Article Title
Re-viewing the Anglo-Indian Self in Multicultural Australia: A Critical Study of David McMahon’s Vegemite Vindaloo
Abstract
Re-viewing the Anglo-Indian Self in Multicultural Australia: A Critical Study of David McMahon’s Vegemite Vindaloo
Shyamasri Maji
Abstract
In this paper, I have tried to critically study the representation of the Anglo-Indian community in the multicultural society of Australia by referring to the experiences of the Anglo-Indian characters in David McMahon’s novel Vegemite Vindaloo. McMahon is an Anglo-Indian author born and brought up in Calcutta. He has been living in Melbourne, Australia since 1988. Vegemite Vindaloo, his first novel, was published in 2006. It deals with the immigration of the members of the Anglo-Indian community to Australia in the last few decades of the twentieth century which witnessed the emergence of neoliberal policies and crossborder movements of capital and human resources. The dispersal in this novel, it has been argued, is influenced more by the effects of globalisation than by the forces of cultural nationalism in postcolonial India. Since the belief of their Anglo-conformity is strongly embedded in the mindset of the members of the Anglo-Indian community, it is worth probing how they respond to the ‘white’ Australia and how the latter, in the emerging economic and technological conditions, receive this racially hybrid group. Since the novel is marked by a strong Anglo-Indian presence in the Australian diasporic space, one can understand the problematics of inter-racial relationship and interrogate the veracity of the claims made by the multiculturalists. The main objective of this article is to examine the above aspects from the point of view of the Anglo-Indian characters who have left India to experience the socio-cultural space as liminal subjects.