Diasporic Indians Research Articles

The Nature of Diasporic Indian Fiction and the Various Dimensions of Indian Life

In overseas fiction, the image of one's own state is reflected in the creation of literature along with language and craft. The maturity in the thoughts of the writer is the result of his life values and when that writer gives his thoughts the form of fiction or story, then his values influence his literature. When India was under the hegemony of the British rule, a large number of Indians went to other European countries as immigrants, but when the work of writing stories was done by the immigrants, they mentioned various dimensions of Indian life and worked to spread the values of Indian life to different countries. Indian expatriate writer Suman Vedi, who lives in New York, has presented a beautiful depiction of Indian life and culture. Abstract in Hindi Language: प्रवासी कथा साहित्य में भाषा व शिल्प के साथ साहित्य की रचना में अपने राज्य की छवि प्रकट होती है। लेखक के विचारों में परिपक्वता अपने जीवन मूल्यों की देन होती है और जब वह लेखक अपने विचारों को कथा साहित्य या कहानी का रूप देता है तो उसके मूल्य उसके साहित्य पर अपना प्रभाव डालते है। जब भारत पर ब्रिटिष शासन का आधिपत्य था तो बहुत संख्या में भारतीय दूसरे यूरोपीय देशों में प्रवासी के रूप में गये परंतु जब प्रवासीयों के द्वारा कथा लेखन का कार्य किया गया तो उनके द्वारा भारतीय जीवन के विविध आयामों का उल्लेख किया तथा भारतीय जीवन के मूल्यों के अलग-2 देशों में पहुंचाने का कार्य किया। न्यूयार्क में रहने वाली भारतीय प्रवासी लेखिका सुमन वेदी ने भारतीय जीवन और संस्कृति का सुन्दर चित्रण प्रस्तुत किया है। Keywords: प्रवासी, शिल्प, जीवन, सुमन वेदी, आधिपत्य, यूरोप, न्यूयार्क, संस्कृति, आयाम।

Educating Indians, learning ‘Indianness’: navigating pluralistic educational infrastructures in diasporic Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.

A Critique of Modernity and Modern Values: Comparing the British with Indians in 'Bye-Bye Blackbird'

This paper intends to deal with Bye-Bye Blackbird by Anita Desai by presenting the critical gaze of diasporic Indians over modern British society and the ways these maladjusted Indians feel a sense of uneasiness and discomfort in an alien land dominated by modern values. Basing the theoretical framework on criticism of modernity, the study focuses on how Indian immigrants position the British and themselves in relation to modern values. Whereas they associate the British with privacy, isolation, coldness and lack of close and intimate social relations, a mechanical and standardised pattern of behaviours, they identify themselves with a set of social norms which incorporate warmth, affection and close relations along with spontaneity and non-mechanical acts. The central point of attention concerns the impression diasporic Indians have by observing attitudes of the British toward traffic, nature, social relations and technology and by comparing these attitudes with theirs.

Study of Diaspora Elements in Sunetra Gupta’s Novels

The Diaspora is a key element of colonialism because millions of people habitually travelled to industrialized nations in search of better opportunities overseas. Themes of transformation, alienation, loneliness, and self-discovery are prevalent in the novels written by diasporic authors. Whether you leave your own country deliberately or are forced to, it can be distressing. Authors of diasporic ancestry do a fantastic job of capturing the emotional and physical suffering that their heroes go through when they relocate. People from the diaspora are emotionally and physically cut off from their home country and the rest of the globe despite being crowned, projected, known, and adored in their new community. Sunetra Gupta, an experienced member of the Indian diaspora, looks at how immigrants do in the United States. Most diasporic authors' books deal with themes of change, Characters find tranquilly by staying in their own country in a Sunetra Gupta's novels. They are overjoyed and satisfied because their prior encounters have left them with positive and lasting impressions. This essay makes an attempt to describe and evaluate the problems and experience in her Memories of Rain and A Sin of Color. Examining Sunetra Gupta's works reveals how the West is beginning to recognize migrant Indians as well as how this diasporic Indian adjusts to such a shifting plane of recognition through the never-ending process of re- creation.

