5 - Relating to the old homeland

Summary

This chapter investigates some of the main ways in which many South Asians in the diaspora relate to the subcontinent. The title, ‘Relating to the old homeland’, is perhaps a misnomer, because for so many living outside the countries of the subcontinent by the end of the twentieth century it was not in a real or affective sense a homeland because they had been born and brought up far away. On visiting South Asia such people are obviously ‘foreign’ to those locally born, despite their shared enthnicity: they are distinguished by dress and body language, sometimes hardly able to speak or understand a South Asian language, and at times confused by what they find. Moreover, few who have left the subcontinent have ever returned permanently to it as their final home. It was explicable that indentured labourers rarely wished or were able to return; and decades later when it was possible, few did, even when, like many East African Asians, they were evicted from the places they had made their new homes. An added dimension to the ambiguity of the idea of a former homeland is the fact that South Asia is itself changing, in many places very rapidly. So there is no ‘going home’ even for older people born on the subcontinent.

Our first consideration must be the experience of those who left in profoundly disadvantaged circumstances in the earliest of the modern diasporic flows, and quickly formed permanent Indian populations abroad once they were freed from the bonds of indenture or other forms of contract.