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Chapter I

Introduction

Indian writing in English is a voice in which India speaks.

Indian writing in English is greatly influenced by the writing in

England. In its own way Indo-Anglian literature has contributed to

the common pool of world writing in English -- the major partners in

the enterprise being British literature and American literature.

Indian writing in English has emerged as a distinctive literature.

Indo-English literature has been regarded (i) as part of English

literature; (ii) as part of Commonwealth literature; (iii) as part of

Indian literature; and (iv) as a representative Indian literature that

crystallizes and synthesizes responses and traditions in ways that no

single Indian regional literature perhaps can.

Indian English Literature refers to the body of work by writers in

India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native

language could be one of the numerous languages of India.

Indian English literature has a relatively recent history and it is only

one and a half centuries old. The earliest specimens of Indian English

fiction were tales rather than novels proper. Kylash Chunder Dutt’s

A Journey of 48 Hours of the Year 1945 appeared in The Calcutta

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Literary Gazette on 6 June 1835. In it, the author narrates the story

of an imaginary unsuccessful revolt against the British rule a hundred

years later. The first proper English novel is Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864). It is a melodramatic story of

the trials of a long suffering middle class wife at the hands of her

callous husband and is obviously designed to point a moral.

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is Indian in terms of its

storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and in

English and is responsible for the translations of his own work into

English. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a writer of non-fiction is best known for

his novel The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) where

he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal, a poet,

translator, publisher and essayist, translated the entire

Mahabharata into English. By 1930, Indian English Literature was

more than a century old. Then came a sudden flowering when the

Gandhian age (1920-1947) had reached its highest point of glory

during the Civil Disobedience Movement of the thirties. The nationalist

upsurge had stirred the whole country, making it acutely conscious of

its present and its past and filling it with new hopes for the future.

A society compelled into self-awareness provides a fertile soil for

fiction. Three major Indian English Novelists -- Mulk Raj Anand,

R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao began their career during this phase.

During this period Indian English fiction discovered some of its most

significant themes such as the ordeal of the freedom-struggle,

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east-west relationship, the communal problem and plight of the

untouchables, the landless poor and the economically exploited.

A new dimension was added to the novel of social portraiture

when R.K. Narayan began his series of Malgudi novels with

Swami and Friends (1935). During the Gandhian movement,

politics was virtually the daily bread of the age. Raja Rao’s

Kanthapura (1938) is easily the finest evocation of the Gandhian age

in Indian English fiction. With Anand’s Untouchable (1935), the

Indian English novel becomes truly experimental in fiction.

Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) is a powerful study

of life in an Assamese tea-estate.

Two of the best novels about the Gandhian civil disobedience

movement in the early thirties are K.S. Venkataramani’s Kandan the

Patriot (1932) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938). The Second World

War period in India, the growing chasm between India and Britain, the

Bengal hungers, the Quit India movement, and the mounting

frustration and misery are dealt with in novels like N.S. Phadke’s

Leaves in August Wind (1947) Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many

Hungers (1947), R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)

and Kamala Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury (1957).

History as a theme of creative fiction seems indeed to exercise a

special fascination for many an Indian novelist of yesterday and today.

Romesh Chander Dutt’s The Slave Girl of Agra (1909) and

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Sir Jogendra Singh’s Nur Jahan (1909) are historical romances.

Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) and

Four Chapters (1934) present the issue between ends and means in

politics in the context of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth

century. Another type of fiction which made a fairly early appearance

was the historical romance. Prominent examples are T. Ramakrishna’s

Padmini (1903) and A. Madhaviah’s Clarinda (1915).

Novels were written on the partition horrors also. One of the

most satisfying imaginative records of the partition is

Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956). In Balachandra Rajan’s

The Dark Dancer (1959) also we get towards the end, glimpses of the

partition horrors. Manogar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964)

explores fully the origins of the two-nation theory and presents in

some detail the sheer frenzy that possessed people in Punjab in

August 1947.

The urge for social reform was a significant aspect of the

nineteenth century Indian Renaissance. Therefore it became an

important theme in some early Indian English fiction. R.C. Dutt’s

The Lake of Palms: A Story of Indian Domestic Life (1902)

strongly advocates widow-remarriage. Peasant life is the theme of Lal

Behari Day’s Govinda Samanta or The History of a Bengal Raiyat

(1874). The revised and enlarged version is entitled Bengal Peasant

Life (1908). The novels of social criticism and social protest also form

a distinctive group. Sir Jogendra Singh’s Nasrin (1915) is an attempt

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to expose the life of self-indulgence characteristic of some of the

nawabs. Hari Singh Gour’s His Only Love (1929) is a study of the

consequences of the emancipation of Indian women. Ahmed Ali’s

Twilight in Delhi (1940) is a picture of Muslim life in modern Delhi.

A. Madhaviah’s Thillai Govindan (1916) is a portrait of a young

intellectual who rebels against the mere formalism of what passes for

religion. A. Subramaniam’s Indira Devi (1934) decries the validity of

reformation in the shape of inter-racial marriages, inter-caste dinners,

and so on.

The fictional study in Life’s Shadows (1938) and

A Daughter’s Shadow (1943) by Kumara Guru are a mild protest

against westernization. S. Nagarajan’s Athawar House (1939) also

deals with a protest against westernisation. V.V. Chinthamani’s

Vedantam: The Clash of Traditions (1940) is again a study of the

impact of western culture upon a traditional south Indian family.

Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen (1965)

(translated into English by V.K. Narayana Menon) is a poignant record

of the life of the sea-faring folk on the coast of Allepey fringing the

Arabian Sea. S. Menon Marath’s the Sale of an Island (1968) is

about a group of people who live in an island near Kuttanad. They are

suddenly faced with the startling prospect of eviction from the place

that has been their home for generations and so they feel almost

defenceless.

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By a sheer effort of imagination, some novelists tried to bring to

life the hoary Rishis of the ancient times. In K.M. Munshi’s epic novel,

Bhagwan Parashurama (1946) there is a magnificent re-creation of

the Vedic and Epic ages, and Rishis like Vishvamitra and Vasishta,

come back to life. G.V. Desani’s All about H. Hatter (1948) is a novel

in the stream of consciousness technique. Two women novelists,

Shakuntala Shrinagesh in her The Little Black Box (1955) and

Anita Desai in her Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Voices in the City

(1965), have also made use of the stream of consciousness method of

narration.

We have detective novels like S.K. Chettur’s Bombay Murder

(1940) and Kamala Sathianadhan’s Detective Janaki (1944);

philosophical novels like Dilip Kumar Roy’s The Upward Spiral

(1949) and Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and

The Cat and Shakespeare (1965); novels of school life like

R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and Muriel Wasi’s

Too High for Rivalry (1967). R.K. Narayan is a writer who has

contributed to Indian writing in English over many decades and who

continued to write till his death. Similar to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex,

Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi.

Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie,

born in India but now living in the United States. Rushdie with his

famous work Midnight Children (1981) ushered in a new trend of

writing. He used a hybrid language -- English generously peppered

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with Indian terms -- to convey a theme that could be seen as

representing the vast canvas of India. One of the leading recent

novelists, Arun Joshi is preoccupied with the theme of alienation.

The hero of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) is alienated

from his middle class culture, which makes him run away from

civilization and join an aboriginal tribe. Vikram Seth, author of

A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses purer English and more

realistic themes.

Women are the natural story-tellers even when they do not write

or publish. The emergence of women writers during the last quarter

of the nineteenth century is of great significance as it marks the birth

of an era which promises a new deal for the Indian woman.

The zealous social reforms effected by William Bentick and

Raja Rammohan Roy had brought the Indian woman emancipation

from the tyranny of the ages and from cruel customs like sati.

The battle for emancipation was taken over by a few educated women

who communicated to the world their experiences as women as well as

their ideas of social reform as writers. As Prof. Alphonso-Karkala

observes in Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century,

They tried to tell the world the obstacles women faced

and the disadvantages they suffered in an orthodox

Hindu world. These women writers struggled to give

form and shape to their autobiographical accounts,

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which attracted publishers both in India and abroad

(78).

