Chapter III

Global Souls Writing Home: Indian Cosmopolitan Literary

Diasporas and Their (Hi)Stories

“We must take the feeling of being home into exile.

We must be rooted in the absence of a place”

(“Global Soul”- Simone Weil.)

Literature produced by the diaspora has been a focal area of postcolonial

theory and criticism. The contributions that Indian diaspora have made to the body

of postcolonial theory are exceedingly significant. Indian diasporic intellectuals like

Homi. K. Bhabha, Gayathri Chakravorty Spivac and Aijas Ahmed top any list of

postcolonial theorists, and no recent and systematic study of postcolonial theory

fails mentioning them1. The (hi)stories of the diasporic writers are explored with

interest in the context of the cosmopolitan world order constructed by globalization,

liberalization and postmodernity. Diasporic writers relatively have no geopolitical

constraints in formulating national (hi)stories as they are conveniently distanced

from the spaces they describe. Physical displacement would confer writers with

freedom for uninhibited narration, as these writers can remain untouched by the

instant reactions from their home countries to their narratives2. It is ironic that this

state of physical displacement is a welcome convenience or (sometimes) a result of

their own reconstructions of history. Rushdie was forced to prolong his exile

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following the Fatwa declared against him by Ayatollah Khomeini, and it gave him

freedom to be free from further obliging the theocrats.

The need to explore diasporic literature is far more important in the present

context than ever before3. As Edward Said said, the number of dislocated people has

been constantly on the increase in our times because widespread social and political

upheavals have produced “more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles

than ever before in history” (Culture and Imperialism 402). This is also reflected in

writings from all over the world, in “a substantial body of so called literature of

exile, embracing various genres, which admit of large variations, for the writings

vary in their scope, range, depth, and style, a fact that has been widely noticed’’

(Dhar, “Reconstructing Time and Experience: Variations on the Theme of

Dislocation” 69).

John Roosa and Ayu Ratih categorically state that the central writer for

postcolonial criticism and theory has been Salman Rushdie. He is an archetypal

‘postcolonial intellectual’, who keeps enough distance from the home country to see

the faults of anti-colonial nationalism but with enough familiarity with the west to

be disillusioned with the Western nation-state as the ideal to which to aspire.

Rushdie has encouraged, even prefigured the tendency to privilege a cosmopolitan

intellectual like himself, a south Asian resident in Britain. He has also stated that

the ‘indigenous intellectual’ is partially blind since s/he lacks ‘the ability to see at

once from inside and out’4. Rushdie thereby constructs a dichotomy between the

worldly-wise cosmopolitan intellectual and the frog-in-the-well indigenous

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intellectual (“Solipsism or Solidarity: The Nation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and

Salman Rushdie” 2681). The exilic position gives a contrapuntal vision against the

Orientalist’s panoptical vision which always tries to make the Oriental a perpetual

subject. This position of exile is a space for constructing counter subjectivity against

the dominant ideologies. As a result, the exilic perspective becomes one of the main

features of the postmodern intellectual.

Diasporic reconstructions of history have globally been perceived with

tremendous interest5. Over the years, significant alterations have become

discernible in the concerns and motives in the writings by the diaspora, and

theories about them also have undergone considerable changes. Terms like

‘diaspora’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ need to be discussed for interrogating the literature

of Indian cosmopolitan diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor and

Vikram Seth. The interrelationship among terms like postcolonialism,

postmodernism and cosmopolitanism are explored in this chapter, besides analyzing

the relevance of issues like national territories, loss of nostalgia and diasporic

reconstruction of parallel versions of national histories for the construction of

personal identity.

The word ‘diaspora’ is derived from the Greek composite verb dia and

speirein/speiro (infinitive), which means ‘to scatter’, ‘to spread’ or ‘to disperse’. Lipi

Ghosh and Ramakrishna Chatterjee in the introduction to Indian Diaspora in Asian

and Pacific Regions: Culture, People, Interactions (2004) refer to the surprising fact

that the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910 – 11) did not have an

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entry for the term ‘diaspora’. The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1979 however had

given an entry for the term. While the 1958 edition of the Encyclopedia identified

‘diaspora’ as a crystalline aluminium oxide which scattered flakes from its surface

when heated, the 1968 Encyclopedia of Social Sciences failed to find the term in the

category useful for social sciences and did not list it (13). The diaspora began to be

noticed as a result of the topical theories about post - national, trans-territorial and

cosmopolitan discourses, though discussions on diaspora had figured in academic

journals like the Sociological Bulletin since 1965.

The word diaspora is originally related to the history and status of the Jews

during the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C. It also characterized the

flourishing Jewish community that lived in Alexandria shortly before the rise of

Christianity. But later the term began to address people of any nation or

geographical entity who were scattered all over the globe owing to reasons like

bonded labour, forced exile, migration motivated by economic advantages and better

living conditions. Global capitalism accelerated the formation of diasporas that

reckoned migration as a remedy to the growing chasm of financial imbalance among

people. “The phenomenon of exile has emerged in our times due to the uneven

development within capitalism”, says Gurbhagat Singh, “and due to the movement

forced by colonial powers” (“Expatriate Writing and the Problematic of Centre:

Edward Said and Homi Bhabha” 21). S. Padmanabhan says that the immediate

motive for emigrating to England or America is economic (“The Inheritance of

Caliban: Literary Problems Shared by Third World Writers” 20).

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The use of the term ‘diaspora’ is still problematic as there is no consensus

regarding the qualifications required for such a label. The term is generally applied

to people who physically remove themselves from their own country of birth and

settle or even stay in a foreign country, but how long one should prolong one’s stay

abroad is a problem hard to deal with, and might sound even childish. Viney Kirpal

states that an expatriate writer’s roots are where he has spent his ‘formative years’

(quoted by Manju Sampat in “Old and New Expatriate Indian English Novelists” in

Bharucha and Nabar 262). Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Farrukh

Dhondy, Raja Rao, Kamala Markandaya, who lived mostly abroad, but had their

formative years in India can rightly be termed as expatriate writers6. But it may

not be able to convincingly answer questions as to how long can the formative years

in the life of a writer can be, and if there can be a stipulated number of years which

is universally applicable as ‘formative years’ for all writers of the world. However it

seems that nobody ever addresses another as diasporic if the person so addressed

has been abroad only for a short period and it is again hard to be specific as to how

long that ‘short period’ means. Again, just by having stayed abroad a few years no

one may be so described unless that person frequently visits foreign lands. Again

issues like how often one should go abroad to be called diasporic is an issue.

The conceptual space occupied by diasporas is a disputed territory. Braziel

and Anita Mannur feel that diasporas need to be relocated within the contemporary

critical paradigm of postcolonialism, postmodernity and late capital so that the

terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘diasporas’ as migratory formations circulate with new

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currencies in global discourses, and also confound the once clearly demarcated

parameters of geography, national identity and belongingness. Diasporas, Braziel

and Mannur suggest, work in two directions simultaneously, challenging both the

strictures and structures of nationalism and the increasingly imperialist, hegemonic

forces of globalization (Theorizing Diaspra: A Reader 7, Diaspora: An Introduction

25).

Theorists like William Safran, Robin Cohen and Khachig Tololyan have

attempted to define the characteristics of diasporic communities. William Safran

distinguishes the term diaspora from categories like expatriates, immigrants,

refugees and aliens. He lists six features that characterize diasporas as follows

(“Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” 83-84):

1. The term diaspora refers to people who have “been dispersed from a

specific original ‘center’ to two or more ‘peripheral’ or foreign regions.

2. Diasporas “retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their

original homeland- its physical location, history and achievements”.

3. Diasporas have the strong conviction that “they are not- and perhaps

cannot be-fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly

alienated and insulated from it”.

4. Diasporas “regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home,

and as the place to which they and their descendants would (or should)

eventually return- when conditions are appropriate”.

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5. Diasporic communities “believe that they should, collectively, be

committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original

homeland and to its safety and prosperity”.

6. Diasporas “relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one

way or another, and their ethno-communal consciousness and

solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a

relationship”.

Robin Cohen describes diasporas as communities of people living together in

one country who “acknowledge that ‘the old country’ - a notion often buried deep in

language, religion, custom or folklore –always has some claim on their loyalty and

emotions” (Global Diasporas: An Introduction ix). According to him “a member’s

adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an

inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with

others of a similar background” (ix). He adds that “diaspora signified a collective

trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile” (ix). However,

as john McLeod points out, not all those who share an emotional bond with the ‘old

country’, or all those who live in a diaspora have experienced migration, as in the

case of second generation diasporic communities who are assimilated into the

culture of the country they inhabit, and as they have the legal claim for being the

natural citizens of that country if they happen to be born in that country as in the

US (Beginning Postcolonialism 207). Cohen also adds four extra traits to the details

already furnished by Safran (Global Diasporas 24-25).

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1. Diasporas may consist of groups that scatter for aggressive or

voluntarist purposes, such as revolutionary minorities fighting for an

imaginary homeland as well as those travelling for commercial trade.

2. Diaspora and diasporic consciousness are predicated upon a “strong tie

to the past or a block to assimilation in the present and future”.

3. Diasporas are defined positively and not just negatively, and diasporic

consciousness involves a “recognition of the positive virtues of

retaining a diasporic identity”. Cohen also considers the “tension

between an ethnic, a national and a transnational identity” as a

“creative, enriching one”.

4. “Members of a diaspora characteristically sense not only a collective

identity in a place of settlement, nor again only a relationship with an

imagined, putative or real homeland, but also a common identity with

co-ethnic members in other countries”.

Diasporic literature has undergone an evolutionary process over the years

and has switched its concerns, altered its shape, shifted its sensibilities, reinvented

its tone and appeal. According to Khachig Tololyan the following five features

characterize and constitute any diaspora:

1. The paradigmatic diaspora forms due to coercion that leads to the

uprooting and resettlement outside the boundaries of the homeland of

large number of people, often of entire communities. This is to be

juxtaposed to the voluntary and cumulative emigration of individuals

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or small groups, which can also result in the formation of dispersion

and enclaves in host countries. Just what causes ‘coercion’ becomes an

important issue for contemporary appropriation of the term.

