• Writers of South Asian origin are either first-, second-, or third generation immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh; some have also journeyed here via Kenya and Uganda, or Trinidad and Guyana, areas where the long arm of British colonization 'invited' a predominantly merchant class into East Africa, and a mainly indentured laboring class into the West Indies.
• Today, new forms of colonization dictated by the geopolitical and geoeconomic realities of a capitalist 'new world order' continue to necessitate migrations and relocations from South Asia into North America.
• Writers from South Asian nations (themselves often invented as nations by the British) encompass a multiplicity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures.
Thematic concerns:
▪ Loss of homeland
▪ Uses of memory and indigenous folklore as sustaining mechanisms in alien environments
▪ Reconciliation
▪ Hope in creating new spaces of belonging.
Earlier writers/hyphenated identities:
▪ Zulfikar Ghose - is from pre-Partition India and Pakistan, lived in Britain from 1952-69 and then moved to the US. Issues of rootlessness, migrations, and identity formations, a sense of not belonging to any one place. The Loss of India (1964) - encapsulates enormous personal despair, loss, and rejection.
▪ A. K. Ramanujan - India-born poet, scholar, and translator. The value of the oral tradition in the Indian context. The preoccupation with family history is balanced by a situating of his poetic psyche in his adoptive home of Chicago, and often the poems bring the Indian and Chicagoan landscapes together. His poetic voice is balanced delicately between his past and his present. He retains a strong sense of being part of a rich Indian tradition, along with the texture of his adoptive home and its landscape. Speaking of Siva (1973).
▪ Himani Bannerjee - was born in what is now Bangladesh but was then still part of pre-Partition India. A poet and engaged theorist about issues of race and multiculturalism in the Canadian context. Volumes of poetry: A Separate Sky (1982) and Doing Time (1986). 'On the one hand, you have the multicultural ossificatory imperative. On the other, you have the state and the dominant media with their assimilative imperative.'
▪ Indo-Canadian writers: Saros Cowasjee, Rohinton Mistry, Uma Paramswaran (play Rootless But Green Are the Boulevard Trees [1985]). Indo-Trinidadian-American Ismith Khan. Indo-Guyanese-Canadian Frank Birbalsingh, and Cyril Dabydeen. Sri Lankan Canadian writers Rienzi Crusz and Michael Ondaatje.
Ethnic identities and transforming geographies:
▪ The simultaneity of geography - the possibility of living here in body and elsewhere in mind and imagination - provides significant frameworks for a historical analysis of contemporary South Asian writers, and indeed writers of Asian, African, and Caribbean diasporas. The simultaneity is of a specific kind for writers with a colonial history whose socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural conditions require migrations and displacements, for writers who express themselves in English.
▪ Diaspora writers who imaginatively challenge the linearity of time and the specificity of space by juxtaposing their here and now with their histories and past geographies.
▪ Matters of 'choice' in terms of location often turn out to be necessitated by the geopolitical and geoeconomic realities of the world today. Geoeconomic national borders are redrawn under financial dictates of bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank in a capitalism 'new world order' that has unleashed 'all kinds of satanic geographies on the third world.' as capital travels and establishes new controls over physical soaces, its effects pervade silently into the bodies of vast populations. Forced relocations are part of a contemporary geography drearily full of dry statistics taht must be humanized.
Identities defined and defied by locales:
▪ Agha Sahid Ali - a poet. 'Triple exile' from Kashmir to New Delhi, and then to the Unites States, traces a journey of loss that has been extremely enabling in his creative universe. His poems explore and contain the anguish of displacement and exile through memories, history, and the Urdu poetic tradition. Along with nurturing, often painful, bagful of the bones of memory from other homes and distant locales, Agha re-creates an imaginative simultaneity of place and time, of history and geography.
▪ Sara Sureli - from Pakistan. Meatless Days (1989) - autobiographical narrative; nontraditional, nonlinear life story, equally about Pakistani politics, her family's roles and responsibilities in the fortunes of changing regimes, as it is about acutely drawn portraits of family members.
Meena Alexander:
▪ Born in India, was taken to Sudan when 5, since 1980 has lived in NY.
▪ Her work voices a deep concern for the survival of the female imagination in different spaces. History, memory, and myth interact as she re-creates strongly felt images of her childhood in Kerala. Her poetic voice seeks an accountability to a history of migration and dislocation as it affets so many ordinary people.
▪ She explores th eneed to re-create a past, to use it as a healing bedrock for the onslaughts of life in the present. Similar to the necessity of re-memorying lived spaces of her childhood, Alexander recognizes the significance of family history.
▪ Nampally Road (1991), Manhattan Music (1997), memoir Fault Lines (1993).
Ethnicities celebrates or erased in terms of locations:
▪ Sakhi - an 'activist' group which deals with Souath Asian women and domestic violence. Sakhi's challenge of the stereotyped ideal images of Indian womanhood drawn from mythology was perceived as a 'betrayal' of all that this model represents - Indian nation, culture, tradition, family.
▪ In attempts at cultural preservation throughout history, women have been regarded as the guardians of tradition, particularly against a foreign colonizer during nationalist liberation struggles.
▪ For a woman to leave an abusive space of battering and move out of the heterosexual, patriarchal family is tantamount to betraying a 'nationalist' ideal.
Bharati Mukherjee
▪ Mukherjee's adoption of an immigrant as opposed to an expatriate identity has been profoundly enabling for her writing.
§ Her novels The Wife (1975) and The Tiger's Daughter (1971) trace a trajectory of a kind of upper-class female protagonist, socialized within a Brahmin religious and social code, equipped with a English-language education. Also - disillusionments with marriage and struggle between identities as defined within their upper-class home environments in Calcutta, and their movements into an impersonal USA where they must face loneliness and redefinitions of their ethnicities.
§ Jasmine (1989) - her village protagonist leaves behindd the stranglehold of traditional customs and embraces the myth of becoming an individualistic American, prepared to forge her own poath and destroy what stands in her way.
§ Mukherjee's upper-class background and the classist and elitist tone she adopts toward her characters. She overtly endorses the melting-pot concept and regards American society as the most welcoming of any in the world toward the 'other.' Even when racism is part of her exploration and critique, there is no attempt to place it within a larger political system of exploitation in the US.