AKHIL SHARMA’S FAMILY LIFE: REGRETTING DOUBLENESS OF DIASPORA INDIVIDUALS

This study discusses a matter of cultural identity faced by diaspora individuals in Akhil Sharma’s novel Family Life. As a diasporic Indian American, Sharma depicts that cultural identity is problematic, especially for an individual who experiences two or more conflicted cultures from home left behind and the home this individual has moved to. Sharma also demonstrates that the identity of this diasporic is never complete. This study aims to critically analyze Sharma’s fiction by highlighting the issues he engages as a diasporic writer. It also depicts how voluntary displacement done by diaspora characters tends to lead them to mourn. The analysis applies a concept of cultural identity by Stuart Hall. It explains a notion of identity within the discourses of history and culture, which is not an essence but a positioning. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method. The result shows there is doubleness of cultural identity conveyed by Sharma. This regretting doubleness appears in structured stages: admiring the West and being rejected by the West.

Invitation to Restorative Practices in Critical Qualitative Research

Introduction| June 01 2022 Invitation to Restorative Practices in Critical Qualitative Research Kakali Bhattacharya Kakali Bhattacharya Kakali Bhattacharya is an award-winning professor at University of Florida housed in Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Program. Her work has made spaces in interdisciplinary de/colonizing work and qualitative research where creativity and contemplative approaches are legitimized and seen as gateways for cultivating depth, integrity, expansive inquiry, and discovering critical insights. Substantively, she explores transnational issues of race, class, gender in higher education. She is the 2022 winner of American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) inaugural Guba award for Outstanding Contributions to Qualitative Research from the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group (SIG). She is the 2018 winner of AERA’s Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative, has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from International Congress of Qualitative Research. Correspondence to: kbhattacharya@coe.ufl.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2022) 11 (1-2): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2022.11.1-2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kakali Bhattacharya; Invitation to Restorative Practices in Critical Qualitative Research. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 June 2022; 11 (1-2): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2022.11.1-2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentDepartures in Critical Qualitative Research Search I am at a rural tea estate in Darjeeling, India. It is April 2021. Three new mutated variants of the coronavirus are in the air, creating devastation and death the likes of which I have never seen before. Whole families are dying within days of each other. Diasporic Indians who have flown back to India from the US, Canada, and other parts of the world to tend to sick parents and other family members are themselves becoming ill and dying. Relief groups are struggling to serve the needs of countless citizens begging for oxygen, medicine, and beds for their loved ones. Amid this rampage, the most forgotten are the transwomen, migrant workers, Dalit garbage pickers, custodians, Adivasi (Indigenous) tribes, and unhoused HIV-positive folks, battling the virus with little or no support or priority of care. In the midst of all this suffering, I can’t help but recognize my privilege in... You do not currently have access to this content.

English language use of the Malaysian Tamil diaspora

ABSTRACT Diasporic Indian languages in Malaysia are unique and distinguishable from their native variants. Past studies have indicated that dominant languages tend to overpower minority languages in multilingual communities, hence causing languages to shift. The aims of this study are to identify the language choices of Malaysian Tamils and to what extent does English influence their shift from their native language. The respondents were 30 Malaysian Indians. The findings of the study revealed that in the family domain, there was an alarming shift to English when participants spoke to their children (93%) and their spouses (63%) as opposed to the older generations. Meanwhile, in the friendship domain, 76% of the participants preferred using English when they had to speak to other Malaysian Tamils. As for strangers, there was a 50–50 distribution between English and Malay between these participants. These findings seem to show that most families shifted from their native language to English among children in the family domain, education domain and friendship domain. Therefore, it is possible to note that factors such as imperialism, economic status and relevance of usage in language domains are the driving factors behind the shift of Tamil to English in Malaysia.

“We are similar, but different”: Contextualizing the Religious Identities of Indian and Pakistani Immigrant Groups

This article explores how Indian and Pakistani immigrant groups from the Bay Area in North California relate to and interact with one another. There is limited research on the role of religion in shaping sentiments of distinctiveness or “groupness” among diasporic Indians and Pakistanis in the UK and North America. Through conducting qualitative interviews with 18 Indian and Pakistani immigrants in the Bay Area, I recognized three factors pertaining to religion that were salient in influencing notions of groupness—notions of modernity, sociopolitical factors, and rituals. With respect to these three variables, I flesh out the spectrum of associated groupness; while some factors were linked with high levels of groupness, others enabled the immigrant groups to find commonality with one another. This research is integral to a better understanding of the interactions between South Asians in the diaspora, as well as to gain insight into how these immigrant groups—whose countries of origin share a history of religious conflict—perceive and interact with one another.

