Uncategorized Indians in Vietnam and questions for diaspora studies

ABSTRACT This research report describes individual Indian descendants in Ho Chi Minh city in the aim of raising research questions for the scholarship of Indian diaspora studies. I focus on the Indian diasporic members who are largely descendants of those who, in the second half of the nineteenth century and before, migrated from French–British India to Vietnam. They are economically and culturally different from the current Indian expats, the members of the capitalized 'Cộng Đồng Người Ấn Độ' (Indian Community) in Vietnam. The current Indian immigrants largely work in Indian companies and multinational groups. In other words, the Indians in Vietnam are not classified either as children of 'Kinh paternalism' or of Vietnamese 'state paternalism' (Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1900. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003, 258, 287). Nor, are they perceptually overseas daughters and sons of 'Hindu paternalism' (Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 31). The Indian descendants in Vietnam belong nowhere politically. The ambiguity of the Indian descendants in Vietnamese history and society does not suggest that they would be a research subject of the Indian or South Asian diasporas in the field of diaspora studies. Indeed, exploring the Indian diaspora in the dynamic contexts of Vietnamese nationalism offers a new direction in the diaspora studies in general and South Asian diasporas in particular. The report is based on my ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City in 2012–2014 at Indian individuals’ houses and at cultural centres.