means while the relationship between religion, development and politics is intrinsic and endogenic, the abuse of this relationship that is often noted across the world needs to be underscored. It, therefore, makes sense for scholars who have acknowledged the positive role of religion in development to caution, “[W]e have emphasised that this is not a plea for adding religious institutions or networks to the list of existing instruments by which development policies are implemented” (ter Haar and Ellis, 2006: p. 365). 280

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There is a gross negligence on the part of the development agencies in the West by operating in isolation from the realities of the context in which the development programmes are implemented. The officials implementing the development programmes need to spend long periods becoming acquainted with key members of religious networks and establishing the mutual trust that is necessary to develop ideas together. In other words, if the development of Africa is to be taken seriously, it will require at least some categories of Western officials to change their mode of operation quite fundamentally. (Ibid.: p. 363) In other words, heavy reliance of officials of the Western development agencies on local religious elite can be detrimental to development if left unmonitored. The development agenda, especially of the third world countries, needs to be examined more broadly in the context of the type of governments that came to power and the policies they had adopted for social transformation, poverty alleviation and development. The unintended consequences of some of the policies only benefited a certain sector of people and not everyone. For instance, in countries like Argentina and Chile, [T]he pursuit of social justice by or through the state had merely created opportunities or rents for some at the expense of others—unionized workers at the expense of the non-unionized, for those enjoying legal protection at the expense of the rest; for importers at the expense of exporters and so on. (Lehmann, 1990: p. 76) Lehmann offers some insight into how the Church in Latin America plays a vital role in influencing politics almost to the extent of collaborating with the state. He also offers insight into the failure of the emergence of democracy in Latin America in the wake of alliances between ruling economic classes and the state (1990: pp. 31ff ). In continuity with the Catholic thought that placed its faith in the state, the new generation of activists, while rejecting repressive regimes that represented Marxism, as well as rejecting capitalist values, “as citizens of the Third World they derived from developmentalism a faith in the state…” (1990: p. 50), opted for the nationalization of idle industries and handing over the role of planning to the state. Underlying the critique of religion and development, there are two sides that need to be profiled—those who are entrenched in religion/religious institutional setting and feel the need for religion in development to be positively profiled, and those who are situated on the development spectrum and critique religion/religious institutional networks being in cahoots with the state to the detriment of the poor. In other words, one of the concerns is that those who critique development from the standpoint of religion seem to project a weak and simplistic understanding of development. Similarly, those who critique religion from development side of the equation seem to have a naïve understanding of religion (Marshall, 2013: p. 32). Another significant point is that development is often closely allied with democracy, especially liberal democracy. Implicit in this association between development and democracy is that religions that are seen to be anti-democratic tend to be anti-development as well. In other words, progress and modernity are intrinsic to democracy. Or to put it differently, modernity must lead to democratic ideal. This means, those who are opposed to democracy are also opposed to modernity and vice versa. It is in this context, Islam is one that is generally put under the microscope as one that does not subscribe to modernity. There are a plethora of books and papers on Islam and democracy (Cotran and Sherif, 1999; Bayat, 2007; 281

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Özbudun, 2009). In the context of Islam and Muslim countries, some scholars have argued that democracy is no precondition to economic development although emergence of middle class and increased standards of living can promote democracy (Cotran and Sherif, 1999: p. 18), while others have argued that contrary to international perception, Islam and the rule of law and democracy are not incompatible (Ibid.: p. xvi); yet others believe that independent judiciary is significant for democracy (Ibid.: p. 3). In other words, the argument here is that it is not so much that Islam is opposed to democracy and by implication to development, but rather the fact that most Muslim countries are poor and poorer communities have less education and hence lack understanding of core principles of democracy. But, in the case of Islam there is another moot point—some scholars believe that where there is separation of church and state, democracy generally flourishes, and because Islam insists on not separating the two realms it fails to reconcile with democracy (Neher and Marlay, 2018: p. 9). More broadly then, where religion is closely enmeshed in state politics, basic rights and freedoms may come under greater pressure leading to religion/religious institutions becoming an interference rather than help to progress, modernity and development. South-East Asia is a case in point where authoritarianism and democracy have been linked negatively. It would be interesting and useful to examine if religion in general gives rise to authoritarian dictatorial governments. In a significant number of cases where Muslim majority existed, dictatorial governments resulted thwarting the development projects. Dictatorial governments by nature tend to favour their populace to be relatively illiterate and poor so that it becomes easier for them to manipulate the masses. Such examples exist throughout Africa and elsewhere.

Religion, development and the South Asian diaspora Having offered a critique of the relationship between religion, development and politics in the foregoing pages, I now wish to contextualize the critique within the context of the South Asian diaspora. However, at the outset I should point out the paucity of case studies available on the role of religion within South Asian diaspora involvement in development. I, therefore, attempt a broader theoretical approach to the issue and offer some insights as to how religion might be understood as a role player in the context of development within the South Asian diaspora. My argument would be consistent with my above critique. Asian communities generally are today spread throughout the world. There was a time when it is humorously said that if America sneezes the whole world gets cold. But in the face of the new Coronavirus, we might as well say that if China sneezes the rest of the world better watch out. Indeed, many airlines have cancelled their flights to and from China in the unfolding saga of hundreds of deaths and thousands of infected people in China and the world is agonizing over its inability to travel to China to pursue their businesses being afraid of the virus’ destructive power. In a poignant way, it points out the fact that Asian communities have become globally significant to the extent that the Asian diaspora has become an important cog in the vast global machinery of trade and commerce and movement of people across the world. What does this global significance of Asian diaspora, in particular the South Asian diaspora, mean for the issues of religion, development and global politics? Implicitly and at times explicitly, I have tried to argue above that religion could be an impediment in the development projects because of its nefarious link with politics and power. However, from a sociological perspective, Asian diaspora broadly and South Asian diaspora in particular, especially in the West, tend to exude greater cultural and religious affinity than their counterparts in their places of origin. And equally significant is the fact that South Asian diaspora is quite deeply involved in various development projects often directed towards 282

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their countries of origin, almost as a return for the investments that those countries had made in those who immigrated to the West. Such projects emanate from a deep-seated loyalty to their social and cultural origins. Virtually all the development projects by the South Asian diaspora are geared towards a predominantly single goal of economically developing the people in the countries of origin. In other words, they are morally obligated to help their own communities in their countries of origin so that they can become economically improved. But this goal of economic development and independence has an unintended consequence. In a recent survey conducted by Pew Research Centre on living arrangements around the world and the role that religion plays in that scenario, they found that while religion seems to guide the trend of managing the size of the households, economically developed countries tend to have smaller households compared to the poorer countries. For instance, in Germany and Sweden there are an average of 2.7 members per household compared to the less economically developed countries in the Balkans, such as Kosovo and North Macedonia which have 6.8 and 4.6 members per household, respectively. In Asia, South Korea and Japan have 2.9 and 3.1 members, respectively, whereas in Afghanistan and Pakistan it is 9.8 and 8.5, respectively. Now, here comes the factor of religion—in Hindu (55%), Buddhist (44%) and Muslim (36%) societies, larger or extended households tend to be the norm. And Christian (29%) and Jewish (17%) homes tend to be of smaller households.2 South Asians in the diaspora generally come from a practice of extended family systems and there is a growing disquiet among them about the increasing trend of the collapse of the extended family system in the context of the diasporic societies. This obviously has to do with the increasing tendency of younger generation to opt for smaller nucleus families and confining their older generations to the care of old age homes and other such institutions. This is underpinned by the economic progress of these communities in the countries of their settlement. Scholars have noted the correlation between growing economic progress among the South Asian diaspora and the development engagement in countries from where they originated (Yong and Rahman, 2013; Singh and Koiri, 2018). One of the key areas of South Asian diaspora engagement in development has to do with the economic and social development “through remittances, foreign direct investments, business facilitation, entrepreneurship, charity work and philanthropy” (Yong and Rahman, 2013: p. 9). The development projects are undertaken by the South Asian diaspora with the goal of economic and social development; they are by default contributing to transformation of the extended family system in their home countries. Singh and Koiri have noted the significance of diaspora engagement in effecting social and cultural changes in countries of origin (2018: p. 480). In other words, such impact in the areas of culture and social systems could transform their families back home. As the families back home with the help of their relations abroad become economically independent, they too could move towards smaller nucleus family structures leading gradually to the collapse of the extended family system. And this, in fact, could be counterintuitive to the religious practices and belief systems that they adhere to. There is no denying the fact that religion does play a vital role in shaping the identities of South Asian immigrants in the West (Mohammad-Arif, 2007; Rai, and Sankaran, 2011; Shah, 2017). In particular the divisive role played by religion in the context of South Asian Hindus and Muslims in the US is made by Mohammad-Arif (2007). Given such volatile place of religion in the South Asian diasporic communities, their approach to development especially in the countries of their origin will invariably be informed by such divisive approach to their ethnic identities. For instance, as pointed out by Mohammad-Arif (2007) in the context of America, both Hindus and Muslims tended to chart a pathway to their ethnic identity through their historical differences along religious lines. Both have tended to lobby 283

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for political patronage within the US. This is done through establishment of organizational branches throughout America—the Muslims have extensive branches of Muslim Students Association and Islamic Circle of North America; the Hindus have established branches all over America for the Vishva Hindu Parishad which is “part of a network which includes the Overseas Friends of BJP, the Hindu Swayam Sewak Sangh (HSSS) which is the American equivalent of the RSS, and the Hindu Student Council (HSC) which is represented in several American universities” (Mohammad-Arif, 2007: p. 4). Such organizational networks of religions are part of what is often termed “religious transnationalism”. As McLoughlin argues, long-distance religious transnationalism, whether amongst the followers of Babbar Khalsa in Vancouver, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in London, or Jama’at-iIslami in New York, might take a number of forms, including fundraising and charitable giving, lobbying governments and international human rights organizations, as well as supporting more militant activities. (McLoughlin, 2013: p. 134) It is their religious connection to politics that betray their narrow focus of development along religious and ethnic lines. Similarly, the Jain diaspora in the West have used their religious identity to engage in development activities both in the diaspora and in South Asia (­ Vekemans, 2015). Such staunch religious identification in the context of development tends to cater to their narrow target group thereby leaving out the really needy and poor. In this context, it must be pointed out that both the remittances approach and other organization-based development projects tend to provide for the narrow target rather than to offer development to those who are in real need. This is not to suggest that religious networks are less significant for projects of global nature. For instance, Marshall and Corman (2016) in their study have underlined the importance of religious networks in enabling Burmese and Bhutanese refugees in the US to cope with the new environment. However, such narrowly focused development engagements tend to mask the underlying cultural and religious prejudices and perpetuation of those beliefs. In pursuit of developing business and other entrepreneurial opportunities, the South Asian diaspora are known to have used their cultural, religious and social capital by navigating through a network of political and diaspora connections. Often, this has happened in the context of returning expatriates to South Asia to “advance their global entrepreneurship and home country development” (Yong and Rahman, 2013: p. 10). The fact that governments of developing countries in South Asia particularly profile the diaspora as a valuable asset muddies the religious dimension of the various development agencies because of the invariable role of political connections in the development agenda. It is a well-known fact that the Government of India has launched its diaspora integration policy to attract the Indian diaspora capital to advance its domestic development agenda. Such policies tend to target the so-called most successful entrepreneurs of the diaspora rather than offering well-structured plan for investments in the development projects. Naturally, such politically motivated policies tend to advance narrow alliances between ruling parties and their political supporters in the diaspora. No wonder, as scholars have noted, Many Indians living abroad want to fund small projects in their home villages, but the procedural delays and corruption in India have made it difficult to implement their programmes. In other cases, the community felt that the procedures for transferring funds 284

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for philanthropic activities were too cumbersome, without much assurance that the funds would be used appropriately. Others complain of little protection in case of fraud or cheating in financial or land matters. (Singh and Koiri, 2018: p. 487) Religion and its affiliate agencies in development have not been able to separate themselves from the corruption and maladministration that permeates the bureaucracies of the developing countries in South Asia. The close proximity between religion and politics in South Asian society in fact lends itself to complicity in the prevailing environment of corruption and discrimination. Caste politics may be more endemic in South Asia, but a sense of caste consciousness and caste superiority is quite pervasive in the diaspora. A strong desire to be part of the same caste group in the diaspora has been identified among the Hindu Punjabis in the UK (Gorringe et al., 2017). Such sense of in-group identity invariably links them to their counterparts in South Asia via development activities. In other words, it is this strong caste sense in the diaspora that prompts them to become involved in the development of their own communities in South Asia, whether it is done through remittances or more formal development projects.

Conclusion In the above discussion, I have tried to highlight the complex nature of religion in the context of development. The difficulty with involving religion in development as a base tends to not only limit the scope but also, in view of the fact that religion is often invariably linked to regional and national politics, impact negatively on the outcomes of the development projects. Abuse of the relationship between religion and politics has been underlined above. I have also noted above that there is no necessary correlation between the existence of religious majority and their involvement in development. Notwithstanding the fact that religious inspiration and consciousness often could be seen as the driving force behind development projects, I have also noted that patronage politics that involve religious leadership can stymie the effective achievement of developmental goals for a wider society. I have also noted above that where religion becomes enmeshed in state politics, religious institutions can be an interference to progress, modernity and development. It is against the background of the above points that I have analysed the role of religion in the South Asian diaspora in relation to development. One of the significant characteristics of South Asian diaspora is the affinity they exhibit to their cultural and religious traditions. Using their religious identities not only do they lobby for political patronage in the countries of their settlement, but they also establish political linkages with their countries of origin. This tendency, coupled with the more aggressive approach by South Asian countries to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from South Asian diaspora for various projects, tends to limit the relevance of such projects for the larger and needier sections of the population. Such close proximity between religious identities of South Asian diaspora communities and political patronage does privilege certain groups who can leverage the governments leading to more corrupt forms of engagement in the guise of development. Needless to say, the undying caste consciousness among the South Asian diaspora can also have a negative impact on developmental activities in their home countries. It is, therefore, suggested that greater caution needs to be taken in regard to overt involvement of religious and cultural agenda in the development projects. Although religious and cultural networks are important to garner financial support for development, such networks should also be carefully monitored for their long-term effects and narrowly based goals. 285

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Notes 1 Heslam (2014) argues that solution to poverty is material wealth and that business generates wealth. Christianity offers conducive environment for business. His case is based on the examination of Evangelical-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement. 2 See ‘Religion and Living Arrangements around the World’. Religion and Public Life, Pew Research Centre, December 12, 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.pewforum.org/2019/12/12/ religion-and-living-arrangements-around-the-world/

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21 FROM ‘POLITICAL TO SOCIAL’ ROLE The shifting strategy of Indonesian diaspora movement on development Bilal Dewansyah Introduction The establishment of the Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN) in 2012 as a formal organization of overseas Indonesians has brought significant influence on the domestic dynamic in Indonesia. In the last few years, through this organization, the campaign on full dual citizenship adoption not only shaped the Indonesian public discourse but also entered into the legislative formal agenda – so-called Prolegnas (National Legislative Program) for 2014–2019. They called this proposal as aspirasi akar rumput or grass-root aspiration (Wanandi, 2015, p. 11) that implicitly shows this is as their main political agenda. In current Indonesian citizenship law (Law No. 12/2006), dual citizenship is prohibited, except for children until 18 years old, and maximum after three years such age (21 years old), they should choose only one citizenship, whether Indonesian or the second citizenship (Harijanti et al., 2007, pp. 53–54). However, this proposal, even though implicitly supported by the government, faced many rejections from members of Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR), an Indonesian House of Representatives, and, therefore, failed to pass in that period (Dewansyah, 2019, pp. 57–58). Another fact acknowledged after that failure was that Indonesian diaspora activists were seen to shift their strategy to be more involved with development issues and thus looking for potential fields to be filled in supporting the government program as well as to gain public support. Although their political agenda on dual citizenship law was still listed in their program, to some extent, it put down after their programs on development issue, especially since 2017 – the fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (CID-4) Global Summit (IDNGlobal, 2017a). However, the latter role is not a completely new strategy for their movement. Previously, they had been involved in some social development programs that benefited Indonesian society in the home country, such as providing public housing in cooperation with Jakarta Provincial Government, fundraising to provide computers and foster parents program, and was involved to build access bridges to schools in rural areas. These involvement conducted through their task forces and the Indonesian Diaspora Foundation (IDF), an affiliated organization of the IDN (IDN-Global, 2014, p. 1; Supriyadi, 2015, p. 9). However, the Indonesian public in general was not made well aware of this role, compared to the dual citizenship issues, which gained more public attention. 288

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In another aspect, this shifting strategy was also influenced by an internal split of the IDN organization in 2017, after the two similar congresses were held almost simultaneously, followed by the establishment of another diaspora formal organization so-called Indonesian Diaspora Network United (IDN-United), besides the existing IDN that then called IDNGlobal (I. Morgan, personal communication, February 10, 2019). Initially, before this split was known by the public, some of IDN activists had resigned from the IDN management – one of the reasons was also a strategy to advocate dual citizenship (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 58). In this paper, I argue that this situation occurred because of a political setting that does not support the dual citizenship proposal and the need to prove its tangible contribution to society. To support this argument, I will analyze the political setting as the cause: in the macro informal political sphere, in internal politics in the IDN organization, and in public response. Then I will provide elaboration on how this shifting happened. In the following section, I will first describe the concept of Indonesian diaspora, then discuss several aspects of how this concept is developed and challenged, and its dynamic as a background to analyze the main argumentation. In the next section, I will begin the analysis on how the IDN has set up its agenda since the first Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (CID-1) in 2012, including the rise of dual citizenship aspiration over their social roles; I will also explain how and why this aspiration is rejected in the current political setting. The next section will elaborate on the process and reasons for role shifting of the IDN strategy – more emphasis on their social roles in development, and how they interact within the network and with the government. I will then provide a brief conclusion, summarize the finding and draw some reflection on the roles of Indonesian diaspora in development.

Indonesian diaspora: a contested concept and its dynamic The term ‘Indonesian diaspora’ or ‘diaspora Indonesia’ is a relatively new concept both in academic literature and in public discourse. It indeed does not have any entry yet even in the official dictionary of the Indonesian language (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia – KBBI). The term was introduced by Tan-Cullamar in his article ‘The Indonesian Diaspora and Philippine-­ Indonesian Relations’, published in 1993, which referred to migrants living in the Philippines who came from the Sangire-Talaud area in northeastern Sulawesi, an island in Indonesia’s territory. This migration occurred since the 1990s in the Dutch East Indies colonial era and continuously happened after Indonesia’s independence. Tan-Cullamar classified these migrants as diaspora because they established ‘a minority ethnic group’ and have maintained ‘sentimental and links with their homeland’ (Tan-Cullamar, 1993, p. 41), although a recent study shows that this homeland orientation is becoming less prevalent for young diaspora (Talampas, 2015, p. 151). Nevertheless, I suggest that Tan-Cullamar called them ‘Indonesian Diaspora’, not ‘Sangire Diaspora’, because the term ‘Indonesian’ also refers to citizenship status: he stated, ‘they are Indonesian citizens’. Even though this definition meets the modern concept of the diaspora which not always reflected the negative migratory situation, such ­ igau, Pande, and as Jewish, Armenian or Greeks diasporas in exile (Missbach, 2012, p. 14; T Yuan, 2017, p. 191), this term was unpopular until it was publicly introduced by the IDN in 2012 (Setijadi, 2017, p. 9; Dewansyah, 2019, p. 56). Before 2012, many literature attributed the ‘diaspora’ lens to a particular ethnic group, originally from the Indonesia region who migrated and settled in another country. In this context, Missbach has observed that many studies have been carried out on Papuans, ­Moluccans, East Timorese and Acehnese diasporas, mostly in conflict situations in relation to secessionist movements (Missbach, 2019, p. 198). For Acehnese diaspora, Missbach’s work 289

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(2012) provides an extensive ethnographical analysis of Acehnese diaspora’ long-distance politics – most of them lived in Malaysia – in time of conflict and the post-conflict situation in Indonesia (1970–2005). Another important example is a study from van Amersfoort (2004) on Moluccan diaspora in the Netherlands after the decolonization of Dutch East Indies which – according to this study – transformed to an immigrant community that gradually integrate into the host society. Overall, because Indonesia is a multi-ethnic country, rather than a single homogeneous nation, studying specific ethnic diaspora is always interesting since each of these groups has different collective local traditions and histories which also influence their migratory pattern. However, the existence of ethnic-based Indonesian overseas cannot be overgeneralized by the fact that citizenship or nationality sentiment has no role at all in forming Indonesian diaspora identity. In this context, the case of Indonesia’s exile in 1965 could be the best example from the past about how national sentiments triggered the formation of non-ethnic diaspora groups. In this case, following a bloody putsch in Indonesia in 1965, many Indonesian citizens abroad, mostly students, had their citizenship status revoked because they were allegedly affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) or at least perceived as a pro-President Soekarno’s group (Sipayung, 2011, pp. 4, 16). Since then, they have sought protection; fought for citizenship in some Western European states, mostly the Netherlands, France and Sweden; and thus began the creation of the diasporic network in exile (Dragojlovic, 2012, pp. 162–163). Another type of non-ethnic diasporic community is Indonesian overseas workers (Tenaga Kerja Indonesia – TKI), most common in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia (Muhidin and Utomo, 2015, p. 96). Since the early 1980s, the dispersion and life of this migrant has been gaining public attention (Tirtosudarmo, 2018, p. 133). They are mostly lowskill women workers but are considered to be ‘hard-currency heroes’ (Pahlawan Devisa in Indonesian or literally, foreign exchange hero) for sending remittances to family in Indonesia and thus economically help the government to alleviate poverty. On the other hand, they often face human rights violations (Hearman, 2016, p. 239; Setijadi, 2017, pp. 5–6; Missbach and Palmer, 2018). In this case, the nationalist narrative played significantly in the form of pressure to the government to take adequate measures to protect and promote welfare to the workers (Hearman, 2016, p. 239). Even though the existence of non-ethnic Indonesian overseas with various terminology has been observed in many studies, ‘the Indonesian Diaspora’ terminology introduced by the IDN has some distinctive features. First, it is a self-constructed terminology coined by the insider, rather than an academic or political phrase labeled from the outsider perspective. In this context, this term represents the global collective movement of overseas Indonesians, which is institutionalized through a general and formal organization that has never been established before. Its self-constructed nature also reflected from their commitment expressed in the Declaration of Indonesian Diaspora at the first Congress of Indonesia Diaspora (IDN) in 2012 to connect each other regardless of their geographical boundary to contribute for better Indonesia (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 56). Second, it thus not only refers to the Indonesian nation as a unit attributed to overseas Indonesians, regardless of ethnicities, but also promotes a more optimistic and positive image of people living abroad. As I already noted, most of the narratives of the Indonesian overseas community mirror pejorative exposition, from a secessionist image, exiling from homeland to struggle from inhuman practices. In contrast, IDN’s concept of diaspora promotes a positive image that emphasizes a collaborative approach among overseas Indonesians in contributing to national prosperity. In this respect, one of the founders of the IDN, Dino Patti Djalal (Indonesian ambassador to the United States, 2010–2013), states that when he was in office as an ambassador, he met many scholars 290

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and entrepreneurs from the Indonesian community, and he was surprised by their success stories but they did not know each other. Then the idea emerged to connect these individual dots to be a global network ( Jusuf, 2017). Nevertheless, in some aspects ‘the Indonesian Diaspora’ concept popularized by the IDN seems contested. Even though, in the Declaration of Indonesian Diaspora (2012), it is clearly stated that the Indonesian diaspora consists of ‘Indonesian citizens (abroad) and citizen of other nations who poses Indonesian ancestry’ (IDN-Global, 2019), Djalal defines this term in a wider sense. His definition includes: (1) the Indonesian people who still legally have their Indonesian passports; (2) the Indonesian citizens who became foreign citizens after a process of naturalization and no longer have their Indonesian passports; (3) foreigners who have parents or ancestors of Indonesian origin; and (4) foreigners who have no Indonesian origin at all but love Indonesia (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 56). The final category is difficult to include as diaspora in the context of cross-border migration as the term is always correlated with birth and descent (Muhidin and Utomo, 2015, p. 95). Later, in the interview with Setijadi (2017, p. 10), Djalal exlcudes the fourth category of Indonesian diaspora. While the three former categories have a specific sense in which Indonesian descendant are the keywords, the fourth one not only presents difficulty in defining numbers globally (Setijadi, 2017, p. 10) but also lacks agreement on what generational level can be classified as Indonesian diaspora. For instance, in India, diaspora status – Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) – is recognized up to third-generation descendants (Harijanti et al., 2018, p. 333), similar with South Korea which also attribute the Overseas Korean status up to third-generation emigrants (Lee, 2012, p. 93). This categorization will be useful when entering the discourse and formulating the diaspora policy and legal framework. As I will discuss later, there has already been significant progress in Indonesian law on this issue, and it can also be improved in the future. Another contested feature of the Indonesian diaspora concept is related to those who are included and excluded from this group. Formally, as stated in the Declaration of Indonesian Diaspora, it includes a very inclusive category of social groups: professionals, labors, nurses, ship crew, engineers, architects, teachers, students, politicians, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, innovators, athletes, religious figures, youngsters, housewives and many more (IDN-Global, 2019). However, a high-level or elitist impression of Indonesian diaspora is undeniable since it mostly refers to the success story of several groups, leading to other group members, such as low-skilled migrant workers, being excluded (Suastha, 2017). Moreover, the exclusion of other marginal Indonesian overseas communities from the Indonesian diaspora has been publicly observed with regard to many aspects, such as the involved people, issues concerned, and events conducted by the IDN. Wahyu Susilo – who founded Migrant Care, an Indonesian NGO which actively advocates for migrant worker’s rights – spoke of a time in 2012 when many migrant workers in Hong Kong were prohibited to join a meeting between President Yudhoyono and IDN representatives in a hotel due to exclusivity of that event (Indana, 2017). Until 2015 when a big event ‘A Thousand TKI and Diaspora Meeting’ was held as an unseparated event from the third Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (Arubone, 2015), migrant workers’ issues were never included on the main IDN congress agenda (Setijadi, 2017, p. 25). Thus, the Indonesian diaspora term, although it conceptually refers to the Indonesian global community, is bound by ‘common national homeland and modern nationhood’ (Setijadi, 2017, p. 8) and thus reflects inclusivity but is overshadowed by, perhaps unintentional, exclusivity. In general, ‘Indonesian diaspora’ can be perceived as an ongoing concept which apparently will thrive in many aspects, from socio-political perspectives and legal arrangements. As will be shown in the next section, the practical conception of the Indonesian diaspora 291

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which is still debated, will determine the actual role of this community, particularly through the IDN in national development.

The early movement: ‘political over social’ role toward dual citizenship The earlier movement of the Indonesian diaspora community via the IDN started with optimism that overseas Indonesians can have more roles to support each other and ultimately for Indonesian society. This can be seen formally from the agendas – such as entrepreneurship, job creation, trade and investment opportunities, education, culture, art and science, and consular affairs – that were discussed in the first Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (CID-1) in 2012 at Los Angeles, the United States (USINDO, n.d.). Interestingly, one of the panels entitles ‘Citizenship and Immigration’ which brought together speakers from high-level immigration bureaucrat to Indonesian House of Representative – DPR – also was colored by aspiration of dual citizenship from the overseas Indonesians who previously voiced out a petition on it since 2011 (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 53). They believed that dual citizenship law will generate more benefits – not only personal benefits for individual Indonesian diaspora, such as easiness in setting up a business in Indonesia, but also a more public benefit to Indonesian society, such as economic investment, which they believe will be higher if this proposal adopted (Irawan, 2012, p. 29). Nevertheless, although the dual citizenship proposal had a positive tone in CID-1, it was unclearly responded by the representative of the government and DPR. In this context, Priyo Budi Santoso, a vice speaker of the DPR, spoke that this aspiration will be discussed in the DPR forum, while the government representative, Director General of Immigration Bambang Irawan, focused on developing a legal framework on a diaspora identity card that will allow diaspora to open a national bank account, apply for multiple reentry visas or buy non-landed property (Irawan, 2012, pp. 22, 29). After CID-1, the IDN focused on exercising its strategic program and institutional building to concretize its program. They established some structures: IDN Brain Bank, Indonesian Diaspora Business Council (IDBC) and Indonesian Diaspora Foundation (IDF) as IDN wing for social activities as well as IDN country chapter and a local chapter (Djalal, 2013). After the 2013 CID-2, held in Jakarta, the IDN continued to focus on the institutional building: IDN-Global was created as a global structure with 12 task forces, including Task Force on Immigration and Citizenship, which is dedicated to advocating for dual citizenship (Anonymous, 2015, p. 18; Wanandi, 2015, p. 11). Thus, IDN’s inside agenda is not only limited to dual citizenship advocacy; it is wider than that – it comprises many strategic aspects to engage Indonesian diaspora in business activities oriented to the homeland, economic contribution (for instance, to optimize remittance effect), human capital mapping and social development, particularly through philanthropy activities (Wanandi, 2015, pp. 10–11). However, dual citizenship issues attracted more public attention, especially after CID-2, when the Task Force on Immigration and Citizenship also organized several seminars in cooperation with many well-known scholars and public universities (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 53). This task force also approached DPR effectively. As mentioned earlier, this task force succeeded in influencing DPR to include the amendment of Citizenship Law (Law No.12/2006) in the national legislative program, 2015–2019. These significant attempts, which are mostly reported by the press, raised public debate on dual citizenship, thus hiding IDN broader roles, at least from the public optic. Although the newly elected President Joko Widodo and his administration had agreed to include dual citizenship for the diaspora, opposite responses came from members of DPR 292

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(House of Representative) who perceived this proposal intentionally pushed to protect certain interests and assumed that dual citizenship and nationalism are contrary (Setijadi, 2017, p. 18, Harijanti et al., 2018, p. 305; Dewansyah, 2019, p. 57). This rejection appeared dominantly, in particular, after the dual citizenship case of Arcandra Tahar – a returned US-based Indonesian diaspora who was appointed as the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources – was reported by the national press that he also holds US nationality. In Indonesian citizenship law, an Indonesian citizen who acquires foreign citizenship (or nationality) automatically loses his/her citizenship status, then this is announced publicly in Berita Negara (State gazette). Afterward, President Widodo dismissed Mr. Tahar in August 2016 and appointed him a new position in the same ministry as a vice-minister, after Minister of Law and Human Rights made a controversial decree reaffirming Mr. Tahar status as an Indonesian citizen. Ultimately, the rejection or, at the very least, an uncertain delay for dual citizenship became clear in the 2017 CID-4. At that event, the DPR representative stated that dual citizenship law cannot be adopted in the near future (Setijadi, 2017, pp. 18–20). To summarize, dual citizenship rejection is arguably caused by nationalism sentiments or disloyalty perception and security issues as well as practical matters, such as tax evasion (Harijanti, 2017, p. 2; Setijadi, 2017, pp. 19–20). The 2017 CID-4 was also controversial since it represented two separate congress agendas of the IDN: one was held in July, called ‘CID’ and initiated by IDN-Global adviser Dino Pati Djalal, with an exclusive speech from the US President Barack Obama, while another, called ‘Indonesian Diaspora Global Summit’, was conducted in August (Anonymous, 2017a). These two large IDN events marked an internal split in this organization, as I noted earlier, and thus formed another diaspora organization called ‘IDN-United’. According to I. Morgan (personal communication, February 10, 2019), all of the task forces from IDNGlobal, including Task Force on Immigration and Citizenship, moved to IDN-United side, although the latter also existed in IDN-Global structure. Nonetheless, the internal division in the IDN structure had occurred since 2015, when some of IDN activists, such as Indah Morgan (Coordinator of Task Force on Immigration and Citizenship – Global), resigned because of a disagreement with IDN-Global board, including on dual citizenship issue and advocacy (I. Morgan, personal communication, April 12, 2015; Dewansyah, 2019, pp. 58–59). While in Indonesia dual citizenship has not been fully accepted, as a global trend, it has been adopted in 75% of countries as of 2018 (Vink et al., 2019, pp. 362–363). In this context, it is practically more accepted and conceptually tends to have a positive meaning. The wide recognition of dual citizenship started after the human rights norm recognized internationally after World War II (Spiro, 2010, pp. 113, 116). Thus, dual citizenship can give more protection to individual human rights: if particular human rights cannot be protected adequately in one country, another country of citizenship subsidiary will fill this gap. While dual citizenship often suspected to pose a national security threat, for example, espionage, there is no clear evidence on it in practice, nor in a war between two states (Spiro, 2010, p. 115). Although the practical problems of dual citizenship, such as tax payments or military services, require extra efforts, they can be resolved as long as the government of the involved countries is keen to cooperate. The above explanation thus exposes dual citizenship rejection as something beyond fully rational consideration, but it touches on more ideologically related matters (Harijanti et al., 2018, p. 305). As I previously argued, the rejection of dual citizenship touches on one Indonesian constitutional identity: anti-dual citizenship (Dewansyah, 2019, p. 53). Nevertheless, mirroring from ‘limited dual citizenship’ for children’s inclusion in the 2006 Citizenship 293

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Law, relaxation on the single citizenship principle is indeed possible. Thus, as a constitutional identity, such a principle is subject to modification but is indestructible ( Jacobson, 2010, p. 7). In this case, dual citizenship for diaspora can be perceived as ‘exception’, which does not undermine the notion of single citizenship. However, the Indonesian diaspora’s proposal on dual citizenship was far from clear and thus not convincing to law-makers. Inconsistent criteria of Indonesian diaspora have led to the perception that the Indonesian diaspora demanded wider dual citizenship, and abolish the single citizenship principle (Secretariat General of DPR, 2015, p. 24). Although the IDN then tried to convince DPR and the public that the dual citizenship proposal is meant not for general foreigners but for Indonesian descendants and former Indonesian citizens (Anonymous, 2017b), it was not supported by written concrete proposal: how it would be inserted in Citizenship Law. They realized that conceptual and academic justification such as writing diaspora’ version of Naskah Akademik (academic paper) was needed to convince DPR. Yet it was never been produced until the national legislative program ended in 2019. Thus, despite the lack of political design, the rejection of dual citizenship was also caused by the unpreparedness movement of the IDN in developing a more accepted concrete proposal. In another perspective, the dual citizenship movement proposed by diaspora groups reached some development of legal and policy frameworks: finding an alternative. In this case, the Indonesian government favors more to adopt a softer diaspora policy in the field of immigration law guaranteed special rights instead of ‘formal’ dual citizenship (Harijanti, et al, 2018, p. 305; Dewansyah, 2019, p. 58). In 2016, the government revised visa regulation with Government Regulation (GR) No. 26/2016, which regulated some categories of foreigner: former Indonesian citizens, and their spouses and children, could obtain a ­multiple-entry visit visa for five years, marking an exception to the general rule that it is only valid for 60 days and cannot be extended. Furthermore, in 2017 the government then issued Presidential Regulation (PR) No.  76 of 2017 on Facility for Indonesian Overseas Community (Masyarakat Indonesian di Luar Negeri) or popularly Presidential Regulation on Diaspora Card because it mainly governs issuance Kartu Masyarakat Indonesian di Luar Negeri (Overseas Indonesian Community Card), which gives the holders – in this case, Indonesian diaspora – some facilities or rights. However, compared with GR 26/2016, this regulation adopts broader categories of Indonesian Diaspora because it also includes overseas Indonesian who still retain their Indonesian citizenship status; on the other hand, it excludes other categories stipulated in GR 26/2016: the spouses and children of former Indonesia citizens. The non-citizen categories of this community, according to PR on Diaspora Card, consists of: first, former Indonesian citizens; second, children who have relinquished their Indonesian citizenship status (in the case of a dual citizenship child it is allowed until they reach 18–21 years); and third, a foreigner whose parent is an Indonesian citizen who has settled and/or works overseas (Harijanti et al., 2018, p. 308). Although the PR made an explicit reference to Indonesian Diaspora as Overseas Indonesian Community who have some ‘facilities’, or rights, these facilities, such as opening a bank account and owning property, are only explicitly granted to those who still hold Indonesian citizenship status. In contrast, for the ‘foreigners’ categories, it stated diplomatically in Article 3 (4): ‘can be granted facility and easiness according to the legislation’, thus refers to another law which has not been created yet. The government argued that they focus first to identify the number of Indonesian Diaspora within the Diaspora Card framework (Putra, 2017). However, from the perspective of the diaspora community, this card model is seen to be useless, resulting in dissatisfaction among diasporas (WGIK IDN-G, 2020, p. 20). 294

