It is a peculiar yet a potent observation that writers in exile generally tend to excel in their work as if the changed atmosphere acts as a stimulant for them. No doubt exile, whether forced or self-imposed, is a calamity. But world literature has an abundance of writers whose writings have prospered while they were in exile. Although it would be preposterous to assume the vice-versa that exiled writers would not have prospered had they not been in exile, the fact in the former statement cannot be denied. The very word ‘exile’ has negative connotations but if we consider the self-exile of a Byron then our response to that very word becomes ambivalent. In order to take a holistic view of the word ‘exile’, we must stretch our imagination as we stretch the meaning of the said word. Then only exile would include migrant writers and non-resident writers and even gallivanting writers who roam about for better pastures to graze and fatten their oeuvre. The obvious political, racial, religious and war exiles instead of being skewed runs parallel in the same plane of self-imposed and internal exiles when an all-encompassing definition of exile is taken.

In an interview with Nikhil Padgaonkar for Doordarshan Edward W. Said reflected on exile:

John Simpson in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Exile writes that exile ‘is the human condition; and the great upheavals of history have merely added physical expression to an inner fact’. It is well agreed that exile is a part of the human experience. Many a Shakespearean play has in it exile in the form of banishment and it dates back even before the time of Pericles of Athens. As for writers of yore we have Ovid whose hyperbolic lamentation on being exiled from Rome for publishing an obscene poem forms part of his Tristia I. There is also Virgil whose Aeneas leaves Troy urged by the ghost of his wife displaying the writer’s predicament.

To return to the effect that exile has, this time not on the writers’ work but on the writers themselves, we arrive at an apparent paradoxis arrived at. Exile appears both as a liberating experience as well as a shocking experience. The paradox is apparent because it is just a manifestation of the tension that keeps the strings attached and taut between the writer’s place of origin and the place of exile. Whatever be the geographical location of the exiled writer, in his mental landscape he is forever enmeshed among the strings attached to poles that pull in opposite directions. The only way the writers can relieve themselves from the tautness of the enmeshing strings is by their work. The relief is only a temporary condition for no writer’s work is so sharp a wedge that can snap the strings that history-makers have woven. Even if a writer consciously tries to justify one end, simultaneously but unconsciously there arises a longing for the other. Therein lies the fascination of exile literature.

Prominent among exile literature are the works of writers who were made to flee their countries by oppressive regimes. Two of the Russian writers namely Gorky and Solzhenitsyn form an amusing pair of victims of political exile. Gorky’s works- especially his communist manifesto Mother- incited the Tsarist regime as much as what Solzhenitsyn’s works- like The Gulag Archipelago- did to the Communists when they came to power. Such is the dichotomy of world politics faced by the writers. If it is not politics then there are racial segregation, religious discrimination and war that make writers flee their countries. The First World War saw a large exodus of writers who felt that they could not write in war-time Europe as they have previously written. The Second World War saw the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. Thomas Mann wrote from his refuge in Chicago to Hermann Hesse in Germany about the uprooting and also mentioned that Europe would be a different place after the war. As it turned out, the whole world became a different place as soon as Enola Gay flew over the sky of Hiroshima. What these writers benefited from their exile was freedom of speech but they could never forget the shock of their original expulsion. They always believed that it was their right to be home yet those who were privileged to return home often were disappointed with the changes. At home few friends remained and they missed the society of like-minded intellectuals that they had formed during the time and in the place of their exile. Once-an-exile becomes forever-an-exile and the works of such writers hold the verve of their restlessness.

