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Worship communities play important roles in civil society, in a few cases promoting political engagement around homeland causes and immigrant issues. Many communities provide informal or formal social services to their members; others focus their charitable activities on the needy in inner-city America or abroad. Needier immigrant communities tend primarily to their own, especially in family-style worship communities; others draw on denominational resources to provide for immigrant members and others in their surroundings. More affluent worship communities provide money, goods, and volunteers for causes outside their immediate communities. Circumstances of immigration, the demographic profile of worship communities, and their organizational cultures and religious ties thus explain the considerable variation in the civic presence of immigrant worship communities.

Most communities encourage lay involvement in worship and leadership, thereby teaching civic skills. Smaller Protestant churches, Hindu ashrams, Sikh congregations, and even some activist Catholic parishes do this well. Some communities engage in direct training in civic skills, through literacy and English classes, naturalization and citizenship classes, discussion groups and forums, and programs to promote greater civic awareness. Lay and religious leadership is often crucial to mobilizing members around homeland causes or immigrant issues, and encouraging immigrants to exercise their civic skills in such causes.

The Indigenous Aryan debate can only be understood in the context of the history of the greater Indo-European homeland quest in Europe. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the most prominent features of this history that are most directly connected with the problems of Indo-Aryan origins. Indigenous Aryanists are almost universally suspicious of the motives surrounding the manner in which evidence was interpreted and construed by British and European scholars in the colonial period. It is important to excavate clearly the various biases that influenced the epistemes of the time before attempting to consider the evidence itself, so this chapter addresses some of the more blatant ideological and religious attitudes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West that co-opted Aryan discourse in some form or fashion. Since there have been a number of studies focused on the general history of Indo-European Studies, it focuses on the aspects of this history that are of particular relevance to the Indian side of the family.

This chapter addresses other linguistic issues often utilized in the Indo-European homeland quest and in examining Indo-Aryan origins. It looks at the center of origin method (the arguments of Robert Latham, Lachhmi Dhar, and others), dialectical subgroupings of the various cognate languages and their implications (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov’s model and Koenraad Elst’s co-option of this), and Johanna Nichol’s Bactria-Sogdiana (east of the Caspian Sea) model. The basic thrust of this chapter and the previous two has been to demonstrate some of the problems that have arisen in an attempt to pinpoint the origins of the Indo-Europeans and their offshoot Indo-Aryans through linguistic methods. The next three chapters look at the archaeological evidence.

This chapter examines questions about bodies and origins, homelands and fatherlands in À la recherche du temps perdu. In Marcel Proust's novel, the important parental body is the maternal body—at once sacred and profane, place of both sanctuary and exile. We are also taken back periodically to the Recherche's original religious home, by, for example, the views of Charlus in pious mood on the subject of the Christian Church and the sacrament of the Word made flesh. Charlus spews out a set of stock themes from the history of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe. The chapter also considers the presence of churches and cathedrals in the Recherche; the cathedrals are an expression of nation and ancestry, and as national patrimony they belong to “the body-France.” The chapter concludes by suggesting that in Proust the body is where we live but not where we are at home.

In addition to the traumatic and post-traumatic effects migration has on young refugees, prolonged displacement poses a greater effect. It affects the young refugees’ perception of their selves, homeland and future. Reintegration of young refugees is more difficult as most of them have profound alienated feelings towards their homeland which they feel that they barely know and they often feel intense attachment to the host country in which they grew up. This chapter addresses some gaps to better understand the less visible social and emotional trajectories experienced by young Afghan refugees in the process of reintegration to their homeland. It examines the personal journeys resulting from the respondent’s experiences of Iran and Pakistan, and their return to Afghanistan: their resettlement and their remigration. It highlights the expectations and the meaning of returning and repatriation to the homeland through the perspectives of the young refugees. The first section of the chapter provides a background to the study and the approach for the selection of a target group. The next section discusses the contradictory characteristics of young Afghan refugees who grew up as refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and looks at their perceptions and expectations with regard to Afghanistan. The last sections are devoted to the discussion of the barriers to successful reintegration and the key issues which can provide support to young returning Afghans beyond material assistance.

Voluntary repatriation has been framed as the optimal and durable solution in internal politics and legal frameworks since the 1980s. While still generally put into practice as the solution of choice, repatriation is no longer perceived as an unproblematic end to the refugee cycle. With the growing awareness of repatriation’s less than exemplary methods, the sometimes coercive nature of it, and the unstable post-conflict conditions awaiting returnees, voluntary repatriation has waned over the years. However, there is an insufficient understanding of the long-term prospects of the returnees and the repatriation perspectives of the young refugee. This chapter hence explores repatriation within the perspectives of Afghan youths. It presents stories of four Afghan youths: in 2003 as they face the prospect of voluntary repatriation in the hands of the Iranian government; in 2006 as they situated themselves vis-á-vis Afghanistan in the early flush of return to their homeland; and in 2007 as they narrated their hopes and aspirations within their growing understanding of their new context. The stories presented in this chapter offer a longitudinal examination of repatriation from the perspective of the long-term forced migrant youth and a window to the lives of young Afghans repatriating from Iran.

