The South Asian Diaspora

Transnational networks and changing identities

Rajesh Rai, Peter Reeves, Rajesh Rai, Peter Reeves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415456913
• eBook ISBN: 9781134105946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The South Asian Diaspora numbers just under 30 million people worldwide, and it is recognized as the most widely dispersed diaspora. It is, moreover, one which of late has seen phenomenal growth, both due to natural increase and the result of a continued movement of professionals and labourers in the late 20th and early 21st century from the subcontinent to countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Singapore.

This book uses the concept of transnational networks as a means to understand the South Asian diaspora. Taking into account diverse aspects of formation and development, the concept breaks down the artificial boundaries that have been dominating the literature between the 'old' and the 'new' era of migration. Thereby the continued connectedness of most historic South Asian settlements is shown, and the fluid nature of South Asian identities is explored.

Offering a unique and original insight into the South Asian diaspora, this book will be of interest to academics working in the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora and Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Transnationalism and Globalisation.

Part I
Transnational networks

1 Ethnicity, locality and circulation in two diasporic merchant networks from South Asia

Claude Markovits

This chapter is situated at the intersection between the field of diaspora studies, with its heavy focus on questions of identity and ethnicity and its ‘culturalist’ orientation, and the field of commercial network studies which has been more preoccupied with situating trading networks in relation to the development of an international economy in Asia.¹ Although few academic studies have tried to combine the two approaches, at a more popular or semi-academic level, it is a commonly held assumption that a strong correlation exists between the success in business of particular groups and their ethnicity. Western commentators trying to account for the surge in the growth of some of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies in the 1980s and 1990s have often emphasised the crucial role played by overseas Chinese ethnic networks in that success story. They also gave great importance to the prevalence of a specific value system (which they sometimes characterised as ‘Asian’, whatever that means, or sometimes as ‘Confucian’, which of course is not the same thing), which they saw as partly opposed to the Western value system, but at the same time favourable to entrepreneurship. Although there were some reservations regarding the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of this so-called ‘Asian’ value system, it was on the whole praised as having contributed decisively to the spectacular economic development of some Asian countries.

Western academic authors, such as Jack Goody (1996) and André Gunder Frank (1998), each one in his own different way, but both rejecting the ‘Eurocentric’ orientation of the dominant strand of economic history as practised in the West, attempted to give some historical depth to the upsurge of Asian capitalism by pointing to its longstanding roots. Interestingly, their notion of Asia was inclusive of India as well as of China and Southeast Asia, while South Asia had figured very little in the dominant narrative of ‘Asian’ capitalism. That narrative, however flawed and inadequate, had the merit of focusing the attention of a Western public away from its usual obsession with its own story, but it suffered from the advent of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which led to a sudden reversal in perceptions: the same Asian capitalism which had been praised to the skies was suddenly vilified as ‘crony capitalism’ (as if there had ever been capitalism anywhere without an element of cronyism). The ‘ethnic factor’, which had been viewed in a positive light as a resource, became open to a more critical kind of scrutiny, as the nepotism supposedly bred by the dominance of family-based firms in the so-called Asian model of capitalism was identified as one of the main sources of cronyism. Whatever the ups and downs in intellectual fashion in the West, which, it should be noted, have had little influence on perceptions in Asia, it remains a difficult task to combine the diaspora studies approach with the study of trading networks, and I shall make use here of recently published personal research to question some of the basic assumptions behind the whole exercise of ‘ethnicising’ the study of economic behaviour.

The study of ethnic business networks

The question of the specific role played by certain ‘ethnic’ groups in the commercial economy exercised the minds of sociologists much more than those of economists and economic historians. Having been initiated by Weber, Sombart and Simmel, whose preoccupation was mostly with the specific economic niche occupied by Jews in medieval and modern Europe, this problematic was reformulated in a more general way by Blalock and Bonacich in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the ‘theory of middleman minorities’ put forward by the latter in a well-known 1973 article (Bonacich 1973). That theory, it should be noted, never made it into mainstream economics or economic history. In the 1980s, Philip Curtin, elaborating on an earlier insight from Abner Cohen (1971), linked it with the emerging ‘diaspora’ theme to produce his wide ranging theory of the trade diaspora, which took in some aspects of the middleman minority paradigm but gave it more anthropological and historical depth (Curtin 1984). Curtin endowed his trade diasporas with a role mainly as cultural brokers, which made them redundant once the age of world capitalism had dawned by the early nineteenth century, producing a degree of uniformisation in the functioning of markets. Mainstream economists and economic historians, it should again be noted, remained unmoved. In the meantime Goitein and his pupils had produced their massive work on the medieval Jewish trading diaspora operating from Cairo, on the basis of the Geniza documents (Goitein 1967–93), and, from that horizon, Avner Greif produced a sophisticated analysis of coalitions of Maghribi traders (Greif 1992), which attracted some attention from mainstream economists. In spite of that, studies of ethnic business communities have remained to this day the almost exclusive preserve of area specialists, and a ‘generalist’ scholar like K.N. Chaudhuri did not hesitate, in his grand synthesis on the Indian Ocean, to summarily dismiss the notion of trade diaspora (Chaudhuri 1985: 224–6).

