The modern migration of people from the Indian subcontinent to further lands begins in 1834 when the British relocated Indian peasants to the plantations of Mauritius. Until 1916, about five million subcontinentals came to the plantations of the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Fiji, South and East Africa. These folks came to work and live in hostile conditions which, in the Caribbean, came to be known as hell (narak) with the living quarters known as the ghost lines (bhut lien). England, for the subcontinentals, became a destination after decolonization. Gujaratis, Punjabis and Bengalis moved to the small island to work in foundries and textile mills, to drive trains and buses, to open shops for the workers and to provide some services for the English. By the mid-1980s, the Census estimates that about 1.2 million South Asians live in England. Southall, a town at the outskirts of London and besides Heathrow Airport, is the Asian capital of Britain and, as Baumann demonstrates, it is seen as a ghetto from which its residents wish to flee (hence, he argues, there is a high rates of female employment to gain capital to facilitate spatial-class mobility, p. 52). While many migrants are visible and successful, such as Swaraj Paul who arrives with money already in his pocket, those who came from the working-class and peasantry continue to struggle to make a living in England as well as to make their lives in England. In recent years, the study of overseas South Asians exploded and before a review of Baumann's outstanding book is possible, it behooves me to assess the reasons for this plentitude of scholarship and commentary.

The early working-class migration interested the homeland as early as 1898, when clerics of the Arya Samaj went to the plantations to inculcate the culture of spirituality into the lives of the subcontinentals. In the 1910s, Indian nationalists, led by Gandhi and the Ghadarites, took up the cause of the migrants and fought to end indenture, seen in general for its poor working and living conditions, but also for its mistreatment of women (the protest on the latter score came in a familiar patriarchal register -- notably in Totaram Sandhya's 1914 Fiji Dvip Mein Mere Ikkis Varsh). Just before India's independence, Nehru greeted the Indians of South Africa with the plea for internationalism and not narrow tribalism (the policy of the Apartheid regime):

The struggle in South Africa is...not merely an Indian issue. It concerns all Asians whose honour and rights are threatened, and all the people of Asia should, therefore, support it. It concerns ultimately the Africans who have suffered so much by racial discrimination and suppression. It is a struggle for equality of opportunity for all races and against the Nazi doctrine of racialism. Therefore, the Indians in South Africa should help in every way and cooperate with the Africans
--Hindustan Times, 4 September 1946.

The subcontinentals overseas remained important, but scholarship on the various fragments of the diaspora came slowly and around a few single themes. For instance, apart from the historians such as Hugh Tinker who mapped out the trajectory of the migration, anthropologists, linguists and theologians studied the overseas community with this problematic in mind: how have the migrants altered or preserved their culture? The book that comes to mind is The Asians in East Africa: Jayhind and Uhuru by Agyananda Bharati (Chicago, 1972), but there are many such books which assume that there is such a homogenous thing as Indian culture (or in many cases, Hindu culture) and that the Indians in diaspora can be tested against this template to see if they are indeed authentic, or how they keep their traditions alive. This approach continues to be popular and forms the basis for Baumann's critique.

The recent explosion of interest in the overseas subcontinentals comes for the following reasons:

• After 1967-73, the Indian government sought various means to raise finances for its strained balance of payments. During the Emergency, the Planning Ministry asked the government to take steps to encourage investment by non-resident Indians. The notion of the NRI simultaneously emerged as a cash cow as well as a security threat (notably when Swaraj Paul began to buy shares of Escorts and DCM in 1983). As RBI Governor in 1982, Manmohan Singh noted that the NRIs have accumulated large resources of investible funds and since the NRIs have a sustained interest in India's development, these funds must be attracted to India.
• Various important political developments, whose conjuncture brought sustained attention to certain territories, such as East Africa (briefly, after the Idi Amin 1972 expulsions, but soon this was forgotten), Fiji (after the Rabuka coup of 1987), South Africa (as the apartheid state is dismantled and notable people of Indian descent gain publicity as high-ranking figures in the Mandela regime, such as Mac Maharaj and Jay Naidoo), the Caribbean (notably, when Cheddi Jagan returned to power in Guyana and when Basdeo Panday, PM of Trinidad & Tobago, recently visited India in a big homecoming), of Canada/UK (after the 1984 elaboration of Khalistani politics) and of the USA (after the 1991 liberalisation which turned attention to the US in general, but also to the number of professionals who work or once worked in important agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF as well as to those who send substantial funds to the VHP efforts).
• The emergence of a generation of scholars of Indian descent born and raised in the territories of the diaspora, such as Brij Lal's Girmitiyas (Canberra, 1983).
• The formation of pastiche cultures in England, notably the creation of Bhangra and remix music (whose ambassadors are Bally Sagoo and Apache Indian), alert scholars who are interested in cultural complexity, notably those who are attentive to the demise of the old anthropological paradigm which, at its worst moments, claimed that a people have a culture which is bounded, discrete and without internal contradictions.
• The desire among some Euro-American scholars not to learn foreign languages and to travel amongst peoples in distant lands; these same scholars can now study difference within their homelands, particularly difference which speaks English.
• Lastly, the development of transnational studies in Euro-America as an institutional location to undermine the nationalism of the disciplines encouraged funding and support for students interested in issues which cut across national and geo-political lines. The study of the marginal diaspora facilitates anthropologists who are rightly anxious about the relevance of the idea of the field and cultural studies folks in search of a means to critique the resilient idea of the nation in Euro-America. These scholars engage with the diaspora as if it is marginal, a thing which does not belong -- such accounts fail to take into consideration the immense pride and joy evinced by certain migrants and their offspring for the new nation (a suggestion which is politically embarrassing only if we assume that a community acts like a stereotypical anthropological tribe).

