Reading Indian Diaspora Literature

"At a Slight Angle to Reality": Reading Indian Diaspora LiteratureAuthor(s): Rosemary Marangoly GeorgeSource: MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 3, Other Americas (Autumn, 1996), pp. 179-193Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-EthnicLiterature of the United States (MELUS)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/467981 .

Accessed: 17/07/2014 12:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States(MELUS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MELUS.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:01:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=melus

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=melus

http://www.jstor.org/stable/467981?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Review Essay

"At a Slight Angle to Reality": Reading Indian Diaspora Literature

Rosemary Marangoly George University of California, San Diego

In April 1984, India sent her first astronaut, Rakesh Sharma, into space in the U.S.S.R. space craft "Soyuz T-11/Salyut-7." In a national- ly telecast space to earth telephone conversation, Indira Gandhi, (then prime minister of India) spoke with Sharma-the first such conversation that was relayed live to millions of Indians. The high- light of this televised event was when Mrs. Gandhi asked Sharma (in English): "Tell us, what does India look like from space?" Sharma's quick response was the first line of a popular patriotic song (in Hindi) "Sarey jahaan sey achha, Hindustan hamara" [Better than all the universe, is my/our India].1 Sharma's seemingly unrehearsed comment was a perfectly patriotic utterance because it was delivered from his vantage point in space: distance and technology, one wanted to believe, gave him proper perspective. He had subjected the words of a nationalist poem to the most exacting test possible and declared the sentiment true.2 And as the newspapers announced the next day, In- dians were amused, even moved, but chose to believe. Better than all the universe indeed. Such is the hold that fictions have on us.

Sharma's sentiment resonates in much of the everyday life of Indi- ans living outside India. Over the last two centuries, thousands of In- dians have moved out of the subcontinent and subsequently set up small communities all over the globe. Today there are an estimated ten million "Indians" living outside India. Every sixth person on the globe today is of Indian origin.3 The India that is declared "better than all the universe" is the one carried over and nostalgically recre- ated in the mind, the heart, the food, the festivals, the clothes, the mu- sic, the films and sometimes even the literature.

In recent years, the use of the term "diaspora" has been extended to refer to situations other than the experience of Jewish peoples outside a Jewish homeland. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have

MELUS, Volume 21, Number 3 (Fall 1996)



ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

witnessed events that have resulted in several millions of expatriate peoples whose exodus from home was marked by varying degrees of violence and hope. Many of today's diasporic groups (Africans, Chi- nese, Palestinians, Armenians, Jews, Indian subcontinentals, to name a few) have a long history of travel away from original homelands. Yet very often within mainstream literary studies, terms like exile and homelessness are read at a purely metaphoric level or as experiences afflicting the "lost generation" in Paris and other such dilet- tantes.4 However, in recent years, critical texts by Edward Said (especially After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives,) Mary Layoun's Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology, the now well-established Dias-

pora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and several articles in other academic journals like Public Culture have brought the everyday realities of exile, immigration, refugee status, migrancy, community dispersal and dislocation to the notice of literary practitioners in the U.S.5

The literature produced out of diasporic experiences has always been in the business of constructing fictions that fit realities that don't fit realities. The quality and quantity of literary writing by diasporic peoples merit sustained, historically located, critical attention. Such

readings could, at the least, transform our reception of contemporary fiction and our understanding of literary history. This is perhaps best illustrated by the powerful counter-reading of modernity offered by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. This book forces a reorientation of every prior analysis of western modernity that did not or could not recognize that cultural hybridity (transcending ethnicity and nationality and resulting from the movement of peoples) was characteristic of modernity.6 Other scholars like Abena Busia, Gloria T. Hull, Gay Wilentz, and Wendy Walters have written critical texts that read African American literature as diasporean texts.7 In their essays, such literature is revealed to have global reach rather than operating only within a U.S. cultural context. To- day it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate the nation in "national literatures," even as new nations are constituted daily. What/where/which is the nation in diasporean literature? For every new nation that is carved out, there is a new diaspora, a group of na- tives who find themselves outside the borders. A "national literature" like that of contemporary US literature, it can be argued, is no more than a weaving of various diasporic narratives. And yet, all diasporas are not identical: they do not share identical histories nor will they fol- low the same trajectory into the future and as such deserve individual attention. Even as insightful overarching theories about diasporas continue to be produced, this essay will examine some of the issues

180



READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE

raised in recent publications on and by writers of "the Indian" diaspora.

