ABSTRACT
According to a United Nations report, Indians, numbering 16 million, made up the largest number of people in 2015 who were living in a country other than that of their birth (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UNDESA), 2016). The total number of Indians living overseas stood at just over 29 million in 2016 (Non Resident Indians Online (NRIO), 2016). While Indians have a centuries-long history of migration to places like Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia, Southeast Asia, and Africa (Bose, 2006; Goswami, 2011), this chapter primarily focuses on the descendants of those Indians who emigrated as indentured labourers to sugar-producing colonies such as Mauritius, Trinidad, Suriname, Natal, and Fiji from the 1830s following the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 (Tinker, 1974). It also traces the descendants of the free migrants who followed in their wake as traders (Oonk, 2013; Vahed & Bhana, 2015), sometimes termed the ‘Old Diaspora’, as well as those who migrated to the United Kingdom, North America and the countries that now make up the European Union in the post-World War II period, whose reception has varied according to class and vocation (Fisher et al., 2007; Ali et al., 2008; Lal, 2008; Gautam, 2013; Vora, 2013), and who are known in the literature as the ‘New Diaspora’. While a substantial number of Indians, known as expatriates or Non Resident Indians (NRIs), have been working in the Gulf countries following the oil boom in the 1970s (Vora, 2013), they are not included in this discussion.
