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Chapter 2

Where to he? >

cTo he or not to he’?:

(Diasporic DiCemma in Literature

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 CHAPTER 2

WHERE TO BE ? ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’ : DIASPORIC

DILEMMA IN LITERATURE

Diaspora, derived from the Greek term ‘diasperien’ from dia-across, and

sperien-to sow or scatter seeds, is now used to name the communities of

people who have dislocated from their native homeland through

movements of migration, immigration or exile. This word was first used

in the Septuagint- the Greek translation o f Hebrew Scriptures to describe

the Jews living in exile from the homeland of Palestine. As mobility,

dislocation and relocation along with exploration and travelling have all

been human practices across the races of the world, the term diaspora has

been variedly defined by scholars of various beliefs and schools of

thought. Right from the ancient times, human races have travelled and

reveled in terra incognita in search of their desired goals and aspiring

ambitions. Sometimes, they were really forced by circumstances beyond

their control and had to consequently migrate to the ‘other lands’. Hence

the experience of diaspora has world wide commonality. It is in this

sense that John Durham Peters states: “Diaspora suggests a dislocation

from the nation-state or geographical location of origin and a re-location

in one or more nation-states, territories, or countries. (Durham.23). The

word ‘diaspora’, originally used to describe the plight of the Jews living

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outside Palestine, has today acquired a wider meaning and has become an

interesting area of study.

The term diaspora might have been used for the displacement of the Jews

from Palestine to different countries and the after effects political, social,

cultural and even literary. It might have taken a long way to identify the

changes due to the fusion of two or more cultures. History is full of such

instances where diaspora has practically enlarged the impact of

civilization. If the meaning of ‘diaspora’ is taken in a broader sense, the

expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Paradise to the earth would be the

first and the most significant instance, where the act of expulsion

unfolded many cultural dilemmas in the years to come. Similarly in the

Hindu mythology in the great epic the Mahabharata, the expulsion of the

Pandavas and their hide for fourteen years, their secret movements to

different places unfolded their cultural and political crisis. Not only in the

Mahabharata but similar diaspora emerges with the banishment of Shri

Ram, Sita and Laxman to forest. Their journey from Ayodhya to Shri

Lanka vividly projects the everlasting impact on the minds, manners and

mottos of respective places. It was an attempt to re-establish faith in the

higher values in life.

A revolutionary change o f diaspora in the European countries was seen

during the Renaissance. The invasion of Turks forced the Greek and
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Latin scholars to move towards the European countries. This flood of

scholarship not only reviewed and revived the value of local literature; it

also enriched the French and English literature by a new wave of human

touch. The contemporary social values too got an additional dimension.

Undoubtedly, the prominent gift of diaspora is America as a country.

Different people from different European countries set foot on the ‘New

Soil’ in Mayflower and settled on the eastern shores in the form of 13

states. Gradually these settlers became to be known as a new civilization,

the different roots flourished in the form of a huge powerful tree. The

cultural Utopia of each clan still remains and causes clash and crisis.

America today is the biggest centre of diaspora. Apart from being a great

attraction for the young generation to fulfil their dreams, it has also been

a vulnerable place where people have lost their roots. The first generation

tries to have the hold of past. They are at times tom between ‘should’ and

‘should not’, but the next generation, being bom and brought up there,

unhesitatingly brush aside the old values and at times they even grade it

as ‘worthless’ from utilitarian point of view.Today, when one is part of

the wheel of globalization, the world has to give to each and everyone the

feel of diaspora. Such polarity of life begets clash and crisis where, at

times, culture is sacrificed at the altar of liberation. In name of identity,

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self esteem and individuality, much good of social security is being

shaken off.

According to a renowned political thinker, scholar and theorist Lord

Bhikhu Parekh, a London based Professor o f Political Science and a

Gujarati by origin thus a scholar with diasporic identity, opines that

diaspora is a mere extention of a particular community that resides

outside its native origin; hence any diasporic group mirrors the image of

the original community it belongs to. Diaspora is not a mere footprint of

the original community extended beyond the boundaries of the native

nation but it is a lively reflection of the community. It is in this sense that

diasporic communities should not be treated as relics or remnants of the

original community but as a live and progressive extension of the same.

Systematic study of diasporic communities often known as Diasporology

focuses on identification and evaluation of cultural traits of a particular

community or society; not only that such study also reveals the strengths

and weaknesses of a particular community or society by way of studying

in comparison the the native and non native members of a particular

community on the basis of their achievements and failures. Those who

care to find this out will have to take the diasporic studies seriously.The

history of Indian diaspora dates back to several centuries as Indians have

travelled far East and even far West. However there have not been
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instances of systematic migration till 1830. It was only after the

abolishment of slavery in Britian that a new way was made open for

labours to work on contract basis in Britian and her colonized countries.

Such migrations continued till the opening years of the 20th century after

which, on the opposition of the Indian National Congress, such labour

contracts ceased to be entertained. The second wave of systematic

migration was witnessed especially after the Second World War and it

has continued in the recent times also. Thus the history of Indian diaspora

spans for nearly two hundred years. As per academic surveys, migrated

Indians have been living in considerable numbers in as many as forty

countries. Such Indian migrants have, on one hand, continued with some

of the native traditions and on the other hand they have changed a lot as

per their living conditions on ‘home away from home’. Thus many mini

Indias exist at different places that share many things in common and at

the same time they also differ to great extent if not in substance then

certainly in their practices. In order to make systematic study of Indian

diasporic communities, we have to make sincere attempts to know the

structure of their family, caste system, concepts of God and religious

practices, attitudes towards professions, food habits as well as life style in

general.

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Today, diaspora speaks of diverse groups of persons and communities

moving across the globe. These people are not the suppressed; on the

contrary, diasporic community o f any country makes its presence felt in

the host land through its contribution in politics, literature, cinema and

other forms of Art. They are introducing their motherland to the people of

the host land with their stories and thus acting as mediators or translators

of culture and language of both the countries. These people are not only

recognized outside their country but also in their homeland as the

governments of many countries have made certain policies for them

recognizing the value of diaspora population and their contributions in the

development of their own country.

With the passage of time, as everything changes, there are changes to be

traced in the multiplicity' o f diasporic activities, too. Owing to the

interdisciplinary interests that the term ‘diaspora’ has earned today, it is

used by anthropologists, literary theorists and culture critics to describe

the mass migrations and displacements taking place especially in the

second half of the twentieth century. This term which was originally

associated with exile, is today related to its more positive and fertile

meaning, that of fertility of dispersion. The scattered seeds (diaspora)

tend to grow on the new soil, new surrounding and at the same time,

inherit the characteristics of the mother plant. What we are more

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concerned with are the experiences of all those who have migrated across

the world leaving behind their respective mother lands. The theory of

diaspora tries to unfold before us the hybrid and heterogeneous nature of

its subjects and the concern lies about their culture, language and their

experiences as ethnic groups. Homi K. Bhabha in his exemplary work

The Location o f Culture discusses:

It is from those who have suffered the sentence o f history- subjugation,

domination, diaspora, displacement- that we learn our most enduring
lessons for living and thinking. (Bhabha. 172).

This is the experience of the immigrant, the expatriate which is hybrid

and heterogeneous in nature. Stuart Hall, another prominent theorist also

defines the diasporic experience:

Diaspora is defined, not by essence o f purity, but by recognition o f a

necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception o f identity
which lives in and through, not despite, difference; by
hybridity.(Hall.244).

The key words that we are here concerned with are ‘hybridity’ and

‘identity’that encompass the diasporic experience. Homi K. Bhabha

discusses exciting ways of thinking about identity bom from “the great

history of the languages and landscapes of migration and diaspora.”

(Bhabha.235). He discusses the three conditions that underlie an

understanding of the process of identification:

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 1. ‘to exist is to be called into being m relation to an otherness, its
look and locus’,

2. ‘the very place o f identification, caught in the tension o f

demand and desire, is the space o f splitting’ and,

3. ‘the question o f identification is never the affirmation o f a pre­

given identity, never a self fulfilling prophecy, it is always the
production o f image o f identity’( Bhabha.44-45).

One’s existence, as Bhabha states, is in relation with the other. He talks

about the existence of the other i.e the colonizer and the native i.e the

colonized. The ‘otherness’ felt is not in the colonialist self or the

colonized other but it lies in the disturbing distance in-between.

Edward Said’s Orientalism is another influential piece of writing when

one attempts to discuss the relationship between the colonizer and the

colonized. It is one of the most influential books of the 20th century in

the study of diaspora. He discusses the nature and attitude of the West

towards the East and sees Orientalism as a construct of the West and as a

way to deal with the ‘otherness’ of the East, its culture, traditions,

customs and beliefs. He examines that the West produced knowledge

about the colonized land and has developed observations based on the

assumptions that the East wields around it a gyre of mysticism,

exoticism, peculiar structures of morality, sexuality and fixed sets and

subsets of beliefs which are totally in contrast with what is seen and

practiced in the West.

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Edward Said coins two words ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. The word Orient

(East) is described in a negative manner as a place of ignorance which is

primitive, backward, unusual, irrational and abnormal; whereas, the

Occident (west), as a contrast to the Orient, is outrightly and rather one-

sidedly depicted as developed, rational, sensible and deliberately made

familiar perhaps only to the western pockets of humankind. The

‘otherness’ of the East is brought out by the contrast in the meanings. The

‘Orient’ serves as the ‘other’ in a subservient position to the glorified

ideologies of the western Occidentalism.

