This article was downloaded by: [University of Calgary]On: 07 October 2014, At: 23:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

South Asian DiasporaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsad20

South Asians in Toronto: geographiesof transnationalism, diaspora, and thesettling of differences in the cityIshan Ashutosh aa Department of Geography , The Ohio State University ,Columbus , USAPublished online: 20 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Ishan Ashutosh (2012) South Asians in Toronto: geographies of transnationalism,diaspora, and the settling of differences in the city, South Asian Diaspora, 4:1, 95-109, DOI:10.1080/19438192.2012.634566

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2012.634566

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

South Asians in Toronto: geographies of transnationalism,diaspora, and the settling of differences in the city

Ishan Ashutosh∗

Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

This article examines the formation of South Asian identities through transnationalurban networks. Using narratives of South Asians in Toronto from diverse contextsof migration and settlement, I investigate the ways in which the city brings togethergeographies of South Asian transnationalism and diaspora in the production ofidentities. In the first section, I examine how connections across urban centers inToronto, South Asia, and the South Asian diaspora re-spatialize identities.The second section focuses on the relation between discourses of urbanmulticulturalism and South Asian diasporic identities in Toronto. I find thatSouth Asian identities are formed through connections across urban sites and ineveryday encounters in the city. These identities cannot be contained withinnational conceptions of diaspora and are owed to the particular experiences ofmigration and settlement in the city and in the transnational spaces that shapediasporic imaginaries.

Keywords: Toronto; South Asian identities; transnational migration; urban

Rupa returned to Toronto in 2006 upon graduating from university in Montreal. As anartist, Rupa seeks to represent the transformation of Toronto since her childhood inNorth York in the mid-1980s. Through murals, street performances, and the construc-tion of tent cities in public space, Rupa’s art collective strives to ‘give people who areusually excluded from the public sphere a voice’ (Interview with author, 2008). As wewalked around her neighbourhood of Parkdale, with the trendy bars and cafes dottingQueen Street West seemingly poised for gentrification in this long-established centerfor immigrants (Slater 2004), Rupa described the emergence of South Asian identitiesin the city:

I’ve definitely witnessed a change in arts and culture; in the visual arts, TV, film and theseindustries that I work in . . . I’ve seen these changes. These new organizations, these newcollectives. . . Young South Asians in Toronto are starting to have an impact artistically. . .and I love it. There is now a scene here. (Interview with author, 2008)

Rupa succinctly summarised her place in the city with an exclamation loud enough forall passers-by to hear: ‘we are the urban mongrels!’ Her evaluation of the city as‘mongrel’ enacts debates in urban studies on the production of identities in which‘difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity,plurality prevail’ (Sandercock 2003, p. 1). At the center of these conceptions of cities as

ISSN 1943-8192 print/ISSN 1943-8184 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2012.634566http://www.tandfonline.com

∗Email: ashutosh.2@osu.edu

South Asian DiasporaVol. 4, No. 1, March 2012, 95–109

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

syncretic spaces characterized by ‘kaleidoscopic urban world(s)’ are the particular con-nections between migration, identity, and everyday encounters in the city (Amin andThrift 2002, p. 30). The task of this article is to bring the transnational geographiesof the South Asian diaspora to the city with the guiding question: how are SouthAsian identities in Toronto – which include forms of belonging that traverse distinc-tions between the local, regional, national, and global – mediated by discourses onthe city in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora?

The diversity of South Asian diasporas is a reflection of the very differences thattheories of ‘multicultural’, ‘mongrel’, ‘cosmopolitan’, and ‘diasporean’ cities allgrapple with. This article examines the ways in which the city acts as a critical cosmo-politan ‘zone of conversation’ (Manjapra 2010) in which the contingent formations ofidentity and difference are manifest in the everyday lives of Toronto’s South Asians.Although in the Canadian context the term ‘South Asian’ represents the officiallanguage of the state that homogenizes and often eradicates difference in the enumer-ation of Canada’s ‘visible minorities’ (Bannerji 2000), I build on scholarship that finds‘South Asian’ to be an expression of the range and diversity of experiences that shapemigration and identity (Rajan and Sharma 2006, Rai and Reeves 2009, Tolia-Kelly2010). As I discuss in this paper, South Asian diasporas are produced and sustainedthrough dynamic transnational urban networks. Following the concepts of transnationaland diaspora space (Brah 1996, Jackson et al. 2004) in which connections acrossnational territory and urban locales forged by migrant activities are extended tobroader spaces of the city, I will show how the city mediates the forms of belongingand identity of South Asian diasporas in Toronto. For instance, Rupa’s connectionsto other cities are anchored in Toronto and escape the confines of national identitiesthat would reduce the multi-stranded connections that create a transnational sense ofbelonging (Das Gupta et al. 2007). Rupa is keenly aware of the insufficiencies thathaunt each of the categories of identity she is forced to use – Gujarati, Indian, 1.5 gen-eration, migrant, minority. Each term silences a part of her experience that range fromvisits to Johannesburg, where her extended family lives, to London, the city her parentsmigrated to from South Africa in the late 1970s, and as Rupa acerbically noted,exchanged ‘apartheid with Paki-bashing’ (Interview with author, 2008). With amuse-ment, Rupa pointed out that she has only visited her ‘native’ India three times, thelast visit to Mumbai in 2007. ‘Before I arrive (in India), I am always like “yes! I’mgoing back to the motherland!” Then I get there and leave confused.’ (Interviewwith author, 2008). Rupa’s confusion, however, arose from an excess of connectionsand affiliations beyond societies of ‘origin’ and ‘settlement’ that cannot be subsumedunder national identifications like ‘Indian’ or ‘Canadian’. Instead, Rupa’s connectionswith multiple sites move notions of diaspora as a condition of loss, alienation, and exilicun-homeliness (Clifford 1994) to the city that ‘gathers’ the scattering of the nation’speople (Bhabha 1994). Rupa’s sentiments refused thoughts of return or the searchfor originary homelands and alternatively evoked the mobile and diverse ‘routes’ ofdiaspora (Blunt 2005, p. 10).

