THE DIASPORA WRITES HOME: Subcontinental Narratives

The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives is a work of gathering the multiple dispersions of the emigrants from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. The word ?write? is used in all its multiplicity the fact of creative expression, as an inscription, a mark and writing as a connectivity, a remembrance, an involvement with memory with all its shifts. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of poetics and aesthetics, categories which need to be problematised vis-?-vis the writer and his/her emotional location.

This work, thus, explores the many ways the diaspora remembers and reflects upon the lost homeland and its own relationship with an ancestral past, its history, culture and the current political conflicts. Amongst the questions it asks is ?how does the diaspora relate to us at home and what is our relationship to them as representatives of our present??. The last is problematic in itself for our present is not theirs and distance cannot equate the two. The transformations that new locations have brought about as they have travelled through time and interacted with the politics of their new homelands wherever they be Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean Islands, UK, US and Canada, as well as the countries created out of India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, have altered their affiliations and perspectives. An important aspect of political emigrations is the refugee/muhajir especially in the subcontinent. The above issues together seek for new insights into the problematic of the diasporas? lost homes.

Contents
1 Writing Home: Memory, History and Imagined Spaces
2 The Burden of Culture: Between Filiation and Affiliation
3 Geographical Dislocations and the Poetics of Exile
4 Memory and Reflection in the Writing of the Diaspora
5 Writing in One?s Own Language and the Grounds of Being
6 The New Parochialism: Homeland in the Writing of the Indian Diaspora
7 Out of the Colonial Cocoon? From The Mimic Men to India: A Million Mutinies Now
8 Routes of Passage
9 A Bit of India: Under African Skies
10 In Search of Nationhood Across Borders
11 Mid-Air Tragedy: The Emperor Kanishka Crash
12 Call of the Homeland: The Civil War in Sri Lanka
13 Failed Hijrat? Cultural Mourning, Refugees and Muhajirs
14 The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders
15 The Children of Jahazi Bhai: Histories, Cultures and (Dis)Continuities
16 To India with Love: Rushdie, Ghosh and Mistry
17 Cultural Interpretations/ Representations in Film of the Indian Diaspora: Nostalgia, Memory or Spoofing?
18 Overwriting Memory