In Kafka’s short story The Departure the protagonist mentions that he can reach his goal by ‘getting out of here’. When asked what his goal was he gives a memorable riposte: ‘Out of here- that’s my goal’. Many writers get out of their native land because either the weather does not suit them or the society does not suit them or they just get out in search of the springs of Hippocrene for their muse. R. L. Stevenson preferred to live in Samoa because he enjoyed health in the tropics. P. B. Shelley was the quintessential radical. Even before his elopement with Mary Godwin he showed signs of his radicalism by publishing a tract called The Necessity of Atheism for which he was expelled from Oxford. Eventually the Conservative English society forced him to leave England. Shelley’s exile from society was so acute that in one of his letters to Mary he expressed his desire to desert all human society. He wrote, ‘I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea, … and shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world’. On the other hand Byron’s was a self-exile into the continent in search for the fire to keep his muse’s torch burning. He even participated in the Greek War of Independence because England did not provide him with such a stimulating atmosphere in which to work.

Exile in the form of migration has been the cause of emergence of a large number of writers who have given direction to the progress of English literature. Irish-English writers like G. B. Shaw and W. B. Yeats have produced works that have become landmarks of English literature. Joyce, another great Irish-English writer, in his novel The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man writes: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. … I shall try to fly by those nets….’ Similar was the case with American-English writers like Henry James and especially T. S. Eliot who in his poems expressed his observations about the rootlessness of modern life. As for Joseph Conrad, he was born in Poland but had to spend a part of his childhood with his family exiled in northern Russia. He knew little English till the age of twenty yet when he made his home in Canterbury, Kent, in England he had a considerable amount of English works under his name. In the same way Indian-English writers, especially NRI writers have carved a niche for themselves in the literary world.

Internal exile is another form of exile that many writers face. Perhaps it is the most damning of all exiles for it exiles one in one’s own country. The Russian writer Dostoevsky looks back in his autobiography on the effect of his Siberian sentence thus: ‘… I had been cut off from society by exile and that I could no longer be useful to it and serve it to the best of my abilities, aspirations, and talents’. In fact it was the colonial powers that made most people aliens in their own country. It is in this colonial context that we have a perspective view of the writers who spawned the genre of Indian-English literature. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao were all subjects of the British rule in India. With independence the Indian diaspora took wings and there arose the sub-genre of NRI (non-resident Indian) literature.

Colonial and post-colonial India are divisions that are now more relevant to a historian than a littérateur because Indian-English literature has transcended the barriers of petty classifications and has become amalgamated with mainstream English literature. When V. S. Naipaul at a writers’ retreat in Neemrana, Delhi, scoffed at some of the writers’ fixation with colonialism, his point was worth noting. Writers of Indian origin, especially NRI writers like Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Amitav Ghosh have gained enormous respect in the literary circle of the world, particularly in the field of fiction. The NRI writers have explored their sense of dislocation, which is a perennial theme in all exile literature. In fact NRI writers have given more poignancy to the exploration by dealing not only with a geographical but also a socio-cultural sense of displacement.

Non-resident Indian writers can be grouped into two distinct classes. One class comprises those who have spent a part of their life in India and have carried the baggage of their native land offshore. The other class comprises those who have been bred since childhood outside India. They have had a view of their country only from the outside as an exotic place of their origin. The former group of NRIs have a literal displacement whereas the latter group find themselves rootless. Both the groups of NRI writers have produced an enviable corpus of English literature. Their concerns are global concerns as today’s world is afflicted with the problems of immigration, refugees, exiles and they all give birth to that very sense of displacement and rootlessness.

The first group of NRI writers have already established their credentials but recently the second group of NRI writers have seen their ranks swell enormously and many among them like Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri have already made a name for themselves. Formerly NRI writers dealt generally with NRI characters but lately they have also taken a liking for Western characters and they have been convincing in dealing with them. The big issues like religious intolerance and racial discrimination are no longer the main concern of an NRI writer. The world as a global village has become more accommodating and now what matters are the small things. Little, unacknowledged things gain enormous importance in changed situations. It is here that the differing reactions by Western and NRI characters towards similar circumstances are found to differ only superficially. The inner needs of all human beings are the same. If alienation is a part of NRI experience then it does not mean it won’t find a victim in a Western character- some might be alienated from happiness, some from peace and so on.