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http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/19/2-3/279The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080295

2007 19: 279Cultural DynamicsS. Charusheela

The Diaspora at Home

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Charusheela: The Diaspora at Home 279

T H E D I A S P O R A AT H O M E

S. CHARUSHEELA

University of Nevada, Los Vegas, USA

ABSTRACT

The concept of diaspora can be fruitfully used to open up economic analysis.

Unlike the current ways in which the terms immigrant, emigrant, and migranthave entered economics, the term diaspora shows promise in pushing ustoward richer analyses of economic subjectivity. In addition, it opens thepossibility for a more critical interrogation of the international and nationalthan is currently available within mainstream economic analysis. However,the term can be pushed further. Using the experience of growing up Tamilin Bombay in the 1970s as its focus, this article complicates the concept ofdiaspora. It highlights diasporas within nations, and shows how groups mayenter the diasporic experience without traveling. This exploration allows usto critically re-examine binaries of nationalcosmopolitan, assimilationresistance, necessary before we can usefully deploy the concept of diasporafor projects of cross-disciplinary conversation.

Key Words cosmopolitan diaspora economy national subjectivity

Introduction

My aim in this reflection is to re-examine the term diaspora. By juxtaposingmy own experience of growing up Tamil in Bombay1 with narratives ofdiasporic experience and meaning, I wish to complicate the term diaspora

itself, to ask what it reveals and what it masks.Before proceeding, I should note that I am not someone who normallylooks at diaspora. An economist by training, I work on issues of gender anddevelopment in South Asia, with theoretical interests in the epistemologicaland ontological limits that beset much theorizing in my field. However,through my engagements with scholars from without my discipline, I havecome to see the concept of diaspora as a potentially valuable source ofinsight for heterodox and dissident analytical projects of rethinkingmainstream economic analyses. Thus, I hope that my heterodox economics

19(2/3): 279299. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080295] http://cdy.sagepub.comCopyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

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280 Cultural Dynamics19(2/3)

colleagues and scholars more versed in the literature on diaspora will readthis as an invitation to a cross-border exchange of a different type.

Further, I am also not someone who normally draws on personalexperience for analytical insight. Indeed, much of my work within

economics is about the problems that beset scholarship coming fromanalysts who extrapolate a bit too generously from their own experience.This, combined with the habitual (and unnecessary) biases of my disciplineagainst any type of non-quantitative source of information, makes this typeof exploration quite novel, and indeed a bit unnerving, for me. Since thisreflection marks my first experiment in combining personal experientialnarrative with social analysis, I am not quite comfortable about markingit with the standard signs of academic scholarship. So, I eschew the classicmarks of academic work (the scholarly note, the carefully excavated and

referenced concept, the literature review).2 I do this not because I see thisas less scholarly than my other work. Rather, I want my readers to enter thistext in a different way, and invite them to contribute their own analyticalinsights to my writing and speculation on personal experience. Instead ofseeing this reflection primarily as an intervention in an academic debateabout the meaning of the term diaspora, I hope it acts as a spur to further,more sustained scholarship and analysis by those more conversant with theliterature than I.

But since genre is discursively agential, and I have been trained within

the genres of academic discourse, I will mimic some of the conventions ofacademic writingnamely, the use of sections to organize the narrativestructure of knowledge production, along with the provision of a roadmapto the sections in the introductory section of an article. Here it is. Followingthis introductory section, I explain why I think the term diaspora ispotentially useful (The Value of Diaspora). Then, I examine what the termgestures toward, and complicate that via reflecting on my own experience ofgrowing up Tamil in Bombay (The Diaspora at Home). This in turn leadsme to ask, what does this term mask? (Other Diasporas). I conclude with

some reflections on how we can resituate the term diaspora and considerhow we may need to supplement it with additional ideas if we are to makeit do more robust work in our analyses.

The Value of Diaspora

Diaspora is a term that situates analyses of subject formation and socialexperience in a transnational context. It thus draws attention to the cross-border transactions that shape social, psychic, and experiential subjects.In mainstream analysis within my discipline, there is no diaspora in thesubfields that explore international economic relations. Instead, there are

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international migrants, immigrants and emigrants, people crossing nationalboundaries, whose importance we mark by noting their numbers. Theyenter our analysis in the form of data about the numbers of immigrants intoa country or numbers of people leaving a country or numbers of a countrys

citizens residing abroad. Now, while scholars may note or mark the factthat specific groups of immigrants or emigrants have entered or left anational space at particular historical junctures, the discussion of historicaland social-structural contexts, networks of affiliation, and experientialsubjectivities that mark discussions of immigrant experience and history inother fields is not central to economic analysis of transnational transactionsand relations.

This is not surprising, given the analytical structure of the internationalin economics. As Danby (2004) notes, the effect of the international

on the national in economics is arrived at by opening up the nationaleconomy to a select subset of cross-border flows without disturbing orretheorizing the nature of the national economy which is being opened.This is analytically possible because the international itself is confectedas little more than the simple aggregation of, or as the space of a carefullydelimited set of interactions across, equally confected natural units ofnational economies that correspond to the natural unit of the nation state.Thus, while there are no doubt scholars who provide rich discussion of thesocial context and experience of migration, there is really nothing in the

way that the concept of immigrant and migrant has entered the field ofeconomics that automatically invites such analysis. Further, where suchrich detail is provided, it does not result in retheorizing the category of theinternational (and national) in the organization of the field or types ofanalyses produced in the discipline.

Instead, the quantification of immigrants invites economists to focuson other types of questions that isolate their analytical and theoreticalapparatus from taking up the types of critical questions about nationaland transnational belonging and the experience of migration, let alone

questions about the analytical status of the categories national andtransnational, that are often central to writing in other fields. Immigrantsenter our analysis in terms of their quantifiable contributions and coststo the economyeither to the economy they live in or to the economythey left. In either case, economy is always already natural nationalandthe international is a rarified field of movements between the naturalnational units (Danby, 2004).

