Cultural Dynamics

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The Diaspora at Home

S. Charusheela Cultural Dynamics 2007 19: 279 DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080295 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/19/2-3/279

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T H E DI A S P OR A AT HOM E
S. CHARUSHEELA

University of Nevada, Los Vegas, USA

ABSTRACT The concept of diaspora can be fruitfully used to open up economic analysis. Unlike the current ways in which the terms immigrant, emigrant, and migrant have entered economics, the term diaspora shows promise in pushing us toward richer analyses of economic subjectivity. In addition, it opens the possibility for a more critical interrogation of the international and national than is currently available within mainstream economic analysis. However, the term can be pushed further. Using the experience of growing up Tamil in Bombay in the 1970s as its focus, this article complicates the concept of diaspora. It highlights diasporas within nations, and shows how groups may enter the diasporic experience without traveling. This exploration allows us to critically re-examine binaries of nationalcosmopolitan, assimilation resistance, necessary before we can usefully deploy the concept of diaspora for projects of cross-disciplinary conversation. Key Words cosmopolitan diaspora economy national subjectivity

Introduction
My aim in this reection is to re-examine the term diaspora. By juxtaposing my own experience of growing up Tamil in Bombay1 with narratives of diasporic experience and meaning, I wish to complicate the term diaspora itself, to ask what it reveals and what it masks. Before proceeding, I should note that I am not someone who normally looks at diaspora. An economist by training, I work on issues of gender and development in South Asia, with theoretical interests in the epistemological and ontological limits that beset much theorizing in my eld. However, through my engagements with scholars from without my discipline, I have come to see the concept of diaspora as a potentially valuable source of insight for heterodox and dissident analytical projects of rethinking mainstream economic analyses. Thus, I hope that my heterodox economics

19(2/3): 279299. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080295] http://cdy.sagepub.com Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

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colleagues and scholars more versed in the literature on diaspora will read this as an invitation to a cross-border exchange of a different type. Further, I am also not someone who normally draws on personal experience for analytical insight. Indeed, much of my work within economics is about the problems that beset scholarship coming from analysts who extrapolate a bit too generously from their own experience. This, combined with the habitual (and unnecessary) biases of my discipline against any type of non-quantitative source of information, makes this type of exploration quite novel, and indeed a bit unnerving, for me. Since this reection marks my rst experiment in combining personal experiential narrative with social analysis, I am not quite comfortable about marking it with the standard signs of academic scholarship. So, I eschew the classic marks of academic work (the scholarly note, the carefully excavated and referenced concept, the literature review). 2 I do this not because I see this as less scholarly than my other work. Rather, I want my readers to enter this text in a different way, and invite them to contribute their own analytical insights to my writing and speculation on personal experience. Instead of seeing this reection primarily as an intervention in an academic debate about the meaning of the term diaspora, I hope it acts as a spur to further, more sustained scholarship and analysis by those more conversant with the literature than I. But since genre is discursively agential, and I have been trained within the genres of academic discourse, I will mimic some of the conventions of academic writingnamely, the use of sections to organize the narrative structure of knowledge production, along with the provision of a roadmap to the sections in the introductory section of an article. Here it is. Following this introductory section, I explain why I think the term diaspora is potentially useful (The Value of Diaspora). Then, I examine what the term gestures toward, and complicate that via reecting on my own experience of growing up Tamil in Bombay (The Diaspora at Home). This in turn leads me to ask, what does this term mask? (Other Diasporas). I conclude with some reections on how we can resituate the term diaspora and consider how we may need to supplement it with additional ideas if we are to make it do more robust work in our analyses.

The Value of Diaspora

Diaspora is a term that situates analyses of subject formation and social experience in a transnational context. It thus draws attention to the crossborder transactions that shape social, psychic, and experiential subjects. In mainstream analysis within my discipline, there is no diaspora in the subelds that explore international economic relations. Instead, there are

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international migrants , immigrants and emigrants, people crossing national boundaries, whose importance we mark by noting their numbers. They enter our analysis in the form of data about the numbers of immigrants into a country or numbers of people leaving a country or numbers of a countrys citizens residing abroad. Now, while scholars may note or mark the fact that specic groups of immigrants or emigrants have entered or left a national space at particular historical junctures, the discussion of historical and social-structural contexts, networks of af liation, and experiential subjectivities that mark discussions of immigrant experience and history in other elds is not central to economic analysis of transnational transactions and relations. This is not surprising, given the analytical structure of the international in economics. As Danby (2004) notes, the effect of the international on the national in economics is arrived at by opening up the national economy to a select subset of cross-border ows without disturbing or retheorizing the nature of the national economy which is being opened. This is analytically possible because the international itself is confected as little more than the simple aggregation of, or as the space of a carefully delimited set of interactions across, equally confected natural units of national economies that correspond to the natural unit of the nation state. Thus, while there are no doubt scholars who provide rich discussion of the social context and experience of migration, there is really nothing in the way that the concept of immigrant and migrant has entered the eld of economics that automatically invites such analysis. Further, where such rich detail is provided, it does not result in retheorizing the category of the international (and national) in the organization of the eld or types of analyses produced in the discipline. Instead, the quantication of immigrants invites economists to focus on other types of questions that isolate their analytical and theoretical apparatus from taking up the types of critical questions about national and transnational belonging and the experience of migration, let alone questions about the analytical status of the categories national and transnational, that are often central to writing in other elds. Immigrants enter our analysis in terms of their quantiable contributions and costs to the economyeither to the economy they live in or to the economy they left. In either case, economy is always already natural national and the international is a raried eld of movements between the natural national units (Danby, 2004). Thus, we have debates about whether immigration costs a country in terms of lower wage rates and higher social insurance payments, and about whether and how immigrants contribute to the economy they come to. Here, immigrant means a legal category, and hence rst-generation versus second-generation has no meaning in the eld, since the second

