Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Orthography Introduction 1. Creole Island or Little India? The Politics of Language and Diaspora 2. An Indo-Mauritian World: "Ancestral Culture," Hindus, and Their Others 3. Social Semiotics of Language: Shifting Registers, Narrative, and Performance 4. Colonial Education, Ethnolinguistic Identifications, and the Origins of Ancestral Languages 5. Performing Purity: Television and Ethnolinguistic Recognition 6. Calibrations of Displacement: Diasporization, Ancestral Language, and Temporality Conclusion: Time, Technology, and Language Notes References Index

About the Author

Patrick Eisenlohr is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University.

Reviews

"Through the depth, subtlety and breadth of his intellectual engagement with Mauritius, Eisenlohr establishes himself as one of our leading scholars on South Asia. Empirically rich, theoretically informed, imaginative, nuanced, and powerfully argued, Little India should transform how we think about language ideology, quotidian and ritual practice, and the complex intersections of national and transnational politics of culture." - Don Brenneis, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz"