Multiple dislocations in the shifting dynamics of transnational globality: a study of Bharati Mukherjee's novels

In anthropological context the term Diaspora has ethnographic implications. Here it functions as a critical discourse and as a site of difference and becoming. Diaspora involves the conflicted space of centre-periphery, home-location, self-other, nation and post-nation, citizen-outsider, original-hybrid, sameness-difference, rooted-uprooted and so on. All these conflictual combinations collide before intersection; these are multi-referential and multi-dimensional. What emerges from such construction of the complexity is that the diasporic components have homogenous, collective identities bound together by shared feelings of alienation and dislocations and nostalgic affiliation with the past. This change of habitat often results in translational representation of Diaspora and displacement, both spatial and psychological. However, their diasporic condition, their sense of exile and alienation, their metaphoric existence and their efforts to seek replenishment by making symbolic returns to their origins bind all this writing into a unity. Bharati Mukherjee emphatically asserts her American citizenship. She has her characteristic way of defining her Indian heritage and affiliations through several assertions. Mukherjee has expressed the reality of being located in a particular culture, geographically and ideologically separate from her chosen home and citizenship and has thus problematised her own identity.