Diasporic Migration

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The concept of home constitutes a significant aspect of diaspora studies. This is precisely because the very dispersal of the diasporic individual from his original home/ homeland and subsequently his search for identity and a secured home in an alien land essentially forms an indispensible part of diasporic culture. Diasporic sensibility is grounded upon the postcolonial concept of home and space in the backdrop of migration and dislocation from the native land. As such, it involves three stages of development ------ from the loss of original home to the stage of an ‘expatriate’ and from the state of an ‘expatriate’ to the state of an ‘unsettled’ immigrant and from the state of an ‘unsettled immigrant’ to the state of a ‘settled immigrant’ …show more content…

Mircea Elaide terms it ‘a sacred place’ (1959 : xiii). Similarly, Lee Rainwater (1966: 22) considers home a ‘secure place’ to which people are attached and are comfortable with. On the other hand, K. Dovey (1978: 27-30) terms it a place of certainty and stability. It is a principle by which we order our existence in space. Home is ‘demarcated territory’ with both physical and symbolic boundaries that ensure that dwellers can control access and behavior within. To be at home is to inhabit a secure center and to be oriented in space so as to live a peaceful life of security, sacredness and …show more content…

Even though he himself lived in exile, Naipual did never celebrate the state of exile. He considers his lifelong uprootedness more in terms of a personal trauma than a source of positive liberation. He regards the Trinidad of his childhood as an absurd society, where Africans and Indians had been moved by force or persuasion to work on sugar plantations. Torn away from their homes epitomizing their traditions and cultural root, they were fooled into believing that they were a kind of Britons through colonial schooling. And subsequently, they were forced to know the reality. Naipaul always felt uneasy at his sense of rootlessness which revived in him a consciousness of the Hindu origins and beliefs of his Indian ancestors. As he himself was an expatriate, he could capture the texture of the lives of the people of both the cultures – Indian and Caribbean. He explores the fate of the doomed individuals from the point of view of a comic outsider. He views the disturbance, instability and anxiety prevailing in both the societies. In his novels, Naipaul, along with his own dilemmas as an exile about self and home and the psychological and political aspects of alienation, depicts the issues of identity, rootlessness, cultural difference and

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