17 Indian diasporic literature in english

1.0 INTRODUCTION You have already learnt about the origins of the Modern period Indian Diaspora. You also know that the older Indian Diaspora pre-dates the arrival of the Europeans in India from the 16th century C.E. onwards. However most studies of the Indian Diaspora today focus on the Colonial and then Postcolonial Diasporas, rather than on these older ones. The Modern period Indian diaspora today is the second largest in the world after that of the Chinese. Over 26 million Indians are in Diasporic locations today in over a hundred countries. What characterizes all these diverse Indian diasporas is what I term a ‘Home-Consciousness’, an awareness and identification with the old homeland India, which in some cases dates back to a very long time and in others spans not even a full lifetime. It is this divided construction of home and belonging that marks a minority group as diasporic in a location distant from its old homeland. It is this consciousness which also characterizes diasporic literature whether its writers belong to the colonial or postcolonial Indian diasporas.

2.0 A HISTORICAL REVIEW OF THE INDIAN DIASPORA

A quick review of the history of the Indian Diaspora will help you recall what you have studied in the other modules and help contextualize the Literatures written by these various diasporas.

2.1 Pre-European Diasporas

Indians have for very long had a global consciousness and outreach mentality which made them go as traders and travellers to countries bordering the Indian Ocean and beyond. Indian traders also had a strong presence along the land based trade routes that meandered from China, through North Western India, via the Central Asian spaces, to the doorsteps of Europe. (McPherson, 2006). Maritime traders from both the Western and Eastern coasts of India go back to more than 4000 years. Ancient Indians had traded with the Persian Empire, the Arab world, the coastal settlements and kingdoms of East Africa, as well as with Lanka, Burma, South East Asia and the Malay Peninsula (Levi, 2006). Rich though these older Indian diasporas are in monuments, religious influences and cultural links we do not have any access to creative writing/ literature which had documented these travels and settlements. So for literature written by the Indian diaspora we have to depend mainly on the descendants of those who had been displaced or had migrated during the British Rule in India and the Postcolonial period that has followed it.

2.2 Colonial Diasporas

The Indian diasporas of the Colonial period began in earnest in the 1830s when with the end of slavery decreed by the British Parliament in the early 1830s, Indians were taken as indentured labour to fill the gaping holes in the labour markets of the various British colonies which had till then depended on slave labour. So from the 1830s till the 1920s, over a million Indians were displaced all over the globe from Fiji in the East, to the Caribbean islands in the West and from East and South Africa to Burma and the Malay Archipelago. The indentured labour settlements lead to the need for Indian traders and professionals who would fulfill the needs of the Indians who stayed behind in their new homelands after the end of their period of indenturment (5-10 years) but who retained their consciousness of India as Home. So when it came to the employment of lawyers, teachers and doctors, the Indian diasporics preferred to ‘import’ them from their old Homeland (Cohen, 1997). Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who had lead India to freedom from British rule had first gone in 1893 to Natal in South Africa as a lawyer for Dada Abdoolla who was an Indian businessman there from Gujarat. Gandhi had returned to India on 9th January 1915 at the persuasion of Congress leaders to lead India’ s freedom struggle. You would know that this day is since 1993 celebrated as Pravasi Diwas by the Indian government. There is still a large Indian population in South Africa which has projected itself to the world not only through participation in the South African nationalist movement but also through literature by writers such as Farida Karodia and Ahmad Essop. In East Africa too we have indentured Indian labour followed by entrepreneurial and professional diaspora. Descendants of the East African diaspora though driven out of countries such as Uganda after its independence, continue to live in other East African nations and write themselves into the consciousness of the world. I refer to Indo-East African writers such as M G Vassanji, Neera Kapur-Dromson, Jameela Siddiqi, Shailja Patel, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Parita Mukta, and Sultan Somjee. Some of them though like Vassanji are now in a double diaspora in Canada but continue to write about Africa and India. The literature of the contemporary descendants of this colonial diaspora is still infused with a ‘Home Consciousness’ and identity conflicts, which manifests itself, positively or negatively, in their works.

