The Replications of Adversities in the Literature of Indo-American Women Diaspora Novelists
Abstract:
The literature of diaspora incorporates voluminous aspects of various disciplines. The works framed by diaspora writers themselves supply first-hand themes and ideas as well in a great manner. Especially in the literary Indo- American writings the imageries of immigrant women have every so often been discussed. Involvements in many social setups in the host countries by diasporic Indian women writers is discussed at considerable length in their literary writings. With the enlargement of women diasporic authors, the writings of this particular genre have gained even more admirations. Such works epitomize an amalgamation of both positive and negative aspects of migration. This research paper chiefly emphasizes the various misfortunes, cultural clashes, and feelings of nostalgia faced and reflected by Indo-American diasporic women authors in their literary writings.
Keywords: Diasporic Misfortunes, Indian diaspora, Indo-American, Women Diasporic writers
Introduction
Literary writings reproduce the various characteristics of the social order of the nation. It can be considered an echo of the society and ethnic values. Diaspora can feasibly be seen as a naming of the ‘other’ which has traditionally denoted to relocated communities of people who have been displaced from their native country by the engagements of migration, colonisation or exile. Diaspora proposes a displacement from the country or geographical place of origin and repositioning in one or more countries, lands. Diaspora can be described to refer to a miscellaneous assemblages of emigrant individuals and groups of people relocating across the globe. The term diaspora is frequently applied as an expression to say about of and for all movements of relocation, and for all displacements. The diasporic writings which developed out of numerous societal, emotional involvements and ethnic credentials of a particular society or culture of the nation. The Literature of Diaspora includes the protections of all the foremost varieties of forms such as poetry, novel and play. Regardless of various languages, literary forms, and procedures that fascinate the readers across the globe. Therefore writings of diaspora provide indications of diversity of philosophies, languages, individuals, dwellings, and times and many more.
The Patterns of migration and settlement among Indian women are as diverse as that of the overall Indian diaspora. They have shared space with men in most of the groups and streams of people moving beyond Indian borders. However, the initial theoretical and empirical models either omitted or undermined their experiences under homogenised perceptions. As a result, women’s voices, experiences and their critical role in the success story of the Indian diaspora remain to be unnoticed and unmapped. Feminist epistemological interventions in diaspora and migration studies made gender fundamental to the critical understanding of migration and settlement processes and the ongoing course of identity formation in a foreign setting. However, the centrality of gender still revolved around the ‘victimhood’ or passive agents’ paradigm, particularly with regard to women from the Third World. The feminist and subaltern scholarship did take note of this stereotypical representation and started articulating the voice of the ‘other’ woman in the receiving societies. The increasing feminisation of international migration from and among the developing societies further made the incorporation of the sociocultural moorings of the women from these societies an imperative.
As the Diasporas are embedded in both host and homelands simultaneously, the natural corollary is that factors from both the host land and the homeland—including gender relations and gender hierarchies—have an impact on diasporic women. Feminist inquiries suggest that migration and diasporic conditions, on the one hand, can be liberating, bringing more egalitarianism in the family and opening avenues for women to strengthen their agency and create new opportunities for themselves. However, on the other hand, it is also sometimes evident that gender hierarchy gets reinforced and becomes more rigid and traditional than in the homeland. Although standing ‘in-between’ the two worlds—with complex realities of unequal power dynamics of the homeland and stereotypical spaces of the host land—Indian women tend to experience conflicting subjectivities of freedom and subjugation, yet they do find a freedom for self-exploration and deliberation to conceive new identities and move beyond the fixed definitions of femininity.
The Literary writings of the diaspora are an inspirational supply of ideas, knowledge, experiences, and proceedings of the various involvements. Diaspora works in the literature represent innumerable aspects and their role in the diverse socio-cultural setups in the host country. The Indian diaspora especially is such a large community that its dealing and writings address almost every mainland and part of the world. It is really thought-provoking that Indian diaspora addresses exceptional elements of both the home country as well as the host country. With this readers can have the knowledge of other numerous parts of the world also through the writings of the diaspora authors. In the present time, the community of Indian diaspora is so enormous and is inherent in from the Caribbean islands, South Africa, Mauritius to the U.S.A., Canada and Australia, and almost all countries in the world in fact.