Two books published by Greenwood Press examine, and in the process firmly establish the literary contours of, Indian diasporic writing: Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora and Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.8 Em- manuel S. Nelson, editor of both books, deserves rich praise for bringing to our notice the work of an entire body of writers and for matching bio/bibliographic information with critical commentary. The strength of the two books lies in their refusal to homogenize the experiences and histories of various groups of diasporic Indians, even as they attempt to bring the literary work produced in these circumstances under the rubric of "literature of the Indian diaspora."

Nelson's two volumes need to be read against a 1993 anthology compiled and edited by the Women of South Asian Descent Collec- tive in Berkeley, California. Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, is a remarkable project in many ways.9 Germinating from a course on South Asia offered by U.C. Berkeley's Ethnic Stud- ies department, this book was nurtured by a collective of many women, foremost of whom are Sheela Bhatt, Preety Kalra, Aarti Kohli, Latika Malkani, and Dharini Rasiah. Its sixty-six contributors include first, second and third generation women of South Asian descent who currently reside in the United States. What we have in this edited anthology is the first, collective demonstration of the creativi- ty and astute political sensibilities of a young generation of diasporic South Asian women, born in the late 1960s and 1970s, grown up outside their place of origin, articulating their identities as "women of color" and as "South Asian." Their adept negotiation of these hyper- nations will be discussed later in this essay.

Emmanuel Nelson is to be commended for the scrupulousness with which he refuses to sentimentalize gloss over difficulties or to make his two edited volumes a panegyric to a specific "minority" literature. Reworlding, the first of the two books, begins with a theoretically and politically nuanced introduction to the very problematic concept of diaspora itself. Nelson begins with the definition offered by William Safran in the first issue of Diaspora: A Journal of Transna- tional Studies (1991).10 According to Safran:

the concept of diaspora [can] be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteris- tics: 1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original "center" to two or more "peripheral," or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original

181




homeland-its physical location, history, and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not-and perhaps cannot be-fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return-when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe they should collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship (ix-x).

This quotation amply demonstrates why commentators on ethnic communities write themselves into the identity space provided by the very term "diaspora." The term suggests a history, a line of movement, a route into the future, a place of origin, all of which is denied in the alternate terms available to these ethnicities: "refugee," "mi- grant," "contract labor," "immigrant," "foreigner," or "resident alien." Most importantly, "diaspora" in itself suggests solidarity, numbers, community. In his introduction, Nelson proceeds to demonstrate how this general term applies to Indian subcontinentals in locations outside the Indian subcontinent. This is not as easy a task as it might sound. The arena is fraught with ideological icebergs, such as the use of the term "Indian" versus the term "subcontinental" or "South Asian." To call this group "the Indian diaspora" could be read as yet another act of post-independence India's geographic and cultural imperialism toward its smaller neighbors. While "British In- dia"denoted exactly what "the British/Indian subcontinent" did, in- dependent India and the Indian subcontinent are two entirely different political entities. Nelson navigates around such icebergs, with grace and careful argumentation in order to render acceptable the very premise of the collection as well as the inclusion of writers who trace their origins to locations that are now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Nelson's introductory essay asserts that there are "shared diasporic sensibilities" and "common thematic concerns" that invoke varied response from writers of Indian origin in places as different as Trinidad, Fiji, the U.S., Singapore, Uganda, Canada, South Africa and Britain. According to Nelson, what is explored in this literature are "issues of identity, problems of history, confrontations with racism, intergenerational conflicts, difficulties in building new, supportive communities" (xv). Despite acknowledging the differences in the in-

182




dividual writer's responses to these issues, Nelson ends the introduction with an insistence that

