Vinay Patel, in the penultimate paragraph of his short story and this epigraph, rightly alerts his reader to the deep-rooted mark left upon the ‘double diaspora’, by their multiple migrations and travels through three continents. Yet, in Britain today and historically, there is a gap in the everyday modes of popular twice-migrant representation: an absence in how members of the diaspora mark themselves out. As I explore in detail throughout this book, the diaspora that has migrated from Gujarat to East Africa, and later settled in Britain, is hidden in literary and cultural studies, and often obscured in relevant scholarly debates. Patel’s short story appears in the critically acclaimed collection entitled The good immigrant (Shukla 2016).Footnote 1 It is amongst several accounts that do gesture towards Indian East African twice migration and the prolific British diaspora that emerges from this journeying; nonetheless, this theme is never fully surfaced and probed. The collection of short stories is not exclusively about the Indian East African community in Britain; rather, it is about a range of migrant experiences. However, the trope of twice migration appears in four of the 21 narratives in some shape or form (those by Sabrina Mahfouz, Himesh Patel, Vinay Patel and Nikesh Shukla).

For example, Himesh Patel, in ‘Window of opportunity’, offers the classic double diaspora account of migration, diligence, hardship and economic savvy. His family, from India, and later Kenya, moved to Britain (2016, 58–9), to eventually establish corner shops in two Cambridgeshire villages. His intergenerational narrative is one of entrepreneurship, which resonates throughout the double diaspora experience, though it is never fully explored through this lens. Himesh Patel is an actor known for his role as Tamwar Masood, a British Pakistani Muslim, in the BBC soap opera EastEnders (2007–2016). In his short story Patel suggests that the Masood family is ‘widely regarded as a kind of generic representation of the South Asian family’ (2016, 66), while also drawing comparisons between his own identity as a Hindu Gujarati and his character’s religious identity. If this conflation of ‘Asianness’ is useful in articulating Patel’s own formulation of identity, it conversely and simultaneously serves to hide the very specific lived experience of the prolific double diaspora.

An exceptional community of people, this diaspora is disproportionally successful and influential in resettlement, both in East Africa and in Britain. Often showcased as an example of migrant achievement, as Himesh Patel does, their accomplishments are paradoxically underpinned by legacies of trauma and deracination. Reading cultural representations attends to this gap, by studying the cultural life of the prolific Gujarati East African community in Britain today. Subsequently, I probe what it is to be not just from India, but also Africa: how cultural identity forms within, as this book popularises and discusses later, the ‘double diaspora’. First, we must consider the historical trajectory that led to the emergence of the British double diaspora.

Historical Context: The Indian in East Africa

The Indian East African community that now exists in Britain, and which is both prolific and celebrated as dynamic, is a product of multiple migrations and resettlements that span many generations. They first migrated from India to East Africa—specifically Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania—in several capacities over an extended period of time. During the late 1800s many Indians undertook both voluntary and coerced indentured labour in East Africa under British colonial rule , as African labour in the region was either ‘unavailable or unreliable’ (Bharati 1972, 8).Footnote 2 By 1895 it is recorded that Kenya had over 13,000 of these workers who constructed the railways that still function in the territory. Figures of Indian indentured labour during this period in East Africa totalled approximately 32,000. Whilst some of these workers—who were not only labourers, but clerks, surveyors and accountants—remained in East Africa, others returned to India or died during their service (Ghai and Ghai 1971, 2).Footnote 3

Despite the ubiquitous understanding that the massive importation of labour during the 1890s was the first appearance of Indians in East Africa, ‘one of the essential characteristics of South Asian settlement in this particular region of the world is its antiquity’ (Twaddle 1990, 151–2).Footnote 4 Long before the introduction of indentured labour in East Africa, there existed Indian and Arab traders and adventurers in the coastal cities.Footnote 5 This is the consequence of a long, shared oceanic history between India and Africa, a narrative of South Asian maritime navigation and encounter, which is underrepresented in critical study. The Indian Ocean was indeed in pre-colonial times a productive conduit between two territories: a space of transformation, modernity and mobility. It enabled criss-crossing, mercantile and cultural, long before the intervention of European influence in East Africa.

As a result of these maritime networks, in 1844 it was estimated that 1200 Indians already lived in the coastal cities of East Africa (D. P. Ghai 1965, 3). As time went on more members of this community penetrated the interior provinces of East Africa and engendered an established Indian presence. Significantly, these Indian communities, while being religiously, linguistically and by caste heterogeneous, by and large derived from the western region of the subcontinent, primarily Gujarat.Footnote 6 Thus, despite a ‘Eurocentric historiography’ that ignores the presence of a South Asian community in East Africa before the imposition of colonisation, Indians—Gujaratis in particular—have long been in the region. It is from the colonial period onwards that we can recognise an established and substantial diaspora of South Asians in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Subsequently these migrants have been integral architects of East Africa’s economy.Footnote 7 As discussed later, they have not only contributed to building the region’s railways, but further actively provided commerce in the form of dukas (shops), and later have contributed significantly to the commercial public sphere in Britain.

The role of South Asians in developing the East African economy can, however, be attributed to influences other than simply the longevity of the population in the region. The western region in India is acclaimed for its commercial endeavours, and within the subcontinent itself Gujarat has thus been identified as the ‘entrepreneurial hub of India’ (Mehta and Joshi 2002, 73).Footnote 8 Concurrently, in a similar vein of enterprise, it is not surprising that ‘wherever freed indentured labourers have formed communities of rural labourers, they have been followed by Gujarati traders and businessmen, who supply them with Indian clothes, jewellery and foodstuffs’ (Collingham 2006, 244). Although here Lizzie Collingham refers specifically to the diasporas in Mauritius, Trinidad, Jamaica, South Africa and Fiji, this is indeed true of East Africa as well, as attested by my own family history. Following indentured labourers from India, who chose to stay in either Uganda or Kenya, many South Asians sought to fill the gap in the market for Indian commodities. They also catered for Western settlers and Africans, proving cheap and resourceful in the service they offered. Interestingly, D. P. Ghai describes the dukas as being ‘owned almost exclusively by Gujarati speaking Asians’ (1965, 14). It is these migrants who came to Africa of their free will and formed the overwhelming majority of 360,000 Gujarati Indians in the region (Tinker 1975, 15).Footnote 9 The identification of financial opportunity, and the success the Indian community had in seizing this prospect in East Africa, suggests that entrepreneurial skills were transferred from Gujarat to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.Footnote 10

Indeed, in her book centred on pre-colonial Gujarat, Samira Sheikh explains that ‘revenues from trade made a crucial difference to the finances of whatever group was in power in [early] Gujarat. This may be as true of Gujarat of the twenty-first century as of the twelfth’ (2010, 5). It would seem thus that the Gujarati’s aptitude for trade and commerce extends from skills that have been cultivated since pre-colonial times. These entrepreneurial skills can be associated with the multiplicity and diversity Gujarat is known for. The etymology of the word ‘Gujarat’ in fact signifies the non-static nature of the region: ‘The term Gujarat is widely acknowledged to derive from the Gurjaras or Gujjaras, clans of “cattle-rearers, husbandmen and soldiers” who settled in or passed through north and north-western India from about the first century CE’ (25). Because people were continually migrating to and from Gujarat, making the region ‘virtually a moving frontier of immigration’ (ibid.), the area was both linguistically and religiously heterogeneous. A legacy of migration, and the multiplicity of identity of early peoples in Gujarat, emanating from their varied origins, perhaps account for their successes in commerce: having a varied skill set and being inclined to travel far and wide must have helped in trade. As such, there was a self-prophesying mythologisation of their natural abilities as adventurers and pioneers. The Gujaratis of today, not just in the region but all over the world, are not only renowned for these skills, but are also endowed with them. The economic successes of the Gujarati are therefore self-perpetuating: if the nature and self-perception of the community are based on a productive myth of enterprise and entrepreneurial skills, a virtuous circle of further cultural and financial entrepreneurship is entered into. The Gujarati follows in the footsteps of this productive myth and maintains the relevant skills for success.

