Of Indian Origin is a dazzling collection of short stories and poetry by Australian writers of Indian origin. Cultures collide as children encounter racism in the playgrounds of Canberra, migrant women scrounge for a living nursing Melbourne's elderly, and a young author moves to a strange and unfamiliar country where she suffers from dreamlessness. These searing works bring new meaning to the field of 'Asian-Australian writing and new perspectives on the Indian diasporic experience.
Though the field of Indian-Australian writing is still small, this vibrant mix of emerging and established writers shows it is by no means a homogenous entity. Bold, experimental and wildly original, Of Indian Origin unapologetically tackles issues of home and provides a unique overview of how Indian-Australian literary writing has developed over half a century.
Paul Sharrad is a Senior Fellow in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He co-edited Volume 12 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English and contributes regularly to 'The Year's Work in English Studies'.
Of Indian origin herself, Meeta Chatterjee Padmanabhan lives and works in Australia. She teaches research, academic and professional writing at the University of Wollongong, and is one of the co-founding editors of the writers' collective Southern Crossings.
This anthology is a celebration of short fiction and poems by writers of Indian origin either living in or sojourning through Australia. A small but increasingly growing number of writers of Indian heritage are contributing to the larger Australian literary landscape-a scene that has dramatically changed from the early twentieth century, with more ethnic voices becoming part of the mainstream, and literary discussions turning from national to diasporic to transnational frameworks. Many who come from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds choose to shape their writing on the basis of their hyphenated identities, thereby contributing to the model of a multicultural Australia (even if they also question the reality behind the ideal of equally accepting all cultures as part of the national fabric). Others prefer not to be confined by labels and see themselves as projecting sensibilities that are inherently borderless, and their work as exploring the human condition from no specific geographical region. To take but one instance, Michelle Cahill was received into the general Australian literary scene with a book of poetry that did not push her ethnic identity; she went on to edit an online magazine specifically designed to promote multicultural writing in an effort to counter the ongoing concentration of attention on mainstream (Anglo-Celtic-European) Australian writing. Despite the complications of and resistances to simplistic labels, literary work from minority groups in Australia has attained recognition by means of, as well as in opposition to, categories such as 'migrant' and 'multicultural', and in recent decades has used and challenged the catch-all banner of 'Asian-Australian' (which to some extent has been inherited from North American literary movements). Writings by Australians of Indian heritage assert specific differences from Chinese and Southeast Asian ethnicities. (For example, no writer of Indian heritage tells of reaching Australia by fishing boat as a refugee, and unlike other 'Asian-Australians', most can invoke some connection to an Australian readership through shared legacies of British colonialism.) Asserting a specific regional identity (Goan, Bengali, Fiji-Indian) further problematises the categories of both 'Asian' and 'Indian'. Of Indian Origin offers an introductory overview of a newly visible literary presence, both within Australia and within the global space of diasporic Indian writing. It reveals both commonalities across 'migrant writing in general and the increasing variety of experiences that make up contemporary Australian literature.
In 2003, the Indian poet and critic Makarand Paranjape could name only eight Australians of South Asian origin who were publishing literary work, and he reflected the general opinion about Asian- Australian writing. This collection shows that much more has been going on, especially in recent times. In 2016, for example, Witchcraft Press published Manisha Anjali's Sugar Kane Woman, a poetry collection about Indian women living in exile in Fiji, and Giramondo Publishing launched Letter to Pessoa, a book of short stories by Indian-Australian Michelle Cahill. 2016 also saw Roanna Gonsalves enter the literary scene with her debut collection of short stories, The Permanent Resident, published by University of Western Australia (UWA) Press. And Suneeta Peres da Costa's novella Saudade will be published in 2018 by Giramondo. Indian- and Asian-Australian poets are also being published in literary magazines such as Mascara Literary Review, which is interested in the work of contemporary migrant Asian-Australian and Indigenous writers. Peril Magazine is another forum for Asian- Australian arts and culture. In 2017, Melbourne celebrated the Jaipur Literature Festival by inviting a number of Indian writers to present their work and write about Melbourne. With increasing Indian migration to Australia, there is greater awareness of Indian culture (attested to by 'Parramasala', the annual Indian community festival held in Parramatta outside of Sydney, and by regular participation of Australian writers in events such as the Jaipur Literature Festival and the Kolkata Book Fair). It is now possible to find spaces in 'mainstream' Australian literary culture for Indian voices and to break open the 'South Asia' box which previously packed together writings from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh and represented them as an undifferentiated collection of minority writing.
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