The
Politics of Home and Belonging in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Narratives
N Veera Basavaraju1*, Dr. Navjeet Kaur2
1 Research Scholar, Sunrise University, Alwar,
Rajasthan, India
veerabasava48@gmail.com
2 Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sunrise
University, Alwar, Rajasthan, India
Abstract : Using transnational
settings as a lens, this research analyzes how South Asian diasporic narratives
of the present day navigate the politics of home, belonging, and identity. The
study examines literary works that deal with themes of cultural displacement,
generational gaps, racialized experiences, and the emotional conflicts that
arise from migration and remembrance. This piece delves into the ways in which
authors use narrative techniques like fragmented storytelling, nostalgic
memories, multilingual expression, and spatial symbolism to challenge rigid
ideas of "home" and show how belonging is subject to constant change.
Gender, class, nationalism, and cultural hybridity are just a few of the power
dynamics illuminated by the study's examination of postcolonial, feminist, and
intersectional frameworks as they pertain to diaspora. In the end, this study
contends that modern South Asian diasporic literature reimagines home as an
ever-changing emotional and psychological terrain impacted by grief, longing,
strength, and inventive rethinking, rather than a fixed location.
Keywords: South Asian diaspora,
belonging, home, cultural identity, migration, nostalgia, postcolonial studies,
hybridity, displacement, transnational narratives
INTRODUCTION
At
the heart of diaspora is the idea of a distant home, both in terms of physical
location and in terms of time. Diasporans' homes are the places of origin where
they first encountered each other and where they began to build their
identities. While some argue that scholars should not use the terms
"home" or "homeland" when evaluating diaspora communities,
the importance of home and land in the concept's inception and evolution remains
enormously potent. The diasporic awareness of the first, second, or third
generation of migrants, as well as the memory of the first generation, create
this picture of the original home. The concept of home is conceptualized from
one's memories and awareness, which are firmly grounded in one's country. Consequently,
a home is more than just a physical location; it is a concept infused with
subjective experiences and ideas. The 'homeland' that diasporas imagine is
where they reside. Furthermore, they identify more with the past than with the
present (Rushdie 1991). Both ties to one's home and the experience of being at
home are part of one's memory. What this means is that the act of remembering
is foundational to migrants' sense of home and belonging, as are recollections
of the past.
Cultural systems of meaning include a sense of
location and space when thinking about diasporic societies. Cultures are often
depicted as being "placed" or influenced by landscapes, even if this
is only in our minds (Hall 1995). The idea here is to seep across space and
time until one reaches the "homeland" that preserves the
"fundamentals" of one's culture and identity. However, one must
recognize that the concept of identity may have several interpretations
depending on the context in which one finds themselves in order to use it as an
analytical tool. This study aims to investigate 'home' in various contexts,
including but not limited to: land(scape) and belonging, immigrant emotional
and intellectual reactions, ethnic identification, generational bonds,
affective memory, and modern multidimensional identity traits. The South Asian
diaspora is the focus of all these interconnected notions. Understanding the
significance of home, homeland, memory, and repeated displacements in the lives
of migrants seems inevitable, which is why these many notions are considered.
Diasporic identity cannot be defined in isolation, regardless of generational
disparities. Poets from South Asian diasporas who imaginatively reimagine their
origin provide a window into the dynamic process of identity transition that
this article seeks to illuminate. The diaspora of South Asian writers is
particularly well-known for the widespread dissemination of their fictional
works. These books and works of prose also became well-known among academic
readers. Salman Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid, Bapsi Sidhwa, Michael Ondaatje, Kiran
Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Moksha Seth, Attia Hossain, and Vikram Seth are only a
few of the well-known writers from the South Asian diaspora. Because of this,
studies of South Asian literatures almost never include poetry as a genre. Critical
works on poets from South Asia in diaspora are few and few between, and they
notably exclude poets from Pakistan and Bangladesh, two of the most populous countries
in South Asia. These claims call for research into the works of lesser-known
South Asian diasporic poets, in addition to the canonized works of Indian
diasporic poets like Agha Shahid Ali, Saleem Peeradina, Sujata Bhatt, Meena
Alexander, Uma Parameswaran, and others.
Consequently,
we have chosen six poets from the South Asian diaspora—Dilruba Ahmed of
Bangladesh and Rienzi Crusz of Sri Lanka—to delve into the complexities of
identity among the varied South Asian migrant population. These poets hail from
Pakistan (Moniza Alvi and Tariq Latif) and India (Meena Alexander and Shanta
Acharya). The United Kingdom and North America are the permanent homes of all
these poets. A selection of their outstanding poetry collections is examined in
this study, which includes the works of Alexander (2008), Acharya (2010), Alvi
(2008), Latif (2007), Ahmed (2011), Crusz (2009), and Ahmed's Dhaka Dust
(2011). The selection of works for the paper is particularly marked by their
publication in the twenty-first century. In light of the changing global order
brought about by rapid developments in communication and technology, economic
liberalism, and cross-border geopolitics, this chronology is crucial for
understanding how diasporic communities in the host country have been impacted.
Space, time, connection, travel, sojourn, and belonging have all been thrust
upon us in this first decade of the century. Technologies, discursive
interests, and socioeconomic linkages all play a role in creating the schema of
things that people, culture, and objects move inside. This schema determines
how they are attached or detached. In the context of the aforementioned claims,
such pursuits inevitably lead to discussions on "identity," a word
fraught with conceptual complexities.
