Unreliable Truths: Transcultural Homeworlds in Indian Women's Fiction of the Diaspora

224 Pages·2013·1.413 MB·English

by  Sissy Helff

Unreliable Truths
CROSS
Readings in Post/Colonial
ULTURES Literatures and Cultures in English

155

SERIES EDITORS
Gordon Collier Bénédicte Ledent Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
CO-FOUNDING EDITOR
Hena Maes–Jelinek
Unreliable Truths
Transcultural Homeworlds
in Indian Women’s Fiction of the Diaspora
Sissy Helff
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover Image
Ute John
Cover design:
Inge Baeten
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3628-4
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0898-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction:
Homemaking in a Globalized World ix

PART ONE
OF SOCIAL AND IMAGINARY HOMEWORLDS

1 South Asian Homeworlds, Transnational Alliances 3
2 Common Narrative Ground:
Transcultural Narrative Unreliability 29

PART TWO
HOMING IN ON UNRELIABLE STORYTELLING

3 Fictionalizing South Asian Diasporic Homemaking:
Farida Karodia’s Other Secrets & Shani Mootoo’s
Cereus Blooms at Night 51
4 Growing Up in Transcultural Diasporic Worlds:
Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework, Meera Syal’s
Anita and Me, and Shobha Dé’s Strange Obsession 107
5 Transcultural Disillusionments:
Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running 147
Conclusion:
South Asian Diasporic Writing and the Transcultural Imaginary 175

Works Cited 185
Index 201
Acknowledgements

M
UCH OF THIS BOOK was researched and written through a
two-year scholarship granted by the Graduiertenförderung des
Landes Hessen (Grafög) and grants provided by the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Vereinigung von Freunden und
Förderern der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main e.V., and the German
Research Foundation (DFG). I am extremely grateful to Dieter Riemen-
schneider and Mala Pandurang, who introduced me to Indian women’s writ-
ing, and to Gisela Welz for encouraging my interest in migration theory and
modernity discourse. For their intellectual engagement and support, I am
deeply indebted to Vera Alexander, Nadja Butt, and Claudia Duppé, who be-
came close friends during this phase of my life. I would also like to thank my
colleagues Elisabeth Bekers, Angela Hamilton, and Annika McPherson for
their careful readings and critical remarks to sections of this book. I wish to
express my gratitude to Michelle Miles for her diligent proof-reading, Ute
John for providing the basic image for the book cover, and Gordon Collier for
his support and constructive criticism throughout the editing process.
Portions of this book have already appeared in different form: thanks to the
publishers for permitting the release of material that appeared in the following
publications: Africa, Europe and (Post)colonialism: Racism, Migration and
Diaspora (African Studies Series, 2006); Muse India (2006), Muse India
(2007), and Muse India (2009); the Proceedings of the Conference of the
German Association of University Teachers of English 29 (WVT, 2007);
Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in Eng-
lish (Rodopi, 2008); Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Reali-
ties (Rodopi, 2008); and Australian Made: A Multicultural Reader (Sydney
UP, 2010).
I particularly wish to acknowledge the support of my University of Frank-
furt dissertation mentor and supervisor Frank Schulze–Engler, whose intellec-
viii UNRELIABLE TRUTHS (cid:186)
tual enthusiasm and critical questioning have enabled me to write with greater
cogency about imaginary South Asian homelands and unreliable truths.
Personal thanks are also due to my friends Fatma Aslan and Miriam Würz
who always lend a sympathetic ear to my worries. Finally, I want to thank my
parents-in-law and my parents, who looked after my two sons while I was
writing this book, and, above all, Henry, for being patient whenever I failed to
turn up for dinner or breakfast.

(cid:185) (cid:186)
Introduction
— Homemaking in a Globalized World

And so our dreams of distant places change as fast as images on MTV,
and the immigrant arrives at the land that means freedom to him, only
to find out that it’s already been recast by other hands. Some of the
places around us look as anonymous as airport lounges, some as
strange as our living room suddenly flooded with foreign objects. The
only home that any Global Soul can find these days, it seems, in the
midst of the alien and the indecipherable.1

W
HILE MOST PEOPLE find it easy to think of ‘home’ as the
domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard, as the Indo-
American British author Pico Iyer suggests, to grasp its manifold
implications, and even harder to present a neat and tidy definition of what it
is. Discussion of home and nation continues to be a highly complex one with
considerable political relevance. Its significance has been reinforced by the
reshaping of nation-states and national boundaries. These reconfigurations, as
demonstrated by the partition of India in 1947, for instance, are often reli-
giously and culturally motivated. Against this backdrop, the present study
suggests that ‘home’ is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is
constantly in flux and thus can never claim to depict an objective condition or
constitute an ultimate truth. Accordingly, notions of uncertainty, doubt, and
unreliable narration will be explored in relation to the concept of home in
recent Indian diasporic women writing from Australia, South Africa, the
Caribbean, Canada, and Great Britain. The writers’ approaches to their ‘cul-
tural roots’ vary greatly, as is shown by the way in which their narratives

1 Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet-Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home
(London: Bloomsbury, 2001): 269.
x UNRELIABLE TRUTHS (cid:186)
negotiate home and how their women protagonists navigate increasingly
globalized situations.

South Asian migration involved great diversity – different kinds of
people in socio-economic terms moving at different times for different
reasons; people of different religions, reflecting religious diversity on
the subcontinent, including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis and Chris-
tians; people from different regions and linguistic backgrounds; and
latterly people from different nation states. So great is the diversity of
origins, characteristics and experiences, that it is most realistic to see
South Asians abroad as members of different diasporic strands, who
have created many transnational communities which share a sense of
origin in that region of the world.2

In the introduction to her comprehensive historical study of the global South
Asian diaspora, Judith Brown states that the plurality of South Asian migra-
tion manifests itself hence not only in inter-diasporic comparisons: i.e. by
comparing various national diasporic contexts with each other, but also within
a single diaspora, since such intra-diasporic studies provide insights into the
manifold of South Asian life-worlds.
As the title of my book indicates, my aim is to look at Indian diasporic
literature by collating a number of the subcontinent’s global diasporas in order
to establish a comparative framework for a study of unreliable narration. This
strategic compromise, however, is not meant to suggest that I usually give
inter-diasporic analysis preference over intra-diasporic studies.3 In line with
Khalid Koser, I am often dissatisfied with the results gained from an
ahistorical pan-communal approach, yet a pan-South Asian approach to
dispersed communities from the Indian subcontinent has its own limitations,
too, especially when it has to respond to a wide variety of pressing questions.
However, as I hope to show in the following, there are good reasons for such
a comparative, inter-diasporic approach.

2 Judith M. Brown, Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 4; for a collection of socio-historical approaches to
global Indian diasporas, see Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Mi-
gration and Theory, ed. Gijsbert Oonk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2007).
3 For a discussion of the representation of the Zanzibari diaspora in Britain, see
Helff, “Illegal Diasporas and African Refugees in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea,”
Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (2009): 67–80.