Through such narratives, I examine the heterogeneous strands of Toronto’s SouthAsians by focusing on two registers of identity formation: transnational urban networksand diasporic belonging. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted inToronto between 2007 and 2009. Interviews and participant-observation took me toToronto’s parks, business districts, malls, town centers, city-sponsored events and fes-tivals, as well as media-sponsored events and meetings. I conducted semi-structuredand in-depth interviews with South Asian migrants and their Canadian-born

I. Ashutosh96

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

counterparts. The majority of interviews were conducted with Sri Lankan Tamils andIndian immigrants and their children, though interviews were also conducted withmigrants from Pakistan, Trinidad, Uganda, and the Middle East. I relied on the snow-ball technique starting with primary contacts of social workers, college students, andartists. Of equal significance, however, were the serendipitous encounters that thecity provides, the chance meetings that led to frequent conversations and allowed meto interact with South Asians with a range of experiences and occupational and nationalbackgrounds. When interviews were held in public spaces or in pubs and restaurants,respondents would frequently place South Asian identities in the context of the city.I also conducted interviews in people’s homes, where our conversations on transna-tional practices were frequently interrupted with phone calls and the arrival of familyand friends from ‘home’ in Vancouver, Delhi, London, Ahmadabad, Colombo, andLahore. Questions centered on multiculturalism and the city, transnational connectionsand belonging.

As I will elaborate on in the section below, although the two concepts of transna-tionalism and diaspora are closely allied, some suggesting that transnational activitieslead to the emergence of diaspora by the imagining of a ‘fictive ethnicity’ (Levitt 2001),‘transnational’ and ‘diaspora’ spaces stress distinct geographies of migration. Transna-tionalism focuses on geographies stitched together through the practices of migrants,but tends to emphasize relations between specific sites in societies of ‘origin’ and‘settlement’. Diaspora, however, conjures the imaginative geographies of dispersalbeyond fixed notions of ‘origin’ and ‘settlement’. The city is central to both diasporaand transnationalism, for it is the site of transnational practices and as such, concen-trates the global dispersal of diaspora operating in a larger urban network. As wewill see in the following sections, South Asian identities in Toronto are producedthrough the everyday encounters in the city that highlight the role of the urban inshaping transnational flows and diasporic identities. The first section examines SouthAsian diasporas and transnational connections, while in the second section I turn to dis-courses of the ‘world city’ and diversity in relation to South Asian identities in Toronto.

Transnationalizing diasporas, re-spatializing identities in Toronto

Since research on transnational migration cuts across epistemological and disciplinaryboundaries (Bailey 2001, Morawska 2003) with recent attempts to delineate its ownfield of study (Khagram and Levitt 2008), Luis Guarnizo (2003) has usefully delineatedthree waves of research on transnational migration that for our purposes highlight theshifting scale of analysis in identifying the movement of migrant practices. The first‘wave’ of research in the early 1990s emphasized interrogations of the nation-stateand ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2002) while the second andthird waves refined transnational activity by investigating its range of practices, dyna-mism, and everyday manifestations in (trans-) local spaces. In this section, I reviewscholarship on transnational migration to contextualise how Toronto functions as adiaspora city. Through narratives of South Asians in Toronto, I will also explore there-spatialization of the state and subjectivity (Mountz 2004) in the lived experiencesof South Asian diasporic subjects.

An enduring focus of transnational migration is the changing linkages betweennation-states and diaspora. Anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cris-tina Szanton Blanc (1994, p. 269) argued for the de-territorialized nation-state in placeof diaspora as a more accurate characterisation of the relationship between migration

South Asian Diaspora 97

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

and the nation since ‘the nation’s people may live anywhere in the world and still notlive outside the state. By this logic, there is no longer a diaspora because wherever itspeople go, their state goes too’ (Basch et al. 1994, p. 269, emphasis added). From thisperspective, transnational practices fundamentally shift the relation between diasporaand national identity, particularly in the context of South Asian diasporas that have fre-quently been excluded from state-led projects of nationalism (Axel 2001, Varadarajan2010). Sandhya Shukla’s (2003) work on the Indian diaspora in New York City refinedthe distinction between migration, a border-crossing made legible by the state, with dia-spora as a global form of belonging whose politics are not confined to ‘long-distancenationalism’ (Anderson 1998). Instead, by locating the ‘hybrid cultures’ of theIndian diaspora in transnational urban spaces ‘nationalism is not the primary conse-quence of complex forms of identification’ (Shukla 2003, p. 13).

The emphasis on the local contexts of transnationalism revealed the variability andrange of transnational practices (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) and the geographies pro-duced by ‘transnational social fields’ (Levitt 2001) and ‘trans-localities’ (Smith2001). ‘Transnational urbanism’ (Smith 2001) considered the ways in which transna-tional practices are shaped by the inter-relations between scales and are circuitedthrough urban sites. As Michael Peter Smith argues, transnational networks are ‘consti-tuted by their interrelations with, and thus their groundedness inside, the local’ (Smith2001, p. 122). A new set of analytics like ‘transnational life and living’ (Guarnizo 2003,Smith 2006) and ‘middling transnationalism’ (Rogers 2005, Voigt-Graf 2005)suggested that transnational activity was not necessarily transgressive of the nation-state and that transnational spaces encompassed wider social relations and practices.Robert Smith’s (2006, p. 6) ‘transnational life’ focused on the lived experiences ofmigrants and examined transnational identities alongside the formation of racial andethnic identities in the city in relation to the nation-state. Transnational life isdynamic as it consists of ‘travel between the home and host destination’, but also‘the experience of stay-at-homes in close relationships with travelers’ (Smith 2006,p. 7). As Brenda Yeoh (2005, p. 410) notes, the development of a transnationalismgrounded in unbounded local sites corrects the often-overlooked variable mobilitiesbetween ‘relatively mobile and fixed transnationals’ that both produce the city as atransnational urban space.

