INDIA AND THE DIASPORIC INDIAN IMAGINATION /

L’INDE ET L’IMAGINATION DIASPORIQUE

Abstracts of the proposals accepted

Simone A. James Alexander

Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana & Diaspora
Studies, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, USA
‘Two Bo-rat can’t live in the same hole’: “Revis(ion)ing Indo-
Caribbean Female Subjectivity”
Providing a clear-sighted analysis of the absence of Indian women in
postcolonial discourse, Verene A. Shepherd points to the widely accepted
belief that Indian women “functioned largely in the private, domestic sphere,
under the control of Indian men in the patriarchal Indian family system; that
they were subsumed to their male counterparts in the economic and social
spheres and did not merit separate treatment in the historiography” (234).
Indo-Trinidadian author, Ramabai Espinet, in her debut novel, The Swinging
Bridge, addresses this neglect. Offering a much broader perspective of Indian
women’s reality, while according them the status of speaking subjects,
Espinet engenders resistance in her female subjects. Unearthing Indian
female subjects from oblivion necessitates that the novel’s protagonist, film
researcher, Mona Singh, perform an excavation of sorts. Hence, in exhuming
the women in her family whose lives are shrouded in silence and secrecy,
Mona engages a politics of resistance, captured in the idiom “two-bo rat can’t
live in the same hole.” Of noted relevance, this idiom is appropriated from
the masculinist discourse. Reinforcing patriarchal rule and order under his
roof, this phrase, during the “big row,” was uttered as an ultimatum to her
brother, Kello, by their father, Da-Da. Mona narrates that the “big row” had
transformed Kello into a man “even though he was only nine years old at the
time.” Appropriating this highly-charged masculinist narrative to script a
narrative of her own, Mona defies and defiles patriarchal and cultural
expectations of Indian womanhood, of female subjectivity and sexuality.
This essay chronicles Mona’s revision and re-appropriation of the master
narrative. Further, it demonstrates how she renegotiates Indian women’s
subjectivity by refuting the patriarchal construct of the “fallen woman,” the
binary (of entrapment), widow or whore, accorded the Indian woman who
dares to defy male authority.

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

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University of Bucharest, Romania
“Provincialising London in Vikram Chandra’s Novel Red Earth and
Pouring Rain”
Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a novel about migration,
rebirth and identity performance across time, space and generations, but
primarily about storytelling for survival. This act, emblematic in postcolonial
writing, is in this novel the main vehicle for the rewriting of history. Sanjay
Parasher, a nineteenth-century Brahmin reincarnated as a monkey who,
being shot accidentally, must, like Scheherazade, tell stories to prolong his
life, keeps ‘going to London’ – in his dreams and in real life – in a perpetual
search for a political and discursive centre but, ultimately, for his own
identity. London, the centre of the empire, here becomes an imaginary
space that must be conquered by the emerging Indian national
consciousness. An important component of this inverted colonization project
is to read London in a way that is different from the one of the empire’s
power discourse.
Towards the end of the novel there is a chapter entitled In London, a Battle
between Immortals which marks the climax of the protagonist’s journey
through his nineteenth-century life in colonial India and provides an X-ray of
‘filthy’ underground London that reveals the other, hidden, repressed face of
power. By solving the mystery detectives Bolton and Abberline cannot solve,
Sanjay – whose Englishness depends on his Indianness – provides a
rereading of the urban text through a different lens that dismantles the
exemplary value of the metropolis and opens it up to an alternative discourse
which allows for the presence of the other. In order to show this I shall
analyze the textuality of this chapter within the context of the novel from a
perspective informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of ‘provincialising
Europe’ (i.e. restoring the authority of discourses alternative to the European
one) and Barthes’ and Derrida’s alternative views of the centre in discourse
and the free play of textuality.

Savitri Ashok
Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, USA.
“Anamnesis and Amnesia: Salman Rushdie's Imagination in The
Moor’s Last Sigh”
In The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie reimagines and redesigns the
cultural space of the Indian nation, interweaving dissident stories and
dissonant histories. Disenchanted by the version of nationhood projected by
fundamentalist-religious politicians of the nineteen nineties, he writes other
versions of India from the nation's others. One such other is Rushdie's
protagonist, the Moor. The deep conflict between writers and politicians in
their respective imaginings of their nation becomes clear, as the Moor
plumbs the depths of his past in a fiercely anamnestic story-telling, while the
nationalist-politician in the novel uses amnesiac history to exclude
‘foreigners’. What becomes clear in this retelling of history is the inevitability
of a deep conflict between writers and politicians in their respective
imaginings of their nations. Rushdie’s protagonist — the Moor--creature of
artistic fabulation and himself a fabulator, teller of tales and weaver/inter-

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weaver of texts, peels the layers of history and plumbs his past in
anamnestic stories, and simultaneously lays bare the lies inhering in the
religious-nationalist rhetoric of the politician and shows it for what it is:
another narrative of the nation and an amnesiac one. Outsider, freak of
nature, narrating voice and, in effect, a disguised and distorted emblem of
artistic imagination, the Moor contests nationalist politics and its history and
reimagines his nation. Consequently, to read the narrative of The Moor’s Last
Sigh is to read the nation anew and move emphatically from an imagined
unity to a reimagined heterogeneity.

Deepika Bahri
Associate Professor, English department, and Director of the South Asian
Studies program at Emory University, USA.
“A Tale of Two Cities: The Aesthetics of Diasporic Space in Mira Nair's
The Namesake”
An extraordinary tale of an ordinary Bengali immigrant family in the United
States, Mira Nair's The Namesake is based on Pulitzer-prize winning author
Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel of the same name. Aptly, this tale of cultures set
on a collision course begins with a train wreck in India. Ashoke Ganguli, a
young Bengali man with a fondness for the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, is
among the survivors. Years later in New York he nicknames his infant son
‘Gogol’ as a stopgap until he and his wife Ashima can get word about a more
suitably Indian ‘good name’ for the child from her mother. The letter from
Kolkata never arrives. Gogol retains his moniker until a crisis of identity
propels him to select the name ‘Nikhil’. Experimenting with possible
identities, he is ‘Nick’ to his White American girlfriend Maxine before he falls
for Moushumi, a Bengali American with whom he shares the history of his
two names. Shuttling between identities and two great cities, New York and
Kolkata, Gogol is the protagonist of a modern diasporic tale about living
between two worlds. Significantly, he chooses architecture as a profession, a
choice that is poignant given his need to learn how to build an identity, a
bridge, and a life that can span dual worlds. It is this powerful theme,
particularly meaningful for the immigrant, which is captured deftly by the
film's emphasis on the architectural scapes of our lives and the places where
we live. This paper argues for an aesthetic understanding of the mutually
transformative relationship between the film's content and form through an
elucidation of its use of visual and sonic palettes in the construction of the
physical and emotional spaces inhabited by the characters.

Suman Bala
Reader in English, SBS College, University of Delhi, USA
“Re-Configuring Identity through Family Narratives: A Study of Anita
Rau Badami’s Hero’s Walk and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake”
All diaspora deliberations come to be shaded by the ideology of
postcolonialism. Rightly so, because diasporic fiction is replete with issues
related to location, movement, crossing border, original home and adopted
home and identity. The term ‘Diaspora’ implies the notion of a centre, a
locus, a home, from where the dispersion occurs. Migrant writers living away

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from home are thus victims of the ‘in-between’ syndrome. Severed, and
moving away from the culture, they are grafted on the other culture. I
propose to glance at Anita Rau Badami’s Hero’s Walk and Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Namesake as documents offering documentaries of immigrants’ lives
‘displaced and dour, floating in an anonymous island, far away from home.’
The vital question for them is that of identity and their ongoing quest for it.
In exploring this theme, these novelists write not only family diasporic
narratives but also contribute to construct national and cultural history of
their respective countries, namely Canada and America. In this respect, their
narratives serve both as microhistories as also macrohistories.

Tithi Bhattacharya, with Bill Mullen

Purdue University, USA
“Locating the ‘local’ in Diaspora”
The term local people-now increasingly used by ethnographers instead of
primitive or tribal-can be misleading in interesting ways and calls for some
unpacking. ‘Local’ refers to the rootedness of a people. The opposite of ‘local’
implies essentially two oppositional identities: the negative constitutes
identities of ‘displacement’ or ‘uprootedness’ while the positive end of this
spectrum is represented as unlimited, cosmopolitan, universal or belonging
to the whole world. Thus, Islamic theologians in Bangladesh who invoke the
authority of medieval Islamic texts are taken to be ‘local’ while the Western
journalist who invokes the authority of modern secularism can claim to be
‘universal’. Yet both are located in universes that have rules of inclusion and
exclusion. Immigrants who arrive from South Asia to settle in Britain or
America are described as uprooted, while English officials who lived in British
India were not. An obvious difference between them, of course, is power:
the former became subjects of the Crown, the latter its representatives.
In light of this, the panel seeks to explore the discursive definitions of
authorized space. Who or what determines the local-ness of people and
things? Everyone can relate themselves to a multiplicity of spaces-
phenomenal and conceptual-whose extensions are variously defined, and
whose limits are variously imposed. Since modern capitalist enterprises and
modernizing nation-states are the two most important powers that organize
space today, it is worth questioning the processes by which people are
defined as either ‘local’, ‘diasporic’ or ‘universal’.

Nancy E. Batty
Red Deer College, Canada
“Apocalypse Then: Communal Violence and Diasporic Time in M.G.
Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song”
The Assassin’s Song is Tanzanian-born M.G. Vassanji’s sixth novel and the
first to be set largely in India. The novel’s contemporary protagonist, Karsan
Dargawalla, is the reluctant heir to his father’s role as the gaadi-varas of an
ancient Sufi shrine in Haripir, India. Long after Karsan abdicates his role as
avatar of the Pir Biwa and migrates to the United States and later Canada,
his father and the shrine he tends are destroyed in the state-sponsored
communal violence that rips through Gujarat in 2002, an act that finally

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forces Karsan to accept his destiny as the spiritual leader of his people.
Vassanji’s novel raises a number of questions, not least of which is who are
Karsan’s people? And how can Karsan, who has ceased to believe in miracles,
lead them?
But the epic scale and geographic scope of the novel raise even more
interesting questions, questions related to what it means to belong to a
history and a community that, despite the long passage of time and the fluid
movement into and out of it of diverse and accommodating populations,
regularly erupts into the most agonizing sectarian violence. Vassanji’s book is
not optimistic, as its title suggests: the role that assassins and martyrs have
played, over time, in India, is both a destructive and productive one. Seen in
this light, Karsan’s return and capitulation to his destiny is not just a
repetition of the earlier migration of Nur Fazal the Sufi, the Pir Biwa, and the
Assassin, but an apocalyptic embrace of the violence that led them both to
Haripir in the first place.

C. S. Biju, Reader, Research Department of English, St. Thomas College,

Thrissur Kerala, India
“Indian Diaspora and the Performance of Cultural Memory-
Production, Performance and the Politics of Representation in
Theatres of Indian Diaspora in Britain”
The proposed project attempts to explore the role of theatre practice in
redefining the cultural memory of the ‘Diasporic Subject’ in the context of
negotiations of identity and social incorporation in Indian Diasporic
Communities in United Kingdom. This research project envisages the
emerging role of theatre practices in communities of Indian Diaspora as a
critical social tool in their effort to deconstruct the ‘imaginary’ relationship of
the diasporic communities to history and cultural memory. The theatre
groups andpractitioners belong to Indian Diaspora all over the world most
powerfully bear witnessto the profound cultural hybridisation evolved within
the immigrant communities and focus mainly in reconstructing ‘Culture as
Memory’, with a special emphasis on the shifting structures of social
organisations and cultural institutions in locations of SouthAsian Diaspora.
This paper focuses on the works of Tara Arts in London, which performatively
embark upon problematising both Cultural memory and Culture as memory
through the trilogy, Journey to the West.
Theatres like Tara, interrogates the cultural practices of Diaspora in such a
way that it formulates an ethnographic procedure to understand the complex
web of intercultural undulations in the formative process of diasporic
subjectivities. Theatres of Indian diaspora serve us with a moment of
interpretative ethnographic practice and enable us to view the dialogic aspect
of the ethnographic text, which is theatre. In antithesis to the privileging of
the visual image evolved out of performance, rite, ritual, food or cloths
stored and represented in the form of film video, photograph in the domain
of ethnographic work, theatre implicates a discourse which reconstructs the
authentic correspondence of the image with the lived experience. The
proposed paper attempts to view Theatres of Indian Diaspora as
interrogations of the authentic purview of the ‘real’ manifested in the ocular

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and the transmitted when viewed from the quarters of ethnographic
intervention. The performance process of Indian diapsoric theatre including
the research work, auditions, rehearsals, readings, costumes, spectators and
music serves us with a terrain of dialogic construction of social text which
distinctively dismantles the assumptions of any authentic one to one
relationship between the visual image and the lived ‘experience’ transmitted
through cultural memory.
Véronique Bragart
Maître de conférence, Université de Louvain, Belgique
« Dualité irréversible? Négritude! Coolitude! »: Quête identitaire
dans l'oeuvre de Laure Moutoussamy
Laure Moutoussamy est née à la Martinique, d'un père indien et d'une mère
descendante d'esclave africain. Dans ses ouvrages, elle cherche à
comprendre ce double héritage indien et africain qui lui a été transmis:
« Dualité irréversible ? Négritude ! Coolitude ! » (/Passerelle de Vie/, 179).
La prose poétique de l'auteur questionne sa relation à l'appel de la diversité.
La présente communication tentera de mieux comprendre l'histoire et la
présence des Indiens en Martinique et examinera les ouvrages de Laure
Moutoussamy à la lumière du concept de coolitude de Khal Torabully.