Poems
from the South Asian diaspora are located at a global crossroads, where many
cultures clash and merge to create new homes along the diasporic migration
line. As a result of mobilities, one is forced to reconsider identitarian
issues pertaining to one's home, one's memory of it, the landscape, and one's
rituals. Along with people, cultures also migrate, which may lead to a
reimagining of what it means to be "home" and a resuscitation of
politics centered on national pride. After deterritorialization, the use of space,
location, and land helps people remember their earliest cultural reference
point. Therefore, in these liminal areas connected to several cultural realms,
the concept of home has to be rethought. Instead of being in a static cultural
or national context, the concept of home is best understood as being embedded
in a complex network of real and imagined social, economic, and cultural ties.
Despite the constant back-and-forth between homeland and hostland, the concept
of "home" continues to play a key role in diasporic identity.
Therefore, in order to acknowledge the influence of mobilities, cultural
dialogues, and in-betweenness on the overall notions of home, memory, and
identity, the following arguments examine, at a triadic level, the poetic
sensibility of South Asian diaspora litterateurs. First, there are insights
into the importance of home and land in shaping migrant identities. Second, we
see how migrant memories can keep this attachment to the original home alive.
Third, we take a look at the theory and practice of identity transitions to
understand the South Asian diasporic consciousness in the face of the
ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that migrant
populations face today. Scholars have long sought to compartmentalize different
aspects of diasporic belonging, despite the fact that arguments about diasporic
identity forms often occur. Unlike their modern-day counterparts, South Asian
diasporas are multilateral, hybrid, and, in many instances, cosmopolitan
voluntary migrants; in contrast, they were formerly static, unilateral groups
that endured forcible expulsion under colonialism. The central focus of this
research is to use poetry texts from the South Asian diaspora to understand how
the lives of migrants in the hostland have changed over time. This research
aims to contextualize chosen poems from the given collections and explain them
in relation to important ideas for a more precise textual analysis.
Home(land) and Diasporic Identity
Many
South Asians who now reside outside of their ancestral country may trace their
ancestry back to that place and the people who lived there. A community's
cultural identity may become even more convoluted as a result of the
complexities brought up by displacement. So, cultural identity is always being
constructed via recollection, imagination, story, and myth rather than stating
an unquestioned, factual history. "There is always a politics of identity,
a politics of position" (Hall 1990, 226) since cultural identities rely on
identification notes seen as a "positioning" within cultural and
historical discourses. Each diaspora site has its own unique history, and this
history dictates where the topic stands. Nevertheless, in this age with highly
developed information and transportation networks, the needs of location
politics are already complicated. It establishes accountability to many
locations for an identity. With temporary visits to the origin, technology
makes it easy to stay linked to the "lost" home, bridging the gap
between "here" and "there" (the homeland and hostland). However,
this does nothing to alleviate the severity of the root loss. Instead, the idea
of complex multiple rootedness is strengthened by the moves and diversions,
which happen regardless of geographical borders, wherever cultural
identifications take place.
The diaspora notion is defined by the shelter,
residence, dwelling of motherland. Without consulting the idea of diaspora's
origins, connotations, and development, some academics dismantle the
home/homeland dichotomy. Among those who have voiced concerns about what
amounts to "maintenance or restoration" of a homeland and advocated
for its actual construction is Robin Cohen (1997). His position is that we need
to go back to William Safran's six defining features of diasporas. So,
according to his argument, "the case of a 'imagined homeland' that only
resembles the original history and geography of the diaspora's natality in the
remotest way" would be covered in the process of creating a homeland
(1997, 23). "Homeland" was built in the past. On the other hand,
Avtar Brah's Cartographies of Diaspora (1996) takes a strong stance in
distancing diaspora from country. When she thinks about diaspora, she says,
"offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of
a homing desire." This makes home seem less concrete and more abstract. Still,
a "homeland" want and a homing desire are distinct concepts (194). For
her, "home" is more than just a geographical location to which
migrants want to return. Having said that, not every diaspora has any want to
go back to their homeland. For certain South Asian migrant groups in Trinidad,
maintaining cultural ties to their home on the Indian subcontinent may have
greater significance than returning to their homeland, as she explains. In the
diasporic imagination, the 'homing urge' persists even in the absence of
physical access to the motherland. Thus, the house becomes a homing yearning
and a space devoid of a sense of place. According to Brah:
Have you
ever wondered where home is? First, for those living in diaspora,
"home" is a fantastical, idealized concept. Even while it is feasible
to go to the physical location associated with the term "place of
origin," this is nonetheless a place from which no one can ever return. The
lived experience of a place is another definition of home. Through the
historically particular daily of social connections, we experience its noises,
odors, heat, dust, lovely summer nights, the thrill of the first snowfall,
chilly winter evenings, gloomy gray sky midday, and so on. (188–89),
According
to these readings, the physical environment of a house might take a back seat
to the sentiments, experiences, and routines that come with being a home.
Diasporic people's subjective experiences may be multi-placed, but it doesn't
mean they're "rootless" or have no connection to their site of
settlement. Then, a home is a location where one seeks for its
"roots" and discovers its identity—albeit a hyphenated one. With the advent
of modern computer-mediated ultra-fast communication systems, the once-lost
connection to the source is not only restored, but also maintained in the
imagination. Therefore, it is worth noting that Cohen's concept of home is:
the
place of birth, the place of residence, a local, national, or international
location, an imagined virtual community connected, for instance, by the
internet, or a matrix of intimate social relationships and familiar experiences
(thus fitting the adage that "home is where the heart is"). (119).
