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positive and negative effects of migration in india.
essays about diaspora studies
essays about diaspora studies
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When one arrives in a new land, one has a sense of wonder and adventure at the sight and feel of a landscape so different from what one has been accustomed to; there is also a sense of isolation and fear ; and an intense nostalgia is a buffer to which many retreat. (Uma Parameshwaran)
‘Diaspora’, derived from the Greek word diaspeirein, etymologically means “to scatter” or “to disperse”. The term is applied to the dispersion of a set of people from their place of birth to another land. Although Indians have been migrating to different parts of the world since ancient times for trade and religious propagations, the large-scale migration and settlement began with the colonial rule in India when labour emigration was enforced by the colonizers. Since then, Indians have been migrating and settling in foreign lands for various personal and political reasons. Accordingly, in the present day, the term diaspora signifies “contemporary situations that involve the experiences of migration, expatriate workers, refugees, exiles, immigrants and ethnic communities” (Pandey 20).
The experiences of these people of Indian diaspora are an amalgam of both constructive and astringent experiences.
Their experiences range from trauma to felicitations, from nostalgia to amnesia. They have assimilated with the host society as well as insulated themselves. The impact they have made as well as the influence they have received in a multicultural society has either made a good reputation and brought pride to their nation or left them feeling marginalized and given them a fractured psyche (Pandey 32).
This conflict of c...
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...er life ahead. The maladies of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters assert this necessity of being rooted and being the root, the absence of which perturbs the individual and annihilates the warmth of a stable family.
Works Cited
Braziel, JanaEvans. Diaspora: An Introduction. USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Print.
Lahiri,Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008. Print.
Lal,Malashri and Paul Kumar Sukrita. Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature.
New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2007. Print.
Pandey, Abha. Indian Diasporic Literature. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2008.Print.
Parameswaran,Uma. “Writing the Diaspora: Essays on Cul[t]ure and Identity” Writers of the
Indian Diaspora .Jasbir Jain .Ed. New Delhi: Rawat Publication, 2003. Print.
Zhang, Benzi. Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America. New York: Routledge, 2008.Print.
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, an Indian by descent, was born in London in August 1967, to a Bengali immigrant Indian parents. “Jhumpa” is the nickname easier for the teachers remember his name. The Lahiri family moved from England to Rhode Island when Jhumpa was two years old. Her father was a librarian at Rhode Island University and her mother was a school teacher. At age of seven, Lahiri started to embrace writing about what she saw and felt. While growing up, Lahiri lived two lives: An Indian at home and An American outside of the home. Despite of living most of their life in the western world, Lahiri’s parents called “Calcutta” their home unlike Lahiri who thought Rhode Island as her hometown. Lahiri always felt her family had a different li...
Hall, S. (1995). Diasporas. from "routes" to roots (pp. 427-428). new york: oxford university press.
Seeing through a multicultural perspective. Identities, 19(4), 398. doi:10.1080/1070289X.2012.718714. Steven, D. K. (2014). The 'Secondary'.
When Sripathi and his family receive the news of Maya’s and her husband’s fatal road accident, they experience a dramatic up heaval. For Sripathi, this event functioned as the distressed that inaugurated his cultural and personal process of transformation and was played out on different levels. First, his daughter’s death required him to travel to Canada to arrange for his granddaughter’s reverse journey to India, a move that marked her as doubly diasporic sensibility. Sripathi called his “foreign trip” to Vancouver turned out to be an experience of deep psychic and cultural dislocation, for it completely “unmoors him from the earth after fifty-seven years of being tied to it” (140). Sripathi’s own emerging diasporic sensibility condition. Not only must he faced his own fear of a world that is no longer knowable to him, but, more importantly, he must face his granddaughter. Nandana has been literally silenced by the pain of her parent’s death, and her relocation from Canada to Tamil Nadu initially irritated her psychological condition. To Sripathi, however, Nandana’s presence actsed as a constant reminder of his regret of not having “known his daughter’s inner life” (147) as well as her life in Canada. He now recognizeed that in the past he denied his daughter his love in order to support his
276). Curtin’s Coculturation (2010) combats this hegemonic discourse by stating, “everyone is continually engaged in social and political processes of identification” (p. 283). Thus, one’s identity can consist of multiple cultures and they can in fact coincide. The idea that one group “belongs” in a particular imagined community is a myth, there is no single response or adaption. The theory of Coculturation ultimately accommodates to a more realistic approach to cultural adjustment where a newcomer can adopt some behavior of the host culture while still maintaining the conciliatory and subconscious aspects of their native
Multiculturalism, Evidence: Describe commonalities with and experiences of peoples having different cultural norms and histories.
