6 Indianness’ at Crossroads: Diaspora, Border and Travel

Dr. Sanghamitra Dey

Introduction

The module “‘Indiannesss’ at Crossroads: Diaspora, Home, Border and Travel” aims not be conclusive and attempt is made to continue the debate of ‘Indiannesss’ ongoing by situating the discourse of identity, nationalism, cultural difference in the context of the widening territorial range of the nation-state and the ensuing fluidity of the above mentioned concepts. The distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Indian diasporas, according to Sudesh Mishra is between “the semi-voluntary flight of indentured peasants to non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad,Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana, roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and on the other the late capital or postmodern dispersal of new migrants of all classes to thriving metropolitan centres such as Australia, the United States, Canada, and Britain” (“From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora”, 277). Keeping in mind the above mentioned distinctions, this module addresses how the concept of Indianness has gained wide circulation in recent years in the context of globalization and the consequent history of migration and displacement. As Avtar Brah argues in the context of diasporic identity and its relation to home “the concept of diaspora signals these processes of multi-locationality across geographical cultural and psychic boundaries”.

The problematic of identity politics in a globalized world offers a perspective on the fluidity of constitution of self in a postcolonial world. This module deals with the politics of representation of ‘home’, in-between spaces and deterritorialised belonging. Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991) offers a complex negotiation of diasporic identity in terms of feelings of displacement, discontinuity and rootlessness, living in- between different nations.

Objectives

The chapter is designed to help you

• Read critically the history of Indian English novel in the context of the experiences of migrancy and living in a diaspora
• Understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of diasporic literature
• Analyse the complex negotiations between home and host countries, questions of border and margin, time and place
• Apprehend the major texts
• Address the transition from roots to routes
• Diaspora, Travel and the Politics of Displacement

All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way. Diasporas refer to people who do not feel comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as indicated on their passport. Diasporas are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not press the hyphen too far for fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia. They are precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements, self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by spectres, by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or separatist movements.

Literary Representations Novel/ Short Story

Categorising Diasporas

Sudesh Mishra in “From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora” offers an interesting perspective on the question of diasporic identity:

Although the old diaspora is made up of communities that hail from different provinces, who speak different languages and practice different religions, and who are often inspired to leave ‘home’ for quite dissimilar reasons, the category is justifiable on the grounds that the earlier or older migration happened in the context of (and was determined by) colonialism in the heyday of capitalism. For, after all, it was CSR, a giant Australian sugar corporation, that initiated the migration of indentured labour to the Fiji Islands. Likewise, under the category of ‘new’, we have to include those descendants of the old diaspora who, together with the wave of post- Independence emigrants from the subcontinent to sundry metropolitan centres, are the willing subjects of – or unwillingly subjected to—a postcolonial or transnational political economy.

Girmit Diasporas

The term ‘Girmit’ diaspora refers to the migration of indentured Indian labourers to Fiji by European settlers and the connotation of mutual agreement is invoked in the term. The Indian labourers were brought to Fiji to work on sugarcane plantation and the writers effectively reproduce the Indo-fijian indenture experience in their works. Vijay Mishra opts for a productive use of the term for old Indian diaspora. Seepersad Naipaul is concerned with girmit or sugar diaspora. Seepersad Naipaul (1906-53), a journalist of The Trinidad Guardian invokes community feeling and bonding in the collection of short stories, originally appearing in 1943 as Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales and revised and republished in 1976 as The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories. His sons Shiva Naipaul and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul continue the tradition. Shiva Naipaul (1945-85) is noted for Firelies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) and Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984) noted for his sensitive depiction of the plantation colonies. The history of plantation colonies is vividly represented by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (b.1932), winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Born in Trinidad, Naipaul went to Britain in 1950 and lives there. Grappling with the issues of cultural identity and locational positioning, Naipaul is a polymath for whom both Caribbean and Indian sensibilities open vistas of creative energy. His perspective on nation, culture, border and postcolonial sensibility is expressed in works like The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961),The Mimic Men (1967), In A Free State (1971), Guerillas (1975), A Bend in the River(1979), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), The Return of Eva Peron; The Killings in Trinidad (1980), Among the Believers (1981), Finding the Centre (1984), Half A Life (2001). The depiction of Hanuman House in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) invokes the sense of homelessness and consequent longing for home as expressed in the architectural metaphor of the house.

