Our House on 100 Feet Road

We return, now, to an opening vignette on the first page of this book—an overseas Vohra family in the United Kingdom with a recently acquired flat in Anand. In a living room in West London, on a flat-screen TV, pictures of Indian streets and food stalls flash. “This is Mumbai,” Ahmad clarifies. Then, “This is our flat in Anand.” The conversation takes place on a Friday evening in 2016, at the weekly gathering of his (extended) family. Surrounded by his brothers, their wives, and his elderly mother, with children playing on the floor in front of the TV, Ahmad uses the occasion of my presence to take another look at the pictures of his recent trip to India. Lately, he has been going every year.

Ahmad bought the flat as a vacation home. A video taken from its balcony shows a wedding passing by on the street below. “You can just sit there, and the entire life of Anand passes by: it’s wonderful,” he comments. From the image, I recognize it as 100 Feet Road. Calculating the flat’s proximity to this street, I react, “We are neighbors!” I clarify which housing society I lived in during my stays in Anand. We spend some time discussing our shared knowledge of the people and places in the area.

Ahmad is so pleased with his new flat that I struggle to raise the question of the town’s painful history. When I finally find the words, I ask how he perceives the post-violence trends of displacement and residential segregation. Ahmad briefly responds, “Well . . . yes, but this is not our fault, is it?” For a moment we both fall silent, unsure of what to say. Then, the conversation is back to food stalls and restaurants. “The town is developing fast,” he says. His brother and mother nod appreciatively, commenting that it could be developed even more. Ahmad continues, “There are hardly any eateries within walking distance of our flat. People could make great business on that street. You could have a pizza place; why doesn’t anyone start that up?”

Ahmad’s was one of the sixteen Vohra households in the United Kingdom that I had interviewed in 2012 about their investments in India. Ten households had invested in land or houses in Anand town, while others were considering buying property in Anand in the future. Only a few had ties with Anand prior to 2002, so I asked them why they chose the town. Ahmad’s situation made me particularly curious—he had grown up in Mumbai, married in Mumbai, and raised his children in London. Now he had invested in Anand, a one-day train ride away from Mumbai. In 2012, he explained:

We’ve invested some money. Basically we bought land [thinking], “We will build a house” or whatever. In Anand. . . . We bought quite a big plot; we wanted to build a house like this one over here [in the United Kingdom]. Huge plot.

[I ask, “Why Anand?”]

Because that’s where the family is. If we go there on holiday, we go to Anand.

In 2016, when I returned to this family in London, they’d sold the plot at a profit, and had just purchased a new flat. When I asked again, why in Anand, Ahmad replied that it was conveniently located within six kilometers of his natal village, Boriavi, so they could easily visit relatives in the village. Moreover, many of the Muslims from this village had moved to Anand in the previous fifteen years, and some of them had bought houses close to the flat. Ahmad reflected:

I can walk down the street there [in Anand], I can bet you, there will always be someone who will be related to me. . . . We have good contacts there and [whenever we need anything] someone would mention a name: “Oh so-and-so is doing good work, I know him, he is so-and-so’s son, and I was on the phone with him yesterday.” That’s how it goes.

Anand is a convenient vacation location: the shops, restaurants, and services that are available there provide all that the family needs. Another advantage of investing in Anand, suggested Ahmad and others, was the price differential between Anand and Mumbai. Land prices in Mumbai make land there accessible only to the hyper-rich. In Anand, land was more affordable, at least in the decade after 2002 (prices have risen dramatically since then). Relatives in Anand, moreover, have more time than those in Mumbai to help arrange buying, guarding, and maintaining a house in the absence of the owners, and dealing with bureaucracy. Mumbai, in contrast (it was suggested), is an expensive city, and its residents work around the clock, with very little time available for helping their overseas relatives.

Of the overseas Vohras in the United Kingdom who had bought flats in Anand, two more examples demonstrate how reorientation works in this transnational social field. Yousuf and his wife bought a flat within walking distance of the relief colony where her family had resettled after 2002. Like Ahmad, Yousuf and his wife had no prior history in Anand. He had moved to Tanzania (then called Tanganyika) from the village of Sunav in Gujarat at the age of four or five. He spent most of his childhood in Tanganyika and moved to the United Kingdom after he turned eighteen. His wife came from a small village in the vicinity of Dharmaj and had relatives in the nearby city of Ahmedabad. Their visits to Gujarat prior to 2002 were mostly spent in his village, his wife’s village, or Ahmedabad. It was in 2002 that both his own and his wife’s family suddenly left their villages and moved to Anand. At this time, Yousuf became very active in the United Kingdom, organizing charitable relief for Anand (more below), and supported these relatives in finding a home in a relief society in Anand. He and his wife bought their own flat in Anand a few years later. “I am from the village of Sunav,” he clarifies. But “now, nobody from my family lives in Sunav. So obviously, I don’t have any feelings about Sunav, even though it is my birthplace. Because there is nobody there now! They all have shifted to Anand!”

The investors I interviewed had bought houses within walking distance of their recently relocated relatives; in one case, a new house doubled as a resettlement house for a locally displaced family and a vacation home for their overseas relatives. This house, a third and last example, was bought by an elderly man in London to help his younger brother resettle in 2002. It is big enough to serve two purposes simultaneously: the younger brother is both caretaker and main occupant, with his nuclear family, while the older brother overseas uses part of it as a vacation home. When the older brother and his wife visit from London—which they try to do once a year—they are, as his wife says, “visitors in our own house.” She explains:

We stay there for four weeks, maximum five weeks. They [the relatives in Gujarat] won’t let us do anything. . . . OK, I cook once in a while, something different . . . but clothes washing, everything, they won’t let me do it. So, I just relax.