I am not a child of immigrants, but maintaining one’s culture is a universal struggle in a land far from one’s ethnic origins. Lahiri suggests that without cultural connections such as family and friends, one’s culture can simply vanish if they are not in the land of ethnic origin. I have found this to be true within my own
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
Rajan, R. S. (n.d.). Concepts in postcolonial theory: Diaspora, exile, migration . Retrieved from http://english.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/10743/G41.2900fall09.pdf
The first way describes cultural identity as a shared culture by many people; a culture is like a collective self. As he further argues that cultural identities always highlight the same practices of past which give people stability, unshifting and constant frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and shifting in their actual history (6). Hall shares his personal experience of immigration in Minimal Selves (1987) that when he thinks about identity, he got to know that he has always felt that he is a migrant amongst the foreigners. Similarly Lahiri’s fiction is autobiographical she explains her sorrows as a migrant and suffering in a foreign
...he character flaws found within her main characters. There is no doubt that this author has the ability to clearly remember childhood concerns with critical understanding as well as have a solid focus on using this knowledge to fully develop and reveal the human shortcomings of adult characters who somehow have forgotten how to do this themselves. While depicting both cultural differences and universal truths in the short stories found within “Interpreter of Maladies,” Jhumpa Lahiri illuminates the innocence found within childhood and uses this quality to substantially display the many facets of relationships and marriages that have become exhausted for a variety of reasons. Childhood is used as a major contribution to plot, shedding light not on love’s failures but rather on the opportunities for healing and forgiveness that adults may not always be able to see.
There was one incident in my life that I can remember when I was moving from one cultural environment to another and it wasn‘t easy to get use to the new way of life. Ever since I was born until the age of seven I lived my life in Poland which was a fairly small country located in Europe. Living there was a complete different thing when compared to life here.First of all there was a different language spoken which was Polish,there were different holidays, for example we didn’t celebrate your birthday but instead we celebrated the time when your name was give to you which was considered more important.The means of transportationused by the people were the train or the bus and not everyone had cars because many people weren’t able to afford them because of their cost.Today it is much harder to find jobs in Poland then it use to be, even when someone is fresh out of college with lots of degrees and time in ...
This research project is centered upon the idea that individuals, specifically those in second and third world countries, need to protect their cultural identity by combating the imperialism of western, dominant cultures. According to research, some reasons behind this imperialism are war, totalitarianism, tourism, the need to fit in, peer pressure, immigration, and globalization. These reasons are prevalent in today’s society and can be seen worldwide. Some solutions to the problem that I found in my research are to create a multicultural society that embraces diversity, encouraging a multilingual society along with preserving dying languages, and protecting smaller villages and towns from tourism, industrialization, and globalization. While
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing world. In his works one can find the agony of an exile; the pangs of a man in search of meaning and identity: a dare-devil who has tried to explore myths and see through fantasies. Out of his dilemma is born a rich body of writings which has enriched diasporic literature and the English language.
The term “Diaspora” is used to refer either to singular person or ethnic population forced or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands being dispersed throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and culture. In the beginning, the term was used by the Ancient Greeks to refer to citizens of a grand city who migrated to a conquered land with the purpose of colonization to assimilate the territory into the empire. A large number of Indians migrated to Far East and South East Asia to spread Buddhism during the ancient times. The migration was a history of misery, deprivation and sorrow during the colonial period. In this century the migration was mainly due to the industrialized and