The final chapter draws together some of the enduring legacies and persistent challenges of the histories traced in the rest of the book. It also offers a series of reflections on the interplay of historical memory and modern-day identities, which are often fluid and contested. Many Native Americans and American Scots look to the past to define and represent themselves, individually and collectively.

This chapter introduces the reader to the unusual social situations that were created when shiploads of Indian workers were taken to these distant lands. Not only did the workers learn to share the space with other colonized people, but because ship loads from Calcutta had alternated with those from Madras, in most cases they also had to build community across the North Indian–South Indian cultural and linguistic divide. The Introduction argues that the religious traditions that were eventually developed share some common features that make them different in kind from traditions one might find either in India or in the later Hindu diaspora to Europe and North America. The label “new homeland” is used to describe the especially strong commitment people have made to the religious traditions their ancestors developed in these situations.

This chapter tries to explain why the Indian workers were so successful in building what they call a “new homeland” for themselves. One important factor was the weak and temporary nature of the colonial regimes. Another factor was that while the Indians arrived in the society at a given point in time and set about defining themselves, the other colonized persons were in most cases less clear about their cultural goals. Although there were sometimes tensions between the North Indian and South Indian groups in building an Indian tradition, even that rivalry proved stimulating. In these postcolonial situations, the need to have a cultural identity was clear; and these six Hindu communities are more focused on that task than Hindus in India or in the later diaspora to Europe and North America are inclined to be. Hindus from these new homeland settings clearly take pride in their new religious traditions, and when they have immigrated to other parts of the world, they have usually reestablished their new religious tradition in that setting as well.

A survey of research on the period more generally termed the ‘Exile’ reveals an important distinction between analyses of the literature of two of the communities that experienced the disaster that followed the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, namely, that in Judah and that deported to Babylonia. Analyses of literature from the exiles show greater awareness of the importance of context in the articulation of religious ideology. Since recent studies have provided greater details about the distinctive context of the community in Judah, it follows that an important step in moving research on the period of the exile into new directions should include new data that has come to light as well as the reassessment of religious literature from the people of the homeland in this period. It also requires that the terminology for the period under question be taken under consideration as greater concern to be inclusive of the variety of populations that experienced the disaster of 587. The term ‘Templeless period’ is suggested as a suitable alternative to the ‘exilic age’.

This introduction describes the book as primarily a historiographical study of how various Indian scholars, over the course of a century or more, have rejected this idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans by questioning much of the logic, assumptions, and methods upon which the theory is based. The aims of the book are discussed, with the primary aim identified as an excavation of marginalized points of view reacting against what is perceived as a flawed and biased historical construct. As a corollary of this aim, the book further complicates the Indo-European homeland quest by exposing the whole endeavor to a critique from scholars outside mainstream European academic circles who do not share the same intellectual history as their Western peers. A further aim of the book is to present a comprehensive exposition and analysis of views from within mainstream academic circles, addressing the issue of Indo-Aryan origins. The main part of the introduction gives an outline of the contents of each chapter and addresses various methodological issues.

This chapter starts the analysis of the actual data concerning Indo-Aryan origins. By the mid-nineteenth century, one of the few things regarding the homeland that Western Indo-European scholars did agree on was that it could not have been India; wherever the original homeland might have been the Indo-Aryans at least must have come to the subcontinent from outside. While not the slightest bit concerned with the homeland obsession of European scholars in general, Indigenous Aryanists soon reacted to the corollary of the problem when it impinged on the origins of their own culture; it seemed unacceptable to consider that such an enormously speculative and seemingly inconclusive European undertaking should be entitled to make authoritative pronouncements on the early history of the Indian subcontinent. The first voices of opposition that attempted to utilize critical scholarship to counter the claim that the forefathers of the Vedic Indians hailed from outside the subcontinent are introduced. The initial objections concerned the philological evidence that had been brought forward as decisive by Western philologists. Since philology was a discipline that resonated with their own traditional Śruti epistemologies, and since it focused on texts in their own ancient language, Vedic Sanskrit, the philological evidence was the most easily accessible to Indigenous Aryan scrutiny; moreover, these texts that were suddenly of such interest to Western scholars happened to be their sacred ones and this fueled their concern.

An examination is made of various points of view on the location of the Indo-European homeland based on evidence from the method of linguistic paleontology. This is one of the most exploited disciplines used in the homeland quest, and one that is also fundamental in insisting that the Indo-Aryans had an origin external to the Indian subcontinent. Here, Indian scholars are found reconfiguring the same logic and method to arrive at very different conclusions from those of their Western counterparts. The two principal aspects of linguistic paleontology examined are terms for various Indo-European flora and fauna (including trees), and the term “ēkwos” for horse (along with references to the accompanying archaeological evidence). The chapter finishes by presenting criticisms of the linguistic palaeontology method.