In the growing, but still overall thin, body of literature devoted to diasporic trading networks, assumptions about their nature often remain implicit, and are rarely spelt out openly. It is, however, possible to perceive the existence of two different schools of thought, one which I call ‘primordialist’, which lays heavy stress on pre-existing factors, often labelled ‘predispositions’, in the emergence of ethnic business networks, and one which could be called ‘constructivist’, which emphasises the processual nature of such phenomena. The ‘ethnicist’ paradigm is just the most widespread version of the dominant ‘primordialist’ thesis. Although ethnicity in this conception is a fairly polysemic term, since it can apply as much to ethnic groups stricto sensu or to religious ones or (in the South Asian context) to caste groups, a common characteristic is the given and somewhat timeless nature of the specific endowments assigned to such groups. It is pointed out that they are already closely knit, for extra-economic reasons, such as the fact of belonging to a persecuted religious minority, and therefore particularly well suited to operating in the field of long-distance exchanges, characterised by the existence of large gaps in information and the absence of reliable transcultural institutions for building trust. Hence the particular focus in this literature on longstanding diasporic communities, such as the Jews and the Armenians, which have been actively involved in international trade since medieval times.

However, when it comes to contemporary Asia, the leading business network ethnicities, those of various South Asian and East Asian groups, are not linked in the same way with the existence of longstanding diasporas created by the political and religious persecution of minority groups. The Asian networks developed in various contexts at different periods in time, mostly in ‘majority’ communities (such as Hindus in India or Han in China), and in their case it was a mixture of commercial and political factors which led to the emergence of the diaspora. Professor Hamashita (1988), in particular, has shown how the expansion of Chinese networks in Southeast Asia was linked to the Chinese ‘tributary’ system. In the case of Indian merchants, who (if they were Hindu, which was most often the case) had to brave a religious taboo (of varying severity) to travel and settle overseas, trade expansion was partly linked to the renewal of links to the Islamic world fostered by the establishment of the Mughal empire (Dale 1994).

The study of Asian merchant diasporic networks must therefore pay special attention to the political dimension, given the often direct link between the growth of merchant diasporas and the expansion of specific political systems, including the European commercial-cum-military enterprises which intruded into the Asian commercial sphere from the sixteenth century onwards,² and came to largely dominate it by the second half of the nineteenth century. The bewildering ethnic variety of Asian ethnic networks (at least in the South Asian case, but the East Asian one does not appear to be vastly different) is also to be taken into account, for it belies any attempt at finding an obvious link between precise, often discrete, ethnicities, and success in business. Why, to take an example, should a particular sect or subcaste of Gujarati merchants be more successful than another one in the international market place? An answer inevitably involves a deep research into the minutiae of the historical record of various groups, which generally remains rather obscure to the contemporary observer.

In the South Asian field, one study which has tried to combine an anthropological approach putting special emphasis on the role of caste and a more historical one centred on the development of one particular network is David Rudner’s work on the Nattukottai Chettiars (Rudner 1994). This American anthropologist saw in the strength of their caste organisation the major competitive advantage of that subcaste of Tamil bankers who dominated rural credit transactions in large parts of mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Cochinchina) for half a century, between 1880 and 1930. Using their Saivaite temples as clearing houses, they wove a thick web of transactions linking their homeland of Chettinad, situated in the South Indian princely state of Puddukottai, and the neighbouring big emporium of Madras with Southeast Asia and Ceylon, some of its ramifications extending all the way to Mauritius and South Africa. While basing his analysis of the role of caste on contemporary ethnological observations made in Chettinad, Rudner also delved deep into the historical record of the Chettiars in Southeast Asia, which is fairly well documented. There remains however a certain mismatch between his ethnography and his history. As regards the crucial question of why caste solidarity proved particularly well suited to sustaining such a network, apart from the regulatory framework provided by the caste panchayat, Rudner has no really convincing explanation to offer.