Florence Cabaret
Maître de conférence, Université de Rouen, France
“From the Page to the Screen: Diasporic Variations on India in The
Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2004) and Mira Nair (2007)”
Confronting Jumpa Lahiri's ‘The Namesake’ (2004) and Mira Nair's film
adaptation of the novel in 2007, I would like to study the representation of
India through the eyes of an Indian woman who has recently emigrated to
the USA. Several points will be envisaged for this paper, among which the
treatment of nostalgia and its evolution as the heroine grows used to her
adoptive country, as well as the specificity of this woman's link to her mother
country, mainly identified to family ties (which accounts for the strong links
that still bind the Indian diaspora to India). The comparison between novel
and film will focus more particularly on the staging of viewpoints as far as the
female protagonist's relation to India is concerned (narrative structure,
selection and election of specific scenes, additions and removals of other
scenes / images), so that I will eventually show how Mira Nair's filmic
interpretation of the novel both sustains Jumpa Lahiri's inside-outside view of
India, but also departs from it. This study will also take into account the fact
that more and more Indian writers in English are women who write from the
USA, illustrating the shift of emigration that has taken place at the end of the
20th century (from the former colonial centre to the new post-colonial
economic world centre, with a persistency of marriages contracted with
"genuine" Indian girls brought up in India, once again pointing to the
sentimental and economic interpendence of India and its diaspora), and
opening onto another tradition of connections between India and the West. It
may therefore be interesting to see how far film-shooting is part of this
emerging phenomemon (representing India for the Indian diaspora and for
audiences willing to "discover" India according to visual codes which are part

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and parcel of both the Indian and American cultures) and how it contributes
to the spreading of either clichés or new images of India as seen by artists
who have the benefit of this double vision, both as insiders and outsiders.

Subhash Chandra
Reader (Associate Professor) in English, University of Delhi, India
“Translated Beings, Transplanted Wor(l)ds: Indian Umbilical Chord in
the Writings of Cyril Dabydeen”
Displacement, unhousement/rehousement are processes that shift not only
the spatial, cultural location of the subject, but work some important re-
figurings in the psychic canvass, turning the diasporics into translated
beings, individuals who retain both the ‘mother language’ and the ‘target
language’ and create words/worlds which are transplanted, but with the
originary elements still intact. They are, as Homi Bhabha and Salman
Rushdie argue, people with a more profound, richer, and more complex
repertory of emotions, feelings, ideas, and impulses. They are composite
beings, with the dual vision of insider/outsider, which gives them an edge
over the single-culture-centric writers. They are Janus-faced, looking back
but not lost to the past and gazing into the future, but not sundered from
their genealogical earthy roots.
In my present interdisciplinary paper, I propose to explore and analyze the
creative oeuvre of Cyril Dabydeen, a celebrated Indian-Guyanese-Canadian
poet and fictionist (the poet laureate of Ottawa) whose writings penetrate
and move back and forth in the orbit of concentric cultural circles and
simultaneously straddle territorial and psychic continents.
It is well known now in the field of Cultural Studies, that all creativity is the
product of location in subjectivity, and interplay of diverse discourses
operating within and outside the writer. I will attempt to focus on the
discourse of Indianness/Hindu religion: mythology, iconography, value
system and cultural philosophy, which I would argue act as an inspirational
catalyst in the creativity of Dabydeen. I will further posit that this Indian
religious and cultural dimension in his works not only lends aesthetic appeal
to his poetry and fiction, but also enables his protagonists/personae to
grapple and come to terms with, what one of the most important Hindu
scriptures, The Gita calls ‘Isness’ of life -- while at the same time reflecting
on and interrogating the invisible/hidden nuances of ‘reality.’ The Indian
influence makes his writing imbued with the particular and the universal,
with suffering, anguish and pain and yet love and compassion.
The paper would conclude with a critique of Dabydeen’s contribution to the
contemporary Canadian literary scene and assess the place he occupies
among the modern Canadian literary pantheons.

Claude Chastagner
Professor of British and American Popular Culture at Montpellier University,
France.

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“Bhangra, the Sound of the Indian Diaspora: A New Paradigm for US-
Indian Relationships?”
Indian sounds have affected Western popular music, whether jazz, folk, or
pop, from the early 60s onward. However, the influence was mostly limited
to cultural clichés, which seldom went beyond ironic amusement and cheap
exoticism. Something changed with the advent of bhangra, a Punjabi dance
and music style, which found its way into Britain during the seventies.
Originally limited to wedding parties of the diasporic communities, the
infectious beats of bhangra gradually spread onto the white British dance
floors, combining with techno and reggae. In North America, the arrival of
new waves of educated and wealthy immigrants also led to the dissemination
of the music, to the estent that recent rhythm & blues or rap artists have
incorporated bhangra sounds and rhythms into their own styles. Today,
bhangra has come full circle and has become, in its hybrid, westernized
version, a staple of Bollywood movies produced for the international market
and the diaspora.
My purpose is to explore the meaning bhangra has come to take in North
America both for the Indian communities and for non-Asian audiences. To
what extent has the combination if Indian, Jamaican and Western sounds
changed American youth’s perception of the Indian Diaspora? How much
have prejudices and cultural clichés been challenged by the growing
recognition of bhangra? Are the changes superficial or will they entail a shift
in relationships? Conversely, I wish to understand better the changing place
India, the motherland, is representing in and via bhangra, for its Indian
performers and audiences. My paper will be based on recent, personal field
research.

Guillaume Cingal
Maître de Conférence, Université François Rabelais, Tours, France
“Epistolary Modes & Diasporic Nodes in C.B. Divakaruni’s Mrs Dutta
Writes a Letter ”
As has been underlined by novelists and scholars alike, the possibility to
exchange letters is often seen as one of the modes of connection between
exiled Indians and those who have ‘stayed at home’. However, the very fact
of sending and receiving letters is ample proof of the fact that ‘home’ is, in
itself, a problematic concept, as it simultaneously bridges and points to the
gap.
Mrs Dutta Writes a Letter is the opening short story in Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (Abacus, 2001). The
main focalizer in the story is none other than the elderly Mrs. Dutta, whose
displacement from Calcutta to her son’s flat in the U.S. proves disarmingly
distressing. Different interpretive strategies may well suggest that, though
the focalizer is Mrs Dutta, the main point of view is that of a more educated,
more ‘Americanized’ Indian whose half-tender half-ironical gaze might also
be interiorized by Mrs. Dutta as she becomes a (letter-) writer. Hence, the
narrative stress on the focalizer’s thoughts and whimsical hesitations as she
imagines various drafts for the letter she will send her best friend in Calcutta
is far from gratuitous: the letters which she receives and the various

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alternative messages which she has in mind are tokens of how unsettling
the diasporic divide and the generational gap can prove.
The aim of this paper is first to study the various meanings that may be
assigned to the epistolary genre and to a narrative technique which borrows
a lot from the ‘stream of consciousness’: the narrative voice seems to be
stressing less family incommunicability than the impossibility of exchanging
letters/words/phrases within a literary work. Besides, the polysemic aspects
of the personal pronoun ‘you’ provide a further means of semiotic
obfuscation. Blurred focalization thus enhances the contradictory aspects of
the diasporic experience by using sporadic pronominality. Eventually, the
strong emphasis on negative phrases, as well as on adjectives and adverbs
connoting deprivation or impotence, is a reminder of V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel
prize address, which stressed ‘unusualness’ as a key concept when defining
the identity of ‘Indian[s] from Trinidad’. Unusualness having become one of
the usual modes of being of first-generation diasporic Indians, it is highly
significant that a story whose main narrative feature is the writing of a letter
should end by leaving the letter unfinished.

Sophie Croisy
Maître de conférences à l'Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines,
France
“Unveiling Everyday Traumas: Migrations in Shani Mootoo's Cereus
Blooms at Night”
In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich finds new ways of thinking about
trauma as ‘connected to the textures of everyday experience’. For Cvetkovic,
the traumatic is everyday: representations of trauma as catastrophic and
foreign are thus incomplete because trauma can also be an inherent, quasi-
intrinsic aspect of the very social and cultural communities in which we
evolve.
In my presentation, I will show how Shani Mootoo, in Cereus Blooms at
Night, develops this theme of ‘the traumatic everyday’.On the fictional
Caribbean island of Lantanacamara, the traumatic lies in the ‘queerness’ of
the main characters vis à vis the social system in place, their uprootedness,
their ‘scatteredness’ (‘the scattered’ being the Greek translation for diaspora)
measured through their inability to stay still and avoid departure from the
conventions of a clostrophobic social system. Migration thus becomes a
symptom of trauma, whether it is a social migration through separation from
the island community, or a mental migration from sanity to madness. These
forms of migration are all indices, symptoms of trauma and recall the social
and cultural ‘queerness’ of the displaced, scattered Indian diaspora. The
forms of migration adopted by the novel's characters are clear repetitions
without a difference of the original migration from India to an often
unwelcoming elsewhere, an original trauma which gets accentuated by the
strictly regimented social and cultural system of this colonial land of
adoption: the Caribbean islands. Through a close reading of Mootoo's text, I
will clarify the relationship between the original trauma of geographical
migration and the forms of social migration exposed in the novel which are
indices that the original trauma has not healed, but has been exacerbated by

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the social institutions and repeated expectations of the Lantanacamara
social/colonial system.

Corinne François-Denève
Research Assistant at Liverpool University; PRAG Université Paris III-
Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
“Vijay Singh or Choosing Paris”
Our paper focuses on Vijay Singh’s life and works. Vijay Singh was born and
educated in India, and settled himself in Paris in the early 80s, originally to
write his doctoral thesis at the EPHESS. First a journalist, Singh first began to
publish books when co-authoring L’Inde, published by « Autrement » in
1986. This was to be the starting point of his career as a novel-writer and
film-maker: Jaya Ganga, a novel first written in English, translated into
French under the title Le Gange et son double, then The Sikhs, an essay
translated as La Nuit poignardée, and Whirlpool of Shadows, translated as
Tourbillons d’ombres, were successively published, while Man and Elephant,
a ‘fictional documentary’, and the movie Jaya Ganga were screened around
the world. More interesting, though, in our perspective, is his 2004 movie,
One-dollar curry: shot entirely in Paris, this film focuses on the daily life of
some Indian citizens living in the French capital, and thus indirectly deals
with genuine Indian issues. An Indian citizen living in France himself, Singh
seems to provide an ideal case study of what can be labelled ‘contrastive
cultural identity’: indeed, he chose to settle himself outside the
Commonwealth and to speak about Indian issues both in French and English,
and, what is even more interesting, to deal with an Indian diaspora located
out of the Commonwealth countries. Consciously revolving in the periphery
of the Commonwealth, Singh thus sheds an interesting light on it – not to
mention the fact that he also speaks about the Sikh ‘cultural identity’.

