Essay On Sense Of Identity

Who am I?Why am I here? And what is my purpose of my life? These fundamental questionshave been contemplated through the centuries by the immigrant’s minds insearch of identities and finally to sense the true meaning of existence. Your identity is your sense of self. One should not lose ones sense of identity especially if you are an immigrant since it is unattainable belonging. Erikson has rightly quoted,

“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” (Erikson, 1968, p.38).

Indian-American authors Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and JhumpaLahirihave been persistently adhered to the shared theme i.e. Sense of belongingness, rootlessnessmulticulturalism and displacement. Both the writer’s work is frequently ruminate onto be supposedly-autobiographical as most of their stories are located in the regions where they live, tackle the immigrant experience- especially of Indians who settle in the US.- and analyses the investigation of Indian-American women both in India and America.

This paper is an endeavor to scrutinize the plight of ‘name’ and ‘sense’ of identity andbelongingness of the immigrant charactersin the works of Divakaruni and Lahiri. The certainty that both of them are born of the Indian parents and cross borders

Their works as a diaspora writers are autobiographic and pinpoint to the issues like rootlessness, homelessness, nostalgia, dislocation and displacement. So diaspora fiction concerns with space, move between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ country, between ‘known’ and ‘strange’, ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. The contrasts and the comparisons between these two spaces are typical in the works of Divakaruni and Lahiri, which are different from regular Indian English fiction. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their bookKey concepts in Postcolonial studies define ‘diaspora’