How is india represented differently by a writer writing in regional language and a writer writing in english?
Answers
Indian American literature is among the very ‘young’ literature in the United
States, hardly forty years old.
(A) Memoirs: Writing by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent is associated with
personal and communal identity, memories of the homeland, and the active response
to this ‘new’ world. Writers express their personal, familial identities and sociopolitical contexts, explaining how and why they come to be where they are and to
write what they do. Ved Mehta’s autobiographical inquiry in The Ledge between the
Streams deals with his personal and familial detailed in an old fashioned way.
Bharati Mukherjee widens the autobiographical tradition of Ved Mehta in quite
different ways. Society is the subject matter of her memoir, Days and Nights in
Calcutta, co-authored with her husband. It is a work in which Mukherjee reveals her
nostalgia for her home city.
Meena Alexander turned to writing for strength, catharsis, and alternate
possibilities. The title of her memoir Fault Lines gives insight into one of the main
preoccupations, self-creation, and identity formation in the context of migration.
Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country is a moving memoir of how human
participation and engagement with a community make any place a home
autobiography of a doctor specializing in infectious diseases, battling with AIDS
patients in a small town in Tennesse, unfolds the satisfaction that many professional
Indian Americans feel about their specialized work.
(B) Poetry: Poetry is not as popular as the novel or short-story but still, there is some
major contribution by the Indian diaspora in Indo-American Literature. A. K.
Ramanujan occupies an important place among Indo- American poets with a wish for
connectedness and the absence of connection are the two facts of Ramanujan’s poetic
world. Meena Alexander’s Migrant Music deals with belonging and home which are
created by the excavation and re- composition of the past. Agha Shahid Ali is a
Kashmiri exile. The themes of homeland, loss and exile are central to Ali’s work. The
Half-Inch Himalayas, a collection of poems depict in four sections; the very spaces
opened up in exile. A Nostalgiast’s map of America is a volume that reveals alien
spaces of hyphenated identity. Sharat Chandra’s April Nanjangud views and
remembers India through an expatriate’s sensitive awareness. Once or Twice also
contains some of his earliest passionate reflection of America’s attitude towards its
immigrants. The family of Mirrors is an extension of earlier immigrant themes. His
Immigrants of Loss deals with universality of dislocation and sharply divisive nature
of American social hierarchies Vikram Seth, a well known Indian expatriate novelist
has also contributed to his collections of poems like the Golden Gate and All You Who
Sleep Tonight. Poets like Vijay Seshadri, Ravi Shankar, Maua Khosala, Prageeta
Sharma have also contributed their literary talent.
(C) Novel and Short-Story
Bharti Mukherjee is one of the prominent expatriate writers who reject the
tradition-bound society of the East as she reaches out for the more empowering and
individualistic society of the West. Her novel The Tiger’s Daughter depicts a young
women’s unsettling return home to Calcutta after years abroad. The wife is about the
desolation of an immigrant woman of middle-class Bengali origin devoid of her
support structure in a foreign society. Darkness portrays the despair produced by the
encounter with Canadian racism. Her Middleman and Another Stories reveals
immigrant experience in US and Canada in ironic vein Mukherjee’s later novel
Jasmine shows the possibilities of remaking oneself in the New World.
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Meena Alexander’s writing shares her experiences of exile. Self creation is a
familiar theme of Meena Alexander’s work. In Manhattan Music she portrays how
New World Hybrid Dopti, a personification of the old world mythic Draupadi, saves
Sandhya from an attempted suicide, as if to say that the challenge of exile is in
survival and not in death. Vikram Seth shot to fame with A Suitable Boy, followed by
the novel Equal Music and the non-fiction funnily memoir two lives written at the
suggestion of his mother. Chitra Banerjee- Divakaruni’s writing has come late in life
and is directly linked with her migrant condition. Her Mistress of Spices is a novel
that threads magic, memory, and immigrant life into a story of love and survival.
Most of her fiction and poetry deals with the theme of gender and migration. Writers
like Indira Ganesan, Amulya Maladi, Sanjay Kumar Nigam, Hema Nair, Vijay
Lakshmi, etc. have also dealt with various aspects, dimensions of expatriate
sensibility.