Chun Fu
Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature,
National I-lan University, Taiwan
“The (Im)possibility of Backtracking in M. G. Vassanji’s The In-
Between World of Vikram Lall”
A crucial narrative element in M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall, railroad signifies both the place where the 19th century Indian
indentured laborers worked in Kenya and the forge upon which their
descendents strike identity badges. Railroad can also be regarded as the
beginning point of Vassanji’s life and of Indian diaspora centrifugal
movements. Railroad, laid on land, suggests fixity, but paradoxically,
through the narrative twists and the novelist’s further diasporization to
Canada, railroad, once carried (him) over, (as it were), transforms into
something in flux. This paper addresses the colonial past vis-à-vis Indian
diaspora imagination in that the past figures large in the present. Vik Lall in
the novel backtracks in the double sense of the word to where he came from
in memory. Doubly cut loose, first from India, where his forebears has come
as indentured laborers, and then from Kenya, Vik Lall embodies a 20th
century phenomenon---global deracination---whose roots buried back in the

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19th century imperial expansion that sent huge numbers of Indians abroad.
The more he denies the past, the firmer it grips him as Njoroge’s son appears
in his present life.
Unlike V. S. Naipaul whose infamous renunciation of the past in A Bend in the
River, Vassanji’s decolonization story emphasizes the importance of the past.
Given Vassanji’s diaspora experience, this paper underscores the notion of
‘other Asians’ expounded by Gayatri Spivak to crack wider the diaspora
interstice. ‘In-between’, pregnant with meanings, bespeaks para-sites
(without negative implication), which in turn suggest proximities of both
places so much so that this unique intermediary spot pushes outward within
the niche. In other words, (Indian diaspora) imagination endows the real
with a material base to substantiation. In-between the past and the present,
thus, has less to do with existential blight Vik Lall and his peers experience
than with what diaspora trajectories direct at in the future. To better
understand it in botanical terms, the deeper the roots delve, the lushier and
more exuberant the diaspora foliage is. The (im)possibility of backtracking in
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall contends that the past is a necessary
evil.

Brenda Gopeesingh
Hindu Women's Organisation (HWO) of Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean
Panel ‘Indo-Caribbean Women: Literature, Art, Culture’
“Identity, Spirituality and Activism in the Art of Bernadette Persaud”
This paper examines the work of Indo-Caribbean artist Bernadette Indira
Persaud, as she explores her ancestral heritage which leads her into the
realm of spirituality and activism. It traces her exploration into her ancestral
heritage, prompted by her early paintings that revel in the beauty of the
many reincarnations of the Lotus lily which is of great significance to
Hindus. Later in her career Persaud is so moved by the political occurrences
of her homeland that her paintings reflect the political turmoil which befell
her country in the 1970s and 1980s when Forbes Burnham was President of
Guyana. Soon her interest is overtaken by the Gulf War of 1990 which leads
her into the study of Islam. This results in a series of paintings critical
of the New World order.
This paper engages in discussions which are relevant to the evolution of the
art of Bernadette Indira Persaud. These deliberations center on her
investigations into her ancestry which exposed the erosion of the psyche and
culture of Indo-Caribbean people in the face of colonization, and they also
unveiled her search for the divine. In addition, the paper examines her
themes as they progressed from dealing specifically with the distribution of
power within Guyana to the condemnation of universal relationships of
hegemony. The paper also focuses on Persaud's outright challenge to the
suppression of Caribbean artists with respect to the imposition of Western
aesthetic standards.

Betty Govinden
Senior Research Associate, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, Republic of
South Africa.

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 “Satyagraha and The Indian Diasporic Imagination - with particular
reference to South African writings on Gandhi"
Against the broad background of representations of ‘Mother India’ in
diasporic contexts, representations of Mahatma Gandhi have been crucial in
shaping the identity of diasporic peoples. This is especially true in South
Africa, where Gandhi embodies the India-South Africa link rather pointedly,
having honed his philosophy of Satyagraha on South African soil. However,
while South African literary criticism has predictably reflected the different
facets of national life, history, culture and politics, literary critical writing on
Gandhi, Satyagraha and Passive Resistance in South Africa has been grossly
neglected in South African literary studies. Scholarship in South Africa on
Gandhi has largely focused on historical, political and socio-cultural elements
pertinent to Gandhi’s life and philosophy. In turn, literary works in South
Africa on Gandhi are largely unknown in India and Indian diasporic contexts.
This paper attempts, then, to draw attention to lacunae in South African
literary and in Indian diasporic studies. It gives a broad overview of the
corpus of literary writings [poetry, prose, short story, drama] in South Africa
that refers to Gandhi in one form or another, and includes the genres of
autobiography, biography and memoir, which are, arguably, also seen as
literary sub-genres. Since this is a new terrain for study, the paper concludes
by pondering over some of the questions and issues that might be considered
in the development of critical frameworks for the reading of these texts, with
particular reference to the way the project enhances both discussions on the
Indian diasporic experience, and on the reconfiguring of the South African
literary canon.

Lise Guilhamon
PRAG, Paris IV-Sorbonne, France
“The Diasporic Tongue of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”
In his latest novel, Sea of Poppies, the first volume of an intended ‘Ibis
trilogy’, Amitav Ghosh, an author of Indian origin who currently divides his
times between New York, Calcutta and Goa, focuses on the Indian diaspora
of the 19th century, which led girmitiyas - Indian indentured workers - to
board European ships bound for plantations located on islands of the
Caribbean or the Indian Ocean. Ghosh’s novel traces the voyage of such a
ship, the Ibis, transporting a group of coolies to Mauritius. One of the most
striking stylistic characteristics of this novel lies in its linguistic
heterogeneity: the Anglo-Indian dialect of the British in India, the pidgin and
specialized nautical jargon of the lascars, the Asian sailors who worked on
the European schooners sailing the Indian and the Pacific Oceans for
purposes of trade, the American English of a mulatto freedman from
Maryland, as well as Bhojpuri, one of the main dialects of Hindi, and French,
mingle and mix in the text. Through this linguistic proliferation, Ghosh
develops a programme – both in terms of poetics and of ethics - for the
deterritorialisation of English, a process linked to the crucial issues and
questions raised by globalization, and in particular contemporary linguistic
issues, which tend to sweep the Indian vernacular tongues into oblivion, and
transform English into Globish, THE language of international communication.

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But Ghosh’s novel shows that this process of deterritorialisation of English
cannot be limited to this phenomenon. The diasporic point of view in this
novel emphasizes the questions raised by the use of English as a language
displaced by the multiplication of new situations of enunciation in a ‘global’
world, and shows how this process must be understood first as an adventure
of language, in which categories of meaning are broken down, shifted, and
relocated.
Felicity Hand Cranham
Senior lecturer in the English department of the Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona, Spain.
“The Construction of Indianness in the Mauritian Imagination”
There have been many studies on the Indo-Mauritian community including
general histories, analyses of the historical role of women, the way ethnic
identity is gendered, studies of politics and ethnicity, of social conflict, and
the connection between religion and language as an identity marker. A very
recent contribution to Mauritian studies is Eisenlohr’s work on the linguistic
plurality of the island and the relationship between the diaspora and the
ancestral homeland (2006). All of these studies have thrown much light on
the construction of identity among Mauritians of Indian descent. However, to
date, there has been no detailed study of the articulation of Indianness in
contemporary Mauritian literature. I believe there is a gap to be filled in both
Mauritian studies and post-colonial literature in general and this paper will
propose a reading of the construction of Indian identity in contemporary
Mauritius through the analysis of its representation in two examples of
creative writing: Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita (1993) and Carl de
Souza´s Les jours Kaya (2000). In particular the tensions and silences in
these works highlight how the centre and the periphery complement and feed
into each other.
Two recent and highly significant events have highlighted the process by
which Indianness has been and is being constructed in Mauritius, namely the
controversy surrounding Collen’s novel and the public outcry and official
reaction to the death in police custody of the Creole singer Kaya in 1999. My
working hypothesis is that Indianness has been linked very closely, on one
hand with religion, especially with Hinduism, or perhaps more precisely
‘Hindu-ness’, and on the other, in opposition to the low socioeconomic
position of the Creole community, who at the same time tend to be cast as
passive victims of their history. Through a reading of these two novels and
the cultural context that they provoked, in the case of Collen, or were
inspired by, in the case of de Souza, I will suggest that the Indian diaspora of
Mauritius has constructed an identity in opposition to the Creole community,
in religious, socioeconomic, political and linguistic terms.

Louise Harrington
PhD student at SOAS, London, UK
“An-Other Space: Diasporic Responses to Partition in Bengal”
The creative responses to the Partition of India fall largely into two camps,
that of and from the pre-Independence regions of Punjab on the one hand
and Bengal on the other. With the division of India, these two regions

13
became the main stages for the atrocities of Partition violence, but with
approximately 1,000 miles between them the effects were quite distinct. In
Punjab, the frenetically violent events were opposed to the more punctuated
violence in Bengal, while the prolonged migration and displacement in Bengal
was set against the sudden and urgent migration of columns of people, or
‘kafilas’, in Punjab. Equally important is the fact that many of the creative
responses to Partition in Bengal/Bangladesh have been dynamically
influenced by the 1971 War of Independence, which is essentially knotted
with the earlier partitions of Bengal but is justifiably considered to be more
an anniversary of independence in Bangladesh than 1947.
Such divergent histories have generated rather dissimilar responses to
Partition from the East and West regions. However it is apparent that the
main focus of critical writing about Partition has been on Punjab, with
creative responses from and about this region receiving considerably more
attention than that of Bengal. In fact, there is a manifest lack of engagement
with this ‘other side’ of Partition. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and
Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age are two of the few novels which give voice to
the silenced event and aftermath of Partition in Bengal. This paper explores
how the diasporic status of these novelists informs and shapes their writing
on this subject, making it possible to elucidate and address the ever-
widening gap in responses to Partition.

Nahal Khaknegar
Ph.D. student in Comparative literature in Paul Valery, University of
Montpellier, France
“Representation of the Indian Immigrant in the Works of Jhumpa
Lahiri”
Second in number after the Chinese, the Indian Diaspora consists of more
than 15 million individuals through the world, gathered especially in Great
Britain and in the United States. After the riots of the London suburbs, a
generation of writers, descendants of the British ex-empire as Salman
Rushdi, Amitav Gosh, Tarun Tejpal, Anita Desai, etc. emerged that literally
revolutionized the English literature and resuscitated it.
Among others, Jhumpa Lahiri is famous as ‘the acclaimed chronicler of the
Bengali-immigrant experience’. The majority of her stories are about exile,
about people living far from home and moving to a new world. Therefore, the
dominant idea of Lahiri’s narratives is to put the personages in a challenge
against the new physical circumstances of life and its impacts.
As author Jaydeep Sarangi explains, ‘Jhumpa Lahiri's stories are the
gateways into the large submerged territory of cross-culturalism’. It is a
metaphor to share cultures…something that will allow them/us to share,
instead of dividing, what is on either side.’1
Both Interpreter of Maladies (2000) and The Namesake (2003), explore ideas
of isolation and identity, not only personal but also cultural. The characters in
both works frequently encounter crises of identity, which are tied to their
inabilities to integrate in the American society. This loss of Indian identity is
also subject of his new story collection: Unaccustomed Earth (2008), this
time with a focus on the lives of second-generation immigrants.

14
Are the immigrants of Lahiri’s stories succeeding to integrate in their new
adopted society? Do her actors of the second generation, caught between
the culture of their birthplace and their adopted home, succeed in reconciling
the traditional values of their immigrated parents with American way of life?
This paper, proposes the definitive responses to these questions while
considering the main characteristics of the Indian immigration literature.

Sabine Lauret
Allocataire-monitrice at Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle, France.
“The ‘Going Home Syndrome’ in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”
Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali writes from what Homi K.
Bhabha defined as an interstitial space in The Location of Culture. In her
debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl is married
off to Chanu, a man nearly twice her age who tries to be a ‘Big Man’ in
London. She does not speak English and knows nothing of the city. Her
everyday life is interrupted by her dreams and by letters from her sister,
Hasina, who lives in Dhaka. Images of the Golden Bengal collide with the
bricks of Bangla Town. Through Nazneen’s eyes, the reader witnesses the
shaping of a multicultural community in a context of social and racial unrest.
Brick Lane is more than the longest street of Tower Hamlets. It is to be taken
as an icon of England, as the epitome of a New Britain, depicted by writers
such as Hanif Kureishi. This paper aims at showing how Monica Ali challenges
the notion of belonging. Her narrative is filled with characters who ‘seek a
place in the world’. She gives a moving account of ‘the tragedy of the
immigrants’, and yet the ‘going home syndrome’ she tackles is a paradox.
What is it to be home? What does it mean to go back home when home is a
country you have never seen before? The métissage of a new identity thus
implies the creation of an ‘imaginary homeland’ to use Rushdie’s words, or
rather of an imaginary borderland.

