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

Author(s): Rosemary Marangoly George

Source: MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 3, Other Americas (Autumn, 1996), pp. 179-193
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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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 uni-
verse, 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 be-
lieve, 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 out-
side a Jewish homeland. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have

MELUS, Volume 21, Number 3 (Fall 1996)

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180 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

witnessed events that have resulted in several millions of expat

peoples whose exodus from home was marked by varying degr
violence and hope. Many of today's diasporic groups (Africans,
nese, Palestinians, Armenians, Jews, Indian subcontinentals, to n
a few) have a long history of travel away from original homel
Yet very often within mainstream literary studies, terms like
and homelessness are read at a purely metaphoric level or as ex
ences afflicting the "lost generation" in Paris and other such d
tantes.4 However, in recent years, critical texts by Edward Said (
cially After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives,) Mary Layoun's Travels o
Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology, the now well-established
pora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and several articles in
academic journals like Public Culture have brought the ever
realities of exile, immigration, refugee status, migrancy, comm
dispersal and dislocation to the notice of literary practitione
the U.S.5
The literature produced out of diasporic experiences has al
been in the business of constructing fictions that fit realities that d
fit realities. The quality and quantity of literary writing by dias
peoples merit sustained, historically located, critical attention.
readings could, at the least, transform our reception of contemp
fiction and our understanding of literary history. This is perhap
illustrated by the powerful counter-reading of modernity offer
Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciou
This book forces a reorientation of every prior analysis of wes
modernity that did not or could not recognize that cultural hyb
(transcending ethnicity and nationality and resulting from the m
ment of peoples) was characteristic of modernity.6 Other scholar
Abena Busia, Gloria T. Hull, Gay Wilentz, and Wendy Walters h
written critical texts that read African American literature as dias-
porean texts.7 In their essays, such literature is revealed to have glob-
al reach rather than operating only within a U.S. cultural context. To-
day it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate the nation in "na
tional 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

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 181

raised in recent publications on and by writers of "the I

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 cir-
cumstances 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 de-
scent 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 out-
side 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" lit-
erature. Reworlding, the first of the two books, begins with a theoreti-
cally 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 com-

munities 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

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182 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

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 soli-
darity 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 move-
ment, 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 differ-
ent 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 dias-
poric 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-

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 183

dividual writer's responses to these issues, Nelson ends the in

tion with an insistence that

At the core of all diasporic fictions, nevertheless, is the haunting pres-

ence 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 diaspo-
ra. (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 "as-
similation" 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 glo-
rious 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 con-
text. 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 sev-
eral purposes. First, the less familiar (to scholars in the west) and

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184 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

younger Indo-Fijian literature takes shape when contrasted wit

older, more familiar Indo-Trinidadian literature. Using both sc
ios as examples, Tiffin demonstrates how differences, in the hist
circumstances of the move away from India, in the history of
place moved to, and in the composition of the local population, a
fect the literature that expatriate Indians produced. Ultimately,
stresses, writers in both locations have to realize the "potentialit
a racially hybridized present" (96). Her comparative study su
challenges the very idea of a "unified" Indian diasporic literatur
provokes a very important question: are all hybridizations si
simply by virtue of being hybrid?
This attention to diasporic movement over two centuries and
the face of the entire globe brings complex and difficult issues t
fore. For instance, in such analyses, some actors (literary critics
ative writers and the characters they create) have difficulty in a
ing the fact or future possibility of racial hybridity and of split af
tions as undeniable features of any diaspora. Victor Ramraj dubs
tional characters who display such traits as "the traditionalists
his article on Indo-Caribbean literature, Ramraj suggests that th
gle most prominent feature of this literature is the conflict bet
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 ar-
gument 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

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 185

context of a long history of coerced and willful travel away fr

subcontinent over the last two hundred years.
The essays in Reworlding on individual writers who reside
west (Naipaul, Rushdie, Markandaya, and Mukherjee) are unev
quality. Reworlding would have been a much tighter book with
excessive attention paid to novelists like Rushdie and Naip
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 with
the diasporic sensibility. Hence, what other readers have calle
Naipaul's racism, elitism, self-hatred and intense anglophilia, P.
Chauhan tries to represent as Naipaul's "cosmic irony" born of an e
sential Hindu consciousness. Chauhan relies too heavily on sto
phrases like "the ancient Indian view of life" and "the Hindu co
sciousness of the terrible fluidity of things human and non-hum
to be able to take his attempted exoneration of Naipaul as an unsen
mental Hindu very far (22). Hena Ahmad's essay on Kamal
Markandaya is placed too late in the collection for the simple, int
ductory tone of her first few paragraphs to serve any useful purpo
Lawrence Needham's essay on the work of the U.S. based poet, Ag
Shahid Ali, is the best of the many articles on individual writers. H
essay quietly guides the reader through four volumes of Ali's poetr
stopping for nuanced close readings of well-chosen poems.
While Writers of The Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critic
Sourcebook was published almost a year after Reworlding, it is cle
that each book requires the other. No doubt this is why Nelson em
barked on the arduous task of compiling this lengthy sourcebo
with detailed entries on fifty-eight outstanding writers of the Indi
diaspora. Each entry contains otherwise hard to locate, up to date b
ographical, bibliographical and critical information on individual
thors. There is a fair representation of feminist women writers as well
as of the better known gay/lesbian writers-groups that are usuall
sidelined in diaspora projects. Nelson's choice of authors includ
those with unending lists of publications, awards and other honor
like Salman Rushdie, as well as lesser known writers of great prom
like Indira Ganesan and Suniti Namjoshi.
Nalini Natarajan's introduction to Writers of The Indian Diaspora d
serves special mention. Her short piece puts forth a brilliant and
phisticated argument for the theoretical soundness of this project t
basically provides the (mainly) western reader with a wealth of info
mation on a group of "Third World" writers. Gayatri Spivak, t
most prolific of Indian expatriate cultural critics, has expressed h

