DIASPORA

Literature of the Indian Diaspora constitutes a

major study of the literature and other
cultural texts of the Indian diaspora. It is also
an important contribution to diaspora theory
in general.

Applying a theoretical framework based on
trauma, mourning, identity, travel, translation,
and recognition, the term migrant identity
refers to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state
that defines itself, consciously or
unconsciously, as a group in displacement.

Co relating the concept of diaspora literally
dispersal or the scattering of people with
the historical and contemporary presence of
people of Indian sub-continental origin in
other areas of the world, it can be studied as a
paradigm to analyse Indian expatriate writing.

various literary traditions within the Indian
diaspora share certain common resonances
engendered by historical connections, spiritual
affinities, and racial memories. Individually, they
provide challenging insights into the particular
experiences and writers. At the core of the
diasporic writing is the haunting presence of India
and the shared anguish of personal loss that
unifies this body of literature.

What mainly comes under its scrutiny is the
complex experience of migration,
encompassing both cultural hybridisation and
assimilation on the one hand and lingering
nostalgia and cultural alienation on the other.

various prominent features of this variety of
diasporic writing are, for instance, of
individualization and self-definition in
Rushdie, of conquest of rootlessness in
Jhumpa Lahiri, of cultural inbetween ness in B.
Rajan, and of the special charms of diasporic
sensibility itself in Naipaul.

Migration always implies change: and change
involves the risk of losing ones identity. While
the migrant does not recognize him/herself in
his/her new image, the people around
him/her do not accept his/her otherness.
Therefore, s/he is compelled to face everyday
life through a continuous oscillation between
reality and dream.
Naipauls sensibility is primarily diasporic, as
he is a prolific writer who is twice removed
from the motherland (India). And to be
diasporic constantly on the move is one of
the special charms of his writing.
Naipauls feeling of being uprooted ,which
may have started with his first move from the
security of all he knew to the new, exciting
world of Port of Spain at the age of six, and
which became, paradoxically, his means of
making a place for himself in the world.
Naipaul is a British writer born and raised
in Trinidad, to which his grandfathers had
emigrated from India as servants in sugar
plantations.
His father, Seepersad Naipaul, however, had been
able to carve out an unlikely career for himself. By
dint of effort and the good fortune of receiving
some education, he had become an English-
language journalist in what was then a largely
illiterate land.
FictionThe Mystic Masseur (1957) - film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)
The Suffrage of Elvira (1958)
Miguel Street (1959)
A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963)
The Mimic Men (1967)
A Flag on the Island (1967)
In a Free State (1971) - Booker Prize
Guerrillas (1975)
A Bend in the River (1979)
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
A Way in the World (1994)
Half a Life (2001)
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories)
(2002)
Magic Seeds (2004

Non-fictionThe Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies British,
French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
An Area of Darkness (1964)
The Loss of El Dorado (1969)
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
A Congo Diary (1980)
The Return of Eva Pern and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (1984)
A Turn in the South (1989)
India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)
Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)

