Diasporic Indian Analysis

Literary Contributions by the Diasporic Indians
As mentioned above, the diasporic Indians have contributed immensely to the literary oeuvre. The various constituents of the diaspora have histories of their own. Their experiences are different and their aspi-rations vary. The pathos and orientation is the same across the diversity, the manifestation differs. The reasons contributing to the differences in manifestation is best brought out in the literature of the Indian diaspora. For a larger section, the manifestation finds way into their creative writings. For others, it ignites a desire to know their history, which results in endeavours leading to academic writings.
Being in the diaspora posits several integral problems which is felt across

In an attempt to understand the diasporic Indian’s everyday life, one is baffled with the ambiguity of ‘home’. ‘Home’ is an ambi-guous term for both the diasporic Indians and others trying to understand the phenomena. The problem of ‘home’ is present not just in the literal sense, but also in the metaphoric sense. The yearning for ‘home’ is best brought out in the writings of diasporic Indian writers. However, as with most of the members of the Indian diaspora, ‘home’ has varied conno-tations for these diasporic writers.
80 Chandrima Karmakar
‘Home’ generates an indisputable problem in the discourse of the Indian diaspora. Besides novelists from the Indian diaspora, the angst over ‘home’ has also been written about by sociologists like Avtar Brah. Brah rightly points out, the word ‘home’ has a qualitative connotation:
… the ‘referent’ of ‘home’ … [is] qualitatively different… ‘home’ in the form of a simultaneously floating and rooted signifier. It is an invocation of narratives of ‘the nation’. In racialised or nationalist discourses this signifier can become the basis of claims… that a group settled ‘in’ a place is not necessarily ‘of’ it (1996:

It involves both consistent imagi-nation and acceptance. One needs to bestow recognition and affirm ascription. It should render a mental state to an individual that bespeaks relative contentment. Such a mental state can be achieved by the dias-poric Indians only if they give up their occupation of the liminal space. A diasporic Indian needs to decide on a particular space as ‘home’. S/he cannot be agonised with the yearning for another space. There cannot be a gaping chasm between desire of ‘home’ and fulfilment of the same. ‘Home’ entails commitment. The commitment can either be with the place that one has left behind or with the place that one occupies. This is often not so in case of the Indian diaspora. They are generally suspended in an in-between (liminal) space between the two places. The simul-taneous presence of an existential and a metaphoric ‘home’ places the diasporics in the ‘interstitial