Stuart Hall in his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ begins with

theorizing the two ways of reflecting on “cultural Identity”:

first, identity understood as a collective, shared history among

individuals affiliated by race or ethnicity that is considered to be fixed
or stable; second, identity understood as unstable, metamorphic, and
even contradictory- an identity marked by multiple points o f
similarities as well as differences. (Hall.234).

Among the diasporic groups, the first identity which is shared by such

people having common history and ancestry gives them the feeling of

being under one umbrella ‘one people’. It is this identity which,

according to him, a Caribbean or Black diaspora must try to discover and

bring to light through various media of expression. It is this identity that

makes the Orient ‘the other’. This concept of cultural identity has been

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the center o f the vision o f the poets and writers and has played a

significant role in the postcolonial struggles that are responsible in

reshaping our world. According to Frantz Fanon, this cultural identity is

to be rediscovered in the post colonial writings as:

passionate research...directed by the secret hope o f discovering

beyond the misery of today, beyond self contempt, resignation and
abjuration, some very splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us
both in regard to ourselves and m regard to others. (Fanon. 170.).

In the light o f this statement o f Frantz Fanon, the study o f diasporic

writings calls for a newer approach that o f going beyond the logistics o f

struggle, subjugation and sufferings to understand and realize how

diasporic conditions have actually enriched human experiences by

expanding horizons o f one’s sensitivity and capability to cope with non­

native life along with its subtleties and disparities. The point raised by

Frantz Fanon is further taken up by Stuart Hall who discusses the second

type o f cultural identity in his critical essay “Cultural Identity and

Diaspora”. According to him,

There is, however, a second, related but different view of cultural

identity. The second position recognizes that, as well as the many
pomts of similarity, there are also critical points o f deep and
significant difference which constitute “what we really are”; or rather
- since history has intervened - “what we have become”. We cannot
speak for very long, with any exactness, about “one experience, one
identity”, without acknowledging its other side- the ruptures and
discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s
“uniqueness”. Cultural identity, in the second sense, is a matter of
“becoming” as well as “being”. It belongs to the future as well as to

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 the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place,
time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere,
have histories. But, like everything that is historical, they undergo
constant transformation.Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous “play” o f history,
culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere “recovery” o f the
past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure
our sense o f ourselves into eternity, identities are names we give to the
different ways w e are positioned by, and positioned ourselves within,
the narratives o f the past.( Hall, 236).

It is this identity which enables us to understand the traumatic

experiences of the colonized. It is through the cultural power that the

colonizers got the power to make us feel as the “other”. Not only did the

colonizers make the colonized feel as the ‘other’ but they also made them

aware of their superiority over them. The colonizers dispossessed them of

their cultural identity and as a result, as Frantz Fanon states, produced

“Individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colorless, stateless, and

rootless -a race of angels” ( Fanon.176). The conception of the “Cultural

Identity” is at once changed with the idea o f otherness resulting from the

very acceptance of one as being the ‘other’. It is in this way that the

Diasporic study of literatures written by the writers away from their

motherlands, provides insight into the retrospective and also prospective

aspects of their writings. This is further explained by Stuart Hall in his

statement:

Cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside

history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit
inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not
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 once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some
final and absolute return. O f course, it is not a mere phantasm either. It
is something- not a mere trick o f the imagination. It has its histories-
and histories have their real material and symbolic effects. The past
continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple
factual “past”, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the
mother, is always- already “after the break”. It is always constructed
through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are
the points o f identification, the unstable points o f identification or
suture, which are made, within the discourses o f history or culture.
(Hall.237).

It is therefore implied that the study of any diasporie work imparts

knowledge o f linkages between the past and the future; at the same time

what makes the study even more interesting is the fact that the interplay

between the past and the present is creatively observed and interloped by

the present that actually witness the links of the ‘gone’ and the

‘upcoming’. The “Cultural Identity” that we talk about today is a

combination of the continuity with the past and the changes that have

taken place with the passage o f time along with its different experiences

due to migration or slavery or transportation or colonization. It is often

observed that the West has the habit of freezing the identity as it has done

with the African identity. The Africans are known by the West as the

primitives but the fact is that the ‘original’ Africa is no longer there

today. It has alsochanged with the time. Similar is the case with India,

perhaps, as the West still associates India with the snake charmers. India

as a country is known to them by the stories put before them by their

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forefathers during the Colonial Rule which still continues to be a

fractional and even fictitious part of the identity of India. But it is a

known fact that India has moved ahead progressively in all the aspects of

life. The country they knew is no more there, so it remains only in the

history as the past. It is in this sense that the cultural identity requires

retrospection as Frantz Fanon states:

W e must not therefore be content with delving into the past o f a people
in order to find coherent elements which w ill counteract colonialism ’s
attempt to falsify and harm ... A national culture is not a folk lore, nor
an abstract populism that believes it can discover a people’s true
nature. A national culture is the whole body o f efforts made by a
people m the sphere o f thought to describe, justify and praise the
action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in
existence. (Fanon. 188).

Today we cannot but fail to mention ‘The New World’ that is America as

the beginning of diaspora of difference, diversity and hybridity in the true

sense of the term. Today America is represented by the people who have

made it their ‘second home’.

Another prominent word, while discussing the diasporic experiences, is

‘hybridity’. On his discussions on hybridity, Homi K Bhabha introduces

the concept of ‘borders’. For him borders are not the ‘ends’ but are

important ‘thresholds’ full o f ambivalence as they are the point where

two places join as well as separate. According to Bhabha, border is

actually a gateway, a point of melting, a place of collapse where political,

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geographical, notional, psychological, social and even personal

preferences and practices o f the past and present, inside and outside are

no more paradoxical or contradictory asthey not only extend mutual

consent and cooperation but alsoguard their competence in constant play

o f one another’s prowess. It is in this sense that hybridity finds its

appropriate vicinity near such borders. Bhabha turns to Bakhtin and his

hybrid which denies cultural totalization:

The... hybrid is not only double-voiced and double accented... but is

also double-languaged;For in it there are not only two individual
consciousness, two voices, two accents, as there are (doublings
of)socio linguistic, consciousness, two epochs...that come together
and consciously fight it out on the territory o f utterance....It is the
collision between differing points of view on the world that are
embedded in these forms...such unconscious hybrids have been at the
same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with
potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for
perceiving the world in words.(Bhabha.58)

However, there is also a counter point found while discussing the term

‘hybridity’ in colonial discourse.Hybridity sometimes, is associated with

a sense of abuse for those who are the products o f mixed breeds.

However, since the concept o f hybridity occupies a central place in the

post colonial discourses, it is no more a term o f abuse but it is:

celebrated and privileged as a kind of superior cultural intelligence

owing to the advantage of in-betweenness , the straddling o f two
cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the
difference.(Hoogvelt. 158).

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For Bhabha, hybridity is the process adopted by the colonial governing

authority to translate the identity of the colonized(the other) within a

singular framework; however such exercise is futile as it fails to

producesomething either familiar or new.This new hybrid identity

emerges from the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the

colonized, and challenges the authenticity of any essentialist cultural

identity. Bhabha himself is aware of the dangers of fixity and identifies

when he says in an interview with Rutherford:“all forms of culture are

continually in a process of hybridity.” (Rutherford.211).

Furthermore, Bhabha introduces us to the ‘third space’ along with the

concept of hybridity. This ‘third space’, according to him, emerges out of

a tension between two cultures. In his essay ‘Cultures In-Between’, he

talks about the ‘partial culture’ which he describes as -“the contaminated

yet connective tissue between cultures.” He further explains “it is indeed

something like culture’s in-between, baffling both alike and

different.”(Bhabha.54).This ‘third space’ not only seems to be the

juncture of translations and dialogues, it also raises questions towardsthe

essentially rooted ideas of identity and the notional concepts surrounding

the original culture. Further explaining the importance of this ‘third

space’, Homi Bhabha in an interview with Rutherford states:

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 For me the importance o f hybridity is not to be able to trace two
original movements from which third emerges, rather hybridity to me
i f the Third Space, which enables other positions to
emerge. (Rutherford.211).

Thus this ‘third space’ marks a new beginning of possibility in terms of

meaningful identification and even productivity that the new identity

carries with it. This newer opening not only questions the established

notions of culture and identity but also provides new forms of cultural

meaning; and thereby it significantly suspends the limits of the

boundaries. The ‘third space’, therefore, is a place of opportunity for the

growth of fresh ideas and it rejects anything fixed, so it opens up newer

scope for fresh thoughts allowing us to go beyond the rigidity and limited

focus of colonial binary thinking. Instead of exclusion and rejection,

thenew space, thus, has the capacity and tendency to include and accept.

While discussing the ‘third space’, Homi Bhabha justifies his stand

substantially as his concept of hybridity is based on the idea that no

culture is really pure as it is always in contact with the other. According

to him, Hybridization is an on going process; it, therefore, cannot be

‘still’. The happenings on the borderline cultures and in-between cultures

have been prime concerns for him. For him the Location o f Culture is

spacial and sequential and the terms ‘hybridity’ and Timinity’ refer to

space as well as time.