My own study of two networks of Hindu merchants based in Sind (Markovits 2000), a province of British India between 1843 and 1947, which is now part of Pakistan, whose operations extended all over Central Asia for one and across the entire world for the other, led me to a reappraisal of the role of ethnic or caste solidarity in the emergence of diasporic merchant communities. Neither of these two groups, contrary to the Chettiars, was either mono-ethnic or mono-caste, and solidarity, which was often breached in fact by various forms of opportunistic behaviour, was much more based on the local patriotism of town dwellers and an ideology of brotherhood, which placed as much emphasis on fictitious as on real blood ties, than on any sense of belonging to one ethnic group or caste. Besides, the success of such networks was crucially based on their ability to develop specific forms of knowledge rather than on a form of ‘moral economy’. I was thus led to stress the importance of the cognitive aspects of mercantile activity, an extremely under-researched area of study.

From a methodological point of view, I became alert to the pitfalls of the dominant morphological and synchronic approach to trading networks, which tends to see them as constituted entities, and favoured a more genetic and diachronic approach, which places emphasis on the way such networks were historically constructed. I shall try in the next section to sketch the main outlines of that approach on the basis of my published work.

A plea for diachrony and cognitivism

The preference shown in the literature for a synchronic rather than a diachronic presentation of so-called ‘ethnic’ business networks has often little to do with a methodological bias as such, but rather tends to reflect the difficulty involved in reconstructing the historical record of groups which do not constitute their own archives (and, even if they do, show a strong reluctance to share them with out-siders) and are often largely absent from the archival records constituted by the various states in which they operate. I was lucky in being able to locate in the records kept by the British Imperial and Indian governments several series of documents which helped me to reconstruct at least partly the historical trajectory of the groups I was researching. That material was not unproblematic, and it offered many challenges to an historian, a question into which I shall not go, but its greatest advantage was that it included many documents, of a mostly judicial nature, emanating from the two groups under study, which allowed a kind of insider’s view of the networks (although not unmediated), rather than simply reflected British views of them (which, one must add, oscillated between indifference and hostility).

The first point I would like to stress is the extremely contingent nature of developments in this field, which tends to make all talk of ‘predispositions’ somewhat dubious. The two groups of merchants I studied originated from two medium-sized towns in a remote province of British India, which had been one of the last to be annexed by the British (in 1843). Prior to the eighteenth century, neither of these two towns appear to have played a significant role in international trade; nor was their geographical situation particularly advantageous in itself. These were two inland towns, one, Shikarpur, situated in Upper Sind, along a caravan route linking Northern India to Afghanistan and Central Asia which took its full importance only after the Kandahar-based Durrani clan had established its hegemony over most of the region by the mid-eighteenth century under its first ruler Ahmad Shah (Gommans 1995).

In an earlier period, it was another town, Multan, situated in the Punjab not very far from the Sind border, which had been the main Indian depot of the caravan trade between Northern India and Central Asia through Afghanistan, a trade which had its origins in the establishment of commercial links accompanying the Ghaznavid and Ghurid penetration of Northern India from the eleventh century onwards and had flourished anew from the sixteenth century onwards with the Mughal conquest of Northern India.³ The shift from Multan to Shikarpur, which occurred gradually in the second half of the eighteenth century, and which remains clouded in some amount of mystery, was largely due to political factors: the decline of Multan following a short-lived Maratha invasion of the town and the emergence of Kandahar as the true seat of power in the so-called Durrani ‘Empire’, which gave sudden importance to Shikarpur as the best-placed mart on the route between Kandahar and Northern India. The situational ‘advantage’ of the town was thus mostly a function of political developments, and had not the Kandahar-based Durranis risen to prominence in Afghanistan, the town would have remained an insignificant mart of only local importance. But within a few decades it became the financial capital of a vast, although loosely held, empire, its bankers, mostly originating from Multan, holding the strings of the Durrani purse, and extending their financial operations across the whole of Central Asia (Gankovsky 1981). The story of the Hyderabad merchants displays even more randomness: based in a town of Lower Sind situated at some distance from the sea, they were bankers to the Baluchi tribal rulers of Sind, who had made the town their capital in the mid-eighteenth century, and financed craft production for the use of the court and the army. Following the British annexation of Sind in 1843, they lost their two major businesses (as well as their share of the Malwa opium trade), while Hyderabad was quickly overtaken by Karachi as a comm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Transnational networks
• PART II Socio-economic identities and change
• PART III Culture and changing diasporic identities