A new book shining new light on the Indian diaspora in New Zealand through the prism of several disciplines has recently been published. Titled “India in New Zealand: Local identities, global relations”, the book follows Jacqueline Leckie’s acclaimed earlier work, “Indian Settlers: The story of a New Zealand South Asian community”.
The new book is the only one that deals with Indians in New Zealand and New Zealand-India relations in the post 1990 period – a period that saw increased migration to New Zealand from India and a dramatic rise in trade and economic activity between the countries.
Indian people in ‘bi-cultural’ New Zealand have long been an invisible minority, rarely mentioned in New Zealand’s history books. The first section introduces the context, briefly tracing the history of Empire and migration, which saw a few hundred adventurers from Gujarat and Punjab braving the seas and settling here in the late 19th century.
Now Indians constitute the second-largest Asian-Kiwi group in New Zealand’s population (having more than doubled in number between 1991 and 2001). This increasing diversity has initiated a fresh debate on New Zealand’s changing national identity, with the emphasis shifting from its bicultural foundation to greater recognition of ethnic minorities within the nation-space.
The second section critically addresses the issue of a distinctive and uniform “New Zealand Indian” identity and rethinks diasporic identity. In the third section, the Indian diaspora in New Zealand is looked at from a wider global perspective.
The book, edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, has several authors. The editor is Professor of Asian History and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. He has published extensively on caste and Indian nationalism and on the Indian diaspora in New Zealand.