523 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 32, No. 3, 2012 doi 10.1215/1089201x-1891543 © 2012 by Duke University Press Exile and Estrangement in East African Indian Fiction Dan Ojwang he sense of displacement and estrangement that assails the “Indian” character over- seas is one of the most enduring subjects of East African Indian fiction, which gener- ally presents images of wandering through strange territory, flight from undesirable homes, expulsions from spaces held dear, a scattering of communities, and the consequent attempts to restore a sense of wholeness amid the threat of alienation that ceaseless movement poses. The figure of an exiled Indian narrator from a Third World country writing out the story of his dislocation in his bleak dwelling in a European or North American city, a figure popularized by V. S. Naipaul in The Mimic Men (1967), appears several times in this body of fiction. So does the figure of the sojourner in a hostile African terrain, or a lonely merchant in an isolated trading outpost. The three writers under study in this article, Moyez Vassanji, Bahadur Tejani, and Peter Nazareth, have written about the multiple displacements of African Indians: their uprooting from India, the disrupted course of their lives within East Africa, and, sometimes, their eventual departure for Europe or North America where their sense of alienation continues. Yet in spite of these common themes, the three writers evince very dif- ferent approaches to the question of exile, and in the process they tell us a lot about changes in East African writing as a whole. The treatment of the theme of displacement in Tejani and Nazareth differs considerably from that of Vassanji, a difference that we can account for by considering the intellectual and historical contexts in which their writing was conducted. The difference between Tejani and Nazareth on the one hand, and Vassanji on the other, is one of nationalism and postnational- ism. Whereas Tejani and Nazareth wrote during the first two decades of independence —the 1960s and 1970s—a period in which there was a general belief in the value of African nation- alism, Vassanji only begins to publish his works in the late 1980s, a moment in which African nationalist discourses have undergone some delegitimation. If Tejani’s and Nazareth’s works explore the possibility of assimilation for their Indian protagonists into the melting pot of new national cultures that were being willed into being in the early years of political independence, Vassanji’s work expresses an uneasiness about projects of nation building in East Africa while extolling the virtues and depicting the pain of remaining politically on the fence. Nonetheless, there are subtle differences in Nazareth’s and Tejani’s approaches. While Tejani’s nationalism was of a romantic kind, Nazareth’s was a more skeptical one, given its Marxist sensitivity to power relations within the incipient nation. My task in this article, in brief, is to account for these different stances on the questions of migration, nationhood, and alienation. In the pro- cess, I hope to shed light on the contributions that Tejani, Nazareth, and Vassanji have made to notions of exile and displacement, which remain central in the understanding of colonial and postcolonial culture in the twentieth century. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Published by Duke University Press