From Periphery to Centre: A Search for Identity in the diasporic fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

In the last century, Indian Diaspora was mainly a personal choice of individuals, particularly for academic pursuit or economic gains either towards the Middle East or to the Western countries, particularly to U.S.A. The native residents in each of these countries reacted differently to the waves of immigrants but in almost all the cases the expatriate did face a clash of opposing cultures, a feeling of alienation which was then followed by the attempts to adjust, to adopt, to accept and finally form a separate identity as a racial group to be acculturated and hence assimilated. All this is reflected in the writing, now generally placed under the umbrella term of Expatriate Writing or Diasporic Literature. These terms have now reached a stage of being used synonymously. This term cuts across various disciplines such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Political Science etc. On the background of globalization, the term ‘Diaspora’ raises the questions of acculturation, assimilation, the loss of identity and various shapes and shades of socio-cultural relationships in the society.