The writers of this group are Toru Dutt (1865-1877),

Krupabai Sathianathan (1862-1894), Shevantibai M. Nikambe

(1865-1895), Smt. Swarnakumari Ghosal (1856-1932) and

Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954).

Only after the Second World War, women novelists of quality

have begun enriching Indian fiction in English. Of these writers,

Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are unquestionably

the most outstanding. Markandaya in her first novel Nectar in a

Sieve (1954) takes us to the heart of a South Indian village where life

has apparently not changed for a thousand years. Jhabvala has had

opportunities of exercising her powers of close observation on a milieu

that changes chameleon-like from local to cosmopolitan, from

traditional to conventional, from naïve to sophistication in her novels

-- To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956),

Esmond in India (1958). Krupabai Sattianandhan’s Kamala: A

Story of Hindu Life (1895) and Saguna: A Story of Native

Christian Life (1895) are frankly autobiographies in fictional form.

Nayantara Sahgal is mostly preoccupied with the political

theme. Her novels, This Time of the Morning (1968), Storm in

Chandigarh (1969) and A Situation in New Delhi (1977) contain

some striking and easily recognizable portraits of leading political

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personalities. Depiction of the social scene has always been the

strong suit of women novelists. Kamala Markandaya’s A Silence of

Desire (1960) depicts rationalism and traditional religious faith.

Kamala Markandaya depicts the rural life of India in Nectar in a

Sieve (1954). Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli (1977) is an absorbing

account of Rajasthan Purdah life. The works of the numerous women

novelists of the period offer a more sensitive picture of the theme of

east-west encounter. R.P. Jhabvala deals with the east-west encounter

in Esmond in India (1958) and Heat and Dust (1975). In her two

novels Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Voices in the City (1965) --

Anita Desai has added new dimension to the achievement of Indian

women writers in English fiction.

Many Indian women novelists have explored female subjectivity

in order to establish an identity. Thus the theme of growing up from

childhood to womanhood, that is, the Bildungsroman, is a recurrent

strategy. Santha Rama Rau’s Remember the House (1956),

Ruth Prawar Jhabvala’s first novel To Whom She Will (1955) and

Kamala Markandaya’s Two Virgins (1973) are noteworthy examples.

As in poetry the image of the New Woman and her struggle for

an identity of her own also emerges in the Indian English novel.

Such a struggle needs supportive structures outside the family to

enable women to survive. Nayantara Sahgal uses this theme as the

nucleus of Rich like US (1986). Cowasjee’s experiment with black

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humour in Goodbye to Elsa (1975) indicates another new direction

which the new novelists are trying to explore.

A recurring theme in many of the novels of the women writers of

the recent years is an exploration of a woman’s identity, a study of her

self. There is, in the novels of all the women writers -- old or new, a

marked pre-occupation with nostalgia, dream and introspection.

Trends in recent fiction unmistakably indicate how the new novelists

are trying to tread fresh paths and this is the surest sign of the

continued vitality of an art.

Bharathi Mukherjee, author, of Jasmine (1989), has spent

much of her career exploring issues involving immigration and identity

with a particular focus on the United States and Canada.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s study of the abnormal mind of the frustrated

Bengali wife in New York in Wife (1976) is a classic example of the

study of the theme of identity crisis.

A number of Indian women novelists made their debut in the

1990s, producing novels which revealed the real state of Indian

society and its treatment of women. In the field of regional fiction, four

women writers, Arundhati Roy, Anita Nair, Kamala Das and Susan

Viswanathan have put the southern state of Kerala on the map of the

genre of fiction while the culture of other regions has been represented

by other women writers. Other authors include Anita Desai,

Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa, Chitra Banerjee

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Divakaruni, Raj Kamal Jha, Prakash Kona, Rohinton Mistry and

others.

The Hindu moral code known as the Laws of Manu denies

woman an existence apart from that of her husband or his family.

Since the publication of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s

Rajmohan’s Wife in 1864, a significant number of authors have

portrayed Indian women as long-suffering wives and mothers silenced

by patriarchy. The ideal of the traditional, oppressed woman persisted

in a culture, permeated by religious images of virtuous goddesses as

devoted to their husbands and the Hindu goddesses Sita and Savitri

serve as powerful cultural ideals for women.

The image of women in fiction has undergone a change in recent

times. Recent writers depict both the diversity of women and the

diversity within each woman, rather than limiting the lives of women

to one ideal. The work of Indian women writers is significant in

making society aware of women’s demands, and in providing a

medium for self-expression. The landscape of contemporary literature

has been transformed by the rising tide of globalization. Texts are

now crossing the borders of nations and cultures, as newly emerging

authors express myriad voices of those once considered a subaltern.

In Indian Writing in English (1962), Professor K.R. Srinivasa

Iyengar states that modern Indian literature begins with

Raja Rammohan Roy (1774-1833), who “was destined to act as a

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bridge between India and England” (30). The award of the Nobel Prize

in Literature to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 provided a stimulus to

Indians to write in English, for Tagore’s content, arrangement, and

style were exemplary, and many out of his fifty plays, one hundred

books of poetry, forty works of fiction were either written in English or

translated into that language by him. Mohandas K. Gandhi,

Jawaharlal Nehru, and the creative writers Mulk Raj Anand,

R.K. Narayanan, and Raja Rao, all who resided outside India for years,

were quickly recognized as masters of English prose style.

Jerry Pinto, writing in the January 4, 1998 issue of Weekend

(Bombay) magazine, identified over a hundred English language

writers working in Bombay alone; but few of them have made a name

for themselves outside Maharashtra, except Nizzim Ezekiel, a

diasporic Jew. The sociology and economics of creative writing dictate

the living and writing where English is the dominant literary language.

Numerous writers have seen the necessity of short or long term

expatriation. Some remain overseas, others visit India periodically to

meet their families or for reasons of writing; still others become

“bridge” (Mcleod, xiv) Indians, because they maintain two homes, one

in India and the other overseas. In each case they contribute to the

Literature of the Indian diaspora. Today it can be well said that the

most important writing by Indians is being produced in the diaspora

by such people as Salman Rushdie, Kamala Markandaya,

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Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai,

V.S. Naipaul and Hanif Kureishi.

The term diaspora is used to refer to any people or ethnic

population forced or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands;

being dispersed throughout other parts of the world; and the ensuing

developments in their dispersal and culture. In the beginning, the term

diaspora was used by the ancient Greeks to refer to citizens of a grand

city who migrated to a conquered land with the purpose of colonization

to assimilate the territory into the empire. The original meaning was cut

off from the present meaning when the Old Testament was translated to

Greek and the word diaspora was used to refer specifically to the

populations of Jews exiled from Judea in 586 BC by the Babylonians,

and from Jerusalem in 136 AD by the Roman Empire. This term is used

interchangeably to refer to the historical movements of the dispersed

ethnic population of Israel, the cultural development of that population,

or the population itself. The probable origin of the word is the Septuagint

version of Deuteronomy 28:25, “thou shalt be a diaspora in all kingdoms

of the earth”. The term has been used in its modern sense since the late

twentieth century.

List of notable Diasporas

1. Acadian Diaspora or Great expulsion occurred when the British

expelled 10,000 Acadians between 1755 and 1764. The British sent

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members of the same community to different colonies to impose

assimilation.

2. Palestinian diaspora is a term used to describe Palestinians living

outside of historic Palestine -- an area today known as Israel.

This diaspora began in 1948, when the Palestinians were expelled

from Palestine (now called Israel).

3. The African diaspora comprises the indigenous peoples of Africa

and their descendents, wherever they are in the world beyond the

African continent.

4. Australian Diaspora is a new term, probably coined by the

Southern Cross Group, to refer to the 860,000 Australians living

overseas. The migrations have a variety of causes ranging from war

brides and their children to the more recent exodus of young

Australians to Europe under working holiday visa programmes.

5. Bosnian diaspora as a phenomenon appeared after four years of

planned ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

6. Cornish diaspora refers to Cornish emigrants and their

descendants in countries such as the United States, Canada,

Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico.

7. Tamil diaspora is a term used to denote people of Tamil Nadu and

Srilankan Tamil origin who have settled in many parts of India,

Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore Reunion, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji,

Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and French Caribbean islands, Europe,

Australia and America.