Thus, we have debates about whether immigration costs a countryin terms of lower wage rates and higher social insurance payments, andabout whether and how immigrants contribute to the economy they cometo. Here, immigrant means a legal category, and hence first-generationversus second-generation has no meaning in the field, since the second



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generation is not a separate legal category in terms of what is beingquantified. The actual historical context of migration or the types of socialnetworks of affiliation available or not available to a particular immigrantgroup seeking an economic foothold in a new country are of almost no

relevance to how we assess the implications of costs and benefits. Instead,we hear discussions of immigrant contribution or immigrant cost, withoutallowing the social context of migration for different groups to complicateour understanding of the social and cultural processes that allocate andarrange the ability of a particular immigrant group to contribute or makeit in a given national space.

Alternately, we hear of the costs and benefits of emigration for backhome. We hear of brain drains and of remittances. While brain drain mayfigure the emigrant in the social context of leaving, the status of the emigrant

at the other endas citizen or legal residentis of no relevance to thediscussion. When it comes to remittances, it becomes even more interesting,since not only is citizenship no longer the key organizing principle, evengenerations of migration are irrelevantwhat is being quantified is a fundsflow across national boundaries.

Since the concept of migration invites little sustained social-historicalanalysis in mainstream economics, the types of experiences and socialnetworks of material life tracked in these data shift rather loosely: themovement of funds across national borders tracks something different about

transnational relations than is tracked in the numbers about immigrants andemigrants. But the distinctions in what is being tracked by these differingtypes of numbers triggers no effort to rethink either the base terms ofnational and international on which these numbers are constructed, or tore-examine the disparate subjectivities they presume.

In general, the type of critical exposition about not just social andhistorical context, but also analytical categories used to organize knowledge,that the term immigrant invites within economic analysis is thin. At most,one hears of push and pull factorspush factors such as poverty and

necessity, or structures of coercion and compulsion, or in more optimistictellings, of pull factors such as opportunities and jobs. One rehears thesetales elsewhere, with different valencesin more xenophobic versions ofthe optimistic narrative, pull factors of social safety nets and opportunitiesbring in those we think do not really have the right to such things into thebody of the national economy, a narrative countered by anti-xenophobicreminders of the contributions of those who come to the body of the nationaleconomy and reminders about the push factors back home and perhaps ofour complicity in making those push factors. But within the mainstreamof my field, or in the ways this field enters other discourses, we find littleabout what that movement of either people or funds may mean in terms ofnarrating anexperiential subjectinto being.



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This gap is a problem for those of us seeking to make economics moreattuned to issues of historical structure and social experience. In particular,economic activity entails economic subjects, and the concept of the migrantor immigrant has not so far invited an exploration into the formation of

economic subjectivity. Simple stories of contribution or cost, of economicsuccess or failure, substitute an after-the-fact account of the successesand/or failures of specific types of movements of peoples and funds acrossnational borders (they contribute; no they dont), for an analytic explorationof economic activity as a social process that is always-already constituted atthe boundaries of national and transnational formation of social subjects.

What we lack is an exploration of the mechanisms by which people makemeaning of the social networks they draw on and discourses through whichthey insert themselves into a particular social-economic formation; of the

material practices by which a group manages, or fails to legitimate its rightto a share of the distribution of resources and rewards in a body politic, orindeed of how a body politic is formed; and of the economic consequences ofthat ability or inability of a people to narrate themselves into the discoursesand networks that shape material life. Since the category immigrantslipstoo easily from a concept that highlights the social-structural aspects ofdaily experiences that shape material life to the asocial category of a bodythat traverses a national boundary, it does not automatically open the doorto richer analyses within economics.

Indeed, the only place where the concept of a communityof immigrants,rather than a congeries or aggregation of them, and of intergenerationalexperiences shaping economic interaction emerges in economics is whenthere is something akin to the ideas the term diaspora invokes. This takesplace in the context of examining not international, but national data.Here, when we look at different groups of racially or ethnically classifiedpeople within a nation relative to each other, we suddenly begin to markthe role of social experience as part of our analytic, and do so in waysthat are much more historically situated and nuanced than found in the

discussions of the cross-border movements of people across nations.The exploration of collective social experience and memory invoked inthese discussions tends to be far richer, and far more nuanced, than inanalyses of movements of people and funds across national boundaries,where the term economicstands infor narrating experiential subjects inour analyses. Thus, I find it fascinating that, within economics, it is atthe moment of noting the fracture of the national body, rather than innoting the transnational or cross-border aspects of social experience, thatthe subjective aspects of social life invoked by diaspora come into theirowna point taken up later in this article.

Thus, standing where I do, I find much useful about the term diaspora.Its immediate associations with social groups, networks of affiliation,



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historical moments of movement, structures of constraint and possibility,processes of meaning making, all make it less easy for analysts to deploythe term without immediately providing a more critical-historical analysis.It forces us to explicate and narrate the process of entry into a space, and

articulate the meaning of a relationship to another space, imagined or real,in fabricating social identities. In other words, unlike the way the termsmigrant and migration have entered economics, diaspora does the work ofhighlighting something about material life in a way that cannot be bypassed.After all, one could not really provide data on the numbers of diaspora inthe USA. The category automatically invites us to explore the social andhistorical contexts of a community, of where it came from, how it changesover time, how it fits in different spaces and locations, in a way the termimmigrant, for some reason, does not within economics. Going further, I

think the concept of diaspora may help us rethink the international andnational, whose status as analytical categories has not been subject tosustained critical reflection and revision within mainstream (and alas, alsomuch heterodox) economics.

