Anita Desai The Diaspora Indian Communities

Abstract: The need to write was born as soon as they could hold a pen and place letters one after each other and across the page. The substance of this paper is set against the story weaving tradition of two generations i.e. mother (Anita Desai)-daughter ( Kiran Desai) duo. The two generations of story weaving, Desais touch on the same raw social nerves and massage them deftly into literary art. Both Desais are known for their devastating wit and charming style. The way both Desais keep the pace going on in her novels is remarkable. They leave no issue untouched and no point of view un-presented. They have a rare eye for detail. As the daughter of the noted writer Anita Desai, Kiran Desai has inherited considerable gains in the world of fiction.

The Diaspora Indian community is also not exempted from being a victim of the sense of loneliness since Indian Independence; UK has been a prime destination for migrant Indians. The earliest of such communities constitute either of ‘Anglophiles’, whose purpose of migration has been to experience the pristine beauty of England, or of ‘Anglophes’, who migrate to take the proverbial ‘postcolonial revenge’. In England, both these two types of migrant Indians are pressed together and marked as ‘the others’. Anita Desai’s characters tend to be outsiders, torn between privacy and the powerful family and social bonds that both stifle and unite them. Anita Desai’s novel Bye-Bye Blackbird is about migrant Indians in the England of1960s. Adit lives in London with his English wife, Sarah. Dev is newly arrived migrant from India and, thus, feels more lonely and alienated than Adit who is comfortably settled in the city. Dev’s loneliness stops haunting him and he decides to stay in England. Adit, in the interim, suffers from a crisis of identity. He, too, aspires for his homeland and its people. Like the United Kingdom, the United States of America has emerged as an attraction for Indians who want academic and economic prosperity. As a result, the Indian Diaspora community in the US is gradually increasing day by day in this era of post-globalization. Arun from Fasting, Feasting is such an Indian living in the suburbs of Massachusetts, USA. He finds himself so alienated and lonely that he cannot adjust to a culture that votes for freedom. In her latest novel The Zig Zag Way, Anita Desai again focuses her attention on the subject of migration. In her earlier novels, America has been a favourite place for Indians but in The Zig Zag Way, she marks a change and portrays the immigration from New York to Mexico. The Zig Zag Way showcases Anita Desai’s unique ability to view a new world through an outsider’s eyes.