Anand has emerged not only as a safety zone and a destination point from the villages, but also as a new base for overseas investment, social connections, and belonging. Referring to the 2002 displacements, Yousuf states, “We [Vohras] have been uprooted!” But when I ask him how he feels when he visits Anand, he nevertheless answers, “I feel at home when I go to Anand . . . I feel at home.”2 These findings conjure a regionally produced meaning of transnational real estate investment, which adds another layer to Vohra stories of rural-urban transformation. Other aspects that shape the overseas Vohras’ transnational experiences include their histories of migration and settlement, the community organizations they have formed in their countries of arrival, and the political developments in India that influence their homeland relations.

Overseas Migration

For many young people in central Gujarat, going abroad (or bahar—outside) is a key aspiration. Cross-border migrations have so far mostly been described in the regional literature from the perspective of the local Patidars (Tambs-Lyche 1980; Rutten and Patel 2003). When Vohra interlocutors compared their own migration with that of the Patidars, they said that Vohras went abroad later and in fewer numbers. In this, Vohras of central Gujarat are different not only from the Patidars but also from the Gujarati Muslim communities on the coasts of Baruch and Kutch, with their long histories of overseas mobility and exchange across the Indian Ocean.

The story of the Patidars’ overseas migration is well known among the Vohras, as illustrated by the middle-class Vohra family whose apartment I lived in during my research in Anand. From my first encounters with this family (in 2011), they made clear that the migration of Muslims was not an ordinary affair here. At the time, one of the overseas sons of the family happened to be visiting from Australia with his wife, and she told me that there were fifteen Vohras from Anand in Sydney. When I told her that some of the neighbors had estimated that there are about 400 Vohras living abroad in total, she considered this an optimistic estimation:

That may be true, I don’t know, but they are not well settled. They are just starting. They have no old links, like Patels. That is why all the Patels go to the United States and United Kingdom: they have connections there so it is more easy for them to start their lives there. We [Vohras] don’t have those old links; this is why we go to Australia.

At the same time, the family history did illustrate that an earlier line of migration existed. An elderly uncle of Shahinben was also visiting Anand in the winter of 2011–2012. He had moved to the United States in 1993, in his late forties, to join his son, who had migrated earlier. According to him and other Vohras I talked to in the United States, the overseas migration of Vohras had started in the 1960s. Nevertheless, they agreed that the number of Vohra migrants has remained very limited compared to the number of Patels.

To assess the volume of migration in the neighborhood, I conducted a household survey in six housing societies (Survey A). The residents of these housing societies described themselves as middle-class Muslims, and some indicated that they were more transnationally connected than other housing societies in Anand’s Muslim area. Even so, only a third of the surveyed households turned out to have transnational connections—42 of 147 households (see table A.09). Of these forty-two households, thirty-six had one or more family members living abroad. This family member was a child of the family in twenty-six households, with a total of thirty-five children (twenty-seven sons and eight daughters) living abroad.3 Of these thirty-five children, ten were in the United States, ten in Australia, and eight in the United Kingdom. A few were in the Middle East or South Africa, and one was living in mainland Europe. Four houses were closed at the time of the survey, and neighbors indicated that the owners were abroad (see table A.09).

The locations that figure prominently in these findings are the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia (and, more recently, Canada)—not Africa, the Gulf, or Sindh in Pakistan, which are destinations that appear more frequently in travel descriptions of Gujarati Muslims on the coast (Ibrahim 2008; Simpson and Kresse 2007). The United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia are important destinations in the Charotar region (Guha and Dhak 2013) and figure prominently in the literature on the Patidars. The Patidars are described as “twice migrants” (Bhachu 1986) because they migrated to East Africa first, and then onward to other destinations, such as the United Kingdom and the United States. The migration of Patidars to East Africa began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the (British) colonial state encouraged Indian merchants and workers to migrate to its other colonies (Jain 1993; Makrand Mehta 2001). These migrants took up jobs on the railways or in the civil service, and some started their own businesses. After the British colonies became independent in the 1960s, Indians were confronted with anti-Indian sentiments and, in Uganda, with forced expulsion. In 1999, Parvin Patel and Mario Rutten wrote that “there may not be a single village from about one thousand villages of Charotar” from which at least one Patel family had not migrated. In some villages, more than half of the Patel families had emigrated (952). To this day, the surname Patel is one of the best-known Indian surnames in the United Kingdom.

Some Vohras of these villages joined the Patidar trails to East Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Vohras report that migration was rare in their community during the colonial period, and, in some cases, was strongly discouraged by relatives. The Gujarati Muslim communities who settled in eastern and southern Africa are mostly from urban or coastal mercantile trading groups, not from the Charotar region. By 1956, when the Patidars from Charotar and Gujarati Muslim groups from the coast had become a prominent presence in East Africa, only a handful of Charotar Sunni Vohra families were living there. This was recollected by an elderly Vohra man who moved to Tanzania (then Tanganyika) from his village, Kanjari, in 1956. He remembered approximately four Charotar Sunni Vohra families living in Uganda, three in Tanganyika, and a few in Kenya. He himself had migrated against the will of his family when a (Muslim) friend from Surat helped arrange a job for him as a teacher in a school in Tanganyika. He moved back to India in 1967, and then migrated to the United Kingdom in 1986, where I interviewed him in Leicester in 2012. This is what he said about the migration history of Vohras:

From Charotar, when the British government started to build a railway from Mombasa to Nairobi, most of the Patels sold off their land and went as laborers to Kenya. And in Kenya, after the railway was finished, they settled there; they did not come back to Charotar. And in that way, the Patel community started migrating to other parts. But in our community [Vohras], there was no support for that. . . . In Uganda, it so happened that three to four [Vohra] families [migrated], but they were taken there by Patels. In the village, the Hindu-Muslim relations were very cordial at that time, nothing of this riot. So, to his neighbor, a Muslim and a Vohra, he [the Patel] said: “You send your son with me; I’ll give him employment there.” So, four or five people [Vohras] were there [in Uganda] in this way.