Now this is, of course, simply a broad description of what I see as the layof the land, and no doubt a more scholarly excavation of the terrain wouldreveal the edges, the overlooked contributions which cross the intellectualboundaries that I mark here. But with all its overgeneralizations, itspurpose was simply to indicate the value of the term diaspora for opening

a space for a richer comprehension of economic subjectivity and for placingthe categories of national and international in economics under morecareful scrutiny. The term may not be adequate and, indeed, the rest ofmy reflection is all about why it is not. But it foregrounds something thatis bypassed both by the primarily quantificatory identification of groupsand flows twinned with overly thin concepts of the social subject usuallyfound in my discipline, and by the equally narrow concept of the economicas necessity or structural power that stands beyond or outside the dailyformation of meanings, networks, identities, and subjects utilized by many

scholars from other disciplines who wish to reinsert economic questionsinto social and cultural analysis. Thus, as a scholar who studies economicformations and subjectivity, I find the category diaspora both valuable andfascinating, because it foregrounds something that the category immigrant,as it entered my field, did not.3

The Diaspora at Home

The narratives of diaspora tell of how one came to move across variedtypes of boundaries, of how one grew up as a stranger at home, of thehistories through which one came to occupy this place between two



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nations, and of how one then navigates experience between two nations,two communities. This navigation may be tense, may invoke the need forchoosing, or may be comfortable. In response, and depending on context,one may then react by assimilating, or refusing to assimilate, or noting

that one need not assimilate at all as one is not confronted with a needto choose. And one then reads a politics through thisthose who choosemay be deemed immigrant success stories or failures in one narrative,those who refuse to choose may be deemed traitors or political resistersin another, and those who do not have to choose can either be seen asmodels of a cosmopolitan transnational consciousness or as members of anew global cultural elite.

(An important aside on terminologytoo important and long to dropinto the notes: cosmopolitanhas a specific valence in much theorizing about

national and cosmopolitan identities or sensibilities. So far and in the rest ofthis section, I use it in the sense used in much of the literature derived from19th-century European debates about cosmopolitanism and nationalismas the two opposing forms of consciousness that confront the Europeanemerging from provincialism. This is the sense in which cosmopolitanismis revived as a category and ethos today, as something that can provide analternate model to horrors of nationalism. But later in this reflection, I willbe using it in a different way, with the types of valences and meanings thatmark its common deployment in Indians description of modern cities. The

gap between these two types of meaning will in turn become important formy discussion of the category of cosmopolitanism as used in discussions ofdiasporic experience further along this reflection.)

To return to the thread of my reflection, what I wish to do here is toexplore the stories told and link them to my own, as a way to rethink thenarratives themselveswhat they angle to, and how they decode or narrateethical and agential subjects in being. In the process, I wish to complicatesome of the ways in which debates between the types of narrationbetweenassimilation as success or failure of agency, between multiple identities as

marks of elitism or cosmopolitanismhave made assumptions about howone may presumably read politics off of some simple economic registerwhich would let us know which narrative is somehow more true or moreradical.

An Indian raised in India, my childhood is very far removed from anyof the groups whose experiences the term diaspora narrates. Indeed,if any aspect of my life were to be seen as coming under that term, itwould be my life after I left India and went to the USA to get my graduatedegreethe trajectory of the PhD, the marriage to an Anglo-American,the green card, and the subsequent academic track career. Yet when Ireflect on writing about the diaspora, very little I read about the Indiandiaspora in America, about the NRI (non-resident Indian), speaks to my



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own life. If it speaks to me at all, it speaks to the social scientist in me, tothe experience I have of observing, of watching and hearing otherIndianstalk about their lives.

But the literature of diaspora speaks to me experientially when I

consider my years in Bombay. I felt a shock of recognition when, on comingto the USA, I began reading novelists describing what it was like to growup feeling trapped between two cultures, feeling a sense of displacementand dislocation, wondering where and how one belonged in a land thatboth was and was not ones homeland. I felt a shock of recognition when Iread stories about anxiety around marriage and beauty and looks, shameat ones parents when a teenager. I felt a shock of recognition when I sawstories of being torn between assimilation and maintenance of ones ownculture, when I read of intergenerational struggles played out between first-

generation immigrants and their second-generation children who wereborn and raised abroad, and when I read about the particularly genderednature of such struggles. I felt a shock of recognition when I learnt of theanxieties about language and learning Mother- and Other-tongues. Thesestories spoke to me of my experiences as an Indian growing up in IndiaIgrew up as a Tamil in Bombay.

My Father was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), inMaharashtra cadre. My parents were Tamil Iyers who were simultaneouslydevout and liberal in the particular way that R.K. Narayan has described

in his writings about Tamilians. The fifth of seven children, I was born inNagpur, while my father was still in the stage of his career where he wascollector in various districts, but I have no memory of this stage in my life.He was then posted to Delhi until I was about 4 years old, but here too, Ihave no memories, but rather, memories of being told stories by my parentsabout what that period was like and how I was then. What I rememberis Bombay, where I was until 18 years of age. At that point, my fatherwas posted to Delhi, and I followed along (with much bitterness, beingconvinced, as most Bombayites are, that Delhi was simply not civilized

enough to even be called a city when compared to Bombay), to get my BAat Miranda House College, Delhi University. After that came the move tothe USA for graduate school and my shift to NRI status, an identity I havenot been able to own.

Thus, from age 4 or so to 18, I was a Bombayite. An Indian in India,an urban brat from the milieu of the Indian administrative class, oneof the many Indians from all over the nation in that most multilingual,vibrant, and diverse of Indian cities, in the period from about 19689 tomid-1982. And yet, my shock of recognition on encountering the storiesof Asian AmericansJapanese, Chinese, Filipinas, Koreansin theUSA indicates that perhaps the Bombay of that time was not quite the



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multicultural polyglot melting pot we envisage or encounter in the novelsof Rushdie.