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186 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

doubts about the value of academic work (teaching/writing) wh

the project becomes reduced to mere "information retriev
Natarajan's essay suggests an alternative reading of the role of
information-packed volumes. She argues that, "in introducing
ers to the multiple subjectivities that arise in conditions of dias
[Writers of the Indian Diaspora] provide[s] a useful antidote to th
ductive processes of homogenization at work everywhere aroun
today" (xix). Natarajan's introduction inscribes a framework ar
the text that thwarts any attempt at mere information gatherin
presents this sourcebook as an "invaluable resource" for unders
ing the "transnational potential of diasporic populations" to int
rupt the "monologic discourses of contemporary nation states" (
Reading through the entries on writers as different as Santha
Rau and Samuel Dickson Selvon, one finds it impossible to sum
rize the wide range of authorial literary takes or even on the v
inflections added on by different commentators. Natarajan's in
duction walks the very fine line of not presenting one unified
poric literary vision nor a field of endless multiplicity. She sees the
erature as twisting together various strands of diasporic cultura
occupations: the sub-textual inscription of male anxiety match
female escapism, an aesthetics of loss often comically represente
nancial security undercut by cultural anxiety, religious fundam
ism fueled by consumerism, etc.
A given factor in the publication of such sourcebooks is that
stant updating is required if this book is to continue to be a usef
source in the years to come. There are already several Indian
poric writers (working in English) whose fiction has been publ
in the period between the release of this book and the writing o
essay: Anjana Appachana (U.S.), Sunetra Gupta (England), Ma
ma Mathai (Bangkok), Romesh Gunasekera (England), Meena
Nayak (U.S.), Shyam Selvadurai (Canada).13 Many of the contrib
to Our Feet Walk the Sky will undoubtedly find a place in futur
tions of Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Foremost among them is
Kamani, whose powerful collection of short stories Junglee Gi
published simultaneously in the U.S. and in India in 1995.14 Fut
editions of the sourcebook might also include those writers who
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

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 187

clearly merited inclusion in this edition of the sourcebook. Wh

course unpredictable is the continuous movement of writers
the subcontinent-for example, since the publication of this s
book I have seen established Indian writers like Anita Desai listed as
part of the diaspora.16 Then there is the case of Taslima Nasrin, th
outspoken Bangladeshi feminist whose 1993 novel Lajja [Shame] was
banned in her home country for it's strongly worded denouncemen
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 ulti
mately 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 withi
the subcontinent and within Indian diasporic communities is no
written in English, and this needs to be clearly acknowledged in such
sourcebooks. There are several vernacular or regional language liter-
ary 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], broadcas
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, theo
ry, and "Indianness." The selection includes brilliant, nuanced medi-
tations by well-known scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty an
Indira Karamcheti, as well as contributions from high school stu
dents like Tesha Sengupta and Sajani Patel who write with an engag
ing determination to "be who they want to be." Our Feet Walk the Sk
forces many acknowledgments, the first and foremost being the issu
of gender as a dynamic within the diaspora. In their discussion o
family, sexuality and community, the best of these contribution
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
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

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188 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

filiations and India's hegemony in the region as well as a determ

effort to share space with contributions that represent minority
gions and cultures from the region. The introduction states tha
book is "primarily for South Asians" and, while there are very
quate glossaries of words from specific Indian languages right
the appropriate pieces, "the non-South Asian reader" is instruc
the introduction to "make an effort to try and understand the
basic words in order to get a sense of the bi/multilingual vocabu
of many of the writers" (xvii). The editors have shown admirab
straint in having resisted standardizing the grammar, genre, or
ject requirements. Instead what has been fashioned out of many
erogeneous submissions is a narrative that begins with a sectio
tled "Lighting the fire beneath our homes" and ends with a sec
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-immi-
grant 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 pro-
vide 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 primari-
ly within an academic audience, Our Feet Walk the Sky might well be-
come 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 au-
dience 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 con-
sider 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

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 189

problematizes diasporic literary production and consumpt

highlighting a whole spectrum of cultural/political alliance
than an affiliation to one's country of origin. It is such prod
complexities that await us in further bulletins on the literary
er cultural texts produced from diasporic locations.
In this context, a recent and noteworthy book is R. Radhak
nan's Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Whil
hakrishnan is not centrally concerned with the literary text
duced by the diaspora, his study offers a meditative and theor
nuanced consideration of the many affiliative tugs and pulls
ferent generations of the Indian diaspora in the U.S. In his f
last chapters, Radhakrishnan explores the tensions and limitat
the diasporic location that he himself epitomizes in his "pres
demic-immigrant location in the United States" (1). Radhakri
writes:

Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the

imperatives of an earlier "elsewhere" in an active and critical relation-
ship 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 au-
thor 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 "dias-
poric 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 pri-
marily 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).

