Table of Contents

Introduction Part 1: Transnational Networks 1. Ethnicity, locality and circulation in two diasporic merchant networks from South Asia 2. The social world of Gujarati merchants and their Indian Ocean networks in the seventeenth century 3. Subaltern networks in a colonial diaspora: a study of Indian migrants and Mauritius 4. An entrepreneurial diaspora? Transnational space and India’s international economic expansion Part 2: Socio-economic Identities & Change 5. Indians in Southeast Asia: migrant labour, knowledge workers and the new India 6. Indo-Fijians: roots and routes 7. From Bharat to Sri Ram Desh: the emigration of Indian indentured labourers to Suriname 8. Sociological reflections on the diasporic Bangladeshis in Singapore and USA Part 3: Culture & Changing Diasporic Identities 9. The attrition and survival of minor South Asian languages in Singapore 10. Forging kinship with food: the experience of South Indians in Malaysia 11. Bhai Maharaj Singh and the making of a ‘model minority’: Sikhs in Singapore 12. ‘The familiar temporariness’: Naipaul, diaspora and the literary imagination: a personal narrative