Mahika Gautam
Diasporic Timelines- A methodology for temporal cartography
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This dissertation is best seen as a theoretical framework for the making of a diasporic timeline. It will discuss the process, reasoning, and justification behind a timeline I have produced based on the historical accounts from three members of London’s Tamil diaspora. The timeline interweaves personal memories and experiences with broader histories of colonialism and the Sri Lankan civil war. The main object of study is this historical mapping I have produced. However, examining this process allows us to study how diasporic histories are written, how colonial narratives are constructed, and how the labour behind these constructions are often hidden due to the colonial idea of modernity. In doing so, I am critiquing the linear construction of history and proposing an alternative mapping of diasporic histories that delineates time and further, de-centres the temporal framework within which history is so often written. As a student of architecture, the spatial element of history, both as it occurred and how it is depicted, is of great importance to me. I wish to centre both the temporality and spatiality of a diasporic history, thus creating a methodology for what I will call a ‘temporal cartography.’
In this essay, which stems primarily from an interdisciplinary way of thinking, reading, and writing, I am engaging with multiple scholarly subjects. The first is scholars of diaspora, from which I will be using the work of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Homi Bhabha. Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Modernity has been of great significance to the way I have considered diasporic timelines due to his notion that how history has materialised and is remembered has often been a tool used by the ‘ruling classes’ (1993). Gilroy’s ideas on modernity, memory, and history, prompted me to collect oral histories. Hall (1997) discusses how we suffer from a kind of historical amnesia, whereby we fail to locate present day processes/ phenomena in their much longer histories. In my essay, I integrate colonial histories with processes of migration and globalisation to redress this historical amnesia. Bhabha writes about hybrid identities and diaspora, and criticises the ‘English’ inability to find meaning in overseas histories directly linked to British imperialism (1990). Feeling similarly sceptical about diasporic historiography, I make sure to prioritise the Tamil diaspora’s experiences in this essay, using their stories as stepping stones to discover British colonial histories. By creating a map to materialise their stories, I am trying to create a tool that diasporic communities can use to understand their own history, in a narrative written by them.
There has been significant literature written already on how South Asian histories are written. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a leading Indian historian and scholar of postcolonial and subaltern studies, works on situating subaltern history within a postcolonial critique of modernity and of history itself. He highlights the strange dichotomy between any one society’s unique understanding of temporality and compares it to the absolutism of a historian’s ability to produce a past, present, and future from their story (2018). Similarly, Gyanendra Pandey (2006) and Prathima Banerjee (2006) have written respectively about the importance of accounting for the politics of both colonial historiography, and of time itself, when writing subaltern histories and particularly in the acute representation of the ‘past’ in postcolonial discourse. My work responds to them whilst pushing subaltern studies further, by demonstrating how foregrounding oral stories when writing diasporic histories is a way to respond to and acknowledge the politics involved in this historiography. I read Cartographies of Time (Rosenberg & Grafton, 2010), a book that displays a variety of graphic representations of time, but still rooted in Western histories and time, my essay broadens their scope.
However, the book that inspired this essay the most is Joëlle Bahloul’s The Architecture of Memory (1996), in which oral histories and memories are used to “phenomenologise history” (p.17) which leads me to my diasporic timeline. I have created a timeline (what I call a temporal map) that has stemmed from conversations about how members of the Tamil diaspora, who have been involved in this project, think and speak about time- in which we delve into their present, past, and future (Fig. 1). The map is a way to understand their histories, within their own specific understanding and expression of time, rather than mapping their stories onto a pre-existing temporal and historical notion. Time is relative to their oral histories, and the speed and density at which they narrated how they came to live in Hendon became the very guideline for the pace at which I researched and the historical time periods Ilooked at.
