THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES
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Roehampton Conference Abstracts 13. Subarno Chattarji (Delhi University, India): Subarno Chattarji is Reader is English. His publications include Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (2001). He is a GIPSC Project coordinator. This paper will look at representations of diasporic Indians in the UK and US in the Indian print media. The focus will be on two mainstream English language publications, The Times of India and India Today, which encapsulate the aspirations of the fabled Indian middle class and its projection of a globalized existence. The Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and People of Indian Origin (PIO) have always exerted an ambivalent and powerful force in popular culture representations, particularly in Hindi films. Some of that ambivalence remains especially in discourses that stress 'traditional Indian values' and the NRIs having been 'corrupted' by the morally licentious West. With the liberalization of the Indian economy and the push and pull factors of globalization the moral rhetoric has been jettisoned in favour of assiduous wooing and reportage on the achievements and stature of NRIs and PIOs. India as a nation state now basks in the reflected glory of people who emigrated from its lands most often to seek better economic opportunities and quality of life. The welcome home message is perhaps best articulated in the Bharatiya Pravasi Divas initiated by the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP's advocacy and celebration of NRI, PIO causes is representative of a resurgent nationalism coalescing with economic pragmatism; it is both a call for return to roots and for NRI investments in India. The paper will look at various types of articles over a period of a year, beginning April 2003, dealing with Indian food, the IT revolution and Indian techies in the US, 'reverse brain drain', and the emergence of what India Today calls the 'global Indian'. These articles reveal contradictions between the surge towards a globalized economy in India (and the selling of Brand India) on the one hand and a land of poverty, illiteracy, and communal violence on the other. They tell us as much about contemporary India as they do about contemporary Indians in the UK and US.
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