Chapter One

Introduction: Bengal and Bengalis, Home and Diaspora

"Home is where your feet are, and may your heart be there too, and I would hope that we
write about the world around us and not about the world we have left behind" 1 -here is
Uma Parameswaran writing from Canada to her fellow expatriate writers; her colleagues
however seem to continue writing compulsively and consistently both about their present
reality as well as their homeland, perhaps because these are overlapping, intertwined
territories and, therefore, practically inseparable from each other. It may be also because,
as Salman Rushdie has poirited out in his Imaginary Homelands, if writing from outside
and trying to reflect the world left behind is obliged "to deal in broken mirrors, some of
whose fragments have been irretrievably lost," then paradoxically, "the broken mirror
may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed."2

Since the 1970s, the phenomenon of expatriation, the trauma of being uprooted,
loss of home and resultant identity crises have preoccupied many South Asian writers:
they are "haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back" with the
knowledge that they "will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost."3
Naturally therefore, the world they take their readers into is filled with fragmentation,
rebirth, transformation, lost memory where the characters face everyday the problems of
definition and identity.4 Rather than leading to a senseless pastiche, however, diasporic
spaces often provide such writers with a double perspective - as they happen to be at one
and the same time outsiders and insiders in the society - that is, a point of view from
which certain significant critical perceptions about homeland becomes possible. 5

3
4
5

Parameswaran, Uma. "Contextualising Diasporic Locations in Deepa Mehta's Fire and Srinivas Krishna's
Masa/a." In Diaspora: Theories. Histories, Texts. Ed. Makarand Paranjape. New Delhi: Indialog, 2001.291.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991. 11.
Italics mine.
Ibid. 10.
Chand, Meira. "Book of Books." Indian Horizons 53 (Summer 2006): 95-98. 98.
"What was initially felt to be a curse" as Paul Gilroy has written, "the cause ofhomelessness or the cause of
enforced exile - gets repossessed as a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical
perceptions about the modem world become more likely." See Against Race: Imagining Political Culture
Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 111. Rushdie too believes that "however
ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. Ifliterature
is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long
geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles." See Imaginary Homelands. op. cit. 15.

In a 1987 interview Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak said that she is "not at home in
either of the places" she inhabits; yet she views this as an advantage, since she, like
Edward Said, feels "it's important for people not to feel rooted in one place."6 Divakaruni
on the other hand said that the expatriate condition was "good for me as a writer, though
painful as an experience. It made me realise what immigrants go through, placed in
unfamiliar situations, visually a minority, their extended family, close neighbourhood,
people they grew up with, all gone ... But there's also growth, excitement, challenges. An
immigrant learns to adjust, to balance paradoxes." 7 But this position, however fruitful, is
problematic as well, especially from the perspective of reception where the culture of
adoption wishes to see through the text the culture of the other, while the culture of origin
wants to assess the authenticity of self-reflection, and very often the writer is assailed for
being inauthentic or misrepresenting reality or for catering to hegemonic market forces.
The work of a diasporic writer, Jasbir Jain explains, attracts the attention of two
different sets of readers - the west looks for familiar landmarks, a west-centric vision,
while the reader at home seeks his own validity - and the writer is trapped between the
two. It is here that the writer's perception of himself as anchored in a linguistic culture or
community becomes significant; it is here that it begins to intervene with the politics and
culture at home. 8 In the following pages I would briefly refer to the wider discourses of
home and diaspora in which my research-authors are placed, with a view to understand
some of the meanings accrued to them and to their writings in a diasporic context.
TheoreticaVConceptual Issues:
In recent years the study of the experience of migrancy and living in diaspora has
animated postcolonial literature, theory and criticism as well as research in the field of
English and Cultural Studies. Questions of identity, legitimacy and representation have
always been crucial to this discourse as the diasporic consciousness presupposes

6
7

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah
Harasym.London and New York: Routledge, 1990.83.
Qtd. in Ramnarayan, Gowri. "In conversation with Divakaruni: Of gains and Losses." The Hindu
Litarary Magazine 5 Nov. 2006: 3.
Jain, Jasbir. "The New Parochialism: Homeland in the Writing of the Indian Diaspora." in Paranjape. Ed.
op. cit. 79-92. 85.

predominance of traits like alienation, identity crisis, nostalgic longing for the ancestral
homeland and shared cultural myths, a double/conflicting identification with the
originary homeland and the adopted country, or the desh-pardesh dialectic, protest
against racial discriminations in day-to-day life in the new land etc. Many diasporic
narratives document - or attempt at forging coherent visions out of - the chaos of
multiple displacements diasporics are fated to encounter. This research intends to study
the contours of particular instances of such diasporic narratives. But before I attempt to
define the scope and objective of my study, I shall deal with some of the theoretical/
conceptual aspects that are intrinsic to this study. These aspects broadly include:
a) Ideas of home and diaspora, and the positionality of a diasporic writer;
b) Diasporic anxieties;
c) Common themes in diasporic fictional narratives;
d) Question of identity and ethnicity;
e) Issues surrounding authenticity of diasporic representations of homeland;
f) Bengali mind and culture;

g) Bengali writings in English.

General Context

As we know, every writer struggles to find a meaningful context within which to

write; he tries to find an exact angle at which to align himself to the universe; within his
own tradition this is difficult enough but the problem is greatly compounded when the
writer is relegated to a peripheral position on the edge of an alien society. Meira Chand 9 herself a second generation immigrant writer of Indo-Swish parentage - admits, "Writers
like me who write as multicultural mongrels have been cut off from any pure source of
tradition ... how this crisis [outsidership and cultural fragmentation vis-a-vis writing
from the security of a specific cultural tradition] is dealt with is perhaps one of the
greatest and the most interesting problems confronting them." 10 If the diasporic writer
sticks to his own peripheral viewpoint from which to look into his new society, he
realises only too quickly the limitations that now afflict him. Again, if he tries to
9

At present, she lives in Singapore.

Chand. op. cit. 95.

exclusively preserve his homeland as his ideal writing space, it can stiffen, and its
tangible contents fade away leaving him incapable of reclaiming the thing that is lost; he
would then create a fiction, an "imaginary homeland." But will his work be any less valid
for this? To follow Rushdie's logic,

11

the very partial nature of his memory and

imagining would rather make it the more evocative as trivial things in this context
transform into symbols, just as for the archeologist the broken pieces of ancient pots lead
to a vivid and exciting, but not always factually accurate, reconstruction of the past. And
also, perhaps this loss and its subsequent search for the healing of a fragmented self
would enable the writer to speak even more concretely on a subject of universal
significance and appeal.
Diasporic writings often reflect the writers' attempts at striking new roots in
places far from their ethnic origin; for Chand, "they insistently speak of their own
histories wherever they take place, be it America, Britain, Canada, Australia or anywhere
else." 12 The diasporic writers seek their audience globally while, simultaneously, they
remain cautious about preserving their subjectivity, difference and marginality. 13 This is a
very different position from the one the home-based writer is concerned with; his subjectposition in his own country, his involvement and interpretation of his reality, no matter
how fragmentary or selective, has a wider concern than the recovery of subjectivity or the
fear of erasure. It is often argued that the diasporic writer occupies a kind of second space
- of exile and cultural solitude - or Bhabha's third space, a hybrid location of
antagonism, perpetual tension and chaos. K. Satchidanandan says that the reality of the
body, a material production of one local culture, and the abstraction of the mind, a
cultural sub-text of a global experience, provide the intertwining threads of the diasporic
existence of a writer: this is a neither/nor, a Trishanku condition.

14

Diasporic writers - when writing home - are often critiqued on grounds of their
having lost touch with objective reality back home; it is argued that their home narratives

11

See Rush die. Imaginary Homelands. op.cit.l2.

Chand. op. cit. 98.
13
For details see Spivak. "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the ThirdWorld." In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. 241-268.246.
14
Satchidanandan, K. Authors, Texts, Issues: Essays on Indian Literature. Delhi: Pencraft, 2003. 51.
12

are essentially framed by memory and distance, and motivated by a desire to construct
their own reality. Jasbir Jain argues that "the diasporic urge to appropriate space at home
and to use it for self-sustenance abroad is partly responsible for their non-acceptance." 15
Indeed, the diasporic projection of homeland has to do with an attempt to define the
reality of the diaspora and not a resident people's reality who can afford to forget the
western pressure if he so desires. This freedom does not exist for the diaspora as it writes
from a marginal position and never ceases to be alien and begins to belong.
For long, diaspora was connected only to the migration of the Jews from Israel to
all comers of the world; now it has increasingly become a more open-ended field of
enquiry, less clear-cut and no longer principally based on the Jewish paradigm of
expulsion and return. A cursory list of chief theorists of diaspora would include names
like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, William
Safran, James Clifford, Aljun Appadurai, R. Radhakrishnan and others. The classic
definition of diaspora, based on the Jewish model, presumes that dispersal is due to
forced exile from a homeland to which people essentially desire to return. This old theory
of forced exile does not apply to the "new" diaspora where the present writers locate
themselves; they are away from their centre, but in no way they could be thought of as
victims of any dispersal, nor could they be entertaining the idea of actual/physical
returning. Their texts feature the world of new diaspora that is comprised not of
indentured labourers but "economic migrants and refugees entering the metropolitan
centres of the ex-Empire as well as the New World and Australasia." 16 In fact, most
migrations at present are necessitated by either socio-economic disintegration back home
or prompted by lure of the lucre. Did their leaving home then amount just to an
enactment of wish-fulfillment? Not really, because, even if voluntary, their passage
involves a significant amount of tension between the source and the target cultures.
Safran's outlining of the characteristic traits of diaspora - dispersal, collective
memory, alienation, respect and longing for the homeland, a belief in its restoration and
self-definition in terms of this homeland - has been both prescriptive and exhaustive, if

15
16

Jain. "The New Parochialism." op. cit. 87.

Mishra, Vijay. "Diasporas and the Art of Impossible Mourning." in Paranjape. Ed. op cit. 24-51. 26.

not restrictive, in analysing fiction. However, according to many, the predominant feature
of Saffran's definition- the extensive emphasis on the connection with and return to the
homeland - is apparently more applicable to the Jewish than the South Asian diaspora.
Amitav Ghosh, for example, has argued that the South Asian diaspora is not so much
oriented to roots in a specific place and a desire for return as around an ability to recreate
a culture in diverse locations. 17 Some recent usages of diaspora refer simply to the
migration of an ethnic community and articulate less stringent requirements regarding the
relationships between dispersed communities and homelands. Tololyan, for example,
rather than eliminating or evading diaspora' s relationship with the homeland, unfetters it
from a permanent physical return in favour of diverse connections to the homeland. 18
Removing homeland from the centre of diaspora Stuart Hall argues that diaspora does not
have to evoke "those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to
some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return." 19 Paul A Gilroy too does
not focus on the return to homeland, but recognises the exchanges and connections
between members of diasporic communities. Thus, reflecting the sentiment that it is not
where you are from, but where you are at, their works focus primarily on the developing
situation of diasporic location as home. In short, they have decoupled diaspora from
homeland in a bid to avoid essentialist narratives of belonging and origins?0
However, it is to be noted here that Gilroy's characterisation of diaspora as a
space "marked out by flows" implies the global dynamic of "flows" - of peoples,
cultures, ideas, capital, and institutions - that has given rise to what has come to be
known as "cultural citizenship,"21 a category of analysis which has gained currency in
recent scholarship on identity politics in response to the dramatic transformations that are

17

Qtd. in Clifford, James. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (August1994): 302-38. 306.
Khachig Toloyan points out, "it makes more sense to think of diaspora or diasporic existence as not
necessarily involving a physical return but rather a re-return, a repeated twining to the concept and /or
relation of the homeland and other diasporan kin." See his article, "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless
Powers in the Transnational Moment." Diaspora 5.1 (Spring 1996): 3-36.14.
19
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader.
Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.392-403.401.
2
For Gilroy, diasporic consciousness "stands opposed to the distinctively modem structures and modes of
power orchestrated by the institutional complexity of nation-states. Diaspora identification exists outside of
and sometimes in opposition to the political norms and codes of modem citizenship." (Gilroy, op. cit. 124.)
21
For detail see Miller, Toby. "Introducing Cultural Citizenship." Social Text 19.4 (2001): 1-5.
18

taking place as a result of the great waves of migration over the last fifty years. While
conventional narratives of citizenship frame national identity within neatly bounded
spatial parameters, placing emphasis on "roots" and origins, cultural citizenship offers a
flexible framework which can deal with the questions of home and belonging set into
motion by the complicated "routes" of identity in an age of diaspora. The fundamental
aim of the discourse of cultural citizenship is to call for "the positive acknowledgment of
difference in and by the mainstream," as the cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo
argues that cultural citizenship involves the right for people from minority groups like a
diasporic community to be different and still belong to the dominant discourse.

22

Any diasporic community feels the need to ensure its own cultural survival; for
this it maintains a conscious distance from the adopted country although at the same time
it knows that there is no possibility of an easy return to the homeland either.Z 3 The older
diaspora caused an enforced break with the motherland, which "remained frozen in the
diasporic imagination as a sort of sacred site or symbol, almost like an idol of memory
and imagination"; 24 new diaspora, on the other hand, has access to the motherland, and in
most cases, the state of exile is not enforced. Most writers of the new diaspora chose to
relocate themselves in the metropolitan centres chiefly for economic gains. This breeds in
them a certain anxiety, if not guilt towards the homeland, and consequentially, their texts
not only describe the motherland but also justify why it has to be left behind. 25
Based on Derrida's concept of differance and Gramsci's concept of war of
positions, Stuart Hall proposes diasporic cultural identity as a politics of positioning and
22

Qtd. in Miller. op.cit. 2.

This made Rushdie say: "It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are
haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into
pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge- which gives rise to
profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not
be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual
cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind ... Writing my book in
North London what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India
was just that: 'my' India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of
possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could." See Imaginary Homelands. op.cit.
10.
24
Ashcroft, Bill and Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989.
8.
25
See Paranjape, Makarand. "Displaced Relations: Diasporas, Empires, Homelands." Introduction. in
Paranjape. Ed. op. cit. 1-14. 10.

23

identity characterised by hybridity and heterogeneity. He declines any unproblematic

assimilation into a host nation-state as well as relinquishes a primary or exclusive
identification with a homeland: "Diasporic identities are those which are constantly
producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference ...
Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the
continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power."26 Samir Dayal also talks about the
diasporic's endless transformation and translation of self, his double consciousness, his
ambivalent allegiance to, or double hesitation about, belonging to ancestral home on the
one hand, and to the host country, on the other. 27
As is evidenced above, this thesis is aware of recent articulations28 that construct
alternative architectures of diaspora based on cultural difference and hybridity, rather
than the classical "longing for homeland" model. All said and done, this study bases itself
on the empowering paradox of diaspora that dwelling "here" assumes a solidarity and
connection with "there,"29 and in that sense, though at a certain divergence with his focus
on Jewish diaspora alone, it broadly follows William Safran's suggestion that diasporas
are characterised primarily by the relationship between the dispersed people and the
original homeland to which they hope to return; 30 it does not however miss out on noting
that the return for many characters of the present authors is more often imaginative or
nostalgic than actual.
Thus, in the present study, the term diaspora does refer to an ethnic minority
always in the context of its relations with an original homeland; consequentially the
diasporic experience here involves a crossing of multiple borders the loss of homeland

26

1bid. 401.
Dayal, Samir. "Diaspora and Double Consciousness." The Journal of the Midwest Modem Language
Association 29.1 (Spring 1996): 46-62.54.
28
Tololyan, Paul Gilroy et al.
29
Clifford. op. cit. 322.
30
William Safran in the first issue of Di!llil>ora defines diasporas as "expatriate minority communities" i.
that are dispersed from an "original center" to at least two "peripheral" places; ii. that maintain a
"memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland; iii. that "believe they are not - and perhaps
can't be fully accepted by their host country;" iv. that see the ancestral home as a place of eventual
return, when the time is right; v. that are committed to the maintenance or restoration of this homeland
and vi. the group's consciousness and solidarity are "importantly defmed' by this continuing relationship
with the homeland. For details see Safran's article, "Diasporas in Modem Societies: Myths of Homeland
and Return." Diaspora 1.1 (Springl991): 83-99. 83-84.
27

would suggest. 31 As Paranjape argues, the whole importance of diaspora must involve a
cross-cultural and cross-civilisational passage; it is only such a crossing that results in the
unique consciousness of diasporic. 32 Other terms used in similar contexts are expatriate,
emigre, immigrant, exile, refugee etc., although there may be differences in shades of
meaning. Bharati Mukheijee, for example, makes a distinction between immigrant and
expatriate experience. According to her, expatriates are those who have greater "cultural
retentiveness," and try to recreate the experience they have left behind; the immigrant
experience, on the other hand, involves liberation and a transformation. For her,
immigrants are those who "remake" themselves and are "reborn" in the host culture.33
Culture, in one usage, is an attempt towards summarising the ways in which
groups distinguish themselves from other groups, representing what is shared within it,
and simultaneously what is not shared outside it. The identity markers that are cultural
~

include language and religious beliefs, customs and habits, forms of address and modes
of inter-personal behaviour, dress codes and food habits, form and content of education,
songs and stories, symbols and icons, myths and legends, practices for preserving history
and tradition and many other similar things. Spivak is of the view that cultural identity
always presupposes a language and "In that sense, I suppose I am a Bengali."34 She
writes, "Any sense of Bengal as a nation is governed by the putative identity of the
Bengali language" 35 ; and that despite her position as a postcolonial subject her ethnicity
as a Bengali remains the mark of her regional identity. 36 Amit Chaudhuri also explained
in an interview, how, for him, home was interwoven with the Bengali language, his
mother tongue. 37 That said, a complete cultural cartography of communities would also

