This book by eminent author Jasbir Jain explores the many ways the diaspora remembers and reflects upon the lost homeland, and their relationship with their own ancestry, history of the homeland, culture and the current political conflicts. Amongst the questions this book asks is, 'how does the diaspora relate to their home, and what is the homeland's relationship to the diaspora as representatives of the contemporary homeland in another country?'. The last is an interesting point of discussion since the 'present' of the homeland and of the diaspora cannot be equated. The transformations that new locations have brought about as migrants have travelled through time and interacted with the politics of their settled lands---Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean Islands, the UK, the US, Canada, as well as the countries created out of British India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh---have altered their affiliations and perspectives. This book gathers multiple dispersions of emigrant writers and artistes from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. The word 'write' is used in its multiplicity to refer to creative expression, as an inscription, as connectivity, and remembrance. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of poetics and aesthetics, categories which need to be problematised vis-a-vis the writer and his/her emotional location.

Histories are important and histories have a way of traveling. West Indies is one example of a society constructed artificially of imported populations, who have gone on to build their own power structures, political histories and national identities. The Caribbean is one such society where multi-culturalism has been put to test. This book is an attempt to understand Caribbean histories, patterns of migration and race-relations. It is a collection of essays by Caribbean writers like V.S. Naipaul, Paule Marshall, Jean Rhys, Austin Clarke, Caryl Phillips and Cyril Dabydeen. The essays in this book have taken up most of the representative authors of the Caribbean, either by addressing their work or through contributions by the writers themselves. The attempt has been to provide a chronological history of the Caribbean and to give representation to writers living now in different host cultures. Some papers are gender-oriented and locate the position of the women in the West Indies.

This book by eminent author Jasbir Jain explores the many ways the diaspora remembers and reflects upon the lost homeland, and their relationship with their own ancestry, history of the homeland, culture and the current political conflicts. Amongst the questions this book asks is, 'how does the diaspora relate to their home, and what is the homeland's relationship to the diaspora as representatives of the contemporary homeland in another country?'. The last is an interesting point of discussion since the 'present' of the homeland and of the diaspora cannot be equated. The transformations that new locations have brought about as migrants have travelled through time and interacted with the politics of their settled lands---Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean Islands, the UK, the US, Canada, as well as the countries created out of British India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh---have altered their affiliations and perspectives. This book gathers multiple dispersions of emigrant writers and artistes from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. The word 'write' is used in its multiplicity to refer to creative expression, as an inscription, as connectivity, and remembrance. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of poetics and aesthetics, categories which need to be problematised vis-a-vis the writer and his/her emotional location.

"Narrative of the Village: Centre of the Periphery attempts to dismantle the polarities of centre and margin and substantiate the way they interconnect and flow into each other across all differences of region and language. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the essays in this volume foray into sociological, political, economic and narratological issues in order to fathom the rural life of India. Landscapes, histories and folk culture interact with each other to affect both narrative constructs and power-structures. The period covered by the essays spans nearly a hundred years and traces the history of India from the early decades through the dislocations of the partition right up to the present in an attempt to recapture the past, relocate priorities, recover lost myths and unveil the process of nation construction. The preoccupation with village India has been a constant concern with writers and film-makers from all regions and languages. Premchand, Sarat Chandra, Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee, Buddhadev Guha, Khushwant Singh, Krishna Sobti, Rahi Masoom Reza, Kamala Markandeya, Ashis Gupta, Phaneshwar Nath Renu, Thakazi Shankar Pillai, Thapil Mohammed Meeran, Sharan Kumar Limbale, O.V. Vijayan and David Davidar being only some of them.The kaleidoscopic nature of village life has always been a part of the nations imagination. The essays in this volume, open out the narrative of the subcontinental village to look at it anew in all its complexities and sociological concerns, to unfold a multi-layered reality."