The immigrant and diasporic novel

A prominent diasporic writer featured at the HSBC Galle Literary Festival of 2011 is Manju Kapur who is the author of three bestselling novels; Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman and Home . Manju Kapur lives in New Delhi where she teaches English Literature at Miranda House, Delhi University. Her latest novel is The Immigrant.

In this week’s column, I explore how the author has vividly captured the quintessential characteristics of diasporic existence which is described on the back cover of the novel as NRI (Non-resident Indians) life through the story of Nina and Ananda.

Although the novel discusses the middle-class Indian life, its lifeblood is the diasporic life in Canada, a feature which qualifies it to be put into the category of diasporic novel and diasporic literature.

The meat of any diasporic novel is the journey (sometimes a difficult one) from ‘home’ to a new country and the concomitant struggle on the part of fresh immigrants to settle down in the host country. This move can be described as losing of one’s homeland and reclaiming a new one or in other words a de-territorilisation and a re-territorilisation.

Shedding off old values, behavioural and culinary habits constitute an important aspect of rather uneasy assimilation process in the diaspora. Manju Kapur vividly captures this aspect of assimilation through acculturation of Ananda, a dental student who had come to Canada for his graduate studies and stayed for a short stint with his uncle Dr.Sharma.

Caste

“As he boiled his vegetables and seasoned them with butter, salt and pepper, Ananda wondered how much his caste meant to him. His uncle pushed him gently towards eating of flesh. He offered himself as an example. Should one’s identity depend on what one ate? .

Carefully he started with fish –that almost vegetable-taking his first bite of fillet soaked in lemon and tartar sauce, asking his mother’s forgiveness, but feeling liberated. By the end of summer he had graduated to processed meats. Culinary convenience entered his life. His uncle approved.”

In the novel The Immigrant, the protagonist Ananda was determined to be a fully-fledged citizen of Canada and did not want to marry an Indian girl. “A wife from India meant the Indian Club, meant socialising with immigrants, pretending they had a bond, when really he found his conversation monotonous and boring. With a superior nigger compare their own virtues with the shortcomings of their adapted country; look at their domestic life, the way they educate their children, their sexual morality, their marriages, their treatment of the old, etc,etc. Then they talked of Hindi films and songs. Their heads, hearts and purses were permanently and uneasily divided between two countries. ”

Diasporic writing in a globalised context has assumed ‘conscious raising genre’ where the concerns are not only about the themes of nostalgia, imaginative reconstruction of the homeland and identities but also about the issues such as cultural citizenship, cosmopolitan justice and global inequality. The theme of identity in diasporic writing is not a mere attempt at exploring multitude of locations and subjecthoods but largely a political issue of global justice, cultural rights, self-determination and cosmopolitanism.

The process of claiming cultural citizenship at first half-heartedly has been described vividly realising the mindset of the newly immigrants. The author also stresses the fact that the Indian immigrants are not among ‘those who have fled persecution, destitution, famine, slavery, death threats’.

“These immigrants are always in two minds. Outwardly they adjust well. Educated and English speaking, they allow misleading assumption about a heart that is divided.

….As far as citizenship is concerned, a divided heart means that the immigrant clings to his status, feeling that to give up his passport is the final break in the weakened chain that binds him to his motherland. That day does come ,however.

Sometimes trips to home country bring disillusion and bitterness that the immigrant has forgotten how to cope with….In fact, the years it takes to qualify for citizenship are needed to adapt, bit by bit, day by day. To stop finding little things strange and confusing, laughable and inappropriate…Get rid of the chism, become enough like them to be comfortable, merge and mingle. From East to West over and over. Forget the smell, sights, sounds you were used to, forget them or you will not survive. There is new stuff around, make it your own, you have to. “

Nostalgia

One of the major themes in diasporic literature is nostalgia. which is a recurrent feature of The Immigrant . The images of homeland merge with the reality in Canada. Nina involuntarily tries to interpret emerging reality in terms of places and spaces associated with life in India. “On the other hand, they wouldn’t have inherited the template in mother’s mind where every experience contained a hidden double. If she saw a horse, it stood against the emaciated beast back home, if horse droppings were cleared she was reminded of the way cow dung patties dried in the sun, if she wandered around a fair it was against the vast backdrop of Diwali melas. Compound images shuttled to and fro in her mind, faster than the speed of lightning, covering thousands of miles, there and back…”

The Immigrant takes a turbulent course through profound changes that took place in the lives of Nina and Ananda, a newly-wedded couple in their attempt to integrate into the diasporic life in Canada. Manju Kapur brilliantly captured the un-static nature of diasporic life in the couple of passages at the end of the novel. “Perhaps, that was the ultimate immigrant experience. Not that anyone thing was steady enough to attach yourself to for the rest of your life, but that you found different ways to belong, ways not necessarily lasting, but ones that made your journey less lonely for a while.

When something failed it was a signal to move on. For an immigrant there was no going back. The continent was full of people escaping unhappy pasts. She too was heading towards fresh territories, a different set of circumstances, a floating resident of the Western world. When one was reinventing oneself, anywhere could be home. Pull up your shallow roots and move. Find a new place, new friends and new family. It had been possible once, it would be possible again.