Anti-colonial Homelands: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, c.1930–50

The 1940s saw the rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements in Kenya and India. By using the Indian Ocean arena as its paradigm of analysis, and arguing for the continued relevance of this realm till well into the 1940s, this paper explores the rise of “Indian” nationalism and religious communitarianism amongst the South Asian diaspora in Kenya. Eschewing the temptation to present the political orientation of diasporic Indians as a derivative discourse of Indian nationalism and communitarianism emanating from the subcontinent, this paper explicates the ambivalence that shaped the political imaginary of “diasporic nationalism” of Indians in Kenya who mediated between the anti-colonial nationalist discourses articulated in Kenya and India. By examining the political postures arising out of this mediation, the paper reveals the competing contours of the diasporic subjectivity of Indians in Kenya whose politics was informed by event taking place in both Kenya and India. It does so by highlighting the interplay between the universalizing aspirations of anti-colonialism that transcended territorial boundaries across the Indian Ocean, and the shared political space of Indians and Africans within the territorially-bound nationalism emerging in Kenya. Significantly, this paper argues that the Indian nationalism and communitarian politics of Indians in Kenya were not simply derivative of the political impulse that had led to the partition of British India in 1947. Rather, it places the “national” and “communitarian” politics of Indians in Kenya within the Indian Ocean realm which was traversed by the diaspora that moved between India and Kenya. Though these trajectories appeared to mirror the political events that had overtaken the subcontinent, this paper emphasizes the distinctly diasporic subjectivity of these Indians to unravel two competing political articulations resulting from concerns with the local Kenyan political landscape – inter-racial anti-colonialism and racially-exclusive communitarian politics amongst those who demurred from the former’s nationalism.