Abstract
Sikh Formations, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2007, pp. 51– 66 Karen Leonard TRANSNATIONALISM, DIASPORA, TRANSLATION Comparing Punjabis and Hyderabadis abroad Themes and theories Comparing the Punjabi diaspora to the US and the Hyderabadi diaspora worldwide is more than an intellectual exercise investigating issues of transnationalism, cosmopo- litanism and translation studies. An ethnographic comparison illuminates the ways in which migrants define and represent themselves and their experiences over time and in different contexts. Both diasporas represent the decline, at different points in time, of lingering Mughlai or Indo-Muslim societies in South Asia, I argue. The words and phrases used by immigrants show the disintegration of Punjabi and Hyder- abadi plural societies, and they also show slippages, or possible slippages, into com- munities narrowly based on religion. In both cases, the words used to identify and locate self and other in the shifting landscapes testify to significant translations. The comparison is more than a two-way one, since both diasporas have internal contrasts as well. The Punjabi diaspora took place in two distinct historical periods. A few hundred speakers of the Punjabi language in India’s northwestern region migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, to be followed after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act by many thousands of Punjabis. Fol- lowers of the Sikh religion were prominent in both movements, although the first diaspora consisted primarily of farmers, rural men who settled in the farming valleys of California and adjacent western states, while the second diaspora featured well-educated professional people moving in family units to cities all over the United States. The Hyderabadis too were internally differentiated. Hyderabadis is a name given chiefly to those from Hyderabad city who had been mulkis (countrymen) or citi- zens of the princely state ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad, a state incorporated into independent India in 1948. Again there was an earlier diaspora, of Muslims to Paki- stan in 1947– 48, followed by another, beginning in the 1960s, of emigrants to the United States and elsewhere. These later Hyderabadi migrants came from many reli- gious backgrounds (Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and Christian), although, like the ISSN 1744-8727 (print)/ISSN 1744-8735 (online)/07/010051-16 # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17448720701332592
Highlights
Comparing the Punjabi diaspora to the US and the Hyderabadi diaspora worldwide is more than an intellectual exercise investigating issues of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and translation studies
Followers of the Sikh religion were prominent in both movements, the first diaspora consisted primarily of farmers, rural men who settled in the farming valleys of California and adjacent western states, while the second diaspora featured well-educated professional people moving in family units to cities all over the United States
The more conspicuously religious orientation among Pakistani Hyderabadis, combined with the dominance of Hyderabad Associations formed in North America by Muslims from Hyderabad’s former ruling class, presents the Hyderabadi diaspora, like the Punjabi one, with the possibility of being pushed in a narrower religious direction; it is in danger of being misperceived as a Muslim diaspora
Summary
Comparing the Punjabi diaspora to the US and the Hyderabadi diaspora worldwide is more than an intellectual exercise investigating issues of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and translation studies. Arabic and Persian were the languages of the courts and of law in the late Mughal empire and the corresponding Nawabate in Bengal, and traces of them lingered in the Bangla of the Bangladeshi activist-poet Farhad Mazhar’s Ashmoyer Noteboi (Untimely Notebook), a text Spivak is translating into English She reflects on societal and linguistic changes under British rule in the eighteenth century, as ‘the fashioners of the new Bengali prose purged the language of the Arabic-Persian content until . In the cases of the early-twentieth-century emigrants from the Punjab and the late-twentieth-century emigrants from Hyderabad State, people were leaving regional cultural syntheses or composite cultures that were breaking down These cultural syntheses were based on the Punjabi and Urdu languages, languages that, like Spivak’s Bengali text, still strongly reflected traces of Indo-Muslim or Mughlai culture. The more conspicuously religious orientation among Pakistani Hyderabadis, combined with the dominance of Hyderabad Associations formed in North America by Muslims from Hyderabad’s former ruling class, presents the Hyderabadi diaspora, like the Punjabi one, with the possibility of being pushed in a narrower religious direction; it is in danger of being misperceived as a Muslim diaspora
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