31

Riggs, Fred W. "The Modernity of Ethnic Identity and Conflict." International Political Science Review
19.3 (July 1998): 269-288. 286.
32
Paranjape. "Displaced Relations." op. cit. 6.
33
Bharati Mukheljee qtd in Purewal, Jasjit. "Reborn in the USA." Express magazine 2 March 1990: 4.
34
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Marginality in the Teaching Machine." Outside in the Teaching Machine.
New York: Routledge, 1996.53-76. 55.
35
Spivak. Foreword. Draupadi. By Mahasweta Devi. Trans. Spivak. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural
Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. 179-196. 181 .
36
Qtd. in Roy, Anindyo. "Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora: Figuring 'Home,'
Locating Histories." Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts. Ed. Gita Rajan and
Radhika Mohanram. London: Greenwood, 1995. 101-115. 107.
37
See Galvan, Fernande. "Amit Chaudhuri with Fernande Galvan." Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary
Writers Talk. Ed. Susheila Nasta. London: Routledge, 2004. 216-28. 217, 224.

include economic, political and societal organisation, and professional and philosophical
preferences. 38 Some of these cultural tokens, the immigrants are ready to shed easily
while there are some others they give up only reluctantly and there are still some more
that they want to keep as long as they can. These negotiations provide sites for
contestation and consequential conflict between the host and donor societies.
Culture can thus be viewed as a framework within which meanings are shared,
that is, a social process which results in the social construction of symbolic worlds.
Shared meanings are held together in a symbolic matrix resulting, for instance, in rituals
and other types of social practices that in tum work towards the consolidation and
reaffirmation of identity and difference. At one level, this consolidation and assertion of
ethnic identity today has been a protest against the unifonnisation/standardisation which
is almost inevitably the imposition of the identity of the most powerful group within
national boundaries. The old divide of the West and its Other still continues, and
interrogates the theories of diasporic identities celebrating fluidity and hybridity. Phrases
like pluralism and multiculturalism are frequently used to depict Western sites as
locations of tolerance, where all cultural practices are happily accommodated. A number
of critics however believe that the Western representation of cultural diversity iconised
by the concepts of pluralism/multiculturalism is a conventional/convenient fiction that
masks the continuing economic, political, and social inequities experienced by migrants
and their descendants from once colonised countries.39 Diasporic creative writings bring
to fore how the co-existence/assimilation with mainstream discourse has never been
smooth for the immigrants despite America/England being lands of immigrants with
avowed adherence to the doctrine of multiculturalism which apparently suggests the
acknowledgement and promotion of cultural pluralism.
The diasporic cultural space - fraught with contestations between the donor
culture and the recipient culture - is the space that immigrants occupy almost perpetually

38

39

Narang, Harish. "Of Rivers Going Back to the Mountains (Politics and Identity in Dhami's Maluka)."
Mapping Migrations: Perspectives on Diasporic Fiction. Ed. Charu Sharma. New Delhi: Books Plus,
2006.95-109.98.
Ashcroft, Bill and Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London:
Routledge, 1995. 63.

10

since assimilation is an ongoing process and full assimilation never takes place. While the
donor culture tries to pull the members to their moorings as far as possible, the recipient
culture tries to oust and replace the former as much and as quickly as possible. While
trying to make necessary adjustments in this state of contestation between the two
contending cultures, the diasporic individual becomes Janus-faced- now looking back,
now the gaze fixed straight ahead. 40 He has to unlearn many of his past lessons and
acquire new ones to fit him to his new environment and to find new growth.
To stay back and struggle for a place in the new world often becomes the ethic of
immigrant existence. Uma Parameswaran uses the mythical king Trishanku - who
remains suspended between heaven and earth- as the symbol of immigrant location,41
because, the diasporic self wishes to remain both continuous as well as in "selected
discontinuities," to use Mishra's phrase. 42 The discomfiture and the adventure that result
therefrom are what diasporic writers relish. Since this in-between world of diasporic
experience is inhabited by individuals as members of a particular community, writers of
diaspora, while writing the individual-self, in many cases also write communities.43 From
Naipaul to Rushdie, Mistry to Vassanji, immigrant writers across various locations and
times have woven their tapestries from these two-tone yams and textures. All this, as we
shall see, comes out quite concrete in the present writers too.
The essential ingredients of the immigrant experience and sensibility gtve
diasporic literature its unique critical position, its own web of complexity, thematic
energy and plural forms. If diaspora implies the notion of a centre, a locus, a home from
where the dispersion occurs, the idea then necessarily invokes images of journeys and
displacements. Diasporic journeys essentially imply putting down roots in other,
alternative homes. Distinctions of class, sect and patriarchal norms within the family are

40

Narang, Barish. Foreword. in Sharma. Ed. op cit. x-xiv. xii.

Members of diaspora lead a Trishanku-like existence in a liminal world. Trishanku was a king in Hindu
scriptural lore who wanted to go to heaven in his mortal state. He was not admitted to heaven as he was
not dead, nor was he accepted back by Earth, as it did not take back those who have left it as long as they
are in the same body. So after being shuttled back and forth, Trishanku was given his own constellation
in the sky. See Parameswaran. "Contextualizing Diasporic Locations." in Paranjape. Ed. op. cit. 135.
42
Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora." Textual Practice 10.3 (1996):
421-447.441.
43
Narang. "Of Rivers Going Back to the Mountains." op. cit. 101.
41

11

often reproduced by the diaspora as part of the structures at home. 44 Both the situations of
leaving home and the circumstances of arrival in a new land as also the ways in which
these new settings intersect with other social relations determined by class, race,
ethnicity, racism, gender and sexuality are important factors that configure a diaspora,
and subsequently its literature, in a certain manner.
The ambivalent, complex and dialectical relationship between diasporas and
homelands has been summed up in the words of Victor Rarnraj: "Diasporic writings are
invariably concerned with the individual's/community's attachment to the centrifugal
homeland. But this attachment is countered by a yearning for a sense of belonging to the
current place of abode.'.4 5 This makes diasporic writing transitional and liminal; the texts
themselves become journeys between source cultures and target cultures, petween
homelands and diasporas, until the two overlap, change places or merge. The relationship
between diasporas and homelands thus helps us understand not only how diasporas
regard themselves, but how homelands come to be created and defined.
Any notion of dispersion or exile has to be founded upon a prior sense of home
which then serves as the point of departure; it is in relation to such a notion of home that
the diasporic consciousness can be defined. Home then is both real and physically
situated, in the past or in the present, but it is also a metaphorical and conceptual space. 46
As we see, home, for the characters in diasporic fiction, is not a simple quest for spatial
identity, but a search for roots; it is also a hunt for self.47 As homeland is often a series of
mental images for him, highly eulogised, so, a physical return to the homeland - laying
bare the chasm between his nurtured images and the visible reality, thus failing to
produce a mental equivalent of his physical return - punctuates his alienation even
doubly. Again, when home becomes a mythic space of desire, it becomes also a place of

44

Satchidanandan, K. "That Third Space: Interrogating the Diasporic Paradigm." in Paranjape. Ed. op.cit.
15-23.20.
45
Ramraj, Victor. "Diasporas and Multiculturalism." New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An
Introduction. Ed. Bruce King. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996. 214-29. 216.
46
Kumar, Alka "'The Man who Finds his Homeland Sweet...': Re-Configuring Identity through Rohinton
Mistry and Michael Ondaatje." in Sharma. Ed. op. cit. 1-14. II
47
Kirpal, Viney. The Third World Novel of Expatriation. New Delhi: Sterling, 1989. 71.

12

no real return. Adorno suggests therefore that the "only home truly available now, though
fragile and vulnerable, is in writing.',4 8
Thus, in postcolonial studies, the question of home has increasingly come to be a
vexed terrain.

49

The idea of home, in this age of diaspora, increasingly foregrounds a

personal choice the individual exercises, and home and homeland are now for all
practical purposes separable units. 50 Recognising this, Uma Parameswaran brings in the
gender perspective and comments, "Perhaps women with centuries of indoctrination and
expectation are able to adopt more quickly and to accept and love two homes without
conflict or ambivalence." 51 This thesis ofParameswaran, as this study will show, applies,
to a significant extent, to the women in the fictional narratives dealt here. But generally,
between homes there are several conflicting areas and, as Edward Said has pointed out,
"you always feel outsider in some way'' in either of the places. 52
'Traditionally the home has served as the site of origin, as a source for a
nostalgic understanding of the continuities of private and public self and a place for
recovering or maintaining the stability of this self.'' 53 For the diasporic consciousness, for
the individual thrown into the reality of transnational hyphenation, home is a problematic
site, since the reality of home as well as its imaginative projection is vulnerably linked to
an entire network of personal, national, social and cultural identifications. Home can be
seen to have many versions for the diaspora - as the actual geographical space of origin,
refigured and reinvented through the imagination, as also the lived experience of present
day reality with its local sounds and smells, sights and colours. 54

48

Qtd.in Roy. op. cit. I 03.

Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. New York: Palgrave,
2002. I.
50
Parameswaran, Uma. "Home is Where Your Feet are and May your Heart be There Too!" Writers of the
Indian Diaspora. Ed. Jasbir Jain. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1998. 32-39.38.
51
Ibid. 32. In her Trishanku (1998) we notice that while Chandrika is willing to bond with the land to
which her husband, Chander has brought her, and can love both homelands, Chander cannot commit
himself to either.
52
Qtd. in Jain. "The New Parochialism." op. cit. 80.
53
Roy. op. cit. 104.
54
Kumar, Alka. op. cit. 2.

49

13

The idea of "imaginary homelands," a phrase originally coined by Rushdie in the

1980s, is a powerful metaphor to describe the fragmented vision of the migrant. 55 The
diasporic condition generates new myths and meanings - some of them autonomous or
total constructs- of the homeland. In fact, the feeling for what is one's own even after
years ofseparation from one's roots is intrinsic to displaced communities. Northrop Frye
writes, "We are but creatures of our origins and however stalwartly we march forward,
paving new roads, seeking new worlds, the ghosts from our pasts stand not far behind and
are not easily shaken off." 56 The diasporic space is never one's natural space; it is the
space that has to be negotiated amidst overwhelming contradictions of ethnicity, religion,
natiomilisms. 57 The cultural collision the diasporic faces culminates in his bewilderment,
withdrawal or adaptation. His loyalty to the culture of his adoption often clashes with the
loyalty to the far away homeland, the culture of origin: "diasporic histories are often by
their very nature discontinuous and frequently involve a doubling of vision, a form of
accountability to more than one location, more than one tradition." 58 Practically it is not
possible for the diasporic to continue with his native culture sans challenges any more,
because, as Frye explains in an interesting analogy likening culture with vegetable,
"culture has something vegetable about it, something that increasingly needs to grow
from roots, something that demands a small region and a restricted locale." 59 Both first
and second generation writers of the present selection have written about these cultural
differences and problems of adjustments and the discourse of loyalty and betrayal.
The diasporic self is simultaneously open to two epistemologies, two histories and
two social realities. "The narrative of the diaspora is above all a narrative of the "self,"
for the very act of migration implies a ''bodily'' lifting out of the familiar and relocation
in the new and unfamiliar . . . But it continues to depend on the bits and pieces of its
origin to hold itself to gather in the face of the onslaught, rejection or domination by the

55

Raja Rao, for example, once said "My India I carry with me wheresoever I go." (The Serpent and the
Rope. London: Murray, 1960).
56
See for detail, Frye, Northrop. "Sharing the Continent." A Passion for Identity: An Introduction. Eds. Eli
Mandel and David Taras. Toronto: Methuen, 1987.206-216.
57
Mohanta, Namrata Rathore. The Indian Trilogy. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004. 2.
58
Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996. xiv.
59
Frye. op. cit. 207.

14

"other'', by the world which both frightens and fascinates." 60 Diasporic writings trace the
split in the diasporic subject, manifested in his sense ofbeing here and elsewhere, even in
his practically leading dual lives, following American/British norms outside, at
workplace and returning to his own ethnic self inside, at home.
Obviously, diasporic displacement is socio-cultural and not merely a change of
address. The diasporic inhabits a world intersected by the complex, temporal as well as
spatial dynamics of home and location where the dilemma of allegiance between one's
native country and one's adopted country is tantalising and gives rise to the sense of
alienation and rootlessness. Some of the characters in the texts under study, for example,
spent a part of their lives in Bengal and have carried the baggage of their native land and
culture offshore while others have been bred since childhood outside Bengal who have a
view of their country only as an exotic place of origin; the former group has a literal
displacement whereas the latter fmd themselves rootless. This is to say that the
experience, in regard to home, of the second or third generation migrant is very different
from that of the first generation migrant. Home becomes unreal to the next generations,
just a space of imagination rather than of nostalgic recollection; they reconstruct their
homeland from fragments of information gathered from their occasional visits, their
parents' stories, or from the internet; thus for them home is not a place to return to, but a
place to fantasise about, or may be to visit some time as a guest or a tourist. 61
Diasporas subsist in one country but look across time and space to a different; this
living in-between condition is excruciating and marginalising for the diasporas. There is a
yearning for home, to go back to the lost origin, and imaginary homelands are created
from the disconnected and fractional reminiscences of the motherland. The diasporic
stands bewildered and confused; in succeeding generations however these confusions,
problems and yearnings become less intense as they get influenced by the culture of the
host country and also adapt themselves to it. 62 The first generation wishes the next
generation has a similar emotional attachment for the country of their ancestry. The

60

Jain. "The New Parochialism." op. cit. 79.

Satchidanandan. Authors, Texts, Issues. op. cit. 53.
62
Kaur, Tejinder. "Portrayal of Diaspora Experiences in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies." The
~ 16.2 (Dec. 2002). 38.
61

15

attitude witnessed in the second generation is however complex: as children they try to
underplay their ethnic identity, but a number of them later find themselves wanting to
know more about their heritage. 63 The depiction of the second generation in the present
research attests to this observation.
The children tend to question the relevance of the past to the present, of old and
distant customs to the new and different environment while their parents fear the
permanent loss of their dearly nurtured original culture and identity. No doubt, due to the
generation gap the migrants and their children inhabit dissimilar spaces in the
representative culture but their understanding of rootlessness and displacement can also
be of parallel nature. As John McLeod remarks, though such children enjoy a better deal
in the host country, their sense of identity is influenced by the past migrant history of
their .parents or grandparents. 64 It is often assumed that the first generation immigrants
generally suffer more alienation and despair than the second generation, but some
children. of immigrants may feel equally that they inhabit the no man's land between two
cultures and that they can never be entirely comfortable in either.
Diasporic texts seem to uphold individual accounts, imaginative projections and
memories to recorded history and thus explore alternative means of documenting events;
experiences and memories are the writers' raw material, and they strive to retrieve them
imaginatively and put them together to constitute a meaningful narrative. But how
authentic could be the images created by memory when we know "Imaginative truth is
simultaneously honourable and suspect"?65 The current thesis is well aware of the fact
that the texts taken for study here are fiction, and fiction, as we know, always has a
tenuous relationship with reality; and because of this characteristic imaginative aspect of
the novel one cannot expect a think-tank report or news or for that matter, normative
historical record of a people, place and culture from them. Interestingly here, this
corresponds well to the inevitable and perhaps intrinsic fictionality of all homes, as they

63

Sharma, Kavita A. "Indian Diaspora in North America: Issues of Education, Migration". Indian
Diaspora: Global Identity. Ed Ajay Dubey. Delhi: Kalinga, 2003. 177-190. 188.
64
McLeod, John. Beginning Post Colonialism. New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 207.
65
_Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands. op.cit.J 0

16

say, "A place does not merely exist, it has to be invented in one's imagination"; 66 and
then we have Amitav Ghosh declaring confidently "the more complicated the world
becomes, the greater is the need for it [fiction). Fiction explains the world, gives a shape
to the world, represents it, makes it understandable." 67
Nostalgia is a dominant theme, an inevitable topic for those who have forfeited a
homeland and placed themselves in a new one; however, nostalgia in second generation
writings wrestles with its own inability to hold on to direct experiences of longing,
because those who describe and articulate it were born outside and are thus emotionally
and physically removed by at least one generation from the original homeland; hence
such authors find it difficult to recapture any real sense of belonging to what is practically
nothing but another far-flung culture for them, despite the fact that their families and
members of the older generation continually remind them of their duty to retain
something of the traditional past. Nostalgia therefore, for them, must often be built upon
a fragile foundation; whilst it has its origin in the artistic imagination, fostered by stories
of childhood recounted by elderly relatives, it is still frequently an indirect emotion.
Nostalgia, though often evocative of sadness, is, nonetheless, an important
cathartic emotion. The first generation is able to live and breathe this feeling, while the.
second generation remains apart; as, speaking of her parents' generation, ItalianAustralian writer Anna Maria Dell'oso writes "It's that, with their flight into the past, I
have been left behind."68 Agha Shahid Ali in his poem "Postcard from Kashmir"
illustrates the workings of nostalgia as purifying memory to fit the postcard image of the
absent landscape so that home becomes no longer a topographical space but an
unattainable possibility. Home as the nostalgic sublime is an arrested and idealised
photographic moment for Ali. 69

66

67
68

69

Ernest Gellner qtd. in Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread ofNationalism. London: Verso, 1983. 6.
See <http://prufrockspage.blogspot.com/2005/08pro-fiction-anti naipaul.html>.
These words come from her untitled short story in Homeland . Ed. George Papaellinas. North Sidney:
Allen and Unwin, 1991. 2-3.
See Mishra, Sudesh. "From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora." An Illustrated History of
Indian Literature in English. Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 293.

