Ph.D. Thesis Proposal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Subject

English Literature

 

Inter-disciplinary Field

Indian Writing in English

 

 

 

 

Title

The Alien into the Native: A Spectrum of Literary Representation of the Self-Fashioning Indian Diaspora by Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri.

 

 

 

 

Author

Amit Shankar Saha

BSc, BA (Spl.), MA (Eng.)  

Calcutta University

 

Supervisor

Dr. Santanu Majumdar

Senior Lecturer, Calcutta University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Alien into the Native: A Spectrum of Literary Representation of the Self-Fashioning Indian Diaspora by Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri

 

Introduction

           

            The word ‘diaspora’ is derived from Greek – dia-speirein, which means to scatter through. The Indian diaspora can be described exactly in the aforementioned words because it has not been formed by an exodus of population at a particular point of time but rather by sporadic migration for a long time: from the indentured labourers of the past to the IT technocrats of the present day. According to Amitav Ghosh[1], ‘the modern Indian diaspora … is not merely one of the most important demographic dislocations of modern times: it now represents an important force in world culture’. Since Indian independence the Indian diasporic community has acquired a new identity due to the mutual processes of self-fashioning and increasing acceptance by the West.

            A study of a range of selected literary texts by writers beginning from Anita Desai (b. 1937), through Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940) to Sunetra Gupta (b. 1965) and Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) will not only show through a broad spectrum the self-fashioning by the Indian diaspora but will throw into sharp focus the treatment in literature of the philosophical problem of personal identity. Philosophers have variously defined identity in terms of ‘form’ (Aristotle), ‘soul’ (Locke), ‘relationship’ (Hume) and ‘mental continuity’ (Parfit). According to Stuart Hall[2], identities are the names that people give to the different ways they are positioned by, and position themselves within, the narratives of the past. Therefore, all Jasmines and Gogols are found to be preoccupied in constructing their identities as the relation between the present and the past keep constantly changing. Identity can no longer be recognized as static but an ever-changing process of dynamic self-definition. The treatment of the subject of displacement by the chosen writers brings into relief the fundamentally exilic, not to say alien quality of all human existence[3].

            The choice of Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird (1971), Fasting, Feasting (1999), Diamond Dust (2000), Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), Desirable Daughters (2002), Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992), A Sin of Colour (1999), Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and The Namesake (2003) has been made because of their diversity of treatment as well as their integrity of literary standard. These four writers represent four phases of development of Indian women writing in English and their selected works will help to map the thesis topic with proper justification especially because these writers themselves straddle a spectrum in terms of the degree of acceptance into the host society of the diaspora portrayed by them exhibit. It is quite incidental, though interesting, that all these four chosen writers are of Bengali heritage.

A brief review of the literature pertaining to the work

            The exploration of the idea of geographical displacement in the literary canon has for long been a male domain. Very few women writers from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf have directly dealt with the issue in their fiction. Contemporary women writers, though, have subtly taken up the issue in their works and women writers of the Indian diaspora like the selected four along with Kamala Markandaya, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Meera Syal, and Tanuja Desai-Hidier have not lagged behind in any respect[4]. The perspective of women writers on self-fashioning by the Indian diaspora brings fresh insight into the topic.

            Anita Desai’s works have been critically dealt with before but most of the researches have been unidirectional – concentrating, as Rushdie[5] noted, on the ‘private universes’ of her characters. Critics like Fawzia Afzal-Khan[6] have gone to some extent in exploring other aspects of Desai’s works and this thesis will take the effort further. Bharati Mukherjee, who is widely regarded as the grand dame of Indian diaspora literature, has also been devoted fair share of critical space by critics like Fakrul Alam[7] and this thesis will add to that oeuvre. Sunetra Gupta has a Joycean fate where her works are highly acclaimed but studied only by a few critics like C. Vijayasree[8]. Gupta’s ‘problematic, and increasingly complex nature’ of work, as opined by Amit Chaudhuri[9], proves to be the deterrent. This thesis will attempt partially to redress the anomaly. Jhumpa Lahiri, despite being critically appreciated worldwide, has got relatively little attention in the field of Indian writing in English. One reason may be that she has been identified more in the American tradition of Hemingway and Isherwood than in any English or Indian tradition. But academics like Sanjukta Das[10] and Sudeshna Kar Barua[11] have shown that Lahiri’s stories bear comparison with those of Anand, Narayan and even Tagore. This thesis will attempt to give a deserving critical space to her works.

