English Literature: Voices of Indian Diaspora (Hardbound - 2009)

The word ‘diaspora’, derived from the Greek word diaspeiro, literally means scattering or dispersion of the people from their homeland. Diasporic writing has been increasingly receiving academic and disciplinary recognition. It has emerged as a distinct literary genre.

A large number of people have migrated from India to various alien lands under ‘forced exiles’ or ‘self-imposed exiles’. Some of them have made a mark in the field of writing. These immigrant writers reflect, on the one hand, their attachment to the motherland and on the other, their feeling of alienation and rootlessness.

The diasporic writings which are also known as ‘expatriate writings’ or ‘immigrant writings’ give voice to the traumatic experiences of the writers when they are on the rack owing to the clash of two cultures or the racial discrimination they undergo. Immigration proves a pleasant experience only to a few immigrants who succeed in assimilating themselves with new geographical, cultural, social and psychological environment. To most of the diasporic writers, immigration is not a delectable experience. They often find themselves sandwiched between two cultures. The feeling of nostalgia, a sense of loss and anxiety to reinvent home obsess them which find expression, consciously or unconsciously, in their writings.

The present volume is a collection of twenty-two research papers on the literary works of various eminent diasporic writers. They all voice the anguish of the people, living far away from their native land and being discriminated on grounds of race, colour or creed. The writers included in the list are A.K. Ramanujan, Uma Parameswaran, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Besides, there are papers on the works of some emerging writers like Iqbal Ramoowalia, Yasmine Gooneratne and Ann Bhalla. There is a variety of research papers on the literary works of these diasporic writers along with the articles on the theoretical aspect of diaspora.

The book will be highly useful to the teachers and students of English Literature in various Indian universities, as well as to the researchers particularly those working in the field of Indian diasporic literature.

Malti Agarwal is Reader and Head, Department of English, N.A.S. (P.G.) College, Meerut. She has been teaching postgraduate classes since 1974 and is actively engaged in guiding research. She has presented a good number of research papers in various national and international seminars and conferences and published articles in journals of repute. She has authored many books which include Professional Communication (2 vols.); Technical Writing in English and Objective English for Competitions. She has to her credit an edited anthology entitled New Perspectives on Indian English Writings. She takes keen interest in organizing seminars and conferences.