Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, professor in York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies focused on South Asia and issues of human development, was interviewed by The Globe and Mail June 10, in a story about the Day of Overseas Indians conference in Toronto:
The conference is the first of many large events planned for 2011, declared the Year of India in Canada.
Q: What’s the conference about for you?
What I really like is that it’s not totally about only diaspora issues. It’s about the issues of the day: youth issues, gender issues, which are not the issues of one diaspora or another. Our country should be looked at not only as isolated communities. We should have a say in policy-making. People doing jobs they’re over-qualified for is not an Indian issue, it’s an issue for all of Canada. If not, we lose the sense of Canada as a whole.
Q: How would you describe the Indian diaspora in Canada?
In Canada, we have representation from all over India, with the dominant group being the Punjabi community. In the last few years I’ve seen more of an effort to have a pan-Indian presence. We do tend to have more engagement with the mainstream, partly because of our prominence in the professions and our facility with English. We had the right colonizers.
Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.