Indian emigration has been taking place for centuries but never before in history India witnessed such massive movements of people from India to other parts of the world as in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the immigrants of diverse nationalities, overseas Indians constitute a sizable segment. In terms of sheer numbers, they make the third largest group, next only to the British and the Chinese.The people of Indian origin with over 15 million population settled in 70 countries, constitute more than 40 per cent of the population in Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam. They are smaller minorities in Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda, UK, USA and Canada.There were three broad patterns of overseas migration in terms of history and political economy: emigration that began in the 1830s to the British, French and Dutch colonies;  emigration to the industrially developed countries during the post- World War II period; and  the recent emigration to West Asia. In India the sacred Hindu scriptures prohibited crossing the seas. There was no large scale emigration until the nineteenth century. During the second half of the eighteenth century some Indians emigrated to Philippines, USA and Indonesia to work as agricultural laborers. It was the European imperialist expansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which created conditions for emigration in large numbers. New plantations, industrial and commercial ventures in European colonies created the need for large supplies of labor. With the abolition of slavery in the British, French and Dutch colonies respectively in 1834, 1846 and 1873 there was a severe shortage of laborers working in sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, rice and rubber plantations in the colonies and century, and India and China became the obvious alternative sources of labor. These countries also provided the entrepreneurs who settled in different colonies. Thus, by and large, there were two streams of Indian and Chinese emigrants to the colonies: unskilled laborers and small scale entrepreneurs. In countries where the two types of immigrants or their descendants co-exist, the distinction between them is a marked feature of intra-group relations in the Indian community.Indian labor emigration under the indenture system first started in 1834 to Mauritius, Uganda and Nigeria. Later the laborers emigrated to Guyana (1838), New Zealand (1840), Hongkong (1841), Trinidad and Tobago (1845),Malay (1845),Martinique and Guadeloupe (1854). Grenada, St.Lucia and St.Vincent (1856), Natal (1860), St. Kitts (1861), Japan and Surinam (1872), Jamaica (1873), Fiji (1879), Burma ((1885), Canada (1904) and Thailand (1910). Under the indenture system some 1.5 million persons migrated. On their arrival in the colony the immigrants were assigned to the plantations to which they were �bound� for five or more years where they lived in isolated and insulated life. When their indentures were completed, some immigrants stayed on the plantations while others moved out into the rural communities. They combined subsistence farming with wage labor. However, most of these migrants and their descendants did not return home though the indentured system of labor was discontinued in 1917.Emigration to Sri Lanka, Burma and Malaya presents a marked contrast to migration to the West Indies. All the emigrants to Sri Lanka and Malaya were from the South and the migrants were recruited by headmen known as the �Kangani�. The Indians worked on the tea, coffee and rubber plantations. During the period 1852 and 1937, 1.5 million Indians went to Ceylon, 2 million to Malaya, and 2.5 million to Burma. After 1920 the Kangani system of labour recruitment discontinued due to fall in demand for the Indian labor.Emigration to East Africa, Natal, Mauritius, Burma, Malay and Fiji during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries presents a third pattern: the free emigration of traders, skilled artisans, bankers, petty contractors, clerks, professionals and entrepreneurs. Though initially indentured laborers from India were brought to East Africa to build the Mombasa railway, most of the present Indian population of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania arrived after the railway stimulated opportunities for trade and industry.Emigration to the developed countries like Britain, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is a post-World War II phenomenon. The first trickle of Indians to Britain occurred during the period of British Raj. However, a major influx of Indians took place only after India�s independence in 1947. The number of Indians in the UK in 1987 was 12,60,000. There was also migration to England and Netherlands of people of Indian origin from Africa and the Caribbean. In contrast to the ex-indentured populations, the Indian migrants in the industrially developed countries have been able to maintain extensive ties with India because of their comparative affluence. Marriage arrangements, kinship networks, property and religious affiliations keep many migrants well linked to their place of origin, since a large number of Indians are still first generation migrants. Another factor which has enabled overseas Indians in Britain to maintain ties with their homeland is the flow of their remittances and investments.Large scale migration of Indians to the United States of America started only after the repeal of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. By 2001 there were about 1,500,000 Indians in the USA The Indians who migrated to the USA belonged to the class of educated and professional elite such as engineers (mostly software), scientists and college teachers as well as accountants and businessmen. Their life style and aspirations are similar, in general, to the American middleclass. We notice absence of ethnic concentration or ethnic neighborhoods of the Asian Indians in American cities. Religious, regional, linguistic and caste factors still play an important role in the lives of the Indians living in the USA Regional associations have emerged to serve the purpose of both maintaining a separate identity as much as providing a setting for meeting people coming from the same region who also speak the same language. It appears that language and religion have emerged as the most important identities among the Indian immigrants.Indians are the largest component of peoples of South Asian origin in Canada, whose population at present is about 700,000. Majority of the Indians in Canada emigrated during the post-1947 period. As a consequence of the 1969 Immigration Policy of Canada, the flow of Indian immigrants has been highly selective. About three-fourths of the recent immigrants are educated and highly skilled. Most Indian ethno-cultural populations form informal communities, through links between relatives and friends who share common ethnic, linguistic and religious roots.Recent emigration of the Indians to the West Asian countries is basically oriented to labor and servicing occupations on a contract basis. There were only 14,000 Indians in the Gulf in 1948 and 40,000 in 2001. Following the oil boom of the mid-1970s, the Middle East has witnessed a massive induction of the South Asian workers. The population of Indian workers, which was 154,418 in 1975, rose to 599,500 in 1981 and to 1,150,000 in 1992. Presently there are about 3.6 million Indians in the Gulf countries. Here, the need for skilled South Asian workers during the 1960s and early 1970s has been eclipsed by the requirement for skilled labor since the 1980s. There are more than two million Indians in West Asia. The year 1973 experienced the beginning of the rapidly increasing demand for expatriate labor in oil exporting countries of the Gulf and North Africa such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Libya. These countries adopted a development strategy centering around the building up of infrastructure and, in turn, creating a demand for labor in unskilled manual work, especially in the construction sector. At the termination of the first phase of infrastructural projects and with the new emphasis on industrialization in the Middle East, there has been a significant change in the structure of labor demand. Between 1975 and 1980 one million skilled workers had to be imported to manage and operate this new infrastructure. Majority of the unskilled and semi-skilled migrants from India in the Gulf is without their families and lives in communal accommodation. (Courtesy: Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora)

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