Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora

South Asia’s diaspora is among the world’s largest and most widespread, and it is growing exponentially. In 2001, the government of India estimated that 20 million persons of Indian descent live abroad; and many more millions have roots to other countries of the subcontinent, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There are three million South Asians in the UK and approximately the same number resides in North America. South Asians are an extremely significant presence in Southeast Asia and Africa, and increasingly visible in the Middle East.

This inter-disciplinary Handbook on the South Asian diaspora brings together contributions by leading scholars and rising stars on different aspects of its history, anthropology and geography, as well as its contemporary political and socio-cultural implications. The Handbook situates the contemporary diaspora firmly within an historical context. South Asians have travelled abroad for many reasons, in many guises, to many destinations for many centuries. The first section of the Handbook provides a historically grounded analysis of these movements of people. It includes chapters on the following themes: mobile South Asians in the early-modern world, diaspora and Empire, and the diaspora in the age of nation states. The second part of the Handbook centres on politics, culture and identity in the South Asian diaspora, thus offering the reader an overview on transnational politics and economics, culture in the diaspora and the socio-cultural impact of the South Asian diaspora on the countries where they have settled.

This much needed and pioneering venture provides an invaluable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers world wide interested in South Asian Studies.

Joya Chatterji is Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of Trinity College. Her publications include Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932-1947 (1995), The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-67 (2007) and co-author of The Bengal Diaspora (forthcoming 2013, Routledge). She is also the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies.

David Washbrook is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK, and he has previously taught at Warwick, Harvard and Oxford Universities and the University of Pennsylvania. His major interests lie in the societies and cultures of southern India on which he has published extensively.