17

The themes of the diasporic texts are often social and political; however, the
concerns and contradictions that the writer perceives mirrored in the contemporary sociopolitical fabric are very often reflective of his or her own personal history and conflictual
psychic pulls. The uncertainties with which a writer who has left his homeland speaks
about those themes can hardly be the same as those of one located securely within it; the
act of leaving home and settling elsewhere shapes both the writer's sensibility and the
text. The diaspora writers' perennial outsider status, their alienation, awards them a
special fluid space wherein memory can intervene to create unreal and often distorted
images. The peculiar positionality, often manifest in the self-reflexivity that marks one
significant genre of diaspora writing, is a result of the writers' inability both to look at
home in real terms and also to look away from it.70 Also, their positionality as a minority
community facing the challenges of being pitted against the hegemonic dominant
discourse has its unique repercussion in the literature of these writers.
The experience of migration is context specific, and therefore it provides
opportunities to compare and contrast the same community in a different setting. Such
diachronic studies serve to unfold the dynamics of ethnic relations both in the country of
origin and in the state of immigration. The texts under study in this research, for instance,
expose the pattern of identity formation in the Bengali diaspora and the agencies involved
in the construction of this identity which is essentially Bengali in content though
recreated in form; this pattern arises from the need to remain connected to the sources
from which this ethnic community derives its meaning of existence.
Another important point to be noted here is the trend of global. commodification
of ethnicity and marketing of native difference. 71 Ethnicity has been used increasingly
since the 1960s to account for human variation in terms of culture, tradition, language,
social patterns and ancestry, and refers to "the fusion of many traits that belong to the
nature of any ethnic group: a composite of shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes,
behaviors, experiences, consciousness of land, memories and loyalties."72 However,

Kumar, Alka. op.cit.4.

71

72

For detailed discussion on the issue see Roy. op. cit.

Schemerhon, R.A. "Ethnicity in the Perspective of the Sociology of Knowledge." Ethnicity 1 (Apr.l974): 1-14. 2.

18

gtven the fact that it comes into greatest contemporary currency in the context of
immigration, ethnicity might therefore be further defined as "a group or category of
persons who have a common ancestral origin and the same cultural traits, who have a
sense of peoplehood and of group belonging, who are of immigrant background and have
either minority or majority status within a larger society."73 In the international literary
market there has always been a niche market for fictional representations of exotic
ethnicity. The promotion of diasporic writers by the publishing industry is integral to this
hegemonic market politics thriving on the commodification of an exoticised oriental. This
market thrives on fiction that reinforces the westerner's impressions of an east untouched
by globalisation, feminism, capitalism and individualism, that serves as armchair tourism,
resorting to fetishised symbols of the eastern culture the westerners feel at home in.
The diasporic is thus picked up as the local expert on-his ethnic culture; and his
versions of realities are marketed as more acceptable than those of the resident/stay-athome writers who find it hard to endorse the absence of balance, the limitations and
exoticisation in diasporic representations of the homeland. 74 As only a devalued and
abused East is marketable in the West, the subcontinent is also often projected as an area
of darkness inflicted by poverty, violence, urban chaos, rural exploitation, caste conflict,
political instability and insurmountable corruption; it automatically becomes a problem
one solution to which is exile, emigration, the departure to greener pastures, that is the
West. Considering that most such writers belong to the new diaspora, that is those who
left homeland largely to better their material prospects, they become self-valedictory.
While discussing Indian diasporic literature M K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan
complain

th~t

"most expatriate writers have a weak grasp of actual conditions in

contemporary India, and tend to recreate it through the lens of nostalgia, writing about
imaginary homelands." Their best work, for them, deals with Indian immigrants, the
section of society they know first hand. Citing examples from Jhumpa Lahiri' s stories,

73
74

Isajaw, W .W. "Definition ofEthnicity." Ethnicity 1.2 (1974): 11 I- I 74. 118.

Uma Parameswaran says, "... supported by neither the ethno-centric community nor the larger
community, literary efforts of the Diaspora are stifled at birth while the publishers, of course, prefer the
marketability of negative stereotypes." See her essay, "Home is Where Your Feet are and May your
Heart be There Too!" op.cit. 38.

19

Naik and Narayan opine that "Mrs. Sen" and "A Temporary Matter" which are set in
Boston are "better than those set in Calcutta which sometimes ring a false note when
describing the Indian milieu."75 There are however difficulties in insisting upon a
standard for accurate or authentic representation of a cultural milieu; how would we, for
example, specify what constitutes an accurate representation of Bengal and Bengalis? In
my study, therefore, instead of insisting too much on determining accuracy of ethnic
representation, I would mainly elaborate on images of Bengal and Bengalis scattered in
their fictional narratives and how the complex, intertwined dynamics inherent in
diasporic existence work behind their unique vision of looking at themselves and their
community in the home context and in the diasporic condition. After all, as we know,
every representation has its own value, and therefore, is worth discussing in itself for an
independent understanding of its unique characteristics, politics and world-view without
resorting to judging it in terms of certain pre-scripted standards.
Well, we can still ask, how real is the reality depicted about Bengal in these texts?
What right do these Bengali expatriates have to speak about homeland at all? To approach
from outside? Rushdie has a very simple answer to such queries: Don't we know that Reality,
after all, "is built on our own prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our own
perceptiveness and knowledge"?76 And that literature is self-validating; "a book is not

justified by its author's worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been written ...
Literature is not the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. ,,n
Sometimes the diasporic writers, to counter the subtle marginalising aspect of
multiculturalism, express their wish to be mono rather than multi, to be referred to by the
mainstream discourse as British/American writers. Bharati Mukheijee could be a case in
point. Yet, despite their living outside their homeland permanently and their professed desire
to be integrated into the dominant culture, their links with the countries of origin could not be
severed completely; they cannot but return to their homeland in their writing, representing it
as outsider-insiders. These novels are thus usually records of paradoxical personal realities.

75

Naik, M K. and Shyamala Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey. Delhi:
Pencraft International, 2001. 106, 139.
76
Rushdie, Salman. "Errata : OR, Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children." Imaginary Homelands.
op.cit. 25.
77
Imaginary Homelands 14. op.cit. Italics mine.

20

So, the expatriate writer's identity remains to be at once plural and partial; he is,
as Rushdie says, now partly of the West: "Sometimes we feel that we straddle two
cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools."78 Thus, they remain, at best,
informed and critical outsiders, but never total insiders; and ultimately there is bound to
be a difference in the way in which the diaspora writes the mother country and the mother
country writes itself. Citing examples of Naipaul and Rushdie, Paranjape argues that
these diasporic authors are not addressing India or Indians, they are addressing the West;
their primary allegiance is to the West.79
Diasporic writing sometimes resorts to chutneyfied80

as Rushdie might say -

narrativisation of the desh; sometimes the writers utilise the matribhumi for their
narratives for which they are not well equipped, making their narratives nothing but
creative elaborations of pre-existing white stereotypes accentuating typically eastern
idiosyncrasies. The "ethnic trap" serves as "exotica" and such a plot "encashes on the
marketability of the homeland."

81

They are expected to regularly serve the West these

exotica; therefore the efforts at modernisation happening in this part of the world are

often ignored. The London-based Bengali author, Neel Mukheijee, recalls his experience
with one UK publisher - whom he approached for his debut novel Past Continuous
(2008) - who wanted him (which he refused) to tum the novel "into a fluffy, romantic,
weepy Exotica Fest"; she wanted that he put in more of India's "heat and dust," "smells
and colours." 82 But if representation of ethnicity is automatically exotic, it is then
impossible for a writer to come out of this politics; in fact, what should be of real concern
regarding this whole exotica discourse is to put all importance on the intention of using it.
In this study I would surely follow the writers' intentions while analysing their
delineation of Bengal and Bengalis.

78

Ibid. 15.
Paranjape, Makarand. Towards A Poetics of the Indian English Novel. Shimla: Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, 2000. 122.
80
Rushdie qtd. in Mishra, Sudesh. op. cit. 284.
81
Ibid.
.
82
Sudarshan, Aditya. "Exile as a Choice." Interview with Neel Mukherjee. Hindu Literary Review Sept 6
2009:1. See also Dastider, Sreyashi. Interview with Neel Mukherjee. Telegraph (Calcutta) 17 Feb. 2008.
<http://www .telegraphindia.com/1 080217 /jsp/calcuttalstory 8911272.jsp>.
79

21

The Bengali Context

Migration is a phenomenon that has been going on since time immemorial for
varied reasons inclusive of wars, economy and agriculture. In fact, the term, in its widest
sense, connotes the evolution of all human civilisation and culture as the primitive
human's progeny spread or dispersed to several sites of human societies all over the
world rendering the human condition, even temporally, the diasporic condition. 83 This is
to say that there is no non-diasporic state to begin with; and migrancy/dispersion into
other cultures is the human condition. The new, limited meaning of the term diaspora
however signifies "a dispersion or migration of people coming from the same country or
having a common culture."84 Bengalis also have joined this trend of human mobility
across countries and continents; at present Bengali dispersion to various foreign lands
across the globe is sizeable. UK has always been a prime destination for migrant
Bengalis; both Anglophiles and Anglophobes fmd themselves in the same boat here. The
size of Bengali diaspora in the US is also gradually increasing. Being displaced and
marginalised abroad, they face, like other diasporas, problems of integration and identity
and of achieving a general cultural adjustment with the predominant foreign ethos
together with an anxiety to come to terms with their own native heritage. The research
texts here predominantly focus on the conflict - that afflicts the generation of Bengalis
that left Kolkata in the 1960s and their offspring- between economic success in a foreign
country and a lingering sense of failure/guilt at having left one's roots behind.
The conduct of Bengalis abroad often blurs the line between ghettoisation and
self-assertion. The Bengali diasporic texts convey their conduct, lifestyle and sensitivities
that are different from their counterparts in the West and other diasporic groups there.
Emphasis on family and kinship as fundamental, close-knit life lived as a community as
opposed to a highly individualistic life in the West, neighbourhood addas - favoured
pastime of both the young and the old - that meanderingly embrace reminiscing, parocharcha with all its over-inquisitiveness as well as impassioned debates seem to be some

83

Kumar, Sudhir. "Gandhi and the Diasporic Question: Histories, Texts and Readings." in Paranjape. Ed.
op. cit. 68-78. 69.
84
The New Penguin English Dictionary. 2nd edition. 2003. 385.

22

of the key agents which defme their otherness. Another cluster of themes has to do with
cross-cultural relationships, political upheavals and the violence accompanying events
such as the Partition and the war leading to the independence of Bangladesh, the exile's
return to a country that has changed and the search for roots, and of course, the lot of
women, whether living in Bengal or as immigrants in the West.
Within the discourse of the geo-political nation-state, Bengal is not a single entity;
its western part falls in the state of West Bengal in India; its Eastern part is now
Bangladesh. What binds both geo-political entities together are the Bengali language and
culture and a long shared history. From this perspective, Bengal has been taken here to
represent a single culturally and linguistically defined entity straddling various nationstates. This culturally and linguistically defined identity/ethnicity is at odds with new
Indian or Bangladeshi citizenships; yet the spatial-political boundaries of nation-states
cannot vivisect the common thread of cultural ethos, historical legacy.
Though they belonged to Pakistan through the Partition of India in 194 7 along
religious line, the Bengali Muslims had been well aware of their own distinctive language
and culture. Culturally, linguistically, even geographically, they remained distant from
the West Pakistanis which, when conjoined with discrimination and deprivation, led to
their struggle for separate identity. Most historians of Bangladesh date the origin of the
Bengalis' independence movement in the then East Pakistan to 21 February 1952, the day
when Bengali students demonstrating in the streets of Dhaka against the imposition of
Urdu as the national language and demanding equal status for Bengali, the language of
nearly the entire population of East Pakistan, were shot at by the police. The death of
some of the demonstrators sparked off a chain of events that led to the birth of
Bangladesh by the end of the year 1971. Continuing insistence on the dominance ofUrdu
from the Pakistan state machinery was perceived as the automatic marginalisation of
Bengali, a threat of linguicism or linguistic imperialism. Interestingly, the subsequent
independence of Bangladesh and its linguistic nationalism, led to the marginalisation of
the English language which remains a major reason behind the lesser existence of quality
creative writing in English (I am aware of some important exceptions to this
generalisation) from Bangladesh.
23

Historically, "Bengal has always existed as a distinct cultural formation within the
Indian subcontinent" 85 embracing and synthesising various religious, spiritual and
philosophical communities in the subcontinental social milieu. Bengalis are always very
much aware of their own distinctive language and culture and they have got a kind of
mental attitude of accepting external elements without renouncing their own
individuality. This particular trait of the Bengali personality has been called by the great
Bengali historian Nihar Ranjan Ray as baitasibritti,86 an interesting analogy connecting
the essence of Bengali spirit to the resilience of cane plant. In keeping with the spirit, in
the diasporic context, Bengalis recreate the experience they have left behind while
simultaneously remaking themselves and are reborn in the host culture. Interestingly,
sometimes the sense of being Bengali in an expatriate has been stronger than the feeling
amongst anasporic 87/native Bengalis. The select fictions touch upon the theme of
Bengalis' cultural retentiveness and stress their ethnic distinctiveness while at the same
time they do not forget to expose as well Bengal's being the prime site of British colonial
domination and the resultant economic, political, socio-cultural and educational impact,
Bengalis' ironic anglophilia, their assertion of intellectual, literary and cultural pride
which practically verges on ethnic/racial arrogance or smugness etc.
Ahmad Sharif in his well-researched book Bangia, Bangali o Bangalitto [Bengal,
Bengali and Bengaliness] (2001) describes the influence of diverse strands of traditions
and culture, life style - often coming from outside - in the formation of Bengali
ethnicity. 88 He observes that the educated upper/middle class Bengalis still nostalgically
cling to the ways of the colonial master to prove themselves cultured and flaunt their

85

Kabeer, Naila. "The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh." Feminist
Review 37 (Spring 1991): 38-58.39.
86
Meaning the resilient spirit of cane plant. For detail see Ray, Nihar Ranjan. Bangaleer ltihas. Kolkata:
Deys Publishing, 1996. 712.
87
Fred W Riggs has coined this neologism as an antonym to diaspora; as he says, "Diaspora lacks an
antonym, but we could easily coin a neologism, such as 'anaspora' to refer to members of any ethnic
nation who are not in diaspora- they are the people who remain at home. The stem for 'diaspora' is
'speirein', meaning to scatter, and the prefix, 'dia' means apart. The suffix an- or ana- means 'not' as
in 'anachronism', 'analogy,' 'anonymous' or 'anomaly: We may therefore think of those who have not
scattered from home as being in anaspora. The use of this novel term would help us compare the position
and attitudes of the home people (anaspora) and those who have left home (diaspora), contrasting those
who have not dispersed with those who have." (Riggs. op.cit. 286).
88
Sharif, Ahmad. Bangia. Bangali o Bangalitto. Dhaka: Anonya, 2001. 10-13.

24

superiority and sophistication. Sharif argues that Bengali culture thus was never "pure"
and unique; rather Bengal was hugely influenced by colonial reforms; and the 19th
century Bengali renaissance was inspired by western thoughts and ideas. 89 In a 1992
interview Sayeed Ahmed, another Bangladeshi intellectual and playwright, identifies
Bengali culture as "a summation" of things from here and there, an amalgamation of
various strands coming over in this part of the world across a thousand years. Bangladesh
occupies a very unique cultural position, in the sense that "it was at one time so much a
part of Bengali-Hindu-Brahmo Samaj culture," and then it confronted the British impact
and an Islamic world view. However, Bengalis share the common trend in all nonWestern cultures: there are those who want to preserve the illusion of purity in cultures
which are not pure to begin with because of the great mixture of forces that have come to
those countries over centuries; they wish to preserve this illusion against what is
perceived as cultural imperialism from the West. This mentality, in effect, seeks to view
culture as a frozen heritage and denies it the life-breath of change and evolution. On the
other side there are those who wish to draw from other parts of the world, from different
traditions and cultures. 90
Religious issues have entered into political arena in Bangladesh since long. Naila
Kabeer who researched in this area argues that the dynamics of relationship between the
state and religion in Bangladesh stem from a central ambivalence within the Bengali
Muslim collectivity: in its claims to independent nationhood, it has had to reconcile itself
to the fact that, while Islamic beliefs and Bengali culture are the very essence of its
separate identity, its historical experience has prevented the two from being successfully
moulded together. 91 Analysing the place of religion in defining the identity ofthe Bengali
Muslim, she sates that, historically, Bengalis have enthusiastically embraced every major
anti-Brahminical devotional movement that emerged in the region - Buddhism,

89

For detailed theoretical, anthropological, historical study of Bengali society, culture and ethnic origin see
Sur, Atul. Bangia o Bangalir Samaj o Sanskriti. Kolkata: Jyotsnalok, 1990; Nath, Rakhal Chandra.
Mononer Aloke Bangali. Kolkata: Apama, 2000; and Ray, op. cit.
90
Marranca, Bonnie and Gautam Dasgupta. "Tradition and Modernity in Bangladesh: An Interview with
Sayeed Ahmed." Performing Arts Joumall4.2 (May 1992): 104-112. 106-107.
91
Kabeer. op. cit. 38.

