The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives

The Diaspora Writes Home looks at 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 creative expression: as an inscription, a mark of connectivity, a remembrance, and an involvement with memory with all its shifts. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of poetics and aesthetics, categories which can be problematic vis-a-vis the writer and his/her emotional location. The book 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. Among the questions the book asks is: How does the diaspora relate to us at home and what is our relationship to migrants 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 traveled through time and interacted with the politics of their new homelands have altered their affiliations and perspectives. An important aspect of political emigrations is the refugee/muhajir, especially in the South Asia subcontinent. [Subject: Literary Criticism, Asian Studies, Migration Studies]