A kind of India happens everywhere : Bombay-London-New York and beyond

In this thesis I explore the literary reconfigurations of Bombay, London and New York in texts written by South Asian diasporic authors between the middle of the Nineties and the first decade of the new millennium. Situating my argument within Bakhtin’s model of the chronotope, I contend that movement, displacement and relocations contribute to the creation of a renewed concept of space, by means of which the three metropolitan destinations are perceived to coexist in one single location. ‘A kind of India happens everywhere’, asserts the narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Equating cities to nations, I seek to illustrate this pronouncement through an analysis of South Asian immigration, its impact on the concept of national affiliation alongside the disjunctures it creates within the simulacral continuity projected by the panoptic rhetoric of economic globalisation. I commence by investigating national space and how textuality interrupts the cultural fixities of the nation. The creativity of fiction, de-provincialising traditional syntax through a process of ‘inscription’, generates the ‘elsewhere’ of fictionality. In this space antipodal constructions of national affiliation are displaced and dismantled. It is in this site, forged by literature, which I also term the ‘Beyond’, that Bombay, London and New York find their referents. Combining the abstractions of theory with the necessity to provide an alternative insight into the study of multidirectional travel between North and South, I investigate the trajectories described by South Asian diasporic subjectivities in a diachronic perspective. From post-war immigration to Britain, I proceed to illustrate the new destinations of South Asian relocations. Arguing that in recent texts London is presented as a transit zone for New York, I discuss neo diasporic formations in the US, and focus on the notion of deterritorialisation propagated by the media. I subsequently present an opposite view of migration in a diptych chapter in which I reveal that recent South Asian texts tend to expose the gaps rather than the continuity between cities. I conclude that the writing of later authors exhibits a magnification of the disjunctures exacerbated by displacement.