At the core of all diasporic fictions, nevertheless, is the haunting presence of India-and the anguish of personal loss it represents. It is pre- cisely this shared experience of absence that engenders an aesthetics of reworlding that informs and unites the literature of the Indian diaspora. (xv-xvi)

Happily, despite this attempt to neatly pull together all the multifari- ous features of this literary genre, Nelson's sequencing of the essays opens up the field in a productive manner. Most of the essays subject notions such as "India," "unity," "loss," "absence," "exile," and "assimilation" to serious scrutiny. Each essay serves to underline (and in some cases to undermine) the arguments put forth in other essays. Hence, the follies of the less self-consciously written pieces are cri-

tiqued when read in conjunction with other essays in the collection. Nelson astutely places Vijay Mishra's article on the "grimit" ideol-

ogy driven Fiji Indian literature and culture at the beginning of this collection. "Grimit" is the vernacular form of "agreement"-a refer- ence to the agreement made (yet never honored) between the British plantation owners and Indian indentured labor at the time of recruit- ment (from the late 1870s onward). This "grimit" ideology was based on fictions: the fiction circulated by the British was of generous pay and passage home to India after the contract period; and the Indian laborers' fiction was of a glorious Indian past and an even more glorious return to India in the future. Mishra's theorizing of the "Grim- it" ideology illuminates the phrase from Salman Rushdie's writing that I have used as a title to this essay: both citations reveal the in- escapable proximity of everyday life and fiction in the diasporic context. In what is almost an authorial aside in Shame, Rushdie writes that the country in which the novel is set is "like myself, at a slight angle to reality."" Since literature in itself can be understood to be produced at a slight angle to reality, the match is perfect.

Mishra's definition of a diaspora is simple: it is "a fossilized" frag- ment of an original nation-that seeks renewal through a "refos- silization" of itself (4). This very suggestive articulation cuts through the weight of Safran's definition without quite as many clauses but with equal precision. Another similarly productive juxtaposition is offered in the essay by Helen Tiffin on "history and community in- volvement in Indo-Fijian and Indo-Trinidadian writing." Tiffin's comparative study of these two very different literatures serves several purposes. First, the less familiar (to scholars in the west) and

183




younger Indo-Fijian literature takes shape when contrasted with the older, more familiar Indo-Trinidadian literature. Using both scenar- ios as examples, Tiffin demonstrates how differences, in the historical circumstances of the move away from India, in the history of the place moved to, and in the composition of the local population, all ef- fect the literature that expatriate Indians produced. Ultimately, Tiffin stresses, writers in both locations have to realize the "potentialities of a racially hybridized present" (96). Her comparative study subtly challenges the very idea of a "unified" Indian diasporic literature and provokes a very important question: are all hybridizations similar simply by virtue of being hybrid?

This attention to diasporic movement over two centuries and over the face of the entire globe brings complex and difficult issues to the fore. For instance, in such analyses, some actors (literary critics, cre- ative writers and the characters they create) have difficulty in accept- ing the fact or future possibility of racial hybridity and of split affiliations as undeniable features of any diaspora. Victor Ramraj dubs fictional characters who display such traits as "the traditionalists." In his article on Indo-Caribbean literature, Ramraj suggests that the sin- gle most prominent feature of this literature is the conflict between fictional characters whom he classifies as the "assimilationists" and the "traditionalists" with authorial sympathy lying almost always with the assimilationists (80). Simple though it sounds, could this argument be applied to all Indian diasporic literature produced from various global locations at different times? My impulse is to resist such classifications of literature that are motivated more by a desire for easy categorizing than by the need to accurately reflect a clear-cut feature of the literature itself.

