Mother India

There8217;s an unsettling predictability to the rhetoric that accompanies the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas conclave. As Bharat Sarkar briefly dons the robes of Mother India and presses its 1,200-odd invitees of Indian extraction from some 50 countries to its bosom, emotional words may lace the air but very little else.

A distinct fallacy marks this attempt to construct an uber-Indian universe defying geographic location. The Indian diaspora is possibly the most diverse and variegated in the world. Unlike the Jewish diaspora, they cannot be defined by any one religion. They had no common ethnicity, nor do they speak a common tongue. If Tamil was the language of the indentured tea garden workers of Ceylon and Hindi the mother tongue of those who worked in the sugarcane plantations of Fiji in the 19th and 20th century, the majority of IT professionals in the Silicon Valley today find themselves most comfortable in English. Equally, migration out of this country was not prompted by any one momentous political development. Unlike, say, the White Russians who moved out in the wake of the October Revolution, Indian out-migration was prompted by an astounding diversity of factors. These men and women waged wars for other people, worked machines, traded in goods and services, ran hospitals and houses of worship, designed software. The complex interweaving of community circumstances and individual enterprise that launched a million journeys from these shores to destinations as far flung as Surinam and

Singapore, Guyana and Great Britain, the UAE and the US seems to even defy the standard definition of diaspora.

The brave attempts of the Government of India, therefore, to re-imagine a variegated Indian diaspora as a homogeneous community, ends up almost betraying the idea of India. In any case, it is really not the government8217;s business to bond with non-resident Indians. It should instead allow private interests and initiatives to create their own networks. Karan Johar8217;s KANK did more to bring diverse NRIs together than any Pravasi Bharatiya Divas could have hoped to do in a hundred years.