BHARATI MUKHERJEE'S INTERPRETATION OF FEMALE DIASPORA: DISLOCATION, RELOCATION AND TRANSLATION

The varied migratory movements attempt to give some indication of the ideologies, choices, reasons and compulsions which may have governed the act of immigration. While ‘immigrant’ defines a location, a physical movement and a frontward attitude, ‘exile’ indicates an unavoidable isolation and a nostalgic anchoring in the past. The word exile evokes multiple meanings covering a variety of relationships with the mother-country such as alienation, forced exile, self- imposed exile, political exile and so on. In the Indian context the migratory movements are governed by the movement of indentured labour and of the trading communities; the same is also governed by the pursuit of higher standard of living, opportunities for work, education and corporate service assignments among others. In the trans-cultural global context a migrant is an important postcolonial subject. In her phenomenal novels Mukherjee visualizes how the immigrant subjectivity has lost the culture that used to unify the unanticipated and startling events of history leaving a negotiated space for recasting the comforting and stable perspectives, generating a new hybrid (sub)-culture. In this process the dislocations have led to some ambivalent and intersecting visions. The whole process of trans-migration results in multiple homes and diasporic spaces and a migrant, in the process of new ways of being human, suffers dislocations and acquire a non-exclusionary hybridized global identity. Yet, this multiplicity of ‘homes’ does not bridge the gap between ‘home’ – the culture of origin; and the ‘world’ – the culture of adoption. In such precincts of history, the boundaries have an uncanny pattern of persisting in thousand different ways, and are very often conflictual