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Strategy turning: shifting the role and unintentionally split-up As I already explained, the social role of Indonesia diaspora through the IDN has been seen in many development projects to support the government program or directly help specific Indonesian community. However, this role, more limited to philanthropy practices, distributes financial contribution from Indonesian diaspora abroad to society in Indonesia through charity projects and promoting Indonesia’s culture and products (Setijadi, 2017, p. 13). Thus, even though it provides tangible results to bridge community needs and government capacity gaps, in the IDN case, it lacks the sustainability needed for a more strategic effect on long-term development. Nonetheless, this strategy had shifted since the second version of CID-4 Global Summit held in August 2017, which emphasized to concretize the role of Indonesian diaspora with the real program, not just ideas or talks (Banirestu, 2017). Thus, in that event, four so-called ‘breakthrough’ programs were discussed and launched: (1) education and telemedicine initiative for Papua and West Papua provinces, (2) energy initiative to meet national demands, (3) global diaspora protection advocacy and first legal aid for diaspora, and (4) diaspora cards as well as a discussed concrete program in every IDN task force (IDN-Global, 2017a). Although dual citizenship discussion was also placed in four break-out or parallel sessions, it was not the only focus of the IDN movement. Moreover, overseas Indonesian or migrant workers’ issues, which in all previous congresses only took up a small part of the events, were, in the 2017 Global Summit, discussed as part of the breakthrough program on diaspora protection advocacy in plenary session and further elaborated in four parallel sessions ­(IDN-Global, 2017b). In general, the 2017 Global Summit was the first turning point of the IDN movement strategy to respond to public doubt on the diaspora’s contribution to national needs and problems. Nevertheless, after the IDN split into two separate organizations in 2018 (Utomo et al., 2018), most of those programs focused on long-term empowerment were conducted by the new IDN-United networks, instead of IDN-Global. For example, in 2018, a breakthrough program on Papua and West Papua project has been started by conducting a workshop for teachers in two high schools in Papua on integrated teaching technology. This event was organized by some Indonesian diaspora professors from Indonesian American Society of Academics (IASA) and coordinated directly by IDN-United President, Herry Utomo, who is also the chairman of IASA in cooperation with Kementerian-PPN/Bappenas (Ministry/ Agency of National Development Planning) (IDN-United, 2018a, p. 1). It then continued in 2019 when IDN-United via IASA in collaboration with Bappenas initiated an Integrated Boarding School program for two schools in Papua Province and was combined with a telemedicine pilot project in a community health center (Puskesmas) (IDN-United, 2019, p. 2). Addressing the social problems in less-developed provinces like Papua with a strategic long-term program shows the commitment of IDN-United to involving the national development project concretely. Outside of the breakthrough program, diaspora philanthropy is still conducted by the two IDN organizations. For IDN-United through IDF, this strategy is less dominant as IDF also have many long-term programs. Therefore, they only apply this strategy mostly for emergency response, such as fundraising for Lombok island earthquake victims in 2018 or donation to Asmat people in Papua province after health crisis occurring also in 2018 ­(IDN-United, 2018b, p. 10; IDN-United, 2018c, p. 4). However, for IDN-Global philanthropy, it still seems to be the main strategy used in concretizing the role of the diaspora; for example, IDN-Global launched the ‘Diaspora Care’ program which distributes monthly 295

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financial donation from Indonesian diaspora abroad to Indonesian families who become unemployed due to COVID-19 pandemic (Iswara, 2020). Interestingly, both IDN-United (and its affiliated organizations such as IDF or IDBC) and IDN-Global conduct most of their programs based on formal agreements with government agencies, such as the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between IDN-Global and Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration for Diaspora Care program, MoU between IDN-United and Bappenas for Papua education and health project, or MoU between IDBC and Ministry of Interior for sister city program (IDN-United, 2018d, p. 8; IDN-United, 2019, p. 1). This pattern implies that the diaspora organization has a strategic role as a partner for the government to accelerate development. Furthermore, the government’s attempts to harness the capacity of the diaspora have become more active since 2018, not just on the basis of the diaspora’s proposal. It has thus appeared in at least two government programs – diaspora recruitment in domestic position and sovereign bonds for diaspora (Surat Utang Negara – SUN), and diaspora bond – echoing common patterns in terms of what diaspora policy intended to exploit: human capital/ ­ igau et al., 2017, ­t alent and economic investment (Agunias and Newland, 2012, p. 26; T pp. 200–201). Indonesia began to recruit from among its talented diaspora in 2018, with positions specifically for Indonesian diaspora (for those who are still Indonesian citizens) in civil service recruitment. Nevertheless, though there were 99 positions intended for the Indonesian diaspora, only 15 applicants completed final registration (Pratama, 2018). One of the reasons for this regulatory mismatch was that many talented diasporas are in their 40s, while, according to regulation, the maximum age to apply for civil service positions is 35 (Awaliyah, 2018). Later, being aware of the mobility nature of diaspora, the government began to look at other options for recruiting diasporas – through a non-permanent government officials’ scheme (Kencana, 2018). Moreover, a talent diaspora program has recently been introduced through the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) research grant program to fund joint research between Indonesian scientists abroad and Indonesian-based researchers. (LPDP, 2020). However, managing talented diaspora directly needs a huge economic incentive. China, for instance, as a country with a sophisticated economic condition, started to recruit its high-skilled diaspora in 1992 with a short visits programs, mostly during the summer, with an attractive pay package which is five times greater than the wage abroad, and then developed many kinds of program, such as funded research programs, visa exemption schemes and recently the ‘1,000 Talents program’, which have recruited 4,000 overseas Chinese in six years to return and work in scientific positions (Tigau et al., 2017, pp. 196–198). Nevertheless, for countries that are still struggling with economic improvement, recruiting diaspora with a direct state (financial) incentive is not a favorable option. For example, India, which is currently known for its success in the IT industry with its diaspora, did not begin with human capital policy directly; instead, it developed investment policy supported with a quasi-citizenship status, such as OCI and its predecessors, which provided visa exemption and privileges in investment in many fields, such as setting up business and owning properties, with only a small exception in agriculture estate as well as issuing special bonds (Tigau et al., 2017, pp. 195–196; Harijanti et al., 2018, p. 304). In this context, although some diaspora talent programs are have been formulated by government agencies, it looks unconnected and poorly designed. In other words, it does not reflect the needs and capacity calculation on how this diaspora talent policy can effectively benefit Indonesian society. From many government initiatives, it can be said that the diaspora bond is the most promising attempt to institutionalize the diaspora’s contribution to national development. It 296

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is also well planned in the regard that the Financial Service Authority (OJK) started a study on it in 2016 (OJK, 2016), and many related government agencies, as well as civil society organizations, including diaspora organizations, have been involved in the preparation, survey and information sharing to overseas Indonesian communities (N. Hallet, personal communication, January 15, 2020). This instrument will be offered only in certain times (not regularly) to overcome state budget mismatch calculation, for example, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, for three-year fixed periods and interest (Anonymous, 2020). It is more likely to reflect the Indian model of diaspora bonds (with various types) that intended as emergency finance, rather than Israeli’ model which sells annually to finance development projects (Ketkar and Ratha, 2007, pp. 10–15). In the future, Indonesia can seek the possibility of adopting the various types of diaspora bonds for broader development objectives. Overall, the government offering on this bond has indeed gained positive response from overseas Indonesian (Massabuau, 2020). All in all, The Indonesian diaspora should be more engaged in socio-economic development dialogically responded by government policy as well as public acceptance. However, government policies to harness diaspora potential have not been translated into sufficient institutional schemes, such as in India and China, which have separate ministry/agency or public-private organizations to deal with diaspora-related affairs (Tigau et al., 2017, pp. 195–196, 198). In this context, a small, informal ‘Diaspora Desk’ in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, established under President Yudhoyono administration, is not adequate to develop more well-coordinated diaspora-oriented programs. This is another problem that the government should address, by taking into account institutional building to translate policy into a more workable program. Furthermore, although the Indonesian diaspora has demonstrated its social and economic roles in national development, its political aspirations also remain strong. Because of their active role, mainly through IDN-United, the Citizenship Act amendment’ agenda, a gateway for dual citizenship, has been re-listed once again in Prolegnas 2020–2024 (Anonymous, 2019). Moreover, both IDN-United and IDN-Global made significant contributions during the 2019 National Election through a survey on overseas Indonesian voters’ attitudes and a campaign to disseminate candidate profiles (Anggriawan, 2019; Medistiara, 2019). In general, the role of Indonesian diaspora in recent years has become more proportional, both in its socio-economic development and in its political role.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how the Indonesian diaspora movement – through IDN – emerged and evolved in a national development context, beginning as an exclusive elite group – in a public perspective – focusing on the dual citizenship agenda, then changing to become known for their socio-economic role and contribute to development directly. IDN’s interactions with its internal networks and other overseas Indonesian communities, such as low-skilled migrant workers, have resulted, on the one hand, in unique changes in redefining the term ‘Indonesian Diaspora’ to be more inclusive in practice but reflected, on the other hand, that it is not possible to see a single face of ‘Indonesian diaspora’ within a single organization, as seen in the internal divisions in the IDN structure. Because they are heterogenic, differences in vision, strategy, and imagination to contribute to the homeland are inevitable. As this chapter shows, the internal division within the IDN has led to changes in the diaspora strategy to be more innovative and to significantly contribute to development, without abandoning original strategies, such as philanthropic practices and second-track diplomacy 297

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promoting Indonesian culture and commodities abroad, including their political aspiration: dual citizenship. Thus, the government’s response through several policies and public awareness to the Indonesian diaspora movement can be considered as a result of this change. Even though the government’s current diaspora policy still needs to be reformulated toward a more coherence policy within an institutional context, it reflects state awareness to harness this community potential. Within this mutual context, many diaspora aspirations, including a version of ‘dual citizenship’ proposal, may be accepted as long as they are advocated for proportionally with their social and economic role, and, of course, with clear and adequate policy recommendation.

References Agunias, D.R. and Newland, K. (2012). Developing a road map for engaging diasporas in development: A handbook for policymakers and practitioners in home and host countries. Geneva – Washington, DC: IOM – MPI. Anggriawan, R.D. (2019, February 8). Survei IDN-United soal Pemilu di Kalangan Diaspora, Ini Hasilnya [IDN-United Survey on National Election within diaspora group, this is the result]. Tempo. Retrieved from https://pemilu.tempo.co Anonymous (2015). Diaspora Indonesia Sudah Memiliki 12 Gugus Tugas [Indonesian diaspora already has 12 task forces]. Tabloid Diplomasi, No. 91, Year VIII. August–September. Anonymous (2017a, August 21). VP confused over two Indonesian diaspora networks. Jakarta Globe. Retrieved from https://jakartaglobe.id Anonymous (2017b, August 21). Diaspora Indonesia desak DPR prioritaskan RUU dwi kewarganegaraan [Indonesian diaspora push DPR to prioritize bills on dual citizenship]. Gresnews. Retrieved from http://www.gresnews.com Anonymous (2019, November 27). RUU kewarganegaraan diusulkan masuk Prolegnas DPR [The bills on citizenship proposed to be included in DPR’ National Legislative Program]. DPR-RI. Retrieved from http://www.dpr.go.id Anonymous (2020, May 29). KBRI Paris perkenalkan ‘Diaspora Bond’ untuk pendanaan pembangunan [Indonesia Embassy in Paris introduce ‘Diaspora Bond’ for development fund]. Antara News. Retrieved from https://www.antaranews.com Arubone, B.F. (2015, August 11). Kerjasama TKI dan diaspora Sebuah Keniscayaan [Cooperation between Indonesian migrant workers and diaspora is a must]. RMOL.ID. Retrieved from https:// rmol.id Awaliyah, G. (2018, October 17). Menristekdikti ungkap alasan diaspora enggan daftar CPNS ­[Minister of research and higher education reveals reasons for diaspora reluctance to register in civil servant selection]. Retrieved from https://www.republika.co.id Banirestu, H. (2017, August 16). CID-4 Global summit dorong diaspora tunjukkan darma bakti ke Indonesia [CID-4 global summit encourage diaspora show devotion to Indonesia]. Swa. Retrieved from https://swa.co.id Dewansyah, B. (2019). Indonesian diaspora movement and citizenship law reform: Towards ‘semi-dual citizenship’. Diaspora Studies, 12 (1), 52–63. Djalal, D.P. (2013, December 4). Surat terbuka duta besar Dr. Dino Patti Djalal kepada diaspora Indonesia di Amerika Serikat [Open letter ambassador Dr. Dino Patti Djalal to Indonesian diaspora in The United States]. Retrieved from http://www.dinopattidjalal.com Dragojlovic, A. (2012). Materiality, loss and redemptive hope in The Indonesian Leftist Diaspora. Indonesia and the Malay World, 40 (117), 160–174. Harijanti, S.D. (2017, February). Report on citizenship law: Indonesia (Country Report 2017/04). Retrieved from Cadmus – the EUI Research Repository website: https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/45372 Harijanti, S.D., Dewansyah, B., Abdurahman, A. and Dramanda, W. (2018). Citizenship and the Indonesian diaspora: Lessons from the South Korean and Indian experiences. Border Crossing, 8 (2), 297–310. Harijanti, S.D., Prasetianingsih, R. and Dewansyah, B. (2007). Politik Hukum Kewarganegaraan Indonesia [Legal policy on Indonesian citizenship]. (Research Report). Bandung: Fakultas Hukum Universitas Padjadjaran.

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Bilal Dewansyah Missbach, A. and Palmer, W. (2018, September 19). Indonesia: A country grappling with migrant protection at home and abroad. Migration Information Resource. Online Publication. Retrieved from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indonesia-country-grappling-migrant-protection-home-and-abroad# Muhidin, S. and Utomo, A. (2015). Global Indonesian diaspora: How many are there and where are they? Journal of ASEAN Studies, 3 (2), 93–101.OJK (2016, October 17). Press Release: OJK supports diaspora bond issuance. Retrieved from https://www.ojk.go.id Pratama, A.M. (2018, October 22). Seleksi CPNS Melalui Jalur Diaspora Sepi Peminat [Selection on civil servants’ candidate through the diaspora path is slight enthusiasts]. Kompas. Retrieved from https://ekonomi.kompas.com Putra, W.P.A. (2017, August 31). Penjelasan Menlu Retno Soal Kartu Diaspora Indonesia: Untuk Pendataan [Foreign Minister Retno explanation on Indonesian diaspora card: For data collection]. DetikNews. Retrieved from https://news.detik.com Secretariat General of DPR (2015, August). Naskah Akademik dan Rancangan Undang-Undang tentang Perubahan Atas Undang-Undang Nomor 12 Tahun 2006 tentang Kewarganegaraan Republik Indonesia [Academic Draft and Bills on Amendment of Law Number 12 Year 2006 on Citizenship of Republic of Indonesia]. Jakarta: Secretariat General of DPR. Setijadi, C. (2017). Harnessing the potential of the Indonesian diaspora. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. Sipayung, B.A. (2011). Exiled memories: The collective memory of Indonesian 1965 exiles. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/10793. Spiro, P.J. (2010). Dual citizenship as human right. I-CON, 8 (1), 111–130. Suastha, R.D. (2017, August 22). Menggugat status diaspora dari Perspektif TKI [Accusing diaspora status from TKI perspective]. CNN Indonesia. Retrieved from https://www.cnnindonesia.com Supriyadi, M.W. (2015). Sejumlah Task Force Diaspora Telah Berpartisipasi dalam Program Pembangunan di Indonesia [Some diaspora task forces has participated in national development program in Indonesia]. Tabloid Diplomasi, No. 91, Year VIII, August–September. Talampas, R. (2015). Indonesian diaspora identity construction in a Southern Mindanao border crossing. Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia, 51 (1), 130–162. Tan-Cullamar, E. (1993). The Indonesian diaspora and Philippine-Indonesian relations. Philippine Studies, 41 (1), 38–50. Tigau, C., Pande, A. and Yuan, Y. (2017). Diaspora policies and co-development: A comparison between India, China and Mexico. Migration Letters, 14 (2), 189–203. Tirtosudarmo, R. (2018). The politics of migration in Indonesia and Beyond. Singapore: Springer. USINDO (n.d.). Open Invitation from the Indonesian Ambassador to the US: “Congress of Indonesian Diaspora”, Los Angeles, CA. Retrieved from https://usindo.org/other-events/ congress-of-indonesian-diaspora/ Utomo, H., Tangkar, M. and Wanandi, W. (2018, March 8). Surat pemberitahuan penggantian nama dari “Indonesian Diaspora Network – Global” (IDN-Global) menjadi “Indonesian Diaspora Network – United” (IDN – United) [Notification letter replacing name from “Indonesian Diaspora Network – Global” (IDN-Global) to “Indonesian Diaspora Network – United” (IDN – United)]. Jakarta: IDN-United. van Amersfoort, H. (2004). The waxing and waning of a diaspora: Moluccans in the Netherlands, 1950–2002. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30 (1), 151–174. Vink, M., Schakel, A.H., Reichel, D., Luk, N.C. and de Groot, G.-R. (2019). The international diffusion of expatriate dual citizenship. Migration Studies, 7 (3), 362–383. Wanandi, E. (2015). Memaksimalkan Potensi Diaspora [Maximizing potential of diaspora]. Tabloid Diplomasi, No. 91, Year VIII, August–September. WGIK IDN-G (2020, August), Kartu masyarakat Indonesia di luar negeri antara konsep, implementasi dan harapan [Overseas Indonesian community card between conception, implementation and hope]. WGIK Report. Retrieved from http://www.diasporaindonesia.org/news/ kmiln-antara-konsep-implementasi-dan-harapan

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PART V

Media, culture and representations

22 DIGITAL MEDIA AND EAST ASIAN DIASPORA Youna Kim

Transnational mobility of young people from East Asia has increased massively since the 1990s, and women now constitute a considerable proportion of this cross-border flow and diasporic population. Migration from East Asia has been increasingly feminized, widespread and frequent through forms of study abroad and work, giving rise to student diaspora, global knowledge diaspora sustained by the expansion of the international education industry ­( Waters, 2008; Welch, 2015), knowledge-based economies, information and communication technologies in a digital age. Rapid economic growth in East Asia has shifted the patterns of international migration to the skilled, knowledge-intensive move into Western countries. There has been a rising trend of women leaving their country to experience life overseas using Western educational institutions as a contact zone in order to increase their work opportunities and the subsequent role of work in developing an emancipatory mode of identity formation – individualization (Kim, 2011). Studying abroad has become a common career move for relatively affluent women in their 20s. These new generations of women, who divert from the usual track of marriage, are markers of contemporary mobile transnationals. This mobility tends to form a prolonged temporary status or diasporic sojourner mentality – willing to go anywhere for a while – in pursuit of maximal opportunities with unpredictable consequences on women’s transnational lives. This unpredictable, temporary and transient nature is precisely one of the unique features that characterize today’s transnational mobility, diaspora and development in a digital age, calling for an understanding of the new formation of digital diaspora. Significantly, this contemporary manifestation has been enabled and perhaps accelerated by the rise and ubiquity of the digital media, information and communication technologies. The multi-vocal and multi-directional flows of the ethnic media and digital technologies facilitate people’s transnational, nomadic, back-and-forth movements creating new and complex conditions for identity formation in digital diaspora (Kim, 2011). Since the 1990s, the mediated networks established through the Internet and the transnational ethnic media have been instrumental in facilitating these changes in contemporary movements, allowing dispersed yet networked migrants to maintain transnationally their home-based relationships and to regulate a dialectical sense of belonging in host countries. The media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects. These new kinds of transnational networks, connections and various capacities of mobility are now changing not only the scale and 303

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patterns of migration but also the nature of migrant experience and thinking. The present wave of migration and diaspora differs significantly from previous waves in that contemporary trans-border movements have been intensified, diversified and feminized to some extent, and the process of digital diaspora has created new meanings of diasporic subjectivity and new consequences that are yet to be known and understood. Providing detailed empirical data on Korean, Japanese and Chinese women, this chapter explores the highly visible yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in everyday life. It draws attention to the digital media and mediated networks that facilitate women’s transnational movements. This plausibly powerful capacity of the media, deeply ingrained in what people take for granted, should be recognized in any attempt to understand the present phenomenon of transnational mobility in a digital age. This chapter considers a pulling-effect of the media: women’s mediated symbolic encounter with the West that generates imaginations of alternative lifestyles and work (Kim, 2005, 2011). People seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they will live and work in places other than where they were born, and their plans are affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space (Appadurai, 1996). The profusion of the media, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, culture and society in Asia (Kim, 2008). Under social controls that deny women the ability to act on their own, the chances for individualization become smaller, and individualization can be sought in ever greater participation in media consumption (Kim, 2012). Media consumption can be understood as a key cultural mechanism creating the emergence of individualized identities, both imagined and enacted. This chapter will argue for the potential role of the media in triggering enactment of transnational mobility – the interplay between media consumption and physical displacement towards a deliberately encouraging yet precarious movement of freedom. As the chapter will further argue, the media are integral resources that shape diasporic experiences and identities. Diasporic media space is a transnational site of contestation in which nation, race, gender, class, culture and language continuously interrelate to produce complex identities. The ethnic media are mobilized as key resources to manage the difficulties of everyday life, banal racism and marginalization. Popular media culture from national homelands is circulated transnationally, often reproduced and amplified by digital technologies and the strategic, self-determined use of the Internet generations forming ethnic online communities. Today’s ubiquitous media flows from the periphery to the West, with greater access through the Internet, create national space and identification within the transnational field, changing the dynamics of diasporic identity in an unpredictable manner (Kim, 2011, 2017). In what follows, this chapter will offer insights on the nature of women’s transnational mobility, the media and digital diaspora with the data drawn from an ethnographic project. Personal in-depth interviews were conducted with 60 Asian women (20 Koreans, 20 Japanese, 20 Chinese) who had been living and studying in the UK/London for three to seven years. The women’s ages were between 26 and 33 years – single women of middle-class and upper-class positions. They were recruited by the snowball method of sampling, based on friendship networks of the participants, and several snowballs were used to ensure that interviews were conducted with women from different universities. A panel of ten diarists were recruited from the women interviewed; they were asked to write/email diaries about their experiences and to express in detail key issues raised by the interviews. This method was designed to generate biographical material accounts from the women and incorporate a reflexive biographical analysis. 304

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Female individualization Education guarantees nothing. In Korea, the more women are educated, the more we would find it difficult to get a job. Not just any kind of job that doesn’t need a university degree or just a low-paid secretary… There was no job future, no hope to make my own life. It’s the only exit. If work life is not fulfilling, mothers’ generation would choose marriage. We try to find an alternative, such as studying abroad, hoping to find better work. Work comes first, marriage later. “Education without a guarantee” is illustrated in gendered Korea, where the dualistic labour market, with non-regular workers accounting for a third of employment, and the ­under-employment of women remain labour market challenges (OECD, 2014; Kim, 2016). The low female employment rate (53.5%, the tenth lowest in the OECD) in contrast to women’s high level of tertiary education (64%, the second highest in the OECD), and the gender gap in female earnings (64%, the largest gap in the OECD) reflect Korea’s ­under-utilization of its human capital. A contradiction of female individualization lies in the gap between the growing expectations of education and the reality of work inequality. There has been a remarkably impressive increase in educational attainment for middle-class women in Korea, and with universal access to education historically being regarded as a crucial means of national development and upward social mobility, gender inequality is generally thought to be diminished or non-existent at the educational level of the middle class. However, women equipped with work knowledge are often confronted with male privilege that has been perpetuated within the labour market system and corporate culture. While marriage is not repudiated but postponed temporarily, women’s socioeconomic status has not been improved enough to operate individualization through work. This disjuncture between education and labour market conditions, the persistence of gender inequality and the women’s desire to develop a self-determined life politics are some of the main forces that have led to growing transnational mobility. Similarly in Japan, it is increasingly common for women to quit their unsatisfying jobs and move to a Western destination. Education is consumption. We pay for it without expecting economic returns, because there is no guarantee for a job or a better salary. It’s not easy to get a good job even with a top university degree. Job recruitment works favourably for men… I disliked the ordinary office job. The salary was low, though I had a materially good life living with my parents. I am not sure if a MA or a PhD overseas will help me find a fulfilling job in Japan. It’s like a gamble. Without knowing the chance of success, I try it. The perception of education has become “consumption”, a thing to be consumed by women without expected consequences. Japanese women are among the world’s best educated but most under-utilized (Mukherjee, 2015; Japan Times, 2019). High school education has reached equal levels for men and women (97%), and 49% of the women advance to higher education. However, Japan’s male-dominated labour system divides recruits into career track positions and general clerical work, in which many women are hired in the second category. Unlike their parents’ generation, many younger workers get part-time or temporary employment and experience delayed marriage and increased singlehood ( Japan Times, 2007; Dales, 2014). This inequity has caused the phenomenon of “parasite singles”, referring to 305

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Japanese who continue to live with their parents for a longer period of time than in previous generations. Women are willing to be risk-takers of a de-normalization of gendered roles at a transnational relocation to develop an individual and independent self. The search for the individualized self is a kind of gamble. Rather than wanting to live in a particular Western country, women often feel trapped within Japan, and have an urge to leave (Fujita, 2009) or escape it for a while. Similarly in China, a new desire has emerged among young women making a Westward journey to redefine a work identity and pursue self-development. We all know it is difficult to get a job for women, and extremely difficult to get a satisfying job in China. After graduating university, luckily I got a job but a very ordinary one that could not expect self-development, so I quit. It is hard to find a job when you have just graduated from university, though you are so ready to work! Just a BA degree is not sufficient to get a good job in the competitive market. An overseas MA degree with English and work experience is preferred. We call it a golden certificate. Although modern women have learned to seek and embrace “self-development” through increasing education, the Chinese labour market impedes such possibilities. Education in China has witnessed a rapid development since the 1990s. The enrolment rate for women in higher educational institutions is more than 50% (Xinhua News, 2017). Despite the large expansion in educational access, educated women lack egalitarian labour market opportunities due to persistent gender norms, while the rise of unemployment in the urban labour market discriminates and removes women out of the workforce to control surplus labour problems (Liu, 2012; Mukherjee, 2015). Though “so ready to work”, new women graduates in cities have a hard time in locating their first job. Urban women tend to postpone marriage for the sake of a career, independence and personal freedom, seeking opportunities in Western higher education which would allow them to access international jobs outside the Chinese labour system. There emerges a desire for what they call a “golden certificate” to access a “global career” and a life of a “global woman” effectively moving out of the constraints of domestic work environments. It is against this context that Chinese women manifest an emerging attitude towards individualization, construction of a self-responsible life politics that is embraced as a positive yet anxious expression.

Media consumption and transnational mobility Despite the paradoxical outcomes and anxieties of where women actually stand in a move towards individualization, multiple ways of imagining such a possibility are widely open in mediated cultural domains with proliferating resources for the mobilization of self. The women’s desire to move is constituted by the contradictory socioeconomic relations, as well as by the cultural-symbolic forms by which everyday life is lived out, re-thought and re-articulated in its intersection with the emergence of precarious individualized identities. This is frequently figured in their imagination of the West through the everyday media. The seemingly unachievable idea of individualization is endlessly played out in women’s “imagination” and “media talk” and thus remains an unresolved identity in everyday life (Kim, 2005, 2011, 2012). In Western society, people choose any kind of life they want. The more I see it on the media, the more I think (in Korea). If I go there, wouldn’t life be free? I imagined such a possibility. 306

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My job might be OK, my life might be OK compared to my mother’s. But I didn’t feel happy, couldn’t be satisfied with just that! I have bigger desires… The more I got to know bigger things through the media, the more I thought about them. I asked myself, am I having a happy life? Why can’t I live like that? The media are implicated in the imaginative pull towards mobility and the emergence of fledgling individualized identities within women’s socio-cultural landscape, where the multitude of quotidian constraints and expressions for a not-yet-realized-self take place in their lack of choice and control. While the Korean society does not encourage women to pursue different ways of being, notions of a new self, an individualized individual, are effectively discovered and articulated within their mediated experience. A yearning for a new identity and a new mode of life is expanding in the globalizing, mediated world of everyday life, which stimulates a high degree of reflexivity in relation to lived experience and interweaves its relevance structure into an ongoing process of the self (Kim, 2008, 2011). Young ­Korean women appear to have more choices and capacities in life – higher education, more knowledge and better material provisions compared to past generations – yet this does not necessarily translate into greater happiness. Expectations of satisfaction have risen, affected by what other people have or an insatiable endless desire to have, which occurs through the intrusion of global cultural Others into everyday consciousness via the global media and has the consequence of causing both rising expectations and rising frustrations. The ­self-conscious engagement with, and symbolic exploration through, the media develops resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project that has a potential to transform everyday discourse of subjectivity and to mobilize the imagined self in actuality. This imaginative social practice as mediated by cultural consumption is grounded in deliberate agency and lived experience, generating multiple points of everyday reflexivity, self-monitoring, self-confrontation and self-analysis (“am I having a happy life?”). Younger generations of educated women today, more knowledgeable than ever previous generations, can be characterized by a growing reflexivity and the imagining of more choices or a “choice biography against a normal biography” (Giddens, 1991), constantly choosing, changing and constructing an identity, albeit predicated upon structural constraints, thereby a sense of happiness is heavily driven by the situation of imagined global Others and a “heightened desire to keep up with other people” (Layard, 2005). Young Japanese women, too, become increasingly aware of differences and changes in the socio-cultural position of women elsewhere in a wider world, while the process of their self-reflexive imagination in mediated culture can cause a sense of unhappiness and a prolonged decision to act upon. I have gathered bits and pieces of images from TV, magazines, websites. Something you like always affects you somehow… You wait for that moment and go, at least once, to fulfil an endless desire to go. So sick and tired of office work, one day I decided to do nothing and watched this (Western) film. Romance, freedom, laugher, London parks are so green! I felt, go there! It makes you feel something good can happen there… You know that is an illusion but you want to believe that illusion and go. Bits and pieces of media cultures, self-constructed collage effects of images have been elaborated in mediated memory in order to contain pleasure, an element of possibility or an “endless desire to go”. The media play an important role in inducing transnational mobility for many young Japanese (Fujita, 2009). They have grown up much exposed to Western 307

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architecture, landscapes of cities, cultures and lifestyles, while re-configuring a preferred view of the world and an ideal lifestyle they desire. The West is idealized in a desire for cultural diversity, an unfixed heterogeneous self and a greater range of possible lives, which marks a contrast to their own living conditions as constrained by gender. The significance of media consumption cannot be separated from the particular socioeconomic and cultural contexts within which they are embedded and called into. A desire to move away is an outcome of mediated relationships to the plurality of individual lifestyles and the process of dis-embedding from the nation. The aestheticization and romanticization of Western cities is known to be false but felt to be true or suggestive of possibility, “something good can happen there”. A general awareness of the link between media consumption and physical displacement exists in the women’s emotional investment in the media at a level of utopian sensibility. It is intertwined with good feelings the media embody and evoke – “utopian feelings of possibility” (Dyer, 1992) acting as temporary answers to the specific inadequacies of society and showing what solutions feel like. The media certainly construct an illusion or an image of something better that women’s day-to-day lives do not provide. But it is the intelligently detectable illusion that is put to work by knowing individuals. Media culture is a powerful pull factor in stimulating mobility, but this symbolic power is certainly recognized and intentionally allowed by educated women. This intentionality is at centre stage in the way the media are used and the meaning is mobilized by the knowledge class, including young Chinese women. Life in China is so competitive, crowded and stressful. People work so hard, try to survive and win in competitive society… Bus is so crowded that you have to squeeze in. There is no space for your self. I started the everyday with this crowded bus… A bus ride in the West seemed fun, pleasant (on TV), people easily got on and got off. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in that environment? I saw this empty bus on TV a long time ago but still remember… Here, London bus is not crowded, most of time I can sit down and think. There is a space for thinking about my self. The significance of media consumption can be understood as a dynamic and transformative process, often involving active and intended engagement. The construction of transnational subjectivities among the Chinese is facilitated by the mobility of media images and the media images of mobility (Sun, 2006). The flow of the media is a significant mediator of knowledge and an extension of social imagery from which women reconstruct their conceptions of self in comparison to global Others. The media present the prisms of possible lives through which women reflect on their life conditions in a critical way. This mediated experience can powerfully create and allow a space for the self to emerge in the fluidities of transnational imagination, while engaging with a newly found curiosity and a search for a new self that can be played out and actualized. Different ways to imagine the self are emerging in more individualist terms marked by an outward-looking reflexivity. Such self-reflexive imagination in an increasingly mediated world may not always lead to immediate action, but it is a historically accumulated quality through long-term exposure to the everyday media that potentially forms a powerful yet taken-for-granted, staging ground for the conduct of physical movement or a very firm orientation towards mobility. Media consumption is constitutive of the process of transnational mobility, female individualization and identity work, not to be seen as an entirely determining force but to be understood as a mediating cultural experience within an imaginative, seductive, yet highly selective and intentional, everyday social project of the self (Kim, 2011, 2012). 308

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Banal racism Migrant women may use a transnational space as a rare and effective way to avoid conformity to normative gender roles and obstacles to their individualization, in an effort to create self-identity in an extended process of reflexivity and a seemingly open and seductive culture of a world city. Dis-embedded from the everyday regulatory practices, migrant women try to negotiate their way around out of the initial familial and social position, and hope to find opportunities for a more self-fulfilling and independent lifestyle. Diasporic consciousness develops a new capacity to consider many cultural differences in everyday encounters and to reflect on who they are in relation to cultural Others, while the increasingly self-steered phenomenon produces the disproportionate cost making them remain vulnerable to the unpredictable and constraining aspects of diasporic conditions. The world city of the multiplicity of Others is a place that is “open to everyone who has their own caravan and money to pay the rent” (Bauman, 2001) but also a highly ambiguous place where every decision becomes a personal risk and the state of transnational existence is far from liberating. I will be always a foreigner, though having lived here (London) for 7 years… I often moved room because of fleas, noisy neighbour, water leakage, blocked toilet that never got fixed. Nobody cares… People think moving is a good thing, freedom. But why bother to move if life is so good? I cannot articulate this repressive feeling but feel clearly… It’s the everyday little things that matter. Racism is not like hitting but staring or just ignoring. Is it because we are Korean, Asian? We imagined England would be a country of gentlemen. It’s like proud B&B culture – people will always come to the city of Buckingham Palace and leave. It signals to foreigners, “If you don’t like it, go back to your country”. I will never belong… I do all on my own, feel so alone. Korean women’s transnational lives are often described in terms of a struggle for articulation as a tool for progressive practice and emancipatory politics. This experiential lack of articulation with the yet-to-be-heard voices precludes the deeply felt tensions, while repressing a complex and many-sided translation of how the banal experience of the everyday (“little things”), thoughts and sentiments shape and define the meaning of marginal discourses, different conditions of being and becoming. Ambiguous and subliminal forms of banal racism (“not like hitting but staring or just ignoring”), inferiorization and alienation at an interpersonal level can be shocking when England was imagined to be different, cultivated. Racism is a sign of rejection that one will never belong (“always a foreigner”). In a changing Europe built on economic models of mobility and integration, mobile transnationals appear to face none of discrimination; however, seductive world cities are also national capitals which exclude even the most privileged of foreigners at a “human dimension” (Favell, 2008). Diasporic space is not primarily a sociable space to valorize, connect and exchange with Others, but a space of struggle to deal with societal insecurity and a tacit acceptance of individuated practice (“all on my own”). While women may enjoy greater autonomy in a newly found place, they also suffer in silence greater burdens, dilemmas of choice and personal responsibility, as revealed by Japanese women. People’s knowledge of Japan is narrow. When I first met a British family, they said, “You don’t look like a Japanese woman”. What did they expect? Geisha in kimono? I just showed a smile … I cannot complain about life here because it is my choice, my responsibility. 309

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No quality food, no caring for others’ feelings… I stop fighting because it was my choice to move here, because my English is not good enough. I cannot even express frustration to outsiders as they say, “You live in attractive London!” My friend depressed in Paris hears the same, “You live in beautiful Paris!” The choice is burdened by responsibilities, ambiguities and hidden pains that cannot be expressed in the dominant language; not being able to articulate is not liberating. Disarticulation and unsympathetic response is the predicament that they never fully resolve in daily struggles of living in the lure of world city, its glorified myth and (mis)perception to outsiders. Problems and anxieties of exclusion and foreignness are often experienced as individual faults or weaknesses (“because my English is not good enough”) and individual responsibilities (“because it is my choice, my responsibility”). This tendency shapes a diasporic consciousness that individuals are responsible for their own choices and any unspeakable situations they happen to face and inhabit. Some are concerned with politeness and avoidance of conflict by constructing a careful tactic (“smile”). Many reflect on why Japanese women are seen as exotic, docile subjects, “paragons of femininity as in the geisha”; perhaps this is because the image of Japanese and East Asian communities is one of invisibility or ­“sub-humanity”, in the absence of their diverse representation, in the voyeuristic obsession of the UK media culture (Aoki, 2006). While inhabiting in the new ambit of freedom of individual choice, women’s choice often confronts tensions and contradictions in struggling to achieve a certain level of self-expression and fulfilment, as indicated by Chinese women. I still cannot express my self in English. This hurts me … I don’t fight racism, though it happens, because I’ve got a new habit of thinking it’s always my problem, always blame me, because of the language. People have very low expectations of Chinese women. Working part-time I hear, “You’ve done a brilliant job!” It’s a too simple task for me with an MA degree … A topclass Beijing woman is suddenly a second-class. I live with my boyfriend (white British). His mother says, “Take care of my son, you are so lucky!” His friends are similar. From their views, I am so lucky to marry a British man, I should feel happy, not complain about anything. Everyday encounter and communication in the dominant language sometimes disturbs ontological security and confidence (“always my problem, always blame me”), intensifying women’s vulnerability to social marginality and ambiguous forms of alienation. Employment conditions and interpersonal relations with unbearably low expectations tend to confine them to a socioeconomically and psychologically inferior status (“second-class”). Those in wage labour often experience the racialization of global economy, low job positions by devaluation of place-bound ethnic identity, which does not have a potential of liberating migrants but widens transnational inequality. Racialized dimensions of labour inequality intersect with other structures of subordination to shape the lived experience of gendered global subjects in interracial intimacy with hierarchical world views associated with a particular national culture that generate the new regulation of race and romance. While interracial marriage emerges as an important means of producing transnational networks and relationships, it also produces unarticulated forms of gender inequality and gendered global subjects to be negotiated as normative constraints. It is the dialectical engagement wherein women position themselves and understand both the limited social reality and the limited symbolic, mediated relations. 310