Kirpal Singh's article on Indian writers in Singapore and Arlene Elder's article on Indian writing in East and South Africa are infor- mative and thoughtful assessments of historical circumstances and of specific writers' engagement with these situations. In fact the most rewarding aspect of Reworlding is the reader's sense of being exposed to tantalizing glimpses of several hundred novels, poems, plays and short stories. Names like Satendra Nandan, Raymond Pillai, Subra- mani, Sudesh Mishra, Suniti Namjoshi, Cyril Dabydeen, Neil Bosson- dath, Ismith Khan, Edwin Thambu, Gopal Baratham, Chandran Nair, Nalla Tan, are added to the more familiar and shorter list of names like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukherjee. In these essays the former group become more than just a string of names of writers with local reputations and the latter group is given a context that renders them less odd, less spectacular, less alien. Fur- thermore, post-1960s immigration to the west is placed within the

184




context of a long history of coerced and willful travel away from the subcontinent over the last two hundred years.

The essays in Reworlding on individual writers who reside in the west (Naipaul, Rushdie, Markandaya, and Mukherjee) are uneven in quality. Reworlding would have been a much tighter book without the excessive attention paid to novelists like Rushdie and Naipaul. To readers familiar with the works of these well-known writers and with the critical debates around their work, there is not much new material here. The attempt in most of these essays is to reposition specific authors or to reread their work as belonging squarely within the diasporic sensibility. Hence, what other readers have called Naipaul's racism, elitism, self-hatred and intense anglophilia, P. S. Chauhan tries to represent as Naipaul's "cosmic irony" born of an es- sential Hindu consciousness. Chauhan relies too heavily on stock phrases like "the ancient Indian view of life" and "the Hindu consciousness of the terrible fluidity of things human and non-human" to be able to take his attempted exoneration of Naipaul as an unsenti- mental Hindu very far (22). Hena Ahmad's essay on Kamala Markandaya is placed too late in the collection for the simple, introductory tone of her first few paragraphs to serve any useful purpose. Lawrence Needham's essay on the work of the U.S. based poet, Agha Shahid Ali, is the best of the many articles on individual writers. His essay quietly guides the reader through four volumes of Ali's poetry, stopping for nuanced close readings of well-chosen poems.

While Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook was published almost a year after Reworlding, it is clear that each book requires the other. No doubt this is why Nelson em- barked on the arduous task of compiling this lengthy sourcebook with detailed entries on fifty-eight outstanding writers of the Indian diaspora. Each entry contains otherwise hard to locate, up to date bi- ographical, bibliographical and critical information on individual authors. There is a fair representation of feminist women writers as well as of the better known gay/lesbian writers-groups that are usually sidelined in diaspora projects. Nelson's choice of authors includes those with unending lists of publications, awards and other honors like Salman Rushdie, as well as lesser known writers of great promise like Indira Ganesan and Suniti Namjoshi.

Nalini Natarajan's introduction to Writers of The Indian Diaspora deserves special mention. Her short piece puts forth a brilliant and sophisticated argument for the theoretical soundness of this project that basically provides the (mainly) western reader with a wealth of information on a group of "Third World" writers. Gayatri Spivak, the most prolific of Indian expatriate cultural critics, has expressed her

185




doubts about the value of academic work (teaching/writing) where the project becomes reduced to mere "information retrieval."12 Natarajan's essay suggests an alternative reading of the role of such information-packed volumes. She argues that, "in introducing readers to the multiple subjectivities that arise in conditions of diaspora, [Writers of the Indian Diaspora] provide[s] a useful antidote to the re- ductive processes of homogenization at work everywhere around us today" (xix). Natarajan's introduction inscribes a framework around the text that thwarts any attempt at mere information gathering. She presents this sourcebook as an "invaluable resource" for understanding the "transnational potential of diasporic populations" to inter- rupt the "monologic discourses of contemporary nation states" (xix).

Reading through the entries on writers as different as Santha Rama Rau and Samuel Dickson Selvon, one finds it impossible to summa- rize the wide range of authorial literary takes or even on the varied inflections added on by different commentators. Natarajan's introduction walks the very fine line of not presenting one unified diasporic literary vision nor a field of endless multiplicity. She sees the literature as twisting together various strands of diasporic cultural pre- occupations: the sub-textual inscription of male anxiety matched by female escapism, an aesthetics of loss often comically represented, fi- nancial security undercut by cultural anxiety, religious fundamentalism fueled by consumerism, etc.