2.3 Postcolonial Diasporas

British colonial rule in India ended in 1947 at the midnight hour of the 15 th of August, as Jawaharlal Nehru had famously said: “When the world sleeps, India shall awaken to life and freedom…” This brought to an end the colonial domination of the British over India, but the centuries of an exploitative colonial economy had left the newly independent India a nation state rich in culture, history and values but poor in material terms. On the other hand the war casualties had left Britain with insufficient labour. So she sought from the Indian subcontinent skilled and semi-skilled factory and transport workers. With the introduction of the welfare state by the Labour Government, Britain also called from India doctors and nurses, teachers and engineers (Visram, 1986 and 2002). This labour and professional diaspora was followed by the postcolonial entrepreneurial diaspora and the academic diaspora which also established itself in Britain. (Ali, Kalra, Sayyid, 2006). The writers of this diaspora number among their ranks the likes of Salman Rushdie, Sunetra Gupta and Atima Srivastava.

The postcolonial Indian diaspora in Britain soon spread across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada and the USA. In Canada the ‘White Canada’ policy, laid down in the Immigration Act of 1910 and further ratified in the 1952 Immigration Act, which had been repeatedly challenged in the first half of the 20th century by the earlier Punjabi immigrants to British Columbia (Buchignani, Indra 1985), officially ended with the Immigration Regulations of 1967. In the 1970s began the movement of Indian professionals and students to Canada. Writers such as Uma Parmeswaran belong to this diaspora. The number of Indian diasporics in Canada was also augmented by the outflow of the descendants of the old indentured labour diaspora from the Caribbean islands and the newly independent states in Africa. Old racial traumas had surfaced with the departure of the white colonisers. The neither white nor black Indians who had over time become a kind of partial colonial elite, suffered a backlash from the new rulers and empowered citizens of these former British colonies in Africa (Gregory, 1971 and 1993). Britain was the preferred destination of many of these ‘unhomed’ Indian diasporics but the opening up of Canada to non-Whites, meant that many Indian diasporics went to live there in the 1970s, becoming the ‘double’ diasporics and also thereby burnishing the official face of ‘Multicultural Canada’ (Fleras and Elliott, 1992). Writers such as M.G. Vassanji and Ramabai Espinet are just two of these double diasporic writers whose work moves across continents and Old, Older and New Homelands.

From the 1980s onwards other ‘Whites-only’ dominions of Britain such as Australia and New Zealand also woke up to the realization that their ageing populations needed to be augmented by well educated, English speaking former colonials from India and other parts of the Indian sub-continent. So Australian and New Zealander Universities began to recruit and lure away Indian students from the USA with promises of work permits at the end of their courses (Voigt-Graf, 2003; Tiwari, 1980) . Not much literature has emanated so far from these diasporics. However, Christopher Cyrill’ s The Ganges and Its Tributaries (1993), Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework (1999) and Shalini Akhil’s The Bollywood Beauty (2005) have begun exploring Indo-Australian identities.

It was however the USA which attracted the largest number of Indian students in the 1970s and 1980s, with new more liberal quotas for student visas and then with the Green Cards on offer to highly qualified Indian men and women, the number of Indian diasporics in the USA soon climbed several notches in the USA demographic statistics. The majority of this Green Card holding, highly paid and very well educated Indian diaspora decided against the surrender of their Indian passports and became NRIs – Non- Resident Indians. The NRIs had a very strong ‘Home Consciousness’ and sought to impose it on their not so keen born-in-America children, which created generational conflicts in this diaspora to an extent greater than in other postcolonial diasporas, where the first generation diasporics though they had strong connections with their old homeland, had with the acquisition of the citizenships of their new homelands, become less aggressively ‘Indian’ (Jenson, 1988; Rangaswamy, 2000; Shankar and Srikanth, 1998). This generational conflict in this diaspora is well represented in the literature of writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri. See her novel The Namesake (2003) which has also been turned into a film in 2006 by the diasporic film maker Meera Nair and about which you’ll find more details later in this module.

These different Postcolonial Diasporas and their sociocultural characteristics, psychological elements such as nostalgias, traumas, hybrid and hyphenated identities have been well recorded and documented in the literature produced by Diasporic writers from diverse locations. Not only has the Indian Diaspora produced ample literature but this literature has also resulted in the theorization of this writing by diasporics themselves or others. You can read the works of Vijay Mishra and Brij V. Lal both Indo-Fijians for the theorizing of the Indian Diaspora. You could begin with reading an article by Mishra entitled, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’ (1996) and another by Lal entitled, ‘The Indian Context’ (2006). You could then move on to complete volumes on this subject, some of which have been listed in the References section.