2. A diaspora results from the departure of a group that already has a

clearly delimited identity in its homeland. This notion emphasizes the

preservation and / or discontinuous evolution of a single, previously

available identity and tends to overlook the possibility that quite

loosely related populations possessed of many different locally

circumscribed identities in their homelands are regarded as ‘one’ in the

host land.

3. Diaspora communities’ activities maintain a collective memory which is

a foundational element of their distinct identity. In some cases, the

collective memory is embodied in a text, i.e., the Old Testament for the

Jews.

4. Like other ethnic groups, of which they may be a special and distinct

case, diasporas patrol their communal boundaries either on their own

volition or at the insistence of ruling majorities of the host countries,

who do not wish to assimilate them.

5. Diasporic communities care about maintaining communication with

each other. Individuals living in different diasporic communities stay

in touch with kinfolk and with family and with often quite formalized

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obligation and friendship networks in the homeland (“Rethinking

Diaspora(s)” 3, italics added).

N. Jayaram says that migration is not mere physical displacement. Migrants

carry with them a socio cultural baggage which among other things consists of a

predefined identity, a set of religious beliefs and practices, a framework of norms

and values governing family and kinship organization, food habits and language

(The Indian Diaspora: Dynamics of Migration 16). But it can be seen that these

notions have not remained sacrosanct in the evolution of diasporas over the years.

The identities that migrants carry with them to a foreign land undergo

transformation because identity is constructed not by familial values alone but by

environment and other social factors. As these factors change, the identity that such

factors aid to construct also would change. Identity cannot be retained just by

memories of the past alone, since people are more responsive to the current

movements in the society than to memory.

Issues of identity, ethnicity, culture, language, traditions, idea of home etc.

are deeply related to the discussions of diaspora and their literature. Said remarks

that it is not easy for an exile to maintain a predefined identity. While others take

one’s identity for granted, it is not that easily preserved by an exile. Preserving an

identity as a socially fashionable icon may be easier but having to enclose oneself to

the habit of a particular order is not easily done, especially in politically troubled,

racially conscious spaces. Talking about the plight of Palestinians Said says:

“Identity- who we are, and where we come from, what we are- is difficult to

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maintain in exile. Most other people take their identity for granted. Not the

Palestinian, who is required to show proofs of identity more or less constantly”

(“After the Last Sky” 16). Said’s discourse on identity though unabashedly

subjective and reveals his empathy for the Palestinians, is significant. Having to

maintain an identity with the help of an identity card is to strip one of the basic

human dignity which is central to the concept of identity. On the other end,

Anthony K. Appiah introduces the case of ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ who believe that

the disappearance of old cultural forms will always give birth to new ones, so there

is nothing to worry about (“Against National Culture” 176). Treating the concept of

identity in a historical perspective Stuart Hall says that “identities are names we

give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the

narratives of the past” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 225). For Hall, identities

are not static givens, but are constructed according to the manner in which human

subjects are positioned. Bill Ashcroft endorses the perspective of Hall as he says

that identity is “inextricable from the transformative conditions of material life”,

and “is not a fixed essence at all but a matter of positioning. . . [T]he means of

representing cultural identity includes . . . strategies for consuming these products”.

Besides, “cultural identity does not exist outside representation” (Postcolonial

Transformation 4-5). Significantly, a long distance has been covered by these

theorists from the time of Tololyan.

Said uses terms like exile, refugee, expatriate and émigré with different

connotations. He defines each of them quite cogently as follows:

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Exile originated in the age old practice of banishment. Once banished,

the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of

being an outsider. . . the word “refugee” has become a political one,

suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring

urgent international assistance, whereas the exile carries with it , I

think, a touch of solitude and spirituality. Expatriates may share in

the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its

rigid proscriptions. Émigrés enjoy an ambiguous status. Technically,

an émigré is anyone who emigrates to a new country. Choice in the

matter is certainly a possibility (Reflections on Exile and Other

Literary and Cultural essays 181).

Said’s definition of exile comes close to Tololyan’s view that diaspora

formation is caused by coercion, or forced exile. However, as one examines the

attributes which Tololyan identifies to be characteristic of diasporas, one cannot but

raise queries regarding their validity in the present day context. Tololyan

distinguishes diasporic people as those who are coercively ousted from a country

and those who willfully emigrate for economic, professional or for other reasons. The

contemporary practice is to identify all people who move away from one’s country of

birth for a considerable period, whatever the reason be, as diaspora. William Safran

says: “today, ‘diaspora’, and more specifically ‘diasporic community’ seem

increasingly to be used as metaphoric designations for several categories of people –

expatriates, expellers, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and

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racial minorities tout court” (Ghosh and Chatterjee, Indian Diaspora in Asian and

Pacific Regions 18). There is also the practice of using the term diaspora exclusively

for the literary community which functions outside its own country of birth,

whereas the expression Non Resident Indian (NRI) (as far as India is concerned)

addresses people who are engaged in non literary activities in foreign locations.

NRIs in UK and the USA are also called as ‘resident aliens’7.

The second point of contention is about the claim that diasporas maintain

previously available identities. This trait was valid in the early part of the

migration history especially among the Jews because of the interests and concerns

Jews shared among themselves. The patterns of formation as well as the concerns of

contemporary diasporas are heterogeneous. They are not particular about their

previous identities, since there are ample opportunities for the evolution of their

identities in a global dimension. In the wake of globalization and the information

boom, the distance between cultures has diminished such that discussions dwell

around world culture rather than national cultures. There is greater interaction

among people all over the globe. Advanced technology has made it possible for

anyone to be in touch with anyone else anywhere at any time. The hazard of

physical distance is not a barrier for people to interact, as the virtual space has

opened up great avenues for global diasporas as to everyone else. Facilities like

video phones, live internet chatting with web cameras and other online interactions

have reduced the sense of displacement (if any) that diasporic people once suffered

from. The electronic mobilization of the diaspora constitutes what Arjun Appadurai

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addresses as ‘diasporic public spheres’ (Modernity 4). Ananda Mitra says that

diasporic people including Indians are increasingly using these technologies to re –

create a sense of virtual community through a rediscovery of their commonality

(“Virtual Commonality” 58). Yet it would not be wise to say that these contraptions

and facilities have entirely taken away the ‘cultural shock’ resulting from the

feeling of rootlessness of the diasporic people regarding geographical displacement8.

Still, the role of technology in the lives of the diaspora cannot be underrated. The

claim that diasporas have predefined identities cannot hold in the present as

identity is not a static given but a transformative idea.

The element of nostalgia that is often said to characterize diasporic

communities has dwindled with the arrival of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon

holds that ‘any recall of the past must, by definition, be sentimental nostalgia’ is a

reductive and naïve notion (A Poetics of Postmodernism 30). Nostalgia is generated

as a result of the inability to belong completely and feel at home in a different place

or time. Besides, nostalgia may be felt severely when one is forcefully ousted from a

geographical space as in the case of Edward Said who says: “To me, nothing more

painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many

displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have

kept in motion all these years” (Out f Place 217). As Camille A. Nelson says, to

claim a home is not only a territorial process, but also an emotional and psychic one

(“Adrift in the Diaspora” 182). In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and

Cultural essays (2001) Said says: “What is true of all exile is not that home and love

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are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both” (171). In Said’s

perspective, the exilic subjectivity is constituted by the sense of loss. Said here is

less open to the merits of being homeless, and is more conscious of its

disadvantages. The difference between exiles and other voluntary diasporas may be

that while the former is forcefully ousted from a territory; the latter opts to be away

from it. While the latter has the freedom and free will to go back to the place which

one left, the former is less free, or is not free at all to return to the place one left.

It may be possible to distinguish diasporas into two categories. Those who

cherish ‘the myth of return’ and those who are free from all such bonds with the

territory one happened to be born in. The reasons for the wish to come back to one’s

own homeland are many. In a world that is heavily driven by economic concerns,

having a pecuniary edge over others may make one more acceptable and hence

powerful. S. L. Sharma categorically states that people go abroad chiefly motivated

by economic motive (“Perspectives” 61). Ghosh and Chatterjee also comment that

‘‘historians typically address migration as a symptom of economic change’’ (20).

Diasporic writers, when they return to their homelands, are consciously or

unconsciously propelled by the urge to be more acceptable by the people around.

The desire to belong and to be accepted by society is asserted by Fanon in Black

Skin, White Masks (1967): “All I wanted was to be a man among other men” (113).

People of foreign geographical spaces where diasporic writers reside may look down

upon them as people deprived of the advantage of ‘being at home’ or as less powerful

than themselves. Ironically once these diasporic people return to the country of

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their origin they are held to be powerful in most cases as many of them are

financially much better off than most of the local people.

Being far from ‘home’ is not without any advantage for Said. Critical

judgment is easier for one who is able to leave the critiqued space. Physical

distancing would facilitate one to be free from obsessions. In Orientalism Said says:

“The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to

judge it, and the whole world as well with the spiritual detachment and generosity

necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien

cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance” (259). Crossing

borders would equip one with “a double perspective that never sees things in

isolation” (Said, Representations of the Intellectual 58).

The synonymous use of the terms expatriation and immigration may be

problematic. It can be said that expatriation focuses on the native land that has

been left behind, while immigration denotes the country into which one has

ventured as an immigrant. Stainslaw Barnezak states that ‘exile’, ‘emigrant’ and

‘expatriate’ are sad prefixes that conjure up “states of exclusion”. While the

expatriate lives on his ‘ex’ status, the immigrant celebrates his present in the new

country (quoted in P. A. Abraham, “Crisis of Unbelonging in Some Expatriate

Stories from the Canadian and Indian Context” 49 – 50). The condition of diasporic

writers is perceptively commented on by Tej. N. Dhar:

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Whether writers go into exile for aesthetic or economic considerations,

or just for fanciful reasons, their narratives of reconstruction of their

home and country are generally less painful and more playful, less

emotional and more intellectual. Invariably they are also characterized

by a high degree of artifice and cleverness (“Reconstructing Time and

Experience” 70).