A given factor in the publication of such sourcebooks is that con- stant updating is required if this book is to continue to be a useful resource in the years to come. There are already several Indian diasporic writers (working in English) whose fiction has been published in the period between the release of this book and the writing of this essay: Anjana Appachana (U.S.), Sunetra Gupta (England), Manora- ma Mathai (Bangkok), Romesh Gunasekera (England), Meena Arora Nayak (U.S.), Shyam Selvadurai (Canada).13 Many of the contributors to Our Feet Walk the Sky will undoubtedly find a place in future editions of Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Foremost among them is Ginu Kamani, whose powerful collection of short stories Junglee Girl was published simultaneously in the U.S. and in India in 1995.14 Future editions of the sourcebook might also include those writers who were overlooked when the current volume was assembled: writers such as the Ghanaian writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of Memory of Depar- ture, Pilgrims Way and Dottie, as well as Reshard Gool, the South African Indian writer of Capetown Coolie, or fellow South Africans, Agnes Sam (Jesus is Indian) and Ahmed Essop (The Hajji, Noorejehan).15 Sara Suleri, Alamgir Hashmi and Bapsi Sidwa ( all "from" Pakistan) and Michael Ondaatje ("from" Sri Lanka,) are among those who

186




clearly merited inclusion in this edition of the sourcebook. What is of course unpredictable is the continuous movement of writers out of the subcontinent-for example, since the publication of this sourcebook I have seen established Indian writers like Anita Desai listed as part of the diaspora.16 Then there is the case of Taslima Nasrin, the outspoken Bangladeshi feminist whose 1993 novel Lajja [Shame] was banned in her home country for it's strongly worded denouncement of religious fundamentalism and communal politics in the region.17 Faced with death threats and constantly under attack in the press and by the government and clergy, Nasrin went into hiding and was ultimately forced to accept political asylum in Norway in order to sur- vive thefatwah issued against her in Bangladesh. Like Nasrin's novel, which was written in Bengali, much of the writing produced within the subcontinent and within Indian diasporic communities is not written in English, and this needs to be clearly acknowledged in such sourcebooks. There are several vernacular or regional language literary texts, newspapers and magazines published outside India. In the U.S. itself there are Hindi, Gujarati and Malayalam literary associa- tions with their own prominent and struggling writers. In Canada there are groups of Punjabi writers who are organized into writing groups, edit their own journal called Watan [Homeland], broadcast radio programs and stage public performances.18

Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora radically challenges the very categories of writer, fiction, autobiography, theory, and "Indianness." The selection includes brilliant, nuanced medi- tations by well-known scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Indira Karamcheti, as well as contributions from high school students like Tesha Sengupta and Sajani Patel who write with an engag- ing determination to "be who they want to be." Our Feet Walk the Sky forces many acknowledgments, the first and foremost being the issue of gender as a dynamic within the diaspora. In their discussion of family, sexuality and community, the best of these contributions move far beyond the two categories of "assimilationalist" and "tradi- tionalist" that Victor Ramraj established in his reading of diasporic literature. For instance, in Lata Mani's reading of Indu Krishnan's film, "Knowing her Place," in Inderpal Grewal's assessment of Bharati Mukherjee's work, and in the oral history of Abha Sharma Tyagi collected and transcribed by Kiran Lall and Francis Assisi, Ramraj's "assimilation versus traditionalism" matrix is rendered in-

adequate to live or theorize by. Despite the occasional piece that verges on the maudlin, this is an

anthology with a sophisticated articulation of its purpose and intent. There was an editorial decision to attempt to deconstruct national af-