First, I must note that, while many children of the IAS seem to havea good sense of their parents role and standing in Indian society, I

absolutely did not. I think this is because I was lower down in the peckingorder of birthby the time I was old enough to make sense of socialstatus, we were in Bombay, and frankly, in Bombay, civil servants on thegovernment pay scales of the time did not rank high; businessmen did.Compared to my classmates in Convent of Jesus and Mary, Byculla, I wassort of lower middle class, which is not surprising given that my parentswere raising seven children on a single salary (later, my mother went backto get degrees in management, and taught at Bajaj Institute, and then wenton to teach at the Indian Institute of Public Administration when Appa

got posted to Delhi. But at that time Amma was not working or going tocollege).

Culturally too, we had no cachetmy Amma wore ethnic saris, butthey were not smart in terms of the aesthetic of that period. She worebasic polyester prints or cottons during the day, and dressed in heavyKanchipuram silk for formal events. While her Kanchipuram silks weregorgeous, there was no ethnic chic around yet to let me see their beauty.Appa and Amma, besides, spoke with Tamil accents, and did not seemmodernthe parties they went to were mainly official functions. We held

no elegant dinner parties at home, our dining room furniture and livingroom were definitely not fashionable (even living room furniture seemedto be more of a concession to the place than anything, since they were aslikely to put a paidown on the floor or provide a moda to guests as invitethem to sit on sofas). Our food was not proper anywaywe ate rasamandsambhar with our hands from steel plates, and, besides, idlis and dosas hadno larger cultural cachet then, let alone the varied kootus made by Amma.Who wanted to have smart parties and invite over friends when we couldnot really serve them proper things like samosas on those nice-looking

plates, and coffee would be given in a steel davara and kinnum and not in achina cup? It would have been embarrassing. Tamils were definitely not inin the Bombay of that time.

While today we look back at the slow Shiv Sena-ization of Bombayin its shift to Mumbai mainly in terms of a linear narrative of Hindufundamentalism, we should recollect that, at that time, the Shiv Senasprime target was TamilsTamil migrants coming in from drought-stricken areas were seen as taking away jobs from native Maharashtrians,Tamilians were seen as dominating government because of thepreponderance of Tamils and Bengalis in the IAS of that time (a legacy ofthe British educational systems in Calcutta and Madras Presidencies and



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the subsequent rise of these two communities within the administrativeand other apparatus).

If the Shiv Senas nativist expression of Maharashtrian identity was theimmediate context of my experience growing up Tamil in Bombay, the

legacy of the Northern-Hindi imagination of national identity, and thestruggles that the subsequent marginalization of Southern identities withinthe imagined boundaries of national culture generated in previous decadesformed the general backdrop to my experience. In general, there was (andremains) a tendency to imagine India in and through the experiences ofthe Northern-Hindi belt, and Southern cultural expression and experiencewas seen as foreign and slightly uncouth. As Tamil regional-identity-basedmovements resisted Northern hegemonic appropriation of the meaning ofthe national, they fused the issue of regional identity with anti-caste politics.

The high culture of the Congress-oriented Tamil Brahmins (of whom theIyer community I am from is one), and their elite status in Tamil Nadu, wasviewed as an extension of Northern control and hegemony in the South,especially in the politics of Periyar and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam[DMK]. This forms the context for the language riots and Periyars gestureof protest referred to later in the essay.

Thus, at the time, my Tamil identity could not find a space withinBombays multicultural, multilingual, cosmopolitan landscape, since it wasoutsider to both the national pan-Indian cultures that dominated, and the

regional Maharashtrian identities that sought to dominate, the landscapeand ethos of the city. We were not seen as particularly cultured eithersince we lacked the western polish which could have allowed us entry andwere dark to boot.

So, my memory of my Tamilness from this time is one of angst andshame combined with anxiety about how, as a Tamil, one could fit in withthe bigger Bombay culture. Some memories. This is sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. By this time I had shifted to Kendriya Vidyalaya (CentralSchool) in Navy Nagar, Colaba (KVC), which contributed to my sense of

awkwardness since, in the Bombay I wished to be part of, everyone else wasgoing to Cathedral and Fort Convent and St Annes. But what with sevenkids and rising costs of living and Amma just beginning to move back intothe labor market, we last four children went to the non-elite government-run Kendriya Vidyalaya in Navy Nagar with a mix of officers and sailorschildren (not too many officers kids, though there were still some in mydaytoday officers kids go to private schools and KVC is much less class-diverse than it was then). In hindsight, this was good for me, because itmade me have school friends from diverse class backgrounds. But then, itmade for anxiety, especially when I had to answer that invariable questionIndians ask each otherWhere do you go to school?



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In any case, this is from the time I was at Kendriya Vidyala, in 6th grade.By then, the language riots had subsided into memory, or so one hoped.But I remember sitting in class and having the teacher tell the class thatTamils like me burnt the Ramayana and Mahabharatha and did not want

to learn Hindi (a reference to Periyars gesture of protest, explained below).This was a Brahmin Hindi teacher from UP, highly fastidious and quitecasteist-Hindu fundamentalist, who was particularly abusive toward thetwo Muslim boys in the class (physical punishment was not uncommon atgood old Kendriya Vidyalayaone professor was particularly notoriousboth for meting out punishment of this type and for copping a feel fromgirls on pretext of patting them complimentarily on the back). Further, ourHindi teacher noted, since Brahmins were really Northern Aryans, Tamilswere really all Scheduled Caste.

The ironies and confusions this sort of engagement created are deliciouslyfunny in hindsight. For example, I had no real idea about my caste. I mean,I knew we were Tamil Iyers, but in Bombay, what did that mean? I hadno context to make sense of the caste labels, and besides, the things thatmay have triggered in me some type of recognition, such as my parentstendency to wear the caste marks and do pooja on holy days, were notreally rituals that provided much meaning in the flats of Bombay. Rather, inBombay, they marked us off as indubitably rural-not-cool-too-unmodernfor words. And since one tended to get simplistic analyses (which remain

as tropes to this day) about urbanity, modernity, and progress lining up onone side, and rurality, tradition, backwardness on the other, these rituals,which seemed to not be markers of the urban, hip, and modern, couldnot really be identified by me as the marks of privilege that I knew casteindicated. Besides, we all knew that it was the poor and backward typeswho had lots of kids, and here I was, one of seven in that Hum-do-hamare-do world. So for a week or so after my Hindi teachers proclamations onTamils, I went around anxious about my Scheduled Caste/Scheduled TribeIyer background. I also note today with amusement the sudden desire of

people not very unlike the Hindi teacher for whom the Aryan invasionstory was necessary and good to show the superiority of Northernersover the Tamilian types, suddenly arguing against it once the stake is aclaim to indigeneity. Not to note the irony of Periyars gesture of strugglein destroying a portrait of Rama, deployed against elite Brahmins likethose of my background, in turn invoked to suggest the illegitimacy of mypresence in that classroom in Bombay.