Jhumpa Lahiris Interpreter of Maladies and
The Namesake, dwell on the overwhelming
sense of loss and despair to be felt in the
fictional writings of Lahiri, showing how the
author seems to be engrossed in her diasporic
location/dislocation.
She is an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short
story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won
the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first
novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the
popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana
Sudeshna but goes by her nickname (or in Bengali, her
"Daak naam") Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of
the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities,
appointed by U.S. PresidentBarack Obama. Her
book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee
for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award
for Fiction.
Lahiri was born in London, the daughter
of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal.
Her family moved to the United States when she was
two; Lahiri considers herself an American, stating, "I
wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri
grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father
Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of
Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The
Third and Final Continent," the closing story
from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted
her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage,
and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta
(now Kolkata).
When she began kindergarten in Kingston, Rhode
Island, Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by
her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to
pronounce than her "proper name". Lahiri
recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my
name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain
just by being who you are." Lahiri's ambivalence
over her identity was the inspiration for the
ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her
novel The Namesake, over his unusual name.
Lahiri's early short stories faced rejection from
publishers "for years". Her debut short story
collection, Interpreter of Maladies, was finally
released in 1999. The stories address sensitive
dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian
immigrants, with themes such as marital
difficulties, miscarriages, and the
disconnection between first and second
generation United States immigrants.
Lahiri later wrote, "When I first started writing
I was not conscious that my subject was the
Indian-American experience. What drew me to
my craft was the desire to force the two
worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I
was not brave enough, or mature enough, to
allow in life.
The collection was praised by American critics, but
received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were
alternately enthusiastic and upset that Lahiri had "not
painted Indians in a more positive light." However,
according to Md. Ziaul Haque, a poet, columnist,
scholar, researcher and a faculty member of the English
department at Sylhet International
University, Bangladesh, "But, it is really painful for any
writer living far away in a new state, leaving his/her
own homeland behind; the motherland, the
environment, people, culture etc. constantly echo in
the writers (and of course anybody elses) mind.
So, the manner of trying to imagine and describe
about the motherland and its people deserves
esteem. I think that we should coin a new term,
i.e. distant-author and add it to Lahiris name
since she, being a part of another country, has
taken the help of imagination and depicted her
India the way she has wanted to; the writer must
have every possible right to paint the world the
way he/she thinks appropriate." Interpreter of
Maladies sold 600,000 copies and received the
2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh
time a story collection had won the award).
In 2003, Lahiri published The Namesake, her first
novel. The story spans over thirty years in the life
of the Ganguli family. The Calcutta-born parents
emigrated as young adults to the United States,
where their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up
experiencing the constant generational and
cultural gap with their parents. A film
adaptation of The Namesake was released in
March 2007, directed by Mira Nair and
starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood
stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents. Lahiri
herself made a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa".
Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was
released on April 1, 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed
Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting at number 1 on The
New York Times best seller list. New York Times Book
Review editor, Dwight Garner, stated, "Its hard to remember the
last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction particularly a
book of stories that leapt straight to No. 1; its a powerful
demonstration of Lahiris newfound commercial clout."
Lahiri has also had a distinguished relationship with The New
Yorker magazine in which she has published a number of her short
stories, mostly fiction, and a few non-fiction including The Long
Way Home; Cooking Lessons, a story about the importance of food
in Lahiri's relationship with her mother.

