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While many people see 'home' as the domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard to grasp its manifold implications, and even harder to provide a tidy definition of what it is. Over the past century, discussion of home and nation has been a highly complex matter, with broad political ramifications, including the realignment of nation-states and national boundaries. Against this backdrop, this book suggests that 'home' is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is constantly in flux and thus can never capture an objective perspective, an ultimate truth. Along these lines, Unreliable Truths offers a comparative literary approach to the construction of home and concomitant notions of uncertainty and unreliable narration in South Asian diasporic women's literature from the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Canada. Writers discussed in detail include Feroza Jussawalla, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Meera Syal, Farida Karodia, Shani Mootoo, Shobha Dé, and Oonya Kempadoo. With its focus on transcultural homes, Unreliable Truths goes beyond discussions of diaspora from an established postcolonial point of view and contributes with its investigation of transcultural unreliable narration to the representation of a g/local South Asian diaspora.

This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the various colonies of the British. Of course, this was not the only cause of international migratory processes. The partition of India and Pakistan led to large scale migration. There was Punjabi migration to Canada. Several Indians, particularly the Gujaratis travelled to Africa for business reasons. South Indians travelled to the Gulf for employment. There were migrations to East Asian countries under the kangani system. Again, these were not the only reasons. The process of demographic movement from South Asia, has been complex due to innumerable push-pull factors. The subsequent generations of migrants included the twice, thrice (and likewise) displaced members of the diaspora. Racial denigration and Orientalist perceptions plagued their lives. They belonged to various ethnicities and races, inhabited marginalized spaces and strived to acculturate in the host society. Complete cultural assimilation was not possible, creating layered and hyphenated identities. These intricate social processes resulted in amalgamation and cross-pollination of cultures, inter-racial relationships and hybridization in all terrains of culture—language, music, fashion, cuisine and so on. Situated in this matrix was the notion of Home—a special personal space which an individual could feel as belonging to, very strongly. Nostalgia, loss of home, culture shock and interracial encounters problematized this discernment of belongingness and home. These multifarious themes have been captured by women writers from the South Asian region and this book looks at the various aspects related to negotiating home in their narratives.

For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted.Culinary Fictionsprovides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa Lahiri'sThe Namesakecombines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppers to create a dish similar to one found on Calcutta sidewalks, it evokes not only the character's Americanization, but also her nostalgia for India. Food, Anita Mannur writes, is a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, andCulinary Fictionsmaps how it figures in various expressive forms. Mannur examines the cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora. Using texts from novels-Chitra Divakaruni'sMistress of Spicesand Shani Mootoo'sCereus Blooms at Night-and cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey'sInvitation to Indian Cookingand Padma Lakshmi'sEasy Exotic, she illustrates how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.

This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines. Madhurima Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English, Columbia College Chicago, USA. Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Augustana College, USA. Table of Contents Introduction Madhurima Chakraborty Section One: Urban Outcasts, Urban Subalterns 1. Recasting the Outcast: Hyderabadi Subjectivities in Two Literary Texts Nazia Akhtar 2. The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction Sourit Bhattacharya 3. \"Someone called India\": Urban Space and the Tribal Subject in Mahasweta Devi’s \"Douloti the Bountiful\" Jay Rajiva 4. \"Stuck at Pause\": Representations of the Comatose City in Delhi Calm Amit Baishya Section Two: The National, The Global, and the Diaspora 5. Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing in New India Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan 6. Lahore, Lahore Aye : Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid’s City Fictions Claire Chambers 7. Between Aspiration and Imagination: Exploring Native-Cosmopolitanism in Adib Khan’s Spiral Road and Mohammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Payel Chattopadhyay Mukherjee, Arnapurna Rath and Koshy Tharakan 8. Portrayal of a Dystopic Dhaka: On Diaspora Reproductions of Bangladeshi Urbanity Maswood Akhter Section Three: The Space of the Margins 9. Imag(in)ing the city: A Study of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi Nishat Haider 10. Gendering Place and Possibility in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence and Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours Lauren J. Lacey and Joy E. Ochs 11. Delhi at the Margins: Heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage, and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City Sanjukta Poddar Section Four: Forms of Urban Outcasting 12. Carl Muller’s Palimpsestic Urban Elegy in Colombo: A Novel Maryse Jayasuriya 13. The fiction of Anosh Irani: the magic of a traumatized community Kelly A. Minerva 14. New Capital? Representing Bangalore in Recent Crime Fiction Anna Guttman