India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history

https://www.economist.com/international/2023/06/12/indias-diaspora-is-bigger-and-more-influential-than-any-in-history

by langitbiru • 3 years ago

40 95 3 years ago

economist.com

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/CnjZm

FreshStart• 3 years ago

Numbers and education push are what alloweth a cultural take over of a global industry.

dartharva• 3 years ago

Feels like the other way round in India's case. Compared to the degrees of change India's own culture has gone through because of foreign influences, Indian immigrants' cultural impact on the West is nearly non-existent.

jmopp• 3 years ago

I don't know, Indian religious traditions made their way to the West in the 60s, and today things like yoga are pretty much mainstream. There is also the effect that Indian culture had on British culture in the 19th century: shampoo was brought to the West by an Indian immigrant, not to mention curry, tea, and pyjamas - among others. The effect that Indian culture has had on the West is greater, in my opinion, than the effect Chinese culture has had - though not as strong as that of the African diaspora cultures.

BelleOfTheBall• 3 years ago

I'd say it's more just numbers, it's about the culture's status in the recipient country. While stuff like Indian food or Chinese food is super-normalized, you don't really see either culture dominating the US. Education does help, because it makes them seem "closer" to us, but a lot of the time a big culture will just end up absorbing all others that connect to it.

sramam• 3 years ago

While stuff like Indian food or Chinese food is super-normalized, you don't really see either culture dominating the US.

Let's not forget "Namaste".

The total number of Indians in the US is ~3M [0].

Given the relatively miniscule number of Indians (or Chinese) in the US, I'd actually say both have had an outsized impact on the host country.

"Dominating" is a different notion. I cannot imagine a peaceful path to that end.

[0] https://www.immigrationresearch.org/indian-immigrants-in-the...

gloryjulio3• 3 years ago

In an alternative history, a non ccp China would be close to the US just like India and their dispora would be competitive with India's. But due to the ccp baggage, the Chinese influence is much weaker.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

The (cry) wolf warrior shtick certainly isn't doing them any favours on the world stage.

pydry• 3 years ago

Their industrial might certainly is though. Africa doesn't really care about interhegemonic competition and its associated grandstanding, they care about who builds their airports, roads, dams and railways.

brmgb2• 3 years ago

I think the parent comment was strictly limited to the USA which China views as an adversary and not a partner. Anyone who has travelled a bit in Africa, South East Asia or the Balkans in the past decade could tell that the influence of China is far larger than that of India and does rival the US in more and more places.

The Chinese diplomacy is very very good and hard working. Their diplomats are constantly travelling and that includes both major and small countries.

anticodon3• 3 years ago

But due to the ccp baggage, the Chinese influence is much weaker.

Due to the "cpp baggage" China is big, influential and has much higher domestic level of life than India.

Why do you think so many Indians are leaving the country? Have you ever been to India?

QuesnayJr• 3 years ago

This is despite the CCP baggage. Look at Singapore and Taiwan. If it wasn't for the CCP, China would be as rich as Japan and South Korea.

gloryjulio3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if u get the point. I am referring to the individuals from China, where the ccp baggage makes them less likely to thrive in the US society.

They are either less willing to integrate into the US due to the their ccp upgringing, or more prone to be targeted to be purged(see the recent trump purge of the Chinese scientists), or more prone to actual go back and work with the ccp again.

In contrast, the Indians are much closer to the US society, many Indians actually thinks that the US is just a better and richer version of India(source my Indian friends).

saagarjha4• 3 years ago

People leave China too…

smt88• 3 years ago

Chinese influence has nothing to do with the quality of domestic life.

Whatever the CCP's effect on Chinese domestic life, their authoritarianism and Uyghur genocode have made China incredibly unpopular among the voters in the world's strongest economies, especially the US.

In fact, they're driving Western companies from China to India, which will hugely decrease their global influence.

audunw• 3 years ago

PRC did some things right. I won’t fault them for having an authoritarian phase. Taiwan and South Korea did too. So far they’ve done better than India. Although, perhaps, in ways that doomed them in the long run (one child policy)

But if you compare PRC with for instance Taiwan/ROC, it’s clear that China could have been much more powerful and influential than they are today if they hadn’t been so distracted by disastrous communist ideology/fantasy. They had a chance at becoming the number one superpower, but they blew it.

xNeil6• 3 years ago

While that's a very good point, I also wonder about other countries. Indian origin residents have had major impacts in countries throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East as well, to an extent I believe greater than that of the Chinese. I don't think it's just the CCP baggage, there's got to be something more (maybe cultural).

aydyn2• 3 years ago

Language

safety1st• 3 years ago

To be frank the Economist is pushing the alternative history here. The Chinese diaspora has been shaping real world history, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, for a thousand years or more. To this day the power elite of business and government in most of SE Asia are heavily dominated by ethnic Chinese and you better believe it shapes the politics.

