An exploration of the Indian diaspora in Trinidad. It is very insightful although you have to remember that a great deal of it is subjective and based on one person's perception.
Chutney Popcorn
Indian traditional culture humorously collides with contemporary New York City family values. Sarita discovers that she can't have children and finally her sister Reena can do something that the perfect Sarita cannot do: get pregnant! Now Reena just needs to convince her commitment-phobic girlfriend to go along with the idea.
SANGAM
This is a story of the meeting of two Indian men in a NYC subway, one an Indo-American with a nostalgic, romanticized memory of India and the other a newly arrived immigrant with a romanticized vision of America.
KNOWING HER PLACE
A moving look at the cultural schizophrenia experienced by Vasu, an Indian woman who strugglesbetween traditional roles and modern aspirations.The piece fuses photographs, verite sequences, and experimental techniques to create a raw and candid documentary.
DESI: South Asians in New York
This documentary film is a groundbreaking tribute to the diversity and dynamism of South Asians living in New York City and the U.S. A Hindi word meaning "countryman" or "people of the soil," desi refers to a broad, multicultural spectrum of South Asians - Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalese and others - who have become an integral part of many regions in the United States including California. Illustrating the growing sense of shared identity here in America, Pakistani and Indian cab drivers are seen uniting in a New York taxi strike as nuclear tests explode on their native subcontinent, threatening the outbreak of war. Directed by Allen Glazeb & Shebana Coelho, 58 minutes, 2000, USA.
Fiction Books
Crockett, Thompson Sayer. (2000). Turtle Island Dreaming. New York, NY, U.S.A. ISBN Number: 0-7595-5001-8
Nanda, Serena. (1999). The Hijras of India: Neither Man nor Woman. Wadsworth Publishing. ISBN: 0-534-50903-7 www.wadsworth.com.
Mazumdar, Sucheta. Whose History is it Anyway? Asian Indian and Other Forgotten Minorities in America by Beyond Bound Feet: APA Women and Political Activism
Jhumpa Lahiri (1999). Interpreter of Maladies. A series of short stories about South Asian Americans. Comments: won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000.
Jhumpa Lahiri (2004). The Namesake. A finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates this acclaimed author's signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the tangled ties between generations.
Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, Art Spiral, and Little India Magazine.
Dasgupta, S. D. (1998). A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America (Rutgers University Press).
Sunita S. Mukhi (2000). Doing the Desi Thing: Performing Indianness in New York City (Garland/Routledge, 2000) ISBN: 0815333722. A vivacious inquiry into how Asian Indians in New York, or Desis, as they describe themselves, perform Indianness, or Desiness, in several cultural variety shows that are mounted in New York City. These community cultural productions underscore Desiness, i.e., that these are songs, dances, foods, and crafts for the non-Indian to see, learn from and consume, and for the Desi to reminisce, enjoy, and be validated by. At the same time these cultural productions reveal a tense negotiation between the preservation of Indianness and the innovative assimilation into American life. This work ultimately demonstrates that Desi identity is ephemeral: it constantly needs to be manufactured and begs to be performed.
Academic Books
L. D. Shankar & R. Srikanth (1998). A part, yet apart: South Asians in Asian America. Temple University Press
Bahri, D., & Vasudev, M. (1996). Between the lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Temple University Press.