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Ethnic media and diasporic nationalism The UK media can help migrants gain some knowledge of the host society, and users try to make sense of mediated culture in the first years of arrival; however, their sojourner mentality and how they think about belonging to the society (“always a foreigner”) are a crucial determinant of the modality of disengagement with the media. In the condition of being foreign, some media images are seen as disturbing the familiar and taken-for-granted character of migrant predisposition and modes of appreciation. Instead, quotidian experience of their national home is sustained through their ethnic media, seeking a sense of familiarity and inclusion that they rarely experience in a new disrupted place. Engagement with the ethnic media and communicative activities is a logical choice and determining resource gaining a special meaning “suddenly”. I am suddenly addicted to our Korean media. I rarely watched TV in Korea as my social life was busy, colorful … Through website Naver I get all information, how to make food, kim-chi, do everything myself as everything in London is expensive. It’s all there! Through the Internet I watch Korean dramas, download movies, music every night. I keep in touch with friends, express what I am doing, how I feel, what made me angry today. Displaced subjects can find social ontological security in their own communication channels and become attached or even more (“suddenly addicted”) to the inclusive mediated community, while becoming less interested in or connected to the host society. The new connection to the ethnic media from the national homeland and its substantial impact can promote disengagement and further distance from the mainstream. New ways of being and feeling at home are created and sustained by means of virtual engagement. The “Korean Wave” media culture in a digital age (Kim, 2013) and variegated ritualistic links – via Korean social networking websites, infotainment online portals, food, drama, film, music as a constant ­background – are established in the structure of everyday life. This mediated experience away from home has multiple purposes; it is a response to the loss of belonging, a ­self-determined need to seek symbolic inclusion, a desire to connect with significant others back home and a pleasure to expand the space for self-expression, understanding and articulation in the language of home. The habits and strategies for experiencing home in the routines of diasporic lives develop into the Internet resources. I get a headache for concentrating so much on English … Relax! Through the Internet I get all Japanese content, write diaries to friends in Japan, my English is not improving! At the end of day I email to my family and friends to express what happened, how I feel, to release frustration. I’ve got a new habit of confessing my self … They ask, “What do you eat? What sort of people do you meet?” In conscious distance and anxiety (“my English is not improving!”), a culture of relaxation is built around the Japanese language media providing the capacity to participate in routine communicative activities and cultural spaces where talk and reflection allow for more pleasurable, self-referential modes of identification. The Internet with multifaceted infotainment and active networks, including Japan’s social networking sites, music, drama, comedy and variety shows, plays a key role in amplifying the pleasure of a shared sphere of familiarity and connection, a unity of constructed styles and practices that can create a temporarily effective 311

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psychological comfort and directedness. Women on the move may be particularly avid users of the Internet as this resource is mobilized to deal with unresolved tensions and intricacies of interpersonal dynamics and relationships within the transnational social field. The Internet use is not a practice of mere communication but of active articulation and significance. The self is made visible, presented and understood in narrative (Giddens, 1991). The narrativization of the self – enacted through ritualistic and microelectronic engagement in the language of home – is an effective strategy and apparatus through which identity is produced and reaffirmed. What is significant here is not just the sheer availability of the Internet, but the self-determination of users and the consequences of how they use it. If I have time to watch UK television, I would rather watch Chinese through the Internet. That’s why my English has not improved … The Internet is super! Every day, the first thing I do is to open the Chinese website and read news. Anytime I can access through Chinese websites, all information, fashion, travelling, Visa advice, sharing life experience abroad, diaries of Chinese women married to Western men … While preparing Chinese dinner, eating alone, watching Chinese dramas on computer, I am home! I am feeling good, though Western flatmates mock, “Why do Chinese say yeng yeng yeng?” The Chinese media, due to the de-territorializing Internet, are viable socio-cultural resources to open up channels of information and pleasure, self-expression and communicative encounter, to be sustained in the routinized activities of daily life. Media consumption becomes a ritualistic cultural practice in securing a character of communal life from home and abroad through rich, eclectic and multifaceted content, whether news, online forums with the Chinese diaspora or dramas from the national homeland, affirming a sense of connection through habituation. The Chinese language Internet is a regularly shared resource for diasporic difficulties and the expressive emotional r­ epertoire – from anxieties about interracial relationships, visa troubles, food interests, to the meanings of home in the midst of displacement. Home is invented in the diasporic imagination and is sometimes secured through its familiar sounds and familiar smells (“Chinese dinner”) as mediated and experienced by the diasporic media in the humdrum of everyday lived culture. For mobile women, the simultaneous absence and presence of home is in the making. The sites of media consumption remain central to the home-building project and the pursuit of livelihood (“feeling good”), identity and status when threatened or challenged. Migrant women tend to affirm a sense of continuity, self-esteem and deliberate nationalism that is emotively marked and powerful. Watching TV back home I imagined life here, but living here I become indifferent. Never felt my essential self as Korean so strongly before. I become more Korean, unique while living abroad… I don’t fit quite here or quite there. I can live anywhere in the world if there is a good job and the Internet connection for all Korean stuff. I am solid Japanese. Never thought about this identity in Japan… The fact that I’ve lived in foreign countries for 7 years and speak English does not mean I am changing, it just means a physical move… What is the quality of living and actual experience motivates whether or not you want to change. I feel like a woman warrior of China. I feel the wall, whether that is racism, invisible hostility, coldness, or superiority in culture… I am becoming more Chinese while living abroad. This feeling grows. 312

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For many women who are acutely aware of the reality of foreignness, how much they differ from the majority, their transnational lives do not easily result in emancipation. The imagined West becomes a problem after their migration as the media back home represented desirable images of the West without signalling actual conditions and banal racism. Women’s diasporic experience suggests an emotional struggle and a hidden fight to create a representational space and a defiant voice that can speak against inferiorization. This impedes or denies them the possibility of becoming transnational, transcending the national and existing boundaries, and instead compels them into ethnic particularism and its reified identity positions within a transnational field. A paradox is that the more physically close, the more they try to remain different, distinct. Far from moving beyond nation-defined ethnic markers, the tendency is to foster distinctly national identity (“becoming more Chinese while living abroad”, “solid Japanese”, “more Korean, unique”). The search for uniqueness becomes intense and dependent on the ethnic media space where the symbolic construction of internal and external boundaries is regularly sustained. Although some aspect of lifestyle change can make women feel incompatible with lives back home, there is a strong denial of association or influence from the West host society, finding themselves located neither “quite here” nor “quite there”; indeed, neither place is desirable any longer. To resist a Western influence is a quality that manifests itself in lived relations of difference, often as a reaction to the hegemonic racial order, as a conscious way of re-claiming their status. The ethnic media use proliferating through the Internet is mobilized to sustain diasporic nationalism in the trajectories of women’s nomadic voyaging (“can live anywhere”) as there is no yearning for returning home. The ethnic media are at the centre of the process of national identification reclaiming bounded yet vital identity in the wired transnational world. An unintended consequence of the new connectivity and meaning of being in a digital world is a revitalization of national subjectivity, perhaps more than ever, often expressing nationalized difference and uniqueness in the midst of massive transnational flows and reconfigurations. Transnational identification is not available to all migrant subjects. Nations are inevitably in the making; transnational mobility can work to reinforce diasporic nationalism in a digital age (Kim, 2011 and 2017). Diasporic nationalism emerges within a larger transnational framework, reinstating a territorial space for revitalized national perspectives and reifying the taken-for-grantedness of essentialist identities. Ironically, the choice to live in the world does not necessarily lead to an expanded world view or enlargement of self, but rather a constrictive one that is an inevitable consequence of the lived experience of social closure.

References Aoki, D. (2006). Those Crazy Japanese. BBK Magazine, 20. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Z. (2001). The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity. Dales, L. (2014). Ohitorisama, Singlehood and Agency in Japan. Asian Studies Review, 38(2), 224–242. Dyer, R. (1992). Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge. Favell, A. (2008). Eurostars and Eurocities. Oxford: Blackwell. Fujita, Y. (2009). Cultural Migrants from Japan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Japan Times (2007). Sustained Growth Needs More Access, 9 June. Japan Times (2019). Japan un Underdeveloped Country for Women, 11 January. Kim, Y. (2005). Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope. London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2008). Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia. London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2011). Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters. London: Routledge.

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Youna Kim Kim, Y. (2012). Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kim, Y. (2013). The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2016). Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Kim, Y. (2017). Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media. London: Routledge. Layard, R. (2005). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Penguin. Liu, Q. (2012). Unemployment and Labor Force Participation in Urban China. China Economic Review, 23(1), 18–33. Mukherjee, S. (2015). More Educated and More Equal? Gender and Education, 27(7), 846–870. OECD (2014). OECD Economic Surveys: Korea 2014. Paris: OECD. Sun, W. (2006). Media and the Chinese Diaspora. London: Routledge. Waters, J. (2008). Education, Migration and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora. New York: Cambriapress. Welch, A. (2015). A New Epistemic Silk Road? European Review, 23(1), 95–111. Xinhua News (2017). Women Dominate Higher Education in China, 27 October.

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23 FOOD IN THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA Parama Roy

I Appetites and avoidances Perhaps the earliest diasporic voyager from the subcontinent about whom we have a literary record is the low-caste Tulu-speaking slave Bomma in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. We know that Bomma served as his employer Abraham Ben Yiju’s factor in Aden, purchasing “a large consignment of goods, including a whole array of clothes, household utensils and presents for Ben Yiju and his family” (Ghosh, 1992, p. 255). Details about Ben Yiju’s taste in comestibles are amply recorded. His friends in Aden sent him cane sugar (unavailable in Malabar), raisins, nougat, dates, and almonds, and the occasional frying pan. When he returned with his household and his goods from Malabar to Yemen (and then to Fustat in Egypt) in late 1148 or early 1149, his list of luggage for the long voyage across the Indian Ocean contained a detailed list of foodstuffs, cooking utensils, cooking fuel, dishes, and storage containers, in addition to other household items.1 What, however, did Bomma cook or eat in his extended separations from the Malabar Coast, whether at Aden or, later, at Egypt, where he joined Ben Yiju in the last years of the merchant’s life? There is no record of this; all we know from the letter of Ben Yiju’s business partner in Aden, Madmun ibn Bundar, is that Bomma was frequently drunk during his sojourn there. Of more solid forms of aliment we know nothing. Elizabeth A. Lambourn speculates that Bomma might have accompanied Ben Yiju in his voyage from Malabar, given that he appears to have been with him in Fustat in the 1150s (Lambourn, 2018, p. 29).2 If so, Bomma, as a respected member of the household, might well have shared in the rice, bread, coconuts, wine, citrus, ginger, and clarified butter with which his employer had provisioned himself on his voyage. We know that other South Asians had followed in the footsteps of Bomma, and we have a somewhat fuller sense of their alimentary appetites and aversions, though the record remains slender for the most part. From the early years of the second millennium of the Common Era, Jains traded with Arab merchants who controlled the Indian Ocean trade, and they were to be found in port cities like Muscat, Aden, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Kilwa (Mehta, 2001, p. 1739). Gujarati Banias had settled in the ports of southern Arabia by the 15th century (Maloni, 2003, p. 626). The distinctiveness of their diet and patterns of commensality 315

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were such as to draw the notice of several European travellers to these port cities. In 1507, Martín Fernández de Figueroa, a Spanish traveller to Malindi, described their diet not so much in terms of positive content as in terms of abstention: “Called Gujarati, they are very withdrawn and sparing of conversation. Many of them will eat no living thing; by that I mean anything that must be killed and has blood” (cited in Pearson, 2005, p. 236). The young Thomas Herbert, a member of the first English embassy to Persia during the reign of Charles I, remarked in more pointedly incredulous and rather contemptuous terms upon the strict vegetarianism of the ( Jain) Banias, which – like Figueroa – he glossed as an offence against the requirements of companionability: They are so unsociable that with us they would neither eat flesh, eggs, radish, or other root that had a red colour, nor drink wine, for that it resembled what is called the blood of the grape. … They believe the trans-animation of souls into beasts and vegetables. (Herbert, 2005, p. 1024) In common with many of his English contemporaries, he was willing to concede that the nonviolent diet that apparently preceded Noah’s flood in Genesis made for longevity, and even that the abstemiousness it entailed made for health. But such self-denial made for an unpleasing physical and moral debility, appropriate enough for the Banias’ station but hardly admirable: We find that mediocrity in diet usually enervates nature; for, albeit a temperate diet (in hot countries especially) preserves health, I observed that the Banians, though healthy through their abstemiousness, are but of weak bodies and small courage, yet well enough agreeing with their condition. (Herbert, 2005, p. 1213) Their temperance in diet, moreover, was no index of virtue; rather, it served to dupe those more simple than themselves, whom they enticed with the “baits” of “sugared words” ­(Herbert, 2005, p. 1024). Appropriately for the adherents of this perverse and anti-social diet, they relished the malodorous asafoetida above all other gastronomic pleasures: “though the savour be offensive to most, the sapor [taste] is so good that no meat, no sauce, no vessel pleases some of the Gusurats’ [Gujaratis’] palates save what relishes of it” (Herbert, 2005, p. 1274). These European observers noted other critical details about the dietary practices of this vegetarian mercantile diaspora in Gomroo (Bandar Abbas) and other port towns such as Muscat and Zanzibar. In particular, they noted the caste restrictions that kept the Banias from eating or drinking with those outside their own sect. “They will not eat with any but their own tribe, lest they should be defiled,” Dr John Fryer notes, and comments that this makes occasions of feasting awkward for them (Fryer, 1698, p. 225). In this the Gujarati “Pythagoreans” differ from their Hindu merchant brethren from Sind, who “indulge themselves in goats-flesh, sheep, pullen [poultry], and almost everything but cows-flesh” (Fryer, 1698, p. 225). The most tender-hearted of the Jain merchants were careful to avoid destroying even the minutest life forms. But even the carnivorous Sindhi merchants joined with their (Hindu, Jain, or Nanakpanthi) merchant compatriots to circumscribe the slaughter of cattle and the sale of beef. They had sufficient influence over the local authorities to spare cattle from slaughter for a sum of “350 Thomands [tomans] yearly”; hence, says Fryer, no beef could be procured in a town (Bandar Abbas) where other forms of flesh and fish were available in abundance (Fryer, 1698, p. 225). Charles Lockyer makes a similar report about 316

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Banias’ endeavours to keep beef from the local markets in Ormuz, though he is more sceptical about the effectiveness of such efforts (1711, pp. 237–238). The Hindu and Jain merchants were not alone in their struggle to maintain rules of dietary propriety in conditions of diaspora. Muslim travellers endured some of the same difficulties. Mirza Itesamodeen, a munshi (scribe/scholar/translator) selected by the East India Company as a Persian translator and assistant to Captain Swinton on a mission from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II to the British sovereign George II in the 1760s, observed in his travelogue of two decades later that the Christians of Britain and the Continent obeyed no restrictions of any kind on food and drink. He refused the wine that was prescribed to him for medical purposes when he suffered a severe bout of diarrhea on his voyage to Britain, and thereafter took pains to hew to dietarily abstemious practices so as to avoid the need for such forbidden therapeutics (Itesamodeen, 1827, pp. 227-228). His eventual break with Captain Swinton came about as a result of their disagreements about the religious and gustatory entailments of diet. Importuned repeatedly and discourteously by the Captain to accompany him on his travels without the servant who ensured that his food adhered to halal (Islamically sanctioned) norms, he had to endure a condition of near-starvation on more than one occasion. For him, the offence against religious rules of consumption that sharing the Captain’s diet would have involved was compounded by an offence against the claims of gastronomy. As he explained to his nettled colleague, “You are in the habit of eating your food without the accompaniments of spices, ghee, and salt; in consequence of which an offensive odour arises from your meat, which is very disagreeable to our olfactory organs; therefore, then, how can we swallow such food?” (Itesamodeen, p. 216). In the 19th and 20th centuries the challenge of sustaining appropriate dietary practices, especially vegetarianism, outside the subcontinent, and often in normatively carnivorous societies, would constitute an important dimension of South Asian diasporic self-­representation. The best-known instance of this is M.K. Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929), in which he details his strenuous endeavours to maintain his vegetarianism in London and in South Africa. His very desire to travel to London to train as a barrister was hedged with dietary roadblocks. His uncle Tulsidas, the patriarch of his family, objected that British-trained barristers “know no scruples regarding food. Cigars are never out of their mouths” (Gandhi, 1929, p. 34). Eventually, Gandhi was able to obtain his mother’s permission to leave after committing himself to a set of alimentary and sexual renunciations – encompassing meat, alcohol, and sex with women – for the duration of his diaspora in Britain. On board the ship to Britain, he sustained himself with the sweets and fruits he had brought from home, but in London he encountered more significant difficulties. After his initial experiences of embarrassment and unsatisfied hunger, he stumbled upon a vegetarian restaurant (the Central, off Farringdon Street), where he also discovered Henry Salt’s pamphlet, A Plea for Vegetarianism. Gandhi was to speak of this as a moment of conversion, confirming but also transcending his vow to his mother; at this point, he became something other than his vegetarian mother’s son. So far, he had eschewed carnivory (except for some unhappy experiments in Kathiawad) but was philosophically committed to the necessity of a “carnivorous virility” that would help puny Indians reach bodily parity with muscular Englishmen. In Britain, he came to invest in an entirely new and ethically committed vegetarianism, one forged in the experience of diaspora and quite distinct from the maternally mandated, caste-based dietetics of his Indian youth. While in England and South Africa he carefully read the extant (Western) literature on vegetarianism available in fin-de-siècle London, including the works of Howard Williams, Anna Kingsford, and Percy Shelley. He also became an enthusiastic member and later office-bearer of the London Vegetarian Society, writing numerous articles for The Vegetarian and the Vegetarian Messenger, 317

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and giving interviews to The Vegetarian. In his concluding remarks in The Vegetarian in June 1891 he was to highlight vegetarian principle and vegetarian friendship as the most signal achievements of his three-year sojourn in the British capital: In conclusion I am bound to say that during my nearly three years’ stay in England I have left many things undone … yet I carry one great consolation with me, that I shall go back without having taken meat or wine, and that I know from personal experience that there are so many vegetarians. (Gandhi, 1999, pp. 48–49) 3 That this was not mere hyperbole fitted to the occasion of addressing a vegetarian audience is evident in the entirety of Gandhi’s political career, powerfully animated as it was by a focus on diet, dietary reform, and fasting. He remained committed to thinking about, practising, and refining the reflexive, ethically grounded diasporic vegetarianism he had forged in Britain when he went to South Africa. In fact he met two of his most important South African associates, Henry Polak and Albert West, in a vegetarian restaurant at Johannesburg. Both Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg, and the Phoenix Settlement in Natal, the two ashrams he established as experiments in communal living, were experiments in forging alimentary discipline. Gandhi had been a self-confessed epicurean in Britain and in his early years in South Africa. But at the ashrams he came to see gastronomic desire as a form of morally debilitating indulgence. He progressively simplified his diet and that of the commune, introducing a notably spartan diet of mostly saltless and spiceless food (though not without grumbling on the part of the other members of the ashrams). As a result of these protracted diasporic insights and encounters, food came to be at the centre of the bioethical minimalism that would define his religious and political life. Gandhi was but one of many South Asians living in Britain who constituted what ­M ichael H. Fisher (2004) has called “counterflows to colonialism.” In fact, there were numerous English-language travelogues and guidebooks that, starting in the 1880s, came to be produced by Indian male travellers to London. Several were quite critical of the poverty, overcrowding, filth, and economic inequality that they encountered in the metropolis; Antoinette Burton glosses this as a “provincialization of Britain,” one that functions as a critique of the claims to civilisational superiority that functioned as justifications for imperial rule (Burton, 1998, p. 186). Among these works were those that commented with mingled asperity and horror about life in a categorically carnivorous society. In The Indian Eye on English Life (1893), the Bombay-based Parsi journalist, writer, and social reformer Behramji Malabari engaged in what one must call an ethnography of carnivorous life. Though he was neither a vegetarian nor an advocate for animal welfare, he took issue with the English diet, and especially with the ethics and aesthetics of English meat-eating. He finds the spectacle of the English at table somewhat revolting, with respect to the quantity they eat, their venue and manner of consumption, their prodigious ingestion of alcohol, and their choice of alimentation. “Bismillah! How these Firanghis do eat!” he notes with wonderment and disgust, reversing the familiar Orientalist trope in which the Western visitor encounters nauseating foods in exotic locales (Malabari, 1893, p. 47). He finds English cuisine lacking in imagination, taste, and variety, and recommends the employment of Indian cooks to elevate the standard of the cuisine. The disgusting spectacle of the English table is in keeping with the exposure of the dead bodies of slaughtered animals to the public gaze in butcher shops, a scene to which Malabari returns repeatedly. The unfeeling elation of the crowds witnessing such displays constitutes for him a significant element of the horror of the spectacle: “what can excuse the sights and smells of a butcher’s shop in London, gloated over by the people?” 318

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(Malabari, 1893, p. 107). It is worth noting that this experience of revulsion was repeatedly displayed, not so much (or only) by Jains or Hindus, but also by those who were exempt from any religious commitments to meatlessness. Hence the Reverend Nundo Lal Doss, the Christian convert and missionary for the London Missionary Society, was – like Malabari – nauseated by the spectacle of animal carcasses at butcher shops, a response that separated him from the English spectators with whom he presumably shared ties of religion: Many of the bystanders gaped with wonder at this fat beast, and no doubt many a tongue watered at the sight of this dainty dish, but I can assure you mine did not, with all my old Hindu tastes still deeply ingrained in me. (Doss, 1893, p. 67) What one might describe as the vegetarian witnessing of Malabari was echoed by the Pandita Ramabai Saraswati in her account of her sojourn in the United States. An enthusiastic panegyrist of the egalitarianism of the north-eastern United States, she was nonetheless distressed by the inordinate carnivory of its inhabitants. Despite being a high-profile Chitpavan Brahmin (and therefore vegetarian) convert to Christianity, Ramabai Saraswati had not undergone the “baptism of meat” that many Asian converts to Christianity underwent; she remained resolutely non-carnivorous to the end of her days.4 Eschewing a diet of flesh, she finds it difficult to keep herself fed: “A person who is averse to fish, meat, or dishes prepared with eggs and animal fat has a very hard time getting enough to eat, and is compelled to manage largely with milk, bread, and fruit” (Saraswati, 2003, p. 108). But, what is worse, an inordinate slaughter of animals attends American holidays, as she notes in her account of domestic conditions in the country. With uncharacteristic vehemence, and a particularly pointed irony given her own status as Christian convert, she asserts: “These customs cannot but make one feel that it would be a good thing if missionaries of some compassionate Buddha came to this country and converted the people here” (Saraswati, 2003, p. 135). As we see here, the striking ethnographies undertaken by her and by Malabari of the carnivorous cultures of Britain and the United States have the singular effect of displacing carnivory from any position of normativeness. More than a century later, we find a continuation of the same theme in a novel by Anita Desai, encapsulated in the response of the vegetarian Arun and his sympathetic host Mrs Patton, to the offerings at the supermarket: Together they wheeled the cart around and avoided walking past the open freezers where the meat lay steaming in pink packages of rawness, the tank where helpless lobsters, their claws rubber-banded together, rose on ascending bubbles and then sank again, tragically, the trays where the pale flesh of fish curled in opaque twists upon the polystyrene, and made their way instead to the shelves piled with pasta, beans and lentils, all harmlessly dry and odour-free, the racks of nuts and spices where whatever surprises might be were bottled and boxed with kindergarten attractiveness. (Desai, 1999, p. 183)

II Curry’s careers Malabari may have bemoaned the paucity of Indian cooks and dishes in Britain, but by 1893, the year in which his book was published, the tastes of the subcontinent had established 319

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themselves on British terrain in varied guises for a century and a half. Hannah Glasse’s 1747 volume, The Art of Cookery, was the first British cookbook to include Indian recipes, and a diversity of spices for Indian cooking could be purchased from chemists (Collingham, 2006, pp. 137–141). The following century saw the appearance in the metropolis of recipe books of Indian food (Collingham, 2006, p. 134). Some Anglo-Indian men returning from India sometimes brought Indian cooks back with them, while Anglo-Indian women collected recipes from their cooks in India for future use in Britain. In the pre-Waterloo era of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the returning Anglo-Indian Joseph Sedley cannot avail of the gastronomic services of an Oriental Club, which was established in 1824. But at his parents’ home his mother offers him “a pillau, just as you like it,” in addition to green chilli peppers from the subcontinent and a curry that he pronounces “as good as [his] own curries in India” (Thackeray, 1883, pp. 23, 27). (The unsuspecting Becky Sharp, however, is tortured by the heat of the dish and of the chilli pepper.) When the Indian entrepreneur Sake Deen Mahomed established the Hindostanee Coffee House in 1809 near Portman Square, he sought his clientele among “Indian gentlemen,” that is, Europeans who had lived or worked in the subcontinent. Making a virtue of the authenticity of his culinary offerings and ambiance, his advertisements offered “the Hoakha [hookah], with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England” (Fisher, 1996, p. 258). Though the Hindostanee Coffee House was well received initially, Mahomed was unable to compete with other coffee houses that served (what were called) curries, including the more conveniently located Jerusalem Coffee House, already favoured by a British clientele doing business in or travelling to India. He had to declare bankruptcy within two years (Fisher, 1996, p. 260). The limited success of Mahomed’s appeal to authenticity was perhaps a portent of the transmogrifications that the term “curry” was to undergo. From being a placeholder to describe a range of Indian dishes, it became, as Lizzie Collingham notes, “a dish in its own right, created for the British in India…. simply a spicy sauce for meat” (Collingham, 2006, p. 118). This led to the emergence of the phenomenon known as curry powder: As the Anglo-Indians began to think of curries as variations on one theme, they began to collect recipes for spice mixtures that they simply labeled “Curry Powder.” By the 1850s British cookery books called for a spoonful of curry powder in most of their dishes. Sometimes they supplied recipes for curry powders that the cook could make up in advance, but as the popularity of curries became widespread it became easy to buy curry mixes. (Collingham, 2006, p. 141) By the middle of the 19th century, such curries became popular among the urban middle classes as an economical way to use leftover meats and fish, and they were featured in the popular cookery books of Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton (Sen, 2009, p. 41). English-style curries, complete with curry powder and ready-made chutneys, also came to be popular in the taverns of British settler colonies, including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, in the 19th century (Sen, 2009, p. 12). The most upscale successor to the Hindostanee Coffee House would emerge over a century later, in 1926. This was Veeraswamy’s of London, started by Edward Palmer, great-grandson of the famous “white Mughal” William Palmer and Princess Begum Fyze Baksh of Hyderabad, and an importer of spices and chutneys from India. In its menu, decor, 320

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and staffing, the restaurant was dedicated to reproducing the atmosphere of the Raj for aristocratic diners and Anglo-Indians homesick for their days as sahibs. On the other end of the spectrum, there were the lascar cafés in port cities like London and Liverpool that produced Indian food; these catered to a mostly male population of lascars (Indian sailors, often from Sylhet in Bengal) on shore leave or to students from the subcontinent.5 During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of boarding houses and cafés catering to the same clientele had established themselves in Brick Lane and other locales in London. These modest establishments were the precursors of the “curry houses” – “the generic name for a generally downmarket Indian or Pakistani eating establishment,” as Colleen Taylor Sen puts it – of a later era (Sen, 2009, p. 46). In the meanwhile, after enjoying some favour in the Victorian period, Indian cooking fell out of favour with a British public that came to see it as foul-smelling and over-spiced. Relatively liberal immigration policies in the aftermath of the Second World War – an entailment of post-war labour shortages – increased the size of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. There was an influx of immigrants willing to work long and inconvenient hours at the unpleasant jobs that were key to British industrial expansion. They were joined in the following decades by South Asian refugees from East Africa, including those expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972. Among this group was the Gujarati-Kenyan Pathak family, which would become famous for its Patak’s brand of cooking sauces, curry pastes, chutneys, pappadums, chapatis, and pickles; in 2007, the company supplied “some 75% of the 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain,” according to the business editor of The Guardian (Walsh, 2007). Immigrants from the newly created nation of Bangladesh also added to the numbers of people of South Asian origin resident in Britain. A sizeable number of these newcomers joined the restaurant and food provisioning sector. As a result, remarks Elizabeth Buettner, there was a significant multiplication in the number of curry houses. While there were 300 such establishments in 1960, mostly located near factories with large Asian labour forces and catering to working-class South Asian men, there were nearly 9,000 restaurants and takeaways run by South Asian immigrants and their descendants in 2001, employing over 70,000 people (Buettner, 2008, pp. 865, 874–875). No longer restricted to serving a limited population of South Asian working people and students of modest means, they expanded beyond Asian enclaves to serve a largely white customer base. As Buettner also observes, “going for an Indian” became for young working- or lower middle-class white males a ritual weekend event following hours of drinking at the pub. These visits often involved lobbing racist insults at the dark-skinned staff, demanding what they believed to be “typical” Indian food, ordering and eating the hottest dish that was available, and occasionally engaging in vomiting, assault, or vandalism (Buettner, 2009). Curry houses, however, managed successfully to expand their clientele beyond the ranks of loutish young men to a wider cross-section of the white public with a taste for their cheap and tasty fare. Part of their success involved cloning menus, using low-cost ingredients, and instituting labour-saving shortcuts; many curry houses relied upon a limited set of spice pastes that became the base for a variety of curries. They also endeavoured to make their food palatable to the unschooled tastes of their customers; chicken tikka masala, widely popular in Britain and celebrated in a 2001 speech by the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as a triumph of British multiculturalism, is said to have been the result of a white customer’s complaint that his chicken tikka was dry rather than sauced. Another innovation of the Pakistani diaspora in Birmingham was the introduction of Balti cuisine, supposedly the cuisine of the inhabitants of Baltistan in Pakistan. Ziauddin Sardar describes in some detail his quest for the origins of Balti cuisine among restaurateurs in Birmingham. He himself is unable to distinguish Balti cuisine from non-Balti offerings. 321

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The restaurateurs, however, explain Balti cuisine in a variety of ways. One relatively young owner insists vigorously on Balti cuisine as his own innovation for “highly educated” white customers and emblematic of the Pakistani and Kashmiri (rather than generically Indian) identity of the food he serves. A second, and older, owner of a curry house that is accredited with the invention of Balti, however, is downright cynical (and more contemptuous about white Britons’ capacity for gastronomic discernment): “It’s a joke. It all started as a joke. Hundred per cent joke. It was an invention for the goras [white people]…. Balti is like curry. It exists and doesn’t exist. Do you know what curry is?” “No,” I replied. “I don’t.” “Neither do I,” he declared, beaming. “In fact, I have never had curry in my life!” (Sardar, 2012, p. 26) Sardar notes with relish that the Balti food phenomenon is a superb feat of marketing, lifting the curry house “from the bog-standard confines of curry and vindaloo” to give it a more upmarket sheen of authenticity (2012, p. 37). That such a gambit triumphed is evidenced by the publication of the Balti Bible by Pat Chapman, also the founder, in 1982, of the Curry Club, a guild of curry enthusiasts. The Balti strategies outlined by Sardar’s interlocutors are a useful reminder of the fact that immigrant or minority restaurateurs are not simple victims of the formulaic, ethnocentrically limited desires of their non-South Asian customers. For all the breast-beating about the demeaning implications of “curry” for the richly varied cuisines of the subcontinent, curry house owners themselves are often voluntaristic participants in the self-exoticisation that enables them to earn a livelihood, and may be quite canny about the forms in which it can be mobilised. The fact that South Asian food in the diaspora frequently has been associated with degraded, unrefined forms of appetite and consumption has sometimes led scholars of diasporic experience to write as if suffering and exploitation are the most authentic, politically compelling experiences of immigrant life; hence we are reminded repeatedly of the majoritarian opprobrium directed against South Asian diasporic subjects in the course of cooking South Asian food or operating curry houses. The chronicles of Balti cuisine, however, lay bare the intensely plotted dramas of aspiration, calculation, and disavowal that constitute the life of the plebeian curry chef. Krishnendu Ray speaks penetratingly of what we lose when we think of taste only or primarily as “a matter of elites and emulation” à la Pierre Bourdieu (Ray, 2012, p. 184). An understanding of taste as elite-driven can disable us, he suggests, from thinking subtly and critically about pleasure, enjoyment, taste, and connoisseurship – including the connoisseurship of non-elite constituencies like Balti restaurateurs – as part of any discussion of the aesthetics or politics of gastronomy. Perhaps as culturally important as the proprietor of the curry house or the Balti restaurant, and often imagined as antithetical to his values, are those figures who are constituted, or who constitute themselves, as authorities on an authentic subcontinental cuisine. Of these the most illustrious undoubtedly is Madhur Jaffrey; she is the single best-known authority on Indian gastronomy in the United States and Britain, the host of three extremely popular cooking shows on the BBC in the 80s, and the author of over two dozen volumes, almost all food-related. She has been hailed by no less than the British Tourist Authority’s guide as “the Mrs. Beeton of the 1990s,” and been granted an Honorary CBE in 2004 (Basu, 1999, p. xvi).6 Her first cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), was scathing about the authenticity and quality of the food produced by curry houses in Britain and the United 322

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States, as also about the vulgarising operations of that homogenising, gastronomically impoverished, commercially debased quick fix, curry powder. “To me,” she says in this work, “the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to ­China’s” ( Jaffrey, 1973, p. 5).7 But if “curry” is a gross flattening of culinary heterogeneity, there is, for Jaffrey, something that ties the variegated cuisines of the subcontinent together – “the imaginative use of spices” ( Jaffrey, 1983, p. 9). She situates spices within an idiom of culinary authenticity, associated with variety, complexity, painstaking labour, and the home cooking of women; they come to function for her as a reactivated trope of authenticity, distinct from the formulaic commercialisations of curry powder and the mild-medium-hot Indian restaurant menu norm in the diaspora. Over several of the early books she would insist on the irreducibility of the domestic hearth to the experience of delectable and regionally unique Indian cooking; “India hides its real food--and the best of its food--in millions of private homes, rich and poor, scattered across its provinces,” she writes in A Taste of India ( Jaffrey, 1985, pp. 12–13). Jaffrey’s ascendance as an icon in Britain and, to a lesser degree, in the United States – and the popular elevation of South Asian cuisine as gastronomically sophisticated, rather than the cheap and nasty food of marginalised communities – is keyed in crucial ways to her mobilisation of what some reviewers have described as “the romance of spices.” As noted above, spices, as the charismatic corrective to curry powder, find their place within the idioms of the authentic and the natural, particularly resonant in the aftermath of the transatlantic counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. “Today Americans especially seem to have a great desire to experience the ‘real’ thing, an authentic taste, a different life style. Anything fake is deplored, fake foods included,” she notes in An Invitation to Indian Cooking ( Jaffrey, 1973, p. 7). Invoking newly valorised lexicons of authenticity and racial-cultural difference, Jaffrey’s work locates itself within a new order of ethical or at least reflexive consumption. The upmarket success of her books and television shows certainly owes something to this. Something is also due, surely, to the considerable narrative skills she has brought to the cookbooks, especially the early ones. These tend to weave together the production of recipes with the seductions of a personal narrative that combines exilic nostalgia, cosmopolitan taste, mobility, and memories of class privilege. Such a narrative is worlds apart from the milieu of curry house chefs, mostly “former seamen who left their ships with the hope of making a living, somehow or other, … and as cooking seemed to require no unusual skills, a great many became restaurateurs” ( Jaffrey, 1973, p. 3). Despite Jaffrey’s excoriation of curry and curry powder in the years she was establishing her career, though, the staying power of the term “curry” has proved itself in the past two decades. In keeping with its (somewhat oxymoronic) title, her Quick & Easy Indian Cooking (1996) relies upon a number of shortcuts, including – perhaps most significantly – the use of curry powder. “In the interests of speed,” says Jaffrey matter-of-factly, “I have turned to a rather good brand of curry powder, Bolst’s” ( Jaffrey, 2007, p. 134).8 And a 2003 work, titled Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible, seized upon the very term that she had once held up to derision, even echoing the title of Pat Chapman’s Curry Bible (1997) and coming to be enlisted (through her British publisher) in a “biblical war” with his claim to the title.9 The term “curry” for an Indian or Indian-style dish with a sauce is “not exactly my definition,” she notes somewhat ruefully in the introduction to this book. But it belongs to a script that is too overpowering and, eventually, too familiar to be resisted for very long. Since then, she has published more cookbooks that showcase curries in the title, though it is entirely possible that these titles were chosen by her publishers. Her television show on the Good Food Channel in Britain in October 2012 was called, simply, “Curry Nation.” 323

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III The innovations of indenture The end of slavery in the British empire in 1833 was followed by a great migration of Indian workers from the subcontinent to various sugar-producing colonies (Trinidad, Mauritius, British Guyana, Surinam, Fiji, and Natal), where former slave plantations found themselves facing a shortage of exploitable labour, given the reluctance of former slaves to continue their toil on them at the wages and job conditions offered by planters. (Indentured labourers were also recruited for rubber, tea, and oil palm plantations in Malaysia.) The planters’ search for labour recruits took them to densely populated Asia, especially China and India. The frequency of famines in India – a marked feature of the 19th and early 20th centuries – ensured the success of these recruiting efforts. Indentured migrants entered into agreements to receive transport to a sugar-producing colony in return for a fixed period of labour. The indenture contract regulated the terms of employment of labourers as well as their living conditions, since it spelled out not just working hours and rates of pay but also what the worker would receive in terms of food rations, housing, and medical care. The experience of life on the ship would constitute the first of many bodily and psychic re-makings of the girmityas (people contracted to indenture by the Girmit, a corruption of the English word agreement). There, in a striking departure from the laws of caste hierarchy that had governed diet and commensal relations on land for most of them, they were fed the same food – rice, flour, sugar, salt, dal, onions, garlic, ghee, oil, potatoes, tamarind, spices, tobacco, pumpkins, dried fish, and the occasional mutton – regardless of prior distinctions of caste, creed, or class. Though high-caste labourers occasionally demanded separate facilities on board for cooking and eating, their requests were politely refused (Kumar, 2016, p. 47). The Indo-Fijian poet Sudesh Mishra described what was lost and, more importantly, gained as a result of this: many things were lost during that nautical passage, family, caste and religion, and yet many things were also found, Chamars found Brahmins, Muslims found Hindus, Biharis found Marathis, so that by the end of the voyage we were a nation of jahaji bhais [ship brothers, shipmates], … all for one and one for all. (Kumar, 2016, pp. 47–48) Partly though not entirely as a result of the proximities and commensality of shipboard life, some of the rigidities of caste broke down on the plantations. There were cross-caste marriages though, as Vijay Mishra notes, “Brahmins and Kshatriyas (the two upper castes) did make an effort to maintain some semblance of class solidarity by marrying among their own castes” (Mishra, 2007, p. 89). We get frequent glimpses of the powerful hold of a Brahminism of the alimentary tract in the fiction and the discursive prose of V.S. Naipaul. In A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), the boy Mr Biswas’s status as a Brahmin means that he is ritually fed on ceremonial occasions. His apprenticeship as a priest under Pundit Jairam concludes with an appalling lesson in the rules of jootha/uchhishta, or the pollution generated by leftovers, in a Hindu caste-based gastropolitics. Having consumed without permission two bananas out of a bunch gifted to Jairam, he has polluted the entire bunch. As punishment, he is made to consume all the bananas in the bunch, an episode that ends in constipation and the improper disposal of bodily wastes, and the further pollution of sacred objects. This occasion of food-related excess, cruelty, and disgust seems in many ways typical for a Naipaul 324