In
the context of imagined and virtual environments that link dispersed people
beyond physical location, the quote above offers a fresh and adaptable
perspective on the idea of home. Cohen places more emphasis on making a house a
home than on keeping one. A place like this, his metaphorical home, may
transcend borders and be anywhere, in his view. Having said that, Cohen is not
the only one who has elevated the concept of homeland to a global stage. The
diasporic home must be meticulously located in the ancestral homeland,
according to Khachig Tölölyan. “Exilic nationalism” is losing ground to
“diasporic transnationalism" among today’s youth. The location where new
immigrants still feel most at home is the transnational social space, and they
attribute this quality of modern forms of dispersion to diasporas, according to
Tölölyan (2012, 11). The second and third generations of immigrants continue to
live in more than one country, bridging the gap between their ancestral
homeland and the modern world, all the while keeping in touch with loved ones
back home and hoping for the best for their ancestral homeland. The need for
harmony and cohesion permeates every imagined society, whether it a
nation-state or a region. As the world's geopolitical, social, and technical
landscapes change, the notion of diaspora evolves, yet these concepts imply
that the homeland is its base.
Poetry
written on a topic from the host country frequently makes the reader feel a
sense of territorial belonging. Poets from the South Asian diaspora share this
trait. At the forefront is the idea of the "land" and
"home" becoming one. The loss of one's homeland—representing one's
cultural, emotional, linguistic, social, political, geographical, and economic
necessities—can lead to a profound feeling of dispossession for those
experiencing diaspora. Deterritorialization refers to the "loss of the
'natural' relation of culture to geographical and social territories"
(Canclini 1995, 229). Both the literal "home" and the more abstract
"homeland" have a role in shaping migrant identities, and both are
discussed here. In contrast to the latter, the former does not insist on a
direct physical link to the source. There is a tangible one and an abstract
one. If "home" refers to an internal experience, then "homeland"
refers to an external location. Both concepts have developed from their
traditional, orthodox, and steady origins in today's technologically advanced,
internationally interconnected society. While the diasporic imagination and
cultural distinctiveness can serve as technological conduits for the symbolic
home (e.g., photos, videos, live broadcast), the internet and other forms of
modern transportation make it possible to swiftly and easily access the
geopolitical homeland. The "land/territory" and the "home"
both house the diasporic identity. Diaspora poets from South Asia, like
Orissa-born Indian Shanta Acharya, evidently find ways to communicate the
concept of home (country) in their poetry. She expertly depicts the
'dispossession' of land in order to question the lifestyles of migrants. She
thinks of the traditional Jewish idea of a "promised land" and the
journey there that is expected. "Dispossessed" is a poem on
homelessness and its omnipresence from Dreams that Spell the Light (2010). Those
fleeing persecution are the narrators of this poem. They are prepared to give
up everything—even their children and future—in exchange for a safe haven. The
predicament of such deterritorialized entities is astutely articulated by
Acharya:
As
sincere Christians, unwavering in our faith, and dreaming of putting our
confidence in an adopted nation, we set out on this voyage to the promised land
across the perilous seas, believing that life would no longer be cheap or
readily stolen: (2010, 30)
After
going through many migrations herself, the poet knows that even a homecoming
can't guarantee the "faith" that everything would be well. In 1985,
Acharya joined the asset management profession in London after leaving India to
pursue a PhD at Oxford. She worked as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard
University's Department of English and American Literature and Languages before
moving into asset management. Coming from an Indian background, she understands
the challenges of adjusting to other environments. The importance of one's
country to one's identity, nationalism, emotions, and fantasies is something
she concedes.
Deterritorialization,
which results in the loss of land or home and the familiar environment, affects
her sensibilities as a poet. In the poem up there, we get a picture of a group
of refugees making their way to a place where they hope to find a better life,
where they hope that their existence would have more meaning. But they are left
high and dry without any possessions. Forced immigrants bring more suffering to
the so-called "adopted homeland" by clinging to the optimism they
left behind. Because of everything they've been through, the refugee group is
understandably fearful of what the future holds. The poet thus expresses a
strong yearning for a homeland whose absence follows one even after migration. The
existentially invested homeland and the hostland's role in identity negotiation
are called into question by the crises that these people endure. A state of
spiritual anguish and disintegration brought on by dispersion is symbolized in
the poem. 'Promised land' here alludes to the unfortunate Jews who were sent
out of the biblical country of Israel by a furious God. In light of the Jewish
people's plight and the loss of their "homeland," other dispersed groups
from all over the world began to use the term "diaspora" to
characterize their own relocation and hardship.
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
MATERIAL AND METHOD
Dispersing the Queer in Divakaruni and Patil
Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni opens "The Blooming Season for Cacti" by
depicting Mira's journey to California, the quintessential diaspora, which in
the text's universe is only reachable across a desert with "[b]rown land,
brown sky, hills like brown \breasts" (167). In addition to bringing to
mind Mira's brown body and the implicitly brown South-Asian reality that
characterizes her hybrid existence in this white setting, these allusions
("[b]rown land, brown sky") also more precisely foreshadow her queer
desire ("hills like brown breasts") and the queer diaspora, which
becomes increasingly clear as we continue reading (167). Mira's observation
that the "sand rippled into a thousand lines of cursive" creating
"a dangerous alphabet" (168) is a clear example of the subversion reflected
in the opening sections by this South Asian queer diaspora already in the
making. The swirly cursive is reminiscent of Amruta Patil's paintings in Kari,
where the transition from distinct straight lines to a mess of swirly ones
pictorially captures every introduction into the realm of queer desire and
every suggestion of homosexual sexuality. The scene when Kari reflects on her
own romance with Ruth best illustrates this. Kari presents this as a
traditional movie story, depicting their first encounter at a train station.