These works illuminated the role of the city as the site of transnational practices,pointed to the variability and different forms of transnationalism and therefore, simul-taneously re-imagined the connections between diasporic settlements and the ‘home-land’. In the narratives below, I highlight the dialectical relation between the city asthe site that ‘gathers’ both the transnational ties and national imaginaries that continueto shape South Asian diasporas.

Re-spatializing Indian cities in Toronto

I interviewed Shardool at a busy pub in the financial district across from Roy ThompsonHall, where Hindi cinema playback singer Asha Bhosle would perform in two hours(Interview with author, 2008). Shardool explained that the upcoming concert poten-tially imprints a new model of Indian society for Canadians and the South Asiandiaspora. He hoped that the increased transnational traffic of singers, actors, andmigrants would teach Canadians that Indians ‘come from a very mature metropolitansetup’. Shardool migrated to Toronto in 2000 from London when he was 34 yearsold and had previously lived in Paris, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. While

I. Ashutosh98

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Shardool described moving across cities as ‘easy’, he found settling in Toronto signifi-cantly more difficult. He migrated to Canada under the skilled worker category but wasunable to gain employment in his profession. This speaks to a larger trend of decliningeconomic parity of racialised immigrants with white Canadians (Preston et al. 2003, Lo2008). Instead, Shardool began working at a downtown travel agency, making the dailyjourney on the GO commuter train from Mississauga, one of the fastest growing areasin Canada (Lorinc 2006, p. 99) and part of the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) 905 area-code that popularly serves as a shorthand for the primary sites of immigrant settlement.Shardool expressed his frustration over what Aihwa Ong (1999, p. 91) has described asa ‘mismatch’ between immigrants’ symbolic capital and their racial identity that accom-panies transnational movements: ‘you see, for me to walk into a flashy place inNew York would not be a big deal. . . Indians can sit quite comfortably anywhereelse and relax’. Shardool insisted that Toronto offers a lifestyle no different from thefour most populous cities in India. ‘I’ve been to parties on the same level, lounges,bars. The four metropolitans (sic) offer that’. Shardool’s India is composed of thefour largest cities that radiate images of the ‘global Indian’, the urban upper-classwho hope that symbolic capital will enable easy movement between the erstwhilefirst and third worlds. The de- and re-territorialisation of the Indian state is made poss-ible by giving a primacy to the city that acts as the locus of Indian neo-liberal nation-alism and the aesthetics of the bourgeois transnational capitalist class. KatharyneMitchell (2004) has argued that the movement between cities re-spatializes the stateand ‘associated hegemonies’ as ongoing processes that travel back and forth, materia-lizing in transnational urban locales. In the case of Shardool, Indian identity operatesthrough a comparative urbanism in which Toronto and select cities in India –Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai – produce distinctions with notonly rural India, but a hierarchy of Indian cities as well. The narratives below continueto investigate the ways in which cities re-spatialize the state and the contradictions ofnational belonging through connections across multiple urban sites concentrated inspecific locales of the city.

For the first few months after migrating to Toronto in the summer of 2000, Vireshrecalled that ‘there was something very strange about this place, but I could not put myfinger on it’. Viresh had moved to Toronto when he was in his late 20s from Dearborn,Michigan in what amounted to an unsuccessful search for a job as an engineer. Thesource of Toronto’s strangeness was its familiarity, but not with Dearborn or AnnArbor, other cities Viresh had lived in:

It struck me one fine morning— I saw Toronto as an Indian city. Toronto had lots offoreigners, non-Indians, but it was an Indian city. I lived in the U.S. for six years, butin Toronto I have never felt homesick. (Interview with author, 2009)

Indeed, the very notion of home for Viresh has been transformed when he returns tovisit his family in Hyderabad, with Viresh deriding his place of birth as the UnitedStates’ ‘fifty-first state’. When Viresh visits Hyderabad he gains a ‘peak insideAmerica’, given the city’s information technology industry promoted by the state ofAndhra Pradesh since the 1990s (Rao 2007) and the transnational traffic of e-commerceand labour between Silicon Valley and Hyderabad.

That ‘fine morning’ of belonging for Viresh occurred while taking a walk onGerrard Street and was reminded of the ‘old smells and organized chaos ofIndia’. Gerrard Street is the city’s South Asian business district long marketed as

South Asian Diaspora 99

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

‘Little India’ with the city designating a portion of the street as a Business Improve-ment Area in 1982 and calling it ‘Gerrard India Bazaar’ (Bauder and Suorineni2010). While Gerrard Street takes Viresh ‘back’ to an Indian city that he acknowl-edges never existed, for Nikhil, who migrated to Toronto’s Brampton from Kolkatain the mid-1980s as a six-year old, ‘Little India’ on Gerrard Street reflects the antag-onisms that cut across ‘South Asian’ diasporas. He contrasted his brief experienceson Manchester’s ‘curry mile’ while studying acting in the city for six months in2005, with Toronto’s Gerrard Street, which he occasionally visits. Nikhil remembersgoing to Gerrard Street every few weeks with his parents shortly after they migrated,and he finds the business district representative of South Asian diasporic nationaldivides. ‘Gerard is a mix, a bunch of different groups, but it doesn’t feel unified.When I walk there, it feels like individuals are there because they have to bethere, and they are fighting with their neighbors’. The different histories of migrationbetween Canada and Britain, between Manchester and Toronto revealed to Nikhilthe ‘elitist’ representations of South Asians in Toronto that produced daily antagon-isms he felt while walking down Gerrard Street. Of course, national nostalgia alsoshapes the distinct experiences of Gerrard Street for Viresh and Nikhil, the latterhaving spent most of his life outside India and therefore identifying with Indiathrough diasporic sites rather than with Viresh’s characterization of Gerrard Streetas an Indian site.

