Description
Book SynopsisOffers an exploration of the oral histories of three generations of refugees from India's Partition. This book focuses on the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of participants from ten Hindu and Sikh families in Delhi.
Trade Review"Chawla employs a lyrical writing style that is able to collapse the boundaries between ethnography and autobiography, and between academic history and personal reflection." -Oral History "Home, Uprooted is a beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated and disarmingly fluid analysis of the idea of home through oral histories with three generations of Partition refugees from Delhi, India. Devika Chawla explores what home means to those who have been displaced; how the notion of home has a life of it's own, and why it is important to tell this story of an Un/homely Partition. Whether the Partition maintains a spectral presence or an embodied materiality in each rendition of home, in every story that she tells us, Chawla moves effortlessly through the shifting contours of loss, belonging and memory. Beyond history, beyond ethnography, this book is among the first of its kind in both - its passionate destabilizing of any fixed notion of home and its narrative form, which carefully combines personal history and autobiography with stories shared by other participants in the project. The book offers a much needed critical reflection on method, and a trenchant critique of Self/Other binaries by centering stories told and heard via multiple encounters between self, ethnographer, storyteller and interlocutor. Engaging and accessible in terms of writing style, Home, Uprooted will appeal to a large audience beyond the academy, and is a MUST read for anyone in the fields of Cultural Studies, Communication, Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies." -- -Himika Bhattacharya Syracuse University "Chawla's family story is woven throughout the book, and many of its most moving moments are deeply personal." -- Corine Colbert, Ohio University -Perspectives
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Beginnings-In Headnotes 2. Fieldwork-Homework 3. A Story Travels 4. Home Outside Home 5. Adrift-Reluctant Nomads 6. Hearth Crossings 7. Remnants 8. My Father, My Interlocutor Notes Bibliography Index
