LOCATING LIFE WRITING IN THE DISCIPLINE OF GLOBAL INDIAN MIGRATION AND DIASPORA STUDIES

Abstract

As institutional scholarship commands academic inquiry, the sponsored status bemoans its contingency. This pattern is quite evident in global academic entrepreneurship, e.g., the study of Indian Writing in English, an accidentally forced evolution of English Studies. A similar pattern can be observed in the evolution of studies of Indian migration and diaspora in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This paper attempts to investigate the contingency integral to the evolution of the Department of Migration and Diaspora studies in India followed by a solemn consideration of the sheer absence of Life Writing in the field of migrations and diaspora research. Hence, the inquiries recorded in this monograph will unfold two critical issues - first, to what extent migration and diaspora scholarship has evolved and expanded, and second, why Life Writing texts remained a pariah in the Humanities and Social Sciences research on migration and diaspora. A detailed horizontal and vertical study of the development of the discipline has been attempted to deal with the first issue. A critical survey of Indian Life Writing in English has been presented with relevant examples to explicate the second issue.