Furthermore, I contend that it is this nature and multiplicity of identity that led many Gujaratis to East Africa, where they lived affluently. As successful settlers in East Africa, the South Asian community comfortably composed the middle stratum that created a cushion between the ruling British and the oppressed and subjugated Africans (Robinson 1995, 331; Tandon and Raphael 1978, 10; Mangat 1969, 131). In this privileged position, with flourishing finances, the immigration of Indians into urban areas of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania continued, until the 1940s, when the British—in a bid to preserve the social hierarchy—prevented the ‘wholly unrestricted immigration from the Indian subcontinent’ (Twaddle 1990, 156). This was followed by the conclusion of British colonial rule in the 1960s and subsequent African independence.Footnote 11 As a result of controversial Africanisation policies, large numbers of Indians—long settled in this region—left their homes.Footnote 12 Whilst in Kenya and Tanzania the migration of South Asians was due to political upheaval and uncertainty, in Uganda the Indian community was brutally expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972. Accused of non-integration, being ‘the saboteurs of the [Ugandan] economy’ (O’Brien 1973, 93) and commonly dubbed as ‘brown Jews’,Footnote 13 the 30,000 to 50,000 strong Indian population in Uganda had just 90 days to uproot, forcing them to abandon any semblance of their settled and established lives and homes.Footnote 14

Historical Context: Arriving in Britain

Exercising their British nationality , over a number of years as many as 200,000 Indians chose to come to the UK to start new lives as double migrants—moving first from India and later from East Africa. Others left Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to resettle in countries that helped ‘share the burden’ (Alibhai-Brown 2001, 73), such as Canada.Footnote 15 For many, ‘returning’ to India or Pakistan was not an aspiration, as they had rarely been to these places, and did not regard them as ‘home’.Footnote 16 As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s cookbook memoir illustrates—as I shall explore in the next chapter —‘home’ was in East Africa.Footnote 17 This affair of dislocation was far from painless, and for the forcibly expelled Ugandan South Asians it was fraught with further anxiety given the threats of military camps for remaining members of the community (O’Brien 1973, 96), and the transition into refugee camps in Britain (Mamdani 1993, 266). The second migration divided families further, scattering the diaspora all over the world, and resulted in one more life-changing move. It is this traumatic past that underpins the future of the community, and as the various texts and articulations that I shall examine reveal, this pain is more acute within the double diaspora because of the multiple dislocations it has thereby experienced. As well as these ordeals, reflecting a rejection of responsibility to its minority population in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania that had already long existed and manifested itself in other ways, the British government slowly closed down avenues of migration available to South Asian East Africans through limiting immigration legalisation . The changes to immigration law effectively left some of these migrants stateless and created further hardship for others, who faced a hostile East Africa on the one hand and a reticent India and Britain on the other.Footnote 18

As with their arrival in East Africa, many of those who migrated to Britain sought out urban areas where kinship networks already existed, such as the Midlands and London.Footnote 19 Extended families bought communal homes to reside in, and together embarked on commercial ventures, utilising well-honed skills. Parminder Bhachu, who coined the term ‘twice migrants’, explains that these doubly displaced groups differed from those who migrated directly from the subcontinent, because they not only arrived later, but they also had ‘skills [that] helped them to establish themselves much more rapidly than direct migrants who ha[d] not possessed the same expertise, linguistic facility, and communications network to develop community structures at the same pace’ (1985, 6). Furthermore, Bhachu points out that, despite diminishing ties with India, the twice migrant is in fact more culturally ‘traditionalist’ than the single migrant.Footnote 20

Paradoxically, and in spite of the ‘stringent’ maintenance of traditions, twice migrants have a longer-term commitment to wherever they settle.Footnote 21 Because the South Asian East African in Britain has generally never lived in India and is in the most part unlikely to return to Africa for political and social reasons, Britain becomes a more permanent residence over previous ‘homelands’.Footnote 22 However, as I shall discuss later in this introduction, and explicate as the monograph unfolds, there is a sense that the twice migrant is continually looking ahead. There is a desire to move forwards and progress, which could effect further movement. Nevertheless, the diaspora is under no illusion, and the ‘myth of return’—a phrase popularised by Muhammad Anwar (1979) pertaining to the assumption by the migrant that one day they will return to the homeland—does not exist. ‘The fusion of these factors’, Joanna Herbert explains, ‘facilitated the considerable economic and social success which is associated with East African Asians and enabled them to emerge from one of the poorest minority ethnic groups to one of the richest’ (2008, 18).

An example of this success is the city of Leicester, where a large proportion of Indian East Africans have chosen to settle.Footnote 23 The city has been identified as a European role model for multiculturalism. Despite the initial efforts of Leicester council to deter migrant Ugandans from the area through advertisements in the East African newspaper Ugandan Argus,Footnote 24 Indians are now a significant facet of the landscape and have been congratulated on regenerating failing areas such as Belgrave Road. Commenting upon Belgrave Road, Panikos Panayi indeed notes that ‘East African Asians, especially Hindus, played the most significant role in the initial transformation of this part of the city’ (2002, 68). There has also been an absence of riots in the area, which have plagued other cities with an ethnically diverse population. On the surface Leicester is an example of racial harmony and multiculturalism; though this reading is cursory and singular, given the competing discourses denied.Footnote 25

These outward achievements, which are achievements nonetheless, mirror those in East Africa of developing the economy and society, and can be traced forwards to the demographic of Leicester. The high proportion of Gujaratis that resided in East Africa is reflected in the overall Indian population in Leicester, as the landscape of South Asians consists of predominantly Gujaratis.Footnote 26 The successes of Leicester’s multiculturalism and the major presence of Gujaratis have been linked, and again attest to the entrepreneurial nature of these people, as well as their ability to settle and resettle.Footnote 27 It would seem thus the experiences of numerous displacements, alongside a keen commercial nature, have created the Gujarati as an expert in successful resettlement and relocation, a characteristic that has been clearly acknowledged and celebrated within discourses of multiculturalism.

