Indian Literatures in Diaspora

Sireesha Telugu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032015408
• eBook ISBN: 9781000604108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses diasporic literatures written in Indian languages written by authors living outside their homeland and contextualize the understanding of migration and migrant identities.

Examining diasporic literature produced in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Indian Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Marathi, and Tamil, the book argues that writers in the diaspora who choose to write in their vernacular languages attempt to retain their native language, for they believe that the loss of the language would lead to the loss of their culture. The author answers seminal questions including: How are these writers different from mainstream Indian writers who write in English? Themes and issues that could be compared to or contrasted with the diasporic literatures written in English are also explored.

The book offers a significant examination of the nature and dynamics of the multilingual Indian society and culture, and its global readership. It is the first book on Indian diasporic literature in Indian and transnational languages, and a pioneering contribution to the field. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, South Asian literature, Asian literature, diaspora and literary studies.

1 Shifting Contours of Identification

Contemporary Tamil Diasporic Writing

V. Bharathi Harishankar

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182795-2

Introduction

Over the last few decades, the term diaspora has encountered different levels of semantic accretion. From referring to a sense of exile, alienation and displacement, the term has expanded to embrace transnational networks, which in turn, entail intersectional negotiations of socio-cultural markers including gender, class, race and the like. Studies on the Indian diaspora have foregrounded certain tropes. The most important trope is that of negotiating the parent and adopted cultures, which involves facing the “memories of the past, uncertainties of the present, and fear of the future” (Bissoondath 22). The literature from the Indian diaspora¹ represents this negotiation through themes such as an acute perception of the sense of loss brought about by every act of migration, nostalgia for the homeland, comparison between the parent and adopted cultures, re-visiting and re-working the past from the spatial vantage point offered by migration, immediate and materialistic perceptions on the host culture, their hyphenated identities which necessitate a straddling of cultures, their position in the host culture, intersection of gender and culture and a continuing quest to define and mark an identity (Harishankar, “Exile as Transformation…” 52–53). Increasingly, there is also a trend to project the sub-cultural identity within the diaspora through different cultural forms drawn from the homeland.² Another facet of the Indian diaspora is its presence as “transnational communities” sharing “an enduring relationship to their place of origin” (Cohen cited in Mukherjee and Bhattacharya 12–13). These transnational communities include several categories of migrants³ in diverse locations and therefore, any description of the term identity needs to state “the positions of enunciation” they embrace⁴ (Hall 234). The Indian diaspora also reflects the “collective consciousness” of several groups of individuals to their homelands (Cohen cited in Mukherjee and Bhattacharya 12). Arguably, the Tamil diaspora shares many of the features of the Indian diaspora. The crucial difference is that while the Indian diaspora is bound culturally, the Tamil diaspora has shared linguistic and cultural heritages. The act of articulating in the Tamil language provides a veritable substratum for the different diasporic negotiations.⁵ In order to comprehend this choice, it is useful to trace the spread of the Tamil diaspora across the globe.

The migration of Tamils to different parts of the world has a long history. The earliest mention of Tamil migration is recorded from the Chola period. For instance, the expanse of the Chola kingdom during the reign of Rajaraja Chola extended from Cape Camorin to Gulbarga, Kalinga territory, Sri Lanka, Maldives and south east Asia corresponding to modern Indonesia (Gautam 59). What is interesting about these mighty exploits is that “political conflict was no obstacle to cultural growth” (K.A. Nilakanta Sastri qtd in Gautam 59). Subsequently, the Tamil diaspora has proceeded along three waves of migration. The earliest emigration from Tamil Nadu is to Sri Lanka, which has since developed into a second linguistic–cultural hub for the Tamils. The second wave corresponds to a labour migration to the British colonies of Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.⁶ Sunil Amrith points out how this wave of migration reveals a “confined mobility”⁷ for the Tamil labourers in the sense that the plantations were “enclosed cultural worlds, in which workers remained under the surveillance and supervision of the Tamil plantation foreman (kangani)⁸, who often originated from the same village or region as the workers and who recruited them “by advancing money to their families” (559). Even though the conditions in the plantations were harsh, local Tamil schools, temples and press⁹ served as linguistic and cultural links to the homeland. The Tamil press in Malaya, in particular, moved beyond invoking the homeland to create “a sense that Tamils in the Straits Settlements and Malaya formed part of a broader dispersion of Tamil overseas, who shared similar problems and struggled together for equal status and recognition in their lands of residence”. By frequently reporting about “the conditions of Indians in South Africa, Fiji, Ceylon and Burma … the language of the newspapers also conveyed a sense of the diversity of this diaspora” (Amrith 562). Such a networking through the Tamil language has become the defining feature of the Tamil diaspora until today. The third wave records the emigration of professionals from Tamil Nadu to western locations like Europe, the UK and USA, as well as the movement of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to Canada, Germany, France and Switzerland. This wave also presents the double diasporic consciousness, in that the Tamil ethnic group has migrated twice into two locations in the diaspora. Each of these migrations has necessitated fresh negotiations of the home and the host lands and eah has in effect created the superimposition of several diasporic identities – Tamil, Indian, Southeast Asian and Asian.