Rushdie himself has stated that “literature has little or nothing to do with a

writer’s home address”, (Dhar, 70) which shows that the obsessive longing for ‘home’

that characterized early diasporas has given way to literary cosmopolitanism. There

are some theorists who believe that the state of exile is necessary for creative

writing. Amarjit Singh holds the view that expatriation is an ‘absolute precondition’

for an author to ‘create’ (quoted in Sampat, “Old and New Expatriate Indian

English Novelists: An overview” 263). Diasporic experience is not one of ‘loss of

home and language’ as it was for Conrad in the opinion of Said, but an enriching

experience. Said himself concurred with this view when he stated that “[t]he exile

knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional.

Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can

also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross

borders, break barriers of thought and experience” (Reflections on Exile and Other

Literary and Cultural essays 185). He says: “most people are principally aware of

one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this

plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an

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awareness [that is] contrapuntal” (186). Manju Sampat arraying a vast number of

novels and expatriate novelists claim that all of them are using the ‘double

perspective” of their expatriation to advantage (“Old and New Expatriate Indian

English Novelists: An Overview” 272).

Tololyan’s third claim is that diasporas maintain collective memory which

serves as a foundational element of their distinct identity. In spite of the

proliferation of postcolonial perspectives on the position of the third world

individual, the collective memories diasporas cherish are often cosmopolitan, which

coexist with a postcolonial outlook. There is a dialectical relationship between

cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism, as the former does not privilege nationalism

and patriotism whereas the latter quite often is rooted in national consciousness

and ‘mother country fixation’- an idea that Naipaul has touched upon in The Middle

Passage (1963). Naipaul was a Trinidad East Indian who could not come to terms

with the Negro – Creole world or with the East Indian world of Trinidad. He was

unhappy with the grayness of England and did not find a home in India where he

had been in search of ancestral roots. The Middle Passage is the result of his

attempt to reconnect himself with the landscape of his childhood and to assess the

reasons for his self chosen exile. The term ‘middle passage’ is a symbol of the

original journey that transplanted the Africans and Indians from their native

environment to the West Indies, and marked the beginning of slavery. It is also a

symbol of the present West Indian attempt to traverse the no-man’s-land between

the culture the people have lost, and are yet to regain. It is this space that Sura P.

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Nath terms as ‘Trishanku”, and identifies as Bhabha’s ‘third space’, a hybrid

location of antagonism, perpetual tension and pregnant chaos (“Homes Abroad:

Diasporic Identities in Third Spaces” 86).

There is a tension also between nationalism and postcolonialism. Laura

Chrisman comments in “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies”:

The culturalist turn of social and literary theory, poststructuralist

critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity – these

encouraged postcolonial studies to view nationalism as a primarily

cultural and epistemological, rather than socio-political formation.

This accompanied the view that nationalism was, as Gayatri

Chakavorty Spivak suggested, ‘a reversed or displaced legitimation of

colonialism’ doomed to repeat the ‘epistemic violence’ of the colonialism

it had rejected (Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion 183).

Tololyan’s argument that diasporas patrol their communal boundaries is

untenable in the present world. The literary diasporas as well as the host

communities at large have directed their concerns beyond communal identities9. It

is significant that many of the cosmopolitan diasporic writers are diplomats or

teachers in globally acclaimed centres of learning or are members of international

bodies for protecting the rights of diverse classes of people, and so on. Rushdie is

considered more as a South Asian than a Muslim. His Muslim identity surfaced

prominently only in relation with the debates on his Satanic Verses (1989). He has

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severely critiqued his own community’s practices, which would have been

impossible had the host communities ostracized him. As O. P. Mathur says,

Rushdie, though a Muslim, mocks at the paraphernalia of prayer and sympathizes

with his grandfather’s decision not to pray, “unable to believe in a God whose

existence he could not wholly disbelieve” (Midnight’s Children 6). He also makes fun

of the institution of ‘purdha’ in the episode of the perforated sheet (Book One, “The

Perforated Sheet”) and criticizes narrow communalism for which Saleem’s

grandfather threw out a tutor (77). Rather than communal identities, diasporic

writers are conscious of their international identity, which is largely constructed not

though communal practices but literary, social and political engagements. Besides,

if diasporas maintain communication with each other, it is due to sociological needs

as is applicable to all human beings who, as Aristotle identified, are ‘social animals’.

Tololyan’s views were based on the Jewish diaspora, and the features of modern

diasporas cannot be analyzed wholly in terms of his perspectives. The attitude

toward the home country, mother tongue and cultural practices has changed in the

course of time. The home oriented diasporas have been replaced by cosmopolitan

diasporas in the postmodern times, and there is a ‘reversal of nostalgia’.

Nostalgia has been replaced by a celebration of migrancy in the postmodern

times. Postmodernity critically confronts the past with the present, and vice versa.

As Hutcheon states, if nostalgia connotes evasion of the present, idealization of a

(fantasy) past, or a recovery of that past as Edenic, then the postmodernist ironic

rethinking of history is definitely not nostalgic (A Poetics of Postmodernism 39). She

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later adds that “postmodern historicism is willfully unencumbered by nostalgia in

its critical dialogical reviewing of the forms, contexts and values of the past” (89).

As we explore the course of development of Indian diasporic writers we come

across traits that run counter to the notions espoused by Tololyan. For Walter

Conner, contemporary diasporas are free from the feeling of rootlessness and

nostalgia. He simply addresses them as “that segment of a people living outside

homeland” (Ghosh and Chatterjee, Indian Diaspora in Asian and Pacific Regions

17). John Roosa and Ayu Ratih state that the theoretical field of postcolonialism

has been delimited in such a way as to privilege the concerns of migrancy, diaspora,

hybridity, the ‘double vision’ of the exile, and the uncertainties of belonging. The

foregrounfded figure of the postcolonial is that of the writer from a former colony

who has a long experience of living in the west, someone who has made what Said

calls ‘the voyage in’ (“Solipsism or Solidarity: The Nation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer

and Salman Rushdie” 2681). However, there is a distinction between the diasporas

of old times and the contemporary times. The ‘old’ diasporas are different in many

respects from the ‘new’ ones10. The old diasporas were formed during the colonial

period, at the peak of capitalism. The new diasporas are the result of postcolonial or

transnational late capital.

“Migrancy”, for Andrew Smith, is “the name for the condition of human

beings as such, a name for how we exist and understand ourselves in the twenty-

first century” (Lazarus, The Cambridge companion 247). Smith points out that

there has been “a growing uncertainty over nationalism” and tries to establish “a

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link between the loss of hope in anti-colonial nationalism and migration” (247).

Referring to the works of Salman Rushdie and Homi K. Bhabha, Smith says that

“migration and exile are associated with the establishment of the truth that truth is

relative, that no knowledge can ever be certain. Rushdie himself is in many respects

the archetype of those who have, in his own words, ‘been forced by cultural

displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties’” (248).

Tabish Khair says that writers like Rushdie have been engaged in a ‘celebration of

migrancy’. Khair refers to the perceptive comments of Aijaz Ahmad:

Rushdie’s idea of ‘migrancy’ which is quite central to his self

representation both in fiction and in life has come to us in two

versions. In the first version, fully present in Shame (1983) and in the

writings that come at more or less the same time, migrancy is given to

us as an ontological condition of all human beings, while the ‘migrant’

is said to have ‘floated upwards from history’. In the second version the

myth of ontological unbelonging is replaced by another, larger myth of

‘excess’ of belonging: not that he belongs nowhere, but that he belongs to

too many places (“Rushdie’s Recipe for Newness: What’s Burning?” 65,

italics added).

Khair holds that there is an element of bourgeois complacency, elitism and a

Europe based intellectual radicalism in the ‘self – exile’ of Rushdie, shying away

from affirmative action by ‘other’ sections of society (65).

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The second category of diaspora is unaffected by ‘homeland’, and they happen

to be dominant enough in the adopted territory with their financial and professional

excellence. Being influential enough in the host society, they are not perturbed by

feeling of rootlessness. They are respected, accepted and are integral to the adopted

space and they do not wish to return to their homelands. As Bhabha says, there is

“no necessary or eternal belongingness” for them (The Location of Culture 179).

Camille A. Nelson holds that many Jamaican immigrants return to their native

place because they are economically privileged, and their current financial status

surpasses their previous status in their respective communities. Such people have

accumulated capital from the same systems that have impoverished their siblings

home (“Adrift in the Diaspora” 183). Ashis Gupta reasons that he did not want to

return to the homeland because he “had grown tired of standing in long lines”

himself “to buy rationed rice, wheat and sugar”. He “had grown equally weary of

sending out” his “young servant to stand in line for rations or do other chores that

was part of living” in the home country (“The Extraordinary Composition of the

Expatriate Writer” 41). Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak once commented in an

interview: “If there is one thing I distrust, in fact more than distrust, despise and

have contempt for, it is people looking for roots” (The Post-Colonial critic 93). These

comments reveal that the old nostalgic diasporas have become history.

Malashri Lal refers to the fact that both Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh

refuse to be labeled as ‘diaspora’ or ‘resident’ (Dislocations 106). So is the case with

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Pico Iyer, who moves beyond the notion of citizenship, to talk about the ‘global soul’.

He writes:

A person like me can’t really call himself an exile (who traditionally

looked back to a home now lost), or an expatriate (who’s generally

posted abroad for a living), I’m not really a nomad (whose patterns are

guided by the seasons and tradition), and I have never been subject to

the refugee’s violent disruptions; the global soul is best characterized

by the fact of falling between categories” (Jasbir Jain, Dislocations

247).

