Indian Diasporic Women Writers

This dissertation examines Jhumpa Lahiri's representations of Indian immigrant femininity in her fiction. Exploring socio-historical constructions of Indian femininity, this dissertation demonstrates how Lahiri's early representations of first-generation female immigrants remain conventional while her second novel, The Lowland, radically breaks away from stereotypes through the complex character of Gauri, who crosses physical as well as ideological boundaries. Paralleling contemporary feminist and queer intersections within diaspora studies, which emphasise the importance of independent experiences, Lahiri depicts how individual female narratives rooted in specific socio-cultural contexts help to deconstruct homogenous and normative notions of diaspora and transnationalism.

Indian English fiction is a major component of contemporary Anglophone literature (Ashcroft, 2013), and diasporic writing has had a central role over the decades before and after the turn of the XXI century. However, the complexity of the Diaspora concept has remained largely patriarchal and the intersection of gender and Diaspora has been a less explored literary manifestation (Rao Metha, 2015). Moreover, research has mainly focused on the problems of a whole diasporic community, thus overlooking the specific individual experiences faced by women in their geographical shift (Mohanty, 1991).
My paper aims at investigating the role of Indian women in the new homeland as protectors of their culture and faithful custodians of Indianness. Through the analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs Sen’s (1999), I will show how women are further marginalised in the new society as victims of a double displacement (Gopinath, 2003), both physical and metaphorical (Said, 1994). I will point out that the distance from the motherland does not coincide with a break with tradition. On the contrary, it entails an additional burden for women who must keep alive the notion of “home” while negotiating a new self within the Western society.
In conclusion, I will argue that we should think of Diaspora as a gendered process since the experience of migration for men and women is different: the former have the opportunity to look at the future by achieving self-fulfilment in their jobs and public life, while the latter remain in a condition of stasis, constrained in a constant tussle between homeland and host land.

References:
Ashcroft, Bill. (2013). “Re-writing India”. Writing India Anew. Indian English Fiction 2000-2010. Ed. Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Gopinath, Gayatri. (2003). “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian sexualities in motion”. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana Braziel and Anita Mannur. MA: Blackwell Publishing. 261-79.
Lahiri, Jumpa. (1999). “Mrs Sen’s”. The interpreter of Maladies. London: Flamingo.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (1991). “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse”. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 51-80.
Rao Metha, Sandhya (ed.). (2015). Exploring Gender in the Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Said, Edward. (1994). Representation of the intellectual. New York: Pantheon Books.

Diaspora has been a recent and growing field in literature. Indian Diasporic writer  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has tried to discuss various elements of both Indian and American cultures and has tried to make a comparison between the two. This paper is a detailed analysis of the novel in this perspective of culture studies.

 These writings as an image of adjustments in the host culture of their migrated place, as graphics of invert expectations, as words of subconscious memory and as signs of a flash of insight present social conditioning and pressures of migrants in alien lands, who traversed across cross-borders for some or the other reasons. Migration is mostly an economic, escape, expatriate, exile activity. It encourages cultural inflow and cultural outflow. Migration to abroad indeed brings good-feel factor, but there is emotional crisis of self and nationality. There is a discovery of one's " Self " as the center of human existence and for interdependence. Because of " Videsiya bhav " , lots of narratives, memoirs, letters, and travelogues have been written to search roots of nativity, belongingness in their imagination. Besides manifestation, it is the catharsis of their wings/flight. With their spatial paradigms, the novelists go beyond the past. They perceive present by way of imaginary construction of memory, nostalgia, and myth in order to dispossess the past. To remove the sense of otherness, they eliminate western standardization and reorient their cultural tradition. The paper aims to interrogate the human displacement across borders and rupture in relationships. The study attempts to sensitize the migrants' memories and emotional loss and to understand mobility in terms of the social structure and cultural process. It examines Western psyche with Indian psyche in a context of the emotional history of migrants. The stories of emotional disposition, remembrance, missing, searching evoke resilient attitude towards one's own and towards the place they live. Emotion is a child like activity for Indian migrants as well as for those who are left behind in their homeland. The writers of Diaspora express their expatriate, immigrant, migratory, dislocated, disoriented, displaced subjectivities and experiences through a continuous flow of ideas, feelings, and thoughts in a stream of consciousness. Their conscious experiences, observations, impressions reoccur from their subconscious mind, memory, desire, menace or apprehensions. The authors articulate their sentiments to project the contemporary circumstance, but basically they demystify the reality of their subconscious mind. That not only suggests the inner anguish but also universalizes the problem through their evolving process of self-consciousness. Their artistic dialogic perception and creative urges establish syllogism between the thinking readers and the autobiographical experiences and consciousness of the novelists. They unleash such exposition through the art of characterization in the story. The novels of the women authors in this paper are the " un-homely, fictions of the world literature " (Bhabha, 1994, p. 12).

Eleanor Nesbitt’s introduction contextualises the life of Kailash Puri, Punjabi author and agony aunt, providing the story of the book itself and connecting the narrative to the history of the Punjabi diaspora and themes in Sikh Studies. She suggests that representation of the stereotypical South Asian woman as victim needs to give way to a nuanced recognition of agency, multiple voices and a differentiated experience.

The narrative presents sixty years of Kailash’s life. Her memories of childhood in West Punjab evoke rural customs and religious practices consistent with recent scholarship on ‘Punjabi religion’ rather than with the currently dominant Sikh discourse of a religion sharply distinguished from Hindu society. Her marriage, as a shy 15-year-old, with no knowledge of English, to a scientist, Gopal Puri, brought ever-widening horizons as husband and wife moved from India to London, and later to West Africa, before returning to the UK in 1966. This life experience, and Gopal’s constant encouragement, brought confidence to write and publish numerous stories and articles.

Kailash writes of the contrasting experiences of life as an Indian in the UK of the 1940s and the 1960s. She points up differences between her own outlook and the life-world of the post-war community of Sikhs from East Punjab now living in the West. In their distress and dilemmas many people consulted Kailash for assistance, and the descriptive narrative of her responses and advice and increasingly public profile provides insight into Sikhs’ experience in their adopted country. In later years, as grandparents and established citizens of Liverpool, Kailash and Gopal revisited their ancestral home, now in Pakistan – a reflective and moving experience. The book includes a glossary of Punjabi words and suggestions for further reading.