25

Vaisnavism and finally Islam. 92 The syncretic form of Islam that flourished among the
Bengalis across centuries, which we can call the Bengalisation of Islam, and the common
cultural legacy they shared with Bengali Hindus have often made them suspect in the
eyes of the self-proclaimed "true" believers. A war of liberation was fought to defend
what Bengali Muslims believed to be their own distinct national identity: a fusion of
Bengali culture and humanist Islam; yet, since Bangladesh came into being, certain issues
have been reopened, which one thought were buried in the ashes of the war of liberation.
However, political Islamisation is still seen as a negation of the spirit of 1971. 93
Writing in English from the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of
Bangladesh and by probashi Bengalis has in fact a long history of over two centuries.
Calcutta was the capital of British India from the early years of colonisation until 1911; it
was the hub of Anglophone literary activity with East Bengal playing a secondary role.
Until the partition nearly all the important Indian poets writing in English were Bengalis.
In fact, Mehrotra's history locates the origin of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the
Bengali Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Most of the early Indian English writers:
Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Aru and Torn Dutt, Aurobindo and Manmohan
Ghosh, Sarojini (Chatteijee) Naidu and others were Bengali, owing to the existence of a
large Anglicised Bengali upper-class with literary interests. Dean Mahomed (17591851 )94 who was in the service of the British East India Company's Bengal Army, wrote
Travels of Dean Mahomed (1794) which is not only the first book in English ever written
and published by an Indian but also the first narrative of diasporic consciousness written
in English, one that contains the idea of India inscribed through the diasporic
imagination. 95 Sultana's Dream (1908) by Ruquiah Sakhawat Hossain was perhaps the
first attempt at creative writing in English by Bengalis in East Bengal, now Bangladesh.
Among the earliest East Bengali creative writers in English, Syed Waliullah, a bilingual
author, wrote a handful of short stories in English. Razia Khan Amin, Kaiser Haq et al
92

Addi, Premen and Ibne Azad. "Politics and Society in Bengal." Explosion in a Subcontinent. Ed. Robin
Blackbum.London: Penguin, 1975. Qtd. in Kabeer, Naila. "The Quest for National; Identity: Women,
Islam and the State in Bangladesh." Feminist Review 37(Spring 1991): 38-58.39.
93
Kabeer. op. cit. 55.
94
Dean Mahomed emigrated from India to Ireland in 1785, then to London around 1807, finally settled in
1814 in the coastal resort town of Brighton.
95
Kumar, Sudhir. "Writing India from the Margins." Littcrit (Dec 2005): 7-22.8.

26

write poetry in English, the journalist-writerS. M. Ali's novel Rainbow over Padma was
published posthumously in 1995. Farhana Haque Rahman's The Eye of the Heart (1998)
is a novel on the exploits of a Bangladeshi female ambassador in Washington. Among the
diasporic Bangladeshi authors Adib Khan, Monica Ali, Syed Manzurul Islam and
Tahmina Anam are now internationally familiar names. The immediate audience for
English writings is however limited in Bangladesh; as is already said, Bangladesh's ultranationalist rejection of English in the 1970s - a reaction to the collective memory of
linguicism under British rule as well as West Pakistani hegemony- is the major reason
for the arrested growth of English writing there. Later in this very chapter, I would
introduce some other notable stay-at-home and non-resident Bengali creative writers and
their works in some detail.
The diasporic Bengali writers refuse to be treated as outsiders to Bengal; as
London-based young Bengali author Neel Mukheijee, one of the latest entrants in the
Bengali diasporic literary scene, asserts: "I do not write as an outsider. I know the place
and the period in my blood and my bones. So no one could accuse me of not being a
Bengali/Calcuttan." For these Bengali authors, the act of living outside is more of a
personal choice; secured about their roots and identity, they do not need to indulge into
"The garden variety of nostalgia, which is nothing more than a spurious, confected
sentimentality."96 The expatriate Bengali writers now seem to be taking on the role of
mediating Bengal to the West thanks to the controllers of the international publishing
industry seemingly losing interest in home grown literature in favour of that produced by
the western born/educated diaspora at their doorstep. They write their own version of
Bengal, and are often accused (not always, of course) oftarnishing the image of Bengalis.
Scope, Objectives:

While studying different features of diasporic articulations is its objective, I

intend to limit the scope of this research to English fictional writings from the Bengali
diaspora. Not only do Bengalis comprise a sizeable diasporic group, but amid the wider
phenomenon that encompasses the extraordinarily successful phenomenon of English

96

Sudarshan. op.cit. 1.

27

language writing by people of South Asian origin, a discemable subset of fiction is from
probashi Bengalis. This subset, to name only some obvious figures, would include

Bharati Mukherjee, Amitav Ghosh, Sunetra Gupta, Adib Khan, Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali and others. These writers demarcate a fairly
extensive fictional terrain that highlights both the general traits it shares with the rest of
the sub-continental diasporas, as well as its peculiarly Bengali qualities. Of particular
interest, and this comprises the objective of my research, is the picture of Bengal and
Bengalis -both native and diasporic - that emerges from the works of these writers.
To make the scope of my research further focussed, I intend to choose for study
only four of the Bengali diasporic authors mentioned above. The primary fictional texts
selected for the proposed thesis are Adib Khan's Seasonal Adjustments (1994) and Spiral
Road (2007), 97 Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain (1992), Jhumpa Lahiri's The
Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003), and Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
and Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003). However, in the course of my discussion I would
bring in other fictional and non-fictional works of these select authors where they cross
ways with the themes of my present research. These exemplary works have been chosen
to highlight their representation of Bengal and Bengalis, both at anasporic and diasporic
levels. Through my study of these works I would try to get answers to questions like:
What does it mean to be Bengali inside as well as outside Bengal? How can culture be
preserved without becoming "ossified"? What is the need for change within Bengalis to
negotiate the present demands, and what are the consequences of refusing to make any
concessions to, or of embracing Western ideas and practices and turning away from the
ones that come here with them? How should they change without seeming to play into
the hands of their "racial enemies"? How do we draw the line between exoticism and
writing ethnicity? Between ghettoisation and self-assertion? And do we evaluate their
writing from a purely literary perspective or a cultural one? Do the novels chart a slow
but certain cultural shift? How much are they an imaginary construct? Are they cliched and
stereotypical, failing to capture changes within? Do these texts chronicalise the community

97

Spiral Road first came out in 2007 by Fourth State, NSW. I have, however, consulted the 2008 editon of
the book published by HarperCollins & India Today, New Delhi.

28

for the west? In effect, what I intend to explore is how Bengal and Bengalis figure in
diasporic Bengali imagination and how this imagination negotiates its diasporic existence.
I have taken for study some of the key representatives of diasporic Bengal whose
writings are translations of their personal dislocations and are centred on Bengalis at
home and abroad as well as Bengali history and culture. The chapters that follow, despite
their focus on select texts, are illustrative of the varied elements of a particular writer's
oeuvre, offering detailed study of most of their texts in an attempt to bring out many
facets of their representation of Bengal and Bengalis, both at anasporic and diasporic
spaces. It would be interesting to see how the authors' location outside Bengal influences,
alters and informs their attitudes to Bengal as they lose touch with its everyday reality.
The texts I have chosen are all very recent writings which were published within
the last one decade and a half, and are therefore comparatively less studied. Two of the
writers - Adib Khan writing from Australia, and Monica Ali writing from London - are
originally from Dhaka, while the other two - Sunetra Gupta, writing from England, and
Jhumpa Lahiri, writing from America- are originally from Kolkata. While Monica Ali's
and Jhumpa Lahiri's stories are predominantly about diaspora, Adib Khan's and Sunetra
Gupta's are mainly about homeland. Not only that, two writers have been taken from the
first generation immigrants and the other two from the next to help probe deeper into
generational conflicts and difference in perspectives while looking at the diasporic and
home realities. Again, the choice of three women writers in a selection of four is not only
to reflect the reality of predominance of women writers in the fictional canvas of Bengali
diaspora but also to enable a substantial study of female perspectives on the related issues
and to see how their readings are different from the male viewpoint of looking at home
and diaspora. The balanced representation of two major religious strands within the
Bengali community has also been ensured in the selection with a view to having a fuller
view of an ethnicity that embraces people from diverse religious affiliations.
All of the novels and short stories selected here "become caught up in a repetitive
economy of loss and belonging where the process of writing is inexorably tied to a search

29

for [meaning and] identity and place," 98 and reveal strong affiliation with their authors'
Bengali background. Apart from the contents of the narratives, which obviously concern
Bengalis, my study will also take into account, with particular reference to Sunetra
Gupta, the writers' stylistic distinctiveness as Bengali writers - in modes of expression,
imagery, use of language and symbols of material and non-material culture, references to
history and literature which mark a distinct Bengali mode of narrativisation.
Ethnic groups wish to remain distinct, and consolidate and reaffirm their
existence, identity and difference by means of symbols employed in their material culture
(goods, clothes, food etc) and through non-material means (life-style and sensitivities,
speech, music, literature etc.). The diasporic situation provides a fertile ground for
translation of markers of such ethnic identities. Following the Rushdiean analogy of
archaeological survey where even pieces of the most quotidian objects are exciting
discoveries to reconstruct a past, 99 in my study too, I shall refer to even relatively
insignificant fragments of a culture reflected in the select fiction as significant symbols in
projecting this common Bengali life and ethos.
Now I want to pinpoint some of the significant issues ofthe texts to be taken up in
the present study. I begin with .Monica Ali's novel, which is the first comprehensive
fictional portrayal of Bengali community in contemporary England, and which has been
accused of a skin-deep understanding of the Bengali Muslim social space. In my study I .
shall examine the validity of the charges brought against her, and investigate the question
whether the success of Brick Lane in the West and Ali's elevation to the status of a
celebrity on the strength of this one book is the British cultural establishment's attempt to

98

Fokkema, Aleid. "On the (False) Idea of Exile: Derek Walcott and Grace Nichols." (Un)Writing Empire.
Ed. Theo D'haen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.99-116. 101.
99
Rush die explains, "I am not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely, the partial nature of these
memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired
greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like
symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. There is an obvious parallel here with
archaeology. The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provincially,
be constructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects ... the
broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also, I believe, a useful tool with which to work in
the present... human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures,
cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions ... those of us who have been forced by cultural
displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truth, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism
forced upon us." See Imaginary Homelands. op.cit.l2.

30

create an icon to represent the sizeable Bangladeshi community in Britain. I will show
how her narrative dispels the myth of an ideal home, "the Golden Bengal," to which a
section of immigrants want to return with a view to rescue their families from the present
"corrupting land." The novel also initiates questions concerning the status of women and
the position of patriarchy in an expatriate Bengali society. Monica Ali clearly suggests
that the diasporic space offers possibilities and rights denied to a Bengali woman in the
mother country, and therefore, it is natural that women are more willing to carve out their
identity in British-Bengali terms. Ali also seems to be espousing the emergence of a new
generation of Bengalis who accept the challenges of acculturation. I will also discuss how
Brick Lane underscores the futility of politics based on religious divide and mutual hatred
through a detailed picture of Bengali Muslims' involvement in political conflicts in
Banglatown against the backdrop of September 11, 2001. A brief discussion of Ali's
other novel Alentejo Blue (2006) will also be provided.
In my study of Adib Khan I will describe how a novel, which can depict such a

cosy scene in a typical Bengali village -"when the hot evening crept across the river and
engulfed the house, the family assembled in lantern-lit front veranda to eat a huge meal
and listen to Lipu Chacha singing Rabindro Shongeet and Nazrul Geethi" (Seasonal 23)ultimately turns out to be a highly pessimistic projection of Bengal and Bengalis.
Seasonal Adjustments (1994), which won the Commonwealth prize for the best first book
in 1995, is set in Dhaka and Shopnogonj, "a replica of the thousands of villages which
confirm the rural primitivism of Bangladesh" (11 ). Khan's later novels, The Illusion of
Solitude (1996), The Storyteller (2000) and Homecoming (2003) however, mark an
interesting new shift in his work, revealing only a minimal concern with Bengal or with
the displacement experienced by migrants, and therefore, are not considered as primary
texts for this study, though detailed references would be made to all of these novels too. I
will specifically challenge the validity of Khan's extremely pessimistic projection of the
land and its people, and the depiction of its history as a grim catalogue of chaos, army
coups and political agitations, of poverty, hunger, insurmountable corruption and ''the
fragile semblance of democracy''(31 ). I would show how the bigotry, selfaggrandisement, communal hatred or racism that the protagonist faces from common
Australians is paralleled with the apparent existence of the same evils back home in
31

Bengal and within Bengalis abroad. I would also discuss the other themes of the novel:
the dialectics between liberal, orthodox/fanatic and syncretistic Islamic traditions within
Bengali society, how the common cultural legacy the Bengali Muslims share with fellow
Hindus have often made them suspect in the eyes of the self-proclaimed true believers in
Islam, the ambivalent native perception about probashi Bengalis, and how the trauma of
displacement, coupled with the racism immigrants frequently encounter, generates
alienation and despair that sometimes can result in confrontations. I will specifically
examine in detail Khan's interpretation of the Independence war of 1971 and his rejection
of the popular glorification of it, not only on the ground that war in general is a "horrible
and vicious thing," 100 but also, by counterbalancing the Pakistani genocidal rampage in
Dhaka in the midnight of March 25, 1971 with the after-war indiscriminate slaughter of
Biharis by Bengalis in "the hysteria of revenge" (Seasonal 117). In his latest novel, Spiral
Road (2007) Adib Khan re-explores the old home and migration issues through the
shifting and fractured identity of his Bengali protagonist Masud Alam who is now a
librarian in Melbourne. However, compared to Seasonal Adjustments, this time he has
ventured into a more ambitious canvas tying the issues of identity and belonging, of
family and homeland to the rise of terrorism home and abroad; personal tragedy
overwhelms the entire narrative reflecting metaphorically the broader issues of moral
complexities of a people. Khan's narratives succeed in being the most scathing and
relentless portrayal of the worst in any society; he practically panders to the popular
western perception of the subcontinent as a land of poverty, beggars, filth and rampant
corruption, leading critics to complain that his is a representation of Bangladesh that is
unjust, untrue, produced in the designated space allotted to the diasporic writer who has
to link up to the mainstream market forces and hegemonic politics of publication.
Memories of Rain (1992), Sunetra Gupta's first novel which won her the
Sahitya Akademi award in 1996, nostalgically recreates the Calcutta101 of 1970s and
reveals not only the diasporic selfs "wish to remain continuous" 102 but also the author's

100

Khan, Adib. "What I've learnt." Interview with Chris Beck. Age 6 Dec. 2003. 23 Sept. 2007.
<http://www .theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/03/1 0703 51646166.html>.
101
Since 2001 Calcutta became Kolkata. In my thesis however I have used both.
102
Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary." op. cit. 441.

32

initial interest in "conveying my ideas and thought about Calcutta to a Western

audience." 103 Gupta however appears to try later to shift the gaze away from the
seemingly narrow and repetitive theme of migrant loss and displacement. The initial selfconsciousness and desire to represent Bengal and Bengalis is thus less evident in the
subsequent novels which become more free and concerned with human condition in
general, and which therefore, are not taken as primary texts for this study, though detailed
reference would be made to all of her other novels too: The Glassblower's Breath (1993),
Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), The Sin of Colour (1999) and So Good in Black (2009).

In my study I will particularly analyse Gupta's image of Kolkata as the "loving mother"
betrayed by her own child; her use of Bengali proverbs, phrases, expressions; her
articulation of the central emotion of the story through Tagore songs; her exposure of
Bengalis' love for literature, music, theatre, adda and intellectualism; and thus I will
describe how the novel reverberates with the feel of Bengali life and ethos, and embodies
a distinct Bengali mode of narrativisation. I will argue that the novel is less concerned
with gender or social issues suggested by the female protagonist's physical displacement,
than with the imaginative sustenance provided by the reworking of her memories
interwoven with legendary and mythical stories of her cosmopolitan Bengali past. In
other words, the author's narrative poetics of making memory figure prominently as the
characters try to reconstruct and reconfigure their identities will be commented upon.
In Jhumpa Lahiri's stories, Bengal keeps cropping up as a setting sometimes
literally, sometimes figuratively, in the memory of the characters. Evoking a specifically
female experience, Lahiri describes the expatriate situation as "A sort of life long
pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling of out of sorts"
iliamesake 49). Her stories stand out as narratives of delicately revealed ethnography
where one gets details of upper-middle class Bengali customs in Kolkata vis-a-vis their
painstaking adaptations into a foreign culture. Her first work The Interpreter of Maladies
(1999) discusses displacement, processes of integration and the accompanying loss of
culture and quest for identity of second generation Bengali immigrants. The collection

103

Ghosh, Ranjan and Christiane Schott e. " ... nobody likes to be bracketed." Interview with Sunetra
Gupta. Critical Practice 12.2 (June 2004): 117-124.122.