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8. The French Canadian diaspora includes hundreds of thousands

of people who left Quebec for greener pastures in the United States,

Ontario and the Prairies between 1840 and 1930s.

9. Cuban diaspora is the exodus of over two million Cubans

following the Cuban Revolution and the resulting communist regime.

It is the largest diaspora in the history of the western Hemisphere.

10. The Irish diaspora consists of Irish emigrants and their

descendants in countries such as the United States, the United

Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa

and nations of the Caribbean and Continental Europe. The diaspora

contains over 80 million people and it is the result of mass migration

from Ireland, due to past famines and political oppression. The term

first came widely into use in Ireland in the 1990s when the then

President of Ireland, Mary Robinson began using it to describe all

those of Irish descent.

11. The Jewish diaspora in its historical use refers to the period

between the Roman invasion and subsequent occupation of the land

of Israel beginning in 70 CE. In modern use, the word diaspora refers

to Jews living outside the Jewish state of Israel today.

12. The South African diaspora mainly consists of white South

African emigrants, especially white African speakers who have fled the

country for a number of reasons. There is also a growing black middle

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class in South Africa, many of whom are starting to emigrate as well,

furthering the demographic weight of South Africans abroad.

South Africans have largely settled in the United Kingdom,

Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Canada.

13. The Ukranian diaspora, represented by the Ukranians who left

their homeland in several waves of emigration, settling mainly in

America, Australia and Europe.

14. The Southeast Asian diaspora includes the refugees from the

numerous wars that took place in Southeast Asia, such as the

World War II and the Vietnam War.

15. The Romanians, who emigrated for the first time in large

numbers between 1910 and 1925, and left enmasse after the fall of

the communist regime in Romania in 1989, comprise the Romanian

diaspora and are found today in large numbers in USA, Italy, Spain

and Canada.

16. The South Asian diaspora includes millions of people in South

Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, Mauritius, Fiji,

Singapore, Malaysia and other countries, who left British India in the

nineteenth and early twentieth century, and millions who have moved

to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, the

United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates in recent decades.

The literatures produced by these people are known as diaspora

literature.

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The term diaspora, originally used for the Jewish externment

from its homeland, is now applied as a metaphoric designation for

expatriates, refugees, exiles and immigrants. It refers to the work of

exile and expatriates and all those who have experienced unsettlement

and dislocation at the political, existential or metaphorical levels. It is

an interesting paradox that a great deal of Indian writing in English is

produced not in India but in widely distributed diaspora in the

South Pacific, the Caribbean, South Africa, Mauritius and the

Contemporary Indian diasporas in the United States of America, the

United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The writing of diasporic

Indians is not new, and it has attained very high standards as

literature in all its forms -- not just in general prose and poetry but in

the genres of drama, oratory, philosophy, theology, and literary history

and criticism.

Meena Alexander in an interview with the Hindu Literary

Magazine, December 1997, has related the Indian diaspora to freedom

and postcoloniality. The very idea of a diasporic literature is pregnant

with two relationships: One, the relationship to its motherland that

gives rise to nostalgia and reminiscences; second, the forged

relationship with the new land and its people, which gives rise to

conflicts and split personalities. The writings of any diaspora are full

of these. They all talk of alienation, exile, loneliness, the cultural

conflicts, the sense of rejection by the host community, their efforts at

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assimilation, sprinkled with descriptions of home again which become

sometimes romantic outpourings of nostalgia and longing.

A sense of dislocation and separation is common to immigrants

who find themselves caught up between their native land and the

adopted land. The in-between world that the immigrant occupies

makes the immigrant a Janus looking at the past and the future life.

Immigration is a process that involves uprooting and replanting.

Hence the immigrant has a feeling of rootlessness. The major quest in

an immigrant’s life is a search for roots. The process of

transplantation makes the immigrant a victim of rootlessness.

The notion of in-betweeness fuels a desire in the immigrants for a

place to call their own. This is the main reason for the preoccupation

with home in an immigrant. Home becomes for an immigrant

“a mythic place of desire -- a place of no return” (McLeod 2000: 9).

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie made

their return journeys from India in disillusionment. Naipaul’s return

to India only promoted him to discover an area of darkness.

Chaudhuri mentions that for him to live in Calcutta was similar to

death. First-generation immigrants have a propensity to denigrate all

things that belong to the adopted land. Yet their children, the second

and third-generation immigrants may have accepted the culture of the

adopted country and forgotten the home-culture. Thus the concepts

of home continue as Uma Parameswaran says, “to exacerbate

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inter-generational frictions” (Jain 35). There exists a disparate culture

within the diaspora itself.

There has been a surge of movement across geographical

boundaries in the twentieth century. The migration, especially to the

west has been fuelled by difficult conditions at home and the

attraction of peace and lucre outside. The age of globalisation,

therefore, belongs to the migrant. Migration forces a rethinking of the

issues of culture and community. Multiculturalism is the defining

aspect of the new millennium.

Migrant literature is a topic which has commanded growing

interest within the literary studies since 1980s. Migrants are defined

here as peoples who have left their homes to settle in countries or

cultural communities which are initially strange to them. Migration or

immigration has directly or indirectly affected several generations of

contemporary writers in English, engendering hybridism and culture

complexity within them and urging them to grapple with multiple

cultures, countries and tensions between them.

First-generation migrants are those who as adults, themselves

made a move from one country to another. Second-generation

migrants are the children of migrants, who were very young at the

time of migration or were born in the country of arrival. In the

literature of the second-generation migrants, a location between two

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cultures is often mentioned as a way of expressing a sense of

belonging to neither the guest nor host community.

The study of diaspora opens up a multitude of paradoxes,

shifting identities and intellectual challenges. There are centres of

Diaspora studies at Tulane University, the University of California at

Berkeley, the University of South Florida, Michigan state, the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bryn Mawr College, the

Barnard project on Migration and Diaspora, to mention only a few;

journals like Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies to name only

one; music publishing companies such as Diaspora connections; and

numerous websites.

Diasporas occur as much across time as across space, for they

are like their motivations, continual but changing processes of the

scattering of peoples. They do not automatically exclude assimilation

or resettlement. This is precisely where, for example, Asian diasporic

studies find a common ground with Asian American studies.

The lived reality of relocations and dislocations of vast populations

makes the phenomenon of diaspora commonplace in these modern

times.

Diaspora Literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from

where the displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys

undertaken on account of economic compulsions. In the

Indo-Christian tradition the fall of Satan from heaven and

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humankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, metaphorically the

separation from God constitute diasporic situations.

Etymologically diaspora with its connotative political weight is drawn

from Greek, meaning to disperse and signifies a voluntary or forcible

movement of the people from the homeland into new regions.

Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas -- An Introduction (1997)

classifies Diaspora as (i) Victim Diasporas (ii) Labour Diasporas

(iii) Imperial Diasporas (iv) Trade Diasporas (v) Homeland Diasporas

and (vi) Cultural Diasporas. Cohen finds a common element in all

forms of Diaspora: these are people who live outside their

“natal territories” (ix) and recognize that their traditional homelands

are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, the religions they

adapt to, and the cultures they produce. Each of the categories of

diasporas underlines a particular cause of migration usually

associated with particular groups of people. For example, Africans

through their experience of slavery have been noted to be victims of

extremely aggressive transmigration policies.

In the age of technological advancement where travelling is

made easier and the distance shorter, the term diaspora has lost its

original connotation; yet simultaneously it has also emerged in

another form healthier than the former. At first it is concerned with

human beings attached to the homelands. Their sense of yearning for

the homeland, a curious attachment to its traditions, religions and

languages give birth to diasporic literature which is primarily

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concerned with the individual’s or community’s attachment to the

homeland. According to Rushdie, the migrants arrive from the native

land and the migrants run from pillar to post crossing the boundaries

of time, memory and history, carrying with them the vision and

dreams of returning to their homeland as and when the migrants like

and find fit to return. Stuart Hall in Cultural Identity and Diaspora

(1994), states that it is an axiomatic truth that the migrant’s dreams

are futile and it would not be possible to return to the homeland.