2.4 Global/Transnational Indians

In addition to those Indians already in diaspora, who are today becoming almost bi-nationals thanks to the PIO/OCI- Persons of Indian Origins and Overseas Citizen of India – cards made available to them by the Government of India, there are also a large number of Indians who are not in a diaspora, becoming transnationals in a global world order. These are not the traditional diasporics, NRIs or double diasporics. These are Indians who live and work across borders, but not necessarily only in the former colonial centre or in the former colonies of Britain such as Canada or even Australia or New Zealand, but in non-Anglophonic European countries and those of the South American continent (Bharucha, 2014, Safran, Sahoo and Lal, 2009).

These transnational Indians are usually IT professionals or highly qualified technocrats who are either directly employed by countries across the world which need their expertise, or are outsourced by their Indian or multinational companies in India to their foreign partners around the globe. These employments, contracts are the result of a global world order and even if at first glance these transnational Indians might appear to be some kind of ‘cyber-coolies’, they are not really that. They usually have well-paid, plush contracts and live the life of not indentured labourers but those of the till now only Western category of ‘Expatriates’. Some of them work for companies around the world, get paid global level wages but live in India as their work can be done through internet connections.

Being a more recent phenomenon and composed of a homogenous population, generally IT or scientific or technical in its orientations, this group of Indians have still not begun to produce any literature that describes their lived across borders, real and virtual.

3.0 DIASPORIC INDIAN LITERATURE – FORM AND CONTENT

All the above outlined colonial and postcolonial diasporas have produced ample literature and now also cinema. The focus in this module though is only on Literature. For more details on diasporic films see the modules for cinema. These literary manifestations have been an attempt by the diasporics to understand themselves and also project themselves to the world. As diasporics, either colonial or postcolonial, they have faced discrimination and loss of self in their new homelands and seek to retrieve both by the act of writing.

Even though some of the Indian diasporics have lived in their new homelands for over a hundred years such as those in the West Indies, the awareness of Home is still very strong and is available in their literature as nostalgia and pain. The mainly indentured labour diaspora in the West Indian islands were generally illiterate peasants and their link with the old Homeland was usually sustained by a copy of the Indian epic Ramayana many of them had taken with them on their voyage as a talisman. Some critics of Indian Diasporic literature see the descendants of these indentured labourers as so many Rams in Exile (Thieme, 1983). These men and women felt like the legendary Ram, banished from their Homelands and in exile in a strange land for reasons ranging from poverty to caste atrocities and in the case of women from widowhood to abandonment. As noted by Brij V. Lal (2006) they not only tried to inculcate in their lives the values exemplified by Ram – loyalty, obedience and fealty – but also attempted to create in their new Homeland a version, often imaginary, of their old Homeland. This is also true of the earliest Indian diasporics and their literatures. I refer to the case of Mauritius which was the first British colony to which Indian Diasporics had been transported in the early 1834. The literatures from these diasporics is a good example of how sacred Indian rivers such as the Ganga or sacred lakes such as the Mansarovar were ‘recreated’ in the New Homeland by naming the rivers and lakes of these countries with names beloved to them and recalled with nostalgia and the pain of loss. Interestingly enough not all Diasporic Indian Literature is written in English so in Mauritius we have literature in English, Bhojpuri, Creole and French (see the writings of Shakuntala Hawaldar, Khal Torabully, Abhimanyu Unnath, Azize Asgharally and Ananda Devi).

This expression of longing and nostalgia for the Old Homeland is a common motif in much of the literature of the Colonial Diaspora as this was the diaspora which had experienced the greatest loss of self and the greatest diminution of status, not just having been transported hundreds and even thousands of miles away from home at a time when it used to take months of long and often dangerous sea voyages to get back to India, but also in their new Homelands suffering a loss of not just caste but ignominy and humiliation. For instance the degrading tag of ‘Coolie’ was attached to the Indian diasporics in the West Indies, South and East Africa as well as in Mauritius and Fiji. A latter day descendant of these ‘coolies’ in Mauritius, the writer Khal Torbally, in a resistant mode inspired by the Negritude Movement of Francophone Black African writers, had coined the word ‘coolitude’ and sought to subvert the humiliation and loss of self-esteem contained in the term ‘coolie’. As for the feeling of longing for the old homeland in diasporic literature, it is most clearly expressed in the Fijian poet of Indian origins, Sudesh Mishra’s poetry. Mishra has in his poems used Hindi poetry’s ‘Bidesia’, the one who has become a foreigner, tradition. In this tradition the beloved who has been left behind by the lover who has through his travels become a foreigner, pines for him. In Mishra’s poetry through the strategy of inversion it ’s the old Homeland India which has from ‘des’ (one’s own country) become ‘bides’ the foreign land for which the poet in the guise of the beloved longs for and calls his ‘Bidesia’ (the foreign lover). You could read Mishra’s poem ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ (2002) to better understand the ‘Bidesia’ mode of poetry.