A
noticeboard featuring stills from the heteronormative mainstream cult classic,
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, serves as the backdrop for their first meeting.
This institutionalizes the conventional love story in the novel's world while
also highlighting the transgressive departure indicated by Kari and Ruth's
romance (68). Subsequently, the following page consists of three top-to-bottom
parallel panels that illustrate the development of the love narrative. Kari and
Ruth are positioned at the left and right ends of each panel, with background
lines linking them. Here, we see a definite variation in the lines between the
two characters: they are straight when they are face to face, randomly curved
when their eyes contact, and then pronouncedly and artistically swirly when
they are obviously nude and Kari is holding Ruth by the thighs. "Whatever
love laws have to be broken, the first few seconds suffice," the story
below states (69). The lines in Patil's art are straight, but the transgressive
gay love twists them into something more akin to the perilous
"cursive" of the diasporic California desert in Divakaruni. I would
contend that this diasporic exodus is portrayed in Divakaruni's text as a
metaphor for what is fundamentally also a daring queer sexual experience for
the narrator, even if it is physical and literal (where Mira really journeys to
Sacramento via the Californian desert).
The
story's title serves as the most direct allusion to this cliché, which is the
blossoming cactus of the desert, which symbolizes both the diasporic landscape
and queer yearning inside the book. Thus, Radhika and Mira become close while
reading The Great Deserts of the American West. The book describes the desert
cacti, which Radhika uses as a metaphor for Mira in her hidden love poem, and
how they unexpectedly sprout soft blossoms from within their unlikely thorny
hard exteriors. The cacti are part of the symbolic and literal diasporic space
of the desert. Mira and Radhika spent hours cuddled up with this book, which
depicts "vibrant coronets of hedgehog cactus, candy cactus and prickly
pear that push out through the plants' spiny armament"—a picture that
represents the unexpected beauty of queer love—and the cacti's "brief
flowering," an allusion that suggests the transience of queer love despite
societal resistance.
When
Radhika brings up the book's depiction of the cactus, Mira subtly confesses
that she had "always imagined their thorns to be stinging, poisonous"
(187), further implying that queer desire might be harmful. The "evening
light" in the photograph catches a particular "fineness so that they
shine, exalted, like the hair of infants" (187), despite this foreboding
message about the lethal cactus thorns. Despite societal accusations and personal
fears, Radhika's love poem—found on a crumpled and discarded piece of paper
that Mira finds by chance later—and its subdued gurgling sexuality have a
profound and impactful effect, suggesting innocence beneath the supposedly
corruptive nature of queer desire. As Mira's writer, Radhika:
"You,
cactus blossom,
blossoming
thorn-free,
in
the desert of my heart." (205)
The
desert cactus in full bloom becomes a potent and terrifying symbol that
encourages and forbids, with undertones of queer sexual desire and diasporic
life. It seems that the language of diaspora is where queer sexuality takes
form; this is not only a physical condition, unlike Mira's real voyage; rather,
it is a mental condition that mixes intricately and strongly with queer
experience. This text's queer sexuality chimes with a broader portrayal of the
diasporic state, which is personified by the (Californian) desert, a metaphor
that is both promising and dangerous. With all the possibilities this terrain
offers, the narrator seemed to be welcoming it: I had the ambition of reaching
the peak of the tallest dune. I want a complete metamorphosis. "Above,
vultures waited to swoop down on the helpless skitter of smaller
creatures." (168) This is happening despite the obvious danger of
predators in this diasporic area. (168) In time, her concerns start to fade:
"Some of the scared hardness at my core was melting in the desert's
heat." Since my arrival in the United States, "I was a burning
wind," and all the possibilities that come with this change to diasporic
life take flight. I was quite sensitive. I was planning to go to California. (168)
She briefly experiences "desert-dangerous" feelings, which she
associates with her impending sexual and diasporic adventures, but these
feelings quickly fade as she becomes "tired and, again, afraid" upon
inhaling the familiar Indian aromas emanating from Malik-ji's
restaurant—"the old, known smells and the boundaries they once
promised" (172). On closer inspection, what at first glance seem to be
remarks about the physical displacements (and the crossing of topographical
"boundaries") that accompany a diasporic shift take on the quality of
a metaphor. Here, the concerns and interests surrounding a geographical
diaspora start to allude to a diasporic mentality, and via it, to a queer
sexual life that shares numerous of the same complexities and anxieties.