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Can the Subaltern Speak!- a proposition raised by Gayatri Spivak is best

responded to by Homi Bhabha’s term ‘hybridity’.It is the concept of

‘diaspora’ that adequately explains the term ‘hybridity’ which in turn

points out the notion o f ‘in-betweenness’. The effect of ‘hybridity’

lessens the sense of ‘displacement’ that the term ‘diaspora’ refers to. The

term ‘hybridity’, thus serves as a bridge narrowing down the distance

between the West and the East, the colonizer and the colonized, the

Occident and the Orient.The construct of such a shared culture saw the

colonizer and the colonized being mutually dependent on each other.

Aiming at describing the identity of self and others, Bhabha says:

It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude

o f the symbols across diverse cultural experiences- literature, art,
music, ritual life, death... and the social specificity o f each o f these
productions o f meaning as they circulate signs within specific
contextual locations and social systems o f value. The transnational
dimension of cultural transformation— migration, diaspora,
displacement, relocation...M akes the process o f cultural translation a
complex form o f signification. The naturalized), unifying discourse o f
nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths o f
cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great,
unsettling advantage o f this position is that it makes you increasingly
aware o f the construction o f culture and the invention o f tradition.
(Bhabha.247).

The terms diaspora, displacement and relocation exhibit the dynamic

nature of culture. Since the historical narratives on which culture tries to

define itself are inconsistent, culture must be seen alongwith the context

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of its construction. Thus, the term ‘hybridity’ can be viewed as a

liberating power from the domination of colonizers forced upon the

colonized by the formers’ bounded definitions of race, language and

nation.

Due to the expanse o f immigration and with the increase in the hybrid

population across the world, today, we can say that the classification of

black and white no longer carry the same power structures and prejudices

that go alongside it; however the old labels still persist. The existence of

racism in a diluted but persistent form can be seen in the most liberated

and so called open society of the United States where in the year 2000,

options for multiracial identification were included the census. The

Presidential Election of Barrack Obama revealed, on one hand, that there

was a collective acceptance of the hybrid bodies; however, on the other

hand, he continues to be referred to as the first ‘African American

President’. His Presidency is evidential of the change that has taken place

in the acceptance o f the ‘other’ but his being called an African American

President still refers to the fact that the power of the racial labels still

continues even in the most modem society. Hybridity cannot be seen as a

conflict or struggle between two racial identities but it should be seen as a

constantly mitigating factor between spaces.

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Alongwith the concepts of identity, culture and race, even language has

been identified as a symbol of nation and a mode of exclusion and/or

inclusion.Frantz Fanon’s theory on the diasporic study addresses the

power of language in the formation of identity: “To speak... means above

all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (Fanon.17-

18). According to Fanon, by speaking the language of the colonizer, the

colonized accepts a role in culture and in this case, the language no longer

‘belongs’ to the colonizer but it relies on the colonized to shape it. As

With the language changes hands and the changing users render it

altogether different perspectives, it is always in a state of flux and cannot

remain the same; therefore, a paradigm shift in the meanings and

practices can be observed and experienced. The hybridized languages

have made new openings for multifarious studies in various branches of

learning across the world. Herskovils’ notion o f Syncreticism, Claude

Levi-Strauss’s theory of bricolage and creolization are some of the

examples that prove this point. In the post modem literature there is a rise

in ‘hybrid genre’ and one can sense that ‘hybridity’ is now a celebrated

term and is no more a marginalized and negative term and is accepted

form of literature today. In these new developments the purist notion

seems to be diminishing and the specific boundaries related to

‘belonging’ of the language to a specific area or place are fast dissolving.

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There seems to be a U turn as, today, the colonized is giving back the

crimes of the colonizer in the act of resistance in the latter’s own

language, and thereby, questioning the ownership of the language. It is a

force responsible in deconstructing the borders for the ehnic or the

collective groups. One can affirmatively say that ‘hybridity’ liberates us

from the stubborn boundaries of the society and at the same time permits

us to think and act beyond them.

Another significant aspect while dealing with the diasporic experience is

the concept of ‘home’. Whether it is forced or voluntary migration, one

leaves one’s own country and settles into a foreign land. This migratory

displacement leaves the migrant with the sense of homelessness and

rootlessness. The migrants miss their own native land or homeland. The

history shows that this craving for their homeland has been very acute as

with such displacements, there was no possibility of returning to what the

migrants identify as their ‘home’. The past experiences of ‘homelessness’

were that of nostalgia, as the distances between their motherland and the

new home could not easily be covered due to the then modes of limited

transportation facilities .Abdul R. JanMohamed speaks of four modes of

border crossings: the crossing of the immigrants; the colonists; the

scholar; and the crossing o f border by exile. The stance, says

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 3 S l&

JanMohamed, of an immigrant to the host culture is positive but that of

exile is negative. He writes,

The notion of exile always emphasizes absence of ‘home” o f the

cultural matrix that formed the individual subject; The nostalgia
associated with the exile often makes the individual indifferent to the
values and characteristics of the host culture.( JanMohamed.101).

This ‘homelessness’ according to Bhabha can be real as well as

metamorphical. He uses the word ‘uncanny’ which means ‘unhomely’, to

explain his homelessness,

I have lived that moment o f the scattering of the people that in other
times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of
gathering. Gathering of exiles and emigres and refugees ; gathering on
the edge o f ‘foreign’ cultures ; gathering at frontiers; gathering in the
ghettos or cafes of city centres : gathering in the half-life, half light of
foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency o f another’s language :
gathering the signs of approval and acceptance , degrees, discourses,
disciplines ; gathering the memories of underdevelopment , of other
worlds lived retroactively : gathering the past in a ritual or revival ;
gathering the present. Also the gathering o f people in the diaspora :
indentured, migrant, interned : the gathering o f incriminatory statistics,
educational performance, legal statues, immigration status.
(Bhabha. 139).

Bhabha has candidly observed the migrant experiences which are M l of

dualities. He brings out the uncanniness of the migrant experience

through a series of ideas like ‘half life’, ‘partial presence’, ‘gathering the

past’,’edge of foreign cultures’ and other such experiences that the

migrants go through. The migrants live a ‘half life’ in a foreign land as

they are not able to accept the new land completely. Their memories of
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homeland haunt them and many times they live reviving their past. This

experience of living a partial life is sometimes very disturbing for the

migrants. The second generation migrants do not, perhaps, have the same

nostalgic feeling as the first generation migrants have; however they, too,

are linked to their homeland through the stories they hear from their

parents. The picture of homeland created before them is based on what

they have heard from their parents. Salman Rushdie, an Indian by origin,

also talks about this partial identity of the migrants. In his book

“Imaginary Homelands” he states,

Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes w e feel that we

straddle two cultures ; at other times, we fall between two stools , but
however ambigious and shifting the ground may be, it is not an
infertile territory for a writer to oecupy.(Rushdie.l5).

This experience of being ‘in-between’ two cultures is what the diaspora

comes across in the foreign land. Sigmund Freud, a pioneer of the

psychoanalysis, offers the definition o f uncanny: “the uncanny is that

species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known

and had long been familiar”. ( Freud. 124). Giving this definition, Freud

makes the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ definitions equivalent. According to

him, it is through self observation and self objectification only thatthe

uncanny can be analysed and understood. As per the theory of

psychoanalysis, the uncanny is not something that we have control on and

50
nor can we access it directly. This feeling of uncanny as an involuntary

recurrence of the old and the familiar is very close to what Freud calls

‘repetition compulsion’ which actually refers to the way in which our

mind repeats the traumatic experiences in order to deal with them. The

psychoanalysts believe that the traces of the past experiences remain

present in the mind and they tend to surface in the present life of the

human beings. This uncanniness breeds a feeling of alienation in the

‘other land’.However, such a sense of alienation is not a problem but very

much a part of the diasporic experience. In fact, the sense of alienation

proves to be a driving force to re-evaluate our identities and it should be

considered as an opportunity. It does the job of opening up a space for us

to reconsider how we have come to be and who we are. Bhabha talks

about this sense of uncanniness of culture in the following manner:

Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary generalizations, its mimetic

narratives, its homologous empty line, its seriality, its progress, its
customs and coherence. But cultural authority is also unheimlich, for
to be distinctive, significatory, influential and identifiable, it has to be
translated, disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary, intertextual,
international, interracial. (Bhabha. 136-7).

Culture has a dual identity as the notions of it being homely, on one hand

and unhomely on the other always keeps it ever changing. The migrants

represent this dual nature of culture, since they are always looked at as

51
being tossed in between both: their ‘original culture’ and the culture of

the ‘new land’.

The diasporic experience cannot be expressed in a simple way. It is a

complex experience as it deals not only with the physical dislocation of

migrants from a place called ‘homeland’ or ‘native’, but it also deals with

the psychology of the dislocated persons; hence, it becomes a very

complex phenomenon. While dealing with the diasporic experiences, it

becomes inevitable to refer to the psychoanalysts so as to track the

behavioral patterns of the migrants. In order to understand and analyse

their experiences, one has to be aware of the role that their culture,

language and idea of nation plays. According to Julia Kristeva, a

Bulgarian psychoanalyst and philosopher, when we try to analyse a group

identity like a nation, we should not try either to cure nation of its ills or

to make the nation feel whole again. Instead, such analysis reveals that

every nation is always in process, and so is always open to new cultural

identities and forms. This openness in a way refers to the ‘hybridity’that

Bhabha talks about. Kristeva also talks about the uncanny relationship

with the self and describes an otherness that is always within the self:

The foreigner is within me, hence w e are all foreigners. If I am a

foreigner, there are no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not talk about
them. The ethics o f psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would
improve a cosmopolitanism o f a new sort that, cutting across
governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind
52
 whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness o f its unconscious-
desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible. (Kristeva.192).