33

''testifies to the uneasy co-existence of confident public identities with a tendency to

ethnicize and privatize other aspects of their lives, including gender relations." 104 Other
serious subjects of study here would be Lahiri's viewing the geo-political division of
Bengal as "We were sliced up ... like a pie, Hindus here, Muslims there" ("When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine," Maladies 25) and the 1971 War as a reaffirmation of Bengali
togetherness, and also, how the diaspora is always influenced by what happens back
home in Bengal. Lahiri is enthusiastic about the elaborate Bengali rituals and festivities
which are less personal occasions than community events to be shared by the extended
family and the entire neighbourhood. However, sometimes it is the painstaking attempt at
verisimilitude in her writing that betrays the anxiety about authenticity. In addition, her
admission that her own experience of Bengal is "largely that of a tunnel, the tunnel
imposed by a single city we ever visited, by the handful of homes we stayed in, by the
fact that I was not allowed to explore the city on my own" 105 only contributes to make her
position more vulnerable to her critics. Not only is her right to write about home under
interrogation but the veracity of her knowledge has also been questioned. Her second
work, a novel, The Namesake (2003) foregrounds the tradition/practice of Bengali
nomenclature as the assertion of a distinctive cultural identity both in anasporic and
diasporic spaces. With the publication of her latest work Unaccustomed Earth (2008),
Lahiri has returned to the short story form yet again. With special focus on the
representation of second-generation Bengalis in the US and their cultural markers, she
deals here with inter-generational conflicts and anguished self-divisions among both first
and second-generation immigrants who inhabit the no-man's land between integration
and resistant memories/inherited mores of the abandoned "home." I will attempt to
explore the major themes and issues which link Lahiri's only novel The Namesake and
the erstwhile anthology of stories Interpreter of Maladies with her recent work
Unaccustomed Earth.

104

Vijayasree, C. "Survival as an Ethic: South Asian Immigrant Women's Writing." in Paranjape. Ed. op.
cit. 130-40. 135.
105
Lahiri, Jhumpa. "My Intimate Alien." Stree [Woman]. Spec. issue of Outlook (2000): 116-20. 116-17.

34

Existing Research:
All the writers chosen for study here are relatively new: they started publishing
fiction in English in the 1990s. Hardly any full book has been authored so far on any of
the four authors' life and work. We do not even have a good number of research articles
specifically focussed on their writings; all one has are reviews, comments, and some
journal and newspaper articles on .their works. Among them Adib Khan is the least
written about while Sunetra Gupta's works are highly acclaimed but only by a very few
critics. Neluka Silva's well-researched work The Gendered Nation: Contemporary
Writings from South Asia (2004) devotes a few pages on Adib Khan's debut novel
Seasonal Adjustments where Silva argues how Khan's narrative is integral to the politics
of the gendered structure of the traditional Bengali culture, society and religion. For
primary information about Khan's latest ventures, Rebecca Sultana's 2007 article in
Dhaka's Daily Star on Spiral Road is quite helpful. Monica Fludemik' s essay "Colonial
vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity: A Comparison of Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan with
Recent British and North American Expatriate Writing (Singh Baldwin, Divakaruni,
Sunetra Gupta)" published in 1998 manages to throw some light on certain aspects in
Gupta's works. Sarah Curtis's Times Literary Supplement article on Sunetra Gupta,
"From Calcutta to Oxford." (1999) as well as Chitra Padmanabhan's recent interviewbased essay "Of Lost Moorings" (2009) in Hindu Sunday Magazine also deserve
mention. Debjani Ganguly's "Of Dreams, Digressions and Dislocations: The Surreal
Fiction of Sunetra Gupta" ( 1996) brings into surface some unique aspects of Gupta's
early novels including Memories of Rain. Besides, the website dedicated to the author:
<http://www.sunetragupta.com> - which provides an impressive archive of her own
literary and critical essays, reviews and comments as well as reviews and interviews by
others- prove particularly helpful.
Compared to Gupta and Khan, Jhumpa Lahiri appears to have attracted quite a lot
critical attention both from home and abroad. In addition to some scattered articles in
various journals including the on-line ones, and also in newspapers, Sumon Bala-edited
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Master Storyteller: A Critical Response to Interpreter of Maladies
(2002) offers a collection of essays on different issues of Lahiri's debut collection of
35

short-fiction ranging from food to costume and customs to generational differences in

diaspora. In 2005, Indira Nityanandam also published Jhumpa Lahiri: The Tale of the
Diaspora - a collection of essays all written by herself which covers a number of issues
ofboth Interpreter of Maladies and the novel The Namesake. Mandira Sen's three-page
Review of The Namesake, "Names and Nicknames" (2004) in Women's Review of
Books is very illuminating; it takes up the issue of nomenclature in the politics of ethnic
identity as dealt by Lahiri in her novel. Noelle Brada Williams in her article "Reading
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies as a Short Story Cycle" (2004) elaborates how
Lahiri repeats herself in her tales both in terms of subject matter and stylistic articulation.
The Bangladeshi poet-critic Kaiser Huq has written about Adib Khan and Monica
Ali along with some other diasporic Bangladeshi authors in his essay "Jumping Ship:
Three Bangladeshi Diaspora Novels in English" (2004). His "Review of Brick_ Lane"
(2003) is also helpful as are Sumitra Mishra's article, "Monica Ali's Brick Lane:
Alienation, Acculturation and the Diasporas" (2006) and Saugata Bhaduri's article "The
Lane, Brick by Brick: Practices of Identity-Formation of the Bengali Diaspora in
London" (2007). Sukhdev Sandhu in his elaborate review of Brick Lane published in
2003 in London Review of Books not only talks about the text but also provides an
informative historical and demographic overview of the Tower Hamlets in London where
Brick Lane is located. Besides, while Yasmin Hussain's Writing Diaspora: South Asian
Women, Culture and Ethnicity (2005) devotes a few pages exclusively on Ali's debut
novel, Michela Canepari Labib's "The Multiethnic City: Cultural Translation and
Multilingualism in Monica Ali's Brick Lane" (2005), Alistaire Cormack's "Migration
and the Politics of Narrative Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick
Lane"(2006) and Michael Perfect's "The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in

Monica Ali's Brick Lane" (2008) focus on different aspects of the book.
Certain other books such as Writers of Indian Diaspora (1998) edited by Jasbir
Jain or The Postmodem Indian English Novel (1996) edited by Viney Kirpal offer a
collection of articles worth mentioning, most of which concern Indian diasporic writings
in general - Nilufer E Bharucha's article, "Charting of Cultural Territory: Second
Generation Postcolonial Indian English Fiction" for example - but still there are some in
36

both the collections that have particular focus on Jhumpa Lahiri and Sunetra Gupta.
Kirpal's other book The Third World Novel of Expatriation (1989), Susheila Nasta's
Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Perspectives on
Diaspora Indian Fiction in English (2005) edited by Tejinder Kaur and N.K. Deb,
Malashri Lal's The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English (1995), A.L.
McLeod's The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (2001), Chitra Baneijee Divakaruni's
essay "We the Indian Women in America" (1996), C. Vijayasree's "Survival as an Ethic:
South Asian Immigrant Women's Writing" (2001), etc are also relevant to the issues this
study is concerned with. These books and articles map migrations through critical
evaluation of various diasporic fictional works. Mapping Migrations: Perspectives on
Diasporic Fiction (2006) edited by Charu Sharma has a couple of articles on Jhumpa
Lahiri by different authors. One particular book which I want to mention here with
special importance is South Asian Writers in English published in 2006. This is in fact
one of the volumes (vol. 323) of a series called "Dictionary of Literary Biography," a
massive archival venture by Broccoli-Clark-Layman from America. This particular
volume features brief sketches of a select bunch of writers of South Asian origin that
include all of my four authors. The "Introduction" to the book, by its editor Fakrul Alam
- a Bangladeshi academic-critic - is as informative as the individual entries on authors
prepared mostly by English professors from various countries of South Asia.
I have found interviews and personal writings of the concerned authors a great
source of knowing their take on different issues; they provide some valuable insights into
how their actual experiences have affected their fictional narratives, to what extent are
they guilt-tainted writings, whether they possess the right to write about homeland, and if
they do, how much authenticity they can claim for such representation, etc. I want to
name here some such pieces of views and interviews that I find particularly beneficial :
Adib Khan's essays "In Janus's Footsteps" (2001) published in Australian Humanities
Review, and "Writing Homeland" (1995) in Australian Book Review and his interview
"Bangladesh Storyteller in World Fiction" (2000) to Dhaka's Star Weekend Magazine;
Monica Ali's Guardian essay "Where I'm Coming From"(2003) and her Interview (2003)
by Kaiser Haq for Daily Star (Dhaka) as well as her 2004 Interview with Diran Adebayo;
Jhumpa Lahiri's interview with Elizabeth Fransworth in 2000, and some of her 1999
37

Interviews like the ones with Vibhuti Patel for Newsweek, with Arun Aguiar for
Pifmagazine, with Gaiutra Bahadur for Citypaper.net, and her more recent one (in 2007)
with Kal Penn for Filmiholic; Sunetra Gupta's personal essay "Why I Write" (1994), and
her interview "Never Far From Home" (2003) by Mithu C. Banetji for Sunday
Statesman, and another interview in 2004 with Ranjan Ghosh and Christiane Schotte,
" ... nobody likes to be bracketed" published in Critical Practice. Gupta's Essay on
Calcutta which she wrote as an Introduction to Calcutta (2003) by Benoit Lange is a
highly lyrical and evocative reminiscence of the city during the 1960 and 70s. Capturing
the intricate dynamics of the author's old emotional attachment and present relationship
with the city's life, history and culture, the essay offers obvious parallel/contradictory
real-life narratives to her fiction making it valuable for this study.
While there has been very little work on the particular authors I intend to study,
there is a lot of existing research on diaspora studies in general and the history and
culture of Bengal, two areas which are intrinsic to my research. One can name, as
examples of the first area, books like Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands (1991),
lain Chambers' Migrancy, Identity, Culture (1994), Jonathan Ratherford's Identity:
Community. Culture, Difference (1990), Rey Chow's Writing Diaspora (1993) , Peter
Van de Veer's Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in South Asian Diaspora
(1995), Makarand Paranjape's In Diaspora: Theories. Histories, Texts (2001) etc. Vijay
Mishra in his essay "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora" tries to
unravel the complex relationship between homelands and diasporas. The key concept in
his essay is that of the "diasporic imaginary" which is defined as any ethnic enclave in a
nation-state that defines itself, either consciously or unconsciously or because of the
political self-interest of a racialised nation-sate, as a group that lives in displacement.
Mishra appears to reconstruct the relationship between diaspora and homeland in
dialectical terms: diasporas construct homelands in ways that are quite different from
people of the homelands themselves; and at the same time the nation-state as an
"imagined community" needs diasporas to remind it of what the idea of the homeland is.
Nalini Natarajan in her Introduction to The Writers of the Indian Diaspora (1993) argues
that in introducing readers to multiple subjectivities that arise in conditions of diaspora,
writers provide a useful antidote to the reductive processes of homogenisation at work
38

everywhere around us today, and an invaluable resource for understanding transnational

potential of diasporic populations to interrupt the monologic discourse of the contemporary
nation.
While R. Radhakrishnan is not centrally concerned with the literary texts
produced by the diaspora, his study Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location
( 1996) offers meditative and theoretically nuanced consideration of the many affiliative
tags and pulls on different generations of the Indian diaspora in America. In his first and
last chapters, Radhakrishnan explores the tension and limitations of the diasporic location
that he himself epitomises in his present acadenlic-immigrant location in the US.
Radhakrishnan notes that diasporic subjectivity is necessarily double: acknowledging the
imperatives of an earlier "elsewhere" in an active and critical relationship with cultural
politics of one's present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement.
"Home" then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, a form of accountability to
more than one location. Radhakrishnan's book can be read as a call to the diaspora to
take on the responsibility of being accountable to both locations, in this case,
contemporary India and the "not-home" place: "I cannot live, earn, pay taxes, raise
family, produce scholarship, teach, and take passionate and vigorous political stances
here and still call it 'not-home.' Conversely, I cannot historicize the very valence of my
being here except through Indian/subaltern/postcolonial perspectivism." 106 Rosemary
Marangoly George in her article "At a Slight Angle to Reality: Reading Indian Diaspora
Literature" reiterates that the quality and quantity of literary writing by diasporic peoples
merit sustained critical attention. According to her, all diasporas are not identical. They
don't share identical histories nor will they follow the same trajectory into the future and
as such deserve individual attention. 107 In his article on Indo-Caribbean literature Victor
Ramraj suggests that the single most prominent feature of diasporic literature is the
conflict between fictional characters whom he classifies as assimilationists and the
traditionalists with authorial sympathy lying almost always with the assimilationists. His
other article "Diasporas and Multiculturalism" in New National and Postcolonial

106

Radhakrishnan. op. cit. 1-2.

George, Rosemary Marangoly. "At a Slight Angle to Reality: Reading Indian Diaspora Literature."
Other Americans. Spec. issue ofMelus 21.3 (Autumn 1996}: 179-193. 179-80.

107

39

Literatures: An Introduction (1996) edited by Bruce King is also illuminating. There are a
host of other scholarly articles on the subject like James Clifford's "Diasporas" (1994),
Paul Gilroy's "It Ain't Where You're From, It's Where You're At: The Dialectics of
Diasporic Identification" ( 1991 ), Samir Dayal's "Diaspora and Double Consciousness"
(1996), Fred W. Riggs "The Modernity of Ethnic Identity and Conflict" (1998), Anindyo
Roy's "Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora: Figuring 'Home'
Locating Histories" (1995), William Saffran's "Diasporas in Modem Societies: Myths of
Homeland and Return" (1991), Ronald Taft's "Migrations: Problems of Adjustment and
Assimilation in Immigrant" (1973), Stuart Hall's "Cultural Identity and Diaspora"
(1993), R. Radhakrishnan's "Ethnicity in an Age ofDiaspora" (1991) just to name a few.
Among available historical and critical writings on Bengal and Bengali society
and culture, that is the second area, I have consulted a number of books and articles. The
list includes among others: Bangaleer Itihas by Nihar Ranjan Ray ( 1996), Bangia,
Bangali o Bangalitto (2001) by Ahmad Sharif, Bangia o Bangalir Somaj o Sanskriti
(1990) by Atul Sur, The Last Days of East Pakistan (1993) by G. W. Chowdhury,
Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (2003) by Krishna Dutta, Days and Nights in
Calcutta ( 1986) co-authored by Bharati Mukherjee and her husband Clark Blaise, The
Islamic Heritage of Bengal (1984) published by UNESCO and edited by G. Michell,
Rafiuddin Ahmed's Bangladesh: Society, Religion, Politics (1985) and Asim Roy's The
Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (1983). As for articles I want to particularly
name Naila Kabeer's "The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in
Bangladesh" (1991), Zillur R. Khan's "Islam and Bengali Nationalism" (1985), "Bengali
Nationalism and the Emergence of Bangladesh" jointly written by A R Mullick and Syed
Anwar Hussain in Bangladesh, National Culture and Heritage: An Introductory Reader
(2004) edited by Salahuddin Ahmed and B.M Chawdhuri. The name of another article,
"Desh-Bidesh: Sylheti Images of Home and Away'' (1993) by Katy Gardner should be
mentioned too. Gardner - who stayed in Bangladesh for some time to prepare this article
- throws light on the mindset and attitude (regarding home and Britain) of native Sylheti
Bangladeshis who constitute a major chunk of the Bengali population in London.
Besides, detailed researches on Bengali immigration in Britain are available in C. Adams'
Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers (1987); Y. Choudhury's Roots and Tales of the
40

Bangladeshi Settlers (1993) published by the Sylhet Social History Group in Binningham;
J. Eade's "Nationalism and the Quest for Authenticity: The Bangladeshis in Tower
Hamlets" (1989); and David Garbin's "An Overview of Religious and Political Dynamics
among the Bangladeshi Diaspora in Britain" (2007) as well as in The Ethnic Minority
Populations ofBritain (1996) published by the Office for National Statistics in London.
Apart from the already-mentioned works, some other fictional texts by authors not
included in the present research, which deal with similar concerns of displacement and Bengali
identity as well as native/contemporary Bengal - its history, culture and way of life- may also
be considered as "existing research in this area" One can particularly name here Bangladeshi
journalist-writerS MAli's novel, Rainbow over Padma (1994); London-based Bangladeshi
authors Syed Manzurul Islam's novel Burrow (2004) and Tahmima Anam's debut novel A
Golden Age (2007); Kolkata-based Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (1991),
Freedom Song (1998), A New World (2000) and Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence
(2002); the US-based veteran Bengali writer Bharati Mukheijee's two short story collectionsDarkness (1985) and The Middleman and Other Stories (1988)- as well as her novels, The
Tiger's Daughter (1972) and Desirable Daughters (2002); another US-based author Chitra
Banetjee Divakaruni's novels, Arranged Marriage (1995) and Sister of My Heart (1999) and
her short fiction, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001 ). Another very prominent writerand perhaps the most discussed Bengali writer of today- who is not present in this project is
Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh's most iconic work The Shadow Lines (1988) is a novel about memory
and desire, the diasporic consciousness and the invisible lines that bind people and transcend
boundaries. 108 It exemplifies that, in a way, each mnemonic effort is an attempt at
historicisation. 109 As the narrator in The Shadow Lines states, "people like my grandmother
who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection" (194); as is
Tridib and is lla. Meenakshi Mukheiji observes, in regard to Ghosh's novel, that "the public
chronicles of nations are interrogated in this novel, by highlighting on the one hand the reality
of the fiction people create around their lives, and on the other hand by recording the verifiable
graphic details of individual memories that do not necessarily tally with the received version of

108

Alam, Fakrul. Introduction. South Asian Writers in English. Ed. Alam. Farmington: Thomson Gale,
2006. xv-xxiii. xix.
109
Gupta, Pallavi. "Historicising Memory in The Shadow Lines." Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines :
Critical Perspectives. Ed. Novy Kapadia. New Delhi: Asia Book Club, 2001. 274-82. 274.

