The Indian diaspora is the largest diasporic movement from Asia, with the Indian community numbering over twenty-five million around the world. Its large scale encompasses a kaleidoscopic community from disparate regions, languages, cultural heritages, religions, and traditions within the subcontinent. The many peoples of the Indian diaspora have growing social and economic impacts on their new homes, but maintain their cultural bonds with India.
This volume offers a thorough analysis of the diasporic practices of the Indian communities in essays covering a number of fields, such as literature, cultural studies, and film studies. The contributors deal with the Indian diaspora’s historical and contemporary connotations, its theoretical framework, the cultural hybridizations that emerge from diaspora, and other topics touching on the cultural and social effects of the spread of Indian peoples around the globe.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Shaping Indian Diaspora, or the Instability of Human Morphoses, Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández and Veena Dwivedi
Part I. Home Diaspora after Indian Partition
Chapter 1: Stories of Hasan Azizul Huq and the Shaping of Indian Diaspora in post-Partition India, M. Rakibul Hasan Khan
Part II. Great Britain and Scotland
Chapter 2: “Seeing Through a Glass”: Diasporic Identity in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, Mélanie Heydari
Chapter 3: Roots and Routes in Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Mounir Guirat
Chapter 4: Indo-Scottish Cultural Flows: Bashabi Fraser and the Streams of Identity, Carla Rodríguez González
Part III. United States of America
Chapter 5: Rice and Fish: Food Rituals and Women in Lahiri’s The Namesake and Divakaruni’s The Vine of Desire, Paromita Deb
Chapter 6: The Ebb and Flow of Homecoming—The Nature of Diasporic Existence in The Hungry Tide,Kinga Földváry
Chapter 7: Historicizing Diaspora, Multiculturalism, and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, Julia Hoydis
Part IV. Canada
Chapter 8: Diaspora Identity in Kim and The Cat’s Table, Judith Caesar
Part V. Australia and New Zealand
Chapter 9: Alternative Literary Spaces: India in the Antipodes, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez
Chapter 10: Outside, Inside, and Somewhere In Between: Laughter and the Indian Diasporic Experience in A House for Mr Biswas and The White Tiger,Adele Holoch
Part VI. Bollywood and Diaspora
Chapter 11: Little Indias: Diasporic Communities in the US and the Consumption of Bollywood, Keith M. Corson
About the Author :
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is associate professor in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba.
Veena Dwivedi is assistant professor of English at Feroze Gandhi Institute of Engineering and Technology.
Review :
Discussions of the 'Indian diaspora' inevitably throw up more questions than answers about Indianness, globalisation, and the perception and depiction of human migration. That is why they are necessary. Shaping Indian Diaspora contains papers that engage critically and fruitfully with the matter, and accentuate it in necessary directions.
A refreshing look at the literature of the Indian diaspora, testifying to its variety and dispersal across many geographical regions. Lively and accessible, the essays in Shaping Indian Diaspora show how this body of writing is transforming our understanding of world literature.
In a timely volume that articulates multiple meanings of the term ‘Diaspora’, Shaping Indian Diaspora investigates nuanced applications of the term with reference to India’s expatriate community and their evolving cultural interests. The editors engage thoroughly with varied interpretations of the term as it relates particularly to transnational literature and cinema. Theoretically informed and substantively grounded in raging debates relating to India’s scattered human settlements, this book incorporates the latest scholarship from a number of respected specialists in their fields even as it encompasses interdisciplinary attitudes and positions. In doing so, it makes a distinctive contribution to the existing research on this subject.
A relevant collection that negotiates with the construct of diasporic practices through the prism of an array of interdisciplinary fields. The essays when put together raise important issues about the ways in which identities, cultures and institutes intersect.