Other memories. I am around 13 or 14. I remember telling my motherto shush because she talked loudly in that Tamil accent when at the store.Desperately wanting to not look Tamil, I recollect giggling with delightwhen, with a friend, I pretended to be Gujarati and she Sindhi when we



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met some girls at some event I now forget. Around 15, I remember goingto a beauty parlor with my sister, and feeling terrible about myself as shepreened, since the beautician paid her the highest complimentTamil,really? Why, I never would have guessed, you are not ugly or anything, you

know, not dark, no thickish features, and none of that curly Mallu hair.In the quick shift from Tamil to Mallu (Malayali) looks, the beauticianwas simply reflecting a general Northern sense of spaceanything Southwas an indistinct region of Madrasis.

An earlier memorythis from Byculla Convent (till 4th grade) and alsofrom Scholar High School where I spent a year (5th grade) before movingon to Kendriya Vidyalaya. I remember schoolyard refrains of angada-pongada and idli-sambhar, combined with exaggerated gestures indicatinghow utterly uncouth the Tamil eating habits were (this entailed a gesture of

licking the hand from the elbow all the way up and then smacking the lips onthe fingers), which would make me try and hide my lunch or eat it separately,and make me pray devoutly that my mother would stop giving me the damnidlis for lunch and, instead, make those nice sandwiches. (Sandwiches wereat the top of the pecking order as those were anglicized/civilized.) Or, failingthat, at least move to reasonable Northern or Maharashtrian foods likechapatior poha. Thankfully, this form of teasing was not evident in KendriyaVidyalaya, whose student body was composed mainly of children from thenaval colony to which the school was attached. Hence, it was less dominated

by the cultural modes and tropes of general Bombay culture (though as myexperiences attest, it too reflected the general Northern-Hindi attitudes toSouthern identities in the national imagination of the period). And as theteasing disappeared, so did the anxiety about my lunch box.

On the gender front, the sense of being dark was completely fused in mymind with being Tamil, and given the racial hierarchies of Indian beautynorms, a source of much sorrow. Faced with an inability to be both a full-fledged Bombay-ite and a Madrasi, I retaliated with class and languagemyEnglish became highly anglicized as all traces of the South got suppressed

in my self-presentation, and I in turn mocked vernies who had tauntedme for being Madrasi, as I firmly jumped into an imagined cosmopolitanmodernity of western clothes and English movies, desperately seeking tojoin the cool folks of the Bombay that Rushdie reinvokes in his novels.

Cosmopolitan was very much a word my friends and I used to thinkabout this identity we desired and sought to adopt. But our understandingof this word had slightly different meanings from the term as used in theliterature on European debates about cosmopolitanism versus nationalism.Cosmopolitan meant urban and urbane, not provincial. We thoughtof places like Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras, and especially Bombay, ascosmopolitan. We also saw it as outward-looking, looking beyond narrow,traditional confines. The taunt vernie itself derived from the contraction



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of the word vernacular, and meant the very opposite of everythingcosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan meant being chic and hip and cool, and sincelooking outward pretty much meant looking westwardto us, this also meantwearing westernized clothing, speaking English, being what we thought

to be as modern (which was practically synonymous with westernizedin our vocabulary). Thus, in meaning something that was not regional orprovincial, something that looked outward and beyond the confines of anarrow regional identity, there were definite parallels to the Europeanusage. But it also did not quite mean a transnational or supranationalidentity as in the European usage, a point I return to in the next section. Inany case, this cosmopolitan identity which was especially associated withcities like Bombay was one which I very much wished to enter and be partof, and tried to adopt with a vengeance, though my Tamilness was explicitly

something that could not be part of this cosmopolitanism.If in the public sphere of cosmopolitan Bombay, cosmopolitanism was

reserved for the Parsi, Sindhi, Gujarati communities (the fairer ones, thericher business communities), and Tamils were not really part of that modernspace, then in the private sphere of the home, I look back and recognize myparents anxieties about culture, language, and child-rearing. My siblings andI went through the standard rituals of cultural transmission for a whiletheCarnatic vocal lessons for my sisters, veena for me with a small period ofbharatanatyam thrown in. (The initial efforts at cultural transmission were

gendered, since my older brothers were not put through the education intoclassical music and dance as my sisters and I werelater, my younger brothershad a stint with Carnatic violin, but this was more at their own initiative.)My father and mother would take us to Shanmukhananda auditorium, along trip from Churchgate where the government flats we lived in were, tosee music, dance, theater provided by the Tamil Sangham. While much ofthis was about exposing us to classic Tamil culture, I have vivid memoriesalso of playsKumarans mythological dramas enacted to fabulously grandsets, and the pleasures of Chos drama. And the periodic trips to Matunga

and Chembur to visit relatives in Tamil-enclave communities and purchaseproper coffee, and sambhar powder and rasam powder and mulaghai podiparallel tales of Chinatown Sundays in the USA.