The commitment and contribution of Indian diaspora in the literature and the writings with the same occurrence can be characterised into two major points which are;
1. Literature that written on the diaspora and its various aspects and,
2. Literature of diaspora that written by the diaspora writers themselves.
The Literary works written by the Indian diaspora authors have really made a considerable impact on the arena of literary writings from the historical to the contemporary period. We can say that such literary writings are encouraged by the enormous spread of relocation or immigration. The progression of replacement to the other countries marks the migrated people a victim of rootlessness. One of the prominent features is that the diaspora endures transmitting to their native country in numerous ways. In addition, they also describe all the new elements as well which they have encountered in host countries. As a consequence, the collected works of the diaspora writers encompass a notion of a native and host country, the descriptions of severe excursions and also negative aspects and experiences that embarked on willingly or by forced circumstances, including monetary, administrative and communal characteristics. Especially in the case of women diaspora writers, we may find many common themes and components such as memories and craving for their native country, a special affection to the conducts and values of their country, ethos assemblage, conviction and language, exploration for distinct individuality, displacing and re-rooting, character crisis, feeling of estrangement as the Indians in the United States of America, melancholy, yearning for the nation, the various despairs of the Indian skilled workforces in the overseas countries, and many more in their writings. Moreover, Indian women diaspora writers write in their own language as well as in the English language in the United States of America.
Reflections of Adversities in the Writings of Indian Women Diaspora Authors
In the study of Indian diaspora women writers considered as a multidisciplinary perception with indispensable propensities and also recognizing the gender scholarship with race, social structure, class, religious conviction, nation-wide and numerous other sub-groupings. It is interesting to note that women diaspora have always been a part of the immigration procedure, willingly or forced as well (Pande 2017). With the help of literary writings they narrate their creativity as well as their experience as migrants, their voices, and the attitude of the society toward them as being women also in a brilliant manner. Indian women diaspora authors institutes a foremost division of modern Indian diaspora writings. Indian-American authors have made their native country remarkable and prevalent by writing about it in their works. At the preliminary phase Indian women diaspora authors are considered an ‘outsiders’ and many times they face the question– who am I? The initial works of diaspora writers are mostly autobiographical and majorly emphasis on the adversities such as nostalgia, rootlessness, destitution, dislocation and transposition.
Furthermore, there is a feeling of loss of region, terrestrial and ethnic and gain of new place which is very new to them in their literary writings. In such literature of Diaspora themes and characters deal with space, passage between ‘home’ and ‘host’ country, between ‘known' and ‘unknown', ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. Moreover, the dissimilarities and evaluations between these two places are repeated in the novels of Indian women diaspora authors, which are dissimilar and new from the consistent Indian English Writing. They consider it the passage to India with its descriptions and impersonations of India of their preceding, and their remembrance of a pretended motherland. They provide an amazing mixture of Indian recollection with their present conditions in the society. Indian women diaspora authors incorporated all the things which they have experienced in the host country and culture. They feel nostalgic, displaced, estranged, and rootless and henceforth they go on originating provisions from the country of their residence. They started writing about all the aspects they have felt and came across all the way. The cross-cultural involvements, awareness of homeland, strict excursions, dislocation, rearrangement, racial refinement, language difficulties, and culture astonishment faced by them are the adversities of the diaspora treatise they have focused. They have also encompassed an engagement in social and cultural diffusion and double identification.
Women diaspora writers have produced a massive literary output that can be seen through the lenses of various aspects such as multiplicity of cultures, colour, and beliefs, religious and custom practices and especially of gender role and approaches in special regard of the society. In numerous of the works of the literature, we encountered that diaspora authors especially women writers endeavour to describe their daily involvements of in various situations, their sorrows, and adversities, cultural clashes grieved by them in the host country in both the ways, multicultural exchanges as well as within such elements of their individual beliefs and tradition itself. In such writings, we may find various sorts of dilemma of women writers which they have faced or experienced in the societal setting. Moreover in their literary writings they go beyond the masculine notion of the society. Articulating feminine figure, corporal, opinion, sensual, and representative rebirth by expressing ethnic excursions portrayed in their storyline in a magnificent manner (Al-Samman p. 61). In addition the diaspora women writers also can be seen as a mirror of various inconsistencies and inappropriateness that she experienced further they also reflect the predicaments, severe complications in the host land. In this regard Jaiwanti Dimri has correctly explained that:
“Expatriate experience is problematic for the second generation immigrants of the third world for specific reasons. Born and brought up on foreign soil expatriation for this neo class of immigrants hangs the background as an imaginary reality, free from the stigma of nostalgia and the popular symptoms of angst, loneliness existential rootlessness and homelessness, their predicament is in many ways worse than that of their predecessor. Despite their assimilation and acculturation they cannot escape from being victimized and ostracized” (Giri pp. 100-101).
