14

Indian Diasporas and the Creation of Subnational Identities

Pablo Bose

The existence, composition, and activities of contemporary diasporas present an interesting and productive challenge to the idea of national identity—especially the idea of national attachments framed by the idea of the nation-state, borders, or even regional scales of belonging. While some traditional narratives of migration might suggest that people’s attachments to home and nation will eventually be transferred to their new countries through assimilation and integration processes, the evidence from many parts of the world has been much more complex. Despite often vast distances in space and time that separate people from an original homeland, the identification of immigrant groups with their old homes has remained strong. Such linkages occur at various scales via temporal, territorial, and identity-based attachments to place. Diasporic connections to distant lands, different cultures, and distinct identities help, therefore, to complicate the modern nation-state as well as the concepts of borders, nationalism, and citizenship more generally.

In this chapter, I explore the role that diasporas play in the making of national identity through two Indian cases that focus specifically on the political and economic ways that diasporas can affect national identity formation. There are multiple ways this dynamic might play out—through the redefinition of citizenship, by affirming the importance of a territorial reference point for national belonging regardless of physical proximity, or through the dependency of local governments and communities on overseas nonstate actors. The political example examined in greater detail in this chapter is that of the secessionist struggle and the demand for subnational statehood in the state of Punjab and among elements of the overseas Sikh community. The economic example concerns the emergence of a remittance-based economy in Kerala dependent upon a Persian Gulf–based labor diaspora. Prior to exploring these two cases, I discuss some of the transnational practices through which diasporas in general remain connected to old homes. Next, as a way of showing how complex and sometimes confusing the diaspora’s relation with national identity can be, I provide an overview of the various Indian diaspora groups and on what basis they might fit under this definition—or struggle against it. Finally, I examine these dynamics and nuances through the two specific cases from India described above to illustrate the multiple ways that diasporas remain connected with former homes and often seek to reshape these territories from abroad.

Diasporic Identities and Transnational Practices

Diasporas may be old social formations with well-established histories as communities in exile—traditionally applied in particular to the experiences of Jewish and African groups forcibly displaced by persecution and slavery—but today the term has been applied to a wide range of populations living beyond the territorial boundaries of an originating, ancestral, or imagined homeland. Diasporas are marked not only by a shared “origin story” but also retain a strong and 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. In many ways, the existence of diasporas calls into question assimilationist views of immigration and acculturation processes in multicultural societies of the Global North. 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 while forging ties to a new one.

This strong diasporic connection to old homes has renewed interest among many scholars, policy makers, and community members for a multitude of reasons. These include geopolitical and security concerns, questions of identity and integration in multicultural societies, and the economic impact of remittances (Demmers 2002; Levitt 2001; Mohan 2006). The possibility that diasporas might help 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 (De Haas 2010; Hugo 2012). In this context, diasporas are increasingly viewed in the international community as well as by national governments as important contributors to the growth of their homelands.

Textbox 14.1. Diasporic Transnational Practices and Attachments to Home

The following is a sample typology of diasporic transnational practices arranged into broad categories. Many of these practices are often not limited to one of these types but transcend one or more.

Practice	Type	Example
Philanthropy	Economic	Contributing to charities, disaster relief
Remittances	Economic	Money regularly sent by foreign workers to family
Investments	Economic	Overseas citizens’ ownership of government bonds
Entrepreneurship	Economic	Starting business in country of origin
Language	Cultural	Speaking language at home, establishing schools
Food	Cultural	Growing familiar crops, starting ethnic restaurants
Travel	Cultural	Regular visits to home country or region
Religion	Cultural	Participating in religious activities
Secession	Political	Engaging in militant actions in either new or old home
Electoral	Political	Supporting political parties in home country
Advocacy	Political	Protesting in new country on issues in home country
Organizing	Political	Establishing a mutual aid or ethnic association

Remittances—money sent back by workers to their home countries—are a good example of this potential, as well as of the types of transnational practices that diasporas engage in to potentially affect national identity formation. Remittances in recent years have ranked second only to oil exports globally, reaching nearly $550 billion in 2013 with $414 billion of that figure going from workers to the developing world and far outpacing both foreign direct investment and aid to developing countries (World Bank 2015). Much of this money has moved informally; 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.