187




filiations and India's hegemony in the region as well as a determined effort to share space with contributions that represent minority reli- gions and cultures from the region. The introduction states that this book is "primarily for South Asians" and, while there are very adequate glossaries of words from specific Indian languages right after the appropriate pieces, "the non-South Asian reader" is instructed in the introduction to "make an effort to try and understand the more basic words in order to get a sense of the bi/multilingual vocabulary of many of the writers" (xvii). The editors have shown admirable re- straint in having resisted standardizing the grammar, genre, or subject requirements. Instead what has been fashioned out of many het- erogeneous submissions is a narrative that begins with a section titled "Lighting the fire beneath our homes" and ends with a section titled "Our feet found home." What we have in between are the many stages of moving toward a politicized understanding of the sustenance that can be provided by the terms "South Asian woman" and "woman of color." Along the way numerous possible subject (or non-subject) positions are examined and laughed at, cut down, lamented, scorned, further embellished or wistfully put away as no longer applicable. These positions, to name a few, include: non-immigrant South Asian, U.S. citizen, Asian American, ABCD (American Born/Bred Confused Desi), ABCDEFG (ABCD Emigrated From Gu- jarat), Aryan/non-White Caucasian, Green Card Holder, NRI (Non- Resident Indian), and Resident Alien.19 This anthology works to provide South Asian women with an alternate community to which membership comes with political rather than blood affiliations. It should also succeed in it's objective of speaking directly to the many thousands of "1.5 and second generation South Asian Americans" from various class, national, and religious backgrounds.

While the books edited by Nelson will no doubt circulate primarily within an academic audience, Our Feet Walk the Sky might well become a kind of guidebook for young members of the Indian diaspora as they struggle with issues of identity and community. The absence of the kind of vocabulary that would self-select a small academic audience opens up the possibility that these new books may be given the attention hitherto reserved for news magazines with a focus on South Asia, children and/or young adult books with Indian themes, films from the region, NRI taxation guides, NRI directories, etc. Yet realistically, this is a slim possibility-and one that leads us to consider the kind of audience that South Asian diaspora literature ap- peals to. How would this literature fare when compared to the im- pact of Hindi films (imported from India) on the Indian diasporic community? Furthermore, a project like Our Feet Walk the Sky further

188




problematizes diasporic literary production and consumption by highlighting a whole spectrum of cultural/political alliances other than an affiliation to one's country of origin. It is such productive complexities that await us in further bulletins on the literary and other cultural texts produced from diasporic locations.

In this context, a recent and noteworthy book is R. Radhakrish- nan's Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. While Rad- hakrishnan is not centrally concerned with the literary texts produced by the diaspora, his study offers a meditative and theoretically nuanced consideration of the many affiliative tugs and pulls on different generations of the Indian diaspora in the U.S. In his first and last chapters, Radhakrishnan explores the tensions and limitations of the diasporic location that he himself epitomizes in his "present academic-immigrant location in the United States" (1). Radhakrishnan writes:

Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier "elsewhere" in an active and critical relationship with the cultural politics of one's present home, all within the fig- urality of a reciprocal displacement. "Home" then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location. (1-2)

From this starting point, Radhakrishnan proceeds, in ten more or less autonomous essays, to write on issues that reveal his "accountability to more than one location." Clearly, Radhakrishnan's greatest alle- giance is to critical theory and consequently, the central figures in this book are political/cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault, Anto- nio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. And yet, none of this seems extraneous to the diasporic framework set up by the author at the very outset. What this book succeeds in demonstrating is that issues as seemingly diverse as Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition politics, the canon wars in western academia, the rise of religious fundamentalism in India, the "Ethnic Foods" aisles in U.S. supermar- kets, and a host of other political/cultural debates are ripe for "diasporic mediation." This stance takes us beyond the India-centered world of the diaspora that Nelson presented in his introduction to Re- worlding. However, it is important to keep in mind that Nelson is primarily concerned with the "aesthetics of reworlding that informs and unites the literature of the Indian diaspora" and as such is an accu- rate reporter on the literary texts that his collection examines (xv-xvi; emphasis added).

