HOME AND RE-HOMING IN NORTH EAST INDIA: WHEN HOME IS DIASPORA
HOME AND RE-HOMING IN NORTH EAST INDIA: WHEN HOME IS DIASPORA

Summary/Abstract: The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium are marked by artistic writings, theory and theoretical criticism on post-coloniality, migration, diaspora and transnationalism. William Safran’s (1991) characterisation of diaspora from 1991, imposing the existence of a migratory group for diaspora to even be accepted, has been long debated, re-assessed, and re-interpreted with some theorists taking diasporas to the global level, some others emphasising the inevitable hybrid nature of diasporans’ identities and the ‘in-between’, ‘Third Space’ that they inhabit (Bhabha, 1994). Some others have questioned the very validity of recent diasporas, as opposed to ‘classic’ diasporas, due to their widespread conceptual extension generative of lack of density and of substance for diaspora.In this paper, the researcher, aware of the processes of ‘diasporic homing’ and of how diasporans may or may not negotiate their cultural affiliations in the diasporic space, sets to explore modalities through which diasporans re-consider ‘home’ by gradually becoming part of a de-diasporisation process (Laguerre, 2006). This article is an analysis of director Sange Dorjee Thongdok’s Crossing Bridges (2013), a film that challenges theories according to which diasporans negotiate their home and space in the diaspora. Instead, it follows the experience of a multi-lingual multi-cultural man who re-discovers the homeland, involuntarily getting involved in a whole system of de-diasporisation within the home. The type of diaspora alluded to in the film is internal diaspora while the protagonist’s diasporic thinking and consciousness are equally investigated in the context of post migration homeland. The paper also insists on the particularity of internal diaspora with the protagonist shifting between ethnic and national identities, languages and cultures.

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