Transnational South Asians: the making of a neo-diaspora

Over the last decade, the South Asian diaspora has been the focus of intense interest. In an era of mass migration and easy communication, borders have become porous, and populations have multiple allegiances. South Asian diasporic identities have shown an extraordinary capacity to thrive in the face of exclusion, partition and expulsion, and to embrace pluralism, assimilation, and dual citizenship. Their experiences illuminate the topographies of identity and loyalty transforming the new global order. Following a multidisciplinary approach, this volume examines practices of political organization, civic participation, religious activity, cultural production, sexual relationships, family organization, and economic activity through which displaced communities reconstruct themselves. It, thus, allows us to probe scalar levels from individual to the community, to national to global. Ideas of home, cast in a world-in-motion, offer new understandings of globality and belonging. This volume spans four centuries-from the little-known eighteenth-century Indian Ocean slave diaspora to the high-velocity mobility of the twenty-first century. During this time, South Asian slaves, convicts, indentured workers, traders, techies, maids, nurses, and their families have spread to all six inhabited continents. The essays offer shifting views of the geographical heterogeneity and historical transformations of this diaspora. Critically, they discuss subjects often misrepresented or marginalized in existing literature-slaves, women migrants, queer desis, Ceylonese indentured labourers, British Muslims, and the contemporary Lankan Tamil diaspora.