189




Overall, Nelson's Reworlding offers academic and other readers an introduction to the wide range of Indian diasporic literary responses to the business of living away from an imagined "Home"-a condition that is shared not just by other diasporic peoples but by most persons who inhabit this frenetic world of ours. Radhakrishnan's book can be read as an urgent call to the diaspora to take on the re- sponsibility of being accountable to both locations-contemporary India and the "not-home" place. He writes:

I cannot live, earn, pay taxes, raise a family, produce scholarship, teach, and take passionate and vigorous political stances here, and still call it "not-home." Conversely, I cannot historicize the very valence of my being here except through an Indian/subaltem/postcolonial per- spectivism. The demands of the "politics of location" are complex: "home" and the "not-home" and "coming" and "going" are neither lit- eral nor figurative, but, rather issues within the politics of "imagina- tive geographies." (2)

Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative youth of it editorial group, Our Feet Walk the Sky holds its own amidst such sophisticated theorizing. This generation's assessments are made from the experience of having lived through an American childhood constantly in- terrupted by "India" (or Pakistan, or Sri Lanka and so on). At its brightest moments, Our Feet Walk the Sky directs us to an appreciation of a stance best articulated by Salman Rushdie in Shame: "Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth designed to keep us in our place." The final impression left by both books edited by Nelson is one of whole groups of people for whom living (and writing) on the margins has been an everyday event for many decades and over several generations. Our Feet Walk The Sky demonstrates the ways in which this "everyday" is transformed in the lives and writings of contemporary diasporic women. It could be argued that diasporic peoples, rather than being a fringe population, in fact best epitomize the postmodern/postcolonial condition. Writing of a not so different circumstance in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, Michelle Cliff concludes a chapter called "Passing" with lines that seem equally appropriate to this conclusion:

We are not exotic-or aromatic-or poignant We are not aberrations. We are ordinary. All this has happened before.20

190



READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 191

Notes

1. "Hindustan" is commonly understood to signify India in Hindi. However, given the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in India today, "Hindustan" can be readily understood to signify a "Hindu" state and can therefore easily take on anti-secular inflections that this patriotic song "Tarana-a-Hind" (written by the poet Mohammad Iqbal in the 1940s) expressly opposed.

2. What is noteworthy is that the Indian mission of this joint venture into space was to photograph India from space in order to gather information on water sources in arid areas and to find possible sites for hydroelectric power stations, etc. The space shuttle made several passes over the Indian region of the globe collecting hundreds of images of India, shot with the sophisticated MKF-6M. Hence the special potency of Sharma's sentimental declaration.

3. I use the term "of Indian origin" to account for persons who can trace their ori-

gins to the subcontinent. This usage, while less objectionable than the use of the term "Indian" for all subcontinentals, is fraught with political overtones that should become clearer as the essay proceeds.

4. In recent years, the catastrophic events in the former Soviet Union and the dis-

placements caused by the series of crises in that region, have bought mainstream media attention to such issues as diasporas, exile and homelessness. Over the next few years we should see some analysis of the literature being produced from such locations.

5. Edward Said, After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Mary N. Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990). This is, of course, a partial list. There are several books, published in the last five years, that consider various aspects of diaspora cultures. In the context of the Indian diaspora, the most relevant new book would be R. Radhakrishnan's Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Lo- cation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996) which is briefly discussed later in this essay. Also see the periodicals India Alert and SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection) as well as the activities of groups like SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) for a sampling of the pro- gressive political stances adopted by U.S. based South Asians. For studies that offer some examination of diasporic literary/cultural texts, please see: Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Rey Chow (In- diana: Indiana UP, 1993); Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: U of North Carolina P, 1989); Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Blooming- ton: Indiana UP, 1994); Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers (NY: Rout- ledge, 1994); The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996); and Immigrant Acts: Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe (Forthcoming, Duke UP, 1996). Also see the very interesting and theoretically sophisticated work on "border cultures" being produced by/about minority cultural work- ers in the west.

6. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam- bridge: Harvard UP, 1993). Also see Gilroy's book on the Black presence in Britain, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987) and the important work of Stuart Hall, especially, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" in Identity: Community, Culture, Differ- ence, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).



