Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900-1947

How and why did Indians move within and across the West? What effects did this have on their identities? Despite the burgeoning scholarship on the postcolonial South Asian Diaspora, histories and geographies of colonial Indian mobility have received much less scrutiny. Focusing on a range of individuals who moved within and across Europe and North America, including a champion of London's female poor, a tourist and a war-time spy, this book addresses that gap by examining the production of Indian mobility within the West over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. By analyzing the lives of individual Indian men and, in particular, women it articulates new perspectives on transnational histories and geographies of mobility, gender, performance, and embodiment.

• 20th century
• America
• biography
• English literature
• France
• gender
• gender studies
• India
• Indian
• literature
• methodology
• subject
• time
• twentieth century
• women

"This is a wonderful book. Through its detailed analysis of a wide range of textual and visual sources, the book provides a rich and compelling account of individual lives and different mobilities. At the same time, it makes a significant and original contribution to wider debates about mobility, performance, and embodiment across the humanities and social sciences." - Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London

"Indian Mobilities in the West gathers familiar and unexplored stories of colonial migrancy and racial imposture that remind us of the Indian diaspora's rich and unsettling past. Readers will find a treasure trove of restless subjects whose lives speak eloquently to the politics of travel and its embodied dimensions. More than just the moving targets of a late colonial modern gaze, the figures Lahiri captures here underscore the multidirectionality of twentieth century cosmopolitanism in all its theatricality, contradiction, and tragedy." - Antoinette Burton, Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, The University of Illinois

"Drawing upon a large and notably variegated cast of characters - women and men, ethnographer-journalists and domestic workers, revolutionaries and spies, performers and travellers - in Britain, the United States, and Europe, Lahiri provides an engaging, intelligent, and often counter-intuitive account of the South Asian diaspora in the colonial period.Historians, geographers, and scholars of cultural studies will find much to admire in her deployment of her rich source materials." - Parama Roy, Associate Professor of English, University of California at Davis

SHOMPA LAHIRI is Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.

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