Make a précis of the following passage in about one-third of its length. Do not give a title to it. The précis should be written in your own language :
Recent decades have witnessed an upsurge of literature on Indians settled abroad. Mainly three types of writings can be distinguished : historical, diplomatic and anthropological. The historical works provide an account of the phases of emigration of Indians and their early life situations in foreign lands. The diplomatic works read like country reports on the status and problems of Indians beyond seas. The anthropological works are in the nature of ethnographic accounts with their accent on cultural continuity and change.
Varieties of writings apart, the existing literature shares three notable features in common. One, much of it is in the form of country-specific profiles. Cross-country comparisons are few and far between. Two, most of it is descriptive, with analytical ideas and imaginative hypotheses in short supply. Three, for most part, it tends to project the problem in colonial perspective.
There are broadly two ways in which the problem of Indians abroad has been looked at: the colonial and the nationalist. The colonial way maintains that Indians went abroad driven by their domestic economic compulsions, or greed or avarice; that they were 'heathens', lazy, cunning and quarrelsome; that they tended to cling tenaciously to their culture in order to make up for the loss on economic front or to cope with their status loss on the social front; that they were so carried away by their desire to grab wealth and power that they had no compunction at throwing the natives out of employment and power in the latter's own lands; and, that their difficulties in foreign countries were largely of their own making. All this is clearly indicative of the ways colonialists and their ideologues look at the problem and would have us look at it.
As against this, the nationalist way contends that in most cases Indians did not go abroad on their own, but were indeed taken, taken under various arrangements as instruments of colonial domination; that they were not led by their own predatory instincts, instead they were lured and duped by colonial designs; that they did not plunder the country they went to, instead they served its development needs and worked hard to better the lot of its residents; that they were not lazy but industrious, not cunning but thrifty, not indolent but enterprising; that they had been tolerated only as long as they were prepared to play second fiddle to the natives, but once they began to assert their rights they were pushed out; and, that their difficulties in foreign lands were not of their own making, but of the making of neo-colonial powers which keep playing political games in the Third World countries.
In the study of Indians abroad it is the functionalist orientation that predominates. This is evident from the fact that the existing literature is preoccupied with the question of the cultural identity and integration, to the relative neglect of the question of class and power. It is a pity that no systematic attempt has been made to look at the problem in terms of other perspectives.
Indians are not the only people who have ventured out of their homeland in such vast numbers. Their number looks small when compared to overseas Chinese and overseas British. Their relatively lesser numbers notwithstanding, Indians form large enough numbers outside India and significant enough group in several countries to merit serious research attention as well as civil concern.
Spread over most parts of the world, Indians are found more in some regions than in others. They are concentrated in South, Southeast and Southwest Asia, in South Africa and East Africa, in Western Europe, North America and the Caribbean. Taking 1,500 as the minimum figure, overseas Indians are found in as many as 53 countries. They form a majority in at least three foreign countries : Mauritius (74 percent), Fiji (49 percent) and Guyana (53 percent). They are close to majority in Trinidad and Tobago where they are 40 percent as against 43 percent of the blacks.
In respect of their regional derivations and settlements there are noticeable some broad interesting patterns. There is a preponderance of South Indians, particularly Tamils, in South and Southeast Asia and South Africa, of East Indians in West Indies, of Punjabis and Gujaratis in Africa, Europe and North America. This is not to underestimate the presence of Indians of other regional origins in these parts of the world, but just to indicate that there are some perceptible regional linkages between the regions of origin and of settlement. (745 words)