Imagining community in godzone - hinduism and identity amongst Indians in Wellington: an oral history project

Abstract

The history of New Zealand's Asian communities has long been an under researched topic in the national historiography. The Indian community in New Zealand is the second largest Asian community in this country, after Chinese New Zealanders, and has a history of settlement that dates to the end of the nineteenth century. They have tended to be regarded as an exotic, small ethnic minority and to be confined to the margins of written history. This thesis sets out to research and relate how a sense of a New Zealand Indian identity has nevertheless developed over time in this country. It relies on fifteen oral history interviews were made specifically for this project with Indian people from the Wellington region in 2005. The issue of identity construction is approached through discussion of religious practice in New Zealand as a vehicle for both cultural maintenance and cultural production. Due to the limited size of this project, subjects were limited to members of the Hindu faith on the basis that Hindus form the majority of the Indian community in New Zealand, and hence were the obvious group to start with in a grossly under studied field. Subjects were chosen to include representatives of four main waves of Indian migration to New Zealand. The interviews are used to describe how individual respondents have used religion to preserve and create meaning for their lives in the New Zealand environment, as well as how collective Indian identities have developed over time. Religious practice is found to be a particularly flexible tool in the project of identity construction for Hindu Indian New Zealanders from a wide variety of backgrounds. A sense of increasingly complexity of Indian identity in New Zealand that has developed in parallel to increased diversity amongst the Indian population in terms of regional, linguistic and socio-economic status is also described. Despite this, the idea of some sort of connection between all people of Indian ethnicity in New Zealand was validated in all the interviews. This leads to the conclusion that what lies at the crux of the New Zealand Indian identity is the common experience of being Indian in New Zealand, and hence that the history of Indian New Zealanders is part of the national story.