Oldal 126 [126]
MÁRIA PALLA
narrative to follow, I foreground the question of ethical responsibility Badami
couples with the idea of transnational interconnectedness apparent in the
lives of her characters and the lands they inhabit.
THE EMERGENCE AND INCREASING IMPACT OF
THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN CANADA
In North America, the designation South Asian came into use in the wake of
the Second World War, when the “academic and policy elites [of the United
States] sought to map the world in terms of a series of contiguous regions.”
Afterwards, terms like this were adopted by institutions of higher education
when area studies was introduced as an interdisciplinary field. Then the
sending region’s political elites adopted it, and the term “became a category
of self-definition,”? and was subsequently employed by the diasporas of South
Asian origin in the West, too, thereby completing its transnational migration
across borders on different continents. According to Giri and Kumar, the last
leg of the journey of the term illustrates how members of a diaspora have
embraced a broader identity as South Asians and have created “solidarity,
neighborliness, and hospitality with others from the region” by emphasizing
their common roots. * Thus, what appeared first as an etic, that is, externally
attached, use of the term became also the emic, or self-applied, designation.
Yet some critics contest the use of South Asian as the designation of the
diaspora in question, since it does not refer to any shared historical, religious or
linguistic traditions or national-political orientations of its members. In geo¬
political terms, South Asia includes five or more nation-states, depending
on the definitions provided by different political institutions or academic
departments. The five countries unanimously included are India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. South Asia is also the home of at least five
world religions: Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism and Christianity. Due
to this heterogeneity, Pnina Werbner categorizes the South Asian diaspora as
a “complex or segmented” one.°*
Yet, it is exactly because of its expansiveness that the designation South
Asian can be successfully applied as an umbrella term to diasporans of
different religions and ethnicities, sometimes from one and the same country,
as well as migrants sharing the same mother tongue but not the same
2 B.P. Giri — Priya Kumar, On South Asian Diasporas, South Asian Review, Vol. 32, No. 3
(2011), 13.
3 Ibid. 13.
* Ibid. 13.
Pnina Werbner, Complex Diasporas, in K. Knott — S. McLoughlin (eds.), Diasporas:
Concepts, Intersections, Identities, London, Zed Books, 2010, 76.
* 124 +