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generation is not a separate legal category in terms of what is being quantied. The actual historical context of migration or the types of social networks of af liation available or not available to a particular immigrant group seeking an economic foothold in a new country are of almost no relevance to how we assess the implications of costs and benets. Instead, we hear discussions of immigrant contribution or immigrant cost, without allowing the social context of migration for different groups to complicate our understanding of the social and cultural processes that allocate and arrange the ability of a particular immigrant group to contribute or make it in a given national space. Alternately, we hear of the costs and benets of emigration for back home. We hear of brain drains and of remittances. While brain drain may gure the emigrant in the social context of leaving, the status of the emigrant at the other endas citizen or legal residentis of no relevance to the discussion. When it comes to remittances, it becomes even more interesting, since not only is citizenship no longer the key organizing principle, even generations of migration are irrelevantwhat is being quantied is a funds ow across national boundaries. Since the concept of migration invites little sustained social-historical analysis in mainstream economics, the types of experiences and social networks of material life tracked in these data shift rather loosely: the movement of funds across national borders tracks something different about transnational relations than is tracked in the numbers about immigrants and emigrants. But the distinctions in what is being tracked by these differing types of numbers triggers no effort to rethink either the base terms of national and international on which these numbers are constructed, or to re-examine the disparate subjectivities they presume. In general, the type of critical exposition about not just social and historical context, but also analytical categories used to organize knowledge, that the term immigrant invites within economic analysis is thin. At most, one hears of push and pull factorspush factors such as poverty and necessity, or structures of coercion and compulsion, or in more optimistic tellings, of pull factors such as opportunities and jobs. One rehears these tales elsewhere, with different valencesin more xenophobic versions of the optimistic narrative, pull factors of social safety nets and opportunities bring in those we think do not really have the right to such things into the body of the national economy, a narrative countered by anti-xenophobic reminders of the contributions of those who come to the body of the national economy and reminders about the push factors back home and perhaps of our complicity in making those push factors. But within the mainstream of my eld, or in the ways this eld enters other discourses, we nd little about what that movement of either people or funds may mean in terms of narrating an experiential subject into being.

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This gap is a problem for those of us seeking to make economics more attuned to issues of historical structure and social experience. In particular, economic activity entails economic subjects, and the concept of the migrant or immigrant has not so far invited an exploration into the formation of economic subjectivity. Simple stories of contribution or cost, of economic success or failure, substitute an after-the-fact account of the successes and/or failures of specic types of movements of peoples and funds across national borders (they contribute; no they dont), for an analytic exploration of economic activity as a social process that is always-already constituted at the boundaries of national and transnational formation of social subjects. What we lack is an exploration of the mechanisms by which people make meaning of the social networks they draw on and discourses through which they insert themselves into a particular social-economic formation; of the material practices by which a group manages, or fails to legitimate its right to a share of the distribution of resources and rewards in a body politic, or indeed of how a body politic is formed; and of the economic consequences of that ability or inability of a people to narrate themselves into the discourses and networks that shape material life. Since the category immigrant slips too easily from a concept that highlights the social-structural aspects of daily experiences that shape material life to the asocial category of a body that traverses a national boundary, it does not automatically open the door to richer analyses within economics. Indeed, the only place where the concept of a community of immigrants, rather than a congeries or aggregation of them, and of intergenerational experiences shaping economic interaction emerges in economics is when there is something akin to the ideas the term diaspora invokes. This takes place in the context of examining not international, but national data. Here, when we look at different groups of racially or ethnically classied people within a nation relative to each other, we suddenly begin to mark the role of social experience as part of our analytic, and do so in ways that are much more historically situated and nuanced than found in the discussions of the cross-border movements of people across nations. The exploration of collective social experience and memory invoked in these discussions tends to be far richer, and far more nuanced, than in analyses of movements of people and funds across national boundaries, where the term economic stands in for narrating experiential subjects in our analyses. Thus, I nd it fascinating that, within economics, it is at the moment of noting the fracture of the national body, rather than in noting the transnational or cross-border aspects of social experience, that the subjective aspects of social life invoked by diaspora come into their owna point taken up later in this article. Thus, standing where I do, I nd much useful about the term diaspora. Its immediate associations with social groups, networks of af liation,

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historical moments of movement, structures of constraint and possibility, processes of meaning making, all make it less easy for analysts to deploy the term without immediately providing a more critical-historical analysis. It forces us to explicate and narrate the process of entry into a space, and articulate the meaning of a relationship to another space, imagined or real, in fabricating social identities. In other words, unlike the way the terms migrant and migration have entered economics, diaspora does the work of highlighting something about material life in a way that cannot be bypassed. After all, one could not really provide data on the numbers of diaspora in the USA. The category automatically invites us to explore the social and historical contexts of a community, of where it came from, how it changes over time, how it ts in different spaces and locations, in a way the term immigrant, for some reason, does not within economics. Going further, I think the concept of diaspora may help us rethink the international and national, whose status as analytical categories has not been subject to sustained critical reection and revision within mainstream (and alas, also much heterodox) economics. Now this is, of course, simply a broad description of what I see as the lay of the land, and no doubt a more scholarly excavation of the terrain would reveal the edges, the overlooked contributions which cross the intellectual boundaries that I mark here. But with all its overgeneralizations, its purpose was simply to indicate the value of the term diaspora for opening a space for a richer comprehension of economic subjectivity and for placing the categories of national and international in economics under more careful scrutiny. The term may not be adequate and, indeed, the rest of my reection is all about why it is not. But it foregrounds something that is bypassed both by the primarily quanticatory identication of groups and ows twinned with overly thin concepts of the social subject usually found in my discipline, and by the equally narrow concept of the economic as necessity or structural power that stands beyond or outside the daily formation of meanings, networks, identities, and subjects utilized by many scholars from other disciplines who wish to reinsert economic questions into social and cultural analysis. Thus, as a scholar who studies economic formations and subjectivity, I nd the category diaspora both valuable and fascinating, because it foregrounds something that the category immigrant, as it entered my eld, did not. 3

