Assistant Professor

English

NAS College

 Meerut, U.P., India 

"Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools."

-Salman Rushdie

Abstract:

Many Indian diasporic writers play an important part in developing Indian English Literature. They are often preoccupied with the nostalgic elementsas they try to fit in a new culture. Although the culture and language of diasporic writers have changed with the contact of new cultures, these writers always try to write about their native culture. The writings of diasporic writershelp us to understand multicultural relationships, and in this way, the literature breaks the boundaries among countries and cultures.

The word diaspora refers not only to physical displacement but it also refers to a sensibility in which nostalgic alienation and sometime cynical celebration are deeply engrossed. Diasporic communities include many displaced and relocated individuals who leave their country and settle in new locations for social, political, or economic reasons.A diaspora is a large population of individuals or ethnic groups compelled or persuaded to migrate from their native ethnic homelands to other regions of the world.With a desire to reclaim the past, writers of the Indian diaspora encompass every continent and part of the world. Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kiran Desai, Uma Parmeswaran, Bharti Mukherjee and others significantly differ from one another in their thematic preoccupations and literary styles. In the world of Indian writings, the term diaspora is taken as the loss of identity. The aspect of alienation brought on by various circumstances is present in diasporic works and is strikingly displayed in the books written by diasporic writers. In their works, the migrant protagonists experience a dreadful dilemma and agonising sensations of divided identities, suppressed emotions, and displacement that cause them to become alienated from their families, societies, and the outside world.These characters go on symbolic excursions that emphasise the pointlessness of all human endeavours and, in turn, establish the ultimate absurdity of human life.

Keywords: Displacement, Diaspora, Alienation, Loss of Identity, Multicultural, Separation, Dilemma, Rootlessness.

Since diaspora is a worldwide phenomenon, it is necessary to compare the characteristics of a particular diaspora's identity in various nations. The Indian diasporic writing is a distinct field supported by many male and female authors. Indian writers have been marching worldwide since their country's independence, putting strong stamps on other soil and yearning for a more lush and bountiful future. Both male and female writers from the Indian diaspora are significantly influencing Indian English literature.Many Indian women writerslivingabroad must fight for acceptance in the West. Their talent as authors is attested to by their ability to accomplish it. However, even after experiencing literary success in the West, they are forced to assume the contradictory roles of change agents and cultural guardians. Although being an Indian woman writer in the West is freeing, it also raises identity and cultural belonging issues. The Indian diasporic writings portray the myriad problems brought about by the experience of migration and diaspora, such as dislocation, friendlessness, rootlessness, fragmentation, racial discrimination, marginalisation, identity crisis, cultural confrontation, and many more.

The more recent writers of the Indian diaspora are Bharti Mukherjee, Kiran Desai, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Uma Parmeswaran. These writers have diasporic feelings about their motherland, but also the feelings of acceptance and rejection manifested towards them by India herself. Alienation, isolation, sufferings of humans, suppression of women, man-woman relationships, and emancipation of women are some of the common themes on which the women writers in India wrote. The present chapter attempts to analyse the theme of desolation, alienation, and isolation of humans in the selected works ofdiasporic writers.

The first and the youngest diasporic writer whom I have taken here is Kiran Desai. She is the most talented writer of the Indian diaspora. She is a citizen of India and residing permanently in the United States. Though she was born in New Delhi in a reputed family of the noted author Anita Desai, she later moved to the United States of America. There, she studied art and literature with great interest.With her own immigrant experience, she portrays the helpless Indians who wish to have the great American Dream come true. Desai's debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, saw daylight in 1998 and was hailed by notable figures like Salman Rushdie. Her other novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2006.

The Inheritance of Loss is a magnificent novel that illuminates the pain of exile and many ambiguities of postcolonialism with cultural displacement. Here, Desai tries to portray "What happens when a Western element is introduced into a country that is not of the West'. It was seen during the colonial days of the British and can be seen at present,' with Indian's new relationship with the states". (Bookbrowse.com)The present book ruminates back and forth between Kalimpong, a tiny part of the Himalayas, and the streets of New York City. Moreover, it comprises cultures, religions, generations, and different faces. Kiran Desai creates an elegant thought and study about families, the loss of each member must confront alone, and the lies we tell ourselves to make memories from the past more palatable. At the centre of the story is a beautiful teenage girl named Sai Mistry, the orphaned daughter of an English-educated Indian judge. She lives with her maternal Cambridge-educated grandfather, Justice Jemubhai Patel, at Cho Oyu in the city of Kalimpong.Since the death of her parents in a car accident in Moscow, she came to live with Jemubhai. Jemubhai seems to be very cold-hearted towards his friends and family; when he studied at Cambridge University, he was not as friendly with his fellow Indians. The only person he truly loves is his dog,Mutt. Now, Jemubhai considers himself more British than Indian and believes that hardworking but impoverished people like his cook, who hopes for a better life for his son Biju, are the driving force in his life.

