Understanding Identity and Transnationalism in the Indian Diaspora

More than 35 million people of Indian origin live outside India today, spread across over 200 countries. They vote in foreign elections, celebrate Diwali in European capitals, send billions home in remittances, and simultaneously follow IPL scores and local news in their adopted homelands. To understand how any of this is possible – and what it tells us about identity in the modern world – we need to first get our concepts right. What exactly is globalization? How does it differ from transnationalism? And what does “diaspora” actually mean in a sociological sense? These four concepts – globalization, transnationalism, diaspora, and identity – are not just academic jargon. They are the building blocks for understanding how the Indian diaspora exists and defines itself in the 21st century.

Globalization: more than an economic buzzword
Transnationalism: living across borders, not just between them
Transnationalism from above and from below
Diaspora: what the term actually means
Identity formation in the Indian diaspora
Distinctiveness and the sense of “Indianness”
Common history and colonial memory
Common fate and ongoing negotiation
How these concepts are interlinked

Globalization: more than an economic buzzword

Globalization is often described in purely economic terms – the free flow of goods, capital, and labor across national borders. And in many respects, that description is accurate. Economic transnationalism, commonly understood as globalization, accelerated sharply in the latter half of the 20th century through the development of the internet, wireless communication, and the dramatic reduction in global transportation costs through containerization. Multinational corporations reorganized production across borders to minimize costs, and national economies became progressively enmeshed in global markets.

But reducing globalization to economics misses its full significance. Globalization processes are multidimensional and multifaceted – they bring together economic, political, and cultural dimensions simultaneously, expressed both in networks between transnational institutions and in processes of cultural convergence and organizational change. The Indian diaspora is a product of this full-spectrum globalization: it was enabled by cheaper air travel, shaped by information technology, and given cultural direction by the global spread of Bollywood, yoga, and Indian cuisine.

For the Indian diaspora specifically, globalization played a decisive role in its most recent wave of expansion. The Indian emigrant population tripled between 1990 and 2024, from 6.5 million to over 18.5 million – a period that corresponds almost exactly with the rise of global IT outsourcing, the liberalization of Indian markets, and the lowering of international migration costs. Indian professionals poured into Silicon Valley, Gulf construction sites, British hospitals, and Canadian universities. Globalization didn’t just create economic opportunities; it created the infrastructure through which a diaspora of this scale could remain connected to home.

Transnationalism: living across borders, not just between them

Transnationalism is a broader concept than globalization, and the two are often confused. While globalization tends to describe the connecting of economies and governments across geographical borders, transnationalism grew to accommodate the exploration of human behavior, identity, and broader social thought – including what it means for individuals to belong to one or more communities at the same time. As scholar Steven Vertovec defines it, transnationalism refers to the multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states.

The concept gained serious academic momentum in the early 1990s, when anthropologists and migration scholars recognized that immigration was no longer a one-way process of assimilation. Transnationalism refers to the diffusion and extension of social, political, and economic processes in between and beyond the sovereign boundaries of nation-states. For the Indian diaspora, this means members literally live their lives across international borders – maintaining families, businesses, cultural practices, and political commitments in two or more countries at once.

Transnationalism operates on multiple levels. At the individual level, it may mean holding dual citizenship or multiple identities. At the institutional level, it means organizations and businesses stretching their activities across borders. Arjun Appadurai, one of the most influential theorists in this field, described the cultural dimensions of globalization in terms of “scapes” – ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes – that are constantly in play, creating new forms of cultural imagination that cross national lines. For an Indian engineer in Toronto who watches Tamil serials online, remits money to parents in Chennai, and votes in Indian elections via overseas ballot, all of these scapes are active simultaneously. That is transnationalism as a lived reality.

Transnationalism from above and from below

Scholars also distinguish between transnationalism “from above” and “from below.” The former refers to states, corporations, and international organizations driving cross-border connections – for example, the Indian government’s active engagement with the diaspora through the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas convention or the Overseas Citizenship of India scheme. The latter refers to grassroots, migrant-driven activity: community associations, remittance networks, diaspora cultural festivals, and informal support systems that migrants build for themselves. The Indian diaspora is shaped by both. The Indian state has increasingly recognized its overseas communities as strategic partners; and simultaneously, diaspora members organize their own transnational lives through family networks, religious institutions, and digital communities.

Diaspora: what the term actually means

The word “diaspora” derives from the Greek diaspeirein, meaning “to scatter.” Originally used to describe the dispersion of Jewish communities outside Israel, the concept has expanded significantly in contemporary social science. Today, diaspora refers to communities that have migrated from their ancestral homeland, maintain connections to their place of origin, and develop a distinct collective identity that is shaped by that experience of dispersal.

The idea of an Indian Diaspora as a transnational social community is based on a psychological sense of being Indian and possessing the social values of Indian heritage. This is the basic requirement that distinguishes diaspora from simple migration: it is not just about where you live, but about who you feel you are. Diaspora identity is forged through a combination of shared cultural practices, historical memory, and a sense of collective fate – the feeling that your community shares a common story that links your present situation to a specific ancestral homeland.