The Diaspora at Home

The narratives of diaspora tell of how one came to move across varied types of boundaries, of how one grew up as a stranger at home, of the histories through which one came to occupy this place between two

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nations, and of how one then navigates experience between two nations, two communities. This navigation may be tense, may invoke the need for choosing, or may be comfortable. In response, and depending on context, one may then react by assimilating, or refusing to assimilate, or noting that one need not assimilate at all as one is not confronted with a need to choose. And one then reads a politics through thisthose who choose may be deemed immigrant success stories or failures in one narrative, those who refuse to choose may be deemed traitors or political resisters in another, and those who do not have to choose can either be seen as models of a cosmopolitan transnational consciousness or as members of a new global cultural elite. (An important aside on terminologytoo important and long to drop into the notes: cosmopolitan has a specic valence in much theorizing about national and cosmopolitan identities or sensibilities. So far and in the rest of this section, I use it in the sense used in much of the literature derived from 19th-century European debates about cosmopolitanism and nationalism as the two opposing forms of consciousness that confront the European emerging from provincialism. This is the sense in which cosmopolitanism is revived as a category and ethos today, as something that can provide an alternate model to horrors of nationalism. But later in this reection, I will be using it in a different way, with the types of valences and meanings that mark its common deployment in Indians description of modern cities. The gap between these two types of meaning will in turn become important for my discussion of the category of cosmopolitanism as used in discussions of diasporic experience further along this reection.) To return to the thread of my reection, what I wish to do here is to explore the stories told and link them to my own, as a way to rethink the narratives themselveswhat they angle to, and how they decode or narrate ethical and agential subjects in being. In the process, I wish to complicate some of the ways in which debates between the types of narrationbetween assimilation as success or failure of agency, between multiple identities as marks of elitism or cosmopolitanismhave made assumptions about how one may presumably read politics off of some simple economic register which would let us know which narrative is somehow more true or more radical. An Indian raised in India, my childhood is very far removed from any of the groups whose experiences the term diaspora narrates. Indeed, if any aspect of my life were to be seen as coming under that term, it would be my life after I left India and went to the USA to get my graduate degreethe trajectory of the PhD, the marriage to an Anglo-American, the green card, and the subsequent academic track career. Yet when I reect on writing about the diaspora, very little I read about the Indian diaspora in America, about the NRI (non-resident Indian), speaks to my

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own life. If it speaks to me at all, it speaks to the social scientist in me, to the experience I have of observing, of watching and hearing other Indians talk about their lives. But the literature of diaspora speaks to me experientially when I consider my years in Bombay. I felt a shock of recognition when, on coming to the USA, I began reading novelists describing what it was like to grow up feeling trapped between two cultures, feeling a sense of displacement and dislocation, wondering where and how one belonged in a land that both was and was not ones homeland. I felt a shock of recognition when I read stories about anxiety around marriage and beauty and looks, shame at ones parents when a teenager. I felt a shock of recognition when I saw stories of being torn between assimilation and maintenance of ones own culture, when I read of intergenerational struggles played out between rstgeneration immigrants and their second-generation children who were born and raised abroad, and when I read about the particularly gendered nature of such struggles. I felt a shock of recognition when I learnt of the anxieties about language and learning Mother- and Other-tongues. These stories spoke to me of my experiences as an Indian growing up in IndiaI grew up as a Tamil in Bombay. My Father was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), in Maharashtra cadre. My parents were Tamil Iyers who were simultaneously devout and liberal in the particular way that R.K. Narayan has described in his writings about Tamilians. The fth of seven children, I was born in Nagpur, while my father was still in the stage of his career where he was collector in various districts, but I have no memory of this stage in my life. He was then posted to Delhi until I was about 4 years old, but here too, I have no memories, but rather, memories of being told stories by my parents about what that period was like and how I was then. What I remember is Bombay, where I was until 18 years of age. At that point, my father was posted to Delhi, and I followed along (with much bitterness, being convinced, as most Bombayites are, that Delhi was simply not civilized enough to even be called a city when compared to Bombay), to get my BA at Miranda House College, Delhi University. After that came the move to the USA for graduate school and my shift to NRI status, an identity I have not been able to own. Thus, from age 4 or so to 18, I was a Bombayite. An Indian in India, an urban brat from the milieu of the Indian administrative class, one of the many Indians from all over the nation in that most multilingual, vibrant, and diverse of Indian cities, in the period from about 19689 to mid-1982. And yet, my shock of recognition on encountering the stories of Asian AmericansJapanese, Chinese, Filipinas, Koreansin the USA indicates that perhaps the Bombay of that time was not quite the