Lahiri's writing is characterized by her "plain" language,
and her characters are often Indian immigrants to
America, who must navigate between the cultural
values of their homeland and their adopted
home. Lahiri's fiction is autobiographical and
frequently draws upon her own experiences as well as
those of her parents, friends, acquaintances, and
others in the Bengali communities with which she is
familiar. Lahiri examines her characters' struggles,
anxieties, and biases to chronicle the nuances and
details of immigrant psychology and behavior.
Until Unaccustomed Earth, she focused mostly on
first-generation Indian American immigrants and
their struggle to raise a family in a country very
different from theirs. Her stories describe their
efforts to keep their children acquainted
with Indian culture and traditions and to keep
them close even after they have grown up, in
order to hang on to the Indian tradition of a joint
family, in which the parents, their children and
the children's families live under the same roof.
Unaccustomed Earth departs from this earlier original
ethos as Lahiri's characters embark on new stages of
development. These stories scrutinize the fate of
the second and third generations. As succeeding
generations become increasingly assimilated into
American culture and are comfortable in constructing
perspectives outside of their country of origin, Lahiri's
fiction shifts to the needs of the individual. She shows
how later generations depart from the constraints of
their immigrant parents, who are often devoted to
their community and their responsibility to other
immigrants.
Diasporic Indian writing is in some sense also a
part of exile literature. By exemplifying writers
both from the old Indian diaspora of labourers
and the modern Indian diaspora of IT
technocrats, it shows that despite peculiarities
there is an inherent exilic state in all dislocated
lives whether it be voluntary or involuntary
migration.
More importantly, a broad survey of the
contributions of the second generation of the
modern Indian diaspora in the field of Indian
writing in English depict certain shift in
concerns in comparison to the previous
generation
and thereby it widens the field of exile
literature.
Displacement, whether forced or self-
imposed, is in many ways a
calamity. Yet, a peculiar but a potent point to
note is that writers in their displaced
existence generally tend to excel in their work,
as if the changed atmosphere acts
as a stimulant for them. These writings in
dislocated circumstances are often
termed as exile literature.
If a holistic view of the word exile is taken,
the definition would
include migrant writers and non-resident
writers and even gallivanting writers who
roam about for better pastures to graze and
fill their oeuvre. World literature has
an abundance of writers whose writings have
prospered while they were in exile.
Although it would be preposterous to assume
the vice-versa that exiled writers
would not have prospered had they not been
in exile, the fact in the former
statement cannot be denied. Cultural theorists
and literary critics are all alike in
this view.
The diasporic production of cultural meanings
occurs in many areas, such
as contemporary music, film, theatre and
dance, but writing is one of the
most interesting and strategic ways in which
diaspora might disrupt the
binary of local and global and problematize
national, racial and ethnic
formulations of identity.
The effect that exile has, not on the writers work,
but on the writers
themselves seems apparently paradoxical at first.
Exile appears both as a
liberating experience as well as a shocking
experience. The paradox is apparent
because it is just a manifestation of the tension
that keeps the strings attached
and taut between the writers place of origin and
the place of exile.
Whatever may
be the geographical location of the exiled
writer, in the mental landscape the
writer is forever enmeshed among the strings
attached to poles that pull in
opposite directions. The only way the writer
can rescue oneself from the tautness
of the enmeshing strings is by writing or by
other forms of artistic expression.
The
relief is only a temporary condition for no
writers work is so sharp a wedge that
can snap the strings that history-makers have
woven. Even if a writer consciously
tries to justify one end, simultaneously, but
unconsciously, there arises a longing
for the other. Therein lies the fascination of
exile literature.
The Indian-English writers, notably, Raja Rao became
an expatriate even
before the independence of the country; G. V. Desani
was born in Kenya and
lived in England, India, and USA; and Kamala
Markandaya married an
Englishman and lived in Britain (ref. Mehrotra 180, 186,
226). Nirad C. Chaudhuri
preferred the English shores because his views were
not readily accepted in
India.
Salman Rushdies imaginary homeland
encompasses the world over. The
Iranian fatwa phase has added a new
dimension to Rushdies exilic condition.
Colonial and post-colonial India are divisions that
are now more relevant to a
historian than a littrateur because Indian-English
literature has transcended the
barriers of petty classifications and has become
almost become part of mainstream English
literature.
A major contribution in this regard has been that of
the Indian writers, like Rushdie and Naipaul, who live
as world citizens - a global
manifestation of the exilic condition. Indian-English
writers like Anita Desai,
Bharati Mukherjee, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh,
Vikram Seth, Sunetra Gupta,
Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Hari Kunzru have
all made their names
while residing abroad.
The non-resident Indian writers have explored their sense
of displacementa perennial theme in all exile literature.
They have given more
poignancy to the exploration by dealing not only with a
geographical dislocation
but also a socio-cultural sense of displacement. Their
concerns are global
concerns as todays world is afflicted with the problems of
immigrants, refugees,
and all other exiles. These exilic states give birth to the
sense of displacement
and rootlessness.
The Indian diaspora has been formed by a
scattering of population and
not, in the Jewish sense, an exodus of
population at a particular point in time.
This sporadic migration traces a steady
pattern if a telescopic view is taken over
a period of time: from the indentured
labourers of the past to the IT technocrats of
the present day.
Indian diaspora into two categories - the old and the new. He writes
that:
This distinction is between, on the one hand, the semi-voluntary
flight of
indentured peasants to non-metropolitan plantation colonies such
as Fiji,
Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam, and Guyana,
roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and the other the late
capital
or postmodern dispersal of new migrants of all classes to thriving
metropolitan centres such as Australia, the United States, Canada,
and
Britain.