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15. Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada
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15 Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada Chelva Kanaganayakam A latter-day Gandhi, if asked what he or she thought about Canadian culture , might well have answered that it would be a good idea.1 There is a perception , particularly within the framework of multiculturalism, that Canada’s decision to replace its historically constituted unity with racial and cultural multiplicity has resulted, ironically, in attenuation rather than renewed strength. As one of the few nations in the world that acknowledges in legal terms its multicultural status, Canada is now a space for all cultures, at least in theory if not in practice. The transition has not been an easy one, and political philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka have tried, in various ways, to offer a model that would rationalize this shift.2As culture needs much more than legal sanction to thrive, the much advertised mosaic model often tends to reveal its scars rather than its substance. Multicultural Canadian culture is for many simply a gathering of many cultures, without a strong sense of its own cohesion, authenticity, or agency. Unlike the United States, Canada appears to be reluctant to assert and flaunt its status as a nation-state with a strong sense of cultural unity, with the consequence that its social and cultural structures come across as imitative rather than original. While all cultures in Canada may be self-conscious about their originary claims, immigrant cultures from the non-West are even more vulnerable to this charge of imitation. The much abused acronym ABCD— American Born Confused Desi—points to the general notion of cultural deracination among the diasporic South Asian population.3 Titles such as 241 Tanuja Hidier’s Born Confused and Kiran Desai’s Man Booker Prize–winning The Inheritance of Loss certainly help to reiterate this sense of displacement and loss of identity. In scholarly discourse, the binarism of authenticity and imitation persists in a different form. S. Satchidanandan writes, “The essentialist, often Orientalist, conception of India derived from colonial-Indological and nationalist discourses is beginning to give way to a more federal democratic perspective of a polyphonic India, a mosaic of cultures , languages, literatures, and world-views. But the critical discourse on the diaspora still seems to swear by that exotic, eternal India which is also at times woven into the writer’s own perception of the country” (19). The number of texts that keep appearing with overtly exotic titles further corroborates the notion of diaspora and multiculturalism as concepts that use home—in this instance, countries in South Asia—as a point of reference , and, by extension, the periphery as a site of imitation. David Davidar ’s The House of Blue Mangoes, Ameen Merchant’s The Silent Raga and Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon are a few examples of recent titles that suggest an Orientalist frame, although the novels may not be Orientalist in their preoccupations. These texts do not necessarily essentialize India or offer utopian visions from the perspective of a nostalgic artist, but at least in their refusal to straddle both Canada and India, they imply an identification with India as home and Canada as a place of displacement. The fact that second-generation South Asian writers, with no experience of having lived in South Asia, still choose to locate their fictions in South Asia is further proof that the dichotomy between identity and national belonging is deeply problematic in Canada. My concern in this chapter is not the sense of homeland as imagined by the diaspora, but about the ways in which “home” is affected and transformed by the diaspora.4 It is useful to point out that particularly in Canada, where South Asians are the largest visible minority group, accounting for almost 4 percent of the total population but up to 13.5 percent in multicultural cities such as Toronto where they represent almost one third of all visible minorities,5 the potential for facilitating transformation in the home country is great; although it is often difficult to separate Canadian influences from a broader Western impact, it is possible to map the various ways in which the Canadian diaspora becomes a locus of reflection, in both senses of the term. In some ways, one might contend that the notion of hybridity or “third space” (Bhabha) does not allow us to conceptualize the diasporic space as one of empowerment and originality. Hybridity remains a 242 SPACE, PLACE, AND CIRCULATION [3.95.233.107] Project...