Reimaging India and Australia

Re-Imagining Australia and India: Culture and Identity brings together key themes from the fourth international conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA). Chief among them is the proposition that the maturing relationship between India and Australia now encompasses far more than bilateral economic exchanges, and can therefore be usefully explored in order better to understand the evolving cultural identities of both nations from the nineteenth century to the present day. India and Australia were both fundamentally shaped by British colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were reshaped by globalisation during the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Both belong to the 'global South'. However, Australia has a complicated and ambivalent association with the legacies of both processes, and with their outcomes in the Asian region of which it is a part. Indian perspectives upon these transformations, and their effects upon Australian culture and identity, are fresh and insightful. This book's chapters range from analysis of contemporary strategic relationships, trade, and immigration, and discussion of cross-national social and cultural issues, to historical perspectives upon overlooked aspects of Indo-Australian convergence such as cricket, and the role of cameleers in Outback Australia.