The desire to achieve psycho-cultural recognition and integrity through the activity of house-building is recurrent in K.S. Maniam’s The Return (1981) and in Neil Bissoondath’s collection of stories, Digging Up the Mountains (1986). K. S. Maniam (b. 1942), an Indo- Malayasian writer of Tamil background spent his childhood in provincial Kedah, Malayasia, and completed his education in England. He is a professor in English at the University of Malaya. Maniam’s works include The Cord (1983) and In a Far Country (1993) and his fictional world is replete with the descendents of rubber planters indentured in Malayasia. Like Naipaul, Subramani (b.1943) explores the themes of alienation, dislocation against the backdrop of girmit diaspora in The Fantasy Eaters and Other Stories (1988). Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Harold Ladoo are some other famous writers of girmit diaspora.

Non-Girmit Diasporas

The writers of the old non-girmit diaspora, Menon Marath (b. 1906), Santha Rama Rau (b. 1923), Balachandra Rajan (b. 1920), and Victor Anant (b. 1927), are all born on the sub- continent (Rajan in Burma). They invoke an intimate representation of homeland and the pangs of dislocation and spatial displacement but their representation is, to some extent, address the dislocation of communities by colonial history. The most noted works are Marath’s The Wound of Spring (1960) and An Island for Sale (1968), Home to India (1945), an autobiographical novel by Santha Rama Rau. Rama Rau’s Remember the House (1956) and The Adventurer (1970), three travel books, East of Home (1950), A View to the Southeast (1957), and My Russian Journey (1959). Her playscript of E.M. Forster’s novel,A Passage to India is unique. In the two novels by Balachandran Rajan, The Dark Dancer (1958) and Too Long in the West (1961), we encounter the problematic dimension of returning home faced by an expatriate. The Revolving Man (1959) and Sacred Cow (1996) by Victor Anant (India-Britain) skillfully represents the themes of dislocation, homelessness and divided self.

In-between

Sudesh Mishra offers a categorization of an in-between diaspora:

There exists another group of writers from the old diaspora who belong neither to the comprador class nor to the girmit diaspora, but who share some of their preoccupations in relation to its own geo-political context. Most of these writers come from the professional or trading diasporas who took advantage of the mobility afforded by colonial rule, both in this and in the last century, and settled mostly in East or South Africa. They write preeminently about the unenviable middle position held by their community, sandwiched between the imperial oppressor on the one hand and the indigenous oppressed on the other, and enamoured of neither.

In this category, we can include writers like G. Vassanji (b. 1950), author of the collection of short stories, Uhuru Street (1991) and novels, The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1995); Ahmed Essop, born in Surat in 1931 noted for two collections of short stories, The Hajji and Other Stories (1978) and Noorjehan (1990), and two novels, The Visitation (1980) and The Emperor (1984).