As a result of this long history and the scale of current transfers, remittances have become an integral growth strategy in countries as far apart as Haiti, Lesotho, and Tajikistan, among many others (Ratha and Plaza 2011). 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; Bailey 2013). 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 underscrutinized (Raghuram 2009). As the U.S.-based transnational solidarity network Association for India’s Development (2004) has asked, “What kinds of developments in India are Indians in the US (and other countries) making possible?” Some critics point to the inequitable distribution of disaster relief from Indian diasporas on the basis of caste and religion (Corbridge and Simpson 2006). Others note the appeals made by the proponents of controversial development projects such as dams to wealthy overseas communities to provide financial and political backing for ventures that have significant local impacts (Mehta 2010). I have also argued in other work that the landscape of Indian cities has become profoundly transformed over the past two decades due to a boom in speculative housing construction aimed at enticing transnational diasporic subjects from India to buy a second home in their former or putative homeland (Bose 2015).

We might equally ask why and how contemporary immigrants maintain transnational linkages to their countries of origin. The motivations may be varied. The migration itself may be temporary, as in the case of seasonal labor or short-term contracts. For others, they 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.

What forms beyond the economic exchanges described above might such involvements take? Basch et al. (2005, 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.” Diasporas imagine themselves and their links to various national cultures through a diverse set of such everyday practices, including maintaining languages and the arts, growing and cooking familiar foods, and constructing community and religious facilities to practice traditional rituals. Diasporas have also long rallied for a variety of philanthropic causes in their countries of origin, founding charities, fund-raising for specific projects, and providing aid following natural disasters, among other efforts.

Perhaps the most well-known and often notorious connections that diasporas have had with their former homes have been political projects designed to reshape, resurrect, defend, or even enlarge homelands, ancestral or putative. Immigrants from Ireland and India in the United States supported nationalist struggles against the British Empire during the twentieth century, for example, while the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas are vocal advocates of differing positions on conflicts in the Middle East, and separatist movements in the Caucasus, South Asia, and Africa have all been lent significant aid from diasporas overseas. Such involvements can take the form of moral support and encouragement, they can manifest through material assistance in money and weapons, and they 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 1990s wars in the Balkans (Satzewich and Wong 2003, 273).

In the case of the Indian diaspora, there have been multiple instances of diasporic support for both nationalist goals—such as the Ghadr Party in California’s aid to anticolonial struggles against the British—and regional ones, as in the case of Khalistan described below. Over the past few decades, there has also been a great deal of controversy regarding the connections between overseas Indian communities in North America and Western Europe and resurgent right-wing Hindu nationalism in the subcontinent (Menon and Nigam 2007). The various components of this political movement have received substantial support from wealthy diasporic patrons, and the Hindu nationalist party’s candidates during the most recent Indian election were beneficiaries of significant fund-raising efforts among Indians overseas ( Times of India 2014). The successful election of a Hindu nationalist prime minister was followed by a triumphal tour of North America, where he was greeted by raucous crowds in Toronto, New York, and other cities with large Indian diasporic populations (Mandhana 2014).

