Indians on Indian Lands

Winner of a NWSA/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

Nishant Upadhyay unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonialist relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy. Resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s–90s and in present-day Alberta offer examples of spaces that illuminate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and simultaneously reveal racialized, gendered, and casted labor formations. Upadhyay juxtaposes these extraction sites with examples of anticolonial activism and solidarities from Tkaronto. Analyzing silence on settler colonialism and brahminical caste supremacy, Upadhyay upends the idea of dominant caste Indian diasporas as racially victimized and shows that claiming victimhood denies a very real complicity in enforcing other power structures. Exploring stories of quotidian proximity and intimacy between Indigenous and South Asian communities, Upadhyay offers meditations on anticolonial and anti-casteist ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarities. Groundbreaking and ambitious, Indians on Indian Lands presents the case for holding Indian diasporas accountable for acts of violence within a colonial settler nation.