Context:

Since the High-Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora report (2001-02), the term ‘diaspora’ has gained traction in policy debates.

India’s international diaspora, now estimated at over 30 million, has been widely studied on its various aspects. However, the concept of diaspora need not be confined to crossing national borders.

In India, terms like pravasi and videshi often apply to long-distance internal migrants as well. For example, Odia workers in Surat describe their relocation as going “abroad.”

A diasporic experience arises from crossing significant cultural zones, whether within or outside national boundaries. Yet, compared to the extensive literature on international migration, research on internal diasporas remains limited.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• Internal Diasporas in India
• Patterns of India’s Internal Diasporas
• Cultivation of Diasporic Identities
• Rethinking Diaspora: Beyond Borders

Internal Diasporas in India

• Internal diasporas differ from simple migration as they reflect both historical and recent population movements that have established enduring cultural and linguistic communities.
• For example, while Census data in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, records few Gujarati ‘migrants’, the language Census identifies over 60,000 Gujarati speakers—a number larger than India’s diaspora in many countries.
• Like the Indian diaspora in Mauritius, which originated from 19th-century migration, such communities emerge from layers of past and present movements.
• A recent study in Sociological Bulletin estimated internal and international diasporas through language data.
• Strikingly, while India’s international diaspora is about 30 million, the internal diaspora—measured by dispersed language groups across states—totals over 100 million, highlighting a far more significant domestic diasporic experience.

Patterns of India’s Internal Diasporas

• Among Indian language groups, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Tamil are the most dispersed (over 10% relative to their size), followed by Telugu and Gujarati.
• Hindi speakers (including Bhojpuri and Marwari) form the largest diaspora overall but are less dispersed proportionally, while Marathi, Kannada, and Bengali are the least dispersed.
• Internal diasporas also show a distinction between ‘old’ communities, such as Gujarati traders and weavers in Tamil Nadu for centuries, and ‘new’ communities linked to more recent business migrations in Karnataka and Maharashtra.
• Significant clusters include the Telugu diaspora in West Bengal and Maharashtra, complementing the well-known Telugu presence in the US.
• Notably, except for Malayalam and Tamil, all major Indian languages have larger internal than international diasporas, with nearly one-third of the internal diaspora concentrated in India’s ten largest cities.
• This highlights the enduring and evolving role of internal migration in shaping India’s cultural and linguistic landscapes.

Cultivation of Diasporic Identities

• Diasporic identities are often sustained through community associations, such as Bengali groups organising Durga Puja, Marathi Mandals promoting Ganapati festivals, and Gujarati Samaj bodies in India and abroad.
  • The Gujarat State Non-Resident Gujaratis Foundation once recorded 176 Gujarati associations within India and 120 overseas, underscoring their scale.
• A key marker of diasporic identity is the preservation of language, though this tends to weaken over generations.
• While some communities balance their native and local languages, in highly cosmopolitan settings, learning local languages is sometimes deemed unnecessary, reflecting varied patterns of cultural adaptation.

Rethinking Diaspora: Beyond Borders

• The challenges of integration and intergenerational conflicts between first- and second-generation migrants, evident in cases of international migration, are equally visible within India’s internal diasporas.
• Yet, despite being nearly three times larger than international diasporas, they remain understudied.
• Viewing diasporas through the lens of linguistic dispersion highlights their interlinkages — for instance, Antwerp’s diamond trade with Surat or West Asia’s oil sector links with Kerala were enabled by Gujarati and Malayalam diasporas in Mumbai.
• Internal migration often precedes international migration, and sometimes the reverse.
• Limiting diaspora to national borders is misleading; India’s true diasporic experience is closer to 100 million people, shaping the spread of customs, cuisines, and cultures both abroad and within India.
• Recognising the subnational as part of the transnational is essential to fully understand what it means to be videshi — outside one’s homeland, whether abroad or within the country itself.