South Asian Diaspora Research Articles

Decolonising gender in South Asia: a border thinking perspective

ABSTRACT The current collection elaborates on various ways of thinking about gender outside the epistemic frame of coloniality/modernity that is bound to the European colonial project. Following Walter Mignolo, we call for epistemic disobedience using border thinking as the necessary condition for thinking decolonially. Borders in this case are conceptualised not just as geographical borders of nation states, they also signify the borders of modern/colonial world, epistemic and ontological orders that the gendered and racialised populations of ex-colonies inhabit. We claim that dwelling, thinking and writing from these borders create conditions of epistemic disobedience to coloniality/modernity discourses of the West. The contributors of this collection, all women of colour from South Asia and South Asian diaspora write from and about these borders that challenge the colonial universality of thinking about gender. They are writing from and with subalternised racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies located geographically in South Asia and South Asian diasporic contexts. In this way, when coloniality/modernity is shaping universalist understandings of gender we are able to use a broader canon of thought to produce a more pluriversal understanding of the world.

Inflammatory bowel disease and the South Asian diaspora.

Migration is associated with changes in the incidence of diseases, often linked to new environmental exposures or movement away from such exposures. Studies are complicated by the time and length of migration and also by differences in the experience of second‐ and third‐generation migrants. South Asian people have migrated across the world. In this review, the incidence and prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease in these communities is considered, along with their potential role in future investigative studies of the diseases’ etiology.

Book Reviews

87 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 42, No.4, Summer 2019 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum The Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa INDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW by Mira Kamdar. United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 244 pages. India is fast overtaking China to become the most populous country on Earth. By mid-century, its 1.7 billion people will live in what is projected to become the world’s second-largest economy after China. While a democracy and an open society compared to China, assertive Hindu nationalism is posing new challenges to India’s democratic freedoms and institutions at a time when illiberal democracies and autocratic leaders are on the rise worldwide. How India’s destiny plays out in the coming decades will matter deeply to a world where the West’s influence in shaping the 21st century will decline as that of these two Asian giants and other emerging economies in Africa and Latin America rise. In India in the 21st Century, Mira Kamdar, a former member of the New York Times Editorial Board and an award-winning author, offers readers an introduction to India today in all its complexity. In a concise question-and-answer format, Kamdar addresses India’s history, including its ancient civilization and kingdoms; its religious plurality; its colonial legacy and independence movement; the political and social structures in place today; its rapidly growing economy and financial system; India’s place in the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century; the challenge to India posed by climate change and dwindling global resources; wealth concentration and stark social inequalities; the rise of big data and robotics ; the role of social media and more. She explores India’s contradictions and complications, while celebrating the merging of India’s multicultural landscape and deep artistic and intellectual heritage with the Information Age and the expansion of mass media. With clarity and balance, Kamdar brings her in-depth knowledge of India and eloquent writing style to bear in this focused and incisive addition to Oxford’s highly successful What Everyone Needs to Know series. 88 AUSTRALIANAMA: THE SOUTH ASIAN ODYSSEY IN AUSTRALIA by Samia Khatun United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 286 pages. Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of ‘Muslim-majority’ countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of nonwhite people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future. A POPULATION HISTORY OF INDIA: FROM THE FIRST MODERN PEOPLE TO THE PRESENT DAY by Tim Dyson. United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 310 pages. A Population History of India provides an account of the size and characteristics of India’s population stretching from when hunter-gatherer homo sapiens first arrived in the country—very roughly seventy thousand years ago—until the modern day. It is a period during which the population grew from just a handful of people to reach almost 1.4 billion, and a time when the fact of death had a huge influence on the nature of life. This book considers the millennia that were characterized by hunting and gathering, the Indus valley civilization, the opening-up of the Ganges river basin...

Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre by Jerri Daboo

Reviewed by: Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre by Jerri Daboo Merritt Denman STAGING BRITISH SOUTH ASIAN CULTURE: BOLLYWOOD AND BHANGRA IN BRITISH THEATRE. By Jerri Daboo. London: Routledge, 2017. Paperback, $31.96. Jeri Daboo's text Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre introduces its reader to the practice of analyzing culture in diasporic performance through the lens of South Asian culture on the British stage. The constant flux of cultural identity renders the process of analysis difficult in any context; however, when encountering a displaced or translated culture that fluctuation is thrown into sharp relief. In her introductory chapter Daboo clearly articulates the complex cultural and geographical translations associated with historical and contemporary England, and then applies that history to the staging of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. She chooses a representative sample of theatrical productions (along with a few notable television programs) and explores the ways in which British South Asian culture and identity were staged over the past few decades. As well as being a genuinely enjoyable read, this book represents a valuable contribution to the fields of South Asian, British, and diaspora studies. Daboo's text opens by examining the three major components of her argument in her first chapter: "Bollywood, Bhangra, and Being British." This chapter explains the concepts of Bollywood and Bhangra and contextualizes them in their diasporic British setting in a manner that is concise, accessible to the uninitiated reader, and yet manages to convey the complex nature of these cultural phenomena. Throughout the book, Daboo leans into the questions that naturally arise when dealing with issues of representation and acculturation on stage and effectively navigates these difficult waters. She discusses the concept of the "burden of representation," or the questions that arise when one or two people belonging to a group are assumed representatives of that group. She notes that frequently the British South Asians who appear in the works discussed are assumed to stand in as synecdochic emblems of their group. While this is certainly a task which any one individual cannot be reasonably asked to fulfill, these artists are attempting to stage their personal experiences of being British South Asian. So while Daboo acknowledges the problems of the burden of representation she also acknowledges the value of telling an individual's story in a manner which stays true to cultural experience. Daboo again deftly handles difficult subject matter when she discusses the use of stereotyping on stage. She notes that many of the productions which she explores employ stereotypes as comic cultural [End Page 253] touchstones. The employment of stereotype inevitably raises the problem of reception. How can the artist be certain that the use of the stereotype is not further reinforcing racist ideology? Rather than answering such a large and fraught question Daboo presents all views of the issue. And it is these spaces in which tension between large abstract issues intersect with these actual productions where Daboo's writing is most effective. She is willing to ask difficult questions and show how they play out in production, but does not display a sense of urgency at giving definitive answers. Instead she allows the works and the artists to speak for themselves and, in doing so, demonstrates the value of questioning. While the text is a valuable contribution to fields relating to contemporary cultural studies, it also provides insight to those interested in performance studies. Because she is dealing with questions regarding the nature of putting specific cultural representations on stage, Daboo offers insight into the unique qualities and effects of live performance. As she points out, liveness itself is a form of adaptation. One example she gives is that the act of seeing live scenes audiences might already be familiar with in Bollywood film can drastically change the experience and/or reading of those same moments. Furthermore, Daboo asserts that theatre itself offers a physical space for the embodiment of diaspora rather than the liminal space it usually occupies. Through the exploration of these productions, she illustrates that diaspora can find concrete expression in the physical space of the theatre. Furthermore, in the third chapter Daboo draws...

Connective Afrasian Sea memories: Transregional imaginaries, memory politics, and complexities of national “belonging”

This article focuses on memories of South Asian Kenyans and their claims to full citizenship as Kenyans through acknowledgment of their role in Kenya’s past. By focusing on memory claims and memory practices of the South Asian diaspora, it unravels complexities and tensions of scale (local, national, transregional, transnational). It adds new insights into complexities of national “belonging” in an entangled world by demonstrating how people operate as citizens within states and how memory politics are played out at nation-state level and how, simultaneously, the lived experience, affiliations, and shared memories of particular groups transcend the national scale or operate at a scale below it. This article’s seven sections focus on connected histories (a brief history of the Indian Ocean), connective memory research (explicating multi-sited methodology and using brief examples of Cape Malays and Siddis), and connective memory practice addressing memory practices in the South Asian diaspora in Kenya that consciously engage with entangled histories.

Changing nature and emerging patterns of domestic violence in global contexts: Dowry abuse and the transnational abandonment of wives in India

This paper argues for the need to understand dowry-related abuse through a lens that focuses not only on micro-and meso-level gendered socio-cultural milieus and economic norms, but also on macro-level formal-legal structures and global power asymmetries. Based on life-history narratives of 57 women in India and 21 practitioner interviews, this paper documents a growing phenomenon whereby men who are resident in another country abuse their Indian-origin wives, appropriate their dowry and abandon them. While dowry-related abuse in such marriages is part of a continuum of domestic violence prevalent in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, we explore how gender and migration intersect to exacerbate existing forms of violence against women and foster new forms of violence such as transnational abandonment. Gender-blind transnational formal-legal frameworks and gendered and transnational structural inequalities come together to construct transnational brides as “disposable women” who can be abused, exploited and cast aside with impunity.