By
assisting us in diasporizing the queer, queer sexuality effectively becomes a
diasporic condition, both symbolically and verbally. "Who is to
say?'" the narrator says at the very end, bringing these two threads
together in the most direct way possible. "Who are we to judge a woman's
feelings when they express delight in the bare, naked skin of a desert woman or
another woman's sand-brown figure?" (208) Most obviously, when the
narrator attempts to envision the (fictional) journey of the "woman in the
photo" (perhaps by "a bus" when "she moved to the
hills," as Mira says), the image of the woman in the desert that Radhika
and Mira see in the book ends up sliding into this conceptual whiteboard. (208)
The desert, which has come to represent both diasporic destination and gay
yearning, seems to be the place the lady has reached. In addition, Mira
questions whether anyone had cautioned the woman about "saying what she
was doing, it just wasn't right, wasn't natural"—criticisms that combine
the woman's sister-in-law's words with the stereotypical condemnation of
women's independent (diasporic) travel and (queer) sexual adventures that one
typically hears in society (208). At the end of her story, Mira boldly
proclaims, "I decide I know whom she is smiling at," the
revolutionary character of the woman's gay love: "It is her lover, the
woman whose shadow has entered the photograph, and in doing so shifted the
balance of light" (209, emphasis mine), revealing the woman's "small,
secret smile" (208) and the secret of her queer desire. "On the long
bus ride south, and later, in sand and rock, among the fierce momentary
blooming of cacti," Mira writes about her love for Radhika, incorporating
the contradictory images of desert travel and blooming cacti. She's Radhika,
and I'm going to rest my head on her shoulder. My fingertips will caress her
scar..." (a) (2009) On one level, the South Asian queer female body
imprints itself on the Californian desert, challenging geographical and sexual
hierarchies. However, central to this essay is the way queer sexuality is
portrayed as akin to an imagined diasporic state of mind through Radhika and
Mira's desire. As a result, the queer experience is further marginalized.
Because neither the author nor the
text in Kari by Amruta Patil is obviously situated in the diaspora, a similarly
evident diasporization of the LGBT experience occurs in this work. My argument
is that the textual construction of the gay experience alludes to the imagined
diasporic condition, and not in a simple sense. Ruth takes flight to an unknown
nation, escaping the truth of her homosexual connection with Kari, and thus
represents one side of the diasporic journey's argument against the recognition
of queer desire. While Kari, who is based in Mumbai, considers, cultivates, and
acts upon her queer desire in relation to Ruth and her distant life, the
diasporic condition is one that persists in characterizing, fueling, and flavoring
the many aspects of homosexual love. After Ruth's suicide attempt, Kari
imagines that she and Ruth are physically apart and that Ruth is boarding an
aircraft to go. Aerial views of the city must have been her final recollection
of it. Embers of light splattered on a black backdrop. She crossed the airport,
which was really a ford. Ruth stands out in the illustration—the only one awake
and staring as the plane disappears from Kari's skyline—as the other passengers
doze off. It's a powerful symbol of queer desire and diasporic departure that
the others would rather ignore (6-7). This iconic moment in the diasporization
of queer love is heightened by a two-page extended depiction, the aerial view
of a city submerged in darkness (suggesting both loneliness and ignorance), and
the paradoxical power of the airport as a ford, which paradoxically provides
Ruth with both escape and empowerment. To begin with, it's a weird longing loss
because Kari keeps bemoaning Ruth's leaving (for instance, when she sees a lady
on the street, she wonders, "Would she fall in love with me forever and
never leave?") (54). At the same time that leaving Mumbai for an unnamed
foreign country allows Ruth to more openly pursue a gay relationship outside of
India, it also gives the occasion for the assertion of queer love and desire
throughout the text.
Similar to the dual nature of
contemporary diasporic displacement, this estrangement from gay desire is seen
as both powerful and isolating, depressing and forceful. However, the textual
link between gay and diasporic experiences is much more nuanced. One side of
the story has Ruth's departure from Kari as the pinnacle of diasporic flight,
which rejects queer desire. But in the last pages of the book, the
"faraway city" is described as a place "where the palette was
pure and bright," an idealized landscape that, in contrast to the squalor
and filth of Mumbai's gutter-like neighborhood, promises gay love through its
radiant light (116). You may see this dichotomy between Bombay/Mumbai, with its
damp and aggressive streets, and Divakaruni, with its dry and liberating
outside city. Patil supports this notion that people in faraway lands have
magical potential with Kari's "snow globe with a winterscape inside"
and the "Fairytale Hair" commercial's recurring motif (48, 11). Kari
sets the snow globe on her "bedside table"—a spot secretive enough to
soothe the soul and strategic enough to inject dreams—indicative of the
closeness of the diasporic backdrop to her inner fantasies of gay love and
sexuality. It presents what seems like a typical global metropolis scene:
"Church, park bench, girl standing shin-deep in snow." As Kari
describes the snow globe, she says: "Tip the snow globe over and a
blizzard of slow snow falls over church and bench and girl." This suggests
a terrifying possibility of the world flipping upside down, a change from this
(foreign) winterland to maybe the Indian reality, or a change from the
heteronormative paradigm to queer desire. (48) Kari immediately grasps the
danger of this dream's self-reversal over an internal binary: "What is it
about snow globes that makes them fascinating and terrifying at once?" Kari
describes the terrifying scenario in which passion and romance are contingently
divided along sexual and geographical lines in (48):
The idea
of the snow-globe girl who waits indefinitely, hoping that a fresh snowstorm
would fall on her mantle the moment someone else topples her snow-globe world,
makes my heart flutter. Her garment is impervious to the wind, and the steeple
is safe from birds. (48)
To
escape this brutal arbitrariness, one must break out of this dichotomy and live
on a sexual and geographical continuum. In response to Lazarus's question
regarding her sexual orientation, Kari suggests a spectrum that lies beneath
politically significant but ultimately shallow categories: "I'd say
armchair straight, armchair gay, active loner." This is a pivotal
statement that I will come back to later in the essay.
