Construction of Diasporic Identity in the Select Novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The intellectual tradition of the West and of the East has examined the primordial question of what constitutes the identity of a person. There are two broad paradigms; the essentialist and the socio-pragmatic. The essentialist paradigm explicates that the underlying and pregiven ontological realities determine the identity of a person whereas the socio-pragmatic models expounds that the social, economic, political, cultural, and linguistic realities structure the identity of a person. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in her novels has represented the condition of migrated human beings who migrate from one country to another, from one culture to another and what happens to the identity of a person in the entire process of migration. The paper intends to examine the process of the formation of diasporic identity in the selected novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.