My methodology for writing and researching this dissertation has been one that mirrors the labour of map-making, expressing as well as arguing for historiography as a cartographic practice. From the beginning of my research, spatial relationships have played a key role. The Tamil families that I have spoken with all live within a few streets of each other in Hendon, North-West London, where I too have grown up. My knowing them over the past decade has drastically changed the way I interact and feel in my neighbourhood, becoming part of a community that I never had growing up. I have walked up and down those roads for years, whether it is for situations of crisis such as locking myself out of my own house or when I am hungry and craving Amma’s food, or for moments of collective care such as delivering food from my house to theirs or celebrating their family member’s birthday. My parents migrated from India alone, so I was always fascinated by, and envious I suppose, that these Tamil families all came from Sri Lanka to London and ended up so close to one another. During our conversations, I learnt how this was an intentionally choreographed and executed process. The impact of the Sri Lankan Civil War is of course significant and has shaped a large part of their lives and identity, but there is a necessity to think about all the other rather complex and intricate details of their lives as Tamil diaspora. I wanted to focus on the phenomenological experiences of their migration, how their memories interact with spaces in London, and more importantly highlighting how their stories are a powerful example of continued solidarity and resistance within their community. Postcolonial ways of thinking and writing can often neglect the individual experience of migration, and whilst their situation may well be a product of a wider colonial history, it is these individuals’ continued resilience that creates the beautiful phenomenon which we study, which in this case is:London’s Tamil diaspora.
The first section of this essay will briefly map the relationship between British colonial history and the Sri Lankan Civil War, examining the inherent subjectivity of Sri Lanka’s history due to colonialism. By criticising conventional temporal frameworks in timelines, I will then introduce how diasporic oral histories are essential to postcolonial historiography and how time-stamps are not so much. The second part is about the importance of considering the spatial aspect of historical timelines; how these timelines are drawn. I will explore the linearity of the historical timeline through the West’s colonial understanding of time and modernity. Framing diasporic timelines as a rejection of such modernity, I then discuss alternative temporal frameworks that allow us to understand processes of migration. This part is experimental, drawing from theories of physics to understand postcolonial phenomena. The third part considers how with the aforementioned tools of temporal cartography (oral histories and non-linear mapping), diasporic practices can reveal themselves as vital acts of resistance. This section explains the importance of integrating not only memories, but present-day living onto diasporic timelines.
The end of the essay reveals the beginning, but in a new light, showing the cyclical nature of events and the ability to live both in the past and in the present. All these sections will be grounded in my primary research with members of the Tamil diaspora who I will refer to as Amma (mother), Appa (father), Mama (mother’s brother), and Periamma (eldest one of mother’s sisters) here.
In this essay, which stems primarily from an interdisciplinary way of thinking, reading, and writing, I am engaging with multiple scholarly subjects. The first is scholars of diaspora, from which I will be using the work of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Homi Bhabha. Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Modernity has been of great significance to the way I have considered diasporic timelines due to his notion that how history has materialised and is remembered has often been a tool used by the ‘ruling classes’ (1993). Gilroy’s ideas on modernity, memory, and history, prompted me to collect oral histories. Hall (1997) discusses how we suffer from a kind of historical amnesia, whereby we fail to locate present day processes/ phenomena in their much longer histories. In my essay, I integrate colonial histories with processes of migration and globalisation to redress this historical amnesia. Bhabha writes about hybrid identities and diaspora, and criticises the ‘English’ inability to find meaning in overseas histories directly linked to British imperialism (1990). Feeling similarly sceptical about diasporic historiography, I make sure to prioritise the Tamil diaspora’s experiences in this essay, using their stories as stepping stones to discover British colonial histories. By creating a map to materialise their stories, I am trying to create a tool that diasporic communities can use to understand their own history, in a narrative written by them.
