The growing recognition of India as an emerging economic power of the twenty-first century, as well as the less welcome attention attracted to South Asia by its association with the threat of global terrorism, has served to spur interest in the worldwide spread of people of South Asian heritage. Whereas the emphasis of the case studies included in the eclectic collection edited by Oonk is anthropological and sociological (although the historian Claude Markovits contributes a thought-provoking afterword), Judith Brown, the veteran historian of modern India best known for her biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, gives us a broad, British-centred, thematic survey of the story of South Asian migrants from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Yet, while approaching the subject from rather different perspectives, both books reflect the diversity of the subcontinent in considering its global progeny.

It is this diversity that makes the very notion of the existence of a South Asian or an Indian ‘diaspora’ the subject of debate. Judith Brown begins by confronting the issue, saying, ‘it is most realistic to see South Asians abroad as members of different diasporic strands or even as different diaspora groups originating on the one subcontinent’ (p. 4). However, seemingly constrained by the rationale implicit in her title, she then proceeds to leave the issue to one side. Oonk, too, begins by questioning ‘the effectiveness of the diaspora as an academic historical/sociological concept’ (p. 10) and admitting the great difficulty of unifying the waves of migration of South Asians under a single heading. The Indian or South Asian diaspora, if such a concept is admitted, is certainly religiously and culturally more diverse than, say, the Jewish, Armenian, or Chinese diasporas, and linguistically more diverse than the Arab diaspora. Nevertheless, it arguably possesses more coherence than the notion of an African diaspora.

Global Indian diasporas provides varied insights into the South Asian immigrant experience, with contributions on South Asians in East Africa, North America, Mauritius, Suriname, Britain, and the Netherlands. Although four of the eleven chapters deal with Gujaratis in East Africa, Britain, and Canada, the studies also cover a number of other South Asian ethnic groups, notably Telugus and, in a piece that stands out for its historical scope, traders from Multan and Shikarpur in present-day Pakistan. This last, by Scott Levi, considers the spread of a Multani (later Shikarpuri) merchant diaspora in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran over a millennium and serves as a valuable reminder of the pre-modern precursors of the contemporary South Asian migrant communities.

The collection’s strength lies in the empirical depth of the various studies. The subject matter covered includes the loss of facility in their mother tongue of Gujarati over three generations among Hindu Lohanas in East Africa (Oonk); Hindu–Muslim relations in Mauritius and Suriname (Ellen Bal and Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff); British Gujarati experiences (John Mattausch, and Mario Rutten and Pravin Patel); the adaptation of Nizari Ismailis to modernity (Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani); and a couple of pieces on South Asians in Amsterdam (Brit Lynnebakke, and Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten). As Claude Markovits comments in his afterword, while raising pertinent doubts about the utility of the concept of a so-called Indian (or South Asian) diaspora, the collection only underlines the difficulties in presenting a coherent counter to the idea of such a ‘diaspora’.

As Oonk says in his introduction, migrants are part of both global and local history. In focussing on the particular, Global Indian diasporas succeeds in demonstrating this without providing an analytical framework for understanding the links. It is a pity that no biographical studies are included: they might have served to provide clues towards the development of such a framework through vividly illustrating the connections wrought in an individual life. Another curious omission in a book about diasporas is the absence of maps. More trivially, there are one or two factual errors (for instance, South Asians are not politically dominant in Fiji (p. 10)), spelling (‘Bhojpuri’ and ‘Bojpuri’ are used in the same sentence (p. 13)), and layout (Chapter 6 is placed in Part 1 of the book in the Table of Contents but is actually included in Part 2 of the text).

Judith Brown’s succinct introduction to the modern South Asian diaspora provides a rather different perspective to that of the collection edited by Oonk. It takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, with a particular focus on Britain. Despite the express intention to put ‘South Asia back into the story of migration’ (p. 7), the study disappoints in its cursory consideration of the factors behind migration, especially in the decades since Indian independence. (It is much better on British India, ably tracing the role of the system of indentured labour, as well as other factors, in the global spread of South Asians in the century or more before 1947.)

A work of synthesis, which draws heavily upon the rich corpus of research on South Asian communities in Britain, Global South Asians, like Global Indian diasporas, brings out the diversity that characterizes South Asian migrants almost everywhere they are found. Brown uses the term ‘transnational’ to describe them: ‘South Asians abroad cannot be understood just as local “ethnic minorities” … They are involved in a dense network of local or global connections which make them truly transnational people (p. 8).’

The experience of migration and living as part of a migrant community has not generally made people cosmopolitan in their outlook, with, as Brown shows in her chapter on ‘Creating new homes and communities’ (pp. 59–111), inherited religious solidarities playing a significant role for many in the new environment in which they find themselves. In fact, migrants have often, as in the case of many Gujarati Hindus in Britain, or Sikhs in Britain and Canada, sympathized with and supported manifestations of religious nationalism in India. So the notion of being ‘transnational’ is certainly more useful in thinking about diasporas than is cosmopolitanism. However, it is one that requires more development. For instance, Markovits, unlike Brown, uses the term in a much more limited sense, suggesting that the East African Asians, many of whom ended up in Britain, are ‘a rare case of a really “transnational” population, devoid of strong national-political loyalties’ (Global Indian diasporas, p. 268).

Brown rightly points out how living in the diaspora is ‘an experience shot through with ambiguity and tension’ (p. 148). It is an experience perhaps most successfully understood through the medium not of history or social science but of literature,Footnote ¹ a subject strangely absent from both the studies reviewed. Migrants embody the quintessence of the global human experience, one that scholars might seek to understand but can never quite evoke in the same way that a singer or creative writer might.