Summary Of Bharati Mukherjee's Imaginary Homelands

Identity politics driven by migration, Diaspora and exile have in turn mapped literary imagination and produced literary writings of distinct characteristics. Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands states: ‘Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habitats.’ This change of habitat often results in translational representation of Diaspora and displacement, both spatial and psychological. However, their diasporic condition, their sense of exile and alienation, their metaphoric existence and their efforts to seek replenishment by making symbolic returns to their origins bind all this writing into a unity. Rushdie comments that migration ‘offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age.’ He adds, ‘Migrants-borne-across humans-are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples.’ In her novels, Bharati Mukherjee has dealt with such moving metaphors of culture- their displacement, dislocation, mutation and translation.

Postcolonial transnational counter-textuality began by affirming the contestation between estrangement and search for identity. The counter-textual mood of anti-colonial or nationalist writing finds its resources in the transcultural restlessness of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje and Bharati Mukherjee. However, Mukherjee’s position is different from