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multicultural polyglot melting pot we envisage or encounter in the novels of Rushdie. First, I must note that, while many children of the IAS seem to have a good sense of their parents role and standing in Indian society, I absolutely did not. I think this is because I was lower down in the pecking order of birthby the time I was old enough to make sense of social status, we were in Bombay, and frankly, in Bombay, civil servants on the government pay scales of the time did not rank high; businessmen did. Compared to my classmates in Convent of Jesus and Mary, Byculla, I was sort of lower middle class, which is not surprising given that my parents were raising seven children on a single salary (later, my mother went back to get degrees in management, and taught at Bajaj Institute, and then went on to teach at the Indian Institute of Public Administration when Appa got posted to Delhi. But at that time Amma was not working or going to college). Culturally too, we had no cachetmy Amma wore ethnic saris, but they were not smart in terms of the aesthetic of that period. She wore basic polyester prints or cottons during the day, and dressed in heavy Kanchipuram silk for formal events. While her Kanchipuram silks were gorgeous, there was no ethnic chic around yet to let me see their beauty. Appa and Amma, besides, spoke with Tamil accents, and did not seem modernthe parties they went to were mainly ofcial functions. We held no elegant dinner parties at home, our dining room furniture and living room were de nitely not fashionable (even living room furniture seemed to be more of a concession to the place than anything, since they were as likely to put a pai down on the oor or provide a moda to guests as invite them to sit on sofas). Our food was not proper anywaywe ate rasam and sambhar with our hands from steel plates, and, besides, idlis and dosas had no larger cultural cachet then, let alone the varied kootus made by Amma. Who wanted to have smart parties and invite over friends when we could not really serve them proper things like samosas on those nice-looking plates, and coffee would be given in a steel davara and kinnum and not in a china cup? It would have been embarrassing. Tamils were denitely not in in the Bombay of that time. While today we look back at the slow Shiv Sena-ization of Bombay in its shift to Mumbai mainly in terms of a linear narrative of Hindu fundamentalism, we should recollect that, at that time, the Shiv Senas prime target was TamilsTamil migrants coming in from droughtstricken areas were seen as taking away jobs from native Maharashtrians, Tamilians were seen as dominating government because of the preponderance of Tamils and Bengalis in the IAS of that time (a legacy of the British educational systems in Calcutta and Madras Presidencies and

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the subsequent rise of these two communities within the administrative and other apparatus). If the Shiv Senas nativist expression of Maharashtrian identity was the immediate context of my experience growing up Tamil in Bombay, the legacy of the Northern-Hindi imagination of national identity, and the struggles that the subsequent marginalization of Southern identities within the imagined boundaries of national culture generated in previous decades formed the general backdrop to my experience. In general, there was (and remains) a tendency to imagine India in and through the experiences of the Northern-Hindi belt, and Southern cultural expression and experience was seen as foreign and slightly uncouth. As Tamil regional-identity-based movements resisted Northern hegemonic appropriation of the meaning of the national, they fused the issue of regional identity with anti-caste politics. The high culture of the Congress-oriented Tamil Brahmins (of whom the Iyer community I am from is one), and their elite status in Tamil Nadu, was viewed as an extension of Northern control and hegemony in the South, especially in the politics of Periyar and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam [DMK]. This forms the context for the language riots and Periyars gesture of protest referred to later in the essay. Thus, at the time, my Tamil identity could not nd a space within Bombays multicultural, multilingual, cosmopolitan landscape, since it was outsider to both the national pan-Indian cultures that dominated, and the regional Maharashtrian identities that sought to dominate, the landscape and ethos of the city. We were not seen as particularly cultured either since we lacked the western polish which could have allowed us entry and were dark to boot. So, my memory of my Tamilness from this time is one of angst and shame combined with anxiety about how, as a Tamil, one could t in with the bigger Bombay culture. Some memories. This is sometime in the midto-late 1970s. By this time I had shifted to Kendriya Vidyalaya (Central School) in Navy Nagar, Colaba (KVC), which contributed to my sense of awkwardness since, in the Bombay I wished to be part of, everyone else was going to Cathedral and Fort Convent and St Annes. But what with seven kids and rising costs of living and Amma just beginning to move back into the labor market, we last four children went to the non-elite governmentrun Kendriya Vidyalaya in Navy Nagar with a mix of ofcers and sailors children (not too many ofcers kids, though there were still some in my daytoday ofcers kids go to private schools and KVC is much less classdiverse than it was then). In hindsight, this was good for me, because it made me have school friends from diverse class backgrounds. But then, it made for anxiety, especially when I had to answer that invariable question Indians ask each otherWhere do you go to school?

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In any case, this is from the time I was at Kendriya Vidyala, in 6th grade. By then, the language riots had subsided into memory, or so one hoped. But I remember sitting in class and having the teacher tell the class that Tamils like me burnt the Ramayana and Mahabharatha and did not want to learn Hindi (a reference to Periyars gesture of protest, explained below). This was a Brahmin Hindi teacher from UP, highly fastidious and quite casteist-Hindu fundamentalist, who was particularly abusive toward the two Muslim boys in the class (physical punishment was not uncommon at good old Kendriya Vidyalayaone professor was particularly notorious both for meting out punishment of this type and for copping a feel from girls on pretext of patting them complimentarily on the back). Further, our Hindi teacher noted, since Brahmins were really Northern Aryans, Tamils were really all Scheduled Caste. The ironies and confusions this sort of engagement created are deliciously funny in hindsight. For example, I had no real idea about my caste. I mean, I knew we were Tamil Iyers, but in Bombay, what did that mean? I had no context to make sense of the caste labels, and besides, the things that may have triggered in me some type of recognition, such as my parents tendency to wear the caste marks and do pooja on holy days, were not really rituals that provided much meaning in the ats of Bombay. Rather, in Bombay, they marked us off as indubitably rural-not-cool-too-unmodern for words. And since one tended to get simplistic analyses (which remain as tropes to this day) about urbanity, modernity, and progress lining up on one side, and rurality, tradition, backwardness on the other, these rituals, which seemed to not be markers of the urban, hip, and modern, could not really be identied by me as the marks of privilege that I knew caste indicated. Besides, we all knew that it was the poor and backward types who had lots of kids, and here I was, one of seven in that Hum-do-hamaredo world. So for a week or so after my Hindi teachers proclamations on Tamils, I went around anxious about my Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Iyer background. I also note today with amusement the sudden desire of people not very unlike the Hindi teacher for whom the Aryan invasion story was necessary and good to show the superiority of Northerners over the Tamilian types, suddenly arguing against it once the stake is a claim to indigeneity. Not to note the irony of Periyars gesture of struggle in destroying a portrait of Rama, deployed against elite Brahmins like those of my background, in turn invoked to suggest the illegitimacy of my presence in that classroom in Bombay. Other memories. I am around 13 or 14. I remember telling my mother to shush because she talked loudly in that Tamil accent when at the store. Desperately wanting to not look Tamil, I recollect giggling with delight when, with a friend, I pretended to be Gujarati and she Sindhi when we

