Premonitions of the Past

Bibliographic Data

ID3629482
AuthorsMrinalini Sinha (corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume74
Issue4
Pages821-841
Publication date2015-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s0021911815001552
OpenAlexW2302125394
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited91

A hundred years ago, on January 9, 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India after approximately two decades of living and working in South Africa. In 2003, the Government of India designated the day of Gandhi's return as official Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or Overseas Indian Day. The centenary of Gandhi's return was marked at this year's thirteenth annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas with appropriate official fanfare. The occasion was also observed in a wide variety of public celebrations, including a full-scale reenactment of the disembarkation from on board the S. S.Arabiaof Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, at Apollo Bunder in the Bombay Harbor; and with rallies and functions held all across India (see NDTV 2015;Outlook2015; see also Roy 2015). These centenary celebrations follow upon more than a decade-long shift in official Indian policy towards overseas Indians, or, in official parlance, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin (see Amrute 2010; Hercog and Siegel 2013; Upadhya 2013; Varadarajan 2014). The policy, at first, was directed mainly towards attracting the wealthy in such places as the United States and the United Kingdom. Even though it now extends to the much larger labor diaspora, both old and new, settled throughout the regions of the world, the focus remains on the rich, whose investments in India are greatly coveted. The embrace of a diasporic and deterritorialized Indian imaginary-anchored, ironically, in the commemorations of Gandhi as the poster boy for the global peripatetic Indian-is a symptom of the changes in the nation-state's relationship to global capitalism in these times of accelerated globalization

Ancient history · Diaspora · Economic history · Government (linguistics) · Political science · Wife · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Indian Economic and Social Development · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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