Whilst these are the well-documented accomplishments of the transient South Asian East African, there is, I argue, a narrative of trauma that is silenced as a result of the accomplishments that dominate the discourse. It is this traumatic impact and effect of the multiple and challenging dislocations faced by the South Asian East African diaspora in Britain that this study is concerned with. These alternative narratives and articulations must be recognised and elucidated, and my research thus aims to investigate several questions: how does a contemporary community fraught with upheaval make and remake individual and collective identity? How are the negotiations of representation and trauma managed? What modes of representation are deployed in a bid for community and self-reconstruction amongst this diaspora of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How can one determine these identities when they are firmly concealed by other hegemonic interlocutions? Finally, what cultural narratives of representation do the favoured forms of social knowledge reveal? In the work of addressing these questions, let us begin by considering the research that exists within this field of study, to provide the appropriate intellectual framework.

Researching the Single Diaspora, Overlooking the Double

In their settlement and dislocation from East Africa the South Asian diasporic community, on the one hand, has been well investigated through both a sociological and historical lens, by, for instance, Michael Twaddle (1975, 1990), Yash Tandon and Arnold Raphael (1978), Yash Ghai and Dharam P. Ghai (1971), Dharam Ghai (1965), Agehananda Bharati (1972) and J. S. Mangat (1969). Research into the Ugandan South Asian diaspora has enjoyed further scholarship, owing to Idi Amin’s infamous expulsion order of 1972 (O’Brien 1973; Mamdani 1976, 1993). More generally there is also sociological research on South Asians in South Africa by scholars such as Surendra Bhana and Bridglal Pachai (1984). On the other hand, there has been scarcely any work on the South Asian East African diaspora in Britain. Where analysis has been undertaken, for example, by sociologist Parminder Bhachu (1985) and Maritsa Poros (2011), or into the South Asian community in Leicester, there still remains a resounding silence on this topic within the disciplines of literary and cultural studies.Footnote 28 Within these fields, this particular diasporic community has perhaps been overlooked for three reasons: firstly, because of the paucity of fictional writings concerned with this subject, and indeed a lack of interest in literary production by this diasporic communityFootnote 29; secondly, because of the twofold nature of the migration itself; and thirdly, because of the non-postcolonial nature of the settled migrant group.

The studies listed, though extremely useful, are now in several instances rather dated. They are, however, complemented by recent research by the scholars Dan Ojwang and Gurauv Desai. Ojwang’s book-length study oscillates around the theme of ‘East African Asians’ and an examination of the literary outputs from within this diaspora from all over the world (2013). In his monograph, Desai examines the historical economic and cultural exchanges of the Indian Ocean, with an interest in literary texts by South Asian writers in and about East Africa (2013). The research I offer in this book narrows its geographical focus to the double diaspora in Britain, yet broadens its purview to explore not just literary outputs, but a collection of non-literary ‘texts’ that perform cultural identity. By examining the prolific double diaspora in Britain, through a range of cultural expressions—including the written text, dance, culinary and dress practices, as well as visual materials and digital practices—this research is unique and a crucial and appropriate addition to the studies that currently compose the field. As I elaborate later, it is the relationship between embodied practice and cultural identity that drives my analysis. I explore how the body performs and represents community and individuated belonging in the double diaspora. Subsequently, I attend to a gap in the current critical offerings on the South Asian East African diaspora.

The paucity in research on the South Asian East African migrant is surprising given the abundant findings and fictional writings on the cultural implications of the diasporic South Asian community in Britain. For example, Susheila Nasta (2001), Peter van der Veer (1995) and Roger Ballard (1994) have undertaken milestone works in this field, with more recent offerings by N. Ali et al. (2006). Yasmin Hussain (2005) has further considered the concept of the South Asian diaspora with reference to gender; whilst Rozina Visram’s ground-breaking Asians in Britain: 400 years of history (2002) firmly positions those from the subcontinent as participants in British life for over four centuries, evidencing the historical intricacies of this exchange. There has also been reflection on the novels of M. G. Vassanji, an Indian East African who has now settled in Canada. For instance, while in her doctoral research Stephanie Jones (2003) is predominantly concerned with East African Anglophone literature, her primary materials do include several of Vassanji’s works. Where Vassanji’s fictional writings are considered, however, the British aspect of this diasporic community is bypassed for the investigation of the Canadian diasporic community, owing to the author’s final settlement.

There is also a canon of literature pertaining to the experience of the South Asian who migrated to East Africa—rather than for the migrant for whom East Africa was the first of many displacements—and it includes works by Peter Nazareth (1972, 1984) and a limited edited collection of oral histories of South Asian experience in Kenya by Cynthia Salvadori (1996).Footnote 30 There are, however, a select few texts pertaining to the double diaspora. These are currently limited to works by Parita Mukta, Jameela Siddiqi, Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Alibhai-Brown’s The settler’s cookbook (2009) draws our attention to the interface between embodied practice and cultural identity, via culinary practices. She deploys food, as well as autobiography, to shed light on this doubly displaced community, and follows in the tradition of several other diaspora writers who invoke the same fusion genre (Candappa 2006; Umedaly and Spence 2006).Footnote 31

Like Alibhai-Brown, Mukta’s Shards of memory (2002) assumes the autobiographical mode. There are four parts to the biography, each dedicated to a family member, starting with Mukta’s disempowered paternal grandmother, then progressing to her father, and later her uncle and daughter. Distinctly absent is Mukta’s maternal side, and in particular details on her mother and maternal great-grandmother, who is widowed yet chooses to evade that stigma and recast herself as an independent woman. Alibhai-Brown conversely celebrates strong women, positioning herself as one, whilst too elevating and honouring her own mother in the cookbook memoir. Generally, Mukta focuses on family networks in East Africa and Britain. Specifically, the trauma and disenfranchisement of widowhood suffered by the author’s paternal grandmother preoccupies the work, rather than the lived experience of migration and resettlement. Hunger is a trope that haunts the narrative, which is relevant to the commentaries in the following chapter. Bhuchar and Landon-Smith’s play Strictly dandia (2004) derives from a small-scale production concerned with ethnic and caste rivalries. Nevertheless, Strictly dandia represents effectively cultural and socio-religious identity within the North London Navratri space, and this critical commentary is integrated into my readings and is examined in my chapter on dance.