192 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

7. Abena Busia, "Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Women's Re- bellious Voices in the Novels of the African Diaspora" in Black Feminist Criti- cism and Critical Theory, eds. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker (Green- wood, FL: Penkevill, 1988) 1-44. Also see by Busia "'What is Your Nation?' Re-

connecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall's Praisesongfor the Widow" in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing By Black Women, eds. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989) 196- 211; Gloria T. Hull, "The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora," Black Scholar, 17.2 (March-April, 1986) 2-4; Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women Writ- ers in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); Wendy W. Wal- ters, "Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven: Diasporic Displacement and the Feminization of the Landscape," Diaspora/ Borders/Exiles, ed. Elazar Barkan

(Forthcoming, Stanford UP, 1997). For a reading of African American culture that focuses on migration within national borders see Farah J. Griffins, "Who Set You Flowin'?" The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995).

8. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. (New York: Greenwood, 1992). Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. (New York: Greenwood, 1993). Further references to these books will be cited by page number in the essay.

9. Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, ed. The Women of South Asian Descent Collective (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1993).

10. See William Safran, "Diasporas in Modem Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (Spring 1991): 83-99. For an earlier definition of diaspora that was developed in the analysis of cross- cultural trade, see Abner Cohen," Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas" in The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, ed. Claude Meillassoux (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1971) 267.

11. See Shame, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983) 29. 12. See Gayatri. C Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues,

ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990) 77, 91. 13. Archana Appachana, Incantations and Other Stories. (London: Virago, 1991);

Sunetra Gupta, Memories of Rain (New Delhi, India: Penguin India, 1992) and also by Gupta, The Glassblower's Breath (UK: Orion, 1993); Manorama Mathai, Mulligatawny Soup (New Delhi, India: Penguin, 1993); Meena Arora Nayak, In the Aftermath (New Delhi, India: Penguin, 1992); Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). Romesh Gunasekera's Monkfish Moon (New York: New, 1993) and Reef (New York: New, 1994). Again, this is a very partial list.

14. Hailed as a "new subversive voice" by Alice Walker, Kamani's Junglee Girl was published by Aunt Lute Press, U.S. in 1995 and by Penguin India in 1995. India Currents Magazine, a U.S. based newspaper, compares Kamani's writing quite accurately to "ripe fruit-lush, bursting and sticky. And brimming with sinful delight." (Both quotations are taken from the Penguin book jacket.)

15. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Memories of Departure (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); also see by Gurnah, Pilgrim's Way (1988) and Dottie (1990)-both novels were published by Jonathan Cape Press. Reshard Gool, Capetown Coolie (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990); Agnes Sam, Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (London: Women's, 1989); Ahmed Essop, The Hajji and Other Stories, (Johannesburg, 1978) and Noorjehan and Other Stories, Johannesburg: Raven, 1990).

16. For instance, Bapsi Sidhwa is categorized as both Pakistani writer and as part of the diaspora. The cover of American Brat informs readers that Sidhwa "di-




vides her time between the United States where she teaches and Lahore [Pak- istan] where she lives."

17. See Tutul Gupta's translation of this novel into English, published by Penguin India in 1994 under the same title, Lajja.

18. Writers based in Vancouver, British Columbia, who write in Punjabi and occa-

sionally in English would include Sadhu Binning, Gurcharan Rampuri, Surjeet Kalsey and Ajmer Rode. An older generation of Punjabi-Canadian writers also deserves mention-Sadhu Singh Dhami, author of the English novel Malooka and Giani Kesar Singh. I am grateful to Amritjit Singh for discussing this issue of inclusions/exclusions with me and for providing me with names of addi- tional writers and information on their literary works and activities.

19. Desi derives from the Hindi word Des/Desh which means "country"-hence, Desi signifies "from/of the country." ABCD is a dismissive term for second

generation South Asians used mainly by newly arrived South Asians in the U.S. who are unsettled by their encounters with "Americanized" South Asians. The complementary and equally uncomplimentary term used to refer to newly arrived Indians, especially scholarship students on college campuses, is PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students). In India, NRIs are often perceived as not deserving of the many tax and investment concessions made to them by a

government eager for foreign exchange, hence NRIs are sometimes referred to as "Non-Relevant Indians" or as "Nervously Returning Indians." Envy and a desire for the authentic mark all these exchanges.

20. See Michele Cliff, The Land of Look Behind. (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985) 23.

193



Documents

Reading Indian Diaspora Literature