In The Other One Percent, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh provide the first authoritative and systematic overview of South Asians living in the United States.

Indian Diaspora in the United States takes a new perspective on the topic of brain drain, departing from the traditional literature to include discussions on brain gain and brain circulation using Indian migration to the United States as a case study. Sahay acknowledges that host country policies create the necessary conditions for brain drain to take place, but argues that source countries may also benefit from out-migration of their workers and students. These benefits are measured as remittances, investments, and savings associated with return, and social networking that links expatriates with their country of origin. Through success and visibility in host societies, diaspora workers further influence economic and political benefits for their home countries. This type of brain gain becomes an element of soft power for the source country in the long term. Indian Diaspora in the United States is a ground-breaking work that intersects economic and political issues to the dimension of migration and the concerns over brain drain. With its rigorous, connectionist approach, this book is a valuable contribution to the fields of diaspora, labor, globalization, and Indian studies.

This edited collection of essays describes the main broad streams of Asian migration and their wide geographical spread, both in terms of migrants' origins and their destinations. Evidence comes from several of the countries of South and East Asia. It shows migrants moving within their own countries; abroad but still within Asia; and overseas particularly to Britain and North America. The essays address both the subjective and objective causes of migration and some of the consequences, for the individual, the family and the migrant community both as an entity and in relation to the host society.

India Abroad analyzes the development of Indian diasporas in the United States and England from 1947, the year of Indian independence, to the present. Across different spheres of culture--festivals, entrepreneurial enclaves, fiction, autobiography, newspapers, music, and film--migrants have created India as a way to negotiate life in the multicultural United States and Britain. Sandhya Shukla considers how Indian diaspora has become a contact zone for various formations of identity and discourses of nation. She suggests that carefully reading the production of a diasporic sensibility, one that is not simply an outgrowth of the nation-state, helps us to conceive of multiple imaginaries, of America, England, and India, as articulated to one another. Both the connections and disconnections among peoples who see themselves as in some way Indian are brought into sharp focus by this comparativist approach. This book provides a unique combination of rich ethnographic work and textual readings to illuminate the theoretical concerns central to the growing fields of diaspora studies and transnational cultural studies. Shukla argues that the multi-sitedness of diaspora compels a rethinking of time and space in anthropology, as well as in other disciplines. Necessarily, the standpoint of global belonging and citizenship makes the boundaries of the "America" in American studies a good deal more porous. And in dialogue with South Asian studies and Asian American studies, this book situates postcolonial Indian subjectivity within migrants' transnational recastings of the meanings of race and ethnicity. Interweaving conceptual and material understandings of diaspora, India Abroad finds that in constructed Indias, we can see the contradictions of identity and nation that are central to the globalized condition in which all peoples, displaced and otherwise, live.

The geographical diversity of the Indian diaspora has been shaped against the backdrop of the historical forces of colonialism, nationalism and neoliberal globalization. In each of these global moments, the demand for Indian workers has created the multiple global pathways of the Indian diasporas. The Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora introduces readers to the contexts and histories that constitute the Indian diaspora. It brings together scholars from different parts of the globe, representing various disciplines, and covers extensive spatial and temporal terrain. Contributors draw from a variety of archives and intellectual perspectives in order to map the narratives of the Indian diaspora. The topics covered range from the history of diasporic communities, activism, identity, gender, politics, labour, policy, violence, performance, literature and branding. The handbook analyses a wide array of issues and debates and is organised in six parts: • Histories and trajectories • Diaspora and infrastructures • Cultural dynamics • Representation and identity • Politics of belonging • Networked subjectivities and transnationalism. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the diverse social, cultural and economic contexts that frame diasporic practices, this key reference work will reinvigorate discussions about the Indian diaspora, its global presence and trajectories. It will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and students interested in studying South Asia in general and the Indian diaspora in particular.

This book studies Indian diaspora, currenlty 20 million across the world, from various perspectives. It looks at the 'transnational' nature of the middle class worker. Other aspects include: post 9/11 challenges; ethnicity in USA; cultural identity versus national identity; gender issues amongst the diaspora communities. It argues that Indian middle classes have the unique advantages of skills, mobility, cultural rootedness and ethics of hard-work.

Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.