The suggestion that Vohra migration from Charotar was less dense than the migrations of the Patidars is also confirmed in the Charotar Sarvasangra (Chronicles of Charotar (P. C. Shah and C. F. Shah 1954): a book containing almost 200 pages on the history of migration from the Charotar region and listing overseas migrants from Charotar by name. From its telephone-book-style list of names, it is possible to confirm that only a few Vohras migrated to East Africa in the colonial period. The book mentions 347 migrants from Charotar living in Kampala, Uganda, for example. Most of them (301 out of 347) were Patidars: 287 had the surname Patel and 14 had the surname Amin (who are also considered Patidars). Of the other names mentioned in this list, only two were Vohra. This suggests that caste networks had been important in shaping migration from the region. Only recently have migration networks been broadening, with new groups embarking on overseas study and work, and new destinations emerging.

Among the Vohras who did migrate overseas earlier, and who now have the financial capacity to participate in Anand’s real estate markets, approximately ten Vohra men arrived in the United States as early as the 1960s and 1970s. This group of highly educated young immigrants then brought over their wives, relatives, and acquaintances from India, through the US system of family-sponsored immigration.4 Others came independently on business or work visas, or as students. In 2018, the total number of Vohra individuals in the United States and Canada was estimated (by members of the Vohra Association of North America) to be up to 1,000.5 Most of them live on the East Coast and in Illinois.

Some Vohras also migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1980s. Abdullahmia Hassan Vohra is remembered as the first Vohra in the United Kingdom. He is said to have migrated from Mumbai6 to the United Kingdom in 1959, and to have then helped his relatives and friends make the move as well. The first Vohra migrants to the United Kingdom arrived on visitor, work, or business visas; some migrated on a special visa for religious leaders. Some worked as taxi drivers, factory workers, or shop personnel; others started businesses of their own. Vohra families who had lived in East Africa also moved onward to the United Kingdom. In 2012, the total number of Vohra households in the United Kingdom was between 110 and 120 (according to the Vohra list maintained by the UK Vohra Association).7 In addition to these settled families with British passports, an estimated sixty Vohras constituted a floating population of singletons and young couples having arrived recently on temporary (student) visas.8

Overseas Organization

For the UK Vohra Association in London and the Muslim Vohra Association in the United States, 9 the events of 2002 in Gujarat were a trigger, a “compelling moment,” as one interlocutor said. Their histories of self-organization confirm an idea advanced by political scientists (Koinova 2011, 348) that pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations in the homeland can be a trigger for collective action among formerly inactive diaspora members. This collective action was short-lived in the case of the Vohras. But something else also happened in the process: a spatial reorientation within the homeland.

The UK Vohra Association had been started in 1992 for social purposes. After two initial events, however, the association had been mostly inactive. In 2002, the community association and its bank account were suddenly relevant again and became a vehicle for collective fundraising in the United Kingdom, to support the victims in Gujarat. In the United States, the Vohras had organized informal social meetings since the 1990s, to maintain familiar relations between ten to twelve dispersed families who had migrated from Gujarat and Mumbai to different US cities in the late 1960s and 1970s. Initially, reunions were organized in the homes of one of the migrants; since 1991, a space has been rented to accommodate the growing number of new arrivals. Activities during these reunions included Gujarati cooking and garbah (a folk dance), communal prayers, cricket and volleyball games, and other social activities. In 2002, for the first time, it was an emergency that triggered the heads of households of these families to meet. At this time, a formal Vohra association was established in the United States, so that collective funds could be gathered for affected relatives in Gujarat.

Yousuf Vohra from Sunav (one of the Anand homeowners mentioned earlier) shared his memories of the 2002 episode in detail during a 2012 group interview with him and two of his friends in East London. An elderly man who had grown up in Tanzania and lived in London since he was a student, Yousuf had traveled to Gujarat many times since he was a child, always as a visitor. This is what he remembers from 2002:

At the time of those riots [. . .] my wife was in India. I was supposed to go there after two weeks, via Bahrain. My relatives rang me, [saying], “Please don’t come. How are you going to come home from the airport? Vehicles are burning on the roadway; houses are burning on the roadway. How are you going to go? Cancel your ticket!” I said, “No, my wife is there; I have to come there. I am not going to cancel.”

Then my wife called me. She said, “You can come now; it’s a little quieter.” Then I saw with my own eyes . . . I heard with my own ears what was happening there. How people suffered. How my wife’s family suffered. [. . .] We had been going regularly. I had seen the town [where the family lived, a few kilometers away from Anand], how happily they were living; they had spent a lot of money; they had made a nice bungalow. All ruined. All looted.

What happened? A lot of Vohras came together in Anand at the time and made camps because all the people were fleeing from the smaller villages. Relief camp. There were so many relief camps over there. And I went to visit them. Personally. In each camp. Had a word with them. Find out what their grievances were. What they suffered. How they suffered.

[I remarked, “That was daring of you, as a tourist, a visitor!”]

Because it is my community. I am a Vohra. This is my community.

Among the refugees in Anand were members of Yousuf’s own family and that of his wife. They never returned to the village afterward. Yousuf returned to London:

Then I came to the airport [in London]. I talked to my brother-in-law and to other people of my community. I gave them all the reports. What I’ve seen with my own eyes. Businesses burning. I can still see the flames coming out.

In the following months, Yousuf became active as one of the committee members of the UK Vohra Association. He traveled from London to Leicester to attend the Vohra meeting that had been organized there, in the middle of the country, so that “nobody should [have to] travel so far.” The meeting in Leicester was attended by members of eighty-five Vohra households: “The heads of each family, all of us were there,” he remembered. They exchanged information and decided to form a relief committee and organize a fundraising event. Yousuf explains:

As I said, I visited the camps and asked the people what suffering they had. . . . This man was telling me his experience, what he saw with his own naked eyes. He was telling me that a heavily pregnant woman was knifed, and the child was taken out from her womb and killed—the child died instantly. Another saw a burning tire put on a couple of men; they were burned to death. Young girls were raped by these people [the attackers] in front of their own parents and relatives. I did not see anything, but I heard, in the relief camps. And when I came back here [to London], I told them [pointing at his two friends in the room] and we decided that we should bring all the Vohras in this country together and discuss about this. Make a contribution. Every family should contribute an amount and it send back to India for those people. We did. A couple of meetings were held. Everybody decided, pledged a lot of things. And we liaised with the relief committee in Anand, because nobody could be there (in Gujarat) personally to oversee. We sent twenty-seven to twenty-eight thousand pounds.