The highlight of all these migrations is that the Tamil language has become the key for communication of the Tamils world over. To this extent, the Tamil diasporic identity is strongly forged by the language and this necessitates a re-definition of the process of identity formations. Further, these waves of migration present not only a group identity as “overseas Tamils” but have also resulted in a fine distinction made in these global locations between “local born Tamils” and their “India born brothers”¹⁰ (Amrith 564–565). The present study contends that, given its diversity and ramifications, Tamil diasporic identity cannot be circumscribed by a static and monolithic framework but needs to be examined as a fluid and continuing process.

Identity vs Identification

Identity as a concept has been used extensively in academic research across various disciplines by scholars like Margaret Mead, Raymond Williams and Erik Erikson. It is often used as a “key word that is deployed in making sense of the self and society” and refers “to a sense of sameness” (Mallett 161). This view of identity as static and homogeneous is contested in contemporary discussions. Oliver Mallett cites alternative definitions of identity provided by A. D. Brown and M. Alvesson. While Brown defines identity as “people’s subjectively construed understanding of who they were, are and desire to become”, Alvesson suggests that “personal identity draws together feelings, values and behaviour such that group identities become resources in its development” (162–163). Adding to this debate is M. Moran’s book entitled Identity and Capitalism (2014), wherein she describes three ways¹¹ in which identity is often evoked: “legal, which is closer to the original sense of identity as sameness, in terms of the official recognition”, “personal, the core of the sense of self that is more about difference and what makes one unique”, and “social, referring to membership of social groups” (cited in Mallett 163). These different descriptions suggest “more active, dynamic and self-reflexive” meanings of identity, which makes it “both the sense of personal identity … (and) social categories as identity markers” (Mallett 163). It is in this context that Brubaker and Cooper in their study entitled “Beyond Identity”, argue that identity is no longer static or monolithic but

is used to highlight non-instrumental modes of action; to focus on self-understanding …; to designate sameness across persons and over time; to capture (…) core, foundational aspects of selfhood; to deny that such core, foundational aspects exist; to highlight the processual, interactive development of solidarity and collective self-understanding; and to stress the fragmented quality of the contemporary experience of ‘self’.

(8)

In doing so, the term “bears a multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden” (8).

The interrogation of the “reifying connotations of identity”¹² by Roger Brubaker and Frederick Cooper provides an avenue to avoid conceptualizing “all affinities and affiliations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness and cohesion” (Brubaker and Cooper 1) as one homogeneous whole. To explicate this idea, the authors differentiate between identity as a category of practice (which embodies the “everyday social experiences” of ordinary people) and a category of analysis (which are “experience-distant categories used for social analysis”) (Brubaker and Cooper 4). While identity is useful in invoking groups, collectives and socio-political action, the term is restricted by its essentialism and constructivism. Identity can exist and be invoked as “strong” or “weak” conceptions. However, in both these aspects, the concept entails assumptions such as “Identity is something all people have, or ought to have, or are searching for”, “Identity is something all groups (at least groups of a certain kind – e.g., ethnic, racial, or national) have or ought to have”, “Identity is something people (and groups) can have without being aware of it” and “Strong notions of collective identity imply strong notions of group boundedness and homogeneity” (Brubaker and Cooper 10). In this respect, what begin as “strong” or “weak” conceptions of identity often morph into identity politics and “continue to inform important strands of the literature on gender, race, ethnicity and nationalism” (Brubaker and Cooper 10). The criticism against essentialism is often refuted “by theorizing identities as multiple, fluid and fragmented” and by using “constructivist gestures”. However, Brubaker and Cooper consider it “an uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation” (6). The authors use a more “processual, active term” – identification, which is “fundamentally situational and contextual” and which contests the view that “identifying (even by powerful agents, such as the state) will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness” (Brubaker and Cooper 14). In this respect, identification empowers individuals and groups in ways that fixed identity constructions cannot. For instance, the issues pertaining to ethnicity are perceived differently by Tamils in India and Sri Lanka. “For Tamils in India, ethnic assertion has become symbolic … whereas in Sri Lanka, ethnicity has remained (literally) a matter of life and death” (Jones 3). This nuanced perception becomes very important not only to differentiate between identity and identification but also to understand the diversity presented by the Tamil diaspora.