Which brings us to the heart of Baumann's thesis: that culture and community are strategic concepts which people bring to bear in different locations for different specific (political) reasons, but, nevertheless, that "culture-making is not an ex tempore improvisation, but a project of social continuity placed within, and contending with, moments of social change" (p. 31). Baumann argues that multi-racist states like the UK produce a dominant discourse which reifies cultures and then yokes a culture to a reified community which is judged according to its adherence to its own norms. This is the way in which an outdated anthropology studied tribes -- a Maasai acts in a particular way because s/he is a Maasai. People who live in the midst of this dominant discourse, produce a demotic discourse, which wends its way around the community-culture nexus since it cannot fully explain the complexity of their lives, such as the bonds of neighbourliness across communities. The dominant discourse, he argues, "is based upon, and reinforces, a denial of the cross-cutting social cleavages that characterize plural societies" (p. 28). The masses obtain a "discursive competence" (p. 144), as they are able to both engage and disengage with the dominant treatment of culture as an ethnic heirloom of a reified community. Baumann's book is an extended assessment of the ways in which people use the dominant discourse and how they disrupt its cosy and racist logic. While the idea that a people have a discrete culture is not new, what is precisely novel about Baumann's book is that he demonstrates this through an analysis not just of the lives of Sikhs in Southall (a tempting study itself), but of the ways in which the five principal communities regard the nexus and their relations between each other: the Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims Afro-Caribbeans and the Whites. Interspersed in the text is a discussion of the other cultural communities, such as feminists, socialists and the youth, whose various forms of internationalism self-consciously bring the dominant discourse to crisis, while the mundane experience of the masses objectively troubles the culture-community connection.

Baumann does not dismiss the reification of culture, since it is a veritable social fact in Southall as elsewhere (p. 107). One of our modern developments is the mobilization of the idea that a people have a culture which is singular. This idea is useful for those who claim to be community leaders and who use the culture community connection to supervise those who dissent and to train youth. Given the context of racial discrimination and of the crisis of social life in Euro-America, overseas subcontinentals are nervous to allow state educational channels and the wilds of the streets to manage the instruction of children. These elements find their solace in those agents of cultural conservatism, such as the VHP and the Jamaat, which flog an homogenous type of culture, identified solely with religion. Such a use of culture is not unique to the diaspora for it can be found within the boundaries of the Indian Republic wherein the culture-community nexus becomes the leitmotif of Hindutva's culture war.

Baumann introduces the issue of resources to the core of the notion of community -- "community has come to serve as shorthand for a category of people in need of civic resources and reliant upon the brokerage of community leaders" (p. 71). In other words, certain people mobilize the idea of community in order to gain resources from a state which builds loyalty from its people on the basis of its largess and who tests its equitable generosity on the basis of the amount it gives to each community. Hence, the multi-racist state will provide monies for Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, etc.; these various groups now come to battle each other for access to funds. South Asians, notably chary of being raced (in order to both refuse the idea of race which was levied against Asians during colonialism and after, but also to refuse to acknowledge linkages with those of African descent for various racist reasons), willingly solicit funds on the basis of ethnicity-race. Asian will operate as a corporatist category, since it is used to gain resources for segements of the community (a designation, now, forged to attract funds). In the US, the Census classified Indians as white from 1940 to 1977. In 1974, the Association of Indians in America successfully lobbied the state to classify Indians as a minority not to claim solidarity with Blacks and Latinos, but to benefit from ethnic quotas set by the state in its activist bid to demolish structural inequalities. The community is reified, in this example, as a means for gain.

Others craft notions of community in order to create wide solidarities in order to combat the multi-racist states and the rot of racism in society. Baumann offers a sense of the socialist and feminist visions of community-based internationalism. He refers to the Indian Workers Association (which deserves its own study), the Southall Monitoring Group and Southall Black Sisters, all groups which use various forms of internationalism as organizing principles. In most studies, Baumann writes, "it is decidely strange [that] no one local seems capable of fundamental dissent and everyone seems engaged in reproducing the same, indiscriminately shared, ethnic culture" (p. 158). Internationalist peoples carry a culture of conviction which is at odds with those who engage culture with community; such internationalist folks, Baumann shows, are not anti-traditional, but they draw their sustenance from alternative traditions within the broad sweep of what might be called the history of the complex community. Thus, the execution of Uddam Singh in July 1940, the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in 1976, the killing of Blair Peach during the Southall riots of 23 April 1979, the Chix/Grunwick/Imperial Typewriter strikes in 1974-80, and the campaigns run by Southall Black Sisters to protest the killing of Mrs. Dhillon and her children in 1980, the virginity tests of the British state, the death of Krishna Sharma in 1984 and the murder of Balwant Kaur in 1985 -- all provide the tradition of struggle to the socialist Asians. These events provide the rich tradition of struggle which provides those with a culture of conviction to continue the fight against bigotry and capitalism especially since Indians succeed in Euro-America on the backs of Blacks. While Baumann does not take up this issue, the terms for such a discussion are set by the book. One can only hope that Cambridge will decide to release an Indian edition which will not be too costly.

References:

1. Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic, London, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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