If you limit your view to the Western world of the last 20-30 years everything the author says about the Indian diaspora and the comparison is correct. But then the "in history" needs to be removed from the headline.

Similarly the Economist's comparison of 18M Indian migrants vs 10M Chinese in the world today doesn't really tell the whole story - by most accounts there are 40M+ overseas Chinese scattered across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese

dirtyid• 3 years ago

How does this alternative history benefit PRC? All the elite Indian diasphora couldn't stop US from siding with Pakistan for most of recent history, or prevent global supply chains from shifting to PRC for decades, or secure critical tech transfers to help India develop. Reality is diasphora tend to have very little control over foreign policy unless it already aligns with state interests (Jewish/Cuban lobby).

Ultimately PRC would take increased Chinese (as in the country) global influence, by simply being 5x the size of India because "CCP baggage" allowed her to transfer, retain and coordinate more domestic talent, over increased Chinese diasphora influence in the US anyday. Functionally, CCP baggage didn't prevent plurality of foreign students being from PRC (again because 5x richer), which translates to knowledge flow back to PRC. Recent NBER study on Indian brain drain to US had some crazy figures like 90% of top 10, 60% of top 1000, 36% of top 100 Indian IIT rankers gets brain drained to US. That may be good for Indian influence in the US, but not for India. Meanwhile ethnically Chinese talent is flowing back to PRC because >4% of US being Chinese = not enough political power to prevent another red scare regardless.

What's more benefitial for PRC, diasphora that also makes PRC stronger or diasphora that exclusively makes US stronger. It's the former. PRC extracts more benefits from diasphora with a few decades of successfully lobbying the much more influential US business interests.

ETHisso2017• 3 years ago

It's interesting how the Chinese diaspora was able to drive a large amount of China's economic growth, but the same is not true for the Indian diaspora.

accurrent3• 3 years ago

I'd argue that theres a lot of factors at play. Personally, my parents belong to said diaspora and I spent a long time in China. Ive asked myself the same question. First of all India started out a lot poorer than China post independence. The work needed to bring india up to speed is a lot more. The second issue is one of ethnic identity. China has been working on a predomonantly han based identity for 2 millenia. Indians dont quite have that. Each Indian ethnicity has their own set of values. Also a lot of educated Indians are more familiar with English than there own mother tongues making themselves feel more at home overseas than back home. Then there is the problem of India's financial policy - transacting money is a pain in the bottom for people with money overseas. In recent years things are changing. Younger indians do have a stronger sense of national identity and thanks to technology payments are somewhat easier. The indian government however still does not recognize or know how to exploit this diaspora.

yorwba• 3 years ago

I don't think a common national identity is a big factor. From what I've read about economic development during China's reform-and-opening-up period, private investment from overseas usually piggy-backed on existing trust networks between family and friends. E.g. a Taiwanese investor would support his second cousin's business in Xiamen right across the strait, not some random stranger whose trustworthiness is completely unknown.

So the Indian diaspora split into dozens of smaller groups could provide the same level of support as a hypothetical unified diaspora, each group contributing to their ancestral region's development, just like the Chinese diaspora.

csomar• 3 years ago

My opinion is that it's due to the backwardness of the Indian government rather than lack of enthusiasm in the Diaspora.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

Europe has a long history with the Indian diaspora. Particularly in East Europe, where to Romany, a people of Indian origin, have lived for hundreds of years. The two regions have long historical ties that I think should continue to be strengthened. Shame that Europe fails to acknowledge the history of slavery it made them endure and lacks the will to correct it.

xNeil6• 3 years ago

While your point is quite interesting (I didn't know Romanis originated from India!), they did emigrate around 1000 CE, or 1000 years ago. I'm not sure whether you can even call them of Indian origin anymore?

quonn• 3 years ago

First of all, Europe (which is in many respects not a single entity) has extensively acknowledged injustices done to Roma.

Second, no, there are not relevant historical ties there anymore. Otherwise you could argue that Italy has ties to Egypt due to the Romans or Greece has ties to India due to Alexander.

Perhaps India should acknowledge it‘s own history before lecturing Europe, which is a history of surpressing the scheduled castes - in many ways comparable to the Roma.

4gotunameagain4• 3 years ago

what more could be done to correct it? gypsie communities already receive great support without contributing anything.

gypsie communities are incredibly narrow minded, conservative and sexist, I find it perplexing that typical left wing people tend to support them. I guess they don't really know what's up because they've never met any.

gypsies actively shun their own that go to school. Not university or college. School.

they buy their wives from their parents.

they expect everything from the state/host society, and give nothing back.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

Whoa, ok. Amasing.

