Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. Introduction: more than one mother

1.1 Gender and nation

1.2 Theories of the maternal

1.3 Theories of diaspora

1.4 Outline of chapters

2. Historical performances: reading Mother India in nationalist discourse and Kipling

2.1 Bharat Mata

2.1.1 Vande Mataram

2.1.2 The mother-as-metaphor

2.1.3 Condensation and transaction

2.1.4 Metaphorical performances

2.2 Kipling's imperial Mother India

2.2.1 Imperial doublings

2.2.2 The native-born diaspora

3. Citational performances: "Talking major mother country" in Rushdie's Midnight's Children

3.1 Diasporic maternal practices

3.2 Victorian Mothers

3.3 The performance of mothering

3.4 'De-condensing' Mother India

3.5 Diasporic bastards

4. Exile performances: Pakistani mother-daughter relationships in Bapsi Sidhwa's

Cracking India and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days.

4.1 Sidhwa's matricide

4.1.1 Allegorical readings

4.1.2 Hired Mother India

4.2 Suleri's mother elegy

4.2.1 A poetics of unbelonging

4.2.2 Mother(ing)land

4.2.3 Performances of abjection

5. Maternal performances: mother tongues in Ravinder Randhawa's A Wicked Old

Woman and Monica Ali's Brick Lane

5.1 Performing the mother tongue

5.2 A wicked old mother

5.3 Herethics and diasporic mothering

5.4 Diasporic seas

5.5 Ali's coming-of-agency

6. Outlook and conclusion: diasporic maternal aesthetics

6.1 Indo-Caribbean labours

6.2 Retrospects and prospects

7. Appendix

8. Works cited

9. Index