Writers of Indian Diaspora

  Book Review : Writers of Indian Diaspora
                        
           Series Editor: Jasbir Jain

  Launched in 1998, this series seek to provide Indian perspectives on the writings of the Indian diaspora. This study places Gita Mehta's works fiction and non - fiction in the framework of Diasporic studies and tries to ascertain how the author responds to the Indian realities vis -a- vis her Western experience.
      The book focuses on the fact that though she looks at her country with the bemused gaze of an outside, her strong urge to recover the lost essence and to return to the folds of her culture become explicitly obvious. Her works are set in India but they move in and out of the two cultures, blending subjective experience with recreate India that was and India that is.
       Gita Mehta's work offers and defines it's own problematics. It raises questions related to location: first of the writer, then the world of her fiction and then of the historical underpinnings of the fictional world. Karma - Coal evokes images of Hindu mysticism as well as the fizz of the western drink whose popularity haa travelled beyond the west.
        Karma - Coal, Raj, A River - Sutra each is different from the other but all respond to Western engejments with India and it's tradition of meditation, mysticism and naturelore. When it's come to diaspora, it also means post colonialism, and post colonialism in its turn impiles post modernism. One has sift and arrange the material carefully before one starts justifying it's applicability to the author. It means delving into theory and theory takes time.

             "It isn't where you're from;
              It is where you're at."