Having analysed, Rristeva rejects the idea of any authority of the native

thrust upon the foreigner that is, the migrant. For her, we are all

foreigners even to ourselves. This realization would, perhaps, increase the

tolerance towards the ‘other’. Talking about tolerance, it should be noted

that the West was forced to reconsider its place in the world as the study

of the Sanskrit texts made them realize and eventually acknowledge the

presence and the eminence o f the other civilization. They realized the

similarity in the Sanskrit texts and their astounding qualities that brought

about an uncanny feeling; which despite being long denied its due

importance, is now making its presence felt. For Bhabha, “The nation fills

the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss

into the language of metaphor” (Bhabha. 139). The concept of nation or

the word nation itself arouses in us the feeling of patriotism, of home of

something one is proud of. For him nations are forms of narrations,

The linear equivalence o f event and idea that historicism proposes,

most commonly signifies a people, a nation, or a national culture as an
empirical sociological category or a holistic cultural entity. However,
the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on
cultural production and political production is the effect o f the
ambivalence o f the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy. As an apparatus o f
symbolic power, it produces a continual slippage o f categories, like
sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference’
in the act o f writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement

53
 and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure o f the liminality o f
cultural modernity. (Bhabha. 140)

Therefore, the theory of diaspora is a myriad o f multifarious themes that

at times seem contradictory to one another; however, a patient and

scholarly approach to the same would surely reveal that they in fact are

eye-openers to those who have, by dint of their global vision and

experiences, cultivated greater level of sensitivity and sensibility towards

the masses of people who continue to migrate and make the other world

their home despite having one of their own back at their native lands. The

theory of diaspora in itself is an experience o f not only being the other

one but also knowing the other ones, perhaps as one’s own or at least

making them one’s own. It is this fecundity of diasporic study that has

attracted scholarly attention of multidisciplinary experts and researchers

to explore meditative deliberations of people, notions, ideologies and

practices surrounding the world of diapsora across the globe. Among the

diasporas world over, the Indian diaspora has a leading edge in the sense

that it has not only experienced the tyranny of the colonizers but also

made a niche wherever they have settled across the globe. The Indian

diaspora has all the varieties to incite interests of academic and

multidisciplinary researches who have been engaged and engrossed with

its study in a rewarding manner. It has not only produced writers of

54
international repute, but also encouraged scholars to look at the

indianness with adequate intellectual reverence. From among the western

scholars, T. S. Eliot, Nobel Laureate and one of the most celebrated and

influential creative writers and critics of the 20th century, has

emphatically pronounced the echoes of the East especially referring to the

Indian heritage of culture and literary creativity. It is with his remarks

that the Diasporic experiences through diaspora writings with special

reference to Indian diaspora writers are worth mentioning. He has made

judgmental observations on the contemporary status o f the third world

immigrants:

The migrations o f modem times... have transplanted themselves

according to some social, religious, economic or political
determination, or some peculiar mixture o f these. There has been
something in the re-movements analogous in nature to religious
schism. These people have taken with them only a part o f the total
culture... The culture which develops on the new soil must therefore
be baffling alike and different from the parent culture: it will be
complicated sometimes by whatever relations are established with
some native race and further by immigration from other than the
original source. In this way, peculiar types o f culture - sympathy and
culture - clash appear.(Eliot.63-64).

The diasporic experiences essentially underline the partial culture brought

by the immigrant to the new land and resultant clashes of culture they

suffer from. The diasporic writings have a variety o f experiences to share

with the world. As we see variedness in the causes of migration, there is a

55
peculiar variedness seen in the expressions of the experiences in the

diasporic writings. These experiences are those of sense of rootlessness,

agony and pain arising out of homelessness, anxiety in the new land and

the nostalgia for their homeland. As the migrants share in common the

experiences of dislocation from their motherland, despite the differences

in their cultures, traditions and practices, they bond with one another

primarily on the basis of their similar status- that of migrants living on

foreign lands and have consequently formed diasporic communities.

When diasporic writings are talked about, it is found that these writings

are basically rooted in the native culture; hence the writers from specific

areas having specific cultures try to portray the same in their writings.

Such diasporic experiences enrich their writings. These writings are

creative outcome o f fluidity, conflict and instability that the writers must

have experienced being migrants. It is this anxious sense of dislocation

that is the characteristic of the expatriate writers.The diasporic writings

are unforgettable testimonials of the migrants as their works are results of

their human conditions, sufferings, complexity of their vision, and more

so, their ability to look forward without being able to forget the past. In

The Invention o f Canada :Literary Text and the Immigrant Imaginary,

Arnold Harichand Itwaru writes :

56
 The immigrant writer is not merely the author who speaks about the
immigrant experience, but one who has lived it, one whose response is
an irruption o f words, images, metaphors, one who is familiar with
some o f the inner as well as the outer workings o f these particular
contexts.(Itwaru. 25)

Relocation to the new environment means shedding off the protective

cover of the ‘known’ on the part o f the migrants who at once feel

vulnerable without the cover of the ‘known’. The immigrant writers have

lived and experienced this vulnerability; therefore, the feelings of

alienation blended with an acute sense of insecurity find a vent in their

writings.The process of migration in the recent times is seen more with

‘The Third World’ countries that saw the light of independence especially

after the end of the Second World War. On one hand the people of the

third world countries were absorbed in the newly found national identity

and on the other hand quite a few of them had to assume a new identity

away from their homeland.At such a crucial juncture o f establishing

identity in an age o f dilemmas, the process of migration for the people of

the third world countries including the Indian Subcontinent especially

seems to be a formidable task. Among the Asian countries, India has

significant number o f migrants and has thus created a profound impact as

far as Asian Diaspora and Asian Diasporic literature are concerned.

57
The entire South Asian Diaspora, according to Vijay Mishra, can be put

under two groups: the first one being the forced migrations on account of

slavery and indentured labour and the second being the voluntary

migrations of businessmen, professionals and students who have made a

foreign land their new homeland for better opportunities and money.

These two types of diaspora differ to great extent when we try to analyse

how the attitude towards their homeland is shaped and formed. This

difference may be due to the changed face of transportation as well as a

rise in the acceptance o f the identities of the ethnic groups and their

acceptance in the new land. This difference in the old and new diaspora is

very well brought out by Mishra as he puts it,

This narrative o f diasporie movement is, however, not continuous or

seamless as there is a radical break between the older diasporas o f
classic capitalism and the mid- to late twentieth century diasporas o f
advanced capital to the metropolitan centres o f the Empire, the New
World and the former settler colonies. (Mishra.422)

According to him, these two are “interlinked, but historically separated

diasporas”. The old and the new diasporas, according to him, produce

different literatures. This difference in their literature is due to the fact

that the reasons of migration for the old diaspora were different and were

mostly compulsions whereas the case is different with the new diaspora.

Today going out of one’s own country is mostly not a sad affair or any

type of compulsion. In most cases the reason is to go for ‘greener

58
pastures’. The old Diasporas experienced a kind of ‘break’ from their

homeland which was traumatic. This trauma was experienced as their

migration was a forced one and in most of the cases ‘returning back’ to

their ‘home’ was not possible. This increased their sense of loss as they

were in no condition to travel back to their motherland due to slow modes

of transportation and above all the lack of economic means to make

journeys back to their home. In most cases o f the old diaspora, it was a

one way journey where there was no return ticket. In the old diasporas,

distance played an important role. This distance was not only physical but

also psychological. Going away from the known land, known people,

known places to unknown land, unknown people and unknown places

was indeed difficult for them. These people who migrated from then-

homeland tried to freeze the image of their motherland as something that

is sacred in their minds. They revived their connections with their sacred

land in the memories of their past and remained emotionally connected

with it. The old diaspora carried with it a baggage which was full of

memories and things that not only reminded of their homeland but also

created a safe and secure place around them, so to say, a part of then-

motherland. Mishra in his “New lamps for Old” says:

Their homeland is a series o f objects, fragments o f narratives that they

keep in their heads or in their suitcases. Like hawkers they can
reconstitute their lives through the contents o f their Knapsacks: a

59
 Ganapati icon, a dog-eared copy o f the Gita or the Quran, an old sari
or other deshi outfit, a photograph o f a pilgrimage or, in modem times,
a videocassette o f the latest hit from the home country.(Mishra.68).

The old diaspora was cut off from the motherland but the new diaspora

has an easy access to the motherland due to the fast means of

transportation and the new technologies that have made this world a very

small place. Talking about the position o f the new diaspora, the fact that

they were not forced to leave their homelandmakes the migration process

less traumatic for them and, therefore, their adjustment to the new place is

somewhat easy compared to the old, forced diaspora. The new diaspora

writers have immigrated by choice and therefore there is no guilt found in

their writings. Looking at the present scenario, there is a lot of place for

such writers and their writings; as, there isa great demand for such

literature in the international market-A few years ago, this market was

occupied by English, European and American writers only; however,

today, the South Asians too have made their place in this market.

