Dialect of the Diaspora - Sourceland, Empire and Homelands.

While oil and water are the most important physical factors of international politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most important human factors are population and migration. Population pressures are intricately connected with poverty and oppression, which in turn lead to the voluntary migration of millions in search of better economic opportunities and the involuntary migration of other millions in flight from tyranny and oppression. Yet\ud this distinction is itself of doubtful validity, when economic conditions are so bleak as to generate activity that produces the threats to life that drive out refugees, and are themselves a form of oppression. The term diaspora, which makes no distinction based on the reasons behind the fact of emigration, is the most useful tool for conceiving this vast flood of humanity that is forcing a complete reconsideration of such concepts as nations, strangers, aliens and refugees, and is generating new forms of oppression masked by such terms as border-control or counter-terrorism. The history and writing of the Indian diaspora offers some possibility of coming to terms with this phenomenon that has now moved from them margins to the centre of the world stage