Eastern Africa and the South Asian Diaspora

People interacted across the Indian Ocean for centuries before numbers arriving in East Africa from India increased with colonial rule. Although “South Asian”/”Asian” is now commonly used in scholarship and daily life in East Africa to refer to citizens and residents with ancestral roots in South Asia, “Indian” has been deployed for most of the time under discussion, including to migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The label “Indian” has been used to include and exclude, for instance to make and deny political claims. “Indian” has not been an immutable term, but it has been modified, subverted, and reworked in practice. Indians have and occasionally still continue to be treated as an addendum, a separate and distinct phenomenon, strangers and a perpetual foreign group, rather than integral to East Africa where their influence and contributions include, but are not limited to, the economy, politics, civil society, literature, arts, and the built environment. Understanding their lives is also significant for African and South Asian history, as well as to many wider areas of scholarship, including on multiracial societies, diaspora, identity, and gender. It also highlights the dangers of homogenization when naming communities; the importance of understanding inequalities within communities; the need to situate all interactions between people in their specific time and place; and the necessity of recognizing continuities as well as change. Typically one-dimensional representations of Indians in East Africa as male economic actors left Indian women and other political and social roles, identities, and subjectivities largely invisible. Scholarly attention has its origins largely since the 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, political scientists focused their interest on the status of Indians after independence, economists on the roles that Indians had played and would play in their economies, and anthropologists on studies of social structures and the persistence of cultural traits. The focus has since broadened to include impacts of globalization, transnational networks and practices, and nationalism in East Africa. Diverse opportunities for further research exist, such as examining how differences between and within Indian communities may relate to particular localities, the roles African labor and patronage have played in the success or failure of Indian enterprises, and issue surrounding recent Indian migrants.