India in New Zealand : local identities, global relations

Abstract

This book has been edited from the 2007 Asian Studies Institute workshop on "New Zealand and India : migration, perceptions and relations, a multi-disciplinary investigation of Indians in New Zealand and India–New Zealand relations.

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