Reflexivity and the Diaspora: Indian Women in Post-Indenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa
“This chapter tries to compare women’s agency in four post-indenture Indian communities. The data is contradictory in the sense that there is general exploitation including, and especially, that of Indian women as well as sterling contributions to cultura
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f Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2018 P. Misir (ed.), The Subaltern Indian Woman, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5166-1_11
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interpretation of diaspora. This is as a methodological prolegomena for the discussion of Indian women’s agency in post-indenture Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and South Africa. I have chosen these localities because they represent the ‘old’ diaspora or the People of Indian Origin (PIOs).
Variations in Reflexivity To begin with my personal trajectory, the understanding of diaspora institutions and networks explored by me for the last several years seems to be grounded in my schoolboy fascination for Toynbee’s theory of rise and fall of civilisations in terms of challenge and response. Later on, in the study of Indian communities abroad, I was interested initially in the processes and results of various categories of Indian population making adaptation to situations abroad that were multiethnic and multiracial. As a student I was also interested in anthropological comparisons as cultural translation, namely, not only the sociocultural adaptations abroad but the light that these ‘experiments in nature’—Indian communities abroad—shed on Indian social institutions themselves. To give only two examples, the way in which Hinduism and the caste system could be disjointed (contra M.N. Srinivas) and the manner in which ‘collapsing space’ (Haraksingh 1988, p. 116) forged in the diaspora regional and religious differences and heterogeneity into a novel kaleidoscopic pattern. The other curiosity satisfied for me by globetrotting in the Indian diaspora was this: to demolish the facile distinction that some sociologists in Jawaharlal Nehru University and elsewhere in India made between the sociological ‘bird’s eye view’ and the social anthropological ‘worm’s eye view’—the latter in their estimation fit only for ‘tribal studies’! With due modesty, let me state that comparative, analytical and theory-based anthropological studies of the Indian diaspora requires a ‘jet’s eye view’ (cf. the journal Global Networks that began publishing in 2001). Perhaps the best examples of diaspora-based Indian scholars are authors such as Brij V. Lal and Vijay Mishra (Fiji), Kusha Haraksingh, Brinsley Samaroo and Patricia Mohammed (Trinidad and Tobago), the Gayan sisters—Surya and A. Devi—and Vinesh Hookoomsing (Mauritius), and Surendra Bhana and Anand Singh (South Africa). The list could be much longer if it was not confined to the PIOs who have written about the four locations discussed here and included Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) as well. Contrasted with a lot of non-Indian scholars (cf. Tinker (1974) as the leading light) there is in this category of authors a certain common
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enominator of reflexivity. In a broad sense, they subscribe to the ‘challenge d and response’ paradigm that I mentioned earlier. An instance is the point of view of Brij V. Lal, who is originally a Fi
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