41

history."

110

Though Thamma indulges in imagined boundary-making she is still trapped in her

pre-national spatial identity; the characters create a sense of belonging around a pre-political
community integrated on the basis of descent, a shared tradition and a common language. 111
Shadow Lines sums up the post-colonial condition where, aptly exemplified by the
immigrants, "going away'' or "coming home" challenges essentialist notions of belonging
and identity. In configuring the partition as fratricidal war, almost literally, Ghosh returns
to a memory earlier than nation-ness. The pre-national imaginings that conflict with the
new national identity here are both linguistic and religious, which often overlap. Thamma's
prenational, linguistically defined identity as a Bengali is at odds with her new Indian
citizenship as she tries to recover her old sense of belonging in her birth-place.

112

Ghosh

has used memory's truth to explore alternative means of documenting events: "Non-fiction
gives you the facts. Fiction gives you the truth," declares this self-professed believer in
fiction. 113 Thamma's identification with Dhaka as home figures the memory of a
linguistically constructed unity; it traces a disjuncture between the history of India and the
history of Bengal, as different regions/ethnicities have their own local histories.

114

Ghosh's

narrative in this sense challenges the myth of the unitary history of the Indian nation,
reducing India to a geographical area with several sub-nationalities speaking several
languages and following many different traditions of religion, food, dress and conduct.

115

Before I draw extensively on my primary authors, I wish to take a brief but critical
look at those diasporic and anasporic Bengali writers who have not been included in the list
of primary authors for this research but can always be studied with profit by anyone
considering the subject in greater detail. They are certainly noteworthy presences in Bengali
writings in English in general; and some of them constitute key representatives of diasporic
Bengal, meticulously documenting the unique hybrid existence of Bengalis in different

110

Qtd. in Gupta, Pallavi. op.cit . 280.

Gera, Anjali. "Des Kothay? Amitav Ghosh Tells Old Wives Tales". Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Companion. Ed. Tabish Khair. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 109-127. 115.
112
Ibid. 116.
113
A point made in a book advertisement in the November issue of the New York Times Book Review.
114
Gera. op. cit. 119.
115
However, Amitav Ghosh himself has discussed India as an academic and emotional geography in In an
Antique Land (1992), citing Arabic and Hebraic documents of the middle ages. His idea of Indian
nationhood- sort of a unitary vision of India- is elaborated there as well as in The Imam and the Indian
(2002).
111

42

western sites in their writings. In the following few pages I shall discuss some of these
fictional works as well as the non-fictional Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977) - of which
Bharati Mukheljee happens to be a co-author - in some detail as they relate to my study
here. I shall look at some of the thematic clusters that bring three authors - Chitra Baneljee
Divakaruni, Bharati Mukheljee and Amit Chaudhuri - and my research-authors together.
However, detailed references to some Bangladeshi authors namely Syed Manzurul Islam,
Tahmima Anam and S.M. Ali will be made only in the next chapter as well as the chapter
devoted to Adib Khan's representation of Bangladesh for the sake of convenience and
comparison. Right now, let me begin with Amit Chaudhuri.

Amit Chaudhuri: A Strange and Sublime Address; Freedom Song: A New World; Real

Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

The new generation of Bengali writers in English - Amit Chaudhuri (b.l962) and
the likes - who live and work in native Bengal, are engaged in depicting not the eternal
and mythical home but the post-independence complex reality of today. Kolkata, the state
capital of West Bengal, the place which many Bengalis consider to be the intellectual and
emotional heartland of their community, is to Chaudhuri's oeuvre what the fictional
Malgudi was to Narayan's: the literal as well as the figurative locus of a distinctive
culture. His works convey the traditional ambience, the leisurely pace of life of Kolkataa lifestyle and sensitivities that are different from those of the West. Chaudhuri once
referred to Kolkata as a spiritual space to which he looked for peace in troubled times:
"Calcutta used to be a city of the mind ... it represented high culture of the modernist
kind." According to Chaudhuri, Bengali culture is "a profoundly middle-class culture." 116
Recalling his childhood association with the city and its language and culture, he says,
I grew up in a cmporate Bombay, with high buildings; it was a kind of existence
outside any community. To go back and visit Calcutta was to go back to houses
which were nearer the street level. Streets in south Calcutta had their own particular
noises ... I identified Calcutta as a place that was home. Home was interwoven with
116

Qtd. in Sen, Krishna. "Amit Chaudhuri." in Alam. Ed. op. cit. 47-54. 54.

43

the Bengali language, my mother tongue . . . which was hardly spoken out of my
immediate home. In school I spoke only English, so to go back to Calcutta was to reenter the Bengali language ... The Bengal I grew up with, with its own language and
its own culture, and which I consider psychologically to be home, no longer exists. 117
Chaudhuri believes that a major consequence of the social and intellectual churning
caused by colonial rule in India was the evolution of a western-educated middle class that
creatively adapted its indigenous ethos to new priorities.

118

He sees himself as a product of

this very historical-cultural process. The life portrayed in his first book A Strange and
Sublime Address ( 1991) is that of the middle and upper-middle class echelons of Bengali
society which is Chaudhuri's own background. Devotional hymns and songs by Tagore and
the harmony they signify constitute an important motif in this work. The novel portrays an
extended family of relatives and friends- a typically intricate skein of Bengali kinship. In a .. personal note at the beginning of the book Chaudhuri describes the Bengali family as
"tangled web, an echoing cave, of names and appellations, too complicated to explain
individually." Chhotomama's unglamorous home in Kolkata evoked for the child narrator a
securely located heritage: the old family photographs, and portraits of grandfathers and
grandmothers symbolised another world, another order of calm, inviolable existence. The
book comprises the title novella and nine short stories; the novella tells the story of a
summer vacation taken by Sandeep, a ten-year-old boy living in Mumbai, who is visiting
his uncle's (Chhotomama's) home in Kolkata with his mother. The long, lazy days,
punctuated by the repetitive rituals of daily life - Sandeep frolicking and squabbling with
his two younger cousins, leisurely meals with time enough to pick every fish bone clean,.
evening tea on the balcony, outings in the ancient family car, and the occasional visitor, the
pavements shimmering in the noonday glare, and the cries of the itinerant vendors - form
the backdrop for Sandeep's brief sojourn in the old three-story house in a "middle-middleclass" neighbourhood. Outside there is "Calcutta, old and vast and complicated" (183):
basti-s, narrow lanes with cramped shops and rickshawallas smoking dimly incandescent
beedis (63), the peipetual movement of pariahs, beggars, vendors (53), destitute, homeless

117
118

See Galvan. op. cit. 217.1talics mine.

For detail see Chaudhuri, Amit. "Modernity and the Vernacular." Introduction. The Picador Book of
Modem Indian Literature. Ed. A. Chaudhuri. London: Granta, 2001. xvii- xxii.

44

workers, refugees from 1971 war, parents worrymg about their children's English,
arguments and dissensions in the tea-shops, football craze - East Bengal versus Mohun
Bagan. "Even at night, the streets were theatres full of actors and extras: reckless dogs,
insufferable cows lying in the centre of the lane, families arguing, old women gossiping,
children chasing cats, rickshawallas idling, V aishnav devotees singing religious songs for
all to hear . . . this vague and vast enterprise in which everyone seemed to be taking part"
(124). The entire summer is filtered through Sandeep's consciousness, but in a real sense
Kolkata is the protagonist. By a trick of the boy's imagination, the city metamorphoses into
a mythic space; the phoenix-like vitality makes it the "strange and sublime address" of
Sandeep's childhood recollections: "Calcutta is a city of dust. If one walks down the street,
one sees mounds of dust like sand-dunes on the pavements ... Daily, Calcutta disintegrates,
unwhispering, into dust, and daily it rises from dust again." (8-9).
Another novel of Chaudhuri, Freedom Song (1998) presents the traumatic effects of the
1947 partition of Bengal from the perspective of a family of Hindu refugees who struggle to
maintain a veneer of financial respectability on the one hand, and on the other it chronicles,
through the protagonist Vaskar, the passionate romance of Bengalis, and especially Kolkatans
since the mid 1970s with the heady Marxist mantra promising the redemption of the proletariat
The world depicted in Freedom Song, desultory and economically stagnant, is greyer than that
in Chaudhuri's earlier writing. The gap between the "freedom song" for the downtrodden and
the actual realisation of those lofty aspirations is presented with sober detachment
In A New World (2000) Chaudhuri returns to the Bengali upper-middle class

milieu, and explores the crises of identity experienced by its more cosmopolitan and
westernised members. Jayojit, an economist and sometime writer, migrated like many an
ambitious Bengali of his generation, to the new world of the US; he was now returned to
Kolkata for a summer vacation with his ten-year-old son Vikram- nicknamed Bonnyafter a long and messy divorce from Amala, his wife of eleven years. Early in the
narrative, on the occasion of their marriage, we learn about certain peculiarities in
wedding rituals in different parts of Bengal: "West Bengalis carried the bride around the
fire; in East Bengal she walked round it. Moreover, before the meeting of the eyes, the
'shubho drishti,' in West Bengal, a large betel leaf was held in front of the bride's face"
45

(145). A New World watches Jayojit and his son as they share a dark flat in Kolkata with
his parents while the city outside scorches in fierce summer heat. Although he imagined
this trip as a return to the security of home, J ayojit finds himself inhabiting an unfamiliar
"new" world. To Jayojit's parents- the crusty old Admiral Chatteijee and his diffident,
dominated wife- their son's divorce, the result of Amala' s infidelity, is an unprecedented
assault on their deep-rooted cultural norms and conservative family values, an
incomprehensible intrusion from some strange "new world." The only way the elderly
couple can deal with this is by refusing to acknowledge or discuss it. However, Jayojit's
. parents' stable marriage is not an ideal one either; instead of meaningful communication,
there is only the bond of habit. A New World juxtaposes the two worlds within the
affluent, educated Bengali upper-middle class - the westemised world of impetuous
individualism (Amala's extra marital affair) and cultural hybridity (Vikrarn's nickname)
on the one hand, and the older world of custom and convention on the other- and shows
them up for what they are. The patriarchal admiral and his wife are "a mass of
confusions" while Jayojit is the rootless modem Bengali. Finally, Jayojit returns with his
son to their home in the American Midwest on a Bangladesh Biman flight crowded with
large Bangladeshi families. In the last vignette Jayojit listens to a Bangladeshi mother on
the plane "exhorting her child to sleep," a simple experience that now eludes his own
childhood. A New World captures what Chaudhuri has described in "The Flute of
Modernity'' (1998), his essay on Tagore, as "the poignancy of the trajectory of Bengali
middle class life, with its bhadrolok [cultured] propriety, gentility, rationality and its
iconic lack of fulfillment." 119
Several of the stories from Chaudhuri's 2002 collection Real Time: Stories and a
Reminiscence focus on the mental/cultural hybridity of the Bengali middle class manifest
in the distinctive blend of the colonial and the ancestral, in the seemingly non-strained
co-existence of utterly contrasting elements. In the story "Beyond Translation" two sets
of young cousins inhabit their mutually exclusive worlds of Bengali and English
children's literature with no tension or conflict between tastes and worldviews, while in
"Portrait of an Artist" the narrative voice finds "a strange connection" between "this

119

Qtd. in Sen. op. cit. 52.

46

small, cold island [Britain] and faraway Bengal," probably because Kolkata was the
original seat of British power in the subcontinent. The unitalicised use of the familiar
Bengali word mastermoshai [teacher] in "Portrait of an Artist" is a case in point; the
English root, master, which denotes only a function, is invested with all the associations
of hierarchy and deference that reside in the Bengali honorific suffix moshai.

Chitra Baneijee Divakaruni: Arranged Marriage; Sister of My Heart: The Unknown

Errors o(OurLives
Chitra Baneijee Divakaruni - who was born in Calcutta in 1956 and now lives in
America - is an established name among the Bengali diasporic writers whose narratives
capture glimpses of the local expatriate community. Although in The Mistress of Spices
(1997) Divakaruni extended her subject, in her own words, "from dealing exclusively with
the Indian-American community to include three other ethnic groups living in the inner city
- Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans," 120 her principal engagement
however remains throughout the same - South Asian immigrant women. As we see, most
of the eleven stories ofDivakaruni's first volume ofshort stories Arranged Marriage (1995)
are about immigrants in North America from the author's native region of Bengal and are
told by female narrators in the first-person-singular point of view, often in the present tense
imparting a sense of intimacy to the stories. They capture the experiences of recent
immigrants mostly from professional classes such as electronic engineers and business
people, but also a few from the working class, such as auto mechanics and conveniencestore clerks. References to local attractions and Bengali traditions are sprinkled liberally
throughout the tales as they deal with issues like domestic violence, racism, interracial
relationships, economic disparity, abortion and divorce. The collection shows how everchanging times and situations affect the traditional institution of arranged marriage, and
explores the> cross-cultural experiences of diasporic womanhood through a feminist
perspective. These are the themes that continue to inform her work, and for which

120

Marcus, Morton. Interview with Divakaruni. Metro (8-14 May 1997). Qtd. in Mandai, Somdatta. "Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni." in AI am. Ed. op. cit. 112-22. 117.

47

Divak:aruni is often accused of reinforcing the stereotypes of the "oppressed" Indian

woman, thereby tarnishing the image of the community.

121

She talks about several

immigrant brides in this collection who are, as Patricia Holt puts it in her essay "Women
Feel Tug of Two Cultures,"

122

"both liberated and trapped by cultural changes," and

struggling to carve out an identity of their own. In fact, one common image that runs
through the stories is that of Calcutta-born women living new lives in the United States,
finding independence a mixed blessing that involves walking a tightrope between old
beliefs and new found desires. In the story "Affair" two temperamentally ill-matched
. couples,. whose marriages had been arranged on the basis of their horoscopes having
matched "perfectly," divorce after many years of affluent living in the Silicon Valley.
Though the characters vary, the themes of the short stories, as I have said above, are
essentially the same: exploration of the nature and outcome of arranged marriages as well
as the experience of affirmation of self, and rebellion against obstructive social traditions.
Divak:aruni's second novel Sister of My Heart (1999) is set in Calcutta and
describes the complicated relationships within a traditional family in Bengal. Born in a big,
old Calcutta house on the same night when both their fathers mysteriously disappeared,
Sudha and Anju Chateijee are cousins brought up together. Closer than sisters, they share
clothes, worries and dreams. The Chateijee family fortunes are at low ebb, as there are only
widows at home - the girls' mothers and their aunt. The forty-two chapters of the novel alternately titled as "Anju" and "Sudha" - comprise a sort of sustained dialogue between
the characters gradually unveiling the secrets of the past and putting to test the cousins'
mutual loyalty. Soon their mothers start the serious business of arranging the girls'
marriages, and the pair is tom apart. Sudha moves to her new family's home in rural
Bengal, while Anju joins her immigrant husband in California Although they have both
been trained to be "perfect wives," nothing has prepared them for what each will have to
face in her new life. The story line then on becomes predictable: Anju saves Sudha from
121

Uma Parameswaran notes, "Divakaruni ... delves into the darker dreams and nightmares of womanscape
and has an appreciative readership among feminists, but since her women characters are mainly IndoAmerican, there is a tendency to see them not as individuals so much as representative of the Diaspora,
and we are back on square one perpetuation of negative stereotypes that the average north American
reader has of Indian life and culture." See her essay, "Home is Where Your Feet are and May your Heart
be There Too!" op. cit. 34.
122
San Francisco Chronicle 1 Aug 1995: ES.

48

the machinations of her husband and in-laws, who want to kill the girl child she has
conceived, and brings her to the US. Feminist views are present in many passages of the
novel and the discrimination against women in a traditional Bengali household stands
exposed. The year before the publication of Sister of My Heart Divakaruni wrote, "My
writing is made more complicated by the fact that I'm exploring the experience ... ofbeing
brought up in a culture where many still consider motherhood a woman's supreme destiny,
and the inability to get pregnant her supreme failure. This is one of the major themes of the
novel I'm working on right now." 123 C~early, this novel provides a female-centric narrative
offering a new look at possibilities of female bonding, as Divakaruni herself declares that

in South Asian mythological stories, "the main relationships the heroines had were with the
opposite sex: husbands, sons, lovers or opponents ... Perhaps in rebellion against such
thinking, I find myself focusing my writing on friendships with women, and trying to
balance them with the conflicting passions and demands that come to us as daughters and
wives, lovers and mothers." 124
"The Names of Stars in Bengali" from The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (200 1)
is the nuanced story of a San Francisco wife who returns to her native village in Bengal
to see her mother. Both the mother and the daughter could feel the emotional dislocation
caused by stepping into "a time machine called immigration" that subjects them to "the
alien habit of a world they had imagined imperfectly." All of the stories of The Unknown
Errors of Our Lives are touching tales of lapsed communication, inarticulate love, and
redemptive memories. They illuminate the difficult process of adjustment for women in
whom "memory and duty must co-exist with a new, often painful, and disorienting set of
standards." 125 Eight of the nine stories in this collection have female protagonists who are
caught between the beliefs and traditions of their subcontinental heritage and those of
their new homeland, the US. The problem of acculturation is deftly dealt with in "Mrs.
Dutta Writes a Letter", a story in which a widow discovers that her old-fashioned ways
are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law.

123

Divakaruni, "My Fictional Children." Salon.com. 28 Jan 1998. 6 Feb. 2009. <www.salon.com/mwt/
diva/1988/0 l/28diva.html>.
124
Divakaruni said so in her 28 Feb.l999 San Francisco Examiner article. Qtd. in Mandai. op. cit.ll8
125
Mandai. op. cit.ll9.