Plan of work

            Chapter One will introduce the concept of displacement as a sociological phenomenon and take a holistic view of the term ‘diaspora’ to include exiles, refugees, migrants, expatriates et al. The chapter will specifically frame the Indian diaspora’s place in globalized world culture. Chapter Two will tackle A. J. Lyon’s[12] central question of how people remain the same through change and put Desai’s, Mukherjee’s, Gupta’s and Lahiri’s characters to the test of the philosophical theories of identity. Chapter Three will show how the dilemma of allegiance between one’s native country and one’s adopted country is tantalizing and gives rise to the sense of alienation and rootlessness. It will deal with the selected writers’ depiction of their characters’ loneliness and human relationships in the said context. Chapter Four will be on how these writers’ characters grapple with their identities. It will bring out that the degree of integration into the host society of a diasporic community is of no empirical or objective matter, but a matter of perceptions and self-reflexive consciousness, either communal or individual. Thereby it will make clear that the contingency inherent in displaced existence begets the notion of self-fashioning to create one’s identity. Chapter Five will deal with each of the writers’ distinctive diasporic condition that fashions their individual literary styles. It will show how these writers reinforce each other in their similarities and complement each other in dissimilarities leading to a universal appeal. Chapter Six will depict how the chosen writers’ selected works unravel that increasing acceptance into the host society does not indicate that that the diasporic characters can feel at home. Social alienation is replaced by metaphysical alienation.

                    

Provisional Bibliography

Primary Texts

 

Desai, Anita. Bye-Bye Blackbird, Orient Paperbacks, Delhi, 2001.

-        Fasting, Feasting, Vintage, UK, 2000.

-       Diamond Dust, Penguin, India, 2000.

Gupta, Sunetra. Memories of Rain, Orion, UK, 1992.

               -               A Sin of Colour, Penguin, India, 1999.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies, HarperCollins, India, 2000.

                -            The Namesake, Flamingo, UK, 2003.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine, Virago, UK, 1998.

                -                      Desirable Daughters, Rupa, India, 2004.

 

Secondary Texts

 

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel, The Pennsylvania State

University Press, USA, 1993.

Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee: A Biography, Twayne Publishers, US, 1996.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1991.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.). The Empire Writes Back – Theory and

Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, Routledge, London, 2002.   

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Prentice

Hall, Europe, 1999.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, OUP, UK, 1995.

Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur (eds.). Theorizing Diaspora, Blackwell Publishers, UK,

2003.

Chaudhuri, Amit (ed.). The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Picador, UK, 2001.

Crane, Ralph J. and Radhika Mohanram (eds.). Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures, Rodopi

B.V., Amsterdam-Atlanta GA, 2000.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces, Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black, India,  

2002.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, University of

Chicago Press, US, 1980.

Head, Dominic. Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2002.

Kivisto, Peter. Multiculturalism in a Global Society, Blackwell Publishers, UK, 2002.

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna (ed.). An Illustrated History of Indian Writing in English, Permanent

Black, Delhi, 2003.

Naficy, Hamid (ed.). Home, Exile, Homeland, Routledge, NY, 1999.

Paniker, K. Ayyappa (ed.). Indian English Literature Since Independence, The Indian Association

for English Studies, New Delhi, 1991.

Parker, Michael and Roger Starkey (eds.). Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai,

 Walcott, Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1995.

Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.). An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Routledge, London, 1988.

Pollock, Sheldon (ed.). Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, OUP,

                             India, 2004.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Granta Books,

 London, 1991.

                -               Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002, Vintage, UK, 2003.

                -               ‘Interview’ from Newsweek, 12 February 1990.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin, India, 2001.

-                   ‘Reflections of an Exile – Interviewed by Nikhil Padgaonkar for Doordarshan’ from  

                                Biblio: A Review of Books, November-December 1999.

Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, UK, 2003.

Sen, Krishna and Jharna Sanyal (eds.). Journal of the Department of English Vol. XXIX Nos.

1&2, Calcutta University, 2001-2002.

Simpson, John (ed.). The Oxford Book of Exile, OUP, UK, 1995.