Varied efforts to teach me Tamil remained inadequate. While I canmanage to understand Tamil and speak it enough to make myself understood,literary Tamil eludes me, and if the conversation gets too complicated, Iam lost. I cannot read or write it, my accent and grammar are abysmal.Every so often we would take the trip home to Madras (now Chennai),and I would face culture shockin Bombay I was Tamil, but here I wasnot. I did not speak the language well, and when I spoke it, was an objectof much ridicule. Elders routinely lamented to my parentsinvariably inour presenceabout how terribly western we girls had become, especially



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since we declined to wear pavada chokka despite a brief attempt by myparents to enforce that on us at least for family functions. Once we turnedabout 1314, it was pants and midis for us, please (this was in the days beforesalwar-kameez and churidar were raised to the status of a national dress

worn by Indian women generally). I knew almost nothing about variousTamil functions and their meanings, despite the fact that my parentsdid gollu every year and made us get up for oil baths and kaka-podi onappropriate ritual days. After being mocked a few times, I retaliated in theonly way I couldI wore my ignorance proudly, as a badge of a calculatedlydifferent, more modern identity. And above all, I remember the endlessdiscussions about marriage and inter-caste marriage and arranged marriageand love marriage, and what-ifs about Punjabi boys with parents andrelatives and friends (if for Northerners everything South of an uncertain

marker around the Deccan is Madrasi, then for those in the South,everything above some equally uncertain marker above Karnataka wasPunjabi).

Being raised Tamil in Bombay was not all about exclusion and marginalityof coursewith all its exclusions, Bombay was still, after all, a vibrant,polyglot, cosmopolitan city, and inadequately cool or not, we were stillBombayites who aspired to its cosmopolitan identity. My parents lack ofsuccess in making us into good Tamil girls was partly due to Bombay, andpartly due to the fact that they genuinely cared for their children and lacked

the peculiarly stark authoritarian streak that would have been necessaryto enforce conservative gender conformity in their daughters. It was aspace where, though efforts were constantly made to reinforce a fairly rigidconcept of being well behaved and good, we also managed to find theroom to resist, maneuver, and rebel.

The rebellious identities we adopted, of being modern and smart,were wonderfully freeing and enabling. We cut our hair (I grew it backlater, once fashion morphed to longer hair, but I wore it loose and retaineda fringe in the front to mark it off from the traditional long hair of good

Southern girls). We went to dance parties and developed a healthy disdainfor the good girls who were held up as models of decorous behavior worthyof emulation. And all my parents really enforced successfully was fairlystrict discipline on schoolwork and study. Their efforts at cultural controlwere loosening over time, with periodic efforts at enforcement re-emergingwhenever we had relatives visiting or when there were family functions.Further, our circle of friends was much more diverse than it would havebeen had we been raised in Tamil Nadu. Not to say Madras did not havesmart girls with short hair wearing pants or diverse groups, but wewouldnot have been part of that world had we been raised there.

As I re-examine my anxieties and resentments at my parents effortsto enforce proper gendered Tamil behavior through the lens of diasporic



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experience, I can, in hindsight, recognize that they were doing what millionsof immigrants in other contexts have doneseeking in their own ways toperform an act of cultural transmission to the next generation. They were inBombay, but as Tamilians in Bombay, not as Bombay-ites. And it is unclear

if, back then, they could really have been or become Bombay-ites, given theclimateat that time, Tamils were not one of the imagined communitieswelcomed into Bombays cosmopolitan consciousness.

When I presented this talk, Paula Richman also noted that a Tamilfriend once told her that the biggest sense of being in a foreign land heexperienced was when he went to Delhi. In many ways, then, my experiencein Bombay is a classic immigrant/diaspora experience. We were membersof one community entering another where the terms and conditions of ourentry were fraught and disputed. For many Tamil speakers who knew little

Hindi or Marathi, the language surrounding us was alien. The flowers forpooja differed, the vegetables and spices we used were unavailable, and theway we lived our lives, decorated our homes, arranged our living rooms,spoke, dressed, and looked marked our difference from the surroundingcommunities. For women of an earlier generation, such as my grandmotherwho spoke nothing but Tamil, the shock of a sudden need to relearn how tonavigate the public sphere and realign public sphere and home life wouldrequire great cultural readjustment and, in turn, make the formation ofsubcommunities, of immigrant enclaves if you will, necessary for material

and psychic survival. My family had the context of the administrativeservices, where other women and children and families were similarly onthe move. For those without that living context, the spaces of Matungaand Chembur and Andheri in Bombay, of R.K. Puram in Delhi, acted asspaces where communities could try to reknit the fabric of meaning andconnection, and enact cultural transmission in strange locations.

Other Diasporas

Today, I find that my nephews and nieces, Tamils of a different generationentering the spaces of Delhi and Bombay, do not face the types of anxietieswe did. There of course remain anxietiesthe NorthSouth differencesremain part of the tensions they navigate, particularly when it comes toissues of marriage, no doubt. But their valence, and the nature of thestruggles around identity, is less strainedone can be Tamil andhip, pretty,cool, cultured, and cosmopolitan! I am of course happy for them, for theself-identities and self-images open to this generation. But somewhere in melurks a questionhow did this shift take place? I may be wrong, but I suspectthat as a particular type of national identity got forged, Tamils are nowmore firmly part of the national imagination of Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari.



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Whereas earlier, regional identities had difficulty absorbing Tamils evenin cosmopolitan spaces like Bombay and Delhi, todays Mumbai andDelhi can absorb Chennai because the cosmopolitan identity is no longersimply made up of a sanctioned subgroup of regional identities expressing

their modern or non-provincial nature. Rather, regional and national-cosmopolitan identities resolve their differences through the register ofanother difference. A new urban trans-Indian consciousness and identity isforged that transcends the regional differences of the type that plagued myown childhood through the margins of its difference from Muslim identity,or of difference from a rural, non-elite non-cosmopolitan identity whichis class- and caste-coded.

