The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, literally means scattering or dispersion of people from their homeland. It was first used by the Greeks to refer to the movement of the Jews away from their homeland. In the...
moreThe word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, literally means scattering or dispersion of people from their homeland. It was first used by the Greeks to refer to the movement of the Jews away from their homeland. In the words of N. Sharada Iyer, 'the greatest single fact of our age has been the vast human migration caused by war, colonization, decolonization, ethnic cleansing, political and economic revolutions and devastating natural occurrences'. Today the term 'diaspora' is applied to the numerous ethnic and racial groups living in an alien land. Immigrants feel, on the one hand, a haunting loss of their homeland as they are forced to sever their umbilical cords, and on the other, a sense of alienation and rootlessness in the culture that they have adopted as their new 'home'. While most people are principally rooted in one culture, an expatriate is aware of at least two cultures. The process of acculturation and acclimatization is inevitable when one is exposed to more than one cultures. The transplanted writers explore the immigrants' experience-their awareness of geographical dislocation, cultural ambivalence, social and political alienation, an absence of centrality and nostalgia. Acculturation and assimilation often take generations to achieve and diasporic writers caught in the intense and painful process of assimilation churn out their experiences in writings as a means of coming to terms with the process themselves. The ongoing process of migration has led to an outpouring of creativity in diasporic writers which in turn has led to a growing awareness of the concept of multiculturalism. This shift of geographical homeland has produced generations of immigrants who have to survive the burden of two cultures often so different from each other. The immigrants are always searching, often in darkness, to get back a sense of wholeness. In the words of Beena Agarwal, 'The apathy born out of cultural encounters becomes more intense and pungent in case of women who are forced to resist the forces of patriarchal and national cultural identity simultaneously. The women writers of South Asian diaspora have tried to search out a middle ground for sympathetic amalgamation to avoid the discontent born out of crossing the boundaries.' These women writers give voice to their pasts – bequeathed memories, oral testimonies, remembered histories and stories. They also give voice to their reaction to the alien lands where they have come as immigrants. The paper proposes to study the various problems faced by second-generation, young, talented British Indian women in their quest for individual identities as depicted in Neetika Lalwani's Gifted, Preethi Nair's Beyond Indigo and Meera Syal's Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hi Hi. The double lives the protagonists are forced to live pulled in one direction by their parental ambitions and traditions of their home country and in another direction by their individual desires. The paper also touches upon how insensitive and restrictive immigrant parents become to enforce the continuity of the outdated values of the 'homeland' because they know no other way to keep their children and family honour safe. The literature of the 'British Asian' label in its present avatar started emerging in the 1990s with the success of books, films, plays, music albums and TV shows by and about the British Asians. From Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia published in 1990 it has been an exciting