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met some girls at some event I now forget. Around 15, I remember going to a beauty parlor with my sister, and feeling terrible about myself as she preened, since the beautician paid her the highest complimentTamil, really? Why, I never would have guessed, you are not ugly or anything, you know, not dark, no thickish features, and none of that curly Mallu hair. In the quick shift from Tamil to Mallu (Malayali) looks, the beautician was simply reecting a general Northern sense of spaceanything South was an indistinct region of Madrasis. An earlier memorythis from Byculla Convent (till 4th grade) and also from Scholar High School where I spent a year (5th grade) before moving on to Kendriya Vidyalaya. I remember schoolyard refrains of angadapongada and idli-sambhar, combined with exaggerated gestures indicating how utterly uncouth the Tamil eating habits were (this entailed a gesture of licking the hand from the elbow all the way up and then smacking the lips on the ngers), which would make me try and hide my lunch or eat it separately, and make me pray devoutly that my mother would stop giving me the damn idlis for lunch and, instead, make those nice sandwiches. (Sandwiches were at the top of the pecking order as those were anglicized/civilized.) Or, failing that, at least move to reasonable Northern or Maharashtrian foods like chapati or poha. Thankfully, this form of teasing was not evident in Kendriya Vidyalaya, whose student body was composed mainly of children from the naval colony to which the school was attached. Hence, it was less dominated by the cultural modes and tropes of general Bombay culture (though as my experiences attest, it too reected the general Northern-Hindi attitudes to Southern identities in the national imagination of the period). And as the teasing disappeared, so did the anxiety about my lunch box. On the gender front, the sense of being dark was completely fused in my mind with being Tamil, and given the racial hierarchies of Indian beauty norms, a source of much sorrow. Faced with an inability to be both a fulledged Bombay-ite and a Madrasi, I retaliated with class and languagemy English became highly anglicized as all traces of the South got suppressed in my self-presentation, and I in turn mocked vernies who had taunted me for being Madrasi, as I rmly jumped into an imagined cosmopolitan modernity of western clothes and English movies, desperately seeking to join the cool folks of the Bombay that Rushdie reinvokes in his novels. Cosmopolitan was very much a word my friends and I used to think about this identity we desired and sought to adopt. But our understanding of this word had slightly different meanings from the term as used in the literature on European debates about cosmopolitanism versus nationalism. Cosmopolitan meant urban and urbane, not provincial. We thought of places like Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras, and especially Bombay, as cosmopolitan. We also saw it as outward-looking, looking beyond narrow, traditional con nes. The taunt vernie itself derived from the contraction

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of the word vernacular, and meant the very opposite of everything cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan meant being chic and hip and cool, and since looking outward pretty much meant looking westward to us, this also meant wearing westernized clothing, speaking English, being what we thought to be as modern (which was practically synonymous with westernized in our vocabulary). Thus, in meaning something that was not regional or provincial, something that looked outward and beyond the con nes of a narrow regional identity, there were denite parallels to the European usage. But it also did not quite mean a transnational or supranational identity as in the European usage, a point I return to in the next section. In any case, this cosmopolitan identity which was especially associated with cities like Bombay was one which I very much wished to enter and be part of, and tried to adopt with a vengeance, though my Tamilness was explicitly something that could not be part of this cosmopolitanism. If in the public sphere of cosmopolitan Bombay, cosmopolitanism was reserved for the Parsi, Sindhi, Gujarati communities (the fairer ones, the richer business communities), and Tamils were not really part of that modern space, then in the private sphere of the home, I look back and recognize my parents anxieties about culture, language, and child-rearing. My siblings and I went through the standard rituals of cultural transmission for a whilethe Carnatic vocal lessons for my sisters, veena for me with a small period of bharatanatyam thrown in. (The initial efforts at cultural transmission were gendered, since my older brothers were not put through the education into classical music and dance as my sisters and I werelater, my younger brothers had a stint with Carnatic violin, but this was more at their own initiative.) My father and mother would take us to Shanmukhananda auditorium, a long trip from Churchgate where the government ats we lived in were, to see music, dance, theater provided by the Tamil Sangham. While much of this was about exposing us to classic Tamil culture, I have vivid memories also of playsKumarans mythological dramas enacted to fabulously grand sets, and the pleasures of Chos drama. And the periodic trips to Matunga and Chembur to visit relatives in Tamil-enclave communities and purchase proper coffee, and sambhar powder and rasam powder and mulaghai podi parallel tales of Chinatown Sundays in the USA. Varied efforts to teach me Tamil remained inadequate. While I can manage to understand Tamil and speak it enough to make myself understood, literary Tamil eludes me, and if the conversation gets too complicated, I am lost. I cannot read or write it, my accent and grammar are abysmal. Every so often we would take the trip home to Madras (now Chennai), and I would face culture shockin Bombay I was Tamil, but here I was not. I did not speak the language well, and when I spoke it, was an object of much ridicule. Elders routinely lamented to my parentsinvariably in our presenceabout how terribly western we girls had become, especially

