Comparative Cultural Rights in Select Writings on Indo-Guyanese Plantation Diaspora

One of the contributions of the recent literary scholarship has been to question the absence of authorial representation of minority diasporic voices from the widely acknowledged canon of British plantation diasporic literature. This canon has been established and upheld by the substantial and well-known critical studies which focus on the colonial andro-centric modes of representation. The implication is that the writers of the plantation diaspora barely resist the charms of Euro-centrism and essentialism. In this research paper I have tried to analyze selected novels written on the Indo-Guyanese plantation diaspora which are the imaginative representation of the lived experiences of the early Indian immigrants and their descendants in and of the plantation colony of British Guiana and the post-independence Co-operative Republic of Guyana to find out the palimpsests of identities and belonging. Attention has also been paid to literary representation of the historical phenomenon of twice migration of the Indo-Guyanese population to England and North America to understand its implication in my study of comparative cultural rights.