Iyer has stated on a different occasion that ‘globo-culturalsm’ has led to the

phenomenon whereby the expatriate writers are ‘international citizens’11. Iyer has

been consistent in identifying the features of contemporary expatriates as is

evidenced in his works composed in different times. Minoli Salgado claims that

whereas writers like G. V. Desani, Samuel Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Kamala

Markandaya present us with highly individual and personalized perceptions of the

migrant condition, “Rushdie’s presentation of it involves an act of deliberate

cultural dislocation, a dispersal of the local specificities of his own rootlessness into

the abstractions of metaphor such that he can claim in his study of The Wizard of

Oz that it is not so much that there is ‘no place like home’ but that there is ‘no place

as home’” (“Migration and mutability” 38). Though Rushdie states in Shame (1983)

that “Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our

places” (86), he does not build up an opposition between rootedness and rootlessness

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in which the latter is privileged. Salgado later adds that Rushdie’s rootlessness is

part and parcel of his self perception as an internationalist belonging to too many

places at once (“Migration and mutability” 39).

Salman Rushdie in “The Location of Brazil” states that migration redefines

human identity:

The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new

types of human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather

than places, in memories as much as in material things, people who

have been obliged to define themselves – because they are so defined

by others – by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange

fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and

where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having

experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory

nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier (reprinted in

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 – 1991)

S. Padmanabhan holds that this rootlessness is the direct outcome of the

destruction of the old order in colonial societies by imperialist policies. Their

communal solidarity and sense of unconditional belonging which pre-colonial

cultures took for granted, have disappeared. The loss of this sense of belonging has

affected every form of society- from the family to the religious congregation. Though

the forms themselves have not vanished, they are no more simply given. They are

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now under siege and have to be force-fed and defended. More and more people have

been facing this sense of insecurity in their hearts- a lack of assurance that they

belong to anyone, anything, anywhere (“The Inheritance of Caliban” 13).

When diasporic people are discussed, there used to have a tendency to be

excessively imaginative and sentimental, without considering the fact that human

subjects are capable of having transnational identities. Edward Said was used to

the practice of mythifying the space of one’s birth and growth when he said that the

coercive displacement of people would result in an “unhealable rift forced between a

human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”, and “its

essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Out of Place 217). In Out There:

Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (1990) Said again states that exile on

the Twentieth –century scale is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to

experience, and as a phenomenon, is irremediably secular and unbearably historical

(357 - 358). Vijay Mishra comments on the role of memory and the need to mythify:

“Without memory, without a sense of loss, without a certain will to mythologize, life

for many displaced people will become intolerable and diaspora theory would lose

its ethical edge” (Jain, Dislocations 245).

But what Uma Parameswaran writes in her narrative “Home is where your

feet are, and may your heart be there too” (2003) shows that the era of ‘nostalgia’ is

only a trait of the past and upholds the cosmopolitanism of the contemporary

diaspora she is a part of:

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Some never grow past the phase of nostalgia. Romanticizing one’s

native land has a place, so long as it does not paralyze one’s capacity to

develop new bonds within one’s adopted homeland. Nostalgia as the

only sustenance can become quite toxic, vitiating the living stream into

a stagnant cesspool (32).

One may contend that it is the desire for power that motivates diasporic

writers to metaphorically ‘return’ to their homelands and reconstruct histories of

them in their literature. Diasporic (hi)stories are not apolitical or ahistorical

exercises aimed at innocent construction of alternative versions of national

histories. They are political and power-oriented discourses. “Historiographic

metafiction” does not engage in simplistic mimesis. Instead, fiction is offered as

another of the discourses by which we construct our versions of reality, and both the

construction and the need for it are what are foregrounded in the postmodernist

novel”, says Linda Hutcheon (A Poetics of Postmodernism 40). Narrating a space

gives one power over it since narration itself is an assertion of power. The

Expatriate writers negotiate a new literary space, and writing ‘becomes the space’

for a diasporic writer. Constructing history endows one not only with a past but also

a future. That is why diasporic cosmopolitans are so much devoted to history

making practices. Doctorow says that “history is [a] kind of fiction in which we live

and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history - - - by which the

available data for the composition is seen to be greater and more various in its

sources than the historian supposes” (Trenner Ed., E. L Doctorow: Essays and

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Conversations 25). This is a Foucauldian ‘exercise of power’ which is not content

with mere ‘possession of power’. Articulation of power over a space by narrating it,

reconstructing its history and fantasizing it is what Rushdie, Tharoor and Seth

have done through their literary oeuvre. Greenblatt in “The Improvisation of

Power” (1990) illustrates that a common way for one person to achieve power over

another is to enter into that other person’s narrative of identity, to see it and

understand it as a fiction, and to subvert it to achieve his ends (Renaissance Self-

Fashioning 222-54). That is what the cosmopolitan diasporic writers also do through

their fictional (hi)stories as well.

Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel brings out the politics of historicizing. The

novel has an intrinsic power to captivate its readers both as a text that tells a

contemporary tale and as a text born out of a text. This perhaps arises from the fact

that contemporary political events as well as the episodes of the great epic

Mahabharatha which form the two basic components in the novel exercise an

irresistible power over the reader’s mind, particularly that of Indian readers.

It is necessary to address the attributes of cosmopolitanism before making

further attempts at identifying the cosmopolitan elements in the fictions of Indian

diasporic writers like Rushdie, Tharoor and Seth. Wikipedia, the online

encyclopedia defines cosmopolitanism as

… the ideal that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community.

This is contrasted with communitarian theories, in particular the

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ideologies of patriotism and nationalism. Cosmopolitanism may or may

not entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to

more inclusive, moral, economic, and/or political relationship between

nations or individuals of different nations ( xxxxx ).

Rushdie remained and continued in England as his parents migrated to

Pakistan, because it was his cherished dream (Dhar, “Reconstructing Time and

Experience 76). Nationalist feeling was no hindrance to his continued stay there.

Malashri Lal recounts Khushwant Singh addressing the younger Indian diasporic

writers as “five star exiles”, and Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Farukh Dhondy and

Pico Iyer saying that they were people everywhere, and “home” was an unsuitable

code of reference in the fast paced cyber – world (“Trends in Contemporary Indian

Writing in English” 103). Dhar says that Rushdie’s decision to write about India

after the failure of his first novel was the result of an elastic bond with India rather

than an emotional one (“Reconstructing. . .” 76). Rushdie’s comment that exiles,

immigrants and expatriates are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to

reclaim, to look back is contrasted with the painful and anguished desire of Said.

Consequently his fictional recreations take a different tone and texture, a

pronounced tilt that emanates out of his consciousness that he cannot reclaim the

past that was lost but only could create “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but

invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indians of the mind” (Rushdie, Imaginary

Homelands 10).

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Rushdie does not reckon history to be sacrosanct but just as one of the many

versions possible. He mixes funny and hilarious episodes into the ‘making’ of

history. In the course his concern turns to the artifact alone and history assumes

only secondary significance. Dhar comments:

A crucial consequence of this is Rushdie’s concentrated focus on the act

of retrieval itself. With a faltering memory and a fragmented vision,

past can be retrieved only in bits and parts. Through ‘broken mirrors’

and ‘fragmented sheets’, it comes through a unique process of

filtration, which admits of opportunities for fun and colour. Rushdie is

so overwhelmingly fascinated by the process of recreation that the past

itself becomes a secondary consideration (“Reconstructing Time and

Experience” 77).

It is imperative to ask why diasporic cosmopolitans privilege history above all

other discourses. R. King opines that “for those who come from elsewhere and

cannot go back, perhaps writing becomes a place to live” (quoted in Salgado

“Migration and mutability” 39). Zulfikar Ghose, who was born in pre-Independence

and pre-partition India, in his Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) recounts how he

was suspected to be a fraud when he returned with a visiting English Cricket team

to his native place after a long gap of nine years as a free lance reporter.

“But this name” many would say, “Zulfikar and Ghose is very odd.

Who are you?”

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But these hurts to my vanity only exaggerated the truth that I

did not belong to any group of people who have allegiance to a country.

The colour of my skin, my educational background and my employers

were all irrelevant. Myself and my loneliness were all that counted.

And they intensified the need to write poetry (italics added 125-26).

It can be seen that narrativizing the diasporic condition is an existentialist

exercise. The existential human subject attempts to achieve some sense out of the

general meaninglessness of the conditions of life by narrativizing them. Diasporic

experiences and national histories are welded together and are narrated as

alternative histories by the cosmopolitan diaspora. Andrew Smith states that there

is a link between narrative and migration:

“If human beings have tended to understand themselves as citizens of

nations or as blood members of ethnic groupings, migration

increasingly exposes the insufficiency of these ways of identifying

ourselves. It reveals these identities as stories which are acted out in

life but which are not unchangeable. It also shows how they often

smother and silence other competing stories. Migrants become

emblematic figures in postcolonial literary studies precisely because

they represent a removal from ‘old’ foundations and from previous

‘grounded’ ways of thinking about identity” Lazarus, The Cambridge

Companion 249).

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According to S. Padmanabhan, sensitive individuals in the Third World have

turned to some form of creative writing in an effort to find a momentary stay

against confusion in the modern chaos. Through their writing, they trace a

fascinating graph of the changes in societies- racial, cultural and political. They

have colonial experience as a common backdrop. Hence, writing is a means for

constructing an ordered world for them (“The Inheritance of Caliban” 14).

Writing being the space of existence for the literary diaspora, they assert and

establish power over the spaces they narrate. Colonial historiographers asserted

power over the colonized by offering biased versions of history; likewise

cosmopolitan diasporic writers through their versions of history make light of

official histories, and demonstrate the fact that history is just stories people tell to

put themselves in power. Reconstructions of history have always been seriously

approached both by the colonized as well as the European imperial masters. Andre

Codrescu notes: “the creations of exiles have gained central part in contemporary

discourse” (The Disappearance of the Outside 93). Having something to say on

history, being able to offer a new version to it is doubtlessly an assertion of power

over the space from which one is physically separated. Brodsky states: “the reality

of (exile) consists of an exiled writer constantly fighting and conspiring to restore

his significance, his leading role, his authority” (quoted by Jain, Dislocations 244).

It is this ability to deal less seriously with high held notions of history,

nationalism and issues of belonging that characterize the modern literary diaspora.

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Rushdie has reasons for articulating his own versions of history that he

reconstructs through memory.