Maria Mar Garcia Lopez

Université Autonome de Barcelone, Espagne
« Poétique du postexotisme chez Ananda Devi: lecture de Soupir »
Le rapport que les narrateurs postcoloniaux entretiennent avec l’exotisme
est, le plus souvent, passé sous silence par la critique. Tout se passe comme
si l’exotisme, moteur de l’écriture coloniale et des premiers romans
ethnographiques, était incompatible avec le statut contestataire de l’auteur
postcolonial. Or, souvent exilé ou formé en Occident, l’auteur postcolonial
promène un regard de plus en plus étranger sur ses origines en raison de son
nomadisme esthétique, culturel et intellectuel. Dans leur recherche d’un lieu
de parole qui permette d’articuler l’expérience du local et celle du global, les
auteurs postcoloniaux sont par conséquent confrontés d’une manière ou
d’une autre aux clichés et aux stéréotypes qui circulent sur leur(s) culture(s)
L’œuvre d’Ananda Devi pose avec acuité la question de la place de l’exotisme
(Affergan, 1987, Moura, 1998, 2002, Forsdick, 2005) et de la stéréotypie
(Amossy, 1982, 1991) dans les littératures émergentes. Dans la mesure où
cette anthropologue de formation prend soin de distinguer ses écrits
scientifiques (en anglais) de ses romans (en français), elle ne saurait être

15
classée comme romancière-ethnographe. Ni idéalisation du « royaume
d’enfance » (Senghor) ni réhabilitation des mythes et des légendes anciens
(Hampâté Bâ), sa connaissance profonde de la culture mauricienne ainsi que
le rapport quasi mystique qu’elle entretient avec la « Terre rouge » sont au
contraire mis au service de la création d’une patrie individuelle. Dans ce
travail, nous procéderons à une étude des composantes formelles et
thématiques d’un nouvel espace d’écriture, que nous nommons postexotique
(Volodine) dans Soupir. Nous montrerons que, tout en se servant des
stéréotypes établis, cet espace d’écriture se propose de les démonter pour se
construire à partir d’une relecture des lieux communs liés à l’insularité
comme refuge et aux connotations édéniques liées aux îles. Un examen
approfondi des stratégies de renversement des stéréotypes — ironie,
parodie, dérision — et de réappropriation de l’exotisme mettra en évidence
leur rôle fondamental dans la construction de la nouvelle identité littéraire
insulaire proposée par Devi.

Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo
MCF à l’Université de La Réunion, LCF – UMR 8143 du CNRS, La Réunion
« Un retour du discours des origines : L’écriture ethnographique
comme réparation de la perte de l’Inde dans quelques romans
francophones antillais et réunionnais de l’engagisme »
Nous proposons ici de comparer des romans francophones de la « diaspora »
indienne, terme que nous interrogerons, aux Antilles françaises et à La
Réunion (romans des Guadeloupéens Ernest ou Laure Moutoussamy, des
Martiniquais Maurice Virassamy, Camille Moutoussamy, des Réunionnais
Firmin Lacpatia ou François Dijoux….). Ces œuvres sont souvent masquées
par des auteurs et des titres plus prestigieux, tant anglophones caribéens
que francophones mauriciens, et leur littérarité même est parfois contestée.
Si les personnages indiens sont présents depuis la littérature coloniale dans
les textes insulaires, ils passent, à partir de la fin des années 1970, au
devant de la scène et sont écrits, dans la majeure partie des cas, par des
auteurs d’origine indienne, dans une perspective postcoloniale de délégation
de la voix à des subalternes, jusque-là exclus de la narration et de
l’énonciation. Leur utilisation est souvent politique et pour cela, développe
une description ethnique. Ces textes sont construits sur un ensemble de
stéréotypes et d’épisodes redondants de l’engagisme qui les essentialisent.
Le monde indien est figé dans une typologie qui suscite l’illusion de sa réalité.
Car ces romans sont avant tout naturalistes, en même temps qu’historiques
et didactiques. Si des romans naturalistes décrivant la diaspora comme ceux
de Ladoo ou des frères Naipaul à Trinidad avaient su rendre le réel
carnavalesque, si les textes poétiques en créole du Réunionnais Carpanin
Marimoutou savent jouer d’une intertextualité mythologique retravaillée par
la créolisation, si les récits de voyage de l’Antillais Quillin ou du Réunionnais
Ramsamy relisent leur mémoire créole de l’Inde à la lumière de la réalité du
lieu matriciel, les romans de l’engagisme s’avèrent avant tout
ethnographiques, obsessionnellement descriptifs et explicatifs. Ils
accomplissent un curieux parcours rétroactif. Depuis la perte imposée par
l’histoire, ils élaborent une mémoire donnée pour vraie où peut alors, enfin,

16
s’originer un travail de deuil. A partir d’une créolisation, perçue comme
dissolution, ils reconstruisent, par le biais de l’écriture ethnographique, un
sentiment d’exterritorialité. Semblant redouter la fiction par un surcroît de
précisions savantes, culturelles et rituelles ainsi que par un fort tissage
lexical, le récit, précisément, donne corps à un fantôme de l’histoire, imagine
une identité et une nation, résorbe la fracture entre identité crispée et
identité créolisée. C’est donc cette gageure que se propose l’écriture
ethnographique que nous observerons, qui vise à masquer la fiction pour
mieux se réinventer à partir de fragments mémoriels et mieux tisser un
discours du deuil.

Joy Mahabir
Assistant Professor, Department of English, State University of New York, NY,
USA
Panel ‘Indo-Caribbean Women: Literature, Art, Culture’
“Silent Archives: Indo-Caribbean Women’s Jewelry”
Visual representations of Caribbean laborers in postcards and photographs
from the period of indentureship often highlight the jewelry worn by Indo-
Caribbean women. These pieces, fashioned in the Caribbean, are uniquely
styled in a hybrid Indian-Caribbean aesthetic. Some interpretations claim
that Indo-Caribbean women wore jewelry to show off their husbands’ wealth.
This paper suggests that the jewelry of Indo-Caribbean women have never
been worn simply as objects of adornment or display, but function as silent
archives of the historical and social conditions of Indo-Caribbean women, and
are sensitive registers of wider social issues and conflicts affecting these
women. Indo-Caribbean women laborers often dictated the designs and
patterns of jewelry, and usually purchased their own pieces. Certain items,
such as cocoa-pod beras, were worn as records of specific types of labor, and
many female laborers used jewelry to signify their economic independence
from men, or from the plantation structure itself. Pieces of jewelry associated
with the period of indentureship are continually reproduced today, and figure
prominently in matrilineal structures of inheritance and investment. An
exploration of the actual pieces created during indentureship, their visual
representations during this period, and contemporary representations in the
work of Indo-Caribbean women writers can offer valuable insights into the
importance of jewelry in Indo-Caribbean culture.

Kumar Mahabir
Anthropologist and Assistant Professor, School for Studies in Learning,
Cognition and Education, University of Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean
“Indian Sculpture, Art and Architecture of two Temples in Trinidad”
The Temple-in-the-Sea and the Dattatreya Yoga Centre are two cultural
monuments in Trinidad which exhibit outstanding values that are universal to
all mankind. The monuments can certainly qualify to be placed on UNESCO'S
list of world heritage sites that should be exhibited to all of humanity and
preserved for generations to come. Each building is a beautiful masterpiece
of creative genius. The world-famous offshore temple is the only one of its
kind in the world. With a bicycle as his only means of transportation, one

17
man took seventeen years to build this temple 500 feet (150 metres) from
the seashore. At the Dattareya Yoga Centre stands a gigantic Hanuman
*murti *[statue] which towers over 85 feet (25 metres) tall. This *murti *is
the largest in the Caribbean, and the Western Hemisphere. It is also the
tallest *murti *of Hanuman outside of India.
The paper will be presented with visual images to illustrate how these
monuments have given pride to South Asians/East Indians in the Caribbean,
and Indians in India. The paper will also show how these two monuments
have been diasporic representations and re-creations of temples in India. By
screening detailed photographs of sculpture, art and architecture, the
presentation will demonstrate how these sites have been able to bring people
together with a common culture from opposite sides of the world.
Keywords – Temples; art, architecture and sculpture; India; Caribbean;
Trinidad.

Irma Maini
Associate Professor and Chair of English at New Jersey City University, USA
“Food Codes in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Stories”
Mary Douglas in Deciphering a Meal asserts: ‘If food is treated as a code, the
messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being
expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion
and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries’.
Images of food have functioned in many different and often contradictory
ways in literary works, particularly in writing by women. Food is seen as a
cultural signifier that could be a source of empowerment and control on the
one hand and of powerlessness and domination on the other, of bonding as
well as of separation, of a form of resistance to assimilation and at the same
time a nostalgic longing for a lost world; in short it could define one’s identity
in both positive and negative, complex and complicated ways. In Jhumpa
Lahiri’s collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed
Earth the images of purchasing, preparing, serving, and eating food perform
in much the same way as listed above, however, her use of alimentary
imagery becomes further problematized in these stories when seen within
the context of migration and diaspora.
In this paper I will critically analyze Lahiri’s varied use of the culinary
metaphor in her stories understating the fact that the preparation and
consumption of food has multiple and complex meanings. By decoding the
discourse of food in the literary imagination, we can begin to understand the
way that the politics of food permeates various aspects of the Indian
diaposric experience.

John McLeod
Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, School of English, University
of Leeds, UK
"Hanif Kureishi and the Fortunes of Diasporic London"
This paper explores Hanif Kureishi's representation of diasporic London in
the twenty-first century, and attends in particular to the contrast between
Kureishi's initial investment in London's diasporic possibilities dating back to

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the 1980s and his contemporary, mature visions of the city in which London
now plays a significantly altered role. The primary text discussed will be his
recent novel Something to Tell You (2008), in which the precarious
achievements of 1970s and 1980s South Asian diasporic families are
reconsidered in the light of a post-7/7 city, in which diasporic survival has
been both transformed and curtailed by the perpetual yet changing
prejudices of a so-called multicultural milieu. A key concern will be Kureishi's
depiction of diasporic cultural transformation in London -- the utopian dream
of The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), of course -- and the ways in which it has
(according to Something) struggled to open a space of urban cultural and
intellectual transformation beyond the co-option of bourgeoise chic and
professionalisation. Yet, for all of its sobering vista on contemporary London
diasporic life, Kureishi's latest novel retains a faith in the possibilities of city
living which take one far beyond the protocols and demands of contemporary
diasporic theory.

Binita Mehta
Assistant Professor and Chair of the French Department at Manhattanville
College, Purchase, NY, USA
“Bhaji, Curry, and Masala: Food and/as Identity in Indian Diasporic
Cinema”
In the past two decades, a plethora of films written and directed by
South Asians have represented the situation of South Asian diasporic
communities in the West. These include films made by British South Asians
writers and filmmakers such as Hanif Kureishi and Gurinder Chadha and by
Indian American and Indian Canadian filmmakers such as Mira Nair and
Srinivas Krishna. They have been joined by younger filmmakers who have
written, directed, and acted in films that articulate their experiences of being
caught between two cultures, the traditional culture of their South Asians
parents and those of their own generation, born and raised in the West.
This paper will investigate the representation of the South Asian diaspora in
films from four countries and two continents: Srinivas Krishna’s Masala
(Canada, 1991) and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (US, 1991) from North
America; Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (UK, 1993) and Vijay Singh’s
One Dollar Curry (France, 2004) from Europe. What do the films share and
how do they differ? Is the representation of the South Asian community
specific to the geographical areas to which they migrate, or do they share
common experiences that supersede the particularities of the country they
now call home? How do the historical, political, socio-cultural contexts of the
adopted homeland affect the identity formation and assimilation of these
South Asian immigrants? How do the films depict generational and gender
differences? Given the migratory patterns of some of these South Asian
filmmakers and characters, are the films truly transnational? How do the
culinary terms in the films’ titles (i.e. bhaji, curry, masala) translate
metaphorically into a form of self-identification, a political statement by the
films’ protagonists to assert their own identity as hybrid, as a rich and
vibrant blend of their South Asian roots and their Western upbringing.