However not all these old diasporics cherish nostalgia for the Indian Homeland. Among the West Indian diasporics from India we have the Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul who has had a troubled relationship with his original Homeland and now lives in a double diaspora in Britain. There are also some diasporic Indians from the West Indies who over the century long diaspora have inter- married with the Black West Indians who either retain their ‘Indianness’ or like Sam Selvon the writer who moved to Britain, are in denial of their Indian identity.

Thus another issue the Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Diasporics deal with in their literatures is that of Identity. The questions of Who am I? Where do I belong? Am I a West Indian or am I still an Indian? Am I British or am I Indian? Am I American or am I Indian? – are questions that haunt the diasporics. Identity is a complex issue and has as much to do with the person as it has with her surroundings, so it is not always sufficient for a diasporic, especially the colonial diasporic, to jettison his/her old identity and adopt a new one. It is also essential for the host country to recognize this new identity. For instance the Indian Diasporics in East Africa had to leave their new homelands when these newly independent countries began an Africanisation programme. This also happened in the West Indies although it was not an official policy as it had been in Uganda. This kind of rejection by the new Homeland leads to a double diasporisation and the literature of the double diasporics such as that of the Afro-Indo-Canadian writer M.G. Vassanji provide us good examples of this kind of diasporic literature. Not all double diasporics though are forced to leave their new homelands, some of them choose to do so for economic or academic reasons.

Linked to the matter of identity is the question whether the diasporic Indian has a ‘hyphenated’ identity or a ‘hybrid ’ identity. The term ‘hybrid’ can be initially understood in botanical terms. In botany when one plant is grafted onto another plant the product of such grafting is called a hybrid plant, one which exhibits characteristics of both the old as well as that of the grafted plant but is in many ways different from both of them. It is in essence a plant which occupies what the postcolonial meta-theorist Homi K. Bhabha (1990) calls the Third Space in the context of diasporics (see “The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha”). The sociologist and postcolonial critic Avtar Brah (1996) calls this phenomenon the occupation by diasporics of a space not the same, but not different, ‘intersectionality’. What then is a hyphenated identity such as the one adopted by the ‘Indo-Canadians’ in Canada? Is the hyphen an indication of less assimilation and integration into the host population than those who are supposed to be hybrids? Or is it a proud assertion of the older identity on par with the newer one? It would be interesting for you to read the literature produced by Indo-Canadian writers such as Uma Parmeswaran, Anita Rau Badami, Rohinton Mistry, Shauna Singh Baldwin and others and see how far these writers and their characters are integrated and assimilated into the Canadian space. You could for a start begin with Parmeswaran’s novel Mangoes on the Maple Tree (2006) and read the short story “Swimming Lessons” from Mistry’s collection Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987).

We have so far been looking at the content of Diasporic Indian literatures and their characteristic features of nostalgia, longing, pain and problems with identity. However, one also needs to look at the form of this writing. How do the diasporic writers construct their literature? What are the narrative styles used by these writers? These are very important questions as it’s not just what you write but how you write that feeds into the impact made by any writer on his/her readers. Like the postcolonial Indian writers, the diasporic Indian writers too use their coloniser’s language to not merely curse with like Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest (circa 1610-11). Caliban had been taught his Master Prospero’s language but felt he had had no profit from it but to curse his master in it. The Postcolonial and Diaspoiric writers instead use/appropriate their Master’s language to subvert the privileging of colonial discourse and the hegemony of Western narrative modes. It is thus that they sabotage the unequal Prospero-Caliban dichotomy (Bharucha, 2010).