…[Narrative history] selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates,

minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also: but in the end it creates its own

reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and

no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his

own (Midnight’s Children 211).

P. K Rajan says that Tharoor in his The Great Indian Novel provides

us with “a superficial treatment of history (…) in the absence of an adequate

historical vision”. He adds: “The ruling concept of history in the novel seems to be

basically flawed as it sees history as a gorgeous spectacle, a dexterous chess – play

of heroic personages, a splendid pantomime in which men and women move about

in their make – believe world” (“History and Myth in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great

Indian novel” 159). But Rajan has missed the point that the very error spotted out

by him in the novel was not something inadvertent, but was consciously applied to

achieve the very same result. It was the plan of Tharoor to present an alternative

history of India in a less serious and comical manner, so that the novel would be

stripped of the sense of authenticity that any work of history would work hard to

achieve. Like Rushdie who uses history to carve out a space for himself, Tharoor

does not strictly adhere to the canonical versions of history to the distress of

conventional critics. Instead he makes ‘a caricature of the historical events’ and

ignores the ‘borders between myth and history’. Rajan feels that in the hands of

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Tharoor, ‘history becomes a splendid frame without much substance in it, a body

without a soul’ (159).

It is worth pondering over Rushdie’s observation that there is a fundamental

flaw in Indian readers in general that they tend to find allegories in all creative

literatures. In a lecture/interview he stated that “in India allegory is a kind of

disease. You know, everything, even texts, all statements, are interpreted

allegorically” (“Midnight’s Children and Shame: Lecture/interview”, Kunapipi Vol.

7, No. 1 (1985), 3). It may be admitted that Indians have the propensity to make

sense of things through correspondences; associating new things with things they

already know. Literary historians have attested to the overwhelming results

allegorical narratives have yielded to creative writers the world over from the

beginning of the culture of book publishing. Besides, the status of allegorical

narratives has shot up lately. In the opinion of Stephen Slemon this mode is

reckoned to be “the ultimate discourse itself, so that all writing is deemed to be

allegorical and all reading allegorical misreading” (Postcolonial Allegory 157).

Therefore, the principle of allegory is rooted in the principle of “correspondence to

text to the old, authoritative text” which “encourages the reader to look for a tertium

quid, a principle of interpretation to which the correspondence points” (Barney,

Allegories of History 16-17).

As is evident from the title, The Great Indian Novel relies on the

Mahabharatha, the great Indian epic, as its “primary source of inspiration” (6).

Later in the ‘Afterword’ to the novel, Tharoor explicitly states: “Many of the

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characters, incidents and issues in this novel are based on people and events

described in the great epic… a work which remains a perennial source of delight

and inspiration to millions in India” (419). Endorsing the allegorical nature of the

novel, Tharoor states in an essay that it is “an attempt to tell the political history of

20th century India through a fictional recasting of events, episodes and characters

from the Mahabharatha” (“Myth, History and Fiction” 30). As Dhar says, the shape

and sequential drift of the novel is dictated by a text already known to his readers,

and confirming that it is a rational construct predetermined by another work

(“Entering History” 127).

Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy has a lot of historical personalities in it,

and it does give a good picture of the political events during the immediate post

independence years of India. A. K. Singh says that Seth’s use of historical material

is journalistic (“Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy: A Critique” 19). Amit- who is said to

be the alter ego of the novelist in A Suitable Boy- reveals his attitude to historical

reconstruction or restructuring: “We are all accidents of history and must do what

we are best at without fretting too much about it”(1253). Seth has assumed the

ability to surpass the nationalist sense of history. Alberta Fabris Grube comments

about the cosmopolitanism of Seth:

What characterizes this truly cosmopolitan writer is his extreme

liberty in moving effortlessly between different worlds, absorbing what

suits him from different sources in order to create something new

which finds an immediate response in his readers. In other words,

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although his work is rooted in his tradition as well as in deep concern

for finding an equilibrium between the urge of passions and a rational,

positive choice which will not be destructive to the order of society

clearly reveals, Vikram Seth should be appreciated as an artist above

the limits of ‘belonging’ to one country or another (“Vikram Seth” 298).

Seth has always been a true cosmopolitan in all senses of the term. He has

lived in three continents and the experiences his travels accrued to his perspective

of life are tremendous. Seth feels that intimate associations with different nations

would temper the cynical use of national power. In From Heaven Lake (1983) he

says that to learn about another great culture is to enrich one’s life, to understand

one’s own country better, to feel more at home in the world (178).

Rushdie in his Midnight’s Children (1980), Tharoor in his The Great Indian

Novel (1989) and Seth in his A Suitable Boy (1993) present diverse versions of post

independence Indian history. These authors are governed not by the feeling of

rootlessness and unbelonging but feel at ease everywhere. The relative absence of

both nostalgia and obsession with the home country characterize the modern

cosmopolitan diasporas.

The reasons for the gradual dwindling of nostalgia and the sense of

rootlessness from the lives of diaspora may be so accounted, but it is still necessary

to analyze the issue in terms of postcolonialism as well. There is a view that

postmodernism is an ideology strategically programmed by the West for infusing

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post-national sentiment among postcolonial nations to facilitate the colonial agenda

in novel ways. The Marxian dictum that every institution breeds seeds of its own

destruction may be said to function in a reverse direction that with every

revolutionary ideology there would come up ideas that would contribute to the

growth of the ideology it originally resists. Postcolonialism being reckoned to be an

ideology that operates against the colonial exploitation and subjugation of the

developing third world, is dexterously undermined by associative ideologies like

postmodernism. As has already been expatiated, postcolonial theory has at its

centre the nation as an obsession. Postcolonial theory has no existence if it is

removed from the concept and scope of a national space. Postmodernity on the other

hand has no excessive affinity with any idea, and is against the practice of

cherishing any idea as central. It privileges the margins, and in a way the margins

function as the centre, finally making it impossible to have a centre. The practice of

hierarchization that is fundamental to postcolonial theory has no scope in

postmodernity.

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism is in fact

ambiguous. Cosmopolitan sensibility ensues from post-national or non-territorial

consciousness of the geographical location of the human subject. When one is

obsessed with the land of one’s birth, it is impossible for one to feel easy to be

geographically distanced or displaced. Only when one is capable of overlooking one’s

affiliation with the country of one’s origin can that person be said to be

cosmopolitan. Postcolonial thought is ascribed to be biased towards the nationality

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of the subject, for the attempt of the postcolonial writer is said to privilege the

position of the once-colonized territory against the exploitative strategies of the

colonizers. Whereas a cosmopolitan feels at home anywhere in the world, a

postcolonial feels at home and composed only when the nation breaks free from the

theoretical and historical constructions of the colonial powers. The colonial residue

that lingers in all realms of life is to be wiped out for the postcolonial to celebrate

the cultural and historical significance of the native land which was so far

obfuscated and devalued by the colonial powers. The polyvalent trait of

cosmopolitanism is that it also functions to dilute the sense of nationalism, whereas

the foundation of postcolonialism may be reckoned to be nationalism as well as

patriotism.

When the term ‘postcolonial’ is employed, it strongly labels the country so

addressed as one still defined by colonial experience and the colonizer or the

experience of colonization still becomes the centre12. So even in the term

postcolonialism there is a colonial agenda, because when this term is used it

cements up the binary construction ‘colonizer/postcolonial’, the politics of which has

been dealt with by Said three decades back13. Post structural theory proposes that

there can be no transcendental signified, an ultimate referent as far as

communication is concerned. The use of terms which are central to postcolonial

thought like ‘identity’, ‘nationality’, ‘selfhood’, ‘authenticity’ etc… would sound

ironic in this context, as postcolonial theory draws from the poststructuralist

denunciation of the binary constructing practice of structuralist thought. These

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terms cannot be said to denote fixed meanings, as post structuralism as well as

postmodernism has rejected the possibility of ever attaining a transcendental

meaning. Besides, meaning of a term always anticipates its binary opposite

according to Derrida’s scheme of ‘dissemination14’ and ‘trace15’. Whereas

dissemination refers to the endless chainlike process of signification of a sign, trace

refers to the residual properties that remain after ‘erasure’ that occurs as language

attempts to emphasize meaning.

Annamaria Carusi comments: “postcolonialism lays itself open to a

recolonization by its very dependence on the notion of the subject as a humanist

subject and therefore inherits the limitations of the imperialist subject” (Post, Post

and Post 84). The postcolonial period may also be considered as a period of

neocolonialism, which operates with the assistance of ideologies like

multiculturalism and postmodernism.

The sense of nostalgia which often is ascribed to the diaspora has been

commoditized in the postcolonial, market oriented literature, film and other popular

media. Packaging and exporting Indian culture, they are addressed to the hopes

and aspirations of global Indian citizens who have profited from globalization, but

who are in search of an identity. Pratibha Umashankar in “Pop Patriotism,

Designer Nationalism and Choreographed Nostalgia in Bollywood Films in the

Light of Transnationalism and Globalization” discusses at length how patriotism

had always been a weak spot for the Indian audiences16. Consequently, films based

on the Independence struggle, and later, the partition formed the staple themes of

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Bollywood films in the pre and post-independence era. As the fervour of the freedom

struggle faded, it made way for romances. But films with patriotic overtones, where

the decadent West was pitted against the culturally rich and virtuous East

continued to be made. This, in turn, was replaced by films with Pakistan-bashing as

the central theme.

With sporadic peace overtures being made between India and Pakistan, and

with a sizable audience on the other side of the border, it soon became

unfashionable to tar the neighbour with the terrorist brush. So, invoking the

specters of the martyrs of the independence movement became all the rage in film

industry. Hence a spate of Bhagat Singh films and Mangal Pandey: The Rising. But

somewhere along the way, the film makers realized that the theme of naive and

overt pan-patriotism had been milked dry, and that there is a vast paying audience

among the NRIs, be it in the Middle East, the US, the UK, Canada, Australia or

elsewhere. Indian filmmakers, therefore, evolved a new brand of pop patriotism,

choreographed nationalism and designer nostalgia, especially aimed at and

targeting the vast Indian diaspora.

