Page 127 [127]
THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA...
nationality, all coming from the same region of the world. In spite of such
divisions in the diaspora, Werbner convincingly argues that its members share
the same cultural region of consumption because they enjoy “similar cultural
preoccupations, tastes, cuisines, music, sport, poetry, fashion and popular
cinema.”° Obviously, they are in contrast with the archetypal Jewish diaspora
in that their religious and cultural orientations do not necessarily coincide with
the bounded territories of their homeland, the Sikhs and the Parsis serving as
prominent examples. However, by having a common culture of consumption,
members of the South Asian diaspora create “public arenas and economic
channels for cooperation and communal enjoyment, which cut across the
national origins or religious beliefs of performers and participants.”’
Studying the history of the South Asian diaspora in a North American
context, Joel Kuortti distinguishes “three specific periods, or immigration
waves, during which there was a more substantial number of immigrants
coming in.”§ As Vogt-William also notes, “[a]lthough massive migrations of
people from the subcontinent have become more apparent in the latter half of
the last century, South Asian diasporic communities have existed in England,
the USA, and Canada since the nineteenth century.”°
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, there were about five
thousand South Asians in British Columbia, ninety percent of whom were of
a Sikh farming background, mainly men from the Punjab area in northern
India; they were attracted to Canada by employment opportunities.’° “After
1909 the immigration rules were tightened in Canada,”"' so the second wave
of immigration brought larger numbers of South Asians, lured again by
higher wages, to Canada only after the Second World War. The third and
largest immigration wave occurred in the 1960s in the wake of “the legislative
reforms in 1962 and 1967.” These South Asians belonged to a different
demographic group, that of the middle-class, for whom the prospect of a
better education in Canada was the main attraction. The new immigration
laws of the 1960s eliminated overt racial discrimination and introduced a
6 Ibid., 76.
” Ibid., 76.
Joel Kuortti, Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American
Identity, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 9.
Christine F. Vogt-William, Bridges, Borders and Bodies: Transgressive Transculturality in
Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Novels, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2014, 4.
Norman Buchignani, South Asian Canadians, The Canadian Encyclopaedia, (2010, 2015),
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/south-asians (accessed 15 November
2016).
Kuortti, Writing Imagined Diasporas, 10.
2 Ibid., 10.