Re-spatializing diasporic belonging in Toronto

Vijay and Deepa first thought of moving to Toronto when they visited the city as uni-versity students in Montreal in the late 1970s. Before returning to their homes near Cha-guanas, Trinidad, where their family had moved from Port of Spain, they filed forCanadian immigration and moved to Toronto in the early 1980s. Now in their late40s, they expressed their belonging to Toronto by referring to it as home in distinctionto other cities in which they have family and business ties: Port of Spain, Chaguanas,and Montreal. Toronto’s multiculturalism reconnects them to India as their ancestorswere brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers in the early 20th Century. ForVijay and Deepa multiculturalism expressed a form of transnational belonging that con-nects them to the diverse and heterogeneous strands of the South Asian diaspora. Nearher home in Brampton, Deepa explained that multiculturalism has had particular impor-tance in how she hopes her children live and experience diaspora and belonging. Unlikeher or her husband, both of her children, she proudly states, are learning French andHindi. The latter has special importance for both Deepa and Vijay, as it remindsthem of their childhood in Trinidad and engenders connections with India no longerpossible for them in Trinidad, their seeming dislocation from north India impedingthe transmission of language over three generations of the Indian diaspora in the Car-ibbean (Tinker 1977). That their children are learning Hindi in Toronto superimposesmulticultural promotions of language as national culture. When placed in the context ofIndia, this diasporic reconnection in Toronto corresponds with Hindi as Hindu hege-mony, and as Arvind Rajagopal (2004) has shown, constituted a central shift in thelanguage of secularism made in the Hindi press during the Ramjanmabhumi movementthat culminated in the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid. The re-spatialization of theIndian state is made through a potential reversal of the narratives of the Caribbean-Indian diaspora, famously characterized in V.S. Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas(1961) in which tradition and connections with India collapse under the weight of

I. Ashutosh100

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

change in diaspora (Rai and Reeves 2009). Hindi was a language that Deepa has fondmemories of hearing her grandparents occasionally use, mostly peppering sentenceswith a word or two. Because her children are now learning the language, she indicatesthat in Toronto one’s cultural identity can be less consumed with issues of loss and nos-talgia, but rather imbued with new connections that further a sense of diasporicbelonging.

Sanjeevan moved to Toronto in 1987 and reflected that Toronto is ‘home’ notsimply because it has been his primary address for most of his life, but because it pro-vides him with experiences, interactions, and encounters that move between Toronto,Jaffna, Colombo, Lagos, and Montreal. He was born in Jaffna in 1975, a few weeksbefore the assassination of Jaffna mayor Alfred Duraiappah by Vellupillai Prabhakaran,who would become the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE) the following year. Shortly thereafter, Sanjeevan’s parents moved theirfamily to Colombo. Sanjeevan’s early memories of home and childhood are inextric-ably bound up with Sri Lanka’s civil war (Interview with author, 2008). During the1983 anti-Tamil pogroms, seven year-old Sanjeevan remembers tanks moving acrossthe street and the patrolling of schools by gangs. Over time, through makeshift memor-ials, remembrances, and discussions in Toronto, these faint memories have accumu-lated a significance that keeps him and thousands of other Tamils exiled from theironce homes in Sri Lanka. His last memories of Sri Lanka are of travelling on a busto Colombo airport to leave the country for Lagos, Nigeria, where his father hastilyfound a job in the wake of the 1983 pogroms.

His parents quickly decided to send him to stay with his aunt in Montreal, which heremembers as a ‘total shock’ because of the provincial policy that required French cur-riculum in school. A few months later, Sanjeevan was sent to Toronto to live withanother aunt who had moved from Sri Lanka immediately following the 1983pogroms and first settled in St. James Town before moving to Scarborough, the residen-tial and business hub for Tamil Sri Lankans. He found moving to Toronto ‘easier toadapt to because everyone spoke English’ and more importantly, because ‘there wasthat heavy settlement of South Indians at that time, especially Sri Lankans, it wasjust getting started’. Toronto’s demographic shift was well underway but almostentirely absent in Sanjeevan’s school:

Fifth-grade was when I started in Toronto. The dynamics at the time, I did not have any SriLankans that I knew of in my elementary school. I knew few Indians. I was “it”. In myclass I was definitely the only Sri Lankan, and about three or four Indians, NorthIndians. It (school) was a majority white, I would say 80% of the class were white Cana-dians. (Interview with author, 2008)

The demographic transformation in Scarborough’s schools coincided with Sanjeevan’sentrance into high school. In 1989, Sanjeevan, in grade seven, met ‘the first Sri Lankanguy that I knew’. The teacher ‘set us up for a kind of culture bonding’, Sanjeevanremembers with a smile that signals the essentializing gesture. ‘But, he ended upbeing my best friend’, Sanjeevan is quick to add. By the time Sanjeevan was a sopho-more in high school, ‘we [“visible minorities”] actually exceeded Canadians, and Cana-dians became a minority. All the other minorities made the majority’. Indeed, JohnLorinc (2006, p. 86) has noted the profound impact of immigration on Toronto’sschools where in a quarter of the city’s schools ‘a white-skinned child qualifies asthe visible minority’.

