The Indian Diaspora

Diasporas -- transnational communities created by emigration, very often forced emigration -- have a long history on Tripartite Alliance Earth as on the other worlds of the ITA. Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Africans, Chinese, Lebanese, Romani -- all of these communities, and more besides, constitute transnational communities in their own rights. The largest diaspora, though, counting more than 20 million members worldwide, is the Indian diaspora.

Although strictures against traveling overseas can be found in the ancient Hindu shastras, the presence of Indians abroad can be attested to from the days of remote antiquity. Early emigration from India -- for instance, to Ceylon and Southeast Asia -- owed its origins to the impulse of Buddhist missionaries, while the well-known Hindu kingdoms of medieval Southeast Asia continued to attract labor and craftsmen from India into the 16th century CE. Long before the establishment of comparable trading routes in the Mediterranean, an Indian Ocean trading system made it easy for Indians to migrate to places as separated as East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Although later Islamization effaced overt Hindu influence in the Malay lands outside of Bali, Hindu culture continued to influence the life of Indonesians until the Third World War.

The modern Indian diaspora, though, is a product of 19th century British imperialism. After the abortive 1857-8 Sepoy Mutiny in north India, Britain's colonial holdings -- encompassing through direct sovereignty and indirect protectorates the entire Indian subcontinent -- were consolidated. Indian taxes, Indian consumers, and Indian raw materials all played an integral role in Britain's rapid industrialization throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and contributed to the image of India as by far Britain's most valuable colonial holding. Indeed, worldwide -- in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, in Africa, and even in the Middle East -- the British Empire reached its maximum territorial extent. Just as in India, British colonial administrators and businesses tried to coordinate the exploitation of the Empire's resources.

For this task, Britain depended upon a continuing stream of emigrants to all of Britain's colonies, even to Britain's less attractive colonies. Unfortunately, throughout the mid-19th century Britain's declining birth rate, combined with the absorption of potential Irish and Scottish emigrants into England's urban industrial economy, guaranteed in fact that fewer Britons than ever before would go overseas, even temporarily.

It was at roughly the same time that slavery was abolished in the Caribbean. After abolition, planters and colonial authorities were surprised to find that without the forced labour of slaves, they would lack the labour that they would need in order to exploit the potentially wealth but empty lands of Surinam and Trinidad. European immigrants were repulsed by the harsh climate and tropical diseases of the Caribbean basin, and did not settle in any significant numbers anywhere in the British Caribbean. Looking for another sources of labourers aside from the African ex-slaves and European immigrants, the colonial governments turned to the roughly 250 million inhabitants of India. Beginning in the 1840's indentured labourers -- most Hindi-speakers from the north of the subcontinent -- were transplanted from India to the British Caribbean, promised fair wages and a return voyage to India in exchange for a predetermined number of years spent working in the colonies. Dishonest contracts with their employers, poverty, and the desire to build a new life ensured that very few of these indentured labourers ever returned to India. By the 1860's, Indian indentured labourers had acquired a reputation as hard workers. On the French islands of Réunion and Mauritius off of Africa's east coast, south Indian indentured labourers made up the majority population by 1870, while more Indian indentured labourers were recruited for the bauxite mines of British Jamaica, the sugarcane fields of Natal, and the rubber plantations of French Guyana. Indian indentured labourers had become the global working class of the British Empire.

Coincidentally, just as the number of skilled professionals willing to emigrate from Britain to work in the empire dropped worryingly in the 1870's, the first generation of Western-educated Indians was emerging from British-founded schools. Although many Britons still doubted the intentions of Indians a half-generation after the Sepoy Mutiny, few British colonial subjects were interested in the Colonial Service, while employing foreigners was impossible. And so, Western-educated Indians attracted by the high wages paid by the British colonial service came to take up a large share of clerical positions in the British Empire's territories bordering the Indian Ocean . Although these Indian clerks began by occupying the lower ranks of the Colonial Service, by the beginning of the 20th century many Indians had achieved respectable positions. The Indian communities abroad grew even more, as letters sent by Indian civil servants to their homeland, telling of the opportunities abounding in the British colonies, attracted more members of merchant classes. Soon, large communities of Indian merchants and their families -- particularly north Indians and Tamils, but also including Sikhs and Jains --  had formed in Malaya, East Africa, and Natal. In Sri Lanka, Tamils were imported from India to work the Kandyan tea plantations, further bolstering the numbers of their coethnics on the northern and eastern coasts of the island.