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since we declined to wear pavada chokka despite a brief attempt by my parents to enforce that on us at least for family functions. Once we turned about 1314, it was pants and midis for us, please (this was in the days before salwar-kameez and churidar were raised to the status of a national dress worn by Indian women generally). I knew almost nothing about various Tamil functions and their meanings, despite the fact that my parents did gollu every year and made us get up for oil baths and kaka-podi on appropriate ritual days. After being mocked a few times, I retaliated in the only way I couldI wore my ignorance proudly, as a badge of a calculatedly different, more modern identity. And above all, I remember the endless discussions about marriage and inter-caste marriage and arranged marriage and love marriage, and what-ifs about Punjabi boys with parents and relatives and friends (if for Northerners everything South of an uncertain marker around the Deccan is Madrasi, then for those in the South, everything above some equally uncertain marker above Karnataka was Punjabi). Being raised Tamil in Bombay was not all about exclusion and marginality of coursewith all its exclusions, Bombay was still, after all, a vibrant, polyglot, cosmopolitan city, and inadequately cool or not, we were still Bombayites who aspired to its cosmopolitan identity. My parents lack of success in making us into good Tamil girls was partly due to Bombay, and partly due to the fact that they genuinely cared for their children and lacked the peculiarly stark authoritarian streak that would have been necessary to enforce conservative gender conformity in their daughters. It was a space where, though efforts were constantly made to reinforce a fairly rigid concept of being well behaved and good, we also managed to nd the room to resist, maneuver, and rebel. The rebellious identities we adopted, of being modern and smart, were wonderfully freeing and enabling. We cut our hair (I grew it back later, once fashion morphed to longer hair, but I wore it loose and retained a fringe in the front to mark it off from the traditional long hair of good Southern girls). We went to dance parties and developed a healthy disdain for the good girls who were held up as models of decorous behavior worthy of emulation. And all my parents really enforced successfully was fairly strict discipline on schoolwork and study. Their efforts at cultural control were loosening over time, with periodic efforts at enforcement re-emerging whenever we had relatives visiting or when there were family functions. Further, our circle of friends was much more diverse than it would have been had we been raised in Tamil Nadu. Not to say Madras did not have smart girls with short hair wearing pants or diverse groups, but we would not have been part of that world had we been raised there. As I re-examine my anxieties and resentments at my parents efforts to enforce proper gendered Tamil behavior through the lens of diasporic

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experience, I can, in hindsight, recognize that they were doing what millions of immigrants in other contexts have doneseeking in their own ways to perform an act of cultural transmission to the next generation. They were in Bombay, but as Tamilians in Bombay, not as Bombay-ites. And it is unclear if, back then, they could really have been or become Bombay-ites, given the climateat that time, Tamils were not one of the imagined communities welcomed into Bombays cosmopolitan consciousness. When I presented this talk, Paula Richman also noted that a Tamil friend once told her that the biggest sense of being in a foreign land he experienced was when he went to Delhi. In many ways, then, my experience in Bombay is a classic immigrant/diaspora experience. We were members of one community entering another where the terms and conditions of our entry were fraught and disputed. For many Tamil speakers who knew little Hindi or Marathi, the language surrounding us was alien. The owers for pooja differed, the vegetables and spices we used were unavailable, and the way we lived our lives, decorated our homes, arranged our living rooms, spoke, dressed, and looked marked our difference from the surrounding communities. For women of an earlier generation, such as my grandmother who spoke nothing but Tamil, the shock of a sudden need to relearn how to navigate the public sphere and realign public sphere and home life would require great cultural readjustment and, in turn, make the formation of subcommunities, of immigrant enclaves if you will, necessary for material and psychic survival. My family had the context of the administrative services, where other women and children and families were similarly on the move. For those without that living context, the spaces of Matunga and Chembur and Andheri in Bombay, of R.K. Puram in Delhi, acted as spaces where communities could try to reknit the fabric of meaning and connection, and enact cultural transmission in strange locations.

Other Diasporas
Today, I nd that my nephews and nieces, Tamils of a different generation entering the spaces of Delhi and Bombay, do not face the types of anxieties we did. There of course remain anxietiesthe NorthSouth differences remain part of the tensions they navigate, particularly when it comes to issues of marriage, no doubt. But their valence, and the nature of the struggles around identity, is less strainedone can be Tamil and hip, pretty, cool, cultured, and cosmopolitan! I am of course happy for them, for the self-identities and self-images open to this generation. But somewhere in me lurks a questionhow did this shift take place? I may be wrong, but I suspect that as a particular type of national identity got forged, Tamils are now more rmly part of the national imagination of Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari.

