Abstract
Diasporic writing is primarily a writing of the ‘self’, of a body removed from familiar moorings. How does the writer relate to home culture—through language, religion or memory? How is the nation defined and where is the ‘self’ rooted—are issues which have become important in the present context. Does the diasporic writer relate to a fragmentary geographical region in order to have a sense of belonging rather than to the larger concept of a nation with all its abstractions? Writers like Gayatri Spivak and Amartya Sen have defined themselves in relation to their mother tongues, while several writers living in India define their positions in relation to the whole country. Further, does internal migration from one region to another within the country qualify as a diasporic location? These questions all give conflicting answers and need to be understood in their complexity as they stand in relation to each other and to the act of representation because very often a visiting diaspora writer works with narratives of the homeland, many a time through myth and stereotyped images, at times through the tunnel of memory or through imagination based on a partial glimpse. These and other issues are raised in order to explore nationhood in its relationship to language, culture and region in its impact on the construction of a felt reality.
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- 1.
Several different words have been in use at different periods of history, to emphasise contemporary concerns—expatriate, émigré, immigrant, exile, refugee . But for the purposes of the present essay, the word ‘diaspora’ is being used as an umbrella term and includes all those who have left their homeland (whether voluntarily or under compulsion is not of significance) and are now living outside India. It is also of no concern as to what citizenships they have acquired, though this directly attacks the concept of patriotism as a unitary whole. Homelands, also in order to lay claim to the wealth of the NRI community, are now enlarging the meaning of NRI to encompass People of Indian Origin. See ‘Team Indians,’ The Times of India 25 August 2000, late city ed. 14.
- 2.
George Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
- 3.
See Gurmukh Singh, ‘The Trillion-Dollar Diaspora : The Empire Strikes Back?,’ The Sunday Times of India (New Delhi) 13 August 2000, late city ed. In India, we have moved away from the early immigrations of indentured labour, political exiles and upper class migrations to that of trained professionals. Today’s immigrants are leaving a country which is politically an independent nation state, and very often they also go in for the citizenship of the new homeland. But since September 2000, when this paper was presented at the JNU seminar, and 2001, the employment scene in the west has changed. Everyday there are newspaper reports to that effect, what with IT professionals returning home. See Rajpal.
- 4.
See Parameswaran in Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Jasbir Jain (Jaipur: Rawat, 1998, 2011) 20–39, 38. Also see Kanaganayakam ‘Writing Beyond Race: The Politics of Otherness’, in The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, 12.3 13–14 (1994). I also draw the reader’s attention to Rushdie, ‘The Location of Brazil,’ in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991). For Bissoondath, ‘even the word “homeland” is problematic,’ Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin Books), 119.
- 5.
Salman Rushdie, ‘On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edwards Said’ in Imaginary Homelands (London: Grant Penguin, 1991), 166–186.
- 6.
M.G. Vassanji, Amriika (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1999), 124.
- 7.
This conclave was announced with a lot of fanfare and conducted with great éclat, but the economic results are yet to be seen. The long list of invitees from outside India is outmatched by the longer list of invitees from outside Rajasthan but inside India. Rajasthan Patrika has brought out a supplement listing their names and addresses (23 September 2000).
- 8.
See the Foreword to Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’. She writes, ‘Any sense of Bengal as a “nation” is governed by the putative identity of the Bengali language’ (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1988) 181). Similarly in ‘Marginality in The Teaching Machine,’ (Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1996), she is of the view that cultural identity always presupposes a language and writes, ‘In that sense, I suppose, I am a Bengali’ (55). Contrast this with a text written by a semi-literate nineteenth-century Bengali woman Rassundari Devi, Amar Jiban (originally published in two parts, Pt. I, 1876, Pt. II, 1906) who begins her autobiography Amar Jiban (translated by Enakshi Chatterjee, Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 1999), by stating ‘I was born in the month of Chaitra in the years 1218 and I am 88 years old. I have spent such a long time in Bharatvarsha’ (21). Here, the author is not limited by the limits of her language.
