Paper Title
Transcultural Imagination in SouthAsian Diasporic Writers

Abstract
The paper explores how SouthAsian Diasporic writers by challenging the obsolete autonomist and universalist pattern, evoking a revisiting as to where and how cultures are positioned and also how to create new fictional spaces in the formation of partisan in diasporic and postnational contexts, without diffusing or homogenizing disparate cultures and identities. The paper highlights the works of Michael Ondajee, Shyam Selvadurai and Yasmine Goonaratne as how these writers by reconstructing histories strive to represent historical events, at the same time being conscious of the difficulties of representing history in textual form. Their delving into the past is characterized by a tension between a desire for autochthony and the realization of hybrid origins. The diasporic writers therefore address this tension by imaginatively recreating the past and opening it to fresh perspectives for new beginnings. By breaking down the traditional distinction between history and fiction, they suggest that both are discourses through which we formulate our notion of reality, and that simple and objective recounting of past is problematic. By reconstructing history, the three authors deconstruct the teleological and organist assumptions about history positing it as inevitably a process of rupture and invention in which we need to understand hybridity, immigration, exile, diasporic movements and other transcultural consequences, for it is these disruptive forces and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy that shapes history. Their literature conveys an appeal for a new regenerative politics, which recognizes identities as combination of multiple traits and loyalties and allows all ethnic groups’ access to democratic politics yet privileges none and does not include provision that guarantees the survival of such groups this position being comparable with the contingent, transcultural and heterogeneous nature of cultures. Keywords - SouthAsian Diaspora, Transculturation, Culture, Identity