May 10, 2006 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
It’s hard to imagine a more successful diasporic population than the Indo-Mauritians. Persons of Indian descent form two thirds of the Mauritian population, dominate politics from the local to the national level and are a commanding presence in business and the professions. The Indo-Mauritians, in fact, wield sufficient power that one might expect them to not identify as a diaspora at all; indeed, one might expect Mauritius to be a neo-India in the same way that the New World and Australasian colonies are neo-Europes. But this is clearly not so. Although the Indo-Mauritians are politically and economically dominant, they are much less dominant culturally, and haven’t succeeded in putting their stamp on Mauritian society in the same way that British colonists did in the United States and Australia. What’s more, they overwhelmingly identify, not as the creators of a new India over the seas, but as part of a worldwide overseas Indian population. [The Head Heeb]
Jonathan Edelstein asks and answers why ethnic Indians have not managed to create neo-Indias in countries where they are dominant.
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