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190 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

Overall, Nelson's Reworlding offers academic and other reade

introduction to the wide range of Indian diasporic literary resp
to the business of living away from an imagined "Home"-a c
tion that is shared not just by other diasporic peoples but by m
persons who inhabit this frenetic world of ours. Radhakrish
book can be read as an urgent call to the diaspora to take on th
sponsibility of being accountable to both locations-contemp
India and the "not-home" place. He writes:

I cannot live, earn, pay taxes, raise a family, produce scholarsh

teach, and take passionate and vigorous political stances here, and st
call it "not-home." Conversely, I cannot historicize the very valence
my being here except through an Indian/subaltem/postcolonial pe
spectivism. The demands of the "politics of location" are compl
"home" and the "not-home" and "coming" and "going" are neither li
eral nor figurative, but, rather issues within the politics of "imagin
tive geographies." (2)

Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative youth of it edito

group, Our Feet Walk the Sky holds its own amidst such sophist
theorizing. This generation's assessments are made from the ex
ence of having lived through an American childhood constantl
terrupted by "India" (or Pakistan, or Sri Lanka and so on). A
brightest moments, Our Feet Walk the Sky directs us to an apprecia
of a stance best articulated by Salman Rushdie in Shame: "Ro
sometimes think, are a conservative myth designed to keep us i
place." The final impression left by both books edited by Nelso
one of whole groups of people for whom living (and writing) o
margins has been an everyday event for many decades and ove
eral generations. Our Feet Walk The Sky demonstrates the way
which this "everyday" is transformed in the lives and writing
contemporary diasporic women. It could be argued that dias
peoples, rather than being a fringe population, in fact best epit
the postmodern/postcolonial condition. Writing of a not so diff
circumstance in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to De
Michelle Cliff concludes a chapter called "Passing" with line
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

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 191

Notes

1. "Hindustan" is commonly understood to signify India in Hindi. However, giv-

en 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 main-
stream 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 lat-
er 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, es-
pecially, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" in Identity: Community, Culture, Differ-
ence, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).

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192 ROSEMARY MARANGOLY GEORGE

7. Abena Busia, "Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Wome
bellious Voices in the Novels of the African Diaspora" in Black Feminist C
cism and Critical Theory, eds. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker (Gr
wood, FL: Penkevill, 1988) 1-44. Also see by Busia "'What is Your Nation?
connecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall's Praiseson
the Widow" in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Wri
By Black Women, eds. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989)
211; Gloria T. Hull, "The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora," Black Sc
17.2 (March-April, 1986) 2-4; Gay Wilentz, Binding Cultures: Black Women W
ers in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); Wendy W
ters, "Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven: Diasporic Displacement an
Feminization of the Landscape," Diaspora/ Borders/Exiles, ed. Elazar Ba
(Forthcoming, Stanford UP, 1997). For a reading of African American cu
that focuses on migration within national borders see Farah J. Griffins,
Set You Flowin'?" The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxfor
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-

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READING INDIAN DIASPORA LITERATURE 193

vides her time between the United States where she teaches and Lahor
istan] where she lives."
17. See Tutul Gupta's translation of this novel into English, published by
India in 1994 under the same title, Lajja.
18. Writers based in Vancouver, British Columbia, who write in Punjabi a
sionally in English would include Sadhu Binning, Gurcharan Rampuri,
Kalsey and Ajmer Rode. An older generation of Punjabi-Canadian writ
deserves mention-Sadhu Singh Dhami, author of the English novel M
and Giani Kesar Singh. I am grateful to Amritjit Singh for discussing t
of inclusions/exclusions with me and for providing me with names
tional writers and information on their literary works and activities.
19. Desi derives from the Hindi word Des/Desh which means "country"-
Desi signifies "from/of the country." ABCD is a dismissive term for
generation South Asians used mainly by newly arrived South Asians
U.S. who are unsettled by their encounters with "Americanized"
Asians. The complementary and equally uncomplimentary term used t
to newly arrived Indians, especially scholarship students on college ca
is PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students). In India, NRIs are often perce
not deserving of the many tax and investment concessions made to th
government eager for foreign exchange, hence NRIs are sometimes ref
as "Non-Relevant Indians" or as "Nervously Returning Indians." Envy
desire for the authentic mark all these exchanges.
20. See Michele Cliff, The Land of Look Behind. (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 198

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