Sanam Roohi is a Marie Curie COFUND fellow at Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt, currently researching the transnationalisation of the Telangana movement. She defended her thesis ‘Giving Back: Diaspora Philanthropy and the Transnationalisation of Caste in Guntur (India)’ from the University of Amsterdam in December 2016. Her research outputs include publication of a few book chapters and articles in journals including Modern Asian Studies, International Political Sociology and Ethnic and Migration Studies, apart from a co-produced film on diaspora philanthropy. Excerpts from our PhD which primarily focusses on Kamma NRIs in USA.
Guntur district in southern India has been a site of substantial outward transnational mobility by educated professionals (especially doctors and engineers) from dominant caste groups, who started migrating to the USA and other countries in the 1960s. This pattern of high-skilled migration, which intensified in the 1990s, gave rise to a regional diaspora that remains culturally and materially rooted in the region of Coastal Andhra Pradesh. Materialising the dual experiences of belonging and uprooting, these transnational migrants started sending resources back home, in particular through ‘diaspora philanthropy’. Members of this regional diaspora started engaging in social development projects, especially from the 1990s, in the fields of education, health and rural development. The thesis is an attempt to understand how regional specificities – especially caste connections – have shaped diaspora philanthropy in this case, and how diaspora philanthropy in turn has defined or reconstituted a caste group – the Kammas – that has become transnational. Extensive fieldwork carried out in Coastal Andhra and the USA revealed that these philanthropic engagements have been primarily channeled through particularised caste and kinship networks and are usually directed to aid members of the donors’ own ‘community’ – helping this group transform itself from a regionally dominant (agrarian and business) community into an emergent transnational caste.
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