Exploration of Immigrants Experience and Identity Crisis in The Major Fictional Works of Anita Desai V S Naipaul Jhumpa Lahiri and Kirandesai

Abstract

These words of Meena Alexander in her poem Fault Lines very beautifully unfurls the true condition of diaspora people throbbing with their emotional turmoil; newline I skipped a whole ring of life newlineand made-up a sensitive, cultured woman; newlinea woman who had a tradition and a history newline-precisely what I lacked... newlinea woman who had lived to newlinewitness the birth pangs of a nation newlineThe dispersion of a large scale of people to other lands outside their native land due to various reasons personal, economic, social, political or exile led them to settle there in foreign lands. A huge chunk of people known as girmitis or indentured laborers also left for West Indies, South Africa, and other countries in the nineteenth century. A notably large amount of professionals and intellectuals left migrated to other countries of their choice in the pursuance of employment, business, education and as well as for acquiring technical expertise as per their need and dreams in the twentieth century. The group of people who left for their short or long time settlement came to be known as Diaspora. They became an ethnic and racial group, residing in foreign lands and share the same characteristics newlinevii newlineand the same sense of feeling -alienation, homelessness, up rootedness, nostalgia and faced the same trauma of cultural crisis. These feelings of alienation and nostalgia found expressions in the writings of those expatriates who were blessed with literary gifts, which was termed as Diaspora Literature describing and highlighting the effect and experiences of displacement on the immigrants.The immigrants living in alien lands deeply immersed in the sweet memories of their native land, near and dear friends and the rich cultural bonding of place where they originally belong. The felt deeply nostalgic and recalled their familial, social, cultural and emotional associations with their motherland, which made them, lost in nostalgia. An acute sense of displacement and uprootedness overpower the life of immigrants.