But, the interest that Indian diaspora evinces in Indian tradition and culture

is an ambiguous one. As Umashankar asks, if the diaspora feels so much concern

and love for India, why do they still remain in a foreign country, rather than come

back and do something to improve conditions here. The answer is a bit disturbing,

that everyone is free to feel patriotic from a distance, without dirtying one’s hands

in the cesspool of reality. Besides, the films produced with the aim of capitalizing on

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the Indian diaspora, are largely shot outside India in fancy locales, which NRIs can

identify themselves with. These films are primarily romantic family dramas that

reflect either the lives and aspirations of the NRIs or evoke nostalgia and a feeling

of patriotism. They dole out generous doses of nationalistic fervour in the form of

the national anthem, the national flag, Indian weddings and festivals. The rich and

evocative visuals are choreographed to make NRIs homesick. But by the same

token, watching these scenes gratifies a deep-rooted longing in us. On this longing

of an Indian for his homeland rests the commercial success of Bollywood

blockbusters like Kabhie Khushi Kabhi Gham, Pardes and Dil Wale Dulhaniyan

Lejayenge. Their popularity is guaranteed abroad because they address something

fundamentally vulnerable in the NRIs. They are facile, escapist and pseudo Indian

and help the great Indian diaspora reaffirm its Indianness.

When Rani Mukherjee, who has returned to India from UK in Kuch Kuch

Hota Hai sings a bhajan, much to the surprise of the other college students, she

sends a strong message that she has managed to remain untouched by Western

influence, and is still a typical desi at heart. Similarly, when a school kid takes to

the stage in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and instead of singing Do ré me, sings

Jana gana mana, albeit with a foreign accent, one can be sure that multiplexes

across the world would ring with the sound of applause of the Indians, who are

trying to hold back their tears. In the same film, strangely enough, the heroine first

makes her entry waving the Indian tricolour because India has won a cricket match.

Cricket and patriotism is a heady combination that no NRI can resist, and the

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movie makers know it! In Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayenge, Amrish Puri, a successful

businessman, while feeding pigeons in London dreams of the swaying fields of

Punjab; a scene guaranteed to tug at the heartstrings of all Indians away from

home. These are not patriotic films, but candy floss romances. The patriotic element

is slipped in surreptitiously amid the romance and extravaganza of glittering

ghagra cholis and kurtas. It is a shallow brand of nationalism that touches us only

at a very superficial level. The commoditization of diasporic nostalgia and

consciousness of nationality needs to be approached as manifestations of internal

colonialism and neocolonialism.

The term ‘neocolonialism’ was popularized by Kwame Nkrumah in 1960s

with reference to the continuing influence colonialism exerted in the third world

societies (Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back 95). Though half a century has

elapsed since Nkrumah’s identification of the continuant colonial presence in the

colonized spaces, the global scenario has not altered significantly. It may be

adequate to examine the hitherto neglected clauses in the definitions of imperialism

in the contemporary context. It has also got to be clarified as to how the colonial

projects for the exploitation of the ‘third world’ have programmatically switched its

purview, from the subjectification of indigenous communities or maintenance of

political control over geographical and national territories, to non-territorial spaces.

It is a sine qua non for understanding the formative principles of cosmopolitanism

among diasporic writers.

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A mode of remote controlled colonization still operates in the ‘third world’,

aided and abetted by the discourses of globalization and neoliberalism. Besides, the

notion of colonization as a fundamentally nation - centred project performed for the

advantage of any distinct nation is also put on trial, since nationalism and its

cognates commenced to erode with the arrival of the postcolonial17. Transnational

corporations have plugged up the slots that were formerly occupied by colonizers.

Nation primarily is a concept based on territory. The Oxford Advanced

Learners Dictionary defines the word ‘nation’ as “a country considered as a group of

people with the same language, culture and history, who live in a particular area

under one government”. Hence, if a group of people are to be admitted to belong to a

nation, they should be living in a particular area which could be geographically

mapped. But this idea does not have the same validity it earlier had. Though

geographical territory is a highly political category which is strategically significant,

in the postmodern age, it becomes only a part of the categories that define one’s

identity. Benedict Anderson’s view that nation is an imagined community

unfailingly hits the mark. Nationalism would remain deep rooted only if the idea of

nation remained firm in the minds of the subjects18. The centrality of the nation is a

myth of the colonial period, which gradually disappeared in the postcolonial era.

Post structuralism with its distrust of the centre, and postmodernism with its

privileging of the margins have put on trial the relevance of national boundaries

and hence, commitment to any particular territory.

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Nation is a grand narrative which did make sense in the colonial period19.

With the advent of free market economy, IT revolution and globalization, the nature

and profile of the diaspora have changed. The contemporary diaspora is largely

constituted by the new generation of economic migrants. They are unlike the forced

indentured labourers of earlier periods but have left their homelands voluntarily for

better conditions of life. The transition from colonial period to the postcolonial,

postmodern century has almost made it difficult for anyone to be as nationalistic as

before. Increased movement of capital, people, knowledge, and culture across

borders in recent years has given rise to a vast Indian diaspora, which views itself

as being transnational and belonging to the global citizenry. When we interrogate

the discourse of diaspora that endorses the salutary effects of globalization and

migration, the answers could be uncomfortable, because, the attitude towards

globalization is usually celebratory, and does not always fit well with nationalism.

Colonization, in the vein of imperialism, is an exploitative mechanism which

has been attested to be the ‘highest stage of capitalism’ by Lenin. As he expatiates

on the attributes of imperialism, one is acutely made conscious of the incontestable

affiliations he thinks imperialism shares with geographical territories. Lenin says:

Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the

domination of monopoly and finance capital has taken shape; in which

the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the

division of the world by international trusts has begun; and in which

the partition of the territory of the earth by the greatest capitalist

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countries has been completed (quoted by Woodfin, Introducing

Marxism 93, italics added).

Lenin’s idea of imperialism as one that functions only with the prerequisite of

domination over territorial spaces by a national ‘other’ is evidenced by the

vocabulary he employs in defining the phenomenon. The presence of the ‘other’ is

important and necessary for the definition of the self. In Margins of Philosophy

Jacques derrida says: “Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other.

Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition,

its production” (x). The West has habitually ‘othered’ the East over centuries, to

facilitate domination.

Timothy Brennen states, “Imperialism is a later and more systematic

organization of the foreign exploitation pioneered by colonialism….Imperialism

makes the process begun by colonialism more efficient and generalized”.

Colonialism, for Brennen, is located in the period before imperialism. In a

categorical way he asserts that “imperialism can and does involve military invasion

and/or occupation”’ (“From Development to Globalization” 135-136, italics added).

Brennen’s notion of imperialism is also inextricably mixed up with the idea of

authority over geographical spaces. The impulse behind imperialism and

colonialism being capital, which was often identified to be the natural resources

obtained from land, territories used to be of vital import in the early history of

colonization. Having power over land assured easy access to capital, and the growth

of colonization can be identified as a struggle for territories. The Latin word

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‘imperium’ itself means ‘territory’. Pitched battles were fought and war cries were

sounded for domination over land20.

The history of the world as has been analyzed by Karl Marx has passed

through the stages of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. Marxian ideology

purported to liquidate all rights of property in land and rights of inheritance

(Woodfin, Introducing Marxism 4). His notion of a bourgeois was one inevitably with

power over land. Ownership of land separated one from the other and led to

exploitation of the latter by the former. Marxian analysis was very much rooted in

the nineteenth century realities and could not have anticipated the course of

history. Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia comment that “imperialism refers to the

formation of an empire, and as such has been an aspect of all periods of history in

which one nation has extended its domination over one or several neighbouring

nations (Edward Said 89-90).” Here too, nations are conceived of as geographical

categories. Said’s definition of imperialism, they think, is one that specifically

invokes effects of culture. For Said, imperialism is “the practice, theory and the

attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory”, which they

recognize to be distinct from colonialism which is “the implanting of settlements on

a distant territory” (89-90). Colonization was a programme that thrived on

conquering the territories of various countries for sheer exploitation under the

claims of ‘civilizing missions’.

Said’s preoccupation with geographical spaces become clearer here:

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Underlying social and cultural ‘spaces’ are ‘territories, lands,

geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings’ of the

imperial contest, for geographical possession of land is what empire is

about. Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the

primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory (Quoted

by Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 95-96, italics added).

All these thinkers and theorists are obsessed with the material reality of

geographical territories as a prerequisite for colonization and imperialism. Though

imperialism and colonialism at their inception and early stages of development

were inextricably linked with geographical or territorial subjectification and

exploitation of the colonized, since the advent of postmodernism, imperialism has

had to focus on less problematic non-territorial spaces for ensuring and continuing

with its exploitative projects. Since the arrival of postcoloniality- referring to the

period following the transfer of power over national territories to the indigenous

(elite) communities- colonialism operates not by establishing power over

geographical spaces but other spaces. Said points out that imperialism “lingers

where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific

political, ideological, economic and social practices” (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia,

Edward Said 90). Its very investment in culture makes imperialism a force that

exists ‘far beyond a geographical empire’, suggesting the future direction of

colonialism and imperialism (ibid 90).

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Colonization in the present century functions with the construction and

maintenance of postmodern sensibilities which are strategically infused into all

kinds of discourses. Lyotard defines postmodernism as the ‘incredulity towards

metanarratives’. This is not an innocuous position as it may seem, for

postmodernism zooms in on the project of composing an individual politically

neutral, ideologically uncommitted, and historically and metaphysically

insignificant. One would say that territorial colonization dwindled by the middle of

the twentieth century leaving a number of colonies politically independent at least

per records, not because the colonizers became equitable all of a sudden or because

the colonizers could not withstand the struggle for independence from the part of

the colonized but because it was no longer economically feasible for them to

continue maintaining power over the natives, and because the colonial powers had

identified better avenues for capitalizing on the colonized21. Though the acquisition

of political freedom had considerably reduced the pace at which the world was

realigned with the exploitative strategies of colonialism, the slow but ever gradual

imbuing of the ideology of postmodernism and discourses of globalization geared up

grounds for the what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman deplore as the

‘manufacture of consent’, allowing for the interventions of imperial motives to define

the lives of the colonized22.

