India in New Zealand
Subtitle: local identities, global relations
By: edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Otago
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Dunedin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 269
ISBN-13: 9781877372858
Subjects: Immigrants; Economic conditions; Relations; East Indians
Description: Indian people in 'bi-cultural' New Zealand have long been an invisible minority, rarely mentioned in our history books. This volume is a second contribution to remedying this historical silence, following the publication of Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community by Jacqueline Leckie. 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 our 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-269).