Dr Soumi Basu

Keywords: British Asian Literature, diasporic literature, women's literature, Preethi Nair Diasporic writings has emerged into a distinct literary genre today. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering of people from their land of origin. One of the central features of diasporic writing is a mapping out a journey. This is a journey from the centre of the immigrant's home culture to the periphery of the alien culture and again from the periphery of the alien culture to a different centre representing multi-culture, that is, a consciousness of at least two cultures or more. The paper proposes to study Preethi Nair's One Hundred Shades of White as representative of such a journey spanning three generations of women through the metaphor of cooking. Food is one of the most popular tools in the hands of diasporic women writers to express their longing, rejection and finally acceptance of their home culture. Against the backdrop of contemporary British Asian literature Nair's One hundred Shades of White stands out for her deep insight into the lives of the immigrants and her empathy with the characters. The novel is an unforgettable rendering of a mother and daughter's search for identity and 'wholeness' in an alien land and coming to terms with the 'duality' of their existence. Diasporic writing has emerged into a distinct literary genre today. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering of people. Though initially limited to the dispersal of Jews from their homeland, in this increasing era of globalization, it is applied to the numerous ethnic and racial groups living in an alien land. The immigrants who left their home countries for various reasons, voluntary and non-voluntary, had to construct afresh a sense of community, culture and nationality in a country where they were a minority. Thus, their writings deal with their own experiences of geographical dislocation, displacement, cultural ambivalence, social and political alienation and absence of centrality. On the one hand they express a longing

Greek. The reader would need a lot of annotations, patience, guidance and courage before they can enjoy these texts. This leads to the second most significant cause of disinterest in the classics. Unlimited access to high speed internet, smart phones and social media have significantly reduced the attention span of the present day learners. They are so used to instant gratification that they would look for easier alternatives rather than invest themselves in the study of literature written in a language they cannot decipher immediately about social situations and cultural practices hundreds of centuries old and apparently no longer relevant. For example, why would twenty-first century students want to study Malik Muhammad Jayasi's sixteenth century epic Padmavat about a Rajput queen Padmavati who performed the practice of Sati or Jowhar to save her honour after her husband died? Unless a famous director makes a controversial Bollywood film about it and makes her story the talking point again. So what can we take away from her story? The feminists have trashed the movie for glorifying the practice of Sati. Yet the most important take away from the film is the relevance of a woman's consent even when women were treated as commodities to be owned. The film like most good historical movies immediately immerses the audience in the world of eleventh century India. However, it does so by using the latest technologies of film making.

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 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia it's been an exciting journey to see the South Asian immigrants or descendants of the immigrants find a foothold in mainstream literature. For the first crop of writers and artists it was a heady feeling of freedom that their own life experiences could be acceptable and marketable. However, every time a new British Asian book or film appears, the narrative brings with it a strong sense of deja vue. Stories of overbearing traditional parents, the cultural and racial conflicts, arranged marriages, grand weddings, Indian feasts, funerals and rich fabrics provide a clichéd backdrop in novel. Individuality and freedom of choice do not exist as there is a strong pressure to conform to the outdated values of the 'homeland'. This paper proposes to study some of the journeys undertaken by second-generation young women immigrants in Meera Syal's Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hi Hi, Nikita Lalwani's Gifed and Preethi Nair's Beyond Indigo and show how restrictive and stifling parental expectations can be for the second-generation women. The study will also focus on how these women finally manage to carve out a more freeing space for themselves and the steep price they have to pay for their freedom.

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 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

Women's literature has often been dismissed as 'chick lit' as opposed to the 'research-worthy' mainstream literature. When it comes to diasporic Muslim women's chick lit the marginalization is understandably much more severe. This paper proposes to analyze why chick lit is worthy of academic reflection. A literary framework of diasporic literature will be used to analyze the novels of Rekha Waheed, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Ayisha Malik where it will be shown that though they have a limited audience these stories document the lives of diasporic women who are each juggling between at least three labels of being British, being of Asian origin and being Muslim in a predominantly white, Christian, western society. They reflect the aspirations and frustrations of Asian British Muslim women who are smart, well educated, well employed, westernized and yet often deeply rooted to their religion and Asian culture. The search for soul mates who are 'men enough' to embrace the almost-schizophrenic personalities of these young women become spiritual journeys of self-discovery.

Diaspora studies emerged as an important branch of cultural studies since the 1980s. This paper proposes to focus on the horrific stories of Indian-origin teenage victims of honour abuse and forced marriages in Britain. There are thousands of such victims, both boys and girls, who feel abandoned by both their parents and the host country often reluctant to interfere in the sensitive issues related to the 'cultural' matters of an ethnic group. This paper will study Jasvinder Sanghera's Shame, Bali Rai's (Un)arranged Marriage and Sufiya Ahmed's Secrets of the Henna Girl and show how emotionally devastating it is for these young children to break away from the family they love and find themselves doubly orphaned and alone in their battle to live their lives on their own terms, something the British part of their consciousness would take for granted. The word 'diaspora', derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, means scattering of people from their land of origin. Initially the term referred to the scattering of the Jews outside Palestine. Soon the word became an umbrella term to embrace every immigrant living outside their homeland or place of origin. Migration and diaspora are natural phenomena both in the animal and plant kingdoms. Anthropologists have recorded nomadism before early human beings settled down into communities. Even after the formation of communities and races, human beings have continued to migrate from their homeland either voluntarily in search of better opportunities or standard of living or when forced to leave by hostile situations at home. In human migration two unique factors need to be recognised. Migration does not mean the physical movement of the migrants from one place to another alone, migrants carry with them a sociocultural baggage which consists of a predefined social identity, a set of religious beliefs and practices, a framework of norms and values governing family and kinship, food habits and language. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the migrants are never irrevocably cut off from their homeland. They retain physical and or mental contact with their homeland and often think of returning to their homeland one day. These two factors make diaspora always a bittersweet experience where the immigrations are torn between both the cultures and suffer from displaced or fragmented identities.