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Whereas earlier, regional identities had difculty absorbing Tamils even in cosmopolitan spaces like Bombay and Delhi, todays Mumbai and Delhi can absorb Chennai because the cosmopolitan identity is no longer simply made up of a sanctioned subgroup of regional identities expressing their modern or non-provincial nature. Rather, regional and nationalcosmopolitan identities resolve their differences through the register of another difference. A new urban trans-Indian consciousness and identity is forged that transcends the regional differences of the type that plagued my own childhood through the margins of its difference from Muslim identity, or of difference from a rural, non-elite non-cosmopolitan identity which is class- and caste-coded. The emergence of this new type of national-cosmopolitan identity marks a break with some of the more traditional writing on diaspora, especially as coming from western writings about diaspora and cosmopolitanism. As noted, in India, regional identities would be closer to identities based on states within a federalist system of national governmentand the ethniclingual histories of such regional identities are as strong as the histories of ethno-national identity in Europe. Given this, in India, national identity then would be pan-regional, an identity that would seek to assert both a greater commonality and greater ease of movement within and across the varied regions or states. Such greater ease of movement across cultural boundaries came to be called cosmopolitan or pan-national in Europe simply because the regional and the national were so closely aligned in European experience. But in India, it became a basis for an imagined modern national consciousness. It is in this sense then that cosmopolitanism, as we understood it, both was outward-looking (pan-Indian) and yet not supranationalthough it looked westward, it did not do so in terms of an antithesis to the nation, but as part of the effort to form a modern Indian national sensibility. If so, then Tamilian entry into the cosmopolitan modern imagination of todays urban Indian centers complicates some of the binary renderings of diasporic experience discussed in the section on the Value of Diaspora. Neither a tale of resistance nor assimilation, the incorporation of Tamils into the broader cosmopolitan identities of cities like Bombay and Delhi is a tale of rearticulation of the national. If the Shiv Sena had not shifted from being anti-Tamil to being anti-Muslim, and if we Tamils had not in turn acquiesced in the renarrativizing of struggles over identity in the shift from Bombay-to-Mumbai (never mind that many of the poor Tamil migrants were not Hindu), could my siblings, nephews, and nieces have found it so much easier to enter into the national imagination of the cosmopolitan city, to be Tamil in Mumbai as compared to being Tamil in Bombay? If my experience in Bombay complicates the concept of the diaspora by marking one at home, the structural and historical factors that inform

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how it is now easy to be both Tamil and hip-modern-cool-Bombayite complicate the efforts to read off politics from simple stories of assimilation or resistance. Tamils today do not assimilatethey do not need to. Yet this can hardly called an act of resistance. Nor can success of managerial and professional classes of Tamils in Bombay/Mumbai be attributed to their assimilation or lack thereof. Instead, a structural shift, the parameters of which are politically troubling, opened the space for this freedom in identity formation for a new generation of Tamils outside Tamil Nadu. As noted, today, it is easy enough to be both Tamilian and part of the modern, cosmopolitan identity of Mumbai. But we need to think carefully about the class and caste locations of my narrative. Surely, I sought to navigate and constitute my identity in the face of anti-Tamil sentiments in the Bombay of that time. But the Shiv Sena outrage against Tamils and the rst calls of Maharashtra for Maharashtrians arose in reaction not only to people like me and my parents, but in response as well to the many poor Tamils ooding the city from drought-stricken areas to work as coolies. They were poor workers swelling the ranks of Bombays slum dwellers. I would see them when I went for walks on Chowpatty and Marine Drive, selling Narial Pani, but felt no kinship with them, no sense of we are Tamil. And it was not to them, but to similarly placed educated professional Tamils that my parents turned when they sought to tell me of Tamil culture. Not for me the Tamil culture of folk songs and ammans and people revering Periyar and Annadurai and MGR, but the Tamil culture of high Brahmin ritual, of high classical music and dance, of R.K. Narayan and C. Rajagopalachari. This divide persists. These poor migrants or/and their children cannot enter Mumbais cosmopolitan cultures as my nephews and nieces can. They do not manage to narrate their equally legitimate Tamilness into the Tamilness that enters the pannational urban-cosmopolitan cultural imagination. If diaspora marks the experience of being an outsider to a national body, then these may also be seen as other diasporas. The children of poor Tamil migrants may mirror my story of movement across regional boundaries. But that makes for no automatic common cause even in the narration of cultural identity and Tamilness, since the codes by which a regional identity enters the national cosmopolitan imagination open up a space for me that necessarily leaves them out. And Muslims in Mumbai found that when Bombay became Mumbai, they were suddenly narrated into the experiential status that diaspora marks when coded as the stranger-within. They may not have crossed the border. The border crossed them. This, then, marks my tension with the concept. Diaspora is useful for marking the experience of subject-formation, for narrating a subject into

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being, for highlighting the social and structural parameters of power within a given social-cultural formation, and for locating cultural experience within the tangled lines of power, for marking vectors of being inside or outside, belonging or not belonging. And yet, the term is too tightly tied to pre-given boundaries and borders of nation states to make it fully responsive to the question of how boundaries are formed and how one becomes a member or outsider to a social space. But the types of exclusions and navigations the term highlights, the recompositions and fusions of identities it brings to our attention, can be found within a nation as groups move across it and transverse varied internal boundaries of regional and lingual identity. And the movement may be a structural displacement or relocation of an identity vis--vis the imagined boundaries of national identity, so that experientially, religious minorities may have intense forms of similar efforts and tensions around cultural identity of the type marked by the concept of diaspora even if they do not physically move. Further, once we mark these varied conjunctural locations of diasporic experience, we nd we cannot even come up with simple ethical rankings around assimilationresistance, cosmopolitanismnationalism, and so on. How we note a moment of exclusion and belonging and rework it, even how we evaluate a particular type of response to the politics of identity that diaspora throws in sharp relief, turns out to have the economists maddening non-answer of it depends.

