Indian Diaspora Literature: A Critical Evaluation

Book excerpt: In this period of globalization, many individuals are trying to upgrade the life and for that most of them are now migrating to other lands. In the process of getting settle in new land they encounter many problems. The issue of migration and immigration brings forward the question of exile, identity, assimilation, memory, nostalgia, hopelessness, uprootedness, hybridity and so on. Indian writers have beautifully picked up experiences of such people and penned them down. Such writing is called ‘Diaspora Literature’, wherein immigrant experiences have been shared through literature. This type of literature includes expatriate stories, refugee chronicles and immigrant narratives. The present anthology Indian Diaspora Literature: A Critical Evaluation covers as many as twenty articles where the authors have discussed innumerable issues and challenges as confronted by Indian immigrants due to their distance and dislocation from their familiar homeland to the alien hostland, irrespective of what kind of exile they follow: forced or voluntary. Apart from bringing into surface the migratory problems, the anthology also sheds light on the complexities that arise out of such migration. Some of the notable Indian writers who have been given room in this book are V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Desai and Kiran Desai to name a few. Authors have tried to give their best outputs to reach this anthology to its intended goal. Hopefully this book will be helpful to both students and scholars alike.