Colonial Migration and Cultural Transformation in India and Burma: Exploring the Role of Transnational Mobility in Shaping Chettinad Heritage

ABSTRACT Migration has played an important role in the transformation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage across regions, including in the Global South, especially among postcolonial nations, due to their longstanding people‐to‐people contacts leading to socio‐economic and historical‐cultural transferences over time. In the case of India, global migratory forces have irreversibly transformed its tangible and intangible sociocultural landscape into a form of syncretism reflected in our civilizational ethos of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’. In this context, this paper explores the role of international in‐/outmigration in historical and contemporary times toward the evolution of India's regional cultural identities using a case of Chettiars' migration from the hinterlands of Chettinad in present‐day Tamil Nadu, which is in the south of the Indian subcontinent, to the far‐flung nation state of Burma/Myanmar in the northeast, including their subsequent return, primarily during the 19th and the 20th centuries. Using the 3i Framework (Interests, Ideas and Institutions), the study explains the role of cross‐border migration in shaping the tangible and intangible heritage of Chettinad, as reflected in its architecture, cuisine and social customs.