- 9.
Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps (Calcutta, Thema, 1991). Also see Mahasweta Sengupta, ‘Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and the Images of Power’, Between Languages, Cultures and Cross-cultural Texts. Ed. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, (Delhi: OUP, 1996), where she points out how the processes of selection (and omission), rewriting texts, denudes them of their richness, intensity and meaning (160–61). Sengupta proceeds to look at Rabindranath Tagore’s autotranslations and observes that he consciously pruned the original and substituted images as the meaning had to be rendered acceptable and intelligible to people of a distant land (170). In a letter to Thomas Sturge Moore (11 June 1935), Tagore confessed to a sense of futility at the whole process of translation, (Sengupta 171).
- 10.
Introduction, Imaginary Homelands 2. Rushdie also points out how the use of the word ‘Moghul’ for Muslim immediately excluded the Indian Muslims from any claim on their own country, and Indian tradition was ‘being described in exclusive, and excluding, Hindu terms.’
- 11.
Dingwaney, ‘Introduction: Translating Third World Cultures,’ Between Languages, 3. Dingwaney quotes Fanon, ‘To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture,’ and goes on to elaborate upon its inference—the importance of contexts. Writers like R. Parthasarthy, The Rough Passage, and Bhatt have also responded to the expatriate condition as the loss of a voice. (See Bhatt ‘Search for my Tongue’ Daskhat 1, 1992).
- 12.
Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, ‘South Asian American Literature Off the Turnpike of Asian American’, Postcolonial Theory and the United States, Eds. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
- 13.
See Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘My Intimate Alien,’ Spec. issue of Outlook (2000): 116–17, where she admits that her own experience of India is ‘largely that of a tunnel, the tunnel imposed by a single city we ever visited, by the handful of homes we stayed in, by the fact that I was not allowed to explore this city on my own.’
- 14.
Mistry, ‘Swimming Lessons’, Tales for Firozsha Baag (1987, New Delhi: Rupa, 1993).
- 15.
This discussion took place at a seminar in Jaipur on Expatriate Writing: Theory and Practice in December 1996 where some of the speakers also referred to a similar controversy which had taken place in Canada. Also refer Santosh Gupta, ‘Balancing Pluralities: Search for Ideology in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance,’ in Writers of the Indian Diaspora, Ed. Jasbir Jain, 1998. and Keki Daruwalla ‘Of Parsis and their Literature’, Critical Practice 7, (2000).
- 16.
See my article, ‘Framing Cultural Narratives.’ The Postmodern Indian Novel. Ed. Vinay Kirpal (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1996).
- 17.
My initial response to both these novels was that the writers had lost touch with India. Meenakshi Mukherjee’s response to Desai’s latest collection of short stories, expressed to me in personal correspondence, has been the same. But for a more detailed examination of Desai’s Journey to Ithaca see the rev. ed. of Stairs to the Attic: The Novels of Anita Desai by Jasbir Jain (Jaipur: Printwell, 2000).
- 18.
Bissoondath, he argues for a reduced emphasis on ethnicity and a greater one towards acceptance and a sense of belonging (Selling Illusions). Perhaps there a need to create a third category between assimilation and ethnicity which can impart individuality without alienation? Daruwalla in his essay on the Parsi Novel makes a distinction between multiculturalism and pluralism basing his argument on Fulford’s (referred above, 83).
- 19.
My reference here is to a table talk between Punjabi writers who live in North America but continue to write in Punjabi, and writers from India, ‘Parwasi Sahitya sambandha Table Talk, published in April–June 1994, issue of Watan (Punjabi) where Sadhu Binning asserts his claim to a voice in the happenings back home (19). Others also express similar views. Discussants were Sutinder Singh Noor, Mohanjit, Navtej Bharti, Balraj Cheema, Sadhu Binning, Daljit Mehta and Ravinder Sahraw.
- 20.
See Spivak, ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’ in Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1988), 246.
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Jain, J. (2017). The New Parochialism. In: The Diaspora Writes Home. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4846-3_7
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