Nandan draws on literary work by V. S. Naipaul and critical work by Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall and Edward Said to discuss issues of identity and belonging. He mentions how the Indian epic the Ramayana offered solace to his parents and grandparents who related Rama's banishment to indenture/exile in Fiji, and he suggests that tensions between Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians may be read in relation to the ancient fratricidal war depicted in the Mahabharata. Yet however important these two epics are to 'the Indian psyche,' Nandan believes they 'are still profoundly limited' as allegories of the Indian diaspora. He turns instead to the indenture experience itself and to Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa. The essay ends with an extract from 'Travelling into a Far Country' from Nandan's selected work Lines Across Black Waters.
