Description
Book SynopsisIndia Abroad analyzes the development of Indian diasporas in the United States and England from 1947, the year of Indian independence, to the present. Across different spheres of culture--festivals, entrepreneurial enclaves, fiction, autobiography, newspapers, music, and film--migrants have created India as a way to negotiate life in the multicultural United States and Britain. Sandhya Shukla considers how Indian diaspora has become a contact zone for various formations of identity and discourses of nation. She suggests that carefully reading the production of a diasporic sensibility, one that is not simply an outgrowth of the nation-state, helps us to conceive of multiple imaginaries, of America, England, and India, as articulated to one another. Both the connections and disconnections among peoples who see themselves as in some way Indian are brought into sharp focus by this comparativist approach.
This book provides a unique combination of rich ethnographic wor
Trade Review
"Shukla's book is motivated by, and gives direction to, the energy of the Indian diaspora. The book achieves an ideological agency through a series of negotiations between 'home' and 'away', the organic evolution of a community and its fossilization of traditions and customs in exile. It shows the community becoming individuals."--Dipli Saikia, Times Higher Education Supplement "Sandhya Shukla ... cannot but impress with the scope of the book... India Abroad ... is a delightful and informative read, of cross-disciplinary interest, and a major contribution to the rethinking of nationalism."--Manu Bhagavan, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION Geographies of Indianness 1 ONE Histories and Nations 25 TWO Little Indias, Places for Indian Diasporas 78 THREE Affiliations and Ascendancy of Diasporic Literature 132 FOUR India in Print, India Abroad 175 FIVE Generations of Indian Diaspora 213 EPILOGUE Presents and Futures 249 NOTES 253 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 303 INDEX 305