Jameela Siddiqi’s first novel The feast of the nine virgins (2001) also draws upon a diaspora displaced from India to East Africa, later settled in Britain. The narrative operates on multiple levels in this experimental fiction, with character transformations and revelations, alongside overlapping plots lines. Partly set in historical East Africa, amongst the everyday lives of the South Asian community, and partly set in contemporary London where a Bollywood movie is being produced, the fiction comes to a climatic and chaotic end, drawing these discrete sections together through character overlaps. Siddiqi offers a wide lens through which to view life in East Africa, and in particular her fictionalised region named ‘Pearl’, which is most closely aligned to Uganda. Whilst Alibhai-Brown and Mukta converge upon very specific familial-related networks, thus only writing about one section of a community in and from East Africa, The feast of the nine virgins draws together an assortment of competing classes, castes, religions, languages and practices amongst its ‘Indians’ in Pearl. There is the miserly and detested shopkeeper Mohanji, who lives in unnecessary poverty and deprivation despite his excessive wealth, together with the elite professional teacher Mrs. Henara, who holds herself above those around her, patronising in particular the shopkeeper class. Through these characters Siddiqi draws hierarchies within the often simply perceived ‘Indian’ community in East Africa. She thus exposes a hierarchy within the hierarchy, of the Indians sandwiched between the European settlers and the black communities of East Africa. Unlike Alibhai-Brown or Mukta, Siddiqi’s novel reveals a layered community in East Africa, one that defies the homogenisations of a unified Indian community in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Each of these works by Siddiqi, Mukta, Bhuchar and Landon-Smith and Alibhai-Brown offer some intervention into representations of the double diaspora, which I draw upon; however, the selection remains limited. Whilst textual fictional representation of the double diaspora is narrow, there is, furthermore, a paucity of culturally significant films interested in this community. Though the double diaspora has produced a number of successful creative pioneers,Footnote 32 including the film director Gurinder Chadha, who was born in Kenya before migrating to the UK at a young age, representation of the twice-migrant experience is largely absent in film. Chadha’s Bend it like Beckham (2003) and the popular East is east (O’Donnell 2001) give insight into the South Asian diasporas they portray; however, they again are only concerned with those displaced once. Mississippi Masala (Nair 2003) does engage with narratives of double displacement; however, it is the experience of the South Asian East African community in the US that is accounted for there. Alibhai-Brown herself tells us that ‘there are no films about our old lives’ (2009, 13), and I would argue that indeed there are none about the new ones. In film, consequently, the Gujarati East African in Britain is once more overlooked.

The absence of a signature novel or film concerned with the discourse of the British East African South Asian, it seems, thus has inhibited palpable literary research. Perhaps this absence, as Mihir Bose suggests, is a ‘necessary amnesia’. Quoting A bend in the river, Bose explicates V. S. Naipaul’s argument that there is an ‘Asian inability to record and evaluate; [South Asians] rely […] on Europeans to recognise even their own forebears’ achievements’ (Bose 1982, 456). Though this interpretation is ruthless and erroneous, ignoring the lacuna in scholarship composed by anyone at all and failing to take into account that which does exist, of the fictional text one is compelled to ponder: where is the iconic novel that attempts to represent the Gujarati East African in Britain? Where is its Brick Lane (Ali 2003) or White teeth (Smith 2001)? And if it does not exist, why not?

In answering these questions I reflect upon other forms of cultural production that represent twice-migrant identity in Britain. These alternative instances of cultural production—culinary, dance and dress practices, as well as visual materials—are posited here as ‘texts’ themselves. Though they are not text-based, these forms of cultural productions are exposed to close readings within this work. It is the critical treatment of these practices and materials that reveal complex, creative and multiple instances of identity amongst the double diaspora. Culinary, dance and dress practices are all forms of key cultural texts, which too have the commonality of ‘embodiment’. I am interested in the role certain forms of embodied practice have in shaping and mediating cultural representations, and how they can reveal the complexities of selfhood and collective identity amongst the double diaspora. The analysis of the body is thus fundamental in this work, and significant to the selection of primary material. Given that the texts of gastropoetics, dance and dress, when closely read, offer exciting opportunities in the task of interpreting culture, I prioritise the body, and therefore the embodied practice. Whether it is the dancing body, the body cooking or recipe writing, or indeed posing for a family frame or in ‘traditional’ attire, there is a cultural significance to these everyday acts. A sustained focus on material culture, via embodied practice and close reading practices, in this way, enables a thus far hidden diaspora to be revealed in critical discourse.

In the close reading of these texts my research not only goes some way to addressing the lacuna in scholarship on the cultural identity of the Gujarati East African in Britain, revealing hidden narratives of the double diaspora, it also complicates the singularity of migratory movement often embedded in the meaning of the term ‘diaspora’. Usually understood as the scattering or dispersal of a group of people, the term ‘diaspora’ privileges singular movement, signposting ‘unidirectional’ migration, from a homeland to a place of settlement (Shukla 2003, 11). I seek to challenge this understanding of British diasporic communities, and in doing so illuminate the complexities of this South Asian diaspora, often discussed in monolithic terms, rendering the multidimensional nature of the communities that lie within this umbrella group invisible. This monograph thus intervenes in wider postcolonial conceptual debates centred on the term ‘diaspora’.

In broadening the literary critical interpretive practice of ‘close reading’ to the analysis of other modes of ‘texts’, which exist beyond the written, I draw from other forms of cultural production to read the double diaspora. This methodology enables the twice-displaced community to be investigated whilst capitalising upon analytical practices of literary studies. I delineate this methodological approach in more depth later in the introduction; first let us consider the disciplinary crossover, with the rich field of literary studies, and the wider context of the South Asian diaspora and postcolonial studies. There is a well-established canon of South Asian diasporic writers in English, including Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh and Meera Syal.Footnote 33 Many common themes emerge within the writings of these authors, including that of the relationship of the migrant to the homeland, as well as how identity—for example, class, race and sexuality—is formed in the diaspora. These authors furthermore often produce literatures of resistance. This monograph, in its analyses, builds upon and contributes to these earlier formulations of diaspora and postcolonial literatures.

For example, I demonstrate how Alibhai-Brown’s cookbook memoir can be understood as a form of resistance via its recipe writing. My chapter on the cookbook explicates the possibilities of recipe writing as a form of cultural resistance against eradication, either physical or notional. Throughout, and as another instance, I explore notions of belonging. There is an ambivalence in diasporic home-making for Alibhai-Brown, which mimics the preoccupations of some earlier diaspora writers; yet, elsewhere there are expressions of dynamic traversals of multiple identities, particularly via dance. I thus expand the space carved out in postcolonial literary studies, to explore, for example, notions of resistance and belonging, situating this work on the double diaspora within this larger tradition, whilst reaching beyond it to other forms of cultural production. Throughout the chapters that follow I endeavour to draw attention to how my analysis is situated in relation to the work that has gone before, and which I develop.