How do postcolonial narrative modes manage this sabotage of unequal linguistic power relations? They do this by using alternative non-Western narrative modes. The most effective of these alternative modes of narration is what is called orature, or the adoption of oral literary modes in the written text. The Western world and its colonisers went armed not just with guns and swords to the non-Western parts of the globe but also with the ‘Word’, with the Logos, the written text. Many of the countries they colonized were pre-literate societies but had their own rich culture. This oral culture was negated by the colonizer and these societies termed savage and barbaric. So in order to now in the postcolonial times, reverse and subvert such cultural prejudices and discriminations, postcolonial writers use the story-telling modes of oral cultures. These modes of narration are usually non-linear. The stories in such narratives are often told by Alternate voices and instead of a singular ending or opinion, offer multiple ones. Postcolonial writers also use non-Western literary styles such as that of the Indian epics or tales which employ a non-realistic story telling mode. This is also the style used by Islamic literary culture in for instance in The Arabian Nights or in the Shahnamah. A related stylistic mode is that of the linked stories. Non-Western literatures did not have the novel form until it was introduced to them by the colonisers in the 19th century. However, they did have linked narratives like in the Arabian Nights which is after its narrator, Scherezade, called the Scherezadic style. These non-Western narratives were also often non-realistic and used magic in their stories. Many diasporic Indian writers have used the Scherezadic mode of narration and also subverted Western realistic narrative modes by the use of magic realism. You could try reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1991) which uses many of these alternative narrative modes. Rushdie has in this novel adopted the linked stories, Scherzadic approach and also used magic realism. Additionally he has a Lord Ganesha type of scribe. Ganesha you might know was the scribe for the Mahabharata, which was supposed to have been dictated to him by its author Vyas. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie has also used magic realism and one such example of this is the way in which the protagonist of this novel, Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of the midnight hour at which India became free in 1947, is able to communicate inside his head, with the other 1001 children who were also born at this magic hour. You could also read Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982) or the pioneer of magic realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ s book One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). It also needs to be noted that magic realism is not just restricted to Indian diasporic writers but used by Western Postmodern writers especially feminist writers such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Women like the Diasporics and Postcolonials see themselves as disempowered and discriminated against by White Western men so they too use the magic realism form to subvert the Master/Male Narrative of the West. However, Western male writers too have used magic realism and the novels of the German novelist Gunter Grass who pioneered this format in Western literature and the British writer Martin Amis stand testimony to this.

Like the postmodern writers, diasporic Indian writers too use several other devices to challenge the Western master narrative. They use intertextuality, i.e. sections from other books and self-reflexivity. So in the latter technique the author intrudes himself/herself in the text, thereby challenging the supremacy and power of the text. A good example of this is the manner in which Rushdie and Mistry write themselves into their novels and short stories –Midnight’s Children and “The Swimming Lesson”.

4.0 SOME IMPORTANT DIASPORIC WRITERS AND THEIR WORK

Almost all the Indian diasporas have been well represented in creative writing. The Caribbean diaspora has V.S. Naipaul as its figurehead and the tail is brought up by writers such as David Dabydeen. From the African diaspora has emerged M.G. Vassanji. Fiji has given us Sudesh Mishra, Satendra Nandan and Subramani. The postcolonial economic and academic diasporas have its own representative writers in North America such as Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Vikram Chandra and Bharati Mukherjee. In Britain there is the towering figure of Salman Rushdie and other first and second generation writers such as Sunetra Gupta, Atima Srivastava and Farrokh Dhondy. The petroleum diaspora has given us the bi-lingual Vilas Sarang. This is just a representative and not a complete list of Indian Diasporic writers.It is not possible here to deal with even just the writers mentioned above so I have picked three writers as the focus of this section – Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Salman Rushdie’s texts began to appear at a time when the first postcolonial generation had come of age in the erstwhile colonies of the British Empire. In Britain too this was a time when the first post-war/ post-imperial generation, never to have experienced the Empire first hand, had come to maturity. The 1980s in the U.K. witnessed a tremendous ‘Nostalgia for the Raj’ phenomenon, fuelled as much by Mrs. Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Put the Great Back into Britain’ rhetoric as by the post-imperial generation’s desire to connect with their past. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which became highly visible after receiving the Booker Prize in 1981, provided a vehicle for such time-travel. In India too, the first postcolonial generation not to have personally experienced the bonds of empire, became time-travellers into the past of Saleem-Shiva. Fed so far on official histories of India’s independence struggle against the Raj, this generation revelled in the alternative narratives and magic realism of Rushdie’s texts. Midnight’s Children was followed by Shame (1983), which did for Pakistan what the earlier book had done for India – recaptured and repossessed its immediate history. Then was published The Satanic Verses (1988) that became a theological/ideological battleground and changed Rushdie’s life from a globe-trotting celebrity to one of the Twentieth Century’s most celebrated literary prisoners. This book it was felt by many in the Islamic world insulted the prophet Mohammed and blasphemed against Islam. A fatwa was issued against Rushdie enjoining all good Muslims to destroy this man, ironically on 14 th February, 1989 the feast of St. Valentine, the saint of lovers. If the intention of this fatwa issued by the then Iranian leader, the late Ayotollah Khomeni, was to silence the writer it has not succeeded. Post-Fatwa Rushdie’s fictional and non-fictional output has been prolific. First came the so-called children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, (1990) where the Land of Gup (Talk) triumphs over the Land of

