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-à-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.

Jasbir Jain is the Honorary Director of the Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies (IRIS), Jaipur and was Sahitya Akademi Writer-in-Residence (2009), and Emeritus Fellow (2001–2003) both at the University of Rajasthan. Recipient of several prestigious awards and fellowships, she is an elected Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge and has had teaching assignments in Europe and the United States.

Amongst her recent publications are Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency (2011), Experiential Aesthetics (2012) and Theorising Resistance: History, Politics and Narrative (2012). Her monograph on Forgiveness: Between Memory and History is in process.