49

Divakaruni feels that being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer, being expected to be

a spokesperson for the community can be stifling: "that is just an unfair kind of burden" ;
and insists that she is presenting just "one vision about what is true about the IndianAmerican community ... just one angle of looking at it." 126

Bharati Mukherjee: The Tiger's Daughter; Darkness; The Middleman and Other Stories;

Desirable Daughters

In a critical and creative career spanning over three decades, Bharati Mukherjee
(b.1940) - a major writer of the first generation Bengali diaspora - has been engaged in
redefining the idea of diaspora as a process of gain, as an enabling site contrary to
conventional perspectives that construe immigration and displacement as a condition of
terminal loss and dispossession, involving the erasure of history and the dissolution of an
"original" culture. Mukherjee's professed advocacy, her explicit endorsement of melting
pot nationalism and her renditions of assimilationist multiculturalism in her fiction are
widely read as mere acquiescence to the hegemonic American cultural policy of
assimilation. Her optimistic narration of the American saga of immigrant incarnations
have taken issue with her negative portrayal of Indian culture and traditions, viewing it as
setting the context for jettisoning of her past and cultural history so as to gain the full
benefits of Americanisation. However, many of her works demonstrate that Mukherjee's
apparently linear embrace of melting pot multiculturalism is far more radical/intricate
than it appears. In fact, Mukherjee's description of herself as "an American writer, in the
American mainstream trying to extend it," 127 her reconceptualisation of American
multiculturalism and citizenship resonate with Homi Bhabha's "third space" of cultural
production within which different elements encounter and transform one another. "Such
negotiation," Bhabha explains, "is neither assimilation nor collaboration," but makes
possible the movement of meaning within the dominant culture

128

it is a two-way

126

1bid. 121.
Qtd. in Meer, Ameena. "Bharati Mukheijee." BOMB 29 (1989): 18-29.26.
128
Bhabha, Homi. "Culture's in-between." Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds, S. Hall and P. du Gay.
London:Sage,l996.53-60.58.
127

50

process of cultural interchange and interaction. Along this line, Mukheijee asserts that
immigrants have altered the definition of what constitutes America. Impatient to establish
themselves and rejecting self-effacement, the immigrants, she maintains, are re-shaping
American culture. 129 Mukheijee, thus, eschews the term "assimilation" and its coercive,
homogenising connotations, in favour of an ethic where identity and difference are built
simultaneously in the national project.
Mukheijee' s poetics of diaspora embody her sense of what, as in her case, it
means to be a writer who was born and raised in Bengal, had been a citizen of Canada
and the United States, and was shaped and transformed by the cultures of India and North
America. Thus in her fiction dislocation, cultural alienation, survival and adaptability
remain persistent themes. Her characters hail from divergent ethnic origins who have to
negotiate "between two modes of knowledge" ("Management of Grief," Middleman 189)
and remake home out of "the burly-burly of the unsettled magma between two
worlds." 130 In her first novel The Tiger's Daughter (1972) she considers these issues in
relation to Tara, her protagonist. Tara hails from a middle class Bengali Brahmin family
and is married to an American. Tormented by nostalgia for the world and tradition she
has left behind, she returns to Kolkata after several years in New York only to find that
everything - Kolkata, her friends, herself, has been affected by an "estranging alchemy."
She is struck by overwhelming impressions of poverty, hunger and political turmoil. The
narrative thus captures Tara's trajectory as an expatriate revisiting her native land.
Published in 1975, Mukheijee's second novel Wife is the story of one Dimple
Basu who submits to an arranged marriage to be with her engineer husband in New York,
where she leads an idle life - sleeping, watching television, and reading housekeeping
journals. Shy and emotionally unhinged, she feels herself threatened by the violence she
senses all around her and is afraid to go out alone. Eventually, she kills her husband,
extemalising the rage that has long been suppressed within her. In Days and Nights in
Calcutta Mukheijee recalls a chance encounter with a foreign scholar in the Ramakrishna
129

Mukherjee, Bharati. "Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!" New York Times Book Review.
28 Aug. 1988:28-9.
130
Mukherjee, Bharati. "A Four Hundred-Year-Old Woman." The Writer on Her Work: New Essays in
New Territory. Vol. 2. Ed. Janet Stemburg. New York: Norton, 1991.33-38.37.

51

Mission in Kolkata that triggered the writing of this novel: "quite by accident, I heard the
question that shaped my second novel: What do Bengali girls do, between the ages of

eighteen and twenty-one? asked casually by a visiting Columbia professor of history''

(220). She started writing Wife which, in her own words, is "about a young Bengali wife
who was sensitive enough to feel the pain, but not intelligent enough to make sense out of
her situation and break out. The anger that young wives around me were trying so hard to
hide had become my anger. And that anger washed over the manuscript. I wrote what I
hoped would be a wounding novel" (268). However, Mukheijee' s indictment of
patriarchy in the Indian social system in the novel is undermined, because, Dimple's
mental instability makes her an unreliable point of reference. 131
The issue is reiterated in Mukheijee's short story collection Darkness (1985)
which explores the loneliness of expatriate women, and the immigrants' struggle to come
to terms with memories of their former lives as they negotiate the demands of the present.

In the Introduction to the collection, Mukheijee describes the stories of "semiassimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire
for permanent return" as celebration of her own transformation "from the aloofness of
expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration" (Darkness 3). Earlier, in a 1988
interview, 132 she rejected Naipaul' s bleak vision of the immigrant experience. Despite
Mukheijee's claim of a positive tone to the collection, Darkness includes several stories
haunted by anxiety of expatriation as characters struggle to understand the norms and
social codes of an unfamiliar world. The trauma of displacement, coupled with the racism
they frequently encounter, generates alienation and despair. The story "Angela" presents
the narrative of a Bangladeshi girl adopted by a family in Iowa after she is orphaned by
Pakistani soldiers during the struggle for her country's independence. Throughout the
narrative she remembers the violence done to her and her country by invading soldiers;
these memories flood her consciousness more devastatingly when she considers, near the
end of the story, the possibility of marriage to Mr. Menezies - the middle-aged Indian

131

For detail on the issue, see Jain, Jasbir. "Foreignness of Spirit: The World of Bbarati Mukherjee's
Novels." Journal of Indian Writing in English 13 (July 1985): 12-19.
132
Carb, Alison B. "An Interview with Bbarati Mukherjee." Massacusetts Review 29.4 (1998): 645-54.

52

physician who is part of her Iowa acquaintances. This is the tale of a survivor who seems
to be destined to retain her independence and go her own way in life; she has willed
herself to accept America although she will carry unpleasant fragments of the past
forever in her memory. In "A Father'' Mr. Bhowmick, a bhakt ofKali-Mata, a successful
metallurgist in Detroit, finds his old beliefs and values challenged by his Americanised
daughter Babli, who becomes impregnated through a sperm bank. Babli is vocal in her
scepticism about traditional marriage: "that's what marriage is all about, isn't it?
Matching bloodlines, matching horoscopes, matching castes, matching, matching,
matching ... "(Darkness 73). For her traditional Bengali father "An American son-in-law
was a terrifying notion" (70). He can neither let go of the past nor embrace the present; he
does not want "to assimilate, to be pukka American" (170). With Bhowmick eventually
attacking his daughter, the story culminates into a bizarre and violent end symbolising
patriarchy gone mad finding itself powerless, and failure to cope with the pressure of
immigrant existence. Things never take such a violent tum in the narratives of Jhumpa
Lahiri or Monica Ali. Nor do we encounter illegal immigrants in their writings as we do
in Mukheijee's. As Fakrul Alam notes, with reference to Mukheijee's The Middleman
and Other Stories (1988), that she has widened her coverage of the South Asian in the
United States to include illegal as well as legal immigrants. 133 We encounter Sikh illegal
immigrants in "The Imaginary Assassin" in her other short-story collection Darkness too.
The twenty five year old protagonist of "Visitors" in Darkness, Vinita is a
seductive, charming girl who is not happy when she has been brought over from Kolkata
to play the role of a conventional Bengali wife in New Jersey. She misses "the cultural
events of Calcutta ... It's such a lively city. Always some theatrical program, some crafts
exhibit, something that touches the heart" (169). To cope with her intense loneliness she
secretly longs for something or someone that will disrupt her life. Though her traditional
upbringing comes into conflict with new values, she is excited to be in a new country
with new rules. She is overwhelmed by the desire to break free from the cage she had
been living in, yet there seems to be no definite possibility of liberation in sight for her.

133

Alam, Fakrul, "Migration and Settlement in North America in Bharati Mukheijee's Fiction." Dhaka
University Studies 53&54 (Dec. 1996- June 1997): 1-20.

53

One day when Rajiv Khanna, a graduate student at Columbia drops in without notice at
her apartment, she gets excited, yet confused.
In "Love and the Indian Immigrants in Bharati Mukhetjee' s Short Fiction," an
essay included in Nelson's collection of criticism, 134 Mitali R. Pati draws attention to her
use of eroticism in her construction of the immigrant psyche: "Desire, both for material
advancement and for sexual fulfilment; becomes the central motif in the South Asian
immigrants' self-fashioning in the New World." 135 Sexual liberation becomes the means
both for self-fashioning and assimilation into dominant culture. Mukhetjee fmds the
American context suitable for the fashioning of hybrid identities, because imniigrarits
there, according to her, are initiated into a fluid reality with great liberating potential. 136
There are critics who have questioned this premise of her stories that anyone can reinvent
himself or herself in America, irrespective of race, gender, or class. Malashri Lal suggests
in a discussion of Mukhetjee's another novel Jasmine (1989) that the adaptations in her
stories are "unrealistically rapid and clearly superficial . . . Mukheijee has made up a
formula which apparently works - Indian characters in search of American citizenship
retain sufficient Indianness to be exotic but float gleefully into American materialism." 137
Inderpal Grewal, similarly, disapprovingly critiques Bharati Mukheijee for her simplistic
designation of America as the land of choice and freedom for oppressed women from
traditional cultures. 138
Desirable Daughters (2002) provides a clear autobiographical parallel: Tara and
her sisters, brought up in a privileged but conventional Bengali home, recall Mukhetjee' s
own upbringing in Kolkata back in the 1950s-60s. In the novel, Tara says, "Bengali
culture trains one to claim the father's birthplace, sight unseen, as his or her desh, her
home. Although she has never seen it, my mother's desh is Dhaka" (33). Both of Tara's
parents were born in Kolkata, but her mother's family hailed from Dhaka, her father's

134

Nelson, Emmanuel S, ed. Bharati Mukheljee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993.
Qtd. in Chakrabarty, Radha. "Bharati Mukheijee." in Alam. Ed.op. cit. 242-51. 248.
136
Mukheijee, Bharati. "A Four Hundred-Year-Old Woman." Qtd. in Chakrabarty. op. cit. 249.
137
Lal, Malashri . The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English . Shim! a: Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, 1995. Qtd. in Chakrabarty. op. cit. 249.
138
See Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Nationalisms. Durham, N.C: Duke
University Press, 2005. 79.
135

54

from a provincial town called Faridpur, and they still pined for the eternal greenery of
East Bengal. Tara was transported from "the enchanted garden" of Ballygunge to
Stanford University in the early 1980s by a man called Bish Chatteijee (81 ). And after a
decade of marriage, when she left Bish "it was because the promise of life as an
American wife was not being fulfilled" (82). Tara's narrative is interspersed with some
vignettes of real life around contemporary Calcutta: the disapproval of many a Calcuttan
when Satyajit Ray announced the name of Babita, a Bangladeshi actress as the leading
female cast for his new film Asani Sanket based on the novel of a great Bengali author
Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay: "What would a Muslim girl know about serving a
Brahmin's food, cooking, how to sit, how to speak?" (178); or the narrator's description
of Ray as a member of Brahmo-Samaj, part of that progressive wing of the nineteenthcentury Bengali culture which is despised by families like hers whose "Westernization
was superficial, confmed to convent school, Metro Cinema ... which overlaid a profound
and orthodox Hinduism" (178). Recalling "the joy of being born rich and Brahmin and
Bengali in the great city at the center of our culture," Tara confesses with self-sarcasm,
"Any community whose roots were not in Bengal, preferably in the eastern half of
Bengal; anything like the Marwari, Parsi or Sindhi community, was seen as alien and
money-grubbing, worthy of our disrespect, if not outright contempt" (214). Bengalis'
pride and arrogance does not stop here: "Proud Bengalis, we hated Mahatma Gandhi, that
worm of a Gujarati. We thrilled to the martial cadence of our homegrown hero, our
Netaji, our leader, the martyred Subhas Bose" (289).
Desirable Daughters begins with the tale of the narrator's legendary ancestress,
her namesake, Tara Lata or the Tree-Bride. On the day of the five years old Tara Lata's
wedding, the news of the thirteen years old bridegroom's death came. Everybody agreed
she was paying for the sins of a past life. Her father Jai Krishna Gangooly, a man of old
ways - the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the caste consciousness, the star charts, the
observance of auspicious days, the custom of dowry - had her married to a tree, the god
of Shoondar Bon the beautiful forest, on the same night "to save her from a lifetime of
disgrace and misery" (16). Ironically, the cases Jai Krishna, an advocate in the Dacca139

139

Till 1982, Dhaka used to be spelt that way.

55

High Court, pleaded often cast him as the apostle of enlightment and upholder of law
against outmoded customs: "The majesty of law was in conflict with Jai Krishna's search
for an uncorrupted, un-British, un-Muslim, fully Hindu consciousness." He had removed
his wife and children from cosmopolitan Dacca and installed them in Mishtiganj. "He
sought a purer life for himself, English pleader by day, Sanskrit scholar by night" (9).
Jai Krishna Gangopadhaya, whose surname the colonial authorities lightened to
Gangooly, was a not "a native of Calcutta," neither did he come from "Dacca, Bengal's
second city," and therefore suffered "the anxiety of the small-town provincial elevated
into urbanity." Nonetheless, he belongs to the powerful, middle class "bhadra lok," the
"civilized" folk, for whom the English fashioned the pejorative term "babu," with its hint
of fawning insincerity and slavishly acquired western attitudes. The rest of the population
is "chhoto lok," literally "little people" and referring to the lower class (7).
Importantly, the Tree-bride's story is replete with glimpses of the socio-cultural
and political history of modem Bengal beginning from the late 19th and early 20th
century and the contemporary dynamics of intercommunity relationship between Hindu
and Muslim Bengalis:
In those years, Bengal was the seat of British power, Calcutta its capital, its
cultural and economic center. The city is endowed with the instruments of
Western knowledge, the museums, the colleges, the newspapers, and the Asiatic
society. The old Bengal Presidency included all of today's Bangladesh, the
current Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of Assam, Bihar, and Orissa. A
reconstituted Bengal Presidency today would have over 330 million people and be
the world's third most populous country. China, India, Bengal ... The eastern
region of Bengal, even before the flight of Hindus during the subcontinent's
partition in 1947, and its reincarnation as Bangladesh in 1972, always contained a
Muslim majority, though largely controlled by a sizeable and wealthy Hindu
community. The communities speak the same language- Muslims, if the truth be
told, more tenaciously than Hindus. But for the outer signs of the faith - the
beards and skullcaps of the Muslims, the different dietary restrictions, the caste
observances, the vermillion powder on the hair-parting of married Hindu women
56

- there is little, fundamentally, to distinguish them. The communities suffer, as

Freud put it, the narcissism ofsmall difference ...
The Hindu Bengalis were the first Indians to master the English language
and to learn their master's ways, the first to flatter him by emulation, and the first
to earn his distrusts by unbidden demonstrations of wit and industry. (5-6, italics
mine)
To conclude, we do not see in Mukheijee's writings any deliberate intention of
exoticisation of Bengali culture; rather, the immigrant's experience of the clash of
cultures and the question of identity they must face continue to be Mukheijee's major
preoccupations.

Her

immigrant

protagonists

undergo

changes

of

identity,

metamorphosing according to the demands of unfamiliar environments in which they find

themselves. Fluid identities, name changes, altered personalities - these motifs in
Mukheijee's fiction come to represent not only modes of personal survival for the
immigrants but also their ways of altering the American reality of which they seek to
become a part. "What is fascinating however is her determined rejection of the emotional
paralysis of exile and her enthusiastic affirmation of the immigrant condition, her ability
to articulate a coherent vision out of the chaos of her multiple displacements."

140

In short,

as a writer who straddles multiple cultures, whose own biographical trajectory spans
continents, Mukheijee charts the lives of immigrants in North America: their trials and
tribulations as well as their zest for survival and ingenuous modes of self-refashioning.
Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise: Days and Nights in Calcutta
In 1973 Mukheijee went on a sabbatical with her husband, spending a year mainly
in Kolkata; the year yielded a collaborative semi-autobiographical work Days and Nights
in Calcutta which was published in 1977. In that memoir, they created separate records of
their responses to the city and its people during that visit; for Blaise the journey to
Kolkata was a voyage of discovery - initially overwhelmed by visions of squalor, he
soon found enchantment in "the blend of myth and reality'' in Bengali culture.
Mukheijee, however, was visibly disappointed to fmd that her memories had misled her.

140

Chakrabarty. op. cit. 251.