introduced a new syncretic religion – Din e Ilahi – composed of the best from Hinduism and Islam. It was he who had surrounded himself with men of wisdom and learning from all over India and the world. The court of Akbar was therefore a space that challenged all possible essentialisms and fundamentalisms.

The work of the Canada based Parsi Zoroastrian writer Rohinton Mistry is a good example of diasporic literature which is ethnocentric – focussed as it is on the Parsis – but also works at the level of multiculturalism and transnationalism. Rohinton Mistry’s first collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), is set almost exclusively in Bombay. But there are three stories in this collection which are either partially or wholly set in Canada – ‘Squatter’, ‘Lend me your Light’ and ‘Swimming Lessons’. In Such a Long Journey (1991), his first novel, Mistry uses Scherezadic narrative techniques to tell the story of a group of Parsis against the backdrop of the 1971 war that India had fought with Pakistan and which had led to the creation of Bangladesh. In this text the Parsi world gradually moves out of its self-imposed isolation and interacts at the highest political and financial levels with the wider Indian world. In this text Mistry’s discourse transcends the boundaries of the Paris self and moves into the wider areas of the nation space. However, this does not mean that the Parsi identity is not evident here but that the focus has changed. A Fine Balance (1996), which is Mistry’s second novel, records the dark episode in Postcolonial Indian history when her then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, suspended the constitution and declared an internal emergency. Mistry records this period in the story of his two tailors who work for the Parsi widow Dina Dalal. The tailors belong to the one of the lowest castes in India and Dalal, as a woman and a poor widow at that, is not exactly a member of the dominant group. This is a thus a tale of subalterns. With Family Matters Mistry moves back into the ethnoreligious space of the Bombay Parsis. The miniature Parsi world though is enriched by the literary prowess and emotional maturity of a writer at the height of his writing talent. Foregrounded in this novel are not just the problems of the ageing Nariman Vakil, but those of an ageing community at large, so one could look at Vakil as a metaphor for a geriatric community on the brink of extinction. However, this text too transcends the ethnic boundaries and concerns itself with larger political issues in India of the 1990s, such as the Post-Babri Masjid riots. Shattered dreams of immigration also haunt the pages of Family Matters. A successful immigrant himself, in the wake of the overt racism he has suffered in post 9/11 USA, Mistry is here sympathetic towards those who did not have the ‘luck’ he did. In fact sympathy, compassion and humanity are the keywords to the comprehension of this novel. The compassion for the Dalits and the other unfortunates he had centre staged in A Fine Balance has come of ripeness in Family Matters, making it till date Mistry’s finest text. This is a novel in which Mistry has indeed transcended the self and the other. The self being both the persona of the writer and also his Parsi self; the other being the wider world. Here all three have come together in an epiphanic moment that speaks across national, ethnic and gender boundaries, with a voice that cannot be denied (Bharucha, 2003).