A Queer Canadian Affair: The Diasporic Indian Woman Negotiating Queerness in Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen

A Queer Canadian Affair: The Diasporic Indian Woman Negotiating Queerness in Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen

Jews and Muslims in Globalization Literature and Theory From William Shakespeare to Ayad Akhtar

The use of Jewishness as a trope for understanding contemporary economic theories arguably originates with Karl Marx’s characterization of the commodity as an “inwardly circumcised Jew”, which Slavoj Žižek extends to include money itself. The notion of commodity is central to contemporary economic and globalization theory, and Marx’s characterization of it has gone largely unchallenged. At a time when circumcision as a religious practice is once again controversial, we would do well to attend to such discourse. I contend that many of the discourses and problems that inhere to both popular and theoretical constructions of globalization – such as circumcision, nationalism and cosmopolitanism – impact Muslims and Jews alike, often in strikingly parallel and interconnected ways. By way of illustration, I undertake a reading of the literary oeuvre of Ayad Akhtar, a Muslim-American writer of Pakistani descent. While his work is best known for its critical examination of the place and identity of the American Muslim in the post-9/11 world, I argue Jewish–Muslim intimacy is the key to Akhtar’s identity politics, a fact which reframes questions of globalization, and ought to trouble its contemporary theorizations. Far from being a subject of theological or ethnographic interest, I contend that the Jew in the literature and culture of South Asia and its diaspora provides a set of discursive practices for negotiating transnational and non-local identities, such as South Asian Muslim, diasporic Indian and global citizen.

Dynamics Of Indian Diaspora Literature: A Panoramic View

Diaspora Theory has affected the literature of every language of the globe with its multiple characteristics. This literature is commonly referred to as Diasporic or Expatriate Literature. Diasporic Literature is a very broad idea and a paragliding term that involves all those literary works published by writers outside their home nation, but these works are linked to indigenous culture and background. All those authors can be considered as diasporic authors in this broad context, who write outside their nation but through their work stayed linked to their homeland. Diasporic literature has its origins in the sense of loss and alienation resulting from migration and expatriation. Diasporic literature generally deals with alienation, displacement, existential rootlessness, nostalgia, identity quest. Migrants suffer from the pain of being away from their homes, their motherland memories, the anguish of leaving behind everything familiar agonizes migrants ' minds. The diasporic Indians, too, are not breaking their ancestral land connection. There is a search for continuity and an astral impulse, an attempt to search for their origins. Settlement in alien territory leads to dislocation for them. Dislocation can be seen as a rupture with the ancient identity. By debating characteristics of expatriate or diasporic literature, the article tried to examine the reflection of Diaspora Theory and its multiple aspects in literature. The Indian contribution to diasporic literature was also evaluated in English.

Immigrant, Nationalist and Proud: A Twitter Analysis of Indian Diaspora Supporters for Brexit and Trump

The Brexit referendum to leave the EU and Trump’s success in the US general election in 2016 sparked new waves of discussion on nativism, nationalism, and the far right. Within these analyses, however, very little attention has been devoted towards exploring the transnational ideological circulation of Islamophobia and anti-establishment sentiment, especially amongst diaspora and migrant networks. This article thus explores the role of the Indian diaspora as mediators in populist radical right discourse in the West. During the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election and presidency, a number of Indian diaspora voices took to Twitter to express pro-Brexit and pro-Trump views. This article presents a year-long qualitative study of these users. It highlights how these diasporic Indians interact and engage on Twitter in order to signal belonging on multiple levels: as individuals, as an imaginary collective non-Muslim diaspora, and as members of (populist radical right) Twitter society. By analysing these users’ social media performativity, we obtain insight into how social media spaces may help construct ethnic and (trans)national identities according to boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. This article demonstrates how some Indian diaspora individuals are embedded into exclusivist national political agendas of the populist radical right in Western societies.