57

In the traditions she had so cherished, she now detected a hidden desire to oppress
women. In the upper class women of her circle, she saw with apprehension images of
what she would have become had she remained in Bengal. Love and sympathy combine
with anger and resentment to make her journal a record of an intense struggle with her
own dual identity. By the end of her trip, she realised that she thought ofherself"more as
an immigrant than an exile" (Days and Nights 284).
In Part One of Days and Nights in Calcutta Blaise records the cultural, sociopolitical and economic condition of Bengal at that time; he talks about the feeling of
insecurity in day-to-day life in Kolkata, starvation, corruption in civil administration,
political chaos and murders, bandh, Naxalite agitation, the Marxist rule, the Calcutta
business world, unpleasant weather and seasonal changes, unbelievable crowdedness
particularly in Muslim quarters like the New Market area, and of course, Howrah Station:
".. . Calcutta's rail terminus, is the center of life and the end of hope, the place of arrival
and surrender; it is Calcutta at its densest and most paradoxical. It is where village India
arrives every day by the uncountable thousands and where others manage to return, but
not escape" (297). Blaise observed that the people from other parts of India thought of
Bengalis to be the most fair minded, tolerant, progressive and cultured people in India but
they (the Bengalis) complained too much, and tended to blame the city's troubles on
everyone - North Indian or Bihari migrants or Bangladeshi refugees - but themselves.
There are certain things in Bengali society that shocked Blaise: he found arranged
marriages cold and calculating; "the hardest thing in Indian society for a Westerner to
accept" (142); it shocked him that here "marriage, like death, is forever'' and "the girl
takes her whole identity from the two men in her life - her father and her husband - and
marriage marks her transfer from one identity to another'' (151). The extended Bengali
families bewildered him: ''No amount of dedicated cramming can quite prepare a
Westerner for sorting out an Indian family" (65). Again, he wondered, "It is absurd how
small a gesture constitutes rebellion in India. A son smoking in his father's presence, a
daughter exhibiting any will of her own" (47).
He was amazed by the Bengalis' love to explain Calcutta: "the identification with
the city is so complete that the standard question put to an outsider "What do you think of
58

Calcutta?" is a shorthand way of asking, "What do you think of Bengalis? What do you
think of me?"(65). He noticed in many Bengalis a tendency of idealisation of their own
"pure culture"; they are "fiercely proud of it." Blaise captures many facets of this culture:
the "so profound influence" of Tagore; the theatre of Kolkata- "the nearest thing extant
to the Renaissance stage of England, plays immediately accessible to all strata" (87); the
many coffeehouses of Calcutta, "where poetry, band, revolution mingle"; the great
Satyajit Ray, "an instinctive synthesizer of cultures" (122); the fastidious Bengali
intellectuals: a Bengali gentleman told Blaise, "God himself if He made a perfect film
couldn't please a group of Bengali intellectuals" (127); the serious filmmaker Mrinal Sen,
the novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay and his associates- the young creative souls who
discovered their own circle of Bengalis, all passionately devoted to creative practices,
un/employed by day and "scholar poets by night" (132); the literary magazine, Desh "that
publishes a hundred thousand copies a week in culture-mad Bengal"(l37). 141 He also did
not forget to mention the widely adored sweets and confections of Bengal, and of course,
"Bengalis' collective sweet tooth" (87). Finally, Blaise has all the admiration for
Bengalis: "The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has
absorbed him, while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease" (122).
Mukheijee's account in Part Two of Days and Nights in Calcutta combines
cultural commentary with personal angst; she was going to Calcutta after fourteen years
because "I had discovered that while changing citizenship is easy, swapping cultures is
not" (169). According to her own account in this memoir, Mukheijee's father was a
Bengali Brahmin whose ancestral home was at Faridpur in East Bengal, now Bangladesh;
during the years preceding the Partition, their families moved to Kolkata where

s~e

spent

her early years; about forty members of their joint family lived together in their home on
Rash Behari Avenue. She does not adore that childhood part - her first eight years - that
she spent in a large joint family; she detested the lack of privacy; and "crushing parental
love" (283). In her own words, "the intense Bengaliness of my childhood that left me
with a horror of its coarseness, and the suspended dream world of my adolescence that
shattered so completely I would distrust all attempts to restore it" (217).

141

This, by the way, is misinformation. Desh is a fortnightly magazine.

59

Mukheijee contrasts the "greenery, flowers, a studied calm" inside the

Ramakrishna Mission - where she was staying for the vacation - with accouterments of
Ballygunge life: "hawkers, beggars, loiterers, squatters, sleepers, cows and pariahs, cars,
taxis, buses, mini-buses, cycles, rickshaws, bullock carts, and heedless pedestrians"
(186). Whatever be the actual day-to-day condition of life in their city, Bengalis from
Calcutta were "arrogant about their subnational identity; they do not seek connection with
a larger world, except on equal terms." Mukheijee talks about one of her acquaintances,
Anjali, an upper-middle class lady in Old Ballygunge - formerly a favorite residential
location for the British - who, apprehensive of being invaded by foreign culture, became
militant about "preserving certain Beng3.Ii rituals. She still insists on chopping the day's
vegetables on the traditional Bengali bonthi which is a large floor-mounted knife with a
curved blade sharp enough to slice off any distracted or unpracticed finger'' (211 ).
Nevertheless, Kolkata was a tolerant, open, friendly city: "The American consulate is on
Ho Chi Minh Sarani." Also, it was "the most British of Indian cities" (259).
According to Mukheijee, in Calcutta people dream of the present or past, but
never of the future. Here the girls are pretty but lack the brash artifice of girls in Bombay,
and the boys of Calcutta think of themselves as hopelessly intellectual. For those who
have come from elsewhere, Calcutta is only a transit stop; for those, who were born here,
Calcutta is the "generator of fierce and contradictory passions" (199). Bengali middle
class, rich and fashionable elites, industrialists, businessmen, club/party-goers, theatreactivists, intellectuals, writers, artists - all crowd Mukherjee's memoir. She also talks
about the city's passion for film, theatre and other artistic activities.
Mukheijee's memoir focuses on some crucial social aspects of the Bengali society
of the time, especially the Kolkata of 1960s and early 70s. She talks about joint families
which she disapproves; she describes the Bengali wedding as "a raucous, joyous, vulgar,
typically Bengali festival" (277); she informs that caste was crucial in marriage. She
describes the Bengali girls as foster children, who were brought up in one family but then
belonged to some other household (273). The good Bengali girls with middle-class
training were trained/expected to be utterly "obedient and submissive." Her observation,
"In Calcutta, being the wife of a socially and professionally prominent man was a full60

time career''(204) talks a lot about the dismal state even of women in the privileged
section of society; the situation was worse in middle and lower classes: "The middleclass Bengali woman was locked into a woman's world of gossip and speculation," they
did not have the right to independent thought without incurring censure (225); in lower
class, the married Bengali women cook, feed, and scold their children, get beaten by their
husbands (223). Interestingly, despite her curiosity, she never found what the Bengali
women, even the upper class, educated ones, thought of sex: "We talked quite often about
happiness and love. But, in spite of Kama Sutra and the Khajuraho temple, it is not a
culture ... that encourages conversations about sexuality'' (214).
In her Epilogue, Mukheijee admits that by the end of the year, though she was
glad to be racially invisible there, she no longer liked Kolkata in the unreal and
exaggerated ways she did in Montreal (she was based in Canada at that time); and she
believed that if she stayed on, the place would fail her more seriously than she had failed
it by settling abroad (285). In Toronto and Montreal, she was exoticised as different, but
also as inferior; she felt she was never considered a "cultural citizen," really Canadian,
but only an "alien other'' who threatened to contaminate the white national self.

142

She

poignantly describes this "unhoused" phase of her life in her memoir, and the anxiety
stemming from "the absolute impossibility of ever having a home" (287). And this
realisation had further strengthened her to brave the difficulties of her immigrant
existence: "Most Indian women do not give up easily. What foreigners perceive as
forbearance is really a secretive love of revengeful survival. Most writers do not give up
easily. What died, that year in India, was my need for easy consolation. What has
survived is the stubbornness to go on" (287). And this is no less true of the writers and
their characters whom we are going to meet in the following chapters.
Distinctive Traits of This Research:

While significant research exists on diaspora per se and the culture and history of
Bengal, some studies do exist on the particular authors I have chosen to examine, and

142

See Connell, Michael and Jessie Grearson and Tom Grimes. "An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee."
The Iowa Review 20.3 (1990): 7-32. 12.

61

individual accounts of Bengalis trying to negotiate their contemporary identity are

aplenty, there is, to the best of my knowledge, no concerted research that clubs together
for study the authors that I have demarcated under the rubric of a collective Bengali
diasporic identity. This research, thus, may be one of the first comprehensive studies on
the representations of an inclusive - from both Bengals, Hindu and Muslim, male and
female, first and second generation- diasporic Bengali imagination. Also, this study will
detail the oeuvre of the Australia based Bangladeshi author Adib Khan who deserves to
be discussedy but has so far been ignored in sub continental literary-academic circles.
On the very conceptual plane the proposed research establishes its difference from
other studies in the area by its departure from the dominant practice of broader
categorisation of the select writers as Indian/South Asian Diaspora writers or writers of
Indian English Literature or of transnational hyphenated identity, and by its clear
identification of them as Bengali diasporic writers. While this specialised categorisation
is neither to contest the above widely practiced categories, nor to propose that they
cannot be meaningfully studied under those more generalised rubrics, it is nevertheless
meant to emphasise, among other things, that these writers demarcate a fairly extensive
fictional terrain by themselves that can more usefully be labelled and studied as such.
Again, while it is customary to forge a "prototype image" 143 of the characters
from any part of the subcontinent as Indians both by Western popular perception and
critics from home and abroad, the present study chooses to stress not merely on the
commonalities among different racial groups but also on the essential distinctiveness of
every individual and ethnic identity. As Divakaruni says, "A Bengali immigrant is very
different from a Kannada or a Punjabi immigrant." 144 Clearly, this study goes against
attempts to unify and homogenise all the subcontinental diasporic cultures into a
monolithic category called Indian culture overseas, moulding everything from language
to food, religion and accent into "a composition to fit a uniform view about an Indian"

143

Adib Khan's Bengali protagonist Iqbal in Seasonal Adjustments detests that "they [Australians] have a
prototype image of me as an Indian. It is laundered and made acceptable in their own minds ... " (144).
One point of contention in this study of course is the homogenisation of people from the subcontinent
into a monolithic category called "Indian" from the inability to recognise cultural differences.
144
Qtd. in Ramnarayan. op. cit. 3.

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(Seasonal 144). It deconstructs this hegemonic homogenisation through a detailing of

daily lives of the community projected in diasporic Bengali narratives.
This study marks its difference by also going beyond the essentialist narratives of
geo-politically defined nation states,

145

and considering Bengal and Bengalis as a singular

and unified cultural whole spreading over multiple geo-political boundaries. This is in
keeping with the fact that diaspora poses a range of analytic possibilities that challenge
many categories of modernity such as the nation and national identity. Ethnic identities
often do not correspond to territorially based identities and the ties with homeland can be
preserved or even reinvented.

146

While Bengalis cannot ignore the reality of present geo-

political boundaries of West Bengal or Bangladesh or the other nation-states where they
are presently located, they are aware of their shared cultural identity as Bengalis that
transcend those borders casting them safely into different citizenships - Bangladeshi or
British, American or Indian. And as we know, "The paradox of diaspora is that it is a
concept intimately linked to a sense of territory, to the lost homeland or the once-andfuture nation. Yet at the same time, because diaspora formations cross national borders,
they reveal precisely the fact that cultural practices are not tied to place. They show
culture, in other words, as deterritorialized." 147 In short, this study has taken the Bengali
community as a single, linguistically and culturally defined entity, which incidentally
belongs to the nation-states of India, Bangladesh and beyond.

Approach/Method:
As I have already mentioned, the primary texts taken up for this research are very
recent writings; all of the texts have been published within the last one decade and a half,
and they are comparatively less discussed as well. None of them has yet attracted much
critical and academic investment; in fact, I have seldom come across any full-length book

145

The rise of nationalism as the single most prominent form of modern communal organisation gave the
idea of the 'homeland' a new state-oriented connotation, associating it with political and popular selfdetermination. For detail on the issue see Lazarus, Neil. The Cambridge Companion to Post Colonial
Lierature. Cambridge: CUP, 2004. 254.
146
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasoporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. 507.
147
Lazarus. op. cit. 256.

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on any one of them; it is only logical then that my primary approach here would be to
provide a detailed introduction to the writers' lives and works.
The proposed methodology for this research would be one of textual readingbased exegesis, literary-critical reading of the key texts and their comparative analysis.
Some technical/representational considerations are involved in the very selection of
authors and texts with a view to ensure a balanced study. Two of the writers hail from
Dhaka, while the other two from Kolkata, and while Monica Ali's and Jhumpa Lahiri's
fictions are predominantly about diaspora, Adib Khan's and Sunetra Gupta's are about
homeland. Again, two writers, Khan and Gupta, are first generation immigrants while the
other two, Ali and Lahiri, are from the next. And it is also important that they hail from
two major religious traditions within Bengali society which will enable a fuller depiction
of various nuances and strands of socio-cultural life of Bengalis. Lastly, the
representation of both male and female writers has been ensured to bring in balanced
gender perspective in the study.
For the purpose of a more comparative study by means of contrasts and
parallelisms, I would consider writings of some other diasporic and resident Bengali
authors as well. In addition, contemporary analyses of Home and Diaspora, and the
phenomenon of expatriation and resultant anxieties, as well as books on Bengal and
Bengali history, society and culture would be consulted. Interviews and personal writings
of the select authors will also be taken as study material to have insights into how the
authors' own experiences were unconscious preparations for the writing of such fictions.

Chapters:
The thesis is divided into six chapters out of which four chapters are devoted to
four select authors: each of these four chapters provide formal introduction to the
concerned author which includes a brief survey of his/her life and works; and also, the
outline of the stories of his or her primary as well as other fiction, lest their multistranded narratives prove confusing in abrupt references. Besides, it would be interesting/
beneficial to bring in other authors and see how their fictional tropes cross ways with

64

those of my research authors; the appearance of these related texts will continue in all the
chapters for comparative purposes.
In this introductory chapter I have already defined the parameters of this research,
mapped Bengal and Bengalis at home and abroad, and introduced writers from the
Bengali diaspora. I have also discussed here existing research available so far in this area.
Some historical and critical discourses on Bengali culture and society and contemporary
views on Home and Diaspora and related anxieties as well as the politics of diasporic
representation and issues of authenticity have also been discussed to prepare the
theoretical background of the study to follow. I have also dealt somewhat elaborately
with the works of some important native and expatriate Bengali fiction writers other than
my primary authors in the present chapter to understand the issues in broader perspective.
In the second chapter I try to understand Monica Ali's representation of the
Bengali diaspora of London, and how, in addition to looking into migration and its
consequences for the lives and mores of the community, she enlarges her narrative-scope
to probe gender relations and the position of patriarchy in a Bangladeshi household. This
chapter will also address another serious issue that the novel elaborately deals with: the
dialectics between a Bengali diasporic cultural space one the one hand, and a global
religious space, the Ummah, the global community of Muslim believers on the other.
The third chapter will attempt to show how Sunetra Gupta's novel dwells on the
image of Kolkata as a loving Mother betrayed by her own child, "the city, whose tired
blistered nipples she had pushed aside with disdainful lips"(Memories 112). I will
describe Gupta's lyrical evocation of Kolkata life of the 1970s principally walking along
memory lane with her characters, and showing how the city becomes the real protagonist
in her narrative. Tagore's overwhelming presence in her fiction will also be studied in
this chapter. The chapter will also focus on Gupta's prose style to argue that her English
reads almost like a translation of a stylised, even poetic Bengali, reflecting perhaps an
unconscious but a distinct Bengali mode of narrativisation in English.
In the fourth chapter, I take up for study Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of nine shortstories, Interpreter of Maladies, her recently published short stories in Unaccustomed
65

Earth and her only novel The Namesake, all of which reverberate with the feel of Bengali
life and ethos and bring to fore many of the issues Bengalis face abroad. I will explore the
issue of cultural retentiveness of Bengalis and their ability to accommodate the other
culture without ceasing to be Bengali. The chapter will also examine how Jhumpa
Lahiri's apparently innocent personal narratives can engage in serious socio-political
discourses - on issues like the partition of Bengal and the resultant dialectics between
Muslim and Hindu social spaces within Bengali community, 148 or the existence of
marginalised Bengali social groups within Bengal itself etc.
The next chapter will describe Adib Khan's portrayal of Bangladesh and
Bengalis, and question his representational strategies for various socio-economic,
political, religious and cultural issues. I will probe deeply into the views the novel
presents on the Independence War of 1971, and also on Islam as it is practised by
Bengalis. I will examine Khan's existential thesis on the migrants' position too, which is
presented as a state of perpetual wandering. The chapter will also deal elaborately with
Khan's latest novel where he ties issues of identity and belonging and the notion of
family and homeland to the rise of terrorism home and abroad.
The concluding chapter of my dissertation will provide a brief review of all that I
have tried to convey in the preceding chapters as well as explore some potent
commonalities between the authors on various related issues. In short, here I will attempt
to summarise the images of Bengal and Bengalis which surface in the course of my study
of the Bengali diasporic imagination, and comment on them.

148

The child narrator Lilia in Jhumpa Lahiri's short story "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" reacted when
her father insisted that she understand the difference between Mr. Pirzada, a man from Dhaka, and they
who are from West Bengal: "It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents speak same language,
laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same ... , ate rice every night for supper with their
hands ... drunk no alcohol. Nevertheless, my father insisted that I understand the difference and be led
me to a map of the world ... " (Interpreter of Maladies 25, italics mine).

66