In
my life, the circus does not exist. I'm thinking about it. (79 points) The
combination of Kari's statements and the sarcasm and rudeness visible on her
face gives the impression that the categorization of sexual orientation into
discrete categories ("armchair straight, armchair gay, active loner")
is nothing more than a taxonomic ploy—a meaningless "circus" that
exists only in one's mind and has no bearing on the actual sexual experiences
one has. In contrast, queer sexuality is starting to integrate into a more
seamless continuity, and the diaspora is showing up in a more substantial way
via increased global (geographic) connectedness. The snow globe on Kari's
nightstand reveals that this diasporic space—which seems to be more promising
for queer sexuality—even if it is geographically outside her grasp, is really
very much within her reach. Kari lives in a constructive and enabling
continuity by inhabiting this imagined diasporic condition and allowing it to
diasporize queer experience. From the suffocating home urbanscape of
filth—representing the smelly Mumbai of her daily physical existence—she
marches out of the binary of the much-touted sexually liberated global
metropolis of diasporic ambition, which is founded on a naive premise of sexual
liberation in global metros.
The
idea of a sexually liberating city is undermined when the girl in the snow
globe, who is subtly situated in a freeing international space, is unable to
escape and ends up cutting her finger while sewing. The blood that drips onto
the snow creates a beautiful bed of roses, but it is the most terrible kind of
roses, representing the only outcome for queer desires. In addition, Kari's
dogged battle against the stink and filth of Mumbai as the "Boatman"
(Patil 32-4, 97-8) challenges and ultimately overcomes the city's horrible
claustrophobia. Despite her seeming problems inside Mumbai, she manages to
break out of both of these extremes and imaginatively inhabit the diasporic
state of mind, a condition of global cosmopolitanism. Patil takes the diasporic
mentality and the geographical global continuity it suggests to its logical
conclusion. Cities, in her view, are like interconnected organs that bleed when
people leave them (or go from the globe). After Ruth departs, Kari depicts
Mumbai as teeming with stifling lifeforces, illustrating how the network of
worldwide cities is like a pulsating body. "A city alters when a person
leaves," she adds, lying in bed surrounded by the swirly etchings that
define the novel's world of queer sexuality. "At dusk, it looks hairy,
drops drawbridges, grows new roads" (14).
She
on to accentuate the intricate web of connections in our globalized society by
saying, "Every day I wander into strange backyards and junk heaps and
miraculously find my way out and back to work or home again." (14) Despite
the issues with diasporic cosmopolitanism, which I will address in detail
below, Cruz-Malave and Manalansan argue that this type of globalization has
given the queer rights movement more space to fight for equality and that the
"increased global visibility of queer sexualities and cultures in the
marketplace has also generated multiple opportunities for queer political
intervention through an equally globalized coalition politics" (1-2). Kari
is able to love Ruth, image Ruth as linked to her, and envision Ruth laughing when
Kari refuses to take her own life at the conclusion of the book because she is
connected with the world and, by extension, with faraway Ruth via this
diasporic imagination and global cosmopolitan continuity. Emotionally
fulfilling connections and politically effective LGBT action are made possible
by the diasporization of queer experience and the rise of an integrated global
cosmopolitanism.
The South Asian Queer Experience through the Global
Diaspora
It
would be a simplification to equate the purported liberatory possibilities of
diasporic and queer life when we say that the literary-cultural works under
consideration diasporize the queer experience. I will now talk about how this
becomes even more apparent when these writers, in the midst of diasporizing
queer experience, challenge the teleological premise of queer sexuality—which
links a backward non-West to a gay-friendly modern West—and instead establish a
framework of South-Asian queer experience, which is distinct, complex,
ambiguous, and even revolutionary. Several publications on queer globalization
and the queer diaspora argue that global connectedness hinders homosexual
politics by promoting a metropolitanist perspective. The Globalization of
Sexuality has a helpful concluding section. Binnie addresses the "global
gay subject" and whether it has "become as unsustainable as notions
of global sisterhood among feminists" (38), while also recognizing the
importance of the term "global gay" as an identity label required for
official recognition.
"Whether a global gay subject exists, and
if so, how can it be characterized" (38), as Binnie explains, has been a
contentious and ongoing topic of discussion for quite some time. An assumed
"universality of legal constructs involving sexuality and culture" (38),
according to Sonia Katyal, is problematic. According to Dennis Altman,
everything of American "queer theory" is focused on the Atlantic. (42)
According to David Halperin, "queer theory" has mainstreamed the LGBT
community and reduced their ability to cause disruption. Peter Drucker, who
"rejects the notion that it is Eurocentric to criticize Robert Mugabe's
persecution of gays in Zimbabwe" (37-8), is one of those who promote
"[t]he notion of a common gay identity" and who stresses the
"commonality of a gay identity" globally. Chong Kee Tan, like others,
notes that western gay culture is not a monolithic whole. He goes on to
demonstrate how different local contexts adopt certain aspects of western gay
culture and politics, resulting in a "hybrid sexual culture" that is
not an imposition from the West.