The emergence of this new type of national-cosmopolitan identity marksa break with some of the more traditional writing on diaspora, especially

as coming from western writings about diaspora and cosmopolitanism. Asnoted, in India, regional identities would be closer to identities based onstates within a federalist system of national governmentand the ethnic-lingual histories of such regional identities are as strong as the histories ofethno-national identity in Europe. Given this, in India, national identitythen would be pan-regional, an identity that would seek to assert both agreater commonality andgreater ease of movement within and across thevaried regions or states. Such greater ease of movement across culturalboundaries came to be called cosmopolitan or pan-national in Europe

simply because the regional and the national were so closely aligned inEuropean experience. But in India, it became a basis for an imaginedmodern nationalconsciousness. It is in this sense then that cosmopolitanism,as we understood it, both was outward-looking (pan-Indian) and yet notsupranationalthough it looked westward, it did not do so in terms of anantithesisto the nation, but as part of the effort to form a modernIndiannational sensibility.

If so, then Tamilian entry into the cosmopolitan modern imagination oftodays urban Indian centers complicates some of the binary renderings of

diasporic experience discussed in the section on the Value of Diaspora.Neither a tale of resistance nor assimilation, the incorporation of Tamilsinto the broader cosmopolitan identities of cities like Bombay and Delhi isa tale of rearticulation of the national. If the Shiv Sena had not shifted frombeing anti-Tamil to being anti-Muslim, and if we Tamils had not in turnacquiesced in the renarrativizing of struggles over identity in the shift fromBombay-to-Mumbai (never mind that many of the poor Tamil migrantswere not Hindu), could my siblings, nephews, and nieces have found it somuch easier to enter into the national imagination of the cosmopolitan city,to be Tamil in Mumbai as compared to being Tamil in Bombay?

If my experience in Bombay complicates the concept of the diasporaby marking one at home, the structural and historical factors that inform



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how it is now easy to be both Tamil and hip-modern-cool-Bombayitecomplicate the efforts to read off politics from simple stories ofassimilation or resistance. Tamils today do not assimilatethey do notneed to. Yet this can hardly called an act of resistance. Nor can success

of managerial and professional classes of Tamils in Bombay/Mumbai beattributed to their assimilation or lack thereof. Instead, a structural shift,the parameters of which are politically troubling, opened the space forthis freedom in identity formation for a new generation of Tamils outsideTamil Nadu.

As noted, today, it is easy enough to be both Tamilian and part of themodern, cosmopolitan identity of Mumbai. But we need to think carefullyabout the class and caste locations of my narrative. Surely, I sought tonavigate and constitute my identity in the face of anti-Tamil sentiments

in the Bombay of that time. But the Shiv Sena outrage against Tamilsand the first calls of Maharashtra for Maharashtrians arose in reactionnot only to people like me and my parents, but in response as well tothe many poor Tamils flooding the city from drought-stricken areas towork as coolies. They were poor workers swelling the ranks of Bombaysslum dwellers. I would see them when I went for walks on Chowpattyand Marine Drive, selling Narial Pani, but felt no kinship with them, nosense of we are Tamil. And it was not to them, but to similarly placededucated professional Tamils that my parents turned when they sought to

tell me of Tamil culture. Not for me the Tamil culture of folk songs andammans and people revering Periyar and Annadurai and MGR, but theTamil culture of high Brahmin ritual, of high classical music and dance,of R.K. Narayan and C. Rajagopalachari. This divide persists. Thesepoor migrants or/and their children cannot enter Mumbais cosmopolitancultures as my nephews and nieces can. They do not manage to narratetheir equally legitimate Tamilness into the Tamilness that enters the pan-national urban-cosmopolitan cultural imagination.

If diaspora marks the experience of being an outsider to a national

body, then these may also be seen as other diasporas. The children ofpoor Tamil migrants may mirror my story of movement across regionalboundaries. But that makes for no automatic common cause even in thenarration of cultural identity and Tamilness, since the codes by which aregional identity enters the national cosmopolitan imagination open up aspace for me that necessarily leaves them out. And Muslims in Mumbaifound that when Bombay became Mumbai, they were suddenly narratedinto the experiential status that diaspora marks when coded as thestranger-within. Theymay not have crossed the border. The border crossedthem.

This, then, marks my tension with the concept. Diaspora is useful formarking the experience of subject-formation, for narrating a subject into



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being, for highlighting the social and structural parameters of power withina given social-cultural formation, and for locating cultural experience withinthe tangled lines of power, for marking vectors of being inside or outside,belonging or not belonging. And yet, the term is too tightly tied to pre-given

boundaries and borders of nation states to make it fully responsive to thequestion of how boundaries are formed and how one becomes a memberor outsider to a social space. But the types of exclusions and navigationsthe term highlights, the recompositions and fusions of identities it bringsto our attention, can be found withina nation as groups move across it andtransverse varied internal boundaries of regional and lingual identity. Andthe movement may be a structural displacement or relocation of an identityvis--vis the imagined boundaries of national identity, so that experientially,religious minorities may have intense forms of similar efforts and tensions

around cultural identity of the type marked by the concept of diaspora evenif they do not physically move.

Further, once we mark these varied conjunctural locations of diasporicexperience, we find we cannot even come up with simple ethical rankingsaround assimilationresistance, cosmopolitanismnationalism, and so on.How we note a moment of exclusion and belonging and rework it, evenhow we evaluate a particular type of response to the politics of identitythat diaspora throws in sharp relief, turns out to have the economistsmaddening non-answer of it depends.

Conclusion

I suggested earlier than it was mainly at the moment of thinking aboutthe relationship of groups to a nationalbody politic that we actually seeeconomics and economists talk in terms of historic location, subjectivity,and experience. My exploration of the concept of diaspora, and suggestionthat we could find the experience of diaspora at home, through my example

of Tamils in Bombay, indicates that perhaps what the concept diasporapicks up and presents as a specifically transnational problem is a generalproblem of the nation state.

