Constructing Indian Diasporic Identity: A Comparative Study of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas and Anita Desai's Bye-Bye Blackbird

The term diaspora generally refers to people leaving their home country. In Indian literature, the diaspora story encompasses centuries of migration, colonial trauma, and cultural adaptation. Indeed, the narrative of Indian exile—from involuntary indenture, voluntary migration, or exile—has been able to critically examine struggles between self and colonizer-centric visions of home and identity. For diasporic writers, that tension between being rooted and needing to keep moving is pivotal to their writing. Writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bharati Mukherjee have all succeeded in turning that restless spirit into something veritable. In Midnight's Children, the narrator Saleem Sinai, via Rushdie's protagonist, experiences a fragmented sense of identity intricately linked to the traumatic history of postcolonial India.