India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England

India 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.