The Composition of the Indian Diaspora

This is not to suggest that all Indians in the diaspora support Hindu nationalist politics—far from it. The Indian diaspora is, like other overseas communities, not monolithic by any means. As with other diaspora groups, the attachments to homeland and “origin community” operates at multiple temporal, political, cultural, and spatial scales. Therefore, there are a diverse range of activities and motivations across multiple sites and manifestations where we may find groups whose identities are tied in some way to the Indian subcontinent. Unlike the spread of Chinese labor and trading communities across the globe historically, movement out of the Indian subcontinent has been uneven. Indeed for many years cultural and religious prohibition meant that leaving the physical space of early India was limited. In the classical and medieval periods, we can see migration in the form of trading communities in East Africa and Central Asia, Roma journeys out into Europe, Buddhist missionaries in China and Indonesia, and Hindu kingdoms all throughout Southeast Asia, but in far smaller numbers than the Chinese equivalents (Sahoo et al. 2012). In the modern era, scholars have identified a number of major flows out of the subcontinent including migrant labor to neighboring regions and various parts of the British Empire, emigrants to North America in the early twentieth century and again from the 1960s onward, and both skilled and unskilled migrants to the Persian Gulf, among many others (Jain, 2011; Brown 2006; Landy et al. 2004). See map 14.1.

Map 14.1. Selected Countries’ Diasporic Indian Populations, 2001

Source : Singhvi, L. M. (2001). “Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora.” New Delhi, Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, Non-Resident Indian and Persons of Indian Origin Division. Cartography by Anna Cerf and Lea LeGardeur, Middlebury College.

Some of these groups—though importantly not all—have laid a claim to a diasporic Indian affinity. The difficulties in understanding who exactly might have membership in the “Indian diaspora” is illustrated in an influential report commissioned by the Indian government in 2001, which suggested that the Indian diaspora numbered anywhere between 25 and 40 million individuals (Singhvi 2001). The wide discrepancy in figures has much to do with how one defines membership; the numbers include Indian citizens living outside the country, those who have emigrated directly/recently from India but no longer retain citizenship, and those who have Indian or mixed-Indian heritage. There are large Indian or Indian-origin/heritage populations scattered all over the world, though the diasporas in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States and in regions such as the Persian Gulf often tend to especially dominate the general public’s imagination. The Indian government has attempted to court many of these groups in recent years—in 2002 it launched the Person of Indian Origin program, which provided entry into India in lieu of a visa and allowed those who could prove Indian heritage the ability to own certain kinds of property and invest in industries both previously restricted to Indian citizens. Yet such an initiative was criticized by many for appealing primarily to wealthy diasporas in the Global North (Dickinson and Bailey 2007). Only later, after much backlash from groups in the Caribbean, Africa, the Persian Gulf, and other parts of Asia, have newer initiatives such as the Overseas Citizen of India program attempted to incorporate others as well (Dickinson 2012).

Of course not all who could be counted as part of the Indian diaspora might themselves wish to be. In the first government-sponsored Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas (PBD) or Overseas Indian Days in New Delhi in 2003, several delegations—notably the South African, Fijian, and Canadian ones among them—resisted attempts to label them as Indian, arguing that this mythologized national identity ignored or attempted to subsume both historical and contemporary differences (Mani and Varadarajan 2008). Similarly some scholars have argued that in South Africa, while there are identifiable and visible Indian identity formations, these are highly fragmented and differentiated by geographic, caste, religious, and class distinctions; as a result, a singular Indian identity has been difficult to forge or maintain, though “neo-Indian Creole” formations have emerged (Landy et al. 2004, 206).

Moreover, being counted as part of the diaspora may not always be a choice, and might have possible negative consequences. Ong (2003) illustrates such a situation with the case of ethnic Chinese communities in Indonesia who, while welcoming support from the global Chinese diaspora against the attacks and scapegoating it faced from the Indonesian military and media during the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, did not necessarily consider themselves to be ethnic Chinese or possessing hyphenated identities but rather saw themselves as Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, and such first and foremost. Being identified primarily through their Chinese identity only reified their position as eternal outsiders and contributed to ongoing accusations of disloyalty and national “impurity” along ethnic/racial lines (Ong 2003, 95–97).

