The vibrant Swahili coast port city of Dar es Salaam—literally, the “Haven of Peace”—hosts a population reflecting a legacy of long relations with the Arabian Peninsula and a diaspora emanating in waves from the Indian subcontinent. By the 1960s, after decades of European imperial intrusions, Tanzanian nationalist forces had peacefully dismantled the last British colonial structures of racial segregation and put in place an official philosophy of nonracial nationalism. Yet today, more than five decades after independence, race is still a prominent and publicly contested subject in Dar es Salaam. What makes this issue so dizzyingly elusive—for government bureaucrats and ordinary people alike—is East Africa’s location on the Indian Ocean, a historic crossroads of diverse peoples possessing varied ideas about how to reconcile human difference, social belonging, and place of origin. Based on a range of archival, oral, and newspaper sources from Tanzania and India, this book explores the history of cross-cultural encounters that shaped regional ideas of diaspora and nationhood from the earliest days of colonial Tanganyika—when Indian settlement began to expand dramatically—to present-day Tanzania, a nation always under construction. The book focuses primarily on two prominent city spaces, schools and cinemas: the one a site of education, the other a site of leisure; one typically a programmatic entity of government, the other usually a bastion of commercial enterprise. Nonetheless, the forces shaping schools and cinemas as they developed into busy centers of urban social interaction were surprisingly similar: the state, community organizations, nationalist movements, economic change, and the transnational winds of Indian Ocean culture and capital. Whether in the form of institutional apparatuses like networks of Indian teacher importation and curricula adoption, or through the market predominance of the Indian film industry, schools and cinemas in East Africa historically were influenced by actions and ideas from around the Indian Ocean. Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean argues that an Indian Ocean–wide perspective enables an examination of the transnational production of ideas about race against a backdrop of changing relationships and claims of belonging as new notions of nationhood and diaspora emerged. It bridges an academic divide, because historians often either focus on the Indian diaspora in isolation or write it out of the story of African nation building. Further, in contrast to the swell of publications on global Indian or South Asian diasporas that highlight longings for and contacts with the “homeland,” the book also demonstrates that much of the creative production of diasporic Indian identities formed in East Africa was a result of local (albeit cosmopolitan) encounters across cities like Dar es Salaam.

A premier debate in the present conjuncture of globalization has been the prospect of ‘post nation’ and the obsolescence of patriotism at the horizon of transnationalism. In an ethnographically rich and discursively sharp intervention R. K. Jain articulates the contribution that diaspora studies can make to this debate. In this anthropological narrative both nation and trans-nation are ‘moving targets’; their positionality shifts and changes according to the geo-political location of the analyst and the frame of comparison brought to bear on the objects/subjects of study. In Jain’s case the locus happens to be India but the discussion in this book does not foreclose perspectives from ‘other’ nations. Indeed as his own examples from countries of the Indian Ocean zone, the Asia Pacific region and the Caribbean amply demonstrate the methodology of ethno-cultural relativism built in these diasporic comparisons is the surest guarantee for tracing the juxtaposed dialectic of nation and trans-nation from whichever existential location one begins. The rootedness of this particular discourse in India provides coherence in the nature of a case-study of globalization from a prominent diaspora node of our times. At the same time it unravels dimensions of Indian social institutions viewed from the vantage point of diaspora. The book, therefore, is an invitation to further multi-disciplinary and multi-sited collaboration in the exploration of globalization, diaspora, nationalism and patriotism as well as transnationalism from diverse perspectives.

The Hadramis of South Yemen and the emergence of their diasporic communities throughout the Indian Ocean region are an intriguing facet of the history of this region’s migratory patterns. In the early centuries of migration, the Yemeni, or Hadrami, traveler was both a trader and a religious missionary, making the migrant community both a “trade diaspora” and a “religious diaspora.” This tradition has continued as Hadramis around the world have been linked to networks of extremist, Islamic-inspired movements—Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda and descendant of a prominent Hadrami family, as the most infamous example. However, communities of Hadramis living outside Yemen are not homogenous. The author expertly elucidates the complexity of the diasporic process, showing how it contrasts with the conventional understanding of the Hadrami diaspora as an unchanging society with predefined cultural characteristics originating in the homeland. Exploring ethnic, social, and religious aspects, the author offers a deepened understanding of links between Yemen and Indian Ocean regions (including India, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa) and the emerging international community of Muslims.

Over 33 million strong Indian diasporas spread all over the world has been an exceptionally successful story. Given their skills and other social qualities, they are also among the most sought after lots in most countries. Indian diaspora has performed well on all important parameters Ñ political, economical, technological and cultural. PIOs are amongst the top skilled, employable and prosperous non-native people in most countries. They are heading some of the top multinational companies and hold high positions in many international organisations, in a way making an important contribution to the evolving global agenda. Today, Indian diaspora is investing in creating jobs and cutting edge technologies world over. India has also done very well in reaching out to its diaspora through various channels, including the youth. At over USD 75 billion annually, India is the top recipient of remittances. Diaspora could also be an important source of technology and know-how. Given their goodwill on both sides, they are a great source of confidence-building between India and countries of their adoption and have demonstrated their clout on many occasions. Over the last many centuries, Indians have travelled to many near and far off destinations in the world for trade, business, education and jobs. One major wave of such movement was carried out by the colonial administration under the so called indentured system for meeting labour shortages in their overseas plantations. This inhuman system of exploitation of workers finally ended and the centenary of its abolition was commemorated in many parts of the world including India during 2017-18. Antar Rashtrya Sahyog Parishad (ARSP) had organised year long activities to mark this important land mark in the life of Indian diaspora, culminating with an international conference on the topic, ÔContribution of Diaspora in Nation BuildingÕ in Mauritius in July 2018. Several leaders and scholars addressed this gathering and this publication captures the essence of its outcomes. This publication could be a good reference for students and scholars working on diaspora.

With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews , Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments. This finaly-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade. A microhistory, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic.

Although much has been written about the African Diaspora in the Atlantic Ocean, the Diaspora in the Indian Ocean is virtually unrecognised. Concerned with Africans who lived south of the Sahara and were dispersed by free will or forcefully to the non-African lands in the Indian Ocean region, this book deals with a topic that has been overlooked for too long. Eight scholars researching in distinct geographical areas and with interdisciplinary expertise offer a comprehensive and informative account of the Diaspora in the Indian Ocean.