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text; Mishra observes correctly that “in Naipaul food is never something to be enjoyed or an occasion for celebration” (Mishra, 2007, p. 93). Even when Mr Biswas stages his rebellion against the tyranny of the Tulsis by eating promiscuously of oysters and pepper sauce in a fly-infested shop, followed by tinned salmon and hops bread – the last a product they consider “feckless, negroid, and unclean”—his experience is one of nausea and distress rather than the exhilaration of rebellion or even the satisfaction of appetite (Naipaul, 1969, p. 140). Elsewhere, too, distaste and avoidance mark most of his recollections about or presentations of food or commensal encounters, especially when the food involved in that of ethnic or civilisational others. In An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes his distaste about salivary contact, whether it is among boys sharing popsicles, women licking the ladles with which they stir their cooking pots, or people refusing to segregate their dishes from those of their pets. Summoning up a memory from his days as a schoolboy, he describes his secret pleasure at the way in which his revulsion about contact with others’ saliva is recognised by others as his specifically Brahminical signature. The food that is served at the Tulsi household – food that Mr Biswas dislikes – has elements that recur frequently: tea, roti or chapattis, rice, curried beans, curried potatoes, spinach, lentils, and coconut chutney. This is the cuisine of the Indian indentured diaspora, even though the Tulsis are decidedly past indenture. This cuisine was determined by the weekly food rations of the sugar plantations, which were very similar to what they had been given (though in cooked form) on the ships that brought them to their destinations. These rations were identical, as Mishra remarks, for Indian labourers, whether in Surinam or Mauritius or Fiji and, as a result, indentured populations in widely different locales had an unusually consistent cuisine: The pattern of daily meals based on these rations was remarkably uniform throughout the colonies and led to a cuisine that included curried fish, baigan chokha (aubergine roasted in an open fire), vegetables (mainly beans), dhal, and varieties of roti, both sada (plain) and paratha (with oil). (Mishra, 2007, p. 92) Some of the foods and cooking techniques that emerged from this experience have distinct continuities with the cuisines of the Indo-Gangetic plain from which many indentured labourers originated. Certain idioms of culinary processing – as in the use of the verb “chonkayed” as a variant of the Hindi chhaunk (the addition of spices popped in hot oil to dal)10 – also remain relatively unchanged. But there were also distinct transmutations of a received cuisine. The loosening of caste restrictions, as well as the conversion of some to Presbyterianism, meant that many who had been vegetarian earlier came to incorporate meat in their diets, though there was, up till 1980 at least, a self-confessed reluctance to consume beef and pork, respectively, by people of Hindu and Muslim origin (Debysingh, 1986). New vegetables were cultivated. “Hardee, arooi or dasheen, and rehere ke dal, pigeon peas. Chowrai bhaji, with pink stems and green leaves, was growing like weeds everywhere around the barracks, and we cooked it almost every day like spinach,” explains Deeda, an indentured labourer in Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin (2008, p. 123). Some staple foods underwent modification as well. In Jahajin, the linguist-anthropologist narrator notes that there is no word for atta, or whole-wheat flour, in the Bhojpuri of Trinidad, since wheat was not grown in the region from which the labourers were recruited. The rotis of Trinidad are made of white flour and leavened with baking soda. As a result the sada rotis “are spectacularly bigger than the thin brown chapattis of India,” capable of feeding a woman and two children. Hence, too, the 325

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large size of the dhal-puris and thick white layered parathas, “common to the entire purabiya [the eastern Gangetic plain] diaspora but unknown in the purabiya heartland” (Mohan, 2008, pp. 48, 50). Another distinction from the practices of the “purabiya heartland” is the unapologetic use of pre-made commercial curry powders. When the young narrator waxes nostalgic about the fresh, stone-ground masalas of yesteryear, her much older interlocutor, who has endured the hardships of indenture, retorts tartly that the curry powder from the supermarket is a welcome labour-saving expedient. In several of the locales in which indentured labourers found themselves, versions of their food have found wide acceptance outside South Asian ethnic enclaves, becoming the fast food of both the Caribbean and Fiji. One well-known instance of a dish widely beloved in Trinidad (as well as in Guyana and Surinam, and in the Caribbean diaspora in New York and Toronto) is the dhal-puri, a flatbread stuffed with seasoned split peas, served with a mango chutney and sometimes consumed with curried vegetables, goat, chicken, or fish. It has been memorialised by several writers and filmmakers, including by Richard Fung in Dal Puri Diaspora (2012), a documentary about the history of the indenture journeys that produced this iconic food. Jahajin, too, is replete with appreciative references by the narrator (at the opposite bound, surely, from Naipaul’s food-aversive protagonists) to the delectations of dhal-puri: “I bit into the paper-thin roti, bursting with split pea stuffing, and lapped up the spicy, juicy curry shrimps wrapped inside it” (Mohan, 2008, p. 30). The book also makes loving reference to the other foods of subcontinental origin that have become popular street foods in the Caribbean: doubles (“little fried rotis made up into sandwiches with spicy channa as filling”), huge sada rotis, thick layered parathas (also called “buss-up-shut” for their resemblance to torn shirts when crumbled), green bandhaniya (wild coriander leaves) chutney, and tomato chokha. As is evident from this catalogue, breads of various kinds appear to have achieved widespread popularity in areas of South Asian indentured arrival all over the world. In Trinidad, roti is a large, lightly fried bread wrapped around a curry and accompanied by chutneys, pickles, and relishes. A widely consumed street and takeaway food, it is often seen as the country’s national dish. In East Africa, where many food stores are owned by people of South Asian origin – a result of the migration of relatively well-to-do merchant communities – chapatis are used as wraps for different kinds of food. In Mauritius, Roti chaud (“hot roti”) is a classic street food dish, rolled up with cooked and chopped meats, fish, or vegetables and a spicy sauce. Singapore has its Roti prata, or Roti canai, a large, thin, flaky bread eaten with sauced meats and vegetables, while the popular Murtabak, filled with egg and minced meat and cut into squares, originated in Tamil Muslim restaurants and stalls in South-East Asia.11 South Africa, like Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, and other indenture destinations, saw the arrival of indentured labourers in the 1860s, followed soon by “passenger Indians,” a merchant class that opened businesses catering to this growing community, and that was careful to distinguish itself, especially in the early years, from “coolies.” The scarcity of familiar culinary ingredients, and exposure to new kinds of produce and cooking traditions, gave a distinctive inflection to the cooking of the South Asian diaspora in South Africa. “Out went the dairy, coconut milk, and hard-to-source spices like saffron,” observes Sarah Khan (2016). “In came amadumbe (taro), calabash (gourd), mielie-meal (maize flour), semp (dried corn kernels), and pumpkin. Lentils found their way into the folds of biryani, which over time became known locally as breyani” (Khan, 2016). As in Trinidad, pre-mixed curry powders are readily used, though any expectation of predictability is belied by a plethora of masala blends, including leaf masala (with coriander and fennel), mother-in-law masala (with turmeric and chile powder), and potjiekos masala (with cinnamon) (Khan, 2016). 326

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One of the most distinctive products of the South Asian diaspora in Durban is what has been named “bunny chow.” A half- or quarter-loaf of bread that has been hollowed out and filled with a curry to be consumed on the go and without utensils, it was named for the Banias who ran the restaurants; bunny chow was thus the food of the Banias. There are varying accounts of how the dish came to be invented. Ishay Govender-Ypma speculates that it might have originated in an endeavour to circumvent the laws of apartheid, which forbade the sale of food to Black people by Indians (or people of other races). Alternatively, it was an economical way for takeaway shops to sell food to labourers, golf caddies, and those who could not afford to take the time for a sit-down meal (Govender-Ypma, 2017).

IV Diaspora’s new directions? The history of the South Asian diaspora in North America follows distinctly different contours from those of Britain or the lands of indenture. Both before and after the American revolution, Americans had access to a wide range of Indian spices and curry powder, and curried chicken, veal, and lobster featured routinely on the menus of Boston taverns and eateries in the 1820s and 1830s (Sen, 2009, p. 53). As in 19th-century Britain and the British settler colonies, cookbooks featured recipes for curries of all kinds. Perhaps the most legendary of these was country captain, a braised chicken dish popular in the southern United States. It was rumoured to have been introduced in the port of Savannah by an English skipper who had served in Bengal, though subsequent research has traced its origins to a mid-19th-century cookbook published in Philadelphia and to the chef at Delmonico’s in New York.12 It was featured in Irma Rombauer’s iconic Joy of Cooking and in the cookbooks of Craig Claiborne and James Beard. These curries were cooked and enjoyed almost entirely in the absence of a South Asian diaspora in the United States. The migration of people – mostly men – from the subcontinent from the 19th century to the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 involved extremely limited numbers. In the decades preceding the restrictive “Barred Zone” Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigration from the Asia Pacific region, small numbers of men from Punjabi villages immigrated to rural California. In the first decade of the 20th century, about 6,800 Indians, mostly Punjabis, entered Canada, and a couple of thousand went south to the United States, once Canada started restricting admission on racial grounds. The group was composed largely of Sikhs of peasant or military background; there were smaller numbers of Muslims and a handful of Hindus. As immigrants from Hindustan or India, they were known as “Hindus” in the United States, regardless of religion. At first they worked primarily on the railroads and in lumber mills, where they encountered significant racist violence. They were more successful in agriculture, establishing themselves in the Sacramento, Central, and Imperial Valleys of California as rice farmers and owners of orchards. Barred by racialised immigration policies from bringing wives from India, and forbidden by California’s anti-miscegenation laws from marrying across racial lines, many of these men married Mexican women who worked alongside them in farms in California, the white county clerks being indifferent to whether Punjabi men married black or brown women from among the agricultural labourers (Leonard, 2000, p. 194). Their resulting families would be known as Mexican Hindus or Mexidus.13 The children of these unions would be socialised into the religion and language of their mothers. The fathers usually resisted transmitting aspects of Punjabi language or religious 327

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identity to their wives and children, with the important exception of food and funeral customs. (Describing these marriages later, one Punjabi immigrant would point to the commonalities between Punjabi and Mexican culture with respect to diet and household furnishings.) For them, says Karen Leonard, “‘Being Hindu’ meant eating chicken curry and roti, lemon pickles and Punjabi vegetables, and having a reverence for the ‘holy book,’ whether the Granth Sahib of the Sikhs or the Quran of the Muslims” (Leonard, 2000, p. 198). There were some food taboos the men observed; most Muslim Punjabis abstained from pork and tried to obtain halal meat from Jewish suppliers, while Sikh and Hindu men eschewed beef (Leonard, 1992, p. 129). Outside of these limits, food was the most important locus of cultural exchange and blending. The men taught their wives to cook rotis, chicken in the Indian style, vegetables, and pickles, but they also took to Mexican food, which they found relatively familiar (Leonard, 2013, p. 276). Their non-Punjabi spouses developed considerable expertise in cooking Punjabi food, a relish for which would be transmitted to their biracial children. In 1999, Lavinia Dhingra Shankar and Pallassana R. Balgopal would discover how consistently second- and third-generation descendants of these ­Punjabi-Mexican unions would understand their ethnic heritage (as part South Asian) in terms of culinary nostalgia or attachment (Shankar and Balgopal, 2001). This is one explanation for the popularity of the El Ranchero restaurant in Yuba City, run for several decades by the Rasul family of Imperial Valley. It served Mexican and Punjabi food, including “roti quesadillas” or “Hindu pizza,” in addition to chicken and lamb curries and Punjabi vegetable dishes (Leonard, 1992, p. 213; also see Chopra, 2019). Punjabi immigrants to California were not the only diasporic subjects from the subcontinent. As Vivek Bald has established, from the 1880s, Bengali Muslim chikondars (or peddlers of chikon embroidery) selling embroidered silks and other handcrafted goods made their way through the United States selling their wares to a public with a taste for exotic goods (Bald, 2015, p. 176). They were joined at the time of the First World War by hundreds of seamen of rural Bengali origin, who fled brutal conditions of employment on British-owned steamships when they reached New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Like the Punjabis, they too married local women, generally Black, Puerto Rican, or Creole, and raised families with them. They lived in historically Black neighbourhoods for the most part: Harlem, West Baltimore, Detroit’s Black Bottom, and Tremé in New Orleans. Some of them found work as hot dog vendors on the streets of Harlem, while others sold herbs and spices. Those who had the means opened restaurants with their wives and children. By the 1940s and 1950s there were several restaurants in midtown Manhattan and Harlem; Bald suggests that the first Indian restaurant may have been started in Harlem. Harlem was an apt location for Indian restaurants given the sizeable Caribbean population resident there; one of the early Indian restaurants was in fact started by two Indo-Caribbean men (Bald, 2015, p. 3211). These institutions in Harlem were places where men of South Asian origin met to partake of familiar food and discuss subcontinental politics, but they were also integrated into the everyday life of Black and Puerto Rican Harlem. These establishments were racially and ethnically mixed in terms of both their operations and their clientele. Black activists congregated for their events in the restaurants, and immigrant Muslims from South Asia and Black Muslims rubbed shoulders there to discuss different practices and interpretations of their faith (Bald, 2015, pp. 3094–3211). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was also a network of Afghan vendors who sold tamales and chili on the streets of nearly every city and town in the Western United States, from Wyoming and Montana to Washington and Alaska. They hailed from the region of the Khyber Pass, in the borderlands between present-day Pakistan and 328

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Afghanistan. In fact, Kathryn Schulz comments, these tamale vendors “were so common as to become a stereotype—akin to Turkish coffee-shop owners, Syrian rug dealers, and Jewish pawnbrokers” (Schulz, 2016). One of them, Zarif Khan, was beloved in Sheridan, Wyoming as Hot Tamale Louie for over four decades. The successors to these early, working-class diasporas of Punjabi, Bengali, and Afghan men are what we might call the post-‘65 immigrants – those who were beneficiaries of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act’s privileging of certain kinds of English-fluent ­m iddle-class professionals, including engineers and doctors. Arriving under distinctly different auspices from their working-class forebears, these immigrants have achieved a certain kind of “model minority” status as a result of their white-collar success. (There are also a host of poorer, less upwardly mobile immigrants of South Asian origin who toil as taxi drivers and restaurant workers, and so on; they do not constitute the most visible or celebratory face of the post-‘65 diaspora.) This diaspora has produced a rich archive of literary writing. In many of these writings migrants accord food and consumption an imaginative centrality in negotiating experiences of attachment, aspiration, displacement, improvisation, and transformation in their places of diasporic arrival and habitation.14 There is in fact an abundance in the aesthetic of the South Asian diaspora of food-centred memoirs as well as fiction, film, television shows, and discursive prose that limn the migrant experience in terms of a gustatory and commensal schema. In some instances the turn to food culture as a vehicle for self-representation can come across as self-exoticisation or self-fetishisation; ­Chitra ­Divakaruni’s 1997 novel, The Mistress of Spices, is perhaps the best-known instance of this, but there are innumerable other fictions and memoirs that feature masalas, curries, chutneys, and mangoes in their titles. But this archive involves more than the seductions of exotic cooking and exotic eating. That taste involves not just pleasure but an assortment of traumas of the digestive tract, including disgust, shame, abjection, and loss is evident in a variety of other diasporic texts. For the juvenile protagonist of Pooja Makhijani’s “School Lunch,” the aloo tikkis her mother packs for her lunch are at the opposite bound from the Coke and Lunchables and Doritos that she thinks of as white/American/normal food; the tikkis alienate her from the Americanness she longs strenuously to inhabit. More subtly, someone like Jhumpa Lahiri has written movingly about the costs of immigration as measured in gastronomic and commensal losses. In “Mrs. Sen’s,” the eponymous character’s inability to find in New England the foods that will satisfy her Bengali palate is inseparable from a sense of lost female and familial community. Whenever there is a wedding in the family, … or a large celebration of any kind,’ she tells her young charge Eliot, ‘my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night. (Lahiri, 1999, p. 115) Her Bengali tastes are also unmistakably racialised when she occupies public space. When, after much searching, she finds a fish she likes and brings it back on the bus, other passengers complain of the odour. It is a characteristic moment in the gastronomic abjection of the immigrant, whose foods are often seen to exceed the limits of olfactory propriety. In his ethnography of relatively affluent probashi (expatriate) Bengali Hindu families in the United States, Krishnendu Ray provides a gloss on some of the investments and tensions that animate diasporic cooking and eating of the kind we find in “Mrs. Sen’s.” Fish and rice, 329

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which are deemed to constitute the core of Bengali cuisine, are reserved for dinner, which, in contrast to Westernised breakfasts and lunches eaten away from home, is seen as the only Bengali meal of the day. In fact, in contrast to Calcuttans, there is a certain hyperbolisation of the Bengaliness of dinner in terms of the frequency and quantity of the consumption of fish and rice (Ray, 2004, p. 56). In fact, Ray comments astutely, the very difficulty for the first post-‘65 generation of migrants of procuring the necessary culinary ingredients has had the effect of trigger[ing] a deeper association between Bengaliness and the missing ingredients. The memory of long ago and of another place was kept intact, just as Proust could associate the madeleine with his Combray childhood precisely because he had not tasted a madeleine since. (Ray, 2004, p. 100) At the same time, and notwithstanding a sentimental and ideological commitment to the affirmation of Bengaliness, these diasporic households are in practice fairly eclectic about what they eat. And, as in the instance of most migrant communities, the following generations seem to feel a relatively diminished desire to make Bengali food central to their experience of gustation. But this too might change with time, if the nostalgic attachment to roti and saag of latter-day Punjabi Mexicans is any indication. The early experiences of scarcity experienced by the protagonist of “Mrs. Sen’s” are no longer the norm, at least in the larger urban areas of the United States and Canada. South Asian grocery stores and eateries are quite abundant and desi food products quite widely available, including in mainstream grocery stores. Recent years, moreover, have seen the emergence of several upmarket, even Michelin-starred, Indian restaurants and star chefs in the major cities, though a true sampling of the diversity of the cuisines of the subcontinent and its diasporas remains limited. There are writers on the foods of the subcontinent on many major newspapers, and relatively sophisticated reviews of the restaurants that offer the foods of South Asia. At the same time, South Asian restaurants in the United States and Canada have not achieved the cultural primacy that they enjoy in Britain, for a variety of reasons: the absence of a colonial history between North America and the subcontinent, the ubiquity of other cheap “ethnic” cuisines, and a relatively shallow history of immigration. Nor has South Asian food assumed the kind of ubiquity or iconic status that it does in large parts of the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, or s­ub-Saharan Africa. What will its contours be in North America in the coming decades? Its future in a volatile gastronomic landscape is difficult to predict.

Notes 1 This, according to Lambourn (2018, p. 11), is “the only known document of its type to have survived from the premodern Indian Ocean.” 2 Ben Yiju’s correspondence mentions only that he was accompanied by his son and daughter. 3 Swami Vivekananda can be seen as something of a contrast to his contemporary, Gandhi. Travelling in the United States in the 1890s, he was critical of those of his adherents in India who wished him to follow a “Hindu” diet during his sojourn abroad. He advocated instead the value of a carnivorous diet to enfeebled Indian males as an aid to building up physical and moral muscle. 4 Eric Reinders suggests that Western Christian missionaries in 19th-century (Manchu) China came to connect religious identity, whether Buddhist or Christian, with a decided stance on carnivory. Abstention from meat was seen as religiously meritorious for Buddhists; hence, conversions of Chinese Buddhists to Christianity had to involve a “baptism of meat” (2004). 5 For details of some of these early eating establishments, see Visram (2002, pp. 279–280).

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Food in the South Asian diaspora 6 It is apposite that in post-imperial London Jaffrey’s likeness should hang in the National Portrait Gallery. 7 In remarks at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2014, she also dismissed Balti cuisine as a “craze with no authentic origins which will slowly die as people’s tastes turn to more complex dishes” (Gibbons, 2014). 8 For a more detailed review of Jaffrey’s gastronomic and filmic career, see Roy (2010), pp. 154-190. 9 Pat Chapman notes on his website his unavailing endeavours to patent the term “curry bible” as his own (http://www.patchapman.co.uk/page2.html?view=0&ID_select=4475; accessed N ­ ovember 26, 2007). 10 As in Ramabai Espinet’s novel (2003, p. 1433): “The food was purely the Trinidad of my youth– the dhal chonkayed with geera and garlic, the bhaji perfectly cooked, the carilee bitter and crisp, the fried fish peppered to perfection.” 11 Some of these details have been gleaned from Kaig and Sen (2013). 12 For a history of country captain, see Sifton (2009). 13 For a detailed account of this hybrid Punjabi-Mexican community, see Leonard (1992). 14 For a comprehensive review of this archive, see Mannur (2010).

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24 CONCERTO FOR SOLO PIANO Rethinking diaspora music with Azerbaijani women musicians in the United States Anna Oldfield Azerbaijani women musicians: a diaspora on a mission In the afternoon of February 16, 2020, I approached the entrance of St. Mark’s Church-inthe-Bowery to see the Azerbaijani Pianist Nargiz Aliyarova perform with baritone Stephan Salters for a concert dedicated to Black History Month. St. Marks, a historical church located in New York City’s East Village, has been a venue for arts in America since the 19th century. It was a sunny and fresh NY February day when my friend and I entered the simple, stone building where we were given a paper program and chose our folding chair seats. The audience, chatting quietly, looked to be a mix of casually dressed local music enthusiasts, mostly white and African American, as well as people dressed more formally, as if for an evening in a concert hall, talking to each other in Azerbaijani and Russian. A piano and microphone stood on stage, where a woman was setting up a video camera near the left. It was a disparate crowd of people who seemed to have arrived for several completely different occasions. A month earlier I had interviewed Nargiz Aliyarova in person. She kindly invited me to her home and allowed me to ask about her experiences as a musician both in her native Azerbaijan and in her new home in New York City. One theme she emphasized as common to both locations was the transformative power of music to bring people together. As she described it, people come to a conference as individuals, with different thoughts and problems, but during the live performance, they achieve a kind of special consciousness, transcending their ordinary live to achieve a kind of communion, at least for the time of the concert: “Music has that power,” she told me (personal interview with Aliyarova, 2020). During the interview, Nargiz also discussed her preparations for the Concert for Black History month with African American Baritone Stephan Salters. As the president of the National Music & Global Culture Society, Aliyarova had organized the concert for the past two years. This year, she told me, in addition to the works of African American composers and traditional Spirituals, the program would center on art music composed for songs by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, thus introducing an aspect of global Black history unknown to most Americans. At St. Marks Aliyarova introduced the concert and brought Salters to the stage. His deep, emotional baritone filled the vaulted stone space as Aliyarova’s stirring piano provided a responsive accompaniment. Aliyarova took time between sets to introduce the music and give 334

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a short talk about Pushkin and his African heritage. The emotional center of the concert was Pushkin’s poem Я вас любил [I loved you] as set to music by Gara Garayev and sung by Salters, and at times I felt my breath taken away by the stirring song. As often happens in live venues, a feeling of joy, spinal chills, and awareness of the music filling the chamber seemed to bring the audience together, murmuring appreciation and clapping more and more in unison as the concert progressed. It was exactly what Aliyarova had described to me, the power of the music to bring a hall of disparate people together in a feeling of heightened consciousness, even a kind of communion. The concert ended with a feeling that was celebratory, triumphant. People chatted to each other, to strangers, smiling as they came back into themselves and filtered out of the hall. The power of music had done its work. The concert for Black History Month was quite different from my expectations of a musical performance of diaspora. There were none of the national dress, ethnic instruments, or Folk dances familiar from typical displays of ethnic heritage in the United States. The theme of Black History Month seemed remote from Azerbaijan, and much of the music was American or Russian. However, Aliyarova used the opportunity of the concert to educate those in the audience who might not be familiar with her country, introducing herself as Azerbaijani, explaining connections between Azerbaijan and Russia to contextualize the choice of Pushkin songs, and introducing Gara Garayev as an Azerbaijani composer. The concert was an event of the National Music and Global Culture Society, which has a mission to “increase awareness and appreciation of global and multinational culture through music” (NMGCS, 2008). As surprised as I was at the time, in retrospect I realized that the event exactly expressed many aspects of musical performance in the Azerbaijani diaspora. The study is based on research with a small and specific diaspora of women musicians from the Azerbaijan Republic who have made a home in the United States. Research was conducted in a series of semi-structured interviews intended to give the women freedom to represent their experiences of musical practices both in Azerbaijan and in the United States. By considering their reflections on practicing music in America, these women shed light on the interactions of music and place that influence on the negotiation of Azerbaijani identity in the United States. After conducting the interviews, I put their words into conversation with scholarship from ethnomusicology, Azerbaijani studies, and post-Soviet studies. This chapter uses these conversations as a framework through which to view the experiences of Azerbaijani women musicians in the United States. The five women I interviewed all came to the United States from the Azerbaijan Republic (AR), a former Soviet Republic located in the southern Caucasus. Azerbaijan is located on and around the current land border between the continents of Europe and Asia, a border that has fluctuated from the time of the ancient Greek geographers and still is not set today (Chibilev and Bogdanov, 2011; Chandrasekhar and Chapman, 2019). The AR lies between Russia and Georgia to the North, Iran to the South, Armenia to the West, and the Caspian Sea to the East. The capital Baku is known for its oil industry and increasing visibility in international sports and culture since independence in 1991. The majority in this developed, secular republic are ethnically Azerbaijani, speak a Turkic language, and identify as Shi’a Muslim, but there are many ethnic and religious minorities. Azerbaijan has a history of being between large empires, both as a crossroads and as contested ground. Although for much of its history Azerbaijan was connected to the Iranian cultural and political sphere, its northern territories were colonized by Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Azerbaijani regions were subsequently divided up in a series of wars between Russia and Iran, with the border set by the Turkmanchay Treaty of 1828. Northern Azerbaijanis were then part of the Russian Empire, while southern Azerbaijanis remained 335

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(and still are) in northern Iran (Naroditskaya, 2003). Northern Azerbaijan became part of the Russophone world as a colonial possession, declared independence from 1918 to 1920, was pulled into the Soviet Union for 71 years, then gained independence in 1991. This chapter is focused only on the diaspora from the northern Azerbaijan Republic in the United States. There are significant diasporas of Azerbaijanis in Turkey and Europe as well as in the United States. The diaspora population from the AR in the United States is relatively small, counted at 14,205 by the 2000 Census (Table FBP-1 2000). The greatest number of these immigrants arrived in or after the 1990s, when education, travel, and work abroad became more accessible after the fall of the USSR. Azerbaijanis live everywhere in the United States but have higher populations in the New York region, Texas, and California. They tend to be a well-educated and high-status population, many working in the oil industry, education, medicine, and high tech. This chapter is concerned with how Azerbaijani women in the United States engage in public musical practices that enable meaningful shared experiences between performers and audiences. Because it is based in live performance, music is a rich field in which to study identity and intercultural negotiation. Professional musicianship in a diasporic context includes many public activities, including solo and ensemble performance, musical composing and arranging, organizing and managing events, promotion and marketing, teaching, lecturing, and translation between musical languages. Public activities allow a musician to represent themselves and their home culture and to creatively negotiate relationships between their home culture and the new dominant culture and subcultures. The women I researched for this chapter have had very successful musical careers in the United States. I will argue that the skills, attitudes, and ideals that Azerbaijani women developed from growing up in a large multicultural country where music was a way of defining and sharing identity (the USSR) made them well prepared to succeed in the United States. Further, I will discuss how Azerbaijan’s self-identification as a bridge between Europe and Asia has infused its musical practices and has created a musical tradition that actively seeks to communicate across cultures. Finally, I will discuss how their musical practices strive to create transformative experiences within the space and time of the concert, giving the women agency to communicate across cultures while retaining a uniquely Azerbaijani voice.

Music and diaspora In 1782, visiting Frenchman Honoree Crèvecoeur declared that in the United States “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” (Gleason, 1964, p. 22). The United States has thousands of diaspora communities, and music is an important way by which immigrants and their descendants can resist the forces of the “melting pot” and retain a connection to their home culture. Dominant white Anglophone culture exerts powerful pressure to assimilate, which can erase a native language in one generation, leaving grandchildren of immigrants with only a favorite food and a few Folk songs. Immigrant communities often use music to feel a sense of ethnic solidarity and take pride in a home culture. As Mark Slobin writes, “Music is central to the diasporic experience, linking homeland and here-land with an intricate network of sound….people identify themselves strongly, even principally, though their music” (1995, p. 243). Studies of the brain show that music is deeply interwoven with language, memory, and emotion in human neural networks (Patel, 2008). Music allows the simultaneous self-definition as unique in a multinational country while also helping to negotiate a relationship with a dominant culture. 336

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Music in diaspora has a huge variety of forms and purposes, but studies have mostly concentrated on music performed in the native language with traditional musical instruments. Native songs and instruments can help a diaspora embed in a new place and make it their own, as Jennifer Post describes among Kazakh musicians in Mongolia (2000). Writing on music in the Afghan diaspora in California, John Bailey (2005) contrasts music played within the community, often evoking a sense of longing and loss, with more positive and demonstrative music played for the non-Afghan public. Music can be a way of “drawing symbolic boundaries” between diaspora communities (Türünz, 2006, p. 81) and can be a site “through which competing notions of identity are played out” for children of immigrants creating hybrid identities (Bakrania, 2013, p. 5). Music can open multiple windows on how diasporas perform their identities in new contexts. In the United States, diaspora music is often displayed in Folk festivals, which became popular in the 19th century as “Musical Celebrations” featuring national dress, music, dance, food, and crafts (Cohen, 2008). These festivals often take place in ethnic neighborhoods and are connected to holidays, such as St. Anthony’s Feast, which celebrates Italian culture in Boston’s North End. These festivals can be made up of large diaspora populations with generations of descendants and attract large audiences of Americans to watch or take part, as in the large Balkan dance festivals that have become popular in the United States ­(Ivanova-Nyberg, 2012). Of course, diasporas are not a conglomerate of people with only one kind of music, and individuals have complex relationships to music. Much of the public music in a diaspora comes from genres considered “folk, which in the American Folk Festival context is thought of as the music of ethnic groups, including distinct songs, dances and instruments held in common” (Allen and Groce, 1988, p. 2). In recent years the classical art music of diaspora cultures, such as the Afghan music Bailey discusses, has been increasingly performed on the concert stage, played on indigenous instruments by highly trained masters (2005). These categories are in addition to a richer variety of music, including urban, popular, and fusion styles, that fill a culture but are of less interest to audiences looking for an “authentic” display of ethnic heritage (Weiss, 2014, p. 508). Azerbaijani national music includes all of these genres, including Folk songs, dances, and a professional folk/bardic genre. Azerbaijan’s classical art music, called mugham, is played in small ensembles on indigenous instruments by highly skilled musicians. Based in named modes called mugham, the music develops as improvisation within a structure intended to culminate in a peak of intensity that is a transcendent experience (Naroditskaya, 2003; Dessiatnitchenko, 2017). In scales, intervals, and structures, mugham is related to neighboring art musics, such as the Iranian dastgah and the Turkish makam, but it is unique in musical expression. Azerbaijanis call Folk, bardic, and mugham their “national” [milli] music, and these are the types of genres typically found in a diaspora settings as described by researchers, the musics used to link “homeland and here-land.” The Azerbaijani musical diaspora in the United States, however, does not primarily display itself through Folk music. This is a diaspora of classical musicians, trained at the Azerbaijan State Conservatory, one of the most prestigious musical institutions in the former Soviet Union. Far from the Folk festival, It is a diaspora that has embedded into a classical music culture based on Western instruments, scales, and genres – a world of Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. And yet this diaspora works within this world to infuse it with Azerbaijani attitudes, ideals, and accomplishments in music. The women who were kind enough to participate in this study are, in the order I interviewed them: concert pianist Nargiz Aliyarova (New York City, NY), concert pianist 337

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Kamilla Mammedova (Hartford, CT), musicologist Aida Huseynova (Bloomington, IN), composer Rahilia Hasanova (Baltimore, MD), and organist Jamila Javadova-Spitzberg (Arlington, TX). These women have all had distinguished musical careers in the USSR, Azerbaijan, and Europe before arriving in America.1 They all moved to the United States after the year 2000. They do know each other and sometimes collaborate, but have all embedded themselves as individuals into American musical communities. All working “solo,” often the only Azerbaijani musician in the area, their musical practices are consciously embedded into multicultural, educational events – much like the concert I witnessed at St. Marks. This chapter will discuss how, in Azerbaijani self-definition, musical syncretism across cultures and the bridging of a perceived East-West divide are not just positive qualities but are essential to the culture and how it interacts with the world (Naroditskaya, 2003; Huseynova, 2016; Guseynova, 2019). Multiculturalism, receptivity, and openness are deeply held values that were strengthened by Soviet era ideals and lived musical practices. These values took a hit in the traumatic times of the 1990s and the following nation-building processes, but have been re-embodied by musicians in 21st century America. In conclusion, the chapter looks at how Azerbaijani women musicians use the power of music not just to react to, but to transform their new environment. In order to better understand the dynamics of the Azerbaijani diaspora, I conducted individual semi-structured interviews that asked the women to talk about their musical lives in Azerbaijan and the experience of transposing them onto America. My greatest surprise in their answers was that all of the women reported positive experiences of moving to the United States. Having worked with immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s I expected to hear about struggle, disappointment, and misunderstanding, when, in fact, all of the women reported an easy, even happy transition. They all described other musicians as receptive and friendly and American audiences as attentive, appreciative, and open; as Jamila Javadova-Spitzberg told me, after moving to Texas she found people “very open, very kind, and very embracing” (personal interview with Javadova-Spitzberg, 2020). All of the women also expressed enthusiasm for the cultural diversity of the United States and the chance to interact with many kinds of music; as Rahilia Hasanova told me, “it was like all your life you had had one cup of tea, and then suddenly you are offered hundreds of cups of tea, each one different. I wanted to try them all” (personal interview with Hasanova, 2020). As Kamilla Mammedova observed, “America is so international. You can listen to Latin-American music, African-American music, Italian…that’s what’s so beautiful about this country” (personal interview with Mammedova, 2020), while Nargiz Aliyarova said simply “in America you have the whole world” (personal interview with Aliyarova, 2020). Moving directly into cosmopolitan classical music cultures and university communities, they had quickly found their places. Aida Huseynova related sitting in her office in Bloomington Indiana and hearing musical instruments practicing “the exact same sounds I would have heard in my office at the Baku Music Academy” (personal interview with Huseynova, 2020). When I tried to bring out some challenge or difficulty they had faced in the United States, most of the women talked about the need to create your own career and promote yourself, especially after coming from a musical/state culture that took care of those aspects. But they all took to it with energy, building careers of performance, teaching, composing, arranging, writing, organizing, and touring. These women hit the ground running, as if they had been preparing to live in the United States for their whole lives. Their experiences spoke not of a diasporic “displacement” (Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996) but rather one of transposition, as if they were recreating their lives with similar notes but in a different key. 338

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And the American classical music world has welcomed them. They have performed in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Washington Cathedral, been invited to teach at major universities, and have been welcomed in local communities as piano teachers and church organists. All of the women have piles of positive performance reviews, which share an interesting feature; reviewers never refer to them just as a musician (pianist, organist, etc.) but always as an “Azerbaijani” musician. Reviews further often comment on the performance as “bridging” a perceived gap between “eastern” and “western” musics, as in this commentary on the compositions of Rahilia Hasanova: The strength of her music is in bridging the two seemingly disparate worlds of Eastern and Western cultures. By combining the essence of her native (Azerbaijani) culture and traditional music that represents the East with the contemporary classical music traditions of the West, Hasanova creates unparalleled music forms and materials that are as diverse as they are unforgettable. (Leone, 2018) Clearly, Azerbaijani-ness is an essential element of their musical identity as it is perceived in the United States. Aida Huseynova observed that in a “paradoxical” way she had become “more Azerbaijani” after coming to the United States: “While in Azerbaijan, you are not supposed to play Folk music on the piano if you are a classically trained pianist. But here in the US you are expected to demonstrate your cultural code,” she explained, detailing being “always encouraged” to play Azerbaijani music on the piano at university events (personal interview with Huseynova, 2020). All of the women described similar experiences of being recognized in America not only for their classical training but also for bringing Azerbaijani music to the United States. Kamilla Mammedova, who as a performer specializes in Rachmaninoff, received an award in New York for her work as a “Cultural Bridge” for “presenting the musical art of Azerbaijan in the USA” (Kamilla Mammadova, 2020). From the interviews it was clear that the women have enthusiastically taken on the role of representing Azerbaijan in the United States as a new part of their identity, and one way they enact it is to embed educational outreach activities into their musical practices. For Aida Huseynova, who teaches at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, teaching and scholarship related to her home culture are central to her musical life. All of the women have higher degrees and are associated with universities, either as faculty (Huseynova, Mammedova, Hasanova) or as guest lecturers (Aliyarova, Javadova-Spitzberg). In addition, most of their performance activities are what one reviewer called “lecture-recitals,” which embed a teaching element into the musical performance (Shrade, 2019). In Texas, Jamila ­Javadova-Spitzberg organized, introduced, and played in a centennial concert for Azerbaijani composer Gara Garayev in collaboration with the University of North Texas Music faculty and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, an event which included educational program notes (see Gara Garayev@100 The Music of Gara Garayev). The event was produced under the banner of the Azerbaijan-American Music Foundation (AAMF). The AAMF, which ­Javadova-Spitzberg founded and runs in Texas, is devoted to musical activities which teach the American public about Azerbaijani music. The National Music & Global Culture Society (NMGCS), which Nargiz Aliyarova founded in New York, has the same educational mission and has offered many concerts featuring Azerbaijani musicians and composers over the past two years. Working in the academic world, Aida Huseynova has brought Azerbaijani composed music into Anglophone conversations with her monograph Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera (2016). 339