New Diaspora

Unlike the old diaspora representing a conscious, melancholic invocation of the exclusivity of spatio-temporal affiliations, the writers of the new diaspora celebrate the poetics of dislocation in terms of conscious representation of border and the in-between spaces. The themes of complex negotiations with ethnicity, nation-states, gender, and class are skillfully worked in their writings. Ved Mehta (b. 1934) is noted for his wide range including history, fiction, theology, biography travelogue etc. The Face to Face: An Autobiography (1957) in its first two parts recalls the author’s childhood in India before his departure for the United States. The filial narratives Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979) offers an examination of his life as well as the lives of his Hindu parents. Vedi (1982) invokes Mehta’s time at the Dadar School for the Blind and The Ledge Between the Streams (1984) describes his youth during the time of Partition and his family’s forced departure from ancestral Lahore. Sound-Shadows of the New World (1985) is a self-conscious assessment of his adolescence and maturity in America; The Stolen Light (1987) describes his three years at Pomona College, his sexual awakening and his father’s struggles for financial independence. Up at Oxford (1992) offers an engaging portrait of the poet Dom Moraes, a fellow undergraduate. The last two volumes in Mehta’s autobiographical series ‘Continents of Exile’ of which Daddyji was the first, are Remembering Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ (1998) and All for Love (2001). Sound-Shadows of the New World narrating his life as a student in the American South is an interesting book. Farrukh Dhondy (b. 1944) maps the themes of sexuality, politics, crime, migrancy, nationalism, and ethnicity in Bombay Duck (1990), East End at your Feet(1976), Come to Mecca and Other Stories(1978), Poona Company (1980) etc. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) is an experimental novel in verse on the model of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825-1833). Set in California, The Golden Gate is a narrative in thirty books and the narrative is a sequence of sonnets in four-foot rhymed lines.

Pico Iyer (b. 1957) born in Britain is the author of Video Nights in Kathmandu (1988), The Lady and the Monk (1991), Falling off the Map (1991), Cuba and the Night (1995) and expresses the agony of fragmented identity. Rohinton Mistry(b. 1952) is noted for novels like A Fine Balance(1995) , Family Matters, Such a Long Journey (1991), and the short story collection Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1987). Mistry’s works express his unique Parsi sensibility and the notions of home, nation, and identity. Salman Rushdie (b.1947) born to a Muslim family is noted as one of the greatest novelists of India. His works include Grimus(1979), Midnight’s Children(1981), Shame(1983), The Moor’s Last Sigh(1995),The Satanic Verses(1989), The Ground Beneath Her Feet(1999), Fury(2001). Rushdie is noted for the use of magic realism and a polyphonic language in his fiction replete with the nuances of fragmented self, carnivalesque aura, celebration of marginal position. His perspective on Indianness is often unique and Midnight’s Children is an epoch-making book in Indian English fiction. The novel narrates the saga of Saleem Sinai born on the midnight of 15 August, 1947. His birth and consequent life echoes the birth of the nation and the political allegory makes it a brilliant work of fiction.

Rushdie on Indianness

The Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles.(I am of course, once more, talking about myself.)I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated…and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, when we seem, to ourselves, post-lapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result—as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates— we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to copy. (Imaginary Homelands).

The narratives of Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940) address the politics and poetics of fragmented self and her novels depict the condition of the diasporic subject caught in the web of multiple loyalties. The Tiger’s Daughter (1972) represents this feeling in the case of Tara who returns from New York and her attempt to rekindle her feelings for Calcutta leads to the frustrated discovery of the city and everything (Calcutta, her friends, herself) being affected by an estranging syntax. Her other novels and short story collections include Wife (1976), Jasmine (1989), The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Bombay Duck (1990) Suniti Namjoshhi (b. 1941) is noted for her brilliant use of fantasy and surrealism in The Conversations of Cow (1985), In The Mothers of Maya Diip (1989), St. Suniti and the Dragon (1994),.Building Babel (1997). Shone Ramaya’s novel, Flute (1989) is set in the days of the Raj. The first novel by Indira Ganesan (b. 1960), The Journey (1990) invokes the picture of fictional India as a saleable commodity in the West. Indira Ganesan’s second novel, Inheritance (1997) is also a depiction of Indian life. Sunetra Gupta (b, 1965) is an epidemiologist by profession who works at  the Imperial College, London. Gupta lives in Oxford. Her first novel, Memories of Rain (1992) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1996. Set in the cities of London, New York and Calcutta, The Glassblower’s Breath (1993) describes the search for self and her other novels include  Moonlight into Marzipan (1995) and .A Sin of Colour (1999). Atima Srivastava and Meera Syal are settled in Britain. Atima Srivastava’s first novel, Transmission (1992) is about the complex process of adaptation in a new land. Sayal’s Anita and Me (1996) is narrated by a child in an Indian family in Britain. Sayal’s definition of diasporic selfhood is not melancholic as expressed in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) which deals with the youth and middle age of three school friends. Meena Alexander’s first novel, Nampally House (1991) is set in Hyderabad. Her second, Manhattan Music (1997), deals with the lives and the problems of Indian immigrants living in American. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s second novel Sister of My Heart (1999), Anita Rau Badami’s Tamarind Men (1996), Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998).Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999) are some interesting works. Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967), an Indian American author is noted for her works like Interpreter of Maladies(1999), The Namesake(2003), The Lowland(2013).