[His friend interrupts: “That was the first installment.”]

First installment, twenty-eight thousand pounds.

The UK Vohra Association organized collections in mosques in Southall, Leicester, Birmingham, and Coventry. In Leicester, they also organized a mela (fair) to raise money. It sold homemade samosas and cakes, and there were speeches, information stalls, and a jumble sale (flea market). The money collected was sent to the relief committee in Anand. It was used to build a housing society for some of the refugees, consisting of thirteen small houses, each with one room and a kitchen, and a communal water pump. Yousuf visited this housing society later “because my wife’s family is over there. . . . They are living there as well, in the relief committee houses. They were displaced.”

This collective organization of charitable activities proved short-lived. If the collection of the funds had brought Vohras together, the distribution of the money was accompanied by disagreements, and some disappointment. Some felt that the committee in Anand had not distributed the funds evenly among the victims. In London, one woman said:

Lot of ladies did, like, you know, in the mela they had a stand, dress, clothes, food . . . some did go around collecting, [and] a lot of us just donated money straight away. But then, we felt . . . obviously things didn’t work out properly back home. . . . We felt bad. Because all his family [pointing at her husband] is back home. They were all in Anand, well, now they are all in Anand, before they weren’t. . . . We sent enough money for people to like . . . clothes, food, money, saucepans, all the necessities for a house. And they didn’t get anything. And it upset us, because we were part of the management team here as well. . . . Lot of people [were] homeless; lot of people didn’t have places to go . . .

Many of the participants continue to support families in India individually, through household remittances or charitable donations, as they had done before 2002. Many provide support to their own relatives; some have supported schools, hospitals, or social welfare initiatives with donations; and a few have even established their own foundations.10 But there is not much enthusiasm left for collective donations. The UK Vohra Association still exists but has reverted to being dormant, with occasional social events only. While in 2002, Leicester had been a good location so that nobody would have to travel very far, in 2010, people in East London found a planned community event in West London to be too far from their homes, and the event was eventually cancelled.

If these narratives of 2002 highlight how the violence was a trigger for temporary collective organization in the diaspora, they also show that the collective action drew on an older register of community with which the migrants had been familiar in Gujarat—the Charotar Sunni Vohra Association. In contrast to the broad umbrella organizations of Indian Muslims that also exist in the United Kingdom, the Vohras directed their collected funds specifically to the town where their own relatives had gone after they had fled. The Vohras in the United Kingdom had come from the villages of Sunav, Boriavi, Kanjari, Borsad, Malataj, Mogri, Vaso, Kathalal, Bakrol, Narsanda, Umreth, Petlad, Tarapur, Vera, and Vododla (as indicated in their own records or in the interviews), with some having lived in the cities of Baroda, Ahmedabad, or Mumbai. The events of 2002 marked a turn toward Anand as a new, additional, and collective site of significance in India (“well, now they are all in Anand; before they weren’t”).

An Ambivalent Relationship

When the interviews turned to the relationship with India, ambivalent feelings were exposed, with different tones depending on which aspect of the homeland was at stake. When the discussion centered on politics, a dark narrative emerged, characterized by concerns about the mistreatment of religious minorities in India. When the conversation shifted to the register of personal and economic relations, the tone was much lighter. These ambivalences are a reflection of simultaneous inclusion in and exclusion from contemporary concepts of nationalism in India.

Simultaneous with the exclusion of Muslims at home and abroad from the national imagination, India has gone through a process of economic liberalization and globalization, with an increasing emphasis on policies that include the Indian diaspora in the economic development of the nation. The overseas Vohras I talked to considered themselves in this light. They included themselves in the category of “overseas Indians.” To a large extent, this inclusion was a lived experience, not wishful thinking. For example, their real estate investments were facilitated by the arrangement of Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), which makes it legally possible to invest in land in India, to travel back and forth easily without a visa, and to stay for long periods of time without the hassle of bureaucratic procedures.

India is not the only country that has developed policies to demarcate a diaspora (a transnational community of co-nationals) and incorporate this diaspora within the nation in cultural, economic, and political terms. This has occurred in parallel with the neoliberal economic policies globally propagated by Bretton Woods organizations such as the World Bank. Neoliberalism, in a nutshell, is the idea that basic social welfare services such as health care and education are most efficient and of best quality when they are organized by private actors rather than the state. In countries with a sizable volume of outmigration, one such private actor is the transnational migrant.

In India, where a protectionist and more socialist economic policy has been replaced by economic liberalization policies since the 1990s, migrants and their remittances have come to be recognized as a source of foreign direct investment and as an asset to economic development (Xavier 2011, 34–35). In the 1990s, financial schemes were introduced to attract remittances and encourage overseas Indians to deposit their money in Indian banks. This was accompanied by the cultural project of internationalizing Indian nationalism, as shown, for example, in the shift in Hindi cinema from ridiculing or ignoring overseas Indians to incorporating them as natural and heroic elements in storylines.11 Overseas Indians responded by demanding specific rights and regulations. In 2003, in response to these demands, the OCI scheme was launched. The Indian government has invited overseas Indian citizens to promote Indian national interests on Indian soil and in their countries of settlement.12 In the state of Gujarat, government initiatives for nonresident Gujaratis (NRGs) include an official bureaucratic cell started specifically to encourage NRGs to invest and participate in development projects in the state (M. G. Mehta 2015, 329).