Limiting Language

A central argument of my second chapter, centred on culinary practices, relates to the limitations of language, and the management of representation and trauma, by the South Asian East African diaspora in Britain. Whilst these limits bear upon the representation of the community and subjectivity, they concurrently affect the articulation of this work, because it is entrenched in the act of writing. Thus here I clarify the terms I employ. Whilst some secondary criticism might refer to ‘Asian’, which pertains to peoples and cultures of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, I endeavour to use more specific nomenclature. For example, I refer to ‘India’ and ‘Indian East Africans’ or ‘Gujarati East Africans’, to signify those who have moved from India, and the region of Gujarat, to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.Footnote 34 With the all-encompassing reference to ‘India’, however, problems quickly arise. The creation of the separate entities of Pakistan and India during the 1947 partition, the subsequent creation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the non-existence of a unified state during pre-colonial times result in the concept of ‘India’, and indeed ‘Indian’, being contentious and distorted.Footnote 35 Unified modern India itself is a contemporary creation, and what constitutes that space is contested.Footnote 36 Its use is therefore slippery. Here I use the term primarily in reference to the twice migrant, and refer to the Gujaratis, Punjabis and Goans that experienced double displacement. When making reference to the peoples from Gujarat, I use this more specific language. Similarly, my use of ‘East Africa’ is not to suggest the region is homogenous, or that the Indian population that is connected to these parts are in uniformity. Instead ‘East Africa’ is another placeholder: the specificity of the region and its peoples being revealed as each chapter progresses and precise evidence is investigated.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s own heritage helps articulate these difficulties of terminology: her father, having disowned the place and the family who live there, was from Karachi and her maternal grandfather was from Gujarat. Whilst according to patriarchal paradigms we might perceive Alibhai-Brown to be Pakistani in identity, because of the tangible presence of her maternal family, coupled with the absence of any relations with her father’s family in Karachi, the author rather affiliates with her Indian identity.Footnote 37 Concurrently, as evidenced by numerous references in her work, for the writer her Ismaili religious identity is also of significance (Alibhai-Brown 2009, 47, 66–7, 98).Footnote 38 Thus, despite the availability of a Pakistani identity—as a Muslim and a Pakistani by paternal lineage—Alibhai-Brown still somewhat paradoxically chooses to assert her ‘Indianness’. To say that, therefore, Alibhai-Brown, and of course other doubly-displaced migrants, are simply ‘Gujarati’ or ‘Indian’ is not ideal, as it ignores the multiplicity of identity. However, it is the aim of this monograph to analyse representations of selfhood and community, and these terms are enabling placeholders that are gateways to investigating identity in its complexities. These labels are points of departure, rather than instances of arrival.

One further geographical designation, referred to prominently throughout the monograph, is ‘Britain’. Subsequently, the contours of Britishness and British identity come into play within this work. However, whilst I refer to Britain, it is specifically, in geographical terms, a diaspora located in England that I analyse. Though the wider diaspora exists beyond these boundaries in the UK, the examples I draw upon are in England. I opt for the usage of ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ nevertheless, because of the way in which citizenship has been historically expressed. As I have suggested, South Asian migrants in East Africa exercised their British citizenship rights in opting to migrate to the UK. It is this form of identity that was first claimed, and I would argue is most appropriate over other forms of identification.

‘Diaspora’, a term that takes its place in the title of this study, has enjoyed significant scholarly attention and debate within the last few decades, stimulating research in a number of fields, and in particular in literary postcolonial and cultural studies. Initial conceptualisations of the term referred to Jewish diasporas, exile and victimhood; however, here I narrow the focus to the representations of a particular South Asian diaspora. There are numerous scholarly interventions on diaspora theory, and I highlight a select few: Sudesh Mishra (2006) and Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan (1996) precede Kim Knott and Sean McLoughlin’s more recent collection Diasporas: Concepts, intersections, identities (2010). A study of major diaspora concepts and theories, this collection of essays is multidisciplinary in its examination.

Mishra’s key work too is an overview of diaspora critical trends; however, this investigation seizes upon a far-reaching range of major theoretical works and thinkers, from Homi Bhabha to Avtar Brah, and Stuart Hall to Arjun Appadurai. The review is undertaken by dividing diaspora criticism up into three ‘scenes of exemplification’, resulting in a focus upon these criticisms, rather than on ‘diasporas’ themselves. Radhakrishnan’s earlier work overlaps the frameworks of poststructuralism and postcoloniality to map out identity politics. This account begins with an autobiographical tone, and is often self-reflexive in its readings. For Radhakrishnan, both intellectually and subjectively, ‘the diasporic location is the space of the hyphen that tries to coordinate, within an evolving relationship, the identity politics of one’s place of origin with that of one’s present home’ (1996, xiii).

Other scholars too seize upon a framework whereby identity politics are mediated by the hyphen, including Vijay Mishra (2007). As his title suggests, in The literature of the Indian diaspora Mishra focuses predominately on key geographically selected diasporic literatures and their writers; however, he divides the field up into ‘old’ and ‘new’ Indian diasporas. Mishra has an acute awareness of the Indian diaspora that is the by-product of indentured labour, and in conjunction discusses briefly the double diaspora in the section entitled ‘Unfixed selves: the twice-displaced’ (154–72). He opens his book with the forthright first statement: ‘All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way’ (Mishra 2007, 1).

In contention with these studies, here the term ‘diaspora’ provides a space of interpretation, fluid and open, rather than pre-determined and closed. Whilst a space of critical pluralism, it is also one of cultural self-fashioning, ‘a constructing space to negotiate many identifications’ (Shukla 2003, 14).Footnote 39 If sometimes ‘diaspora’ might be construed as a byword for dislocation, fragmented and splintered belonging, we see here, as the chapters unfold, how such boundaries are sometimes comfortably traversed. These are instances where the middleman identity politics of Radhakrishnan’s hyphen, and too the cynical sentiments of Mishra, are no longer relevant. It is acknowledged that there is a dual trajectory, where:

On the one hand, ‘diaspora’ is deeply conservative and imbricated in historical narratives concerning a timeless exile from an autochthonous ‘homeland’. On the other, ‘diaspora’ is also commonly understood as a state of creatively disruptive impurity which imagines emergent transnational and postethnic identities and cultures. (Cheyette 2013, xiii)

Indeed, in the first chapter it is clear that Alibhai-Brown often struggles against her diasporic identity; however, I do not begin with a preconceived understanding of what it means to be a twice migrant.

The term ‘twice migrant’, as I have already outlined, is one that has been coined and popularised by Bhachu. It pertains to those migrants who have settled in Britain, via South Asia then East Africa. Bhachu primarily writes of the Sikh contingent of the twice-migrant community, though the term is useful in considering the broader diaspora. In addition to ‘twice migrant’, the monograph, and its title, refer to the ‘double diaspora’. Nuancing the term ‘diaspora’, which can suggest a linearity of migrant movement, the use of ‘double’ seeks to emphasise the experience of twice displacement as being distinctive from singular displacement. Whilst the nomenclature of ‘twice migrant’ places significance upon the individuated, or a group of individuals if pluralised, ‘double diaspora’ highlights the significant community dynamic of the group I investigate. The alliterative term, however, does have its limits. Like ‘twice migrant’, ‘double diaspora’ suggests finality. As my fourth chapter reveals, for a group that is compelled to look backwards while simultaneously looking forwards, it is ultimately artificial to insist on the sense that the community discussed is permanently settled and is satisfied with twofold movement, as the phrase ‘double diaspora’ might suggest. The concept of the ‘double diaspora’ remains valuable to this work; nevertheless, it is distinctly the migrant from Gujarat, who travelled to East Africa and is currently located in Britain that the monograph investigates.