Non_Fictional Prose

Sharan Jeet Shan’s In My Own Name (London: The Women’s Press, 1986), an autobiographical narrative of an Indian wife in England evidences the life of deprivation piled up when she encounters discrimination as a woman, black and a foreigner belongs to the literature of the diaspora. The encounter between India and the West is an important theme in Suniti Namjoshi’s Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000). Pico Iyer’s travelogues Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (1988), The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto (1991) and Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (1993) skillfully portray his immediate observation with acute sensitivity to the culture and history of the places visited by him. Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991) is a children’s book. The collection of essays Imaginary Homelands (1991) is an important landmark in the history and theory of diaspora. His collection of short stories is East-West (1994). V. S. Naipaul’s travelogues and other prose writings include The Middle Passage (1962), An Area of Darkness(1964), Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion(1963), A Flag on the Island(1967), The Loss of El Dorado (1969), The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972), India:A Wounded Civilisation(1977), A Turn in the South (1989), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).Poet and novelist Meena Alexander is the author of two autobiographical books: Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993) and The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Post-Colonial Experience (1997) which integrates poems and prose passages and deals with the themes of migration and memory. She also wrote the academic study Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989),The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979), the book of essays Poetics of Dislocation (2009). She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticisms.

Poetry/ Drama

According to Sudesh Mishra “If the border zone is often charecterised by things falling apart on the political or ideological levels, it is just as often charecterised by things coming together on the imaginative and domestic levels, especially in terms of the mailing back and forth between discourses and countries that is the condition of the diasporic writer. This we observe clearly in the poetry of G. S. Sharat Chandra (1935-2000), Saleem Peeradina (b. 1944), Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), and Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956)” (291). Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Meena Alexander (b.1951) lives and works in New York City where she is Professor of English at the City University of New York. Her collections of poems include Illiterate Heart (2002) and Raw Silk (2004), Quickly Changing River (2008), Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013 ). She has edited a volume of poems in the Everyman Series, Indian Love Poems (2005). Some of her other works include House of a Thousand Doors (1988), The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts (Short Work Series) (1989),Night-Scene: The Garden (Short Work Series) (1992),River and Bridge (1995/ 1996). Similar conceptualization of home as an imaginative realm of nostalgia and memory appear in the poetry of Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956). Known for the collections like Brunizem (1988), Monkey Shadows (1991), and The Stinking Rose (1995), Bhatt confidently uses Gujarati with English and her bilingualism contributes to her creativity. Her preference for her mother toungue is symbolic of the nostalgia for her lost origins as she spent her formative period in U.S.A. The American feel of her poetry can hardly be ignored. Bhatt’s famous ‘road poems’ where she uses the metaphor of journey reminds us of Agha Shahid Ali’s treatment of the similar theme. Like Bhatt, themes of sexual and maternal instinct, frank descriptions of female experience of subjugation, exploration of self distinguish the poetic world of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni(b. 1956) who is also a part of America’s literary and cultural scene. Her collections include Point No Point (1997) Leaving Yuba City (1997) Black Candle: Poems About Women from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (1991). She offers a multifaceted portrait of Indians and Indian immigrants in New Jersey in the context of the exploration of themes of alienation, rootlessness, memory and nostalgia. An interesting poem which is basically a self-portrait is ‘How I Became a Writer’ which denotes a sense of community and mutual bonding countering the feelings of alienation, exile and displacement.