I am however glad you made this comment.

I want the world to learn about what’s happening in europe. Both east and west are guilty of an ongoing genocide and no one wants to talk about it and rectify this atrocious mistake.

I hope Indians will not take this kindly, because even though Romany are European there are some in their community that are proud of their origin and seek closer ties. And to be fair I would support any political movement that wants to help these people get back on their feet and one way is even more vocal support from India (Mody already acknowledged their origin). Roma people are valuable to Europe. They are a folk that need to emerge and assert their rightful place in Europe’s history.

accurrent3• 3 years ago

I'm Indian and I dont think "Europe" enslaved India. Britain did. But Britain is not Europe. France and portugal had some small colonies but none of the other european powers were too successful.

India has had a long history of trading with rome, greece and the rest of europe for at least 3500years.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

It’s not India I am referring to. It’s the Romany people that are of Indian origin.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

Do you actually live in Eastern Europe? It certainly doesn't seem so. Roma population are one of the saddest sights I've ever seen, there is minimal integration with rest of societies, ans absolutely 0 integration with India, most of population doesn't even understand their history. Also, not sure if you are linking Roma and slavery, at least in East that was absolutely never the case, in contrary there were medieval laws banning them from entering cities etc.

Communism tried to integrate them into society by force (if you didn't work the work state assigned you, you went straight to jail, or gave them whole apartment blocks which they destroyed beyond repair, see [1]), it worked till the iron hand fell with iron curtain and Roma unemployment reached 98-99% levels. Most, at least in Slovakia, continue to live in extremely basic illegal slums, see [2]. Its still quite normal to see naked kids run around in dirt all year long, including heavy snow.

There are massive health and social issues within community, addictions, parasites and other easily treatable sickness, massive amount of incests, by 15 most Roma girls are already mothers (seen it myself in school), standard amount of kids parents have is 10-12 to get most out of social support. States and society basically gave up, there is no quick solution, and solution that may work would take at least 5-10 election periods, so nobody bothers.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=lunik+IX&client=firefox-b-d&...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=roma+settlements+in+eastern+...

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

I did live in east europe, and whenever I go there and witness this ongoing genocide my stomach turns inside out as much as it does when i witness their status in west europe. Roma people being discriminated heavily in both east and west europe is telling of what europeans have done in their past to other peoples.

“Integration” is an euphemism for erasure. Their unique culture shouldn’t be mistaken for what some elements of their society do thanks to centuries of marginalisation, genocide and slavery.

An assertive India may be beneficial to them. Mody has acknowledged their origin. And although they are a European folk I am resorting to India as that may be their only hope of support for emergence.

As I told another commenter I am glad for your reply. I want people to learn about how the Roma live, and how they are treated and I want them to hear it from those that don’t like them.

OfSanguineFire6• 3 years ago

Also, not sure if you are linking Roma and slavery, at least in East that was absolutely never the case, in contrary there were medieval laws banning them from entering cities etc.

It absolutely was the case. Roma slavery in Romania is a well known part of history.[0] It doesn’t matter that they might have been banned from cities, because slavery put them to work on e.g. boyars’ and monastic estates.

gave them whole apartment blocks which they destroyed beyond repair

Some Roma communities have a code of ritual purity similar to kosher laws in Judaism. Dwellings fall into disrepair once a generation has died in them. It is a failure of public housing policy that this factor was not taken into account when serving the needs of this particular community.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania

oblio5• 3 years ago

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the Indians that came to Europe basically outcasts?

They didn't leave India because India was being nice to them...

So there's shame on both sides.

OfSanguineFire6• 3 years ago

Contemporary scholarship has posited that the ancestors of the Roma left India as e.g. camp followers of armies pursuing their livelihoods, not necessarily as outcasts intentionally turning their backs on India.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

From what I am reading I am not sure. Some sources say they were brought in by the Mongol hordes, while others indeed say they were outcasts.

https://www.travellerstimes.org.uk/features/feature-roma-and...

This link claims that they were captured by the mongols and brought to europe where they were then enslaved, for instance, by romanians and by others.

Other sources indeed claim that they fled india as they were a lower caste and while initially allowed to live freely they were eventually enslaved.

I know for a fact that in Romania they were enslaved - there are articles in the Romanian media showing ads from the interwar period where roma slaves were sold on the open market. In some regions they were still slaves until the early 90s (they were called “sluga”).

The fact that we know little about their history and there are virtually no museums or places to learn about it is quite telling. Western europe for instance completely erases their history and uniqueness by conflating them with romanians.