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Brinda Mehta
Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College, Oakland,
California, USA.
“From Benaras to Caroni: Ghats, Memory, and Kala Pani Narratives"
Ghats or landing spaces occupy a very symbolic place in kala pani or
diasporic Indian literature of indentureship. They are a special kind of
embankment consisting of wide stone steps leading to a river. Representing
transitional points of arrival and departure, ghats are inscribed within a Hindu
cosmovision of life-death-rebirth. The Benaras ghat in India is a site of
bathing, ceremonial celebration, and cremation rites, while the Aapravasi
ghat in Mauritius and the Caroni embankment in Trinidad are the
original landing points for the indentured workers from India who were
brought to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius, the islands of the Indian
Ocean, the South Pacific, South Africa, and the Caribbean after the abolition
of slavery (1834 in the British colonies and 1848 in the French colonies).
In this paper, I demonstrate how the ghat is memorialized in the work of
Khal Torabully and Natacha Mouriquand (Mauritius), Ernest Moutoussamy
(Guadeloupe), Ramabai Espinet and Leelawattee Manoo-Rahming (Trinidad)
to create a rhizomatic spatiality between and across kala pani or the black
waters of the Atlantic. Using fiction and poetry, I analyse the ways in which
the ghat figures as a site of trauma, memory, exile, and kala pani historicity
in these transoceanic communications between motherland and
diaspora recreated in text. The symbolic significance of the ghat has inspired
Torabully's aesthetics of coolitude as a kala pani poetics of being. Coolitude,
in turn, has both inspired and enriched French Caribbean engagements with
creolization and indianite, while Indo-Caribbean authors from Trinidad and
Guyana have negotiated their "indian-ness" through tropes of hybridization,
dougla or mixed race African and Indian identity, and the nostalgia of
'irreclaimable' ancestral affiliations. The ghat gives these literary and
theoretical tropes a transnational Anglophone and Francophone focus
through cross-cultural and multilingual synergies that affirm the historical
subjectivity of the kala pani experience in Mauritius and the Caribbean. In
this literature, the intersecting modalities of loss and recuperation during
kala pani create vibrant textualities of cultural (re)affirmations, diasporic
(dis)locations, and spiritual transcendence.

Vijay Mishra – Keynote Speaker

Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
“In the arcade of Hanuman House': Ghostly Spectres in the Diaspora”
Diasporas are shadowed by ghostly spectres of the homeland. Every diaspora
has its own narrative of these spectres. This paper rethinks the case of the
Indian diaspora and the ways in which India mediates the lives of peoples in
the old and new Indian diasporas. Through an examination of representative
literary and filmic texts, the paper returns to the earlier theorization of the
diasporic imaginary to show how India is mediated through its pre-eminent
popular cultural form (that is Bollywood cinema) and how, in this mediation,
spectatorial response to cinema takes on a form which requires theorization
in terms of a quintessentially diasporic reception aesthetics. A further

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theorization is necessary in the case of literature too since here a very
colonial heritage shadows diasporic writings. Naipaul's phrase 'in the arcade
of Hanuman House' functions as a metaphor for the space of the diaspora in
which Bollywood films are consumed and literary texts created so as to
capture the lives of people of the Indian diaspora.

Nalini Mohabir
PhD student, Dept of Geography, University of Leeds, UK
“Return Journeys in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora”
The Caribbean has been linked to movements of exploratory voyage, shipped
labour, and outward migrations. With a population drawn from around the
world, the Caribbean has also possessed a fluid sense of place extending
beyond its borders. The result is the persistence of two places: ‘a world
beyond, and a world left behind’ (Chamberlain 4). This legacy has created
mobile populations who have remapped Caribbean space onto metropolitan
centres. My work suggests a re-mapping of the Caribbean (i.e. the
representation of the Caribbean outside the region, or spaces where the
Caribbean is made visible) as not only a uni-directional postcolonial
phenomenon, but as an ever-present part of Caribbean flows.
Through the last repatriation of ex-indentured labourers from British Guiana
to India (in 1955) and traces of their re-settlement, I will examine diasporic
connections in a past context. To map Caribbean sites in India may seem
surprising. For one, there are no monuments or plaques that represent or
identify an Indo-Caribbean past as belonging to the land. However, the
canefields, river and ports are imbued with (forgotten) meaning. For
example, according to Mohapatra, a community of returned and displaced
ex-indentured workers from the colonies lived in make-shift settlements
beside the Hooghly river into the mid-twentieth century. Are there vestiges
of this community or do ‘urban slums’ simply disappear? A presence must
exist, even if only in memory, but perhaps also in official documentation. Has
the poignancy of the Calcutta port, busy with the comings and goings of
indenture ships, seeped into an Indian historical consciousness -- did those
who were left behind ever look to the river and wonder where their family
went? Through the interconnections and contestations of memory and
space, I hope to explore some of the ‘non-official’ ways diasporic space is
constructed in India.

Myriam Moïse
PhD student in Postcolonial Literatures at Paris III- Université de la Sorbonne
Nouvelle; ATER at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, France.
“The Diasporic Gendered Subject in and out of Space in Lakshmi
Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind and Sastra”
Lakshmi Persaud’s first two novels, Butterfly in the Wind (1990) and Sastra
(1993) symbolize the growth of Indo-Caribbean women’s writing in terms of
self-representing a gendered minority group and its specific historical past.
Both deal with the life of two young Indian women, bound to face their
destinies and to take the responsibility for their choices. The Indo-Trinidadian
woman has indeed inherited from a double alienation through her belonging

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to the Indian minority amongst the Caribbean as well as to the indentured
patriarchal society. This dual perspective makes the diasporic female subject
a distinctive one regarding issues of race, class and religion. Persaud’s work
is highly significant in representing the Indo-Caribbean diasporic female
subject and the hybridized Caribbean Indian community. This paper
addresses the hybrid female voice(s), thus exploring two main perspectives
in terms of diasporic space(s). India is in fact represented by conflicting
external and internal voices, a mixture of voices implying the voice of the
subaltern, the girl child’s growing consciousness and the young woman’s
growing maturity. The consequent alienation of the Indo-Caribbean woman is
conceived through her specific relation to space and displacement, through
inward and outward movements which are thus emphasized in this article in
terms of cultural change, of progress from innocence to maturity and from
cultural and religious traditions to modernity and education. The paper will
also address this ‘in-between space’ that Homi K. Bhabha urges us to
consider, the Third space, not one based on exoticism or multiculturalism but
on hybridity. It serves to enhance the unspeakable and the unspoken,
demonstrating whether the diasporic Indo-Caribbean voice is eventually
silenced or freed and whether the return homeward is one of salvation or of
destruction for the diasporic female subject. An analysis of the significance of
the flying motif in terms of escape thus underlines metaphors of the butterfly
and the bird moving away from darkness to get ‘closer to the moon and
stars, to the bluest blue of the sky.’ (Sastra)

Pia Mukherji
Independent scholar
“South Asian Cyberlogs and the Postfeminist Debate”
This paper examines feminist South Asian weblogs with a focus on
representative platforms and personas. Specifically, it notices how
conventional narratives of sexuality, maternity, and everyday politics are
reappropriated in mommy blogs and ‘chick lit’ confessionals in popular
cyberlogs from London, Bombay, Delhi, Karachi and Illinois: Broom -
Confessions from the Closet, Em - The Compulsive Confessor, Mad Momma,
Jammie: -Mom on the Outside, Babe on the Inside, and The Desi Punkster.
I will study such ‘feminist’ cyber ethnographies in relation to four broad
theoretical areas. First, we will consider electronic diaries in relation to the
gender politics of journal writing as a feminist strategy, effectively theorized
by second wave feminism and practiced within a long tradition of women
inscribing the everyday, the domestic, the private. Next, we will explore the
question of ‘embodiment’ in virtual space: how negotiations with the
gendered body in discourses of femininity, reproduction, or illness play out in
insubstantial episodes of cyber talk. The analysis will then assess disruptive
‘comment space’ counter narratives that unsettle established politics of
cultural location: global/local, native/immigrant, class/caste, lesbian/
heteronormal. And, in conclusion, we will discuss stylistic issues of
performance, authenticity, anonymity and virtual reproduction within
network dispersals and simulations of subject and form.

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In this context, the paper examines the possible emergence of a
differentiated ‘postfeminist’ politics and postmodern technologies of self
representation in a specific postcolonial forum. Is the diasporic blogosphere,
underwritten by market technology and digital imagery, necessarily inhabited
by ‘incorporated’ citizen-consumers? Or does it facilitate a pluralistic
application of feminist agendas? Does it introduce new political voices or
signal transformative cultural practices? In short, does the cyborg diaspora
initiate a civil exchange or a post feminist debate?

Delphine Munos
PhD student in the English and American literatures Department at the
University of Liège, Belgium.
“Zigzagging Paths to Self-Transformation: Mapping Out the ‘Time
Zones’ of Diaspora in Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee”
Although Bharati Mukherjee is famous, or rather infamous, for her shameless
embrace of America and its melting-pot ideology, in Desirable Daughters
India, the homeland, is unexpectedly made to re-enter the stage of
immigrant identity construction. In many respects it would seem that it has
now become untenable to represent immigrant identity in terms of a one-
directional movement from ‘India’ to ‘America’.
In Desirable Daughters the rise of India, the accelerated time/space
compression of late capitalism, the post-90s paradigm shift in matters of
transnational migration, the emphasis on return migrations and the
emergence of a new global interaction indeed dramatically outflank
Mukherjee’s previous narrative of American ‘exceptionalism’ – which
suddenly seems dated by comparison. By portraying the complex
transnational network of connections operating between RIs (Resident
Indians) and NRIs (Non Resident Indians), Mukherjee’s book gestures
towards the ‘de-spatialization’ of immigrant identity construction and its
consequent ‘re-metaphorization’ in terms of ‘time zones’. What is more, the
increasingly compelling influence of contemporary India on the Indo-
American diasporic subjectivity marks a ‘back to the future’ return of the
repressed which temporally repositions migrant identity between a ghostly
time of repetition and a ‘hauntology’ of new becomings.
What Mukherjee suggests, I will contend, is that immigrant agency and self-
fashioning cannot be associated anymore with the ‘pioneering spirit’ of
forward-looking characters that discard their ‘Indianness’ upon
(geographical) entry into the West. In my reading of Desirable Daughters the
protagonist’s zigzagging path to self-transformation will be emphasized, so
that it will become apparent that time has become the fourth space through
which new spaces for diasporic identity can be renegotiated.

H. Adlai Murdoch
Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature and African-
American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.
“Doubling Difference: Writing the Franco-Indo-Caribbean
Experience”

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It is by no means an exaggeration to state that inscriptions of the French
Indo-Caribbean experience have remained largely absent from the literature
of Guadeloupe and Martinique as they have taken shape across the 20th and
21st centuries. This absence is belied by a Franco-Indian regional population
that is between 5% and 10% in Martinique and rises to approximately 15%
in Guadeloupe, accompanied by its cultural corollaries of music, cuisine, and
religious practice and architecture. In attempting to create identities that
transgress the borders of the Western nation/state, French Caribbean
inscriptions of the Indo-Caribbean experience are largely informed by the
multivalencies of French Caribbean departmentalism, as the compound
discursive strategies inscribed in their fiction draw on localized issues of
ethnocultural difference, dependence and fragmentation to reflect a
postcolonial French Caribbean site within a larger transnational, diasporic
world.
When it first appeared in 1972, Jacqueline Manicom’s Mon examen de blanc
made its mark through its narrator’s apparent sense of self-hatred, one that
she carries over into flagrant declarations of racial separation and complex
conjunctions of otherness and desire. These patterns of ethnicity and alterity
serve to illuminate the novel’s discursive interrogation of a range of
post/colonial tensions as they are exacerbated by Guadeloupe’s ongoing
domination by the metropole. These tensions are symbolically inscribed in
the title of the novel itself, a Franco-Caribbean vernacular expression that
implies the deliberate negation of any indigenous black subjectivity in order
to share in the social advantages that whites automatically enjoy. The novel’s
first-person narrator proves to be overtly intrusive as a result of the series of
racial and identitarian masks and revelations that mark the narrative. Racial
dichotomies between whites, blacks and Indians, metropole and DOM and
their imbrication with identity and alienation are in evidence from the outset,
leading to the author’s ongoing subversion of an implicitly egalitarian
juxtaposition of ethnicities, based on a colonial history of racist violence and
exploitation that departmentalization’s fragmenting and foreclosure of
identity extends rather than ends. Her deliberate dislocation of her own
subjective framework from Hindu to mulatto is symptomatic of this enforced
splitting and its corollary of cultural subjection.