This process has occurred predominantly under BJP governments, who have promoted an understanding that India is a Hindu nation. As a result, these governments have also tended to address overseas Indian citizens in nationalist Hindu terms and as a particular kind of Hindu.13 For example, organizations that aim to advance the welfare of minorities are not treated as being overseas Indian but rather as “foreign,” and on these grounds these organizations can be prohibited from receiving “foreign” funds.14 There has thus been a two-sided reconfiguration of the nation. On the one hand, overseas Indians are encouraged to share their resources and ideas with India; on the other, Indian Muslims at home and abroad are defined as “outsiders” or “foreigners” (van der Veer 2002; Bal and Sinha-Kerkhoff 2005). These political configurations influence how the overseas Vohras describe their relation with the homeland—as shaped by experiences of both exclusion and inclusion.

The Discriminatory Homeland

During interviews, the overseas Vohras drew a stark distinction between India and their place of residence in terms of how religious minorities were treated. They juxtaposed their discriminatory homeland with a tolerant host society, where there is freedom for Muslims to practice their religion and go about their lives without fear or shame. Considering the wide media coverage of Islamophobia and xenophobia in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, I was initially surprised to find such unwavering confidence in the host society’s tolerance toward Muslims. The following is a comment by a middle-aged resident of London, whom I interviewed in Anand. During our conversation, I asked him about the differences between India and the United Kingdom. He replied:

People are given more freedom in those countries [in the United Kingdom], as compared to India. When I went to uni [university], the first thing I noted was that every religion was allocated a separate space for prayer. I was really surprised! This is really good; there is a mosque in the university! And not only in the uni. Even if you go to the workplace, and if you tell them you want to pray, they say fine; they will even think of a way to make it easy for you.

This man, who had moved to the United Kingdom after his marriage, contrasted his experiences as a practicing Muslim in a British university and as a student in Anand:

Muslims are a minority in Gujarat. It happens a lot in schools that they gang up on you. When I was in primary school, one of my teachers was always making bad statements about Islam. I don’t think it was needed. . . . I had a very bad experience [in college in Anand]. I had an exam; on that day it was Jumma [Friday], so I wanted to do my prayer, and then I went to my exam. I was fifteen minutes late. I didn’t expect my lecturer would have an issue with that. But when I arrived, he asked me, “Why are you late?” I told him I was doing prayer, and he sent me off. I was not very religious, only in college I became a little more religious and I started praying. Then I realized: this is not easy, if you want to practice anything that goes against . . . [long silence] ehhhhh . . . which probably doesn’t synchronize with their way of doing things, you know. I experienced communalism a lot.

A younger man, who had lived in the United Kingdom for two years when I interviewed him in Anand, shared what he had heard about the United Kingdom before he moved there (on a student visa), and what he thought after he arrived:

My uncle had told me that the position of Muslims was very bad in London after 9/11. He had not been to London himself, but he had heard about it. But when I landed at the airport, immediately I saw three or four men with beards in a high position: they were stamping passports and working as security guards. So immediately I realized: what my uncle said is not true . . . in London, I can go around dressed in my white clothes even in the center of the city, and nobody turns to look. In East London, the Muslim drivers, six out of seven wear a beard, and they feel safe! In Gujarat, it’s different.

Members of the first generation of immigrants, who were highly aware of the political developments in India, also described differences in the way religious minorities were accommodated at the national and the state level in India. For example, several interviewees described the peculiarity of Gujarat as a violence-prone state, more hateful of Muslims than India as a whole. This differentiation between the two layers of state was articulated during 2012 interviews, but evaporated after 2014,15 when the central government, led by the Congress Party (considered to be more secularist than the BJP), was voted out of power, and the BJP achieved an absolute majority in the national Parliament.

Reports of a discriminatory homeland are similar between the United Kingdom and United States. To illustrate, I share a remark from an interview I recorded in the United States in 2018, two years after President Donald Trump had claimed that “Islam hates us”16 and called to bar all Muslims from entering the United States, while announcing his love for Hindus (“I am a big fan of Hindu, and I am a big fan of India. Big, big fan”17). The interviewee knew about incidents of violence against Muslims in the United States but thought these were relatively contained in comparison with India. He was an elderly Vohra man, a resident of Illinois, and a former resident of Anand who had migrated to the United States thirty-two years earlier:

I know this . . . 9/11. That happened. Right now, some people think that “Muslim is not good.” . . . Trump, his culture, he no like it. That’s OK. But . . . I tell you. Law and order is controlled. . . . Supreme law. . . . Nobody is scared here [in the United States]. Nobody touches me. Nobody broke the car. We are not scared. . . . Look at this, I tell you. . . . I read lots of things, some people broke mosques, threw stones, broke the glass. [But] government controls immediately, in the United States. I know Trump ministry is not good for Muslims, but no! Law and order! . . . Law and order is good in the United States. . . . That’s why everybody is safe. . . . That’s why everybody says, “America is a superpower.”

These optimistic viewpoints about the position of Muslims in the United Kingdom and United States surprised me initially, and when I presented them at research seminars in India and Europe, audiences also responded with surprise, and at times even disbelief. This reaction seems to reveal the success of consecutive Indian governments in maintaining an image of India as being “a pluralistic society with a longstanding commitment to tolerance and inclusion,”18 even when faced with criticism on its treatment of minorities. The comparative narratives shared here, however, were consistent in interviews with the first generation of migrants. They were presented as part of a wider understanding of migration as a life-changing endeavour that has generated improvement in comparison with prior lives in India. It is likely that second and later generations will more prominently describe experiences of exclusion and violence in their cities of residence.19

The Welcoming Homeland

Despite their alienation from Hindu nationalist politics in India, the overseas Vohras I spoke to still used the term “back home” when they talked about India. They continued to project the Charotar region as their homeland and maintained contact with people in the region on an everyday basis.20 Moreover, India’s OCI scheme offers them an opening to cultivate and further develop these personal and financial relations. Their inclusion in the category of “overseas Indians” also becomes a resource that, to some extent, enables them to overcome their marginalized position as Muslims in India.

