The South Asian Child in Colonial East Africa

This article explores competing and changing narratives about the experiences of South Asian children in colonial East Africa. It studies the ways young South Asians engaged in discourses about race, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in a diasporic setting. Through disparate examples from young entrepreneurs to nationalist school children, it highlights the ways South Asian children navigated the temporal spaces between being children, young people and adults at the same time as navigating the geographical, social and political spaces between and through British India and colonial East Africa. It argues that greater focus on South Asian childhood in historical instances of diaspora deepens our historical understanding of colonial migration, long-distance nationalism, and mobility in the imperial era.