Diaspora Consciousness in Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant

Manju Kapur has shot into prominence with the publication of her debut novel Difficult Daughters in 1998 which won her Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in Eurasia region. She is the author of four other novels entitled A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006), The Immigrant (2009) and Custody (2011) of which Home was shortlisted for Hutch Crossword Book Award in 2006. She belongs to Amritsar; she has done her graduation from Delhi University then moved to do M.A. from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and returned to India to do M.Phil. from Delhi University and become a professor in Miranda House, though at present she has retired from there.

Kapur has basically written about women; their marriage, life after marriage, their quest for identity, their trauma and dilemma if failing to achieve the aspired results in their life but in The Immigrant, she has made a departure from the above mentioned themes, for, through this novel, we come across the Diaspora consciousness of the novelist, though she does not stand in the category of the writers of Diaspora such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukharjee, Anita Desai, Upmanyu Chatterjee, Salman Rushdie, Githa Hariharan and so on. The writings of these writers provide an inside view of the problems and obstacles endured by the expatriates in their new adopted land.

Before proceeding in this direction, the words- Diaspora, migration or immigration and exile require a clear explanation. Etymologically, the term Diaspora has its origination in Greek, made up of ‘dia’ and ‘speirin’, meaning to scatter or to disperse. “It was” as N. Jayaram quotes Martin Baumann in his The Indian Diaspora: Dynamics of Migration, “originally used to refer to the aggregate of J...

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...pens up new routes and new ways of thinking which assist in development and advancement and ultimately it depends upon the attitude of the person how to tackle with the obstacles that come in between from migration to settlement.

Works Cited

Kapur, Manju. The Immigrant. New Delhi: Random House India, 2008. Print.

Mcleod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print.

Pandey, Abha. Indian Diasporic Literature. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2008. Print.

Saharan, Asha. “Female Body: Site of Culture- “A Study of Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant”. Labyrinth: Volume-3, No.4 October-2012, ISSN 0976-0814. Print.

Sharma. S.L. “Perspectives on Indians Abroad.” The Indian Diaspora. Ed. N. Jayaram. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004. Print.

Uniyal, Ranu. Women In Indian Writing: From Difference to Diversity. New Delhi: Prestige, 2009. Print.