Asha Pande
Associate Professor in the Department of European Language, Literature &
Culture Studies Department in University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India.
« Le corps et la souffrance dans l’écriture féminine de l’Ile Maurice »
Une des particularités de l’écriture féminine consiste à mettre en avant le
corps de la femme, à signaler la douleur à travers la dégradation et les
changements corporels. Par exemple, dans Moi, l’Interdite, c’est par le biais
du corps que la narratrice réussit à décrire sa souffrance. Même dans Le
Voile de Draupadi, qui est le récit du sacrifice d’une femme, d’une mère, le
corps et la douleur sont intimement liés, d’autant plus que ce sacrifice passe
symboliquement par la mutilation du corps, par le jeûne, la marche sur le
feu. Dans cette intervention, nous proposons d’analyser plusieurs œuvres de
l’île Maurice comme Moi, l’Interdite et Le Voile de Draupadi d’Ananda Devi, La

24
femme enveloppée de Shakuntala Boolell et A l’Autre Bout de Moi de Marie-
Thérèse Humbert pour voir comment le corps s’utilise tour à tour comme un
espace textuel, un lieu de scandale, maison et prison. Parfois on constate un
refus du corps pour arriver au-delà. En bref, le corps a un langage qui reste à
être déchiffré.
Comme dit le psychanalyste Denise Vasse :
« Le corps - pour un psychanalyste - est un texte qui lui parle (…), un texte
qui a une voix, qui se lit et qui trouve son fondement dans les effets de son
déchiffrement. » Nous appuierons nos analyses sur cette notion de « corps
miroir », de « corps parlant » et nous montrerons que c’est l’écriture
féminine qui parvient le mieux à mettre cela en évidence.

Rosa María García Periago

University of Murcia, Spain
“Bollywood and Diaspora: Bollywood Queen and Bride and
Prejudice.”
Contemporary Bollywood films tend to address the diaspora as it provides a
considerable market for the consumption of movies. Non-resident Indians
cling to values which make them different from resident Indians. Bombay
Cinema is in charge of bringing the homeland – India – to the non-resident
Indians and creates, for the diasporic community, a culture of solidarity in
which traditions, values and ideas are shared. Nevertheless, the
representation of diasporic Indians in Bollywood films differs significantly
from one movie to another. Following Richard Burt’s ideas about diaspora
and post-diaspora in Shakespeare the Movie II (2003), the aim of this paper
is to explore the depiction of Non-Resident Indians in two films: Bollywood
Queen (Jeremy Wooding, 2002) and Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha,
2004). Although Wooding is an English filmmaker and Chadha an Indian in
the diaspora, both films seem to expose and ridicule Non-Resident Indians
and cannot be said to display a nationalistic orientation. Parameters such as
the settings, characters and values will be analysed to show how these
movies distance themselves from other films with a clear nationalist drive
like Omkara (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006). This paper argues that hybridity is
superficially taken into account in Bollywood Queen and Bride and Prejudice
and that they share a similar approach to the diaspora as dis-Orientalization
and Westernization still play a significant role in both films.

Catherine Pesso-Miquel
Professor of English and Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Lyon 2,
France.
Unseen Cities: Representations of the Diasporic Experience in
Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers.
The phrase ‘Unseen Cities’ is borrowed from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses, in which chapter 5 is entitled A City Visible but Unseen. Starting from
Rushdie’s treatment of this theme, I would like to analyse diasporic
interactions in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers. In this novel, published
in 2004, an anonymous Northern British industrial city is seen through the
eyes of Asian immigrants and verbally colonised, since the English street

25
names have been replaced by names taken from the Asian subcontinent, and
the City itself is always called Dasht-e-Tanhaïï, which means ‘Desert of
Solitude’. English characters hardly put in an appearance, and an invisible
line of demarcation seems to render the migrant world and the British world
mutually invisible, thus underlining the utter impossibility of any
hybridization. I propose to concentrate on the representation, in this novel,
of the younger generation of migrants, torn between the lure of integration
into British society and the stern lack of pliability of the older generations,
both diasporic and Pakistani. Particular emphasis will be laid on issues of
gender, since the novel deals with migrants from a very traditional,
patriarchal and lower-class segment of the Pakistani population, in which
family ‘honour’ is still synonymous with female chastity and compliance. My
paper would combine a thematic study with an analysis of the richly and
elaborately poetic writing, which relies heavily on similes and metaphors and
seems influenced by Urdu literature. If I have ‘space enough and time’, I
would like to use Kamila Shamsie’s representations of a much more
cosmopolitan, modernised segment of the Pakistani diaspora (in Kartography
and Salt and Saffron) to create effects of counterpoint and comparison.

Shantini Pillai, with Ganakumaran Subramaniam

Senior lecturer at the School of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Social
Sciences and Humanities, University Kebangsaan, Malaysia
“Reterritorialising the Ideological Hailings of Diaspora: The
Transfigurative Power of the Creative Imaginary of KS Maniam and
Philip Jeyaretnam”
There is great power invested in the inventiveness of the diasporic imaginary
to reterritorialise Indian culture-scapes into local contexts and two creative
writers from the South East Asian region are rather renowned for such
transfigurative skills. The first is KS Maniam, a Malaysian Indian writer while
the second is Philip Jeyaretnam, a Singaporean Indian writer. What is even
more intriguing is that the former hails from the dominant Hindu Indian
diaspora in South East Asia while the latter is of the more marginal Christian
Indian diapora in the same region. Given this variation, what then would be
the points of convergence and divergence when the diasporic imaginary
intersects with the myths and memories of India? This session seeks to
examine the ways in which the two writers move away from the ideological
hegemony of the perennial diasporic hailings of persecution, exile and
alienation from India and arrive instead at a synthesis of the various tones of
diasporic experience, arguing that these elements contribute to the
consequent reterritorialisation of the Indian self as borders are broken down
and new imprints are allowed to pattern the fabric of this new identity. An
important feature of the session lies in the exposition of the transfiguration of
Hindu and Christian myths and metaphors that lie at the heart of their
creative writing. The novels that the presentation will focus on are KS
Maniam’s In A Far Country and Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise.

Mariam Pirbhai

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Assistant Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier
University, Ontario, Canada
Panel ‘Indo-Caribbean Women: Literature, Art, Culture’
“Re-Casting Jahaji-Bhain: A Survey of the Indo-Caribbean Women’s
Novel, 1990-2009”
Lakhsmi Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind (1990) is considered to be the first
full-length novel by an Indo-Caribbean woman; 2009 will mark almost two
decades since its publication and the subsequent growth of the Indo-
Caribbean women’s novel. The novelists under consideration are Lakshmi
Persaud, Shani Mootoo, Narmala Schewcharan, Ramabai Espinet, Joy
Mahabir, Ryhaan Shah, Niala Maharaj, Jan Shinebourne, and Oonya
Kempadoo, all of whom look to either Guyana or Trinidad as their countries
of origin, and often to North America and Europe as their adoptive homes.
In providing a survey of the particular kinds of aesthetic and cultural inroads
that a gendered perspective brings to our understanding of Indo-Caribbean
experience and identities, this paper will outline the patterns that emerge in
works that consciously map the trajectory of Indo-Caribbean women’s lives
from the moment of indentureship and colonial servitude to the post-colonial
present, including the feminist recasting of the jahajibhai (the ship-brothers)
to include the plight and peril of the female subaltern in the new world
colony; the rewriting of revolutionary and ideological struggle in the
foregrounding of women’s roles as educators, agitators and activists; the
excavation of taboo subjects often willfully buried in the collective memory of
the diasporic community, such as rape and domestic violence; and the inter-
subjective nature of women’s lives, across race, class and religion. My
inclusion of Jan Shinebourne (of South Asian and Chinese ancestry) and
Oonya Kempadoo (of South Asian, Scottish and Amerindian ancestry) also
speaks to the hybridization of Indo-Caribbean identities as they came to be
rooted in Caribbean plantation history. The survey does not aim to be
exhaustive since this is necessarily an unfolding body of literature at its
fledgling state; rather, the paper aims to provide the first survey of its kind
of a generation of Indo-Caribbean female novelists whose unique
perspectives reshape discussions of Caribbean literary production and enrich
our understanding of the region’s ethnic subjectivities.

Sandra Ponzanesi
Assistant Professor of gender and postcolonial critique at Utrecht University,
Department of Media and Culture Studies, The Netherlands
“At Home in the World? Gendered Visions of the Cinema of the South
Asian Diaspora.”
Cinema, more than other media, allows for a cross-over appeal that is
unsurpassed in cutting across boundaries of language, gender, class and
caste. The major focus of this paper is to investigate how issues of gender
and transnationalism are articulated in the cinema of the South Asian
diaspora, considering some of the transnational productions realized by
diasporic female filmmakers such as the successful Canadian based Deepa
Metha, the US based Mira Nair or British based Gurinder Chadha among
others. It is interesting to notice that the international panorama of Indian

27
cinema is primarily dominated by female filmmakers, a unique phenomenon
if we consider how hard the film world is to enter and to survive in for female
directors.
These diasporic filmmakers are dissatisfied with the modes of representation
available either within Bollywood or regional and art-house cinema and
propose a more encompassing notion of world cinema from a feminist
perspective, offering alternative visions of India as a country in rapid global
transformations, both within and outside its borders. These filmmakers have
managed to become extremely visible at international film festivals, to
acquire critical acclaim and to reach commercial success while accounting for
dissonant voices. The paper will attempt to chart some of the dynamics at
play in the repositioning of the cinema of the South-Asian diaspora within a
transnational and feminist framework.

Faith Pullin
Honorary Fellow of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures,
Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK
“Double Displacement in the Writing of Rohinton Mistry: the Parsi
Community in Tales from Firozsha Baag”
Born in Bombay in 1952, of Parsi origin, Mistry emigrated to Canada in 1975.
In 1987, he published a collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag
in which he explores the uniqueness of the Parsi community and
demonstrates the syncretic nature of the diasporic Parsi experience, whether
in Canada or in India. Some of the stories focus on the journeys of Firozsha
Baag’s Parsis to North America and their subsequent guilt ar resettlement in
the West.
Like other Parsi writers, Mistry’s work examines the experience of double
displacement. As a Parsi, Mistry exists at the margins of Indian society and
his writing resists the dominating Hindu culture.
Tales from Firozsha Baag focuses on the cultural identity and spiritual
challenges experienced by the residents of the apartment complex. Several
characters embrace secular customs; others are torn between old and new
ways oof living. Mistry examines the relationship between the sexes, which
is determined by religious/cultural conventions. Alienation is another of
Mistry’s concerns, especially in those stories that involve the diasporic
experience. In addition, the residents who remain in India are often involved
in conflict with Indian society at large.
All the Tales are inter-related, adding differing perspectives to the events
discussed. Mistry is a writer of the Indian diaspora but he is also from a
community living in a diasporic state in India, since his ancestors were exiled
by the Islamic conquest of Iran.

Srilata Ravi
Lecturer, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
“Indians in Mauritius: National and Postnational Identities”
From the 1940s through to Independence in 1968, Indo-Mauritian leaders
had deftly woven the story of the immigrant Indian into a Mauritian national
romance of indenture. The ‘coolie’ was not painted as a victim of colonial

28
policy but represented as a pioneer whose strong belief in ancestral traditions
helped him overcome his alienation and make him an integral part of the
island’s economic and cultural landscape. However, social changes brought
about by changing politics in post 1968 Mauritius has affected the importance
of this ethnic identification. Furthermore, the economic boom in the 1980s
seen in the manufacturing and tourism sectors has exposed Mauritius to the
darker forces of globalization and internationalization. These changes have
impacted on the way different ethnic groups are perceived and the ways in
which they interpret the present and the past. New rewritings of the
indenture narrative (Khal Torabully) strongly contest the conventional
perception of the indentured labourer and place emphasis on trauma and
displacement stories of ‘coolies’ and Creoles. Other contemporary novelists
(Shenaz Patel, Ananda Devi) foreground the plight of marginalized Creole
communities and question dominant discourses of ethnic stability and
economic progress. Writers like Nathacha Appanah reinscribe ‘Indianness’ on
to a creolized island and redefine Indian diasporic identities in the labour
diaspora. At the same time, it is interesting to note that the recently
published French translation of Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Lal Pasina revives the
original romance narrative of indenture written in Hindi in 1977 by the
acclaimed Indo-Mauritian writer. Thus one observes that while postnational
narratives try to render visible the incoherence and transitory nature of
national narratives, other accounts continue to reinforce essentialist myths of
‘Indianness’ in Mauritius. Through a reading of French language
representations of ‘Indianness’ in contemporary Mauritius, this study argues
that Mauritius is a discursive space where both competing and interlinking
interpretations of past and present co-exist painting different images of social
interactions and identity on this Indian Ocean island.