I would like to address three further ‘slippery’ terms. The concept of ‘memory’, particularly significant to my second and fourth chapters, is a mainstay of many cultural and literary research projects. Being widely acknowledged as constructed and reconstructed, memory is an unstable mediation experience. Herbert explains ‘the act of recalling past events is intrinsically revisionist. It involves a simplification of reality and a process of editing whereby certain details are selected, prioritised and ordered and others suppressed and omitted’ (Herbert 2006, 135). Memory, like remembering, is ‘recognised as an ongoing process’, which is ‘ultimately more interested in serving the present than resurrecting the past, and prone to adapting past events so that they fit more easily with contemporary realities’ (Burrell and Panayi 2006, 14). This ephemeral, abstract nature of memory is pursued further in Chap. 2, with reference to Alibhai-Brown; however, it is significant to note here the relationship of ‘revisionist’ memory to how one projects, and interprets, selfhood and community: ‘Ultimately […] memories are related to the self and identity and recollections provide a sense of identity in the present’ (Herbert 2006, 135). ‘The borders of memory and identity are jagged’, Michael Rothberg explains, ‘what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant’. Rothberg goes on to describe memory as ‘anachronistic’, a ‘bringing together of now and then, here and there’, underlining memory’s ‘powerful creativity’ (2009, 5). It is from this creativity, of memory, that identity becomes mediated.

Penultimately, let us briefly consider the term ‘modernity’. Ashis Nandy’s edited collection of essays Science, hegemony and violence: A requiem for modernity (1988) explores the entangled relationships of the ideology of development, modern science, nation-state violence and technological intervention. Framed by the ‘Indian experience’, a cultural dimension that is the backdrop to the collection, the essays offer a critique of the deployment of modern science in both colonial and postcolonial spaces (4). Arjun Appadurai too investigates modernity and the nation-state, but, as the title of the text suggests, Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (1996) focuses on globalisation theory and culture. In engaging Benedict Anderson’s model on imagined communities, Appadurai considers migration and modern mass media via his five ‘scapes’ of global cultural flow.

There are more recent critiques of modernity that the concepts of this monograph, particularly those in Chap. 4, develop. These studies position modernity within the subcontinent, and do so through a cultural theory of South Asian visual studies. In conjunction with criticisms by Christopher Pinney (1997), Sumathi Ramaswamy (2003), Peter van der Veer (2001) and Ritu Birla (2009), and in contention with Frederick Cooper (2005), I carve out a modernity of the Gujarati East African in Britain via the visual materials of my fourth chapter. This vernacular modernity is an exciting cultural entanglement of the old and new: the looking back to a past of movement and resettlement, to a future of, perhaps, the same. This twofold retrospection and anticipation is marked both by pain and success. It is a vernacular modernity that is outwardly full of paradoxes and tensions, which nevertheless seamlessly merge.

Finally, let us consider my positioning of the concept of ‘culture’. Joep Leerssen describes ‘culture’ as ‘a way of doing things differently, a pattern of behavioural differentiations’. Remaining another ephemeral designation, ‘culture’ here is manifested within the practices I discuss throughout: food, dance, dress, photography and digital practices. This understanding of culture is by no means exhaustive; it seeks to highlight those practices that are significant to the double diaspora of this study. My investigations are not intended to homogenise or essentialise cultural identity by the ‘pigeonholing of diversity patterns’ (2006, 34). My observations are of a specific community, which I have experienced, am a member of, have researched extensively and have attempted to ‘read’ via a carefully selected set of primary materials. And whilst, according to Leerssen, ‘cultural essentialism locates cultural difference between cultures rather than within cultures’, I seek to shed light on the complexities of cultural identity within the overarching South Asian diaspora, and furthermore within the double diaspora itself (35). This is a study of complexities and contradictions, rather than simplifications. Moving forward, I attend to my methodological approach. Enmeshed within these explanations is a detailed delineation of each chapter’s objective.

Innovating Methodologies: Discovering ‘Texts’ and Synthesising Scholarship

In beginning this section of the introduction, I highlight a significant aspect of my underpinning methodology. Although Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has only experienced displacement once—from Uganda to Britain—the displacement from the subcontinent to Africa, as experienced by her elders, I contend can be understood as collective trauma. Ron Eyerman (2001), in discussing black American identity formation, underlines this contention. The critic reasons that the collective memory of slavery forges a shared identity among black Americans, who reinterpret the trauma of slavery to form membership groups. Similarly, Alibhai-Brown herself has not explicitly experienced twice migration, but indeed is burdened with the legacy of her community, which has been multiply displaced. Significant here also is Marianne Hirsch’s widely commented upon research on postmemory (1997). This theory outlines how the offspring of holocaust survivors adopt the memories of holocaust traumas in remembrance. Although Hirsch does not comment upon identity formation, she does consider collective traumatic memory and how it can be inscribed into one’s life story. These established criticisms are significant for the ways I approach Alibhai-Brown , and the other texts I read. Though twice migration might not have been experienced directly by the individuals and groups I read, the legacy of twofold displacement is implicit in a shared identity.

By examining not only traditional fictional texts and imaginatively making connections between interdisciplinary materials, I explore the effects of twofold migration on cultural formations and self-representation. Vis-à-vis the genres of autobiography and cookbook, and in the analysis of Alibhai-Brown’s The settler’s cookbook in my second chapter following this introduction, I excavate the formation of identity within the South Asian East African community in Britain. The cookbook memoir is not a traditional literary text, because of its declared non-fictionality. In its analysis, and by engaging seminal autobiography critics Paul John Eakin (1985, 1999, 2008) and Nancy K. Miller (2002, 2007), I nevertheless tease out the paradoxical nature of this genre as fiction in the guise of non-fiction.

The exploration of the use of the autobiographical mode in rewriting the South Asian East African in Britain brings into play discourses of trauma, in relation to both racism and dislocation. Via the words of Kapasi, an Indian Ugandan, Herbert outlines the pain and trauma of deracination:

The trauma of it and also the anxiety and the suffering which you go through, there is no way words can describe those feelings because suddenly you realise that you have to leave your home and you’re suddenly, homeless, stateless you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from […]. (2006, 138; my emphasis)

This account is illustrative of aspects of the pain of double displacement. An established body of trauma scholarship , including that by Leigh Gilmore (2001) and Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), enables my research to shed light on how this trauma manifests itself, and how it can be managed. However, this body of well-known research is dated, and recent theoretical redirections in trauma discourse, which account for globalisation as well as the postcolonial condition, are pivotal in propelling the thinking on belonging here forward. Using works by Gert Buelens et al. (2014) and Stef Craps (2013) on contemporary literary and cultural trauma theory and witnessing, I move away from Eurocentric models of reasoning, and towards a relevant way of articulating the trauma of multiple deracination. Subsequently, I argue that we must forge new ways of thinking about diasporic loss. I contend that, as Kapasi also indicates, the trauma of this diaspora can never be fully resolved through its representation in language.

Thus although the genre of the memoir attempts to grapple with trauma , the inadequacies of language result in Alibhai-Brown’s reliance upon culinary practices. Given that the significance of the cookbook in relating social knowledge has been widely commented upon, it is the dependence upon the consumption and production of food by the South Asian East African diaspora—and the cookbook aspect of Alibhai-Brown’s text—that is excavated.Footnote 40 Considering first the political act of recipe writing—and its value in manifesting culinary and cultural memory, as well as being a tool of resistance—I highlight, secondly, the act of cooking itself a mode that embodies social knowledge.