The longing for the homeland is countered by the desire to belong to

the new home, so the migrant remains a creature of the edge, the

peripheral man (222-237). According to V.S. Naipaul the Indians are

well aware that their journey to Trinidad had been final, but these

tensions remain a recurring theme in diasporic Literature.

Indian diaspora can be classified into two kinds. They are,

1. Forced migration to Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean in the eighteenth

or nineteenth century.

2. Voluntary migration to the United States, United Kingdom, France

or other European countries for professional or academic purposes.

Amitav Ghosh in The Diaspora in Indian Culture (2002) says

that “the Indian diaspora is one of the most important demographic

dislocation of Modern times” (243), and each day is growing and

assuming the form of a representative of a significant force in global

culture.

23

Markand Paranjpe (2001) differentiates two distinct phases of

diaspora as the Visitor Diaspora and Settler Diaspora, similar to

Maxwell’s Invader and Settler Colonialist. The Visitor Diaspora

consisted of dispriviledged and subaltern classes, whose forced

alienation was a one-way ticket to a distant diasporic settlement.

As in the days of yore the return to homeland was next to impossible

due to lack of proper means of transportation, economic deficiency

and great distances. Hence the physical distance became a

psychological alienation, and the homeland became the sacred icon in

the diasporic imagination of the authors. V.S. Naipaul contributed to

the visitor diaspora. Naipaul remarkably portrays the search for the

roots in his novel A House for Mr. Biswas thus: to have lived without

even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived

and died as one has been born, unnecessary and accommodated (14).

Similarly Mohan Biswas’ peregrination over the next thirty five years,

he was to be a wanderer with no place to call his own (40).

The settler Diaspora was the result of man’s choice and

inclination towards the material gains, professional and business

interests. It is particularly the representation of privilege and access

to contemporary advanced technology and communication. Here no

dearth of money or means is clear. They go there for economic

upliftment and social status. Salman Rushdie is the representative of

this Diaspora. Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Shame are the

“novels of leave taking -- from the country of his birth (India) and from

24

that second country (Pakistan) where he tried, half-heartedly to settle

and couldn’t” (Aizaz 1992: 135).

The diasporian authors engage in cultural transmission that is

equitably exchanged in the manner of translating a map of reality for

multiple readership. Besides, they are equipped with lot of memories

and reveal an amalgamation of global and national strands that

embody real and imagined experience. Suketu Mehta is an advocate

of the idea that home is not a consumable entity. In Maximum City

(2004) he says, “You cannot go home by eating certain foods, by

replaying its films on your T.V screens. At some point you have to live

there again” (13). His novel Maximum City is the delineation of real

lives, habits, cares, customs, traditions, dreams and gloominess of

Metro life on the edge in an act of morphing Mumbai through the

unmaking of Bombay.

It is also true therefore that diasporic writing is full of the

feelings of alienation, love for the homeland -- a double identification

with the original homeland and the adopted country, crisis of

identity, mythic memory and the protest against discrimination in the

adopted country. Diasporic writings are to some extent about the

business of finding new angles to enter reality; the distance --

geographical and cultural, enables new structures of feeling.

The hybridity is subversive. It resists cultural authoritarianism and

challenges official truths. Ahmad Aizaz, in In Theory: Classes,

Nations, Literatures (1992) states that “one of the most relevant

25

aspects of diasporic writing is that it forces, interrogates and

challenges the authoritative voices of time” (126). Most of

Amitav Ghosh’s novels depict contemporary issues of India.

Amitav Ghosh in his book The Shadow Line (1990) says:

In India there is a drill associated with civil

disturbances, a curfew is declared, paramilitary units

are deployed, in extreme cares, the army monarchs to

the stricken areas. No city in India is better equipped

to perform this drill than New Delhi, with its high

security apparatus. (51)

The writers of diaspora offer scope for global paradigm shift.

The challenges of the narratives of power relations are to silence the

voices of the dispossessed; these marginal voices have gained

ascendance and even found a current status of privilege. These shifts

according to Homi Bhabha’s view in The Location of Culture (1994),

suggest “That it is from those who have suffered the sentence of

history -- subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement -- that we

learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking” (172). Most of

the major novels of South Asia are replete with the diasporic

consciousness which is nothing but the witness of the happenings of

social realities, longings and feelings of belonging. This theme became

whys and wherefores of most of the South Asian novels and the

popularity of it will prognosticate its golden future.

26

American novelist Henry James once noted that it takes a lot of

history to produce the flowering of literature (qtd. in Kirpal, 44).

In that light, the speed with which new Asian American literature is

surfacing might be considered a form of encapsulated history, an

enthusiastic response from mainstream US literary circles to the

belated appearance of Asian Americans on the US consciousness.

Scholarly and popular interest in Asian American literature is of

recent origin.

Courses in Asian American literature are common throughout

US higher education. This body of writing has expanded on a large

scale and has made remarkable progress. Journals such as Bridge in

New York City, and Amerasia, are published from the University of

California at Los Angeles. They are vital forces in increasing the

awareness about Asian American writers.

Usually Asian American literature has been assessed by

reviewers and critics from the single perspective of race. In other

words, the literature is read as centered on the identity position of

Americans of Asian descent and within the context of Asian American

immigration histories. Another theme operating alongside race

analysis is gender analysis, with many works recounting

Asian American women’s struggles against traditional patriarchal

attitudes. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) is an

example of a complex series of narratives about growing up in a

community structured along gender and racial lines.

27

Immigration to the United States, where the male and female

roles are more fluidly and more freely defined has put the traditional

social values under stress. It is true, of course, that gender roles often

are presented as a function of culture. South Asian women writers

such as Bharathi Mukherjee and Bapsi Sidwa have focused on the

cross-cultural tensions that arise when crossing national borders.

Another major theme in Asian American writing is the

relationship between parents and children. While second-generation

children often reject their parents’ social expectations, immigrant

parents are not simply flat representations of static societies.

They are also individuals who have broken away from their original

communities in moving to the United States. As a result, the US born

Asian American writers portray complex parental characters who are

themselves double figures.

National identity is viewed as more porous, resulting in the

globalization of cultures. In reading the Asian American literature, we

are reminded that critics and teachers must mediate between new

texts and historically constructed US literary traditions, between

social locations and literary identities of the communities. Besides the

recent works of Asian American authors-- transnational, immigrant

and Native Americans alike -- underscore the phenomenon of rapid

publication and the continuous reinvention of Asian American

cultural identity.

28

The Great Indian diaspora has always been a key topic of

discussion whenever the theme of Asian American writing comes up.

As members of the Indian Diaspora, the diasporic writers share the

same diasporic consciousness, which is a shared sensibility generated

by a complex network of historical connections, spiritual affinities and

cultural memories. This shared sensibility is manifested in the

cultural productions of Indian diasporic communities around the

world. The writings of the Indian diaspora have, of late, been the

focus of much literary acclaim. What makes the writings of the Indian

diaspora unique is the fact that the Indian diaspora differs from the

other diasporas. Unlike the Jewish, and other Asian diasporas, the

Indians, despite being Indian, do not necessarily share a common

faith, language, cuisine and dress. The result is that the diversity of

India gets reflected in the literature of these people of diverse

backgrounds.

Diasporic writers differ among themselves in many ways.

Their attributes vary with regard to their choice of themes, points of

view and narrative techniques. Rohinton Mistry writes very differently

from Jhumpa Lahiri. Meena Alexander is different from Rushdie or

from the other Indian writers living and writing abroad. The cultural

baggage which these diasporic writers carry is different and unique to

the region from which they come. But they are unanimous in

expressing nostalgic outpourings. Their ways of adapting is also

29

different, for in India, there are vast differences with regard to time

cherished traditions.

It is only natural that when these diasporic writers start writing,

they write about the customs, tradition, dress and cuisine, peculiar to

the region from where they come. In a way they bring the same rich

diversity that exists in India into their writings by portraying the

minute details of their rites, dress and cuisine into the literature that

they create.

Another aspect that sets the Indian writers as a class apart is

their way of adoption of values and life in the country of their choice.