Through the process of globalization, there is an access to multiple

cultures and multiple choices of identities. The new diaspora is more

eloquent than the old one as its existence is accepted and acknowledged

across the globe. Prior to the discussion on the writers of the new

diaspora, it becomes essential to discuss the old diaspora writers so as to

bring out the variations in their writings.

60
After the abolition of the slave trade, a new strategy was devised by the

colonial powers; which was the indentured system. Through this system

they got the supply of labourers at very cheap rates from their colonies.

The Indian indentured workers called girmitiyas formed a major part of

the minorities in the West Indies, Malaya, Fiji, Mauritius and the colonies

of the East and South Africa. The epic experience of the Indian diaspora

is the girmit experience in the 1830’s and Gandhiji, the father of the

nation can be very well called as the ‘pehla girmitiya’ who tried to

organize these girmitiyas in South Africa and make them Politically

conscious community. These girmitiyas were subjected to racial abuse

and soon he realized that his place in South Africa was that of ‘a coolie

barrister’. ‘Coolie’ was used as common appellation for all the Indians.

The incident that took place in the train where he was insulted by a white

passenger changed his life and eventually of South Africa and India.

After the incident he thought about what he should do to fight injustice.

He writes in his autobiography-

I began to think o f my duty. Should I fight for my rights or should I go

on to Pretoria without minding the insults, and return to India without
fulfilling m y obligation. The hardship to which I was subjected was
superficial-only symptom o f the deep disease o f color prejudice. I
should try i f possible to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the
process.(Gandhi.94)

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This was in a way, his resolution to fight back and get justice. Giriraj

Kishore in Pehla Girmitiya talks about the same incident:

There is no greater insult than cowardice. Behind his humiliation on

the train, there was neither enmity, nor selfishness, but a pervasive
psychological hatred. W e are all part o f that. W hile livm g with this
pall o f gloom , w e can drill holes m this. (Kishore. 105-106).

Gandhiji, started the Indian Opinion, a weekly and poured his

experiences and his beliefs of truth and non-violence in the editions. In

his autobiography he states about this journal as an account of the

Satyagrah campaign and also of the real conditions of Indians living in

South Africa. Under one umbrella of Indian Diasporic community, people

from all castes joined as one voice. They came up as one nation in the

foreign land. He remarks in his autobiography

In face o f the calamity that had overtaken the community, all

distinctions such as high and low, small and great, master and servant,
Hindus, Mussalmans, Parsis, Christians, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Sindhis,
etc., were forgotten. All were alike the children and servants o f the
motherland. (Gandhi. 118).

The point to be observed here in context o f diaspora is that the concept of

homeland, motherland and nation, aroused patriotic feelings in the people

and they were ready to even die for the sake of it. The Indian tradition is

that of considering the ‘desh’ or nation as ‘bharat mata’ means India as a

‘mother’ and the sons and daughters of ‘ bharat mata’ are always ready to

die for her and fight for her self respect. It would be proper to quote
62
V.S.Naipaul who says that this sense of belonging to a common

homeland and the common experience of displacement and

colonialization, establish strong ties among these communities.In his

work, India: A Million MutiniesNow, he says:

cut off from India by distance,diasporic Indians developed something

they would never have known in India, a sense o f belonging to an
Indian community.(Naipaul.7).

This psychology of the people worked well in the fight for justice in

South Africa and it was possible for Gandhiji, a diaspora himself, to sow

the seeds of independence in South Africa.

While talking about the old diaspora, one of the names that is inevitable

to be mentioned is that of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-). He

is a Trinidadian- British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage o f Brahmin.

He is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empires’

colonialism. In the year 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for

Literature and has also won many other prizes. The main concern in his

writings is his changing relationship with his ancestral land India. There

is a shift of attitudes towards India that can be observed in his writings.

He is not able to disconnect himself from his past that is India and so tries

to relate himself with his ancestral land but in doing so he many times

feels dispelled by its several shortcomings. Discussing one of his well

63
known books An Area o f Darkness, one finds that he tries to discover his

roots and his identity in India, a place from which he has been distanced

and alienated culturally and emotionally. Being bom in Trindad, his

connection with India had been the stories heard from his parents about

their ancestral land. He therefore did not have a first hand experience of

what India was, and so, he romanticized the image of India in his

childhood from whatever stories he had heard about Indiain his book An

Area o f Darknes he confesses about his image of India-

And India had in a special way been the background o f my childhood.

It was the country from which my grandfather came, a country never
physically described and therefore never real, a country out in the void
beyond the dot o f Trinidad, and from it our journey had been final
(Naipaul.27)

For him ‘India’ was in the few articles that his ancestors had brought

from India such as the brass vessels,gods’ idols and pictures, a rained

harmonium and other such things that had the value of belonging to India

and therefore had great importance. The romanticized image of India

through his childhood stories was shattered completely when he visited

India for the first time. He shares his experience with the readers in his

book An Area o f Darkness :

The India, then, which was the background o f my childhood, was an

area o f imagination. It was not the real country I presently began to
read about and w hose map I committed to memory.(Naipaul. 41)

64
V. S. Naipaul comes back again and again to India in his writings and his

love-hate relationship with the country is revealed in his confession in his

book India: A Wounded Civilization?India is for me a difficult country.

It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be

indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close

and too far”. (Naipaul.8). There is a kind of difficulty that he faces in

understanding India as, on one hand he is no more a part of it but on the

other hand he very much feels that there is something within him that is a

part of India which he can not do away with. In his third book, as his

experience with India changes, his expressions also change. The picture

of this changed India that he observes on his visit is noted in India: A

Million Mutinies Now. He observes,

Many thousands o f people had worked like that over the years, without
any sense o f a permanent drama, many millions; it had added up in the
forty years since independence to an immense national effort. The
results o f that effort were now noticeable. What looked sudden had
been long prepared. The mcreased wealth showed; the new confidence
o f the people once poor showed. One aspect o f that was the freeing o f
new particularities, new identities, which were as unsettling to Indians
as the identities o f caste and clan and region had been to me in 1962,
when I had gone to India only as an Indian.(Naipaul.9)

Besides the above mentioned books, V.S. Naipaul has written novels like

The Mystic Masseur{\951), The Suffarage o f Elvira{1958), Miguel

Street^1959), The Mimic Men(\961) ,In a Free State(1911) , A Bend in

65
the River{\919), The House fo r Mr.Biswas(1961), The Enigma o f

Arrival{\9%l) and his latest novel H a lf a Life(2001) are the works where

he , through his characters he unfolds his own innerself as a diaspora

himself. Most of these works deal with the themes of his homelessness

and his feeling of loss of identity. Asha Choubey comments on his

expertise in dealing with these issues,

Critics have spoken o f his feeling o f congenital displacement o f having

been bom a foreigner, a citizen o f an exiled community on a colonized
island, without a natural home except for an India to which he often
returns, only to he reminded o f his distance from his roots. Naipaul’s
protagonists grow away from their native culture and their growing up
depends on their growing away.(Choubey.227)

His experience with India at first is that of a distant one but he is not able

to brush aside his ancestral past and finds himself ultimately identifying

himself as a part of India. All the books, written by him have India as the

center of interest. Most of the diasporic writers have dealt with the notion

of homeland and thereby have discussed their relationship with a country

that is at once so far away and at once so near to them.

Among the old diaspora writers another name that comes up is that of

Moyez G. Vassanji, better known as M.G.Vassanji. He is a person whose

identity is a combination of his experiences of three continents. He

celebrates hybridity as he is characterized by a complex ethno cultural

identity that incorporates multiple countries like Kenya -his birth place,
66
Tanzania -where he grew up, India- his ancestral land, Canada and USA -

where he studied and settled. He has never been rigid about his identity as

he believes that India, Africa, Canada, USA all are a part o f him, his

identity. He visited India for the first time in 1993 and that is when he

tried to rediscover his roots. Speaking about the life o f diaspora in an

interview with Chelva Kanaganayakan, he says,

There was a very strong tendency to look down upon and even deny
the Indian connection. This was a colonial influence. But once I went
to the US suddenly the Indian connection became urgently insistent:
the sense of origin, hying to understand the roots in India that we had
inside us. (Kanaganayakan. 129)

In an interview with Murali Kamma he talks about the difference

between himself and N aipaul:

V.S.Naipaul came from a different, older generation than mine. He left

the Caribbean before they got independence. So they were much more
detached- they could not go back to India. But our parents could go
back. The Asian culture was much closer to us, the identification
easier. Also I think we have different personalities. I don’t hold myself
back and look at ‘them’. I identified so closely (with India) which was
the shocking part of my tap. I have so many close friends, some of my
closest friends are in India.(Interview by Murali Kamma)

While Naipaul has displeased Indians with his writings, Vassanji is

gentle with them. Vassanji has written novels like The Gunny

Sack(1989), No New Land (1991), The Book o f Secrets{1994), Amrika

(1999), The In-Between World o f VikramLall (2003), The Assassin’s

Song (2007), The Magic o f Saida(20l2) also a travel memoir ‘A

67
PlaceWithin : Rediscovering India ’(2009). In Ms works he deals with the

situations of the East African Indians. He also talks about second

immigration and how their lives are affected by these migrations. The

migrants are caught between two or more cultures and they live on

borderland. The fact that they do not belong solely to any one place,

creates a new kind of identity the ‘trishanku’ symbolizes. Talking about

the diaspora writings he says in his interview with Murali Kamma that

the real India is not represented in diaspora writings, “You got upper

middle class stories, but not the heart and soul of India. Those (real)

stories are told in Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam. You didn’t get a good

Indian representation because of lack of a good translation.”(Interview

byMuraliKamma).According to Mm the real India lives in the stories

written in the regional languages and we still have to bring them to the

limelight by good translations.

