Every Day Is Special: January 9 - Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

January 9 - Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

Posted on January 9, 2020

On this date in 1915, Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, where he had lived for more than two decades. Gandhi had raised his family in South Africa (although he had married in India - at just age 13! - an arranged marriage! - and two of his four surviving children were born in India). Also, Gandhi had begun his civil rights activism in South Africa and developed his non-violent resistance techniques there.

An older Gandhi - one who has
adopted the simplest Indian
loincloth and robe - looks more
familiar to us!

But it was after Gandhi's return to India, at age 45, that he became a folk hero to Indians and world famous for his non-violent efforts for human rights. It is not surprising that his October birthday is celebrated as a national holiday - but I didn't realize that the anniversary of his return to India is used as the date to celebrate Non-Resident Indians.

The holiday was established in 2000, and the concept of the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) was launched on this date in in 2006, and since then celebrations and award ceremonies have been held from January 7 to 9 in different Indian city each year. (In 2018 the celebration was held in Singapore.) Each year the celebration has a different theme and various guest speakers.

Non-Resident Indians include people who were born in India but immigrated elsewhere and people who were born outside of India but are Indian by descent. Apparently Indians who they themselves migrated (as opposed to Indians whose parents or older ancestors migrated) are the largest group of all global migrants, with more than 17.5 million Indian migrants in 2019, out of 272 million migrants worldwide.

The largest population of Indians outside of India is in the United States, but Saudi Arabia isn't far behind! Another Middle Eastern nation, United Arab Emirates, is in third place, with Malaysia close behind it. Large populations of Indian migrants and descendants of Indian migrants live on every continent of the world, other than Antarctica of course, with the U.K. taking the top spot in Europe, South Africa having the largest group in Africa, Trinidad and Tobago in South America, and Australia being home to almost half a million Indians. Because India was part of the British Empire for almost a century, it seems pretty natural to me that Indians are especially likely to migrate to English-speaking nations.

Here are a few Non-Resident Indians who have made big contributions to the world:

Above, Khosla.
Below, Chawla.

Narinder Singh Kapany - fiber optics

Salman Rushdie - literature

S. Chandrasekhar - the mathematics of black holes

Vinod Khosla - computers, programming languages, and green (environmental) factories and products

Har Gobind Khorana - biochemistry

Pan Nalin - director and screenwriter

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan - structural biology

Mira Nair - film maker

Anita Desai and Kiran Desai - literature

Kalpana Chawla - astronaut

Indra Nooyi - CEO and Chairperson of PepsiCo

I could go on and on and on and on...Movies, medicine, engineering, business, art, music, technology - Non-Resident Indians are making splashes in every field I can think of!