Diasporas Transforming Homelands: Nuancing ‘Collective Remittance’ Practices in a Western Indian Village

Diasporic communities that advance their ancestral homelands through forging links with it can be best examined in the context of the history of migration of these communities and the culture of developing stakes in the homeland through material and emotional investments of various kinds. While globalization of migration has facilitated diasporas of various kinds, there has been a marked turn of gaze towards the homeland by diasporic members. What ties the emigrant/diasporics with the places of origin are collective mesostructures of village communities/associations and hometown networks which integrate and manage the changes induced by migration, in maintaining and constructing boundaries, villages spaces, resources, hierarchies, norms and practices. While migration encompasses a whole range of social, political and economic factors, the focus of this study in a village in North Gujarat, western India is not on why people migrate nor on why people give but rather on the effects and meanings that migration and collective remittances would hold for individuals or groups in ‘places of origin’.