Diaspora writers like Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie are a part of

new diaspora writers. Rohinton Mistry is an Indian bom Canadian writer

in English.He was bom in Mumbai, India. Almost all Ms novels and short

stories are obsessed with the life stye of tMs city. He has to his credit

novels like Such along Journey (1991) which has been made into film, A

Fine Balance (1995), Family Matters (2002) and a collection of Short

Stories- Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987). His books deal with the Mdian
68
social and economic life and the characters belong to Parsi Zorastrian

families that allow us to observe the traditions, customs and religion of

this community in a minute way. His first novel, Such a Long Journey

came into limelight and became an issue o f debate and ultimately was

removed from the syllabus. The reason was that it contained derogatory

statements about some of the leading politicians of Bombay. The second

novel A Fine Balance also has political linkages but they are from within

as the novel deals with the Emergency period in India when Indira

Gandhi was the Prime Minister. In this novel also he is critical about

Indira Gandhi though he never mentions her name but mentions her as the

Prime Minister of India. The novel deals with four characters who come

from different backgrounds and are brought together be the economic

forces that were shaping the face of India. His third novel Family Matters

also is situated in Mumbai and deals with a Parsi family. The domestic

crisis in the middle class family is well brought out as they try to deal

with the illness that has gripped the old man. Dealing with the illness and

the cost of treatment, that is too much for the middle class, the novel

deals with the changes that take place in the family due to religion, age,

death and wealth. Rohinton Mistry, a Parsi is guided by his experience of

double displacement. Being a Parsi, a minority community in India, many

69
times his writings deal with the marginalization that he has felt in the

dominating Hindu culture o f India.

Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981) is a trend setter as far as the

dealing o f the subject o f homeland is concerned. He portrays a chaotic

India. It is an attempt to recreate the ‘past’ in imagination and to change

the way we tell our stories to the world and also change our way o f

looking at the world. In Imaginary Homelands (1992) he writes “It’s my

present that is foreign, and the past is home albeit a lost home in a lost

city in the mists o f the lost time”. (Rushdie.9).The chaos regarding the

identity o f a diasporie person is incorporated in his writings. Sharing his

diasporic experience he writes in his book Gunter Grass: On wrting and

Politics,

A foil migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his

place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself
surrounded by beings whose social behavior and code is very
unlike,and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what
makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and
social norms have been three of the most important parts of the
definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all
three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of
being human. But I want to go further than such literalistic
discussions; because migration also offers to us one of the richest
metaphors of our age. The word metaphor, with its roots in Greek
words of bearing across, described a sort o f migration, the migration
o f ideas and images. Migrants- bome-across humans- are metaphorical
beings in their very essence, and the migration, seen as a metaphor, is
everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all
migrant peoples. (Rushdie. Ix-x)

70
By declaring that we are all migrants, Rushdie, challenges the idea of

home and identity and thereby demanding a shift in the definition of

identity and nationality. Rushdie sees a migrant as a loser, as, with the

dislocation he loses his identity and the ‘home’ and is put to a foreign

land where everything seems to be unhomely or ‘uncanny’. In such a

situation, he tries to find new definition of life and tries to survive on the

new land.

The old diaspora writers considered ‘homeland’ as a sacred place that

was not to be questioned, but, it is not so with the new writers. The new

diaspora is a more settled diaspora and hence adopted more to their new

home. Many times they compare their new home with their ancestral

home and argue about the reasons for leaving it. Not only that these

writers many a times cater to the western readers and present before them

the India they want to see and are anxious to know about. The dangers

hidden in the presentation of the diasporic representations of India is very

well brought out by Makarand Paranjape,

Diasporic representations o f India can be harmful and misleading in at

least two related ways. First, they might end up usurping the space
which native self-representations are striving to find in the
international literary market place. Secondly, they may contribute to a
continuing “colonization” o f the Indian psyche by pandering to
71
 Western market-tastes which prefer to see India in a negative light.
Both these dangers arise not necessarily from a design on the part o f
the expatriates to “sell” India, though the latter possibility cannot be
dismissed too easily. Rather, they are bom out o f the peculiar cultural
politics o f the diaspora. (Paranjape.19)

Makarand Paranjape talks about the new diaspora writers who are not

‘emotional’ but ‘practical’ about their homeland. The key word for them

is ‘success’ and many times it so happens that in order to cater to the

tastes of the West, who still prefer to see India as a poor and backward

country, portray India as they like it. The fact remains that they are a big

success also. They are selling India which perhaps the old diaspora

writers never did.

The ‘position’ of the diaspora writers is really interesting. They are in a

way a link between their ancestral home and their new home. They

translate ‘India’ to the West and at the same time open the West before

the readers back home. Their portrayals of their marginalization,

rejections and the stories of the insults they have suffered in the foreign

country are sent back home. The responsibility to tell the true story is on

their shoulders.The diasporic writers draw special attention for the reason

that they belong to a special category of writers who are by default

credited with multiculturalism and transnationalism.

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Among diasporic writers, the women writers draw special attention as

their sensibility, consciousness and perceptions provide altogetherly

different dimensions and rather vivid perceptions of those fragments of

human realities which are characteristically specific to the writings of

diasporic writers. The fact that the women’s writing has been considered

an integral part of creative writing in the 20th century literatures of the

world; the women writers from the Asian subcontinents have made their

presence felt significantly on account of their exposure to the world

outside their homeland as well as their grounding and orientation in the

cultural traditions of the homeland.Before talking about the women

writers of India, it is very important to know how women, facing all odds

from the society, started expressing themselves through their writings.

Virginia Woolf talks about the profession o f writing for women, saying:

both the Army and Navy are closed to our sex. We are not allowed to
fight. Nor again are we allowed tobe members o f the Stock exchange.
Thus we can use neither the pressure o f force nor the pressure o f
m oney....W e cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again
although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the Press-
the decision what to print, what not to print- is entirely in the hands o f
your sex.(Woolf. 23)

The importance of money as a power is what Virginia Woolf has talked

about many times. She insists on economic independence for women to

have a stand in this male dominated society. In the past, a woman was

73
denied education. Freedom of expression was not her right. Women’s

education has always been a controversial subject for this male dominated

world because, with education a woman gets liberated and this liberated

state of any woman is not acceptable to the society. Not resisting the pre

set norms of the society, outrightly favouring men, was considered to be a

quality of ‘good woman’. As women started getting educated and started

thinking, they realized the injustice done to them in every walk of life

andas a result demanded for justice. Women’swriting initiated the whole

feminist movement that provided impetus to the process of discovering

‘self. And with the help of hundreds of women across the globe, who

resisted to the male domination, there have been changes in the various

national policies regarding the rights of women. The set structures of the

society are questioned and broken by women and today, because of the

‘beginnings’ done by these women we have successful women in every

walk of life. This beginning is well expressed in Virginia W oolfs talk

given to the women audience:

You have won rooms o f your own in the house hitherto exclusively
owned by men. Y ou are able, though not without labor and effort, to
pay the rent. You are earning your five thousand pounds a year. But
the freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still
bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.
H ow are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it?
With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?
(Woolf.297)

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A lot of research is being done on such women writers who have given

priority to writing. As a result Women’swriting has raised issues related

to the patriarchal constructs of the society like marriage and family.

Virginia Woolf in A Room o f One’s Own writes -

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing

the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure o f man at twice
its natural size. (Woolf.33).

Today, a woman is not a magnifying glass for the world but a mirror that

shows what you really are. It is true that women’s writing has a very slow

development graph but it is due to reasons like - very little access to

education and less number of women writers.An important point to be

made here is that, their writings went unnoticed and were dismissed as

worthless being limited and confined to the domestic life only. Not only

this, but, their subordinate place in the society also was responsible for

not being noticed as women were considered less rational and un­

intellectual compared to their male counterparts.

But gradually the concept ‘woman for hearth and man for war’ is losing

its worth.Today, we see a lot of women expressing themselves through

their writings and they are also noticed and appreciated. Along with the

quest of a woman to tell her story, the woman o f today, also has many

other stories to put before the world. With the exposure to the world and

75
new technologies, a woman writer is no more confined and limited in her

subjects. Not only that, being a woman and being more sensible than man

at times, she delicately handles the subjects related to relationships with

greater psychological insight into everything that concerns human

behavior and nature.

George Eliot in her essay “Woman in France: Madame de Sable”

observed -

W e think it an immense mistake to maintain there is no sex in

literature. Science has no sex: the mere knowing and reasoning
faculties, if they act correctly, must go through the same process, and
arrive at the same result. But in Art and Literature, which imply the
action o f the entire being, in which every fiber o f the nature is
engaged, in which every peculiar modification o f the individual makes
itself felt, woman has something specific to contribute. (Eliot.8).