In the survey I conducted in the United Kingdom in 2012, I asked about transnational practices of exchange with India. Phone calls with friends and relatives in Gujarat turned out to be frequent: every other week on average and, in some cases, every day. Family visits to and from Gujarat were also common.21 Individual visits to Gujarat were particularly common among elderly men, some of whom have visited at least once a year since they retired, and with airline tickets now more affordable than in the past. Some had invested in business ventures or were involved in charitable organizations in Gujarat. As shown above, some families had also bought land or a house.

In Anand itself, I frequently encountered visiting migrants, staying during a work break for two or three weeks, or longer, in cases of retirement. Some of them stayed with relatives; others had bought houses of their own for these occasions. Shahinben’s elderly uncle from the United States, for example, had bought a plot in Anand on which two neighboring houses had been constructed: one for his own use during his annual winter visits, and the other rented out to a Muslim (Pathan) family. Since 2010, he has escaped the harsh American winters by spending several months a year in Anand. His renters operated as caretakers for both houses, cleaned the houses, and even cooked his breakfast and lunch during his stay. These were new houses, which had been constructed shortly after 2002, and were likely a good investment, as land prices had already risen considerably since then.

Formal registration with the Indian state as OCI makes these ongoing personal and financial attachments possible. Besides its practical advantages for ease of movement and investment, the OCI category has also become a marker of status that commands respect in India. For Muslims, this marker seems to work, at least to some extent, to neutralize the “minority” identity, and can be activated to reshape their relations on terms that are not dictated by Hindu and Muslim categories.

One of the visiting migrants who made this point very explicit was Samir Vahora (a pseudonym). A middle-aged man from Nadiad residing in Baltimore, Samir visited Anand twice during my research period in Gujarat (in 2011 and 2012). The aim of his visits was to start up a new business in Anand, a transport company. “I am here for fifteen days, for business, and for fun as well,” he said during his visit in summer 2012. “I work from ten to five, or ten to six, and after that I stop and I tell everybody not to call me. . . . I am enjoying every minute of my life. Over there [in the United States] I work all the time; here I can enjoy as well.”

Many of the overseas Indian visitors I met in Gujarat were very busy during their stays and were often highly mobile, constantly on the way to their next appointment. I was not always able to see much of what they were doing during these stays. But Samir reined me into his business immediately after meeting me, by inviting me to the formal opening ceremony for his new company. During this spectacular event in a luxurious hotel in Ahmedabad, he presented “the first limousine in India” to the public, and I dressed up in my best blouse to give a brief speech about this remarkable “palace on wheels.” Because of my participation, I became part of his crew. For a few days, I accompanied him, traveling around the region in an air-conditioned car, meeting his relatives as well as some of his lifelong friends, and his employees at his new office in Anand. Surrounded by his friends, full of plans for new business ventures, and temporarily relieved from the burdens of work and living in the United States, Samir had an optimism that was contagious.

What struck me during every encounter with him—in contrast to the sorrowful narratives of a discriminatory homeland discussed earlier—was his unambivalent delight in being in India. When I asked him if he had ever faced any difficulties as a Muslim in India, he answered, “In India yes, definitely. Not in the United States,” but then immediately continued to add another layer to this story:

But this is also a matter of how you are dealing with a situation. The problem with the people here [in India] is that they lack confidence. They think oh . . . this is a Hindu and that is a Muslim. They make these distinctions in their minds. I don’t do that. I have never faced any difficulties myself. There is a resistance in here against Muslims in general, but I don’t get delayed by that. It’s all a matter of how you handle a situation. When I was in trouble, I called Modi myself! And he helped me out.

In the story that followed, Samir claimed that he decided to call up Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi to help his family out with a personal matter, and that he had been able to do this because he is an overseas Indian. As the story was long and detailed, I share only its happy ending:

I didn’t know him [Modi]. I looked up his phone number on the website and got his secretary. I told him, “I am a Muslim and I am an NRI [nonresident Indian]. And I am contributing to your economy. Now the chief minister has said that he wants NRIs to contribute to the country . . . and I am going to be very disappointed if he doesn’t help me only because I am a Muslim. I will not make any trouble, but I am going to be very disappointed.” Then the secretary said, “Just hold on, sir.” Very polite. Then I got Modi on the phone.

Samir’s optimistic stories suggest that overseas Indians can present themselves on different terms than the Hindu-Muslim binary and can in this way consolidate their relations with Gujarat, and even with high-ranking representatives of the Gujarati state. This self-presentation includes explicit mention of the communal hurdle that needs to be overcome— “because I am a Muslim.” Samir’s remark that his confidence is not shared by his relatives in Gujarat is an indication of his privileged position—with his implied financial capacity to invest, and the recognized option to claim inclusion in the celebrated NRI category.

A question for the future is whether overseas Vohras and other overseas Indian Muslims will be able to maintain these relations and financial interests in India, and under what conditions. The exclusion of Muslims from concepts of citizenship has reached a new level in the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which was passed in December 2019 by the Indian Parliament and caused widespread protests in India. The act not only introduces religious criteria for emigrants from three neighboring countries (who can become Indian citizens provided they are non-Muslims), but also introduces new provisions for the OCI scheme. Since 2019, OCI cardholders can lose their OCI status if they violate Indian laws. It has become possible for a US citizen to lose OCI status for an act that is criminal in India but not in the United States—including, for example, expression of free speech, which is more limited in India.22 While such OCI cardholders will have a right to a hearing, they will have no right to a full trial. These new stipulations are expected to be used to mute dissenting voices.23

In June 2020, I asked a Vohra interlocutor in the United States what this might lead to in the future. He said that he and other Vohras in his home city of Chicago are deeply worried about the new laws. They had already been concerned about their properties in Gujarat, following the recent violation of the property of an absentee (Hindu) homeowner in Anand, which seemed to signal increasing lawlessness. The new OCI regulations introduce further risks, now that an overseas Indian can be deported after being falsely accused of a small crime. I asked him if houses, businesses, and other financial involvements in Gujarat would be sustainable with the new regulations. He himself runs an import-export business between Gujarat and the United States. He answered, “The short answer is yes, it will stay. The long answer is that yes, maybe people will shrink their portfolio in India, but still they will find their ways around.” On the phone from Chicago, having just participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration, he shared his optimism about the emerging “Muslim Lives Matter” campaign on India’s social media platforms, and his hope that the people of India would see through “this fascist government with its draconian laws, . . . and rise to the occasion.” Because “governments come and go,” and “at the end of the day, I love India.”

