Introduction

Issues of home and nation are a well-recognised aspect of postcolonial debates, and they continue to be key ideas, both politically and culturally, to South Asian writers in the United States and Britain. Such writers examine home in order to raise provocative questions about changing societies and the place of ethnic South Asians within them. Home thus serves as an important synecdoche for wider social and national concerns, and it is used both to affirm and to call into question the status of Britain and America as sites of permanent settlement. Many writers examining concepts of home and nation are still first- or second-generation. Generally, they came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when questions of American or British identity – personalised through the idea of home – were particularly pressing, thanks to the US ‘ethnic revival’, the impact of postcolonial immigration on British society, and the growth of identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus writers may lack the distance from such issues which might be enjoyed by authors born at a later stage. Some writers even display a kind of proselytising zeal about emigration: part of a broader justification, perhaps, for leaving the ancestral homeland in favour of the US or UK.

Madan Sarup has shown the extent to which the word ‘home’ is built into the English language. It is polysemic and, for Malashri Lal and Sukrita Paul Kumar, ‘a term of reference … resonant with indeterminacy’. As Sara Ahmed notes, it is ‘where one usually lives . . . where one’s family lives or . . . [it is] one’s native country’. And indeed, transatlantic South Asian writers deconstruct home in a linguistic and philosophical sense.