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Ascending India and overseas Indians Rising India and Indian communities in East Asia

With the second largest population in the world and nuclear weapon capabilities, India can reasonably be classified a great regional power. But it is the substantial economic growth of recent years that boosts the worldwide assumption that India is indeed an emerging power that merits more attention. Following a series of economic reforms initiated in the 1990s, India has successfully transformed itself from a torpid socialistic-oriented economy to a liberalizing economic powerhouse in the global trade system. Today’s India is the eleventh largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and ranks fourth in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). Unlike China’s economic success, which focuses mainly on the exporting of manufactured goods, India’s growth exploits its comparative advantages in information industries and service sectors, all the while expanding domestic consumer markets. This book is a collection of research articles from a conference organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore in October 2006. In the editors’ words, it is a ‘study of Indian communities in East Asia in the context of a rising India’. Under this ambitious goal, the book is organized into three broad themes. The first examines the positions of Indian communities residing in Southeast Asia. During the colonial period, millions of Indians left for Southeast Asia to work as plantation laborers, military personnel, and servants. Although most of them have since returned to the homeland, there are still about two million Indians living in Southeast Asia today, spreading from Myanmar to Indonesia. Singapore and Malaysia host the largest number of Indian immigrants, therefore roughly a third of the book (12 out of 35 chapters) focuses on Indian communities in these two countries. This volume also includes some chapters discussing colonial-era Indians and their descendants who migrated to other Southeast Asian countries and remain decades later. These include the Muslim Indians of Myanmar (Chapter 26) and Sikh families tucked away in the province of Western Visayas in central Philippines (Chapter 28). First-hand observations regarding the economic and political status of the Indians in these isolated