South Asian Diaspora 101

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Sanjeevan’s experiences in school were reflected in the high levels of immigrationto Toronto in the 1990s, particularly from India (Lo 2008) and Sri Lanka (Hyndman2003). The immigration of South Asians from across national contexts that cutacross the different typologies of diaspora has led Sanjeevan to identify with theterm ‘South Asian’. State demarcations of national minorities are refracted in identityformations based on encounters and patterns of migration to Toronto:

I consider myself brown, not anything else, not anything more, because there was not thatmuch of a Sri Lankan presence at that time. It was just generalized as Indians, and not[even] South Indians. That was fine, and most of the time growing up that’s how itwas. No one was familiar with Sri Lanka, so I considered myself part of India. (Interviewwith author, 2008)

Now as a project manager with an information-technology startup company, Sanjeevanworks with mostly Indians and Chinese immigrants. Since 2005, the company has beenoutsourcing various projects to Bangalore and Chennai. ‘There are lots of South IndianTamils that come from abroad and work, so now I work with a lot more Indians andSouth Indians than I ever have before’, explains Sanjeevan. It is these recent experi-ences that he is most excited about, for it reconnects him with what were once faintmemories of the place he was forced to leave. In the city, Sanjeevan transformednotions of belonging— to the city, nation, and diaspora.

Cities, then, do not merely contain diasporas but are mutually constituted throughthe connections across sites sustained by transnational activities and affiliations. Toron-to’s transnational spaces are not merely connected to sending societies in South Asiathrough ‘umbilical cords’ from which they draw sustenance (Davis 2001), butinstead are conditioned and shaped through multiple urban sites in South Asia andthe South Asian diaspora. To a great extent, Toronto as a diaspora city dovetailswith the promotion of the city as ‘multicultural’. I therefore now turn to South Asianidentities and the discourses on Toronto’s diversity and ‘world city’ status.

At home in Toronto and the world: global South Asian diasporas

Fifteen years ago, urban anthropologist Ulf Hannerz articulated the ways in whichglobal cultural flows have been grounded in the city:

Now more than ever before, the strong sense of place in cultural thought must be comple-mented (complemented, certainly, rather than replaced) by one of cultural flows in space,partly ordered by center-periphery relationships. And at the centers in question, we tend tofind a handful of world cities. . . world cities now are the control centers of the globaleconomy . . . (Hannerz 1996, p. 128)

In the narratives that follow, I examine how ‘world cities’ discourses have influencedpractices of diversity and sense of belonging in the constitution of South Asiandiasporas.

Though part of Toronto’s largest ‘visible minority’ group, Kavita would not necess-arily identify herself as ‘South Asian’. Having lived in Toronto since 2005, however,she recognizes the strategic importance of placing herself in what she described as‘the grand scheme of things’ (Interview with author, 2008). The grand scheme, as itwere, refers to Toronto as Canada’s largest immigrant center (Troper 2003), wherethe uneven flows of immigration and transnational connections circulate and settle.

I. Ashutosh102

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

As a settlement worker, Kavita routinely confronts the limits and solidarities ofidentifying as South Asian, acutely aware that each utterance simultaneously encapsu-lates a mark of the state as well as a refuge within its homogenizing classificatoryschemes.

Toronto, in many respects, did not feel like home for Kavita. She continued to thinkof Surrey, British Columbia, where she was born in the late 1970s, as home. Kavitagrew up surrounded by the imaginative and material geographies produced throughan intricate network of family that extends across multiple sites in South Asia andthe South Asian diaspora: Jullundur, Amritsar, Delhi, Vancouver’s Punjabi Marketand Surrey. After moving to Toronto, Kavita began to trace different conceptions ofidentity by thinking about the distinct transnational connections and histories of immi-grant settlement between Toronto and Vancouver. Her experiences underscore thedynamism of transnational space and parallel Margaret Walton-Roberts’ and GeraldinePratt’s (2005) study that focused on the fluid positioning of modernity and traditionbetween Punjab’s Doab region and Vancouver through a family’s migration and trans-national connections. Kavita, likewise, has grappled with the production of traditionand modernity in diaspora that has led to her contrasting Surrey, with her extensivefamily network and migrations from Punjab that date back to the early 20th century,with Toronto’s relatively recent South Asian migrant streams, particularly the 1967‘points system’ and the 1975 Immigration Act. Toronto, Kavita emphasized, is differentfrom Surrey. Though not at home in Toronto, Kavita argued that in this diaspora city,everyone is an outsider. Kavita came to Toronto in search of this form of contemporaryurbanism, where the city becomes a microcosm of the world, as Toronto has beendescribed as the ‘world in the city’ (Aniseph and Lanphier 2003). The ‘blurring ofboundaries’ that Kavita posited as central to identification with ‘South Asian’ diasporasemerged through interactions and everyday encounters in Toronto that cross national,religious, and linguistic lines (Interview with author, 2008). Kavita’s evaluation ofToronto, as we will see below, resonated with discourses on multiculturalism inwhich the city and diaspora becomes the site of new forms of identity.

In 1998, Toronto became the sixth largest government in all of Canada, followingthe amalgamation of the municipalities of Etobicoke, Scarborough, York, East York,and North York (Lorinc 2006), forming the new City of Toronto. The new ‘megacity’re-scaled governance by implementing a neo-liberal agenda that downloaded provincialresponsibilities to the city (Keil 2002), and actually exacerbated socio-economicinequalities within the consolidated megacity, particularly between the downtowncore and post-war suburbs (Cowen 2005). That same year, the post-amalgamatedcity adopted the motto ‘Diversity Our Strength’. Then mayor Mel Lastman boastedin his speech, ‘Diversity in Toronto’, delivered at the 1998 G-8 Summit of the Citiesin Birmingham, England, that Toronto served as a model for a United Nations studyin diversity. Geographer Michael Doucet (2001) traced the origins of this claim toToronto mayor Arthur Eggleton, who in 1989 claimed that the United Nations hadnoted that Toronto was the ‘most racially and culturally diverse city in the world’(Doucet 2001, p. 44). Although the United Nations’ website notes that immigrationto Toronto has created a ‘mosaic of cultures, religions, and flavors within the city’(United Nations), Doucet attributes Toronto’s ‘multicultural myth’ to Torontonians’‘insecurity about their place within the urban world’, a claim echoed by formerMetro Toronto mayor John Sewell (Doucet 2001, p. 20). Nevertheless, Toronto’sbranding as the ‘world’s most multicultural city’ is a reflection of largerdiscourses on national belonging in which diasporas serve as the model. Charles

