Diasporic Experience in the Novels of Indian Diaspora
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International Journal of Scientific & Innovative Research Studies ISSN : 2347-7660 (Print) | ISSN : 2454-1818 (Online) The Quest for Roots : Diasporic Experience in the Novels of Indian Diaspora ARUN GULERIA VALLABH GOVT. COLLEGE, MANDI In the modern scenario, ‘diaspora’ is viewed as a experience. If a person has no home then there is term carrying many interpretations. The diasporic no question of his being alienated anywhere. It is experience today projects an experience of many in the home where a person’s roots are fixed and a overlapping. When we talk of the diasporas as person without a home has no place to live in and being transnationals it implies the multiple has no survival with true existence. Migrated and geographical spaces inhabited by them. People dispersed people not only experience their living outside their homelands in some way try and physical journey but have sweet and bitter effect maintain a connection with their homeland on their psyche with the sense of retrieving through history, culture and tradition that that memories of their original home. they religiously edify in their host lands. They look Life is said to be an endless journey, and back from the outside, not letting go off the \’home, it has been said, is not necessarily where baggage that they carried when they first left their one belongs but the place where one starts from.” native shores. The diasporic view their hostland or In The New Parochialism: Homeland in the writing adopted land as a temporary stopover destination of Indian Diaspora Jasbir jain avers that “the word and hence are not able to establish and emotional ‘Home’ no longer signifies a ‘given’, it does not bonding with the new land. necessarily connote a sense of ‘belonging’, instead “Even in the age of communication, the place it increasingly foregrounds a personal choice which Where your history and heritage is, and where may the individual has exercised, and ‘home’ and be your childhood was , when you are taken away ‘homeland’ are for all practical purposes separable from there it is bound to do something to your units. Uma Chaudhary enlists the inherent psyche and personality. This is an increasing oppositional tendency in the construction of documented but also imaginatively, creatively homeland associated with the Diaspora people reconstructed for it to be understood.” (Sareen) who travel far away for their homeland in search The above line by S.K. Sareen bring from of a better life when she says: “the realist Home Everywhere: The Consciousness of Diasporic discourse of home relies on a long standing Belonging, about the fact that it is home which conceptual structure in which two figures are gives birth to the sense and feeling of balanced and constructed as opposite: the figures homelessness, rootlessness and homesickness. of belonging and exile. ‘Home’ here signifies the Home is main reason behind any diasporic nation, cultural values, social values and spiritual Vol (3), No.IX, September, 2015 IJSIRS 13 International Journal of Scientific & Innovative Research Studies ISSN : 2347-7660 (Print) | ISSN : 2454-1818 (Online) values; home represents the nation and its the Diaspora is undoubtly the space of overlapping principles. Above all ‘home’ signifies one’s roots, of boundaries. But these boundaries do not existence’. Home often keeps both the terms necessarily lead to polities of heredity; therefore, it ‘homelessness’ and ‘homesickness’ together, and constitutes a politics of segregation, an innate during exile both the endless feelings stand ability in the diasporic individual to reclaim his inseparate to each other. identity as well as construct the other that gives It is the ‘Diaspora’ which comprises the stability to his self. history of slavery, indentured labour, the material Different critics give different descriptions aspects of migrant labour and livelihood, along of Diaspora to signify Indian Culture and its with abstract notions like homelessness, location and dislocation abroad. homsickness, memory, nostalgia and melancholy. Diaspora basically used to refer to the Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture, dispersion of Jews after the Babylonian exile in 586 remarks that “,, although the Únhomely’’ is BC. In modern times, however, the term is applied paradigmatic colonial and post colonial condition, to describe any group of people who are so it has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, if dispersed. Harsha Patadia finds one of the reasons erratically, in fictions that negotiates the powers of of dispersion and migration in multiculturalism in culture differences in a range of trans-historical Migration and Relational Balancing between the sites.” Cultures when she says, ‘One of the reasons for the In case of failure in adjustment and want of better life, education, stable economy or