Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950

Abstract

ON THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE very first “nationalist” history of Kenya, published in 1966, Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham proclaimed that the “largely middle class oriented and religiously fragmented Indian population played only a marginal role in the expanding conflict between the white power elite and dominated African population.”1 While this book opened up new and exciting avenues of research into the history of nationalism in colonial Kenya, it closed off the same spirit of inquiry for the study of the politics of Indian immigrants, who appeared irrelevant and marginal to the story of anticolonialism in the country. Furthermore, it anticipated two interrelated arguments made by scholars three decades later. First, diasporas are a priori assumed to be politically insular, leading to a focus on their internal social and economic organization. Second, territorially and racially bound nationalist narratives of anticolonialism are privileged over diasporic articulations of the same, thus reinforcing the myth of their political obscurity. A closer analysis of the politics of diasporic Indians in Kenya calls these conclusions into question. While the 1940s did witness a political fragmentation among Indians along seemingly religious lines, as highlighted by Rosberg and Nottingham, those cleavages did not signify Indians’ marginality within the anticolonial conflict between European settlers and Africans. Rather, the debates that took place underscored the deep political engagement of a diasporic Indian community with anticolonial nationalist movements in both Kenya and India. In moving the study of diasporas beyond social identity to explore anticolonial nationalism across territorial boundaries, and in taking seriously the political ideas that emerge in diasporic contexts, we can create a new paradigm for analyzing diasporic politics that is located squarely and simultaneously within both the homeland that migrants leave and the hostland where they arrive. In this conceptualization, diasporas emerge as the embodiment of transnational history, in whose political articulations the extraterritorial resonance of anticolonial nationalist discourses can be identified. Scholars have situated contemporary South Asian diasporic identity in between