There has been significant literature written already on how South Asian histories are written. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a leading Indian historian and scholar of postcolonial and subaltern studies, works on situating subaltern history within a postcolonial critique of modernity and of history itself. He highlights the strange dichotomy between any one society’s unique understanding of temporality and compares it to the absolutism of a historian’s ability to produce a past, present, and future from their story (2018). Similarly, Gyanendra Pandey (2006) and Prathima Banerjee (2006) have written respectively about the importance of accounting for the politics of both colonial historiography, and of time itself, when writing subaltern histories and particularly in the acute representation of the ‘past’ in postcolonial discourse. My work responds to them whilst pushing subaltern studies further, by demonstrating how foregrounding oral stories when writing diasporic histories is a way to respond to and acknowledge the politics involved in this historiography. I read Cartographies of Time (Rosenberg & Grafton, 2010), a book that displays a variety of graphic representations of time, but still rooted in Western histories and time, my essay broadens their scope.
However, the book that inspired this essay the most is Joëlle Bahloul’s The Architecture of Memory (1996), in which oral histories and memories are used to “phenomenologise history” (p.17) which leads me to my diasporic timeline. I have created a timeline (what I call a temporal map) that has stemmed from conversations about how members of the Tamil diaspora, who have been involved in this project, think and speak about time- in which we delve into their present, past, and future (Fig. 1). The map is a way to understand their histories, within their own specific understanding and expression of time, rather than mapping their stories onto a pre-existing temporal and historical notion. Time is relative to their oral histories, and the speed and density at which they narrated how they came to live in Hendon became the very guideline for the pace at which I researched and the historical time periods Ilooked at.
My methodology for writing and researching this dissertation has been one that mirrors the labour of map-making, expressing as well as arguing for historiography as a cartographic practice. From the beginning of my research, spatial relationships have played a key role. The Tamil families that I have spoken with all live within a few streets of each other in Hendon, North-West London, where I too have grown up. My knowing them over the past decade has drastically changed the way I interact and feel in my neighbourhood, becoming part of a community that I never had growing up. I have walked up and down those roads for years, whether it is for situations of crisis such as locking myself out of my own house or when I am hungry and craving Amma’s food, or for moments of collective care such as delivering food from my house to theirs or celebrating their family member’s birthday. My parents migrated from India alone, so I was always fascinated by, and envious I suppose, that these Tamil families all came from Sri Lanka to London and ended up so close to one another. During our conversations, I learnt how this was an intentionally choreographed and executed process. The impact of the Sri Lankan Civil War is of course significant and has shaped a large part of their lives and identity, but there is a necessity to think about all the other rather complex and intricate details of their lives as Tamil diaspora. I wanted to focus on the phenomenological experiences of their migration, how their memories interact with spaces in London, and more importantly highlighting how their stories are a powerful example of continued solidarity and resistance within their community. Postcolonial ways of thinking and writing can often neglect the individual experience of migration, and whilst their situation may well be a product of a wider colonial history, it is these individuals’ continued resilience that creates the beautiful phenomenon which we study, which in this case is:London’s Tamil diaspora.
The first section of this essay will briefly map the relationship between British colonial history and the Sri Lankan Civil War, examining the inherent subjectivity of Sri Lanka’s history due to colonialism. By criticising conventional temporal frameworks in timelines, I will then introduce how diasporic oral histories are essential to postcolonial historiography and how time-stamps are not so much. The second part is about the importance of considering the spatial aspect of historical timelines; how these timelines are drawn. I will explore the linearity of the historical timeline through the West’s colonial understanding of time and modernity. Framing diasporic timelines as a rejection of such modernity, I then discuss alternative temporal frameworks that allow us to understand processes of migration. This part is experimental, drawing from theories of physics to understand postcolonial phenomena. The third part considers how with the aforementioned tools of temporal cartography (oral histories and non-linear mapping), diasporic practices can reveal themselves as vital acts of resistance. This section explains the importance of integrating not only memories, but present-day living onto diasporic timelines.
The end of the essay reveals the beginning, but in a new light, showing the cyclical nature of events and the ability to live both in the past and in the present. All these sections will be grounded in my primary research with members of the Tamil diaspora who I will refer to as Amma (mother), Appa (father), Mama (mother’s brother), and Periamma (eldest one of mother’s sisters) here.