South Asian Diaspora 103

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Taylor (1994, p. 63) argues that the multicultural recognition of difference is a simul-taneous recognition of the inevitable future as societies are increasingly ‘porous’, par-ticularly as more members ‘live the life of diaspora, whose center is elsewhere’. These’elsewhere’ centers lie in the city, where new forms of belonging and identity emerge.‘Boundaries break down and there is increased mixing and people define themselves inmultiple ways’. Cole Harris (2001, p. 206) offered that post-modern (Canadian) nation-alism offered the possibility of a ‘gentle patriotism’ in which the nation is built upondifferences, a position more recently (re-) articulated as cosmopolitanism (Appiah2006). Like the concept of transnationalism that occupied the previous section, herediaspora becomes the central figure in the redeployment of cosmopolitanism becauseof its emphasis on dispersal, hybridity, and transnational dialogue.

While Toronto’s global city image-making attempts to produce new national cohesions,the borders of national community and belonging are daily reproduced in the question –‘where are you from?’ This ubiquitous question overtly fixes identity and geography in aneconomy of the white settler society, equating who you are with where you (presumably)have been. Scholars (Henry et al. 1995, Mahtani 2002, Agnew 2005) have noted the daily,prosaic racism embedded in this question that replaces movement with rootedness and apresumption of being out of place. Raffia, a social worker in Thorncliffe Park has for yearsclung to a strategy that exposes the classificatory quest of that question:

When people ask me where I’m from, I will first say to them, “what do you mean bythat?” Then, I’ll go, “well, my dad is from East Africa. My mom was born in India. I wasborn in Pakistan, and my sisters were born in Canada. We are in more than just in oneplace, we’re from all over the place”. (Interview with author, 2008)

Then, to draw attention to the arbitrariness of settlement, Raffia ends her response with‘we somehow ended up in Canada!’ Similarly, Tejal, an artist in Toronto, relishesthese moments of ‘re-teaching and rethinking what it means to be an immigrant’.She returns the very question to those who dare ask. ‘I do it to white people all thetime, and they will have to say “my parents were born here, but I have Scottish heri-tage”. I try to challenge it by throwing it right back at them’ (Interview with author,2008). Throwing ‘it’ right back at them refers to more than just the question, but alsoto the call for exposing the sustained connections across sites that displace distinctionsbetween ‘here’ and ‘there’. As Avtar Brah (1996, p. 194) has pointed out, diasporainterrogates questions of ‘origins’ and instead ‘refers to multi-locationality withinand across territorial, cultural, and psychic boundaries’. The strategies that surroundanswers to the everyday question, ‘where are you from?’ indicate an ongoing formin the practice of diversity that characterises the promise and challenge of cities(Keith 2005, Binnie et al. 2006, Sandercock 2006). In answering the question bypointing to a diversity of connections, Kavita, Raffia, and Tejal re-make identitiesby shifting conceptions of home and belonging (Dwyer 2002) and thereby producethe city as diaspora space by extending the concept to all people in the city(Burman 2006, p. 104).

The post-war Toronto suburb of Scarborough is exemplary of the city’s ethno-cultural diversity, particularly as a destination for recent and low-income immigrants(Bourne and Rose 2001). In these spaces, the city becomes a ‘conjunctural space’, tofollow Nicholas De Genova’s (2005, p. 99) assertion that transnational Mexicanmigration to Chicago has produced a city radically reconfigured in relation to thenation-state. I interviewed six Toronto residents at Scarborough Towne Centre, amall built as part of Scarborough’s suburban city centre that combines civic institutionswith businesses (Charney 2005). Four were cousins, while the other two were family

I. Ashutosh104

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

friends. They had migrated from Jaffna, Sri Lanka between 1990 and 1992, when theywere between five and twelve years of age, and like Sanjeevan’s narrative in the pre-vious section, have been part of Toronto’s demographic and immigrant transformation.‘You don’t see so many white people around here’, said Kalaiselvi, looking up and ges-turing at the generic food court, before being seconded by her cousin. ‘That’s true! Theyare the minority!’ Prior to amalgamation in 1998, immigrants constituted approxi-mately 51 per cent of Scarborough’s population. Since then, particularly in thenorth-east neighbourhoods of Rouge, Malvern, Woburn, the South Asian populationhas increased and consists of some of the largest immigrant population clusters inToronto (City of Toronto 2008). Their cousin, Manimohzi, provided evidence of Tor-onto’s uniqueness by comparing it with London, England, a frequent comparative sitefor Toronto. ‘When our relatives come here from London, they go, “are there no whitepeople here?”’ said Manimohzi, imitating her relatives’ shock. Others nodded, agreeingthat Toronto’s diversity eclipses London.

As the conversation continued, a friend of theirs, Dharuna, pointed out that identityformation in Toronto is markedly different from other less populated cities in Canada.She uses her cousins who live in Windsor, Ontario as the example, as they do not thinkof themselves as Sri Lankan. At this Sutharshini, who had been silent for much of theconversation, abruptly spoke up and exclaimed, ‘they say they are Canadian, becausethey live in Windsor!’ Their statements are reflected in Toronto’s visible minoritypopulation, which in 2006 consisted of 42.9%, while Windsor’s visible minority popu-lation represented 15.9% of the city’s population (Statistics Canada 2006). Dharuniexplained: ‘when they first start going to school, and I have noticed this with a lot ofmy nephews and cousins [in Windsor], they will say that they are Canadian. Theywill come home and be like “Tamil is such a stupid language”’. Kalaiselvi underscoredthe different identities that the city creates by pointing out the difference with theircousins: ‘Which is stupid for us, because we’re like “no you’re not!”’ Sutharshini inter-jected to emphasise the importance of minority identification and the transformationthat their cousins experience through their re-education. ‘But once they start learningfrom us, then they are okay. They will go to their multicultural events in traditionalclothes. Once they get older they understand it; but when they first start off, theythink they’re white’ (Interview with author, 2007).

