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Perspectives on
Diaspora: Indian Fiction in English Initially used in relation to the displacement of Jews from their homeland, the term ‘diaspora’ has come to describe the uprootment-forced or willed-of people from their native land. In the post-colonial situation with people from the Third World countries leaving their homelands in search of greener pastures for the developed countries has added another dimension to the life in exile. Perspectives on diaspora documents the pain, yearnings, anxieties, confusion and aspirations of diasporic people. The present volume brings to us the scholarly analysis of the contemporary literature that tries to capture the nostalgia for the 'roots' and yearning for the ‘home’. It registers the experience of isolation, the feeling of being kept at periphery and the treatment as the ‘other’ in spite of the attempts at acculturation felt by this trishanku community. Shades of diasporic experiences portrayed by V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Itwaru, Farida Karodia, Bharati Mukherjee, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kavita Dashvani and Hari Kunjru are analysed at length, subjecting diaspora to a fresh reflection. The observations of different critics and thinkers about diasporic experience unfold the ambivalent nature of diasporic writings and the emergence of new paradigms of narrating and understanding this experience. If Manjit Inder Singh's scintillating article Contemporary Diasporic Discourse: Towards Understanding Cultural Dialogics discusses the complications and paradoxes enlightening diasporic experience and the noncanonical nature of diaspora writing, Swaraj Raj's Theorizing Diaspora Poetics and Diaspora Literature maps the historical and socio-cultural development of the diasporic experience. Manju Jaidka's article highlights the psychosocial problems, especially the cultural prejudices that the expatriates have to face in the adopted home. The subject of study in Jasbir Jain's article is the problems and complications of diasporic life in multicultural societies. Two articles on V.S. Naipaul by Rama Kundu and R.S. Jhanji discuss different aspects of diasporic experiences and explore Naipaul's perspective on expatriate experience. G. Manoja's article presents a scholarly analysis of Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay, where the writer has dealt with the double exile of the protagonist. N.K. Neb and Swaraj Raj in their articles on Bharati Mukherjee explore multiple aspects of diaspora life portrayed in her novels. Two articles on Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies and her novel The Namesake by P.S. Ramana and Poornima study Lahiri's portrayal of marital conflicts in cross-cultural context and cultural confusion of diasporas in maintaining bonds with their homeland. Rohinton Mistry in his novels generally renders an account of the socio-political reality in India against which diasporic Parsee community's existence is foregrounded. Jagroop Singh's article, Mistry's A Fine Balance, makes an interesting study of Parsee community's problems against the backdrop of Indian political scenario particularly at the time of the internal emergency during the late 1970s. Tejinder Kaur in her article on Kavita Daswani's novel For Matrimonial Purposes examines the change in the subjectivity of the Indian female. This volume is indeed a useful addition to the critical corpus on contemporary diasporic writing. The papers cover the various theoretical aspects pertaining to diaspora in general especially the Indian diaspora, which would undoubtedly interest and enlighten the scholars in this field. The quintessential reflections on diasporic creative writing contained in these 15 articles are also a must-read for those who are stung by the wanderlust in search of lucrative avenues in other countries for, these writers after all do not write in a vacuum but hold a mirror to the stark realities of life.
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