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THE SOUTH ASIAN CANADIAN DIASPORA... Mistry, as well as Anita Rau Badami, that South Asian Canadian literature received the attention of readers and critics of mainstream Canada too. As Mariam Pirbhai observes, “South Asian Canadian literature, as a category of study, came into being in the 1980s, becoming the object of vigorous critical attention until the late 1990s.”1° As for South Asians participating in Canadian politics, this had to wait until 1947 when adult members of the community were finally given the vote. However, it was only in the 1980s that the first South Asian was elected to a legislature in Canada, increasing the political influence of the diaspora as well.”° It was not by coincidence that the 1980s turned out to be the decade when the South Asian and other ethnic minorities gained opportunities in the cultural and political life of Canada never seen before. In 1988 the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, aiming to support cultural pluralism, among other things, was passed after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced multiculturalism as official policy in Parliament in 1971. In the following years, South Asians were chosen to be members of provincial parliaments and eventually there were some who also entered the federal Parliament in Ottawa or became ministers in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet in the 2010s. Another great success achieved in Canadian politics by a South Asian, who happens to be a turbaned Sikh, occurred in 2018 when the lawyer Jagmeet Singh was elected leader of a federal party, the New Democratic Party. This was the first time in Canadian politics that someone from a visible minority group became the leader of a federal party on a permanent basis. As Buchignani observes, it is the Sikhs who form the largest South Asian ethnic group in the whole of Canada today.”' They are also a particular diasporic community because of the position of their homeland. In general terms, any diasporan is located in the interstitial space between the ancestral home left behind and the newly adopted hostland. A determining feature of the diaspora experience is the desire to return home even if not to its physical location but in the diasporan’s imagination. As Robin Cohen states, such a return movement to the homeland “gains collective approbation even if many in the group are satisfied with only a vicarious relationship or intermittent visits to the homeland.” However, the Sikhs have never had their independent homeland, which gave rise to a Sikh separatist movement % Mariam Pirbhai, Introduction South Asian Canadian Literature: A Centennial Journey, Studies in Canadian Literature — Études en Litterature Canadienne, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2015), 8. A Timeline of South Asian Canadian History, South Asian Generation Next, www.sagennext. com/2013/06/27/a-timeline-of-south-asian-canadian-history (accessed 2 November 2017). Norman Buchignani, Sikhism in Canada, The Canadian Encyclopaedia (2008, 2014), www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/Sikhism (accessed 30 October 2018). 2° Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas, 2% ed., Abingdon, Routledge, 2008, 17. * 127 +