The above conversation links the politics of identity with that paradigmatic insti-tution of the state, the school. But this discussion also addressed the constitution ofidentity and belonging mediated through city space. As Dharuni continued in explain-ing the relative comfort of Scarborough compared to downtown Toronto, Sutharshiniinterjected and said ‘all immigrants will feel that racial barrier’. Barriers and bordersring the city, leaving immigrants and visible minorities ‘limited to just Toronto’.Their examples ranged from day trips to Barrie and Lake Simcoe, where they tra-velled for Canada Day and, as their cousin flatly stated, were relieved when theyreturned to Scarborough. Indeed, they cited Canada’s three largest metropolitancenters of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, home to 62.9% of Canada’s foreign-born population (City of Toronto 2008), as the only sites in which they feel likethey belong. The moments in which place, identity, and racism are powerfullylinked move across identities, from being Tamil, South Asian, Indian, and Canadian,all brought together in Toronto. The city provides them with multiple national signif-iers and for that reason, remains distinct from the nation. Toronto may very well be‘the world in a city’, (Aniseph and Lanphier 2003), but not the national reflection inthe city.

South Asian Diaspora 105

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that South Asian diasporic identities in Toronto are situatedin relation to the re-spatialization of the state, representations of the city and in theencounters in multiple city spaces. ‘The name plates on the fence posts’ of migrantsmay indeed ‘continue to have national identities’ (Basch et al. 1994, p. 256), despitetheir connections across sites. Though the nation may serve as a metonym for experi-ences and connections across cities, I have shown how South Asian diasporic identitiesare formed in the transnational connections across cities and the re-imaginings of dia-spora in the city. In the first section, connections between cities in the South Asian dia-spora were brought together through the re-spatialization of the state and identity thatundergird transnational connections. The second section examined the ways in whichconceptions of diaspora have become models for global forms of belonging that areexpressed through discourses on the city. Although the narratives of this article maybe seen as reinforcing Toronto’s ‘multicultural myths’, it is equally essential to seethe ways in which such myths are transformed into practices in the lived experiencesof South Asian diasporas in the city. South Asian identities in Toronto grapple withthe political questions of multiculturalism that Paul Gilroy has framed around cosmo-politan ‘conviviality’ or ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have mademulticulture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolo-nial cities elsewhere’ (2005, p. xv). More recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,while departing from the specific gatherings described by Hannerz locate the city as asite of not just transnational capital, but as a counter to neo-liberal flows of empire,transforming the city to the site of the multitude. ‘A new geography is establishedby the multitude as the productive flows of bodies define new rivers and ports. Thecities of the earth will become at once great deposits of cooperating humanity and loco-motives for circulation, temporary residences and networks of the mass distribution ofliving humanity.’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 397). This prosaic feature of the contem-porary city demands continued focus on the diverse migrations, dispersals, and gather-ings that produce diaspora cities.

AcknowledgmentsI thank the editors of this special issue of South Asian Diaspora and anonymous reviewers fortheir comments on this article.

Notes on contributorIshan Ashutosh is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Geography at The OhioState University. Ishan specializes in urban, cultural, and political geographies centered onSouth Asian diasporas and transnational politics. He received his PhD in Geography from Syr-acuse University, New York in 2010. He has published in Urban Geography, The ProfessionalGeographer, and Citizenship Studies.

ReferencesAgnew, V., 2005. Diaspora, memory, and identity: a search for home. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.Amin, A. and Thrift, N., 2002. Cities: reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.Anderson, B., 1998. The spectre of comparisons: nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World.

London: Verso.

I. Ashutosh106

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Aniseph, P. and Lanphier, M., 2003. Introduction: immigration and the accommodation ofdiversity. In: P. Anispeh and M. Lanphier, eds. The world in the city. Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 3–18.

Appiah, K.A., 2006. Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers. New York: W.W. Norton.Axel, B.K., 2001. The nation’s tortured body: violence, representation, and the formation of a

Sikh ‘diaspora’. Durham: Duke University Press.Bailey, A., 2001. Turning transnational: notes on the theorization of international migration.

International Journal of Population Geography, 7 (6), 413–428.Bannerji, H., 2000. Dark Side of the Nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and

gender. Toronto: Scholars Press.Basch, L., Glick-Schiller, N., and Blanc-Szanton, C., 1994. Nations unbound: transnational

projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. New York:Gordon and Breach.

Bauder, H. and Suorineni, A., 2010. Toronto’s Little India: a brief neighbourhood history.Toronto: Ryerson University. Available from: http://digitalcommons.ryerson.ca/immigration/3/

Bhabha, H.K., 1994. The location of culture. New York: Routledge.Binnie, J., Holloway, J., Millington, S., and Young, C. eds., 2006. Cosmopolitan urbanism.

London: Routledge.Blunt, A., 2005. Domicile and diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Bourne, L. and Rose, D., 2001. Changing face of Canada: the uneven geographies of population

and social change. The Canadian Geographer, 45 (1), 105–119.Brah, A., 1996. Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. London: Routledge.Burman, J., 2006. Co-motion in the diasporic city. In: S. Teelucksingh, ed. Claiming space:

racialization in Canadian cities. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 101–120.Charney, I., 2005. Canadian human landscape examples - two visions of Suburbia: Mississauga

City Centre and heartland business community. The Canadian Geographer, 49 (2),214–220.

City of Toronto. 2008. Toronto neighborhood profiles [online]. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/profiles_map_and_index.htm [Accessed 10 November 2011].

Clifford, J., 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9 (3), 302–338.Cowen, D., 2005. Suburban citizenship? The rise of targeting and the eclipse of social rights in

Toronto. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (3), 335–356.Das Gupta, M., Gupta, C., and Teaiwa, K.M., 2007. Rethinking South Asian diaspora studies.