Tina K Ramnarine
Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
“Music, Memory and Historiography in the Indian Diaspora: Notes on
the Trinidadian Case”
How can we trace musical histories in the Indian Diaspora? This paper
explores the Trinidadian case in response to this question. In one of his most
well known songs, the chutney singer Sundar Popo sang: ‘The Fath Al Razack
came from India, with me nanee [maternal grandmother] and me nana
[maternal grandfather], and some landed here’. Popo’s ‘Indian Arrival’ song
contributes to a broad repertoire of songs composed by Trinidadian
musicians/commentators that remembers the journeys of arrival. These
include James Ramsawak’s Indian Arrival song The New Dawn (1995) and
Brother Marvin’s Brotherhood of the Boat (1995). The Fath al Razack was the
first ship to begin transporting Indian populations to Trinidad in 1845 through
the system of indentureship (or contracted labour). On board were 227
Indian migrants. Their contracts initially lasted for a period of five years after
which they could work for a further five years in order to claim a free return
passage to India. When indentureship was abolished, less than a quarter of
the Indian migrants returned to their homeland. This was not a homogenous
group for people came from different regions, spoke different languages, and

29
were members of different castes (a system that would collapse in Trinidad
and Tobago), but the majority came from the Bhojpuri speaking northern
provinces of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The musical influences that shape
contemporary Indian diasporic musical practice are diverse within the
Caribbean context, therefore complicating attempts to construct a musical
history. This paper explores musical memory and historiography in the
Trinidadian example of the Indian Diaspora, turning both to oral historical
sources (drawn from ethnographic work in Trinidad) and early written
accounts from ship’s journeys.

Zeenat Saleh
Senior lecturer in film in the English Department. University of Besançon,
France; Secretary of the SERCIA (Société d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le
Cinéma Anglophone).
“Mississippi Masala: A Case study in Forced Hybridity”
Mira Nair's 1991 film, Mississippi Masala, mirrors the director's own trajectory
and her obsessive questioning of the notion of being in-between. The main
character Mina describes herself as a ‘masala mix’ due to her forced
migration as a child from Uganda to Greenwood, Mississippi via England. Any
attempt on Mina's part to venture out of the ghetto formed by the ultra-
conservative, business-minded racist Gujeratis in Greenwood is viewed as
transgression of the socio-cultural codes of her community. Not even Mina's
father Jay, obsessed with the idea of returning home – to Uganda – can
reconcile himself to the idea of his daughter's relationship with Demetrius, an
African-American entrepreneur in Greenwood.
Paradoxically, Mina is not the only pariah: Demetrius, for his part, has
betrayed his own. Their ostracism from their respective communities forces
them to sever all ties and create another hybrid space.
It would be interesting to problematize the issue of hybridity by raising
questions about its relevance in a globalized world, about frontiers
(geographical, cultural and psychological) that prevent people from geting
across and mixing. In-betweenness as the space of the liminal where the
artist may create out of this tragic perspective of the impossible present and
the improbable future another possible way of being. The tension lies in the
impossible mediation between past and present. Can hybridity emerge as the
only possible way out of this dilemma and obliterate the idea of chosing
between what is one’s own and what history and private experience may
bring about?

Meg Samuelson
Senior lecturer in the English Department, Stellenbosch University, Republic
of South Africa.
“Crossing the Kala Pani: Citizenship and Belonging in Post-Apartheid
South Africa Indian Narratives”
While comprising the largest diasporic Indian group outside of South Asia,
the ‘South African Indian’ community is often strangely invisible or
submerged in literary and cultural studies of the Indian diaspora. This paper
aims to redress this scholarly silence by exploring a set of novels, family

30
romances and memoirs that represent the three major waves of trans-
oceanic traffic to South African shores (as slaves in the mid 17th to early 19th
century; as indentured labourers from mid 19th to early 20th century; and as
traders following in the wake of the second wave). Recent narratives by
Indian South Africans invite an enquiry back into these three waves of
arrival, and revisit questions of home-leaving and home-making from the
vantage point of post-apartheid citizenship. A number of the texts explore
prominently also the question of the ‘making of India’ in the diaspora, not
least given the impact of Gandhi’s political apprenticeship in South Africa on
his ability to imagine into being a unified India. The crossing of the kala pani
(black water) is theorized in these texts as a moment in which new South
African and South Asian subjectivities and political orientations emerge.
Writing in the moment of full citizenship (albeit threatened by rising
xenophobia), these texts reflect back on both the Indian independence
movement and the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa in
ways that draw powerful connections between past and present, and India
and South Africa, in their theorizations of belonging and citizenship. The
paper will advance its argument through readings of, or with reference to,
the following post-apartheid narratives: Jacob’s The Slave Book; Govinden’s
Song of the Atman; Hassim’s The Lotus People; Coovadia’s The Wedding;
Moodley’s The Heart Knows No Colour; Sarif’s The World Unseen; Memoirs of
Sita Gandhi (ed. Dhupelia-Mesthrie).

Clem Seecharan – Keynote speaker

Professor of Caribbean History and Head of Caribbean Studies, London
Metropolitan University, UK.
“Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado: The Shaping of the Indo-
Guyanese Imagination”.
The address will explore ‘many Indias’ in the making of Indo-Guyanese
identity, with emphasis on the role of amnesia, myth, history and more-or-
less history in constructions of ‘Mother India’  the source of a sustaining
vision. Special attention will be given to the period between the 1890s and
the 1930s.

Kerstin W. Shands
Professor in the English Department, School of Culture and Communication,
Södertorn University College, Stockholm
“Hyperfabula of Gains and Losses: Immanent-Transcendent
Narrative Perspectives in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss”
Critics of Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), have
pointed to the importance of ‘contemporary’ issues. Commenting on the
issues of ‘globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality,
fundamentalism and terrorist violence’, Pankaj Mishra, for example, while
admiring ‘Desai's artistic power’, has read The Inheritance of Loss as an
‘exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair’ that may ‘strike many readers
as offering an unrelentingly bitter view’. While accepting the validity of such
views, this paper will offer a different perspective.
Taking its cue from a line at the end of The Inheritance of Loss where one of

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the main characters has gained the insight that she can no longer ‘think
there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself,
that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it,’
we can read The Inheritance of Loss as a hyperfabula that is local and
universal as well as optimistic and pessimistic in equal measure. This paper
will suggest that the layered worlds created by Desai are surveyed from an
immanent-transcendent narrative position that embraces the smallest
creature as lovingly as the widest landscapes. These descriptions in their
very profuseness could be seen in the main plot, in which a comprehensive
narrative movement as a great equalizer evens out gains and losses while
pointing to the possibility of serenity and survival in the midst of cruel and
tragic events. This paper will explore the intricate ways in which the complex
configurations of this immanent-transcendent narrative movement balances
gains and losses on petty and grandiose levels and in animal and human
worlds, placing the centripetal attractions of home and the centrifugal flights
of diaspora in elaborate relief.

Laurel Steele
Career diplomat, Afghanisthan.
“Writing Class with Mr Khan: No Luncheon at Longchamps for the
Jumbie Bird”
Almost forty years ago, Ismith Khan (1925-2002), taught a creative writing
class at the University of California, Berkeley. I use my memories of the class
as a departure point for this paper. The dynamics of that class—the material
assigned, the interactions between the students and the writer, and Khan’s
teachings—raise larger issues about Khan’s own work, and about Indian
diasporic writings before the term was in use. By the winter of 1971, when
Khan faced the class, the writer had made a real mark with his two novels,
The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man. But, in retrospect, difficult issues that
Khan encountered throughout his career were already apparent.
As it happened, Khan’s output would be comparatively slender and he would
be unable to attract the attention of a wider world of critics and readers.
Discussing the overshadowing of Khan’s work and its relegation to the
footnotes, Rhonda Cobham says, ‘There seems, however, to be no valid
critical reason for his neglect’. Khan sensed a kind of marginalization when
he taught the class at Berkeley. He was obsessed with getting The New
Yorker to publish his short story, Luncheon at Longchamps. He read it to the
class, and discussed his anger and disappointment at the story’s rejection.
He critiqued one student’s short story, set in Iran, as a ‘travelogue’. His
struggles with the prose of a Vietnam vet who was trying to fictionalize a
battle betrayed other tensions. Then, another student, from Yugoslavia, read
a story about boar hunting near his castle. The teaching assistant, a young,
white, male, British writer tried to help, as the class members spoke in a
cacophony of different cultures, all expressing themselves in traditionally-
constructed short stories, and all writing in English. And always in front of
the class, leading it, was Khan’s sad and intelligent face: Male, Black,
Muslim, Indian, Trinidadian, Pathan…
This paper will explore Khan’s teaching of creative writing in connection with

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his own writings, and will look at issues that arose in the class—of location
and marginalizaton, of time and indentity—to explore Mr. Khan’s legacy.

Alexis Tadié
Professor of English literature, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France.
“Is Cricket a Fictional Sport?”
The game of cricket provides the starting point for this paper since it is a
remarkable instance of the link between India and its diaspora. Further,
cricket has been analysed as an instance of a post-colonial ‘instrument for
mobilizing national sentiment in the service of transnational spectacles and
commoditization’ (Appadurai) — this is even more apparent with the creation
of the IPL. But this paper does not want to offer a fresh analysis of cricket so
much as to investigate the relationship between cricket and the arts (as
suggested by CLR James). It will look at various modes of representation of
cricket in literature. It will focus primarily on Romesh Gunesekera’s The
Match, where cricket gives meaning to the main character’s life, through the
restoration of his original passion at a test match between England and Sri
Lanka. It will analyse Lagaan (A. Gowariker), the film that reinvents the
colonial origins of cricket. In order to assess the diasporic dimension of
cricket, in a South Asian context, it will also bring into the comparison
‘cricket scenes’ from classical novels (such as The Go-Between), as well as
from the more recent Netherland (Joseph O’Neill), where cricket, a diasporic
game, stands both at the centre of the novel, and on the outskirts, in the
suburbs of New York. It is hoped that a picture of cricket as a fictional sport
will emerge. I do not wish to define cricket as a sport that does not exist.
Rather, I wish to investigate the ways in which the introduction of cricket in
fictional contexts transforms both the fictional work and the sport itself. It is
hoped that this paper will provide a reflection on cricket and writing, as a
particular instance of a more general relationship between sport and
literature.

Veronica Thompson
Assistant Professor of English and Chair of the Centre for Language and
Literature at Athabasca University, Canada.
“From Komagata Maru to Kanishka:The Indian Diaspora in Canada
in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?”
Anita Rau Badami’s third novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is dedicated
to ‘the man on the bridge in Modinagar and the Victims of Air India Flight
182’. The sight of a Sikh man burned alive as retribution for Indira Ghandi’s
assassination haunted Badami for two decades. A year later Badami lost a
neighbour in the bombing of Air India Flight 182; his grief stricken wife later
committed suicide. In her fictionalization of these events, Badami explores
the theme ‘When do you belong and where do you belong’ (qtd in Ubelaker).
Book ended by references to two ill-fated journeys to/from Canada, the
Komagata Maru and Air India’s Kanishka, Nightbird examines the
repercussions of historical events on three Indian families whose lives are
connected across the spatial and temporal distance of the Indian diaspora.
The novel is divided into five parts; the first three sections of which are

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organized around three central female characters: Bibi-ji Singh, who
immigrates to Canada thereby realizing the dream her own father was denied
decades earlier as a passenger on the Komagata Maru; Leela Bhat, the
daughter of a German mother and Indian father, who also immigrates to
Canada; and Nimmo Singh, who remains in India, but sends her son to
Vancouver to live with her aunt, Bibi-ji. Badami contrasts these characters’
experiences of the Indian diaspora in Canada by bringing them together in
the culmination of the novel’s plot, in their shared suppression of horrific and
violent memories, and in her ambivalent use of Trishanku’s heaven as a
metaphor for diasporic identity and experience, as she posits answers to the
questions of belonging.