In contemporary time we can say that the most significant Indian literary texts are formed by many women diaspora writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Meena Alexander to name a few. Indian diasporic literary works especially written by women writers are really distinctive in its identifiable manner. If we observe the various themes and characteristics that a woman diasporic author compacts, the works appear diminutive dissimilar from the other collected works of Indian Literature and its theme in a broader sense. In such literature the inner and external elements are reflected in the writings of women diaspora such as discernment, estrangement, movement, predicament, downheartedness, hybridity, and nostalgia. All such conflicts of cross-cultural individualities and relocation to the different nations have been encompassed in a magnificent manner by the women diaspora writers.
For instance, in the book Arranged Marriage (1995) written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an assortment of the short stories of Indian women specifically. In all the stories the women characters are dealing with various cultures and between two worlds. More interestingly all the eleven stories chiefly concentrate on the women characters from India and whose lives are interconnected to the Indian rituals of an arranged wedding. It also describes the melodramatic transformation after their migration to the United States of America from India. In this book, she has described how women manage their life from convention to modernity and from India to America.
In the discussed book, we can observe the significant role of women in both personal and social arrangements. They manage so many things after relocation and also the negotiation and devotion for society frames and personal relationships are quite considerable too. In many of the literary works written by Divakaruni, the major characters are conventional as they portray an Indian male-controlled social arrangement. It also provides a broad picture of how society sees them as a woman. It presents the scenario of women that look at the everyday complications of discrimination and deficiency of economic steadiness also. She further talks about the phenomena of shifting lives and other aspects in the host country and host culture. The women characters which are portrayed with their disappointing conditions and lives shows the actual reality of the women in society. By portraying such things in her literary writings she emphases the feeling of alienation and self-transformation of the Indo-American women diaspora (Divakaruni 1995).
In the works of Jhumpa Lahiri also we may find the themes of tragedies and misfortunes of the Indo-American diasporic women. The storyline shifts between proceedings in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City. This work also looks at the gradations between two contradictory cultures and dissimilar communal aspects, and ideologies. In her famous work The Namesake the major character of the novel Ashima is very disheartened. She has a very strong bond with her parents but later in the course of her pregnancy, she was in a harsh time. She was totally upset as she was feeling like a zone of without help and loneliness in her life. At such a tough time, she constantly longs for someone who can be with her and help her in the host country. The longing for the home due to uncomfortable surroundings in a host country can be observed by her discussion with her husband saying that,
“I am saying I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country.
It's not right. I want to go back”. (Lahiri p.33)
(Gogol is the son of Ashok and Ashima Ganguli). The unique distinctiveness of both India and America reflects in the writings of Indo-American diaspora. Moreover, the dynamism in the representation of a particular gender is really considerable. The women diasporic writers chiefly wrote, creating characters considering the between-ness and intellectual suffering in the new nation. Furthermore women diasporic authors demonstrated their personal physical and emotional battles also in the host land in their writings (Lahiri 2003).
The women Diaspora placed in diverse nations or host lands but their various involvements remained the unchanged with minute variance in the host country. For instance in the same regard Obioma Nnaemeka in her work, Sisterhood, Feminisms And Power In Africa, expressed that a woman at her profession even requested to change her haircut (Nnaemeka pp. 30-31). By describing all such things in their narration they not only produce the literary output but also present an actual social scenario of the male dominated society as well.
Conclusion
The Indian-American women diaspora writers produce various characters that paradigm their characteristics and involvements in the host countries. Moreover in Indo-American writings, the conception of character and the progression of construction and modernization of individuality are imperative concerns for the modern aspects. This has been discussed that women's liberation is at the present an outmoded matter and the women have magnificently accomplished equivalence and resisted masculine standards. They have addressed the various issues of the society such as alienation, clashes of cultures, displacement to another nation, and so on in a realistic manner in their literary writings. Such writings not only reflect the voluminous misfortunes but it also marks a modern and revolutionary triumph among the various encounters. All the women writers, especially Indo-American diasporic women writers are contributing to the fields of 'Women's Education, Sociology and Literature of Diaspora by expressing an actual scenario of the society. The contribution of women writers in the field of literature is highly considerable.
References