Theorizing and Critiquing Indian Diaspora
Contents: Introduction. 1. Inaugural address Indian Diaspora : responsibilities and relationships, strengths, weaknesses and contribution/J.C. Sharma. 2. Key note address: theorizing diaspora and the Indian experience/Kapil Kapoor. 3. Valedictory address: interrogating diasporic creativity: the Patan initiative/Makarand Paranjape. 4. Memory, history and homeland: the Indian Diasporic experience/Jasbir Jain. 5. A home everywhere: the consciousness of diasporic belonging/S.K. Sareen. 6. The Indian Diaspora/S.D. Singh. 7. Dual citizenship in a transnational world: Canada and India/Kavita A. Sharma. 8. Caste and nationalism in Indian Diaspora/Adesh Pal. 9. Indian Diaspora and its difficult texts/Sankaran Ravindran. 10. The dynamics of identity: reassertion in Sindhi Diaspora/Michel Boivin. 11. The end of the beginning: a note on the Afro-Indian Diaspora/M.F. Salat. 12. Patidar Diaspora in East Africa: a historical perspective/Makarand Mehta. 13. Cyborg Goddesses? some thoughts on the Asian women writers\' collective/Martina Ghosh. 14. The Indian Diaspora in the west and literary imagination: a study in the larger context of immigration in America and Europe/P.K. Sinha. 15. Polyphony in the poetry of Punjabi Diaspora/N.J. Oberoi and Gulshan Das. 16. Migration and relational balancing between the cultures/Harsha Patadia. 17. From Gunny Sack to Ruck Sack: proposals pertaining to Indian English Diasporean discourse/Avadhesh Kumar Singh. 18. Notes towards a redefinition of the diaspora theory/Chandrashekhar Jahagirdar. 19. Where is here? teleology of return: the homeland of Punjabi Diaspora in British Columbia/Om P. Juneja. Contributors.
"The global Indian Diaspora today, plays a significant role in the socio-economic and political spheres of the host countries. The place that they have created for themselves in their host countries testifies to their resilience and remarkable capacity to adopt and adapt. To assess the success of the global Indian Diaspora and to explore and evaluate its response to its land of origin, an International Seminar was organized by Post Graduate Diploma in Communicative English, Hemachandracharya North Gujarat University, Patan. The proceedings of the seminar have been published in the form of two books.
The present book contains papers that debate and formulate the key theoretical concepts about the Indian Diaspora such as that of homeland, acculturation, religion, caste, ethnicity, double citizenship, gender and other interrelated issues. The successes and failures of the Indian Diaspora in different countries of the world are also taken up for analysis; for instance the condition of the Fijian Diaspora, or the writings of Punjabi Diaspora or those pertaining to the Asian woman. The contributors try to work out paradigms for analyzing and studying the Indian Diaspora keeping in mind the uniqueness of its movement and dispersal.
The book will serve as an invaluable reference work for those interested in the theoretical issues related to the Indian Diaspora." (jacket)