Another important character is Biju, the cook Panna Lal's son, an illegal immigrant living in New York City. His story alternates with the story of Sai Mistry living in India. Biju suffers a lot to meet his father's dream. His character deliberately reveals the diasporic articulation. He tries a variety of jobs but is forced to work illegally in the United States. Through the character of Biju, Kiran Desai presents the status of illegal immigrants and the feeling of alienation that the expatriates often experience.

On the other hand, Sai Mistry lives with her grandfather in India. She falls in love with her Maths tutor, Gyan, a Nepali Gorkhan decedent. Her love for Gyan fades as he grows older; they separate due to their social status. Sai belonged to a formerly powerful, educated family living in the West. Gyan's ethnic Nepalese family lives in poverty. She, too, suffers identity crises.Moreover, at the end of the novel, we find inequalities between the two cultures. Despite his father's tall stories of his wealthy life in New York, Biju lives in the same squalor he hoped to leave when he came to the country. He represents a man who goes to meet the American dream and is exploited and becomes hopeless, dislocated, and alienated. He works for almost nothing there. Biju longs for home; sustaining oneself and remaining alive is a daily struggle. As a result of dealing with many different cultures, Desai displays various characteristics in The Inheritance of Loss, such as life's humour and brutality, passionate commitments, and delicate emotions. The book is a haunting look at the pain of refugees' experiences abroad. The novel provides an insight into the overwhelming feeling of humiliation experienced by ethnic groups who stand on the global dias of America to have a better future.

The next prominent diasporic author is Uma Parameswaran. She is a well-known name among the Indian diasporic writers.She is an Indian poet, playwright, and short-story writer. She was born in Chennai (Madras), raised in Jabalpur, and later migrated to the U.S. Currently, she teaches English at the University of Winnipeg. She has dedicated a significant portion of her writings and literary career since coming to Canada to forge a distinct South Asian Canadian Diaspora.Her writings focus on the experiences of immigrants in Canada. She is a sensitive spectator of the changing urban milieu, and her writing intimately examines the issues of migrated people. She wrote many well-known works like- Sons Must Die(a play centred on the partition of 1947), Meera,Sita’s Promise, Dear Deedi, My sister, and Rootless Nut Green Are the Boulevard Trees. Her most recent collection, What Was Always Hers, delves deeper into character relationships among South Asian Women.

 Her debut novel, Mangoes on the Maple Tree, covers the background of Winnipeg, Canada. The story of the novel revolves around the members of the Bhaves and Moghe family of Canada. They have been living there for almost eight years. The present novel covers the three generations of citizenship and their dilemma of being a Canadian diaspora.The goodness of the family is at stake with the cultures of two different countries. They find it hard to establish their individuality through their choices. In the present novel, Uma Parameswaran deals with the issues of alienation, nostalgic feeling, racism, hybridity and rootlessness.

The parents SharadSavitri Bhave and Anant-Veejala Moghe represent the first generation. Their elder children Jayant-Jyoti and Vithal Moghe belong to the second generation. The protagonist of the novel is Jyoti, daughter of Bhaves.The third generation includes the younger siblings Krish Bhave and Priti Moghe; their connection with India is very far away, too distant and unclear. The theme of alienation is vivid throughout the novel Mangoes on the Maple Tree. Sharad's character is dominated by alienation.He feels completely isolated and lonely in Winnipeg due to losing his earlier job,community, and environment. He has been a nuclear scientist at Trombay in India; however, due to his segregation from the dirty politics in the institute. He resolves to migrate to Winnipeg. Here, he becomes an Estate broker. He is unlikely about his isolated self in the host land because he feels every face is unknown. His dilemma is that he cannot live with the unknown and unpleasant people of the host country. The theme of alienation, being a stranger in a foreign land, is prominent throughout the book.

Another reason for the immigrant sense of alienation is the unequal treatment provided to them. Jayant aunt Veejala resigns from her jobwithout the family's consent because her professional life as a nuclear scientist is male-dominated. Here, she feels isolated, alienated, and dominated. She decides to go to India to enjoy more freedom and liberty in her homeland.

Uma Parameswaran’s diasporic consciousness and multiculturalismemerged from her novel Mangoes on the Maple Tree.She recreates the atmosphere of nostalgic feeling, homelessness and the consequent agony faced by her characters. In the end, her characters gradually rise above their alienation and work for assimilation into their new culture. They remember their ‘homeland’ in various ways by remembering old myths, telling and retelling many versions of the stories from the great Indian books to the children, cooking Indian food at home and maintaining a relationship with their homeland. Uma Parameswaran’s finest achievement is ending the isolation and silence of her immigrant people by giving them a place and voice in her writings.

