DIASPORAS BEFORE AND AFTER THE NATION

Abstract

This paper examines diasporic flows in two temporally distinct global economies – the post-Fordist global information economy and the premodern Indo-Islamic world. It asks why and how the geographically central Indian region of the Deccan came to play a key role as a globalization ‘borderland’ in the supply, reception and circulation of diasporas. What would we find if we took the long durations of history and the vast stretches of geography more seriously and looked before, after, around, and underneath the spatiotemporal order of modernity and of the modern geopolitical imagination? Contemporary scholarship on diasporas is shaped by an understanding of the world as produced through an international system of territorially distinct nations. Viewed from within this geopolitical imagination, diasporas seem novel. By examining the Indian city of Hyderabad’s participation in both the premodern Indo-Islamic world and the contemporary global economy, we suggest that the modern geopolitical imagination – based on the confinement of human beings imaginatively and territorially into discrete ‘homelands’ – is at best an exceptional phase and hence a brief interlude in human history. We argue that Hyderabad’s role in the two global orders is not coincidental. Our excavations into the premodern Indo-Islamic world reveal deeper layers constitutive of Hyderabadi hybridity which might fit comfortably with the postmodern global order. In contrast to colonized/postcolonized spaces, Hyderabad was not deeply constituted through colonial or postcolonial meanings. As such, Hyderabad has had access to languages of globality more varied than those imagined by the colonial/postcolonial world.