But he’s not desi: articulating ‘Indianness’ through partnership preference in the Indian-Australian diaspora

ABSTRACT This article examines young Indian-Australians’ understandings of identity expressed through their preferences in an intimate partnership. Studies in comparable contexts have indicated that diasporic Indians may identify as generically ‘Indian’, and express a desire for partners who are the same. This is no less true for many of Australia’s Indians. Based on fieldwork with members of the diaspora in Sydney, this paper looks at the extent to which the social hierarchies of regional/linguistic identity, religion, caste and class are reproduced through this group’s marriage and partnership practices. I find that their varying relationships with these hierarchies are often unconsciously shaped, and find expression in a sense of ‘Indianness’ and adherence to ‘Indian’ values. This paper further disrupts essentialising conceptions of inherent, intransient diasporic identity by highlighting that the diasporic negotiation of self is deeply personal and prone to differentiation.

‘They Are Fine Specimens of the Illustrious Indian Settler’: Sporting Contact between India and South Africa, 1914–1955

Sporting contacts between the India and diasporic Indian community in South Africa were part of a broader range of links between the two countries. In this article, we consider association football tours between both countries from 1914 to 1955 against the backdrop of increased racism and segregation in South Africa and the anti-colonial movement in India. We draw from a range of sources, including archives, unpublished reports and newspaper articles. The sports tours helped to solidify relations between Indians in South Africa and India underpinning political, cultural, spiritual and emotional ties; they show how Indianness was forged among diasporans and that this was highly contested and constantly transformed in relation to external conditions; and they expose the racism on the part of white sporting organisations in particular and white politicians in general in South Africa.

Kehte Hain Humko Pyar Se Indiawaale: Shaping a contemporary diasporic Indianness in and through the Bollywood Song

In a contemporary moment rife with cultural reciprocation and symbolized by exaggerated hyper-mobilities, Indianness in general and diasporic Indianness in particular is constantly subject to redefinition and reinvention. Even as the Bollywood song’s cinematic fate remains open to speculation, its ability to transcend barriers of space and language, and its near-universal accessibility lend it a unique cultural currency, affording diasporic audiences a space for collective identification. Whether through formal practices, such as dance and fitness classes, or more informal interactions such as wedding performances, appropriation of the song becomes, for the diasporic Indian, a convenient tool for asserting both cultural allegiance and difference even as song themes targeting the diaspora impart a vision of their own that is often grossly exaggerated. Through a combination of primary fieldwork, content analysis and secondary research, this article seeks to understand how the Bollywood song shapes a diasporic Indianness and, in turn, gets shaped by it. My emphasis is on analyzing the diaspora’s relationship with the song and the song’s potential for diasporic identity negotiation.

Cultural diplomacy: India does it differently

This article reviews the singularities of Indian doctrine and practice of cultural diplomacy, beginning with the observation that this term and the notions of ‘soft power’ and ‘public diplomacy’ commonly associated with cultural diplomacy elsewhere do not have much purchase in India, where the spirit and letter of ‘international cultural relations’ are the preferred currency. The essay explores the historical grounding for this preference, as well as the attitudes and practice that flow from it. Another singularity is the role and importance of the Indian diaspora: overseas populations of Indian origin have been both a significant segment of the target audience for international cultural relations – as if a certain idea of India had to be projected abroad to a part of itself – and a significant ‘co-producer’ in projecting that image. A third is the emergence of a new avatar of the diasporic Indian, now identified with capitalist entrepreneurship.

Reading Diaspora: The Architectonic Spaces in Preeta Samarasan’s <i>Evening is the Whole Day<i/>

 Many Malaysian writers have delved into the subjects of race, identity and nationhood, given the postcolonial and multicultural contexts of the country. One relatively new writer who has added her voice to the narrative of the Indian diasporic community in Malaysia is Preeta Samarasan. Evening is the Whole Day (2008) is a riveting text by a diasporic author writing about the diasporic Indians living in Malaysia. Naturally themes of home and homeland are dominant in the text. Indeed, the house occupied by the rich, middle-class family in the narrative, called the Big House, becomes a reflection of the many issues faced by Indians living in a country rife with racial politics. More than just reflecting this family’s desire to belong, in Evening is the Whole Day, the house becomes a space wherein the personal and the public coincide. Within this space too, differing realities exist between the poor and the rich. It is this diverse economic standings which create varying realities for both groups of people.This paper then will explore the architectonic spaces in Evening is the Whole Day with the aim of highlighting some of the pressing issues faced by the Indians in Malaysia. The motif of the house and, by extension, the notion of home, is evoked as a theoretical concept to image and analyse some of these issues.