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If education is embedded into the musical practices of Azerbaijani women, a deeper embedded layer is the goal of being a “bridge” between Azerbaijani and American culture. The AAMF has the mission of “building cross-cultural relationships and musical bridges between the USA and Azerbaijan” (AAMF, 2018), while the NMGCS states a goal to serve “as a bridge for connecting communities to global and multinational culture through classical music” (NMGCS, 2008). One way this “bridge” is enacted is in repertoire, especially in concerts that feature works by European/American, Russian, and Azerbaijani composers. By hearing them in together, concert events put the lesser known Azerbaijani composers in context with more familiar music. All of the women mentioned the importance of bringing the works of Azerbaijani composers such as Gara Garayev, Fikret Amirov, and Uzeyir Hajibeyli to American audiences; as Jamila Javadova-Spitzberg expressed, it is her “duty to bring my classical music culture to America and popularize it here.” Adding that “it would be a pity” if Americans did not know them (personal interview with Javadova-Spitzberg, 2020). Aida Huseynova has participated in a series of bridge projects that have brought Hajibeyli’s mugham opera Leyla and Majnun to American audiences with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and mugham singers Alim Gasimov and Fargana Gasimova (Layla and Majnun). Not only does Huseynova work as a human bridge, translating between languages and musical systems with the Silk Road ensemble; she also tours with the ensemble and gives contextual lectures. The staging of Hajibeyli’s 1908 Leyla and Majnun, most recently in collaboration with the New York based Mark Morris Dance Group, has brought this mugham-opera, part scored, part improvised, to audiences in America, Europe, and Australia for the first time. Included in the mission of bridging cultures are performances with the express goal of inspiring peace and intercultural tolerance. A review of an NMGCS concert by Nargiz Aliyarova and Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing concluded that “the overarching theme… was one of global unity,” noting that “Dr. Aliyarova…presented this recital as part of a mission ‘to bring people of different ethnic groups together through their national music to global culture’” (Shrade, 2019). One of Aida Huseynova’s local projects in Indiana, Abraham’s Children: A Prayer for Peace, was a collaboration of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim musicians intended to “show the unity and integrity of all religions on earth” (Huseynova, 2016, p. 245). In the interviews, it was clear that all of the women have a strong belief that musical collaboration can create positive examples of intercultural cooperation, even in a world where there are many conflicts outside the magic circle of the concert hall. The success of Azerbaijani women musicians, and the ease of their transitions, could be partially attributed to moving from one cosmopolitan musical community to another. However, it is also apparent that the skills Azerbaijani women have used to transition to the United States were honed in the context of Azerbaijan’s history of Russian colonization and incorporation into the Soviet Union. In these colonial and semicolonial contexts, Azerbaijanis developed methods of negotiating identity as a small ethnicity in a large multinational country with a dominant culture. The positive attitude toward multiculturalism, the concept of being a bridge culture, and the special attention on music as a method of intercultural communication are key concepts in how Azerbaijanis position themselves among other peoples. These qualities were firmly a part of the world that all of the women grew up in, and these are methods they were able to transfer to the United States. The USSR of the 1970s–1980s was a large multinational country. Like the United States, the USSR was not a nation-state but a country based on ideals that were intended to transcend ethnicity. Like the United States it had a dominant language (Russian), but unlike the United States Soviet culture did not encourage a “melting pot” of assimilation. Instead, the Soviet Union developed a policy that promoted national identity while attempting to 340

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repress nationalism (Sahadeo, 2007, p. 559). For non-Russian ethnicities, the state provided education in native languages, registered people by ethnicity in their passports, and supported selected cultural arts, particularly Folk music and dance (Hirsch, 2005, p. 225). Relations between ethnic groups were envisioned in an official policy called druzhba narodov, the “friendship of peoples”; but unlike most official policies, it was a genuinely popular ideal (Sahadeo, 2007, p. 560). Believing in druzhba narodov, people moved and traveled around the USSR, many intermarried, and urban centers like Moscow or Baku attracted many different ethnicities. Many people appreciated Russian language for its legacy of literature and the access it gave to the world. All of the women I interviewed described growing up with two native languages, Azerbaijani and Russian, and living in a multicultural Baku that they loved for its diversity. In the realm of music, USSR cultural policies encouraged druzhba narodov through sharing performing Folk arts such as music and dance. In addition, the state strongly encouraged all republics to engage with classical music, which included teaching the Russian classical tradition and supporting national composers. As Aida Huseynova described, at the Conservatory students studied Western, Russian, and Azerbaijani music: “In one day we i­mmersed into three different cultural and musical environments…everything seemed so natural…not just coexistence, but integration” (personal interview with Huseynova, 2020). She further describes traveling around the USSR as a music student on programs that combined musical performance with education, often showcasing Azerbaijani composers (personal interview with Huseynova, 2020). All of the women performed in Moscow and around the USSR as students and later professional performers. There were festivals and competitions where musicians from different republics would compete and projects in which they would collaborate. Music in the USSR was not just an abstract pleasure – it was tied to ideals of druzhba narodov, both helping different ethnicities learn about each other and putting them into multicultural collaborations. In Azerbaijani musical practices, musical syncretism across the cultures, and bridging the perceived “East-West” divide are considered not just a positive quality but essential to the essence of the culture (Huseynova, 2016; Guseynova, 2019). Azerbaijan had already started to integrate with Western classical music before the Soviet period. Under colonization Russian culture had a strong influence on the educated elite, and many progressives equated development of Western art genres with progress toward becoming an enlightened society (Feldman, 2018, chapter 1). Oil boom Baku was full of Europeans and their music, and Azerbaijani oil barons supported the building of the Baku Philharmonic in 1910 and the Opera and Ballet Theater in 1911. During this time the composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli (also Hajibeyov 1885–1948) did a close analysis of the modal system of Azerbaijani mugham and worked out its relation to Western scales. His first “mugham opera” Leyla and Majnun was written in 1908, and he would follow it with more compositions synthesizing Azerbaijani and Western music ever more closely (Naroditskaya, 2003, p. 12). By controlling the process, Hajibeyli saved Azerbaijani music from drowning in Russian aesthetics and founded the genre of Azerbaijani composed music. By the time Azerbaijan was subjugated to the USSR in 1920, Hanjibeyli was already composing music in classical genres that incorporated Azerbaijani aesthetics, and his achievement was a model of how to negotiate artistically with a dominant power while retaining one’s uniqueness. With strong Russian/Soviet support for educating the musically talented, the Azerbaijan State Conservatory became a thriving center of classical music. During the 1930s–1960s there was an influx of Russian classical musicians moving into Baku as performers and teachers, and many Azerbaijani musicians studied in Russia (Huseynova, 2016, p. 88). Soviet 341

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Azerbaijan produced world-class composers such as Gara Garayev (1918–1982), who studied with Dmitri Shostakovich and is well known in Russia. Like Shostakovich, Garayev composed modernist, abstract music, but further integrated Azerbaijani tonalities at the substructural level. Garayev embodied the idea of Azerbaijan as a bridge, claiming “the West and the East stayed side by side within me…I am the child of two mothers” (Huseynova, 2016, p. 28). He was also distinguished as one of two Soviet composers to travel to the United States to perform a work in 1961 at a time of high Cold War tension, an example of music being used as an intercultural bridge. Garayev’s example shows a mastery of the Western genre and its transformation from within. Rahilia Hasanova, who studied with Garayev and was greatly inspired by him, composes in highly modernist genres while making microfusions of Azerbaijani themes into the interior of the music. As she said, “As a composer I have to write my own music, but as an Azerbaijani, I grew up on this music, so it’s inside of me… it goes through my music…my minimalism is different from the minimalism of, say, Steve Reich” (personal interview with Hasanova, 2020). To the very end of the Soviet era, concept of being a bridge culture infused Azerbaijani musical practices. However, while this ideal was so often achievable in the concert hall, druzhba narodov is hard to achieve in political life, and one of the great tragedies of the fall of the USSR was the boiling over of simmering ethnic conflicts that the Soviet government had tried to repress. One of the worst of these conflicts happened in Azerbaijan, as a territorial conflict with Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke down into interethnic violence and the killing of Azerbaijani civilians by Soviet troops in 1990, followed by a full scale war. The new Azerbaijan Republic, declared in 1991, had had a traumatic transition to independence, occurring “amid political turmoil, economic collapse, and bloody ethnic and regional conflicts” (Huseynova, 2016, p. 236). For those who had grown up with druzhba narodov, the events at the end of the USSR were a betrayal of every principal from all sides. The failures of the USSR to fulfill the ideals it had instilled in its own people, which had become obvious in the 1980s, was an important factor in its downfall. For the nation-states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Azerbaijan’s case in the midst of war and occupation, there was a search for new ethnically based identities and values (Cornell, 2015). The Azerbaijan Republic was a new nation, and the country that Soviet citizens had grown up in no longer existed. As Alexei Yurchuk points out, the values and ideals that people grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s did not disappear with the fall of the USSR, observing that the “phenomenon of ‘post-Soviet nostalgia,’…is the longing for the very real humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities….that were irreducibly part of the everyday life of socialism” (Yurchuk, 2006, chapter 1). Researching among non-Russian peoples in a more nationalist new Russia, Sahadeo found “a powerful sense of nostalgia and the persistence of the ideal of druzhba narodov as an ideal in cultural exchange” (2007, p. 97). I would like to suggest that Azerbaijani women musicians have rejected the lure of nostalgia and instead taken the opportunity to recreate and evolve the ideals they grew up with, transposed onto the United States. The new country is majority English speaking, the ethnic groups are different, but the principal is the same: music as a bridge to intercultural communication with a goal of friendship, harmony, and tolerance between peoples. The United States is a deeply flawed society with staggering divides and is no more likely to achieve full ethnic harmony than the USSR. However, musical events can achieve this harmony, at least for the duration of the performance. In addition, the strategy of a small ethnicity using music to express a unique identity in a large multicultural state also works well in the United States. Keeping in mind the context of Azerbaijan’s musical culture in the Russian 342

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Empire and the USSR, it is easier to see how the transition to the United States was not difficult for Azerbaijani musicians. As Jamila Javadova-Spitzberg told me, her “easy and natural process of integration” was a product of her qualities of “curiosity and openness,” which she emphasized were “thanks to my foundation in Azerbaijan and my upbringing, and my friends, and my culture, and my country” (personal interview with Javadova-Spitzberg, 2020). In moving from the USSR to the United States, Azerbaijani women musicians have transposed their musical values and practices into musical and university cultures which are highly receptive to them. As Martin Stokes writes, “music can be used as a means of transcending the limitations of our own place in the world, of constructing trajectories rather than boundaries across space” (1994, p. 4). Thinking of musicians as transcending place in meaningful trajectories from Baku to America is a useful way to conceptualize the experiences of the Azerbaijani diaspora. In a world where so many displacements are brutal, forced and senseless, their experiences have the logic and elegance of a well-constructed symphony. All of the Azerbaijani women in this study are still in contact with friends and family in Baku and still travel there. In that sense they are not cut off or exiled, but they cannot return to the Baku they grew up in, which was part of a country that no longer exists. And yet the women’s experiences show that by transposing their musical practices onto the United States they have continued to promote the ideals they grew up with and even evolve them further in meaningful ways. As Jamila Javadova-Spitzberg mused, “America gave me a chance to express myself into what I turned out to be, into the musician who I am today” (personal interview with Javadova-Spitzberg, 2020).

Conclusion As Tina Ramnarine suggests, displaced identities are constructed at the intersection of old and new: “for the diasporic subject, questions of identity are inextricable from the past and from his/her relationship to a former homeland” (2007, p.3) while at the same time their experience is marked by “newness” in a new environment (2007, p. 2). This newness offers opportunities to recreate self and identity. Musical practices can be seen not just as reaction (to a dominant culture, to stereotyping, to displacement, to loss), but as an agency that diasporas use to communicate with their new environment. Alerting us to the active potential of music when brought into a new context, Stokes writes, “Music does not then simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed” (1994, p. 4). Azerbaijani women musicians are clearly and consciously using music to transform their environment, using deeply held cultural belief in the transcendent power of music. Those who wield that power of music can have tremendous influence. As Laudan Nooshin reminds us, “The power of music to inspire, touch, influence, uplift, heal and transform has long been a source of wonder for human beings” (2016, p. 1). A musician performing on stage can transfix an audience, casting a kind of spell. For a musician of a diaspora within a dominant culture, a musical event is a power reversal and an opportunity to transform a space. In Azerbaijani music, the goal is not just to entertain but to create an experience of transcendence and communion (Dessiatnitchenko, 2017; Guseynova, 2019). These longheld Azerbaijani beliefs are supported by research proving that music has a transformative impact on the physiology of the human brain (Patel, 2008). Research has shown that music can transform individuals into a group that is physiologically “synchronized” and is one of the most ancient methods of enhancing social cooperation and creating group consciousness (Patel, 2008, p. 402). Within the time and space of the performance, music can create 343

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temporary ideal worlds that bridge cultures, promote peace, and create communion. This brief harmonious space created by the aesthetic experience simultaneously affirms and transcends Azerbaijani identity, allowing Azerbaijani musicians to recreate their musical ideals in any setting. A concerto is a musical composition in which a soloist plays together with, but also apart from, an orchestra. Set aside on the stage, the pianist plays sometimes alternately from the orchestra, sometimes together with it. Musical communion is achieved, but the piano never loses its identity in the much larger orchestral swell. It is an ideal model for an idealistic diaspora, offering communion that is not assimilation, an identity that contributes to without melting into the pot.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to all of the women who granted interviews, and who not only shared their time but put great effort into considering my questions and responding to my initial ideas. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge volume editor Ajaya Sahoo for his grace and support while compiling a complex transnational project in the midst of a global pandemic.

Note 1 The musical and academic careers of these women are too extensive to detail in this chapter but are outlined in the following professional websites: www.hartford.edu/directory/hartt/mammedovakamilla.aspx; www.music.indiana.edu/faculty/current/huseynova-aida; www.aamfusa.org/ about-us/jamila-javadova-spitzberg; www.nargizaliyarova.com/; www.rahiliahasanova.com

References Aliyarova, Nargiz. www.nargizaliyarova.com [accessed on 1 January 2020]. Allen, R. & N. Groce. (1988). Introduction: Folk and Traditional Music in New York State. New York Folklore, 14 (3), 1–6. Azerbaijan-American Music Foundation [AAMF]. Home (2018). https://www.aamfusa.org/ [accessed on 10 April 2020]. Bailey, J. (2005). So Near, So Far: Kabul’s Music in Exile. Ethnomusicology Forum, 14 (2), 213–233. Bakrania, F. (2013). Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chandrasekhar, S. & G. P. Chapman. (2019). Asia. In Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. www.britannica.com/place/Asia [accessed on 18 October 2019]. Chibilev, A., & S. Bogdanov. (2011). The Europe-Asia Border in the Geographical and Cultural-historical Aspects. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 81 (5), 552–562. Cohen, R. D. (2008). A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Cornell, S. (2015). Azerbaijan since Independence. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Dessiatnitchenko, P. (2017). Musical and Ontological Possibilities of Mugham Creativity in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Azerbaijan (Doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto, Toronto, CA. http://hdl. handle.net/1807/80818 [accessed on 20 July 2020]. Feldman, L. (2018). On the Threshold of Eurasia Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gara Garayev@100. Concert Held at the University of North Texas, Voertman Hall in Denton, TX on February 12, 2018. YouTube https://youtu.be/CiATjp_QWFY Gleason, P. (1964). The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion? American Quarterly, 16 (1), 20–46.

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Concerto for Solo Piano Guseynova, A. (2019). ИНТЕГРАЦИЯ ИСКУССТВ: ВОСТОК – ЗАПАД [Integration of Arts: East – West]. Большая Евразия: Развитие, безопасность, сотрудничество, 2 (1), 680–694. Hasanova, Rahilia. Rahilia Hasanova: Composer. http://www.rahiliahasanova.com/ [accessed on 5 April 2020]. Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Huseynova, A. (2016). Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Huseynova, Aida. Indiana University Bloomington Jacobs School of Music: Aida Huseynova Aidia (2020). https://music.indiana.edu/faculty/current/huseynova-aida.html [accessed on 31 January 2020]. Ivanova-Nyberg, D. (2012). Folk Dancing Abroad: Bulgarian Folk Dance Activities in the United States Today. In E. Dunin and C. Foley (Eds.), Dance, Place, Festival: 27th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Ethnochoreology (pp. 84–89). Limerick: The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Javadova-Spitzberg, Jamila. (2020). https://www.aamfusa.org/about-us/jamila-javadova-spitzberg/ [accessed on 1 July 2020]. Layla and Majnun. http://laylaandmajnun.org/ [accessed on 20 July 2020]. Lavie, Smadar, and Ted Swedenburg. (1996). Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leone, F. D. (2018). Rahilia Hasanova: Bridging the Two Seemingly Disparate Worlds of Eastern and Western Cultures. Musika Kaleidoskopia (blog), April 10, 2018. https://fdleone.com/2018/04/10/rahilia-hasanova-bridging-the-two-seemingly-disparate-worlds-of-eastern-and-western-cultures/ [accessed on 30 June 2020]. Mammedova, Kamilla. (2020). https://www.hartford.edu/directory/hartt/mammedova-kamilla.aspx [accessed on 1 January 2020]. Naroditskaya, Inna. (2003). Song from the Land of Fire: Continuity and Change in Azerbaijanian Mugham. New York: Routledge. National Music & Global Culture Society [NMGCS]. (2008). https://nmgcs.co/ [accessed on 10 June 2020]. Nooshin, L. (2016). Prelude: Power and the Play of Music. In L. Nooshin (Ed.), Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (pp. 1–31). London: Routledge. Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Post, J. (2007). “I Take My Dombra and Sing to Remember my Homeland”: Identity, Landscape and Music in Kazakh Communities of Western Mongolia. Ethnomusicology Forum, 16 (1), 45–69. Ramnarine, T. (2007). Musical Performance in the Diaspora: Introduction. Ethnomusicology Forum, 16 (1), 1–17. Sahadeo, J. (2007). Druzhba Narodov or Second-class Citizenship? Soviet Asian Migrants in a Post-colonial World. Central Asian Survey, 26 (4), 559–579. Shrade, R. (2019). The National Music and Global Culture Society Presents from East to West in Review. New York Concert Review. https://nyconcertreview.com/tag/nargiz-aliyarova/ [accessed on 20 May 2020]. Slobin, M. (1995). Music in Diaspora: The View from Euro-America. Diaspora, 4 (1), 243–251. Stokes, M. (1994). Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity, and Music. In M. Stokes (Ed.), Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (pp. 1–29). Oxford: Berg. Table FBP-1. (2000). Profile of Selected Demographic and Social Characteristics. Census 2000 Special Tabulations (STP-159). U.S. Census Bureau. The Music of Gara Garayev: 100th Anniversary Celebration. The Dallas Morning News. https:// w w w.d a l l a snew s.com /event/cGVnY X N1cz pld mVud A- M z A z MjE4 -T XpBek1qRTQ/ The-Music-of-Gara-Garayev-100th-Anniversary-Celebration/. Türünz, A. (2006). Music as a Resource for Drawing Symbolic Boundaries with the Turkish Diaspora in Germany. Socialni Studies/Social Studies, 4, 81–96. Weiss. S. (2014). Listening to the World but Hearing Ourselves: Hybridity and Perceptions of Authenticity in World Music. Ethnomusicology, 58 (3), 506–525. Yurchak, A. (2006). Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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25 DANCING OUT OF TIME AND PLACE Memory and choreography in the South Asian diaspora in Continental Europe Sandra Chatterjee The starting point of this chapter is an outline of the position I am writing from (cp. Hall, 1990) – that of a choreographer-scholar born and raised in a Bengali-German family in Germany, engaged in a dance practice that seems perpetually out of place. Through this personal lens, I will reflect diasporic South Asian dance in continental Europe in two different ways: in terms of dancing out of place and out of time, confronting exclusionary notions of contemporaneity as well as lacunae in Eurocentric dance historiography. Part I will be an auto-ethnographic analysis of my displaced dance practice in Bavaria (Germany). In Part II I will look towards dance ancestors, including pioneering dancer Uday Shankar, and put my work in dialogue with Lund-based Rani Nair’s work on the dancer Lilavati, as well as my most recent research questions regarding the Parisian dancer Nyota Inyoka. Central to Part II will be the notions of time, memory, history and archive.

I Dancing out of place Personal beginnings: mapping ‘Indian Dance Practice’ in Bavaria In order to chart the landscape in which I studied and have been practising classical Indian and contemporary dance for several decades, I will begin by recounting an emblematic performance anecdote from 2011, also narrated in a chapter in the edited volume Inderkinder1, which uniquely assembles autobiographical and scholarly essays by first- and ­second-generation Indian/South Asians about growing up and living in Germany (cp.  C ­ hatterjee, 2012, pp. 201–202). Adhering to the common format for presenting classical Indian dance during this performance in a small town outside of Munich, the dance is preceded by an act of translation: on this particular day I provided basic information about Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam, the two classical Indian dance forms I was presenting. I also provided background information about the pieces I was going to perform and translated the narratives of the particular pieces while at the same time indicating landmark hand gestures and poses in order to 346

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facilitate the understanding of audience members new to the form and unfamiliar with the language. 2 Dance studies scholar Janet O’Shea critically comments on the convention of English pre-performance translations of Bharatanatyam, because it ‘treats the English-language explanation as culturally “neutral”’ (O’Shea, 2003, p. 177) and ‘foregrounds the dance’s ­“ foreign-ness”’ (Ibid., p. 178): Preperformance translations, like the textual material of the colonial orientalist period, characterize bharatanatyam [sic] as an object of knowledge, to be uncovered and explained by an expert interlocutor. […] The act of translation, then, marginalizes the dance form for its international viewership, designating it as that which requires explication. (O’Shea, 2003, pp. 178–179) Since this performance took place in Germany, however, and I am a native speaker of German, I did the pre-performance translation in German, not English. Nevertheless, after the performance, German audience members of an older generation came up to me to express their appreciation of the performance – so different from anything they had seen before – in broken English. Some of them also expressed their regret that they could not ask more complicated questions and engage more because they did not speak enough English. The fact that it went unnoticed that I was indeed speaking German on stage (for at least 10–15 minutes) surprised me, even though it is in continuity with my experience of everyday life in Germany. Being ‘othered’ is an integral part of this experience, communicated for example by surprised reactions when I speak German fluently, or being addressed in English in Germany, solely based on my ‘Indian’ appearance (cp. Chatterjee, 2012, pp. 201–202). The way I look has always coloured how what I say is received. In the context of dance, this raises an additional question regarding the rupture in the transaction between performer and audience: if it goes unnoticed that I spoke German, by people who speak very little English, how much of the content I was trying to communicate was understandable and heard? And what about the nuances of my artistic interpretation? What did they receive of the performance except a superficial imagination of a ‘temple dancer’ from the Indian past? How does this limit the possible range of expression for me as an artist?

Indianness in Germany – nostalgia for a different kind of belonging3 Indianness in ‘Germany’ is something different from ‘Indianness’ somewhere else. It is heterogeneous, specific and new. (Goel, 2008, p. 120) Social and cultural anthropologist Urmila Goel, who has been researching second-­generation people living in Germany whose identity is linked or ascribed to the Indian subcontinent, argues that ‘Indians’ in Germany are a heterogeneous group, who do not necessarily share a common connection to India (Goel, 2007). This ‘group’ is, therefore, different from what we might customarily understand as a diasporic community that has dispersed from the homeland, but keeps an active connection to the homeland – and is connected via this shared connection: 347

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‘Germany’ has never been a major destination for migrants from ‘India’ it does not possess the same pull factors for migration as the US, Canada, the UK, or ‘Middle East’. English is not spoken, there are hardly any ‘Indian’ networks fostering chain migration, no welcoming immigration policy lures the migrants, job opportunities for ‘foreigners’ are restricted. Thus in 2003 only 43,566 Indian citizens and [an] estimated 17,500 PIO (Person of Indian Origin) card holders, as well as uncounted others of ‘Indian origin’ who have some other citizenship, live in ‘Germany’. Compared to more than two million people of ‘Turkish origin’ in ‘Germany’ these numbers hardly matter. (Goel, 2011) 4 However, these numbers are noticeably changing: according to geographer Carsten Butsch the number of people who have migrated from India has tripled between 2000 and 2016: from about 35,000 to approximately 100,000 (Butsch, 2018, n.p.). Goel further complicates the definition of an ‘Indian’ community in ‘Germany’ by taking into consideration people who either are ascribed Indian identities or claim belonging to India. What emerges is an imagined Indian community that draws together people with Indian citizenship or people of Indian origin; half-Indians, who have one Indian parent; people adopted from India, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh; Sri Lankans; Afghani Hindus; and diasporic Indians from the UK, Canada, Kenya and other countries. As a result, Goel talks about those ‘marked as Indians [South Asians] in Germany’ (Goel, 2007 [2011]): The experiences of othering and exclusion in ‘Germany’ are one of the few things all those marked as ‘Indians’ in ‘Germany’ share. While their links to ‘India’ are manifold, all of them are ascribed ‘India’ as their ‘origin’ and are told ex- or more often implicitly that they belong to ‘India’ rather than to ‘Germany’. This ascription happens through everyday interactions, public discourses and formal regulations. (Goel, 2007, n.p.) The focus of this ascription is more often than not visual appearance, which is in direct competition to the so-called ‘integration’ debate which is at the heart of Germany (im) migration policies and which rests fundamentally on German language skills among other aspects and which claims mutual obligations5 between German society and those who have migrated there (Hanewinkel, and Oltmer, 2018, n.p., citing Bundesministerium des Innern, 2014). But, what does this mean for practising and professionally pursuing ‘Indian dance’, a non-European dance form, which not only serves to keep alive a (nostalgic) connection to the homeland in the diaspora but also reinforces one’s foreignness in the current home?

Performing Indianness Particularly for second-generation Indians in Germany, therefore, diasporic life is inflected by a denial of ‘unquestioned “Germanness”’ (Goel, 2008, p. 121) and a constant sense of not-belonging, which has consequences for how and why Indian dance is practised here. The difference between ‘Indianness’ in ‘Germany’ and living and dancing in a larger diasporic community became clear to me when I lived in Southern California during my graduate studies. In my dissertation I articulated this difference as follows: 348

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Before moving to Southern California I had never lived in a place where such a large number of South Asian women seemed to have at some point or another practiced Bharata Natyam [sic], classical Indian dance, as a way of [t]aking a Lesson in Indianness’ (Kishore, 2001). […] Within the framework of U.S. identity politics, I would like to suggest, classical Indian dance has primarily become a way of being Indian, a way to teach women in the diaspora the bodily rules of being good women, while simultaneously providing an overview of Hindu values embodied through a select number, rather than a wide range, of stories. […] Through this wide-spread practice, cultural values become quite literally inscribed on and reproduced through the bodies of the daughters raised in the North American diaspora. Their bodies, therefore performatively reproduce a particular cultural home, a domestic space oriented toward the public (Chakrabarty, 2000). (Chatterjee, 2005, pp. 45–47) In the USA, as well as in Germany as a performer – and by extension as a choreographer – my performing body ‘is spoken for’ (Savigliano, 2001, n.p.) in terms of multiple discourses of Indianness: 1 Notions of Indianness that are entangled with India’s national identity, its postcolonial complexities and the way in which cultural values of Indianness are reproduced through the female dancing body. Dipesh Chakrabarty has summed this up in terms of ‘lajja’ – shame, shyness, modesty and respectability – that performs the interiority of the Indian national home and brings together a host of attributes that mark female virtue in the sense of a pan-Indian modern Indian femininity (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 225). Dance theorist Uttara Asha Coorlawala summarized this in the context of the ‘sanskritized body’ of the classical Indian dancer, linking the female dancing body to Sanskritization, a process by which values of the upper social strata and upper casts are emulated – this primarily referred to the values of the urban elite, schooled in English and Sanskrit (Coorlawala, 1994, pp. 71–72). During the anti-colonial nationalist movement in British India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cultural changes that occurred during that time were coloured by Orientalist, Victorian, and national values and interpretations (cp. also Chatterjee, 2005). 2 Diasporic discourses of nostalgia, where the reproduction of Indian cultural values through performance gains different currency for reproducing the far-away homeland that was left behind. Here again the bodies of diasporic girls are central, both in the USA and increasingly in Germany (cp. Chatterjee, 2005). 3 An exoticized notion of Indianness that is particular to the German imagination.6 With its increasing popularity in Germany, the circulation of Bollywood song and dance sequences has become an important landmark for mapping the practice of Indian dance. According to the dance and media scholar, Sangita Shresthova, Bollywood dance is a local phenomenon that emerges from an interweaving of globally circulating dances isolated from films, and geographically rooted live performance, ‘in which local national, postcolonial and more recently global forces converge to encourage constantly shifting imaginary spaces’ (2008, pp. 21–22). There are noticeable differences between the song and dance sequences taken out of the Hindi films and the locally rendered live performances in Bavaria, 349

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which aptly illustrate the contrary notions of Indianness that these song-dances are able to accommodate. Contrary to the song and dance sequences in the film, that – isolated from the plot – create a space to negotiate identities and celebrate a globalized and cosmopolitan performance of Indianness (cp. Chakravorty, 2010), the live Bollywood dance performances in Bavaria celebrate a romanticized re-Indianization (cp. Chatterjee, 2013a, 2013b).

Relegated to performing ‘wonder’7 I would like to connect this context back to the anecdote I recounted earlier in the chapter and now analyse the encounter as an aesthetic encounter. In line with the popular reception of classical Indian dance as ancient and traditional, the aesthetic response that most consistently seems to be evoked in audience members by my performances in Bavaria is the aesthetic flavour of surprise: surprise and wonder of witnessing something foreign, mysterious, exotic. Translated to the terminology used in classical Indian dance, I would say the aesthetic flavour or rasa that is evoked here is adbhutam (which translates as ‘wonder’). The visual elements – the costume, make-up and features of the performer (in the technical terms of classical Indian dance: aharya abhinaya) – dominate the reception by overshadowing other elements of expression (such as movement (angika abhinaya) or speech (vachika abhinaya)). Parallel to the attempt of defining ‘Indianness’ in the German context, here too it emerges that the visual expression of the costume; appearance; and key movement elements, such as eye movements, hand gestures and rhythms produced with the feet, dominate the reception of the dance’s Indianness. This visual appearance marks me as a particular ‘Indian woman’ in the imagination of the spectator – regardless of my artistic intention as a performer. The framework articulated in Sanskrit manuals of performance, notably the Natyashastra 8 and the Abhinayadarpana,9 gives me tools to analyse this encounter from within my dance training. I acknowledge the problematic primacy given to the Sanskritic texts such as the Natyashastra and Abhinayadarpana and the erasures and exclusions this reproduces and perpetuates (cp. Anoop, 2020, pp. 50–52). However, as a diasporic dancer with fragmented, displaced knowledge I do have to cite these manuals as my tools and reference points. From my understanding as a practitioner, not a scholar of the treatises, in particular, the theory of rasa gives an intricate model to understand transfers and communications that the audience and performer mutually participate in. Roughly speaking, the transfer is split up into two major parts: • •

Bhava: the emotional intent performed during a piece, and Rasa: the ‘taste’ or ‘flavour’, or ‘aesthetic response’ that an individual audience member receives/tastes.10

The emotion performed (bhava) is not necessarily the same as the flavour (rasa) evoked in a witness. Although they are easily conflated and ideally do correspond, they do not have to correspond (Rao, 2001, p. 103). The aesthetic flavour created is therefore not only separate from the performer but also out of her control. The aesthetic response depends on the intersection between that which the performer expresses and the predispositions any individual audience member brings to the performance (Chatterjee, 2005, pp. 298–299). The audience member – or ‘partaker’ (Schechner, 2001) – has to actively participate in the exchange, and the enjoyment depends on the level of knowledge the partaker brings (Schechner, 2001, 350

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p. 33). There is, therefore, the concept of an ideal partaker, the rasika, who is knowledgeable about the form and content of the performance, and hence ideally disposed of for reception of the piece and the tasting of rasa, the aesthetic flavour. The rasika is supposed to be knowledgeable and is thought of as ‘sympathetic’ or sahridaya – with an open heart (Schechner, 2001, p. 33). Bringing this back to my experience of performing in Bavaria, I often felt that spectators cast me in one of two roles, neither of which I want to play: either in the role of ‘temple dancer’ firmly situated in the Indian past or, more recently, in the role of the ‘Bollywood dancer/princess’. These landmarks are two dominant images that are crucial for locating ‘the Indian dancer’ in the cultural imagination of my surroundings, that is, my audiences, funders, presenters and critics (cp. Chatterjee, 2013b). The exotifying gaze of many spectators exemplifies exoticism as a ‘system’, as ‘a particular mode of aesthetic perception’ (Huggan, 2001, p. 13). Spectators who are not knowledgeable partakers with an open heart relegate the performing body evoking the wonder of witnessing the ‘exotic’ (Adbhutam). In the role of the translator, who explicates and thereby makes accessible the dance through pre-performance translations, I am – remembering the anecdote from the beginning of the chapter – relegated to the role of the native informant (cp. O’Shea, 2003, p. 178), capable of translating and rendering intelligible, but not speaking German (I have been critiqued for speaking German on stage because it destroys the illusion) (cp. Chatterjee, 2012, p. 203). These cliched images are reductions and romanticized essentializations tied to a constructed cultural identity and multiple different notions of ‘Indianness’. The interpretive authority of the audience is shaped by locally circulating discourses and as Uttara Coorlawala has pointed out the audience’s reactions to a performance become inscribed on the performer’s body and mind, and affect future performances (Coorlawala, 2002). This exoticized and romanticized appearance of the dancing body on stage creates a narrative and discursive closure (cp. Chatterjee, 2005, p. 308) that fixes me as a performer in a pre-scripted role and reduces my artistic possibilities and authority. However, I have formulated a different notion of the ideal, sympathetic viewer emerging from the experience of my displaced dance practice (I want to just mention here that my translations and personal interpretations of the terms of the theory are sometimes ‘free’ and depart from traditionalist understandings). Applying the notion of creating rasa to my diasporic context, I would like to see the rasika not necessarily someone who has ‘deep’ insider knowledge, but rather as someone who is sahridaya in the sense of being willing to embark on the journey of the performance together with the performer and allow a meeting of their perspective and the performer’s. I see the rasika in a sense as a knowledgeable ally (Chatterjee, 2005, p. 296).

II Dancing out of time Contested ‘Nows’ – Wrestling with the contemporary Dancing classical Indian dance in the diaspora, in some ways, is like constantly dancing out of context – and in the process creating a displaced context. In addition to the labour of actually dancing – the hard work, blood, sweat, tears that are involved in rigorous dance training – in the diaspora, there is an added dimension of a specific kind of emotional labour: 351

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the labour of bridging displacement, of keeping alive a connection to a faraway homeland, learning and physically reproducing a diasporic home in displacement, continuously reproducing the nostalgic context of the homeland by repeatedly embodying cultural values, narratives and stories, over and over again. More recently, however, my work has foregrounded notions of time: dancing diasporically is not merely dancing ‘out of place’ but also ‘out of time’. As has been described earlier in the chapter, especially classical Indian dance continues to be implicitly and explicitly connected to the past – to tradition, to the homeland that was left behind long ago. Entering the realm of contemporary dance in Europe has very specific challenges when working from a non-European dance form. As a choreographer, I have been working in Germany, but also in the USA and India. In the South Asian diaspora in North America, I have come to know contemporary dance practices as emancipatory practices actively engaging in and disrupting discourses of diasporic nostalgia and exoticism through performative tactics. Contrary to the emancipatory and disruptive drive of contemporary art practices in the South Asian diaspora in the USA (or the UK), in Germany/ Bavaria there is not much community of critical diasporic South Asian artists to create in dialogue with.11 Contemporary dance here is not easily a space in which to engage with the diasporic present, its lived reality. Instead, I am experiencing ‘contemporary’ dance – even as it considers itself international – as a space that is exclusionary for othered cultural experiences, and replicating a sense of not-belonging in Germany. My movement practice remains marked as a cultural practice with limited scope to comment on the ‘now’ audibly or visibly within the local artistic dance landscape.12 The aesthetic borders of ‘the Contemporary’ are susceptible to perpetuating a colonial ‘denial of ­co-evalness’ ( Johannes Fabian in Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 7) where cultural difference is understood via a time difference. Contemporary European dance for the most part upholds a culturally unmarked state of Europeanness despite evidence of internationality and functions within the paradigm of ‘Western’ artistic dance tracing a primarily Eurocentric lineage. Related to this contested ‘now’ are gaps in dance histories. It is noteworthy that the dancers who I may be able to consider diasporic (dance) ancestors are suspiciously absent, marginalized or forgotten in European dance histories (cp. Chatterjee, 2018).