Cultural Dynamics, 19 (2–3), 125–140.Davis, M., 2001. Magical urbanism: Latinos reinvent the US big city. London: Verso.Doucet, M.J., 2001. The anatomy of an urban legend: Toronto’s multicultural reputation. CERIS

Working Paper, No. 16.Dwyer, C., 2002. Where are you from? Young British Muslim women and the making of home.

In: A. Blunt and C. McEwan, eds. Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Continuum,184–199.

Gilroy, P., 2005. Postcolonial melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.Guarnizo, L.E., 2003. The economics of transnational living. International Migration Review,

37 (3), 666–699.Hannerz, U., 1996. Transnational connections: culture, people, places. New York: Routledge.Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Harris, C., 2001. Postmodern patriotism: Canadian reflections. The Canadian Geographer, 45

(1), 193–207.Hyndman, J., 2003. Aid, conflict, and migration: the Canada-Sri Lanka connection. The

Canadian Geographer, 47 (3), 251–268.Jackson, P., Crang, P., and Dwyer, C., 2004. Introduction: the spaces of transnationality. In:

P. Jackson, P. Crang and C. Dwyer, eds. Transnational spaces. London: Routledge,1–22.

Keil, R., 2002. ‘Common-Sense’ neoliberalism: progressive conservative urbanism in Toronto,Canada. Antipode, 34 (3), 578–601.

Keith, M., 2005. After the cosmopolitan? Multicultural cities and the future of racism. London:Routledge.

Levitt, P., 2001. The transnational villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

South Asian Diaspora 107

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Lo, L., 2008. DiverCity Toronto: Canada’s premier gateway city. In: M. Price and L. Benton-Short, eds. Migrants to the metropolis: the rise of immigrant gateway cities. Syracuse:Syracuse University Press, 97–127.

Lorinc, J., 2006. The new city. Toronto: Penguin.Mahtani, M., 2002. Tricking the border guards: performing race. Environment and Planning D:

Society & Space, 20 (4), 425–440.Manjapra, K., 2010. Introduction. In: S. Bose and K. Manjapra, eds. Cosmopolitan thought

zones: South Asia and the global circulation of ideas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,1–19.

Mitchell, K., 2004. Crossing the neoliberal line: Pacific Rim migration and the metropolis.Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Morawska, E., 2003. Disciplinary agendas and analytic strategies of research on immigranttransnationalism: challenges of interdisciplinary knowledge. International MigrationReview, 37 (3), 611–640.

Mountz, A., 2004. Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling.Political Geography, 23, 323–345.

Ong, A., 1999. Flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. Durham: DukeUniversity Press.

Preston, V., Lo, L., and Wang, S., 2003. Immigrants economic status in Toronto: stories oftriumph and disappointment. In: M. Aniseph and C.M. Lanphier, eds. The world in acity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 192–262.

Rai, R. and Reeves, P., 2009. Introduction. In: R. Rai and P. Reeves, eds. The South Asiandiaspora: transnational networks and changing identities. London: Routledge, 1–12.

Rajan, G. and Sharma, S., 2006. New cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States.Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rao, N., 2007. Cities in transition. London: Routledge.Rogers, A., 2005. Observations on Transnational Urbanism: broadening and narrowing the field.

Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 31 (2), 403–407.Sandercock, L., 2003. Cosmopolis II: mongrel cities. London: Continuum.Sandercock, L., 2006. Cosmopolitan urbanism: a love song to our mongrel cities. In: J. Binnie,

J. Holloway, S. Millington and C. Young, eds. Cosmopolitan urbanism. London:Routledge, 37–52.

Shukla, S., 2003. India abroad: diasporic cultures of postwar America and England. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Slater, T., 2004. Municipally managed gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto. The CanadianGeographer, 48 (3), 303–325.

Smith, M.P., 2001. Transnational urbanism: locating globalization. London: Blackwell.Smith, M.P. and Guarnizo, L., 1998. The locations of transnationalism. In: M.P. Smith and L.

Guarnizo, eds. Transnationalism from below. London: Transaction Publishers, 3–31.Smith, R.C., 2006. Mexican New York: transnational lives of new immigrants. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Statistics Canada, 2006. Community Profile. Available from: For Toronto: http://www12.

statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/details/page.cfmLang=E&Geo1=CMA&Code1=535__&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=Toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&Custom For Windsor: http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CMA&Code1=559__&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=windsor&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&Custom [Accessed on May 15, 2010].

Taylor, C., 1994. The politics of recognition. In: A. Gutman, ed. Multiculturalism and the‘politics of recognition’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 25–73.

Tinker, H., 1977. The banyan tree: overseas emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tolia-Kelly, D., 2010. Landscape, race and memory: material ecologies of citizenship.Farnham: Ashgate.

Troper, H., 2003. Becoming an immigrant city: a history of immigration into Toronto since theSecond World War. In: P. Anisef and M. Lanphier, eds. The world in a city. Toronto:University of Toronto Press.

I. Ashutosh108

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Varadarajan, L., 2010. The domestic abroad: diasporas in international relations. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 19–62.

Voigt-Graf, C., 2005. The construction of transnational spaces by Indian migrants in Australia.Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 31 (2), 365–384.

Walton-Roberts, M. and Pratt, G., 2005. Mobile modernities: a South Asian family negotiatesimmigration, gender and class in Canada. Gender, Place & Culture, 12 (2), 173–195.

Wimmer, A. and Schiller, N.G., 2002. Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-statebuilding, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–334.

Yeoh, B.S.A., 2005. Observations on transnational urbanism: possibilities, politics and costs ofsimultaneity. Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 31 (2), 409–413.

South Asian Diaspora 109

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

alga

ry]

at 2

3:28

07

Oct

ober

201

4