In the course of time, the modus operandi of imperialism and colonialism has

undergone a transfiguration process. The concern for territorial spaces gave way to

non-territorial spaces, the raw materials expropriated from third world countries

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ceased to be identified as capital, and ‘knowledge’ commenced to be acknowledged

capital. Capital ceasing to be a territorial entity, colonialism also has ceased to be

territorial. National borders have become redundant but the propelling force behind

it is not internationalism but corporatism. The notion of colonizer as a (Western)

nation has been deconstructed and has been identified to be Multi National

Corporate powers with the least sense of nationalism. Colonialism indeed was

sensitive towards the idea of nationalism. But the spirit of nationalism began to

dwindle with the political freedom of erstwhile colonies. Nation turned out to be a

psychological category, ‘an imagined community’ in the terminology of Benedict

Anderson23. Respect for national territories was replaced with the agenda of

globalization evincing incredulity towards the notion of national boundaries which

in turn dismantled the differences among the spaces for colonial exploitation. In the

information society, knowledge is identified capital and the producers of knowledge

are the new territories colonizing which do not involve the deployment of extensive

and grandiose machinery like police or army- the coercive mechanisms of

‘ideological state apparatus’ in the Althusserian terminology24. Engineering of

consent is economically and strategically cheaper to run than maintaining

subservience and obedience through the oppressive machinery of the administrative

mechanism.

Imperial powers used the tool of historiography in different ways. The

Roman Empire dates back to a period even before the first century AD, and empires

like Inca, Ottoman, Chinese, and Aztec etc also claim long histories. If British

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imperialism heavily depended on the strategic maneuvering of colonial

historiography of the Orient, American imperialism neglected historiography as a

tool for invasion. Its only recourse has been to the strategies envisioned by global

capitalism which are explicitly materialistic than academic or philosophic.

Postcoloniality does not only refer to the empirical imperial experience realized

through the imperial appropriation of the administrative mechanisms of national

territories of the third world, but also to the accommodation of the neocolonial

experiences facilitated through the discourses of globalization. Timothy Brennen

comments that ‘in an age of globalization the issue was about Eurocentric

assumptions rather than military occupations’ (“From Development to

Globalization” 132). The obsession with geographical spaces expressed in the

discourses of colonialism only benefited the imperial colonial powers in diverting the

attention of the colonized from the real issues at hand. Attempts at colonization

have almost always met with resistance, but it was largely directed towards the

establishment of territorial and physical control of the national spaces, and was

relatively unmindful of the impacts of indirect control or proxy colonialism.

Speaking about the all pervasive aspect of colonialism Ashis Nandi writes:

This [modern] colonialism colonizes the minds in addition to bodies

and it releases forces within the colonized societies alter their cultural

priorities once for all. In the process it helps generalize the concept of

the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a

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psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West

and outside, in structures and in mind (The Intimate Enemy xi).

Pointing to the way transterritorial imperialist powers operate in the

colonized spaces without asserting their physical presence, but achieving their ends

through their hankerers, Timothy Brennen writes:

Under imperialism, the cultural institutions in a foreign country that

serve the imperial centre are no longer run by the imperial centre itself

(at least directly). A whole sector of ‘native’ intellectuals and elites,

inherited from the colonial era, identify with the colonial centre and

carry out its wishes either out of conviction or through pay-offs,

bribery, personal networks of affiliation, and so on. The ideology of

civilizational superiority incipient under colonialism becomes under

colonialism a given, and is used by the imperial centre, as a natural

justification for all its actions. There is no open enlistment, as under

colonialism, of the rhetoric of a righteous cause, or a confrontation of

the enlightened versus the benighted. These categories are rather fully

internationalized, bureaucratized, and no longer controversial (“From

Development to Globalization” 124).

Though Britain was one of the most powerful imperial powers in the entire

world, Britain’s tardiness in identifying the non-territorial spaces amenable for

colonization may be ascribed to be the reason for its diminishing sway in the

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contemporary international community. The US indeed was one of the early birds to

catch its neocolonial worms. The trajectories of neocolonialism may be better

identified by an analysis of what has often been discussed under the rubric

‘American exceptionalism’. R. B. Kershner refers to the exceptionality of the United

States, a former colony, later becoming a major imperial power and including its

own ‘colonized’ minorities. The unsettling fact is that the least numerous of them

are descendants of the original inhabitants. Kershner adds that the American

experience is best understood through its basic difference from that of Europeans

(The Twentieth Century Novel 88). The US based information industries,

knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (LPO) agencies

account for a huge chunk of the heavy brain drain encountered by the postcolonial

societies.

Tejaswini Niranjana cogently lays bare the strategic underpinnings of the

imperial gestures in India under Macaulay, and the trajectories through which the

dissemination of translated literary works were turned into discourses justifying

the imperial interventions in the national territories of the ‘third world’ countries25.

If Macaulay’s education reforms in India were aimed at facilitating the imperial

administration of its territories and simultaneous utilization of its resources, the

current education system followed in our country can be seen to be shaped for

catering to the requirements of the Transnational Corporations (TNC’s). A reason

for this remote controlled colonialism is that education in the postcolonial societies

has been realized to be a strategic one and is funded and sponsored by the imperial

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powers. But in the postmodern globalized world, funding is done not out of charity

but for the attainment of certain specific goals. The funding agencies would chalk

out the master plan for the utilization of funds and would intervene in the

functioning of the educational programmes to ascertain that everything is in tune

with the objectives of the sponsors. What Britain did to the education in India by

establishing control over the political and national territory of India, the US has

been doing from a distance. The curriculum was fashioned in imperial India under

the British to facilitate their administration of its territories, and not for making

the people ‘civilized’ as they have constantly harped upon. The claim of ‘civilizing’

was only a pretext for continuing with the exploitative programmes of the

colonizers. Zora Neale Hurston has reminisced in retrospect that slavery was the

price she paid for civilization, and the choice was not hers. “It is a bully adventure

and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it” (“How it Feels to Be

Coloured Me?” 376).

The colonial presence is conspicuous in a pervasive fashion almost

everywhere. The BPO and KPO industries, online businesses, global entertainment

industries, education, health, insurance, share markets etc are transnational

avenues open for exploration and are functioning without any direct concern for

geographical domination. Timothy Brennen brings to our attention ‘the ownership

patterns of transnational corporations (TNCs), the explosive rise in internet traffic,

the radical breakdown of treaties governing international law, the increasing

recourse to offshore banking, the orchestrated planning imposed by the Bretton

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Woods institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank), or the flows of

migrant labor in Southeast Asia’ (“From Development to Globalization” 125).

Colonization persists in all these fields with the assistance of the mantras of

globalization.

A major strategy by which globalization functions is constructing needs and

then fulfilling them. The term ‘global village’ is a highly political euphemism which

screens the fact that it is only a ruthless ‘global market’. Markets are for procuring

things one needs, and also for selling commodities. The emotionally heightened

sensations associated with a village are crudely absent in the market. In the global

market, needs are manufactured by continuous reiteration of the ‘deficiencies’ of

the third world individual, and by complying one into demanding whatever would

fulfill his/her ‘deficiency’. Media play a pivotal role in manufacturing needs.

Advertisements function by invoking scenes or instances of people who are made

happier by the use of products that are advertised round the globe. This

Goebblesian strategy of reiterating lies or baseless arguments with the intent of

making them resonate right and hence true, succeeds in achieving consent of the

public, and escapes queries of its veracity and logic. Advertisements go in for unique

blends of provincial, regional and local cultural constituents with those expansionist

ideologies motivated by market interests to attain their ends.

The postindustrial society is information based, and Knowledge Process

Outsourcing is a space mobilizing huge capital. The postcolonial ‘labour force’

engaged in BPO’s and KPO’s are having work hours which are strategically set up.

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Temptations like extra time allowances avert possibilities for their mutual

interaction and unification of labour force. Most often one engaged in such

professions are serving for different time zones, which may occur to be odd hours in

the space where one physically exists. Besides, one’s income is often calculated not

as per the value of the currency of the geographical space of his or her subsistence.

One may be drawing income from different geographical spaces, in different

currencies, and traditional work hours envisioned by Marx, or Thomas Moore in his

Utopia (1515-16) do not apply. ‘As a result’, says Brennen, ‘the subject is forced to

trust, since abstract systems tend to ‘disembed’ the subject from immediate

experience, transforming intimacy from the previously anchored criteria of kinship

and obligation to a ‘life politics’ based on controlling once own body’ (“From

Development to Globalization” 124). One becomes alienated even from one’s own job

environments and is exploited to an extreme degree, not by coercion but by consent.

‘A single social space’, says Timothy Brennen, “still allows for complex and dynamic

internal variations across an interconnected system of localities and regions’, since

‘the world is being reconstituted as a single social space” (ibid 123).

It can be seen that it is the agenda of globalization that provides a

springboard for the exploitative strategies of non-territorial colonization. Timothy

Brennen states that for many, globalization ‘appears merely to euphemize

corporatization and imperial expansion’. Brennen suggests that it is perceived to be

‘a veiled way of alluding to the Americanization of foreignness in a world dominated

by US power following the fall of the Soviet Union’ (ibid 123). He adds that it is

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possible to perceive American ideology as the ‘dynamic contemporary expression of

capitalism’. Here, though it is not intended to be a critique of Brennen’s perceptive

insights of globalization, the use of the term ‘American’ here does not refer to a

national territory, but uses it as a trope for what it has come to connote in the

contemporary times, that is, transnational capitalist ideologies. The term American

is a representative term not of the nation but of the non-territorial exploitative

mechanisms sans geographical delimitations. This ‘American twist on capitalism’

says Brennen, ‘has made globalization seem desirable’, and it also generates a

‘suspicion towards “state”’ (ibid 127). Both these are strategies for preparing

congenial grounds for the operations of colonialism. The old wine of colonialism in

its new bottle of globalization is tactfully prepared to ward off all resistance since

‘the latter is relentlessly cast as popularly willed, anonymous, permeating, and

unplanned’ (ibid 137). But the truth remains that this tacit approval of globalization

is a manufactured one.