The Indian diaspora's development was unwittingly accelerated by the British Empire's adoption of economic autarky. Primary products that could be purchased inside the Empire -- for instance, Fijian cotton, Surinamese tropical timber, Malayan tin and rubber, Trinidadian pitch, and Caribbean sugar -- were subsidized and otherwise protected against their extra-Imperial competitors. Very often, these primary products were produced by Indian emigrants. Acting on the principle the Indian masses could be better controlled by Indian civil servants than by non-Indians, Indian administrators emigrated to these territories, and soon came to encourage the immigration of more Indians. In 1900, Fiji and Surinam had developed Indian majorities of roughly 60-65% of the total population. On Trinidad, Afro-Caribbean and Indian populations were evenly balanced. Even in densely-settled Malaya, Indians made up one-fifth of the Malayan population. Though the Dominion of Canada and the Australasian colonies barred Indian immigration on racist grounds, even more Indian labourers were recruited for the sugar plantations of Natal and the mines of the Transvaal. Indeed, many Indians left for Britain itself, seeking education and the joys of life in the Empire's heart.

Many Indians served on the Belgian battlegrounds of the First World War, mostly in construction or medical battalions but including some serving in combat units. Few Indians stayed in Europe after the war; upon their return to India though, they found themselves out of place. The abolition of Indian indentured labour in the British Empire in 1911 aside, many of these Indians emigrated to join the Indian colonies overseas. Through sheer perseverance, labor, and thrift, and most significantly by a calculated withdrawal into their culture, these Indian colonies successfully earned for their children better economic futures. Indeed, these Indian colonies came to capture the trade and commerce of their new homelands. This was just as true in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, as it was in Trinidad, Mauritius, and Burma, where Indian emigrants came to form a new middle class.

In many of the countries in which Indians were installed -- in particular, those countries where, unlike in Surinam, Fiji, Réunion, and Mauritius, Indians did not make up the majority populations -- the resident Indian population acquired a reputation for "un-national activities," that is, for exploiting the indigenous people through Indians' control of local trade and business and through their greed. In Southeast Asia -- in Burma and in Malaya -- these Indians became indispensable as the principal arteries of trade, shopkeepers to the nation, and so opened themselves to the charge that they had done so by marginalizing the local population with no other thought than of enhancing their own interests and prosperity. (This slander is analogous to that applied against Jews, Armenians, and other diasporic peoples noted for their commercial activity.)

None of the Indian communities suffered the direct effects of invasion in the Second World War, although Malaya and Fiji might well have been invaded by the Japanese given setbacks. The Indian communities of Southeast Asia did find themselves threatened by the growth of local nationalisms, though, particularly after India's independence left them vulernable to charges of collusion in Indian imperial plans. For instance, when Burma gained independence in 1954, Indians were prominent property owners and significant in business and trading circles. Indians' property was appropriated by the state, Indians' possessions were confiscated, and many Indians were exiled. Although the Indian community of Burma gradually recovered much of its former status before the Third World War, it never achieved anything akin to its prior strength. The fate of Indians in Malaya was even worse.

Since Indians made up the largest populations in Surinam and Fiji, with local variants of Hindi gaining official status upon independence, they obviously weren't persecuted in the same way as Southeast Asian Indians, though there were tensions with Afro-Caribbean and Melanesian minorities, respectively. Even in Africa, where Indians did not suffer any persecution remotely comparable to what happened in Southeast Asia, they were assumed by native populations and by nationalists to be akin to Jews, and were smeared with the purported Jewish tendencies of being "crafty, mendacious, and money-minded" (as an anti-Indian tract published in Johannesburg circa 1950 claimed). After independence, the Indians of the East African Community were spared persecution despite local anti-Indian bigots, and the Indians of South Africa were able to securely establish themselves in democratic South Africa after the 1960's. In KwaZulu (formerly Natal), though, the fact that Indians made up almost one-quarter of the KwaZulu population and most of KwaZulu's middle class has driven a vicious circle of competition and communal violence that has lasted to this day.

After the Second World War and Indian independence in 1947, a new kind of Indian diaspora took shape. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indians were seen as cheap but hard-working basic labourers in European colonies. After India gained its independence and joined the League of Nations, Indian emigrants came to provide the same services for the European colonizers themselves. In the 23 years after independence, an estimated 1.8 million Indians, from a representative cross-sample of Indian society, emigrated overseas, the largest share (70%) settling in Britain. Despite the modification of British immigration laws to limit the immigration of all but the most highly-skilled Indians, the Indian community of Britain continued its rapid growth, even after the transformation of the United Kingdom into the Confederation of the Isles. Indian professionals, emigrating in the search for better living conditions and higher wages also came to form a highly-visible presence in scientific research, university faculties, and a large variety of small businesses. Still more Indians, professionals and poor labourers alike, found their way to the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, where the rapid expansion of the oil business created space for an entirely new market. Just as in Fiji and Surinam in the mid-19th century, Indian immigrants came to form the majority populations in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, far outnumbering the native Arab population. By 1970, there were perhaps 10 million Indians living outside of India.

