South Asian Diaspora

Abstract

South Asia accounted for more than 32 million emigrants worldwide. These figures do not include the Old Diaspora –when millions were taken to work as indentured labourers, losing all links to their ancestral homelands. Most early migratory interactions, initiated by foreigners who came for trade or conquest, took people out of this region, a people that did not venture far from home. The dispersion out of South Asia can be divided into three waves: the Old Diaspora (early to mid-eighteenth century), the New Diaspora (1940s to 1990s) and the Modern Diaspora (beginning in the early 1990s). This latest diaspora is marked by mass migration of software engineers to Western countries, especially the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia. South Asians are very religious and are less landlocked than people of other faiths in the region. The alienation that result from transplantation in religious and spiritual terms, make migration for South Asians a ‘theologising experience’. Many South Asians have joined the Christian fold in diasporic locations as they feel less stigma than in their ancestral homelands. Uncertainties about the future keep immigrants continually on the edge, which leads some to a deeper spiritual quest.