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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 geopolitical 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 +
