Diaspora is not merely a scattering or dispersion but an experience made up of
collective and multiple journeys; an experience determined by who travels, where,
how and under what circumstances (Pal et al., 2004, p. 14).
Tapas Chakraborty observes that diaspora has two kinds of people: doubly privileged
and doubly underprivileged.
The doubly underprivileged are those who have lost both homelands as illegal
immigrants abroad, have lost izzat. They can’t come back without having earned
the money, which they lost when they left.
The doubly privileged are the people who are ‘high placed’ in both homeland
and the host country (Sharma et al., 2004, p. 55).
In the words of Vijaya Mishra, the Indian context has two kinds of diaspora:
The old Indian diaspora which is a diaspora of exclusivism, as opposed to new
Indian diaspora characterized by mobility, because they created relatively selfcontained
‘little Indians’ in the colonies (Sharma et al., 2004, p. 82). |