Being precise when speaking of the Indian diaspora may therefore be difficult. How does one enumerate membership? By census data? If so, does nationality become the determining factor? Yet diasporas are not synonymous with the nation-state, and using census data is a poor way of aligning the various parts of the diasporic identity—region, language, ethnicity, and culture being only a few of these—with diasporic identity. Some overseas communities certainly identify with a particular nation-state but many do not, preferring a primary affiliation with a family, kin-group, region, hometown, or even a neighborhood. Counting an Indian diaspora by using national census data—as various Indian governments have done—might be possible, but how would one find and measure a Punjabi, Gujarati, or Bengali diaspora? What might we miss about the social structures, networks, and affiliations of particular communities by aggregating them under the broad umbrella of national identities?

A singular focus for observers on a unified and national diasporic Indian identity might in this view create a myopia, which ignores different histories of departure such as indenture (Carter and Torabully 2002), the internal migration of temporary agricultural workers (Rogaly 2009), or the exploitation of migrant labor in the Gulf countries (Buckley 2012). Perhaps one of the enduring aspects of the dominant mythology of diasporic Indians today is its exclusionary nature. In her study of the production of middle-class Indian subjectivities in Dubai, Vora (2008) argues that labor diasporas in the Gulf tend to be absent or invisible in much of the discussion of emigration from India. Her examination of discrimination and racism, as well as the adoption of certain modes of consumer culture by professional (though not elite) Indian migrants, reveals a complicated and often contradictory sense of attachment to place. Vora’s respondents are irrevocably alien in largely closed Gulf societies, yet find that their experiences have little resonance or familiarity within the larger diasporic narratives replayed both in India and abroad, which predominantly recount the stories of software engineers, doctors, lawyers, academics, and entrepreneurs.

If one steps back from the narrow view of the Indian diaspora—and keeping in mind the caution that not all would agree to be labeled as such—there are some broad patterns of migration, settlement, and identification that one can discern. They have followed for the most part colonial connections—first to the former or affiliated territories of the British Empire, later to other areas of the postcolonial and globalizing world. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada all have large Non-resident Indian (NRI)/Person of Indian Origin (PIO) populations, but are closely matched in size by Myanmar and Malaysia combined. Caribbean and African countries also continue to house large numbers of the Indian diaspora as well. These settlement patterns suggest a truly “global” reach for the Indian diaspora—situated in multiple locations, leaving from diverse trajectories, working in different occupations, and assuming a range of identities. I briefly explore such globality using the following two examples as a way of illustrating the complexities that the Indian diaspora expose regarding nationalism and place-based identities.

The Demand for Subnational Statehood—Khalistan and Punjab

Punjab is a major social, economic, religious, and political unit in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, one that well illustrates the complexities of what one means when speaking of diaspora and national identity. As a regional culture and as a political unit, it has a long history especially as the traditional homeland of the Sikh confederacy from the eighteenth century onward. Following the trauma of the British Partition of India in 1947, the province of Punjab (along with Bengal) was split along the lines of religious identity, with Sikhs and Hindus traveling eastward to India and Muslims moving westward to the newly formed country of Pakistan. Enormous violence between the groups of refugees led to a deeply fractured set of regional identities, yet the idea of autonomy has remained important ever since, leading to place-based political movements in both Indian and Pakistani Punjab. This has led to more than parliamentary parties such as the Pakistan Muslim League or the Akali Dal; it has resulted in the emergence of the secessionist Khalistan movement. This is a Sikh-centric political form whose end goal—unlike that of the Akali Dal—is not simply greater control over the state or subregion but rather the creation of a separate country, one that draws on not only the territory of Indian Punjab but potentially the greater region, which had been successively carved up through Partition and the reorganization of Indian states in the postindependence period.

