Cirrus@Austlit

'This essay explores the stories of young Indian Australian writers who negotiate versions of Indias of the mind' through the presence of parents or grand-parents. For second-generation Indian—Australian writers (with or without the hyphen), the challenge is to reconstruct in their writing an India vaguely remembered from infrequent visits, or constructed through images made avail-able in their family homes, including their parents' memories of an India they cherish but have left behind forever. In reading these stories, I am uneasily aware that the writers are negotiating disjunctures of time, generation, spatializations and dissemination' that refuse to be "neatly aligned These dis-junctures and misalignments are interesting to explore, not least because the texts discussed in this essay were created in an intellectual milieu of intersect-ing discourses of multiculturalism, diaspora, and marginality circulating both globally and in Australia in the 1990s. These discourses are outlined briefly, before I turn to examining the 'Indias of the mind' embedded in stories of second-generation Indian Australian writers and the ways in which they rehearse in-betweenness.' (Introduction)