This adjustment varies, depending on whether the person is a

first-generation or second-generation migrant. The first-generation

immigrants are invariably more obsessed by the home they have left

behind which is their land of birth and always suffer from a feeling of

uprootedness that makes it more difficult for them to adjust.

First-generation Indian-Americans are acutely aware of readily

apparent cultural differences. The family becomes a battlefield where

modernity clashes with tradition, where Indian culture clashes with

American culture and where theory clashes with practice.

American culture becomes the basis for interactions outside the home.

Inside the home first-generation Indian-Americans attempt to preserve

their cultural and religious heritage and expect to live according to

Indian cultural values. For example, women are expected to maintain

the household chores like cooking, cleaning, childrearing, etc. in

30

addition to holding part-time or even full-time jobs which they take up

in the United States.

Like their parents, the second-generation Indian American also

compartmentalizes his or her life. At home and within the local

community component they are governed by the compromised Indian

lifestyle developed by their parents and the broader American

community. Conflicts typically arise from the cultural clash of

American individualism and Indian communitarianism. For example,

a second-generation Indian-American’s desire to pursue an

undergraduate degree in the fine arts will not be supported by the

family. Career decisions are based on their impact on the family’s

well-being, not the individual’s. The second-generation is able to

assimilate the cultural import but their problems are of a different

kind. Having been born in the new country they are able to become a

part of the new culture more easily. But they face and experience a

greater sense of rejection and are constantly reminded by their peers

that they are different, that they do not belong to the adopted land

and all this leads to a great deal of conflict in the minds of these easily

influenced children born and brought up in a foreign land.

The conflict is not only caused by their peers, but also, because

they are expected to adhere to different values at home; the child

grows up with two distinct personalities. This is especially true of

Asian immigrants because, even though they belong to the second or

third-generation they continue to remain aliens in the land of their

31

adoption. One of the major reasons for this is the colour of their skin.

They can never integrate and become a part of the white society like a

German, a Pole, a Russian or any other European.

The Asian immigrants are never accepted as part of the white

community. Hence they continue to suffer the sense of alienation, of

being exiles of not belonging. Born and bred there, for generations this

has a disturbing experience as they do not belong to any land, or to a

land that is more strange than the one in which they are settled.

This causes in them, a loss of identity, a feeling of being rootless and

of not belonging anywhere. At the best it gives them a hyphenated

identity. For example the children of the Jews who fled and settled in

America or Canada can call themselves American or Canadian and not

be questioned, but an Indian, or an Asian for that matter, will find

that acceptance lacking. They may dress like them, speak like them,

they may even adopt their culture but they will always remain

foreigners with the result that the sense of exile gets more or less

encoded in their psyche.

Time magazine carried a cover story on “Generation Asian-

American” in its 1 May 2006 issue. The interviews of the Asian

children -- conducted by their correspondents pointed out that racial

alienation and ethnic mockery are two experiences that all children of

Asian immigrants can understand because at some point of time, in

some way or other, they have all experienced them. The difference is

perhaps in the way they handle it or react to it. The first-generation

32

having gone in search of a better life has obviously weighed the pros

and cons of living abroad and may even deny the existence of such

discrimination. What they have done is perhaps, to bury it so deep in

the recesses of the sub-conscious that they do not have a conscious

memory of it. The immigrants are not lying; rather this helps them

survive. Sensitive people, belonging mostly to the second-generation

however are unable to forget or overlook such slights and they suffer

because the instances rankle; causing conflicts and questionings

accompanied by an emotional turmoil that helps the diasporic writers

to create something unique out of this pain.

This is further accentuated because most Indians tend to live in

ghettos, clustered in groups of their own communities. This helped

the first-generation immigrants to survive. Living in their communal

group makes their life somewhat better, for their social interaction

remains confined to people who understand them and who are like

them; who think like them, eat and dress like them. But at the same

time it makes it harder for their children. The Indians who go to settle

abroad try to preserve their culture and their way of thinking

according to the way it was when they left the country. But in India,

the Indians keep changing and accept the western ways of thinking.

They are more tolerant towards many things in the younger

generation, whereas those who settled abroad still resent them in their

children.

33

It is the children, who suffer the most. It is natural for them to

have a conflict, to rebel at times. Their home environment and the

outside world meet only tangentially, so that they are forced into

adopting two or may be even three different identities. When they

write they succeed in creating something entirely different. It is said

that the pain, brings out the best in an artist. The sensitive Indian

born abroad, but treated as an unwanted, or second class citizen or as

an alien, but one who has known no other home, suffers a lot of pain,

and it is a pain, that the second-generation immigrant cannot even

share with anyone, except perhaps with others who can relate to his

or her experience.

Every member of Indian diaspora, while maintaining his

commitment to Indianness has made India proud. What gives a

common identity to all members of Indian Diaspora is their Indian

origin, their consciousness of their cultural heritage and their deep

attachment to India. Throughout its history, India has received

migrants from various parts of the world and has absorbed them

instinctively with their culture, language, economic and social status.

This has equipped Indians to easily interact with cultures and

ethnicities abroad. Indians have carried this rich legacy of

adaptability with them to their host countries. This unique feature of

Indian diaspora is the most important factor in the success of the

evolution of the Indian diaspora across the global countries.

34

A diasporic experience is the experience of the individual who

undergoes separation. It is the experience of the individual, because

literature deals with the specific individual, a specific time and a

specific situation. On examining diasporic literature, it is evident that

the various states of mind are those of indifference, apprehension,

realism, depression, painful projection and despondency. These are

the dominant states of mind. Diaspora creates a specific state of

mind; to understand and to analyse the nature of the mind.

The seven elements which are used to investigate or recognize the

diasporic consciousness are: memory, return, strangeness, desire to

integrate, transience, desire for permanence, a sense of belonging and

embedding.

The diasporic experience is a composite one made up of

collectivities, multiple journeys, still points and border crossings. In a

piece titled “The New Empire within Britain”, included in the book

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism (1981-91), Rushdie

points out that racism manifested a crisis of culture in the country of

adoption. He writes, “British thought, British society, has never been

cleaned of the filth of imperialism . . . even British born blacks and

Asians are thought of as people whose real home is elsewhere.”

(131-132)

The land of hope to which people migrate often turns out to be a

living hell of racial discrimination. In the same article Rushdie

observes:

35

A gulf in reality has been created. White and Black

perceptions of everyday life have moved so far apart as

to be incompatible . . . We stand on the opposite sides

of the abyss . . . while the ground crumbles beneath

our feet. (134)

It is not only homelands which are imaginary but even the land

of settlement or adoption is also imaginary. “Britain” observes

Rushdie is “now two entirely different worlds, and the one you inhabit

is determined by the colour of your skin” (Rushdie (1994:134).

This reality is far removed from the dream of equal cross-cultural

relationships and transplantation to a new culture.

Creativity in order to be significant needs to be engaged not

merely with one’s self but also with the other. It may have its

traumas, its anguish and challenges, but finally it is not about

enclosures but open spaces, it is about intermingling and

interruptions. This intermingling is one value which can be used to

evaluate the diasporic experience. It is this joy of having a double

vision and a pain of being split through and through, of carrying a

nation on their backs as they work through a different history, distant

culture and a fluid memory that characterises the diaspora, its

Indianness and its experience.

Writers like Nirad C. Chaudhuri, G.V. Desani, Balachandra

Rajan, Santha Rama Rau, Kamala Markandaya, V.S. Naipaul,

36

Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Uma Parameswaran, Bharathi Mukerjee,

Cyril Dabydeen, Salman Rushdie, M.G. Vassanji, Meena Alexander,

Rohinton Mistry, Hanif Kureishi, Neil Bissoondath, Sujata Bhatt,

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jumpa Lahiri can be labelled as the

writers of diaspora. These writers have roots in India or less

frequently, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka -- but represent

diverse geographical areas of the Indian Diaspora: from the

South Pacific to South America, from the Indian Ocean islands of

Mauritius and Singapore to the cities and suburbs of London,

New York, Johannesburg and Toronto. The writers practise a variety

of literary forms and represent an extraordinary diversity of

ethnicities, languages and religious traditions. The women among

them contribute to the perspective of gender along with the themes of

ethnicity and migrancy. A large number of these diasporic writers

have given expression to their creative urge and have brought credit to

Indian English fiction as a distinctive force.

Writers of the Indian diaspora have been fairly in the centre

stage in the last decade, primarily because of the theoretical

formulations which are now being generated by the critiquing of their

work and the growing interest in cultural studies. Language and

cultures are transformed as they come into contact with other

languages and cultures.

37

Bharathi Mukherjee embraces a monolithic Americanness,

irrespective of race and class. In the preface to her collection of stories

Darkness (1985), she notes:

Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of

partially comprehending the world. Though the

characters in these stories are or were Indian, I see

most of these as stories of broken identities and

discarded languages and the will to bond oneself to a

new community against the ever-present fear of failure

and betrayal.

Mukherjee wants to be labelled as an American not as Indian and

American, not hyphenated. Besides, she wants to be recognized as an

American writer, in the tradition of American writers.

Meena Alexander allies herself with the voices of other minority

writers, particularly Asian Americans. She takes a nuanced and

thoughtful stance about identity. She does not deny her past and

links her present and past history as a South Asian American to that

of other ethnic groups in the United States. Meena Alexander opines

in her perceptive essay “Is there an Asian American Aesthetic?”

The present for me is the present of multiple

anchorages. It is these multiple anchorages that an

ethnicity of Asian American provides for me, learning

from Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans,

38

African Americans, Indian Americans, and everyone

jostling, shifting and sliding the symbols that come out

of my mind. (26)

In the same essay she delineates “aesthetics of dislocation” (26) as one

component of an Asian American aesthetic. She says,

. . . the other is that we have all come under the sign

of America. In India, no one would ask me if I were

Asian American or Asian. Here we are a part of

minority and the vision of being unselved comes into

our consciousness. It is from this consciousness that

I create my work of art (27).

Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of stories presents a remarkable

vision that certainly transcends narrow nationalism but which

celebrates an ethnic heritage along with evoking an exemplary

universalist humanism. In the title story of the Pulitzer Prize winning

short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) the Das family

returns to India from the United States. As they cross the national

borders they are forced to recognize their own dual identities -- more

American in clothing, speech, body language than Indian, though

ethnically marked. Lahiri recreates national identity through

ethnicized codes of communication both spoken and unspoken;

culturally defined signals are misinterpreted by Mr. Kapasi, who

39

regards Mrs. Das as both native and also one who bears the stamp of

the United States.

Some of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies unfold in the

United States, others travel back to India through their characters’

imaginations and histories and others are set in India with the west

looming in the wings. There are women who have affairs with men,

men who leave their wives, women who give more importance to career

than their families, non-traditional women and men.

Lahiri’s characters demonstrate the diversity of the South Asian

American community with their various languages, religions and

regional food cultures. Their daily lives in this diasporic location

unfold as they struggle and dream, argue and entertain.

These portrayals broaden the representations of Indian Americans,

abandoning any fixed notion of great Indian culture.

According to Usha Kalyani, as stated in her essay “Quilting a

New Canon: A Study of the Select Plays of Uma Parameswaran”,

Uma Parameswaran is “an effective cultural ambassador of India”

(qtd. in Balachandran 2004: 176). She takes the different immigrants’

experiences in her works. The first phase points out the nostalgia for

the world they have left behind and the mixed feelings of wonder and

fear at the new world in which they are in. In the second phase, due

to their impulse to survive, their concentration is on family and

career. In the third phase, the immigrants show an active interest in

the activities of their own ethnic community. The final phase leads to

40

the participation in the larger political and social arena of the new

country. Through this intermingling of cultures, Uma Parameswaran

attempts to effect a shift from a sense of rootlessness to a sense of

community, and from alienation to reconciliation.

Like the heroines of her stories, Sunnyvale author Chitra Lekha

Banerjee Divakaruni has come a long way in the literary circle.

Though Divakaruni’s path to literary success is quick and

unconventional, it still took years of study and struggle.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in Calcutta on 29 July 1956 in

India. She lived in several Indian cities as a child and teenager.

Her father Rajendra Kumar Banerjee, an accountant by profession,

and her mother Tatini Banerjee, a school teacher, brought up their

four children in a modest middle-class ambience. As the second-born

child and the only girl among three brothers, Partha, Dhurva and

Surya, Chitra spent her childhood days in sibling rivalry. She studied

at Loreto House, a convent school run by Irish nuns, from where she

graduated in 1971. She attended the college at the University of

Calcutta and immigrated to the United States of America in 1976

when she was nineteen years old. Divakaruni pursued a master’s

degree at Wright State University in Ohio. To begin and continue her

education in the United States, she had to earn money. In order to

earn money she took up a variety of odd jobs, including babysitting,

selling merchandise in an Indian Boutique, slicing bread in a bakery

and washing instruments in a science lab. While continuing her

41

studies in English Literature at the doctorate level at UC-Berkeley, she

lived in its International House and worked in the dining hall, slicing

Jell-O, removing dishes from the dishwasher. Though she admits

these were not tasks to write home about, they have made it possible

for her to continue her education and have given her the financial

independence that she has always valued.

Divakaruni did not begin to write fiction until after she

graduated from Berkeley when she came to realize that she loved

teaching. But she did not want to do academic writing, and instead

she wanted to write something more immediate. She was married to

Murthy Divakaruni in 1979 and has two sons named Anand and

Abhay. She now lives in Sunnyvale, California. As she began living in

the United States, Divakaruni became more and more aware of the

differences in culture and then she wanted to write as a means of

exploring these differences. In an interview with Julie Mehta, in

Arranging One’s Life Divakaruni says,

Immigrating was the most transformative experience of

my life -- it exposed to me a life beyond my existence

in Calcutta. Immigrating to America made me see my

own Indian culture in a different way, it made me both

appreciate my culture and question some aspects of

my culture. (Jan. 2000)

42

Divakaruni has published poetry, short fiction and novels.

About the many forms in which she writes, Divakaruni has said in an

interview with Erica Bauer in A Discussion with Chitra Divakaruni

thus:

I really like using different forms of writing -- each

form has its own strength. To me poetry focusses on

the moment and in images, it feels like an intuitive

form of writing. Recently I’ve been writing more fiction

because I’m interested in exploring relationships and

showing the differences that develop in characters.

(March 1993)

In 1995 her first book of short stories Arranged Marriage was

critically acclaimed and received many awards, including the

American Book Award.

In 1991 she also began an organization called Maitri

(which means friend) for South Asian women. The first organization of

its kind on the west coast, Maitri offers counselling and referrals to

South Asian women about domestic violence, depression, cultural

alienation and other issues. Besides her work as an author,

Divakaruni also teaches creative writing at the college level at the

University of Houston. She enjoys both reading and writing, and was

a judge for the National Book Award 2000, reading over 300 books

during the summer. She has written a piece for the New York Times

43

“Writers on Writing” which features on this experience and what it

taught about the novel. Her work has appeared in publications as

The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, MS. and Best American

Short Stories 1999. She has been writing full time, and teaching

with a South Asian Community organization. Each Sunday she takes

classes based on various Indian philosophies and helps

second-generation immigrant children learn and explore their own

culture.

Divakaruni’s writing comprises poetry and fiction. She has to

her credit two collection of short stories namely

Arranged Marriage (1995) and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives

(2001); children’s books namely Neela: Victory Song (2002) and

The Conch Bearer (2003) and novels like The Mistress of Spices

(1997), Sister of My Heart (1999), The Vine of Desire (2002),

Queen of Dreams (2004), The Palace of Illusions (2008) and

Shadowland (2009). She has won many awards like the Hackney

Literary Award, Barbara Deming Memorial Award, Editor’s Choice

Award, Gerbode Foundation Award, Pen Syndicated Fiction Awards,

Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, American Book Award; she has also

won many prizes like Paterson poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize and

Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize.

Divakaruni’s first volume of short stories, Arranged Marriage

(1997), explores the cross-cultural experiences of womanhood through

a feminist perspective, a theme that continued to inform her work.