Punjab has had earlier incarnations as a distinct and autonomous political unit prior to its subjugation by the British Empire in the colonial period, dominated politically and culturally by Sikhs but with substantial Hindu and Muslim minorities. The call for an independent Sikh homeland in the modern period gained traction, however, in part as a response to the calls for a separate Muslim homeland in the lead-up to the British withdrawal from the subcontinent in 1947. Massive population movements during Partition combined with increasing turmoil in the postindependence period (with varying claims for subnational representation all through India along linguistic, religious, and cultural identities, among others) led to the repartitioning of Punjab during the 1960s. The Akali Dal led the push for a Sikh-majority state though they argued for using language rather than religion as the basis for differentiation; in practice this meant a division between Punjabi-speaking (but primarily Sikh) Punjab and a Hindi-speaking (but primarily Hindu) Haryana, along with some regions of the former Punjab joining Himachal Pradesh on the basis of being both speakers of a different Hindi dialect and Hindu.

But the internal politics of state reorganization in India did not remain a matter of solely domestic interest; rather, it found strong resonance within the growing and vibrant Sikh diaspora. Many within Punjab had long chafed at their treatment by the central Indian government; indeed while the Akali Dal never pushed for secession, many of the grievances they raised in support of their demands for greater local control and autonomy at the state level were taken up and intensified by the Khalistan movement both at home and abroad (Chima 2015). Its founder and most well-known proponent, Jagjit Singh Chauhan, a Sikh politician, traveled to the United Kingdom and the United States, announcing the formation of Khalistan in 1971 in an advertisement in the New York Times and subsequently raised millions of dollars in support from the Sikh diaspora in North America and Western Europe (Tatla 2012). Chauhan moved back and forth between India and the United Kingdom for the next decade, meeting with politicians and going so far as to create passports and stamps for the imagined nation (as did some others who had taken up similar ideas), though the main Sikh political parties such as the Akali Dal dismissed such actions as stunts (Chima 2015).

While the Khalistan movement was lent a sympathetic ear (especially in the diaspora) through the 1970s, it remained a primarily underground and fringe effort at best during this period. It was propelled into the limelight in the 1980s, however, as violence and turmoil gripped the state of Punjab with the rise of religious militancy and the backlash of state repression culminated in the disastrous Operation Blue Star in which the Indian army attacked one of Sikhism’s holiest sites—the Golden Temple in Amritsar—to dislodge militants who had occupied it. Sikhs worldwide viewed the resulting carnage, which included the killing of hundreds of civilian pilgrims in addition to the combatants, as sacrilege. Domestically the incident led to the assassination of the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards, which in turn led to a pogrom against Sikh communities especially in northern India in 1984 and a decade-long insurgency within Punjab—dedicated primarily to the creation of Khalistan through both violent and nonviolent means (Singh and Purewal 2013).

This insurgency was given significant support by the Sikh diaspora, both through the explicit formation of groups such as the Dal Khalsa (International), and fund-raising among the overseas population in general. Militancy also rose significantly in areas with large diasporic Sikh communities such as Canada and Britain, which saw tensions and violence between moderate and extremist community members. This included attacks on Sikh politicians, media figures, and other leaders who spoke against the violence; in 1985, a Canadian-based Sikh terrorist group committed to the armed struggle for Khalistan carried out a series of bombings, including the destruction of Air India Flight 182 that killed 329 people. Such acts led to a subsequent discrediting of such methods as well as the movement itself, especially as the 1990s saw greater levels of economic growth for India as a whole, a targeting of the leadership of pro-Khalistan groups by Indian security forces in Punjab, and the political resurgence of the Akali Dal within regional politics and as an ally of the Hindu nationalist parties at the federal level. The latent desire for Khalistan, while muted, has resurfaced in recent years in different ways—Singh and Purewal (2013) note the rehabilitation of Bhindranwale, the Khalistan proponent and leader of the militants killed in Operation Blue Star within Punjab, while in Canada the renewed presence of pro-Khalistani elements within festivals held by the Sikh community has raised concerns of new troubles. In 2012, the now-retired general in charge of Operation Blue Star was attacked on the streets of London by several diasporic Sikhs in their late twenties and early thirties, all born and raised in the United Kingdom and committed to both avenging the attack on the Golden Temple and to the cause of Khalistan.