A poet acutely conscious of his Muslim faith, his family heritage and his longing for his homeland Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (b. 1949) seems to offer the most intense experience of dislocation and alienation in his verse. Although he has preferred to live in the U.S.A. his attachment to Kashmir is unmistakable as his heart and soul lies specifically in his home where he was raised; and he himself stresses his “emotional identification with . . . North Indian Muslim culture.” He adds, “Behind my work, I hope the readers can sometimes hear the music of Urdu.” In this, the “Biryanization of English.” Ali’s early verse in Bone-Sculpture (1972) and In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979) evidences the influence of both Urdu verse and modern poetry. His poetic idiom is replete with the creative nuances of the effects of dislocation and his poetry is a celebration of the sublime moment of bliss and longing for Kashmir. The presence of Kashmir in its totality is all-pervading in Ali’s verse as we see him holding a picture-postcard from home, Kashmir and memorializing. Ali’s famous collections include Bone-Sculpture (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), and Rooms Are Never Finished (2001).

G.S.Sharat Chandra (1935-2000) is known for collections like Bharata Natyam Dancer and Other Poems (1968), Reasons for Staying (1970), April in Nanjangud (1971), Once or Twice (1974), Heirloom (1982), and Family of Mirrors (1993). Saleem Pareedina’s First Offence (1980) and Group Portrait (1992) continue the thematic and creative preoccupations of the other poets. Vikram Seth (b. 1952) with his first book, Mappings (1981) makes his mark. Mappings can be read as a creative document of self-scrutiny and soul-searching as expressed in the title the “mappings” which literally and symbolically maps his fragmented selves- “despondent, witty/calm and uncalm, lost in self-doubt or pity”. The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985) contains three sections, each named after a tree from three countries. For example, “Watang” represents China; “Neem”, India and “Live-Oak”, the U.S.A. The poems in the section entitled “China” are influenced by the poet’s experience of living in China as a research student. Although descriptive in nature, the poems deal with the dilemma of negotiating the claims of home and host countries.

Sudeep Sen (b. 1964) is another expatriate poet like Seth. His books include: Leaning Against the Lamppost (limited edition, 1983; revised edition, 1996); The Lunar Visitations (1990) New York Times (1993); South African Woodcuts (1994); Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (1994); and Dali’s Twisted Hands (1995). Postmarked India (1997) contains new and selected poems from the earlier collections. Keeping in mind his multiple affiliations, Sen’s setting covers a wide range from India to Italy, America to South Africa, Mathura to Hiroshima. His verse deals with the themes of love, nature, death, politics and urban life. Hosshang Merchant (b. 1947) lived abroad before his return to India. His work includes: Hotel Golconda (1992), Jonah and the Whale (1995), The Home, the Friend and the World (1995), Love’s Permission (1996), The Heart in Hiding (1996), and Birdless Cage (1997). Talking to the Djinns (1997) is described as a prose-poem. Merchant’s verse is frank and offers uninhibited representation of homosexual love. Ira Gardner-Smith, an Indian Jew married to an American has produced Curry and Rice (1994), a collection of 99 limericks.

Uma Parameswaran, a renowned critic is actively involved in the theatre in Canadawhere she teaches. She founded the Performing Arts and Literature of India (PALI) in Winnipeg, where she also produces a weekly television show. The plays in Sons Must Die and Other Plays (1998) are unique explorations of human relation. In Sita’s Promise, a dance drama Rama and Sita appear only to provide occasion for various types of Indian classical dance. Sons Must Die is a war play against the background of the Kashmir conflict in 1948.Parameswaran’s most famous play is Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees. It is a social play with a modern setting dealing with the problems of the immigrants in Canada.