The texts taken for analysis include two anthologies of short stories – one by M. Nithiyanandan et al. entitled Kannil Theriyuthu Vaanam, which translates as “The Sky is Seen in the Eye” (2001), and includes works of international Tamil writers, and another by R. Prema entitled Penniya Kathaikal (2004), that is, feminist short fiction by Tamil women writers in India and abroad. The collection by M. Nithiyanandan, a diasporic Tamil, includes stories by Tamil writers from Tamil Nadu, including R. Chudamani and Bama. Interestingly, located in Chennai, R. Prema’s collection includes diasporic Tamil writers like Rajeswari Balasubramanian, Kanchana Damodaran and Sumathi Rupan. In his Editorial introduction, M. Nithiyanandan points out how the anthology strives “to capture the individualisms, differences, alternative identities …. It is an attempt to compile the diverse narratives of the Tamil speaking population from different diasporic locations, which portray the differing experiences of people inhabiting the globe” (11, my translation). By juxtaposing the works of Tamil writers from different locations, the anthology not only presents a confluence of Tamil voices but also directs our attention to the linguistic and cultural markers that “preserve their individualities, their lands and their cultures” (Nithiyanandan 10–11, my translation). Since R. Prema’s anthology has a stated feminist orientation, she has selected stories which highlight the intersection of gender and culture within Tamil Nadu and in the diaspora. This selection foregrounds the specific concerns and issues faced by Tamil women in the diaspora. For instance,

even after the emigration, women are compelled to adhere to the cultural norms. While the movement west makes them aware of the restrictions posed by cultural norms, they are unable to break free. Liberation for these women becomes possible only when they are mature enough to understand the contrasting pulls as well as understand the generational differences and support each other.

(Prema xxvii–xxix, my translation)

Together, the two texts foreground a “compelling diasporic orientation towards (a shared) aesthetic world” (Werbner qtd in Jones 3) and present a cross-sectional trajectory to view Tamil writing from different global locations as an organic entity.

The frames of reference, that can be derived from the study of Brubaker and Cooper to explain the active and processual nature of identification, are as follows:

• Identification is an intrinsic aspect of social interaction
• Identification is both relational and categorical
• Identification requires the naming of an agent
• Identification can lead to self-understanding both intersectionally and as a web of connections (14–17).

These four aspects not only foreground a framework but also project themselves as steps in the process of identification. Viewed in this light, identification offers the space and the scope to explain, interrogate, contest and create identities.

Intrinsic Nature of Identification

In all social interactions, there is a continuous identification of the self and the others.

One may be called upon to identify oneself – characterize oneself, to locate oneself vis-à-vis known others, to situate oneself in a narrative, to place oneself in a category – in any number of contexts …. How one identifies oneself – and how one is defined by others – may vary greatly from context to context.

(Brubaker and Cooper 14)

However, it is not made rigid but is “fundamentally situational and contextual” (Brubaker and Cooper 14). This idea is captured well in Canadian Tamil writer Sivalingam Sivabalan’s story “Summer Showers”. Ponnuthuraiyar and Sadasivathar are kinsmen, whose rivalry for the possession of a piece of land in their village results in life long enmity. As years pass, they sell their property and move to join their respective children’s families in London. The story begins with the sad news of Ponnuthuraiyar’s death and Sadasivathar’s intense urge to attend the funeral. The changed protocol of visits to a mourning family in London seems like unnecessary restrictions to Sadasivathar. As he laments: “What a terrible country is this! Whether it’s a marriage or a death, one cannot rush spontaneously …. They have fixed hours for everything” (Nithiyanandan 136, my translation). The nostalgi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Glossary
• Introduction: Linguistic and Literary Identities
• 1. Shifting Contours of Identification: Contemporary Tamil Diasporic Writing
• 2. Partitions, Naxalbari, and Intergenerational Diasporic Bengali Identities in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Purba Paschim (East West)
• 3. Marathi Diasporic Literature: Understanding Anxieties, Identities and Diversity in Select Fiction
• 4. Intersections of the Vernacular and the Diaspora: The Genre of the Nayi Kahani (New Story) and the Pravasi (Migrant) Writer-Usha Priyamvada
• 5. Diasporic Writings of Indian Nepalis: Issues of History and Identity
• 6. Remapping the Land: Displacement and Memory in Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham and Khadeeja Mumtaz’s Barsa
• 7. Hostlands, Homelands and the Odia Diaspora: From Boyita to Biman
• 8. The Dynamics of Movement in G.S. Nakshdeep Panjkoha’s Girvi Hoye Mann: Would the Twain Never Meet?
• Index