Jews and Indians: Imagining Mobile Subjects

Abstract

South Asian identity is coming to be understood in more globalized terms, as Judith Brown’s Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (2006), makes clear. The Indian state itself has also taken strategic steps to recognize and incorporate the identities of those of Indian descent living beyond the subcontinent through the creation of legal categories such as “non-resident Indian” (Brown 155) and “Person of Indian Origin” (Brown 159). The Indian nation-state has not only sought to legally include diasporic Indians for economic gain (both of those categories enable financial investment in India), but has increasingly empowered diasporic subjects to define India culturally, as is evidenced from the repatriation via translation into Hindi of Salman Rushdie’s national allegory, Midnight’s Children, commissioned in honor of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence in 1997 (H. Trivedi). Politically, too, Indians abroad have played an important role (see A. Gandhi). While South Asians are not necessarily the modern diaspora, as Brown’s title perhaps implies, people of South Asian descent are having an important impact on the critical and creative formation of nonlocal and transnational identities.