The profile of the Indian diaspora was also aided by India's rapid growth into a Great Power. When India gained independence, the country was a desperately poor and backward country. The establishment of rudimentary national primary education and medical institutions, along with the development of a reputable network of technical colleges and scientific research centres, had already begun to improve the lives of the mass of Indians even before the beginning of India's economic boom in the mid-1960's. Even though the areas of north India from which most diasporic Indians traced their ancestry were rather less prosperous than the booming southern and western states, India's economic success inspired nationalistic pride among the members of the diaspora. Perhaps just as importantly, India's growing strength made it more interested than ever before in the safety of Indians overseas, and in the possibility that diasporic Indians might be able to serve as intermediaries between the Indian and world economies. As the 1980's began, despite the reverses in Southeast Asian Indian communities over the past generation, the future for the Indian diaspora looked reasonably bright.

The Third World War intervened, though, and the Indian diaspora was devastated. The destruction of the Indian state, and the disintegration of the burgeoning Great Power into unstable successor states in the south and west of India and anarchic future League mandates in the rest of the country, left the Indian diaspora without a country to look to. Although none of the countries in which Indians lived -- outside of Southeast Asia, of course -- were directly attacked, as poor and isolated immigrants in Europe and South America (Surinam and Trinidad aside) a disproportionate number of Indians suffered and died. In KwaZulu and East Africa, looting of Indian-owned stories for food and saleable property gutted the Indian merchant class, while there were pogroms in Uganda and Oromia. Even in Fiji, safe in the Southern Hemisphere and prosperous, the collapse of Pacific trading networks left the country stumbling and ignited a series of bloody communal riots in March of 1983 that were ended only by the landing of Australian peacemaking troops a year later. Many Indians in the diaspora -- in particular, in Mauritius and Réunion -- were influenced by the neo-Hindutva ideologies propagated in the wastelands of post-War north India; only through the concerted opposition of Indian community leaders to the genocidal expansionism of the neo-Hindutva was this threat confined. As the global economy continued its collapse and its painfully slow post-1988 recovery, diasporic Indians continued to suffer.

Even at the nadir of the Indian diaspora, though, circumstances improved. In April of 1983, after the Sinhalese-chauvinist government of Sri Lanka began to unleash pogroms against Sri Lankan Tamils, with the blessing of the League of Nations Tamilnad intervened against the Sri Lankans, using surviving elements of the Indian Eastern Fleet and the Air Force to support a successful invasion of the Tamil homeland of Eelam and saving the Kandyan Tamils from extermination. The subsequent August 1983 referendum, producing a three-quarters majority in Eelam favouring union with Tamilnad, signalled the the League's intolerance of massive human rights abuses among its members, and of the determination of Indians to look after their conationals, diasporic and otherwise.

Later, the League of Nations' 1985 adoption of the Migration Pact allowed those Indians who could afford the plane ticket to immigrate to First World countries. Relatively few Indians actually did emigrate from India or from Indian communities elsewhere in the Second and Third Worlds, but enough did to create an Indian community of more than 1.3 million people in central Europe by 1990, not to mention reinforce the preexisting Indian communities in southern Africa, the British Isles, and Australia. Similarly, the establishment of the League mandates of North India, Bengal, and Khalistan in 1985-8 prevented northern India from experiencing the same decline into Hobbesian anarchy as China, and gave the south and west Indian states a chance to recover. Diasporic Indians came to play a major role in the League of Nations' bureaucracy, as League of Nations aid and reconstruction programs expanded immensely over the 1980's and early 1990's. The Indian migrant labourers living in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar revolted against the corrupt and unrepresentative Arab princely governments, and constituted the radical-democratic Islamic Republic of Arabia. In the Indonesian and Burmese mandates, dispossessed Indian peasants arrived in large numbers; although there are no precise statistics, surveys suggest that a third of the population of the League mandates in Southeast Asia -- and a bare majority of the populations of the Burmese and Sumatran mandates -- are of relatively recent Indian (or Bengali) background. Even in Japan, hitherto invulnerable to Indian immigrants, a sizable population of a quarter-million Indian professionals took shape by the mid-1990's. The establishment of an Indian Community in 1997 by the League of Nations -- a cultural and economic pact including India's surviving pre-war allies in South Asia, the Indian successor states, and the Indian mandates -- has been taken by many observers to mean the eventual restoration of a united India.

In the end, despite the decimation of India and the Indian diaspora as a result of the Third World War, the Indian diaspora has more than doubled in number, to 20 million people -- almost 1% of the global population.

The outlook for the Indian diaspora in the 21st century seems bright. The establishment of League of Nations authority worldwide, and the growth of civil rights for even non-nationals in most League of Nations member states, seems to bode the end of the pogroms that once menaced the Indian colonies abroad. In South America, Surinam and Trinidad have gained some modest prosperity as portals for Indian diasporic investment into South American Community market, as has England in the European Confederation and Fiji in the Pacific islands. The First World economies seem to be on the verge of a repeat of the quarante glorieuses despite impending labour shortages in much of Europe; Indian immigrants might well man the first economic boom of the 21st century, as they are already in Latvia and elsewhere in northern Europe.

Click here for tables describing Indian populations in India and in the diaspora.