The 'Pravasi Bharatiya Divas' held in honour of the Indian diaspora at Delhi in early January 2003, and the announcement of a 'national day' commemorating the return of Gandhi to India from South Africa mark a new moment in the government of India's relationship with its expatriates. But the question still remains, 'who is an Indian?'.
The long history of Indian migration to places far from India has led to a situation where Indians are now found in most parts of the world, in various states of being. In a few places, such as Indonesia and Thailand they have been assimilated to the point of near-indistinguishability; in some they have become an integral if contested element of the host country because of the size of the community (eg East Indians in Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji). In East Africa, they are long-standing communities without a great deal of assimilation; in still others, such as the gulf, the white commonwealth and the United States, they represent economic migrants of various social and economic classes. There are other categories; these examples are intended solely as illustration of the great variety of what can be called NRIs and PIOs ('non-resident Indian' and 'people of Indian origin' respectively).
The modern story of Indian immigration overseas begins with the colonial period and the demand for labour following the abolition of slavery. Indenture, a system of labour-contracting that came close to slavery but retained the fiction of free labour, sent thousands of Indian men and women to the West Indies, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia and other plantation states in the British empire. Many of those who went abroad were low caste agricultural workers from contemporary Bihar and Tamil Nadu. They would not have thought of themselves as 'Indian' but rather as Maithili speakers or members of particular castes as they left the shores of India. When they reached their destination, they had received any number of epithets, 'hindoos' and 'coolies' being only two.
To this well known form of migration has to be added the travels of merchants and their families, especially from the west coast of India, sailors and shippers, civil servants, religious figures and pilgrims, who could be found from the Caribbean to South Africa to Malacca. The British empire initiated a new form of movement in their use of the Indian army as an imperial counterinsurgency and military police force, from Africa to Europe, where Indians distinguished themselves in two world wars. These groups were not necessarily migrants, though some did stay behind in the places they visited, but their travels and presence helped establish the idea of Indians as a transnational category, roughly similar to, though on a smaller scale, the idea of the overseas Chinese. Even before the idea of 'India' was fully established in the territorial domain of the country, the idea of the Indian overseas was a meaningful category that included Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Muslims, Christians and others.