Summing Up

The module is designed to help you read critically the history of Indian English novel in the context of the experiences of migrancy and living in a diaspora and understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of literature of diaspora and exile. The aim is to help you analyse the complex negotiations between home and host countries, questions of border and margin, time and place in terms of reading the major texts. To address the transition from roots to routes central to the complex negotiations of diasporic identity, the module deals with the themes of displacement, living in-between different nations, discontinuity rootlessness.

Introduction

• The chapter aims to continue the debate of ‘Indiannesss’ by situating the discourse of identity, nationalism, cultural difference in the context of the widening territorial range of the nation-state.
• It establishes the ensuing fluidity of the above mentioned concepts.

Objectives

• The module is designed to help you read critically the history of Indian English novel in the context of the experiences of migrancy and living in a diaspora.
• It helps you understand the important socio-cultural events/contexts instrumental to the history of diasporic literature.
• It equips you to analyse the complex negotiations between home and host countries.

Literary Representations

• This section deals with the literary representations of the questions of border and margin, the transition from roots to routes, time and place in terms of understanding the major texts.
• Novel/ Short Story-This section deals with the novels and stories written by the authors who are further categorized in terms of their affiliations.
• Girmit Diasporas-The term ‘Girmit’ diaspora refers to the migration of indentured Indian labourers to Fiji by European settlers and the connotation of mutual agreement is invoked in the term.
• This section highlights their experience as expressed in the writings of Seepersad Naipaul and his sons Shiva Naipaul and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, K.S. Maniam, Neil Bissoondath, Subramani, Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Harold Ladoo who continue the tradition of the desire to achieve psycho-cultural recognition and integrity in terms of exploration of the themes of alienation, dislocation against the backdrop of girmit diaspora.
• Non-Girmit Diasporas-This section unfolds the complex history and affiliation of the writers of the old non-girmit diaspora, Menon Marath, Santha Rama Rau, Balachandra Rajan , and Victor Anant .
• In-between -This section discusses the in-between group of writers from the old diaspora who belong neither to the comprador class nor to the girmit diaspora, but who share some of their preoccupations in relation to its own geo-political context. The most representative are G. Vassanji and Ahmed Essop.

New Diaspora

• This section discusses the writers of the new diaspora who celebrate the poetics of dislocation in terms of conscious representation of border and the in-between spaces.
• The themes of complex negotiations with ethnicity, nation-states, gender, and class are skillfully worked in the writings of the diasporic writers.
• Ved Mehta, Farrukh Dhondy, Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Suniti Namjoshhi, Shone Ramaya, Indira Ganesan, Sunetra Gupta, Atima Srivastava, Meera Syal, Meena Alexander, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri etc. are the noteworthy writers.

Non_Fictional Prose

• The focus of this section is on the various categories of travelogues, literary memoirs, literary criticisms, essays, children’s books, non-fictional prose.
• The major writers are Sharan Jeet Shan, Suniti Namjoshi, Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Meena Alexander etc.

Poetry/ Drama

• This section deals with the representative poets and dramatists
• G. S. Sharat Chandra, Saleem Peeradina, Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Meena Alexander, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Vikram Seth, Sudeep Sen, Hosshang Merchant, Ira Gardner-Smith, Uma Parameswaran etc. are the major writers.

Reference

• Ahmed, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford U P, 1992. Print.
• Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Mishra, Sudesh.“From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora”, (276-294). Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna eds. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print
• Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 447-50. Print.
• Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorising the diasporic imaginary.London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
• Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna eds. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Print
• Morey, Peter. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print.
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Pencraft international, 1971 (first published), 2001. Print
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford UP,2000. Print
• Naik, M. K.A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982(rpt. 2004). Print
• Naik, M. K and Shyamala A. Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2011. Print
• Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991.Print.
• Srivastava, Nilam. Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
• Sheffer, Gabriel. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.