Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900-1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment [Hardcover]

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.Travelling Native: Olive Christian Malvery in Imperial London Narrating Mobility and Home in the Indo-American Autobiographies of Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Parvati Athavale Unsanctioned Mobilities: Indians Transgressions and Imperial Surveillance in Interwar Europe Seeing Subject and Walking Zoo: Indian Women Tourists in 1930s Europe Clandestine Mobilities and Shifting Embodiments: Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan in Second World War Britain and France Conclusion: Bodies in Motion

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 ls)