Nation, Migration, Identity & Diaspora
India World History Tour Week 4: Migration at Home and Abroad
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Historical concepts - like nations, religions, civilizations, classes, or states - fix our chameleon identities despite the flux of time. Migration mixes those claims on who we are in our core. Migration, from and within a place as vast as India, changes perception of the nation. It makes diasporas abroad and at home. It challenges the boundaries of ‘civilization-states,’ especially when primarily defined by religion.
The World Power World History Tour focuses this week on migration in India. Our guide is Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century.
South Asia, then, is not just an exporter of peoples to the West, a ‘source region’, as most people believe. It is made up of internal diasporas, small and large, layered like mica over time. Every city and town is full of outsiders - pardesis [migrants or foreigners].”
Chatterji, Shadows at Noon
Migration, Identity, and India
I write from Australia, which is a ‘migrant’ country. Australia’s population of 27.2 million includes 8.6 million people (31.5 per cent) who were born overseas.1 This proportion is roughly double the rate in the countries of the Greater European world that gnash their populist teeth about migrants destroying their nations: USA 15.2 %, Germany 19.8 %, France 13.8 %, Britain 17.1 % and Italy 11.1%. It is more than ten times the rate in Japan that could do with some young migrant workers. In 2024, Australia received 667,000 people and farewelled 221,000, that is 3.3 per cent of its people were on the move. South and Central Asia was the world region from which most of those arrivals came. India will soon surpass the ‘Mother Country’ as the top country of birth (excluding Australia). If you count related countries of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the South Asian diaspora is already Australia’s largest migrant group.
Old world ideas of ‘blood and soil’ ethnonationalism or neatly bordered civilizations make no sense here. Migration over centuries and in the South Asian twentieth-century has had the same effect in India. As Joya Chatterji writes,
“Now try to see this subcontinent again. Not only is everyone, pretty much, a foreigner there, but each has a very curious (and often tragic) history that brought them to the places where you encounter them. There are no ‘teeming masses’. There are people. People with migration stories.”
Chatterji, Shadows at Noon, p. 339
Now you might object, the indigenous peoples are not foreigners. The land belongs to them. There are indigenous peoples in both Australia and India who make these claims. In India’s cases, there are many, including the Hindus who claim a heritage of a civilization that has endured invasion and colonisation by British, Mughal, Persian and contentiously Aryan peoples. But, in the long view, when seeking subtle insight not partisan identity, are these peoples not foreigners too? They came to their homeland too. But we have forgotten or never had a way to know their migration stories.
The debate about India’s indigenous civilization is raised to white heat in my contentious book recommendation this week. But Chatterji’s stories in chapter four, “Migration at Home and Abroad: South Asian Diasporas,” diffuse the tension. She invites us to look beyond the fixed identities of nations, civilizations, communal identities and religion. She shows us the flickering shadows and light of South Asian migration in individual stories.
“Every one of South Asia’s internal migrants have to be seen not just as a statistic, staggering though those numbers are. Each has a story that, almost on page one of their telling it, rips away all the easy clichés. As with Philomena and Cajetano, so with Sushila - each one’s story is full of twists and turns, and critical events.”
Chatterji, Shadows at Noon, p. 339
In telling these stories, Chatterji examines India’s many overseas diasporas, including the “coolies” who supplied indentured (near-slave) labour across the British empire and were excluded by the White Australia Policy as much as the Chinese. She looks at internal migration, in good times and in the emergencies of the partitions and refugee flights from 1947 to 2000. She explores the refugee cities and squats created by those partition migrations. She looks beyond clichés of the slum and explores how many identities moved into ghettos of many kinds. Finally, she looks at the experience of migration from the countryside of migrating brides.
“Most migration in South Asia has little to do with cities, or even towns. It happens in the countryside. At the start of the century, people who lived off the land made up ninety per cent of South Asia’s population. By 1947 that proportion had fallen to roughly seventy-five per cent, and by 2000, to sixty per cent.
Almost half of these rural people were women and girls, who married at an early age and migrated to their husband’s home after marriage.”
Chatterji, Shadows at Noon, p. 364
I will dive deep into the story of one of those migrant brides shortly. But first, let us look at the weekly history book recommendation.
Book Recommendation: J. Sai Deepak on Civilization-States and Bharat
This week’s choice is very different to Chatterji, Shadows at Noon. It is the work of a mechanical engineer turned lawyer turned historian, J. Sai Deepak. His polemic has attracted adulation and criticism for advocating Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) positions. The work is India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution (2021).
India’s 1947 Constitution begins with the phrase, “India, that is Bharat.” That is why Indian political leaders at international fora, including the G20, have sought to replace the name plates for their country. The nation was named ambivalently, with a British colonial term and Bharat that, J. Sai Deepak argues, reflected an indigenous, repressed Indic consciousness.
India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution is the first of four planned books on the history of the Indian constitution in relation to its civilizational consciousness. The second book of the trilogy, India, Bharat and Pakistan: The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation was published in 2022. The third is expected soon.
India, that is Bharat was a best-seller that polarized. It critiqued India’s strong traditions of secular, liberal and leftist thought. It however also made a case to think of India as a civilization-state, free of the stain of foreign colonising influences of the British, liberal West and the invasive Muslim heritage. In the video below from December 2023, he sets out his main ideas in a little over an hour.