Shubhra Tripathi
Professor & Head of English Department, Govt. MVM College, Bhopal, India.
“Diasporic Ramayana: a Confluence of Cultures”
Indian diasporic literature arresting global attention today, is usually by and
about educated migrants or their descendants. It deals with issues like
alienation, nostalgia, identity crisis, discrimination, etc. It operates in a
cultural space haunted by heterogeneity, and attempts to reconcile with alien
realities. A literary maze concerned with questions of equality and identity, it
attempts at assimilation with host country and culture.
A less noticed diasporic literature, for example of Raja Rao, is that where
emotional and cultural ties were never severed, despite physical alienation.
Since migration was by choice, and religio-philosophical and spiritual values
sustained him, feelings of rootlessness and alienation are missing. Bonds
with homeland and home culture are strongly maintained in writings. Both
these diasporic writings are articulations of the educated, reminiscing the
lost, coming to terms with the present, and yearning for an uncertain future.
A third variety of Indian diasporic literature has almost escaped the notice of
scholars. It is the written record of folk and oral religio-cultural traditions,
which the uneducated diaspora, for example indentured labourers, had taken
with them. These traditions and the diaspora sustained each other. They
were influenced and transformed by the culture of host country, resulting in
myriad hues of the original tradition and a cultural confluence.
The present paper attempts at viewing the Hindu epic Ramayana in this light.
It examines how this epic travelled to countries like Srilanka, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Singapore etc., how it was influenced by other religions and
cultures, how linguistic barriers were overcome in stage performances, what
impact it has on host culture and what relevance it has for India today.

Charu Uppal
Lecturer at the University of South Pacific.
“Old Diasporas, Media and Cultural Identity”
Much of the present literature on Indian diasporas and their consumption of
the media products of India, focuses on the new diasporas, those in English
speaking developed nations, namely US, Britain, Canada and NZ. However,
the peoples of the old diasporas, most of who were brought as indentured
laborers by the British to former colonies, established a new community that

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replicated the ways of India. This recreation of the community was truly
unique in that it was forced to break the old ways of hierarchy e.g. caste,
and was forged from diverse identities of the peoples themselves, often
times giving rise to a new language1, and maintaining some of the old
practices that would themselves be marginalized in modern India. Unlike
their counterpart in the developed nations where Indians migrated of their
own choice, and often hold white collar jobs, people of Indian diaspora in Fiji
form a varied group that almost replicates India in the range of jobs they
hold, the resulting life experiences and interaction with media that they
might encounter. It is common to see Indo-fijians begging for money and
food outside malls and stores owned by Indo-fijians. This paper attempts to
explore various needs that media produced-in-India, (mainly Bollywood, and
presently the television serials) play in the identity construction, maintenance
and re-creation of Indo-Fijians, a diaspora that is completely missing from
the content it consumes. The data for the paper was collected through a
survey followed by focus groups interviews of families that have lived in Fiji,
for more than four generations. The interviews were conducted on three
different islands of Fiji between December 2007 and June 2008.
The theoretical underpinnings of the paper are based in uses and
gratifications theory for media consumption and the concept of ‘nationality as
assemblage’ put forth by Wiley (2004).

Paul-Daniel Veyret
Senior Lecturer at Bordeaux 3 University, France.
“I see dead people: M Night Shyamalan's Cinema”
MNS's work is built upon the paradox of creating a sense of fear out of the
multiplicity of unequivocal signs. His work has indeed been rather
dismissively labelled as ‘one-trick ponies’, as if his films could only sustain
the semiological tension of one single viewing and lost their depth after a
second viewing. MNS occupies a specific position in American cinema: that of
desi who seems to perform in his sleep the aesthetic codes of the Hollywood
industry: cliffhangers, twists and sundry mcguffins seem to be the stuff his
dreams are made on.
And yet. what I wish to demonstrate in this paper is that MNS's cinema is
rather based on the blurring of signs rather than on their definite
assignations in language, on the use of soft focus details in the backgrounds,
and of off-frame characters and details that suddenly disrupt the foreground
or appear in reflections, elements that point at a more problematic and
postmodern use of signs than previously thought. MNS is an artist of what H
Bhabha calls the ‘blind spots’ of reality.
Not only is MNS an overtly political director (The Village and The Happening
should be construed as political fables) but he has made himself at home
within the realm of Howwlywood cinema in order to subvert it, at least partly,
creating a strange oscillation in the spectators' reception between bafflement
and dissatisfaction. MNS should perhaps be seen as the director who shows
us how to see ‘dead people’, who explores the psychic crypt (Abraham &

1 In this case Fiji-Hindi

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Törok) left by the ancestors of the country he keeps reprensenting in his
films (see the importance of Philadelphia – home of the Founding Fathers of
American history – made familiar film after film, the paradoxically acurate
and totally imagined vision of rural America in the emblematic (and Bergian)
village, the resolution of the Happening along the track of the Underground
Railroad etc...).

Amar Wahab
Department of Sociology, York University, Canada.
“Colonial Governmentality and Indentureship: A Genealogy of ‘Coolie’
Subjectivity in the Early Post-Emancipation Caribbean”
One year after the first importation of ‘coolie’ labourers from India to
Trinidad there were numerous reports of emotional, occupational, and
physical abuse perpetrated by planters and estate managers against
indentured labourers. This paper presents an archival footprint of the
tormented existence of these labourers under a system of ‘quasi-slavery’
paradoxically at a moment when Anglo-Creole colonial governance aimed to
reinvent itself as humanitarian, benevolent and indispensable to the
civilization of Indian subjects. It also relies on archival data to rethink
matters of agency, representation and claims-making on the part of Indian
indentured labourers. Labourers’ testimonials question taken-for-granted
notions of passivity and transience that have been assumed to characterize
early Indian indentureship in the Caribbean. Reading these testimonials
through a Foucault’s methodology of genealogy, this paper further unmaps
the related subjectivities of colonial administrators, planters and coolie
labourers as they were positioned and operative in experimental discourses
about colonial governance. The analysis contributes to an ongoing
investigation about the ways in which labour and social regimes were deeply
embedded in projects of British Enlightenment science and rationality as they
were deployed and refined in the Caribbean. This paper is important if one is
to take seriously calls for historicizing the social construction of colonized
subjects in relation to nineteenth-century incipient nationalism and its
implications for redrafting the postcolonial narrative of nationhood.

Busolo Wegesa (and Godwin Siundu)

Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Theatre and Film Studies at Moi
University, Eldoret, Kenya.
“Groups, City-Spaces and the Ambivalence of Modernities: Reading
Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam as Heterotopias in Dawood and
Vassanji’s Novels”
In this paper, we seek to examine how the cities of Nairobi and Dar-es-
Salaam are literarily represented as heterotopias in a novel each by Moyez
Vassanji – The Gunny Sack – and Yusuf Dawood – Water Under the Bridge
– both being East African writers of Asian extraction. Specifically, we
examine the places/spaces of different racial categories within the cities
against the backdrop of dichotomies of rooted/rootless,
indigenous/immigrants et cetera, as they have been used to describe
indigenous African and Asian inhabitants of East Africa, to argue that

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present-day East African Asians resident in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam can
no longer be viewed as a marginal community. This paper is influenced to
some degree by Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which are seen
as real places as opposed to utopias, and which provide a canvas for
contests and inversions.i Reading urbanisation and its epistemic forms
through the novel form differs significantly from using other disciplines for
the reason that, as Roger Kurtz notes, ‘the novel as a form lends itself
quite easily to the hybridity that characterises the postcolonial city and
consequently makes a useful literary vehicle for exploring urbanization’
(76). Guided by a conflation of historical, political and cultural theoretical
constructs within the wider postcolonial discourse, we seek to advance two
positions: one, that both Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, as indeed many
contemporary cities in Africa, have through history invited ambivalent
attitudes from nationals of the respective countries, whether these
nationals are of the African, European and or Asian provenance. This
ambivalence arises out of the simultaneous promises and threats that are
enfolded in the trappings of modernities that only the cities offer, in
particular possibilities of upward social mobility that creates a sense of
sophistication among the urbane members of society, but also the
unhingement from social support structures and exposure to risks related
to crime, social degeneration, and work-related uncertainties. Our second
argument, which arises from the first, is that different groups appropriate
specific city spaces as forms of exercising agency or securing their own
senses of stability within the matrix of racial, economic and social
contests.

Jennifer Yusin
Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English
and Philosophy at Drexel University, USA.
“Crossing the Shadow Lines: Trauma, Fragmentation, and the
Impossibility of Return”
In much of the literature concerning the Indian Diaspora there is a
relationship between the diasporic community and the land—what we often
call ‘home’ or the ‘motherland’—in which the question of ‘Indianness’ bears a
particular currency as Indians abroad abandon regional, ethnic, and linguistic
differences for the generalized identity of being an Indian. In fact, the notion
of an ‘Indian’ identity seems much less contestable abroad than it does in
India. Thus the very ability to speak about the Indian Diaspora as ‘Indian’ is
made possible, in part, by the joining together of the otherwise disparate
elements from the Indian subcontinent into a singular notion of an ‘Indian’
community and nation. But what happens to the ‘Indian’ identity and nation
when individuals from the diasporic communities return home and once again
discover themselves entrenched within the very regional, ethnic, and
linguistic differences they abandoned?
This paper asks: how does one return to India as an ‘Indian’, and how does
returning to one’s ‘home’ change the very conception of home and of an
Indian identity, both national and individual? Through a reading of the tropes
of borders and silence in the narrator’s journey back to Calcutta in Amitav

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Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines, this paper will examine the diasporic
experience as a traumatic experience that irreparably fragments the nation—
and thus the construction and conceptualization of a national identity—as
much as it does the individual. This paper will argue that it is impossible to
return ‘home’, for the very nature of home is changed by the diasporic
experience. Paradoxically, it is only through the impossible return that we
can begin to see how the diasporic experience pushes the nation once called
‘home’ to the border between the familiar past and the foreign present that
cannot be entirely grasped.

Pascal Zinck
Associate-Professor, Université de Lille3 & Ercla-Paris IV La Sorbonne, France
“The Inheritance of Hell in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and
Romesh Gunesekara’s Heaven’s Edge”.
If immigrants like Kiran Desai’s Biju and Hamid Mohsin’s Changez are
beholden to myths of ‘Mother India’ / ‘Mother Pakistan’ as their dreams of El
Dorado have drowned, Sri Lankan expatriates or refugees have a more
ambivalent affiliation with their native country. The scars of ethnic war
between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority are profound and
slow to heal. In the fiction of David Blacker and Channa Wickremesekera, the
war at home between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers resurfaces in
the diasporic communities perpetuating racial prejudices and hypocrisies in
their new home. These same communities bankroll terrorist or counter-
terrorist cells and mastermind operations against Sri Lankan interests at
home and abroad. Both Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekara address
the issues of identity and belonging as their main protagonists return to their
native land, whether temporarily or for good. Ondaatje hones in on the
traumas of the civilian population, on the receiving end of ethnic cleansing.
Hence Anil’s Ghost explores the inevitable tensions between Western human
rights law and the duty to intervene and the Sri Lankan government’s efforts
to derail all UN inquiries which it regards as neo-colonial intrusions. Anil’s
mission may not achieve its political objective, yet through her agency and
that of Sarath, the lives of ordinary people are reclaimed and salvaged.
Pursuing a personal quest like Anil, Romesh Gunesekara’s Marc also finds
himself embroiled in a larger story on an unnamed tropical island plunged
into dystopian chaos. As he endeavours to make sense of family feuds, he is
caught up in a guerrilla war that outlives its political purpose. His becomes a
captivating psychological journey into the events that forever change us as
well as a struggle for survival to turn colonial and post-colonial time on its
head and reverse postapocalyptic civilisation through the sanctuary of
‘Samandia’ – a paradigm of self-exile and regeneration transposed onto the
vibrant palette of Paul Gauguin.
i
For details of Foucault’s arguments on heterotopias, see “Text/Context of Other Space”
Diacritics 16: 1: 1986. 22 – 27

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