A
reference to this controversial discussion, Binnie poses the question,
"Does the growth of the global gay community reflect an evolutionary model
of modernity in which less developed nations are advancing toward the
recognition of lesbian and gay rights as the pinnacle of modernity, as the last
stage of development?" (38). "The diffusion, or more sinisterly, the
imposition of Anglo-American queer sexual norms" (38), as Binnie puts it,
"could reflect a denial of indigenous or folk forms of sexuality" and
the "strategic essentialism" of the global homosexual identity. The
fact that this is contingent and subjective means that it will never be
resolved. It is undeniable that such unity is frequently based on a relatively
privileged (and often Westdependent) metropolitan continuity across the globe,
even though it is politically and socially strategic for gay populations of
different countries to merge movements and demands due to common concerns. In
this global discourse, the discrepancy between the actual lived experiences of
diverse LGBT populations in South Asian nations, for example, risks being
ignored and disregarded. For this reason, it is critical that we include
contextual details from nations and places outside the global north into our
human understandings and academic investigations of local problems. Paying
close attention to these complexities, the texts being discussed cast doubt on
an elite, global homosexual identity hub by revealing its internal cracks. Thus,
Kari, who is based in Mumbai, is intensely aware of this elite urban privilege
that disregards local reality, even if she finds global cosmopolitan
connectivity advantageous in certain ways. Chapter "Love Song"
reflects, if only fleetingly, an understanding of the distinct South Asian
sexual reality as it pertains to class disparity. A group orgy ("a snake
pit of entwined arms," 76) and a homosexual encounter involving Kari and a
stranger follow the picture of upper-class cosmopolitan sexual recklessness
among Billo, Delna, Orgo, Zap, and Vicky. As soon as this transnational style
of heterosexual and gay personal relationships demands worldwide attention, a
completely new reality is shown. Having accompanied Lazarus on his nighttime
strolls with a camera, Kari goes on to detail the individuals who slept on the
sides of the road in the chapter that follows. "She notices:
They go
to the streets, benches, and carts for slumber. Arms cradling bodies, legs
tucked beneath, a protective ball warding off the nighttime dangers. This
viewing is a terrible thing. We would be susceptible to peeping tom charges if
our victims had more money. Just the way it is, our stroll provides artistic
black-and-white images of dreary city life. (78)
"How
do you believe they reproduce out here?" Lazarus inquires of Kari. In
response, Kari states, "Furtively. barely covered. (78) The worldwide
cosmopolitan discourse that demands attention and consumption is savagely
criticized in this. The often-trendy "sexile" or "gay cosmopolitan
subject" (Wesling, 31) is based on a plain desire for public exposure and
market-driven demands for commodification, but this harsh reality is presented
to the reflective reader as an alternative. This is explained by Cruz-Malave
and Manalansan:
In our
modern, consumer-driven, globalized society, queerness has become both a
commodity and a means of self-expression for queers in a world where the
"private" is increasingly turned into a commodity through marketing.
Nonqueers use queerness as a means to channel their passions and money. (1)
Because of this, "the social
and political significance of queer sexualities and culture to a commodity
exchangeable in the marketplace" (2) is reduced as a result of
globalization. The opposite side of poverty-stricken existence, where
visibility is an imposed imposition and an inherited tragedy, and where privacy
is an expensive luxury and denied right, is contrasted with this elite trend
for visibility in Kari's tale. This is the reality for those living on the streets,
where individuals are seen as they mate in broad daylight by curious onlookers
and whose misery is turned into a marketable product by the artistic cameras of
the well-to-do ("arty b&w pictures of grim urban life"). Kari
beautifully captures the issue with the worldwide language around LGBT rights
in a climax scenario that follows the stroll. Lazarus then presses the issue by
asking, "Are you, like, a proper lesbian?" "A proper
lesbian?" Kari asks with a heavy voice, and she mulls over the question further:
When I
put the word "lesbian" into my mouth, I get an uncomfortable feeling.
Something like to a fleshy, salivating, just arrived from Lesbia, completely
unsuitable. (79 points)
Gopinath
notes that Mehta's Fire exhibits a similar uneasiness with the uniform global
lexicon that is incompatible with the South Asian experience of queer
sexuality, as Sita informs Radha that their relationship has no term in their
[Indian] language. Gopinath discusses how Chughtai and Mehta's distinctive
presentation of a South Asian gay sensibility differs greatly from its western
counterparts. In her discussion of South Asian culture, Gopinath highlights the
"depiction of queer female desire emerging at the interstices of rigidly
heterosexual structures, detailing the ways in which desire is routed and
rooted within the space of the middle-class home." Characters in the South
Asian context "are able to access pleasure and fantasy through
unofficially sanctioned sites that function as 'escape hatches' from the
strictures of conjugal heterosexual domesticity," in contrast to the
international rhetoric that demands public visibility and legal identity. The
boundaries of the house and "the domestic," as opposed to a secure
"elsewhere," are where "female same-sex desire and pleasure [is
located] firmly." (Gopinath 153) The private pleasures that Sita and Radha
develop without their uncaring husbands knowing, as well as Begum Jaan's covert
sexual relationships with other women in the privacy of her quarters (while her
husband pursues young, nubile boys himself), are examples of such unusual forms
of bonding. As an illustration, consider the "trope of dressing and
undressing"—a "performance of hyperbolic femininity"—and the
"erotic interplay" between Radha and Sita, which "encodes female
same-sex eroticism within sites of extreme heteronormativity" and
"references the specific modality of South Asian femininity in the popular
Indian films like Utsav or Razia Sultan" (Gopinath 154).