44

How the changing times are affecting the cherished Indian institution

of arranged marriage is the theme of all the eleven stories in this

anthology. Most of the stories are about Indian immigrants to the

United States from the author’s native region of Bengal. The stories

are being told by the female narrators in the first person singular

point of view, often in the present tense, imparting a voice of intimacy

and cinematic credibility. There are several immigrant brides who are

both liberated and trapped by cultural changes and who are

struggling to carve out an identity of their own. One common theme

that runs through all the stories is that for those Indian-born women

living new lives in America, independence is a mixed blessing.

It means walking the tightrope between old treasured beliefs and

surprising newfound desires, and understanding the emotions which

that conflict brings. The strong moral values imposed by her own

middle-class Bengali upbringing often become the fixed loci against

which she juxtaposes the situations of the new world.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni made an indelible impression on the

literary world with her first novel The Mistress of Spices (1997), a

magical tale of love and herbs. Tilo, proprietress of the Spice Bazaar

in Oakland, California is not the elderly Indian woman she appears to

be. Trained as a mistress of spices, she evokes the magical powers of

the spices of her homeland to help her customers. These customers,

mostly first or second-generation immigrants, are struggling to adapt

their old world ideals to the unfamiliar New World. Though trapped in

45

an old woman’s body and forbidden to leave the store, Tilo is unable to

keep the required distance from her patrons’ lives. Her yearning to

join the world of mortals angers the spices. Tilo finds herself caught

up not only in the lives of several Indian immigrants but also in the

life of a young Native American, Raven, who in the process of getting

in touch with his background seduces her out of her enchanting

powers and pushes her into a very ordinary life of love and

community.

Sister of My Heart (1999) tells the tale of two cousins born on

the same day, their premature births brought on by a mysterious

occurrence that claims the lives of both their fathers. The two cousins

are Anjali and Basudha, known as Anju and Sudha respectively.

Their fathers go in search of a treasure, for a cave full of rubies, and

are mysteriously dead. Sudha is beautiful; Anju is not beautiful.

The girls love each other like sisters. The bond between them is so

strong that nothing can break it. Sudha grows up believing that her

father was a no-good schemer who brought ruin on her cousin Anju’s

upper-class father. As they mature Anju dreams of college, Sudha of

children, but arranged marriages divide and thwart them.

Anju adjusts to live in California with Sunil, a man who lusts after

Sudha. Sudha grapples with a mother-in-law who turns to goddess

Shasti to fill Sudha’s womb rather than to a doctor for her sterile son,

Ramesh. Ultimately the tie between Anju and Sudha supersedes all

other love, as each sustains painful loss to save the other.

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Sudha walks out of the marriage with Ramesh, when Mrs. Sanyal her

mother-in-law urges her to abort the female foetus. Anju has a

miscarriage, as she hopes to bring Sudha to America. Sudha learns

the truth that her father is in no way responsible for the mysterious

deaths that occurred in the family. She no longer needs to right his

wrongs and finds that all along her affection for Anju has not been

dictated by necessity. Set in the two worlds of San Francisco and

India, this exceptionally moving novel tells a story at once familiar and

exotic.

The Vine of Desire (2002) is a sequel to Sister of My Heart.

It picks up where Sudha, having been divorced because she refused to

abort a female foetus, comes to America to visit her cousin Anju and

her husband Sunil, who has never got over an early crush on Sudha

at the time of Sudha and Anju’s double marriages. The two cousins

have travelled a lifetime away from their home city of Calcutta to

California. Anju is miserable after a miscarriage and its unhappy

effect on her marriage. Sudha has fled both a husband whose family

forced her abort her daughter, and a first love, Ashok, who wants to

take care of her and her child. They hope to find solace in their

sister-like relationship. Anju uses Sudha to help her cope with a

growing restlessness as well as her dissatisfaction with her husband

Sunil. Sudha is both comforted and suffocated by her life as an

escapee from her past, becoming a servant in her cousin’s household.

At the same time, each woman must eventually acknowledge Anju’s

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husband’s unspoken but obvious attraction to Sudha. The novel

carries the cousins through the inevitable betrayal of Anju and Sunil’s

marriage; but, more important through the gradual realization on the

part of both cousins, although in very different ways, of their

independence from the traditional expectations that have been laid on

them. Anju reaches a position through college education and a

writing group that takes her stories seriously. Sudha understands

that the desire for her beauty on the part of Sunil, her first love

Ashok, and a new love Lalit, is a trap against which she must guard

herself.

Queen of Dreams (2003), tells the double story of a mother

Mrs. Gupta, who is gifted as a dreamteller and a daughter Rakhi who

is trying to live in her shadow. The daughter was born in the

United States, her mother having fled to India to escape the

confinements of her gifts and to experience passion and motherhood.

But the gift proves to be inescapable, causing her to help many

persons, but to remain distant from her husband and daughter,

Rakhi. The mother dies in a strange accident, bringing the daughter

and father together over an attempt to translate and understand

Mrs. Gupta’s journals. Their relationship heals others, such as the

daughter Rakhi’s with her musician husband, Sonny. But 9/11

reveals to Rakhi that her own daughter, Jona has the dream telling

gift, like her grandmother, and so she must reconcile with that as

well.

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The female protagonists of eight of the nine stories in

Divakaruni’s sensuously evocative collection The Unknown Errors of

Our Lives (2001) are caught between the beliefs and traditions of their

Indian heritage and those of their or their children’s new homeland,

America. The diverse range of stories depicts the life in the east and

west. Divakaruni writes about the problems of life which she knows

best. Through the eyes of people caught in the clash of cultures, and

by constantly juxtaposing Calcutta with a Californian city, Divakaruni

reveals the rewards and perils of breaking free from the past and the

complicated, often contradictory emotions that shape the passage to

independence.

The Palace of Illusions (2008) is a retelling of

The Mahabharata, one of the longest Indian epic poems in history

which takes place between 5000 and 6000 BC. The novel is populated

by kings, queens and deities of ancient Indian mythology, spanning

decades and revolving around Panchaali, a princess who is forced to

marry five men. The story is told from her point of view and through

her we learn of her birth, her childhood and her eventual marriages to

the Pandava brothers. The story is complex as political relationships

grow and develop, and friends and enemies are created, leading to

battles and wars that will eventually destroy them all.

The following interview with Arthur J. Pais in Emory reveals

Divakaruni’s attitude existing between women.

49

I have been watching how Indian women were forced

to do certain things -- as the stories of sacrifice and

devotion in the mythology demand from them . . .

And then there are inspiring stories about women like

the Rani of Jhansi that offer women refreshing role

models -- and the strength to fulfill their own

destinies. (Nov. 2007)

Friendships with women were very important to Divakaruni

when she grew up in Calcutta. Her husband, who is an engineer, is

also her best friend, faithful reader and a critical angel, she has

acknowledged. In the interview with Arthur Pais in Emory she says,

“He understands women as few men do” (Nov. 2007).

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wanted to follow in her mother’s

footsteps and be a teacher. She became serious about writing about

ten years ago when she joined a writing group in Berkeley and has

published four books of poetry. She has also edited two cross-cultural

anthologies, Multitude and We, too, Sing America. In an interview

with Arthur J. Pais in Emory, Divakaruni confesses thus:

Expatriates have powerful and poignant experiences

when they live away from their original culture -- and

this becomes home, but never quite, and then you

can’t really go back and be quite at home there either.

So you become a kind of outsider to both

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cultures. This is very good for writers -- to be in a

position of looking in from the outside. (Nov. 2007)

While Divakaruni enjoyed doing her dissertation on Christopher

Marlowe and studying Renaissance literature at Berkeley, she was

also feeling very dissociated from life. In an interview with Julie

Mehta in Arranging One’s Life, she has confessed, “I needed to do

something intellectually connected to my life as an immigrant woman

in America” (Jan. 2000). In the same interview she expresses her

wonder as to whether she would have also thought seriously about

fiction had her husband remained cool to her poems but marvelled at

her ability to write fiction. “I realized then that fiction is in a way

more gratifying to write because it appeals to a wide range of people.

Poetry often scares people, I think” (Jan. 2000). She offers her readers

a window into the multicultural world of her characters. In an

interview with Arthur J. Pais in Emory she says, “I have no particular

reader in my mind but a passionate desire to tell a honest moving

story. If it is a good literature, I know as all sensitive writers know,

the reader and writer will connect. It is inevitable” (Nov. 2007).