‘I know my roots are Indian but my thinking is Kiwi’: hybridisation, identity and ‘Indians’ in New Zealand

ABSTRACTThis article explores identity among the South Asian diaspora in New Zealand. Using data from qualitative interviews with South Asian New Zealanders, it argues that analyses of hybridity need to consider different varieties of hybridisation in relation to ethnicity, religion, language and national identity. South Asian identities may be hybridised with ‘Kiwi’ identity variously represented as values, idealised citizenship and a White Western lifestyle. The data analysed in the paper demonstrate the independence and salience of religious as distinct from ethnic identities in the South Asian diaspora in New Zealand. Hybridisation results, in part, from a conscious strategy on the part of parents who encourage children to identify with their ethnic origins, language, nation and religion.

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the ‘possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it’ [Jayal 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 71]. Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection.

Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora

Migrations are gendered journeys. During contemporary times when migrations happen due to personal reasons like pursuit of better job opportunities, the spouses, mostly women, face several challenges in finding jobs and sustaining a career. Many of these qualified women often turn to alternate means of finding identity and fulfilment. Writing is one activity that provides them with this sense of purpose and achievement. The personal act of writing a literary text becomes as much a social activity when few of them form writing communities. This socio-literary study begins with an analysis of the social and material conditions that foster gendered migrations, and goes on to analyse writing as an alternate career, the role these gendered writing communities play in the process of writing, publishing and marketing as well as the choice of certain topics, like romance, thus functioning as mini-publishing houses. Through detailed interviews of five women writers of South Asian origin, this paper posits that these popular narratives, the products of these writing communities, are very temporal in nature and a product of interesting intersections between migrations as a condition and the gendered communities.

Diaspora and identity: Perspectives on South Asian diaspora

Diaspora and identity: Perspectives on South Asian diaspora

Dietary Transition in the South Asian Diaspora: Implications for Diabetes Prevention Strategies.

South Asians (SA) have a four to five fold higher risk for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in comparison to other Asian migrant groups. Dietary patterns have been attributed as an important independent modifiable risk factor. The aim of this review is to document the dietary patterns of SA migrants in Western countries and to summarize the evidence for the association of dietary patterns with T2DM and its predisposing factors. Using key search words articles from 1990 onwards were sourced from MEDLINE Pro- Quest and PubMed (not MEDLINE) databases for this narrative review. A significant shift in meal pattern with frequent dining out and eating fast foods, traditional festival foods and Western desserts and snacks was common among SA. Consumption of potatoes, dairy, oil, meat and fish increased and beans, lentils, fruits and vegetables decreased post-migration. "Animal protein" and "fried snacks, sweets and high-fat dairy" were associated with greater insulin resistance and lower HDL cholesterol. A "mixed" dietary pattern was associated with obesity and hypertension and a "western" dietary pattern was associated with overall risk for Metabolic Syndrome. A 70% increase in the odds of diabetes per standard deviation in gram of protein intake was also observed. Dietary patterns pave the way to develop diabetes and other obesity related diseases among SA as duration of residence increases. The first five years since migration maybe a window of opportunity to provide targeted interventions to ensure maintenance of healthy dietary habits.

Held to Ransom? The South Asian Diaspora and Postcolonial Discourse

The present paper explores the critical approaches to postcoloniality and subalternity in the theoretical writings of the South Asian diaspora as it seeks to define the nature of postcolonial theory – is it a methodology, an approach, or a theory? Its close association with diasporic studies with its emphasis on exile, homeland and identity and its constant addressivity to the West identifies it with diasporic approaches. If so, where does its use lie for home cultures? Working with Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s two books, Bhabha’s essays on the “Postcolonial and the Postmodern” and “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Gayatri Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi’s stories alongside her Prefaces, Introductions and translator’s notes and her long essay “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” the discussion foregrounds the gap between political freedom and cultural independence.Even though there has been a visible shift in translation theories and in the use and intermittent inclusion of native languages, it has still not succeeded in reclaiming cultural territories of intellectual thought. The world of the diasporic critic, no matter where located, is still locked up in a one-sided approach (refer to Vijay Mishra and Satendra Nandan). There is an urgent need to return to a closer examination of the critical views of native writers in order to relocate our objectives and define our spheres and to complete the incomplete process of liberation and reclaim lost territories. This argument requires a better understanding of colonial histories and pushes us towards an in-depth exploration of power relations. The discursiveness which appears to inhabit this discourse must be sharpened towards making a coherent pattern.