Development and the Homeland—Kerala and the Remittance Economy

While the example of Khalistan is a case study in the way that diasporas can attempt to materially affect national identity in the homeland via political means, Kerala is an excellent example of the ways that expatriates can become involved economically in the affairs of their home country. Remittances to India are among the highest in the world but they are not spread evenly across the country. Gujarat, Kerala, Punjab, Maharashtra, and a handful of other states receive the lion’s share of remittances (Tumbe 2011), monies that are as important in subnational identity formation as they are for the nation-state as a whole; indeed Kerala is often referred to as having a “remittance economy.” This is a situation that is about more than simply economic flows and dependencies, however; the relationship between Kerala, its overseas workers, and the funds that they send home have fundamentally influenced the ways in which those in the region understand issues of education, work, community, and the meaning of being a “Keralite” whether in the Gulf or in India.

A densely populated state in the southwestern part of India with a high literacy rate and low population growth, Kerala is a compelling example of both the potential and the pitfalls of the interrelationship between diasporic capital and a local economy. The state has a long history of labor migration and 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) firsthand. 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 redevelopment 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, postindependence Kerala has seen many Keralites emigrate to other parts of India as well as to regional neighbors such as 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 generally 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 out-migration.

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 2 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 postindependence 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 Irudaya Rajan 2008). Migration to the Gulf—while on a steep decline in recent years—continues to see nearly 3 million Keralites overseas, with the majority in the Gulf. The proportion of Kerala households with an NRK in them has remained more or less at the same level as in 2007; in 2003, it had been 25.8 percent (Zachariah and Irudaya Rajan 2008). The background of the emigrants is affected by religion—a larger proportion of Muslim households see emigration compared to Hindu and Christian ones.

Non-resident Keralites (NRKs), like many other South Asian migrant communities in the Gulf, maintain close contact with family in India, including frequent home visits. They also remain knowledgeable about political developments and socioeconomic 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 Irudaya Rajan 2012). Other forms of economic impact of Non-resident Keralites include financial savings, real estate and business investments, and new home construction, in addition to creating business networks and developing financial expertise (Zachariah and Irudaya Rajan 2008). It is little wonder, therefore, that the Kerala government at the state level has established a ministry for Non-resident Keralites, 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 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 result in job cuts and resulting losses of revenues. For example, in 1990 during the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait, thousands of guest workers based in Kuwait, including those from Kerala, lost their livelihoods and many had to flee and attempt to return 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 or when they would be able to return to their jobs in the Gulf. 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 for 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.

Kerala thus epitomizes the changing modalities of diasporic transnationalism that characterize the complex relationship among migration, labor, and the economies of developing regions. Much more than Gujarat, the other Indian 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.

Conclusion

Diasporas and their transnational political and economic practices—and specifically their involvements with former homelands—present an interesting and provocative challenge to many of the dominant understandings of national identity formation and contestation. While traditional conceptualizations of migration and resettlement often imagine newcomers shifting their allegiances to a new territory and polity, the ongoing linkages between diasporas and their originating (or sometimes imagined) home countries call into question such a view.

The continued support for political movements and even armed struggles “back home,” and the sheer volume of economic flows such as remittances, are but two of the most prominent sets of transnational practices that demonstrate this dynamic. As the case of India on the national scale and states like Punjab and Kerala at the subnational scale demonstrate, the ways in which diasporic populations imagine their nationhood from afar may have significant and often quite mixed consequences.

For diasporic groups, the notion of national identity is thus a complicated one. Their attachment can be simultaneously to multiple locations and manifestations of the nation—to their new home, their old home, to both in equal or varying amounts, to a pan-regional grouping, or any combination of all of these. Their sense of belonging may operate not only at different spatial scales but equally at different temporal, cultural, or political ones. As the case of India demonstrates all too well, the passion that those overseas can feel for their homeland is both deep and abiding and can result in material and ideological changes based on those connections across a range of sites.

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