Diasporic Shrines: Transnational Networks Linking South Asia through Pilgrimage and Welfare Development

Abstract

The majority of the literature on diaspora has hitherto focused largely on flows, nodes and places that privilege links between the `West and the rest' (Hall 1992). In a more subtle manner, this lens refers to networks of metropolitan cities and peripheral sites. Connections between Southall and Jalandhar may be a case in point, or Bradford and Mirpur, or New Jersey and Gujranwala, connected through people, commodities and institutions to form a `diasporic space' (Brah 1996). However, there are various cases where the idea of diaspora does not include the West, constituted by places that are connected across a divided region. One such context is that of India and Pakistan. The formation of these two nation states was accompanied by mass migration, mostly forced, but also some voluntary (Kaur 2007). It resulted over a period of time in a hardening of the border around the time of the 1965 Indo-Pak war and thereafter which mostly sealed the national territorial boundaries, making it difficult to move across for ordinary citizens (Purewal 2006). The inability to travel across the border has created a distinct, if small amount of creative outpouring in the field of literature, film and music, firstly lamenting the violence that created the border, but also the subsequent loss of contact between co-habitants. For Punjabis this fell along the lines of religion, with Punjabi Muslims effectively cut off from Hindus and Sikhs and vice-versa.1