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MÁRIA PALLA
point system, which rationalized the admission procedures.'* These laws
allowed more non-European immigrants, mainly from South Asia and the
Caribbean, to Canada, which resulted in a demographic shift in Canadian
society making South Asians its largest visible minority group comprising
1.9 million people in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.’ However, as
already mentioned above, the South Asian diaspora is extremely varied; in the
Metro Toronto area alone, “over 20 distinct ethnic groups can be identified
within the larger (more than 850,000) South Asian population.”
The significance of the similarly multifarious literature produced by this
loose ethnic group has gradually increased since the 1980s. South Asian
Canadians brought out their first joint English-language publication as an
ethnic community in 1985. As Arun Mukherjee notes, it was a collection
of essays called A Meeting of Streams that represented the diaspora on its
own in a single volume." This was to be followed by The Geography of Voice,
a literary anthology, in 1992, Shakti’s Words: South Asian Canadian Women’s
Poetry a year later (1993), and several other volumes including The Whistling
Thorn: South Asian Canadian Fiction (1994), Sons Must Die and Other Plays
(1998), as well as Her Mother’s Ashes, the third book in a series of writings by
South Asian women in Canada and the United States (2009).
If works by individual authors in South Asian languages such as Punjabi
and Urdu are also taken into account, the beginnings of South Asian diasporic
literature in Canada can be traced back to the time when South Asians arrived
in Vancouver in significant numbers in the early years of the twentieth
century.” As these writings “are rarely translated and circulate almost
exclusively within specific linguistic groups,”'* they are understandably lesser
known than their English language counterparts that started appearing in
Canada after the Second World War. South Asian poetry in English published
in journals has a history dating back to the late 1950s. Short-story collections
followed in the 1960s to be succeeded by the first South Asian novels published
in English in Canada in the 1970s, including works by such authors as Bharati
Mukherjee and Harold Sonny Ladoo. However, it was with the emergence
of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Rohinton
8 Lindsey Van Dyk, Canadian Immigration Acts and Legislation, Canadian Museum of Immi¬
gration at Pier 21, https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/canadian-immigration-acts¬
and-legislation (accessed 16 August 2018).
4 Census Profile, 2016 Census, Statistics Canada,
www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo
1=PR&Codel=01&Geo2=&Code2=&Data=Count&SearchText=Canada&SearchType=Begi
ns&SearchPR=01&B1=All&TABID=1 (accessed 5 August 2018).
Buchignani, South Asian Canadians.
1° Arun Mukherjee, Postcolonialism: My Living, Toronto, TSAR, 1998, 24.
” Ch. Chakraborty — R. E. Field, Moving Ahead, Looking Back: New Directions in South Asian
Canadian Literature and Culture, South Asian Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016), 14.
18 Ibid., 14.
* 126 +