Ellen Bal

Introduction: Aspiring migrants, local crises and the imagination of futures ‘away from home’

This special issue addresses the imagination of futures ‘away from home’ in a globalising world. While a growing number of migration scholars have taken into account that migration considerations are always socially embedded and culturally informed, the processes at work among a mounting number of (young) men and women throughout the world, who are convinced that a better life can only be found ‘away from home’, have been notably understudied. This special issue goes beyond the study of migration aspirations as a question of migration only. It focuses on the specific contexts (in five different countries) within which migration dreams are born, and sometimes even cultivated. It explores the sociocultural embedding of these aspirations by investigating the interpretation of local realities versus global possibilities, and examines how the aspirations of so many worldwide link up to the wider interconnections between globalisation and the sociocultural, political and economic transformations ‘back home’.

Yearning for faraway places: the construction of migration desires among young and educated Bangladeshis in Dhaka

These days, the imagined destinations of ever more people, particularly in the ‘global South’, are not where they were born but elsewhere. Using a case study of educated (lower) middle-class youth in Dhaka, this paper attempts to demonstrate that for many ‘aspiring migrants’, the yearning for leaving is a metaphor for disappointment and disengagement rather than the first step towards transnational migration. Economic growth, rapid urbanisation and the increasing investment in education infest the emerging urban (lower) middle-class youth with new ‘modern’ lifestyle desires that cannot be fulfilled in their home country and generate a sense of disengagement with Bangladesh. The paper focuses in particular on how the – culturally embedded – imaginations of foreign places link up to personal (re-)evaluations of local lives. Nearly all informants explained how local socio-economic, political and existential insecurities made them yearn for ‘safe’ places where their dreams could be fulfilled.

Becoming the Garos of Bangladesh: Policies of exclusion and the ethnicisation of a 'Tribal' minority

Abstract This paper focuses on the relation between state policies and ethnicisation in the borderland of Bengal. On the basis of a case study of the lowland Garos of Bangladesh, the paper argues that attempts by the successor states of Bengal, East Pakistan and Bangladesh to ‘other’, and even ‘exclude’, the Garos have significantly impacted on Garo self-perception and organisation, resulting in the formation of a close-knit ethnic community. The paper focuses on three twentieth-century episodes in the lives of the lowland Garos. The first is the 1936 British administrative reorganisation of Mymensingh District which resulted in the emergence of a notion of a separate Garo homeland in Bengal. The second is the mass exodus of Garos across the international border into the Indian hills which took place in 1964. This traumatic experience pushed the Garos to unify. The third is the Independence War of 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh. All three episodes are directly related to state policies which excluded the Garos (as well as the neighbouring minorities) from the dominant discourse of Bengali/Bangladeshi citizenship. The paper concludes that the Garos of Bangladesh are a close-knit ethnic community—not in spite of these state attitudes—but rather as an outcome of them.

Muslims in Surinam and the Netherlands, and the divided homeland

Abstract This article invites a rethinking of the relation between homeland, diaspora and religion. We reflect on Muslims of Indian origin whose ancestors left British India long before 1947, when the country was partitioned and the new nations of Pakistan and India were established. The article interrogates the understanding of the Indian diaspora with religion as its core feature. It cautions that such a conceptualization often leads to the perception of the Indian diaspora as a Hindu diaspora and consequently to the exclusion of Muslims of Indian origin. Empirical evidence is presented illustrating that Muslims of Indian origin in Surinam and in the Netherlands feel connected to each other as well as to Hindus of Indian origin through a shared sense of ethnic consciousness, a sense of distinctiveness, common history, the belief in a common fate and the perception of their homeland. We therefore argue in favour of the inclusion of these Muslims in the Indian diaspora (studies). Their exclusion means denying these Muslims their history as well as rendering them ‘homeless’. This amounts to a re-enactment of the 1947 partition in the countries which the Indian diaspora now tries to retain a collective memory of, and tries to reinstate as their original homeland in which Hindus ànd Muslims were ‘brothers of one mother’ i.e. Hindustan.

Migrants in liminal time and space: an exploration of the experiences of highly skilled Indian bachelors in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT This paper sheds light on the relationship between individual agency, transnational social relations, geographic place, and cultural constructions of life phase and gender among highly skilled Indian migrants to the Netherlands. Amsterdam is attracting an increasing number of Indian migrants who work primarily in the fields of information technology, engineering and business management. The nature of this highly skilled work requires mobile, flexible workers, and therefore mainly attracts single men between 25 and 34. Their migrant experiences and choices are marked by a ‘performance of liminality’: migration is part of a coming of age ritual that both structures their lives and is structured by circumstances and agency. The experience of bachelors in particular can be understood as a ‘double liminality’ in that it is both temporary and spatial. Many of our bachelor informants felt they were ‘betwixt and between’ the socio-cultural expectations they grew up with and what they perceive to be Dutch or Western culture, and between those that pertain to childhood and to adulthood. They live on a metaphorical threshold, shaped by their masculine ideals, beliefs about ‘Indian culture’, their expected life trajectories, and their experiences in and expectations of the Netherlands and the city of Amsterdam.