location in abroad or other province with inhabit attraction of materialistic life.”8 culture ethics, a dispersed or migrated person But living in multicultural society and being reaches at the state of dilemma whether he has characterized by and ethnic identity, the Indian managed himself to escape from his original communities abroad are required to negotiate the culture or has made him able to locate him in new problem of ethnicity. They have to experience culture atmosphere. His dilemma gives birth to the ethnic discrimination that causes a great abstract notions of homelessness and dislocation of mind and heart. Stendra Nandan homesickness, because neither one is able to avers in The Diasporic Consciousness: From Biswas escape from one’s original culture nor can one to Biswasghat.” Interrogeting Post-colonialism locate oneself in that cultural atmosphere where Theory, Text and Context that “The Modern Indian one is residing currently. Gorffrey Hartman is right Diaspora- the huge migration from the when he writes in The fateful Question of Culture subcontinent that most important demographic that ‘homelessness is always a curse.6”Thus, dislocation of modern times: it now represents an dislocated circumstances are often reflecte in exile important force in world culture.”9 literature. Atanu Bhattacharya is of the view in Post-colonialism brought an historical Everything is there: Relocating the Diasporic Space period where multicultural and cultural in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies that “it discrimination and cultural dislocation issues is no ‘dislocatedness’ that defines the Diaspora, concerning were highlighted alone with the sense but the ‘locatedness’. He further emphasizes that of hybridity, alienation, identity “a sense of 14 | Vol (3), Issue IX, September, 2015 IJSIRS International Journal of Scientific & Innovative Research Studies ISSN : 2347-7660 (Print) | ISSN : 2454-1818 (Online) rootlessness and the longing to search for some Trinadian by birth, English by virtue of his Oxford centres of shelter which writers and critics such a education , Naipaul has given credence to Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldna, inheriting something of his insecurities of the Theodore Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Derekk Waleoll transplanted colonial with an ambiguous identity. Deleuze,, Guattari, V.S. Naipaul and Salman The Indian background has become part of mixed Rushdie have contributed a lot to describe culture.” diaspora as a multidisciplinary field and later For the present research paper the works emphasized its cutlureal perspectives. The by three male and two female writers of Indian contemporary Indian diasporic writers, such as V.S. Diaspora have been selected with aim to study Naipaul, Haqnif Kureishi, Michael Ondaatje, Uma their perception of distinct diasporic experience. Paremshwarm, Meena Alexander, Bharti The works selected are V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds, Mikherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Gloria Anzaldna, Army Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Rohinton Mistry’s Tan, Maxine Hong Kinston, Amitav Ghosh, Hari Family Matters, Chitra Banerjee’s One Amazing Kunzu, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kavita Deswani, Sara Sulegi, Thing and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Agha Shahid Ali and Salman Rushdie explore the One of the male diasporic writers, V.S themes of culture consciousness, rootlessness, Naipaul has gone through expatriate experience in alienation, homelessness and dislocation in their his real life. He is imbedded with pain of his works. Novelists like Naipaul, Rushdie, Vikram displacement. Therefore, he reflects and social Seth, Anita Desai Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistrey, conflict in A House for Mr. Biswas; expatriate Jhumpa Lahiri have made a mark while residing sensibility in his non-fictional works The Middle abroad. Passage , The Area of Darkness, and India: A The modern Diaspora Indian writers can be Wounded Civilization. Rootlessness, alienation and grouped into two distinct classes. One class psychological defences in status, power and sex in comprises of those who have spent a part of their The Mimic Man; memory and the myth of origin life in India and have carried the baggage of their and disorientation of identity, sensibility and native land offshore. Salman Rushdie, Amitav sensuality in Half a Life. Howerer, V.S. Naipaul Ghosh, Rhhinton Mistery, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, takes up more serious issues relating to Trinidad in Chitra Banerjee, were all born in India and became his two novels The Mystic Masseur and The permanent residents of foreign counties. The other Suffrage of Elvira. Both the books depict the class comprises those who have been bred since microcosm of Hindu Immigrants with multicultural childhood outside India. They have had