Jhumpa Lahiri’s two collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccumstomed Earth (2008) and her two novels The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) have all been very well received and won several awards. Much of Lahiri’s work revolves around the question of identity in a diasporic context. One sees this clearly in The Namesake, where Gogol, born in the USA, to an academician father and home-maker mother (who later becomes a part -time librarian), tries very hard to become ‘American’, even abandons his name Gogol, prefers the company of the parents of his white, upper class American girlfriend, to that of his own parents Ashoke and Ashima. However, ultimately when his father dies suddenly he puts on his long-neglected Indian self, like the overcoat in his namesake Gogol’s story, shaves his head, dons white Indian clothes, much to the chagrin of the girlfriend who fails to recognise her partner, in this alternative identity. Turning with a vengeance to ‘Indianness’, he marries a doubly diasporic (like Lahiri herself) Indian girl, Moushimi, but finds her still involved with sorting out her multiple identities, an exercise which he himself has already grappled with and emerged ambiguously victorious from the struggle. There are shades of Lahiri in both Gogol as well as well as in Moushimi’ s characters. Like Gogol although named Nilanajana Sudeshana at birth, she is better known by her family nickname ‘Jhumpa’ which became the name by which she was also known at school. Like Moushimi she was born in the U.K. and then shifted to the USA with her Bengali parents, Tapati and Amar. In The Namesake its Gogol’s mother who becomes a librariarn but in real-life it was Amar who was the librarian. The Lowland shifts to a partially Indian setting, the tumultuous Naxal period in Calcutta of the 1960s and 1970s. Like most Bengali middle class educated Indians who had lived through that time or heard stories about this period, Lahiri too although in a diaspora, had grown up hearing the stories of the Naxal movement in Calcutta and The Lowland is inspired by one such story. The text narrates the story of two brothers – Udayan who was a Naxal activist and his brother Subhash who chooses a more sedate life as a researcher in the USA. When Udayan is killed in the lowland, the swamp between the two lakes that faced his house in Calcutta, it is Subhash who returns home and becomes the unlikely rescuer of Udayan’s widow, the young and pregnant Gauri. He becomes attracted to her but denies this even to himself as he convinces her that he wants her to marry him only for the sake of the future of the unborn child. Their story as it then unfolds in the USA presents a fiercely independent Gauri who in her desire to seek herself, make her own life, abandons her young daughter Bela and second husband Subhash. This tears the little family unit apart and eventually Bela too drifts away from Subhash. What brings her back to him is the fact that she learns finally that he is not her real father. Lahiri offers no judgement on the characters of either of her female protagonists, Gauri, who rejected the traditional roles of wife (twice), daughter-in-law and mother and then Bela who moves away from Subhash who had offered the only security and love she had received as a girl. This makes the novel as challenging as it makes it problematic.

Try reading at least some of these books by the authors chosen above and try to understand both the way they have chosen to construct their narratives as well as the stories they have narrated. This should give you a good understanding of Diasporic Indian Literature. You could also profitably read Amitav Ghosh’s books especially the two recent ones which are part of the Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011). These books specifically trace the story of the transport of the indentured labour from India to Mauritius and the Opium Trade to China.

5.0 SUMMARY

The Indian Diaspora spans in time a period from the 1830s to the present day and is an ongoing phenomenon. Included in this diaspora are the descendants of the Jahajis, the sea voyagers, who had been transported across the Kaala Paani (black waters) of the oceans, as indentured labour in British colonies, the entrepreneurial diaspora, the postcolonial diaspora and now the jetsetting transnationals. Spread across time and space all these diasporas display a strong sense of ‘Home Consciousness ’ which even in the second, third and fourth generation diasporics manifests itself in hyphenated and hybrid identities. The opposing pulls of the East and West on the psyches of Indian diasporics has been well documented in Diasporic Indian Literature written not just in English but in several other Indian languages too. Constraints of time and space do not allow a detailed exploration in this module of these other literatures but your attention has been drawn to diasporic Indian Literature in French and Bhojpuri. Diasporic Indian Literatures have grappled with plural identities and have projected itself into the consciousness of the reading public around the world and also in India. This literature has been recognized by the award of prestigious prizes such as the Nobel Prize for Literature to V.S. Naipaul, the Booker of Bookers prize to Salman Rushdie, the Pulitzer Prize to Jhumpa Lahiri, the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Rohinton Mistry and the Sahitya Akademi Prize for English Literature for Amitav Ghosh, to mention only a few. This literature even as late as the 1990s, was not fully acceptable in India as it was felt that those who had left the shores of the Motherland had no business to project her to the world. However today India has come to terms with the fact that ‘there are different ways of being Indian, which do not necessarily have to do with being rooted in India’ (Salman Rushdie, 1995). As for the rest of the world the international prizes garnered by Diasporic Indian writers point to the fact that they too have begun to deal with the reality of a multivalent, multicultural world in which these multi- layered texts enrich international understanding of an expansive discourse which seeks to create its own spaces of cultural relocations within shifting borders and boundaries.

6.0 References:

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