'Hunger has brought us into this jungle' : Understanding mobility and immobility of Bengali immigrants in Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh

ABSTRACT The recent history of the Chittagong Hills in Bangladesh is marked by ongoing conflicts between minority (non-Muslim and non-Bengali) locals and state-sponsored (Bengali Muslim) immigrants. In general, these immigrants are framed as land grabbers who have been receiving protection from a pro-Bengali military force. We propose instead, that the understanding of these Bengalis as a homogenous category of mobile perpetrators fails to take into account their complex histories as mobile landless peasants. Our ethnographic research reveals that the framing of the local minorities and the mobile Bengalis as two antagonistic categories with opposing interests obscures the fact that both categories have fallen victim to very similar regimes of mobilities and immobilities of the state and national and local (political, economic and military) elites. Here, we reject binary thinking that counterpoises mobility and immobility as two antagonistic concepts and argue that mobility and immobility are intrinsically related and their relationship is asymmetrical.

The Borders that Divide, the Borders that Unite: (Re)interpreting Garo Processes of Identification in India and Bangladesh

Abstract The people known as Garos, from the Garo Hills and adjacent (lowland) areas in India and Bangladesh, have never constituted one unified and self-defined in-group, although British colonial rule indeed produced a feeble notion of an imagined Garo community. Hence, the international border of 1947 formalized certain distinctions between hill Garos and lowlanders that had existed much longer, and gave a further impetus to the articulations of ethnic identities in different spaces. In recent years, however, we do see different attempts by the Garos to establish linkages across the border. This paper examines these processes of disconnection, exemplified by and through the international border, of unification (within the nation-state), and of (re)connection (across the border). We also try to show how the different strategies of the Indian and Pakistani/Bangladeshi states, in dealing with the populations in their borderlands, have impacted local processes of self-identification and self-assertion in significantly different ways, but with similar outcomes.

Religious Identity, Territory, and Partition: India And its Muslim Diaspora in Surinam and the Netherlands

This article relates the Indian Muslim diaspora to the events of 1947, when British India was partitioned. It is argued that although the government of India has tried to woo people of Indian origin, it is interested only in Hindus, while reterritorializing Muslims to Pakistan. It is also argued that, as a consequence, Muslims of Indian origin in Surinam and the Netherlands do not identify with present-day India. Nor, however, do they look upon Pakistan as their homeland. Instead, they have chosen “Hindustan”—pre-partitioned British India—as their imaginary homeland. Although it was lost with Partition, they retain a collective memory of Hindustan and try to restore it in Surinam and the Netherlands.

British Indians in colonial India and Surinam: Transnational identification and estrangement

Abstract: The authors present a case study of Indian nationalists who drew from adiscourse on ‘exploited overseas Indian migrants’ to serve their own political inter-ests. At the same time, overseas British Indians, in this case in Surinam, advocatedthe continuation of transnational relations between (British) India and Surinamin order to strengthen the position of their community locally. Clearly, for sometime, transnational identification served the (national) interests of both groups inthe two different nations. Yet the authors also show that when such transnational‘solutions’ did not serve any longer to solve local problems, estrangement betweenthe two communities followed. Theoretically, this article constitutes a synthesis ofapproaches that connect identities to specific places and theories that have aban-doned the study of geographically-based national societies. It demonstrates howthe politics of place is dominant even within the field of transnational alliances. Keyw ords: estrangement, identity politics, overseas Indians, place, transnationalidentification While one of us was in Ranchi (Jharkhand,India)reading newspaper clippings about the “Murderthat shattered Holland’s dream” (

‘Talking about mobility’: Garos aspiring migration and mobility in an ‘insecure’ Bangladesh

ABSTRACT All around the world, people are exposed to information and imageries that may have been generated in far-away places, but by implication become part of their everyday lives. These cultural imaginaries, whether ‘realistic’ or not, are widespread and have real-life consequences. They do not only produce new self-images, aspirations and ideals, but also transform notions of (aspired) belonging and mobility. In this article, we show how mobility (transnational connectivity, spatial, social and economic mobility) plays an important role in the everyday life and future aspirations of young members of the indigenous community of Garos in Bangladesh. In the contemporary globalizing context of Bangladesh, young Garos have constructed aspirations which can no longer be fulfilled in their native villages. With this case study of social and cultural meanings of mobility for indigenous youth, we also wish to contribute to a better understanding of past and present processes of social transformation amongst indigenous peoples in Bangladesh. While previous studies of indigenous minorities in South Asia are characterized by a focus on stillness and stasis rather than change and mobility, this article calls for a differing approach in ethnographic research on ethnic minorities, one which recognizes the mobile and (globally) connected context and challenges dominant notions of ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ communities as frozen in time and space.