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni captures her cultural dilemma in

a magazine piece she wrote titled “Born in the USA; Yet the question

‘Where are you From?’” In the article, she describes her five-year-old

son, Abhay returning home from school one day and taking a bath,

frantically trying, as he put it, to wash “the dirt color” out of his skin.

Divakaruni writes,

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I began to realize, what a challenge it would be to

bring up my children in a country where all their lives

their appearance would proclaim them foreigners.

Where, though they were born in America no less than

Bruce Springsteen they would have to continually

answer the question ‘Where are you from?’

(Salon Aug. 1997).

In the same article Divakaruni narrates a flashback of the day

after she came to the United States from Calcutta in 1976, at the age

of nineteen. She was walking down the streets of Chicago with some

relatives, wearing a sari, when some white teenagers called them

“nigger” and threw slush at them. “That was such a shock to me;

I realized that people didn’t know who we were” (Hindu 7 Mar. 2004).

Although she kept quiet about the incident, it remained in her mind,

spurring her need to write. In the Pittsburgh Tribune Review she has

confessed thus: “I never talked to anyone about it; I felt ashamed.

Writing was a way to go beyond the silence” (12 Sept. 2004).

Divakaruni’s impetus was to write about a female-centric theme

in a South Asian setting. Divakaruni shares the emotions of her

protagonists and finds in them a mode of feminist expression.

In San Francisco Examiner article, Divakaruni opines thus:

In the best friendships I have had with women, there is

a closeness that is unique, a sympathy that from

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somewhere deep and primal in our bodies and does

not need explanation, perhaps because of the

life-changing experiences we share. (Feb. 1999)

Many critics have dealt exclusively with diasporic studies.

In 1992, Thomas Wheeler researched the issue in his book titled

The Immigrant Experience. It is among the first of its kind to

analyse the problems faced by the immigrants. In India many writers

have contributed books and article on this topic. Jameela Begum’s

Locating the Exile’s Culture: Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy analyses

the displacement of the immigrant from his or her roots which leads to

the creation of space that is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. While the article

focuses on Selvadurai, Begum is of the opinion that all diasporic

writers create a mythic narration of their native land. Begum’s book

on Cyril Dabydeen is a fruitful exercise on the major themes and

preoccupations in immigrant writing.

Jasbir Jain’s Writers of the Indian Diaspora is a collection of

essays on South Asian immigrant writers. In her introduction, she

examines the hyphenated status of such writers and the roles played

by them. A.L. MCleod’s The Literature of Indian Diaspora is a

collection of essays in criticism. These essays assess the archive of

Indian diasporic writing and look at the adequacy of diaspora as a

concept. The essays that appear in this volume were originally

delivered as papers at the fifth biennial international conference held

at the Institute for Commonwealth and American Studies and

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English Language (ICASEL) in Mysore in January 1998. In his

keynote address, Harvard University Professor, Dr. Graham Huggan

used V.S. Naipaul to show how displacements of inner drives and

fears can operate and to suggest an inherent imperialism in travel

writing.

Professor K. BalaChandran has edited the text, Critical Essays

on Diasporic Writings (2008), which presents Indian responses to

diasporic writing. These critical essays bring to light the past, the

present and the future, the history and the geography, the customs

and the crafts, the religious and the rituals, the folklores and the

fashions, the emotions and the ethnicity which are prevalent in the

soils where the diasporic writers live. Dr. B. Sudipta in her article

“The Immigrant Narrative in the Writings of Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni” (43) traces how Divakaruni transcended boundaries,

negotiating two different worlds from various perspectives.

Mrs. K.S. Dhanam’s article, “Negotiation with the New Culture: A

Study of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices” (61)

informs that the novel was born out of a 1994 near death experience

that the writer had following her second pregnancy. Her inquiry into

transculturalism is allusive, subtle and lyrical which cuts through the

Indian stereotypes.

The present thesis attempts to analyse the issue of diaspora

from the perspective of the Indian immigrants’ struggle to maintain

their identity. It seeks to analyse how the Indian experience in

54

America and the conflict between the traditions of her homeland and

the culture of her adopted country is the focus of Divakaruni’s writing

and how it has made her an emerging literary celebrity.

This thesis makes a slight departure from earlier attempts, in

that, for the first time Divakaruni has been evaluated independently

as a diasporic writer. This thesis also attempts to bring out the

duality of cultures which will diminish for the next generation.

The main objective of the study is to examine the Indian immigrant

women dealing with cultural conflict. It is clearly brought out through

analysis that Divakaruni’s aim is to shatter stereotypes. In the

process of analysis it is clear that all Divakaruni’s novels are set in

America and India, and are united by the motifs of exclusion,

loneliness and the search for fulfillment. The thesis also codifies the

finding that the American-Indian relationship is a two-way cultural

equation and the Indians who make their homes in the United States

are freed of many of the structures created by their homeland’s

complex, social and cultural codes.

The thesis is presented in five chapters. Chapter One traces the

history of Indian Writing in English. It seeks to give a general

estimate of the Indian novelists and their contribution to

Indian Writing in English. The major themes of Indo-Anglian

literature are described in detail. It also throws light on women

novelists in Indian Writing in English. This chapter introduces the

concept of diaspora. The definition and scope of diaspora is dealt with

55

in detail. Indian diaspora is discussed at length. The writings by

Indian diasporic writers and South Asian diasporic women writers are

being focused. The literary space of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and

the uniqueness of her writings are vividly brought out.

Chapter Two brings out the excellent perspective of life between

and within the Oriental Values and Occidental ethos, with special

reference to the novels The Mistress of Spices and Queen of

Dreams. The Mistress of Spices presents the dilemma of negotiating

one’s cultural and biological identity with the drama of alienation and

self transformation in an adopted homeland, that is, America.

Tilo, the mistress of spices has many disguises and names that reveal

her multiple identities. Like a chameleon she keeps changing

throughout the novel making clear how complex is the problem of

identity crisis. Queen of Dreams is the story of a dream interpreter

caught between her compulsion to use her gift of dreaming the dream

of others, so that she can help them live their lives and her love for

her family. The novel also centres on 9/11 and its impact on

immigrant communities. The novel also contrasts the lives and

perceptions of first-generation immigrants with that of their children

born and raised in a foreign land. Inevitably it includes the Indian

American’s experience of grappling with two identities or cultures.

Chapter Three discusses the paradigmatic shift from

subordination to empowerment with reference to Sister of My Heart

and The Vine of Desire. Sister of My Heart tells the tale of the two

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cousins Anju and Sudha born on the same day. The novel spans

many years and zigzags between India and America as the cousins

grow apart and eventually reunite. The novel is about secrets and

sacrifices. The Vine of Desire is a sequel to Sister of My Heart.

In this novel Divakaruni reveals the rewards and perils of breaking

free from the past and the complicated and often contradictory

emotions that shape the passage to independence. Both Sudha and

Anju find that they cannot allow themselves to be dependent on men.

They separately search for independence. They try and find answers,

that is, from dependence they move to independence.

Chapter Four concentrates on the diasporic pulse in the novels

of Divakaruni. The deft yoking of the diasporic reality with myths

from an ancient Indian culture within a woman-centric milieu is

clearly brought out. Divakaruni poignantly explores the struggles of

Indian women as they seek new frontiers in a world that would have

them remain submissive. On reading the novels of Divakaruni, it is

evident that the women must be emboldened by their own strength;

women have to fight those forces within the society which do not allow

them to be themselves. Whether set in California, Chicago or

Calcutta, women learn to adapt to their new and changing culture

and, as a result, discover their own sense of self amidst joy and

heartbreak.

Chapter Five tries to sum up the arguments of the earlier

chapters to prove how Divakaruni succeeds in presenting a balanced

57

picture of diaspora. Diaspora is not merely a scattering or dispersion;

it is an experience made up of collective strands of experiences and

multiple journeys; an experience determined by who travels, where,

how and under what circumstances. The study concludes that there

may come a time when the differences between the first and

second-generation immigrants will be unified in the third-generation

immigrants.