This chapter addresses the question of travel through the analysis of Deepa Mehta's 2008 film Heaven on Earth. Through the narration of the journey of a young Punjabi bride from India to Canada, the film provides a critical analysis of the concept of diaspora which on the one hand emphasises the difference between ‘casual travels’ and diasporic journeys (Brah 1996: 182), and on the other focuses on the political, economic and cultural conditions within which people move, as well as their positions in terms of gender, race and ethnicity.

‘At the heart of the notion of diaspora,’ observes Avtar Brah, ‘is the image of a journey’ (1996: 182). Indeed, as the literal meaning of the term diaspora points to the dispersal from an original homeland (Desai 2004: 18; Tölölyan 2007: 648), it would be impossible to imagine a static diaspora. Images of journeys abound in cinematic representations of the Indian diaspora, be they the ones offered by Indian popular films or by Western-based South Asian filmmakers. And yet, if all diasporas entail travelling, not all forms of travelling qualify as diasporas. Embedded in the notion of diaspora is ‘a sense of uprootedness, disconnection, loss and estrangement’ (Cohen 2008: 174), the problematic of identity and the related instability of questions of home and belonging (Brah 1996: 190–5; Mishra 2007: 2; Tsagarousianou 2004: 56–60; Williams 1999). Moreover, unlike ‘casual travels’, diasporas are thought of, analysed and narrated as communities characterised by the specificity of the circumstances which prompted their movement away from their homeland. However, even though diasporic communities share some internal characteristics, they are not monolithic, homogeneous social formations. On the contrary, as Brah observes, diasporas are ‘contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common “we”’ (1996: 184). As a consequence, the scholar argues, in the analysis of diasporas we should remain ‘attentive to the nature and type of processes in and through which the collective “we” is constituted. Who is empowered and who is disempowered in the specific construction of the “we”?’ (1996: 184; see also Hall 1993: 235). This is a question openly addressed by Deepa Mehta in Heaven on Earth.