Images of a Journey: India in Diaspora

Images of a Journey: India in Diaspora by Steve Raymer (Digital Journalist, September 2007). "...Images of a Journey: India in Diaspora documents the struggle of Indian immigrants to survive and succeed in the United Kingdom, the Middle East, South Africa, the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, and in the United States. But it is by no means an encyclopedic account of the diaspora—a scholarly undertaking better left to others. Rather, it is a sometimes larger-than-life story that begins with Great Britain's need for cheap and efficient laborers building railroads and working plantations, as well as for soldiers, policemen, coal miners, managers, and English-speaking teachers across the Empire. Not every Indian went abroad willingly, nor were they universally welcomed. Hundreds of prisoners were shackled in irons and sent to help build, and later settle, colonial outposts like Singapore, today one of the world's marvels of trade, tourism, and material comfort for most of its citizens. Other Indians were known as notorious moneylenders, so loathed in places like Burma that they were expelled."