Revisiting South Asian Diaspora Literature

Revisiting South Asian Diaspora Literature

Educational Attainment in the South Asian Diaspora: Representation of Gender Conflicts in Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair’s Films

Abstract: This article studies the representations that Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, film directors from the South Asian diaspora, offer to portray and denounce the educational attainment inequality suffered by women from the diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. The paper analyses how Chadha and Nair’s depictions challenge the socioeconomic structures that limit these characters both in their homelands and in the welcoming countries and how they disrupt the limiting structures imposed on them for being women.Key words: Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, diaspora, South Asian Subcontinent. Logros educativos en la diáspora del Subcontinente Surasiático: La representación de los conflictos de género en las películas de Gurinder Chadha y Mira Nair Resumen: Este artículo estudia las representaciones que las directoras de cine de la diáspora del Subcontinente surasiático Gurinder Chadha y Mira Nair realizan para presentar y denunciar la desigualdad que sufren las mujeres de esta diáspora en Reino Unido y Estados Unidos a la hora de acceder y elegir qué estudios realizar. Analizando algunos de sus personajes se demuestra que Chadha y Nair desafían el orden socioeconómico que limita a sus personajes tanto en sus comunidades como en el país que las recibe presentando mujeres transgresoras que rompen con las estructuras limitantes impuestas sobre ellas por el hecho de ser mujer.Palabras clave: Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, diáspora, Subcontinente Surasiático

Special considerations for vitamin D in the south Asian population in the UK.

The human requirement for vitamin D is achieved primarily through the synthesis of this prehormone in the skin during exposure to ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation, with only a minor contribution from the diet, year round. Achieving optimal vitamin D status is therefore largely dependent upon adequate exposure of the skin to sunlight, however, the length of exposure required varies with latitude and season, and is also dependent upon skin pigmentation, with darker skin requiring greater exposure than fair skin due to the protective effects of melanin against UVB radiation. In northern European latitudes, where UVB radiation between the months of October and March is of insufficient intensity for the synthesis of vitamin D via this route, vitamin D deficiency is a public health concern, particularly for south Asian diaspora and other dark-skinned ethnic minority communities. The consequences of vitamin D deficiency include poor bone health, including rickets and osteomalacia. In addition, there is increasing awareness of an important role for vitamin D in the development and progression of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, which is prevalent in south Asian populations. The aim of this review is to examine some of the most recent reports of vitamin D status in south Asian diaspora communities, and to explore its impact on bone health. In addition, we will examine the putative association between type 2 diabetes and vitamin D deficiency in south Asian populations and the current guidelines for treatment of vitamin D deficiency of south Asians in primary care settings.

Postcolonial Resentments

Tabish Khair considers the resentment toward those who benefit from colonialis, which lingers in the South Asian diaspora, across social and class lines and tries to draw connections to his own experiences as an Indian muslim in Denmark. He speaks of all that previously colonized nations and societies are deprived of while those that benefitted from imperialism are able to achieve.

Social capital and relationship maintenance: uses of social media among the South Asian Diaspora in the U.S.

ABSTRACTThis study uses the framework of bridging and bonding social capital to explore how South Asian immigrants to the U.S. negotiate relationships amongst three social groups: their ties in their home country, their ties to Americans, and their ties to other South Asian immigrants living in the U.S. In so doing, it develops a model for immigrant social media use that contributes to an ongoing reassessment of the notion of community.

British Asian diasporic writing: construction and representation of identities

The two books considered here both engage with South Asian Diasporas in Britain, focusing on ‘writing’ as a means of exploring the construction and representation of identities. The books share an ...

The diasporic slide: representations of second-generation diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and in Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011)

The novels by Yasmine Gooneratne, A Change of Skies (1991), and Chandani Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011), show the challenge of diaspora as sliding from parents to children. These fictions portray second-generation immigrants as “caught between two cultures”: the Sri Lankan culture of their parents and the Australian culture with which they engage at school and university. In Gooneratne’s comedy this cultural negotiation creates comic ambivalence in the second-generation character Veena, who is set to repeat the actions of her forebears. Gooneratne’s playful outcome contrasts with Lokugé’s tragic vision in her novels If the Moon Smiled and Softly as I Leave You, which position the “model minority” stereotype and racism in Australia, respectively, as significant challenges for second-generation characters. This article aims to counterbalance the dominant critical focus on first-generation diaspora in fiction. It examines relationships between parent and child characters in the novels in the context of social studies on second-generation diaspora, the South Asian diaspora, and multiculturalism in Australia.

Introduction: Realigning the margins: Asian Australian writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2).