DIASPORA.ppt

Indian Diaspora: From Indenture
to Transnational, Hybrid
communities
DR. NIBU THOMSON
Asst. Professor, Newman College, Thodupuzha
(Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam), Kerala

Indian Diaspora: From Indenture to
Transnational, Hybrid communities
“The civilization of India, like a banyan tree,
has shed its beneficent shade away from its
own birthplace …Indian can live and grow by
spreading abroad” -Rabindranath Tagore

 Etymologically from Greek verb dia and speirein - to Scatter, to
spread, to disperse
 The dispersion of Jews after the Babylonian exile in 586 BC
 Situation of people living outside their traditional homeland
 More than 20 Million people
 Old diaspora and New Diaspora
 Old Diaspora- III Decade of 19 century with indian labourers migrating
to the plantation economies (indentured labour) of Mauritius, South
Africa, Malaya, Singapore, Srilanka, and the British, French, Dutch,
Dane and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean.
 Migration to Fiji in 1870s

 New Diaspora
 highly skilled professionals, workers and students with
tertiary and higher educational qualifications migrating to
developed countries, particularly to the USA, UK, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand. This flow started after Indian
independence and gathered momentum with the
emigration of IT professional in the 1990s
 The second is the flow of unskilled and semi-skilled
workers going mostly to the Gulf countries and Malaysia,
following the oil boom in the Gulf countries, mainly from
Kerala and other south Indian states.

 Indians in 53 countries
 PIO in Fiji( 49%), Guyana(53%), Mauritius (74%),
T&T(40%), Surinam(37%)
 In USA 1.3 Million Indians – Hindus
 Leicester city (35%) – non- white majority in 2011-12
 In Paris ‘ Jaganath Rath Yatra’
 In Germany ‘Kamadchi temple’- Tamil Hindus
 In Middle East ‘Onam’

Clash of cultures
 Hindus in France – not a single temple
 In Australia – (MUKTI GUPTESWAR TEMPLE in Minto)
 Failed assimilation
 Concessions and not a matter of right
 Rejection of multiculturalism
“If you pour enough water on a double scotch, it ceases to
taste like Whisky”

 CRITICAL EVENTS in HOST country
Race violence in Bradford in 2001
9/11 attack on twin towers
 CRITICAL EVENTS at “home”
Indian Army entry in Golden Temple at Amritsar
Sikh diaspora becomes victim diaspora
 Emergence of diasporic cultures – resistance to the
claimed superiority , against integrated national
cultures.

Features
 Dispersal from the original homeland
 Retention of collective memory, vision or myth of the
original homeland
 Partial assimilation in host society
 Idealised wish to return to original homeland
 Desirable commitment to restoration of homeland
 Continually renewed linkages with the original homeland

 Udaya Prasanta Meddega
Full of hope
I crossed
The seven seas
Looking for
The pot of gold (“Dissillusionment”)

we forget the crowded windowless trucks in which like chickens we were
taken there ….
we forget the stares that burned through our skins
the shattered moments that came with the shattered windows
we forget the pain of not speaking Punjabi with our children ….
multiplying one with twenty-five
our pockets feel heavier
changing our entire selves
and by the time we get off the plane
we are members of another class. (Sadhu Binning )

 Communities of people living together in one country who
acknowledge “ the old country”
 Living in one country but looking across time and space to
another
 “Past migration history”
 Diaspora identities, not migration identities
“all diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous,
contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the
construction of a common “we”’

 “All Diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy
in its own way. Diaspora refer to people who do not feel
comfortable with their non-hyphenated identities as
indicated on their passport…They are precariously lodged
within an episteme of real or imagined displacements,
self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by specters,
by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or
separatist movements.”
- (Vijay Mishra, The Literature of Indian Diaspora:
Theorizing the Diasporic imaginary)

 DIASPORIC LITERATURE
 the new possibilities and problems in migrancy
 the exposure of diaspora life
 new ways of thinking about individual and communal
identities
 critiquing established schools of critical thought
 rethinking the relationships between literature,
history and politics

THE CONCEPT OF HOME AND IDENTITY
Naipaul’s memoir and his experience
 “ our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream”
 home is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic
imagination
A place of no-return
Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands
 A writer out of country and out of language
 The past becomes a foreign country- “it’s my present
that’s foreign and the past is home”

 It may be that writers in my position… are haunted by
some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back …
But if we do look back … we will not be capable of
reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will,
in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but
invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
…Writing my book in North London, looking out through
my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was
imaging onto paper, I was constantly plagued by this
problem... what I was actually doing was a novel of
memory about memory.(13)

 Rushdie too had a city and a history to reclaim
“faded greys of old family-album snapshots”
 Fragmentary vision
“broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been
irretrievably lost”
 Not gifted with total recall- partial nature of memory
Shards of memory
Eg: Like broken pots of antiquity

 writers do not perceive things as whole
 “ cracked lenses, capable only of fractured
perceptions”
 Meaning is a shaky edifice build out of inadequate
materials
 Provisional nature of truth
Eg: Narrator Saleeem’s use of Theatre
 Loses deeper perspective- Blobs and slabs of the scene

