Ambivalence of Diasporic Experience: a Study of Anita Desai's Bye Bye Blackbird and Bharati Mukherjee's The Tiger's Daughter.

Abstract

Postcolonial theory and literature became prominent in the late twentieth century as a means of analysing the common experiences and problems of people from former colonies as they navigate the world post-independence. One important aspect of postcolonial studies is the experience of Diaspora, which has been a common theme in English literature. Diaspora is not only a physical mobility of the immigrants from their homeland to the foreign land, but a kind of psychological dislocation in which the immigrants experience a sense of displacement, marginalization and a loss of identity. Some immigrants experience ambivalent feelings of ‘in-betweeness’ and are torn between the two cultures, thus they suffer from a broken and split identity. On the other hand, other immigrants try to fully adjust themselves and assimilate with the new culture and live as expatriates. This study examines Anita Desai’s novel, Bye-Bye Blackbird, and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter, both were published in 1971, and fallen in the category of immigration literature. Both novels recapture the experiences of diasporic Indians in Britain and the U.S immigrants but from different perspectives. Moreover, the study attempts to explore the similarities between the two novels but more importantly, how these novels differ in their views of diasporic experiences. Cultural heterogeneity within and across the countries concerned, and the variety of individual voices within the postcolonial novel mean that the Indian Diaspora cannot be construed as one common experience.Keywords: Diaspora, postcolonial, Anita Desai’s, Bye-Bye Blackbird, Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger’s Daughter,