14 - The Mythos of Return and Recent Indian English: Diasporic Fiction

Summary

Introduction: From Aloofness to Cross-Connections

In the first phase of Indian English fiction, its writers were nearly all rooted in the Indian subcontinent and wrote almost entirely about the region and its people based on their vision of the quotidian experience of Indians. Writers like R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao focused mostly on life on the sub-continent in their fiction; although Anand and Rao spent considerable periods of their lives abroad, they concentrate in their fiction on depicting India and Indians at home. In the second phase of Indian English writing, however, quite a few writers began to make the life of diasporic Indians their main subjects. Kamala Markandaya's Nowhere Man (1972), for example, depicts the plight of an Indian who tries futilely to settle down in London. In many ways, Markandaya's novel inaugurates a trend in Indian writing in English in that it takes up the themes of alienation and acculturation. It is clear from this novel that diasporic Indians such as the protagonist live as outsiders in their adopted lands, unable or unwilling to adapt in the country that they have moved to, but doggedly staying on there instead of returning to their homelands. The preoccupation of writers of this period of Indian English fiction, to borrow a phrase coined by one of them, Bharati Mukherjee, in her preface to her collection of short stories, Darkness, was with ‘the aloofness of expatriation’ (XV). However, and to borrow another phrase that she used for her work of a later stage in the same Preface, at least a few of them were soon caught up with the notion of the ‘exuberance of immigration’ (ibid.). That is to say, while many first-generation Indian immigrants depicted in fiction were quite pathetic and seemingly lost souls, some immigrants and their children were seen to embrace life in the West positively in at least a few fictional works. In no time, a new generation of writers emerged, typified by Jhumpa Lahiri who more often than not wanted to depict first-generation Indians or their children in their everyday lives in their adopted homelands. In particular, the members of the second generation are shown questing for fulfilling lives in the country to which they had been brought or where they were born because of the westward move taken by their parents.