In today’s world of globalization, diasporas challenge the traditional idea that identity and belonging are tied to a single nation-state. Instead, diaspora demonstrates that identity can be multi-local, transnational, and hybrid. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall emphasized that diasporic identity is not fixed but constantly evolving through interaction and negotiation. A second-generation Indian in Birmingham or Mississauga is not simply Indian, nor simply British or Canadian – they are something new, shaped by both.

Identity formation in the Indian diaspora

Identity is the most complex of these four concepts, and in the context of the Indian diaspora, it is also the most dynamic. Identity here does not refer simply to national citizenship or ethnic background. It refers to the ongoing process through which individuals and communities answer the question: who are we?

Diasporic communities have historically maintained their ethnonational identities – either actively or passively – but in recent times, these identities have been significantly strengthened by global forces such as the internet, which have created and recreated newer ways of expressing transnationalism and ethnonationalism. For the Indian diaspora, several factors drive this process of identity formation.

Distinctiveness and the sense of “Indianness”

One pillar of Indian diaspora identity is distinctiveness – the felt sense of being culturally different from the host society. In social structure, many features can be shared within the Indian diaspora – vernacular language, kinship nomenclature, ideology of caste, religion, and culture – and these shared features create a boundary between “us” and “them.” This is what scholars like Fredrik Barth called the ethnic boundary function: a group defines itself partly by what it is not. For Indians in Europe, North America, or the Gulf, maintaining cultural practices – cooking, religious rituals, language – is not simply nostalgia; it is a form of identity preservation.

Common history and colonial memory

A second pillar is shared history. Many members of the Indian diaspora, particularly those from earlier waves of migration, maintain strong connections to the historical events that shaped their displacement – British colonial rule, the indenture system that sent Indian laborers to Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji, and South Africa, or the post-independence migration of professionals to the West. These shared historical experiences create collective memory – a sense that the community’s present situation is intelligible only through its past. This is why a Trinidadian of Indian origin and a Kenyan of Indian origin, separated by thousands of miles and entirely different host cultures, can still recognize a common story. They share ancestors, a shared language of displacement, and a shared legacy of colonial labor migration.

Common fate and ongoing negotiation

The third pillar is common fate – the sense that what happens to Indians abroad, as a category of people, affects you personally. This is most visible in moments of political crisis: when anti-Indian sentiment rises in a host country, when visa policies tighten, or when diaspora members face discrimination, the response is often collective. Large numbers of diaspora members today have diverse “habitats of meaning,” living in social worlds stretched between physical places and communities in two or more nation-states. Multiple habitats bring multiple experiences, multiple cultural repertoires, and multiple identities – and navigating all of them is the daily work of diaspora life.

This navigation is not frictionless. For individuals, transnationalism may mean a legal status – two or more passports – and/or multiple identities. But it also means navigating competing loyalties, facing questions about where “home” really is, and managing the expectations of both the homeland and the host society. The second and third generations of Indians abroad often face this most acutely: born and socialized outside India, they relate to India through the memories and cultural practices of their parents, not through direct experience.

How these concepts are interlinked

Globalization, transnationalism, diaspora, and identity are not four separate phenomena – they are mutually constitutive. Globalization creates the economic and technological conditions that make large-scale diaspora formation possible. Transnationalism describes the social and cultural practices through which diaspora members maintain cross-border lives. And identity is the outcome of that process: a constantly evolving, negotiated sense of self that is shaped by origin, migration history, host-society context, and the global forces connecting them all.

The Indian diaspora illustrates this interconnection with particular clarity. As of 2024, the Indian diaspora comprises approximately 35.42 million people spread across more than 200 countries, contributing over $129 billion in annual remittances to India – the highest for any country in the world. This is not just economic activity. It is transnationalism in action: millions of individuals maintaining affective, financial, and cultural ties to a homeland they may not have visited in years, because their identity is partly constituted by that relationship.

Understanding these four concepts – and their interlinked nature – is essential for anyone studying how communities form, persist, and transform in a globalized world. The Indian diaspora is not simply a collection of people who left India. It is a transnational social formation with a continuously evolving identity, produced by the forces of globalization and sustained by the practices of transnationalism. Getting these concepts right is not an academic exercise. It is the foundation for understanding one of the most significant demographic and cultural phenomena of our time.

What do you think? Does the concept of “common fate” still hold for second and third-generation members of the Indian diaspora who were born and raised entirely outside India? And to what extent does globalization strengthen diaspora identity – or does it gradually erode it by promoting cultural homogenization?

References

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Table of Contents

Globalization: more than an economic buzzword 🔗

Transnationalism: living across borders, not just between them 🔗

Transnationalism from above and from below 🔗

Diaspora: what the term actually means 🔗

Identity formation in the Indian diaspora 🔗

Distinctiveness and the sense of “Indianness” 🔗

Common history and colonial memory 🔗

Common fate and ongoing negotiation 🔗

How these concepts are interlinked 🔗