Real Estate Business and Rural-Urban Land Conversions

The ambivalent relationship of Vohras to their homeland does not at all resemble classic descriptions of a “myth of the homeland” formulated in diaspora studies (R. Cohen 1996; Safran 1991), as a romantic or nostalgic notion of an ideal place to return to. Instead of romanticizing the homeland or portraying it as fixed in time, Vohras’ concepts of the homeland are dynamic and respond to changing opportunities and limitations in Gujarat.

The dynamism of Anand town, as a central site of transnational investment in a changing homeland is shown in the story of investor Idris Vohra. A British citizen, he is different from the investors introduced earlier in that he operates as a land broker, buying and selling land for speculative purposes in a variety of locations in central Gujarat. He is also different in that he grew up in Anand and thus has seen the town’s transformation from the perspective of an insider. His interpretations not only confirm how Anand has expanded and segregated at the same time, but also suggest that land on the edges of the town is transferred from one community to another—from Patel farmers to Vohra land brokers and builders. Cross-community friendships play a crucial role in his story of his hometown’s transformation. The Patel-dominated town he remembers from his childhood is transformed to a place of Vohra arrival, in which he continues to feel at home.

I first met Idris in Anand in 2011.24 A schoolteacher I was out walking with commented on a particularly large house we were passing. It belonged to a locally famous businessman, a vegetable trader. He had recently died, and now his son, Idris, had returned from the United Kingdom. After a few minutes of observing the house, we were invited inside and were soon drinking tea with Idris, his wife, their two young daughters, and his recently widowed mother.

At that time, Idris explained that he had taken a sabbatical and was staying in Anand with his wife and children for six months to get more involved with the family business in Gujarat. He had lived in the United Kingdom since 1999, where he worked in the production department of a pharmaceutical company and sometimes as a driver. His father, the vegetable trader, had become active in the speculative land conversion business in recent decades. It was co-managing this land with his mother that brought Idris back to his hometown, Anand.

One of the things that Idris said immediately in that first meeting was that his Gujarati friends in the United Kingdom measured each other’s status by the amount of land and investments they owned in Gujarat. Later, I learned that these friends were all Hindus—Patels from the Charotar region, whom he met at a men’s club every weekend in his town of residence in Sussex. He was the only Muslim in the club. Idris had grown up in a Patel-majority neighborhood in Anand and had gone to school with mostly Patel students, at a time when segregation was not as pronounced as it is today. His father also had many Patel business partners and friends, he emphasized. After marrying a Vohra woman in the United Kingdom, Idris migrated and maintained contact with his Patel friends, many of whom had also migrated to the United Kingdom. These contacts were important for him personally, but he also felt that they contributed to the success of the family business in Gujarat. Recognizing the powerful position of Patels in the region, he said, “Whoever is in the system is our friend,” adding, “Our family has lived and worked with Hindus for four generations . . . so they are very familiar with us.” Further, “Some of our lifelong family acquaintances are now high up in the BJP. This is why they support us when we want to get our work done.”

In migration scholarship, many have argued that informal social networks of friends from “home” are a crucial channel of help for migrants. Such networks facilitate the process of migration and settlement, but also ensure continued access to resources in the region of origin (e.g., F. Osella 2014). In this light, Idris’s extended networks can be seen as a form of social capital—a resource that he can mobilize to realize his own aspirations and to secure access to economic resources in Gujarat. His hope is, as he explained to me later, that the profits from the family business will not only provide for his widowed mother in her old age, but will also help him and his wife support their children in the future. Higher education is expensive in the United Kingdom, but he hoped that the profits from land speculation in Gujarat would help pay for it.

In April 2012, Idris visited Anand again. This time, he took me around in a car for a day to show me what he was doing during his extended stays in the region. He stopped in several villages to show me the parcels of land that were currently, or had been, in possession of the family. Some had already been sold, while others were awaiting development. As he drove me around from plot to plot, he explained about the phenomenon of rural-urban land conversion, on which much of this speculative land business is built. Land conversion is a bureaucratic procedure. An investor buys land that is registered as fit for agricultural use, then tries to convert the legal status of this land to nonagricultural, and finally sells the land at a higher price. Conversion of land from agricultural to nonagricultural use increases its value and can be highly profitable, but it is a complex and lengthy legal process. Contacts, information, and recurrent payments are crucial to its success.

A spatial shift had occurred in the family’s investment pattern over the years. The lands of his father had been dispersed throughout the region but, in the period after 2002, he had bought land at the peri-urban outskirts of Anand, in the stretch now known as the Muslim area of the town. They were agricultural lands that were now in various stages of conversion. At one of these plots, Idris and I got out of the car to walk around. He showed me how the land had been divided into smaller plots, which had been sold to 142 individual owners. On each plot, there was a house at a different stage of construction. Idris contextualized the construction:

Nowadays, Anand has become the center of Vohras in India. When I was three years old, there were about seventy Vohras in Anand! All our neighbors were Patels. During the riots in 2002, so many people came to Anand. Especially Vohras. At the time, my father and I thought we had to do something for these people. So, we started a housing society. It was his vision, and I agreed with it. He wanted to do something for all the displaced people who came here.