Where the cookbook is an accepted convention and has a specific style, for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown these pragmatic practices are entangled with questions of identity. The identity that is presented is on the one hand individuated, but on the other—because of the consumption and production stemming from the recipes in the text, and how they were collected—it is also a collective one. The self thus appears to be paradoxically constructed in relation to the community and collective nature of the recipes. To help nuance the relationship between the author and her community, I also offer a reading of Alibhai-Brown’s unpublished play Nowhere to belong (n.d.). Underlining the secretive nature of the wider twice-displaced diaspora, a theme that reoccurs in Chap. 3, I examine the act of speaking out against the desires of that community. I ask whether there might be a relationship between the capitalisation of the exotic nature of this food—the commodification of culinary practices—and the act of speaking out. There remains a need to speak out, I conclude, to account for trauma. I thus consider the importance of culinary practices as a mode of cultural production, and unearth how these forms of collective representation enable a doubly displaced community to perform, relocate and rewrite its culture. It is the way in which these dynamic modes of memoir and cookbook combine and perform representation, and indeed how food is a form of autobiography, on which I close my analysis.

In investigating these genres, the role of cultural memory in recuperation, and the manner in which it is performed in varying forms of representation, will emerge as highly significant.Footnote 41 Furthermore, the nature of narrated memory and the compromise between what is embraced and what is forgotten reveal a great deal about the trials and tribulations of migration. As well as imaginatively connecting different genres and varieties of writing in the pursuit of shedding light on the cultural and identity practices of the South Asian East African in Britain, I shall turn to other highly exciting and distinctive scholarship from disparate fields and disciplines. In particular Diana Taylor’s The archive and the repertoire shifts the focus of hegemonic Western epistemology from the written archive to ‘embodied culture’, and traditions that ‘are stored in the body’ (2003, 17, 24). Although Taylor’s work is concerned with performance art in Latin and North America, her suggestion that an alternative system of thought is required in the analysis of how communal identity and memory are preserved and rewritten is relevant here.

Whilst informing my close reading of food as a communal and collective practice, the concept of the embodied text provides a productive foundation for my third chapter on dance practices. Via the ‘play’ of Gujarati dances during the Hindu festival of Navratri the value of other ‘texts’, beyond the written, are once again showcased. What the body can communicate about the cultural identity of the double diaspora is not only investigated in this third chapter via dance, but also via gendered dress. To explore the embodied practice of dance I closely read YouTube footage, from the vast materials on Navratri that exist on this site, and images from my personal archive, an archive that is principal in my chapter on visual materials.Footnote 42 In addition, in my third chapter on dance, I analyse the play Strictly dandia to facilitate a discussion of how the Navratri space is quintessentially Hindu Gujarati. I contend that from an outsider’s perspective the Navratri space exhibits a unified identity; however, from within there are competing caste claims, which splinter identity further.

My methodology in this chapter also involved the collection of further primary materials. During 2010 and 2011, in North London, I attended celebrations of the Hindu festival of Navratri, which takes place annually around September and October. North London was the ideal location for data collection, as this is where my kinship networks exist. As a result I was able to easily access events, as well as integrate with the established practices of the festivals. I attended three different locations, and these areas reflected a largely Gujarati population, which too represents my heritage. During my attendance of Navratri at Harrow Leisure Centre, the Watford Leisure Centre and the Kenton Mochi Hall, I employed the qualitative research methods of participation observation . I participated in dances, talking to attendees when the opportunity arose, photographing and videoing events and making lengthy notes on the festivities post celebrations. I deliberately eschewed other language-orientated qualitative methodologies, such as interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, because, as I shall explain in the chapter itself, these approaches are incongruous with the diaspora’s pursuits, and with the nature of Navratri.

In my data collection during this period, I enacted the roles attached to my membership of both the academic community and my ethno-linguistic community. Though I was traversing these dual positions overtly within the data-gathering exercises during Navratri, given the topic of my research and my heritage, this element of navigating between various selfhoods is in play throughout the entirety of the monograph. I bring my own personal experiences, mediated by my heritage, to this research. As the study evolves this becomes more apparent, with the fourth chapter, on visual materials from personal archives, assuming a tone that reflects the very intimate nature of the subject matter.

Within Chap. 3, however, I physically negotiate the two roles I describe. Though I undertake participant observation, I do not become a part of the community, like one anticipates in traditional anthropological participant observation, as I am already a member of the researched community. In participant observation the self is generally effaced in the process of becoming one with the researched society so as to obtain a degree of objectivity, create a scientific method and produce a valid output. My position necessitates an adaptation of this methodology. I am able to bring an existent sense of the community to my undertakings, from within my selfhood, which ultimately forges new methodologies. There exists already an element of the trust, and relationships, which are typically cultivated anew. These pre-existing networks enabled me to access information; they also sometimes created some confusion as to the mechanics of my interest, as an interest associated with an ‘outsider’. The specificity of this dual role is explicated in the chapter on dance itself. In my undertakings I recognise my position as ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’. The variant levels of this binary, in my fourth chapter, are furthermore nuanced.

Others, whose research materials are similar to those examined here, have enmeshed their selfhood into their thinking and writing: they include Marianne Hirsch (1997, 2010) and Annette Kuhn (2002). Avtar Brah, an Indian East African herself, too writes her introduction to Cartographies of diaspora with the backdrop of her heritage, underlining the significance the ‘autobiography’ often plays in the twice migrant’s writings (1997). Overall, my methodology, in this respect, involved the deployment of my membership of the double diaspora to create innovative—and intimate in the case of Chap. 4—scholarship. Notably, though, whilst my data-gathering methodologies were participant observation, the analysis that developed from these materials was of literary criticism. I thus transfer the skills of literary criticism to read other forms of social knowledge, within Chap. 3 and throughout. There is also a symbiotic process of being receptive to new ways of thinking: after all, one of the aims of my research seeks to excavate the value of unexplored ‘texts’. It is thus only apt that within my method of critique, I too attempt to mould new systems of analysis.

The two Navratri dances I attended to observe and participate in, for my third chapter, are quintessentially Gujarati in their nature. As I shall describe later dandiya-raas is a dance that revolves around the use of brightly-coloured sticks, where garba involves rhythmic claps. There is a construction of nationalism through these community dances. This sense of collective identity, which emerges through community practices, is, however, complicated by the use of garba and dandiya-raas to also assert an identity related to regionality—a sense of Gujaratiness. The way one dresses, as well as the way one chooses to move, during Navratri proves significant to the understanding of performative identity in the diaspora. I ask: what can the body communicate within the space of Navratri; how are boundaries crossed and identities remade on the dance floor; and in what ways can identity be hidden and revealed in performance? Drawing on the establishment of dance as ‘covert’, I argue that performing identity within an esoteric system is necessary to protect self and community. Despite this strategy, omissions, additions and reworkings of culture are inevitable, from within. How the beats of Navratri are entangled with the popularist dance moves of the Macarena and bhangra, to perform the intricacies of selfhood, exemplifies these reworkings. A dynamic amalgamation of traditions and innovations by a youth generation is the result. On the dance floor there is a remarkable merging and creating of identity that is complex and ephemeral, ‘written’ by the body.