Other
examples include "Radha[’s] rub[bing] [of] oil into Sita’s hair"
(Gopinath 153–4) and Sita massaging Radha’s feet at a family picnic. While
going on a date with Ajit in an avatar (a short lacy white dress, stiletto
heels, and "glittery crimson" lipstick) that is as contrived for her
own self as it is shocking to Radhika, this latter type of intimacy reappears
in Divakaruni's story, where Radhika similarly massages jabakusum oil into
Mira's hair—a form of loving and erotic intimacy ("her fingers make little
circles" on Mira's scalp and "trace the small dip behind each ear,
186). This emphasis on the locality of the South Asian experience is
reminiscent of writers like Michael Peter Smith (2001), John Tomlinson (1999),
and Jon Binnie (2005), among many others, who argue that a less fatalistic view
of globalization is necessary. They contend that the economic determinism of
the globalization narrative must be abandoned in favor of emphasizing the
agency of the local, refusing to see the local "as authentic and
embedded," "devoid of agency and merely the victim of globalizing
processes" (Binnie 35). By fusing memories of and connections to her
brutal but personal South Asian past with Mira's diasporic queer
experientiality, Divakaruni's tale similarly disrupts the exuberant discourse
of the global queer identity. As a result, Mira is constantly reminded of her
mother by Radhika's behavior, and the story's final thought, in which she
describes her last loving union with Radhika, is tinged with a grim and
agonizing reminder of numerous unspoken desires and longings that originate
from her own particular cultural background. She states:
I am
going to rest my head on her shoulder. I'll touch her scar with my fingertips
in the manner of a Braille reader. Maybe the words for my night with Ajit will
be there. The tank of water. The woman bathing in the ocean at Bombay. For my
mother, who likewise had the view that you must sacrifice your own life in
order to rescue the person you love. (208)
She
acknowledges that she is yearning for these terms rather than the universal
categories of "armchair straight, armchair gay, active loner," which
Kari parodies: "There are so many words I am searching for, I who had
stopped believing in their possibility." (208) As a result, the imagined
diasporic state that queer experientiality conjures up is powerfully revealed
in these works, demonstrating how a diasporization of the queer experience not
only provides the diaspora as a metaphor for queer experience but also makes it
easier to problematize the global gay imaginary. It enables the expression of
problematic and exorcised feelings and subaltern realities from South Asian
culture, which are difficult to express in the home country. Its portrayal also
serves to counter the cosmopolitan elitism of international queer discourse.
CONCLUSION
Identity
has so many facets, it is very difficult to describe and categorize.
Furthermore, the work becomes much more academically stimulating when
discussing diasporas. Therefore, the goal of the current research was to follow
the development of different identity formation processes using the broad
perspective of diasporic sociological and critical theories. The diaspora of
South Asian poets living in North America and the United Kingdom are also taken
into consideration for their 21st-century publications. This chronology is
significant because the global order has been evolving throughout the current
century, characterized by more technology and communication capabilities than
ever before. Such developments significantly impact the maintenance of
diasporic identity practices in the country of settlement by speeding up
mobilities. As a result, identities lose their rigidity and disprove limiting
factors. "Liquid homes" are encouraged to be populated with this
identity fluidity. Through recollections of the (home) landscape, the diasporas
of the second and third generations inhabit the "home." However, the
South Asian diaspora groups' growing receptivity to various cultures—both
domestic and foreign—creates a cosmopolitan atmosphere that does, in fact,
change their identities. The South Asian diaspora's poetry reflects all of
these elements in great detail.
References
1.
Altman, Dennis. Defying
Gravity: A Political Life. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997.
2.
Schein, Louisa. 1999. “Of
Cargo and Satellites: Imagined Cosmopolitanism.” Postcolonial Studies 2(3):
345–375.
3.
Tomlinson, John. 1999.
Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4.
Mehta, Deepa. 1996. Fire.
Kaleidoscope Entertainment and Trial By Fire Films Inc., DVD.
5.
Mishra, Vijay. 2007. The
Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London
and New York: Routledge.
6.
Cruz-Malave, Arnaldo and
Martin Manalansan. 2002. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of
Colonialism. New York and London: New York University Press.
7.
Divakaruni, Chitra
Banerjee. 2001. “The Blooming Season for Cacti.” In The Unknown Errors of Our
Lives. New York: Doubleday (Random House). [Originally published in Zoetrope,
2000]
8.
“Global Gaze/Global
Gays.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 3 (4): 417-436
9.
Binnie, Jon. 2005. The
Globalization of Sexuality. London: Sage.
10.
Brah, Avtar. 1996.
Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York:
Routledge.
11.
Tan, Chong Kee.
“Transcending Sexual Nationalism and Colonialism: Cultural Hybridization as
Process of Sexual Politics in ‘90s Taiwan.” In Post-colonial, Queer:
Theoretical Intervention, Edited by J.C. Hawley. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 2001. 123-3
12.
Brubaker, Rogers and
Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity’”. Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No.
1, pp. 1-47. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108478.
13.
Alexander, Meena. 2008.
Quickly Changing River: Poems. Northwestern University Press.
14.
Alvi, Moniza. 2011.
“Exploring dualities: An Interview with Moniza Alvi”. Interview conducted by
Muneeza Shamsie. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 192-198,
doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.557196.
15.
Basu, Lopamudra and
Cynthia Leenerts. 2009. “South Asian Literary Association 2009 Achievement
Award Recipient: Meena Alexander”. South Asian Review, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp.
71-73, doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2009.11932722.’