“Stick[ing] to their own kind”: Melancholia and/as Anti-Black Racism in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala

In this paper, I explore the relationship between grief and anti-Black racism in diasporic Indian communities. While such racisms are often theorized as an effect of colonial economic structures, I consider the affective dimensions of such racism. How are the anti-Black attitudes of diasporic Indians bound up in the trauma of migration and in the grief that arises from living under white supremacy? Focusing on Mira Nair's 1991 film Mississippi Masala and its specific depiction of anti-Black racism, I argue that melancholic grief in particular fundamentally structures the formation and circulation of racism within diasporic Indian communities.

“Save our students”: contesting discourses of racist attacks against Indians down under

This paper seeks to understand the dominant civic discourses of accusation of racism leveled against the Australians as expressed by the victims of racist attacks and Indian Government officials in the Times of India and Outlook India news magazines. The aim of the paper is to understand how the logics of the discourses have constituted the racially motivated attacks on the Indian diaspora in Australia, and how the nationalistic sentiments are fostered among the diasporic Indians and the Indians in India. The paper argues that there is a mutual production of diasporic and homeland nationalism in the face of a crisis that hits the Indian diaspora in Australia. This analysis also brings to fore the ideology of multiculturalism in Australia.

‘‘Our Line’’ The Shawnees, the United States, and Competing Borders on the Great Lakes ‘‘Borderlands,’’ 1795–1832

In February 1807 delegation of Shawnee Indians traveled from their town of Wapakoneta, in what is now northern Ohio, to Washington where they asked President Thomas Jefferson for piece of land around their settlement to be laid off separately for their people. The headmen carefully detailed where they wished their borders-what they called our line-to run and asked Jefferson to give them a strong writing that would prove their right to territory these boundaries encompassed (see Figure 1). The Shawnees' request is puzzling, for land they asked for was located in Indian Country, beyond reach of American officials. Moreover, chiefs' desire for bounded territory goes against dominant scholarly image of Shawnees as the greatest Travellers in America. Historians typically portray Shawnees as diasporic people whose survival in colonial world depended on geographic mobility. Consequently, borders have played little role in narratives of Shawnee history, as they have more generally in Native American history. Breaking from this tradition, this essay explores how diasporic Shawnees envisioned and drew borders to create homeland for themselves in Great Lakes country between Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and Shawnee removal in 1832 and how these boundaries intertwined and clashed with lines drawn by United States to control this strategically important region. Examining Shawnee borders underlines complexity and contingency of transformation of Great Lakes country from an intercolonial borderland into bordered lands of emerging nation-states during early nineteenth century. Both diasporic Indians and Euro-Ajmerican statebuilders contributed to this development, as they adopted borders as instruments for creating order in world unsettled by displacement and violence.1Historians have traced how boundary between United States and British Canada, formally concluded in 1783, reconfigured Great Lakes region from multicultural middle ground into divided ground, as states on both sides of new line established practices to control peoples and spaces between them. Indian land played an integral part in this process. Both United States and British Empire assumed exclusive right to buy Native land on their side of border; re-selling this land to Euro-American speculators and settlers became primary way for states to gain political support, wealth, and authority on their margins. State-building, then, hinged on drawing borders, both between American and Canadian territory and between Indian and Euro-American land. As historians are increasingly realizing, Native peoples, too, used borders to define and defend their place in region, often appropriating Euro-American notions of borders and creating culturally hybrid forms of asserting land ownership. There has been less attention on how both American and Indian lines constructed nationhood and social order in Native communities. Investigating competing, but often intertwined, Shawnee and U.S. projects of bordermaking in Great Lakes country reveals that borders provided both Indians and Americans with symbolic language to articulate and argue their understandings of Native identity, nationhood, and power. In early nineteenth century several rival discourses of Indian borders developed among both Shawnees and Americans, as they debated how Native societies and their relations with republic should be organized.2The Great Lakes country has long been home to diverse and populous Native American communities whose kinship networks and ideas about human-land relations had ordered land use and territorial rights across region for millennia before European colonialism. In addition to these traditional inhabitants, by end of eighteenth century Anglo-American expansion had pushed thousands of displaced Indians from east and south, including about one thousand Shawnees, to Great Lakes region. …