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Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal

HSS 302: Literature of the Indian Diaspora (3)

Learning Objectives:

This course will examine the work of some recent authors of the Indian diaspora in Britain and North America to uncover the changing historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts of migration from the Indian subcontinent, from the nineteenth century to the present day. The course aims to study, in relation to some contemporary Indian diasporic writing, the postcolonial thematics of diaspora literature, the relation between geography and form, between location and representation, and how these various factors determine the writing and reception of literature. After doing this course, students will have an understanding of issues of diaspora, location, history and geography in literature, and an awareness of the relationship between literary texts and their historical, political and cultural contexts. They will also gain an insight into the complex, traumatic and fragmented history of South Asia, which led to territorial, national and cultural reformulations, which in turn shaped modern South Asian cultural imaginaries of home, identity and belonging.

Course Contents:

In this course, we will study the fiction of some recent and contemporary Indian diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, Rohington Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai. The following issues and concerns will be examined in relation to their fiction:

• Issues of diaspora, location, history and memory in literature
• The relationship between literary texts and their historical, political and cultural contexts
• The relationship between geography and form, between location and representation
• The experiences of dislocation, relocation, acculturation and marginalization as explored and addressed in their works
• These writers’ configurations of the notions of home, cultural identity and belonging
•  How these notions of home and cultural identity are changing across generations of diasporic writers
• How postcolonial migrancy has radically reformulated and redefined earlier dynamics of migration, creating new relations between cultures of origin and adoption
• How the nature and scale of subcontinental migration changed, since the mid twentieth century, due to the effects of decolonization, transnationalism, and rapid globalization, from the earlier nineteenth century model of diaspora, which had its origins in the colonial history of indenture, and how the desire for economic and professional advancement in the West, especially in Britain and North America, became the dominant impulse behind subcontinental migration, in the latter half of the twentieth century, in comparison with the earlier nineteenth century diasporic imaginary charaterised predominantly by loss and disempowerment

Selected Readings

• Primary Reading:
  1. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1980)
  2. Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2003)
  3. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (2008)
  4. Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
  5. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
• Critical Reading:
  1. Vijay Mishra, Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary
  2. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities

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