While the notions of ‘internal’ and ‘international’ migration are widely used, the concept of diaspora has traditionally been used only in the ‘international’ context. This article provides a conceptual framework to understand both internal and international diasporas and the interlinkages between the two. It maps out the internal and international diasporas of India along linguistic lines and finds over 60 million Indians belonging to ‘internal’ diasporas in 2010, nearly thrice the size of India’s ‘international’ diaspora. The internal diaspora is larger than the international counterpart for all major linguistic groups except for Malayalam and Tamil, and a third of the internal diaspora is dispersed across India’s ten largest cities. The concept of the internal and international linguistic diasporas in the Indian context, cumulatively estimated to exceed 100 million in 2025, can be a useful bridge to understand the transnational from the subnational.
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