Chitra Banerjee is a rising star of Indian English Literature. She belongs to the group of Indian Diasporic writers who explore diasporic issues with a keen observance. She was born in Calcutta and received her primary education there. She spent the first nineteen years of her life in India. After her marriage, shemoved to Sunnyvale, California, in 1989 with her husband. She keenly observes female issues like women’s identity, their position in society, male dominance, etc. She had a keen interest in women-related issues and worked with Afghani women refugees and women from dysfunctional families, as well as in shelters for battered women. Chitra Banerjee has insisted on being read not as an Indian or expatriate writer but as an immigrant writer whose literary agenda is to claim that newcomers from the Third World are improvising America.

Divakaruni’s novel Sister of My Heart(1999) explores the themes of marriage, relationship, and love-bonding between two sisters. This book is an expanded version of Divakaruni’s earlier short story ‘Ultrasound’ in The Arranged Marriage. The story of the book spins around two cousins Anju and Sudha Chatterjee who are born a few hours apart from each other on the same day. Since birth, Sudha and Anju have shared a close bond in ways even their mothers cannot comprehend. Both sisters love each other very much. Urged into marriages, their lives take sudden opposite turns, with Anju in India and Sudha in America. However, the women find that, despite the distance that has grown between them, they have only each other to turn to. They took birth in a very conservative upper-middle class home consisting solely of women-mothers, aunts and the maid. Although their personalities and ambitions contrast, they are close friends and soul mates. Sudha is more beautiful and more ambitious than Anju. She dreams of a romantic marriage and motherhood based on Hindu fables and legends. On the other hand, Anju is somewhat physically unattractive, a good learner and a rebel by nature. She dreams of higher education rather than a romantic marriage. They both lost their fathers on a ruby-hunting expedition that Sudha's father had planned. Sudha feels guilty for her father's death. In turn, she compromises her love for Ashoka. She drops the idea of her elopement with Ashoke because it might break Anju's marriage. Sudha renounces herself to an arranged marriage with a weak-willed man, whom his widow mother dominates.

Though miles apart, both the girls face the same alienation, isolation, and a feeling of loss in their marriages. Sudha is desperate for a child, just to call someone as her love. In America, Anju feels that Sunil is a mysterious person. He seeks for his privacy and does not tell her about his whereabouts. There is a sharp contrast between the lives of both the cousins. On the one hand, Sudha spends her whole day performing household duties as a dutiful wife. On the other hand, Anju drives freely, performs outdoor work independently, and studies her favourite subject in college.

Due to the very hectic schedule of her day andmental stress, Anju suffers a miscarriage. Sudha and her daughter Dayita arethe only hope that would give her the energy to forget the loss of her baby. On the way to liberty, Sudha again refuses Ashoke and his love because now she is unsure if she would be happy to try herself to a man's whims again. She becomes a rebel in the world of man. She finally prefers "A future built by women out of their own wits, their own hands". (p.117) All these experiences in Anju’s life changed her entirely, and she began her journey towards herself. A few years in America transformsher into a rebel, a modern new woman. Her shrinking memories of India make Sudha realise that even their memories are marooned on separate islands. The alien land seems to create the immigrants' need for assimilation and transformation. However, behavioural changes are hardly acceptable in the new culture.

Anju shares a room with one of her friends from the writer's club, but their belonging to different lands could not make a comfortable companionship between them. She always wants Sudha close to her to share and understand her fully. Anju feels tingles in her fingertips like pins and needles when any of her American friends criticise her heritage, which she loves a lot. Their everyday talks are so different that she always feels expatriate among them.Sudha engages herself in the service of an old Indian man who is living with his son and his American wife. She feels his pain to be an immigrant and promises to take him back to India. He feels humiliation, desolation, and alienation here. He wants to return to his land (India). The foreign land has badly affected his health. He suffers more psychologically rather than physically. Sudha always tries her best to keep him happy. She leaves her daughter, Ditya, to play with him. She cooks Indian meals for him, calls him Baba, and spends a lot of time with him.

A study of both the sisters' lives exemplifies the experiences of the expatriates and shows how cultural assimilation is far from reality for both the natives and the immigrants. The women who migrated feel the displacement more intensely than men, but they use migration as a step towards their freedom and individuality. Though it is troublesome for them to detach themselves from their native country and customs, they still adapt to the new culture and try to create harmony with the new surroundings. America offers freedom but at the price of losing a stable, perhaps privileged identity.

