India in New Zealand: Local identities, global relations

Indian people in "bi-cultural" New Zealand have long been an invisible minority, rarely mentioned in our history books. This volume is a second contribution to remedying this historical silence, following the publication of Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community by Jacqueline Leckie. The first section introduces the context, briefly tracing the history of Empire and migration, which saw a few hundred adventurers from Gujarat and Punjab braving the seas and settling here in the late 19th century. Now Indians constitute the second-largest Asian-Kiwi group in our population (having more than doubled in number between 1991 and 2001). This increasing diversity has initiated a fresh debate on New Zealand's changing national identity, with the emphasis shifting from its bicultural foundation to greater recognition of ethnic minorities within the nation-space. The second section critically addresses the issue of a distinctive and uniform "New Zealand Indian" identity and rethinks diasporic identity. In the third section, the Indian diaspora in New Zealand is looked at from a wider global perspective.