Revisiting South Asian Diaspora literature

It is a pleasure to bring this issue of Asiatic, being a rich offering on South Asian diaspora literature, to our readers. This is our second foray into South Asian diasporic writings. We brought out our first special issue on this subject in June 2012, and after five years we felt that it would be appropriate to revisit this exponentially growing field again. However, in spite of the broad thematic similarity, the two issues are substantially different. A cursory look will show that except for Monica Ali and Romesh Gunesekara, all the other writers explored in this issue are different from the ones dealt with in the previous issue. This is partly because our strategy this time was to bring the “less visible but qualitatively good writers... to our readers’ notice,” and we believe we have succeeded in this regard admirably. Many of the writers discussed in this issue –including Marina Budhos, Kazim Ali, Hari Kunzru, Kunzang Choden, Bhuchung D. Sonam, Manjushree Thapa, Sorayya Khan and Preeta Samarasan –have not received the kind of attention (that they obviously deserve)as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri, all whom were discussed in the previous issue. In this sense, the two issues very much complement one another and contribute more fully to the creative and critical discourse on South Asian diaspora writing.