In search of diasporic dance ancestors The legendary pioneer of modern or creative Indian dance – Uday Shankar (1900–1977), for example – has been part of my diasporic dance memory via my childhood Bharatanatyam teacher, Arup Ghosh. Trained at the Uday Shankar Cultural Centre in Kolkata, he also taught the Uday Shankar style. Thereby, Uday Shankar was firmly connected to the homeland, in particular, Kolkata – until I discovered his significant life, work and career in Europe, spanning several decades, much later as a dance scholar (cp. Chatterjee, 2013c)13. In the 1920s and 1930s, Uday Shankar lived and worked in Western Europe. Shankar had lived and worked in Europe consecutively for more than ten years while he was honing his craft and voice as a dance-maker, leading up to the creation of his company. In the years between his collaboration with Anna Pavlova, which kicked off his performance career in 1923 (Erdman, 1996, p. 289) and the debut of his company Compagnie d’Uday Shan-Kar Hindoue Danses et la Musique at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on March 3, 1931 (Erdman, 1996, p. 289; Brenscheidt, 2011, p. 6), Shankar choreographed on himself and European partners (in London and Paris), and performed in England, Germany, Italy, Holland and France (Erdman, 1996, p. 295.) Joan L. Erdman considers this time crucial for the cultivation of 352

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his stagecraft and choreographies as translations, ‘designed to convey “Indianness” without being unintelligible’ (1987, p. 84). I, therefore, re-consider Shankar as an ancestor of current diasporic artists, parallel to Nilanjana Bhattacharjya’s analysis of Uday Shankar’s position as an early transnational artist (2007) as well as Prarthana Purkayastha, who writes, I see him as a floating figure who travelled between two worlds, the Euro-American and the Asian, without ever wholly belonging to either one. This quality of ‘­in-betweenness,’ explained by authors such as Homi Bhabha (1994) as being peculiar to the postmodern diasporic condition, thus finds a much earlier echo in the mid-twentieth century work of a South Asian male dance artist. […]. I am not proposing here that Shankar was a diasporic artist in an age when ‘diaspora’ was not yet a reality. Instead, I am suggesting here that Shankar’s travels and movements between the Euro-American and Asian worlds and his resulting work eluded nationalist constructions of identity, perhaps making him a harbinger of what we now know as diasporic hybridity. (Purkayastha, 2012, pp. 75–76)

Lacunae: in diasporic memory – outside (European) dance history Swedish-Indian choreographer Rani Nair has been engaging with a diasporic dance ancestor and her work for more than a decade: Lilavati Häger. According to Swedish dance scholar, Lena Hammergren, Lilavati toured Europe in 1948 and 1949 as a member of the dance company of Ram Gopal, another pioneering dancer, who later settled in the UK. Lilavati, who came from a distinguished Bengali family, later married the Swedish dance impresario Bengt Häger and lived in Sweden, where she continued to work as a dancer (Hammergren, 2009, p. 23; cp. also Khokar, 2002). Rani Nair, who had met Lilavati Häger, ‘inherited’ Dixit Dominus, a significant piece of choreography after Häger’s death in 2002 (cp. Khokar, 2002), along with archival and personal objects surrounding it. Dixit Dominus is a piece which the seminal German choreographer Kurt Jooss choreographed in 1975 with and for Lilavati Häger, which Nair reconstructed and toured in 2003. Despite Jooss’s importance in German and European dance history, Dixit Dominus is a ‘forgotten’ work, which even Jooss biographer Patricia Stöckemann refers to as a ‘marginalia in Jooss’s creations’ (‘eine Marginalie in Jooss’ Schaffen’; Stöckemann, 2001, p. 397).14 In 2012 Nair premiered Future Memory is a ‘second-order’ (Elswit, 2014, p. 5) performance that engages deeply with Dixit Dominus (1975) and her own 2003 reconstruction. Working in collaboration with dance historian Kate Elswit as dramaturge, Nair activates an idiosyncratically intercultural material archive of costumes and other personal items of Lilavati, which she inherited along with the dance. Future Memory brings a piece of entangled and hybrid European dance history to life in the present and opens the possibility for carrying it into an equally entangled and hybrid future (cp. Chatterjee, 2015). Like Lilavati’s and Jooss’s Dixit Dominus, Uday Shankar is conspicuously absent from European dance history (even though he is strongly present in Indian dance history). Around the same time that Uday Shankar worked in Paris, another (almost) forgotten dancer lived and worked, who is associated with India regularly (even if not exclusively): Nyota Inyoka (1896–1971). A few years ago, dance studies scholar Nicole Haitzinger and I encountered Inyoka in footnotes, brief mentions and short descriptions, as well as through striking photographs in selected materials on dance’s modernity in France/Europe. She is an almost forgotten Parisian dancer, whose biography is abundant with mystery, even in terms of the 353

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details of her association with India (cp. Cramer in Chatterjee, Cramer, Gilliger-Correa Vivar and Haitzinger, 2020). Found only in the margins of European modern dance history, the enigmatic Inyoka appeared primarily in terms of her appeal as an exotic/exotified dancer in the period in Paris between the two World Wars, where she seemed to have created work and performed dances drawing from Indian as well as Egyptian and Cambodian (among others) themes and forms (cp. Cramer and Haitzinger in Chatterjee, Cramer, Gilliger-Correa Vivar and Haitzinger, 2020). Because we did not find extensive materials on her in dance historical literature, in particular about her work post-Second World War until her death in 1971, when the popularity of the ‘exotic’ had faded, we became interested in researching her further.15 In this ongoing research project, which I am engaged in both as a scholar and as a dancer since 2019, the challenge, particularly as a dancer, is that there is no personal connection or encounter to draw on (such as the direct connection between Rani Nair and Lilavati Häger). Neither is there a kinaesthetic connection (Srinivasan, 2007), which mediated my engagement with Uday Shankar via movement memories transmitted through my teacher Arup Ghosh, which contributed to shaping my approach to and understanding of Shankar’s work. The encounter with Inyoka’s work is solely mediated by archival materials, which I am navigating in collaboration with a team of researchers. But the connection to the body to dance has to be developed, for example, by physically engaging with notations of her work, not necessarily with an attempt at reconstruction, but as a process of researching and getting to know her oeuvre and choreographic approach (cp. Chatterjee and Haitzinger, 2016)?16 Which research questions emerge when physically connecting to her dance notations? Discovering Nyota Inyoka as another dance ancestor in Europe and getting to know her via this research process is exciting for me as a dancer in several ways: while her persona and oeuvre cannot easily be grasped, analysed and categorized, it is significant that she lived during a time where parts of India were still under French colonial rule. Throughout her career, she engaged with the trope of ‘the exotic’ while also idiosyncratically exploring ‘Indianness’ (as a ‘Chorégraphe Hindoue’17). The questions that come up for me while engaging with Inyoka are: in what ways do her articulations and forms of expression resonate with a ‘European of colour’ and diasporic Indian perspective, such as my own? How did she artistically approach questions of ‘Indianness’ and of being exotified in her work? During her time? How did she navigate the difficult territories of self-exotification and cultural appropriation? How will this historical perspective enrich my understanding of how exoticism functions as a ‘system’ of ‘aesthetic perception’ (Huggan, 2001, p. 13) through time? Can such acts of remembering bridge gaps in dance historiography and challenge canonical Eurocentric understandings of (contemporary) dance and its history? Can this be a step towards bringing diasporic dance practices closer to being ‘in time/history’ and gaining a local grounding in the new home, without having to forego cultural hybridity and multeity?

Acknowledgements This chapter is written in the context of the current research project Border-Dancing Across Time: The (Forgotten) Parisian Choreographer Nyota Inyoka, her Œuvre, and Questions of Choreographing Créolité (Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Project 31958-G). It also draws on previous research conducted in the context of Traversing the Contemporary (pl.): Choreographic Articulations between European and Indian Dance (Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P24190; 2012–2016), both conducted at the Department of Music and Dance Studies at Paris-London University, Salzburg. 354

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Notes 1 InderKinder is a play on words that can be loosely translated as ‘Indian Kids’. It has political resonances, though: in response to plans to liberalize immigration to attract highly skilled (IT) professionals to Germany, Jürgen Rüttgers from the Christian Democratic Union, which was not the ruling party at that time, but has been since 2005. (CDU sparked a campaign called ‘Kinder statt Inder’, which translates to ‘children instead of Indians’.) In the introduction of the book InderKinder, the editors cite this incident as the first time people from India in Germany were the direct focus of an exclusionary campaign (Goel, Punnamparambil and Punnambarambil-Wolf, 2012, p. 9). By using InderKinder as its title, the book attempts to deal with this exclusionary gesture by way of creative and emancipatory re-codings (ibid., p. 11). 2 Translated and paraphrased from Chatterjee, 2012, pp. 201–202. 3 The following section refers to and expands from the unpublished talk ‘Between “Temple dance” and “Bollywood”: Reflections on Practicing “Indian Dance” in Germany’. Bharatanatyam in a Global Age (Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Center, FU and Tagore Centre). Tagore Center, Berlin. 24 June 2013 (Chatterjee, 2013b). 4 In 2015 the PIO scheme was merged with the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) scheme. 5 Those arriving in Germany, for example, are expected to learn German and get to know German history, culture, values, etc. In return, German society is asked to offer equal access and chances (cp. Bundesministerium des Innern, 2014, p. 51). 6 The knowledge produced in Germany about India through long engagement, intellectual engagement, particularly through the discipline of Indology, is vast and was a considerable resource for the British colonial administration. According to Sheldon Pollock German Indology does not fit smoothly into Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism (1978, 1985). He argues that in ­German-speaking areas the impetus of the knowledge production is not directed to the outside, i.e. towards a colony. Instead, he describes an inward focus: a romantic search of identity, which was initially based on a linguistic kinship (‘Urverwandschaft’) (Pollock, 1993, p. 76; cp. ­Chatterjee, 2013b). 7 The following section draws and expands on Chatterjee, 2013b. 8 The Sanskrit dramaturgical handbook Natyashastra is attributed to the sage Bharata. Most often it is dated between the 2nd century BC and 2nd century AD, sometimes it is dated as early as the 6th century AD (Schechner, 2001, p. 28). 9 Abhinavagupta’s Abhinaya darpana is an important commentary on the Natyashastra from the 11th century, which centralizes movement and dance apart from theatre. 10 The Natyashastra defines Rasa like this: But what is this thing called rasa? Here is the reply. Because it is enjoyably tasted, it is called rasa. How does the enjoyment come? Persons who eat prepared food mixed with different condiments and sauces, etc., if they are sensitive, enjoy the different tastes and then feel pleasure (or satisfaction); likewise, sensitive spectators, after enjoying the various emotions expressed by the actors through words, gestures, and feelings feel pleasure, etc. This (final) feeling by the spectators is here explained as (various) rasa-s of natya. (Rangacharya, 2007, p. 55) 11 Therefore, in order to create connection and context I looked at the work of colleagues in continental Europe (e.g. Rani Nair in Sweden and Kalpana Raghuraman in the Netherlands) in the context of the research project Traversing the Contemporary (pl.), conducted at the University of Salzburg and supported by the Austrian Science Fund from 2012 to 2016. 12 Recently I have started exploring the term ‘postmigrant’ in relation to dance practice. The term ‘postmigrant’ has gained currency in Germany following its deployment by Berlin-based theatre producer Shermin Langhoff. It has been used primarily to refer to theatre practices but also all cultural practices, including literature, music, and film of the so-called second- and t­ hird-generation immigrants in Germany – i.e. a group of people who have not migrated themselves, but are still racialized and ethnicized as migrants. It is politicized and resonates with BIPoC, anti-racist and critically white approaches. 13 The following section is based on an unpublished talk (Chatterjee, 2013c). 14 The translation is from Elswit, Kate. Program note for the performances on 4th and 5th December 2012 in Malmö, Sweden.

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Sandra Chatterjee 15 This research project is an extremely enriching collaborative team effort with Nicole Haitzinger, Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar, as well as Franz Anton Cramer. As the only dancer in the team trained in Indian dance and with connections to the Indian diaspora, in this chapter I am focusing on articulating my connections and questions about Inyoka from this particular perspective. 16 As an early example of such a process see the following short video analysis of Nyota Inyoka’s notation ‘Shiva’ by Sandra Chatterjee and Nicole Haitzinger, which was part of a conference presentation (cp .Chatterjee and Haitzinger, 2016). 17 ‘Chorégraphe Hindoue’ is the inscription on her tombstone written on her grave.

References Anoop, M. (2020). Sustaining sādhana: Shifting Significations of Indian Dance and the Culture Industry. In M. Ellis (Ed.), Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship (pp. 43–56). London: Routledge. Bhattacharjya, N. (2007). Aesthetic Fusions: British Asian Music and Diaspora Culture. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/5163 (accessed 6 April 2013). Brenscheidt, G. J. D. (2011). Shiva Onstage: Uday Shankar’s Company of Hindu Dancers and Musicians in Europe and the United States, 1931–38. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Bundesministerium, D. I. (Ed.). (2014). Migration und Integration. Aufenthaltsrecht, Migrations- und Integrationspolitik in Deutschland. Berlin. Online at: https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/63015/migration_und_integration.pdf ?sequence=1&isAllowed=y   (accessed 18 August 2020). Butsch, C. (2018). Die indische “Diaspora” in Deutschland und ihre Verbindungen in die Heimat. Meine Welt, 2 (2018). Online at: https://caritas.erzbistum-koeln.de/export/sites/caritas/meinewelt/.content/.galleries/downloads/meine-welt-artikel/Die-indische-Diaspora-in-Deutschland. pdf (accessed 16 August 2020). Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chakravorty, P. (2010). Remixed Practice: Bollywood Dance and the Global Indian. In P. Chakravorty and N. Gupta (Eds.), Dance Matters: Performing India on Global and Local Stages (pp. 169–184). New Delhi: Routledge. Chatterjee, S. (2005). Undomesticated Bodies: South Asian Women Perform the Impossible. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Chatterjee, S. (2012). ‘Post-migrantisch? Nomadisch? Hapa? Was für eine Erfahrung…?!’. In U. Goel, J. Punnamparambil and N. Punammparambil-Wolf (Eds.), InderKinder- Über das Aufwachsen und Leben in Deutschland (pp. 200–210). Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag. Chatterjee, S. (2013a). Back to Reality? Rückübersetzungen filmischer Bollywood Choreographien in bayerische Tanzgruppen. Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 10 (Dezember 2013), 73–100. Online at http://www.filmmusik.uni-kiel.de/beitraege.php. Chatterjee, S. (2013b). Between “Temple dance” and “Bollywood”: Reflections on Practicing “Indian Dance” in Germany. Paper delivered at Bharata Natyam in a Global Age (Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Center, FU and Tagore Centre) at Tagore Center, Berlin. 24 June 2013. Chatterjee, S. (2013c). Modernisms, Modernities and Male Theatricalities in Uday Shankar: Early 20th Century Dance in Europe. Paper delivered at Purush: The Global Dancing Male, Conference/ Performance Enclave. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chennai, India, organised by Kartik Fine Arts and Arangham Trust, 18–22 December 2013. Chatterjee, S. (2015). Bodily Archives and Performed Acts of Transfer: Interplays of Archive, Repertoire, and “Indian Dance Memory.” In I. Brandenburg, S. Chatterjee, N. Haitzinger and C. Jeschke (Eds.), Tanz & Archiv: Forschungsreisen, derra Dance Research 6: Doing Memory: Zwischen Don Juan Und Bharatanatyam (pp. 3–29). München: Epodium. Chatterjee, S. (2018). Kulturelle Gleichzeitigkeit-Zeitgenössischer Tanz aus Postmigrantischer Perspektive. In M. Hill and E. Yildiz (Eds.), Postmigrantische Visionen: Erfahrungen – Ideen – Reflexionen (pp. 199–206). Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Originally published 2017 in corpusweb.net. Online at: http://www.corpusweb.net/kulturelle-gleichzeitigkeit.html (accessed 3 March 2017). Chatterjee, S., Cramer, F. A., Gilliger-Correa Vivar, C. and Haitzinger, N. (2020). The (Almost Forgotten) Parisian Dancers and Choreographers Nyota Inyoka, Armen Ohanian and Leila Bederkhan.

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Dancing out of time and place Presented at the Zoom-Minisymposium Forgotten Danders//Forgotten Archives Part 1. 9 May 2020. Online at: https://vimeo.com/421652940. Chatterjee, S. and Haitzinger, N. (2016). Nyota Inyoka: ‘Forgotten’ modern Parisian Choreographer? Co-written paper presented by N. Haitzinger at IFTR Conference, Stockholm, June 2016. Coorlawala, U. A. (1994). Classical and Contemporary Indian Dance: Overview, Criteria, and a Choreographic Analysis. PhD. dissertation, Performance Studies, New York University, New York. Coorlawala, U. A. (2002). It Matters For Whom You Dance: Audience Participation in Rasa Theory. In P. Chakravorty (Ed.), Dance in South Asia: New Approaches, Politics and Aesthetics (pp. 61–66). Swarthmore: Swarthmore College. Elswit, K. (2014). Inheriting Dance’s Alternative Histories. Dance Research Journal, 46 (1), 5‒22. Erdman, J. L. (1987). Performance as Translation: Uday Shankar in the West. The Drama Review, 31 (1), 64–88. Erdman, J. L. (1996). Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of ‘Oriental Dance’. In Gay Morris (Ed.), Moving Words: Rewriting Dance (pp. 288–305). London: Routledge. Goel, P. and Punnambarambil-Wolf, N. (2012). InderKinder – Eine Einleitung zum Buch. In U. Goel, J. Punnamparambil and N. Punammparambil-Wolf (Eds), InderKinder: Über das Aufwachsen und Leben in Deutschland (pp. 7–23). Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag. Goel, U. (2007). ‘Indians in Germany:’ The Imagination of a Community. UNEAC Asia Papers, 20, 1–7. Online at: http://www.urmila.de/UDG/Forschung/texte/community.html (accessed 18 August 2020). Goel, U. (2008). ‘Half Indians’, Adopted ‘Germans’ and ‘Afghan Indians’: On Claims of ‘Indianness’ and their Contestations in Germany. Transforming Cultures eJournal, 3 (1), 93–123. Goel, U. (2011). On People Marked as South Asians in Germany. Personal Website: http://urmila.de/ english/englishindex.html (accessed 18 August 2020). Hall, S. (1990). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In J. Ruthford (Ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 222–237). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hammergren, L. (2009). The Power of Classification. In S. L. Foster (Ed.), Worlding Dance (pp. 14–31). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hanewinkel, V. and Oltmer, J. (2018). Integration and Integration Policies in Germany. In Country Profile 1: Germany: Länderprofile Migration: Daten – Geschichte – Politik. Website of Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb (The Federal Agency for Civic Education). Online at: http://www.bpb.de/ gesellschaft/migration/laenderprofile/262812/integration-and-integration-policies-in-germany (accessed 18 August 2020). Huggan, G. (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Khokar, A. M. (2002). Lilavati Hager. (Obit/Tribute). Online at: www.narthaki.com-your gateway to the world of Indian dance. Online at: http://www.narthaki.com/info/profiles/profil16.html (accessed 3 September 2013). Kishore, A. G. (2001). Taking a Class in Indianness. Online at: www.narthaki.com-your gateway to the world of Indian dance. Online at: www.narthaki.com/info/articles/article11.html (accessed 2 January 2015). O’Shea, J. (2003). At Home in the World? The Bharatanatyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter. The Drama Review, 47 (1) (T177). Pollock, S. (1993). Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power beyond the Raj. In Carol A. Breckenridge and P. Van Der Veer (Eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (pp. 76–133). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Purkayastha, P. (2012). Dancing Otherness: Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Work of Uday Shankar. Dance Research Journal, 44 (01), 69–92. Rangacharya, A. (2007). The Natyashastra- English Translation with Critical Notes. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Rao, P. S. A. (2001). Special Aspects of Natya Shastra. Translated by H. V. Sharma. New Delhi: National School of Drama. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge und Kegan Paul. Said, E. (1985). Orientalism Reconsidered. Cultural Critique, 1 (Autumn), 89–107. Savigliano, M. (2001). Translingual Choreocritics: Edgy Meditations on a North- South Flight. Paper delivered at the Dance and Migratory Movements Conference of the Congress on Research in Dance, at Judson Church, New York City, 27 October 2001. Schechner, R. (2001). Rasaesthetics. TDR, 45 (3) (Autumn), 27–50.

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Sandra Chatterjee Shresthova, S. (2008). Between Cinema and Performance: Globalizing Bollywood Dance. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA. Srinivasan, P. (2007). The Bodies beneath the Smoke, or, What’s behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing Kinesthetic Connections in American Dance History. Discourses in Dance, 4 (1), 7–47. Stöckemann, P. (2001). Etwas ganz Neues muss nun entstehen: Kurt Jooss und das Tanztheater. München: Kieser.

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26 PERFORMING ARTS, DIASPORA AND IDENTITY The case of Theyyam performances in the Indian diaspora Surabhi K. and Ajaya K. Sahoo Introduction The religious and ritual practices are the fundamental aspects for the perpetuation of religion. With the growth of diasporas and their transnational activities, various native religions and cultures are not only transported to new places but also adopted strategies to re-create their religion which includes rituals, practices, folklore, etc. The re-establishment of religion includes physical construction of the places of worship, creation of religious leaders, practice of religious rituals at domestic and public spheres, creation of religious organizations and religious enclaves, etc. The diasporas construct homelands according to their own needs and compulsions. The older diasporas had a complete break with the motherland because of lesser technological advancements and lack of financial support to make the journey back to the homeland. The homeland thus remained in their memory. To become close to the homeland while remaining in the foreign land is made possible through the construction of various religious institutions and structures that resemble the homeland. As rightly pointed out by Safran et al. (2008, p. 1) that the Indian diaspora has developed institutions, orientations and patterns of living specific to the institutional structures and socio-political contexts of the different hostlands. These patterns have been marked not only by the influences of the hostland culture but also by relations with the homeland. Today as a result of the global developments in the communication and transportation technology, the diasporic communities become truly transnational by incorporating the homeland. According to Peggy Levitt (2001, p. 19) “transnational religious activities are part and parcel of religious globalization”. With the global capitalism, there is increased interest in people to lead transnational life. They are rooted into various nation-states and get to know and connect to various people and their trade. But when these people move, they take with them their social and cultural histories which are a part of them and form their identities. Religion in the new world is being reconstructed. It plays a central role in forming ethnic 359

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group identity. Religion forms and preserves personal and group identity of the immigrants because it is the force that provides a transcendent grounding for identity. There is always an attempt to bring about a new cultural and religious space that interacts with the new space with new forms.

Ritual art forms of Kerala Kerala was a major hub for immigrants for many centuries. It has attained its cultural background by the influence of various traders in the past like Rome, Greece, Arab, China, etc. Migrant communities such as the Aryans, Brahmins, Jains and Buddhists who came from other parts of India had a major influence in the social and cultural upbringing of Kerala (Koyyal, 2016, p. 21). Many of the cultures and rituals today are the result of the contributions that these migrants brought to Kerala. Similarly, many Keralites have also immigrated to other parts of the world and brought with them the rich experiences when returned. Their interactions with the local population richly contributed towards the cultural practices of the area. These factors also played a major role in the transformation from the cultural styles of simple self-sustaining ethnic groups to the complex societies; and again helped their coexistence and interaction and long process of practices of continuity and change. In the wake of socio-economic transformation from tribal life to agrarian settlements representing an admixture of various cultural traits, the religious ideologies themselves underwent major changes along with the cultural traditions. (Koyyal, 2016, pp. 21–22) The folk arts tell us about the village culture, the agricultural life, the village life and the folk community itself. All the myths and legends associated with the folk arts have a story to tell. Each folk art has its music which is culture specific to the community and its subject varies from heroic tales of the past warriors, welcoming of seasons, agricultural activities, festivals, birth of legends, etc. (Sahoo & Surabhi, 2020). These folk art forms are now on the move as a result of the globalization and diasporic communities are the ones that harbor them by creating their own unique ‘homeland identity’. The diasporic Indians have been recreating their distinct ethnic identities since their physical displacement from the homeland. They share among themselves and with the next generations not only the history of their dispersion but also the history of the people in general, including myths, legends, and traditions that constitute an integral part of their contemporary identity (Sahoo, 2006, p. 89) Following Levitt (2001, pp. 8–9) who argues that “transnational religion focus on the everyday, lived practice of migrant religion in at least two locations” and the “transnational religious practices must examine all aspects of religious life, including individual and collective manifestations and formal and popular religious practices in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized settings”, this chapter tries to argue how local religious ritual art forms of Kerala transported to the diaspora and create a transnational identity as a result of their innovative performances in the diaspora. 360

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Methodology The Theyyam performances in the Indian diaspora have increased considerably in recent times since it started in the early 1980s. Through an ethnographic inquiry, this chapter proposed to understand the dynamics of Theyyam performances in the diaspora; how it creates a specific cultural and localized identity among the Malayalis in the Indian diaspora; and, most importantly, how the performance is changed when it is performed. For this study 20 in-depth interviews were conducted with the Theyyam artists who have performed in the diaspora besides observation of Theyyam performances in Kannur, Kerala. Today, the connection with the homeland for diasporics made it easier as a result of globalization, and especially as a result of the growth of faster information, communication and transportation technologies. This has not only helped the traditional art forms to travel transnationally but also at the same time incorporated several transnational dynamics into the art form.

Theyyam – a transnational art form? Theyyam is a popular ritual dance form in North Kerala especially in the Kannur and Kasargod districts of Kerala state in India. The word Theyyam is evolved from the word ‘Daivam’, which means God in Malayalam. Theyyam or the ‘other god’ is a combination of dance, music and religious worship. Theyyam is ascribed as ‘Devil Dance’ by the West in the diaspora whereas in the homeland it is believed to be the divine lord that has metamorphosed himself from the dancer to the deity during the performance. It is an earliest form of human worship to the man who transforms himself to God. Theyyams are not actually the brahmanic or savarna gods that are worshipped by Hindus in temples, but they were the real people of flesh and blood of ancient village of Kerala who had sacrificed their life for the sake of the villagers and had raised their voice against the then landlords of Malabar and were beaten up or killed or driven from the village by the upper castes (Surabhi & Sahoo, 2020, p. 103). There are several varieties of Theyyams and many of these Theyyams are being sent to the diasporas like Singapore, ­Malaysia, France, Poland, South Korea, Germany and Muscat. However, these Theyyam performances outside the homeland are very recent. Theyyam is performed in the Malayalam month of ­T hulam-Edavam, which is from September end to April–May every year. Although the most hectic period of Theyyam is from December to February, the months such as June, July and August are the lean months for the celebration of Theyyams (Surabhi & Sahoo, 2020, p. 103). There are mainly four stages in the Theyyam performance. The initial stage is called ­T hudangal1/ Thedangal, where Thottam2 are sung usually by the drummers. The performer does not wear any makeup except for a small headdress at this stage. The second stage is called the Vellattam where he performs some rituals and after a brief interlude, he appears in an elegant costume and heavy facial makeup called Mukhathezhutu. Then the headdress is put on the performer when he is seated in front of the shrine. The third stage is called the Mukhadarshanam – ‘seeing of the face’. It is this moment when the performer becomes the deity as he sees the small mirror held in his hand. It is not the case of possession but the performer loses his physical identity in its frenzied trance. His eyes widen with the image of the transformed divine figure in the mirror and a very dynamic Theyyam comes with an elegant speedy motion in front of the worshippers to dance and latter gives prasadam3. This stage is called Kurikodukal. Theyyam at this moment hears the worshippers about their problems in life or disputes. Each Theyyam has its unique style of performance and style of outfits and also the thottam that is sung. Theyyams are usually performed in front of kavus4 or ancestral houses which are open to all flora and fauna and to all strata of people in the respective village. They 361

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are done to bring prosperity, well-being of the family or the village or for the prevention from some disease or ailments (Surabhi & Sahoo, 2020, p. 103). The social system that has kept the Theyyam artists bonded and submissive has made their way in the general marketing of cultural goods. Theyyams are thus packaged, customized and fetishized into a cafeteria format to cater to the demands of the customer where the performers trade its spirituality and culture for money. Miniature versions of Theyyam are produced on demand without any restrictions of time and space. The structural effect of this process is that Theyyam loses its ritualistic anchorage and is made into an exotic spectacle which could be performed by anyone at anytime and anywhere (Dasan, 2012).

Theyyam performances in the Indian diaspora The Indian diaspora has spanned across centuries and successfully maintained their homeland identities even though in many cases they have assimilated and integrated in the host nations (Sahoo & Shome, 2020). They have still retained major part of the Indian culture and tradition alive. Performing Theyyam in a foreign land is not just a simple act of crossing the geographical boundary of one to another but totally taking away the essence of the cultural-specific art form. It becomes just a puppet show now where there is no kavu, chendakaran,5 vadhyakaran6 and ancestral house or village folks. Even though the ambience can be likely to create like village in the host land, they cannot construct a kavu or an ancestral house where it can be performed. Instead Theyyams are performed on a stage to awe the viewers without knowing the context of the specific art form. Thus, Theyyam becomes only a dance form to be performed according to the interest of the foreign settlers and this transition of Theyyam involves abandoning one’s social and cultural setting and entering and inculcating a new one. The Theyyam artists who visited their own communities for performance in the diaspora had myriad experiences of emotions and ecstasies. They revealed that they had the different experience of traveling to the diasporic Malayali communities and received accolades from the Malayali diasporic communities for their performances (Sahoo & Surabhi, 2020). One of the respondents,7 Shekaran, a 47-year-old Theyyam artist from Malayan community who had gone to South Korea, along with the several other artists, as a helper to deck up Theyyam performers, says: I felt a huge difference in the cultural form while performing in a space outside Kannur. Although our travel expense and other needs of the performers in the new land was very well taken care of, the food and language difference made it very bad. A short book on Theyyam was distributed to the audience to make them aware of this art form but the essence of the art form they could no way exchange to them during the performance although the people came to talk to the troupe to ask their queries at the end of the performance. (personal interview by Surabhi with Shekaran) In the diaspora, the migrants often provide a setting for a ritual gathering for the people living in different parts of the same new country. Festivals of all cultures focus on food, clothes, music and dance, sports, arts, etc., and celebrate together bringing people from different ethnic groups. As Jacobsen (2008, p. 202) rightly pointed out: Such cultural festivals are often not religious although religious elements might be involved but probably with an emphasis on their aesthetic quality, on religion as art. Often music with a background in religion is presented, or film music and modern popular music. This is a way to make the diaspora group proud of their cultural heritage and to 362

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show the wider public their positive contribution to society at large and thus counteract the usual mass media focus on negative criminal elements and political extremists. Palgunan, a 67-year-old Theyyam performer, is another respondent who had donned Kandanarkelan in Poland in the year 2009. He went to Poland through a Sweden research scholar from Mumbai who had come to Kannur to make a documentary on Theyyam. In a festival in Poland, his documentary was shown and then Theyyam was called to perform in the ‘Brave Festival’ of Poland. A group of seven people left for Poland where they had to perform on a plain large ground. A temporary kavu was set up by the artists which was half covered by a red cloth and ola 8. Theekundam9 was also set up for the performance which is called Meleri by the wooden wicks available there to perform the Theyyam. This took the performers about two days to arrange the Meleri. The thottam was also sung during the performance and the whole performance took about two hours, from 6 pm to 8 pm. He recalls: The audience had amazing respect for us and was awestruck by our performances. They came and prayed to us and took blessings as flowers we gave during the kurikodukal. Everything was arranged by the student from Sweden who took us there where he had arranged for a translator for the thottam. The fee was also arranged by the student and we were each given an amount of 1,200. The 7 of us stayed in 3 rooms where the food was arranged in the first floor and all the travels, accommodation and food part were free of cost. There was a guide too arranged to show us in and around in Poland when we found gaps of days between the performances… I still remember how the religious institutions initially discouraged our going and later agreed to it. I was so afraid before my performance because it included fire for this particular Theyyam which was also happening in an unknown place. It was so crowded and the Theyyam pictures were pasted everywhere in the town. I lost the concentration while performing. There were men to hold my hand from both sides while running over the Meleri in the native land, but there we had to run by ourselves with none holding our hands which made it more difficult. (personal interview by Surabhi with Palgunan) Vineeta Sinha emphasizes how physical landscape are organized and transformed materially and symbolically in recognizing a revered space for religious reconstruction. An object with no religious value becomes a sacred object once enters the sacred space and “…when religious symbols are de-contextualized and transposed to an unrelated context, there is indeed the potential for their misappropriation and abuse” (Sinha, 2011, p. 199). Achuthan, a 42-year-old respondent from the Malayan community who is a music teacher and does Theyyam every year, went to three different diasporic locations, such as France and Italy in the year 1999, and Japan in the year 2000. He had donned Rakthachamundi Theyyam in all the three countries. France and Italy’s call were through a folklore agent of Kerala and for the Japan it was through a researcher who was a native of Kannur. The performance happened in an auditorium in France and Italy whereas it was an open stage in Japan. Everywhere it was full of people seated even on steps and many on foot. There was neither thottam sung nor any anushtanam10 done. A small temporary kavu was arranged by a diasporic Malayali. But the artists to have the satisfaction, sung the mulamantram11, that is recited before performing Theyyam and went to the stage. He recalled: The audience was pleased seeing the marachal12 with the heavy attire which weighs 10–20 kgs during the performance and didn’t leave until the performance got over. They were 363

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awestruck seeing the performance and came to take photos with us. A group of 21 people were in our troupe which includes chendakaran, vathyamkaran, set maker, helper etc. We stayed in a flat where food was all paid by the agents. The travel didn’t have any issues while check-in at the airport. The difference in food culture made our stay a little difficult and had to survive on bread and omelets. We were paid Rs.100,000 where Rs.50,000 was paid in cash. It was just the money that made us to go to perform in the foreign land. (personal interview by Surabhi with Achuthan) Bharathan, another respondent who is a 76-year-old Theyyam artist, performed Theyyam in France in the year 1989. He had also performed in Germany and Belgium. He had been contacted through an agent of folklore academy and travel; his stays were all sponsored by the government. A group of 13 people including helper, four vadhyakaran, chendakaran and other Theyyam performers were included in his troupe. We did all anushtanam and a temporary kavu was set up only in France. Other places it was just a red curtain that was set up on the stage with lighted lamps. There were no thottam, kurikodukal or dakshina rituals. A Malayali lady was the translator to our performances in France. It was a stay of 10 days with a house for 2 people per room was arranged. We were paid a fee of Rs.4000 each. All the places we went had extreme cold climate and for us, who are unaware of the climate in the foreign land didn’t have any suitable cloths. This made our stay difficult. The restaurants in most of the places had chopsticks and spoon which made it uncomfortable to eat. (personal interview by Surabhi with Bharathan) Reconstruction of the meaning of rituals is always difficult. The legend of essence of rituals is unknown among many devotees. The devotees are involved in the rituals to gain the material profit to them like prosperity in health and wealth. In the diaspora, people indulge in reconstruction of culture and rituals to maintain their cultural and religious ties with the homeland and to make their next generation involved in all the religion. The performance and continuity of rituals is always taken care of by the diasporas. As rightly pointed out by Pratap Kumar (2013, p. 71) in the case of Hindus in South Africa: Hindus do not seem to know the meaning of the rituals that they observe, it does not mean that no meaning can be attributed to them. The rituals in many festivals are the same, or at least similar. But they take on different meanings in different festivals and on different occasions. In this sense, the meaning of the ritual depends on what is celebrated and what is remembered in the context of the ritual. This special meaning is preserved in the myth that relates the significance of the festival. Janardhanan, a 56-year-old Theyyam artist from the Vanaan community, is another respondent who had performed different Theyyams in the Malayalee diaspora, Kathivanur Veeran in England and Switzerland, Kandanarkelan in Italy and Muchilottu Bhagavathi in America. He has also performed in Asian Games and in Pune Institute for Spic Macay. He had received State Award for Folklore Dakshinachitra in 2015. But since 2016, he has been banned in the native kavu for performing Muchilottu Bhagavathi abroad. The Vaniyan community who organizes this particular Theyyam in their various kavu in the village blames him of marketing Theyyam abroad. He has also been banned from teaching in the Folklore Academy from then. He has been going abroad to perform from the 60s but the ban came in 2016 accusing 364

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him of selling the art form which is very precious to the Vaniyan community. He recalls one of his visits and performances in the diaspora: I went as a group with my two brothers and others. We were provided rooms of a flat along with travel, food and medical needs. A sum of Rs.100,000 were paid for the stay for a period of 1–2 months. There were a lot of crowd to witness the Theyyam other than the Malayalis. The foreigners are more inquisitive about knowing the Indian culture than the Malayalis… Before the performance, the audiences just see Theyyam as a figure and artistic ritual as a whole cannot be ever showcased in the other land. So, none would even get a feel like in the native land in a foreign land which is just impossible. It should be understood just as a mere dance performance which should be understood by those who object the performance abroad for no reason. (personal interview by Surabhi with Janardhanan) Religion plays an important role in forming identity of an individual especially in the diasporic context (Williams, 1988). The Theyyam performances in the diaspora creates a sacred space when performed and forms a special bond between the diasporic and host community. For instance, Ramakrishnan, a 49-year-old Theyyam performer who had donned Muthappan in Malaysia and Singapore, shares such unique experience: The performance in these countries took place for 2 days from the evening till the next day morning. There used to be a huge audience, mostly non-Malayalis than the Malayalis from the diaspora. (personal interview by Surabhi with Ramakrishnan)

Conclusion Indian immigrants in the diaspora set up their religious and cultural institutions in order to perpetuate their religious practices, as soon as the circumstances permitted them. All of them make efforts to preserve their old ways of lifestyle in the host countries they occupy. Temples, churches, shrines began to appear in no less time Indians arrived in an alien country. The first generation always took the lead to teach vernacular language to the second generation in order to retain their culture. According to Pratap Kumar (2013, p. 25), these early temples and schools seem to have become centres of religious and cultural activities. Reading of the scriptures, storytelling and staging religious plays became the activities of these centres where people could meet, not only for social activities but also religious ones. These centres seem to have provided the much-needed sense of belonging to Hindus as members of the same community. There were different modes of preserving culture like the lectures, sermons by visitors, observance of festivals, performance of rituals and the study of the vernacular. The traditional art forms have their own representation. Though they are evolved locally, they receive critical acclaim internationally once they are customized according to the global demands, hereby undergoing a process of cultural appropriation. The elite art forms of Kerala such as Kathakali, Mohiniaatam and Bharatanatyam have already reached the transnational status as they are being enacted across the world and consumed by both Indians and non-Indians. However, there are several other art forms of Kerala that are now achieving the 365

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transnational status through their performances in the diaspora for the last two to three decades. Theyyam is one such art form. Though it is very traditional, localized and not a mainstream art form and hence fall under the well-known ‘little tradition’ of Hindu religious practices and distinct from those of the ‘great tradition’ (Redfield, 1956) worshipped all over India under Sanskritic Hinduism, for the last few years, the art form has changed substantially incorporating new trends to woo the Non-Resident Keralites (NRKs) in particular and Indians in general. As Anurag (2017, p. 41) rightly mentioned the potential of Theyyam: Theyyam is now considered as an indispensable cultural art form that is associated with the cultural identity of the state. It started to appear in youth festivals and also started to feature in the National Games as part of Keralite culture. In the 21st century, Globalization caused Theyyam to be commercialized. Both the government and corporate companies see Theyyam as a commercial product rather that has immense potential for contributing to the development of the tourism industry. The uniqueness of this art form is that, first, the essence, meaning, context and history of this art form is never carried along with the performers overseas, and, second, Theyyam, like other art forms, cannot be rehearsed as the Theyyam performers undergo long-term fasting, abstinence, prayers and solitary confinement, and then don the costume of a deity to enter the divine trance and when travel outside, they do not involve a big part of the ritual and tantric karmas (esoteric tradition of Hinduism). Hence, Theyyam creates its own distinctive cultural identity for the group. Many Theyyams are being marketed to the Indian diaspora where significant Malayalee communities reside such as the USA, France, Germany, Poland, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and the Persian Gulf. The trend of selling it and their exploitation in the overseas have been very common in recent times. For example, customized Theyyam performances are now marketed to the Malayali diaspora by various agents as a result the rituals and essence of Theyyams are never carried out in the diaspora as all arrangements are made available according to the availability of resources.