Globalization practices rely upon ‘the dissemination of local values in the

guise of global ones’ (Brennen, “From Development to Globalization” 137), in

contrast to the practices of early colonialism and imperialism that coercively

imposed the imperial values as a universal norm on the colonized. But this must not

be mistaken to be a compromising move of those exploitative mechanisms, or its

sudden acceptance of the universal and catholic nature of social values practiced by

different cultures round the world. Instead, it is a more strategic course to make

inroads into the very local as well as to the mainstream societies, without calling up

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resistance. The local values are taken up and appropriated by the imperial powers

only to be marketed as a commodity with the ‘superior’ culture’s stamp upon it. The

advertisement of CNN about its special coverage of the issues of the Middle East

questions one’s very foundations of cognition: “the Middle East: you may think you

know it. But do you really? We explain the issues…” When a transnational channel

appropriates the privilege to explain something local to the rest of the world, it is

capitalizing on Said’s classic notion of Orientalism in a tactful way. Neither the

‘Orient’ nor the ‘West’ is a pure geographic space.

Brennen’s perspectives are quite insightful when he says that though ‘the

forms and styles of this imperialism are crucially different from those of the past,

the intentions and effects are identical (conquest, occupation, and he stealing of

resources continue…)’. But when he adds that the contemporary mode of

imperialism does ‘enrich distinct national identities’, it becomes questionable, for it

is apparent that the motives of imperialism in the current stage have grown beyond

territorial and national demarcations. But Brennen could be right in the sense that

imperialism, out of pure economic motives, promotes local cultures. The global

marketing of folk forms like Theyyam by the tourism industry in Kerala may be

cited as example. It would not be amiss to examine what Brennen says about

colonial subjugation of the national other:

Both colonialism and imperialism entail the subjugation of one people

by another. Traditionally, neither term refers to individuals within one

society subjugating others within that same society. What is meant,

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rather, is that people who live in one region of the world- not just living

together, but acting as organized members of a recognizable political

territory such as nation state- subjugate those of another part of the

world (“From Development to Globalization” 134).

The notion of colonization and imperialism as strictly confined to nationalist

foundations fails to acknowledge the course they have taken in the globalized world.

Though globalization cannot be taken to be the exact contemporary equivalent to

the ideologies of colonialism and imperialism, it can be reckoned to have

accommodated a set of strategies endorsing these practices. However, Brennen’s

argument that globalization ‘depicts the world as having moved past colonialism

and imperialism’ (ibid 138) cannot be taken for granted. Imperialism is such a force

that finds out novel avenues for its own survival with the course of history.

All these critical perspectives reveal that the postmodern and cosmopolitan

diasporic writers are no more prone to the spirit of nostalgia and rootlessness that

colonial and pre-colonial diaspora were subject to. As has been noted, to feel

nostalgia, the subject should believe in the territoriality of the nation, so that one’s

removal from that would be painful, which was possible in the pre-modern colonial

times, and it was largely due to the colonial exploitation that was basically

territorial. Colonies were set up for the proper and efficient exploitation of the

recourses of the colonized spaces. But with territorial decolonization, territorial

exploitation and capitalization by the colonizers could no more be carried on as

smoothly as it was done earlier. It is here that we note the emergence of the tactics

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of neocolonialism. In the postmodern, post industrial cyber world, territorial

ownership or monopoly does not pose serious threat to the forces of exploitation.

Land becomes only a minor factor of production as territorial boundaries have

become a metaphorical category. The world has shrunk to a ‘global village’, and in a

village everyone is free to move doing one’s own business. As territorial domination

is hard to maintain in this era, colonial agencies depend less on territorial means of

exploitation and focus more on non-territorial methods of capitalization.

The notion of global village is a construct shaped and fostered by the

postmodernist agenda. It impels one to distrust nation and state as potential

agencies, which gradually estranges patriotism and nationalism. The postmodern

diaspora are no more postcolonial in the traditional sense of the term because they

have largely been subsumed by postmodern strategies which have made them less

sensitive towards ideas of patriotism and nationalism26. Postmodernism does not

privilege anything over the other, and in this respect it goes hand in hand with the

post structural idea of distrust towards all binary constructions. The place of one’s

birth does not become an obsession for the postmodern. Ipso facto, the cosmopolitan

Indian diasporic writers like Rushdie, Tharoor and Seth take all liberties in

constructing alternative versions of national histories.

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Notes

1 G. N. Devy in his introduction to Aijaz Ahmad’s essay “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and

Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said”, published in Indian Literary Criticism: Theory

and Interpretation (Orient Longman: Hyderabad, 2002) attests that Ahmad, along with Homi K.

Bhabha and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak is the most brilliant of Indian critics writing for an

international audience.

2 Iska, in the eponymously titled novel by the Nigerian author Cyprian Ekwensi says: “What I want

is to go away from Nigeria – to England, France, America, anywhere at all. As long as it is away! . . .

From there I can read all about Nigeria from a distance. It will all be like fiction and won’t hurt

much” (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1966) p. 199- 200.

3 Migration “is central to what is grouped as postcolonial literature” says Andrew Smith. See

Lazarus. p. 250 (The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies: Cambridge University

Press, 2004).

4 Roosa John and Ayu Ratih have quoted Rushdie from the interview in The Third World Book

Review, 1984, p 1.

5 It may be clarified by the immense readership enjoyed by fictions of national histories and the

acceptance such works win round the world. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Gunter Grass’

The Tin Drum (1959), Herta Muller’s Everything I Possess I carry With Me (Granta, Metropolitan

Books, 2009), Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red ( translated from the Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar. –

New York : Knopf, 2001 ; London : Faber & Faber, 2001. – Translation of Benim Adım Kırmızı).

6 See Manju Sampat’s “Old and New Expatriate Indian English Novelists: An Overview” in

Bharucha and Nabar, 1998.

7 Sura P. Nath in “Homes Abroad: Diasporic Identities in Third Spaces” makes this suggestion.

8 Andrew M. Greeley in Why Can’t They Be like Us? (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India, 1976)

sketches a six-stage process that immigrant communities go through in the course of adaptation, and

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the first stage is cultural shock. The rest are organization and emergent self consciousness,

assimilation of the elite, militancy, self-hatred and anti-militancy, and emerging adjustment (53).

9 The recent attacks directed against Indian students in Australia and incidents of racist insults

infrequently reported from the US and UK notwithstanding, the percentage of racist attacks is too

low on a global scale.

10 The expression old and new in relation to the diasporas of two different times appear in Sudesh

Misra’s article “From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora” (p. 311) in A History of

Indian Literature in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst and Company,

2003).

11 Iyer in the review “The Contagion of Innocence” published in The Sunday Times of India on

28/11/93 analyzes the identity of the expatriate writers.

12 The centre/ margin sort of binary construction is integral to Said, and since Orientalism, to

postcolonial theory.

13 Said’s Orientalism (1978) explains how the colonial programme of representing the East has

depended on binary constructions like man/woman, light/dark, good/bad oriental/occidental etc…The

second term is always held to be inferior to the first term. Orientalism is the principle of treating the

East as an inferior entity when compared with the West which is superior in all respects.

14 Dissemination, a key term of Derrida, refers to the way meaning is diffused over an endless chain

of signifiers, which again assumes the role of signs. Meaning is never confined to a single entity as

signification process is endless like nuclear fission.

15 Derrida’s term trace is the logical result of communication. Since every sign makes sense by its

difference from its binary opposite, the achieved meaning accommodates traces of its opposite term

too. Besides, the process of differentiation is also a process of erasure of the contrary term. Trace is

what remains after this erasure. Hence, language itself can only give traces of the reality it attempts

to represent.

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16 Pratibha Umashankar’s “Pop Patriotism, Designer Nationalism and Choreographed Nostalgia in

Bollywood Films in the Light of Transnationalism and Globalization” was delivered at The Ninth

International Conference convened by Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda and Vidya Bhawan

Rural Institute, Udaipur on “Knowledge-Systems in a Climate of Creativity: Indian Perspectives”

from 17th to 20th December 2006 at Hotel Lakend, Udaipur, Rajasthan. The ideas expressed here on

movies are drawn from her talk.

17 It is contestable, but I would hold that postcoloniality, coupled with the ideologies of

postmodernism and post structuralism has posed serious damage to national consciousness. As I

have noted in the same chapter, postmodernism has the potential to transform an individual

politically neutral, ideologically liberal and metaphysically insignificant.

18 Individual human subject is not to blame for the disappearance of nationalism or patriotism in the

postmodern era. It is, as Jameson says, the cultural logic of late capitalism.

19 According to Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernism evinces distrust of all grand narratives. A

grand narrative, to simplify, is any project, belief or ideology like religion, God, Marxism,

nationalism etc. that seeks to find solution to the fundamental problems of human life. See The

Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

20 In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) we read: “it was

just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale. . . The conquest of the earth, which

mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses

than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much” (10).

21 Regarding the possession of colonies Gladstone says: “It is plain that they are not to be desired for

revenue, because they do not yield it. It is plain that they are not to be desired for trading monopoly,

because that we have entirely abandoned”. See W. E. Gladstone’s “Our Colonies” (1855) in Harlow

and Carter, p.367-8).

166

22 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books,

1988) is by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, which analyses the news media as business.

The title comes from the phrase “the manufacture of consent” from Walter Lippmann’s (1889–1974)

book Public Opinion (1922).

23 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

24 Louis Althusser’s “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays contains the essay “Ideology and

Ideological State Apparatuses: (Notes towards an Investigation)” Trans. by Ben Brewster (Monthly

Review Press, 1971).

25 See Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context (Hyderabad: Orient

Longman, 1995).

26 The term postcolonial generally refers to the efforts of intellectuals, writers etc to retrieve, recover

and reestablish the cultural and epistemological tradition of countries that were once colonized.