This special something is what only a woman can give in her writings.

And it is this specific thing that makes her writings different from that of

men’s writings.

Indian writings in English have developed to a great extent today but if

the history of women writers is assessed, it dates back to middle of the

nineteenth century when Torn Dutt penned some extraordinary work in

English at a very young age. Other names also follow in the list like

Krupabai Satthianandhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Rajalakshmi Debi,

Cornelia Sohrabji, Swama Kumari Ghosal and Sarojini Naidu who have
76
carved a placed for themselves in the field o f Indian English Fiction.

Their works encompassed themes like relationships, society, identity,

conflicts, patriotism etc. The tradition of writing is carried further to new

heights today by the women writers of this age. Today there are famous

names like Anita Desai, Manju Kapur, Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Das,

Shashi Deshpande, Shoba De and many other women writers in India

who have successfully probed into female heart and mind in a language

that is read by most part of the world. Not only these women writers of

India but ,the women writers of the Indian Diaspora such as Bharati

Mukheijee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Rau

Badami, Ruchira Baneijee and others,have, with their feminine sensibility

and that ‘something specific’ explored the process called immigration in

their works. Their works, keeping women in the center, try to expedite

their experiences of being a woman immigrant and the loss they suffer of

separation from homeland. Women, being more sensitive about personal

relationships, the religion and customs and traditions, suffer more on the

new homeland. Their stories are based on the loss of their cultural

identities, sense of alienation, homelessness, uncertainty of their life in

the new surroundings, the complexity that arises due to the female psyche

in the context of her own self and the West that is so foreign to them in

terms of way of living, customs, rituals, dressing, attitude towards

77
relationships and their total attitude towards life in general. Not only the

physical displacement due to immigration is explored but the

psychological impact of this dislocation on the psyche of the women

immigrants is also discovered and expressed vigorously yet delicately.

These new writers have, in their writings, constructed a new world

wherein the characters, who are dislocated geographically, suffer cultural

dilemma and, what is noticeable in these writings is that the characters

suffer from a kind of suffocationcaused not only due to the new

surroundings but also due to the inability to express themselves because

of the language problem.lt is not onlythe language or culture that is

difficult for these characters to adjust to, but, one of the other major

problems for these immigrants is that of food. It takes a lot of time for

them to adjust to the new food habits which vary drastically from the

native. These diaspora writers have, through their characters, tried to

express the phenomenon called cultural migration, which affects the

women migrants more, as they suffer from the psychological dualities

that haunt them in the foreign land. Their haunting past, their attachment

to their motherland makes them feel isolated, homeless and insecure. All

these impacts constitute the psyche of the immigrant. The identity of the

immigrants is constructed by their associations with their root culture,

language, the myths of their country, the history of the motherlandand

78
their personal relations in the new land. Their gender ideologies and

racial prejudices continue to have deep rooted impressions.As a result

their existence becomes complicated because of their consciousness of

the two cultures and the ‘in-between’ life they live.

The Women Diaspora Writers from India have largely focused on the

problems the characters face during their adjustment in the new society.

Some of their characters come out very well and are able to come to

terms with their new life much more easily while there are some who fail

to adjust or the process of change goes very slow with them. Among

these characters are the women characters who, with their psychological

problems, are handled with utmost delicacy and fineness. In order to

elaborate the above mentioned state of female writers, a brief study of

some of the prominent women writers becomes necessary to understand

the complexities o f the process called migration.

Bharati Mukheeijee, one of the most known of the Indo-Canadian

writers, has written novels based on the consciousness of the Indian

women immigrants. Her well Known novels are The Tiger’s

Daughter{\912), Wife(\915\ Jasmine(1989), Holder o f theWorld(l993%

Leave it to me(l997), Desirable Daughter(2004) and The Tree

Bride(2006). Besides the mentioned novels, she has also penned short

story collections Darkness (1985) and The Middle Man and other
79
Stories{1988). In one of her interviews, she unfolds her experience as an

immigrant-

W e immigrants have fascinating tales to relate. M any o f us have lived

in newly independent or emerging countries... When we uproot
ourselves from those countries and come here, either by choice or out
o f necessity, w e suddenly must absorb two hundred years o f American
history and leam to adapt to American society. I attempt to illustrate
this in m y novels and short stories. M y aim is to expose America to the
energetic voices o f the new settlers in this country. (The Times o f
India, 1 Oct, 1989).

Bharati Mukheijee presents the world of immigrants who live the

‘hybrid’ life. Mukheijee’s women immigrants are mostly well educated

middle class persons who suffer racial discrimination as well as gender

discrimination. The themes focused in her writings are that of ‘nostalgia’,

‘cultural dilemmas’ ‘moral values’, ‘quest for self, and ‘relationships’. A

woman, wherever she lives and in whatever relationship she is in, adjusts

more than a man under any given circumstances. As a daughter, as a

wife, as a mother, as a sister or even as a lover, a woman is always a

‘giver’ rather than a ‘taker’. This adjusting nature is always a plus point

when she has to adjust to a new land. Bharati Mukheijee categorically

says in an interview with Michael Connel:

The kind o f women I write about... are those who are adaptable.
W e’ve been raised to please, been trained to be adaptable as wives and
that adaptability is working to be woman’s advantage when w e come
over as immigrants. (Connel.25)

80
The protagonists of these women writers, straggle between their Indian

identity and the new assumed American identity. The experience of

going through this straggle is painful but it cannot be done away with.

Through their protagonists, these writers try to portray their own

experiences as immigrants. Their own ‘in-betweenness’ and their

nostalgia about their homeland is seen while the characters juggle

between two cultures. Even if the writers are second generation

immigrants, there is a fragment of their homeland in each one of them

that connects them with it. In Mukheijee’s Desirable Daughters, one of

the female characters, Tara, coming from a conservative Bengali family,

who marries and immigrates to America, had dreamt of a life that was

liberating, “the life she had been waiting for... the liberating promise of

marriage and travel and the wider world”(Mukheijee. 81). Tara had

dreamt that the life after marriage in America would be different from

India, but, to her disappointment her husband turns out to be a typical

Indian male and denies her the freedom o f doing the kind of work she

likes. The feeling o f suffocation and the shattered dream of being

independent makes her take divorce from her husband. She becomes a

single mother but, one incident in her life brings her back to her husband

and they reunite realizing each others faults. Going back to Calcutta for a

change connects her, once again, with her cultural roots and restores

81
calmness in her life. This novel is Tara’s search for identity. She wants to

be completely free from any Indian baggage in America and her attempts

to be westernized move her away from her roots and she suffers the

trauma of suffering alone on the foreign land. Andy, her live-in lover

signifies the west, who tries to destroy her, and her husband Bishwanath

signifies the homeland. It is her re-connection with the past and her ex-

husband Bishwanth that restores peace in her life thus realizing the

importance of her cultural roots and her ethnic past.Mukheijee admits in

her book Days and Nights in Calcutta:

Identity is the external layer related to colour, race, class, social

position, economic status, nationality and a whole lot o f other outward
indicators, while the self is the deeper layer, the core self, constituted
through cognitive process, reflections o f memory, education, media
exploration and exposure. It is also constituted by the fall o f choice
amongst other things. It is affected by an awareness o f identity and
comes into being through social dynamics. The diasporic journey into
the past or to the homeland is often in search o f wholeness.
(Mukherjee. 287)

Female identity and culture are inter-related. Brought up in a

conservative background and burdened with the responsibility of care

taker of the culture and traditions, a woman, especially an immigrant

suffers the pain of living in between the traditional life of the country and

the changed life of the new land where in, her imbibed culture and

traditions have very little space in the new life style. The conflict and the

82
contrast in most of the things, beginning from food habits to culture and

traditions, is what puzzles the immigrant woman as she is not able to

decide what to do with the Lndianness that is within and the West that is

without. They cannot totally absorb the west and cannot totally reject the

east. The female protagonists like Tara in The Tiger’s Daughter, Tara in

Desirable Daughters, Dimple in Wife, Jyoti in Jasmine are characters

who present the cultural dilemmas and sense of alienation confronted in

the foreign land. Their attempt to liberate themselves on one hand and

their bondage with their roots on the other hand, puts them in a difficult

and confusing position.Bharati Mukheijee presents her characters in a

state of dilemma faced due to the contrast in their life situations. The two

contradictory cultures are before them and they are trapped between

being a typical Indian wife and the independent woman of the west. The

writer observes the mental condition of the immigrants and surmises that

it is not the distance only that affects them but it is also the ‘time’ factor

that plays an important role. For the immigrants, the present is always

linked with the past through their memories of their homeland and the

distances created due to the time generating feelings of loneliness and

sense of loss. The immigrant psyche is in a state conflict andthis conflict

is the dilemma. There is no way out except to suffer this state, as

withdrawal is not the solution and there is no escape to this trauma that a

83
person suffers beingaway from his homeland. The temporariness that

prevails in America is understood by the immigrants after their stay there

for a short duration. Jasmine, one of the characters of Bharati Mukherjee

observes about America:

In America nothing lasts, I can say that now and it doesn’t shock me,
but I think it was the hardest lesson for all me to leam. W e arrive so
eager to leam, to adjust, to participate, only to find that monuments are
plastic, agreements are annulled. Nothing is forever; nothing is so
terrible or so wonderful that it won’t disintegrate. (M ukheqee.160)

Plastic signifies the temporary nature of everything. It is the modem

world where we have houses of concrete, but the ideas, values, morals,

the way we live, all is temporary and undergoes change with the situation,

place, time and age. It is not integration but the disintegration that

prevails everywhere.