The question that diaspora orients us to is the question of belonging andcommunity. But the too-close identification of diaspora with nationallydefined ethnicities naturalizes the national body of origin in the effort torenarrate self into the new national body. It similarly posits as automaticallyharmonious, and as a contribution to the space of origin, any andall relations to the national body one no longer resides in. This insight,of course, is hardly new. My suggestion of looking at diasporas at homepushes us further to ask what is being naturalized in the imagination ofnation both back home and abroad. This excavation, if combined with a



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concrete exploration of the ways in which such narratives shape networksof affiliation, modes of legitimating social membership within a nationalbody, and the concrete organization of material life enabled or disabled forspecific groups on the move vis--vis not only geopolitical but also social-

cultural borders, can help us elaborate the types of analyses that can, finally,let us come to a more nuanced, situated, and historicized understanding ofthe economics of migration.

GLOSSARY

ammans: local deities, usually worshiped by non-elite caste groups in the South

angada-pongada: meaningless syllables used by Northerners to mimic thesound of Tamil speakers

Annadurai: a key leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), was ChiefMinister of Tamil Nadu when the DMK came to power in the state

bharatanatyam:classical dance form associated with the South/Tamil Nadu

carnatic: one of the two broad schools into which Indian classical music isdivided. Carnatic is used to refer to the tradition of classical music from theSouth, Hindustani to refer to the tradition of classical music from the North

chapati:wheat-based flat bread, more common in the North than in the South,

especially less common in Tamil Nadu which traditionally has rice rather thanwheat-based cuisine

churidar:a more fitted form of pants worn instead ofsalwar. Also now nationallypopular, once associated with the North

davara:a flat-bottomed steel cup with a rim and no handle, used with a kinnumto serve hot drinks in the South

dosa: a rice-and-lentil crepe

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam:regional party in Tamil Nadu, historically assertedDravidian (Tamilian) identity and rights for oppressed classes and castes

gollu: a Southern Indian festival involving a display of dolls

hum-do-hamare-do: literally, We two, our two. The national slogan for familyplanning, urging people to limit family size as part of the Indian states projectof modernization and population control

idli:a steamed rice-and-lentil cake

Iyer:a subcaste of Tamil Brahmin

kaka-podi: a South Indian ritual of feeding the birds to help the souls ofancestors

Kanchipuram:city in Southern India (also Kanjeevaram) that is famous for itssilks



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kinnum: steel tumbler with a rim and no handle, used with a davara to servecoffee and tea

kootu:Southern Indian vegetable dish

MGR: M.G. Ramachandran, charismatic film star and Chief Minister of theState of Tamil Nadu, a key figure in the Dravida movement and the DravidaMunnetra Kazhagam

moda:a round bamboo stool with straw-mat woven seats used for sitting

mulaghai podi: a spice powder made with chillis, roasted lentils, and otherspices

narial pani:coconut water

pai:a straw or reed mat put on the floor, often rolled out for sitting on

pavada-chokka:a form of dress worn by younger girls in Tamil Nadu

Periyar:a key figure in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

poha:a common dish of flattened rice flakes especially popular in Maharashtra

pooja:ritual prayer

rasam: a variety of Southern Indian stew made of lentils and spices, usuallytamarind-based (usually lighter and more sour thansambhar)

salwar-kameez:tunic and loose pants worn by Indian women. Now nationallypopular clothing, traditionally associated with the North.

sambhar: a tamarind-based Southern Indian stew made of lentils and spices(usually contains vegetables, thicker than rasam)

samosa:deep-fried pastry pockets with filling, a popular Northern Indian snack

veena: stringed instrument, like a lute or sitar

vernie:derogatory local slang, used to poke fun at those who were seen as notwestern or fashionable. Based on the contraction of vernacular, referring tothose who speak in or exhibit vernacular (rather than English/modern) tongueor habits

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This reflection is based on a talk given to the 2006 Center for South Asian StudiesSpring symposium of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is included in thecollection emerging from that conference. My deepest thanks to Monisha Dasguptaand Charu Gupta for help with numerous drafts of this reflection. Thanks also toS. Shankar and the organizers of the conference, and to Paula Richman, AyeshaKhan, Brij Lal, Kamala Visweshwaran, and Sharmila Rudrappa for their commentsand suggestionsall errors and idiosyncrasies are, of course, my own.



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NOTES

1. Now Mumbai, but since my reflection is on experiences taking place before thechange in the citys nomenclature, and indeed entails reflection on the politics

that led to the change in nomenclature itself as a context for rethinking themeaning of diaspora, I retain Bombay through most of my discussion, switchingto Mumbai when appropriate.

2. The occasional note or reference that intersperses the writing is not scholarly inthe sense of providing fully rounded academic background and references, buttakes the form of the aside, providing nuance or additional background as withthe interjection in the previous note.

3. It is of course true that outside economics, the term immigrant also worked,and continues to work, to highlight experiential subjects, and so my discussionmay sound unfair to those who work via the term immigrant without my field.

But for whatever reasonperhaps precisely because of its angling of experienceto national boundaries and bordersthe term immigrant was not able to focusattention on the experiential aspects of economic subjectivity within economics,except for the question of the national body politic, as noted. This is why I turnto the term diaspora. To folks outside economics, if I use these terms in waysthat seem to obliterate distinctions that are of importance to them, I plead theexigencies of disciplinary discourse.

REFERENCE

Danby, Colin (2004) Contested States, Transnational Subjects, in Eiman Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela (eds) Postcolonialism Meets Economics, pp. 25370. New York: Routledge

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

S. Charusheela is Associate Professor of Womens Studies at the Universityof Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research focuses on the intersection between

postcolonial thought and economics, with particular attention to theepistemology, ontology and ethics of feminist development economics.Recent publications include Structuralism and Individualism in EconomicAnalysis (Routledge 2005) and Postcolonialism Meets Economics (co-edited with Eiman Zein-Elabdin, Routledge 2004). An active member ofthe Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the InternationalAssociation for Feminist Economics, she has served on the editorial boardsof Rethinking Marxism and Feminist Economics. [email: [email protected]]

the diaspora at home

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