Uma Parameswaran's earlier works have earned her praise and awards. What was Always Hers won the Jubilee Award for the best collection of short stories published in 1999. Of the title story, that appeared earlier as The Sweet Smell of Mother's Milk-Wet Bodice, reviewers had this to say: "A deftly wrought novella possessing the quiet elegance born of outrage."(The Globe and Mail) "Uma Parameswaran has written with the insight and lyricism of the fine poet she is." June Callwood "It is activist literature, woman-empowering fiction, and it has a political edge." (Herizons) Of her novel, Mangoes on the Maple Tree, Andreas Schroeder has said, "A hymn to the joys and sorrows of family, in the best, most inclusive sense of the word."

In this period of globalization, many individuals are trying to upgrade the life and for that most of them are now migrating to other lands. In the process of getting settle in new land they encounter many problems. The issue of migration and immigration brings forward the question of exile, identity, assimilation, memory, nostalgia, hopelessness, uprootedness, hybridity and so on. Indian writers have beautifully picked up experiences of such people and penned them down. Such writing is called ‘Diaspora Literature’, wherein immigrant experiences have been shared through literature. This type of literature includes expatriate stories, refugee chronicles and immigrant narratives. The present anthology Indian Diaspora Literature: A Critical Evaluation covers as many as twenty articles where the authors have discussed innumerable issues and challenges as confronted by Indian immigrants due to their distance and dislocation from their familiar homeland to the alien hostland, irrespective of what kind of exile they follow: forced or voluntary. Apart from bringing into surface the migratory problems, the anthology also sheds light on the complexities that arise out of such migration. Some of the notable Indian writers who have been given room in this book are V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Desai and Kiran Desai to name a few. Authors have tried to give their best outputs to reach this anthology to its intended goal. Hopefully this book will be helpful to both students and scholars alike.

Most of the papers presented at the Seminar on the Diasporic Eye : Theory and Cultural Interpretation, held at Jaipur during 17-19 February 2007

Fiction. South Asian Studies. It is a tense autumn the year Mayura comes away from her husband, saying she will never return to the uncouth, lustful monster. Everyone in the family is affected by her arrival. A sense of collective guilt emasculates the men even as they lecture her on the moral duty of returning to her wedded husband. A sense of outrage mingled with secret sorrow overcomes the women. No one knows what to make of Mayura. Meanwhile she behaves as though nothing and nobody can touch her. Using a deceptively simple and intimate style, Parameswaran explores the subtleties of love, marriage, sex, and family life in a changing South Indian environment.