Examining high-skilled professionals of Indian origin who decide to return to India to settle down in so-called gated estates or communities, which now form part of Indian mega cities’ landscape, this article describes the mobility regimes of these estates’ diverse populations in three South Indian cities and the power relations between these high-skilled professionals and their staff. We address the lacuna to study these estates as sites of human capital mobility convergence where international and regional migration and mobility patterns of the diverse groups become entangled and mutually constitutive. Combining theoretical models pertaining to skilled migration research as well as mobility studies and ethnographic description and analysis, we aim to conceptualise gated communities in a way that highlights not only the interconnectedness of local, regional, national and transnational migration, but also their correlation with different forms of (physical, social, cultural, economic) (non-)mobility. At the same time, we argue that these interconnecting social fields are marked by power differences, social and economic inequality, and disparate access to mobility. These factors lead to a differential outcome for the different social actors implicated in our study and eventually to the sustenance of huge economic as well socio-cultural disparity in contemporary India.

Keywords: Indian gated communities, Indian return migrants, Indian knowledge workers, Indian diaspora, new Indian cityscapes, changing Indian urban geographies, new strategies for social exclusion, new civic islands, manufactured communities, new Indian infrastructure havens, models of urban withdrawal/urban participation