ROLE OF A DIASPORIC WRITER
 Writing is a political act- re-describing the world
 State takes reality into its own hands, distorting reality-
politicized
 Denying the official political versions of truth
 Not depend upon author’s worthiness, but by the quality
of what has been written
 Indian writer – “guilt- tinted spectacles”
 Identity – plural and partial- straddle between two
cultures

 Homi K. Bhabha .The Location of Culture
 In-between position of the migrant
 Questions static models- national identity and “rootedness”
 New forms of postcolonial identity
 “border lives”- a new “art of the present”
“ we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross
to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present,
inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion”
 Deconstruct received notions of identity and subjectivity
 Rearticulates fixed, binary divisions
 Inappropriate and doubtful

 In -between spaces provide new strategies of selfhood -singular and
communal
1). Opposes the idea of a sovereign or essentialised subject
identity is a discursive product
2). To be remade and remodeled in new and innovative ways
3). Impact upon both individual and group
Results
 Refuse to think culture as pure and holistic
 Performance – new hybrid identities are negotiated
 Migrant as an agent of change- restaging the past
 incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of

 Subject is produced by the process of hybridization
 perpetually in motion open to change and re-inscription
 The aesthetics of the border impact upon received binary knowledges
 Freud’s term “uncanny”
 The disruption of received narratives of individual
and group identity is an uncanny moment
 It produces trauma and anxiety- “disruptive unhomely presence”
“It is the fabrication of a particular kind of knowledge within which
there exists a tension between the newness of what is being made and an
older way which may be covered over or masked”. Meena Alexander

 Diasporic literature has the task of
 unhousing received ways of thinking about the world and
discovering the hybridity
 Beyond representation- “incommensurable” – cannot be
measured by existing system
 unrepresented, uncanny presences bear witnesses to
displaced experiences, histories, and lives
“Boundary is a place from which something begins it
presencing”
 Cultural diversity and cultural difference

 Cultural diversity and cultural difference
 to “rethink our perspective on the identity of culture” in the Post-
colonial world
Cultural diversity
 An “object of empirical knowledge
 “recognition of pre-given cultural ‘contents’ and customs
Cultural difference
 emerges only at the significatory boundaries of culture, where
meanings and values are (mis)read or signs misappropriated
 identity, individually or en masse, is never pre-given: it must be
enunciated

 THIRD SPACE
 challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing,
unifying force
 hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are
untenable
 Post-colonial peoples are the bearers of a “hybrid identity” and “caught in
the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation”
 No ‘true national culture’
 conceptualizing an transnational culture- A space of Ourselves and Others

JUMPA LAHIRI
 Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri- born in London, the daughter of Bengali
Indian emigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to
the United States when she was two.
Interpreter of Maladies
Unaccustomed Earth
The Namesake
The Lowland
 The protagonist’s true identity is “hung up somewhere between India
and the United States”

 Focuses on family and recreating a new home in the new land
Interpreter of Maladies (1999)
 The nine stories share common themes such as the sense of loss,
marital problems, and the importance of communication, all set
against the backdrop of the migrant experience.
 The subtitle of the collection is “Stories of Bengal, Boston and
Beyond”, which points to the transnational trajectories of its
characters, most of whom are Bengali, immigrate to the United States
and settle in the Boston area.
 live in two or more linguistic and cultural worlds and constantly try to
create an intratextual dialogue between them.
 her own representation of India in the stories is in fact her
‘translation of India’.

 An immigrant’s story is usually a narrative of arrival, not departure
 diasporic tales of adaptation and growth, of a constant quest
for balanced cultural translation
 immigration is a positive, enriching experience
 her first- and second-generation characters come in contact with difference,
and most of them are able to filter the best elements from both cultures.
Namesake
 The Namesake tells the coming-of-age story of Gogol Ganguli, the American-
born son of Indian immigrants, spanning from his birth in 1968 to adulthood
in the year 2000.

 hyphenated status and eventually developing a transnational identity
 straddle multiple nation- spaces and cultures, blending elements
from past and present in their efforts to forge a sense of identity
 acknowledges “the individual’s affiliations to multiple nations and/or
cultures”
 the second generation and on its efforts to articulate their
Indian/Bengali-American identity
Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
 the children of Indian immigrants and on the ways in which they
shuttle between at least two cultural milieus

 the evolution of second and even third-generation personages
 tensions arising from their hybrid status.
 the children of immigrants, now in their adulthood, and surveys more
mixed marriages than previous volumes.
 an amazing freedom to explore ‘unaccustomed’ spaces and flourish
despite adversities.
They are not foreigners in the United States, but they experience
‘foreignness’ within.
“these subjects are always in transit, always becoming, and always
suspended in a state of irresolution”

 Lahiri’s The Lowland adapt relatively easily to a foreign country and
culture.
 Lahiri’s characters, both first- and second-generation, manage these
 cultural interstices successfully.
 the third space between India, the United States, and other
countries as well, into a productive one.
 The resulting transnational consciousness provides them with
possibilities of negotiating their identities and of becoming
empowered.

 Amitav Ghosh‟s novel Sea of Poppies (2008)
 Old diaspora- pre-independent India- back drop of Opium trade and
migration
 Ibis- A huge ship to Mauritius – cultural utopia
“ all the old ties were immaterial now that the sea had washed away
their past”
 Created new community

Child don’t worry
You won’t be cold for long
We are going back
Lets go home
Back to poverty
Mosquitoes and flies (“Before Long”)

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