Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland |
Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland
Rhizomes Postgraduate Conference
Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference
The School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2006-02-24 through 2006-02-25
Alzena D’Costa
Curtin University of Technology
This paper argues that the ‘nostalgia’ that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely.
In his book Long-distance Nationalism, Zlatko Skrbiŝ defines nostalgia as ‘a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means ‘to return home’ and algia, ‘a painful condition’ (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past – a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is ‘perhaps the most dangerous … of all the ways of using history’ because it glosses ‘over the past’s iniquities and indignities’. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also ‘fix’ the past and recover it in ‘narrative terms’ (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home.
Read the entire paper here.
Tags: Alzena D’Costa, Anglo-Indians, India, Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference