How Diaspora Associations Hold Communities Together

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Wherever Indians have settled in numbers, a particular kind of organisation appears within a few years: the association. It may be called a samaj, a sangam, a society, a federation or a council. It usually has a president, a committee, an annual general meeting, a bank account and a hall it hires for festivals. It is almost always run by volunteers who have day jobs. These bodies are easy to overlook because they are unglamorous and because their work is mostly invisible to anyone outside the community, but they are the connective tissue of migrant life, and understanding how they function explains a great deal about how diasporas actually hold together.

The associations are not interchangeable. They sort themselves along several axes at once. The most common is region and language: Telugu, Tamil, Malayali, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi and Kannada organisations exist in most large destination cities, because language is what determines who you can comfortably spend a Sunday afternoon with. In North America, Telugu associations founded from the 1970s onward grew into large national federations holding biennial conventions. A second axis is religious: gurdwara management committees, temple trusts, mosque committees and church congregations, which own property and therefore tend to be the wealthiest and most durable institutions a community builds. A third is professional: bodies for physicians, engineers, accountants and entrepreneurs, of which the best known are the association of Indian-origin physicians in the United States and the entrepreneur network founded in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s. A fourth is umbrella federations, which claim to speak for everyone in a state or country and are usually the ones governments call.

What they actually do

Their first function is arrival support, and it is entirely informal. A new student or worker lands, is met at the airport by someone whose number was passed along, sleeps on a floor for a fortnight, is told which suburb has cheap rent and which employers pay properly, and is walked through opening a bank account and getting a tax number. None of this appears in a constitution or an annual report. It is the single most valuable thing associations do, and it is the mechanism by which migration chains reproduce themselves.

The second is cultural reproduction, which mostly means teaching children. Weekend language classes, classical dance and music schools, religious instruction and youth camps exist because parents recognise, usually with some anxiety, that a language not deliberately taught disappears in one generation. The third is the public festival. Diwali celebrations, Onam feasts, Ganesh Chaturthi processions, Baisakhi nagar kirtans, Durga Puja pandals and Independence Day flag raisings are logistically demanding events requiring council permits, insurance, traffic management, food handling licences and volunteer marshals. Running one successfully is an organisational apprenticeship, which is why festival committees are so often where community leadership is formed and fought over.

The fourth function is welfare at the hard edges. Associations arrange hospital visits, they raise money when a worker dies without insurance and a body has to be flown home, they run aged care support and social groups for elderly parents on long visas who cannot drive and do not speak the local language, and they intervene in family crises including domestic violence, where distrust of official agencies is common and the association may be the only door someone will knock on. Increasingly they also collect for disasters in India, which is where formal charity registration matters: in Australia, incorporation under a state associations act plus registration with the national charities regulator determines whether donations are tax deductible and whether the body can hold funds legitimately.

The strains

The fifth function is political interlocution. Governments in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States prefer to consult a community through a recognisable representative body, and associations position themselves to be that body. This produces real benefits, including multicultural grants, recognition of festivals in civic calendars, and consultation on migration and settlement policy. It also produces the sector's characteristic pathology. If being recognised as the voice of a community brings status, invitations and funding, then the question of who is recognised becomes worth fighting over, and association elections in large diaspora communities can be surprisingly bitter. Splits are common, and a single city can end up with several bodies each claiming to represent the same population.

Two further strains are worth naming plainly. The first is the importation of homeland politics. Associations that present themselves as cultural often align, formally or not, with Indian political currents, and disputes over Indian domestic issues can fracture an organisation that was ostensibly formed to run a Diwali fair. The second is generational. Associations built by first generation migrants around language, region and religion do not automatically appeal to people born in the destination country, who may not speak the language fluently, may have friendships and marriages across community lines, and may find the committee culture stifling. Many organisations are in slow decline for this reason, while newer forms, informal networks, professional groups and single-issue campaigns organised entirely online, take over some of their functions without any of the constitutional apparatus.

Governments in India have tried to work with this landscape rather than around it. Overseas Citizen of India registration, introduced in the mid 2000s, gives people of Indian origin a lifelong visa and certain residency rights without citizenship, and Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, held around 9 January, is the annual convention at which the Indian government engages diaspora organisations. Whether such engagement strengthens community institutions or politicises them is a live argument. What is not in dispute is the underlying observation: migration is not an individual act. It is sustained by dense, unpaid, quarrelsome, locally rooted organisations that most migrants join without ever thinking of themselves as members of civil society, and that would be very difficult and expensive for any state to replace.

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