Whilst previous studies of dance exist in the fields of performance and music, there is often emphasis on music analysis, or a lacuna in cultural enquiry of dance. Bryan S. Turner (1996) refers to this gap and suggests that indeed this absence extends from the lack of investigation of movement in cultural studies, as well as studies in sociology. Navratri scholarly studies are also few and far between: there exist no academic texts in English foregrounding the history of the dances, and very few discuss the dancing body. Ann David’s ethnographic work, however, is an exception to this vast absence. Her doctoral work considers the Gujarati dances of garba and dandiya-raas (2005). Whilst deploying this useful scholarship in my chapter on dance practices, I shall engage with well-established writings on the transnational forms of dance salsa and bhangra. Moreover, Chap. 3 intersects with materials concerned with other traditions, such as Caribbean dance and music theory.

The focus of Chap. 4 is situated within the well-established tradition of deploying literary criticism to consider photographic material. Both Marianne Hirsch (1997) and Susan Sontag (2002) have notably embarked upon this work. The images I refer to in this chapter were collected from large personal archives, from extended and immediate family settled in Britain. The ability to be able to collect such an extensive set of photographs is again testament to the kinships networks I have access to. Via the careful interpretation of selected images, depicting community events, culinary practices and family gatherings, which span the UK, East Africa and sometimes India, I exemplify some of the practices I discuss within the monograph as a whole. The chapter begins by exploring forms of modernity in the subcontinent, through the critical works of Sumathi Ramaswamy, Christopher Pinney and Peter van der Veer.

In addition to the deployment of visual materials of a personal nature in the fourth chapter, some explications regarding the collection of commodities are made via the written evidence in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s cookbook memoir. In returning to culinary practices I draw the monograph’s full circle to my second chapter, and once more demonstrate the value of this cultural knowledge to the diaspora, whilst demonstrating how the diaspora performs progress, and ever aspire to it, yet continually looks backwards. The photographs thus narrate a twofold inclination towards moving on, in the pursuit of progress, whilst paradoxically also an anxiety of further deracination. Developing this argument I comment upon storage of the material and the fact that organisation of these numerous archives had to be undertaken before analysis. The vastness of this archive, as well as what the images depict, pertains to the fetish of the collected and hoarded commodity. An eventual return to the concept of trauma, again recommencing an argument left off in Chap. 2, enables an exploration of the critical material of Ranjana Khanna, in reference to Freud. I suggest the photographs narrate a convergence of divergent identities, and a particular diasporic Gujarati vernacular modernity. In this conspicuous coalescence of the innovative and antiquated, I argue for what I call temporal synchronicity amongst the double diaspora, the effect of constantly gesturing forwards, yet being drawn backwards.

A theme spanning both Chaps. 3 and 4, relating to this vernacular modernity, is the reading of dress amongst the diaspora. Taking into account Gijsbert Oonk’s (2011) recent findings on Indian East African diasporic dress, within my chapter on visual materials I develop my readings of sartorial preference that are conceived in the previous chapter. Clothing is often a powerful tool that reflects the vernacular modernity of the diaspora, as well as the competing cultural, political and generational allegiances that the twice-displaced community attend to. Gendered dress is also significant to the understanding of the representations of self and community in the double diaspora, and too the occupation of various roles. It is in conjunction with Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram (2003) and Emma Tarlo’s (1996) contributions to South Asian diasporic fashion studies that I forge an understanding of how dress can conceive an identity on the dance floor and in the family frame. Linda Lynton’s (2002) interesting work exclusively on saris also assists me in explicating my thesis. In using a broad range of secondary scholarship, in each of my chapters, for instance from autobiography to performance studies to the field of trauma to research on dress, I steadily synthesise disparate material into a viable, innovative methodology. Within this methodology, I employ a non-competitive understanding of memory, as Rothberg suggests, but also of identity.Footnote 43 Previous interpretations of identities replacing one another in the diaspora are redundant for those considered within this study.

The epilogue explores the contemporary digital turn in cultural studies, via an investigation of the cluster of 2017 UK events marking the 70th anniversary of Indian independence. Convened under the banner of the UK-India Year of Culture 2017, these activities were designed for a British audience. I offer a close reading of the events programme, which appears online, and how those events were conspicuously projected into the British public imagination via the Year of Culture. The landmark 70th anniversary, and the associated activities, was capitalised upon as a dual tool to reinforce notions of Indian national identity, as well as widen that national identity around a conceptualisation of ‘diversity’. Problematising this construction and projection of Indian national identity, I suggest that there is a reluctance to acknowledge significant collective historical narratives, of both partition and current political happenings in India, within the anniversary rhetoric. Rather than reflecting the diversity of contemporary India or how this is compromised, the 2017 programme presents an imagined form of national identity, exported into the diaspora and British public imagination, forging a contemporary form of ‘Indianness’.

In the latter part of the epilogue , I scrutinise the interface between the British diaspora and these narratives of Indian national identity, returning ultimately to an exploration of diasporic identity. Drawing upon the popular digital social network Facebook, and its highly popular ‘RecommendAsian’ group, I explore contemporary practices of online memory-making. Online participation can be understood as a form of autobiography, where there is a sustained construction of selfhood, which concurrently shapes the collective performance of ‘Asianness’. The epilogue thus returns us to the theme of autobiography, explored earlier in the monograph, again revealing new forms of subjective expression. It does so by highlighting the specific issues relevant to diasporic studies raised by the digital turn, drawing upon Facebook and scrutinising identity formation online, an area of study that has thus far received little attention.

In closing, it is important to remember that, whilst there exist numerous writings from a sociological and historical perspective on the Indian in East Africa, there are few examples of this research following the diaspora to Britain, especially within the disciplines of literary and cultural studies. As one critic, Michael Twaddle, who has written extensively about the initial migration of this transient community, has concluded, ‘much remains to be discovered’ about this diaspora (1990, 161). This was written as long as 30 years ago, and pertains to the necessity of updated scholarship. It is my aim here to attend to that absence. The multilayered, complex manifestations of cultural identity amongst the twice-displaced diaspora, as evidenced in this monograph, are in many instances remarkable and exciting. In these readings of my primary materials, a lacuna in cultural explorations of the hidden Gujarati East African in Britain is first and foremost addressed. Through these interpretations I nuance the understanding of the designation ‘diaspora’, to contend that the term can mediate a community which has experienced multiple displacement, rather than a singular scattering. My methodologies reveal narratives of depth and richness by broadening the literary critical interpretive practice of ‘close reading’ to the analysis of other modes of ‘texts’. This work thus establishes cutting-edge connections between many of the diverse scholarly areas it draws its concepts and methods from, such as performance studies, trauma studies, diaspora studies and cultural studies. More broadly, however, the monograph also intervenes within the critical domain of literary postcolonial studies, in order to re-contextualise existent approaches to these established discourses and shed light on how the multiple axes of diasporic movement engender palimpsestic identities.