Idris presented the project as a contribution to resettling Vohras in Anand after the 2002 displacements. In this narrative, his father was a generous patron. When I asked (Muslim) residents in Anand about this interpretation, they, too, described his father as generous. They were not so sure about Idris’s philanthropic intentions, however. They thought, rather, that Idris had come back for “making business” out of Anand’s rapid growth. Idris agreed that his actions had been mostly strategic but suggested that he had not made a profit from this particular housing society—or perhaps not enough. He further clarified:

This whole area was a jungle ten years ago. We bought this land at that time. We could acquire it from a farmer because we have good relations with Hindus: a friend of my father owned this land. We bought it and sold it in smaller plots. After we sold the plots, people have been buying and selling with their plots and they have made some money out of that. We also encouraged them to do so; we told them, “Buy two plots, sell one plot after a few years, and with the profit build your house on the second plot!” In the past five years, some plots have been sold five times. Now slowly, slowly, people are starting to build houses . . .

An interview with a (Vohra) friend of Idris in London shed further light on how this real estate business might be related to community politics. He drew a map of the area where Idris’s property was located, and explained:

This area is located in Anand now, although part of it is still registered as agricultural land. Before, in this area, Patels were the landowners. Now, Vohras are becoming the landowners. Patels have gone abroad, and they have lost their interest in agriculture; they close the house, and nobody is there to take care of the farm. So, Vohras have bought some of their land, and they try to convert it to nonagricultural purposes.

This suggestion—of a shift in ownership—implies that the business of land conversion does not just convert agricultural land into nonagricultural land, but also Patel land into Vohra land.

Here, the Patidars have again made an appearance in the Vohras’ stories, this time as the most prominent landowning community in the region, which has started to sell off its farmland on the expanding urban peripheries so that it, too, becomes available for urbanization. The Vohra story of rural-urban reorientation here also becomes a story about a transfer of land from one community to another—a story of land conversion, linked with transnational migration, infused with regional meanings of caste and community. It is within this narrative of land conversion that Idris can present himself as a transnational broker between Hindu farmers, who have reoriented themselves from agriculture to transnational migration, and Vohra residents of the villages, who seek new homes on Anand’s urban outskirts.

Idris grew up in an older part of Anand with mainly Patel neighbors and talks affectionately about how the town used to be. Throughout our interactions, he talked about these long-term friendships with Patels and repeated, “I am good at networking. I can feel comfortable with anybody.” He affirmed that “it is politicians that divide the community, nothing else,” and made it clear that, in his view, the “community” encompasses both Hindus and Muslims. During his extended stays in Anand, he now lives in the house his father built in the developing Muslim area, together with his mother, using it as a base from which to transact. Rather than lamenting Anand’s residential segregation, he has adjusted to it and tries to make the most of recent developments, buying and selling properties where profits can be made.

Idris’s interpretations have further implications for the study of residential segregation in India. They add a new perspective to an emerging literature in India that has started to address the influence of real estate markets on segregated residential developments, particularly in Muslim areas (Jamil 2017; Susewind 2015). Drawing on socioeconomic explanatory frameworks, these authors argue that the segregation of Muslims should be explained not only by the dynamics of discrimination, violence, and insecurity, but also by the logics of capitalist accumulation in neoliberal India. While Raphael Susewind (2015) describes some of the conditions that create positive incentives for Muslims to invest in Muslim areas, Ghazala Jamil’s analysis (2017) draws on Marxist theories of accumulation to suggest that these neighborhoods function as sources of capital extraction, the profits of which are often reaped elsewhere. In her analysis of Jamia Nagar in Delhi, she points to the consistent flow of rural-urban migrants into the city. Because the Muslims among the newly arrived residents are unable to rent or buy accommodation in other parts of the city, builders and developers are doing a roaring business in Muslim areas; here, they can sell houses to a niche market that has little choice to buy or rent elsewhere (Jamil, chap. 2).

More research is needed to substantiate and refine these arguments. Idris’s narratives highlight the importance of a transnational perspective. They open up further questions about how practices of real estate speculation in a city might be co-produced by regionally distinctive patterns of migration and return, as well as by national regimes of migration and development. There are some studies on the real estate investments of transnational migrants in India (Upadhya 2018; Varrel 2012), and on the centrality of land as a crucial yet contested resource (Sud 2014; Upadhya 2017).25 These show that land investments are also entangled with regional identity politics—e.g., when migrant investors are globally dispersed and “deterritorialized,” but still identify strongly with their region of origin and reterritorialize it through their investments (Upadhya 2017, 181).

The case of Anand is an invitation to start looking at the missing links between these two lines of inquiry: one on the political economy of segregation, and another on the transnational politics of regional belonging. Idris’s interpretations confirm Ghazala Jamil’s idea that the paired developments of rural-urban relocation and segregation create a speculative business with a profit-generating potential. Nevertheless, the meanings Idris ascribes to the themes of community, land, and migration do not seem to be fully captured in the Marxist frameworks of accumulation she uses (Jamil 2019; see also Hansen 2019). Disentangling these dynamics would require further research.

Conclusion

The Muslim area of Anand can be seen as a “zone of awkward engagement” (Tsing 2005, x–xi) that draws different actors together. The different actors have their own goals and interests, and there is no specific overlapping agenda. Through their combined efforts, however, they contribute to the creation of a new home base for local and overseas Gujarati Muslims.

In response to the 2002 violence, overseas Vohras collected funds for the riot victims and directed these to Anand, where their relatives had fled. Thereafter, confronted with changes in their homeland while trying to maintain a relationship with it, they themselves followed their relatives to the town. When Anand became a center for the local Vohra community, it also gained relevance for the transnational migrants among the Vohras—alongside other places of Vohra settlement, like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, or London. Some overseas Vohras describe Anand as a new home, after having been uprooted from their villages of origin.

Reorientation in a post-violence landscape, then, is a process of re-anchoring both local and transnational relations. It is a shared experience of the town’s residents and its transnational visitors. The transnational routes of (no) return described in this chapter are made possible by the overseas Indian citizenship scheme, which offers legal and symbolic frameworks for keeping connected, and by the regional developments that shape the spatial contours of their engagement. By keeping connected while redirecting their homeland orientations, potential arises for migrants to realize their own aspirations as well—homeownership, retirement, vacationing, business, respectability, and sheer fun.