Notes 1 Thudangal begins when the person in the kavu maintaining abstinence takes five betal leaves, areca nuts, rolled tiny cloths to be lighted each along with turmeric powder, few rice and places them on a plantain leaf with five wicks. The wicks are then used to light and the plantain leaf, and the things placed on it are given to the performer which indicates that the divine power of the deity in the kavu is transferred through the plantain leaf where all the divine power has been captured, stored and then restored in the performer. It is through Thudangal the power of the deity first gets in to the performer with the legendary ballads sung in the background. 2 Thottams are the ballads that are sung during the commencement of Theyyam. It is sung as an invocation to the deities of Theyyam and proceeds with reciting the legend of the Theyyam. The drummer or the makeup in the Theyyam troupe usually sings thottams with elaborate description of Theyyam legend. 3 Religious offerings which may include sweets, flowers, fruits, etc. In Hindu rituals, the religious rituals end with giving away of offerings by the temple priest or members of the family if happening in a house which are usually sweets, fruits, flowers, sandal paste, etc. In the case of Theyyam, the Theyyam performer as a metamorphosed deity gives away offerings and blessings to the worshippers which is a turmeric powder to be smeared on the forehead. 4 Kavu is a sacred grove or shrine that is mostly found in Malabar where local deities reside. Kavus are different from temples which is a seat for Brahmanic Gods whereas in Kavu various Theyyam deities are prayed. These are very small roofed shrines without elaborate ornamentation. Theyyams are performed in front of these kavus. There are various Sarpa (snake) Kavu found in Kerala.

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Performing arts, diaspora and identity 5 Drummer of Theyyam performance. He accompanies Theyyam during the performance and plays a major role in the vibrant movement of the Theyyam performer with his drum beats. 6 The performer accompanying Chendakaran with a trumpet. 7 Names of the respondents have been changed for anonymity. 8 Coconut palm leaves. Coconut trees are found plenty in Kerala and thus Theyyams use a lot of palm leaves which are available way too cheap for them in making their costumes, headgear and umbrella called Ola Kuda. The costumes for Mari Theyyam in Malabar use coconut palm leaves in plenty. Coconut palm leaves are majorly used to cover the body of the artist that prevent the heat from entering into their body during their vibrant performance with fire. Thalamalika which is a small headgear that the performer wears is made of 300 or more coconut palm leaves. Oli and Arayoda that are tied on the waist tightly to keep the heavy costumes intact are also made of coconut palm leaves. The seats and beds in the green room for the performer is a woven mat of coconut palm leaves on which they lie down for the makeup to be done and to take rest. Many strands of coconut palm leaves are used in constructing various costumes of Theyyam which highlights an amazing craftwork as well. Theyyam artists now pack and take these coconut palm leaves to another country for their performances and use it to construct tiny kavus in the diaspora. 9 Theekundam or Meleri is the pyre into which Theyyam jumps repeatedly which awes the worshippers. Theyyam called Ottakollam makes breathtaking jumps into the Meleri during the performance which happens only once in 10–30 years. The Theyyam is also called Theechamundi. Meleri is dug very deep and filled with firewood which are cut down from pre-selected trees in the neighborhood of the performance venue by ‘kollikaar’ who are authorized workers to collect trees and construct Meleri and are also bound to maintain fast for the day. The most used tree wicks are that of tamarind trees, Champaka trees and Jackfruit trees. The remaining wicks are later on removed from the fire embers after it is burnt into ashes and made into a huge heap. The myth of Meleri is related to Panchagni (Five Fires) where demon Hiranyakashypu prays and gets a boon from Brahma that he cannot be killed anywhere. The Meleri where the performer falls is the fire where Hiranyakashypu is hiding. Theyyam running around the Meleri indicates his frenzy to get hold of the demon inside the fire and his acts in front of the kavu indicates his killing of the demon. Ottakollam and Potten Theyyam have a major role of fire that is used in holy rituals. The performer falls on the Meleri numerous times and is pulled back by the accomplices. Ottakollam Theyyam falls on the huge heap of fire embers more than hundred times. The performer who jumps on the pyre 101 times gets recognized with the title Panicker by gifting silk and bangle. The falling on the embers add colors to the performance and has humongous number of worshippers to watch and to pray. 10 Practicing and solemnization of rituals. The performers have to fast and pray with dedication and faith during the period of solemnization. This includes abstinence varying from 9,11,28,41 days and varies for each Theyyam till the end of the performance from the day it is fixed which is called Adayalam Kodukal to a particular Theyyam performer. 11 Prayers related to Theyyams as a part of solemnization which are strictly studied by the Theyyam artists alone. 12 Marachal is the vibrant turns and leaps that performer takes during the Theyyam performances. The chendakaran and vathyakaran have a major role in making the marachal frabjous.

References Anurag, N. T. (2017). Influence of Brahminic Hegemony on Folk Art Theyyam: Historical Analysis of Theyyam Myths and Socio-Cultural Events in Northern Kerala. International Journal of English Research, 3 (4), 38–42. Dasan, M. (2012). Theyyam: Patronage, Appropriation and Interpolation. Kerala: Kannur University. Jacobsen, A. K. (2008). Introduction: Religion on Display. In Knut A. Jacobsen (Ed.), South Asian Religions on Display: Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora (pp. 1–12). London: Routledge. Koyyal, B. (2016). Folk Art Forms of Kerala. Kannur: Kerala Folklore Academy. Levitt, P. (2001). Between God, Ethnicity, and Country: An Approach to the Study of Transnational Religion. Working Paper, WPTC-01–13, Transnational Communities Program, University of Oxford. Pratap Kumar, P. (2013). Hinduism and the Diaspora: A South African Narrative. New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Redfield, R. (1956). Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Surabhi K. and Ajaya K. Sahoo Safran, W., Sahoo, A. K., & Lal, B. V. (2008). Indian Diaspora in Transnational Context: Introduction. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29 (1), 1–5. Sahoo, A. K. (2006). Issues of Identity in the Indian Diaspora: A Transnational Perspective. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 5 (1–2), 81–98. Sahoo, A. K. & Shome, A. (2020). Diaspora and Transnationalism: The Changing Contours of Ethnonational Identity of Indian Diaspora. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 19 (3), 383–402. Sahoo, A. K. & Surabhi K. (2020). Diaspora, Religion, and Identity: The Case of Theyyam in the ­Indian Diaspora. Asian Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2020.1737506 Sinha, V. (2011). Religion and Commodification ‘Merchandizing’ Diasporic Hinduism. London: Routledge. Surabhi, K. & Sahoo, A. K. (2020). Localization to Globalization: A Study of Theyyam and Cultural Appropriation. In Ajaya K. Sahoo & P. Venkata Rao (Eds.), Indian Diaspora and Transnationalism: Trends and Issues in the 21st Century (pp. 95–112). New Delhi: Serials Publications. Williams, R. (1988). Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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27 THE LEGACY OF THE DIASPORA Memory and homeland-in-memory in the diasporic Vietnamese literature in Germany Tran Tinh Vy

Through the lens of diaspora studies The Greek word diasporá stems from the verb diaspeirein, a combination of “dia” (over or through) and “speirein” (to scatter or sow). Diaspora refers to scattering and dispersal. In its original Greek sense, diaspora focused on the process of destruction, the “decomposition of matter and its dissolution into smaller parts” (Kenny, 2013, p. 2). The destruction of Jerusalem and the collapse of the First Temple (960 BC–586 BC) were agreed upon by most scholars as the beginning of the Jewish diasporic experience (Cohen, 1995). These catastrophic events created central characteristics in the narratives of Jews as slavery, emigration, exiles and the desire to return home. As shown in the case of the Jews, the very early concept of diaspora is closely associated with the dispersal from original geographical places, the longing and return for home. The Jewish classical case, in which the dispersal was usually forced and the return was denied, emphasizes the importance of home with “roots, soil and kinship” (Huyssen, 2003, p. 151), nostalgia and loss. However, from the very early connotation of the Jews, the notion of diaspora has been expanding over time along with the global migration of people to explain their experiences within the framework of exile, connectivity and return. Though being partly overlapped with several disciplinary studies interested in social movements, the diaspora differentiates itself by “the connections between homeland and host land generated by mobile subjects, including the perspectives of long-term residents both at home and abroad” (Stierstorfer and Wilson, 2018, p. xviii). The connection to the homeland is interpreted as “a strong or renewed tie to the past”, which is also stated by Cohen (2018, p. 18) as a condition to emerge a diasporic consciousness. Home and the connection to the homeland by the dispersal communities have been confirmed as key features by several scholars, although they choose to approach diaspora from different angles and perspectives. In the case of Vietnamese literature in Germany, the homeland and the memories of the homeland are the main themes exploited by most authors. However, each of the different Vietnamese groups manifests the representations of homeland and memory distinguishedly. This chapter, therefore, will begin with an overview of the Vietnamese migration history, followed by the formation of Vietnamese community groups in Germany. Different push factors, i.e. the cultural background and motivations of migration, are argued as causes of 369

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the varied representations of memory and especially of the homeland in their literature. Especially, the two issues that I focus on in this chapter are: (1) how the memories of crossing borders are reproduced traumatically in diasporic Vietnamese literature and (2) how the creation of homeland, i.e. Vietnam, is represented ambivalently in the writing. Varied interpretations of the diaspora, both as a social form and as a type of consciousness, also allow me to consider the representations of memory in relation to identity and to figure out the diasporas’ struggles to define their identities through diasporic narratives of memory.

The moving people Vietnam, a country with high levels of geographical mobility, has experienced numerous periods of both domestic and international migration. The history of Vietnam witnessed the expansion of regions and migration in various directions, mainly from the North to the South (Nguyễn Đăng Thục, 1970, pp. 25–43; Phù Lang Tr ươ ng Bá Phát, 1970, pp. 45–137; Tana, 2004, p. 11, 2007, pp. 148–156; Taylor, 1993, pp. 42–65) and from the south-west to the Lower Mekong (Nguyễn Văn Hầu, 1970, pp. 3–24). The first migration of the Vietnamese started in the early 17th century with the number of political or religious victims, landless people, fishermen, cross-border smugglers and criminals crossing the Vietnamese border to Cambodia. Since the end of the 19th century, which was seen as the beginning of the first massive migrations of the Vietnamese to Laos (Tappe, 2015, p. 371), there were several hundred families and sometimes even whole village communities moving across the Lao-Annamite frontier to make a living (Tappe, 2015, p. 378) or to work for the French government in Laos (Baird et al., 2019, pp. 50–70). The second wave of migration took place during the French colonial period (1859– 1954) in Vietnam. The late 19th century witnessed a large number of the Vietnamese migrating to Laos and Cambodia, which was the result of “the administrative and economic development of French Indochina” (Engelbert, 2004, p. 227). Besides, there was the number of laborers working in the Southwest China (Rousseau, 2014, p. 10; Thompson, 1937, pp. 207–212),1 New Caledonia (Thompson, 1937, p. 163), France ­( Vu-Hill, 2011, 2014, pp. 121–125) and other European countries (Thompson, 1937, p. 90) in the late 19th century and early 20th century. France became the most favored destination for the Vietnamese immigrants after World War I, which marked the third wave of Vietnamese migration. While in the peak of the migration (1940–1946), the Vietnamese migration here included both workers and intellectuals (Thompson, 1952, p. 49) mostly the Vietnamese businessmen and refugees arrived in France from 1947 onward (Dorais, 1998, p. 113; Thompson, 1952, p. 49). The fourth wave of migration in Vietnam was formed chiefly in the context of the ­Vietnam War. The year of 1975 could be seen as the time during which many were uprooted and led to the Vietnamese refugee crisis, which happened after the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in South Vietnam. This event resulted in the greatest traumatic journey of Vietnamese (approximately one million people) and the formation of the current overseas Vietnamese community all over the world, which exists in the USA, Australia, France, West Germany and other Western countries (Vo, 2006; Miller, 2015). The last wave of the Vietnamese migration, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, started in the 1980s and is ongoing up to now. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese migrants went to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR to work in factories under contract-based employment in the 1980s (Alamgir, 2014). These Vietnamese contract

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workers not only filled the shortage of labor, especially low-cost labor, in their receiving countries but also provided financial support to Vietnam by sending remittances (Schwenkel, 2014, pp. 235–258). The Vietnamese, who mostly arrived in the third and the fourth wave of migration, accounted for a large number of the Vietnamese living in Germany. As of 2015, there are about 167,000 Vietnamese in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2015), comprising the largest Asian ethnic group living here. As for the boat people, most of the Vietnamese refugees arrived in Germany in the second large-scale wave of refugees (from 1978 to the mid-1980s). The group of 644 Vietnamese in the boat Hai Hong was the first Vietnamese refugees who arrived on 3 December 1978 in Germany. 2 Since then, the FRG took 38,000 boat people in total. As the first group of immigrants from outside of Europe, the boat people received a mixed reception in the FRG. On the one hand, there were concerns about the boat people’s integration into Western society, especially when not one of the new arrivals spoke any German. On the other hand, some organizations were willing to help. The boat people’s rescue even led to the foundation of one of the most German well-known relief organizations, Cap Anamur. The first rescue tour in 1978 and all subsequent tours were a great success as more than 10,000 boat people were rescued and around 35,000 others received medical care on board.3 Later, the image of the boat Cap Anamur was reminisced about and reappeared affectionately and gratefully in literature written by the boat people. For them, it is a symbol of German humanitarianism, which brought them to the shore of safety as they were stranded between life and death in the South China Sea. Compared to the boat people, the community of former contract workers is distinguished in terms of the context in which they emigrated. While the community of boat people found themselves in Germany after the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975, the community of contract workers was shaped by Cold War-era politics. There were hundreds of thousands of workers working in factories in Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in the 1980s. However, the reunification of Germany in 1990, which triggered the swift collapse of the other East European countries and the dissolution of Soviet bloc, greatly affected the Vietnamese people who were living and working in these countries. The Vietnamese workers, who were working in the factories in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), made up most of the Vietnamese former contract workers in Germany. Also, some workers emigrated illegally to Germany after the Fall of Berlin Wall (1989), who formed a group of undocumented workers living in Germany until they got residence permits. For the most part, these former contract workers ran their businesses to earn a living and to secure residence permits. Corresponding to the formation of Vietnamese community groups, Vietnamese literature in Germany has also a clear distinction. First, the literary sector, which was formed and developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is the literature of the refugees. Correspondingly, the memories of their homeland are depicted through the dark experiences of the journey across the border or the characters’ nostalgia for the beloved home country. The arrival of new community groups like contract workers, students and free migrants enriches the subject of expression and appearance of Vietnamese literature. In particular, Vietnamese authors emphasize the social contexts in Vietnam that prompt them to leave, which usually links to the representation of the narrative of memory, the mixed reception they receive in Germany, the sense of rootlessness and the search for identity caused by displacement and cultural diversity. These contents will be clarified in the following sections.

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Go: the dark memories of crossing borders We are in the same boat The experience of migrating by boat and living in refugee camps is one of the most prominent themes in Vietnamese literature and art, contributing significantly to the creation of diasporic identity (Tranguyen, 2015). With the support of Viên Giác Center (Tran Tinh Vy, 2018), the works of the boat people are printed and published with ease, forming a community of writers and readers. The writer-reader communities not only exchange literary activities but also share political views within the community. In this situation, the experiences of crossing the sea and living in refugee camps have become common themes among boat-people writers. In the short stories, Cơn sốt giữa đêm (The Night Fever) by Phù Vân (2004), Giao mùa (The Change of Season) by Huy Giang (1994), Bế tắc (Deadlock) by Trần Phong Lưu (in Nhiều tác giả, 1994), especially the novels Nơi cuối dòng sông (At the End of the River, 1994) and Câu chuyện từ con tàu Cap Anamur (The Story of the Boat Cap Anamur, 1997) by Vũ Nam, across the sea is explored repeatedly. Narratives of escaping by sea by the male protagonist Nhân in Nơi cuối dòng sông or by the female characters in the novelette Câu chuyện từ con tàu Cap Anamur are illustrations. These female characters are lucky enough to be rescued by the boat Cap Anamur and get to safety. However, the vestige of the cross-border experiences can hardly be considered redundant given the fact that many found safe harbors or settled in host countries. The memories of escaping by sea and living in refugee camps, which are reflected in Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng’s short stories, indicate that the price of freedom could be paid by physical pains and mental traumas. Writing about the cross-border journeys, Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng particularly focuses on the mental disorder that refugees faced, particularly their silence, anxiety, nightmares or haunting with memories (Ganesan, Fine and Yi Lin, 1989). Narratives of crossing the sea in the collections of short stories M ườ i hai hoa cúc (The Twelve Chrysanthemum, 1988), Dòng ch ữ tâm tình (The Words of Love, 1988) and Tiếng núi (The Voice of Mountain, 1992) expose persuasively psychological disorder of refugees as the consequences of crossing borders. It is worth mentioning how often Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng expresses the experiences of crossing borders by the sea which he himself does not fulfill. He did not flee Vietnam by boat; instead, he is a former Vietnamese student. He does not actively engage in the war against the SRV regime, while other Southern Vietnamese did. But his repetition of writing about mental consequences of his characters, which caused by their (almost) forced migration, shows that not only memory but also post-memory of traumatic experiences could create a shared sentiment among diasporic writers. Memory in this sense serves “the privileged carrier of diasporic identity” and “the ultimate proof of the diasporic status of a certain community” (Butler, 2001, p. 192).

Or even on planes and trucks While the boat people risk themselves in shabby wooden boats and refugee camps, the former contract workers find an alternative, which is joining in cooperation programs between governments. As a bilateral agreement for Vietnam laborers working and receiving professional training in GDR, the labor recruitment program (1987–1989) received the number of Vietnamese workers to work for German factories in GDR. For the GDR, this program intended to “deepen the fraternal cooperation between the countries by establishing a regular flow of Vietnamese labor to industrial centers in East Germany” (Schwenkel, 2014, 372

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p. 243). By sending laborers, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) could also reduce the high unemployment rate and postwar poverty. For the workers, this program simply opened a new way for them to work overseas. Thế D ũ ng, a former contract worker, describes a Vietnamese intellectual’s journey from Vietnam to Germany to become a contract worker in his novel Hộ chiếu bu ồn (Sad Passport, 2011). Recognizing the inadequacies in Vietnamese society, where social status is more respected than personal ability, the protagonist Tr ần Linh exploits the legal loophole for his self-benefit. It is almost impossible for him to get a ticket to leave for the GDR without using his trick and money (though not much). His sort of trick, mostly taking advantage of co-workers, shows how much effort an individual had to put in to find his way out. His reward is a “slot” of working abroad in Germany. The trip is seen as the result of the person’s realization of his “place” in the homeland in which going overseas becomes a precious chance to have a better life. Nevertheless, the fact that the protagonist views East Germany as a “real paradise” while this country is dying evokes an irony of fate. At the same time, how the character uses tricks to go overseas raises the question of recession not only of the national economy but also of identity. Nguyễn Văn Thọ, another former contract worker, describes the illegal cross-border journey of those who were not as competent and lucky as Tr ần Linh. During the late 1980s, to go successfully overseas without the approval of the Bureau of Labor Cooperation, some people went first to Eastern European countries, then crossing illegally into the GDR. Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s Quyên (2009) describes Quyên’s, the protagonist, journey of crossing the border from Vietnam to Russia and traveling from there to Germany. The protagonist and other illegal border-crossers had to hide in a cramped truck, “holding their breaths, like mummies together”.4 During their escape, Quyên falls into Hùng’s, the leader of the border crossing, hands. He arrests and rapes her in a shabby house in a deep forest, which leads to her becoming pregnant. The illegal crossing of borders does not end with a hidden, stealthy and harsh life in a host land. The moral depravity of characters, such as adultery, looting or gambling, is also argued as a result of the “uprooting” and incompetence to adapt to a new cultural environment by immigrants. In general, narratives about legal and illegal border-crossing offer lived experiences of diasporic formation to understand the human face of contemporary dislocations. While the narratives of departures written by former contract workers overthrow the illusions of the socialist paradise that the migrants mistook before their arrival, literature written by boat people focuses more on the psychological trauma of refugee shelters, the consequences of the obsession with the memory of the characters. Although the Vietnamese diasporic characters share patterns of migration, including “push” and “pull” factors motivating them to leave, the narratives of crossing borders foreground the essentialness of memory, a unique legacy and a burden to every individual, in shaping diasporic identity.

Stay: the creation of the homeland in memory To make it clear at first, “stay” is understood metaphorically as the state of being stuck in the stream of memories of home towns, of the past, of everything in a homeland-in-memory by the migrants. The migrants are all the movers! But their minds are all left behind in the beloved countries. In a host land, their belongings are nothing but memories. It is worth to note here how scholars John Armstrong (1976, p. 395), Gabriel Sheffer (1986, p. 116), William Safran (1991, pp. 83–84) and Rogers Brubaker (2005, p. 6) emphasized the importance of the myth of homeland for the diasporic communities. All of them consider the contact 373

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with homelands, either real or symbolic contacts, by the diasporas as the awareness of diasporic consciousness and a way to preserve a distinctive identity vis-à-vis a host society. In the case of the Vietnamese diasporic writers in Germany, the connection to the homeland is created through imagination and creativity about a distant and nostalgic homeland, which still exists but the diaspora hardly returns. Vietnam, the home country, becomes the creative space for most authors in Germany. Depending on how close the authors are with specific regions, the homeland is described as a place that contains a lot of love, memory, anger and obsession. Normally, the context of the South or North is related to the writers’ origins. For example, Hanoi became a literary space in the works of northern authors such as Lê Minh Hà, Nguyễn Văn Thọ, Thế Giang, Phạ m Th ị Hoài and Mai Lâm. Meanwhile, the contexts in the stories of the South Vietnamese writers such as Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, Vũ Nam, Huy Giang and Phong Hư ng Lư u Nhơ n Ngh ĩa mostly take place in Saigon, Nha Trang or Southwest Vietnam. In short, the creation of homeland-in-memory is localized. Except for writing about the homeland as a native place, the reappearance of Vietnam is influenced by geopolitical factors. In particular, the authors point to Vietnam not as a general entity but instead in terms of what it was like during certain historical periods. The most popular period described by most writers is in postwar Vietnam, which coincides with the departure of the authors from both North and South Vietnam. However, while Lê Minh Hà, Nguyễn Văn Thọ, Đỗ Tr ườ ng and Mai Lâm express many sentiments of the memory of a faraway country, Phạ m Th ị Hoài or Thế Giang exposes a picture of an ugly Hanoi, revealing a pessimistic and critical view of the future of the country. Within the group of authors who departed from the South, the year 1975 was seen as a historic landmark that marked a shift in political views, followed by a change in the perception of the writer. In this direction, it is predictable that South Vietnam before 1975 is portrayed literarily with a lot of regrets. In contrast, Vietnam after 1975 is often referred to with some criticism and condemnation. Thus, the second characteristic of Vietnamese literature regarding homeland is politics. Let’s take a look at how homeland-in-memory is created both real and unreal at the same time in Ngô Nguyên Dũng’s short story Chốn tâm tình ẩn náu (Where the feeling is hidden) in the collection Dòng chữ tâm tình (Words of Sentiments, 1988). The fragments of memories show subtle contradictory emotions in the way immigrant characters view their homeland. In the context of the dying Republic of Vietnam (around from 1970 to 1975), between “the loud protests in the mornings” (Ngô Nguyên Dũng, 1988, p. 177)5 and the roar of gunfire signaling the city’s frenzied transformation, the protagonist Nhượ ng only dreamt of “December snowfall”, “warm candles in the window frames on Christmas Eve” or “the rattle of the deer’s carriage rumbled through the snow-covered field glistening under the moonlight” (Ngô Nguyên Dũng, 1988, p. 179).6 He took a trip to go overseas as a “protective way to escape from a bloody life”.7 Paradoxically, when arriving in a land of snow he had dreamed of, Nhượ ng’s mind embraces exotic desires. His mind is like a film of memories, automatically rewinding the image of the past. When no longer drowned in the cramped Saigon, Nhượ ng is aware of the loss: No longer réveillon at any friend’s home at Christmas. No longer afternoons watching the sunset offshore in Cấp.8 There are no more summer holidays in Đà L ạt and the sounds of swallows chirping on the roof every morning.9 (Ngô Nguyên D ũng, 1988, p. 181) He does not yearn for an old South Vietnam. What he craves for is his memories about it. He nourishes the memory of Saigon consciously when living as a refugee, longing to immerse 374

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himself in the love of his girlfriend Tâm, dreaming of experiencing the feeling of a hangover before his departure just because in such a moment, Nhượ ng learns how to cherish the lost Saigon. As soon as he sets foot in Germany, “Nhượ ng’s heart is empty, the citadel of memory is broken into fragments”10 (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988, p. 181). Since then, he begins his journey of searching for his memories. Fragmentary memory is not only exposed through the stream of consciousness by the protagonists. It is even expressed narratively through which the fiction is built, like in the case of Lê Minh Hà’s stories. Here, memory is not only exploited through the analysis of the characters’ actions and psychology but also through the way the author uses literary devices to create fiction about and of memory. The term “fiction of memory” was first proposed by literary critics Ansgar Nünning and Birgit Neumann to refer to narratives that describe the workings of memory (Neumann, 2010, p. 334). In this kind of fiction, the chronological sequences of events are interrupted by interjections of earlier events to create memory-like narratives. The completing analepses, often found in classical fictional autobiographies, serve as an effective device for “bridging the gap between specific past events, the figures’ memory-created starting point, and a moment in the present at which the process of remembering is initiated” (Neumann, 2010, p. 336). The alteration in consecutive ordering is semanticized to demonstrate “the haphazard workings of memory”, thereby “highlighting the memory-like quality of the narrative” (Neumann, 2010, p. 336). Let’s consider how memory is worked in the novels Gió tự th ờ i khu ất m ặt (Wind from the Unseen time, 2017) and Ph ố vẫn gió (Street is still windy, 2014) by the writer Lê Minh Hà. Leaving Vietnam for Germany in 1994, when Hanoi just started its transition from its subsidy period11 to the socialist-oriented market economy, Lê Minh Hà juxtaposed the elegant and charming old Hanoi with the chaotic Hanoi in the present, thereby questioning the validity of the war and the new government’s ruling. In these opposite extremes of the old and new city, the heroines Ngân (the two protagonists share the same names) are left disappointed and distressed with the current state of Hanoi. The occurrence of memory is recognizable through the frequent shifting between chapters, which is a mimesis of life-narrative. With such a shifting structure of the fiction, the act of remembering becomes pivotal for the protagonists to connect people and events at different points of time, thereby creating a fiction of memory. The narrator Ngân is featured by her state in reminiscence. She not only remembers her life, which is described in disordered stages between her childhood and her present age. Also, she frequently tells the stories of her father, mother, schoolboys and even neighbors. Ngân is still the main character. However, her position, at the beginning of the work, is replaced by her memories of other characters. Memory, with its selectivity and condensation of the most memorable moments, is used to rationalize the sudden occurrence of the supporting characters in the position that would have belonged to the heroine. In that context, the shifting of the character’s viewpoints is particularly conducive to evoking the impression of the process of the heroine’s memory. It can be said that, throughout the novel, the protagonist does nothing more than reminiscence and contemplate the past.

Or somewhere in-between Away from earlier theories of diaspora, which viewed diaspora as a social form linked to geographical dispersion, there is an upsurge of research which engages critically with experiences of individuals under the pressure of diasporic movements. The new expanding 375

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approach to diaspora focuses on the formation of distinctive subjectivities based on the experience of displacement. Diaspora is understood both as a condition of subjectivity and as a state of mind. Homeland and the idea of returning to the homeland are thereby both literal and metaphorical (Procter, 2007; Kenny, 2013, p. 13; Davis, 2018, p. 119). Diaspora as a condition of subjectivity was firmly made by Lily Cho who implied that the meaning of diaspora could not be understood out of subjectivity and subject formation. She stated that diaspora is attained from “deeply subjective processes of racial memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings which hang at the edge of possibility” (Cho, 2018, p.109). Diaspora is comprised “in the spectrality and the pleasure of obscure miracles of connection” (Cho, 2018, p.109). Cho also features the role of traumatic dislocation as a condition of diasporas. However, diaspora does not necessarily include traveling across national boundaries. Instead, the subjective experiences depend more on experience and memory of becoming unhomely: To live in diaspora is to be haunted by histories that sit uncomfortably out of joint, ambivalently ahead of their time and yet behind it too. It is to feel a small tingle on the skin at the back of your neck and to know that something is not quite right about where you are now, but to know also that you cannot leave. To be un-homed is a process. To be unhomely is a state of diasporic consciousness. (Cho, 2018, p.112) The experiences of being diasporic by individuals are also mentioned by Paul Gilroy. Diasporic identity, which reproduced through these coerced experiences of displacements, is “focused less on common territory and more on memory, or, more accurately, on the social dynamics of remembrance and commemoration” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 207). The consciousness of being in-between in a location of residence and a location of belonging also causes tension “between the consciousness of diaspora-dispersal and affiliation and the distinctive modern structures and modes of power orchestrated by the institutional complexity of nation-states” (Gilroy, 1994, p. 207). Individual subjectivity was also included in Dibyesh Anand’s definition of diaspora. Diaspora refers to “those collectivities within which individual subjectivity is marked by ambiguity, confusion, productive anxiety, an affective pull from a different direction, all of which creates a hyper-awareness and not a predominant sense of regret” (Anand, 2018, p. 114). Detached from its association with the original territory, diaspora as a type of consciousness is currently approached through the focus on the state of mind and a sense of identity. Among the Vietnamese writers in Germany, Đoàn Minh Phượ ng tends to build characters who are in ambivalence. Especially, the cultural ambivalence of the main characters is shown as a consequence of the migration process, as confirmed by the state of being uprooted from their homeland. Therefore, the cultural conflicts faced by female characters will be interpreted as consequent representations of the diasporas in their resistance to “the other” cultures and their struggle to locate their own cultural identities. In this sense, Đoàn Minh Phượ ng’s novels can be read and illuminated by the theories and concepts of diaspora studies. These stories of diasporic Asian women also display the universal characteristics shared by almost all immigrant characters from any minority community, who have been struggling to find their own culture with the mainstream cultures of their new homelands. For example, the journeys of the protagonist An Mi in the novel Và khi tro b ụ i (And When this Dust, 2006) could be seen both as a social form and as a type of consciousness. As a social form, the protagonist did several trips: first, the journey from her 376

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hometown to Germany to search for peace; then the journey on the trains through European countries to commit suicide; later, the journey to find the truth in the story of the night-time receptionist. As a type of consciousness, during the process of living in places of settlement (in Germany and other European countries), the protagonist shares a lonely, lost and unconscious expression that comes from a state of lost memory. She is featured by her state of ignorance and cultural ambivalence. She often experienced both the feeling of being discriminated against and excluded from the majority while being identified with cultural heritage, possibly minority, not “here” but “somewhere”.12 The protagonist’s outward-journey to find the truth in the family of the receptionist is her inward-journey to explain the complex and subtle contradictions in her life. Her ignorance of married life, her desire to commit suicide, her fragmentary memories about the hometown, her horrifying obsessions with the deaths of relatives, all these tragedies of the narrator are expressed in a deep and sophisticated way as an expression of the state of the trauma by a migrant who was a victim of the war. Based on the understanding of the diaspora as a function of mind, I argue that the protagonist’ journeys are both real acts to discover the mysteries in social lives and metaphors used to explore the subtle intricacies hidden in her inner worlds. The journeys of the migrant characters are illuminated in their complex relations with memory and identity when as far as the characters go in their journey of finding the truth through fragmentary memories, the closer they get to understanding who they are. Diasporic experiences have also opened up in-between cultural spaces where people are constantly aware of multi-location and duality and keep having to define their identities. This analysis emphasizes our understanding of diaspora as related not only to the roots, i.e. homeland, but also to the routes, i.e. the journeys themselves, migrating, realizing and reconstructing selves.

At the end of the journey Through the lens of diaspora studies, memory and homeland-in-memory are illuminated in a multi-perspective way, revealing how diasporic characters register and respond to changes during their migration. The way the authors reflect on their experiences living in places of settlement, nostalgia for their homelands or even the ambivalence between the two worlds shows the diverse and complex manifestations of the migrant subjects in reproducing memories and forming identities. The narratives of going, staying or wandering somewhere in-between emphasize dynamic attachments between the protagonists’ memory and their relentless questioning of home. In general, homeland, as a constructed discourse, relates not only to spatio-temporal but also to socio-cultural dimensions, and memory, as a process of recalling and reproducing, is found intertwined into the diasporic negotiation of their migrating and belonging. Analyzing memory and homeland-in-memory through complex historical circumstances of refugee-exile allows us to encounter the sophistication and complexity of how different selves are formed, developed, faced or compromised by harsh realities.

Notes 1 The Indochina-Yunnan railway is initiated by French colonial authorities, connected ports of Hả i Phòng to Hanoi, Vietnam and Kunming in Yunnan Province of China. 2 See http://www.dw.com/en/remembering-the-first-wave-of-boat-people-in-­germany/a-1047447 (last accessed 21 May 2017). 3 See http://www.cap-anamur.org/service/über-uns (last accessed 24 May 2017).

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Tran Tinh Vy 4 All stories used for this paper are in Vietnamese. So I quote the original version here: “nín thở như xác ướ p bên nhau, v ượ t qua biên giớ i hai nước” (Nguyễn Vă n Thọ, 2009, p. 32). 5 In Vietnamese: “nhữ ng sáng biểu tình dồn d ập” (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988a, p. 177). 6 In Vietnamese: “[…] tuyết tháng mườ i hai. Có nhữ ng ng ọn nến soi ấ m áp trong nhữ ng khung c ửa kính đêm Giáng Sinh. Và réo r ắt tiếng nhạc chuông c ủ a cỗ xe nai bă ng qua cánh đồng tuyết phủ sáng l ấp lánh dướ i ánh tr ă ng ngân nhũ.!” (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988a, 179). 7 In Vietnamese: “thủ thế để khỏi lao mình vào cuộc sống đẫ m máu” (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988a, p. 178). 8 Cấp is a Vietnamese way of calling Vũ ng Tàu. Cấp means Cape Saint Jacques, the name was named by the French. 9 In Vietnamese: “Không còn nhữ ng giáng sinh ă n réveillon ở nhà b ấ t k ỳ một ng ườ i b ạ n nào đó. Không còn nhữ ng buổi chiề u ngoài C ấp ng ắ m m ặ t tr ờ i l ặ n ngoài khơ i xa. M ấ t c ả nhữ ng ngày hè Đà l ạ t và tiế ng chim én kêu hối h ả trên mái nhà mỗi buổi sáng” (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988a, 181). 10 In Vietnamese: “cõi lòng Nhượ ng trống không, v ụ n vỡ tang thươ ng nhữ ng thành quách k ỉ niệm” (Ngô Nguyên D ũ ng, 1988a, p. 181). 11 Subsidy period is the name used in Vietnam to a stage where most economic activity takes place under the planned economy, a feature of the economy under communism. Accordingly, the private sector gradually removed to make way for the state-economy leader. Although the subsidy regime existed in the north under the regime of North Vietnam before 1975, the subsidy period is often used to refer to economic activities in the country Vietnam period from early 1976 to late 1986 across the country, i.e. before the Renovation period. 12 Diasporic individuals’ awareness of decentred attachments, of being simultaneous “home away from home” or “here and there” is also referred to by Paul Gilroy. Similarly, Clifford mentioned the duality of diaspora as when they dwell here but assume a solidarity and connection there. “… [It is] the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here)”. See further in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 1999, p. xviii.

