Unravelling Indian Diaspora through Literature

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reach an understanding of the effects of diaspora on the Indian English writings, with special reference to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mrs Sen’s from Interpreter of Maladies. The yearning of an individual to come back to one’s homeland, the experiences which that individual gathers from the other places in the world and the effects on her psychology are highlighted in this paper. No matter how much we travel around the world, away from our homeland, we can never forget the very essence of our roots. The colonial influence on Indian English writing can be felt in almost every novel, especially when India was colonised by the British. Divided into several parts, this paper explores the various facets of Diaspora Literature, highlights the personal experiences of one of the authors, attempts to find traces of the inner battles of the characters as a binary to the outer world and finally aims at revealing the perspectives of these changes in the mindset and literature from a woman’s point of view. Both the works are critically analysed along with references to other Indian English works as well.