Conclusion
I suggested earlier than it was mainly at the moment of thinking about the relationship of groups to a national body politic that we actually see economics and economists talk in terms of historic location, subjectivity, and experience. My exploration of the concept of diaspora, and suggestion that we could nd the experience of diaspora at home, through my example of Tamils in Bombay, indicates that perhaps what the concept diaspora picks up and presents as a specically transnational problem is a general problem of the nation state. The question that diaspora orients us to is the question of belonging and community. But the too-close identication of diaspora with nationally de ned ethnicities naturalizes the national body of origin in the effort to renarrate self into the new national body. It similarly posits as automatically harmonious, and as a contribution to the space of origin, any and all relations to the national body one no longer resides in. This insight, of course, is hardly new. My suggestion of looking at diasporas at home pushes us further to ask what is being naturalized in the imagination of nation both back home and abroad. This excavation, if combined with a

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concrete exploration of the ways in which such narratives shape networks of af liation, modes of legitimating social membership within a national body, and the concrete organization of material life enabled or disabled for specic groups on the move vis--vis not only geopolitical but also socialcultural borders, can help us elaborate the types of analyses that can, nally, let us come to a more nuanced, situated, and historicized understanding of the economics of migration.

GLOSSARY
ammans: local deities, usually worshiped by non-elite caste groups in the South angada-pongada: meaningless syllables used by Northerners to mimic the sound of Tamil speakers Annadurai: a key leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu when the DMK came to power in the state bharatanatyam: classical dance form associated with the South/Tamil Nadu carnatic: one of the two broad schools into which Indian classical music is divided. Carnatic is used to refer to the tradition of classical music from the South, Hindustani to refer to the tradition of classical music from the North chapati: wheat-based at bread, more common in the North than in the South, especially less common in Tamil Nadu which traditionally has rice rather than wheat-based cuisine churidar: a more tted form of pants worn instead of salwar. Also now nationally popular, once associated with the North davara: a at-bottomed steel cup with a rim and no handle, used with a kinnum to serve hot drinks in the South dosa: a rice-and-lentil crepe Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam: regional party in Tamil Nadu, historically asserted Dravidian (Tamilian) identity and rights for oppressed classes and castes gollu: a Southern Indian festival involving a display of dolls hum-do-hamare-do: literally, We two, our two. The national slogan for family planning, urging people to limit family size as part of the Indian states project of modernization and population control idli: a steamed rice-and-lentil cake Iyer: a subcaste of Tamil Brahmin kaka-podi: a South Indian ritual of feeding the birds to help the souls of ancestors Kanchipuram: city in Southern India (also Kanjeevaram) that is famous for its silks

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kinnum: steel tumbler with a rim and no handle, used with a davara to serve coffee and tea kootu: Southern Indian vegetable dish MGR: M.G. Ramachandran, charismatic lm star and Chief Minister of the State of Tamil Nadu, a key gure in the Dravida movement and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam moda: a round bamboo stool with straw-mat woven seats used for sitting mulaghai podi: a spice powder made with chillis, roasted lentils, and other spices narial pani: coconut water pai: a straw or reed mat put on the oor, often rolled out for sitting on pavada-chokka: a form of dress worn by younger girls in Tamil Nadu Periyar: a key gure in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam poha: a common dish of attened rice akes especially popular in Maharashtra pooja: ritual prayer rasam: a variety of Southern Indian stew made of lentils and spices, usually tamarind-based (usually lighter and more sour than sambhar) salwar-kameez: tunic and loose pants worn by Indian women. Now nationally popular clothing, traditionally associated with the North. sambhar: a tamarind-based Southern Indian stew made of lentils and spices (usually contains vegetables, thicker than rasam) samosa: deep-fried pastry pockets with lling, a popular Northern Indian snack veena: stringed instrument, like a lute or sitar vernie: derogatory local slang, used to poke fun at those who were seen as not western or fashionable. Based on the contraction of vernacular, referring to those who speak in or exhibit vernacular (rather than English/modern) tongue or habits

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This reection is based on a talk given to the 2006 Center for South Asian Studies Spring symposium of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is included in the collection emerging from that conference. My deepest thanks to Monisha Dasgupta and Charu Gupta for help with numerous drafts of this reection. Thanks also to S. Shankar and the organizers of the conference, and to Paula Richman, Ayesha Khan, Brij Lal, Kamala Visweshwaran, and Sharmila Rudrappa for their comments and suggestionsall errors and idiosyncrasies are, of course, my own.

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1. Now Mumbai, but since my reection is on experiences taking place before the change in the citys nomenclature, and indeed entails reection on the politics that led to the change in nomenclature itself as a context for rethinking the meaning of diaspora, I retain Bombay through most of my discussion, switching to Mumbai when appropriate. 2. The occasional note or reference that intersperses the writing is not scholarly in the sense of providing fully rounded academic background and references, but takes the form of the aside, providing nuance or additional background as with the interjection in the previous note. 3. It is of course true that outside economics, the term immigrant also worked, and continues to work, to highlight experiential subjects, and so my discussion may sound unfair to those who work via the term immigrant without my eld. But for whatever reasonperhaps precisely because of its angling of experience to national boundaries and bordersthe term immigrant was not able to focus attention on the experiential aspects of economic subjectivity within economics, except for the question of the national body politic, as noted. This is why I turn to the term diaspora. To folks outside economics, if I use these terms in ways that seem to obliterate distinctions that are of importance to them, I plead the exigencies of disciplinary discourse.

REFERENCE
Danby, Colin (2004) Contested States, Transnational Subjects, in Eiman ZeinElabdin and S. Charusheela (eds) Postcolonialism Meets Economics, pp. 253 70. New York: Routledge

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
S. Charusheela is Associate Professor of Womens Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research focuses on the intersection between postcolonial thought and economics, with particular attention to the epistemology, ontology and ethics of feminist development economics. Recent publications include Structuralism and Individualism in Economic Analysis (Routledge 2005) and Postcolonialism Meets Economics (coedited with Eiman Zein-Elabdin, Routledge 2004). An active member of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the International Association for Feminist Economics, she has served on the editorial boards of Rethinking Marxism and Feminist Economics. [email: s.charusheela@ gmail.com]

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