Chitra Baneijee Divakamni is also a well known name in the Indian

diaspora writers. Her novels - The Mistress o f Spices(\ 997), Vine o f

Desire (2002),Queen o f Dreams(2004) and collection of short stories not

only present a dilemma of location and dislocation but also try to

synthesize the dilemma. Chitra Baneijee presents, “the deepest fear and

trauma faced by women in India and here (USA) show them emerging at

least in many cases as stronger and self reliant woman”(Kamath,

Interview).

84
It is the assimilation in the life of the characters that is portrayed. They

suffer the loneliness, feel alienated in the foreign land but at last they

assimilate with the new found culture. They embrace the change in life

and are not rigid characters. Her well known novel, The Mistress o f

Spices, is on the lines of magic realism. The experiences of the

immigrants are presented in the backdrop of myth, magic and

romance.Tilo, the narrator of the story holds magical powers related to

spices. She runs a store of spices and this store is a meeting place for all

the immigrants. It is true that we, the people of India love spicy food and

the spices that we have in India are very special to us and the proof is of

course the packets of these spices being taken to the foreign lands even

today. Coming back to the novel, America is the land of dreams for the

people who have chosen this place as their second home. The stories of

her immigrant customers revealed to her in the store, becomes an outlet

for her own fears and uncertainty of being an immigrant herself. In one of

her interviews with Katie Bolick, Chitra Baneijee says, “Moving away

from home culture often allows a kind of disjunctive perspective that is

very important- a sleight sense of being an outsider being out of

place.”(Bolick, Interview).

In the novel Queen o f Dreams, Chitra Baneijee, presents her characters

not as submissive and invisible immigrants but they are the ambassadors
85
of the Indian culture. Rakhi, one of the characters takes pride in asserting

and promoting the Indian culture in America. She says :

The American public w ill leam what a Bhangra remix is, and it w ill
electrify their souls. Sonny w ill make more m oney and more. His
name w ill sneak its way up the charts. His fans w ill adore him, men
and women both. (Divakaruni. 181).

Rakhi, identifying herself with the immigrants and feeling one with them

says with pride,

Some wear western clothes, and some are in Kurta Pyjamas but what I
notice most o f their faces... they hint at eventful pasts lived in places
very different from this one, difficulties and triumphs, I can’t quote
im agine...they are m y countrymen. We share the same skin colour.(
Divakaruni.217).

This sharing of the common history, the common past of the country,

common roots and common culture is like our umbilical chord that binds

us to our country. Chitra Baneijee in her novels as well as short stories

has discussed through various characters, the innate bonding with the

nation. She encounters the west and the east and her approach is that of

assimilation and towards formation of a global identity.

Uma Parameswaran, also a diaspora writer of second generation, belongs

to the group of Indo-Canadian diaspora writers. Her works like The Door

86
I shut Behind Me (1990) and Dear Didi, My Sister (1989) deals with the

nostalgia that the expatriates suffer from. She deals with the concepts of

‘home’ in her writings. Uma Parmeswaran believes that nostalgia has a

place of its own but it should not paralyze the immigrant’s capacity in

adopting and adjusting to the new surroundings. In her work The Door I

Shut Behind Me, Trishanku and Other Writings (1998), she explores the

difference in the experience of being a diaspora male and a female. Her

character Chandrika is more open to the new place and its people than

Chander, her husband. This difference in the adaptability in the nature

may be due to the traditions of the society where a woman is supposed to

leave the house where she was bom and has to go with her husband to his

house and consider and make it as her own. Because of this a woman is

able to love and adapt her two homes without conflict. For Chander it is

difficult as he narrates: “Like the mythological kings, Trishanku, they

stood suspended between two worlds, unable to enter either and making a

heaven of their own”.(Parmeshwaran.l01).Uma Parmeswaran believes

that if there is discontent in the new place, you tend not to adjust and end

up feeling lost. She declares: “The exile is a universal figure. We axe

made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our irrelevance of

function in a society whose past we can’t alter and whose function is

87
always beyond us” (Parmeshwaran.106). What marks her writings is a

balanced view of the diasporic experience.

The panoramic survey of Indian women diasporic writers discussed

herein (above) reveals that the fictional world of these writers is distinctly

different from not only their male counterparts but also those writers who

have not seen the best of both worlds- the home land and the home away

from home. The Indian women diasporic writers meritoriously differ in

their writings on several accounts including education, professional

exposure, extensive travelling, refined tastes, transnational sensitivity and

better understanding of cross cultural identities and practices; many of

these qualities not found among native writers writing in regional

languages. The Indiarmess in literature has certainly achieved newer

milestones owing to the creative efforts of Indian women diasporic

writers who, intum, have achieved success at two levels: in the first place,

as champions of the voice o f women and secondly as Indians who have

succeeded in their settlements abroad. Such multiple recognition,

doubtlessly speaks of their merits both as individuals and as writers

too.Having discussed the above Indian women diasporic writers, it is

worth including two more eminent Indian women writers- Jhumpa Lahiri

and Manju Kapur who have made significant contribution in the field of

women’s writing with diasporic angle being one of their focal points.
88
Manju Kapur was bom in Amritsar, the capital of Punjab State,

India.Brought up in a North Indian Hindu family, she grew up within a

culture with a blend of traditional and liberal practices. Unlike millions of

other women of her age and time, she was fortunate to have firm and

continuous parental support to obtain her post graduation in English from

Dalhousie University located at Halifax, Canada.After gaining

international exposure for her education, she preferred to be grounded

back to India when she married Mr. Gun Nidhi Dalmia. She chose Delhi

as her base, for both, domestic as well as professional life. She has been

teaching English Literature at Miranda House College, New Delhi, also

her alma mater as this is where she completed her graduation.D$?o///

Daughters, her first book published in 1999, won the prestigious

Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and received accolades especially from the

literary circles of Europe and SouthemAsia.In the year 2011, her another

novel, The Immigrant was short listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian

Literature. She has been a writer of substancial influence through her

fictional worlds that narrate the tales of Indian women characterizing then-

real life circumstances in order to bring out the shades of Indianness.

Apart from Difficult Daughters and The Immigrant, her other novels

include A Married Woman, Custody and Home that make her fictional

world full of varieties in terms of characters, situations, issues,

89
conflicts,attitudes and sensitivity,pertaining to the womens world

especially. As a writer, she champions the cause of women on the basis of

her own exposure to international education, professional and economic

independence, experience o f individual freedom and a stable married life.

Thus her treatment of themes and issues related to the lives of Indian

women is realistic, unbiased, mature, thorough and appealing. She is a

woman writer with clarity, simplicity and modesty since her novels are

never chargedwith extremism of any sort that other women writers are at

times accused of and blamed for.

Jhumpa Lahiri, nee Nilanjana Svedeshana Lahiri, exhibits

multinationality, multiculturalism and ethnic multiplicity in her own life.

Bom in London, England to Bengali parents of Indian origin, her family

moved to the US when she was just two. She went on living in Kingston,

Rhode Island. She graduated with BA in English Literature from Barnard

College in 1989. Her bright academic career includes M.A. in English,

M.F.A. in Creative Writing, M.A. in Comparative Literature and PhD in

Renaissance Studies from the prestigious Boston University. She began

her professional career with teaching creative writing at Boston

University and Rhode Island School of Design. She married Alberto

Vourvoulian Bum, a journalist and settled down in Rome, Italy. She has

two children - Octavio and Noor.

90
From her brief biographical details it is obvious that she is an individual

with varied human experiences, exceptional exposure to various cultures

and multinational background. All this has contributed a great deal to the

fact that as a writer she has been received with meritorious acceptance

and critical acclaims. She has been recipient of the following awards and

recognitions

• The Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her collection of short

stories Interpreter o f Maladies

• O Henry Award in 1999 for her collection of short stories

Interpreter o f Maladies

• PEN/Hemmingway Award for Best Fiction of the Year in 1999 for

collection of short stories Interpreter o f Maladies

• Her Short Stories: ‘Interpreter of Maladies’, The Third and the

Final Continent’ and ‘Nobody’s Business’ selected as one of the

Best American Short Stories in the year 1999,2000 and 2002

respectively.

• Received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and

Asian American Literary Award for her story ‘Unaccustomed

Earth’in the year 2008 and 2009 respectively.

91
Compared to other women writers, Jhumpa Lahiri has greater luxury of

diverse professional and personal background. Her richer and wider

exposure to various countries and lifestyles help her look at various

aspects of the Bengali culture found in her fictional world with seasoned

maturity and flexibly balanced approach as a writer. It is surprisingly

noteworthy about her fictions that all of them revolve round the life of

various Bengali families whether in India or abroad. Her real associaltion

with the Bengali culture and her literary fascination o f the same make her

belong to the category of Indian diasporic women writer despite her rare

exposure to the real Indian life. Following are the titles of her works

studied here for this research: The Namesake (novel), The Interpreter o f

Maladies (Collection of Short Stories), The Unaccustomed

Earth(Col\ection of Short Stories) and The lowland(novel) which has

been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize of the year 2013.

92