All I can gather are sparse sources, but they all point to india, slavery, and loads and loads of historical abuse towards them.

OfSanguineFire6• 3 years ago

I spent a year traveling around India early in the new millennium and of course being shocked by the overpopulation. But when I mentioned that overpopulation in conversations with locals as a bad thing, I was surprised to occasionally hear claims that no, that overpopulation would allow India to export more people and thus have a bigger impact on the world stage. Moreover, advocacy for population control was said to actually be a Pakistani and/or Chinese plot.

xNeil6• 3 years ago

A lot of the response in India regarding overpopulation came about during the 1970s, when the Prime Minister's son, worried about overpopulation, started a Compulsory Sterilisation Program, the horrors off which I have heard a lot about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Gandhi#Compulsory_steri...

j-bos• 3 years ago

Scott Alexander had an interesting article about the mind and incentives behind those sterilizations. Section 2 delves into the topic: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck

cscurmudgeon5• 3 years ago

Look up India’s population density and fertility rate. Not as dire as you think. Indians consume much less resources per capita than Wester countries too.

verteu2• 3 years ago

Keep in mind India's fertility rate was much higher at the time of the anecdote (~3.35 children/woman in 2000 vs 2.05 now).

lvl102• 3 years ago

Is it really? India and China make up 40% of the world. Their “output” to the world is fraction of that. And that’s not gonna change due to culture.

ern6• 3 years ago

I was having recently at a management dinner with an Indian colleague (interestingly I think he's a Christian, not a Hindu) who said "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". It's interesting how brazenly open he was, and this was in a western country. I put forward a strong candidate for his team, who happened to have grown up in Saudi Arabia, and he was inexplicably rejected, although in retrospect it made sense.

The article also brushes up against caste, but doesn't explore the role of caste networks in tech.

If that's the "bridge to the west" that India is pushing, I hope some of those tendencies are stamped out, hard.

cscurmudgeon5• 3 years ago

Do you have any pointers to data (not anecdotes) on prevalence of these issues?

butterNaN3• 3 years ago

You demonstrate how important it is to stomp out the rightwing ultranationalism festering in India. It is not solely India's problem any more.

There is irreparable damage being done to the Indian psyche, and it is not going to be contained (unlike, for example, if it was China). Especially considering the impending climate disaster is going to disproportionately affect India and neighbors, resulting in social disaster, mass migration of a scale not seen before.

Indian problems are increasingly world problems.

cscurmudgeon5• 3 years ago

The world's problems are the world's problems. We Indians migrating into other societies see issues that the societies don't see themselves: (asian-hate, white supremacy, sunni-shia violence, anti-semitism).

But I am glad once again the world (ahem, the West) deigned to "fix" India before fixing themselves.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

"I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up".

Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than religion specifically. Muslim countries may still have more clan-based / tribal social structures:

Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions.

[…]

Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...

* https://archive.li/e7DJX

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...

Look at the rates of (non-paid) blood donations, cousin marriage, and corruption, and you'll see high correlations:

* https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per...

* https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Eastern versus western regions of Turkey is interesting:

* https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/

ern6• 3 years ago

Devils advocate: you're trying to justify some destructive (and presumably illegal since it's influencing his hiring decisions based on a protected category) workplace bigotry with a pseudo-sociological treatise.

esalman• 3 years ago

I'd hope so too, buy my grad school experience says otherwise.

Both Chinese CCP and Indian BJP recruit international students studying in the US for spreading propaganda. Maybe more- information gathering, spying... I don't know. I found average Chinese grads very tight lipped about their internal politics. While I didn't encounter any supposed Chinese recruit face to face, I saw Indians who, very amiable and friendly when met in person, would be sharing and posting misinformation and hate speech on social media on a regular basis.

morbidious• 3 years ago

As a Hindu I strongly condemn the burning of Quran in Sweden and Denmark.

butterNaN3• 3 years ago

It honestly feels a statistical inevitability. I highly recommend the book "The Discovery of India" by Jawaharlal Nehru [0] - I think it is a must read, for non-Indians and Indians (especially) alike. India, if anything, has been under-contributing to the world in last couple of centuries.

As an Indian, I feel both fear and cheer about the "Indian influence".

India has been a deeply hierarchical society for a millenniums, and people of Indian subcontinent (I like the term "Thaalis") still have this inertial, hierarchical mental holdover, conscious or otherwise. My hope is that instead of it manifesting[1][2], it is challenged and defeated in the long run. And 'the good parts' are utilised for the betterment of the world.

(Of course, it is never a one-way street, influence is dialectic. In many ways Thaali itself has been deeply influenced by the world. Not saying that's a good or a bad thing necessarily)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_India

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/google-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/caste-...

India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history

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