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What happens when ancient systems of oppression travel across oceans? How do Indian diaspora communities across five nations challenge centuries-old systems of oppression while building new forms of solidarity? Caste, Country, and Creed: Struggles for Social Justice in the Contemporary Indian Diaspora takes readers inside the dynamic world of contemporary social justice activism spanning Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

This groundbreaking collection brings together the voices of artists, activists, and scholar-activists who are reshaping conversations about caste discrimination, Islamophobia, and Hindu nationalism beyond India's borders. Through intimate first-person accounts and critical reflections, contributors reveal how diaspora activists are creating powerful counter-narratives and mobilizing collective resistance across local and transnational networks.

The book documents the lived realities of organizing—the values, knowledge traditions, and pivotal moments that spark political protest. Caste, Country, and Creed shows how activists construct alternative knowledge to dissent, build solidarity, and inspire political participation. Contributors offer nuanced insights into the complex relationships and power dynamics that sustain collective action for social justice in the Indian diaspora.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not for sale in India.
 

Winner of a NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.

Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world.

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind’s era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India’s British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires’ united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens. In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide.

Johanna Ogden’s detailed history of migrants’ experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people’s awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Punjabi Rebels mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but of multi-racial democracy.

Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a “voluntary exile,” who discovers he can tell the story of his life through cricket, a game that has long been an influence—really, an obsession—for him. In so doing, he reveals how his changing views on the sport mirror his journey of self-discovery. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra is thus able to reflect on his changing perceptions of self, and of the nations and cultures that have shaped his identity, politics, displacement, and fandom. 

Chopra’s passion for the sport began as a child, when he rooted for Pakistan and against his native India. When he migrated, he became a fan of the Indian team that gave him a sense of home among the various cultures he encountered in North America and Australia. This “shapeshifting” exposes the rift between the Old and the New world, which Chopra acknowledges is “cricket’s greatest modern crisis.” But it also illuminates the identity dilemmas of post-colonial immigrants in the Indian diaspora.

Chopra’s thoughts about the sport and its global influence are not those of a player. He provides access to the inner world of the global cricket fan navigating the world that colonial empire wrought and that cricket continues to connect and animate. He observes that the Indian cricket team carries many burdens—not only must they win cricket matches, but their style of play must generate a pride that assuages generations of wounds inflicted by history. And Chopra must navigate where he stands in that history.

The Evolution of a Cricket Fan shows Chopra’s own wins and losses as his life takes new directions and his fandom changes allegiances.

The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future.

Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.

As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of "India" and "America."