After Independence, Deepak argued, coloniality - the mindset and institutional legacy of colonial rule - persisted in Indian society, and especially in its constitutional and legal frameworks. He claimed that the Indian constitution mimicked Western, British frameworks and did not express Bharat’s civilizational ethos rooted in India’s indigenous, Dharmic traditions. The book called for a reassessment of India’s governance, constitution and history-writing traditions in light of its ancient civilizational identity.
Many others, including the popular YouTube commentator Abhijit Chavda, have taken up his arguments. Supporters believe India must confront coloniality in its institutions and self-perception, replacing externally imposed ideas of India’s history, secularism, law, and education with alternatives based on “Indic consciousness”.
Critics argue the book is slanted towards a Hindu-centric view, and advocates for a Hindu Rashtra (nation), framing “Indic consciousness” in a way that is exclusionary for minorities and the pluralities of civilizations.
I found it a book that was valuable to read to understand this influential strand of opinion in contemporary India. Its prose is dense and its tone polemical. I was put off for a long time by the manner, until I finally overcame my resistance this week. But there is much to learn from its argument, quotation from historic sources, and reflections on how arguments on the Left and Right can still colonise the Indian mind.
It includes substantial discussion of the concept of the ‘civilization-state,’ which I will discuss in another article. Specifically, he argues that the famed Treaty of Westphalia (1648) reflected a Christian, Greater European consciousness in the very ideas of nation, sovereignty and world order. It has led to “universalisation of the Westphalian or European experience through the instrumentality of ‘international law’ using the ‘standard of civilisation’ as a legal benchmark to judge societies.” (p. 96)
“Not only were non-Western societies expected to abide by the principles of ‘international law’ and become ‘nation-states’ that subscribed to ‘the rule of law’ with regard to Western nationals, they were also expected to conform domestically to the norms, mores and customs recognised in and by Western societies. Effectively European imperial powers gained extraterritorial jurisdiction over non-Western societies through the application of international law, which was nothing but the enforcement of Protestant Reformation-inspired Westphalian principles.”
India, that is Bharat, p. 99
There is no doubt something to this argument, although I find more congenial the gentler genealogies of Felipe Fernández-Armesto in Civilizations and Amitav Acharya in The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West. Even civilizations have chameleon identities. Even Bharat’s consciousness has mingled through migration with other identities, as Chatterji shows.
Curiously and coincidentally, I discussed this issue of the Western myth of Westphalia, the nation and world order with
this week, a day or two before making my way through the thorns of India, that is Bharat. That takes us to my update on my other writing and videos from the week.Content Catch-up
A reminder that paid subscribers have full access to my indexed Nobel Archive profiling all 121 winners of the Nobel Prize in History. It is a cultural history of the modern world. Some winners were featured in my 100 Books to Read Before it is Too Late post. More will be in my 100 poems post coming in a week or two.
With only two months to go to announcement of the 2025 Nobel Prize, and a sense of war coming, you might want to check my post on the only Literature Prize winner to attend the infamous 1938 Munich peace talks, the very intriguing, but forgotten:
Here is your guide to catching up on my content over the last week.
The Books of Jacob Slow Read rerun looked at Chapter 2, the remarkable woman politician, Katarzyna Kossakowska, the courts, and the abuses of the 18th century Polish nobility
My extended interview with Marta Havryshko, Ukrainian historian and Holocaust scholar, provided a deep insight into Ukrainian protests, Historian explains WHY Ukrainians are protesting NOW against Zelensky and CORRUPTION
I released an excerpt of this interview (duration 27:55) that discussed how events might unfold (Note: the Ukrainian Rada voted to restore NABU and CAPU’s powers, but as everywhere the proof of the integrity will be in the implementation)
My Live Stream, Geopolitics & History E3 focussed on Ukraine End Game: Trump's Ultimatum, Protests, Secret Meet, WW3 begun?
I discussed the protests and emerging social crisis in Ukraine with Jamarl Thomas, Jeff Rich On Ukrainian Rage Erupts From Zelensky's Betrayal: Rumor Of US-UK & Yermak Regime Change
I released the third part of my interview with Warwick Powell, How CIVILIZATIONS shape geopolitics and how China & India play the Tibet card, that focussed on China's Civilizations Initiative, how culture shapes geopolitics, and how it plays out in India-China relations, including the succession of the Dalai Lama
I am releasing a video on Saturday at 16:45 AEST, Did the USA COUP Australia, not once but twice? that assesses the popular theory that the USA government through the CIA overthrew recalcitrant Australian Governments in 1975 and 2010.
I did an interview with Pascal Lottaz of Neutrality Studies (channel link to be updated when video is posted soon).
Do check out my interview with Marta Havryshko on YouTube and give it a like and comment. I suspect that it is being suppressed by the algorithm, and it deserves many more views.
Let us turn now to that story of one migrant bride. If a Zen monk sees the universe in a grain of sand, Joya Chatterji sees in one migration story the plurality of all our identities.
Join me below the line for that story, and notes on South Asian (‘coolie’) migrant labour and the Indian slum.
Many thanks to all my subscribers, paid and unpaid, for supporting me in this fantastic journey through history. I hope it helps you to live in tune with a changing world. Please consider upgrading your subscription to get more from my guides, deep dives, and slow reads.