Bring out the relationship between nation-state and Indian diasporic identity.

Indian Diasporic Identity in The New Global World: India has the second largest Diaspora in the world. The overseas Indian community estimated at over 25 million is spread across every major region in the world. Yet, it is difficult to speak of one great Indian Diaspora. The overseas Indian community is the result of different waves of migration over hundreds of years driven by a variety of reasons–mercantilism, colonialism and globalization. Its early experiences make up a saga of trials, tribulations and the eventual triumph of determination and hard work. In the last three decades of the 20th century the character of migration began to change and a ‘new Diaspora’ led by high skilled professionals moving to the western world and semi-skilled contract workers moving to the Gulf, West and South East Asia emerged.

The overseas Indian community thus constitutes a diverse, heterogeneous and eclectic global community representing different regions, languages, cultures and faiths. The common thread that binds them together is the idea of India and its intrinsic values. Overseas Indians comprise People of Indian Origin and Non Resident Indians and today are amongst the best educated and successful communities in the world. In every part of the world the overseas Indian community is recognized and respected for its hard work, discipline, non-interference and for successfully integrating with the local community.

Overseas Indians have made significant contributions to the economy of the country of residence and have added in considerable measure to knowledge and innovation. Overseas Indians share a strong bond with their country of origin. This is reflected in their language, cultures and traditions that have been maintained, often over centuries, and continue to be vibrant and unique. It is now being witnessed in the growing popularity of Indian films, dance, music, arts and culture on foreign shores, the strong surge in remittances back home, the return of many to live and work in India and in their increasing engagement with India’s development. The relationship between India and its overseas community is growing, new partnerships evolving and newer multi-faceted dimensions being explored.

India’s engagement with its Diaspora is symbiotic, the strands of both sides of the relationship equally important to create a resilient and robust bond. To engage with the Diaspora in a sustainable and mutually rewarding manner across the economic, social and cultural space is at the heart of the policy of the Ministry. To create conditions, partnerships and institutions that will best enable India to connect with its Diaspora comprehensively is central to all our programmes and activities. As a new India seeks to become a global player of significance, the time has come for a strong and sustained engagement between India and overseas Indians. The time has also come for overseas Indians to benefit from the exciting opportunities that India provides. The time is now.

Nation-states: Cross Border Identities

National borders are a distinctive type of geographical boundary-drawing associated with the rise of modern nation states. As such they have at least two roles to play in shaping national identity: (1) marking national territory and national sovereignty in a physical way on the ground, and (2) also serving in maps and other visual depictions of nation-states to delimit the geographies of nations as “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983). These material and representational roles of borders are clearly linked, and today they are also changing in ways that are profoundly revealing about the future of the nation-state and national citizenship in the context of globalization (Sparke, 2005).

Some simplistic accounts of globalization argue that it has made national borders obsolete, ushering in a ‘borderless world’ or ‘flat world’ (Friedman, 2005; Ohmae, 1990) that represents ‘the end of geography’ and ‘the end of the nation-state’ (O’Brien, 1992; Ohmae, 1995). However, we should also focus on patterns of reterritorialization rather than generalising about deterritorialization. It has an advantage, that is, it can also reveal the practical consequences of imaginative appeals to a borderless world.

Historically, national identity was ‘territorialized,’ tied to a particular geographical space by the ways state practices made national territory into an administrative space of supervision, authority and control. Reciprocally, the spaces mapped, monitored and regulated by the state were given meaning as national homelands by national identity. These two-way dynamics served in turn to secure the geographical hold of the hyphen in nation-state: the nation giving state space a name and cultural resonance, and the state territorializing national territory. National borders played a particularly important mediating role amidst these two-way dynamics.

Yet today, in the context of globalization and all the associated angst about ‘placelessness’ some of these reciprocal territorializing ties between nation and state have become reshaped and remapped, which is to say, ‘reterritorialized’ by cross-border ties. Everything from increasing trade to the World Wide Web seems to be undermining the idea of the nation-state as a stable territorial unit. Thus at the same time as the movement of migrants stretches and stresses traditional geographical imaginations of the nation, the development of global trade ties, global financial destabilization effects, global media empires, and shared global health and environmental challenges, are all unsettling national forms of state authority. Insofar as it is cross-border connections that lie at the heart of such destabilization, borders themselves can provide a useful research window on to what is happening.

Cross-border connections are certainly upsetting older ways in which borders organized the territorializing ties between state, nation and identity. The need for goods, money and business professionals to move swiftly across these borders has led to all sorts of border ‘softening’ and ‘smoothing’ initiatives, and many of the state practices such as customs and passport control that traditionally turned borders into speed bumps for business are now being practiced in other sites through various pre-clearance programmes designed to expedite the actual experience of border crossing. But is this really a fair conclusion or an empirically accurate picture? If you conduct your own research on a cross border region you will be better placed to answer this question with up to date empirical evidence of your own. As you conduct such research keep asking critical questions about the “borderless world” boosterism you find. Ask yourself whether the borders are being bull-dozed or softened for everyone or just for a select few. Ask what kinds of post-national identities and imaginations may be emerging on the one side. But also ask about how the borders of national identity remain hard and fast and, in some cases, spiked and deadly for travelers who are not investors and capital carrying professionals and tourists. National identity may seem little more than a change in scenery and cuisine for pre-cleared cross-border business travelers, but for non-cleared and undocumented refugees and workers the borders in question remain barbed barriers where the links between non-national identity and curtailed citizenship rights are made brutally clear on an ongoing basis.

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