Introduction

If we were to start this introduction by stating that India is the ancestral home of those who call themselves Hindus, we would expect our audience to concur without ado. If we added, however, that India is also the ancestral home of many Muslims, people would probably look up and ask: ‘you mean Pakistan?’ And surely our audience would gasp if we were to convince them that Pakistan is the ancestral home of Hindus. Clearly, the 1947 partition of British India (hereafter the Partition) has had an impact on the way scholars look at the Indian diaspora. As a result, many studies on the Indian diaspora become analyses of the ‘Hindu diaspora’ (Vertovec 2000) with Muslims sometimes even delegated to Pakistan (Khan 1995: 96). Others prefer to speak of ‘Indian diasporas’ and yet others, having failed to accommodate the Muslims within the Indian diaspora, have proposed abandoning the term and speak instead of the ‘South Asian Diaspora’ (Van der Veer 1995; Clarke et al. 1990). In other words, scholars do not automatically include so-called overseas Muslims – even if (offspring of) pre-Partition migrants – as part and parcel of the Indian diaspora. Religion does seem to divide.

In this article, we analyse the relation between religion, identity formation, and place, which will explain the causes for such above-mentioned, anticipated bewilderment. We not only argue that the Partition along religious lines has made it difficult for scholars since 1947 to link Hindus to Pakistan and Muslims to India, but we also address more fundamental questions concerning communities, ethnicity, religion and homeland. Such questions have gained all the more relevance since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, which seriously induced processes of stereotyping and articulating Muslim identities all over the world. The loyalties of Muslims towards their countries of residence, especially of Muslim immigrants, are addressed with suspicion, and the question has been raised whether ‘true Muslims’ do not consider themselves first and foremost members of a transnational Muslim community or a de-centred Muslim diaspora.

Our focus is on indentured labourers and their descendants in Suriname and Mauritius. We ask how Muslims among them have related to their land of origin, presently known as India. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, approximately 1.5 million people emigrated under the indenture system from British India to several European colonies in various parts of the world.