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INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abraham, I. 272 Abubakar, O. 279 Actor-Network Theory 240 Afghan diaspora 45 African-American 338, 171, 338 Agrawal, A. 241, 242 AIDS Bedhbhav Virodhi Andolan report 8 AIESEC 21 Akuei, S. R. 187 Alkire, S. 280 American Association of Bangladeshi Engineers and Architect (AABEAT) 42 American Association of Physicians from India (AAPI) 44 American Azerbaijan Music Foundation (AAMF) 339, 340 American India Foundation 44 Amuedo-Dorantes, C. 100 Anand, D. 376 Anantharam, A. 7 Anderson, B. 269 anti-black racism 275 Anurag, N. T. 366 Armstrong, J. A. 373 Ashutosh, I. 9 Asian diaspora: cultures and traditions 3; development potentials 4–5; media, culture, and representations 11–13; women and queers identities 7 Asian Youth Movements of 1980s 274 Assayag, J. 113 associational Filipinization 10; bilateral official development assistance (ODA) 264; establishment of new associations and vibrant

gatherings 264; labor associations and leaders 265–266; Pangasinan International Charitable Foundation 265; Worldwide professional associations 265 Association of Asian Indians in Ophthalmology 44 Association of Indian Neurologists 44 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states 258 Australia: Aussie (Australian) 28n2; Australian Research Council (ARC) 28n1; Indian parent migrants (see financial dependence of Indian parent migrants in Australia); Koreans in 74; refugees in 4; Vietnamese achievers 17; Vietnamese community 18–19; Vietnamese diaspora in 17 Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) 264 Axel, B. K. 270 Azerbaijani diaspora: Azerbaijaniness 12; Black History Month, concert for 335; concerto for solo piano 337–338, 344; event of National Music and Global Culture Society 335; music and diaspora 336–343; self-identification 336; in Turkey and Europe 336; Turkmanchay Treaty of 1828 335; USSR of 1970s–1980s 340–341; women musicians 334–336, 340 Bacchetta, P. 206–207 Bailey, A. J. 100 Bailey, J. 337 Bald, V. 274 banal racism 309–310 Banerjea, N. 207

381

Index Bangladeshi diaspora 148; AABEAT and TechBangla 44; American Institute of Bangladeshi 44; North American Bangladeshi Islamic Community 44 Banias 327 Basch, L. 3, 98 Baudh, S. 205 Bauman, Z. 114 Becker, R. 162 Bénéi, V. 113 Bengali refugees 147, 156 Berlant, L. 162 Betai, N. V. 4 Bhabha, Homi 353 Bhagavatula, S. 9, 10 Bharatanatyam 12, 346, 347, 352, 355, 365 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 99 Bhattacharya, S. 204 bhogonia 156 Birkenmaier, J. 123 The Book of Salt (Truong) 9 Bose, P. S. 6 BRICS University Networks 244 British Raj 147 Brubaker, R. 369 Butsch, C. 348 Campaign for Lesbian Rights report 8 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) 264 Carling, J. 187 Chakrabarty, D. 349 Chanda, R. 4 Charania, M. 202 Charleston, B. 27 Chatterjee, S. 11, 12 Chawla, Kalpana (US astronaut of Indian origin) 235n2 Cheltenham Literary Festival 331n7 Chinese diaspora: in Central America - Panama and Belize 55–58; Chinese shops 55–56; credit system 5; demand for workers 53; designer immigrants 54; dialectal and regional affinity of immigrants in Hawaii 53–54; emigration and growth of 5; families, forming and starting 5, 82–83; farthing trade in Jamaica 56; fringe banking, back-alley banking and curb finance 58; geographical distribution in 2020 51; Gini Coefficient 234; global dispersal in 19th century 52–54; going out policy 57; Hakka-speaking immigrants 55, 59; immigration in Singapore (see New Chinese immigration); informal finances and business start-up financialization 5, 58–61; labour recruitment colonial interests 54; larger-scale labour migration 52; localization practices 56; mafia connections 57–58; ms

or mini-super 56–57; mortality rates 52–53; Pearl River Delta (PRD) 51–52; People’s Republic of China (PRC) 51, 58; post-1978 Chinese migration 52; publications 51; risk, trust, interactive performance and informal finance 61–62; rotating credit system 59–60; Singapore, immigration to 5, 79–80; surname/kinship or regional affiliations 54; use of personal loans 59, 60 The Chinese Exclusion Acts in the USA (1882–1943) and Canada (1923–1947) 54 Choudhury, S. I. 139, 154 Chuki, S. 204 Citizenship Act amendment 297 Climate Change Knowledge Network in Indian Agriculture 244 Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO) 266n1 communication: transgeneration 25–28; and transportation 8, 11, 359 Coorlawala, U. A. 349 Corbridge, S. 99 Corman, C. 284 COVID-19 pandemic 7; facemasks 117; giving back to homeland 116, 117; global FDI flows 234; government lockdown 1; international border closures 189; Keralites overseas 101, 102; Kuki dialect 118; natural catastrophes 107; policies of social and/or physical distancing 1; post-COVID-19 scenario 239; Relief Fund 118; restrictions to migrate, USA 112 Craven, S. 7 creole nationalisms of the Americas 269 D-AG (Domestic Academic Gate) 245 dance: exotic (Adbhutam) 351; Indian Dance Practice in Bavaria 346–347; Kathakali, Mohiniaatam and Bharatanatyam 365; Natyashastra and Abhinayadarpana 350, 355n9; outside (European) dance history 353–354; performing Indianness (see Indianness); rasa, creating of 350–351, 355n10; relegated to performing wonder 350–351; in search of diasporic dance ancestors 352–353; wrestling with contemporary 351–352 Danjibi, N. 279 Dasgupta, D. 202 Dasgupta, R. K. 202 Dave, N. 207 D-EG (Domestic Employment Gate) 245 De Glopper, D. B. 62 Deneulin, S. 278 de-territorializing Internet 312 development: existence of 96; external shocks 100; and homeland 97, 100–102; idea of dispersal 96; idea of identity assertion and development 99; ideological reshaping – of

382

Index homelands 100; integral growth strategy 97; Kerala and remittance economy 100–102; Kolkata 103–104; negative consequences 98–100; seasonal (or cyclical) labor and shortterm contracts 98; sending and receiving countries 98; and transnational ties 95–97 Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR) 288 Dewansyah, B. 9, 11 diaspora 2; and communication (see communication); and development (see development); dimensions of 2–3; in economic transformation 9; and education (see education); family (see family formation); and food (see food, South Asian diaspora); holy grail of development 9, 225–235; homeland and development 5–7, 9, 10; and identity (see identity); identity formation and intercultural negotiation 12; and media (see media); mobilized diasporas 2; and music (see music); and politics (see politics); proletarian diasporas 2; and religion (see religion); religious transnationalism, role of 11; and remittances (see remittances); soft power, mobilization, and development 9–11 diaspora diplomacy: aggressive diplomacy for developing states 254; diaspora diplomacy, Philippine-style 258–260; filipinization of global cities 260–266; news and social media coverage 253; WMD’s (see Weapon of Mass Dispersion (WMD)) Diaspora Direct Investment (DDI) 226 diasporas as holy grail of development: celebrating a return 226–228; logic of the quest 230–233; promise of returns 228–230; see also Indian diaspora diasporic homing desire 273 diasporic nationalism 313 diasporic urbanism 273 Diener, A. 100 digital media 11, 303, 304 Digital Equalizer Program 44 Djalal, D.P. 290, 291 Doi, Y. 124 dream politics 269 Dual Identity Leadership Program 23 Durham, M. 168 East Asian diaspora: aestheticization and romanticization 308; banal racism 309–310; diasporic media space 304; ethnic media and diasporic nationalism 311–313; female individualization 305–306; growth of Western educational institutions 11–12; identity formation – individualization 303; media consumption and transnational mobility 306–308; parasite singles phenomenon of 305–306; transnational

networks 303–304; transnational subjectivities 308; women’s transnational mobility, phenomenon of 304; work identity and pursue self-development 306 East Pakistan 147; Muhajir or Muhajireens 147 The Edible Schoolyard Project 220 education: analyzing IPR issues 241–242; Indian diaspora knowledge networks 242–244; knowledge networks 240–241; theoretical framework 244–245; transnationality network model 245; university-linked diaspora knowledge network model 246–249; value add of Indian diaspora 237–240 Ehrenreich, B. 218 elder abuse 186, 188, 189, 194, 195 electronic capitalism suture 269 Erdman, J. L. 352 Etzkowitz, H. 246 European dance history 353–354 Evangelical-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement 286n1 Ewing, K. P. 205 family formation: challenges and opportunities 82–83; Gifted Education Programme (GEP) 85; grounded theory approach 8; immigrant status as constraining factor 83–84; language and socio-cultural setting 84–85; Primary School Leave Examination (PSLE) 85; and sociology of money 8; structural opportunities in education 85–86 farthing trade in Jamaica 56 Filipinization: associational Filipinization 10, 264–266; Comprehensive Tax Reform Law 258; contribution to homeland and hostland 6; cultural influences 259; of global cities 260; land-based overseas Filipinos 257; Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 259; occupational Filipinization 10, 262–264; religious Filipinization 10, 260–262; role in international politics 10 financial dependence of Indian parent migrants in Australia: ageing and transnational care 186–187; an uncertain future 192; children, taking over 192–193; conversation circles 189; culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities 189; elder abuse in India and Australia 188–189; grounded theory approach 189–190; India Human Development Survey 188; migration 186–187; money and family 187, 195; Permanent Residence (PR) 189, 190; reciprocity and transparency of money 191–192; studying parent migrants 189–190; and tensions of multigenerational living border on abuse 194; the upside-down joint family 187–188; Whatever we have is for the children 190–191

383

Index first Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (CID-1) in 2012 289, 292 Fisher, M. H. 318 food, South Asian diaspora: alootikkis 329; In an Antique Land (Ghosh) 315; appetites and avoidances 315–319; Arab merchants 315–316; authentic subcontinental cuisine 322–323; Balti cuisine 321–322; Bengali Muslim chikondars 328; bioethical minimalism 318; bodily and psychic re-makings of girmityas 324; cooking techniques 325; counterflows to colonialism 318; culinary ingredients 326; culinary traditions and dietary practices 12; curry’s careers 319–323; Dal Puri Diaspora 326; diaspora’s new directions? 327–330; dietary practices 316; English-style curries 320; excoriation of curry and curry powder 323; fish and rice 329–330; food of Banias 327; Gujarati-Kenyan Pathak family 321; Hindostanee Coffee House 320–321; Hindu and Jain merchants 316–317; Hindu castebased gastropolitics 324; Indian cooks and dishes 319–320; the innovations of indenture 324–327; low-cost ingredients 321; Malabari 319–320; Mexican and Punjabi food 327–328; The Mistress of Spices 329; Naipaul food 324–325; recollections or presentations of food 325; the romance of spices 323; roti and saag 330; Roti chaud (hot roti) 326; street foods 326; sugar-producing colonies 324; tamales and chili 328–329; Tulsi household 325; vegetarian principle and friendship 318–319 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 9–10, 41, 47, 226, 229, 230 Foreign Exchange and Regulation Act 271 Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) 257 Foreign Service Staff Employees (FSSEs) 257 Foreign Service Staff Officers (FSSOs) 257 fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora (CID-4) 288 Friedman, T. L. 113 Gandhi, M. K. 317, 318 George, R. M. 201, 202 Ghadar movement charted global radicalism 276 Ghoshal, A. 6, 7 Gibson, J. 124 Gilroy, P. 274, 376 Global-Indian Network of Knowledge (G-INK) 10, 242, 243–244 globalization 1–2, 8, 11, 113 Global Summit 288 GOI-UNDP Umbrella programme 243 Gonzalez III, J. J. 9, 10 Gopinath, G. 200, 202 great tradition 366

Gross National Product (GNPs) 254 Gulf Money 101 Gulf War 271 Haidarali, L. S. 170 Hakka 53 Hart-Celler Act of 1965 327 Hartman, S. 274 Harvard Business Review 113 Hasan, R. 279 Hasubanu (Sanyal) 150 HelpAge India 188 Hernandez, V. 264 Hindu Mahasabha 147 Hindu refugees: after Partition 150–151; in East Bengal 150; in India and Bangladesh 7; jobor-dakhal 151; myth and reality 150–151; National Census Register (NCR) 151; political-economic power 148; in the United States 327 Hindutva movement 99 HIV/AIDS 8, 9, 199, 200, 204, 205, 280 Hochschild, A. R. 218 Holi Against Hindutva protest 274 Howdy Modi 225 Huseynova, A. 341 Hussam, A. 45; cost-effective SONO water filter 45 I-AG (International Academic Gate) 245 identity: of Hindu and Muslim Bengali refugees in India and Bangladesh 7; methodology 361; recreation of, collective imagination 155–156; regional variations 155–156; ritual art forms of Kerala 360; sexual and gender identities 7; Theyyam performances, in Indian diaspora 361–365; tragic victims of Partition 155 IDN Brain Bank 292 IDNGlobal 289 I-EG (International Employment Gate) 245 Immigration Act of 1917 327 indenture (system, labor, servants, migrants) 33, 52, 53, 67, 80, 108, 137, 174, 227, 271, 324, 325 India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF) 99; Campaign to Stop Funding Hate 99 The Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 155 Indian diaspora: classical dances, Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam 12, 346–347; communication and transportation 359; cross-border diaspora networks 241; Diaspora Direct Investment 9, 226, 229–230, 231; diasporic Global Indian, notion of 225, 227, 232–233; economic transformation 231–232, 272; FDI equity inflows 237–238, 238; flexibility or adaptability 233; Global Commission

384

Index on International Migration 230; Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) 228; grievances 238–239; Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) 240; history of Indian emigration 231; Homegrown conditionalities 231; increasing exports of IT/IT-enabled services 42; Inderkinder 346, 355n1; India and Indian-ness 226–227; Indian Dance Practice in Bavaria 346–347; Indian Development Foundation of Overseas Indians (IDF-OI) 228; Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) 241; International Financial Institutions (IFI) 228; IT-BPO industry 42, 43; knowledge-based economies 239–240; knowledge networks 240–241, 242; Malayalis in 13; Mrs. Gandhi’s NRI Portfolio Scheme 231; Overseas Citizen of India scheme 228; Overseas Indian/Person of Indian Origin/Non-Resident Indian 226, 228; parent migrants in Australia (see financial dependence of Indian parent migrants in Australia); Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 227, 228, 233; Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government 228; Resurgent India bonds 227; skilled and highly skilled Indian emigrants 238–239, 241; spirit of India 227; temple dance or Bollywood dance 12; Theyyam performances 12–13, 362–365; transnational practices 6; US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement 46–47; value add of 237–240; Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) 227 Indian Diaspora Foundation for Overseas Indians (IDF-OI) 237 Indian diaspora knowledge networks 240–241; G-INK 10, 242, 243–244; The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) 242; TOKTEN 10, 243 Indian Institute of Technology 44 Indianness: diasporic discourses of nostalgia 349; exoticized notion 349; in Germany 347–348; Indian Dance Practice in Bavaria 346–347; India’s national identity 349; integration debate 348; performing 348–350 Indonesian diaspora: contested concept and dynamic 289–292; Declaration of Indonesian Diaspora (2012) 291; definition 291; dual citizenship vs. anti-dual citizenship 11; existence of ethnic-based Indonesian overseas 290; existence of non-ethnic Indonesian overseas 290–291; homeland development projects 11; Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) 290; Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) 289; Tenaga Kerja Indonesia – (TKI) 290 Indonesian Diaspora Business Council (IDBC) 292 Indonesian Diaspora Foundation (IDF) 288, 292

Indonesian Diaspora Global Summit 293 Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN) 288 Indonesian Diaspora Network United (IDNUnited) 289, 293 The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) 242 informal finance or credit system 5 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 225 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 41 intersectional feminist approach 7 IOM’s Temporary Return of Qualified Nationals (TRQN) program 44 Ip, D. 58 Jacobsen, A. K. 362 Jaffrelot, C. 272 Jami, H. 206 Japan International Cooperation Agency ( JICA) 264 Johnson, Boris (Prime Minister) 263 Jun, W. 4, 5 Kaag, M. 279 Kadekar, L. N. 108 Kamal, A. 206 Kapuria, S. 6 Kathakali 365 Kerala: diasporic transnationalism 102; global economic recession, 2008 102; immigrants in Persian Gulf 6; Kerala model of development 101; labor migration 101; Non-Resident Keralites (NRKs) 101; political conflicts and economic downturns 100; religious ritual art form of 13; and remittance economy 6, 100–102; remittances, Gulf Money 101–102; ritual art forms of 360 Khan, F. 207 Khan, S. 326 Khubchandani, K. 206 Kikon, D. 114 Kim, Y. 11, 12 Knight, K. 205 Know India Programme (KIP) 237 knowledge networks: analyzing IPR issues 241–242; co-location and co-nationality 242; democratic intent 245, 250n23; good-life aspirations 244; Indian diaspora knowledge networks 242–244; involving diaspora 240–241; Knowledge Flow Production Function (KFPF) 242; methodological nationalism 245; micro-foundations 242; role of social 241; theoretical framework 244–245; transnational content 245; transnationality 245; university-linked diaspora knowledge network model 246–249 knowledge transnationality 245

385

Index Kolkata: Bengali-Kolkatan diaspora 103; global gentrification 103; public-private partnerships 104; real estate developments 104; remaking city 103–104; urbanization and development 6 Korean diaspora: 1990 and 1992, diplomatic ties 70–71; an out-migration 75; in Australia 74; in Canada 73; in Central and South America 73–74; in China 71; in Commonwealth of Independent States 72; contemporary diaspora 5; current state of 71; definition of 65; end of a growth model 67; in Europe 74; evolution of 75; globalization and informatization 77; global Korean network 75; history of 5, 67–71; immigration, types 67; independence movement 67; in Japan 72; 1910–1945, Japanese colonial era 68; Korean ethnic network community 75; Korean Wave media culture 311; large-scale emigration and settlement 65–66; in New Zealand 74; to non-Korean immigrants 75; onward migration and multilateral coethnic relationships 75–76; population of compatriots 66–67; state of overseas Koreans, 2019 66, 66; 1860s to 1910 67–68; 1962 to 1990, diplomatic relations 69–70; 1945 to 1962, immigration policy 68–69; in United States 72–73 Kuchipudi 12, 346–347 Kumar, P. 206, 364, 365 Kurikodukal. 361 Kuru-Utumpala, J. 206 Lahiri, J. 170 Lamb, S. 190 Language movement of 1952 155 leaders of Congress 147 lecture-recitals 339 legacy of diaspora: condition of subjectivity 376; creation of homeland in memory 373–375; dark memories of crossing borders 372–373; fiction of memory 375; fragmentary memory 375; French colonial period 370; lens of diaspora studies 369–370; moving people 370–371; or even on planes and trucks 372–373; or somewhere in-between 375–377; Vietnamese migration 370–371; we are in the same boat 372 Levitt, P. 359, 360 Leydesdroff, L. 246 Liberation War of 1971 148 Lietsala, K. 178 Lindley, A. 187 little tradition 366 long-distance nationalism: 1983 Black July pogroms 270; creole nationalisms of the Americas 269; destruction of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya 272; dimensions of 270; dimensions

of accountability 269–270; in Hindu diaspora 272; LTTE 270; (ir-)responsibility 269; scholarship on 270–271; Sikh migrant 269; Sri Lankan Civil War 270 Lutheran World Federation 278 Mainstream Indian diaspora 120n1 The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 188 Malaysian Indian Women: class divisions 174–175; digital platforms 176; economic development 176; entrepreneurs 177–181; Gender gap index 175–176; indentured system of labour 174; Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) 175; on-line communities 175, 177; participants, perspective of 181–183; preliminary information 177; Social Networking Sites (SNSs) 176; Special Secretariat for Empowerment of Indian Entrepreneurs (SEED) 183; workshop session 176; WOW (Women of Will) 183–184 Mammedova, K. 339 Mani, B. 272 Manipur diaspora: American dream 112–113; challenges 118–120; cultural ties and identity 114–116; economic recession in 2007–2009 107; ethnic and cultural organization, NAMA 109–110; family, traditional concerns of 117; FindingTheVoices.com 116–118; gift economy or gift culture 116; giving back to homeland 116–118; globalization 113; glocalization 113; identity, culture and tradition 112–113; Impact TV 116–117; Kang game 121n3; Kangleipak or Meiteileipak 121n5; Knowledge Exchange Networks (KENs) 110; Manipuri aka Meitei and tribal identity 110–111; Marup (friendship) 121n6; methodology 111; New diaspora NonResident Indians (NRIs) 107–108; 9/11 terror attack 109; Old diaspora, Indians aka People of Indian Origin (PIOs) 107; Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) 107; social and cultural capital 110; successful knowledge diaspora 107; traditional food habits 113–114; waves of migration 108–110 Mann, H. 202 Marshall, K. 284 Masooda, B. 279 Mavroudi, E. 96 Mead, M. 114, 117 media: Asian diaspora 11–13; consumption and transnational mobility 306–308; diaspora diplomacy 253; East Asian diaspora 304; ethnic media 311–313; Korean Wave media culture 311; South Asian diaspora 7 medical diaspora in OECD countries 44–45

386

Index Meitei 111 Merton, R. K. 113 Mexican Hindus or Mexidus. 327 Meyer, J.-B. 240 migrant transnationalism 98 migration: after Partition 150; Enquiry Commission 149; Mymensingh Convention of East Bengal 149; Nehru-Liaquat Agreement (Delhi Pact of 1950) 149; prior to Partition 148–149 Mills, C. W. 111 The Mindy Project (TMP) 8, 161, 162–163, 164–165, 167 Mindy Kaling 7, 161, 163, 171, Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) 243 Mishra, A.K. 228 Missbach, A. 289 mixed methods analysis: conjoint analysis 129; joint display table 129, 130–131, 132; Magarao’s migrant families 132 mobilized diasporas 2 Modi, Narendra (Prime Minister): current hegemonic status 274; grand ceremony of foundation laying of Ram Temple 11; Howdy Modi event 225; Shared Dreams, Bright Futures 225; Trump-Modi rally 274; Vande Bharat evacuation mission 1 Mohammad-Arif, A. 283 Mohiniaatam 365 Mukherjee, M. 138 music: Azerbaijani national music, mugham 337; compositions of Rahilia Hasanova 339; cultural diversity of the United States 338; curiosity and openness 343; diasporic displacement 338; dominant culture 336; East-West divide 341; Folk music and dance 341; forms and purposes 337; Leyla and Majnun 340; Musical Celebrations 337; phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia 342; Russian classical musicians 341; semistructured interviews 338; USSR cultural policies 340–341; world-class composers 342 Muslim League 147 Muslim refugees: Bengali refugees, in India and Bangladesh 7, 152–153; Census of UnRehabilitated Displaced Persons 154; Dhaka, urbanization of 153–154; East Bengal/ Pakistan 151–153; educated Muslim middle class 153; homecoming and settling down 153–155; Islamic State 151; as Muslim returnees 152; optees or government employees 153; peasants and working classes 153; Provincial Government 154; Urdu- and Hindi-speaking non-Bengali Biharis 152; Urdu- or Hindi-speaking muhajirs (Bihari Muslim refugees) 153, 155 Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 259

Naipaul, V. S. 324 Nair, S. 203 nationalist struggle 156 Nationality Act of the United States 70 National Knowledge Networks (NKN) 244 National Mobilization Act 68 National Music & Global Culture Society (NMGCS) 339, 340 National Pension Scheme (NPS) 237 Nepalese organizations 44 New Chinese immigration: education-relevant engagement in community 88–89; forming and starting families (see family formation); home front, parenting on 87–88; immigrant status as a constraining factor 83–84; immigration in historical perspective 80; intensive parenting 86; parenting strategies and practices in school 79, 86–87; post-1990 Chinese immigration 81–82; Singapore, immigration to 5, 79–80 New diaspora 107–108 New Zealand, Koreans in 74 Nguyen, N.H.C. 4, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27 Niumai, A. 6 Non-Resident Nepali Association (NRNA) 46 Non-Resident Bangladeshis 41 Non-Resident Indians 99, 103, 104, 107, 226, 228, 231, 232, 233, 237, 271 Non-Resident Keralites 101, 366 Nooshin, L. 343 North America Manipuri Association (NAMA) 109 occupational Filipinization 10; English proficiency 262; high-performing economies 263; skilled Filipino migrants 263–264 OECD Countries 4, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44 Okeke, R. C. 279 Old diaspora 107 Oldfield, A. 11 Opiniano, J. M. 6 Orozco, M. 123 Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) scheme 237 Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 258 Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre (OIFC) 243 Pakistani diaspora: American Pak Foundation 42, 45; APPNA 42; British Pak Foundation 42; East Pakistan 147; Human Development Foundation of North America 45; improvement of educational facilities 44; Organization for Pakistani Entrepreneurs 42; organizations 42; Western Pakistan 147 Pangasinan International Charitable Foundation 265

387

Index parenting strategies, New Chinese immigration 86; academic and non-academic tasks 88; children’s extracurricular activities and develop skills 88; education-relevant engagement in community 88–89; emphasis on children’s reading 87; on home front 87–88; intensive parenting 86, 90; and practices in school 79, 86–87; prioritizing children’s school choice 87; private tuition and after-school academic and enrichment programs 87–88 Partition of 1947 148 Perks, R. 17 Person of Indian Origins (PIOs) 43, 44, 107, 273, 348, 355n4; scheme 273 Philippine diaspora diplomacy 258–260 Pigg, S. 205 Pillai, S. 7 politics: anti-dual citizenship 293–294; beyond homeland 273–275; breakthrough programs 295; Diaspora Care program 295–296; dual citizenship issues 292–293, 298; early movement 292–294; Financial Service Authority (OJK) 297; 2017 Global Summit 295; IDN movement strategy 295; Indonesian American Society of Academics (IASA) 295; Indonesian diaspora 289–292; Indonesian Diaspora Global Summit 293; Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) research grant program 296; laissez-faire approach 271; long-distance nationalism 268, 269–271; political to social role 292–294; Presidential Regulation on Diaspora Card 294; shifting role and unintentionally split-up 295–297; social and economic roles 297; strategies, re-imagining diaspora 271–273; toward dual citizenship 292–294 Portes, A. 3, 96 Pozo, S. 100 Pratap Kumar, P. 9, 10 Pratishthit Pravasi 237 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) 237; conferences 272 Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra (PBK) 237 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award (PBSA) 237 Priyanka Chopra 7, 161, 163, 168, 170, 171 private and communal kitchens: The Book of Salt 213–218; culinary tourism 218–220; experience revisited 214–218; The Feast as Marginal Politics: Carnival as a Mode of Expression in Migration 218–219; The Feminine Mystique 216–217, 220; the femivore’s dilemma 220; The French Cook 220; issue of mommy-wars 217 Prolegnas (National Legislative Program) 288 proletarian diasporas 2 Puar, J. 200, 202, 205

Punjabi diaspora: capital expenditure 139; Craigg–Donald test 146n6; Economic and Statistical Office of the Government of Punjab in 2002– 2003 and 2003–2004 140; impact on household labour supply 140; individual or household decision-making 137; information and guidance 140; initiation of migration 137; instrumental variable (IV) strategy 140; international migration 137–140; labour participation for males and females 141, 141–142, 142; land-owning castes, Jat Sikhs 136, 144n1; low-wage unorganised sector 139; male phenomenon 140; migration and labour supply 140–143; probit regression 143; reasons for absence from labour market 143, 143–144; rise of industrial capitalism 145n3; role of state and the development path 138; sectoral employment 138–139, 139; stages of capitalism 138, 144; traditional services 139; transnational network and kinship ties 7 Puri, J. 205 Quantico 8, 161, 163–164, 165–166, 167, 168 queer rights activism 8–9 Queer South Asian, South Asian queer: AIDS Bedhbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) report 200; CALERI’s 207; Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI) report 200; cases of Nepal and Bhutan 204–205; Chocolate 201; concepts of home and gender 201–202; diaspora 199–200; extra-sexual strategies 207; fear of misogynist violence 205; Fire 201; gendered concepts 205; HIV/ AIDS and queer rights activism 199, 200, 204–207; issues of diaspora and modernity 202; Lihaaf 201; A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Experience 201; political engagements 205–207; positioning of queer 208; project of exposing heterosexuality 203; queer diaspora 201; queer diasporic representations contest 202–203; queer sexualities 204; queer visibility and rights 203–204; Research Cluster 201–207; right to sexual autonomy (RSA) 205; same-sex and queer 208n1; Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History 201; sources, methods, theories 200; theorization of homonationalism 205; theory of homocapitalism 203–204 Raj, D. S. 273 Rajiva, M. 7 randomized control trials (RCTs) 125 rapid rural appraisal (RRA) method 125–126 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 99 Ratha, D. 187

388

Index Reddy, V. 164, 169 refugees: categorization and classification of 156; definition 155; nationalist struggle 156 religion: caste politics 285; Christianity, Islam and Hinduism 279; development and South Asian diaspora 282–285; and development, critique of 281; development programmes 281; Human Rights discourse 279–280; most successful entrepreneurs 284; MuslimChristian conflict in Ghana 280; political economy approach 280; principles of democracy 282; religious transnationalism 284; resilience of religion 279 religious filipinization 10; familiar iconography to Filipino language services 262; International Social Survey Programme 261; new religious traditions 261 religious transnationalism 11 Remittance Investment Climate Analysis in Rural Hometowns (RICART) 125; convergent mixed methods design 125; Guiguinto 132; in Maribojoc 132; Pandi 132; Philippine rural hometowns 128; research respondents 127; San Nicolas 132–133; surveys 125 remittances: Bangladesh Bank 41; behavioral stimuli 133–134; development in Kyrgyzstan 100; financial capabilities and development 122–124, 133; financial functionings 123, 129; financial inclusion 123, 129; financial literacy 123, 126, 129; foreign aid 97; Gulf Money 101; inflows from different sources, 2017 40, 40; integral growth strategy 97; international remittances 122; methods 125–126; mixed methods analysis 129–133; in Nepal and Sri Lanka 39, 40; overseas remittances 122–124; Pakistan Remittance Initiative (PRI) 40–41; policy and behavioral relevance 124; privately owned remittances 122; results 126–129; reverse migration 234–235; in South Asian countries 39–41 Resurgent India bonds, success of 235n3 Roosevel, Franklin (President) 264 Rothwell, A. 27 Roy, P. 11, 12 Rubinov, I. 100 Rumbaut, R. 96 Safran, W. 359, 369 Sahlins, M. 116 Sahoo, A. K. 11, 12 Saint-Lary, M. 279 Salzbrunn, M. 218 Sanamahism 109 Senior Citizens Act, 2007 198 Seshan, G. 124 Setijadi, C. 291 Sharma, M. 206

Sheffer, G. 373 Silin, R. H. 61 Simpson, E. 99 Singapore: Chinese immigration to 5, 79–80; education system 5; employment pass (EP) 90n3; foreign talents 90n2; founding races 81; historical perspective 80; immigration policy 81; liberal economic policies 81; portable skills 82; post-1990 Chinese immigration 81–82; socio-political circumstance 82 Singh, Manmohan (Finance Minister) 232 Singh, N. 187 Singh, S. 7 Sircar, O. 203 Sirkkunen, E. 178 The Slow Food Café in Bastille 9 slavery 53, 137, 138, 171, 174, 274, 324, 369 Smart, A. 5 Smart, J. 5 Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) 373 Social movement activism 275 Social Network Theory 240 Sood, A. 139 South Asian diaspora: adoption of homeland government 10; citizenship by naturalization or permanent residency 37, 38; contribution and engagement with homeland 39; development and 9, 10–11, 282–285; distribution of diaspora population 32, 32–33; economic contributions 39; educational profile 34, 35–36, 36, 44–45; Englishspeaking OECD countries 33; food (see food, South Asian diaspora); funding of political activities 48n2; geopolitical importance of 30–31; health and rural development 37, 44–45; International Mobility Program (IMP) 36; intersectional feminist approach 7–8; intra-regional migration 33; investments 41–42; labor market outcomes 36–39; longdistance nationalism 10; media and digital world 7; medical professionals 44; migrant stock for 1990–2019 period 31–32, 32; natural disasters 46–47; occupational profile 36–39; in OECD 4, 31, 33–34; politics 9, 10–11; poverty reduction and capacity-building efforts 30; profile of 31–33; reconstruction efforts post-war 46–47; religion 10–11; remittances 39–41; social, political, philanthropic contributions 43; soft power and political contributions 46–47, 48; stock of foreign-trained doctors 37, 39; Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) 36–37; trade and business ties 42–43 South Asian femininity: framework of analysis and methodology 162–163; Macaulay’s return 164–166; The Mindy Project (TMP) 161, 162–163, 164–165, 167; orientalist positioning

389

Index 162; Quantico 161, 163–164, 165–166, 167, 168; rise of celebrities, Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra 161; The (impossible) time of the Caramel Princess 169–171; white masculine desire 161–162; White masculinity and saviour complex 166–169 Sri Lankan diaspora: aftermath of tsunami 46; associations 44; Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK (SLWAUK) 44; Tamil diaspora in North America 44; Tamilians in 46 Stone, D. 247 Sukthankar, A. 207 Surabhi, K. 11, 12 Tambiah, A. 206 Tamilian diaspora 46 Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) 243 TCDC (Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries) programmes 243 Therwath, I. 272 Theyyam performances: Brave Festival of Poland 363; case of Hindus in South Africa 364; in Indian diaspora 362–365; Kavus 366n4; Kurikodukal 361; Malayan community 363–364; Marachal 367n12; Mukhadarshanam 361; Ola Kuda 367n8; ritual gathering 362; social system 362; Theekundam 363; Theekundam or Meleri 367n9; thottam, kurikodukal or dakshina rituals 364, 366n2; Thudangal/Thedangal 361; transnational art form 361–362; Vanaan community 364–365; Vellattam 361 Thiranagama, S. 270 Thomson, A. 17 Torneo, A.R. 9, 10 transgeneration: biculturality 26; communication and understanding 25–28; histories 25–26; underlying trauma 26–28 transnational content 250n22 transnationalism 306–308, 361–362; definition 3; emergence of 2; migration 1, 3, 98; religious 11 transnationality network model 245, 246, 247 Tran TinhVy 11, 13 Trump, Donald (President) 1, 161, 165, 170 Truong, T. 22, 23, 24, 26, 27 Ugra or provocateur 201 UK Department for International Development (DFID) 264 UNDP’s Transfer of Knowledge and Technology through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN) 10, 243 UNISTAR (United Nations International Short-Term Advisory Resources) 243

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 254 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 264 United States-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) 272 university-linked diaspora knowledge network model 248; access to technology and process of technological development 247; entrepreneurship development 247; hinges and avatars 247; innovation 247; knowledge hub 247; linked-ecologies approach 247; patients 247–248; skill development 247; Transnationality Network framework 246, 249; triple-helix model 246, 247, 250n26; University to University Research and Development Network 248–249 unskilled labour 174 UN trade and development body (UNCTAD) 234 Vaishnavism 121 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari (Prime Minister) 226 van Amersfoort, H. 290 Vande Bharat evacuation mission 1 Vanita, R. 201, 203 Varadarajan, L. 9, 272 Vellattam 361 Vertovec, S. 2 Vietnamese diaspora 18; achievers in Australia in 2013 17; Cathy Nguyen’s narrative 20–22; community in Australia 18–19; Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) 18; Dual Identity Leadership Program 28n5; growth and success 4; Indochinese refugee crisis of 1978–1979 19; literature in Germany 13; Orderly Departure Program (ODP) 18; Postwar Vietnam 18; refugees in Australia 4, 28n2; second generation Vietnamese, narratives of 17–18, 19; Tien Truong’s narrative 22–25, 28n4; transgenerational understanding 25–28 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 99 Vivekananda, Swami 330n3 Wattiaux, J.-P. 240 Weapon of Mass Dispersion (WMD): balikbayan box volumes 257; cash remittances in 2019 256; Commission of Filipinos Overseas (CFO), 2013 255; demographic and economic impacts 254–257; governance and political impacts 257–258; irregular migrants 255; Lingkodsa Kapwa Pilipino (LINKAPIL) or Link for Philippine Development Program 257; permanent migrants 255; temporary migrants 255 Western Christian missionaries 330n4 White, C. 280

390

Index Widodo, Joko (President) 292 women: in digital platforms 8; entrepreneurs in Malaysia 8; Malaysian Indian (see Malaysian Indian Women); musicians 334–336, 340; and queers identities 7; transnational mobility, phenomenon of 304 working-class (women, white men, lesbians, South Asians, migrants) 164, 171, 202, 206, 218, 235, 321, 329

Wong, M. 187 World Bank 225, 229, 230, 234 World Hindu Council 99 Yang, D. 124 Yoon, I.J. 4, 75 Zhou, M. 4, 5 Zimmerman, M. A. 177

391