Bharti Mukherjee is a post-modernist diasporic writer of Indian English literature. With the publications of her early novels, she has successfully created a niche for herself among the prominent diasporic writers. She was born in Calcutta and later moved to the United States of America to attend a two-year creative writing workshop. There, she met her future husband, Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer. Thus, she was caught in the conflict between the two cultures of the East and the West, which was the primary concern of her early writings. After living in Canada for some years, she and her husband settledin New York. Like many of her contemporaries, she has taken up the problems and experiences faced by Indian immigrants in the United States of America or the Western world. Her works explore the themes of rootlessness, frustration, homesickness, and the dilemma of being an expatriate.Wife, Jasmine, and The Holder of the Worldare some of her famous works, which reflect the full view of the metamorphosis of her women protagonists.

With the publication of her novel Jasmine(1989), Bharti Mukherjee asserts her transformation from a writer of 'Diaspora' to a multicultural one. The present novel continues with the theme of the search for identity by the protagonist, Jasmine. In Jasmine, Bharti presents a female character marked by a change in her name and attitude to lead her life. Jasmine is anIndian woman born in Hasnpurand migrated to America after some years. Throughout the novel, Jasmine faces many issuesand survives those painful conditions. Eventually, she traps herself in the catastrophe of identity, and brutal reactions start from her behaviour. Jasmine's life is affected by both physical and psychological issues. Jasmine is on a never-ending journey to describe, seek, and see bright ways of her life that are different and unique from conventional ones. Gradually, Jasmine realises the change in herself. Indira says:

“The pull between the opposing forces does not intimidate her and rather excites her. Amidst the opposite immigrant domestics who suspended between the two worlds, Jasmine feels proud that she is finally getting rooted within the new world”. (Indira,86)

Bharti’s work demonstrates features of the quest for identity and self-searching. In this novel, the central character recounts the idea that Indian femininity undergoes many changes as it emerges from the rural background of the Lahori peasant family in the Jalandhar region. The story of the dislocation and relocation of the main character, Jasmine, continues with her transformation from Jyoti to Jasmine, to Jase, to Jane, according to the circumstances. Through the character, Jasmine Mukherjee throws light on the challengesIndian women faced before they could change their centuries-long situation.They would only revolt once they were familiar with their rights and self-identity. The story of Jasmine demonstrates the multicultural, multiracial fabric of the globalised society and the complicated issues of self-identity and culture. Elizabeth Bronfen writes:

 “The letter J serves as a sign for the dialect of a progressive engendering of identities as these bars already existing identities, putting them under erasure without consuming them. Jasmine’s dislocated others speak out a self-conscious and self-induced effacement in the voice of resilient and incessantly hybridity.” (Bronfen, 79)

The novel highlights that integration, acculturation, and accommodation are crucial in a heterogeneous society. The main character, Jasmine, represents a new generation of women who wish to experience female emancipation and is known for her rebellious nature. The novel's feminist viewpoints have tried to examine the different representations of women. Jasmine represents her life's journey towards realising who she truly is. Her journey represents the restless search of a woman without a place to call home who is irritated by a dismal feeling of solitude everywhere.

Conclusion:

Diaspora has been an enigma, which causes an insubstantial loss on all sides in many ways. All diasporic literature has tried to re-evoke that unforgettable trauma suffered by people across borders. With elements of verisimilitude and humanity, all the selected writers can project life-affirming attitudes, making reading their writings enjoyable. It is apparent from the above discussion that all the selected writings have successfully created a new discourse by bringing the loss of being an expatriate before us. Through the objectification of the dilemmas andstruggles, aspirations and inspirations, paradoxes and perplexities in the charactersof their novels, all the novelists have enriched and enhanced our understanding of the 'being' and 'nothingness' of life. 

References:

1. Agrawal, Beena.Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A New Voice in Indian English Fiction.New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributers. 2003

2. Crane, Ralph. J. of Shattered Pots & Sinkholes: Female Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Span.1992

3. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove Press, 2006

4. Dhawan, R.K. ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora. New Delhi: Prestige Books. 2001

5. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Sister of My Heart. New York: Blacks swan.(1999)

6. Jain, Jasbir. Writers of Indian Diaspora. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. 1998

7. Mukherjee, Bharti. Jasmine. New York: Grove Press.1989

8. Parameswaran, Uma. Mangoes on the Maple Tree. Lincoln Universe. 2006

9. Parameswaran, Uma,“Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees” Sac lit Drama Plays by South Asian Canadians. IBH Publication. 1996

10. Sharma, Vijay K and Neeru Tandon. Kiran Desai and Her Fictional World. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. 2011