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-à-vis the writer and his her
emotional location.
