Indians on Indian Lands
Cloth: 10/08/2024
About the Book
Nishant Upadhyay unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy. Resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s through the 1990s and in present-day Alberta offers examples of spaces that illuminate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously reveals racialized, gendered, and casted labor formations. Upadhyay juxtaposes these extraction sites with examples of anticolonial activism and solidarities from Tkaronto. Analyzing silence on settler colonialism and brahminical caste supremacy, Upadhyay upends the idea of dominant caste Indian diasporas as racially victimized and shows that claiming victimhood denies a very real complicity in enforcing other power structures. Exploring stories of quotidian proximity and intimacy between Indigenous and South Asian communities, Upadhyay offers meditations on anticolonial and anti-casteist ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarities.Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.
About the Author
Nishant Upadhyay is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.Reviews
Blurbs
“Indians on Indian Lands is a brilliant achievement and urgent for our times, as it demands and creates complex tools of critical analysis and grounded study. Nishant Upadhyay carefully addresses the expulsive condition of South Asian migration as a necro-capitalist and caste/class differentiated political economic project, as well as squarely contends with the colonial heritage and ongoing settlement of white Europeans and non-white other migrants within Turtle Island. The book impressively focuses on the dual afterlives of coloniality in relation to the multiple power hierarchies embedded within the persistent and ongoing generational condition of caste and settler violence.”--Macarena Gomez-Barris, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives
“At a moment when ‘the South Asian diaspora’ has seized political power across the landscape of imperial and nation-state extraction, this unsettling and compassionate book is an essential read. It is by centering intimacy, art, activism, and love that Nishant Upadhyay explodes triumphalist accounts of Indian achievement and even of racial divergences. The stories told here are unforgettable. Indians on Indian Lands parses intimate traces and activist dreams to examine the tensile connections forged between differently positioned ‘Indians’ and the enormously divergent impact of settler and colonial history upon each. We appreciate the stubborn endurances and rapid transformation of caste and empire from within, and we can finally identify how to explode the silos that protect race from caste, settler from diasporic, empire from nation. Read this book now!” --Shefali Chandra, author of The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India
“Carefully teasing out the uneven solidarities and complex complicities across relationships between dominant-caste Indians and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, Indians on Indian Lands opens up a radically new direction for envisioning decolonial solidarities and futures across Turtle Island and South Asia. This is essential reading for all those who are invested in the work of shared dreaming and imagining other worlds.” --Deepti Misri, author of Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India
“The first book length study of caste as foundational to settler colonial projects, Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands is beautifully generative, brilliantly sharpening the analytic of the “casted settler” with stories of quotidian intimacies between Indigenous and diasporic dominant caste Indian communities. Upadhyay offers powerful critiques as well as the expansive possibilities of relationalities, of casted settlers who engage in decolonial acts of mutual care.” --Candace Fujikane, author of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i
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